It’s been an exciting, almost boundless time for TV in general lately, but sci-fi as a genre has fared rather less well, the glittering exceptions being The Orville, The Mandalorian and The Expanse (and perhaps we can extrapolate from that roster of success that it’s simply a good time for sci-fi shows with the word ‘The’ in the title).
Star Trek: Discovery is certainly boldly going, as all good Trek series should, but many of the franchise’s fans have also boldly… just gone. Lost in Space is fun and frothy, but nothing more. Just last week there was yet another flashy but hollow outing for the thirteenth Doctor played by Jodie Whittaker (although last night’s Judoon-flavoured romp appears to have turned a few heads), plus a disappointingly lacklustre debut for Armando Iannucci’s new sci-fi comedy series Avenue 5 (let’s hope tonight’s episode kicks it up a gear).
There’s a lot of hope, then, riding on Picard (CBS All Access, streaming on Amazon Prime), Sir Patrick Stewart’s first foray into the Star Trek universe since 2002’s disappointing big-screen outing ‘Star Trek Nemesis’. That’s right, baby: Picard’s back. Except he’s retired. And he needs a stunt double to run. And he’s re-programmed his replicator to dispense decaffeinated earl gray. But what did you expect? He’s an octogenarian now. (“Computer? Stool softener. Phillips’ Gel. Hot.”)
The show’s opening sequence takes place aboard the ship of our Star Trek dreams – which is also literally the ship of Picard’s dreams – the Enterprise D. The old bird’s looking as good as she ever did, hooking a hand-brake turn across a space-lane. On-board the dream-ship, the dearly departed Data is back where he belongs, playing poker against Picard.
If not for the etches on Patrick Stewart’s face or the chub on Brent Spiner’s very human jowls we could be watching an episode plucked straight from the final seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I guess that’s sort of the point. When Data asks Picard why he’s stalling, and Picard answers sadly: ‘I don’t want the game to end,’ he’s acting as a proxy for fans like me who’d rather remain on-board the old ship than wade into the unknown with a new crew and a new focus. But Picard has to wake up, and so too do we. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
We’re in France, actually, at Picard’s vineyard.
Picard now has a dog called ‘Number One’ who likes to jump up on his lap and lick him right in the mouth, which begs the question: why did he name the beast after his former first officer? I guess space must’ve been lonely sometimes.
I’m not sure how Riker will react to discovering that his old boss has named in his honour an animal that gets visibly sexually excited many times a day and presumably tries to hump anything it sees, but he won’t be able to deny that it’s an apt homage. Anyway, that’s probably more than enough words on Riker’s wandering glands.
Picard is having dreams and visions; so too is Dahj, a young woman who finds her Chuck-like killing-powers activated when a bunch of assassins beam into her apartment on date night and murder her boyfriend. Her visions are of Picard, a man she’s never met, so when she sees him giving an interview on whatever they call the telly in the far-future, she goes straight to Chateaux Picard to enlist his help.
‘I’m so confused,’ she tells him, weeping and neurotic, ‘I don’t know who you are. I just killed some men. I know your face. I can do kung-fu. I think I love you.’
‘Come here, you,’ says Picard, ‘And give your uncle Jean a big cuddle.’
OK, I’m paraphrasing a tad. Horrifically, though, it’s a close approximation. Too much of the premiere seemed designed to join the dots of plot, at warp speed and with scant regard for pacing or character. Granted, there was a lot to pack in – everything from the destruction of Romulus to a hot-potato refugee crisis to re-purposed Borg cubes – but more time could’ve been taken to set things up and orient us in this new world. Less jumping around and hashy-bashy dialogue.
Can we talk about the whole Data thing? That’s a rhetorical question; we’re already doing it. See, Dahj is Data’s daughter, which is why Picard and Dahj were so drawn to one another. Artificial life-forms were outlawed, but not before Data’s neurons were used to clone a daughter, because, you know, that’s how robots work. But they couldn’t just clone one, silly, he had to have two daughters, BECAUSE THAT’S HOW THESE THINGS WORK. I can almost hear one of the show’s 80,000 producers asking another of the show’s 80,000 producers during pre-production:
‘You know how Star Trek used to stick as closely as possible to actual science, or plausible projections thereof, with very little in the way of ridiculously fantastical shit in service of quasi-mystical character quests?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well how about we get rid of that science shit?’
By the end of the episode Dahj is dead, but long live her sister, Dohj, or whatever the shit she’s called.
Patrick Stewart, of course, was… well, he was Patrick Stewart. When has that man ever turned in a poor performance? You could watch him taking a shit for twenty minutes and it would still be better than 90 per cent of anything you’d ever watched. Picard still possesses charm and wit and authority, but age has softened him around the edges; Stewart takes the veneer of vulnerability and warmth that always existed in Younger Picard and drapes it around Old Man Picard like a cosy tartan blanket.
That old dog can still bark though. When a TV interviewer probes him about Starfleet’s deplorable political stance in the wake of the android-orchestrated shipyard attack that left Starfleet unable – or unwilling – to come through on its promise to rescue refugees from the Romulan supernova (pauses to catch a breath before passing out from terminal exposition), he seethes that Starfleet’s decision to ‘abandon those people we had sworn to save was not just dishonourable, it was downright criminal!’
This is not the Star Trek we remember (see also Discover, Star Trek). Whereas the first clutch of series in the franchise (TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT) cleaved closely to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the future – despite occasional forays into the grey and dark areas of both the universe and the human heart – Star Trek: Picard firmly establishes itself as a vision of the future that takes as its root a post-colonial, present-day past (I know, I can hear it, too) in which populist demagogues like Trump and Bolsonaro rule the world (Hell, out here in the real-world, in a case of life imitating art, Donald Trump has sanctioned the use of a logo for his Space Force that’s pretty much identical to the Starfleet logo).
Simply put: Star Trek is now a dystopia, in which almost all institutions are inherently and irreversibly corrupt. Most of the baddies from the other iterations of Trek are now the goodies, and most of the goodies are now the baddies.
It’s similar in a way to what happened with westerns. Once the genre had been around for a few decades, doing its thing of showing the rough and tough and noble American dream in its infancy, we started to get revisionist westerns, showing a dirtier and doubtless more accurate version of the Wild West: a world that was grimy, brutal, morally bankrupt, and occasionally genocidal.
Picard is revisionist Star Trek. A revision of the future before it’s even happened. A reversal of hope before we’ve even had a chance to feel it.
I’m willing to sit back and see where the show takes us. I love the character of Picard, I’m intrigued by the set-up, and if I was exasperated a few times, then I certainly wasn’t bored at any point. I guess I liked it? I feel a lot of good will towards Star Trek, having been a big fan of TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY as a teenager (much to the dismay of my balls, which would’ve liked to have been emptied into a woman a little more often). I want to love Picard. I just…
Well. Let’s see what’s out there.
Word of warning to you, though, Jean-Luc. This isn’t the 90s anymore, son. No mansplaining. No assuming anyone’s species. And don’t forget to check your human privilege before you go off and do something patronising or unforgivably offensive like save the day all by yourself.
Forget who you were. Remember who you are.
But whatever you do, don’t forget to engage.