Star Trek: Picard

Star Trek: Picard is a 2020 television series on CBS.

4 out of 10 stars.  I’m a diehard Trek fan.  This series, unfortunately, was a huge disappointment.

Plot.

My major complaint with this series is the writing, especially the dialogue, and the casting.  It centers around an event that took place about 20 years in the past when Romulus was dying and Picard was the lone Star Fleet Admiral who wanted to save the Romulans who were enemies to Star Fleet.  He threatened to resign if Star Fleet abandoned the Romulans and Star Fleet happily accepted his resignation.  Following that debacle, all artificial intelligence in Star Fleet rebelled and blew up a colony and shipyard on Mars.  After that robots, androids, and any artificial intelligence was banned from Star Fleet and all member planets.  And Picard retired to the family vineyard in France with the Romulans he managed to save.

Fast forward two decades later and a young girl shows up at Picard’s vineyard and begs for help.  He clumsily attempts to help her and they are attacked by Romulans in San Francisco where she dies.  Then he finds out who she was–an android created by a scientist named Maddox using one of Data’s neurons.  He also discovers Dahj has a twin sister.  There begins his quest to find and save Data’s other daughter.

Casting.

For the past decade most television shows in this country have cast almost exclusively British actors.  I’m tired of watching American classics ruined by British accents and purple lips from smoking.  This is so un-American, it’s depressing.  It’s not just that they’re all British, there are some pretty bad actors here.  Isa Briones playing Dahj and her twin is awful.  Harry Treadaway as Narek, her Romulan lover, is even worse.  But probably the worst is Michelle Hurd who gave such a terrible performance as a drunken old crewmate it was embarrassing.  Patrick Stewart is considerably old and although still a great actor his lines are delivered very slowly.

Writing.

There are certain crutches that bad writers use.  In this series, they pop up all over the place.  1.  The flashbacks and flash forwards are awful and way too often.  You should be able to weave a story without using flashbacks and flash forwards as crutches.  2.  You can’t take the years off of Patrick Stewart.  You just can’t.  Trying to only looks immature and unprofessional.  3.  The dialogue is something written by a 20s-30s white male and it’s awful.  90% of the reviewers on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes are white men.  It’s clear that’s who the writers are catering to, and is also why the rest of us tuned out after the first two episodes.  Dumb white male jokes are not funny.  Dumb white male dialogue is also not funny.  If I were to give this series a new name it would be “Dumb White Man Jokes in Space”.  4.  There is way too much vomited backstory.  It would’ve made much more sense to start out in the past and unfold the story then jump to the future rather than force feeding us backstory.  5.  One of the characters refuses to call Jean Luc by his name.  Instead she calls him JL.  Such a white man thing to say.

Production Values.

This was obviously shot on a shoestring budget.  It looks it.  In some places, like the fight between Dahj and the Romulans at the Star Fleet Archives, it’s especially bad.  This fight scene was all shot on a series of concrete steps that wasn’t the least bit futuristic.  It actually looked like the steps to the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco and  I wouldn’t be surprised to discover it was shot there.  The CGI part of that shot was very poorly done and looked like a dot jumping from one spot to another, like the Atari game Pong from the 70s.  The space shots are okay, but not great.  Considering people are having to pay to watch this series PLUS be subjected to numerous loud commercials, there should’ve been plenty of money in the budget for better production values.  They managed it with Star Trek: Discovery.  Why not here?

4 out of 10 stars.  Most people stream their content these days.  That means they pay a fee and enjoy streaming all month.  When the first series in this franchise were on television they were completely FREE to watch.  You were subjected to commercials every ten minutes, but there weren’t that many commercials.  Now CBS expects people to pay for the channel PLUS be subjected to commercials during 35% of the playing time and those commercials are LOUDER than the show.  That’s a LOT of commercials.  To have such poor production values, poor casting, and poor writing is unforgivable.  And they didn’t even hire American actors.  This is a cheaply made, cheaply executed show.  It shows.