Picarder, Better, Faster, Stronger? - Star Trek: Picard, Season 1

Sometimes, all I want out of my TV shows is a little bit of consistency; is that really so much to ask for?

I was enjoying the early episodes of Star Trek: Picard, even if it felt like it was taking its goddamned time to get going with whatever it wanted to do. But, by the end of the show…I don’t know, it feels sort of mean thinking this, let alone writing it, but…I want my time back.

I guess it started with the F-bomb that lands in the second episode (that’s the word “fuck” in case you didn’t notice, and I am not afraid of such words or using them.) But first, let’s look at the delightful hard-boiled world that the show sets up, one in which the retired Jean Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) tends his vineyard (with the help of two Romulans; one of whom has an Irish accent…?) only to get approached by Dahj (Isa Briones) looking for help after her life is threatened. She is killed (well, disintegrated) by the end of the first episode, and we see Picard going into something of a hard-boiled detective space to figure out who she was, why she came to him for help and who killed her.

Hard-boiled Picard could work very well, but the show goes out of its way to remind us of the Star Trek bit at the beginning of the title; Picard needs a ship , a crew and some sort of adventures in another part of the galaxy. And it’s there that the show starts to fall apart by bringing both worlds together.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, and, indeed, other Trek series, worked well with its themed and bottle episodes, using the Holodeck or a specific planet to do some building of either individual characters or the interactions between multiple characters. Where Picard could have done the same, we instead get Picard himself looking to be reinstated by Starfleet who’ll give him a ship so he can look into the reasons and causes behind Dahj’s murder; there’s some thinly-veiled science in here, his Romulan housemates have some tech and experience, to help him research Dahj. This goes entirely against any story-telling “show-don’t-tell” expectations and my word, does the show go out of its way to keep doing that.

Aggressively so.

It’s during this conversation between Picard and Admiral Kirsten Clancy (Ann Magnuson) that the show embraces that f-bomb, a somewhat angry dialogue that goes out of its way to show a flawed Picard that we didn’t see in seven seasons of TV and four movies. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a flawed Picard, but when dealing with him in his own TV show, maybe you could play this a little bit more subtly.

Picard’s world has changed, and in some ways, he hasn’t been included in the same; the show goes out of its way to scream that Picard is now old and somewhat infirm, declaring to its audience that the captain has a brain injury that sounds a bit too much like a fucking brain tumour to make me comfortable with watching. Similarly, Picard isn’t entirely sure how to work an updated ship’s engines (as shown in the final episode), is too fragile for any sort of fighting (so ends up recruiting Elnor, played by Evan Evagora, a Romulan samurai-type character who saw Picard as something of an uncle some years previously); and doesn’t even have the emotional wherewithal to discuss his emotions.

This old, flawed and somewhat broken man isn’t the only such character in this show; for an ideological future that previous Star Trek shows have gone out of its way to prove and embrace, Picard aggressively undermines much of that. The series’ Number One (of sorts) Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd) served under Picard following the destruction of Romulus (as seen in Star Trek: Nemesis and the following political clusterfuck that forced Picard into retirement) and, after losing her job, has lost herself and her family in booze; Chris Rios (Santiago Cabrera), the captain and ship that Raffi recruits to help Picard, is also former Starfleet, and equally broken; and our science character Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) has never even been off planet but finds herself drawn to help Picard in his quest to find the cause of Dahj’s death.

It’s been pointed out to me after publishing that the Nemesis’ drama was just a coup, and the destruction of the planet was the subject of the 2009 Star Trek reboot. Makes sense to me, but makes the time-line even more fucked up, and VERY Romulan focused for no real deserved reason.

For a show that originally pitched itself as an ideal world, or at least a world trying to be ideal, Star Trek: Picard goes so out of its way to prove its characters and its world are in no way perfect. That could be embraced easily. If, of course, the show didn’t go out of its way to do that for its world as much as its characters.

But these are not just a handful of broken characters in a perfect world; the very world itself is fucked, and the show turns into a clusterfuck of such epic fucked-up-ness that it goes out of its way to challenge some of the ideal elements and airs that form classic Star Trek. I should stress; my favourite Trek series is Deep Space Nine, partly because of its broken beats and characters, but that show never went out of its way to force them down your throat; within ten episodes, the show changes beats and narrative in a breath, sometimes within the same episode, and sometimes contradicting itself when doing so.

Take a deep breath.

So Dahj is actually an android and has a twin android-sister called Soji who is currently working/living on a Borg cube in Romulan space, trying to un-Borg the Borg on said Borg ship. Which has a huge presence of people from a secretive Romulan organisation(the Zhat Vash) a group that are entirely against synthetic life, which they foresee as fucking up the entire galaxy. (So why are they un-Borging Borg rather than just killing them off like they do towards the end.) The Zhat Vash are also in Starfleet, posing as Vulcans; even though they’ve no reason to do so given that the Romulan Empire has fallen, so why wouldn’t Starfleet maybe let the occasional Romulan join. The story also suggests that other societies, cultures and races also have their own Zhat Vash, so why do they have to be Romulans at all? Despite the Zhat Vash being an ultra-secret organisation, there’s a hell of a lot more people aware of this that the word “secret” shouldn’t really be used. Soji (and Dahj before her) are not aware that they are synthetic beings for some further political reason that gets explained in a passing tell-don’t show conversation involving Rios’s previous ship (and the Zhat Vash either manipulating or right-on being part of Starfleet.) This is before we touch on the fact that Dahj and Soji are so synthetically similar to Data (Brent Spiner) that Dahj was screaming for Picard to get involved and help her and her sister. That the Zhat Vash believe that there’s a higher power for synthetic life, itching to save those synthetics in a weirdly Lovecraftian-kind of way, that sure as fuck makes the Zhat Vash look like they’re not entirely as villainous as they come across. And that’s before we touch on the internal politics within the synthetic culture.

Even as I write this, some of these beats make that little bit of sense, and could perhaps even work in a much-larger work or on smaller scale: why leave Earth at all and introduce a couple of relatively pointless, regular characters? (I sort of adored the broken Raffi, and Rios has become my new man-crush. Maybe not the pointless, meaningless Holograms he uses to work his ship though. But all other characters get significant eye-rolls from me.)

Even the opportunities to revisit beloved characters or scenes from the Star Trek franchise are broken by the Picard logic; Picard, for some reason, crosses paths with fellow former-Borg Seven-Of-Nine (Jeri Ryan) in a series of beats that never truly addresses (nor allows itself the time to address) either of their issues. Sure, the show gives Seven a bad-ass update of confidence that shows some development in the time since we’ve last seen her; it then breaks her emotionally by killing off multiple other ex-Borg characters in front of her (or even while connected to them.)

It’s similarly delightful to see Riker and Troi (Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis) as characters who are more than just former colleagues, but beloved family of Picard; they are not given a chance to breathe, with the show barely touching on their retirement, partly caused by grief for the loss of their son…but Riker is more than happy to come out of retirement and put the costume back on, just so he can help Picard in the season finale. The two have a brief, official conversation by starship monitors, but in doing so, the show contradicts the familial relationship addressed a few episodes previously.

And then the show goes and kills off Picard.

But the series already has its second season, so there’s no risk or threat to Picard at all; the show just goes out of its way to record Picard’s brain, put him into synthetic body and, in doing so, keep him around for another while. Except in doing so, the show completely undermines any sense of risk or threat for the character, nor the uncomfortable ageing beats that the show established for him at the start of the season.

Such a resurrection also serves to undermine Picard’s strengths as both a character and a captain; with the samurai-like Elnor only joining Picard’s quest because it is deemed to be a “lost cause,” the show fully teases and embraces the fact that maybe Picard will be dead by the end of the season. Which he is. Only to be resurrected.

The show leaves something of a bad taste when allowing Picard to be resurrected, but Picard on his part chastises Elnor for taking life, despite putting him into a situations knowing and expecting him to kill on Picard’s behalf…only for Picard to condescendingly berate him for doing so.

Usually, when watching a TV series, I’ll find some element to keep me watching; sometimes it’s an interesting character, a story beat, or maybe it’s just something camp or silly. Star Trek: Picard seems, to me, to have gone out of its way to establish some sense of character, story and silly…and then embracing and murdering those steps so much that I don’t know if I’ll be able to commit to a second season.

But I’m also shallow, and might do so just for shirtless Rios again…