All the Star Trek Stories You Need to Watch before Viewing Picard Season One

(Season one of Picard finished three months ago; I may or may not bother to write up a review of it. However, I started this post when the season was airing and so wanted to finish it off.)

from Picard 1x05: "Stardust City Rag"

Back before Picard started airing, my wife and I viewed a series of episodes I thought might give her context for Picard: she's seen little Next Generation and less Voyager. This definitely helped, but even at the time, I knew we'd left some stuff out-- and I was mostly just guessing based on the trailers and rumors. There were several other episodes I had not guessed would turn out to be relevant. (Definitely some random guest stars!)

So once the whole season was over, I sat down and figured out every episode you needed to see to understand the new show. Either because it directly fed into Picard, because it gave some useful character context, or because it set up another episode on the list. Now, you don't really have to see all of this (Hayley had seen only thirteen of them before Picard began, though we circled back to watch a couple more once I realized they were relevant), but they might help give you maximum enjoyment of the many callbacks and Easter eggs, and make you care about some stuff you wouldn't otherwise.

On the other hand, they might make you like it even less! (I found that some of the stuff Picard did did not ring true with "The Measure of a Man," for example.)

from TNG 4x02: "Family"

I've separated out my rationales into a separate list at the bottom of the post because knowing why some episodes fit in will spoil some aspects of Picard clearly designed to be surprising. Note that the list does assume you have a general familiarity with both The Next Generation and Voyager already: I did not go so far as to, say, include "Encounter at Farpoint" to introduce you to the Enterprise-D crew, or "The Child" to introduce Guinan and Pulaski, or "Endgame" to explain how Voyager got home.

1. TNG 1x13: "Datalore"
2. TNG 2x09: "The Measure of a Man"
3. TNG 2x16: "Q Who" 
4. TNG 3x16: "The Offspring"
5. TNG 3x26: "The Best of Both Worlds"
6. TNG 4x01: "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II"
7. TNG 4x02: "Family"
8. TNG 4x03: "Brothers"
9. TNG 4x11: "Data's Day"
10. TNG 5x23: "I Borg"
11. TNG 6x26: "Descent"
12. TNG 7x01: "Descent, Part II"
13. Star Trek: First Contact
14. VGR 3x26: "Scorpion"
15. VGR 4x01: "Scorpion, Part II"
16. VGR 4x02: "The Gift"
17. VGR 4x06: "The Raven"
18. VGR 5x15/16: "Dark Frontier"
19. VGR 6x16: "Collective"
20. VGR 7x02: "Imperfection" 
21. Star Trek Nemesis
22. Star Trek (2009)

from VGR 6x16: "Collective"

Rationales

1. Prerequisite for #8; first appearance of Lore; first discussion of Data's backstory
2. First appearance of Bruce Maddox
3. Prerequisite for #5; first appearance of the Borg
4. Data's first attempt at creating a daughter
5. Picard is assimilated
6. Continuation of #5
7. Continuation of #6; first appearance of Chateau Picard
8. Prerequisite for #11; first appearance of Soong
9. Data's friendship with Maddox established
10. Prerequisite for #11; first appearance of Hugh
11. Prerequisite for #12
12. Final pre-Picard appearance of Hugh
13. Picard re-encounters the Borg
14. First appearance of Seven of Nine
15. Continuation of #14
16. Continuation of #15
17. First exploration of Seven's backstory
18. Further exploration of Seven's backstory
19. First appearance of Icheb
20. Significant point in Seven and Icheb's relationship
21. Final pre-Picard appearance of all TNG characters; death of Data; first appearance of B-4
22. First mention of Romulan supernova