Random thoughts on Star Trek: Picard (the first eight episodes, anyway)
This past year, since my initial diagnosis, I’ve relied a lot on televisual comfort food to keep myself sane, and for me, nine times out of ten, comfort food means Star Trek. So I gave Star Trek: Picard a try, and, well...
It’s not good.
Be warned: this is really long. I’m not good at brevity.
Picard: It’s a betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s vision as we know it (and I don’t mind)
I can imagine the creators’ knee-jerk reaction to fan criticism of Picard. “The hardcore nerds were never going to like it. It’s too edgy, too dark, too far from the formula. They won’t accept it. Oh, you think it’s badly written? You think you know better writing than Michael Chabon? You feel like Picard is out of character, do you think you know Picard better than Patrick Stewart?” Et cetera, et cetera. I’m guessing. Am I close?
I have read a lot of complaints from Trek fans that Picard is a betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s vision. It may well be, but to be honest, I don’t much care if it is, for several reasons.
Firstly, I think the idea of Star Trek as an expression of Gene Roddenberry’s “vision” has been wildly overstated. The supposed vision of the future as a progressive, conflict-free utopia was not even present in the original series – it was progressive, yes, for 1960s television, but the original series’ Starfleet was hardly pacifist and its crew was not free of conflict or prejudice. I love Dr McCoy, but he couldn’t disagree with Spock without getting angry and hurling racial slurs at him.
The Next Generation was really where the “no interpersonal conflict, no money, humans are tops” idea took shape, and let’s be honest, the first season – the one where Roddenberry was most involved - was awful. Writers lamented being stuck in “Roddenberry’s box”, having to write characters who couldn’t come into conflict with one another. From TNG onward, I think it’s inarguable that the further Star Trek pushed the boundaries of his vision, the better it became.
Secondly, Star Trek is a TV show, not a religious cult. I’m not judging its quality based on its adherence to a set of moral or creative commandments. I only care whether it’s good.
Thirdly, Star Trek was never the product of only one man’s imagination. Obviously the show would never have existed without his imagination and he does deserve praise, but he also had a lot of help, and a lot of his ideas were less than wholly successful.
It bears remembering that Gene Roddenberry shafted Alexander Courage out of half his royalties for the Trek theme tune by writing deliberately awful lyrics that were never meant to be used (but nevertheless got him a co-writer credit). He designed the IDIC pendant and forced it into the show so that he could sell copies of it and make some money. He tried to strongarm Leonard Nimoy into giving him a cut of everything the actor earned for convention appearances. He was affronted that Kirk shot the Ceti eel in The Wrath Of Khan because, in his view, Kirk should have tried to communicate with it instead of just kill it. He wanted to give Counselor Troi four tits.
Call me a blasphemer, but I’m happy enough to consider Roddenberry’s vision as optional.
“This is not Star Trek!”
I vividly remember my reaction when I was aged about eight or nine and my father told me that they were making a new Star Trek show, with a new crew and a new Enterprise. He was excited, but I was affronted, and I said that if it didn’t have Kirk or the others then it wasn’t Trek at all. I’d been raised on the original series, and I was not happy about The Next Generation.
I remember standing in the hallway when it finally aired in the UK in 1990, and glimpsing Code Of Honor through the living room door. I refused to be in the room when my family watched it. I have no clear memory of when or how I shed my petulance and embraced the new show but, given that my family would watch Star Trek every teatime, I assume I had to watch the thing or I wouldn’t eat.
By the time Deep Space Nine rolled around, I wasn’t hung up on What Trek Is anymore; I was just excited to have more of it. When Voyager arrived, I was disappointed by how unambitious it seemed compared to DS9, and by how little it exploited the potential of its premise. After a season to which I barely paid attention, I tapped out, couldn’t be bothered to spend the time to watch it. I didn’t say “this isn’t Trek!” or anything of the kind; I just decided I had plenty of good Trek already, especially since DS9 was still running, and I really didn’t need to watch another show of lesser quality. No more for me, thanks, I’m full.
As for Enterprise, I guessed that I wasn’t in its intended demographic the minute they broke out the decontamination gel, and I gave up on it entirely when the opening credits rolled. That fucking song, I couldn’t listen to it twice. I never watched again. I’ve heard the show improves, but I’m in no hurry to find out.
I’ve watched the first two Abrams Trek films, and the first series of Discovery, and they’re just…not for me. I don’t hate them, I don’t resent them, they’re energetic and pretty. They’re also dumb as a sack of hammers, and empty spectacle is just not my brand. And I’m happy with that – I don’t expect everything to cater to me, and plenty of other people are enjoying them, which is great.
So, no, I don’t have a chip on my shoulder about what is-or-isn’t Star Trek. I don’t long for new Trek to fail in order to preserve the sanctity of the originals. Why would I want a TV show that has been such a wonderful part of my life to fail? I really wanted to love Picard. I swear. I tried.
When Picard was announced, I felt a weird mixture of excitement and weariness. Excitement for how good it could be – after all, Patrick Stewart doesn’t need to play the Captain anymore, so it must be good for him to be willing to return, surely?
Weariness because, well, the dune buggy chase in Nemesis was apparently Sir Patrick’s idea, and anyone who has read the late Michael Piller’s Fade In online knows how the input of crucial cast members, including Sir Patrick, turned Insurrection into a beige cinematic blancmange, so my idea of “good” is clearly very different from his. I suppose he’s looking at it in terms of what will be fun or meaningful to play as an actor, which is perfectly reasonable. And he’s the Captain. As Dr Crusher said in All Good Things, “He is Jean-Luc Picard, and if he wants to go on one more mission, that’s what we’re going to do”.
I wanted my Captain to go out in a blaze of glory. I wanted to love it. The trouble is, I just don’t think it’s very good.
Star Trek (Often) Sucks
The Next Generation could get away with not being very good, especially in its first season. TNG debuted in 1987, when TV was generally not very good and nobody expected much of it. In the 80s we watched Knight Rider and Airwolf and The Equaliser. TV was the poor cousin of cinema, at least dramatic TV – most of the classic shows from my childhood were comedies that still hold up, Porridge and Cheers and Yes Minister. Occasionally there’d be a miniseries, an I, Claudius or something, that was of a higher standard, but the bulk of our viewing was junk. I don’t think we demanded much of TV. TNG didn’t have to be good for us to watch it. We just needed it to show up on the schedule around teatime.
Nowadays, things are different. We’re in the era of Peak TV. Countless programmes on multiple platforms compete for an audience. Prestigious actors and directors now work in television and produce shows that rival the best cinematic work. You can linger over the details in television. Freed of the demands of episodic television and syndication that shackled the earlier Trek series, you can tell a complex story and take your time doing so. You can explore. You can build character over time, telling a story that takes years instead of having to rely on recognisable tropes to do it in ninety minutes.
Unfortunately, what Picard does is cram a ninety-minute plot into ten long hours. It’s full of people having repetitive conversations, regularly meeting new characters in order that they should be able to reiterate what’s happened so far, all circling round a mystery that unfolds with the delicacy of a spontaneous rain of haddock. It’s hollow and it’s undercooked.
I can’t even tell who it’s aimed at. It’s full of references to existing Trek lore (no pun intended): its plot is built upon the ending of Nemesis; they bring back Hugh and Bruce Maddox and Seven Of Nine, and it’s clear we’re supposed to know who they are and why they’re significant. The show’s (nominal) exploration of Picard’s disillusionment with Starfleet depends upon an understanding of what Starfleet represents, both to Picard and the audience. None of this will mean a thing to viewers unfamiliar with Trek.
Yet it also seems that they wanted to reinvent the wheel, to avoid the show becoming a nostalgia cruise. Picard assembles a new crew – he does not drag the Enterprise out or call up his old shipmates for fear of their coming to harm in his quest. We see no familiar faces at Starfleet, which seems a waste - I would have loved to see Admiral Necheyev instead of Clancy: their history would add weight to their exchanges, and I expect she’s wanted to tell Picard to shut the fuck up for quite some time.
Not that I wanted the show to be a parade of familiar faces, but Picard (the character) has a great deal of history and it makes sense to use it. There’s a reason why his brief reunions with Hugh, Riker and Troi, stand out as highlights on the show: I felt just as delighted to see them again as Picard was. But part of the show’s overall theme for Picard is how he has changed, how the galaxy has changed, how he has let people down, let himself down, given up. We already have, what is it, 178 episodes and four films’ worth of history for this character. It makes sense to draw upon that to populate the new show, to give emotional and narrative weight to it. To understand the after, we have to have some investment in the before.
When, in All Good Things, the crew seemed in the future to have fallen apart and lost touch (mostly because Riker was being a dick), it was unexpected and saddening. If, in Picard, we found out that it was a familiar character living out in a trailer at Vasquez Rocks – Beverly, say, or Geordi – their anger with him would have real impact. We would understand just how badly Picard must have screwed up, if even Geordi was mad at him. (We all know Geordi reserves his ire for women who object to his getting off with holographic copies of them.)
Or what if it was Riker? Imagine if he had quit his command in order to serve once more as Picard’s trusty right hand at Starfleet, coordinating the refugee effort. Or (I’m just brainstorming here) imagine if he had, at Picard’s request, defied Starfleet in order to continue the effort, rescuing Romulans on the Titan, only to find that Picard had spat out his dummy and left him hanging, left him out of favour with Starfleet for disobeying orders.
Or imagine even if some lesser names cropped up. They used Hugh and Bruce Maddox, so they clearly weren’t averse to bringing people back. It may seem silly to imagine bit roles from single episodes being dredged up to add texture, but this is Trek! People would recognise them!
If we’re supposed to be examining a future where Starfleet has lost its way, imagine how much more powerful that would be if we had already seen the characters in the “good old days”. No room here for Philippa Louvois, or Captain Jellico? Admiral Haftel or Captain Shelby? Ro Laren (if she wasn’t killed when the Cardassians obliterated the Maquis)? Juliana Tainer (assuming she’s still alive, it’s not unreasonable to think that Data’s mother might crop up in this story)? I’m picking names out of the air here. For that matter, couldn’t Geordi have decided to team up with Maddox to try to build on Data’s legacy? If Picard was so grievously affected by Data’s death, wouldn’t Data’s best friend Geordi be?
One could argue that reusing old characters makes the universe seem smaller, as though the same ten people were the only ones in Starfleet. That’s fair, but really, this show only exists at all because people still love The Next Generation and feel passionately about it.
When you have one main character with whom the audience has a long history, you’ve got a much harder job to make their new relationships seem convincing. We know Picard, we care about Picard, and who is this Raffi anyway? She was allegedly his trusted colleague at one time, and her career collapsed when Picard abandoned her. The show doesn’t allow us to see much of their relationship before it disintegrated; apparently, Picard’s abandonment of Starfleet devastated Raffi and left her a disillusioned, bitter addict, but we spend no time getting to know or care about their shared history, so when she turns up, Raffi just seems like a stranger yelling at your grandpa. It never adds up to a grain of the emotional impact of the moment Troi sees Picard and wordlessly goes to embrace him.
All this speculation is a dead end, really. They didn’t go that way. They created new characters, and to me at least, those characters feel pretty thinly drawn. TNG didn’t have the richest characters either, especially not in the beginning, but they were given time to develop as part of the show itself. The basic nature of TNG was in problem-solving. Every week there’d be a new conundrum for the crew to unravel, and as we saw them work, we got to know them. We don’t get a chance to get to know these new characters because the show is too busy rushing us headlong to the buffet, to swallow the next nugget in its mystery soup.
The Borg Mystery Box (I Digress)
A lot of people pin the blame for the “mystery box” narrative model on JJ Abrams. Personally, I can trace my awareness of this phenomenon back to The X-Files.
That show arrived as TNG was ending, when the trend toward serialisation in television was in its infancy, and though each episode was intended to be a self-contained story, the series itself was fuelled by the abduction of Samantha Mulder, and by the conspiracy to conceal the existence of aliens. Who abducted Samantha? Was she dead? Would she return? What was the aim of the conspiracy? Who was behind it? It’s no exaggeration to say that in the early years of the show, we were hooked on the slow drip of information, the little details that seemed to be building up to…something.
Around season four, I think, when the show introduced its shape-shifting Christ figure, Jeremiah Smith, and introduced us to colonies of drone children that looked like Samantha, and something about bees and smallpox, intrigue turned to bafflement. What did bees have to do with it? Were the aliens little grey men, or mind-controlling oily stuff, or a mind-controlling life form that lived in oil, or shapeshifters, or faceless aliens…? All of the above? Every new episode that focused on the “mythology”, as it was archly termed, piled on new elements but offered precious few definitive answers. The revelations of previous episodes were retconned or ignored in favour of offering up a new mystery to keep things rolling. By the time of the first movie, suddenly the aliens were also giant clawed chest-burster things, and then there was a psychic kid, and then Mulder was Space Jesus, the answer to everything in the X-Files, apparently, though it wasn’t explained how, and –
And I finally realised that the mythology was horseshit. There was no mythology. There was no huge story that tied all these details together in a satisfying way, and there would be no big reveal that made logical or dramatic sense. There couldn’t be. The (original) final episode, The Truth, was basically one long post-rationalisation. What it boiled down to was a creator who had conceived of the idea of a mystery without more than a passing notion of what the answer was – Chris Carter allegedly didn’t even expect the show to last more than one season, so of course he didn’t bother to map out his story. He had to keep us watching, though; he had to fill the airtime.
So we hung on, hoping for a resolution, growing ever more apathetic as Samantha Mulder’s abduction was explained and unexplained and explained again, as the alien conspiracy expanded to include basically everyone in the universe, to be concluded and cancelled and reinvigorated, as the Smoking Man was killed over and over and over. They had started the show with a mystery that had no solution, and to formulate a solution meant killing the show, so they just kept on piling on the mysteries and then contradicting their earlier answers until every new twist felt like spit in the audience’s eye. Turns out it’s really hard to feel emotionally affected by “the truth” if you’ve heard four other previous “truths” already. The X-Files just kept on crying wolf.
This brilliant show – and it was brilliant – completely cured me of any interest in mystery plotting. I remember watching the first episode of Lost and thinking, “This is going to be another X-Files, isn’t it? The whole series is one big question, and somewhere there’s a room full of writers all freaking out because they know that eventually they’re going to have to answer it.” I never watched another episode.
Like an idiot, though, when I caught the end of Sherlock’s second season – having found the series irritating from the start – I was suckered into the mystery of how Sherlock had survived that fall. When the third series started I had to watch the episode repeatedly, convinced I’d missed something, but no – they never explained it. They never explained it! Explanations were suggested, but none made sense, and not one of them was actually confirmed as correct in the show itself. Two years of publicity hinged on the question of how Sherlock survived, and they never explained it! I still can’t quite believe it. Obviously, they never explained it because they had no idea themselves, they had painted themselves into Cliffhanger Corner, so they just ignored it and moved on. That takes some cojones. (Somewhere there’s a Sherlock fan with a remote farmhouse and an axe, still seething about how Sherlock fell off the cockadoodie roof.)
I think it’s the rise of serialisation that has led to this proliferation of TV shows that constantly put these mysteries in front of the audience just to keep you watching. Do they have a truly compelling solution? Probably not, but how many episodes will you hang around for, just waiting to see if there’s an answer forthcoming? When you watch a TV show not because it’s good but because you want to know what happens next, you’re probably being played, a hostage to curiosity.
Back in its heyday, people thought the mythology episodes of The X-Files were the best. We were disappointed when, after a conspiracy-heavy three-parter, we were dumped back down in Middle America for some story about a high-schooler who could control lightning. Looking back now, it seems to me that those monster-of-the-week episodes (as they were disparagingly called) were often the best of the show, because they could never subsequently be unravelled by some later revelation that undercut their story. DPO (the aforementioned lightning-episode) has aged a lot better than the Paperclip trilogy that preceded it. It had a strong, focused, closed narrative that did not – could not – rely on the promise of future revelations to give it weight. By contrast, whenever I watch Paperclip, I can’t help rolling my eyes at it. What felt definitive and revelatory at the time is reduced to just another spin of the mystery wheel.
Similarly, Old Trek had to tell a single story every episode, with a beginning, a middle and an end. They had to answer the questions they asked. They couldn’t just place an endless series of mysteries in front of the audience to force them to tune in next week, and then – like the junkyard lady in Labyrinth – just keep piling more and more and more on top until we’re swimming in meaningless trinkets with no clue anymore where we were supposed to be going.
Picard does not have a single story. It runs on mysteries, throwing one after another after another at the screen until the viewer is bewildered and unable to tell if these mysteries add up. Secret Romulan cults, the synth attack on Mars, the nature of Dahj and Soji and how they are related to Data, the whereabouts of Bruce Maddox, the conspiracy in Starfleet, whatever the hell is going on in the Borg cube – on and on they come. They never add up, and they never quite land – I had the oddest feeling, over and over, that I must have missed an episode or fallen asleep because things that were presented as earth-shattering mysteries in the previous episode were suddenly being treated as ordinary, as answered, in the next, and I couldn’t remember ever getting a satisfying answer to the questions the show posed; it just posed more questions.
For instance, the Borg Cube. The Reclamation Project. It’s presented as a mystery, and then by the next episode we’re just milling about inside it with the staff, and it’s unclear whether this is a Romulan secret or a Federation co-venture or whether we’re supposed to be taking it at face value, or whether we’re supposed to still feel that there’s some ambiguity about the project, or…whatever. It doesn’t matter anymore. The Cube has served its purpose: it made everybody say “ohshitWHAT” at the end of the episode, and then tune in to the next.
The constant air of intrigue also serves to obscure plot holes, of which there are many. Anything that seems inconsistent at first, you initially put aside as part of a mystery that will later be explained. They never are, but by then you’ve been bombarded with a dozen other questions and you forget about it. The show is riddled with scenes and storylines and characters that seem to exist purely to provide momentum, things that any good writer would have excised as inessential. (And to answer my earlier question, no, I don’t think I’m a better writer than Michael Chabon, but I do think that writing for episodic television requires different skills than writing novels, just as writing poetry or a stage play does. Just because someone wrote a brilliant novel, doesn’t mean everything they write in every sphere of artistic endeavour will be unimpeachable. Morrissey wrote some great lyrics, but that didn’t mean his novel couldn’t suck.)
For a specific example of an inessential element: what was the point of Dahj, when you really think about it? The Romulans attack her, she is “activated”, she goes to find Picard and then she dies. You can argue that she kickstarts his quest, but I would argue that she is entirely redundant in terms of the plot. She’s Data’s mysterious android daughter, and she comes to Picard to send him on a quest to…find Data’s (other) mysterious android daughter.
(She’s also an example of one of my least-loved tropes of recent years, the doe-eyed girl who appears fragile and needs to be protected and who also happens to be a hyper-effective assassin and she didn’t even know it. Joss Whedon has a dozen of these. It’s a weirdly specific fetish and it’s very off-putting. All these sexy young avatars of lethal force who don’t know their own strength and are suddenly seized by destiny willy-nilly and generally need wiser, older men to provide stability and guidance.)
Nothing much differentiates Dahj and Soji, so we effectively have to watch the same character do the same things twice over. Twice we watch her question her existence and struggle with the reality of what she is. Twice we watch her “activate”. Twice we watch her team up with Picard – except in Soji’s case, she’s wary of him, all her trust destroyed by finding out that her life has been a lie, and that Narek had manipulated her. Dahj, however, knew she could trust him. The minute she was activated, she sought him out even without knowing who he was. Why did Dahj know instinctively that there was a person called Picard out there that she could trust, and Soji didn’t? If all the synths are so identical that Rios can correctly guess what Soji likes to eat because he met (other synth) Jana once upon a time, why wouldn’t they be identical in their instinctive trust of Picard?
What if there had been no Dahj, and we started with Soji, who – after being activated following Narek’s betrayal - came to Picard for help on her own? What if, instead of a twinned pair of paintings by Data, there had been only one, and it was hanging on his wall when she arrived, and Picard made the connection that way instead of padding the episode by poring through Data’s archive? (As an aside – why would Data paint a picture called Daughter, and not paint Lal in it?)
Obviously I didn’t write the show, and I’m sure the writers felt they had valid reasons for the choices they made, but to me as a viewer, it seems like a lot of those choices were made purely to keep the wheels spinning rather than being the best way to tell an involving story. You could arguably cut a lot of the irrelevancies from the show and tighten the storytelling, losing nothing, but it’s obvious the writers didn’t want a tight, compelling story, or else were so enamoured of the surface embellishments – the fight scene on the rooftop, the Romulan CSI scene in Dahj’s apartment, the mysteries upon mysteries – that they failed to notice just how unnecessary most of this stuff actually was. It’s not even as if the scenes are rich in character – they’re not. There’s no time to waste on character. The show refuses to slow down, quieten down, take time to breathe, and when you start to ask why certain events were necessary, you discover that very few of them actually advance the plot.
The idea that Soji and Dahj are somehow created out of a single fragment of Data’s positronic net is pretty silly stuff. They didn’t need to be literally created from his being, even if the show convincingly explained how this could be done (spoiler: it didn’t, at least not in the first eight episodes. I’m not watching the last two. Life is short, and frankly if your show is 80% bad, I don’t care what happens in the last 20%. If you wrap a lump of catshit in a silk scarf, it’s still catshit). I know it would just be technobabble, but why throw that detail in there if you’re not going to back it up?
Why not just say that Maddox created his super-realistic synths based on Data’s work, and designed them to resemble his painting in memoriam, and therefore they are his daughters in a figurative sense? The answer, as far as I can tell, is simply because they wanted to add artificial weight to Dahj and Soji’s backstory by making them literally a part of Data, as though Picard wouldn’t care about them otherwise – or as though we wouldn’t.
Where did Maddox get the fragment anyway? Did they retrieve Data’s body after he died in Nemesis? (That’s a genuine question. I have no idea, I’ve only seen Nemesis once. I’m not going back.)
Why did Jurati say the synths had to be created in pairs? Was it ever explained why that was? Was it just so that Dahj could be wearing a tell-tale necklace that would lead them to…actually…I can’t remember the significance of the necklace, except that it prompted Jurati to say that Dahj would have had a sister. It makes no sense that the synths would have to be created in pairs at all, especially as we later find out about at least one more identical synth, Jana. Literally, the whole plotline with Dahj exists solely to send Picard out on a hunt to find Soji. Why not just have Soji be the one who finds him in the first place?
Are CBS selling those necklaces? Maybe that’s their significance.
Speaking of Maddox, I’m curious why they recast him, never mind why they brought his character back, chased him for several episodes, just to kill him off. (I mean, I know why they did that. Because they wanted a big shock to end the episode.)
Oh, god, Narissa. Narissa is such a terrible cliché, and she didn’t have to be, she shouldn’t have been.
Romulans have never been simply the bad guys: they are proud, passionate, committed patriots willing to die for their homeworld. Though they’ve never benefited from the sustained attention given to the Cardassian or Klingon societies, their culture could have been explored and expanded upon to great effect. Many of my favourite episodes of TNG focused on the Romulans (The Defector is in my top ten, and incidentally, that’s the episode where the Romulan defector Admiral Jarok tells Data, “I know a host of Romulan cyberneticists who would love to be this close to you”, so the idea advanced by Picard’s Tal Shiar housekeeper that there are no cyberneticists in Romulan society is ridiculous. Data was on Romulus at one point and nobody from any secret anti-robot cult tried to whack him. Eight episodes in and nobody has even given the faintest whiff of exculpatory dialogue to paper over this retcon, but it's a huge retcon and it needs to be addressed. If you’re going to ignore all the established history of Star Trek, why are you trying to write it at all?).
So, anyway, the Romulans are complex and interesting and then Narissa comes along and whatever ambiguity they might have been going for just collapses under the heels of the Stereotypical Sexy Villain Chick.
Narissa’s a true believer, one of the few who has faced the horrors of the Admonition and (apparently) remained sane, one who is determined to do whatever is necessary to prevent the same horrors happening again, even if that means endangering Romulan lives by staging the synth attack on Mars. And yet here she is on the Borg cube, vamping around like she’s on the bonnet of a car in a Whitesnake video, having the time of her life, a super-evil, leather-clad villainess who pouts and swishes and seems to relish the opportunity to kill just about anyone, all the while jealously taunting her brother over his relationship with Soji (incest! It’s so edgy!).
The Narissa we see in the flashback on Aia looks like she comprehends the magnitude of what she’s getting into. That Narissa has the potential to be a grave, committed individual who believes deeply in her cause. That Narissa would be the latest in a long line of Star Trek adversaries who manage to be antagonistic without being merely villainous; driven individuals who believe that what they’re doing is right. That Narissa does not appear again in any of the episodes I’ve seen.
Lord Auch Woz Ere
Then there’s Stardust City Rag, which has become infamous due to two scenes – the opening mutilation of Icheb from Voyager, featuring full-on close-up eye-extraction, and the infiltration of space gangster Bjayzl’s club. (An aside: it’s obviously just a matter of taste, but Bjayzl is a really dumb name.)
In theory, I don’t mind the pirate pimp cosplay and I don’t even mind Picard’s goofy French accent – it’s awful, but it felt like something that could conceivably have been at home in TNG itself, maybe in Gambit, or on the holodeck, as when he busted out his atrocious Dixon Hill accent in Clues. The TNG characters were always such goody-two-shoes that their attempts to play the heavy seemed endearingly cheesy. It’s totally out of place in the grim new vision of Picard, but it didn’t bother me; at least it felt fun. Not good, but fun.
I don’t even object much to the gory opening. It’s utterly heartless and cynical, an attempt to shock and nothing more, but it’s about what I expect from the show by now. (It also makes no sense. If Bjayzl is harvesting Borg body parts, surely it would be more effective if she used anaesthetic? Wouldn’t a writhing, screaming patient make the whole process harder? Why does it have to be vivisection except to hit the audience over the head with how evil she is? And why do we even care how evil she is, when she does nothing of interest in the episode and is vaporised by Seven by the end?)
Still, if Trek wants to be gory these days, I say go for it. Years of bloodless bat’leth fights have left me open to the idea that Trek needs a little more grue when called for. (“I’ve got a metre-long blade that’s pointed in seven different places! Let me fight by hitting you in the face with the handle so you fall down!”) Although it isn’t called for here, and the episode has a terrible problem with tone thereafter, veering from Icheb’s eye being plucked out to the pirate pimp comedy scenes – it’s enough to give a viewer whiplash. I ended up laughing at both, so blatantly do they try to pander to the audience’s baser instincts. Like so much of the mind-numbing action in the show, it’s all about what looks cool and badass. This is why there’s a space samurai running around decapitating people.
No, I hated two other things, specifically. Firstly, the introduction of an alien who can smell lies – an idea that should generate some interesting tension - is immediately negated when Raffi doses Rios with a drug that counteracts the effect. What is the point of that? Why introduce a peril only to instantly defuse it? Again, just to keep the wheels spinning for a few minutes longer.
Secondly, I loathed Seven Of Nine’s massive information dump, delivered while she holds her former friend/current nemesis at gunpoint. It’s draining to listen to. Fourteen years or so of her life, her grief and her hunt for vengeance, and it’s delivered like an episode of Jackanory. She just tells us, and why did we need to know? Why is this Bjayzl character necessary? Not enough T&A in the show so far? If they wanted Seven to have her own arc of betrayal and revenge with a trusted friend/lover (not sure which it was), why not devote an episode to showing it so that we can feel it and react to it? It’s telling us the story rather than showing – and it’s a waste of time too, since it sets her up for future dealings with Bjayzl, then she immediately beams back in and vaporises her.
(I will say this, though, Jeri Ryan is fantastic. It’s as if someone noticed a resemblance to Uma Thurman and decided to turn Seven into The Bride, and now I want to see her in something as Beatrix Kiddo’s long-lost sister. I haven’t finished Voyager, so I can’t say how in-character it is, but she was bloody good anyway.)
You might say Bjayzl was needed because they had to rescue Maddox from someone, but did they? This whole episode seems redundant. If its intention is to deal with Seven’s tragic revenge arc, it fails, because this is dealt with almost as an afterthought, reduced to the aforementioned infodump. If it’s supposed to give us a larky heist episode where our heroes demonstrate their resourcefulness, it fails, because the obstacles they create are instantly handwaved away – the threat of detection by the “I smell lies” guy evaporates as soon as it appears, and the actual rescue is handled by Seven anyway. Nothing happens here that is entertaining or revealing in a character sense, nothing here is even enjoyable. The episode does not exist because it’s resonant, not because it builds up the characters in an involving way, not because it’s necessary to move the plot along. Just to fill up time on the show. It reminds me of a line in Yes, Minister, where Eleanor Bron complains that she wants to find work outside the civil service, somewhere where there’s “achievement, instead of merely activity”. Picard has a lot more activity than achievement.
Of course, you can have a story built up of character moments where the plot is not crucial, but that is not what Picard seems to be attempting. The first episode introduces the concept of the older, disillusioned Picard, but then does very little to develop that. He’s too busy functioning as a device for exposition, either interrogating other people or repeating to them what he’s already been told. This is not a character study. It’s also not a particularly convincing interrogation of our troubled times – notions of intolerance are floated but not explored in any depth, and guys, if you want to write a story about how wrong it is to refuse to help refugees, maybe don’t write it in such a way as to justify all the worst right-wing paranoid fantasies about them by making the refugees turn out to be the villains?
Old Trek had many episodes that were weak in terms of plot but were otherwise full of interesting character beats or humour or something that made it possible to overlook the deficiencies elsewhere. Often, they were – if nothing else – solidly constructed, if uninspiring. I think every viewer has their own internal measure of how much inconsistency or illogic they can accept, how many plot holes they can ignore, if the good stuff outweighs it.
What is there in Picard that’s good? What justifies the dizzying torrent of plotholes it forces us to endure? Nothing that I can recall. It purports to be a character study, but what does Picard do? He spends all his time being confused and getting yelled at. I don’t object in principle to the idea that Picard is old, behind the times, out of touch, or that Starfleet has become xenophobic – as I said, I’m not precious about Trek, and any idea can work if it’s done well – but the show has no interest in exploring those ideas. It tosses them into the pot and they evaporate. Meanwhile, here’s Space Legolas cutting people up.
Fur Coat Vs Knickers
This may be a matter of taste, but I have a real problem with the show’s style in general. I felt the same about the new movies, and Discovery too. Visually and musically, there’s just a constant onslaught of dizzying camerawork, flashy graphics, music underscoring every scene. So much Steadicam! It has a place, but when every scene uses it, it’s nothing but lazy visual shorthand used to generate an urgent, you-are-there atmosphere. Our characters are shaken up and so is the camera. You want to linger over the set design or enjoy an interesting composition? Tough! The camera is too busy for that. Except it happens in scenes where the characters are just talking. Discussing their next move. Eating pudding, whatever. It’s a poor technique designed to trick the audience into thinking something important is happening, and when you use it all the time it becomes numbing.
The same is true of the musical score, which seems omnipresent, underlining every conversation. This is important, goes the music, this is revelatory. This is new information we should dread. You should be feeling unnerved by this vital new information. Are you on edge? Are you eager to know what’s coming? Feel what we tell you! Feel, feel, feel, constantly! Don’t listen, don’t react, don’t think, just feel! The music is swelling and the camera is swirling and you should be feeling very excited and intrigued right now!
It’s exhausting, and the constant audiovisual input makes it that much harder to focus on what’s actually being said. That, I suspect, is the point.
By contrast, I happened to watch The Measure Of A Man today, and noticed how the conversations were not underscored by music, and the camera hardly moved. Obviously, that episode is now over thirty years old and styles have changed, but what’s apparent is that the showrunners back then didn’t feel the need to hit you over the head for forty-five minutes with a whizzy bag of tricks just to ensure you watched the show next week. They actually wanted you to listen to the dialogue because the dialogue, the story, was the whole point, and it was a great script that they had obviously worked hard on, sweated over, to make it as sharp and economical and powerful as possible.
Double Dumbass
People telling Picard off (and swearing at him because it’s 2020 and we can swear on Star Trek now) gets really old really fast. We get it, he disappointed a lot of people. Watching TNG now, it’s odd to think of how often the Enterprise swoops in, deals with the issue of the week on some alien world, and then buggers off again, never to return. Picard could be read as a justified critique of Roddenberry’s future utopia – everywhere he goes, Picard gets slapped across the face by the people he abandoned, the tasks he left unfinished, at least as far as the Romulan refugee situation is concerned.
There’s some mileage in that idea. You could yield interesting results by applying that criticism to many episodes of TNG, seeing what happens to a retired Captain when he no longer has a starship to back up his decisions. Who might come calling to have a word?
What’s Federation policy after, for instance, the events of The Hunted, at the end of which the Enterprise zooms off and literally leaves the government of Angosia being held hostage at gunpoint? Do they send in the diplomatic corps to help? Picard spoke in that episode of Federation help to reintegrate the soldiers into society – did that happen? Did it succeed? What happened to the idiot bimbo planet in Justice, or the Mintakans? Twenty or thirty years later, who might pop up bearing a justified grudge? In practice, though, it just comes across as a lot of people yelling at a frail and confused old man.
This leads me to another problem – Picard doesn’t seem like Picard anymore. Now, a lot of that is perfectly understandable and even to be expected. It’s decades since the original show. He’s an old man now, out of his comfort zone, out of his depth, out of the context in which we’re used to seeing him. He hasn’t got the Enterprise or his crew, his family. He was a man who had found his right place and time, and they are gone. Of course he’s changed. The change, though, seems to strip the character of most of what made him compelling in the first place, and replaces it with nothing of particular interest.
That is, when he’s onscreen. Naming the series after the lead character suggests that it will be in some way an examination of them, or focused on them. In reality, Picard is offscreen as often as not. The characters spend more time discussing Data than Picard – maybe the show should have been named after Data instead. (And maybe Data should be renamed Poochie, while we’re at it.) Picard’s former assuredness, his thoughtfulness, his gravity, all are apparently now regarded as arrogance. It’s as if the writers don’t actually like him.
(This is unsurprising, as they don’t seem to like Star Trek much either. Common to all New Trek is the way in which the writers seem completely uninterested in actually trying to fit their new vision into the established universe. The overwhelming impression that one gets from all these shows is that none of the writers actually want to write Trek at all, they make so little effort to tailor their stories to fit it.)
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Romulan refugee world, where he rips down the ROMULANS ONLY sign on a café and barges in, looking around as if to challenge the patrons to say something. This scene is so wrongheaded it beggars belief. These people are refugees – they are a marginalised people who have lost their home, and have been abandoned by the Federation that promised them help. That such a people would want to demarcate a safe space is perfectly understandable, especially a people as proud as the Romulans, and yet Picard sees this situation without interpreting its nuance and simply concludes that they are prejudiced and must be forcefully challenged. Watching him charge in and sit down is like watching a Britain First supporter force his way into a mosque.
Picard (TNG version) understood and respected cultural nuance better than this. He respected Worf’s right to refuse to help the Romulan in The Enemy, and to commit “honourable” Klingon suicide in Ethics. He respected Moriarty’s right to exist, even when the character had proven himself a grave threat to the Enterprise. In Time’s Arrow, faced with an enemy that had already murdered countless humans in San Francisco, he still tried to negotiate to provide alternative means of feeding the aliens. He wanted to negotiate with the Crystalline Entity, for goodness’ sake. It’s perfectly possible that a lifetime of negotiation ending in savage disappointment would turn him into a grumpy old curmudgeon who no longer gives a toss about cultural nuance, but it’s not addressed.
I know I dismissed the necessity of fidelity to Roddenberry’s vision earlier, but it’s worth mentioning that if anything distinguishes Trek from the vast majority of other science fiction films and TV, it’s that the future presented in it is fundamentally optimistic. Take your pick – 1984, Blade Runner, Akira, The Terminator, Alien, A Clockwork Orange, Dune, The Matrix – the chances are that you’re looking at something dystopian, violent, dark, oppressive, full of conflict, a future in which humans are, on the whole, lousy, and small pockets of decency are left to light their candles against overwhelming odds. Most sci fi posits that humans will, if anything, only get worse.
Star Trek cleaves to the idea that humans, as a bunch, are naturally inclined to be good, and that’s pretty rare. “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” We’re not infallible; we stumble, we make mistakes, but on the whole, we’re a decent bunch. The humanity of Star Trek is not liable to follow a demagogue into a pointless war, or capitulate out of fear, and if we start down that path, we will always fight our way back.
In Picard, though, that’s what Starfleet has done – capitulate, given up on the Romulans, allowed synthetic life to be eliminated (to say nothing of creating a synthetic slave race in the first place). I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I don’t think the show does the necessary heavy lifting to support its own premise – the justification isn’t there, dramatically speaking. Think of all the times that Earth has been threatened, over the history of Trek. Think of every time an Admiral Layton or a Pressman or a Valeris has tried to conspire to sell the Federation’s principles out for the sake of increased security. Every time, they fail, because in Star Trek, the good guys won’t let it happen, and there are always more of the good guys than the bad. What is it in Picard that has finally made the Federation fearful enough to give up on its principles? I guarantee they’ve been through worse. The synth attack? Was that as bad as war with the Klingons, or the Romulans? As bad as the Dominion War? As bad as the Borg?
Patrick Stewart has praised Roddenberry’s vision and optimistic view of the future as the reason for Trek’s enduring appeal. The writers seem not to want to continue in that spirit, and have produced a show that is devoid of optimism, and panders to the viewer’s most base instincts with its gore and determinedly grim tone. It’s not mature, it’s just naughty, like a twelve-year-old writing swear words in her diary. They don’t want to muck about on the Enterprise and solve puzzles: they want to find a dive bar and get hammered thinking about how shit life is. If they were really inspired by current events, if that’s why Starfleet is so complacent and insular, why does this series feel like it too has given up hope? Is it too corny to give Picard a rousing speech that makes Starfleet help the Romulans after all, or persuades them to lift the synth ban? Could he have saved Thaddeus Troi? Is it just more fun to be nihilistic, easier to give up? Is optimism just not cool anymore? Countless scenes of TNG saw the crew sitting around, talking. Picard wants to blow shit up and make you watch some kid’s eyeball being cut out.
If they’re determined to make such a nostalgia-free, unTrekky Trek, why did they bother making this Trek at all? Why not just make an original series that doesn’t have half-hearted references to previous characters and episodes and events, references that just make me wish I was watching the old show instead of this one? (I mean, we know the answer here: Trek is an established franchise with a fanbase willing to pay to see more of it. If this didn’t have Trek in the title, it would never have been made.)
Is this series intended to draw dramatic weight from its history? If so, why does it abandon so much of what made Star Trek feel like Star Trek? As a viewer, there’s a constant effort needed to adjust to the new style, which is fine; I don’t mind the new showrunners making Trek different. All I want is for it to be good television, and this isn’t good television. It’s not a question of it not being Trek. If it was a generic sci-fi actioner, it would still be derivative and shabby and riddled with inconsistencies.
TNG wasn’t always good television – it was frequently terrible - but they had to fill 26 hours a year, so it’s unsurprising they had so many misses, and with an episodic show, at least you could start afresh each week. The series lived or died on the audience’s willingness to spend another hour with this crew. If their adventure was subpar then we still felt affection for the characters and knew that the bad episode was over, and next week might be better.
With Picard, with its single story, we’re strapped in for ten episodes and yet this story never feels like it needed to be told. It feels like script notes and scribblings of plot that have not been fully developed as drama. It’s exhausting, like a journey through a featureless landscape that never arrives anywhere, with a driver who keeps telling you that we’ll be there soon and get to do a ton of cool stuff but he can’t tell you what. Occasionally he’ll tell you some story, too, about a place he once visited. and you’ll wish you could have seen it but, oop, too late. Here’s a postcard, though. And shut the fuck up.
Trek’s Dead, Baby
I mentioned The Measure Of A Man earlier. The episode is, perhaps more than Nemesis even, the progenitor of Picard. It introduces Bruce Maddox and his quest to recreate Data. It’s probably the first truly great episode of TNG. Something struck me, watching it today, thinking about Picard.
The whole episode is a legal drama trying to determine Data’s rights as an individual. “Is he a person or property?” Maddox desperately wants to disassemble Data so he can study him and build more: “As many as are needed!” Picard argues that to create an entire race and regard them as property is slavery. Building these life forms to serve, to be sent out, every Starfleet vessel “with a Data on board, serving as our eyes and ears in dangerous situations”, denied the right to choose. Expendable, disposable.
We get very little exploration of the synths themselves – a lot of focus on Dahj and Soji, obviously, but the mass-produced synths working on Mars are a mystery. The one glimpse we get suggests that they are not as advanced as Data, but are they sentient at all? Are they simply automatons? Do they have rights? Does Picard care about their rights? If he doesn’t…shouldn’t he? Did all the synths die en masse, or were they dismantled? Were they executed? If they weren’t considered sentient, why wouldn’t the ban only apply to non-sentient synths? Why would it apply to technologies used for other purposes, like the medical technology that could have saved Thaddeus Troi?
There are so many questions here, all springing from the issues presented in the episode the series has drawn some of its central mysteries from, and yet they don’t seem to be interested in them. Again, it’s all about what the showrunners chose to focus on, and clearly the issue of the rights of the synths on Mars wasn’t a priority to them. I think exploring that topic would have been a goldmine for the writers on the original show, and that it absolutely would have been an issue for Jean-Luc Picard himself.
Whenever I watch season one of TNG, it strikes me that – with the greatest of respect for the whole cast – the show would have died ten episodes in, if not for Patrick Stewart. Even with that early, grouchy version of Picard, he gives the show such gravitas; every one of those crappy scenes is a thousand times better than it deserves to be, because of him. It’s an incredible con job, really: he managed to create the illusion, through sheer charisma and talent, that the show wasn’t completely dire. He gave the impression that the show was salvageable, and behold, bit by bit, it was salvaged. He was the crucial ingredient in Trek’s renaissance back in 1987, and it feels horribly fitting that he should be central again in its decline.
I exaggerate: I mean, I doubt this is the actually the end of Trek, even if we might want it to be. No franchise ever truly dies nowadays. Those who are disappointed in the latest iteration of their preferred universe should take heart and be patient: the next reboot, the next spin-off, the next expansion of the canon will not be far away. Personally, I’d be happier if they just let it rest. There’s plenty of Trek already. Maybe there’s enough.
Comments
Post a Comment