On Picard: Pretty Much My Last Word

I've finally gone back to see the last four episodes of Star Trek: Picard's first season, including a re-view of the first four episodes and the last one.  I will on no account ever watch the fifth episode again, and the sixth seemed dominated by my least favorite elements, so I skipped it.  Though I didn't intend to write any more about this series, I was persuaded to do so.

I remain impressed by the quality of the acting, and for the most part of the writing and direction.  Patrick Stewart and (in multiple roles) Brent Spiner were classic, and Jeri Ryan brought an effective new personality to Seven of Nine (importing flavors of the character she played on the Bosch series.)  The new actors had to contend with the fragmentation of the story-telling and the fitful writing, especially if Patrick Stewart's experience in not knowing that Picard would die in the final episode generally meant the actors didn't know the full arc of their characters when they started.

 Those that ended up as the new crew also ended up as appealing and differentiated characters, particularly Michelle Hurd as Raffi, though it's not clear to me how they all got there.  The series narrative approach strikes me as more novelistic, and takes some getting used to.  Maybe viewers younger than me get it faster.  Or there were just too many new characters and not enough time.

Though the moral questions confronting individual characters are worthy and dramatic, I don't think that, even at best, the story advances the Star Trek saga very much.  Star Trek VI is perhaps the most specific of many examples that cover much the same territory about fears of the Other, and Generations made the case for mortality as defining what's human (although this series takes it further, to a point that seems dubious to me--but that's a broader philosophical question.) Questions that arise from artificial life forms were dramatized in both the Next Generation and Voyager series.  And to me other such questions were dealt with more artfully in the Spielberg/Kubrick feature film, A.I.

The episode with the Rikers was a high point, less fan service than a concise and convincing portrait of this aging couple, and their tragedy that resulted from the Federation's synthetics ban.  At the same time, their daughter (played beautifully by Lulu Wilson) represented youthful hope.

There were elements of the finale that didn't pass the smell test for me, such as Soji's sudden total identification with the synths, to the point of pleading with Picard to see things from "our" point of view, as they were about to wipe out intelligent biological life, when she had consciously been a non-human synth for about five minutes.   Her villainous doppelganger, like the Romulan sister and brother, was cartoonishly evil.  (But then so is Donald Trump, so maybe that was the point.) The synths we saw on their planet were generally as lively as manikins, and seemed about as smart.

The finale itself seemed rushed, while earlier episodes seemed overly elaborated, even granted the character moments.  But this gets into a broader point of where this series falls in television history, and in Star Trek.

Star Trek: The Next Generation was born into a world of television in which cable channels were starting to be influential with original programming, but which was still dominated by the three broadcast networks.

 The original series Star Trek got its second and bigger life through syndication (often on small UHF stations with weaker signals that themselves got new and bigger life when they were included on cable systems.) The Next Generation was produced to go directly to syndication, and its success (including a prime time Emmy nomination for Best Dramatic Series) helped change television.

Now television fiction has gone through cable to streaming services, which have developed their own forms and preferences.  The 8 to 12 episode series, sometimes released all at once, has become something of a standard.  Dramatic shows are less often a series of separate stories in a common story universe and continuous time-line, than a single season-long story told in fragments.  The model in many ways for fiction in a fictional and fantastic world became Game of Thrones, with fiction in a purportedly realistic world modeled after, for example,  House of Cards.

 To maintain interest and create buzz, character and plot developments are often sensational and extreme.  There might be a kind of winking quality to this, a "meta" fiction vibe that exploits the most simplistic techniques for effect while simultaneously inviting the audience to laugh ironically at it all--and tweet about it as they watch.

I might isolate two elements of this new television world as they apply to Picard. The first element is the new relationship of fans to the storytelling, represented by the new term, "fan service."

The new dramas depend on buzz that is maintained on social media and through websites, more or less the equivalent of continuous fan magazines. "Tentpole" movies are marketed in a similar way, with creators interacting with fans.  While Gene Roddenberry encouraged and even organized fan expression and interaction during Star Trek's network run and afterwards, he drew a stern line at fans being able to dictate or directly influence story and storytelling. He turned back any such demands with no room for doubt.

To its credit, Star Trek: Picard does little of this.  Perhaps the story gets contorted a bit to include favorite characters, but mostly they add a lot to story and the characters. The continuing chemistry among the Next Generation actors is both well-served and inspiring.  However, bringing back beloved characters just to kill them off (elegantly and not really for major characters, cruelly and distastefully for minor characters) might even be seen as some kind of revenge on the concept of fan service.

The second element is the language and depiction of violence. The broadcast networks controlled and still control these, while cable and especially streaming services are largely free of restrictions. In the past at least, the broadcast networks were partly responding to features of the laws governing signals over the "public airwaves" versus the cable and Internet, which are treated as unregulated private property.  They also had commercial sponsors sensitive to public upset.

In the original Star Trek series, Gene Roddenberry chafed under the restrictions of network drama, including active network censorship.  But his greatest concern was commercial censorship--in the example he often gave (apocryphal or not), characters in a western were not permitted to "ford" a river if the sponsor was Chevrolet.  His approach to language however was to avoid slang and expressions of the time that could become dated, and were not credible in the mouths of characters in the 23rd or 24th century.

Similarly, given GR's vision for the Federation and Starfleet,  the use of 20th or 21st century profanity is not credible, at least in most instances that appear in Picard.  The head of Starfleet has exactly two scenes in the series, with maybe three lines each time--and yet she drops the F-Bomb both times.  While I laughed, I was also taken out of the scene, and the whole sequence became a joke.  I could not take her seriously as head of Starfleet.  As a background speaker starts to say in Star Trek VI, just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean you must.

That goes more than double for the graphic violence, particularly in episode 5.  Perhaps the slasher aesthetic, the Game of Thrones syndrome, softens this for contemporary audiences, but to me it seems at best a lapse of taste, and exactly the opposite experience I expect from Star Trek.  As I've written previously, children who assumed this was the Star Trek they knew could have actually been traumatized by this violence.  I pretty much was myself, also because I didn't expect it in a Star Trek production.  (A similar situation to the violence that opened the fifth episode recurs in the finale, but it is handled much differently.  Was that so hard?)

This kind of violence and language has a particular ramification.  One result of both network standards and GR's vision of the future Federation was that Star Trek was a show that children could watch, as well as adults.  This was true even when Next Generation was not as directly controlled, since it was produced independently.

This became a cherished characteristic of Star Trek: not only that children could watch it--and then watch it again as adolescents and adults, seeing new things within it each time--but that families could watch it together.  Star Trek became something which parents introduced to their children, and they in turn introduced to their children.

But today's television environment is intentionally fractured, and programs are specialized.  This has become the trend within the "tentpole" "franchises," or storytelling universes, like Star Wars and Star Trek. Even when Star Trek had three new series running at the same time, the audience--a general audience-- was broadly speaking the same for all of them. Today's Star Trek television shows are fairly rigidly divided into the action-adventure of Discovery, the adult drama of Picard, and now the comedy of Lower Decks.  Picard is now and forever an adults-only space.  And that's more than a pity.

I would suggest a further implication of all this that seems to me expressed by the Picard series, especially when combined with some internal Star Trek history.

Two things changed the Star Trek universe: the Dominion war in Deep Space Nine, and 9/11.  It has never changed back, nor gone forward.

In an effort to darken the Star Trek universe and introduce more (or easier) dramatic conflict, writers chafing under GR's vision for Starfleet and the Federation went back to old war movies for their continuing story of the Dominion War.  Like those war movies, these stories weren't realistic, but pushed adrenaline buttons with hatred, intrigue and revenge.  Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coons and other writers and participants who had actually been in World War II and Korea, who knew the reality that no drama could fully express, had a far different vision for the stories they wanted to tell. They told the stories that made Star Trek different, and that gave this storytelling universe its character.

The alien terrorist attack on Earth in Enterprise

Then just as the new series Star Trek Enterprise was about to take Star Trek back to the wonder of discovery and exploration, two passenger airliners hijacked by terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth was brought down into a Pennsylvania field by a revolt of passengers.  This was the day forever known as 9-11, and Enterprise immediately changed its emphasis to fictionalize such a situation.

It was not a temporary adjustment.  Even after Enterprise stopped production, Star Trek novels continued to obsess over terrorism, covert operatives and--reflecting the new U.S. policy--torture.  One Next Generation novel actually had Picard's Enterprise (and Counselor Troi!) torturing prisoners for information--an explicit rejection of one of the series' most famous episodes.

The J.J. Abrams films continued the mood, with an increasingly militarized Starfleet, complete with Nazi-style uniforms.  All of this tended to reshape GR's Star Trek universe until new Star Trek had little in common with it but the names and technologies.

In terms of the soul of Star Trek, this comes back to the essential point: the Star Trek future was at its best a model, a beacon of hope, a thought experiment that said, what if society consciously institutionalized the best human qualities, while guarding against its worst?  What if we actually learned from centuries of bloody mistakes, so it was in some sense not all in vain?  What would that look like?

What it did look like was unlike anything else on television or at the movies.  But now the Star Trek universe seems to me all but identical with other mostly dystopic portrayals of the future, especially the cycles of war and chaos in the Star Wars universe.   It is true that the moral questions in Picard are vastly more sophisticated--but those decisions confront individuals, the basis of most drama.  It's valid and worthy drama. But the universe is mostly wrong.

In this story universe, the Federation is so panicked that it turns away from anything synthetic after a single horrible outcome, with a fanatical rigor such that even medicine is affected. It abandons the Romulans, insuring that they will again be enemies, having learned nothing from the Treaty of Versailles after World War I (or, in the opposite way, from the Marshall Plan after World War II.)

Starfleet is so stupid that its head of security is a Romulan general, a spy and the fanatical head of a Romulan cult within its secret police. As presented in this series, it's cartoonish.  That she passes herself off as Vulcan is interesting, but undeveloped.

 It may seem also a reflection of contemporary reality, when the most transparently buffoonish people run governments. Or when everyone is so easily manipulated, even as the synthetics are convinced by a ploy (colluding in the killing of one to instantly motivate the others to kill every biological intelligence in the universe) that wouldn't pass muster in a Horatio Hornblower novel about warfare in the early 19th century.

But grant historical precedent to the ease of this deception. That history doesn't have to repeat itself was precisely the message--or the model-- in many if not most Star Trek episodes of the GR era.

Yes, Star Trek always reflected issues of the contemporary moment. But it confronted those issues within the 23rd or 24th century context of the Federation and Starfleet. How do they handle what we can't handle?  Instead, this Federation and Starfleet only tell us that humanity hasn't learned anything.  Not much of a future to aspire to.

In the finale of Star Trek: Picard's first season, Starfleet rides to the rescue anyway, and our new Picard crew warps off to new adventures, each of them changed, apparently in a changed universe.  Maybe the future is better.