Nostalgia can be a great thing, especially in hard times like now. Re-watching your favorite movie or TV show during a particularly rough patch in your life can help you get through the worse of things. Sometimes, a reboot of a classic movie or TV show can be even more satisfying, because it feels like your old friends have returned to give you comfort during dark times.
And so, when CBS All Access offered their pay-walled channel for free for a brief period during the 2020 Pandemic (which was a classy move on their part), I jumped at the chance to be able to finally watch Star Trek: Picard. I had been a fan of the original Star Trek series from the 1960s (I watched it in reruns as a boy in the 1970s), and had watched every incarnation of Star Trek--both movie and TV show--that had been produced since. I was really looking forward to going on new adventures with the calm, cool Jean-Luc Picard, in the hopes that his new series would take my mind off of these troubling times, if just for a while.
However, Star Trek: Picard posits that the future--usually so bright and positive in the past Star Trek series--is now a dire mess, with the galaxy-spanning Federation becoming a close-minded hierarchy that has banned all artificial life forms in the wake of what appeared to be a terrorist attack on Mars by a rogue group of androids (with the Federation having treated these same androids as little more than slaves beforehand). It’s twenty years or so after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis, and Data is long dead--although he shows up in Picard’s dreams, with Data actor Brent Spiner de-aged by CGI. One would think, with the current animus towards androids, that it might be just as well that Data isn’t around to see these dismal times (which is a pretty sad thought to have while watching a Star Trek series).
Picard is moping around his luxurious countryside mansion, having been in retirement since resigning his commission from Starfleet in protest over the fact that the Federation was reluctant to help the Romulans (a sworn enemy) to evacuate during a cataclysmic supernova. When a young woman approaches Picard for help, she not only turns out to be an advanced android, but is also the daughter of Data. This stirs Picard to come out of retirement to help her dodge Romulan assassins, as well to discover the truth behind her missing memories.
And this was where I had expected Picard to touch base with Starfleet again, and get another ship, and get back to the business of doing what he did best: being a starship captain. I was so looking forward to this, that the Trek Geek in me actually wondered what type of ship Picard would get, and if he would manage to get the old TNG crew back together again. But, instead of going this route, Picard becomes…a space pirate?
Wait…what? Really?
Yeah, Picard joins forces with a Han Solo wannabe who smokes cigars (why are people smoking in this series?! Seriously, WTF?) and who flies an over-sized blender of a ship that looks like it auditioned for the part of the Millennium Falcon, but didn’t get it. And now this sad little spaceship is stuck ferrying around Picard and his sorry pack of losers--including two murderers among its crew.
Oh, no, wait, it’s OK that the two killers on Picard’s new crew randomly kill people at a whim: because they’re OUR HEROES! And, according to the Picard writers, just being a HERO is what makes random, unprovoked murder absolutely fine! But the bad guys, they’re still evil meanies whenever they kill somebody because, you know…reasons that the Picard writers really can’t be bothered to deal with. "These people are bad just because we say they’re bad! Now, c’mon, let’s have our HEROES go fly off and fight the giant space flowers!"
Star Trek: The Next Generation may have had a goofy title, but when it was running on all thrusters, it was a superb series that upended as many of the annoying science fiction tropes it could by creating well-rounded characters who truly explored the universe around them in a rich and sophisticated manner. And they explored not just in the physical sense; ideas were also thoroughly explored on TNG, and these intense discussions about them always made great food for thought whenever the viewer applied these concepts to their everyday life--which is what the best SF is meant to do.
In contrast, it appears the Star Trek: Picard writers looked at a couple of episodes of TNG, saw the spaceships and explosions, and decided to take the easy route (just like JJ Abrams did with his Star Trek movies) by imitating Star Wars--which is not to say that Star Wars is stupid; far from it. It’s just that the very notion that Star Trek--which is over a half century old and is complete with its own actual universe--needs to emulate anything is just plain insulting to this storied franchise.
But here’s Picard, numbly wading neck-deep in dopey science fiction tropes while being yelled for no reason at by nearly everybody in the series. All of the new characters resonate about as deeply as cardboard cutouts, and the comedy is so broad and dumb (Picard poses as a space pirate, complete with eye patch and silly French accent) that it’s cringingly painful to watch. And the violence and gore is so over the top (remember Icheb, from Voyager? Now watch as he’s screaming in agony while getting his eyeball ripped out!) that it’s painfully clear that the people in charge are completely tone-deaf with regards to what direction their own project should take.
Having said all of this, I don’t hate Star Trek: Picard. Hatred is too strong of an emotion to waste on a dipshit series like this. If anything, I’m deeply disappointed in Star Trek: Picard. It squandered the promise that Classic Star Trek (and its sequel series) always had by reaffirming that a bright, promising future was in store for us, no matter how bad things may seem now. Instead, Star Trek: Picard tells us that the twenty-fourth century will be just as fucked up as things are now. It’s the breaking of this sacred covenant of Star Trek that is perhaps the most shameful thing to come out of this latest “Star Trek in Name Only” series. Thanks very much for the free access, CBS, but I’m done. --SF
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