“Cheers, big ears.”
Season two, let’s do things in twos. Here goes.
A story: I signed up for Paramount+ a couple of weeks ago, because I wanted to watch the new season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in 4K. (On Crave, it’s presented in… whatever the fuck Crave supplies. I don’t actually understand Crave; I’ve spoken to the people who run Crave, and neither do they.) Anyway, Strange New Worlds isn’t on Paramount+, not in Canada anyway, and certainly not in 4K. Probably because some sort of content-exclusivity deal was signed, prior to Paramount+’s birth, between CBS Studios and Crave; and the fact that Crave streams in whatever the fuck Crave supplies, and not 4K, was not imagined in the wildest imaginings of the deal that holds Strange New Worlds, for Canada (the country in which it is filmed), in check. So it goes.
A week or two later, Paramount+ cancelled Star Trek: Prodigy, and immediately removed it from Paramount+. This is a new wrinkle in the “streaming wars,” the fact that those streamers — with one guild strike ongoing, and another on the horizon — have capriciously realized that streaming shows in perpetuity is not actually equal to the dollar value of paying out residuals to the people who, in good faith, made those shows. Capitalist vehemence at its most nakedly opportunistic. Remove the shows from the platform that promised to show them, and problem solved: no residuals. Oh also: Prodigy is the best thing NuTrek has done. By a country mile.
I gotta tell you, between experience 1 and experience 2, I’ve about had it to my eyeballs with Paramount+, with studios, and with capitalist thinking in general. It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand — the naked, unashamed willingness to play three-card-monte, and insist to the mark that there are three cards when there are, clearly, only one (and it’s not the queen). The current self-correction in not just streaming, but the entertainment industry itself, is not just earned, but wildly overdue. I hope every single studio chief loses their job. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the opposite will happen.
Anyway, in “The Star Gazer,” Picard wants to fuck a Romulan. Not just any Romulan: his Irish Romulan housekeeper. He can’t fuck her, so instead, he starts dreaming about his mother. This being a story about time travel, I don’t mind skipping to the end and working backwards: we’re in season 2 of Star Trek: Picard, and this is all about to go very, very badly.
It’s 2022, and Terry Matalas has taken over as showrunner of Star Trek: Picard. Admittedly, the writing team on season one did not exactly nail it. They attempted a big, novelistic story about Jean-Luc coming to terms with his grief over the death of Data, while shackled by Patrick Stewart’s creative and logistical conditions on how the character would be presented, and how the season would be made. The result, at best, felt like low-rent dinner theatre about a post-Next Gen Picard adventure; but it coalesced somewhat in its latter hours, and presented, in Soji and Rios, at least two new Star Trek heroes who seemed worth following into new adventures featuring, if not starring, Admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Retired).
Naturally, Matalas’ first move is to jetison Soji, and begin a plotline to remove Rios as well, because his long game — for which, evidentally, all of season 2 is a sacrifice play — is to simply make the eighth season / fifth feature film of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with all of the original cast members in play.
So, two more things: 1/ Season 2 of Picard is simply the worst season of television in the history of Star Trek. Not just NuTrek, mind: all of Star Trek. This is it: worse than any season of Enterprise, Voyager, or even the (by comparison, quite) unfairly maligned first and second seasons of The Next Generation.
And 2/, when it first aired, I thought “The Star Gazer” was fucking terrific.
So now, two more things on that: first, the fact that I came out of the first season of Picard, not exactly encouraged, but happy to admit that I was at least interested in further adventures featuring the La Sirena crew. As above, I like Soji and Rios the most, but I was now warm to Raffi and Seven, and Jurati and Elnor, and the aforementioned Romulan housekeeper, Laris. (Her husband, Zhaban, has been conveniently executed between seasons.) “The Star Gazer” does what all great second-season premieres do, and brings us up to speed on all the new friends we made in season one, and where they are now.
And second, more broadly: in the era of legacy sequel franchise TV, I think we, as an audience, have a tendency to put a lot of unearned faith in the early chapters of serialized content, because we — the fucking capitalist marks that we are — tend to approach such content in good faith. I certainly approached this season in good faith; and I’ve done it for a lot of Marvel Disney+ premieres, and a lot of other IP exploitations besides. There is enough broad-strokes excitement in “The Star Gazer” to gamely believe, in good faith, that this story is heading somewhere fun and interesting.
But see above: re: time travel. Let’s skip to the end: they fucked this up so thoroughly that the creative team on Picard season 2 doesn’t actually deserve a season 3, let alone all the warm praise that was bestowed when season 3 finally arrived. Terry Matalas and his team wrote a season of television so bad that if they hadn’t made seasons 2 and 3 back to back, they wouldn’t just have been fired, they’d have been run out of Hollywood on a rail.
So: “The Star Gazer.” Rios is a Captain now; he’s in command of the U.S.S. Stargazer, which is presented as a Very Big Deal (a few incarnations ago, it was Picard’s first command). Picard forgets that this was a big deal by season 3, when they relocate the action to the Titan, which is also presented as a Very Big Deal (a few incarnations ago, it was Riker’s first command); which then gets renamed the Enterprise, which is the Very Biggest Deal Of All. It must be insanity-inducing taking a captaincy in Starfleet these days, given they’ve apparently forgotten how to come up with new ship names, and all these older names have legacies.
Raffi is in Starfleet again and so is Picard. Raffi is in love with Seven of Nine, but they aren’t together. Raffi and Seven holding hands in the finale of season 1 was a surprise — who knew either character was bisexual? — but like all modern IP exploitations, Picard doesn’t have the balls to actually consider their queer relationship, preferring instead to keep it boldly offscreen and between seasons. Elnor is here too, also in Starfleet — the first Romulan to graduate — but don’t get too excited; he’s on Terry Matalas’ hit list, too.
Soji is an ambassador now, or something, and don’t think that her prominence in season 1 means that her character is going to be anything more than a cameo here. She’s on Delta, and she decides to just keep hanging out with the Deltans; and, fuck, who can blame her? Deltans are, to this day, a better premise than just about anything else in Gene Roddenberry’s legendarium, and if my options were to participate in season 2’s mess or stay on the fuckplanet, I’d choose fuckplanet a hundred times over. So, Soji’s gone; Jurati’s drunk, having (also!) broken up her relationship between seasons. Wow: Laris became a widow; Jurati, Rios, Seven, and Raffi all became exes; and Elnor went to school. We’re off to a flying start here.
There’s a big gash in space with Borg coming out of it — who want to join the Federation! — which will frame the season and put everyone together on the Stargazer in time for the big, apocalyptic ending; but if you really want to understand Matalas’ creative project here, you really only need to look at two things about this episode:
One, Jean-Luc beams himself to a back-alley bar in Los Angeles (because Picard was filmed in Los Angeles), and Guinan is there. And two, after things become apocalyptic on the Stargazer, Picard wakes up back in France, and Q is there.
We’ll get to Q next week. Guinan — whose inclusion in the season was forecasted when Stewart visited The View and asked Whoopi Goldberg, personally — is far less useful as a character here than as an inidication of what Matalas’ version of Star Trek: Picard is, at its core. He’s tapping the bases, one by one, on his way to his final destination, which is to put all the action figures back in the box, on the shelf, where they were at the end of “All Good Things,” before time (and franchising) marched on with the four Next Gen feature films*. He doesn’t have room to tackle everyone in season three, so he’s going to tap four bases in season two to get them out of the way; four people who are fundamental to what The Next Generation was, but in supporting, extratextual ways. Those people are Guinan, Q, the Borg Queen, and Wesley Crusher. Guinan has little to do here, besides doing what she always did, which is to supply Picard with some advice; neither Goldberg nor Stewart is particularly on-model as either of their characters, but on Star Trek: Picard, I’m not sure that adhering to Next Gen characterizations is particularly part of the brief. Guinan has a lot to say — rather amusingly, given it’s never come up before — about Picard’s capacity for love. Which introduces, to my enduring despair, season two’s real throughline: establishing a backstory for why Jean-Luc was reserved, distant, competent but unemotional, from the moment we met him 35 years ago.
*oh, and: there’s a peculiar paradox at the heart of this thing, where shareholder IP enslavement and fanboy toxicity meet in a middle that can’t ever, actually, coexist. How do you move a story forward without changing anything? How do you keep churning out content when those instalments also can’t alter any element of what made their franchises beloved in the first place? Picard can’t answer this, of course; but, in its clumsiness, it will reveal the nakedness at the heart of the IP craze, itself.
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.