'Moon Knight' and 'Picard' wrap up well

I'm trying something different for this week's reviews. Please let me know if it works for you.

I often review the start of new shows (or the start of new seasons of returning shows), but unless the entire season dumps at once, rarely do I review the conclusions of those season-long arcs.

This matters because most modern television and streaming shows are written as season-long arcs, which was absolutely not the case with TV shows when I was growing up in the 1980s.

Eighties TV had notable exceptions such as soap operas and miniseries, and long-running or especially popular shows were afforded the luxury of season finales that not infrequently promised to change their shows' status quos, but for the most part, you could watch the episodes of any given season of a sitcom, a crime drama or a fantasy adventure in just about any order, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

Three shows helped change that - "Babylon 5" and "The X-Files" in 1993, and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in 1997 - to the point that, when "Doctor Who" returned in 2005, its previously serialized episodes gave way to season-long arcs, in which each episode initially appeared to be independent of the rest. By the time you watched the whole season, you realized all those supposedly independent episodes added up to a larger overarching plotline, like a stealth miniseries.

"Stealth" is a word long since removed from the equation. Whether it's "The Mandalorian" or "The Book of Boba Fett" for Star Wars, or any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe tie-in shows, or "Picard" for Star Trek,

nearly every currently produced streaming show that I've been watching is all but explicitly a miniseries, likely thanks to a combination of audience demand and streaming services wanting to sell themselves as essential by producing TV series that feel more like cinematic events than just weekly shows.

On May 4, Disney+ aired the sixth and final episode of the MCU's "Moon Knight." On May 5, Paramount+ aired the 10th and final episode of "Star Trek: Picard" season 2, and the first episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."

"Moon Knight," like both seasons of "Picard" to date, fit the glorified miniseries template. I've reviewed the openings of both shows in this space.

But what's striking is that "Moon Knight," while slightly disjointed, ultimately succeeded in both assembling and unfolding a compellingly constructed puzzle box, exploring the troubled psyche of a morally compromised man with dissociative identity disorder, as he forged spiritual connections with ancient Egyptian gods, in ways that challenged his already tenuous grasp on consensus reality.

Meanwhile, "Picard" suffered once again from wildly uneven pacing and first-draft-level plot-mapping, even as familiar favorites such as Patrick "Picard" Stewart, Jeri "Seven of Nine" Ryan, Whoopi "Guinan" Goldberg, Brent "Data and his crazy family" Spinner and John "Q" de Lancie, elevated their workmanlike scripts by delivering career-best performances as their characters.

Which is not to give short shrift to Ethan Hawke, Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy, Oscar Isaac or even voiceover actor F. Murray Abraham, all of whom imbued "Moon Knight" with their own measured, layered performances.

"Moon Knight" satisfied me by tidying up its own loose ends while setting the stage for its characters' future adventures, and "Picard" persuaded me to overlook its considerable shortcomings by treating me to the unabashed fan-service of seeing Picard and Q - originally introduced as snarling adversaries 35 years ago, before their mutual fears of dying in isolation turned them into tear-shedding best friends - sharing hugs and melancholy regrets as aged men.

And yet, both "Moon Knight" and "Picard" felt all too constrained by their rigid serialization, whose absence has made "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" feel like one of the freshest, most unbound Trek series in recent memory.

Anson Mount plays Christopher Pike, the blue-eyed, square-jawed cowboy who captained the USS Enterprise prior to James Kirk, with Ethan Peck as his young science officer Spock, and Celia Rose Gooding as his even younger communications cadet Uhura.

It's a measure of how valuable Majel Barrett was to her husband's franchise that it takes two actors to fill her shoes, with Rebecca Romijn playing Pike's decisive, confident "Number One" first officer, and Jess Bush throwing off sassy sparks as civilian nurse Christine Chapel.

Extended-length prequels run the risk of feeling hemmed in by the history that's already been established about their characters, but "Strange New Worlds" not only leans into this, by giving Pike foreknowledge of his unfortunate fate within the Trek mythos, but it also builds in some breathing room by establishing those events as taking place a decade into Pike's future.

When I watched the original "Star Trek" series in syndication, Captain Pike was little more than the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question, a quirk of the show's mythos, because he'd starred in the show's first pilot, but that episode didn't air unedited until decades later, after it had been sliced and diced into the flashback-laden two-parter "The Menagerie."

It turns out, Chris Pike is kind of a cool dude, and while his crew have yet to become the more established personalities of Jim Kirk's tenure as captain, it's fun seeing them get their sea legs under them, especially since each episode of "Strange New Worlds" that's aired so far has been done-in-one, rather than the umpteenth part of however many installments.

For such a naked exercise in nostalgia-bait, "Strange New Worlds" could very well chart a course for TV and streaming shows to come, as audiences grow increasingly fatigued from miniseries-itis.