Star Trek: Picard – Season One Blu-ray review

Oct 31, 2020- Permalink

Paramount Home Entertainment recently released Star Trek: Picard — Season One on Blu-ray. I was given the opportunity to take a look at the home entertainment release of this CBS All Access series.

The events of Picard take place about twenty years after the events of the final Star Trek: The Next Generation film Nemesis. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is now a retired admiral, having left Star Fleet about a decade ago. He carries with him the grief for his late friend Data (Brent Spiner) and the betrayal he felt when Star Fleet abandoned a Picard-led rescue mission to save the people of Romulus. When an interview he gave on the anniversary of that incident catches the attention of a young synthetic named Dahj (Isa Briones), Picard is pulled into a rogue mission to help save a group even as he faces down his own mortality.

The 1080p AVC-encoded digital transfer is presented in the series’ original 2.30:1 aspect ratio. The ten episodes are spread over three Blu-ray discs. The video presentation is clear and sharp, with excellent details on skin textures, textiles, and environmental elements. The colours are vivid, with ships’ instruments and displays especially popping. The black levels are nice and deep and there’s detail in even the darkest scenes with little sign of crushing. Compression artifacts and digital noise are negligible. It’s just a really nice video presentation.

On the audio side, there’s an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack. Subtitles for English SDH are available. The track sounds great. Action elements are moved nicely through the soundscape, while the surrounds also provide a great amount of ambient information that puts you into the story. Low frequency elements add some weight to the action and the score is bright and dynamic. Dialogue is clear, centred and well-prioritized in the mix.

The set doesn’t come with a digital code, but there’s a nice amount of extras spread across the three discs. There are story logs that take you behind the scenes of each episode, there’s a video commentary feature with key members of the production that place them alongside the action, a short entitled Star Trek Short Treks: Children of Mars, a look at how the series got off the ground, deleted scenes, a featurette on the ex-Borg, a look at the props, sets, and new crew, and a season one gag reel.

Though people who haven’t kept up with the Star Trek franchise may need to do some research to get up to warp speed on all the back stories and references, fans of the Star Trek franchise will want to immediately beam Star Trek: Picard — Season One into their home entertainment collections.