After show-running the first season of Star Trek: Picard, Michael Chabon buggered off to work on the TV version of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay rather than continue to run the day-to-day of Picard (though he still gets an executive producer credit, which comes with a nice paycheck; nice work if you can get it).
He was replaced by Terry Matalas. While he’s probably best known as the co-creator and co-show-runner of the TV version of 12 Monkeys, it’s worth noting that he got his start as a production assistant on Voyager and Enterprise. And the first thing Matalas did was trash most of what Chabon did, and put his stamp on it (bringing back 1990s Trek characters and doing time travel)…
Where the mission statement of the first season of Picard was to finally move the story of Trek forward past Nemesis (which had been the farthest forward any Trek screen production had as its “present day” up until January of 2020), the second season of Picard was entirely about looking either backwards or sideways.
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Let’s start with how the series opened, because one of the biggest problems with this season is that each of the first three episodes made a promise for what the show was about, but only the third one was a promise that was kept.
The season began with all the characters in different places, not necessarily for good character reasons, but because the plot needed them to be there. It reminds me of Ghostbusters II when they made Dana Barrett an art restorer and Louis Tully a lawyer, even though they were a musician and an accountant in the previous movie, not because it made sense for their characters, but because the plot wouldn’t work if they were in their other jobs.
The cast comes together at that old Trek standby, a spatial anomaly, which is transmitting a message for Picard. The Stargazer, under the command of Rios—whose rejoining Starfleet is one of those Ghostbusters II bits—is examining it, and Picard is sent to answer the call. There’s a fleet brought along also, including the Excelsior on which Musiker is serving and where Elnor is doing a field rotation as a Starfleet cadet—his going to the Academy being another Ghostbusters II moment.
This is the second time a Secret Hideout show has promised a nifty show premise in its season premiere episode and then given us something completely different that makes you long for the first thing. Discovery did it with “The Vulcan Hello”/”Battle at the Binary Stars” (I’m still annoyed that we didn’t get the series with Captain Georgiou on the U.S.S. Shenzhou with First Officer Burnham and Second Officer Saru), and Picard‘s sophomore season did likewise. Everything we saw in “The Star Gazer” would’ve made a great season of television, from Picard as Academy commandant (a job he turned down way back in TNG’s “Coming of Age,” remember, but he was younger then…) to Rios as captain of the Stargazer to Seven now using La Sirena for the Fenris Rangers to Soji doing a goodwill tour of the Federation now that the synth ban’s been removed. (Elnor as a cadet not so much, but still, that at least would’ve shown us more of the Trek universe at the turn of the twenty-fifth century.)
Instead, we bring the band back together at this anomaly, when a new masked Borg Queen shows up and starts to assimilate the fleet. Picard activates the auto-destruct, everything blows up—
—and then Picard finds himself in an alternate timeline where Earth is run by fascists and at war with most of the Alpha Quadrant. He’s been brought there by Q because he has to do penance. For reasons the scripts never bother to explain, Q has also brought the people in the opening credits of Star Trek: Picard to this alternate timeline. Well, except for Soji, but Isa Briones will have more to do soon.
Here’s where it starts to become obvious that characters are being used, not because their presence makes sense for the plot, but because they were already under contract to be in this season. After mostly wasting Elnor in the inaugural season, the hope that he would be better developed in season two was dashed by Elnor being killed in the third episode, showing up as hallucinations and flashbacks and as a hologram before being restored in the final episode.
Let me be blunt: Elnor serves absolutely no purpose in this season. He’s there because Even Evagora had a contract and they had to shove him in a requisite number of episodes to justify his salary. This isn’t based on any inside information, mind you—I have none on the subject—but it’s supposition based on the facts in evidence, which is that you could remove Elnor from the season and nothing of consequence changes.
Not that anyone else’s presence in the alternate timeline makes sense, either. Why would Q specifically bring these people? The only ones Picard has a significant personal connection to are Musiker and Elnor, so bringing them makes sense, but even then, Q is an omnipotent entity who apparently hasn’t interacted with Picard since TNG’s “All Good Things…” Why would Q bring a freighter captain Picard hired once, an ex-Borg he barely knows, and a cyberneticist sent to infiltrate his personal mission whom he also barely knows (oh, and who’s also a murderer)?
Anyhow, the hope that we might get a “Mirror, Mirror“-style look at an alternate timeline where our heroes are bastards are also dashed, because the gang pulls a trick pioneered on the original series’ “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and also used in “Assignment: Earth” and The Voyage Home: slingshotting around the sun to travel through time.
And then the remainder of the season until the back end of the finale all take place in 2024 Los Angeles.
The use of actors who were already under contract is one of many ways in which Matalas, et al seem to be focused more on keeping the show under budget than telling the story they want to tell. Most of the sets are either ones that were already created for season one (the Château Picard mansion, La Sirena) or in contemporary L.A. where the show films and don’t require much alteration to work, since it’s only two years in the future. And roughly three-quarters of the season takes place in the same setting as the filming location, leaving only the first two episodes and the very end of the last one to take place in the future.
Isa Briones’ contract also has to be fulfilled, ditto Brent Spiner’s, so we get more Soong family insanity! Spiner plays his fourth member of the Soong family (having played Noonien, Data’s creator, in TNG’s “Brothers,” “Birthright I,” and “Inheritance,” Noonien’s son Altan in Picard’s “Et in Arcadia Ego” two-parter, and their ancestor Arik in Enterprise’s “Borderland,” “Cold Station 12,” and “The Augments”), the twenty-first-century geneticist Adam, while Briones is his genetically engineered daughter Kore.
The actual alleged point of this season is to get Picard to face a childhood trauma that he has repressed up until now: his mother was mentally ill and committed suicide, and it was Picard’s own fault, in a sense, as he let her out of the room she’d been locked in so she could go to the solarium and hang herself.
I get what Matalas and Sir Patrick Stewart were trying to do here: Stewart himself is a survivor of abuse by his father, but he also came to learn later in life that his father, who fought in World War II, suffered from PTSD (it was called “shell shock” back then, not that anyone did anything about it). And so Picard’s arc here deals with an abusive parent, and also a parent with a mental illness—but they’re separated, as it’s the mother who has the mental illness, and dealing with her (and the aftermath of her suicide) is why the father was so abusive.
Unfortunately, while the notion has its heart in the right place, none of it really works. For starters, we have no idea what Yvette Picard’s mental illness is exactly. And while it’s true that the Picard family was established as being Luddites who eschew modern technology and conveniences in TNG’s “Family” (a legacy Picard rejected when he went off to Starfleet Academy), we’re still talking about a future in which mental illness is very rare (viz., the original series’ “Dagger of the Mind” and “Whom Gods Destroy,” which take place many decades prior to Picard’s childhood). More to the point, locking someone mentally ill in a bedroom is behavior that would be prosecuted as abuse now, much less three hundred years from now. The whole thing feels like a nineteenth-century treatise on how hysterical women were dealt with: lock them away for their own good, lest they hang themselves. It’s a story out of 1810 or 1910, not 2310, or even 2022.
And if Q pulled Picard from the explosion to the alternate timeline to do personal penance, why did he complain when Picard went into the past? Why was Q trying to affect Renee Picard’s going on the Europa mission? Oh yeah, Picard has an ancestor who went on the Europa mission, which is the turning point of history; if the mission fails, Earth becomes fascist, if it succeeds, we get the Federation.
The time-travel and history-changing makes no sense, even by Trek’s pliable standards of time travel. The gang came back in time from the Confederation timeline, which is why Seven doesn’t have her implants (no doubt another budget-saving move), but somehow it’s part of the mainline timeline, as their actions restore everything to the way Guinan remembers it, including meeting Picard in her bar in the twenty-first century. But it was a different time track where Guinan never met Picard in the nineteenth century, and—ugh!
Oh, and the time travel did have an opportunity to do some social commentary, on the appalling treatment of people with darker skin that has been a rising issue in this country ever since the 2016 presidential election, with the crackdowns on immigration by people from Mexico and the Middle East. (And yes, it’s that targeted. I live in an area filled with Irish immigrants of varying levels of legality, and they don’t get raided by ICE for some inexplicable reason, cough cough.) But the social commentary is brought up in a couple of episodes, and serves as a subplot for Rios, but it doesn’t actually go anywhere, and is forgotten by the season’s midpoint, never again to be mentioned.
That subplot for Rios mostly seems like an excuse to give Matalas and the gang a reason to get rid of Santiago Cabrera. They’d already effectively written Soji out after the first episode, and Briones’ other role goes off to become a Traveler with Wes Crusher in the finale, and Elnor was marginalized by his temporary death, and Rios in the end decides to stay in the twenty-first century with Dr. Teresa Ramirez and her son. Because it totally makes sense that he’d want to stay in a past which he knows has a nuclear war in its near future. (Okay, maybe that’s why he wants to stay, to help Earth in a tumultuous time, but it isn’t even brought up, he just says he never fit in the future and that’s it.)
We get a few other subplots thrown in for good measure, including Picard and Guinan (the younger version of whom is played by Ito Aghayere, who does an excellent job of channeling Whoopi Goldberg; Goldberg plays the role as an older woman in the first and last episodes) being arrested by an FBI agent named Wells who’s suspicious about alien activity. It’s basically the same role Jay Karnes played in 12 Monkeys, though that was a 1940s-era agent, and it’s not remotely clear why this side plot is even there, as it has nothing to do with anything.
Which puts it in good company with a lot of this season. There’s a lot of gadding about and doing things for the sake of doing things, but very little of it seems to have anything to do with the stated intent of Picard serving penance for torturing himself for his mother’s death, which is mentioned repeatedly throughout the season, but only touched on when the script decides it’s a good time to do so, taking breaks from it for no obvious rhyme or reason.
I’ve been slagging this season a lot, but it has its moments. For starters, we have the Jurati-Borg Queen pairing, which is a fascinating team-up that produces some stuff that is great (Jurati bantering with the Queen in “Watcher“) and some that’s not-so-great (the completely ridiculous Pat Benatar karaoke in “Two of One“). However, the end result is a very Star Trek one: Jurati convinces this version of the Borg Queen—who is the last survivor of the Borg in the Confederation timeline—to try a new way of being Borg. To become a Cooperative rather than a Collective. (This is similar to what the ex-Borg Chakotay met in Voyager’s “Unity” did. For more on the Jurati-Borg Queen pairing, Jaime Babb’s excellent article on the subject here on Tor.com.)
Getting there brings up another aspect of this season that didn’t work, which is the Unconvincing Speech That Somehow Convinces People. It happens three times in this season, and I didn’t buy a single one of them. There’s Picard talking Renee into putting her fears aside and doing the Europa mission in “Two of One.” There’s Picard convincing Agent Wells in “Mercy” to not distrust aliens because the aliens he met as a child weren’t trying to rip his face off, they were Vulcans trying to mind-meld him and erase his memory (how would that make him feel better about aliens??????). And there’s Jurati convincing the Borg Queen to be kinder and gentler in “Hide and Seek.”
In the end, Q reveals that he did all this supposedly as a final gift to Picard before he dies, because “even gods have their favorites.” Except Q didn’t entirely do all of it, and it kind of had to happen because if they hadn’t gone back in time, the Jurati Queen wouldn’t have been the one to show up in the anomaly and my head hurts! Augh!
One of the things I was looking forward to when they announced that John deLancie was coming back as Q is the superlative double act that deLancie and Stewart are when they put Picard and Q together. The best Q stories are the ones that keep those two next to each other as much as possible, and the worst ones are the ones that don’t (which is why Q’s appearances on DS9 and on Voyager did not work).
So it was disappointing to see that deLancie and Stewart are only paired up twice for any significant length: at the top of “Penance” and in the middle of “Farewell.” There were a few bits and bobs elsewhere, but mostly Q was interacting with other people outside of those two scenes, and it was a major letdown, especially since the image Paramount chose to use to sell the season was a lovely shot of Picard and Q side by side.
Based on comments made by Briones, Evagora, and Alison Pill, the three of them won’t be coming back for season three, and it’s already been announced that all the “big seven” stars of TNG will be appearing in Picard’s final season. Which, based on the choices made in season two, is what the new show-runner wanted all along…
Keith R.A. DeCandido has two anthologies coming out in June: One is Three Time Travelers Walk Into… from Fantastic Books, in which each story has three people from different parts of history interacting (Keith’s “What You Can Become Tomorrow” features author Mary Shelley, baseball player Josh Gibson, and NASA scientist Florence Johnson). The other is Zorro’s Exploits from Bold Venture Press, which features seventeen new stories featuring Zorro, the original caped crusader, as he defends the downtrodden in Alta California in the nineteenth century (Keith’s story is called “A Lovely View”).
We’re in agreement, Keith. This season had some bits and pieces that were effective — notably one you didn’t mention, the deep dive into Seven’s lingering assimilation trauma in Kirsten Beyer’s episode — but mostly it was a frustratingly incoherent mess on a conceptual level, it didn’t have enough story to warrant being a full season arc, and it never really justified its existence. I’m angry at it for so cavalierly abandoning everything interesting set up in season 1 and telling a completely unrelated story that was little more than an exercise in continuity bingo. Season 1 had its flaws, but the setting and situations it established deserved further exploration.
it was called “shell shock” back then, not that anyone did anything about it
Er, a slight nit to pick there. That was certainly the case with the First World War, but by the Second the British had officially stopped using the term “shell shock” and sodium amytal was being used to treat those with “combat fatigue.” Though this treatment didn’t work, this was the first step in the condition being treated as a medical condition and not “cowardice.”
Anyhow, yes, this season was a mess, and I sure hope next season has focus of some kind. All this meandering served only as a potent sedative in my household.
“I’m still annoyed that we didn’t get the series with Captain Georgiou on the U.S.S. Shenzhou with First Officer Burnham and Second Officer Saru”.
Me too, Keith. Me too.
(Yeoh is clearly having fun chewing the scenery as Emperor Georgiou. But I’d have much rather had the character we saw at the beginning of Discovery.)
I have never understood why Star Trek Picard felt they needed an elven warrior in their cast.
Thank you very much for plugging my article, Keith!
As for myself, I adopt a philosophical attitude towards this season. It’s the first time in a quarter of a century that I’ve actually been interested in the Borg, and I really hope that they explore this new Collective and how it works, either in season 3 or in a novel (I’m even willing to excuse the Queen being moved by Jurati’s rather unconvincing speech under the assumption that their personas were already well into the process of fusing; presumably, a binary merger with another individual would influence the Queen in a way that yet another mind being added to a hive of trillions would not). For me, that and the Q arc are enough to make up for everything else in the season.
That said, I can definitely understand why other people would disagree. I thought that everything about Yvette’s suicide was abysmally handled, the time travel plot was mostly pointless, half the cast had nothing to do, and each successive character that Brent Spiner plays on Star Trek is more boring than the one before. Terry Matalas seemed completely uninterested in any of the new characters besides Dr. Jurati, and that’s unfortunate because, whatever flaws the first season might have had, the crew was probably the most interesting of the new era. I’m thinking in particular of Cristobal Rios, who not only gets reduced from a brooding, pseudo-cynical existentialist into a cigar-chomping caricature, but who also comes across as a tourist who spent three days in a foreign country (one of them in an internment camp!) before deciding that he wanted to move there permanently. And his death is now locked into the timeline; Elnor and Soji may have been wasted, but they can at least conceivably return at some point in the future; Rios seems gone for good, and it’s framed as a happy ending.
Anyways, one hopes that season three will be better, if only because the showrunners would clearly rather be writing a TNG reunion.
@@.-@ It seems Star Trek didn’t know either, to judge by what they did (or didn’t) do with him.
It seems the general consensus is that a lot of potential was wasted in the season, and I am not about to disagree. But I would also be interested to know how much this – and many other series – were affected in what they could and could not do by Covid protocols. Do we have so many pairings of characters – Seven and Musiker, Rios and Dr. Ramirez, Jurati and the Borg Queen, Picard and Q/Old Guinan/Young Guinan/Watcher – simply because these were easier to control?
@2 This is straying off-topic, but you may recollect that Wilfred Own and Siegfried Sassoon were both famously treated for shell shock by W. H. R. Rivers at the military hospital in Craiglockhart. In 1917, during the First World War.
Jaime: my pleasure, it was a great piece, and everyone should read it….
https://www.tor.com/2022/05/12/transgender-reading-star-trek-picard-season-2-jurati-borg-queen/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Keith, there are times when I disagree with your reviews (you sometimes diss on episodes that I especially love) but this is not one of them.
I agree this season was a mess. Individually, I enjoyed the episodes more this season than last, but the overall arc this year was weak.
As for the characters we’ll be losing this year, frankly, I wasn’t really invested in any of them which is a shame.
I have high expectations for next year since the old crew will be back together.
#8
I stand corrected.
Interesting, I did not know that. Did the treatment help them?
@6, God knows I have nothing against hot elven warriors, Elnor is a pleasure to look at, but why is he in Star Trek? Somebody get that elf a ticket back to Middle Earth!
@krad, re Jurati:
That’s exactly right. Oh used Jurati to commit a murder. On the other hand, in that same episode there’s another character who actually premeditates a revenge murder but for some reason that doesn’t bother anybody.
I tend not to pay too much attention to behind-the-scenes nonsense, so the fact that Michel Chabon had departed slipped past me until, well, today. But it does explain a lot of why this season veered sharply away from the story Season 1 had told. I think the story Season 2 told works, but now that it’s over, I do find myself asking, “could it have been told better?”
One thing about the FBI / Agent Wells plot point is that it felt to me like an attempt to answer a question I haven’t seen anyone ask; to wit: Why didn’t the U.S. Government crush Team Picard? Leaving aside the ICE stuff, our world being so surveillance-mad practically guarantees that the U.S. would notice strange people appearing and disappearing as well as infiltrating secure facilities like the Europa mission (and, yes, breaking out a bunch of ICE prisoners). Why didn’t Homeland Security round them all up and crush them to paste? Agent Wells with his Fox Mulder persona seemed to be the attempt to lampshade that issue. However, again, I haven’t really seen people ask this question, so could it have been dropped quietly without wrecking suspension of disbelief for a story set in essentially our present day? I don’t know.
Aside from Terry Matalas choosing to wipe out every good thing from Season 1, the other thing about this season is also the one reason I’d prefer to grade it on a curve, and that is the fact it was filmed during one of the worst years of this century. Between a violent insurrection and the ongoing pandemic, we had a year that started with hitting us all in the face and moved on to punching us in the stomach and kicking us in the groin. It had to have tried the capacities of even the most professional actors and directors. I find myself amazed we got entertainment at all.
I am cautiously optimistic for Season 3, as it will be our last chance to get the TNG gang back together, but I am less enthused now than I was when Season 2 premiered. We deserved better.
You forgot to add, “completely ridiculous AND AWESOME” Pat Benetary karaoke.
I have my issues with this season of Star Trek Picard and the primary one is that I think it could have been used to deepen the relationships of what I felt was the most likable crew since Firefly. One that they went out of their way to not use and deconstruct this season. Why was Elnor not in the 21st century as a source of comic relief? Why was Soji not used to possibly deconstruct the reverence for the Soong family? (“Hey, meet AI’s ancestor: Elon Musk!). Rios being written out of the franchise also struck a LOT of fans (particularly my wife) as something that was a terrible waste.
The one area I’m going to totally disagree with your review, though, is the handling of Yvette Picard, though. In RL, I have mentally ill relatives and ones who have attempted suicide (some who succeeded). The handling of mental illness was very well-handled, IMHO, because the helplessness and blame and guilt on display is very true. You can’t get them to seek treatment if they don’t want it and they can seem wonderful one day and then things go horribly south the next.
I also don’t take the show as endorsing Maurice Picard locking her away. I think the show suggested this was a one time thing he did and trusted the audience was smart enough to realize that we didn’t need to be told it was horrible because it resulted in her horrifying death as well as Jean Luc being traumatized even beforehand by it. It’s just we’re meant to know Maurice was trying to stop a tragedy that he unwittingly got the absolute worst possible result from.
The incredibly abbreviated 10-episode seasons are not doing the shows any good since they always feel like they need at least three more episodes to breathe. This is more a mixed bag because it simultaneously has a bunch of filler and yet also jumps over things we might have wanted to know more about like the consequences of Season One (Oh, Narek, Mars, the Federation synth ban) and the plot of the last episode (did the Jurati Queen take over just recently? Is it one small group of Borg or all of them?)
Yeah, I’m really sorry Michael Chabon left. He had a heckuva better grasp on his characters and plot than this new guy. There were a lot of fascinating threads from the first season that could have been explored in the second.
As it is, I will buy the Blu-Ray of the first season (I want to own physical copies of shows I like). I won’t buy the second.
What frustrated me the most about the season, much like last season, was the variety of good concepts all thrown into the same pot, and we just ended up with too many ingredients. I mean, there’s a list of singular things that could’ve given them ten episodes’ worth of story, if they had only focused on one or two of them, allowing them to fully explore those issues. Such as:
Picard finds love; the Borg possibly want peace; an alternate universe where Picard is evil; Q is losing his mind or is dying; Picard meets his ancestor; Picard works out some childhood issues (though hopefully not as cliched and treacly as we got here). Or, and this was barely worked into the season, Picard and friends maybe fix climate change in some way; Picard and friends maybe fix immigration and/or poverty; on and on…
But we got everything. It was, ahem, everything everywhere all at once and not in a good way. It tried to be episodic and serialized. It tried to be epic and intimate. It tried to be expensive and very cheap. And it ended up being a whole lot of nothing.
@15/C.T. Phipps: “The incredibly abbreviated 10-episode seasons are not doing the shows any good since they always feel like they need at least three more episodes to breathe.”
Wow, I couldn’t disagree more where this particular season was concerned. The problem was that they dragged out maybe 4 episodes’ worth of story over 10 episodes, so most of it was padding and sidebars. We didn’t need nearly a whole episode about the reception. We didn’t need the Seven-Raffi car chase. We didn’t need the utterly pointless Jay Karnes episode. And so on.
Let’s face it, Star Trek: Picard never needed to be a series. A two-hour reunion movie (though hopefully better than those wretched reunion movies back in the day, like A Very Brady Christmas and I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later) is all they needed to do here.
Have him visit old friends, have a little adventure, go antiquing, propose to Beverly at the end, whatever. Something short and sweet would’ve been nice.
Why does everything have to be twelve Die Hard movies piled on top of each other? Plus an extended therapy session in the middle? It’s exhausting.
I thought the point of the FBI subplot was — after several iterative portrayals of evil law enforcement including the sadistic Confederation security people and Rios’s treatment at the hands of ICE — to depict a policeman whose inner trauma is healed and undergoes a redemptive journey.
Presumably this is supposed to echo Picard’s own arc.
I’m hardly alone that I was, at the end of the season, significantly LESS enthusiastic about season 3’s use of TNG. Because it comes at the expense of a cast (Rios, Raffi, Seven, Elnor, Soji) that I already love and like. For a lot of people, Picard Season 1 established an awesome Trek cast we wanted to see carried over after Season 3 with Seven in the lead.
For me, everything felt undercooked. Lots of things happened but we never had a chance to have any consequences for them. How about Rios suffering trauma for his treatment at ICE’s hands? An episode or two in the Confederation and finding out how it varies from the Mirror Universe and EVIL. Actually getting to know Rene Picard? A meeting with WESLEY THE TRAVELER and his father-figure, Picard? Maybe actually follow up on plots like the FBI and how Guinan was traumatized by the century.
#22
Hey, that’s fine if they wanted to build a series around a cast of new characters and show us their adventures in the 25th century. I’m all for it. But why do they have to be saddled to a ‘legacy’ character? Surely they would be free from a lot of baggage if they distanced themselves from those things we know too well.
I believe a little syndicated series in 1987 did just that.
Again, maybe that’s the real problem with new Trek. They’ve been trying to do too many things all at once. It’s a new series in a future with a new crew AND it’s a reunion with the old crew. How about separating those things? No? Too late? Okay.
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23#
I dunno, I guess I don’t feel I’m alone in thinking I actually liked the new crew’s relationship with Picard. It’s the fact that he has such a weak relationship in Season 2 that’s the problem. I really was looking forward to seeing how Jean Luc developed his relationship to these people he deliberately chose because he wasn’t close to them.
Bizarrely, it reminded me of the Judd Winick Outsiders where a team is formed by Nightwing of people he considers expendable because he just lost Donna Troy. He’s angry and confused when he realizes that they formed their OWN bonds and are upset they look to him for more than the mission. Picard in Season 1 thought it was a suicide mission for him as well so I was hoping we’d see more character follow through.
Rios looks at him as a surrogate dad, Raffi seems to love him in a worshipful/loving way (she made her own love confession that Jean Luc brushed off in the finale), Jurati has no one else in her life, ELnor as a surrogate dad, Soji wasn’t as close to him as Daji but I could have seen that develop too, and Seven looks at him as a fellow “old soldier”
Just to be clear, I was directing my snippiness at the makers of Star Trek, not C.T. Phipps. But okay, the warning is observed.
I really enjoyed the first season of Picard. To me, it held just the right balance of nostalgia and forward motion for the Star Trek universe and for Picard himself.
Season Two – in my humble estimation – is easily the worst season of Trek. Period. Even the worst episodes of TOS Season Three are at least fun to watch. This season was incredibly difficult to watch. Between the nonsensical plot developments and the sheer misery that permeated everything (who’d have thought you could double down on the genocidal nature of the Mirror Universe?), this season was absolutely no fun at all. Frankly, even the Q and Picard scenes were bereft of the sense of fun that every other meeting between the two had on TNG. Does Picard really just hug it out with a guy who got 18 of his crew killed and created a genocidal Earth timeline just to help him get over the death of a single individual? Here’s hoping this show can pull off a last-minute save
I’m really glad someone else recognized that Picard dropped the ball on the mental health issues. The flashbacks seemed like a made for TV movie from the 1980s. I’m sure Starfleet, at least, would have labeled Picard “at risk” given the circumstances of his mother’s death.
@25 / C.T. Phipps:
Bizarrely, it reminded me of the Judd Winick Outsiders where a team is formed by Nightwing of people he considers expendable because he just lost Donna Troy. He’s angry and confused when he realizes that they formed their OWN bonds and are upset they look to him for more than the mission. Picard in Season 1 thought it was a suicide mission for him as well so I was hoping we’d see more character follow through.
That’s…actually a good analogy.
Season One does kinda feel like Winick’s Outsiders all the way up to Infinite Crisis. Season Two, by contrast, feels like the One Year Later-era of the run: Most of the same roster and creative team (more or less), but it feels more like a relaunch and abandonment of the first half rather than a seamless continuation.
I am going to say this. It’s science fiction, and television at that. It’s going to require some suspension of disbelief. It’s not Shakespeare, Broadway, or anything remotely like it. I am just going to enjoy it and understand that not every nitpicker is going to like it. The creators of this are sufficiently challenged making science fiction look somewhat believable. Not going to pile on with the impossible expectation of making everyone happy. I liked it despite its flaws.
I’ve been trying to defend this season throughout, I admit. But that collapsed finally around episode 8. Honestly, hiring Jay Karnes is good — he’s a solid actor — but then having him be Fox Mulder off of Wish rather than Ducane is idiotic. Sure, maybe only a percentage of viewers are expecting Ducane…but then it’s a slap, especially calling him Wells.
‘More than anything else, the Q storyline was just a complete mess — it makes no sense. They needed to rationalize that first: Q is dying. The death throes of Qs cause big cosmic booms (VOY: “The Q And The Grey”). Q is Concerned. Being Q, he can gin up a roundabout way to prevent his passing causing damage…and use that to help Picard and others. And to resolve the Borg.
*Then* you build the other storylines in, with clear hooks to Q’s story.
instead they lurched from one thing to another, and built Picard’s deepest trauma around a Victorian Madwoman In The Attic bit.
I wish I was looking forward to season 3. I’m not.
Lump me in with those who feel that this Season was quite enjoyable at points but doomed never to be the best possible version of itself by The Great Pestilence – but please set me in the subsection most likely to be philosophical, rather than angry about the whole business (The younger Guinan, Mama Picard and Doc Jurati would be enough to keep me from grumbling on their own and there were at least some extra goodies besides – the Excelsiors are still flying people!).
Nonetheless, it bears repeating – A whole damn season replete with allusions to ‘Assignment Earth’ and not a single cat person? Shame, Shame, SHAME!
I couldn’t believe it myself that season 2 could be worse than season 1…
As Keith mentioned, the departure of Chabon certainly put a spanner in the works. And of course, Covid. I’m guessing the outline for s2 existed so Metalas inherited that and threw together this mess while also having to plan s3 which has the bigger pay off.
You didn’t mention Wesley Crusher being wedged in there.
The Tallinn/Laris story line was also frustrating.
I’m so disappointed Rios and Elnor have been dropped. I was looking forward to some real adventures with them.
Whatever
@27 twels:
In fairness to Q, many more people might have died if he hadn’t given the Federation its warning about the Borg in “Q Who”.
I think it’s pretty central to the character of Picard that he would be open-minded enough to realize he has no right to judge Q by the ethical standards of Picard’s own species.
At issue here are Q’s attempts to do the opposite, to judge Picard and humanity. “Why me.” On what is essentially his deathbed Q makes no pretenses, he still considers himself far superior to Jean Luc, but concedes that the latter is a “favorite,” that his interventions in Picard’s life over the years were coming from a place of care. Picard finally comes to understand that this is true and reciprocates Q’s affection in those final moments.
@31/Brian: “I am going to say this. It’s science fiction, and television at that. It’s going to require some suspension of disbelief.”
The full phrase is “willing suspension of disbelief.” It’s not something an audience is “required” to give; it’s a voluntary indulgence that a storyteller has to earn from an audience. It’s getting it backward to say that science fiction doesn’t have to be credible. On the contrary, stories about the unreal and improbable have a higher bar to clear to earn the audience’s willingness to buy into them.
I think it was the great fantasy writer Richard Matheson who argued that a fantasy story should have one impossible premise and make everything around it as believable and real as possible, since if audiences believed in the rest, it would make it easier for them to believe in the impossible part.
Besides, the concept of suspension of disbelief refers only to the impossible premises within a story, such as aliens or ghosts or monsters. It does not apply to the basics of competent story construction and characterization. We’re absolutely not required to settle for a story that doesn’t hold together conceptually or narratively, no matter what genre it’s in. The problems with PIC season 2 are not about the plausibility of its concepts, but about the incoherence of its narrative.
“It’s not Shakespeare, Broadway, or anything remotely like it.”
That’s elitist nonsense. Do you have any idea how much of Shakespeare’s work was fantasy? His plays are full of ghosts and witches and curses and faeries and sorcerors. Besides, Shakespeare wrote for the masses. In his day, theater was considered lowbrow popular entertainment, the equivalent of modern television. Shakespeare’s plays are full of crowd-pleasing sex and violence and dirty jokes and pop-culture references.
Science fiction runs the same gamut from lowbrow to brilliant as any other creative genre. The reason Star Trek outlasted any of its contemporaries in the ’60s and became so iconic is because it was enormously classier and smarter and better-made than nearly all its contemporaries, and indeed nearly all its successors in the ’70s and most of the ’80s. Roddenberry’s entire goal with Trek was to disprove the prejudice that SF was an inferior medium, to show that it could be made with the same sophistication and intelligence as any adult drama, because he’d read prose science fiction all his life and knew how intelligent and literate it could be. So Star Trek fans have every right to expect and demand an intelligent, high-quality series, something competitive with the best dramas on the air. That’s the franchise’s identity and legacy, that it strives for the best rather than settling for the lowest common denominator.
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“It’s not Broadway”
Heh. And THANK GOD for that (if you listen to actors, designers, directors in the biz). As one reviewer put it: “I want you all to know that unlike the Tony Awards, the Drama Desk have many Asian actors in our performance nominations. Because unlike Broadway, Off Broadway gives Asian actors real roles not based in stereotypes”
I wanted to like this season. I really, really wanted to like it. Throughout the season, I felt there were moments that worked very well in isolation. And Terry Matalas was best known to me from 12 Monkeys, which I enjoyed thoroughly. So it was disheartening, to say the least, when it just never came together. And the more I reflect back on it, the more I think about the opportunities that were lost or simply mismanaged. As Keith and others have said, there were situations, setups, and consequences that all could have been used to develop a much stronger story. But this had the sense of trying to toss everything including the kitchen sink at the wall and hoping it would seem coherent. Some have suggested that the weaknesses could have been a product of pandemic-driven limitations, but surely Matalas could have conceived a season arc that managed that better than what we received.
#43
I really wanted to like it, too, and I did with the first episode. Especially seeing Picard as head of the Academy. That gave me the warm fuzzies — like no tribble ever could! ;-)
I saw someone suggest that that would’ve made a better season. You know, Picard being the wise old man and dealing with a variety of students from around the Federation and elsewhere. Might have saved on budget too, I don’t know.
The big-picture plot here — the Borg reformation arc — was grandly ambitious and largely successful. It reminded me a lot of what Ron Moore did on TNG and DS9 (and John M Ford in print) with the Klingons who were previously two-dimensional villains.
@46 / Sarek – I feel that the writers knew what they were going for with the Borg arc and therefore managed to develop it successfully and at a decent pace. One of the reasons why I thought that Jurati stole the show this season was because she was actually doing things while everyone else was going off on side quests or just kind of holding position.
I just wish that they’d found more interesting things for everyone who’s not named Agnes P. Jurati to do.
The Borg arc did have merit, but it would’ve been better if it had been in the 25th century and tied into the X-B arc from season 1. I mean, the show contradicted itself here, introducing this as an alternate-reality Borg Queen, but then treating her as if she were the same one from the Prime timeline, with the feeble and convoluted excuse of her being able to sense her parallel counterparts. If they wanted to treat her as the same Borg Queen, they should have let her be, and built on season 1’s Borg storyline instead of abandoning it.
And they could’ve tied in the Queen’s desire to rebuild the Borg with Soji, Altan Soong, and the android planet, instead of having to invent lookalike characters for Spiner and Briones to play. Again, building on season 1 instead of ignoring it.
The one thing about the time-travel element that had any real value was the chance to flesh out the Supervisors more, but they didn’t do enough with that; it was more just an excuse to include Orla Brady and a plot convenience to give the characters access to high tech and transporters once La Sirena was compromised.
Presumably, the four extra centuries are needed for Queen Agnes to realistically be able to build up a decently sized collective out of people who actually want to be assimilated.
Krad: “The cast comes together at that old Trek standby, a spatial anomaly….” Yes! I get how bending time offers so much fodder for science fiction, but geez, I’m thinking encountering a spatial anomaly should be redefined in Starfleet’s manual as the spatial norm. If they go more than a day or two at warp and don’t encounter one, THAT’S an anomaly.
Have to agree with so much that has been offered here, the irrelevance of Elnor, the calculated arbitrariness of who Q sent back with Picard, etc… but as someone else already did, I will pick a nit with krad about one thing, which to me was a top three highlight: Jurati’s Pat Benatar moment. I don’t get the criticism for that based on it being out of place or whatever. How many times have we seen Trek attempt something outside the box? For better or worse, that kind of risk taking makes the Trek universe as interesting as it is. Personally, I like jarring sidebars like that especially when she looked so spectacular and sounded so great. Forget context and continuity and appreciate it for what it was, which was, in a word, awesome.
Fantastic overview. Cheers
Re: “But the [ICE/racism] social commentary is brought up in a couple of episodes, …but it doesn’t actually go anywhere, and is forgotten by the season’s midpoint, never again to be mentioned.” What would you have preferred? That the injustice be mentioned more times? That “Picard” portrayed the unjust system being fixed? I thought it was good social commentary and I was fine as far as it went. But for the more creative of you out there, where would you have taken this further? Just to be “mentioned again” or something more? I don’t think KRAD or many others think it should have been simply omitted all together, but I of course could be wrong.
@49/jamiebabb: “Presumably, the four extra centuries are needed for Queen Agnes to realistically be able to build up a decently sized collective”
Yes, within the context of the story as they devised it, but my hypothetical is about doing a completely different story, something that has the same broad thematic arc for the Borg Queen (i.e. learning to offer voluntary membership rather than coerced assimilation) but in a distinct way that builds on what season 1 did with the Borg and the X-B rather than being completely disconnected from it. Naturally, if they started from scratch with a different story context, the specific details would be different too.
I mean, the only reason they needed the “decent-sized collective” was to set up the totally tacked-on, random finale with the giant space hole going kaboom and having no connection to anything else in the story arc, which is really terrible story construction. So forget the giant space hole altogether, we don’t need it. The payoff of the Queen/Agnes arc is Agnes convincing the Queen to try another way. That’s the climax. Anything beyond that is superfluous.
Personally I didn’t love the ICE subplot; I agreed with our host that it was blunt as a sledgehammer.
But from the writers’ perspective, I don’t think it was left unresolved, any more than the dystopian Confederation was left unresolved, so much as resolved through shorthand and metaphor rather than explicitly. The point was to showcase a better way, represented by Picard’s optimistic humanism, Jurati’s no-longer-violent Borg, and Wesley’s next-level journey. The charge Rios is given to make a better future — in the messy here-and-now — makes little sense from a time-travel rules perspective but is certainly part of that message.
#51
Ideally, social commentary is more than simply illustrating a societal problem and directly, bluntly commenting on how screwed up it is. If they really wanted to make a statement in the classic Star Trek sort of way, ie placing aliens in familiar human situations, then they already had the ingredients for that with the Borg showing up in the first episode.
Imagine a scenario where the remnants of the Collective are desperate for whatever reason and ‘cross the border’ as it were to seek help from Picard and the Federation. But, and this is where we get political, there’s a faction of the Federation that doesn’t trust the Borg and doesn’t want to help them. And there you go, there’s the setup for the season, with lots of commentary to be had. (This briefly played out in the conference room scene with Picard and Seven arguing their points.)
They touched on this same scenario in the first season with the Romulan situation, but that too was eventually lost in the tangle of plot threads, unfortunately.
I was astonished that they wrote Santiago Cabrera out of the show; I loved him and I loved Rios. But then I was astonished by a lot of the choices, including Jurati’s transformation and Elnor’s forsaking what I thought was supposed to be a life mission for Starfleet. Your pointing out that the new showrunner was basically using the cast as little more than chess pieces to ultimately remake the show to his own taste makes it all make more sense, but it’s depressing, non-sensical sense. Without giving the season much thought, I enjoyed it well enough I suppose, but stepping back and looking at it this way, it just makes me sad.
There appears to have been a degree of retconning with respect to the year that much of the season takes place in, 2024. In DS9, that’s supposed to be when the gated off slums known as Sanctuary Districts existed (“Past Tense”, parts 1 and 2). Of course, what happened is what generally happens when Trek’s treatment of the near future overtakes our actual present, or very soon to be present.
When Rios is taken away from the holding facility by ICE, however, one of the ICE personnel quips that he’s being taken off to “sanctuary.” The way he says it and his nasty attitude, however, suggests that he and the other undocumented aliens being bussed away are headed into the desert, where they’re going to be summarily disposed of.
It’s an interesting interlude that suggests that the fascist future Picard and company are trying to prevent is already (partially) here, and the correction of the timeline is not so much to prevent it as to make sure it is reversed.
By the way, just how many times did Vulcans visit Earth before First Contact? I’m counting at least two: the Carbon Creek episode from Enterprise and Wells’ childhood encounter with Vulcan observers. (The first was a crash landing, but it may have led to the second.) The premise that we weren’t of interest to them before they detected Earth’s first warp flight seems to be a convenient fiction.
I think Season 2 was generally better than Season 1. The opening episode was much stronger than anything in Season 1 and Season 1’s finale was absolutely atrocious and fairly illogical, whilst Season 2’s final episodes were generally more coherent (if a little too neat). But there was a lot of meandering around and I think people like to see a bit more space travel and adventure in a Star Trek show: an Earthbound time travel story is a fun one-off or two-parter, or whale-oriented movie, but for most of a 10-episode season it’s way too much. It would also be cool to see Picard back on the Enterprise (the E or whatever its replacement is) before the end of the show.
The best thing about this season was easily giving the superb Orla Brady way more to do. The worst was the story not really making sense, a perennial problem of the modern Trek shows (Lower Decks and Discovery‘s fourth season honourably excepted, and I haven’t seen SNW yet)
@56 It’s been a while since I saw Carbon Creek, but I think that they mentioned that would be a return survey to Earth on 20 years or so; presumably that was what Wells saw.
@56/Markvolund: “There appears to have been a degree of retconning with respect to the year that much of the season takes place in, 2024. In DS9, that’s supposed to be when the gated off slums known as Sanctuary Districts existed (“Past Tense”, parts 1 and 2).”
Sanctuary Districts were acknowledged directly. There was a sign mentioning one on a fence in the first 2024 episode, and the busload of detainees including Rios was being sent to a Sanctuary District. The events here took place several months before the events of “Past Tense.”
“The premise that we weren’t of interest to them before they detected Earth’s first warp flight seems to be a convenient fiction.”
It’s not that we weren’t of interest to them, it’s that they weren’t going to make open contact with us until we achieved warp drive.
@57/Werthead: I don’t care where the stories are set, I just want them to be coherent and meaningful.
Hrrm, forgot there was going to be a season wrap-up, and I’m late to the party.
The one thing I will say is I believe this was NOT the original plan that Matalas had for the season – that COVID-related concerns caused whatever rough draft to be torn up. I say this because back in March of 2020, Chabon indicated he wrote two scripts for Season 2, and was there throughout the entire writing process. Yet we know that he only had a single story credit. It also came out once the season was airing that Matalas turned over production to Goldsman in order to manage the writer’s room for Season 3 while Season 2 was filming.
What I think happened is whatever plan they had in 2020 – a complete, coherent plan – was completely destroyed by COVID, and thus unfilmable. They either tore it up entirely or heavily reworked it to both be lower budget and to reduce risk of exposure (we know they hived the characters into different subplots most of the season for social distancing reasons). Then the network decided to film seasons 2-3 back to back, which put Matalas in a bind, so he basically washed his hands of Season 2 and turned it over to Akiva (the actors have talked about how Season 2 is “Akiva’s vision” and Season 3 will be Terry’s.
@60/Karl Zimmerman: “the actors have talked about how Season 2 is “Akiva’s vision” and Season 3 will be Terry’s.”
Ohh. That explains a lot, and gives me hope that season 3 will be better.
My feelings about the first two seasons of Picard echo my feelings about the first two seasons of Discovery. I really enjoyed the first seasons, even though the kind of fell apart toward the end, and wanted more of that. The second seasons went in a different direction that at first was intriguing but became pretty stupid pretty fast. A lot of people are calling this the worst ever season of Star Trek, and while I’m not sure I’d go that far, I am finding it difficult to think of another season that left me less satisfied.
Anyway, what we’re getting for the final season is something that is, again, completely different. Let’s hope that this time it’s different in a good way.
I can’t imagine that it will make the series as a whole overly coherent to have each season effectively showrun by a different writer, but it at least makes me somewhat more optimistic about Season 3, even if I think that La Sirena’s crew was mostly ill-used.
@59 I missed the sign, so yeah, I see where it does indeed tie in.
I may be reading more than what was intended into the ICE guard’s nastiness, which did seem to imply a fate for the detainees being bussed more dire than being dumped into a gated slum.
Was it really a slump, though? The first season was a total mess. Seems like an on-par second season.
It’s interesting how Terry Matalas came about as a writer, having started on Trek itself under Brannon Braga’s wing, during a period that would be best classified as creatively troubled (late VOY, early ENT). Like Bryan Fuller, he made a prosperous career on television before coming back to the franchise that gave him that first crack to begin with.
That’s not to say that having his first experience during a troubled production period meant it’d affect his future writing or his career. I haven’t watched 12 Monkeys, but I heard enough good things about it, and I assume he got the EP job because he’s proven reliable as such.
But it doesn’t change the fact that this second season of Picard was a severe misfire compared to its first. And a frustrating one as well. There are a LOT of good moments throughout (Picard and Q’s farewell, young Guinan, Jurati bridging the gap between the Federation and the Borg, the striking image of Yvette Picard hanging, Spiner being riveting as Soong). Good character moments that would have landed so much better had the season been more consistent and cohesive. As it is, we’re left with a lot of inconsistencies and questions, the prime one being: why exactly did Q try and sabotage Picard’s mission of saving Renee? We’re never given a satisfactory explanation for that one.
For that matter, Picard’s troubled history with his parents don’t seem to have any thematic resonance with the overall plot. Saving Renee Picard might have worked in a thematic level, had the show invested in her as a character and given Stewart more to do in that regard.
But there have been at least two or three episodes this season alone where Picard was barely a presence – the secondary characters being given all the action and attention. How you’d craft episodes of a show built around a single landmark character and somehow put that character in the benches for an entire episode is an exercise in WTH.
But I can guess as to why they did it this way, and others already brought it up: Covid-19.
Given the pandemic and risk of contagion, they had to protect 80+ year old Patrick Stewart, giving him less to do and keeping him safe. And here’s where I’m guessing Matalas and Goldsman did the best they could to keep the ship running while keeping things secure, which meant putting these actors as far away from each other in these subplots that had little connection to each other. Given how many of these stories I still enjoyed, it’s a testament to not only the writing of these scenes but especially these actors.
But the end result is still a season made up of Greatest Hits moments rather than the more cohesive unifying thematic story that was told during the first season. This is not an approach that suits this 10 hour movie format the same way it did two years before. If anything, the story ran out of steam five episodes in and took another three to pick things back up. Just because the second act is a natural slower act, it doesn’t mean it should bore the viewer. I can only imagine what would be if they’d done this to 110 minute time travel classics like Voyage Home and First Contact. You want to feel the pressure of time coming up on you. I didn’t feel this once this season. In terms of structure, sometimes, a movie is best being just a movie, and a TV season can and should be something else.
Overall, not a bad season (certainly better than TNG S7, TOS S3, and a lot of both early and late VOY). But still a frustrating one – one where you can see the sparks of brilliance that never quite come together. It didn’t feel urgent and it didn’t really feel dramatic either.
@65/Django: “Was it really a slump, though? The first season was a total mess.”
The first season was flawed, but it had a more or less coherent narrative that actually tried to move the universe forward and introduce new concepts and worldbuilding. I respected what it tried to do, even if the execution fell short toward the end. Here, there are things to respect about isolated parts of the execution, but the overall concept was terribly ill-conceived and the parts fit together poorly.
@67
The first season was flawed, but it had a more or less coherent narrative that actually tried to move the universe forward and introduce new concepts and worldbuilding.
I still amuses and amazes me that more canonical world-building was done with the Romulans in those 10 episodes than had been done with them in the preceding 50 years.
@68/Mr. Magic: I know, right? Given that the Romulans ended up being pretty much TNG’s most frequent go-to villains, it’s surprising how little insight TNG gave us into their culture.
@66/Eduardo S H Jencarelli:
The time-travel stuff, as well as Q’s nature, make this confusing to think of in terms of linear causality. But aren’t we both seeing Q efforts to “initially” sabotage the Europa mission and generate the dystopian alternate timeline to get the “penance” rolling, as well as his efforts to assist Jean-Luc in getting to the bottom of it?
To someone in 2024 it would appear that Q is simultaneously pulling in both directions — but that’s not how he would experience it and from his perspective it would actually make sense.
@68 & @69: To me, the first-season Romulans did not read like TNG Romulans, or like cousins to the Vulcans, at all. I enjoyed the season, but I thought that one of its flaws was that Chabon’s Romulans were basically a brand-new alien race — which was fine for the story he wanted to tell about the Admonition and the Destroyer but a missed opportunity for resonance with earlier universe-building. (The other story problem with the Season 1 Romulans is that their current status in this quasi-reboot simply wasn’t established with any clarity. They were alternately portrayed as stateless refugees or a superpower, as a given plot required.)
I personally find Diane Duane’s world-building in The Romulan Way and Spock’s World much more rich and compelling than Chabon’s. I think TNG could have told more interesting Romulan stories if elements of that world had been adopted as canon. Too bad.
Trek — and its serialized recurring arcs in particular — can be good at developing thoughtful, real-seeming imaginary societies that delight the imagination, explore ideas from the realms of history and the social sciences, and challenge us to think about our own society in new ways. I think the Vulcans, Klingons, Bajorans, and Cardassians are all good examples. In that vein I argued earlier that the new insight into the nature of the Borg in this season of Picard was good science fiction. The opportunity to do this with the Romulans was missed in earlier Trek, and in my opinion the Chabon Romulans, while well-developed, introduced too many entirely new and story-specific elements to satisfy as backstory for the earlier portrayals of the species.
Compared to the two, I prefer season one to season two. I loved the world-building of season one and the massive new focus on the Romulans that has been lacking for decades. I don’t see any difference between what was done with them and what was done with the Klingons in TNG. Yes, there’s differences but that’s the nature of the medium and the TNG Romulans were nothing like the TOS Romulans.
Sadly, Season Two just doesn’t add that much to the canon or world-building by comparison.
@72,
I don’t see any difference between what was done with them and what was done with the Klingons in TNG. Yes, there’s differences but that’s the nature of the medium and the TNG Romulans were nothing like the TOS Romulans.
Absolutely. We’re so used now to the worldbuilding Ronald Moore and others brought to the modern Klingons that it’s easy to forget it’s only a product of the TNG-era and didn’t originate with TOS.
Any modern viewer going back now is going to see inconsistencies (though I ain’t losing sleep over it).
That said, I actually really enjoyed Dayton Ward’s novel In the Name of Honor and him taking crack at recoinciling the TOS/TNG-era depictions of the Klingons.
Ward using Koloth as that literal and figurative bridge (i.e. tranisition from the dandy of TOS to the ‘Ice Man’ of DS9) was especially inspired.
@67 ah, ok. Thats disappointing. so much wasted potential here.
I recall enjoying Season 1 quite a bit – not as much as the original shows, but still entertaining, coherent and bringing something new to the table.
This was very much a mixed bag to me. I did enjoy the finale, and I really liked the Borg/Jurati thread, as well as the idea of exploring the Q/Picard frenemy relationship a bit more (and using this as a chance to get Picard to realize some truth about himself) but it was SO spread out as others have mentioned that it just got watered down.
I also (despite some of the helpful comments) struggle to make sense of the timelines/causality. Picard blows up the Stargazer, ends up in another (bad) timeline, goes back in time (presumably it’s supposed to be to before a divergence happened, but since Guinan doesn’t remember Picard at this point that means other things must have changed) in that timeline with the version of the Borg Queen from the bad timeline and then they eventually end up back in OUR timeline, but now the other Borg Queen is back.
And the whole thing with Renee – if Renee was in fact the divergence, then why was Q working so hard to prevent her from going on the mission? Is Q the one that caused the divergence in the first place? Or was it supposed to be Picard making the wrong decision in the first episode? I’m still not even totally clear on what the ‘penance’ is intended to be for – Picard making the wrong decision, or just the fact he has so much guilt over his mom’s death he can’t form romantic attachments? And somehow THIS is the way Q decides to get him to come to the breakthrough? By creating some kind of time loop (because, who was the Borg queen in the first episode before all of this happened? Ugh I hate time loops).
I missed the releases of the second season episodes and watched all of them last week. Probably not a good idea, because the weaknesses and the incoherence of the story became even more obvious this way. I liked the first season except for the finale, but the second was a big disappointment. As has already been pointed out, there were so many elements from the first season that could have been picked up: The further development of the Synths after the ban was lifted would have been very interesting. I would also have liked to learn more about post-supernova Romulan society, or further adventures of Seven with the Fenris Rangers. What happened to the Borg artefact on Coppelius? But none of that was taken up. That would still have been forgivable if the new plot had been interesting and coherent – sigh. The beginning was still quite promising. Picard as the head of Starfleet Academy makes a lot of sense and is completely in character. An interesting story could have been developed from that. Having Q reappear for a new kind of trial was also not a bad idea. This trial could have been brought together with the other timeline. But the way they did it then, the Q story made no sense at all. Until the end it was not really clear what Q actually wanted. A hug from his favourite pet to ease his dying? Seriously? And then they put the focus on what I like least in a sci-fi show: time travel into our present. I watch Star Trek because I want to see, well, ‘strange new worlds, new life and new civilizations’ and not the Los Angeles of the 21st century, including yet another ‘guy from the future falls in love with a woman from the present’ romance.
To put Picard’s coming to terms with a childhood trauma at the centre of this season didn’t work at all for me. The topic has really been worked through, think of Picard’s trauma of the Borg assimilation or just now in the first Picard season his guilt complexes because of the aborted evacuation of the Romulans or his (perceived) guilt for Data’s death. Moreover, the assumption that he was incapable of relationships because he felt guilty for his mother’s death ignores the fact that he did have more or less serious romantic relationships in the later phase of TNG, think of Nella Daren in ‘Lessons’ or Anij in ‘Insurrection’. Not to mention that in ‘Inner Light’ he was married and had two children. So I don’t see a reason at all why he would have rejected a relationship with Laris if he really cared for her.
The idea of reforming the Borg may well be in best Star Trek tradition. But I liked them the way they were before: The scary super villains of ‘Q Who’, ‘Best of Both Worlds’ and ‘First Contact’. I already hated what Voyager did with the Borg, and I don’t want to see a benevolent Borg cooperative applying for membership in the Federation. But this may be just me.
All this could have been tolerated if the story had not fallen apart into so many incoherent parts. It has been noted that because of the Covid pandemic, the cast had to be kept apart. That may be true, but that is no excuse for poor storytelling.
Yes, season 2 had its good moments. But all in all, I feel a great disappointment. For the first time I found myself looking bored at my smartphone and checking my emails during Star Trek episodes (most of the time during Picard’s childhood flashbacks). Season 3 can only get better (I hope). At least we will see the old Enterprise D/E crew. Again, it doesn’t fit with the Season 1 approach at all, but I’m still looking forward to it.
I enjoyed this season a lot. Last season felt like barely anything happened each episode. I still enjoyed it, but the pace felt very different to this season. This season each episode felt very fast moving, even if the table was swept clear of what happened at the end of the episode or the start of the next one.
Yet I agree the season as a whole was flawed. The biggest flaw for me was the “anomaly” at the end. That “twist” was completely without foreshadowing.
Far better to use it to tie the season together. Star Fleet has two anomalies in the first episode. The urgency for sending Picard out to the one with the signal asking for him is the second one is bigger and Star Fleet needs to know if the two are connected. That would explain why no one else more senior to a Captain’s rank is seen. Then have Rios trigger the self destruct. The Stargazer *is* his ship. The second episode in the Confederation timeline obviously doesn’t have the anomaly caused by the Borg, but does have the second anomaly. While the cast are fumbling around figuring out what’s going on, the wormhole forms, and the ‘plume’ of the vortex wipes out the heart of the Confederation. It’s strong enough to defeat the Borg, but the Confederation couldn’t defend itself against whatever the anomaly is. The Solar System escapes because we’re on the edge of the galaxy. That gives them more incentive to risk time travel on just the Borg Queen’s say-so. The cast doing so without a little more verification, given the risks of time travel seemed a little impulsive. Admittedly they were being chased, but I would have thought a little more research before the slingshot manoeuvre, particularly after Picard’s experiences in First Contact.
Then in the 21st century they’re investigating the data from the anomaly and trying to figure out how to stop the destruction, as well as ‘correcting’ the timeline. They could have had Jurati’s scouting mission into the Borg Queen’s mind confirm the Borg didn’t have anything to do with the big anomaly. The Confederation timeline Borg obviously couldn’t have anything to do with it, but the Federation Borg didn’t either, but Jurati picks up *something* that remains on the tip of her tongue.
In the next episode they speculate that a large fleet of starships coordinating their shields could blunt and dissipate the vortex plume, but that it couldn’t be done on the fly, it would take “a Borg collective a few centuries” to do all the calculations.
Then Jurati gets assimilated, and it’s lampshaded how as a collective of two, as the Borg Queen assimilates Jurati, Jurati is assimilating her, maybe by Seven as she speculates why the Borg Queen was able to kill the bar patron but not Raffi.
Then when Q does his big ‘reveal’ that it was all about Picard, and having him lampshade how Star Fleet and Picard conspired to prevent Picard resolving his childhood trauma (that initial scene with James Callis as the ‘counsellor’ seemed to suggest Picard had resisted counselling as much as possible) because it made him a good Captain, but now those days are gone and he can chose to let go of the trauma. Picard can ask if it’s not about saving the galaxy, why did Q snatch him just before the anomaly is about to ‘blossom’? Q can tell him maybe there’s a bonus, or maybe not. <snap>.
So then we return to the Federation timeline and the last moments of the Stargazer. Picard realises it’s completing a time loop, uses his Admiral’s override to cancel Rios’s self-destruct, and Borgatti Collective coordinates the fleet in saving the galaxy.
That feels like it would have tied the season together much more tightly.
Couple more things I would have like to see in the season. First, more care with the temporal mechanics. Presumably the Borgified Mercenaries didn’t do anything uniquely significant or have have any uniquely significant descendants. But if the bullet holes from the mercenaries were remembered by Picard in the Château, surely that’s means there’s the remains of the mercenaries sticking out of the walls in the tunnels below the Château?
Tue other major thing I would have liked to see would have been more Crusher. At the moment, his clip could have been removed from the episode and left it completely unchanged. Instead, I’d have Crusher tell Kore that before she says yes, she needs to speak to someone. I’d then have had Picard use the Supervisor teleport to take Tallinn back to her apartment, and her insist Picard leave. Then Crusher appears with Kore, with some flippant comment about Jean-Luc always taking the hint or somesuch, introduces Tallinn to her as “one of your father’s victims”, and counteracts Soong’s toxin. No ‘fridging’ here, please. A comment about how Picard shouldn’t see him in this time period. Then Tallinn asks if Crusher knows why Jean-Luc recognised her, and he reveals her family and the Picard’s are linked, and it’s Tallinn’s stories of Renee that inspire her descendant to aid Jean-Luc, even though Tallinn’s not supposed to talk about her time as a Supervisor. He refuses to be drawn more about her family, but does say her and Jean-Luc meeting was Q playing silly buggers, and that Q deliberately brought them into contact. Oh, and then maybe having Crusher, Kore and Tallinn recruit Rios. Having someone like Crusher explicitly providing suggestions to Rios to avoid him polluting the timeline makes more sense, given his track record over three days, than leaving him unsupervised (if you pardon the pun).
That seems to make more use of Crusher and ties up some plot holes
Rewatching this for the first time (and knowing in advance how unsatisfying it would be) I was able to find a lot about it that I actually liked, and there was only one episode where I felt the bad outweighed the good (Two of One). However, there were still only a couple of episodes that I could say I really enjoyed, which leaves seven very mixed bags and a season that feels like it’s barely worth it. It’s not the worst season of Star Trek, but it was probably the worst in at least 33 years, which isn’t a lot better.