Star Trek Picard season 1

Thanks to Amazon Prime I’ve now watched Star Trek Picard season 1. I’d seen mixed opinions on this and went in with mixed expectations. Bottom line: it makes a decent attempt at mixing nostalgia with a new story, has some superb casting, great moments and serious flaws. I’ll explain below. It’s just my opinion as a long time science fiction (and Star Trek) fan. YMMV. Probably a few spoilers if you’ve not seen it.

Back to the galaxy!

Nostalgia

With Picard comes a lot of baggage. Data is omnipresent throughout this series, it being easy enough to layer makeup on Brent Spiner, who is on form through this, as is Patrick Stewart. There’s nostalgia but not so as to overwhelm the new characters.

Various Enterprise crew get mentions, though we don’t learn anything about Beverly Crusher and I kept expecting Wesley to make an appearance! We did get Riker and Troi and most surprising to me, 7of9.

It’s enough. To do even more would have smacked of tokenism and completism. I’m sure some fans wanted everyone and their pet tribble to appear, but I think this worked.

Casting

The newbies had their work cut out. We had a misfit new crew on new spaceship La Sirena (Michelle Hurd as Raffi complete with drink problem and Santiago Cabrera as Cpt Rios and all the holograms). We also had (on Earth) two Romulan staff/ bodyguards who seems interesting to me then were dropped. Too many new characters?

I was pleased to see Alison Pill (who I’d been impressed with in Devs) in a decent role as loyalty tested AI specialist Agnes Jurati and Isa Briones is scene stealing as the androids Dahj and Soji. A mention also to young actor Lulu Wilson who plays Kestra Troi-Riker.

Narek played by Harry Treadway is good as the Romulan spy with true feelings for Soji, as is Peyton List as his sister Narissa. Evan Evagora as Romulan ninja Elno didn’t work for me, mostly as his character never got a solid chance to develop. This is one of the flaws for me (see below).

Moments

I didn’t know Jeri Ryan was back as 7of9 and felt she had a strong screen presence and believable post-Voyager backstory. In fact when she appeared I was growing bored of the main plot and soon wished we were getting a 7of9 spin-off instead!

There were plenty of good scenes between characters, though some were milked too far (esp Data and Picard at the end).

Flaws

Too many new characters to explain in too few episodes. I also felt the first few episodes weren’t relaxed and it took a while to get the series firing on all cylinders. The sense of doom laying in Picard was irritating given I knew a second series is in the works.

The show has now fully become a fantasy, leaving the constraints of science fiction behind. Two instances annoyed me:

1. Trapped on the Borg cube, good job there was a new secret super transmat we never knew about before, able to send Picard and Agnes vast number of light years to a spinning planet in orbit. Usefully it sends them a short distance from the one house where they can get help and yards away from Kestra. Rubbish. Might as well call it a magic portal
2. The final episode (and see more later) has a magic ‘fix things’ gadget that not only repairs the fused core of the La Sirena but then works the illusion trick!

The last episode was a disaster from start to finish. Here’s why I think that:

1. There’s a golem lying around waiting for a mind, and it only takes Agnes and Altan Soong (Brent Spiner) a few hours to complete research which Maddox (killed by Agnes!) had encrypted and slaved over for years. Still, anything to resurrect Picard!
2. A big CGI show-down with 100s of Romulan and Federation ships that appear then run away. Pretty but pointless
3. If the Romulan secret sect hated androids and AI so much, why did they never destroy Data all those years ago?
4. How much super tech can be invented on one planet by a handful of people in a few decades?
5. What happened to Narek (I assume he reappears in a later series)
6. How slow was the non-ending of Picard and Data?
7. What was the point of the uber-AI monster. Why didn’t some of it get through the portal and give all the spaceships something meaningful to do? A battle where Federation and Romulans teamed up to save the day made sense to me, and we could have had a meaningful casualty from Picard’s past.

I’m sure there’s more, but you get the drift. Overall it didn’t feel like Star Trek to me for most of it. I realise it’s hard to launch a sci-fi series, and there is evolution here, I just wanted more of (eg) the conflict between Federation values and the reality of the wild west frontier where this seemed to be set.

I also thought the Romulan supernova was weak. We already had the Klingons come onboard when they had a massive eco-disaster. A supernova would a) be predictable for a very long time, and b) wipe out star systems in a vast radius. Saving a few million in a Dunkirk like mission is all very noble, but…

Quite negative. I did like some of it and now have some interest in the rag tag crew of La Sirena. I’d like a series with less arc and less nostalgia. Could it be made to work? Picard needs something to tilt against. We shall have to wait and see.