I really wanted to see Star Trek: Picard and Season 2 of Discovery, but didn’t want to pay for CBS All Access, so when they announced their 30-day free trial offer, I jumped on it.
To recap the pilot, Picard was haunted in his retirement not only by the death of Data but the deaths of Romulans that Picard failed to save after the implosion of their homeworld. But then he is approached by Dahj (Isa Briones), a girl who seems to be Data’s offspring, and who is hunted and eventually killed by Romulan agents. And in trying to find out exactly what is going on after the fact, Picard discovers that Dahj was created with a twin sister.
Picard’s main staff, Romulan refugees, tell him that the Tal Shiar intelligence agency is only a front for an even older and more sinister conspiracy called the Zhat Vash, which is specifically dedicated to the extermination of all synthetic life on the premise that it will inevitably destroy organics. This conspiracy has reached into the highest levels of Star Fleet Intelligence and turns out to be behind the android attack on Mars that led to the Federation ban on synthetic life.
So the episodes confirm that the Federation, once democratic and tolerant, has become creepy, prejudiced and crypto-fascist, because it’s been secretly under the influence of a defeated enemy which has always preferred to act with espionage and skullduggery.
I’m not sayin’, folks… I’m just sayin’.
Having already decided to find Dahj’s twin, Picard is required to find a ship and a crew and ends up with a party who are each dysfunctional in their own way: “Raffi” (Michelle Hurd) a former aide to Admiral Picard turned burned-out conspiracy theorist; Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) a young scientist who Picard interviewed for her android research but who is conflicted about helping him; Captain Rios (Santiago Cabrera), once a promising Starfleet officer who quit after witnessing his commander commit murder-suicide, and Elnor, a young Romulan warrior (Evan Evagora) whom Picard had befriended as a refugee but was abandoned when the Federation withdrew its support for Romulans. In the course of all this, Picard, after decades of diplomatic service, seems to have bought into his own hype; several times he thinks that his powers of reason and persuasion will save the day, and he usually gets shown otherwise.
Star Trek: Picard Season One is a story about a familiar hero in sunset, if not necessarily decline. I found it to be often moving, well-acted, and usually well-directed. (It stands to reason that the most fun episodes are the ones directed by Jonathan Frakes.) However, I didn’t think it was that well-written. For instance when Dr. Jurati shows up at Picard’s home at just the right time, it’s an obvious Romulan set-up, yet nobody seems to notice even after the set-up later becomes more obvious. It’s a bit pat that all the supporting characters (including Riker, Troi and Seven of Nine) all have traumas that trace directly to the current sociopolitical situation. And the scripts completely fail to address the conflict that sets the story rolling: If synthetics are being hunted by Romulans, and are banned by the Federation, and there turns out to be a whole planet of them where Dahj and Soji came from, why was it necessary to raise the twins on Earth as though they were Human?
This leads to a huge spoiler that I will have to go into because it is part of the whole premise of Season One and will reflect how things proceed with Picard in Season Two.
In the Next Generation series, the main theme of Commander Data’s story lines were his attempts to become more human (for lack of a better word). This was sometimes thwarted by prejudice against him as both an officer and a sentient being. There was at least one episode where a Federation scientist attempted to procure Data for scientific experiments, which required Picard and his crew to defend Data in court. And after Nemesis (where Data discovered his ‘B-4’ prototype and later died to save the Enterprise), it seems that B-4 was disassembled by Federation scientists and and some point after that a drone class of androids was created as a labor force. And after those androids destroyed the Mars colony, the Federation outright banned artificial life.
This is the spoiler: Dr. Soong’s descendant (Brent Spiner) found an isolated planet and used it to create an entire race of synthetics who mostly kept to themselves. Their first contact with the Federation was aborted when Rios’ captain killed the emissaries. And once Picard and Rios reach the homeworld, the androids discover that there is an entire “federation” of synthetics who are willing to exterminate all organic life to protect themselves. And in order to protect this planet from Romulan attack, the synthetics must weigh whether to summon this force, knowing that it would kill the Romulans and Federation alike and thus justify the Romulan fear.
This is the REAL spoiler: after Picard helps resolve the final confrontation, he succumbs to his previously diagnosed terminal illness. But the scientists on the planet download his brain patterns into an artificial body. And before he wakes up, Picard has a final goodbye with Commander Data, who was indeed downloaded through B-4, but who asks Picard to terminate his consciousness, having decided that life only has meaning if it is finite. (Just as well, frankly: all the gold makeup in the world can’t disguise the natural sag of Brent Spiner’s face.)
This denouement creates a certain symmetry (it also explains the digital title sequence), but there are also a couple of themes in Season One that it cuts across. One, the prejudice against synthetics would have been that much more a source of conflict if Picard himself is now an android, but now that the Federation has exposed the Romulan conspiracy in Starfleet, it’s announced in passing that the ban on synths is lifted. Not only that, the show seemed to lean heavily into the theme of age and death, with a certain parallel between character and actor: Patrick Stewart is not terminally ill, but the show is promoted as though it were Picard’s last adventure because it isn’t clear how many years Patrick Stewart has left, either. And even if Picard’s new body is basically the same as the old one minus the fatal abnormality, the fact that he has a second lease on life means that the central message of the finale – embracing mortality – is somewhat blunted.
But overall: Not bad. This series has presented a new cast of characters and reset the table on the “Prime” universe (as opposed to the setting history of Discovery or the parallel ‘Abramsverse’) so things could go in any number of directions with Star Trek: Picard Season Two. And if Patrick Stewart has to bow out, the producers could always shift focus to Cristobal Rios, The Most Interesting Captain in the Galaxy.