Star Trek Picard
Recently I was complaining again about how due to the proliferating Balkanization of streaming services increasingly things one wants to watch might not be on the service one wants and one isn't about to subscribe to all the services ... and in particular that I regretted not being able to watch any seasons of the best sci fi series out there, The Expanse, after the second when it changed platforms -- and one of my friends took pity on me and gave me their password to log in to their Amazon Prime account, on which network The Expanse is!
And upon logging in I found there were several other series I was interested in, such as the new Lord of the Rings spinoff and GoT spinoff, both of which I don't really have high expectations for but they're on my to-check-out list. And Star Trek Picard which I'd been itching to watch!
I had watched all of Star Trek the Original Series, and began to watch all of Next Generation (I got into the 7th/Last season but admittedly kind of lost steam. I have no complaints with it but just found myself not getting around to making time to watch it). Also in the same post I already linked where I laud how amazing Expanse is I review Star Trek Discovery, which I watched only the first season and a few episodes of second of and didn't feel like continuing. So I decided to watch Star Trek Picard before getting on with Expanse.
Star Trek Picard, A Review
Season I:
In short, I think they did a really good job with this in the first season. Now it's not quite The Expanse, and it would be sacrilege to compare it to Firefly, but other than those two I think it's one of the better entries in the advantures in space genre and the best Star Trek thing to come out in the last twenty years. The plot introduces characters naturally, avoiding the common pitfall of obviously throwing the main cast together in the first episode -- at least one of them I didn't catch on was becoming a regular cast member until like halfway through the season. The plot and technology level does have any continuity problems (relatively easy I suppose when this takes place, I believe, later than any other Star Trek series), and the level of technology I think is just the right level of further advancement from where we last saw it in the end of TNG, DS9, Voyager. Each episode is both an interesting self contained plot and fits perfectly into the larger season-wide-plot. And they managed to even make it feel a bit like TNG had, such as when they visit an isolated colony on a remote planet and everyone is wearing exactly the kind of dorky costumes all such colonies seemed to have in TNG.
Of the new characters, I really like the existentially brooding and philosophizing ship captain Christopher Rios, and found his five assistant holograms of himself with different personalities and accents to be delightfully amusing. On the minus side I find new character Raffi kind of annoying in that all she seems to do is whimper, whine, and/or be constantly near or having an emotional breakdown. I do really appreciate that they gave the characters more flaws and weaknesses than TNG had, but some of them such as Raffi seem to be entirely flaws. And one other character who, I don't want to give spoilers away, and maybe skip the rest of this sentence if you want no sort of spoiler but she um blatantly murders someone important to the rest of the crew and they all seem really surprisingly chill about it and I dunno _I_ can't forgive her for that and the fact that they just brush that under the rug kind of breaks willing suspension of disbelief for me and/or my dislike for her immediately became too great for me to shrug off myself.
Also there's two romances among the main characters which I think both suddenly appeared in the last episode and they really felt like they came out of nowhere. One of them they had hinted at though I didn't really see any actual chemistry between the characters, but the one involving Raffi I had totally missed any hints if there were any.
Also, IMO, the ship they're using, La Sirena, is possibly the ugliest ship in the Star Trek universe. And this is just a quibble but its been irking me that several times they land on planets (it can land on planets) and you see them having just arrived or just left the ship but the props department has apparently not bothered to make it a door yet so you never actually see them entering or exiting the ship. I was wondering for awhile if the only way to get in and out was by using the transporter.
Season II:
Season II however I felt like the plot felt much more contrived, and as well this time it DID feel like the characters were just thrown together. They establish that after Season I most of the characters split up, but then Q appears and does some shit, and the characters all rush to get the team back together, but considering all of them presumably have a lifetime of other friends, especially lord knows Picard, it seemed kind of odd that he wouldn't say call up people he served on the Enterprise for 7+ years with but some randos he went on essentially one mission with recently. As the plot goes on through the season it's not terrible but it's not as interesting as the Season I plot, and in particular it felt like they tried to jam a whole lot of really contrived stuff into the final episode of the season.
Also this time since [minor spoiler alert again] they travel back in time (I feel like this is only a minor spoiler because they go back in the first episode of the season or so and stay there for most of the season, so it's more like the conceit of the season), and they do actually make at least one major change to the timeline, we might have once again broken the timeline and created yet another alternate timeline. Which..... at this point is kind of "classic star trek" but I think creating all these timeline splits is a really offputting thing the franchise does.
Also Will Wheaton / Wesley Crusher makes an appearance, and I know he's become a bit of an internet darling in some circles of late, but I can confirm that I found his adult character to be just as annoying and insufferable as he had been as a kid.
Altogether, I'll probably check out Season III when it comes out, even though I found Season II a bit iffy, Season I was really good so we'll see if they correct course from responses to Season II or just get further lost in the interstellar mud.
Seriously this is one ugly ship.
...
And then I thought I'd pick up on Expanse where I left off, which I thought was Season III Episode 1 but I think I must have seen Season III already, perhaps I'd pirated it, but god damn I forgot how good this show is! I proceeded to binge watch about three episodes on each of both Friday and Saturday nights (of Season III even though I know I've already seen it!). Expanse really is the gosh darn best.
It's also on my to-do list to check out the various Star Wars series on Disney Plus but... that's once again on another streaming service I don't subscribe to. I did watch first season of Mandalorian and liked it. I think I'm hearing good things about this Andor series?
And in vaguely related news I really want to see the new All Quiet on the Western Front movie in the theatres but it only comes out in 11 theatres in Australia, of which none are closer than Melbourne. And I'll be in Melbourne for an appointment at the German consulate Tuesday morning (did I mention I've become eligible for a German passport!), but the nearest theatre showing AQotW isn't even particularly near the city center and four hours after my appointment. So probably won't go see it, but at least it comes out on Netflix (is actually produced by Netflix apparently), the one streaming service I do subscribe to. But I bet its so much better in the theatre ::sigh::