Star Trek: Picard, Season One
Click to viewMy foray through my discount Paramount+ subscription continues with ST: Picard.
My interest in this is much more nostalgia driven than my interest in Star Trek in general, because ST:TNG was my true entry point to Trek, even though I did watch TOS shortly before it TNG started. To put it in context, I was in high school at the time.
We pick up with Picard about 15 years after quitting Starfleet and retreating to his family vineyard to lick his wounds. He's haunted by Data sacrificing his life to save him (Star Trek: Nemeis 2002), the destruction of Romulus during which he was pushing the Federation to save as many Romulans as possible and the Federation didn't follow through, and the mysterious destruction of the Utopia Planitia shipyard on Mars by synthetic lifeforms (similar in concept to Data, but nowhere as advanced). The destruction of Utopia Planitia was part of the reason the UFP could not do more to help the Romulans, and also why there was a ban on synthetic lifeforms put in place.
A young woman named Dahj is attacked and her boyfriend killed by Romulan operatives. Something is triggered in her, and she kills the assassins, then happens to see Jean-Luc Picard being interviewed on TV and essentially bad mouthing the UFP's policies with regard to synthetic life and Romulan relocation. She's compelled to find him, shows up in France, and though she claims to not know Picard, he's somehow familiar to her. Of course he agrees to help her, but they're eventually tracked down by the assassins, and while Dahj almost manages to kill this group too, one manages to set off an explosion that kills her. Yet when Picard watches video of what happened, there's no sign Dahj was with him. He's also figured out that Dahj was somehow Data's daughter, and she has a sister, Soji.
He's pretty much burned his bridges with Starfleet, but begins to assemble his own crew to find Soji, starting with his former Starfleet first officer Raffi Musiker, who is shown to be an addict and a conspiracy theorist. Ship captain Chris Rios (Santiago Cabrera) is former Starfleet, just as disillusioned as Picard. They're also joined by Dr. Jurati, a synth scientist who was an associate of Dr. Bruce Maddox, who once called for Data to be disassembled for study, but later became a friend of sorts.
Along the way, we get to see some familiar faces. We see Riker and Troi's married life, what happened to Seven of Nine and Icheb, and that of fellow former Borg, Hugh. He's in charge of a Borg reclamation project on a Borg cube in Romulan space that was cut off from the collective for reasons not fully understood. It's a Romulan project, but Hugh is a Federation citizen in charge of the project to return as many former drones to a semblance of their former life. We also find there's been a black market for Borg parts, which leads to one of the ickiest scenes I've ever seen in Trek.
There's lot of ideas in here, many of them interesting, but even with a ten episode arc focusing on one big story, there's so much that's skipped over or forgotten. I've read that some of this may be due to the showrunner being a novelist, so there's a lot of stuff that we'd be told in a book, but it has to be shown on the screen and it wasn't, or wasn't conveyed well. I can see some merit to this this idea, but I don't think it explains everything. There's a lot of coincidences that make no logical sense, knowledge gained but never explained how, etc. It's more than a bit of a hot mess, but there are still some great character moments, but for me it was primarily with TNG/Voyager folks. I think that was mostly because I know those characters, and don't know much about the new ones to really care what they do.
The biggest disappointment for me was a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives much of the plot. I mean that literally, there's a Romulan prophecy about synthetic life advancing and bringing about the destruction of organic life. They're desperate to stop it from happening, and more than willing to kill people (even their own) to do it. The payoff for the prophecy was also disappointing.
The show already has a season two and three in the works. I'm curious to see if they're going to stick with season-long arcs, or break things up a bit. Since they're releasing on a weekly basis, perhaps slightly more episodic stories would be beneficial. Not putting all the eggs in one basket, as it were. They've certainly set up several bits of plot that could be carried over, but I'm not sure that's the best idea.