So I’ve watched another couple episodes of Picard - I believe I just finished Season 2 Episode 3 - and for the most part I actually don’t have loads to say - the show is still setting up its plot, so there isn’t as much to react to thematically, only at surface level, and unlike the last couple episodes I didn’t keep being so taken out of the show I felt I needed to write notes down on it, but there is nevertheless a few things I did want to call out, one of which is pretty major.
Two minor, non thematic things I wanted to mention is the show has more or less confirmed they have no idea what they wanted to do with Elnor - and possibly never did, since they summarily killed him off. I’ll admit to having spoiled myself a little so I know both that his death is undone at the end of the season, but also that he is summarily written off afterwards, and like, that’s dumb? Why was he even introduced if he was going to be immediately separated from Picard, have a handful of cool fight scenes and funny jokes, then join Starfleet for no apparent reason, then get killed off also for no apparent reason? Also, why is Raffi the one most upset by this? Picard has the most direct connection with him, and he hero worshipped Seven, but Raffi is the one flipping her lid over his death? Really just feels like they wanted Raffi upset and Elnor happened to be someone they could kill off without affecting their plans. Just kind of a lazy writing choice. I loved the idea of his character and it sucks to see him be completely wasted. Since he is canonically not dead as of the end of Picard, my idea for a Qowat Milat traveling samurai show with him in the lead could still happen, or at least a character similar to him (not that it will, thats a concept way too risky in this streaming show development climate and state of the franchise.)
The other thing I wanted to just say is its amusing they are affirming the canonicity of being able to travel back in time by slingshotting around a sun at warp, which makes time travel in theory trivially easy to achieve, but note that you need someone who can do the chronometric calculations live from moment to moment. The Borg Queen fills that role here, but Spock did in TOS. Obviously this has always been canon - its a method from the Original Series after all - but if I’m not mistaken it has not been referenced in canon since that, and I think most people had sort of assumed you were suppose to ignore it, like the time Uhura called it Spacefleet instead of Starfleet or the time Kirk said women weren’t allowed to be Captains. In any case, I kinda like them affirming it - the idea that the series has to live with silly nonsense from the original series is funny - but I don’t super love the implication that Spock is somehow so special that you need him or a Borg Queen to do it. I strongly suspect just any Vulcan wouldn’t do, or at least, wouldn’t do if you asked the writers of Picard - obviously any time in the future writers want to time travel, they can simply MacGuffin another person as being able to do these chronometric calculations, and any time they do not want it available just claim no one around is able to do so - including perhaps Spock himself in Strange New Worlds, since thats Young Spock and only Old Spock has thus far been shown capable. The general push towards making Spock, Kirk, Picard, and other Star Trek heroes chosen ones by fate with special, unique abilities and roles in the timeline just rubs me the wrong way.
Okay, now after all that, here is the big thing I actually wanted to talk about - the Confederation of Planets defeating the Borg, We are lead to understand - assuming I understood the show correctly, which is not guaranteed - that they defeated the Borg and the last Borg Queen is going to be executed on Eradication Day. I kinda suspect that the show is eventually going to come around as explicitly anti-genocide even against the Borg, which if it does so will -help- defuse this a bit, but even if so, this feels like a big problem to me, because the Borg are, in fact, awful. They’ve been established as mindlessly consuming and destroying all other species, civilizations, and cultures without mercy, and even though Janeway tried to negotiate with them and ended up beating their asses repeatedly in a way that greatly diminished their perceived threat, even she failed to actually open up an actually productive dialogue, and they betrayed her at the soonest opportunity. Raising the idea that the Federation might have been able to defeat the Borg, and in doing so save billions or trillions of lives, if only it was fascist, hugely undermines pretty much any antifascist story Star Trek might want to tell. Even if the show later affirms that genocide is always wrong, even against the Borg, you are still painting the picture of a future where if fascism wins, billions or trillions will be saved, and at least some viewers are gonna look at that calculus and be like, “Feels like fascism is better?”
It would be like if you wrote an alternate history novel where the Nazis won, and the resulting society ends up completely utopian without any disease, untimely death, war, or internal strife, with the only downside being that everyone who wasn’t white was killed prior to the start of the story. You can try really hard to sell that as a bad thing, and certainly most people will be uncomfortable coming to the conclusion that your Nazi society is a good thing, but you know who won’t? Nazis. They’ll see it and be like, “See, we told you! All the problems are solved!” You don’t need to concede to the premise that Nazis could actually succeed at their goals or that being a Nazi has any advantages, and by speculating about an alternate history where the Nazis construct a perfect society but everyone is white is doing just that - and by the same token an alternate history of the Federation where they manage to defeat the Borg does the same thing, albeit on a perhaps less extreme scale, but also without necessarily alienating as many people since the Confederation are not explicitly Nazis, just Nazi flavored, a distinction that actually matters quite a bit when you consider the general media literacy in America.
I hate to say it, but Discovery did a much better job showing why a Nazi version of the Federation would be a bad thing. Although the Terran Empire does have a lot of military success, none of its enemies are destroyed so utterly they are no longer a threat, and it is caught in endless war costing lives constantly. Is the same true for the Confederation? Possibly, but we don’t stay there long enough to see. Moreover, the Borg aren’t even mentioned in the Mirror Universe at all, and we have no reason to think they wouldn’t be an enormous threat there - yet the Confederation somehow has managed to wipe them out, and by implication allowed all those they would have assimilated to survive. Logically perhaps the Confederation probably is gonna genocide them all too, but that’s not been stated, and given that we see Romulans and other aliens living on Earth, it really seems likely that the humans of the Confederation would merely rule over and discriminate against them, which while bad is not as bad as what the Borg would have done. There just really is no reason to write what is definitely supposed to be a bad guy as having such a huge potential upside as “saving an entire quarter of the galaxy from assimilation by the Borg.” I have no doubt this was no intended, but it is yet again another example of sloppy writing while trying to make a point, something modern Trek seems to have a big problem with.
All that being said, I do appreciate that Picard is still trying, and while I am not a big time travel person, they clearly are doing it to make sure you cannot miss their point by essentially setting their show in the modern day. Its one way to avoid the issue of “How to handle depicting the Federation in the time of Trump” and while I’d say its probably one of the sillier ways, it has the advantage of making it much harder for someone to mistake the point you are trying to make… except when you make the fascists beat the Borg, I guess.
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