I watched Star Trek: Picard recently, and… I am sad.
Gene Roddenberry had a vision: a future which is truly post-racial, post-war, post-poverty, etc. It’s a world for us to strive towards, to admire, to want to live in. But the world of Star Trek: Picard seems to have all the same problems we have in the 21st century. The Federation is a systemically racist organization that refuses to help an enemy in a time of desperate need. There is deep wealth inequality between different classes of people on Earth. People treat sentient androids like property. And all of “space” is a hostile battleground where one dares not venture without being armed to the teeth.
That’s not a world I look forward to living in, and it would be depressing to me if this is how humanity “turns out” in three hundred years.
Aside from pontificating about today’s political issues, the show’s plot is completely incoherent, and the writing is so lazy and unfocused. Remember Picard’s caretakers at his château who were former Tal Shiar? Those were some interesting characters, but will we ever see them again? Was there any point in having the Borg involved in the story at all? Does the Romulan Samurai kid (bet you can’t think of his name!) have any purpose than to chop people’s heads off? Will Agnes’s murder of Bruce Maddox be swept under the rug? Will the fact that Picard is now a synthetic golem ever be mentioned again?
One perfect example of lazy writing is embodied in the hand-held purple repair device that the Androids conveniently give to Captain Rios. This device basically grants wishes: you can wish it to repair your broken warp core! Or you can wish it to create a mirage of a hundred starships, complete with warp signatures that can fool Romulan sensors! What luck!
And think about how Old Trek and New Trek are different in terms of fandom. There are fans who transform their basement to look like the bridge of the Enterprise. There are fans who program their desktop computer to look like an LCARS interface. And of course there are countless fans who attend conventions dressed up like characters from the Original Series and Next Generation. But will there be any fans who’ll want to recreate the bridge of Captain Rios’s ship (bet you don’t know what it’s called)? Will there be any fans who will admire or want to emulate any of these new characters?
Is it possible anymore to have a show where the whole universe isn’t about to blow up all the time? Can we just have a show where the Enterprise goes to a planet, and Picard negotiates a peace accord, while Data and Geordi get into a wacky holodeck adventure? I ask for so precious little!