It’s hardly the biggest tragedy facing the world right now, but Picard is bad. It’s no worse than a lot of episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation, and it’s nowhere near as insultingly, brain-bendingly, who-pumped-hallucinogenic-gas-into-the-writers’-room bad as Star Trek: Discovery. It just isn’t very good, and that’s sad, because I thought it had promise. It has a great cast, high production values, and a lot of it is written by yer actual Michael Chabon, a genuinely great writer who is brilliant at blending pulp fiction with the literary sort (check out Kavalier and Clay or The Wonder Boys).
But like Discovery and the recent(ish) Star Trek movies, Picard doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. All it knows is what it doesn’t want to be, and what it doesn’t want to be is Star Trek. So all the endearing ‘60s optimism and unlikely futuristic costumes have been thrown out, and instead people wearing T-shirts and bomber jackets stand around gloomily on underlit starships, boldly going nowhere much, while seeking out nothing but the answer to a rather dull and kind of nonsensical mystery, very slowly.
There’s definitely a place for space-dystopia. The Expanse does it brilliantly, with pace, grit, intelligence, and humour. (If the Alien movies had expanded on the society they are set in rather than obsessing about those particular aliens they might have ended up a bit like The Expanse, and a lot more interesting) But no Star Trek spin-off can never hope to compete with that. Picard tries to be dark and edgy - there is enough swearing and gore to make it unsuitable for kids - but the darkness and edginess are constantly being undermined by the traces of gee-whiz space fantasy which linger in the corners of the script - transporters, food replicators, Vulcan Mind Melds.
The fundamental problem is, it’s just no fun. And if Star Trek isn’t fun, what’s the point of watching it? When Picard sets off on his quest, his first port of call is a place called Stardust City on a planet named Freecloud, where we might reasonably expect to encounter star men and wild-eyed boys. But Stardust City turns out to look like a warehouse party, and not even a very good one. No new worlds and strange civilisations for Jean Luc. Even his new ship, La Sirena is dull - it looks like the kind of spaceship you might make out of Lego if your older sibling had used up all the good bits. (And Picard isn’t even its commander - he has, naturally, been kicked out of Starfleet, and has to hire a grumpy smuggler or something to fly him around).
Jeri Ryan is back as Seven of Nine, the de-cyborged Borg from Voyager. Voyager was not a good show either, but Seven was a great character. Jeri Ryan played her with a wonderful deadpan and a world-class raised eyebrow game; she could make me laugh just by the way she sat down, but she also had a vulnerability that was sometimes genuinely moving. In Picard she’s barely used, turning up now and then as part of some kind of resistance group who are never explained and of which she seems to be the only member. Her prissiness and strangeness have been written out. Even her hair is out of character (you can understand Seven would have got tired of the skin-tight space onesies, but surely she’d at least tie her hair back, people don’t change that much).
The story is laborious, trails dozens of loose ends, and has the feel of something that was still being frantically rewritten as the cameras rolled. But even if it hadn’t, Star Trek isn’t really suited to the kind of long-form, single-serialised-story format that streaming platforms encourage. The stuff with the Romulans investigating a defunct Borg cube might have filled a decent two-parter. The android planet would have made a good stand-alone episode, and the space battle which pitches a fleet of starships against some giant flowers was nicely trippy and deserved higher stakes and a story of its own. Separate episodes with an over-arching storyline to tie them together would have made much more sense. (My favourite Star Trek show, Deep Space Nine, did that to great effect, and dealt with far darker and more serious themes than Picard while still being gloriously goofy and camp.)
Still, Patrick Stewart twinkles away wonderfully, the rest of their cast do their best with their thinly-written characters, and it has its occasional moments, so I stuck with it to the end. I guess, in the usual triumph of hope over experience, I’ll end up watching the second series too. Star Trek fans say that the first series of a new version is always a bit of a dud, and that generally seems to hold true - even Deep Space 9 was borderline unwatchable until Captain Sisko shaved his head. So maybe there’s hope for Picard yet,
On the other hand, I’ve seen the second series of Discovery, and it’s even worse than the first one...
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