I hadn’t intended to write an article about Star Trek: Picard of this length for the blog. Not because I don’t have opinions about the show – I rant about it a lot with fellow fans burned by Picard online. Nor because I didn’t plan to cover it here at all – I did. However, I’d planned to cover all three seasons of the show in one article, because unlike Star Trek: The Next Generation and its immediate successor series, Picard is not a long episodic show telling a very large number of stories over its run. Instead, each season tells essentially a single story. How much could I say about each season?
Well, at least in terms of season 1, it turned out I had a hell of a lot to say. I was excitied about it early on, but bit by bit it lost me, making a succession of storytelling decisions which poleaxed my enjoyment of the show despite the excellent cast involved.
So, here it is: my thoughts on Star Trek: Picard, season 1.
This is the season which introduced us to a brand-new cast of characters, then gave them nothing to do.
The Premise
After the events of Star Trek: Nemesis, Jean-Luc Picard’s Starfleet career continued and he eventually made the rank of Admiral. When a supernova destabilised the Romulan Empire (catalysing the time-travel incident that kicked off the 2009 Star Trek movie and the J.J. Abrams-Trek timeline), Picard advocated for Starfleet and the Federation to offer extensive humanitarian aid (uh, Romulanitarian aid), much as occurred when a comparable crisis put the Klingon Empire on the back foot during The Undiscovered Country, and spearheaded the relief effort.
At some point in the meantime, the Soong-type android B-4 that Data had transferred his memory banks into towards the end of Nemesis ceased to function; since B-4 had only ever been an unstable prototype his systems simply collapsed. This freed up his component parts for the Daystrom Institute to study, leading to the creation of a range of Synths – androids more rudimentary than Data and his siblings, due to Dr. Soong’s breakthroughs still not being generally understood (and highly hit-and-miss even when Dr. Soong attempted them himself). Lacking much in the way of autonomy or advanced reasoning, the Synths were used as cheap labour on facilities such as the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards on Mars – but one day the Synths on Mars ran rogue, committing mass murder and setting off a technological cascade which ignited the Martian atmosphere.
Faced with this devastating incident, the Federation rapidly passed a ban on creating synthetic lifeforms as a precaution against future incidents, and Starfleet decided to abandon the Romulan relief effort, leaving hordes of refugees in the lurch. Disturbed by the moral short-sightedness of Starfleet command on this issue, Picard offered his resignation as a desperate last bid to persuade them to rethink – instead, they called his bluff, leaving him pottering about in retirement at Chateau Picard, watching out for the coming symptoms of the neurological disease he knows from The Next Generation finale episode All Good Things he will eventually develop (it’s basically space dementia), and assisted in his housekeeping and vineyard maintenance by Laris (Orla Brady) and Zhaban (Jamie McShane), former members of the Romulan internal security organisation known as the Tal Shiar.
Picard, Laris, and Zhaban’s placid existence is shaken up by the arrival of Dahj (Isa Briones), a young woman who had been looking forward to starting her studies at the Daystrom Institute but now on the run desperate for answers after mystery assailants attacked her apartment and murdered her boyfriend, only to be slain by her when combat abilities that not even she knew she had made themselves manifest. Laris and Zhaban suspect the involvement of the Zhat Vash, a Romulan secret society rumoured to have founded the Tal Shiar itself merely as a front organisation to serve its true agenda.
Realising that Dahj looks familiar, Picard follows up on a hunch and realises that she appears identical to the main figure in a painting which Data made back in the 2360s, entitled Daughter – prompting him to speculate that Dahj may well be some manner of android. When the Zhat Vash assassins strike again, Picard is unable to save Dahj, but when he checks in with Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill), a brilliant Daystrom Institute roboticist forced to keep her research in the realm of the theoretical due to the ban on synthetic life, she informs him that the technique which may have been used to cultivate Dahj’s positronic brain from Data’s would have produced multiple androids as an inherent quirk of the process – which means that Dahj probably has a cloned sibling somewhere who is also in danger from the Zhat Vash.
Picard and Jurati embark on an interstellar investigation to track down Dahj’s sibling and protect her from the Zhat Vash, picking up a range of allies along the way:
- Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd) was Picard’s aide during the Romulan refugee effort; she dropped out of Starfleet in the wake of the Mars disaster and has been in a bit of a mental health spiral, and is convinced that there was something else to the Synth rampage – and that the mystery Picard has uncovered might hold the answers to that one.
- Cristóbal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) is the lone wolf captain of La Sirena, a small star freighter, who Raffi contacts to help the team get out into space when Starfleet refuse to clear Picard for service and let him undertake an investigation with their own ships.
- Elnor (Evan Evagora) was a Romulan boy who Picard helped find a new home with a reclusive sect of Romulan warrior nuns dedicated to the principle of radical honesty, and joins the crew out of his order’s dedication to fight in the name of lost causes.
- Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), the former Borg drone who’d served on the USS Voyager, has become a Fenris Ranger – a member of a paramilitary group out to provide protection to the innocent in regions of the former Neutral Zone which, due to the Federation turning inward and the Romulans being on the back foot, have started to slip into anarchy.
Meanwhile, on the Borg Reclamation Project – a Borg cube which has suffered a total system shutdown, where scientists sponsored by the Romulan Free State work on disassimilating and rehabilitating the drones one by one – Soji Asha (also Isa Briones) is excited to start work, and has absolutely clue about the existence (or assassination) of her sister Dahj, the Romulan conspiracy intent on the extermination of synthetic life, or her own status as an android…
That’s a fairly detailed plot breakdown, but season 1 of Picard has a fairly convoluted plot – as with each season of the show, it’s essentially telling one story, and the story is more or less a big puzzlebox. I’ve also made the whole thing seem much more coherent than it actually is; even when it’s setting up its premise, the show throws in some rather tenuous links, at least some of which never really pan out. For instance, the reason Picard is prompted to look to Data’s paintings in the first place is because he has for some reason been having dreams of Data painting stuff, and he was having them before Dahj showed up.
Isn’t that a really bizarre coincidence – indeed, too much of a coincidence for “it’s just a coincidence” to be narratively satisfying? Isn’t that an odd mystery? What could have possibly prompted Picard to have that specific dream before he encountered Dahj? Friends, do not rack your brains: there is no solution offered for this. It’s simply a weird thing thrown in to deepen the sense that there’s a big mystery going on and to pad out the early episodes of this, in order to pad out a story which could otherwise have been resolved in the span of a Star Trek: The Next Generation two-parter into a ten-episode season of television.
Michael Chabon was the showrunner for this season, and so perhaps bears the lion’s share of responsibility, though the show was conceived as part of Alex Kurtzman’s portfolio of Star Trek shows alongside Star Trek: Discovery. In the lead-up to this season, Kurtzman talked up the idea that whilst Discovery was a fast-paced, action-packed show, Picard would offer a slower and more contemplative experience. This isn’t really what we got – there’s lots of action in here, the whole thing starts off with Romulan black ops raids and culminates in a massive stand-off in space between three vast forces about to fight a massive battle, and in between there’s all sorts of chaos and death and destruction, with a plot which ultimately has big, galaxy-shaking consequences, just as every subsequent season of Picard would tell a story with big, galaxy-shaking consequences.
To my mind, this is a massive missed opportunity. The very concept of a show about Jean-Luc Picard in retirement would seem to be a golden opportunity to tell smaller-scale, more intimate and character-driven tales in the Star Trek universe than Discovery or the J.J. Abrams movies which Kurtzman had helped shepherd into existence focused on. As it stands, no season of Picard really went in that “more contemplative” direction; they all had their contemplative moments, of course, but if Discovery‘s seasons are even faster and less character-driven than Picard‘s seasons are, I shudder to think what sort of amphetamine-fuelled fever dream that show must be.
Many Unhappy Returns
Picard’s dreams of Data are not the only instances of this season spinning its wheels to do something which seems meaningful in the moment but ultimately is not that important to the story, for the sake of filling out its time. Indeed, many of the puzzlebox elements of the season are there largely to provide plot roadblocks to fill time. Part of me suspects that the season was constructed in reverse, with the writers hitting on a final destination they wanted to reach and then working backwards to try and fill ten episodes of television in order to get there. As we shall see later, however, they very much didn’t do that – with one key writer suggesting that they actually began filming before they had any real plan for how the season would end.
A bit of planning would have certainly helped. A major issue with the season is that it spends a lot of time trying to reintroduce us to old favourites like Picard, Seven, Data, in a later guest spot Riker and Troi, plus a few cameos from more minor characters from 1990s Star Trek besides, and it’s also trying to establish a whole new slate of characters – Laris, Zhaban, Jurati, Raffi, Rios, and Elnor – who are here to act as an ersatz crew for Picard, now that he isn’t commanding a Starfleet ship.
Not for the first time, I have to ask who this show is actually for: a new generation of viewers who might be mildly aware of Picard and may at most have seen the Next Generation-era Trek movies or the more famous bits of The Next Generation, or for Next Generation superfans with an encyclopedic knowledge of that show and the other Star Trek series of its era.
Characters like Bruce Maddox, Hugh, and Icheb are thrown in with more or less no introduction whatsoever, which would suggest that this show is for the superfans. You can probably throw in the main bridge crew from The Next Generation into a project like this without reminding people who they are, and Seven of Nine probably approaches the same level of familiarity thanks to the wide appeal of “big titty Borg girlfriend” as a late 1990s prurient fantasy, but there’s every chance that more casual fans won’t remember Bruce, Hugh, or Icheb. None of them are used as brief cameos either – they are all the core focus of one or more scenes, and all the sequences involving them would land much better if you were up to date on who they were. I only remembered Bruce because I’d seen Measure of a Man – the Next Generation episode he appears in – fairly recently; I didn’t remember the others at all.
Now, to be fair, it’s fine to do a big nostalgia exercise for the superfans; it might not be commercially sensible in many cases, but Star Trek is the sort of franchise where you can have an entire spin-off pandering to fans of pre-Abrams Trek and have it pull reasonable numbers. On the other hand, if you’re going to do that sort of nostalgia exercise, it’s quite weird to go as light as this season does on returning main cast characters (Data, Troi, and Riker are only here for cameos, not for the full season), and to put as much energy as Picard season 1 does into establishing a new cast of characters, especially when in the third season all the old main cast of The Next Generation will come back with a vengeance.
Really, it would make the most sense to do this in reverse – have your big reunion in season 1, and then you can spend the rest of the show’s run allowing the old cast to bow out one by one as they pass the torch to new characters. (That is, if you intend to do much of interest with the new characters going forwards… of which more later.)
Moreover, if this is a nostalgia piece for the hardcore crowd who can be counted on to have retained information on who all Hugh and Icheb and Bruce Maddox are, why does the show put so much energy into not seeming like Star Trek? What with Starfleet being in isolationist mode for much of the season, this by far the least Starfleet-y major Star Trek thing since The Voyage Home. In principle, the idea of a Star Trek show which happens outside of the confines of Starfleet altogether is potentially interesting – it provides a chance to offer a fresh perspective on a familiar universe. But that’s not what you’re getting here because we’re not in a familiar universe – the world of Picard is not especially close to the status quo of any of the more familiar Star Trek series.
In other words, season 1 of Picard takes us outside of Starfleet and simultaneously has Starfleet and the Federation behaving in ways strongly at odds with the principles that we’re used to seeing them guided by, set against the backdrop of a galactic situation which is unfamiliar to us due to the disruption around the Romulan collapse. If you want to go for nostalgia, you offer a familiar perspective on a familiar situation; if you want to go for something fresh but still feels like part of an existing franchise, you either go for a familiar perspective on an unfamiliar situation, or an unfamiliar perspective on a familiar situation. Here, you just have an unfamiliar perspective on an unfamiliar situation, which means it just feels like its own damn thing, not part of a larger whole.
Wait up, though – don’t we have good old Jean-Luc Picard to hand to offer that familiar perspective over the entire season, later on joined by Seven of Nine? Well, eh, we do and we don’t.
See, the thing about Picard the TV show is that it’s following on the heels of not only Star Trek: The Next Generation, but also the run of movies from Generations to Nemesis featuring the Next Generation crew, and the thing about Picard the character is that Patrick Stewart played him very differently in the movies compared to the way he did in the TV show.
On the original TV series, Picard exemplified a calm, thoughtful style of leadership, soberly soliciting the contributions of his trusted officers and following an approach which prioritised diplomacy over derring-do. He was always invested in what was going on, but in keeping with his instincts as a diplomat he’d tend towards defusing situations and encouraging peaceful exchange of ideas. He had his emotional depths, but we’d learn them gradually over the course of seven seasons of television, and often when he got the most emotional he was making his biggest mistakes – think of I, Borg, in which his hatred of the Borg almost prompts him to do something unconscionable and using an essentially innocent person as the means of doing so before he realises how far he’s gone.
However, that isn’t what Patrick Stewart really wanted to do with the character. He famously complained that Picard didn’t get to do enough “screwing and shooting”, and by the time The Next Generation had wrapped up and plans were being drawn up for Next Generation-based movies he was in a very advantageous negotiating position. It would have been simply unthinkable to make those movies without Picard, after all; in addition, the TV show had tended towards those low-key, sedate, intellectual stories because very talky stories are much cheaper to make than very action-heavy stories. Since the movies would be going for spectacle, Stewart’s desire for a more action-packed take on the character would be comparatively easy to accommodate. The end result was a more impulsive, emotionally driven, confrontational Picard – a disparity people did not fail to notice.
Obviously, Patrick Stewart’s involvement in a show called Star Trek: Picard is even more crucial than his involvement in any of the Next Generation movies, so we can be pretty sure that he could more or less set his own terms this time around. Now, to be fair, he doesn’t go in for as much screwing and shooting as he did in the movies – he was around 80 when the show was shot and aired – though there isn’t none of that. However, at the same time it’s pretty evident that Stewart wanted to showcase his full dramatic range in this. He gets action sequences. He gets moments of pathos. He gets moments of comedy. He gets arguments, debates, heartfelt confessions, friendly chats, and all manner of other talky scene. He gets to have major emotional moments; he gets to save the entire galaxy. Especially in this season, he is an inescapably central figure to an extent which he wasn’t in the more ensemble based Next Generation TV series.
As such, the Picard of Picard doesn’t feel like the Picard of The Next Generation or the Picard of the movies, though in light of some of his impulsiveness and emotional outbursts he feels closer to the latter than the former. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; he’s witnessed the Federation going back on a lot of its principles in the wake of the synth rampage and feels embittered that not only did he fail to assist the Romulans to the extent that he wanted, but he was actively prevented from doing so by Starfleet. He’s also aging under the ticking time bomb of space dementia. Perhaps a certain frustration and impatience is to be expected, along with a tendency to wax philosophical and try to come up with poetic bon mots to sum up the wisdom of his years of service.
At the same time, though, this shift does mean that he’s less suitable than you would think when it comes for providing that bedrock of familiarity necessary to make this season feel specifically like a Star Trek TV show, rather than a season of some generic sci-fi show which had some Star Trek names and trappings patched onto it. Sure, he’s sort of our old, familiar Picard, but he’s in a state we are not used to seeing him in, having endured two decades of further developments, many of which we only get a faint handle on. By comparison, the full span of time from the start of The Next Generation to Nemesis comes to some 15 years, so we’ve been away from Picard for some five years longer than we were ever hanging out with him.
Seven of Nine has also changed since we last checked in on her. Back in Voyager, of course, she’d been freshly extricated from the Borg collective, and whilst there was a bedrock of emotion in there, she was unused to expressing it particularly openly; she could be quite robotic in how she expressed herself, and her main niche was to use her Collective-bestowed technical knowhow to offer a unique perspective on the scientific and engineering problems facing the crew. In other words, she became another in Star Trek‘s long tradition of neuroatypical-coded characters doing tech-y stuff.
The Seven we get here, on the other hand, is a violent, gun-toting space vigilante, who in one of her early appearances in Picard ends up coldly executing a crime lord who’d been getting bounty hunters to hunt down and dissect former Borg in order to steal their implants, which apparently fetch a nice price on the black market. She’s basically working the “gun-toting hottie with a cool line in quips” archetype, and there’s little to no sign of the suppressed emotional affect she displayed during Voyager.
Now, I actually don’t mind that this is a more emotional, less robotic Seven; it makes complete sense that with the passage of time that stiffness and awkwardness would soften as she got further and further away from her time in the Collective; her Voyager crewmates started that process during the lifetime of the show, after all, and I imagine the least Starfleet could do for her once Voyager made it home to Federation space was to get her a top-notch therapist.
That said, for much of her appearance in this season of the show Seven seems less like a plausible extrapolation of Seven of Nine as she existed in Voyager and more like a Star Trek take on Mila Jovovich’s performance in the Resident Evil movies or Kate Beckinsale’s in the various Underworld movies. Now, admittedly, Jeri Ryan can absolutely pull that sort of thing off, and it’s not often that women in their 50s get to reinvent themselves as action heroes, so more power to her in that respect – but this also means that Seven seems off in a similar way to the way Picard seems off. They basically both live in a sort of character development uncanny valley – they remind us enough of the characters we remember to create expectations of greater continuity of personality than actually exists, which makes it jarring when their performances aren’t really congruous with what they were doing two or three decades ago.
The picture with other returning characters is somewhat patchy. Riker and Troi are fun, but the main episode they are used in is tonally incongruous, for reasons I’ll get into in a bit. Icheb’s reappearance is brief and unusually grim. (He’s played here by Casey King, instead of original actor Manu Intiraymi, who’d got himself cancelled by going to bat for Kevin Spacey on Twitter and mocking one of Spacey’s victims.) The return of Bruce Maddox (no longer played by Brian Brophy but now John Ales) is somewhat longer, but still involves the characrer showing up to die horribly. The season actually does some good stuff with Data by the end, making a level attempt to give his story a better ending than the weird sacrifice-that’s-not-a-sacrifice of Nemesis provided.
Perhaps the best use of an old character is the return of Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco), the former Borg drone who originally appeared in the excellent I, Borg episode of The Next Generation. Having been given a taste of individuality by the Enterprise crew before returning to the Collective to help them get away from the Borg, it was established later in The Next Generation that Hugh and others had managed to break free of the Collective and begin a subculture of ex-drones. Putting him in place as the supervisor of the Borg Reclamation Project is a great idea for reintroducing the character, putting him into a context which ties him in to the wider story but where it makes sense that he would show up, since he possibly has the most experience of freeing former drones (“xBs”, as the show calls them) of anyone in the galaxy due to his experiences setting up his splinter faction.
He is, however, killed off in an astonishingly wasteful way, particularly since Seven of Nine then steps in to do the exact thing Hugh was planning to do anyway, but got killed before he could do it. (Seven shows up on the Borg Reclamation Project in a way which doesn’t entirely make sense to me, since it took Picard and the other team members a bit of finessing with the Romulan security detail to get onboard and Seven just short of shows up and strolls right in.)
Specifically, this takes place at a point when the Romulans have gone full black ops, and, as a side effect of their actions, are causing mass deaths among the xBs – and the dormant Borg drones yet to receive treatment. Hugh’s intention (and Seven’s eventual act) is to partially reactivate the cube, acting as a small-scale Queen in order to awaken the drones so they can defend themselves. Is it cool and badass and kind of hot to see Seven do this? Yes, but arguably it would be even more meaningful to see Hugh do it, because aside from Picard himself he’s the first person we see removed from the Collective (I, Borg having predated Voyager by quite some way) and seeing him purposefully return to it would be a big moment. Hell, you could even have both Hugh and Seven do it; maybe you could have them deliberately act as a sort of dyad, so they can mutually keep each other from losing themselves to the mini-Collective they establish whilst the cube’s networking systems are active.
This, however, would require the writers to treat the Borg Reclamation Project and the themes around it as being particularly important. Unfortunately, after flirting with the idea that they might be important early on in the season, by the end they’ve been shown to be essentially a sideshow; the Project and its masses of xBs and unreclaimed drones literally crash land directly onto the planet where the conclusion of the story of this season takes place, and yet they’re basically not important to that conclusion in the slightest. Unless I’ve forgotten some throwaway line somewhere, we don’t even know how the residents of that world propose to deal with them.
The Zhat Vash: Star Trek Illuminati
The writers just kind of losing interest in an entire cube of liberated Borg is one symptom of a wider underlying issue with this season; it comes up with later seasons too, but it’s particularly acute here. That is the way that as the season goes on it not only becomes more and more laser-focused on its core story, but it becomes actively disinterested in anything other than its main story – and anything which doesn’t prove to be core to that tale, either when it first shows up or by tying into the tale later on, is simply cast aside and forgotten about.
There’s an extent to which this is inevitable, of course. Each season of the show is based around the core story of the season, and when that happens you’re inherently going to get a bottleneck as the end of the season when it comes time to resolve that story. Each season of Picard follows more or less the same pattern: the early episodes open up a wide range of possibilities, but as a result by the end of the season they must select one possibility to be the true outcome of the tale, delegating the rest to the role of red herrings and paths not taken; one of the things which frustrates me about the show is that I liked all the seasons early on but disliked their conclusions, not least because I felt they chose the weakest elements of the season to enshrine as the central pillar of the story by the end.
In this season, however, it’s taken to a whole new level. Not only is everything not relevant to the main story simply not important, but there’s also very little here which isn’t related to the core story in some respect. You would expect this to some extent simply through the requirements of writing the show – you’re always going to give more time to stuff which serves your core story than to stuff which is ancillary to it – but in this case it goes beyond that. In particular, more or less every negative aspect of anyone’s life we encounter can be attributed either to the machinations of the Zhat Vash and their centuries-old campaign to prevent the emergence of synthetic life, or to the unintended consequences of their manipulations.
Seriously – everything. The Zhat Vash did 9/11 the synth attack on Mars to manipulate the Federation into banning synths. Raffi’s alienation from her family is due to her dogged pursuit of the truth about the synth rampage. Riker and Troi lost a son to a disease which would have been curable had they been able to use techniques which require an active positronic matrix to accomplish, and therefore impossible to obtain as a result of the synth ban. Anything bad which is not directly attributable to the synth ban or the machinations of the Zhat Vash is a side-effect of Starfleet and the Federation becoming unsure of themselves after the Mars disaster or the fallout of the botched Romulan evacuation, which are all, of course, second-order consequences of the core plot. Somehow, somewhere, way on the other side of the Delta Quadrant, some poor member of some uncontacted species stubbed their toe on some furniture because of some unexpected consequence of the synth ban.
Indeed, this also applies to most other major events, even those which aren’t all bad. The cube which suffered colony collapse syndrome which is at the centre of the Borg Reclamation Project got that way because it tried to assimilate a Zhat Vash operative, and the deadly meme inside her mind prompted the cube to bluescreen. This smells like bullshit – the Borg have assimilated such an uncountable number of minds over the years it feels like the problem of assimilating concepts anathema to their existence should have been solved long ago, usually by assiduous mindwiping. Nonetheless, we are told that this is the case.
All this adds up to create the impression that the show unfolds in a universe where the core plot is the sole, central, overriding organising principle of the entire cosmos. It’s not a series of important events that are taking place in a wider universe where other stuff is also going on independently of that; it’s the grand narrative that the wider universe exists to tell.
Now, this isn’t automatically a bad way to tell a story; it can be argued that Middle Earth pretty much exists to tell the narrative running from the start of the Silmarillion to the end of The Lord of the Rings, as evidenced by the fact that once Tolkien attempted to write a story set in the Fourth Age he promptly abandoned the attempt. However, I think it is a bad way to tell a story which is explicitly and deliberately constructed as part of a wider fictional universe, in which not only is there this deep bench of older stories you are drawing on but there’s also other stories presently being told by other hands. If you’re participating in a shared universe, you can’t reduce that universe to being solely and entirely about the one story you want to tell, you need to remember that there’s more going on in the universe than just that.
Moreover, it’s a really bad way to introduce a new cast of characters you wish to reuse in subsequent seasons – and whilst most of the new crewmates added in this season would get written out in short order in the subsequent seasons of Picard, the end of this season gives every impression that the plan was to stick with this crew’s stories for a good while, with plans changing subsequent to that.
Hello and Goodbye
Why did so many of these characters lack staying power? I don’t think the actors are to blame at all; Alison Pill was endearing as Jurati and Isa Briones managed to juggle her multiple roles this season very adeptly. Santiago Cabrera had a fun turn as both Rios and the various holograms based on himself Rios uses to round out the crew of his ship when he’s flying solo, and Evan Evagora cut a somewhat Legolas-esque figure as Elnor which might have had legs. No, to my mind it’s definitely a writing problem.
The problem here is that each of the new characters is added largely as an accessory to this one specific story, and are defined largely by their role in it. Soji is the McGuffin the other characters spend most of the season tracking down and who ends up crucial to the conclusion. Jurati is largely here to advance the synths plot, partially through technical explanations and partially through backstory secrets revealed over the course of the story. Rios is basically a cipher, but his biggest backstory feature is that he got alienated from Starfleet after a weird incident which turned out to be part of the big conspiracy. What passes for an arc for Elnor in this season is based on a sense of abandonment he feels after Picard stopped visiting him as a child, due to the premature end of the evacuation effort. Raffi dropped out of Starfleet and ended up in a mental health spiral because of the Mars incident and her theorising around it. Laris and Zhaban are working for Picard in the first place because of the Romulan relief efforts he was involved with and have personal backgrounds which happen to give them insights into who the Zhat Vash are.
Sure, to an extent any character is going to be defined in part by the story they appear in – but these are defined more or less solely by this debut story. Even from the beginning, there was more to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy than those story elements essential to The Man Trap, more to Picard than just “commanding officer who bickers with Q” in Encounter At Farpoint, more to the Deep Space Nine command team from the start than just the major plot points of Emissary, more to Janeway and team than what was vital to Caretaker, and so on and so forth.
The upshot of this is that more or less as soon as these characters were taken out of the context of this story, the Picard writers room abruptly realised that there wasn’t much more they could do with them; more or less all of these new characters, any of whom could have been key players in a much longer ongoing series if they’d had more strings to their bow than they were given here, would end up written out of the show before season 3 even began.
Poor Zhaban doesn’t even make it to season 2. Bizarrely, after we get to know them for the first few episodes, Laris and Zhaban get left behind on Earth rather than going on the mission with Picard, despite having backgrounds and skillsets which would make them perfect for it, and whilst Laris gets some stuff to do in the subsequent seasons, Zhaban was written out, having died offscreen between seasons. Admittedly, it feels redundant to have two characters in basically the same niche, but it seems outright goofy to set up these characters who seem so perfect for this plot and then lose interest in them after three episodes.
Of the entire crop of significant new supporting characters established in this season of Picard, only Raffi manages to have any longevity, thanks largely to two things; firstly, Michelle Hurd is great in the role, elevating things whenever she’s onscreen and generally being a highlight of the series as a whole, and secondly the writers decided to put her into a romance with Seven of Nine, which leaves her well-placed to be given a role in Star Trek: Legacy, Terry Matalas’ proposed follow-up show featuring Seven as the captain of the Enterprise-G.
There’s a phrase Red Letter Media have used in their discussion of this plot point – “passive progressive”. It’s a term they coined previously, I think in reference to the two women kissing at the end of Rise of Skywalker; it refers to the sort of progressive representation which, because it’s not foregrounded and isn’t key to the plot, can fairly trivially be edited out for markets which won’t accept that sort of content, making it the most trivial, limp, and weaksauce form of representation because by refusing to stand up to pressure, it refuses to actually proactively take a stance.
In this instance, the Raffi/Seven romance is more or less confined to a brief shot of them in the background holding hands in the last shot of the season. To their credit, Akiva Goldsman and Terry Matalas would allow the relationship more prominence in season two, but we’ll get to that when we get to that; in this case, it feels like it was thrown in at the last moment as an exercise in saying “look, we can totally do representation” without doing any of the legwork necessary to make that representation actually matter. It’s purely ornamental, and eminently editable-out; gotta make it possible to sell this stuff to China, after all.
Not only did the Picard writers not do the exercise of “Describe who this character is and what’s significant about them and their personal history, making no reference to the plot of the story of this season” to make sure the roles in question would work outside of the context of this season’s story, but maddeningly, they often failed to find much of anything for the characters to do in this story itself. For instance, once Elnor’s been recruited and we’ve had his bit of angst about being abandoned, he has very little to do for the rest of the season; he’s briefly assigned to guard Hugh when the Romulans kick off, fails horribly, and sort of passively witnesses Seven of Nine being a badass, and that’s kind of it for memorable Elnor moments for the rest of this season.
Indeed, most of Picard’s new crewmates are basically bystanders for the climactic event of this season – Soji obviously being the major exception – and whilst to a certain extent that’s to be expected for a show called Star Trek: Picard, it’s bizarre to spend an entire season bringing these people together only to then realise you have nothing for most of them to do in the finale, prompting a certain amount of pointless busywork as they try to enact a plan which doesn’t go anywhere and has little impact on the ultimate course of the story.
Perhaps part of the issue is that the Picard team simply didn’t think ahead when they were writing this season. You need a certain level of foresight to ask the question “What do we do with these characters once we have finished this story?”, and for season 1 foresight seems to have been against policy as far as the writers’ room was concerned. After stepping up to act as co-showrunner for this season, Akiva Goldsman offered this telling response in an interview:
Switching to Picard, what did you guys learn from the first season in terms of pulling off the show that you’re bringing into season two?
Figure out the end earlier. If you’re going to do a serialized show, you have the whole story before you start shooting. It’s more like a movie in that way — you better know the end of your third act before you start filming your first scene.
It’s kind of amazing to me to see Goldsman telling on himself and his co-writers to this extent. You had an entire room of writers, professionals with various levels of experience in television work, and nobody realised that if you are going to construct a season of television to tell a single story from beginning to end, you need to plan out the general course of that story first so that you can then structure the season accordingly and make sure the right beats show up in the right episodes.
I kind of wonder whether this is some kind of veiled jab at Michael Chabon; as season 1 showrunner, Chabon obviously had primary responsibility for how the writers’ room approached its work, and is the logical person to hold ultimately responsible for big picture stuff like “What is the story of this season?” and “What ending are we actually building towards?”, so if the writers’ room were working without answers to those questions it’s unquestionably his fault.
Pizza & Purges
Few episodes highlight the confused muddle of this season’s pacing and overall story structure than Nepenthe. In the previous episode, the Zhat Vash had gone mask-off and are tearing through the Borg Reclamation Project to try and get to Soji, intent on using her to track down the hidden planet of synths that Dr. Altan Inigo Soong (Brent Spiner), son of Data’s creator Soong, has created out in deep space. (Think Harry Mudd’s planet of hotties from I, Mudd, except there’s hotties of both genders, their relationship with Soong is less toxic, and Soong actually understands how they’re put together rather than just pirating some tech from a different galaxy he uncovered.)
Nepenthe opens with Elnor being left behind on the Borg Reclamation Project to protect Hugh, who is trying to do something, anything, to stop the Romulans from mass executing the xBs and the helpless dormant drones; meanwhile, Picard and Soji have been teleported far away, thanks to Hugh being able to use the cube’s transwarp systems to make a portal to safety. It turns out they have ended up on Nepenthe, a comparatively nearby planet, which through sheer coincidence (a coincidence so vast one suspects the writers have no idea of how absurdly big inhabited space is in Star Trek) happens to be where Riker and Troi and their daughter Kestra (Lulu Wilson) have made their home.
What follows is a bizarrely disjointed episode. On the one hand, you have scenes of stark horror and desperate violence on the Borg Reclamation Project, including the perfunctory and pointless death of Hugh, who dies so that Seven of Nine can show up and then do the thing he was going to do anyway. (It also becomes apparent that Seven had passed to Hugh a comm chip usable to summon her in an emergency – Elnor finds it on Hugh’s console and activates it – raising the question of why Hugh didn’t call her for help sooner. Then again, it’s one thing calling her, it’s another thing her physically getting onto the cube, and I’m still not sure how she did the latter.) It’s a nasty, grim strand in the episode, and feels like a really bleak and soul-crushing end for a character who should surely have been a seed of hope in the show, and who could have had some great scenes in conjunction with Seven and offered a contrasting version of the ex-Borg experience to her own.
On the other hand, you have a mostly light, fluffy set of scenes in which Soji and Picard have a happy visit with Riker and Troi, eating Riker’s home-baked pizza and chatting about old times. Though there are some heavy emotional conversations here, it’s basically a gentle feelgood plot strand that’s mashing the nostalgia button more than any other part of this season does. Even when you consider some of the sadder plot points which emerge here, the overall tone of it is sufficiently brighter than the entire rest of the season that it almost feels like an extract of another show plopped right into the middle of this season.
This is kind of because it was; apparently, the entire thing with the Riker homestead was a late addition to the season. Although Jonathan Frakes was fairly closely involved in the season – Riker shows up with a Starfleet posse in the last episode, Frakes directs two episodes of the season, including the one with the best Elnor stuff – Marina Sirtis had other commitments and could only offer four days. The sequence had to be shot on the backlot and presumably the writing for it had to be done in a hurry to accommodate the circumstances.
Either way, the end result is that the episode has all of these scenes of rest and tranquility and reflection and taking stock whilst Picard’s friends and Soji’s good buddy Hugh are in immediate mortal danger. The lack of urgency shown by Picard and Soji given the context is astonishing. It’s entirely possible to do an episode of television where a low-threat, slow-paced plot strand contrasts with a high-energy, high-threat crisis, but you need to do it much more artfully than the Picard team managed here. Between this and a zesty side-dish of angst aboard La Sirena, it’s an episode crammed to the gills with tonal whiplash, and where the most memorable part is the bit which just doesn’t tonally fit with the rest of the season.
This isn’t the only instance of tonal shakiness in this season – the second episode directed by Jonathan Frakes is Stardust City Rag, in which the La Sirena crew must infiltrate the freewheeling casino world of Freecloud in order to get Bruce Maddox out of the hands of its ruler. Much of the episode is a total laugh – with Picard donning a roguish costume and a Pythonesquely outrageous French accent as part of his cover story – and it comes across like a tribute to the Blake’s 7 second season episode Gambit, which features female villains in amazing dresses and a mission to infiltrate a space casino in order to get information from a scientist. It also has a whole lot of grim murder and betrayal; even when Picard season 1 is doing something a bit more light-hearted, it just can’t help but shovel on the grim, and to do so in a weird and incongruous way.
Destroy, Control, and Synthesis
More evidence that the writers were just making this shit up by the seat of their pants without a clear destination in mind comes from the ending itself. So, it turns out that the Zhat Vash are doing this whole Butlerian Jihad thing against synths because they encountered a mysterious pylon which uploaded into their brains informations about a terrible threat to organic life posed by synthetic life, much like the pylons in Mass Effect warned of the threat of the Reapers.
In order to prevent this apocalypse from happening, the Zhat Vash operated in the shadows as hidden masters of the Romulan intelligence structure in order to ruthlessly supress synthetic life wherever it arises. Remember how in Star Trek: The Next Generation the Romulans kept encountering Data and enacting sinister plans to destroy him, prompted to do so by the Tal Shiar’s hidden puppetmasters? No, you don’t, because that didn’t fucking happen, but apparently it should have if the Zhat Vash were as widespread and as integrated into the Tal Shiar as they’re supposed to have been.
Anyway, it turns out Soong Jr. has made a whole society of synths, which is a problem for the Zhat Vash, who’ve undertaken this whole scheme in order to try and find out from Soji where the hidden synth homeworld is, which would be why they destroyed Dahj because… um… destroyed Dahj because… hm. That was an odd call on their part – if they were happy to play the long game with Soji in order to glean information from her, why weren’t they happy to do the same for Dahj, especially when they had infiltrators in high places in Starfleet on Earth who could keep tabs on her under the guise of taking an interest in her career? It’s almost like the writers came up with the hit on Dahj before they figured out what the Zhat Vash’s ultimate goal actually was.
Anyway, the Zhat Vash want to track down the synth homeworld to blow them up, and the synths are sad about this. As it happens, the pylons were a message not for organic life, but for synthetic life – when decoded by a positronic mind the garbled message reads, roughly speaking “Hey, robot friends, if the organics are giving you shit here’s how to make an emergency call to the vast Cthulhu-like robot intelligences which lurk in intergalactic space, kind of like how the Reapers lurked in intergalactic space in Mass Effect, and they’ll come running and wipe out all organic life on your behalf, kind of like how the Reapers regularly do in Mass Effect.”
With the Zhat Vash bearing down on them, Soji and her synth sibs decide to activate the signal, causing a glowy red portal to RoboCthulhu open up in space above the planet, just as the Zhat Vash fleet shows up with lots of green glowy stuff on their ships and a Starfleet posse led by Riker shows up with all sorts of blue glowy stuff on their ships, kind of like how Mass Effect 3 ended up with a split of colour-coded red, green, and blue options themed around whether synthetic life and organic life can ever get along. Then Picard flies up there, interposes himself between the three forces, and talks everyone down.
Now, I don’t mind Star Trek being in a conversation with Mass Effect – it borrowed from Trek, after all. But there’s a difference between being in conversation with another work and outright just lifting stuff from it. None of the Picard writers have admitted to this wholesale borrowing from Mass Effect, but we’re not just dealing with broad concepts that any space opera could run into, even if it happened to be exploring the idea of the relationship between organic and artificial life; we’re dealing with extremely specific ideas, directly utilised, the concept of the pylons perhaps being the most blatant bit.
Moreover, the whole final confrontation left me profoundly confused about two things:
- The Romulans are supposed to be on their knees, the Romulan Free State a mere shadow of its former self, but apparently the Zhat Vash can call on infrastructure sufficient to run the Borg Reclamation Project and pull together a startlingly big fleet at a moment’s notice. Generally speaking, effective force projection is a game for states which haven’t collapsed; what gives?
- Starfleet has simultaneously been infiltrated to the gills by the Zhat Vash but, at the same time, it’s possible for Riker to cobble together a fleet to counteract them without their lead infiltrator in Starfleet finding out. How’d that work again?
Of these two quibbles, the former one is perhaps more damaging; a lot of effort this season has gone into getting across the idea that the evacuation of the nova-threatened portions of the Romulan Empire petered out and left the Romulans living as effective refugees, whilst in parallel depicting them running black ops teams, massive research projects, international conspiracies, and their own space fleets. Sure, the Zhat Vash’s priority is eliminating synths, not rebuilding the Romulan State, but they’re one faction and there’s presumably other Romulan factions whose priority would be “let’s get our shit together” – but they seem to be doing nothing for the Romulans on Elnor’s world.
There were 10 episodes in this season in which it should have been possible to square this circle – it wouldn’t have taken much, just something to establish that there’s a stark divide in the Romulan diaspora between the haves and have-nots. Hell, Laris and Zhaban are already here to deliver exposition about the inner workings of Romulan intelligence: have them explain how opportunistic factions used the crisis to shore up their positions and amass incredible private wealth and resources at the cost of less privileged Romulans. As it is, it feels like the writers had two notes on their ideas board – “the Romulan Empire has collapsed” and “the Zhat Vash are extremely powerful and can call on resources comparable to a major galactic superpower” and didn’t realise that the two concepts clashed and needed reconciliation.
(The Zhat Vash thing is also selling a narrative of “surprise, suckers, that culture with all the refugees also include an Illuminati-like organisation who Hate Our Freedom and want to conspire to distort our social norms!”, which is perhaps the worst message this season could possibly send. I don’t think this was an intentional message, but that’s kind of how the whole Zhat Vash thing shakes out.)
On top of all that, it really feels like the Zhat Vash give up far too easily here; throughout this season they have been depicted as absolute fanatics, and it just doesn’t feel credible that one speech from Picard will be enough to prompt them to stand down, even in the face of impossible odds. Remember: they believe that if they let the synths live, all organic life in the galaxy dies. Why wouldn’t they simply target the synth homeworld in a devastating suicide attack once Soji tells RoboCthulhu “eh, false alarm, you can go back to sleep”?
Sure, the Starfleet ships would blow them out of the sky, but from the Zhat Vash perspective if they let those synths live, they and everyone they ever cared about are dead anyway, so surely they’d take death with a chance of saving the galaxy over fleeing and (from their perspective) dying anyway when the Synth Apocalypse they believe in happens? Again, these are hardline fanatics, fully radicalised, you don’t get people like that to calm the fuck down just by asking them firmly, even if you have armed deterrence in place, they’ve got exactly the profile of people who call your armed deterrant’s bluff to strike anyway.
Fixing a Mistake Then Making the Same Mistake
To be fair, I suspect the whole “three-way standoff in space defused by Picard” aspect of the ending was the part they’d planned the least – I can vaguely imagine Chabon’s notepad having “big confrontation happens” written here without it being filled in with more detail until the season had already started shooting. The part of the ending which works best is the part which is most heavily foreshadowed in episode 1, and therefore probably the bit which was in the plan all along. This sees Picard’s consciousness entering a positronic matrix in which some of the retrieved shards of Data retain an odd sort of half-life, in which he has a final conversation with Data who expresses a wish to be turned off once Picard exits the matrix, since facing death is the last aspect of the human condition Data’s never experienced.
It’s all foreshadowed by that vision of Data doing a painting back in episode 1, and I think perhaps that whole dream sequence would have made much more sense if it were contextualised here as something which didn’t happen at the time, but is a hallucination of Picard as he recalls the events of this season in the process of being drawn into the positronic matrix. For that interpretation to really work, of course, you’d need more such hallucinations and other hints that we’re not watching events as they actually happen but as Picard recalls them seeded thoughout the entire season, but the alternative is pretty much “magic happened and Data’s soul called to Picard”, so I’m happier with the hallucination headcanon.
Still, despite that quibble this scene is an impressive exercise in taking perhaps the biggest mistake made in Nemesis and giving it an apt resolution: one of the goofiest things about Nemesis is how the climax gave Data a chance to do a big flashy gesture of self-sacrifice, only to utterly undermine that by revealing that Data had effectively created a “save point” by stashing his memories in B-4. This feels like a much more appropriate send-off for the character, and one which respects the finality of the moment at that.
So it’s kind of a shame that season 3 of Picard ends up undoing this good work, and an even bigger shame that in the very same episode, Chabon and team make the exact same mistake.
You see, the reason Picard gets his consciousness shunted into the positronic matrix is that he dies of space dementia immediately after negotiatiating the ceasefire, and they need to dump his mind into the matrix while they prepare a brand new synth body for him.
Yes, that’s right – after the show goes out of its way to fix a mistake Nemesis made by having Data sacrifice himself but then it doesn’t count because he had a save point, it then decides to undermine the sacrifice it just depicted Picard making by revealing that he, too has a save point. They go out of their way to point out that his new body is calibrated to have the same capabilities as his old one (because CGI’ing in a 30 year younger Stewart would have been too costly), except that they patched out the whole space dementia thing, which also annoys me because it feels like a massive copout – it means that rather than having to deal with the inexorable progress of his condition over the remaining span of the series, the Picard writers cast it aside because they don’t want to think about it.
This feels disrespectful on two levels. On the one hand, it disrespects the original Next Generation concluding episode, All Good Things, in which Picard learns that he will eventually get space dementia in the future and undergoes an emotional journey to reconcile himself to this even as he tackles a crisis from outside the perspective of linear time, greatly impressing Q in the process. If you just take the space dementia out of the equation, you rob that episode of a lot of its gravitas.
It’s also disrespectful to the subject in question. Why can’t we have genre stories about people who are managing dementia still being able to be active and achieve things – like how Terry Pratchett was able to turn out a swathe of novels (including stuff like the Tiffany Aching books which went on to be some of his most beloved works) even after his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s? If we are going to tell these stories about elderly characters, why should it entail brushing away aspects of being elderly we find it uncomfortable and difficult to think about? Star Trek used to be happy with contemplating difficult, sad things and finding reasons to hope anyway – witness, say, All Good Things itself – but apparently this writer’s room is too chickenshit for that.
Into an Incoherent Future
Still, Picard now being an android replica of his organic self rather than the original article must have a whole swathe of implications going forwards, right? Wrong. In that interview I linked early, Goldsman talks about how Picard’s new body would affect season 2:
Will Picard’s new body impact his character in season two, or does it just not?
It doesn’t. We did fundamentally try to address that at the end of 10. He’s not Super Picard. We reset this congenital problem he lived with since Next Gen and gave him the opportunity for rebirth, but it’s nothing more than a record as he might have been where he not here.
To which I can only respond “are you fucking serious?”
I feel like if you are doing a science fiction show and you have literally turned the main character into an android, you can’t treat it as something which doesn’t really matter and you can just sort of brush off. You need to explore the implications. Doing shit like this purely as a narrative get-out to patch away something you don’t like and then never coming back to it might work in some franchises, and it might even work in some of the looser bits of Star Trek, but it’s totally the wrong spirit to approach something which is trying to be some kind of thematic follow-up to The Next Generation; thinking through the implications is something that show did all the time.
To his credit, Terry Matalas would make Picard’s death and rebirth relevant in some capacity to season 3, and whilst I have my issues with how he did it, this is at least one respect in which he treats the audience as though they have object permanence (something he doesn’t always do), and in which he actually bothers to consider the implications of major shifts like this rather than just brushing it off like “Eh, we had to do that to patch out the dementia, don’t think about it too hard”. You can’t get very far with Star Trek asking the audience not to think about it too hard; too much of Star Trek is built on specifically inviting the audience to think about stuff, it’s the franchise for overthinking shit, if you just want to do flashy shit and not have people ask questions about the implications Star Wars is down the road at the Disney studios.
Note also that Goldsman is indulging in a totally false dichotomy. He’s assuming that the only way Picard having a new body could impact his character would be if he were “Super Picard”, gifted with Data-like strength and hyper-memory and whatnot. That isn’t and shouldn’t be the only way going from a biological, flesh and blood body to a robot body with a positronic brain could have an impact on you! There’s ways to do “Picard has a different body built on fundamentally different principles to his old one and that’s a big deal” without opting for “and now he has superpowers”, and it speaks badly of Goldsman as a writer that the only option he can think of is “he has superpowers”.
But now I am getting into season 2 quibbles. As should be apparent from the above, by far all my complaints about Picard season 1 stem from the writing – you’ve got a good cast here and by and large the show’s nicely executed, but the writers just make a whole slew of decisions which I just can’t get behind. Michael Chabon would be out after this; Goldsman and Matalas would act as co-showrunners for season 2, whilst Matalas would take the lead on season 3, which in some respects is really kind of weird, because those two seasons would be filmed back-to-back. Why would you change horses mid-stream like that at the season 2/3 changeover if you were producing the show that way?
It smells of some kind of quid pro quo going on. As mentioned, we say goodbye to the vast majority of the new crewmates we meet this season over the course of season 2; perhaps whatever backstage negotiations led to this odd arrangement saw Goldsman agreeing to stay on for season 2 to give those characters closure, before leaving a clear path for Matalas to offer a more or less entirely different vision of what Star Trek: Picard should be in season 3. I will get to that when I review those seasons, though. At first I thought I’d be able to cover all three seasons in one article, but I was wrong: Picard season 1 is a multidimensional smorgasboard of unfortunate storytelling choices and it took this much space to identify all the issues.
Suffice it to say that I really wouldn’t blame Goldsman for being a bit unsure of how season 1 Picard panned out. As far as foundations to build season 2 on went, it did a poor job, leaving Goldsman and Matalas lumbered with a cast of characters who’d been sorely underdeveloped this season and an end point of the season which was short of stuff for the characters to actually do, due to all the problems in the galaxy this season being caused by the Zhat Vash, who seem to have been beaten here. There’s no indication in later seasons that they went back to try and finish the job by hook or by crook, so they seem to have decided that the entire raison d’etre of their organisation was just a false alarm. They needn’t have bothered – and viewers needn’t have bothered with watching this season.
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