More Picard Nonsense

 I had some aspirations for a more thesis driven post today, but I’m tired and just feel like ranting, so I’m going to do that instead. These are just gonna be expansions of the notes I wrote down about Picard as I was watching it, so they in theory should be roughly chronological but they are from multiple episodes and kind of scattered, so apologies if they come across as incoherent.

Last season I tentatively identified the intended interpretation of the synthetics plotline to be about immigration - the Federation was using synthetics as a cheap source of labor much like the United States uses migrant laborers from Mexico and other places as cheap labor, then a terrorist attack by the synthetics leads to a ban on them, much like increased xenophobia following 9/11 led to a crackdown on immigration and eventually Trump’s Muslim ban. The Romulans traditionally are stand ins for the Russians, and I’m honestly not really sure whether the Romulan role in orchestrating the terror attack is really suppose to map to anything or say anything of interest regarding real politics, but I do think this was roughly the intended thematic thrust of Season 1. I definitely do not mind when a work has political messaging, and in Star Trek, I consider it mandatory, but I think the closer you come to allegory without actually just plainly stating your meaning, the easier it is to accidentally say something you did not intend to, which I think was a big problem with Season 1 of Picard where they were trying really hard to create a readable allegory about immigration but they missed the mark by just enough to instead be kind of incoherent as to what their intended point was.

Honestly I think the way to go is to pull back and tell more general stories - for instance, while I think you could easily read the situation with the Bajorans and the Cardassians as parallel to Nazi Germany and the Jews, you can also read it as parallel to colonizers and Native Americans (or any colonized group) or Israel and Palestine - similarly the Maquis can be read as parallel to the actual Maquis in Vichy France during the Nazi occupation, but also parallel to any other colonial project or Israel and Palestine or what have you. It’s general enough to be generally readable to any number of situations, and thats a strength, and writing it that way requires clarity of meaning that intentional close allegory does not always reflect. I say all this, because Picard Season 2 does the opposite. They just put their heroes in the present day and had them fight ICE. And… I don’t hate it. Its not general at all, it feels a little silly and super on the nose, but there is no mistaking the message, and that is a good thing. Star Trek V does the same thing with saving the whales, so you can hardly even say its not Star Trek to do it this way, although I do think it is slightly lazier and less creative, but its also bolder and less likely to be misinterpreted, so I’m fine with it. If new Trek cannot writer coherent political stories in a Scifi setting for some reason - and they do seem to be struggling to do so, as Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds all struggled with it at different points - then taking away the scifi setting and just stating what they mean is honestly not a terrible option.

I also really like Jurati and the Borg Queen’s flirtatious disaster lesbian dynamic. I’m not really sure if its “saying” anything - there are some obvious parallels to abusive relationships and gaslighting but I haven’t really put the analytical thought into whether the show really is saying anything coherent about them - but their chemistry is entrancing and I can’t help but hope these two crazy kids can work things out somehow. I mean not really the Borg Queen seems obviously evil and like she’s just going to destroy Jurati but I dunno, it really just tickled me seeing them interact, and I’m not always a hardass about Star Trek needing deep messages its okay to have fun too and the show is definitely having fun here with their dynamic.

On the other hand, I am increasingly disliking basically anything going on in the show that actually relates to Picard. Why is there so much focus in modern Trek on important individuals who must be preserved to maintain the timeline? Why does Star Trek want to be a chosen one story so badly? Why is there a Romulan on Earth doing nothing but stalking Renee Picard? I just really hate this plotline, it feels so anti-progressive and so Big Man theory of history (even if Renee is a woman). Really all timeline preservation nonsense tends to be annoying, but especially of this variety implying that there are some greater beings working to preserve a set history. Its one thing for the heroes to fuck things up and scramble to fix it, as is common in older Treks, but the pattern in newer Treks invariably is something gets fucked up (often for reasons unrelated to the actions of our heroes, like didn’t La’an just wake up to her ship being different despite not doing a damn thing? Here its just Q being a dipshit, Picard did not do nothing. and on Discovery, Spock is just a magic boy who needs to be preserved at all costs with no deeper explanation than he is a main character on the show during important events.) and then we find out there are Greater Powers like the temporal police or the Watchers or the Red Angel trying to preserve the timeline for the greater good. Honestly smacks of “Just Trust the System” politics to me, from a message perspective. I don’t even know that these are intentional messages so much as just a consequence of writers liking time travel and needing a justification for the shows conflict, but I really think it needs to be done more carefully and with less of a focus on “This guy is vitally important.” Like its preposterous to think that if Renee Picard doesn’t fly to Europa Earth will become fascist, even if the mission still happens without her, I don’t care how awesome you tell me she is.

Also, why is our introduction to her like Laris telling Picard how awesome she is? Why can’t we actually spend time getting to know her if she is that important? It was incredibly boring and vapid just watching Laris talk her up and then even weirder having Picard say some insightful things about this woman he has literally never met. I am guessing the reason is they just did not have time to get us invested in her, but that is the case, then don’t write the plot that way. The plot of this season could have been anything, no one forced you to center it around Renee Picard when you didn’t have the time to properly introduce who she is, why she is important, and why we should care in an organic manner instead of having Laris just list off her accomplishments like we are a college acceptance committee instead of an audience.

In my notes I said, “Why is the Supervisor Laris?” but then shortly after we saw another Soong and then Kore and I immediately changed my mind about it. It might be nice if the show offers some explanation - and honestly the amount they point out the similarity I am expecting one - but just from a show writing and casting perspective, reusing actors in new roles in time travel makes a lot of sense, and lets us see the actors in new and fun ways, like in a Mirror Universe episode, so I’m fine with it. If they don’t provide a good explanation for Laris in particular though, I do think thats an issue with how much they harped on the similarity, but they probably could have just had Picard get confused once and never mentioned it again and I’d have been okay with it given Soong and Kore. I do find it super weird though they recast Whoopi for “young” Guinan when she literally could have looked like anything and we know that Guinan looked like Whoopi from the nineties in the 1800s from TNG. Was it just too expensive to have her play the role in all the scenes? To be honest if so I’d have just recast her entirely then, have Guinan explain in the future that she can adjust her appearance up and done as needed, and leave it at that, rather than having her explain she can adjust her aging, then go back and recast her in the past as younger. I’m guessing the writers literally forgot about that TNG episode - I saw an explanation online for why it is not a plot hole because the events of TNG never happened in this timeline, which, like, sure, fine, whatever, but its still kinda weird and I definitely think thats an ex post facto justification.

This is a random aside but I found the idea very funny that Kore cannot go outside because UV causes her DNA to degrade more than normal. Thats just called albinism. Picard reinvented albinism with extra steps. Yeah I know she is eventually revealed to be a clone or something (its not entirely clear to me where I am at, but she discovered she was created) so its presumably her clone DNA being extra weak but it still made me laugh. Also, why does he live in California then? He could live somewhere cloudier. Also, normal window glass filters UV. Why doesn’t he just have normal window glass so she doesn’t need to live in a cave? Honestly this is why technobabble can be useful. You kinda need your science to either be 1) accurate enough to pass a sniff test (this doesn’t) or 2) fantastical enough that no one is going to scrutinize it. Star Trek really struggles to ever hit 1 and usually goes with 2, and at least in my opinion, it succeeds much better with 2 than 1. Its not just Picard of course - the episode where Spot devolves into an Iguana comes to mind, or where Janeway and Paris evolve into salamanders, and honestly countless other examples. But at the end of the day, its science fiction, Star Trek has never been hard scifi and never will, its fine, I just prefer it when the science is fake enough I can’t tell how dumb it is, from an immersion standpoint.

I also have written down, “Why did she remove his spleen?” which honestly I think is about Picard after he passes out and is brought to the clinic? But I kind of forget, and it might have been a joke I just did not get. I think they implied that spleens are pointless but they aren’t, its just possible to live without one, but they do perform a function.

Raffi and Seven have chemistry and I like the pairing, but I feel like its happened entirely off screen, and thats weird. Like they held hands randomly at the end of season 1, there was a year and a half time skip, and now it kinda seems like they might be in a relationship, but the show is never fully clear about it, and I just don’t understand why. It makes me wonder if I missed an episode where they started dating. Why is it written like this? Do they think we don’t care about the details? We just want to know they are an item but don’t care how it happened? Its a wild way to write a romance.

I said before I kind of dislike anything in the show relating to Picard, and this whole trauma plot is a great example. What I took from the weird flashback therapy session story hallucination was 1) Picard seemed to think his mom was great and loved him and his dad was abusive 2) but after confronting and and dissecting it in the most boring, drawn out, and obscure way possible, he is told by the therapist who is almost certainly Q in disguise but looks weirdly similar to Julian Bashir but is apparently suppose to be Picard’s dad that his mom was actually crazy and his dad was just doing his best to shield Picard from her because bitches be crazy but also 3) maybe there is more to it, because Laris literally says, “there is more to this story.” And like, I’ve already said I don’t understand why Picard needs hidden trauma forty years into his character development that we have never seen a hint of before, but even if he does, why is his trauma being inflicted by his mentally ill mother that he mistook for an abusive father? What is the point of this, narratively, thematically, or otherwise? It honestly kinda just feels misogynistic. “If your emotionally unavailable dad felt abusive to you, have you ever considered he might have had to deal with your crazy bitch of a mother and thats why he was so emotionally unavailable?” I honestly just do not understand why this is what they went with, but perhaps I am judging it too early and it will become more clear - certainly my initial reaction to the whole story/hallucination was “this is a dumb waste of time” before the therapist finally just told us what it meant, so maybe in an episode of two Laris or Picard or Q will just tell us the take away and I’ll get it, although on principle I think if you need to do that with your hidden meaning, then you should not have tried hiding it in the first place.

I’ve said similar things before, but Picard really feels like three different shows in a trenchcoat, and that trenchcoat is Picard himself. The writers want to make any other show than this, and the executives said, “No, you have to make a Picard show.” so they shoved all their ideas into a Picard shaped show with him as the main character but because he is literally tacked on. Everything about his plotlines comes off as a stupid, poorly thought out afterthought while the actual interesting meat of the show struggles with not having enough time because it needs to share screen-time with two other shows AND the trench coat. I really wish they had just made one of these shows instead of all three of them plus shoved Picard in there. We really did not need him to come back. Yet my impression is Season 2 dumps all these plotlines in favor of being TNG Season 8, so I know it’s the trench coat that wins. I hope its a nice coat.