From MadCap's Couch - "Star Trek: Picard" (Season 1)

Oh, boy, here we go.

I haven't yet reviewed Star Trek beyond a few (that is, two as of this writing) of the movies and there's a very good reason for that - it's a franchise that has been going on for the past 50+ years and has an exhaustive and diverse range of ways it's been approached. Everything from the camp and cheesy,  Original Series to the camp and cheesy 80sness of The Next Generation, to the early camp going into serious and yet still occasionally camp cheesiness of Deep Space Nine going into the absurdZha campiness of...

You see where I'm going with this. There's a lot of ground to cover and there is plenty of goofy chipmunk shit to be found.

Unlike my Doctor Who reviews (which I know you've all been keeping up with exhaustively), Star Trek doesn't follow on one continuous story. Each series does connect in some way beyond simply being in the same universe, but the various spin-offs have allowed the universe of Gene Roddenberry's creation to open up in ways that even he would have never considered. It's a lot of ground to cover and not an undertaking that should be taken lightly if it's going to be undertaken at all.

As you probably have guessed by that description, this isn't going to be an episode by episode review of the series that the title is about more than it is a general rant on the First Season as a whole. I grew up watching TNG (mostly through reruns), DS9, and Voyager as well as Enterprise up until somewhere in Season 2. I even watched most of the Original Series back when it was still airing on the Syfy channel (which, back then, had a much less embarrassing name and a much better logo). So, needless to say, I'm a fan.

Do I think all of Trek is good? Definitely not. For every Best of Both Worlds or In the Pale Moonlight we have a Spock's Brain or Threshold. Some series are definitely better than others, but Trek overall is a very enjoyable experience for me and I like to see it doing well and being handled by people who actually care about what they're doing.

Which brings us to Star Trek's answer to Rian Johnson, Alex Hilary Kurtzman. And yes, that is actually his middle name. Alex Kurtzman cut his teeth on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys before eventually heading that show and later formed an unholy alliance with Michael Bay to rewrite The Island and later write Transformers. This was alongside his oft-credited partner Roberto Orci, who he would later team up with and team up with JJ Abrams to produce the series Fringe, which would eventually lead to them writing Abrams' Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness.

And we all know how that turned out.

So naturally, after a pretty okay film and an abysmal failure that they should have felt ashamed for, CBS decided to put Kurtzman as the showrunner for this. If you're wondering why I just went through all that and have yet to actually talk about Picard, I just want to make sure that all my complaints are firmly put into focus here, because pretty much all of this is his fault either by his own ideas or refusing to stop the stupidity of other people.

So perhaps not so much Trek's Rian Johnson as he is its Kathleen Kennedy.

I say all of this now to give you a fair warning that following this sentence there are going to be spoilers aplenty. So, if you wish to avoid being spoiled, please feel free to leave this article now.

Picard begins with a dream sequence of Picard playing a game with Data in Ten-Forward on the Enterprise-D. It seems that it's about twenty years since the events of Star Trek: Nemesis and Picard has retired from Starfleet. The Romulan supernova still happened, going from Star Trek, but before that a bunch of androids went insane and caused an incident on Mars - which caused the creation of synthetic lifeforms to be banned within the Federation. This is something we get a flashback to in the first episode, it gets brought up a few times, and then really only becomes important again in the very last episode of the season.

In fact, that's the problem with a lot of this series - there are ten episodes and not nearly enough content to justify half of them. It should have been called Star Trek: Padding.

Let's start with some good: Patrick Stewart remains excellent as Jean-Luc Picard even now, though it's becoming clear that the years are starting to wear on him. Much like the TNG movies didn't understand it - Patrick is really too old at this point to be playing an action hero, so most everything they do to try and make him one in this feels flat. Although, because of that, we do have the rest of the cast...who I'll be getting into when we get to them.

Brent Spiner plays not one, but two roles in this series: that being Data and an actual flesh and blood son of the late Doctor Noonian Soong. He does well, but that's to be expected at this point.

The rest of the Next Generation cast - all four of them that appear being Picard, Riker, Data, and Troi - do very well in their roles almost as if they'd never left them.

I really like the character of Elnor, a Romulan boy who Picard saved during the time the Romulans were refugees either right before or right after the destruction of Romulus. He's plucky, eager, and actually one of the few new people to have any respect for Picard. He feels like someone who belongs here.

I'm interested to learn more about the Synthetics that supposedly live outside of the known galaxy and what their story might be.

And that's...really all there is to say that's good, I'm sorry to say.

"Wait, I agreed to what?"

The rest of the main cast ranges from tolerable to insufferable.

The first is Captain Rios. He is a former Starfleet officer turned pirate. He's also hilariously fucking boring. They attempt to set him up as having a dark past that he's haunted by, but it doesn't really work, because we have no real reason to care. However, he never gets into the realm that some characters get. He also plays his ship's five holograms that are basically the EMH from Voyager on super steroids. They have just about as much personality as he does, just with different accents.

Such as Dr. Agnes Jurati. She is a robotics expert working at the Daystrom Institute. She is a murderer for very, very stupid reasons - namely that a Romulan mindmelded with her and showed her some scary images that she didn't understand and that convinced her to kill her lover, Dr. Bruce Maddox. Despite showing some guilt over it, she ultimately gets away with it scott-free.

Then there's Raffi. Raffi was Picard's second-in-command during the Romulan crisis. I hate Raffi. She's an absolute rock that drags down pretty much every scene she's in. She is immediately hostile and flippant toward Picard from her very first scene, and her general attitude makes it impossible to find her remotely likable in any way. She also calls Picard "JL", which nearly had me screaming with rage every single time she did it. Keep in mind, Picard's crew was with him for seven years, and few of them ever referred to him by his first name. Even then, they did it in private. However, a lack of respect for Picard seems to be a recurring theme in this series. I'll get to that in a bit.

Also, last to note, there is Soji...and her twin sister, Dahj. Dahj dies in the first episode and doesn't really have any relevance to the plot. Soji does, however. They are androids created by Bruce Maddox as the "daughters" of Data, their design coming from a pair of paintings that Data had made.

Which is why a third one, played by the same actress, shows up with skin and eyes like Data's during the last two episodes, but never mind. I'm clearly thinking about this more than the people who actually made it.

We also have Jeri Ryan return to her role as Seven of Nine, except she might as well be playing a different character for all the changes they've made. That isn't to say that Seven's personality couldn't have drastically changed in the decade and some change since the Voyager got back from the Delta Quadrant, but the change is odd and very little reason is given for it. There isn't even that much mention of the events of Voyager, save for a few references. Seven even describes herself as having no family now, which I find odd given how she once claimed that she would be willing to lay down her life for the crew.

What changed? No idea. It seems we're not allowed to know such things.

It's honestly my theory that Seven was intended to be another character and that they were able to get Jeri Ryan and so slotted her in. It would explain how she went from being a somewhat logical, precise, and nigh-robotic being to becoming a reckless, haunted, bourbon-downing gunslinger who acts as though she has no reason to keep on living. Yes, we get a bit where we see a flashback that happened rather recently - but again, it happened rather recently, so it doesn't explain her going into full on nihilism mode.

With Luke in The Last Jedi, they tried to justify a major 180 in character with stuff that really didn't work when you gave it more than five seconds of thought. Star Trek: Picard saw that and decided to not even bother with Seven.

There's so much that could have been done with her and Picard both having been assimilated by the Borg, as well, but all we get is a single scene where they speak of reclaiming their humanity from the Borg. It's nice...and it's something that tonally does not fit with this series at all.

Also, she hooks up with Raffi at the end of the season despite the fact that the two shared no scenes together alone.

Sure.

"Have the drugs kicked in for you?"
"Yep...feels good, man."

Now that we've got our lovable bunch of misfits squared away, let's look at the villains. First off, we have Starfleet. Starfleet, who have gotten so far off the fucking reservation at this point that an Admiral has the gall to accuse Picard of "sheer fucking hubris". Starfleet has become more isolationist since the explosion of Romulus' star for reasons that are not at all made clear. Following the Dominion War, being the only real power left standing in the Alpha Quadrant - particularly after the Romulan supernova - you'd think they'd be more confident in their position. It appears, however, that the opposite is true.

There's the Romulan secret organization of Zhat Vash, who are basically the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 4 but with pointier ears. They hate synthetics and will go out of their way to stop them, even to the point of (somehow) managing to set up the explosion on Mars as a false flag to get the Federation to put a ban on synthetics. They're absolutely terrifying, having been able to infiltrate the Tal Shiar and the Federation...and oddly, have never been mentioned at any point in the 33 years since The Next Generation.

Now, one could argue that they were a secret organization and that no one would know about them beyond myth and rumor. I would argue, given that they go out of their way to drum up a Romulan war fleet to nuke one settlement, these people are about as subtle and mysterious as the Daleks. That is to say, not at all.

Data was a well-known figure during the Next Generation days, even to the point where the Klingons knew of him. He was still being referenced on Voyager years after The Next Generation had left the air, so there's no possible way they didn't know about him if they existed. More to the point, why didn't they ever go after Doctor Noonian Soong? You know, the guy who was inventing androids in the first place?

Maybe that's why he was in hiding in that one TNG episode? No idea. Like I said, they've never been brought up before.

The villains are also hilariously boring. Unlike the crew, who range from meh to pissing me off royal, the Romulans here are just...really boring. The leader, Oh, is so very obviously evil that her being appointed the head of Starfleet Security is the equivalent of Hans Gruber being given control over the Make A Wish foundation. She doesn't really come across as a credible threat, either.

Much the same can be said for the Wonder Twins, a brother and sister duo of Romulans that ultimately mean nothing and don't contribute to much to the story. Apart from some early and frankly very confusing scenes that the brother has with Soji, one could easily cut them out of the story and very little would be lost besides someone else needing to give some exposition during the finale.

The rest are just mooks there to be killed off by Picard's entourage. La de da.

The series, too, has a big problem with swearing. (Or so I'm told) Star Trek Discovery apparently has the same problem, with liberal use of expletives in spots. While it's not necessarily as bad in Picard, it still doesn't really fit. Consider, this is the year 2399. The cusp of the 25th century. During Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (which is set in 2285), James T. Kirk was unfamiliar enough with the term "dumbass" that he wasn't able to accurately use it in context.

It was a joke for the time, yes, but it showed that language had evolved in the time since 1986 on Earth.

Or, y'know, we could just have people accusing Picard and his "SHEER FUCKING HUBRIS!" or telling him to "Shut the fuck up!"

Or have (oddly Irish) Romulans talking about some "Cheeky feckers!"

...all of this, by the way, just because they don't have the usual television Standards and Practices to work under the guidelines of.

It isn't showing that your program is more adult or nuanced. It just shows us that the writer is still stuck in that phase where they're thirteen and don't have to listen to Mom 'cause she's just so lame, man! It's juvenile and ridiculous and does not remotely fit into Star Trek at all. It's not as if swearing makes the content you produce any better.

Got it, fuckers?

"I was one of the most likable characters in TNG, and I got
a knife in the neck for it!"

The whole Season just has this general air of malaise about it. Everything from how Picard is treated by basically everyone who isn't a TNG veteran to the unnecessary swearing to the rather horrific way characters are cast aside for no real reason (looking at Icheb and Hugh, in particular). Star Trek is supposed to have an overall optimistic view of the future, but this future absolutely blows in pretty much every respect and there is no good reason for any of it. 

It's a problem with entertainment in general of late. Anyone who's read my review of The Last Jedi will know how much I hated that film and how disrespected and completely destroyed the character of Luke Skywalker felt. While Picard doesn't go that far in tearing down Jean-Luc Picard (despite everything, he does still feel like the character should be - more so than he did in many of the TNG films), my joke about a young Starfleet officer showing up at Picard's front door for advice and being told to go away is very nearly accurate.

Except Picard actually knows when to accept the damn call to adventure, unlike Jake Skywalker.

Even so, the series puts more focus on Picard's entourage than upon Picard himself. It's a cheap ploy, using the name and iconography to draw people in (much like The Last Jedi) and then pulling the rug out from under them for a cast that would have been rejected from Firefly. The new crew somehow managed to take up all the time in the show, but aren't developed enough or interesting enough in concept for anyone to actually care about them.

I care about Picard.

I care about Riker.

I care about Data.

I don't care for Raffi and her crippling drug habit and her attempts to reconcile with her son when she has been an absolute load for the entire run before that point.

That's just one example, obviously, but it's true across the board. They either give us no reason to be invested in the characters, or the reasons that they give are too little too late and just ring hollow, at least for me.

To toss away the criticism that the series isn't good because it's not like the Star Trek we've seen before - you're right, it's not. It's nothing like Next Generation. It's also nothing like Deep Space Nine or Voyager or even Enterprise. I don't know what this is, but Star Trek is nothing more for this than thieving brand recognition to prop up something else. Yes, CBS, I know new and original ideas are scary. You know who that never stopped? Gene Roddenberry.

If you wanted to make a sci-fi series, then make a sci-fi series. Why did you have to throw Star Trek into a meat grinder?

Brent Spiner looks like I feel watching Picard.

I could go into plenty of other things that don't make sense - why the Romulans feel the need to pursue robots when they're refugees from a dead world, why Hugh had to die, why Doctor Crusher wasn't even mentioned when every other member of the senior staff of the Enterprise besides Pulaski and Yar were, how in the hell an android was able to do a Vulcan mindmeld, how absolutely stupid transferring Picard's consciousness into a robot is, why Data's entire knowledge and experience could be stored on a trio of 30GB flash drives, and so on - but it all ends up boiling down to the same problem: This is some other sci-fi show using the Star Trek name to bring in the views. That's it.

It's clickbait. You're told you're getting Picard and you do get him, but it's bogged down by so much garbage, unlikable assholes, and half-hearted fanservice that you might as well not bother and just go back to watching Next Generation, instead. I also might do an episode by episode guide at some point in the future as I do for my Doctor Who reviews, but that's unlikely to happen as I really have no desire to watch this ever again. Not even for the few bits of good I was able to find and enjoy. It just wasn't really worth it at all.

Star Trek is supposed to be about optimism. It's supposed to be a window into a world where human beings have moved beyond the petty problems that have plagued the Earth through the millennia we've been upon it and have become better as a race and as individuals through the use of technology, logic, and reason. It is supposed to be what we could be, not a reflection of the world as it is, which admittedly was part of Kurtzman idea for this whole series: which explains the rather uncomfortable nature of it all.

Also, an entire Picard-based series and not a single appearance by John de Lancie.

SHAME, Kurtzman. SHAME. Above all else, for that alone, SHAME!

Star Trek: Picard is now available for streaming on CBS All Access.

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