Over on a YouTube video, we were asked to post our thoughts on Star Trek: Picard, and I think I’ve finally summed up my feelings on the entire run in a very tight, compact block, so I’m posting them here for posterity.
The first episode of Picard‘s first season is a real bitter-sweet experience. It showed such promise for it’s remaining episodes. It looks great. Terrific casting, even for the arguably worst of it’s characters. Drop-dead gorgeous VFX and cinematography. Narratively, I can squint and see what they were going for, but they dropped so many subsequent balls. And so needlessly. I could easily spend an hour or two going over every little frustrating choice.
Yet it’s practically Shakespeare compared to Season 2 — a run of Star Trek that I’ve long considered the undisputed champion of shit. That is, until ‘Section 31’ came along. A filthy, poorly thought out season that trips over it’s own nostalgia dick nearly every episode until it collapses heaving and drooling into it’s nonsense finale. (Though, Pill and Wersching make a 12 course meal out of a pile of dog food: they’re amazing especially when they get together, and it really sucks that everything around them was a completely wasted effort.)
And, of course, Season 3 is the “sorry about that, let’s start over with a mostly clean slate” apology tour, which just ended up being Terry Matalas playing with his TNG action figures. All the while the audience is overdosing on nostalgia, squirming and twitching. The easiest of the three seasons to endure: a pleasure in the moment, to be sure, but hardly without it’s own critical bugbears.
Oh, Picard… I can’t say you weren’t, at least, interesting. Which is far more than I can say about Section 31. 😉