Continuing My Picard Rants

 You know what time it is. I’m almost done with S2 of Picard, I have one episode left, but before I finish it, let me dump some more thoughts here. I will once again just be taking my thoughts as they are written down in my notes, but I think they may end up more scrambled even than usual as I merged a couple documents and thus they may not be chronological, and some are more overarching comments.

To make this extra confusing, lets start with a general thematic thing. I commented how weird it was that S1 of Picard ended with such a strong, “Things need to die or they have no point.” message in Data’s final plea to Picard to let him die. Thats a message which has literally never once resonated with me, but that is not why I object to it. I question the idea we can only value things which are ephemeral - although technically speaking the Earth and the Sun and the Universe are ephemeral according to our current understandings of science (or, at least, always decaying, per entropy - I don’t think the Universe is actually predicted to end, merely reach a point of maximum disorder commonly called the “heat death” of the universe, I don’t feel like I need to get into the science here), for the vast majority of human history these things have seemed eternal, and in practical terms they are - none will die even in our lifespan, even if the worst global warming predictions are true - yet we still value those, surely? But anyway, thats all a distraction, I don’t object to that message, even if it is one I don’t quite understand - what I found funny about it is having that be the message of a sci fi show no one asked for reviving a character in his nineties as nostalgia bait. A show which then proceeds to pretend he has a fatal illness only to immediately erase it and give him a robot body in the exact same episode you sold this message. Its some bizarre cognitive dissonance, and requires the show to specify this new robot body will continue to age in order to even begin to reconcile the stated message to the camera and the actual plot of the show. It feels like absolutely atrocious writing, where you could not even manage to write the theme you want so instead of trying, just have a character say it to the screen.

Honestly I am still getting sidetracked, this isn’t supposed to be a dig at Picard and certainly not at S1 of Picard. Rather I just thought it was interesting that this theme persists into the second season. Q too now is facing his death, causing this theme to resurface, the idea that things can only have meaning if they end, and that even if that is scary, it is necessary. It makes me wonder exactly how right I am about the executive meddling in Picard and the show being a Frankenstein’s monster of different shows, disparate plotlines, and executive insistence on nostalgia bait, and whether these duplicate end season pleas to let franchises die is their revenge. I honestly kind of hope so, as that would make the theme resonate with me more, as in this specific case, I agree, even if I don’t think its that profound as a general philosophical theme - as a general theme it feels like copium from people afraid to die, telling themselves death conveys meaning, but in terms of a TV show, yeah, maybe we should stop bringing back zombified forms of old good shows and try making something fresh and new. Even if that means Star Trek as a franchise dies, and especially if it means it doesn’t but we can stop shoving in legacy characters where they don’t need to be. I know Starfleet Academy did it too, but it was really refreshing that none of the legacy characters were main characters at any point, unlike Discovery (Spock, Pike, and Sarek), Strange New Worlds (half the cast), Picard (Picard, Data/all the Soongs, Seven, and tons of more throughout). Weirdly enough I think Lower Decks is the only show with zero recurring legacy characters, despite how much shit people give it for just being entirely referential in its humor (a criticism I disagree with but understand).

This is a dumb complaint but when Kore is confronting Soong about her clone sisters she lists off all their names, which are all different names for the same mythological figure, Persephone, who was locked in the underworld by her husband after he raped in the middle of a flower field. Honestly I feel like the use of the name doesn’t quite fit the character - Soong is her father figure, not her husband - and its especially bizarre that Soong would have chosen it for her - what in the world was he trying to convey, and to whom? Does he just have a fetish for controlling women? But none of that is a real problem - I do think the show is probably trying to be clever with her name but I don’t really care whether or not they succeeded. What I do care about is when listing all the names of her clone sisters, she says “Prosperina” for one, which is notably not an alternate name for Persephone. Its Proserpina. They misplaced the P. “Prosperina” sounds like the love interest in the anime “Oh No! I Woke Up in A Fantasy World and Fell In Love with A Rich Merchants Daughter!” This is a dumb nitpick but it made me laugh so you have to read about it. I will admit though I searched for a bit to confirm I wasn’t in the wrong here, because I thought, hey, maybe that is a legitimate version of her name, but I could find no reference to that name anywhere, not even, weirdly enough, in Star Trek Picard documentation online, meaning this might just even be the actress fumbling a name and no one noticing but me.

The scenes between Seven and Raffi talking about their relationship and the flashback to Raffi’s conversation to Elnor was all good stuff, in my opinion, but it did raise a big question for me, which is why is it here? Why did it take until Episode 9 of a ten episode season for us to know why Raffi was suddenly so attached to Elnor and so upset at his death? Why are we only getting this window into Seven and Raffi’s relationship and Raffi and Elnor’s relationship so late in the season? What was the point of keeping these things a mystery? There are times I think it can make sense from a writing perspective to hide a character’s motivations, but I don’t understand it here. It just made me wonder why the fuck she was acting this way for nine episodes. It made me think the writing was worse than it was. I brought up before, “Why is Picard so nonlinear?” and basically said it felt like the show just inherently thinks nonlinear storytelling is simply better than linear storytelling regardless of what effect you are going for, and you know, it is not. If the show was a show with a close perspective on a single character - like, focusing on Picard, for instance - having him slowly discover why Raffi was so devastated could make sense. But this is not that show. We jump perspectives every scene, and the show fundamentally is one where the viewers have limited omniscience - we are told everything that is happening from everyone’s perspective and the timing of those reveals creates dramatic tension, but we are not living in anyone’s perspective. Delaying Raffi’s motivations for her actions just makes her actions seem out of character until the reveal, and after the reveal I was just wondering why they bothered to delay it. It really made me wish we had actually seen all the events of the timeskip in an episode or two before the first one of this season so we could understand Seven and Raffi and Raffi and Elnor’s relationship dynamics, rather than the bizarre reveal that they’d gotten closer and she saw him as a replacement son just as the season ends and he has been dead for seven episodes.

Speaking of, I spoiled myself to knowing that Elnor ends up coming back when he first died, which makes me beg the question, why did he even die? Yes it provided a lot of drama with Raffi this season, but he is not going to stay dead. Moreover, he kept reoccurring, in flashbacks, hallucinations, and now a hologram, so they did not save money on the actor. Having him come back completely undercuts the emotional impact of his death. They could have just written him to have not gotten shot and then showed Raffi and him growing closer over the course of this mission instead. Of course that would require real character writing rather than using a cheap gimmick to manipulate viewer emotions, but that should be a welcome writing challenge, an opportunity, not a cost. Honestly I think the answer is, “Modern Trek wants to be edgy and kill characters for emotional stakes, but simultaneously doesn’t really have the balls to go through with it, not to mention significant character death is difficult to square with a hopeful outlook that is mandatory for Star Trek properties.” My impression is Elnor does not appear in the third season, so even moreso, they should have picked one, either killed him off or not, killing him off only to bring him back and immediately write him off is just nonsense, but it is what I’ve come to expect from this show which seems to have no idea what it wants to do with any of its characters.

This is another minor nitpick, but on multiple occasions various people have said that the Borg Queen wants to get a 400 year head-start on conquering the Universe. This rang false to me, so I looked it up. Canonically, there is a reference in a single Voyager episode to the Borg having controlled several systems in the Delta Quadrant in the 15th century BCE, but otherwise we do not actually know when the Borg came to be. If I was being an ultra Star Trek nerd, I could simply stop here and say, Ha! This conflicts with established canon! But honestly I don’t think contradicting a passing reference in a Voyager episode is that big a deal - I forget if the Borg Queen herself ever says it, I am positive Seven says it at least once, and in theory Seven should know how long the Borg have existed since she was a member of the collective, but at the end of the day, people in universe getting the exact number of years that her stealing a future ship would give them an advantage is a minor issue. Also I guess maybe the idea is not that they don’t exist then and haven’t started assimilating, but that she would get technology from the future early? Okay, I think I may have actually talked myself into thinking this line is perfectly fine. I was going to say, “My real problem with it is its ridiculous to think the Borg sprang into existence in Picard’s time, they must have been around for longer, probably quite a long tine given how much of the Delta Quadrant they control…” and all of that is true, but I think I was just interpreting this line too narrowly. I have some questions over whether that really is what the writers meant, but at the end of the day even if it was wrong it’d be a minor nitpick, and I can easily explain it to myself having thought about it, so its not even worth nitpicking. I will leave this here though since it may be useful for others who have the same nitpick.

Speaking of me being wrong, I wrote a literal whole blogpost about how the Confederation shouldn’t have been written as successfully genociding the Borg because it rides too close to handing it to Nazis, but I only just realized something I had forgotten: Janeway also genocided the Borg for the Federation. Thus this not an example of, “Maybe being a Nazi has its advantages,” but rather I had just blocked out the fact that canonically the Federation is down with genocide. Honestly, thats fucked up, but I can hardly blame Picard for Voyager’s fucked up writing.

On the contrary, I have not finished the season yet, but it kind of seems like this might be an attempt to fix that. The Federation has gone astray, and we are currently in the past fixing the timeline. We also have now witnessed Jurati and the Borg Queen merging into a new entity which seems more reasonable than the Borg Collective used to be. Given the season started with the Borg Queen asking to join the Federation, it feels like this is an attempt to find a way to square a circle and make peace with the Borg by reforming them into less of a totalitarian forced conformity force of nature and more an enemy who is still fundamentally human and who can be reasoned with. And honestly, I am down with that, even if I strongly suspect most Star Trek fans are not. Let me explain.

The Borg were super cool and super threatening when they were first introduced. However, as they evolved over time, as we saw them get beaten over and over, as we saw more and more ex Borgs be saved, and as they got human faces first as Locutus, then as the Borg Queen, and also in Seven, they became a lot less threatening and, in most peoples opinions, a lot less interesting. By the end of Voyager, most fans were sick of the Borg, and thought Voyager had ruined them. I honestly mostly agree with that assessment. But, much like we cannot blame Picard for Voyager genociding the Borg, we also cannot blame Picard for Voyager ruining the Borg. Its already done. So what Picard is doing here, is recontextualizing the Borg to tell a new story. Is it better than the one that TNG told with the Borg? Probably not. But it is new, and I think deserves credit for finding a way to rework them in an interesting way. They were already ruined, why not try something new with them and see if you can make anything compelling out of them?

Honestly even the idea of throwing a Borg Queen into the past was kind of a brilliant as a way of making them feel threatening again. Maybe Janeway could curbstomp them and blow up all the Cubes in one fell swoop, but can a ragtag group of individuals from the future stop a single Borg Queen from assimilating downtown LA? That is a legitimately amusing and fresh way to make them a threat again. And then finding a way to make it a story about loneliness and humanity, thats real Star Trek shit there. Even if this makes the Borg even stupider and lamer going forward, even if people think it shits on their legacy, I think it is downright the most interesting thing Picard has done so far and I give them credit for it. And Alison Pill is amazing, and she and the Borg Queen have great chemistry. The show should have been about them.

Okay, so, now we get to the meat of what I want to say. Yes, only now. This is the big one. What the fuck is up with Picard’s backstory? So basically, it has finally been fully explained in plain English… wait, wait, I have to rant about something else for a second. Picard has an English accent, but is suppose to be French. Thats just because his actor is British. But why is Renee Picard also English? Are the Picards just a family of English aristocrats who bought a French villa?

Okay, okay, back to the real meat. So yes, it is explained that Picard’s mom has some kind of unspecified mental illness, she takes Picard with her into their unsafe dungeon basement that they have for unclear reasons, he gets stuck on some debris, she disappears, eventually his father finds first him and then her, his father locks her up in her room, she pleads with Picard to free her, he does, then he shortly discovers she hung herself. He then says, in the present, that he should not have freed her, and blames himself for her death. Its also notable that this is supposed to be a repressed memory - Picard has not -always- blamed himself for his mom’s death, he is only now remembering and blames himself NOW for her death, as a rational adult thinking back on his actions as a literal child, not as the child in the moment faced with his mom's dead body. He says this to Talinn, and she does not push back at all. The show gives us no indication that this is anything other than the intended takeaway, Picard is to blame for his mother’s death.

Except, no he isn’t. His mother had been having problems her whole life. Also, why does his family keep an unsafe, unlocked dungeon? In a house with a child and a mentally unstable person? Why did Picard’s dad lock her in her bedroom instead of seeking medical help? Why didn’t he explain anything to his son? None of this is Picard’s fault. It’s also frankly a bizarre trauma to choose give him, and I don’t understand the point. But if one were to read this as having a “message”, that message would be “crazy bitches need to be locked up for their own good.” Is that the intended message of Season 2 of Picard? I mean, honestly, it could apply to Jurati and the Borg Queen too.

I don’t seriously think it was. I think the writers wanted Picard to have a sad backstory to explain why he is cold and distant, they wrote one, and the intended message is we have to process and deal with trauma and move on. Which is all well and good. But why did the trauma need to be written in such a misogynistic way? Men locking up their “crazy” wives is a long and tired trope and writing a story that seems to validate that as necessary, even temporarily, is simply a bizarre choice. There was no reason it needed to be this way. I’ve already covered why I don’t think it even makes sense to write him as a traumatized person to begin with, but even if they were committed to that, why does his trauma need to be the plot of Jane Eyre mixed with Pan’s Labyrinth? Derivative and sexist are labels that certainly can be applied to a lot of Star Trek, but there is no reason new shows should be aiming for that as a goal.

Okay, now I’m done. Can the last episode of the season save it? Almost certainly not, but we’ll see.