The Limits of Nostalgic Sci-Fi

I watched all three seasons of "Star Trek: Picard." I have some venting to do...

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash

[WARNING: THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD FOR STAR TREK: PICARD]

When Star Trek: Picard was announced a few years ago, Trekkies were pretty excited, myself included. And for good reason! I was a devoted Next Generation fan during the show’s initial run in syndication. Patrick Stewart is the best actor affiliated with the Star Trek franchise. The pilot episode hinted at a darker turn for the Federation that echoed real-world political shifts happening in 2020.

There was also the promise of a Star Trek show that offered some counterprogramming to, um, *gestures around the real world*. The original Star Trek offered up a hopeful message about the future during the turbulent 1960s; J.J. Abrams’ reboot did the same in 2009. I was looking forward to seeing a show that explored some darkness while eventually having Picard remind everyone what the Federation was all about.

Alas, the first two seasons of the show failed in almost every way to live up to that promise. Instead there was an attempt to tell a serialized story that allowed everyone to curse in which the reveals were… incredibly lame? Perhaps the best way to put it is that at the end of Season 1, Picard dies, has his consciousness transferred to a robot that looks exactly like Patrick Stewart, that will continue to age and then die. During the exposition scene in which this was all explained, every actor looked like they wanted to be anywhere else doing anything else than explain that plot point.

During the first two seasons the only time the show seemed engaging was an episode during which Picard visited Riker and Troi. Every scene with Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, and Marina Sirtis crackled in a way that highlighted the plot and character dysfunction that defined the rest of the show.

So it was unsurprising that the third and last season of Star Trek: Picard brought the TNG gang back together. Showrunner Terry Matalas found a way to bring back the entire Next Generation cast: LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge, Michael Dorn as Worf, and Gates McFadden as Beverly Crusher. They even figured out how to bring back Brent Spiner as Data.¹ Matalas didn’t stop there, however: he went deep into the TNG well to bring back other characters who left an impression during the TNG run, like Michelle Forbes as Ro Laren and Elizabeth Dennehy as Shelby.

So did it work? The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh suggests the answer is yes:

Picard’s belated embrace of familiar faces produced a justified and dramatic improvement in public perception (with an accompanying uptick in critical acclaim). “I’ve never been so happy to see so many wrinkles,” Troi says in the second-to-last episode. Picard’s audience seems to have felt the same way about the series’ successful assimilation (and reinterpretation) of TNG’s graying core cast.

It doesn’t take a Betazoid to sense a surge in support of this magnitude, but it does take some number crunching to determine whether Picard’s reversal of fan fortunes is one of the all-time TV course corrections. With help from data scientist Harish Swaminathan, I analyzed IMDb user ratings collected by Rating Graph. Our sample—which pulled in all multi-season scripted TV shows with at least 500 user ratings per episode, on average—consisted of 564 series and more than 2,000 combined seasons. Sure enough, no other qualifying series posted a season-over-season increase in average score that could rival Picard’s climb from 6.6 in Season 2 to 8.2 in Season 3. In fact, no other qualifying series came close.

Having finished Season 3, I too would rate it much more highly than Season 2. The thing is, that’s a super-low bar. Game of Thrones’ last season was a goddamn masterpiece compared to Picard’s second season. I might rate ten hours of staring at a graffiti-bedecked brick wall more highly than Picard’s Season 2.

To be fair, this third season had some legitimate strengths. Matalas made sure that all of the TNG characters were in a different place than they had been at the end of Star Trek: Nemesis. Some characters who had been underserved in the TNG years, like Geordi and Beverly, get solid turns here. Every line Worf utters this season is pure gold. Brent Spiner does solid Brent Spiner work. Michelle Forbes reminds everyone why Ro Laren was such a great character. The fourth and fifth episodes of this season evoked some pretty awesome Trek, and the cast has enough familiarity with each other to give weight to even the tiniest exchange. Some of the pure fan servicing, like hearing Majel Barrett’s voice again as the Enterprise D computer, was undeniable fun.

With all that said, the show was a massive letdown. I get why the Picard wanted to pretend that Season 2 never happened, but you can’t make the Borg the Big Bad again after that season.² Reducing the Changelings to agents of the Borg makes even less sense. And who the hell was looking after Troi and Riker’s kid during all these shenanigans, anyway?!

I agree with everything Timothy Burke says here:

I have no problem with a long-running franchise reaching deep into its own history for a new story, to take something old and make it something new. Trek provides one of the best examples of this ever in the second film, Wrath of Khan, where a memorable one-off antagonist turned into a profoundly great villain whose conflict with Kirk also thematically intensified the film’s storytelling about aging and sacrifice. But when you keep going back to the same well again and again, that’s a sign of creative exhaustion. After so many shows in the franchise, the idea of shape-changing infiltrators (or other infiltrators, for that matter) is just boring; the idea of the Borg is just boring.

There weren’t any twists overall. None of the possible mysteries were played out in unexpected or interesting ways. The showrunners felt obligated to write dialogue explaining some of their dumbest stagings (say, a ship without power being able to run a Holodeck simulation of a bar) but they didn’t even try to grapple with some of the worst damage they did to long-running characters in order to create short-term dramatic tension.

Yep. In one of the early episodes Riker and Picard have the most venomous argument they’ve ever had and then… it just dissipates. As a ship captain, Picard lurches from aggressive action to aggressive action without much in the way of strategic thought — the exact opposite of what made him such an engaging character on TNG. None of the newer characters are engaging enough to sustain the spinoff that Terry Matalas craves.

The Trek franchise is still chugging along. Strange New Worlds is a lot of fun, as is Lower Decks. Discovery was an interesting experiment. But I hope Trek czar Akiva Goldsman figures out how to make a show that, like TNG, takes Star Trek into the next century with new themes, new characters, and new challenges.

Enough with the nostalgia: the next Star Trek show should go where no Star Trek show has gone before, but do so in a way that honors the franchise’s optimistic vision of the future. That would add something to 21st century science fiction.

Please. Make it so.

1. They did this even though — as multiple characters noted during this season — Data had died twice already.

2. Admittedly, the Borg timeline has made zero sense ever since Hugh got inserted back into the collective.