“Something in my head seemed to just… go away. Like a child’s sandcastle collapsing.”
So: what was Picard — season one anyway — about?
Let’s start with logistics. Patrick Stewart is roughly 79 when Star Trek: Picard films its first season. The original Rick Berman productions were notorious for their shooting days — 16- or even 18-hour days to accomplish an extremely demanding schedule — and Stewart can no longer maintain that pace, nor does he want or need to. As the raison d’être for the series itself, he can dictate the terms of his engagement with this sequel production; I’ve written about how he’s done so on the series’ creative brief, but form also follows function on the physical production itself. Stewart shoots mornings, and then bugs off for a nap and a cup of tea as the production shoots the other characters — reverse shots and whole non-Picard scenes — in the afternoons. This remains the modus operandi for all three seasons of the show. Form follows function: this means that the show called Star Trek: Picard can’t actually focus on Jean-Luc Picard that much — always for, at least, half the time or less. This in turn means supporting characters, a lot of them, need to be created; and they can’t just be peripheral to Picard, but must be given entire scenes, storylines, A- and B- and C-plots that don’t require Stewart’s on-camera involvement at all.
This, I imagine, is how you get the Artifact. Entire narratives take place there, both before and after Picard himself rolls into the game in episode six. Are any of them strictly germane to the story of the season as a whole? Yes and no. There is a lot more of the Artifact and its characters than the story strictly needs; but, it keeps the camera off Picard. This is also how you get Raffi’s relationship with her son; it’s how you get Seven’s torturous backstory with Vajazzle and Icheb; it’s Bruce Maddox’s murder, and Agnes’ involvement in it. It’s every moment of Romulan Fuckboi and Evil Femdom Romulan. In “Et Arcadia part 2” itself, it’s how Romulan Fuckboi convinces three members of the La Sirena gang to help him blow up “Synthville,” even though five minutes earlier, they were all trying to stop him from ever getting near there in the first place; it’s why, over in Synthville, Soji and Jurati are trying to contact the Evil Space Super Androids, even though five minutes earlier, the last thing anyone wanted was to bring about Ganmadan (the prophesied end of the world, c/o androids). Picard, by the way, is literally taking a nap during these scenes.
Isn’t a lot of this natural to a television series with an ensemble cast? Sure, but I suspect it’s why so much of the material feels aimless or reverse-engineered, rather than organic; and why so little of it is about Picard. It’s not just that these plots and side-quests keep Picard offscreen; it’s that they don’t particularly inform the arc of the lead character himself. It’s plot for the sake of plot, and it’s at odds with what I think is the secret desire of the creation of the series itself, which is: to give Patrick Stewart a signature exit performance for the role that gave him his fame.
In pre-release interviews, the film that Stewart frequently compares Picard to, in aspiration if not content, is Logan. Stewart, of course, is in that film too, and he’s terrific; and he closes down his tenure as Professor X (well; the closing lasted five years, but still) by pulling a depth and nuance in the performance that he’d never been able to hit in the previous projects, because of their generally more simplistic, comic-booky nature. Logan eschews that nature, but it is primarily about Logan; and its primary purpose is to give Hugh Jackman a swan song (well; the swan song lasted seven years, but still) for the role that gave him his fame. Stewart likes Logan, and liked the experience of signing off on Professor X with a sense of permanence (well) and finality (well…), and probably admires what Jackman was able to do while signing off as Logan (wellllll……). This thinking is part of the genesis of Star Trek: Picard, and probably any number of other legacy projects. Why else has Harrison Ford been touring his key roles with decades-later sequels for the last ten years? The end approaches. It’s time to tap all the bases one last time.
So, here’s Thing Two: I’d propose that we have to consider Star Trek: Picard season one its own entity; and Star Trek: Picard seasons two and three a separate entity. (There are two complete storylines in the latter entity; but, they are cut from the same creative cloth.) Even though Picard season one leaves the door open for continued adventures, and even though it fumbles the bag quite badly in the analogy I’m about to make next, this season is clearly structured as a self-contained thematic exploration, like as a mini-series or novel. It’s meant to be a final statement; a swan song. And it’s meant to do it by emulating the Peak TV formulas for drama, to (theoretically) pull more depth and nuance out of the character of Picard than would (again, theoretically) have been there for the taking in the brighter, more optimistic Star Trek: The Next Generation.
What’s wild about it is that Stewart is so sloppy with his reading of Picard here that not only can he not match Jackman in Logan, he can’t even match himself in Logan. Or on Star Trek: The Next Generation, or even in the worst of the Next Gen feature films, which is what we’re all theoretically here for in the first place. He’s neither recaptured the spirit of the character that held the moral centre of the Star Trek universe for fifteen years, nor redefined him as something new or interesting (remember when we all speculated that the series might see Picard embrace his lifelong passion for archaeology?). He’s just… here. Picard as dinner theatre. Come get your Picard, everyone! Final show! See it before it closes! This act will no longer be touring!
Which brings me to Thing Three. In your wildest imaginings, could you ever have predicted that Star Trek: Picard would end with Jean-Luc being downloaded into a robot, after having a cyberspace fireside chat with the disembodied intelligence of the late, great Commander Data?
It’s a collision of narrative and emotional cheats so cataclysmic that it feels like it finally shatters the show. Picard succumbs to his Irumodic Syndrome after a heroic last stand against the über-synths and the Romulan fleet; but his death doesn’t take, because there just happens to be this to-order android body nearby, and the newfound ability to download human consciousness into such a thing. Data, whose death has served as the emotional underpining of Picard’s entire journey this season, turns out to have been living in a laptop on Alton Soong’s desk this whole time (neatly calling back the dangling plot thread from Star Trek: Nemesis, in which he backed himself up to B4’s positronic brain shortly before blowing himself to bits, itself a callback to Spock backing himself up to Leonard McCoy non-positronic brain shortly before blowing himself to bits). But Data doesn’t want out of the laptop, in spite of these to-order android bodies that seem to be falling out of the sky on Soji’s homeworld. Data wants to be turned off, so that he can experience a moment of life as a fleeting, impermanent thing; whereas Jean-Luc gets turned back on, so that he can go on having adventures in deep space with the La Sirena crew. Brent Spiner, here presented under some shaky de-aging tech that doesn’t bother me at all because it nonetheless lets the aging actor play a decent scene in a reasonable simulation of his 2002 face, has now successfully killed Data twice, both times with agency and intentionality. That dude does not have a lot of patience for playing Data anymore.
Patrick Stewart, on the other hand, has resurrected Picard only to kill him and then resurrect him again, neither drawing a definitive line under his time as the captain, nor convincingly establishing why we’d want to continue to follow his ongoing adventures.
Like I said: cataclysmic. It was all for this? All the thematics, ideas, and creative choices of the season wash away, like the CGI dreamspace that dissolves as Picard unplugs Data and gives him the (second) death he has poignantly asked for. It turns out this season was about nothing at all. Null space; a neutral zone. A place where narrative choices do not and can not exist, because the emotional legacy of the material being repurposed is so monumental that none of the people touching it dare leave their mark. This is what legacy sequels are, by the way. In its own depressing way, Picard nailed it.
Blogging the Next Generation: Picard runs Thursdays on tederick.com as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: Picard. The original BTNG did the same for Star Trek: The Next Generation.