Yeah, season 3 of Picard seems to be a palate cleanser after the foul taste of the first two.
We're up to Episode 4, and I'm afraid we've found it a bit of a bore. It simply seems to be milking the old warhorses as hard as it can go, to give them a final payday. Even the theme music echoes the past (it includes the magnificent theme from
First Contact, to my ears, the finest of all
Star Trek themes). In Episode 4, we even had something like a rerun of an early TNG episode! In addition, the cast seems simply too ancient - Patrick Stewart's magnificent speaking voice seems a shadow of its former self, and Will Riker has expanded to be something more than a shadow of his former self! Now there remain plot lines to be tied up, so we as old Trek fans are hopeful that it can pick up. However, it misses something with the absence of Brent Spiner's Data.
As a footnote, we never quite recovered from watching it in German! When we heard it in English for the first time, the original voices were disappointing, except for Stewart's. We had the same experience with
Die X-Akte - Scully's dubbed German voice had a wonderful rich quality, and we were most disappointed with Gillian Anderson's actual voice, until we got used to it.