More Picard Thoughts

 So I have some more thoughts about Star Trek Picard, and once again they aren’t really terribly thesis driven but mostly random, but extrude them I must. For reference I am now up to S1E7, although I don’t expect to specifically be referencing things in granular detail.

One thing that struck me in episode 6 and was affirmed in episode 7 is that Soji does not appeared to have been programmed to trust Picard as Dahj was. Dahj saw him and instantly knew she could trust him, but Soji acts distrustful of him to start and especially in episode 7 makes it clear that she considers him no more trustworthy than the Romulans who were mentally manipulating her, perhaps less due to his friendly demeanor making him seem more suspicious. Now, this is a perfectly reasonable way to expect her to act given what has happened to her… if she were a normal human. But Dahj had an inherent trust for Picard which both read as and I think was explicitly stated to have been programmed into her. In E7, Picard references that Dahj trusted her and tries to get her to listen to his voice and trust him similarly, but it does not really seem to work. Its rather unclear to me though if 1) we really are suppose to think Dahj was programmed intentionally to trust Picard, or if it was some echo of Data in her causing her to trust him and  thus 2) whether Soji lacks said programming, or if simply the echo of Data is not powerful enough to overcome her trauma. Again, I feel like the show needs just a little bit more context to make sense. I’m beginning to think this is just how the show is written - either they assume you can read between the lines and make these assumptions yourself - which in my opinion is a bad creative choice, but I think ones taste can vary on exactly how clear you think a show needs to be about things like this - or they wrote it as such unintentionally, in which case its just bad writing. But, again, maybe things will become clearer over time, but since so far they keep doing things like this and none of them have been clarified, well, I’m beginning to see a pattern.

The show also feels like it is several shows jammed together. I actually was looking up whether the actor who played Hugh is the same as in TNG - it is, Jonathan De Arco - and it was mentioned on that page that Picard started as a Borg focused spin off and the idea to add Picard in came later, and that the actor who played Hugh was cast before Picard even joined. Kudos to them getting him back, but I do feel like a show that was legitimately focused on the ex Borg with Hugh and presumably Seven playing a larger role would have been more compelling than what is going on now. There is one show about the decline of the Federation and Picard’s malaise about wasting the final years of his life, another show about the ex Borgs and their treatment by the other civilizations including the Federation, another show about the Romulan refugee crisis, another show about the synthetics ban and how synthetics are treated by the Romulans, the synthetics and others, and yet another show about Data’s daughters. If you’re making a highly serialized show, it would make sense to pick one of these as your main plot and focus on it, and to the degree any of the others are even included, they show be minor, single episode side arcs at most. Instead Picard has them all competing for screentime, and it makes it feel very scattered and like nothing is getting the time it deserves. Honestly, before reading that the show started as a Borg spin off, I’d been wondering if this was writers rehired to older episodic Star Treks having difficulty transitioning from episodic to serialized storytelling, since in an episodic series, you can tell any number of stories you want, each is just its own episode and you have to be able to tell them in that timespan. With a serialized story, you can go far more in depth and detail and tell a really powerful longer story, but trying to include too many disparate plot-lines can derail it and render none of them effective, and that feels like what is happening here, snd what happened in Discovery, too, throughout its run, although it improved over time.

That all being said, the relatively short sequence on the Artifact where Elnor fought the Tal Shiar to defend Hugh felt like an entirely different show than the rest of it - which is what crystalized this thought for me - but it was a show I really wanted to watch. A show following a traveling Qowat Milat warrior who adopts lost causes and fights for them sounds badass, and would be a neat way to tell a Star Trek story in the Star Trek Universe without grappling with how to portray the Federation in Trump’s America. Would it be very different than other Star Treks? For sure. But I think it could also be incredibly cool, and I personally would love to see them experiment with those kinds of formats. This era did see a lot of experimentation - Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Starfleet Academy were all experiments in one way or another, and Lower Decks and Prodigy were big successes in my opinion, whereas Discovery took awhile to finds it footing - although it was commercially successful so I suspect Paramount thinks it was a success - and Picard and Starfleet Academy, well, I’ll decide once I’ve seen all of them. I definitely want at least one episodic, classic style Star Trek show on the air if possible, and right now we have literally nothing since no Star Trek is in active production, but beyond that I support experimentation. Although if you bring Lower Decks back I’d totally count that as my one classic Trek and the rest can be experiments too.