I Watch TV: Star Trek: Picard

Star Trek Picard

Jean-Luc Picard, previously seen on Star Trek The Next Generation and four succeeding films of varying, um, success, is back. He resigned from Starfleet fourteen years ago when they gave up on trying to relocate the inhabitants of the Romulan Empire from the path of a supernova, the effort suspended after synthetic androids went rogue* and destroyed the shipyards on Mars.

All of this is important, they’ve given up on episode of the week and gone for a ten episode continuing narrative. A woman comes to visit the retired Picard; she’s on the run after being assaulted by mysterious attackers. Picard has seen her before, in a painting of his (now dead) android officer Data. Unfortunatly he's unable to save her. The trail leads off planet.

He tries to mend bridges with Starfleet but it doesn’t work, so he gathers together a motley crew of misfits and heads out into space, though it takes three episodes to get that far.

The show tries to strike a balance between being deep in Star Trek lore (naming it Picard it would have to be**) and creating it’s own story. It sort of succeeds. There’s maybe one or two too many cameos from previous characters, yet in every case they try and tie it into Picard’s story. A major sub-plot has Picard confronting his time as Locotus of Borg, bringing back in other former Borg (“xB”) characters from other Star Trek series’s and the Artifact, a disabled Borg cube. This is rather messily tied into the ongoing plot.

Anyway, this is good Trek, some good work from Patrick Stewart in the lead role, and also some deconstruction of his time as Captain and Elder Statesman which is quite fun. There are also a lot of choices I thought questionable and some issues with timing in the finale, but that’s Trek for you.

Watch This: You wanted more Star Trek and more Picard, come on, eat it all up
Don’t Watch This: You don’t care about Star Trek and never will

 

* This has a novel twist or two but if we’ve seen Battlestar Galactica or played Mass Effect or any of the other stories on this theme it’s a variation on a theme. It doesn’t – directly – link to the Borg storyline. Which is fine.

** My concern when I heard about it was that naming it after the lead character would indicate that it would be bound up entirely in him, when the best Star Trek is always about ensemble casts. There’s a bit of that; everyone is oriented around how they respond to Picard, his reputation, their past relationship with him and the mission he’s on. Still, everyone manages to get a bit of a story of their own which is nice.