I Absolutely Loathe Picard

Now I fully admit that I haven’t watched much Picard. There are number of reasons why, even trying to watch episode one I found that it couldn’t keep my attention – and I couldn’t understand why this revered Starship Captain was suddenly Persona Non Grata. On top of this, the clips I’ve seen where Picard is berated, humiliated, shamed and generally belittled took any enjoyment of the show away from me. When I think of episodes with Reg Barclay where the majority of the crew want to transfer Barclay away from the Enterprise, and Picard is the one who says ‘No. There is a reason he is on the Enterprise; you can work with him, you can make him a valued crewmember.’ At no point is Barclay humiliated, shamed, belittled or berated, in fact the majority of the crew try to accommodate Barclay’s problems and help to work to make him become a more visible member of the Enterprise’s crew. There is none of this in Picard.

Now I freely admit that the writers have a poor knowledge of Star Trek anyway, and certainly they’ve demonstrated this by their use of Lore (who was actually disassembled in Descent Part 2) so shouldn’t exist as an extant android. Now I realise that this was meant to be the Federations 9/11 and that it was meant to be a kind of turning point – or some such thing, but instead of making the Federation seems strong and powerful and ready to face all challenges, it makes them look weak and isolationist and unwilling to face the world as it is. The US went through this during the Second World War when one of its fiercest opponents to getting involved in the war was Henry Ford himself, who felt that it was Europe’s problem and nothing to do the USA – that is until on 7 December 1940, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. At which point even he realised that this concept of shouting, ‘Pull the drawbridge up! We’re all right!’ Was not a good policy, but then Ford had a plethora of problems, most of which would take a book to unpick, the isolationist viewpoint that a country should be left alone to fight its own war fails to take into account the fact that we all live on one Earth no one can exist in isolation – even if we’d like to.

https://www.thegamer.com/star-trek-picard-is-garbage/

I think what has cheesed me off about Season 3 most is the sudden return to the TNG cast; something they did in the very last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise ‘These Are The Voyages’ where instead of it being a reasonably good Enterprise episode where the ship finally gets home, and Archer gives his speech to the Federation, we have a holodeck episode with Riker and Troi, and it seems as if Picard is doing the same thing, going back to the golden age of Trek – or at least the silver age, mainly I think because it was such a successful series and people didn’t think that that was possible, not after TOS; or it could be a case of they didn’t know what else to do and TNG had been massively successful – I don’t know. I do know that there is something called the Law of Diminishing Returns where when one thing has been very successful, the attempt to redo it again and again and again will produce results, certainly, but said results will be less and less successful.

https://www.engadget.com/star-trek-picard-season-3-paramount-plus-preview-review-080010710.html

Comments on YouTube state things like, ‘The Third Season of Picard has been the best yet’ although I beg to differ. There seems to be this drive towards dimly lit bridges, lens flare that would drive the most professional cameraman nuts and stupid, stupid dialogue that at one point had me alternately shouting at the television screen and wanting to throw something heavy at it. And critics will say that I don’t understand that Star Trek is being ‘woke’ – of course Star Trek is ‘woke’, sometimes Star Trek was so bad at stating the obvious that it basically smacked you round the head with a shovel and said ‘See? Two races fighting because one is black on one side and one is black on the other side is stupid, get it?’ But sometimes Star Trek could write some really good episodes, ‘Spectre of the Gun’ where the Melkosians transport Kirk and part of the bridge crew to the town of Tombstone on the day of the fight at the OK Corral, but not as the Earpps, the titular heroes of the story, but as the Clantons, the villains. And the one thing Star Trek was very, very good at was making the audience reconsider their positions on who is the villain and who is the hero – after all the hero is only the hero because they won, or because they were first (or said they were first) after all the first man at the North Pole was an African called Matthew Henson, but his place in history was usurped by Admiral Robert Peary.

There’s talk about more Star Trek series, the success of Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds (although I don’t like that either for the simple reason that its depiction of disability is terribly, terribly disheartening) has seen to that, (and Star Trek is a Cash Cow) but I’m beginning to think that maybe, maybe it’s time to put Star Trek to bed. I’m not saying that the series we have now haven’t been good, they’ve all been a bit like the Curate’s Egg – good in parts. There has not been a Star Trek series where every single episode has been spot on, from TOS, TNG, VOY – although DS9 came remarkably close – although even that series had one or two ‘stinkers’. So I think it’s time that we, for the moment, took a rest from Star Trek and left it for a couple of years. Let the dust settle, and then when we return we might be in a better place to write better stories.