Maybe the thing I miss most about old Star Trek is how the franchise used to be “about things.” It used to be a vehicle to teach us what kind of people we could be. It wasn’t about whizbang action, nonstop melodrama, or loud noises with crazy camera angles. It was about exploring the human condition.
It makes me sad that neither Discovery nor Picard will ever have an episode like A Taste of Armageddon, The Measure of a Man, Duet, or Someone to Watch over Me. Those shows had too much talking, too much examination, too much “science fiction” to be present in a modern Star Trek show. Unlike “space adventure,” science-fiction is supposed to be about using fantastical elements as mere window dressing to subtly teach us parables about morality. That was the mentality of all the great sci-fi writers like Ellison, Asimov, Bradbury, and more.
When sci-fi moved from the short story page to the TV screen, very little change was needed. A typical TV episode served as a good template for a short story format, allowing sci-fi writers to write sci-fi stories for the screen instead of the page. This is how we got classics like Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and Star Trek gems like The City on the Edge of Forever.
Picard’s first season was akin to someone taking a Star Trek icon, slowly killing it, skinning it, and then finally wearing the skin like a cloak. If you stood far enough away you might think it was sci-fi. Get close, however, and you realize it’s just bad TV pretending to be sci-fi, in the hopes of conning enough people into watching.
Somehow the second season managed to top it. Not only was it bad Star Trek. Not only was it bad science-fiction. It was bad television. I’m actually shocked it is as bad as it is. I can’t believe someone who does this for a living looked at the product being released weekly and said “Yes. This is what we want. More of this, please.”
What’s more, as I look over the stupidly long list of producers that are apparently in charge of this show, I can’t believe not one of them said “wait a minute, isn’t this whole thing just…really stupid?”
Apparently, no one did.
Your enjoyment of Star Trek Picard’s second season is entirely dependent on you having the memory of a dead goldfish. It hopes you will experience it piecemeal, little by little, in weekly installments, never re-watching what came before, never asking yourself “wait, if that’s’ why, then how come…?”
It is the television equivalent of check-kiting; it just string you along from one episode to the next, each one sometimes contradicting the one before it, hoping you don’t remember the details well enough to question it. By the time you get to the end, and you realize just how dumb the whole shaggy dog story was, it’s too late. You’ve already watched it, and the carny who conned you has already moved on to the next town to do it all over again.
Here is the basic outline of what happened in season two of Star Trek Picard…
The Borg, led by Queen Jurati, discover some big bad something is on its way and they reach out to Picard to petition to join the Federation. Why? So they can remain at the spot where the big bad something will come out of and prevent it from killing everything. Picard arrives at the rendezvous point to meet the Borg Queen who promptly beams onto the bridge and starts taking over the ship. Naturally everyone freaks out and starts fighting because Queen Jurati kept her face hidden and didn’t directly tell Picard who she is or what is going on.
Fearing for the assimilation of the ship, Picard orders the auto-destruct. That’s when Q, who is dying (despite the fact that Q do not die as we learned on Star Trek Voyager) decides to save Picard’s life by sending him to an alternate universe where the Federation is evil and oppressive and basically space Nazis. The point, Q will later say, is to help Picard come to terms with some childhood trauma related to the death of his mother. Q wants to bring closure to Picard as a final gift before he dies.
He also wants a hug.
Q, however, doesn’t tell Picard any of this, despite the fact that he has already done something similar to Picard in the TNG episode Tapestry, an episode where he basically flat out tells Picard what he did and why, in order to set the Captain off on his journey of self-discovery. Here, however, Q leaves Picard wondering, which causes him to decide to go back in time to a point before the alternate history started to go bad. A Borg queen informs Picard that they must go back to 2024. This is not Q’s plan, but he goes along with it because what else is he going to do other than tell Picard to stop because that’s not the plan he has for him.
Once back in time, Q suddenly (for no explained reason) loses his powers and Picard and co. start goofing off in Los Angeles. Along the way, they discover Picard has a distant ancestor who will make a discovery on Europa that will render the work of one Adam Soong (ancestor to the creator of Data) obsolete. Q eggs on Adam Soong, essentially goading him into killing Picard, because now Q wants Picard to be run over by a Honda instead of learning a lesson before he dies.
Picard eventually comes to terms with his mother’s death, though it’s unrelated to the plot about his astronaut ancestor. And then, after he does, Q decides he has his powers again and snaps his fingers to return Picard and co. back to the Borg Queen (which is Jurati because the Borg Queen from the alternate history was brought along on the time travel mission that wasn’t Q’s plan and somehow assimilated her without assimilating her, starting a chain of events that led her to being the Borg Queen in the real present day, not the alternate present day, which means had the crew not gone back in time Jurati would never have become Queen, so they had to go back in time, even though going back in time wasn’t Q’s plan, but going to the alternate history was, which is where they met the Borg Queen that assimilated Jurati in the past that Q did not intend for them to visit).
And then Q got a hug because this show is stupid and might actually be written by literal monkeys with typewriters like in that one Simpson’s sketch.
I am done with this show. I said I wouldn’t review it, but if I had to put a number on it:
1/10 – I couldn’t even laugh at it.
…See you for the post-season three rant.
