"Star Trek: Picard," Season 1: review

L to R: Soji (Isa Briones), Elnor (Evan Evagora), Picard (Patrick Stewart), Jurati (Alison Pill)

[WARNING: spoilers.]

I guess I'll have to state my unpopular opinion: "Star Trek: Picard," Season 1, wasn't quite the horrible disaster I'd thought it would be—had been led by certain critics to believe it would be. Don't get me wrong: the show was deeply flawed and laughably bad at several points (although I liked the opening-theme music!), and I didn't come away loving the first season at all, but there may have been some redeeming aspects that the conservative critics missed in their haste to lambaste the season. Here are some of my jumbled thoughts.

Because I'd refused to watch Seasons 1 and 2, my viewing of "Star Trek: Picard" began with Season 3, which critics from all over the spectrum raved about. Terry Matalas, writer/showrunner/producer, had been placed front and center, and he brought higher-quality writing, the general absence of a woke agenda, and plenty of memberberries to placate disgruntled fans who'd hated the previous two seasons. I'd heard about those earlier seasons from the usual critics I listen to: Chris Stuckmann (leftie); Jeremy Jahns (moderate leftie); Will Jordan (a.k.a., The Critical Drinker, rightie, not to mention a relentless mocker of Chris Stuckmann); and Gary Buechler (Nerdrotic, rightie). The rightie critics, in particular, hated how Picard had been reduced to a shell of his former self—impotent and constantly yelled at by younger, stronger female characters. A lot was made of Patrick Stewart's influence over the first two seasons: he wanted a Picard who was largely divorced from the prominent Star Trek tropes like the Enterprise and Starfleet. If you consider the course of Stewart's career, though, you can see how the dramatic choices made in Season 1 (the only season I've seen thus far) are consistent with Stewart's penchant for controversy (see my review of BBC's Hamlet here). By the time Season 3 of "Picard" rolled around, people were convinced that it was a good thing Stewart's vision for the show got dethroned. Now that I've seen Season 1 of "Picard," though... I can, at least somewhat, see what Stewart was striving for, and it wasn't all woke.

It's presumptuous to get inside Stewart's head, but I think the essential thing he wanted was to have a Picard who reflected Stewart's own aging process. In the show, Picard is in his nineties—old, feeble, and forced to rely on others when he wants to get anything done. This inevitably means that everyone around him is going to be younger, stronger, and possessed of greater agency. The Critical Drinker complained that this made Picard "a guest on his own show," and he's not wrong, but I was left thinking that, just maybe, that was the idea. Picard encounters a crisis, does what he can to assemble a team, then relies on the charity of others to move forward to his goal.

The show features some strong female characters, but it's not all girl-bosses. Among the most powerful females are Admiral Kirsten Clancy (Ann Magnuson), who comes off as a stone-cold bitch in the early episodes, but who turns out to be reasonable by the end; and Commodore Oh (Tamlyn Tomita), a Romulan spy with Vulcan training, under deep cover as Starfleet head of security. Raffaela Musiker (Michelle Hurd), who was serving under Picard when Picard resigned from Starfleet, has reasons to be bitter toward her former superior; she's also a recovering addict estranged from her son, who rejects her for having been a horrible parent when she was in the middle of her addiction. The main female in the plot is Soji (Isa Briones), one of a pair of twins, who isn't who she seems, but she's simultaneously vulnerable and powerful. One Romulan lieutenant named Narissa (Peyton List) is a bit of a girl-boss, but really, that's about it for what critic Adam Olinger hilariously calls the Stroooooong Female Leeeeeeeeeeads. Cyberneticist Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill—one of the funniest cast members in "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World") comes off as anything but strong—she's timid, flaky, and untrustworthy. We'll have more to say about her later. And there's no lack of strong male characters, either: Captain Chris Rios (Santiago Cabrera), pilot of a small vessel called La Sirena (a possible reference to the Sirens of Greek legend, or more generically to mermaids), is an obvious stand-in for Han Solo, and he's dealing with his own troubled past. Romulan warrior Elnor, who seems to have sprung from Tolkien's universe with his elfin appearance and martial ways, worships Picard and fights like a dervish while ritually imploring his opponents to "Choose to live." Picard eventually finds himself asking for the help of his old first officer, Will Riker, and while we first meet Riker as he's making a pizza, we see the original, tough Riker by the end of the season.

Although I don't think the show was quite as woke as the right-leaning critics made it out to be, it wasn't without its flaws, and many of those flaws ran deep. To understand the flaws, though, we need to take a look at the overall story of Season 1. A simple summary might not be possible because the season was overloaded with subplots, many of which twist together and converge, but not always smoothly or coherently.

As the season opens, several things happen at once. Admiral Picard, in his nineties, has retired to Château Picard in La Barre, France. There, he lives the life of a farmer and is assisted by two Romulans named Laris (Orla Brady, still fetching at 60-something) and Zhaban (Jamie McShane), as well as by his pet dog, Number One. Elsewhere, a young woman named Dahj (also Briones) is with her boyfriend when they are both attacked by assassins. The boyfriend is killed, but the attack awakens something in Dahj, who is able to kill the assassins. She finds herself plagued by visions of Picard, so she finds her way to him. We learn that, fourteen years earlier, an effort to rescue Romulans after their sun exploded was interrupted when, on Mars, a contingent of "synths" (androids) rose up and massacred their human masters. The synths were nothing like Lieutenant Commander Data; very little progress had been made in creating synths as complex as he was. The result of this attack was a permanent ban on all things synth-related: research, manufacture, everything. Since the synths had also been instrumental in the effort to rescue the Romulans from their solar system's disaster, that rescue effort was effectively halted, leaving an enraged Picard to threaten resignation. Starfleet called his bluff; Picard resigned, and his friend and subordinate Raffi (Hurd) was booted out of Starfleet because of her loyalty to Picard, who did nothing to help her. This left Raffi humiliated and embittered, and she went to live in isolation in the desert.

Picard meets Dahj and has ideas about what might be happening—all linked to Data, from whose neurons Dahj, an organic android, had been made. This was the one strand of advancement that had happened with research into synths. Picard visits the Earthbound branch of the Daystrom Institute, where cybernetic research continues, but only in simulation. Picard finds the head of the research team, Dr. Agnes Jurati, but while at Daystrom, the assassination team comes again for Dahj, and Picard watches helplessly as she fights and gets killed—all before Jurati has a chance to meet Dahj, who is indirectly the result of Jurati's work.

As the season unfolds, we discover the assassins are members of Romulan secret special forces, a branch called the Zhat Vash, who are religiously committed to the elimination of all synthetic life because of an ancient prophecy or vision, known as the Admonition, that foretells wholesale destruction should synthetic life ever be allowed to predominate. The Zhat Vash see themselves as holy warriors cleansing the galaxy of an abomination. Meanwhile, Jurati reveals that the nature of the "neuronic cloning" that gave rise to Dahj would generally result in a twinning process, which means Dahj had, or has, a sister. Like Dahj, this sister, named Soji—Dr. Soji Asha—believes herself to be human, and the Zhat Vash is aware of her existence. Soji works on a decommissioned Borg cube called the Artifact, rehabilitating former Borg drones by helping to remove their cybernetic parts, but a Romulan officer named Narek (Harry Treadaway) has been slyly insinuating himself into Soji's life, seducing her so as to glean certain information from her unconscious about a special planet where a colony of synths lives an isolated existence. Narek's sister Narissa will lead the attack on the synths once the world is discovered; Narissa also works with the Starfleet-embedded Commodore Oh, whose spy network is sinister and far-reaching.

Rejected by Admiral Clancy when he asks her for a ship, Picard reluctantly turns to the embittered Raffi to find him a pilot, and she points him to Chris Rios, captain of La Sirena. Jurati and Raffi end up joining Picard as he pieces together where to find Soji, the living twin sister of Dahj. Picard also discovers that Data had once painted a picture titled "Daughter," in which either Soji or Dahj is prominently featured, thus tightening the connection between Data and the two young women.

The rest of the season is about how Picard assembles his group, and what happens next: he recruits the help of Elnor, now a young and talented warrior who pledges himself to lost causes, and he travels to the planet Nepenthe where he meets a happily domesticated Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Troi (Marina Sirtis). They have a daughter named Kestra (Lulu Wilson), and they used to have a son named Thad, who died indirectly as a result of the ban on synths: a cure for a silicon-based virus was no longer possible because of the ban. Picard's travels also lead him to meet with ex-Borg Hugh (Jonathan del Arco) and Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan). Seven works as a "vigilante" for the Fenris Rangers, protecting people where Starfleet cannot. Hugh, meanwhile, is head of the operations on the Artifact to help undo the damage the Borg did in assimilating so many humanoid species. As all of this is happening—Picard's race to beat the Romulans to the synth's "home" planet, the machinations of the Romulan spies, a series of revelations about some of the main characters' pasts—Picard has to deal with the fact that a brain anomaly has left him terminally ill. Can he complete his mission to rescue the synths from destruction in time?

It's a dizzying number of plot strands to cover, and I haven't mentioned half of them. "Picard," Season 1, definitely bites off more than it can chew, and I think that, more than any perceived wokeness, is one of its major flaws. I also think the quality of the show's writing was both inconsistent and, at times, illogical. Agnes Jurati, for example, turns out to be a betrayer who murders a former lover and says nothing, for a long time, about having ingested a Romulan tracking device (it dissolves in the blood) that allows Narek to track La Sirena even when Rios's ship enters a Borg transwarp conduit to travel enormous distances in a short time. Jurati also falls for Captain Rios—a romantic subplot that both came out of nowhere and led nowhere. I also don't understand how, after Jurati's murder of her mentor and lover, and her betrayal of the Sirena's crew and passengers by not mentioning the tracking device, everyone was able to forgive Jurati and let her continue on with them in their adventure. Rios himself was something of a poorly written mixed bag as well; falling for someone like Jurati struck me as very out of character. But I could see some potential in his character; it just never got realized by the end of the season.

At the same time, other characters struck me as both richly dimensional and well written. Raffi may be the best example of this. A totally new character never once seen in "The Next Generation," Raffi has history with Picard, and that's partly thanks to how old Picard is. She's strong but flawed: a horrible mom rejected by her son, who is married and about to become a father. She's trying to put the pieces of her life back together, but she's angry at Picard for how things went down during the botched rescue of the Romulans. The only false note for Raffi is something that is hinted at in the middle of the season but comes to fruition only in the season's final episode: it turns out she's bisexual and attracted to Seven of Nine (who is also bisexual, considering her heterosexual romances over the course of "Star Trek: Discovery"). It's not that I think the bisexuality is icky: it just came out of nowhere, a lot like the Rios/Jurati romance. But maybe Season 2, which I have yet to watch, will flesh this out a bit more. Picard himself is fairly well written even if we're given a horrifying glimpse, in Episode 1, of just how bad Patrick Stewart's spoken French is (and there's a hint that Picard did not grow up speaking much French). Picard is still good at giving inspiring speeches and having philosophical moments; he remains a thinker—perhaps even more so now that he's in his nineties and unable to move about as spryly as he once did.

One big story element that makes me both more and less forgiving of the series is how it incorporates ideas from Isaac Asimov's fictional universe. I've read all of Asimov's Foundation series, and even though I never touched his Robot series, I've been aware for a long time that the two stories were meant to converge eventually. Season 1 of "Picard" hints at something like this, and it's a grandiose idea: by the time we learn about the Admonition, we're made aware that there are intelligent, synthetic beings, godlike in stature, that are looking out for all synthetic life, wherever it may be found. That idea in itself is fascinating, and I wish Season 1 had pushed more in that magnificent direction: new life forms, and new civilizations stretching the limits of human imagination. But—and this is what makes me feel less forgiving of the season—the final episode gets us to a point where the synths on their "home" planet have opened a portal to these greater beings, to summon them and stamp out organic life, and when we get a quick glimpse of what these beings look like... all we see are these armored appendages reminiscent of both angry centipedes and Dr. Octopus's AI robots arms, all flailing about—right as the portal closes. Basically, "Picard" takes a wonderful Asimovian idea—that robotic life might actually predate and supersede organic life—and turns it into a cheap horror-movie special effect. This, too, is a much worse sin than any wokeness in the season.

There was also one major bit of utter sci-fi ridiculousness: the concept of an octonary, a "planetary system with eight component stars." Such arrangements rarely occur naturally, and the Romulans have come to view one particular octonary as a warning: this octonary contains a planet on which can be found the site where the Admonition—foretelling the destruction of organic life—can be experienced. The idea that supreme alien beings would drag together stars and planets in such a unique shape merely to serve as a warning struck me, while I watched the show, as utterly absurd. How would another alien race ever come to the conclusion that the octonary was a warning?

And here's the biggest spoiler of them all: late in the season, when the motley crew of La Sirena finds the synth planet Coppelius, Picard is able to avert disaster with help from Will Riker and a fleet of Federation vessels, but the old admiral finally succumbs to his terminal illness and dies. Luckily for him, it was teased, an episode or two before his death, that the residents of Coppelius had perfected the art of transferring consciousness to "golems," i.e., synth versions of human bodies. So Picard's consciousness is "rescued" from his human body and implanted in a golem that has been made to model Picard's ninety-some-year-old body in every particular: no super strength, no youthful appearance, nothing. This was done to give Picard a chance to get used to the new body without receiving too great of a shock. Honestly, I'm not sure how I felt about this. The downloading and uploading of consciousness brings up many of the same philosophical issues associated with transporter technology: has a copy been created, or was something real and indestructible carried over from one bodily manifestation to another? This new "golem" Picard has all of the previous Picard's memories, but is the golem "ensouled" with the previous Picard's consciousness? Is this the same Picard in a meaningful way, or are we all simply going to pretend he/it is? One final thing about this "new" Picard: his "engoleming" is hinted at every time you watch the Season 1 opening credits: there's a moment in the credits when we see shattered pieces of Picard coming together to form his face. Picard... reassembled.

Overall, I didn't think Season 1 of "Picard" was bad in the way that rightie critics thought it was bad: it was bad for some woke-related reasons, yes, but more fundamentally for totally different reasons. We were almost given a glimpse of something that could have been transcendent—the sort of transcendence that the series finale of "The Next Generation" succeeded at doing—and were instead left with stale narrative crumbs and a feeling of deep frustration. At the same time, the season showed brief moments of potential brilliance even as it deconstructed the tropes that made us love the older TV series. So I finished Season 1 of "Picard" feeling battered and at least a little betrayed, but I can't quite convince myself the season was totally irredeemable. All I can say is: "Watch at your own risk."

And now, I move on to Season 2, which I fear is going to be much, much worse: it uses time travel and supposedly takes aim at Trump-era immigration policy.