Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Is Bringing Back Two Surprising Villains

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 has launched its full trailer during New York Comic-Con 2022, and along with the reveals about what brings the characters of Star Trek: The Next Generation back together, we also got a look at two TNG villains who are making their return! As seen in the Picard Season 3 trailer, Data’s evil “brother” Lore and the rogue A.I. hologram of Moriarty are both going to be causing trouble for Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his former crew. 

Who Is Lore? 

Lore is Commander Data’s “brother” in the sense that he was also an android built by Doctor Noonian Soong and Juliana Soong. Like Date, Lore was a model Soong built in his own image; unlike Date however, Lore was built with the first fully functional positronic brain, including a full range of human emotions. That emotional matrix led to Lore becoming unstable, and he began to view himself as better than humans and frightened the colonists he was around, and eventually Doctor Soong, who dismantled lore for many years while building Data, an android with the same advanced brain, but no emotional simulator. 

Data ultimately defeated Lore in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he was dismantled, while Data eventually took the emotional chip for himself, before his own death. Picard bringing back Lore raises some interesting questions about how the mechievious android must be feeling after being dismantled and having to learn his brother is dead. 

Who Is Moriarty? 

Star Trek: The Next Generations‘ version of Moriarty was a hologram program created by Georgdi La Forge and Data to test their wits as Sherlock Holmes-style investigators. They did too good a job with the program, and Moriarty became sentient and ended trying to cause all kinds of trouble. He was programmed to be a foe that could actually outwit Data’s positronic brain, which made him dangerously crafty. Moriarty’s sentience made it questionable for Captain Picard and co. to simply erase him, so he was instead saved into the ship’s memory banks. 

Eventually during Star Trek: The Next Generation, Moriarty re-surfaced and nearly took control of the ship, Picard outwitted the archvillain by trapping him and his love, Countess Regina Barthalomew, in a simulation world in which they believed they escaped the Enterprise and lived free, together. 

If nothing else, the choice to bring back Lore and Moriarty in Picard’s Final Season suggests a theme of villains Picard essentially trapped in purgatory-style states are now getting a chance to escape and get payback. It’s also notable that both these foes have direct ties to Data… 

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 will stream on Paramount+ on