The Watch: Picard

Friday's Child Is Irritable and Unhappy

If there’s something that hasn’t changed in its interior dynamics in the last forty years, it’s fans talking with fans. The relationship between fan-talk and cultural production has changed in a major way: fandoms matter far more in the making and marketing of mass culture. Fans, especially for SF, fantasy and superhero comics, have been gorging at the cultural trough in ways that none of us could have imagined even in the summer of 1977, when Star Wars suddenly became the triumphant god-king of American cinema.

The contours of fan conversations and how they generate an imagined sense of ‘community’ are discursively the same as they were on Usenet or the WELL, and arguably back into pre-digital discussions in fanzines, the letters pages of comic-books, convention panels, and so on. (And are arguably rather like long-standing discussions between local fans of sports teams.) Broadly speaking, the rhetorical factions sort out as follows, again and again:

• Fans who announce that loyalty is the singular defining value of a fan, that you have to love a show or a franchise or a set of characters regardless of the transient quality of any given production or treatment, and that the community should be purged of anyone who doesn’t share that loyalty, that all the complainers have bad ideas or are trying to make the franchise something it isn’t and shouldn’t be;

• Fans who proclaim that there is some singular ur-text version of the franchise or the character that is the one true grail and that everything else is a horrible violation of the property and should be shunned by any true fan;

• Fans who have a strong head canon about what should have happened in the most recent version of the franchise and prefer what they can imagine to what they saw or read and think everyone else should prefer it too;

• Fans who believe that fandom requires critical thinking and high standards and that fans who accept everything are guilty of idolatry and allow the owners of intellectual property the latitude to make low-quality work;

• Fans who want to grow the fandom by urging the franchise to be friendly to newcomers and to have a standard of production quality that is generally acknowledged to be excellent;

• Fans who want fanservice content that plays into deep wells of knowledge and appreciation within the fandom.

• Fans who are profoundly entitled in their desires and quickly embrace hating other fans as well as creative workers when the franchise goes in a direction the entitled fans dislike.

I do not look down on this sorting from an Olympian distance. I tend to believe in being demanding and critical, I tend to have a strong head canon that influences my sense of how new work in a franchise should develop, and I like work that is consistent with or reliant on previous work but not to the point of being impenetrable for anyone who comes to the franchise as a new viewer or reader. I get exasperated by fans who forgive everything but also by fans who are too possessive and toxic—both factions tend to make it intensely unpleasant for everybody else voicing an opinion and tend to drive people away from the object of their affection/antipathy.

I situate myself on this map of fandom as a prologue to expressing what I thought of the three seasons of Picard because my reactions aren’t just about an analysis of a cultural work but instead are also moves on the chessboard of fandom. This is where the changes in fandom’s relative influence over the people producing culture matter; some of the power that used to reside in middlebrow reviewing in the newspapers (especially for theater, but even for films in the pre-summer blockbuster era) has migrated to fandoms. When the consensus within a fandom shifts, it can actually affect what gets made in the future.

In church terms, I mostly sit in the pews of Deep Space Nine but I gladly encourage ecumenical contact with the original series and The Next Generation. Voyager makes serious doctrinal errors but I can allow that it adds some value to the scripture. Enterprise sins greatly, particularly in its fanservice of the “put a sexy Vulcan in a tank top” kind.

I’m not wild about any of the recent Trek series, really. Lower Decks is fun, but it’s also cheek-to-jowl with Galaxy Quest, The Orville and Quark. (Not the Ferengi, the one-season NBC comedy series about a space garbage ship.) Strange New Worlds is mostly great except when its homages get so close to being rip-offs that you wish they could beg, borrow or steal someone for the writers’ room who had an original idea or two. Discovery is a queasy mix of great ideas, interesting characters, and sudden lurching turns for the worse in the quality of each and every one of its seasons.

Picard? Rather like Discovery, each season has had a couple of worthy ideas and some interesting character work. And each season has screwed up pretty badly by the end of it—an error that has been compounded when the next season has run roughshod over the implications of the previous season.

The recipe book for the first two seasons seems to have been “give Patrick Stewart some chances to show off his skills”, “introduce some new characters”, and “do a bit of nostalgia work”. Of the two, the first season had the most daring additions to the Trek canon. It established a Federation that had made some serious ethical mistakes of a new kind (not just crazy Starfleet admirals), it complicated Picard’s character arc in a variety of interesting ways, and it added some appealing characters and lore. The second season more or less ignored most of the implications of the first one. Surely Starfleet and the Federation ought to be immediately involved in major reforms considering that the head of Starfleet Intelligence turns out to have been a Romulan infiltrator and that the Romulans caused a devastating attack on Mars that threw the entire Federation into crisis? No, apparently not: Picard goes from being a grouchy, mistrusted exile to being the head of Starfleet Academy and then gets thrown willy-nilly into Yet Another Bad Time-Travel Story whose tonality shifted wildly from scene to scene, but where the major point seems to have been giving Picard some new emotional depth via revealing a traumatic childhood and an explanation of his inability to sustain a romantic relationship. It also gives him a new person to share his life with romantically.

Who then gets tossed out within minutes of opening the third season, more or less invalidating all the character development of the second season. The third season is the kind of work that really lights up the schisms between fans. For me, it’s being a squicky, predictable, cloying kind of fanservice that I mostly disliked. For other fans, it’s been a squicky, predictable, cloying kind of fanservice that they loved because it was all that.

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. Troi non-consensually tranquilized her husband so he wouldn’t feel depressed about the death of their son and pushed both of them to retreat to a rural life that neither of them enjoyed? Beverly Crusher hid the birth of a son from Jean-Luc Picard and then hid from all of her friends because of an absolutely on-the-edge-of-mentally-ill belief that her son would be in danger if he knew his father? (During a period of time where Picard was mostly just making wine while stewing in his own juices, mind you.) Worf is the only legacy character who got some appealing character development and some genuinely great dialogue (as was often the case on TNG and DS9). Data too, I suppose, though mostly just via a contrivance intended to allow Brent Spiner to play the character without the hated makeup. (The work done in the second season to deepen and complicate the history of the Soong family also got ignored.)

Both Star Trek and Star Wars have done a lot of their world-building in a fashion that could be at best described as “emergent”—Star Wars to the point that it actually formally undertook a kind of purge of its own legendarium when passing into the hands of a new corporate owner, only to almost immediately refoul its own nest even worse with three sequels whose narrative line and character arcs seem have been wholly unplanned. Trek has undertaken a few genius revisions of its own mythos, most notably with the Klingons (who were then subjected to a completely disastrous further revision in Discovery). But the newer Trek programs seem really incapable of doing anything that adds to or develops the setting in a sustained way. (Strange New Worlds might be about to add a great new element by incorporating work from the show’s licensed fiction about the Ilyrians and Starfleet’s strong restrictions on genetic alteration.) Picard’s first season suggested that the Federation, at least on Earth, isn’t quite the post-scarcity utopia it has sometimes been depicted as, and brought drug addiction into the framework. The third season danced lightly around the edges of addiction but didn’t really think through the implications. We’re left with a Starfleet that did something inexplicable, which was to network its entire fleet—utterly contrary to its technological and ethical ethos, apparently under the command of a non-compromised officer who was supposedly in charge of countering the Borg and ought to have recognized that networking an entire fleet was a dangerous thing to do. I don’t care how many Changelings infiltrated Starfleet: those kinds of changes should be impossible in any major institution even if you control some small segment of its leadership. If I gained telepathic control over ten billionaires and had them announce they were going to give away all their money, you can bet that everyone around them would find a way to stop it from happening.

In the original show, the series bible told writers to stay away from Earth and the Federation’s civilian society in part because the producers didn’t want to answer the questions that science fiction often addresses: was there still organized religion? if there’s no money and there’s relative equality, how does that work exactly? what is it that most people spend their day doing? why is Starfleet still run as a highly hierarchical organization even though the Federation doesn’t seem to be? what’s changed in the basic social structure of human societies on Earth? And so on. They were more ready to do some world-building around ‘familiar aliens’ like the Vulcans and then in TNG and DS9, the Klingons, the Ferengi, the Cardassians, the Dominion, the Bajorans, the Trill. (Though there’s more by far that could be done to think through the Trill—another flubbed opportunity by Discovery.)

Still, the Federation and Earth have become more tangible and imaginable over time, which is good. Two steps forward, three steps back, unfortunately, in the case of this season of Picard. To tell a story that the showrunners think provides closure in this case means world-building incoherence and character incoherence.

It also means appallingly stupid work to set up a new possible spin-off series. If there is a character in the history of Star Trek that I want to see less of than Jack Crusher, I’m hard pressed to think of who it might be. I’d rather see Neelix and Ezri Dax step onto the bridge of Captain Seven’s ship than Jack Crusher. There has never been a more “tell not show” character in any franchise—we were constantly told about Jack Crusher’s personality and past experiences in profoundly unconvincing ways (not helped by the fact the actor cast in the role comes off as a decade or more older than his character is supposed to be). I cannot remember feeling more irritation with a post-credits “next franchise” sequence than the finish of Picard: it was a threat, not a promise.