Star Trek: Picard

1. Out of curiosity, I saw the pilot episode of Star Trek: Picard. I did it in part because the pilot episode can be viewed for free. If I cared enough, I could view the second episode for free by taking out the temporary subscription, then canceling it, but I don't care that much. It's not really fair to judge a series by the pilot episode, but I'll do it anyway. I was never planning to watch the entire series. 

2. I've been viewing Star Trek on and off since 1966. TNG was arguably the most successful of the spinoffs (some Trekkies prefer DS9), so if you're going to exhume one of the spinoffs, that's the obvious candidate. 

3. The newest iteration of the franchise is a star vehicle for Stewart. It will succeed or fail based on his ability to center it. Pushing 80, he looks and sounds his age. In his prime he was a larger-than-life stage actor squeezing into the role of a TV actor. You could often see the frustration as he had to hold so much in reserve. Occasionally he had a scene where he was free to cut loose and perform on a theatrical scale, but that was rare.

Now his situation is the opposite. At his age the reserves are gone. That sets a low ceiling in his ability to rise above a certain dynamic range. 

The Picard character was never all that sympathetic. Aloof and rulebound. For someone who made his career exploring alien civilizations, he was quite narrow, chauvinistic, and intolerant. He treated the Starfleet code of conduct as a universal norm. In one episode, Worf's wife is murdered. Worf exacts revenge by slaying her assailant. That's the Klingon honor code, but Picard disapproves.

However, Stewart's aging process has mellowed Picard. It lends poignancy to the character. 

In that regard, it's striking to compare Stewart, in his prime, playing an old man in "All Good Things…" to Stewart as an old man. Despite his formidable acting chops, Stewart's attempt to play his older self wasn't very prescient or convincing when you compare it to the real elderly Stewart. 

There is a certain irony in the fact that Chris Pine has been bypassed to go back Stewart and TNG. Especially for atheists, there's sentimental appeal to watching beloved actors over the years reprise old roles. Since they deny the afterlife, it gives them a sense of rootedness in their past.  

4. There's a silly fight scene at Stardleet Archives where a female android singlehandedly protects Picard from Romulan terrorists. Doesn't the Starfleet complex have surveillance and security? Can't they scramble/beam armed guards to the fight scene?

5. Picard is having paranormal/precognitive dreams. How does he have that ability? Will the source of his dreams be explained? Is this like hive mind telepathy, where his dreams are subconsciously tapping into other (alien?) minds? Even if that's the case, it wouldn't explain paranormal/precognitive dreams about androids, since their "minds" operate on a different basis, a different wavelength. 

6. The series will have guest stars like Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine. That betrays a certain lack of confidence on the part of the TV producers. She was the actress/character who rescued Voyager from ratings oblivion, so it's understandable that the producers wish to include her, but her character doesn't belong in the TNG timeline. 

7. The episode suffers from tired plot ideas. Data gave his "life" to save Picard. One goal is to revive Data. But was his positronic mind/memories destroyed? Is he gone forever? 

That recycles The Search of Spock, where Spock gave his life to save the crew. Can he be restored? They have a new body, but what about his mind? Vulcans have a soul or katra. But did he transfer his consciousness to someone else (McCoy) before he died? And can the T'Pau reunite the soul to the body? 

8. Another tired plot idea is the destruction of homeworlds. In Generations, a probe collapses the Veridian sun, wiping out inhabited planets in its solar system. In The Undiscovered Country, an explosion on Praxis dissolves the ozone layer of Kronos. In Star Trek (2009), Vulcan is destroyed by an artificial black hole inside planet. Now, in Star Trek: Picard, Romulus is destroyed when its sun goes supernova. This is lazy screenwriting. 

9. In addition, the destruction of homeworlds suffers from a tension in SF metaphysics: time-travel. In a genre where time-travel is feasible, the obvious, easy solution to the destruction of your homeworld is to go back in time and change a key variable, thereby averting the cataclysm and restoring the status quo ante.

10. Admittedly, it might not be possible to prevent a supernova, but that goes to another scientific absurdity. A sun doesn't go supernova overnight. Surely Romulus would become uninhabitable long before its sun went supernova, at that late stage in its lifecyle. So the Romulans had plenty of lead-time to evacuate and colonize another M-class planet.

11. Time-travel poses a dilemma for the SF genre. On the one hand it's one of the most appealing conventions of the genre, because it's such a nifty way to illustrate and explore hypothetical or counterfactual scenarios. On the other hand, the principle is too powerful, too flexible. If feasible, it would be overused and have a radically destabilizing effect. It would obliterate historical continuity as plenary or cosmic history keeps resetting to create alternate timelines that replace the last timeline. So SF writers are arbitrarily selective about the convention.