Well, I just had a gander at the second trailer for the upcoming Picard series, and I'll be honest, I've got some thoughts. And feels!
Have a look:
So, it's still kinda light on details. Plot, and so forth. In fact, like the previous trailer it looks a lot like Logan, except with Patrick Stewart playing the roles of both Logan and Professor X, all in one. Young woman with mysterious bad guys chasing her, hero who's gone into seclusion, etc and so forth.
But I also can't deny that the glimpse of Riker and Troi, more than anything, brought a chuckle and the teensiest lump to the throat. More so than Data or Seven of Nine, or the set from the classic fourth-season episode "Family".
I was thinking a little about my reaction to the trailer, and I guess it's the fact that, while my Star Trek will always be Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation feels like home, and coming back to it feels so, so right.
One of my friends, who was into Trek in high school alongside me, is fond of arguing in favor of Discovery by pointing out that the reaction to TNG was similar (die hard Trekkies saying it wasn't real Trek, "trash and not canon", etc). It's hard to conceive of that, though, as I'd argue that most Trek fans now probably grew up alongside TNG, moreso than fans who've gravitated toward any of the other shows, even the Original Series.
And while I think that TNG was good for a lot less time than us fans would like to recall, even when it failed it was thought-provoking, in ways that Trek really hasn't managed since. Even DS9, which I think had the most sophisticated storytelling of any of the shows, didn't always hit the heights of episodes like Measure of a Man or the Drumhead.
The Mission Log Podcast used to talk about "the Kirk speech" in TOS, where the captain usually delivered that episode's theme, though frequently in ways that haven't aged so well since the 1960s. Then, when they were reviewing TNG, they would talk about the Picard speech, which also delivered that week's theme, but I'd say those have aged a lot better, given that Picard always better exemplified the humanist spirit that Gene Roddenberry aimed to convey in the show.
And Picard was always just a more interesting character, especially once the writers gave him more to do than being cranky. Over the course of the show he was revealed to be a musician, archeologist, fighter, and lover - his card on the TNG card game back in the 90s even explicitly called him a Renaissance Man. Roddenberry always argued that humanity could be great if we could just put aside our hatreds, bigotries and obsession with money - and Picard is probably the best exemplar of that argument that the show ever gave us.
So that's why I'm so looking forward to this new show featuring Patrick Stewart. But then I think of all the things that worry me. For one thing, that similarity to Logan, which also implies to me that they're going to kill Picard off at the end of the show. Not that I blame Sir Patrick for wanting a clean break, but it'd be nice to see him ride off into the sunset, happy, rather than being put into situation after situation until it makes narrative sense to bump him off.
The other thing that worries me is that this is the same studio that brought us Discovery. As I mention in that rundown of season 2, I thought the showrunners fumbled the ball badly, after a first season that was rough but promising. Part of it is the changes they made to the formula: by focusing on the journey of Michael Burnham rather than making it an ensemble show, like the previous ones, CBS painted itself into the corner of following a character who's not actually that clever or interesting, and as a result failing to develop any of the characters unless they were needed in a given episode (RIP Airiam).
Picard looks like it'll be another serialized show, rather than episodic. For the story they look like they want to tell, that's fine, though my objection to it in Discovery is that they seem to have used that narrative structure only because that's what audiences expect, rather than what makes sense for Star Trek. That structure has also led to the show missing out on the humanistic and intellectual angle that TOS, TNG and the others had, to varying degrees, and replaced it with a more cinematic feel.
The cinematic feel can be good, in the form of higher production values and more action. But it can also be bad, in the form of action for the sake of action, and way more simplistic storytelling. And that trailer, where Picard is yelling about the Federation living up to its ideals, indicates to me that we're getting the simplistic storytelling that marred Discovery.
To put it another way: questioning whether the Federation was right was daring and fun when Deep Space 9 did it, but given that it's now the default mode of latter-day TNG movies and Discovery alike, it'd be nice to once again get stories that don't test whether Roddenberry's vision could work, but rather stretch out in it, take it for granted, and see what stories we can tell from within a Federation that isn't venal and corrupt.
And yet...
Much more than Discovery did, Picard is making me consider paying for CBS All Access, rather than waiting for my next trip abroad to watch it. Because even if it's bad, it'll feel like coming home.
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