Star Trek: Picard S2 is a Stupid, Cynical Mess

no I haven't watched S3, I wrote this before S3 came out, and it should have been illegal to make another season after this fucking bullshit

*The original version of this post was published on Patreon on April 22, 2022. Thanks to Adrian Rennix for editing! You can check out Adrian's terrific (and free) newsletter about immigration policy here.

If you happen to love long-running science fiction and fantasy stories, then the times have never been better—every day brings the announcement of some new TV show or movie set in your favorite universe. And yet, if you really love these kinds of stories, then the times have never been worse. Look up at the stars: there’s a glorious supernova of content, spreading across the galaxy. Oh no, it’s consuming the galaxy! Everything you love will be destroyed! All sentient life in the universe is doomed! DOOMED!

Honestly, that doesn’t sound so bad. If sentience means having to watch shit like Star Trek: Picard, then sentience was a mistake.

The problems with Star Trek: Picard are shared by many other TV shows, including Star Trek: Discovery and a whole bunch of recent entrants in the Star Wars, Marvel, DC, and various other beloved nerd properties. But Picard is, I think, uniquely bad, the absolute abyss of content collapse, a glimpse into a dystopian future where all art is made by executive producers. The RedLetterMedia guys (if you’re somehow not familiar with them, they’re fantastic cultural critics, and their video reviews are the only thing getting me through this show) have pointed out that Picard has at least 20 producers, an astoundingly high number. There are a few named writers, but I think they’re imaginary: the script was actually written by an A.I., the kind where you feed it raw images and it spits out disconnected nightmares.

I can’t really describe the premise of Star Trek: Picard because I’m not sure there is one. Jean-Luc Picard is now a semi-retired admiral; he’s called up each season to save the galaxy, accompanied by a ragtag crew of irritating and frequently murderous characters who are supposed to all be friends and love each other (actual human bonding seems to generally take place offscreen.) Pieces of the plot occasionally make sense, and on rare occasions are even interesting (this season stars a fun ghostly Borg queen). But there’s no editing, no oversight, no guiding human intelligence. Women scream and cuss at Picard, blaming him for plot points that aren’t remotely his fault. A character who enjoys cutting off heads joins Starfleet, and nobody says, “hey what about that whole thing where you enjoy cutting off heads, is that going to be a problem in your new job as a peaceful space explorer?” Just about every character is a messy hysteric with TRAUMA, so much trauma. This is a show about trauma, the perfect illustration of what Parul Sehgal was talking about when she criticized the ubiquitous trauma plot. I’ve mentioned this essay before, and how Sehgal received pushback for not providing enough examples of this type of storytelling. Well, here it is. Picard isn’t just an example of the trauma plot, it’s the worst one.

In the seventh episode of the second season of Picard, a comatose Jean-Luc can’t wake up until he deals with his feelings about his mother. He even has a therapist inside his head (played by the actor who played Gaius Baltar! which is fun.) Another character has to work through her depression, and there’s no accompanying metaphor to it, no imagery at all; she’s simply a person who is depressed, and her depression is a problem that must be solved before she can move forward with her life. Okay, you may be thinking: what’s so wrong with that? Don’t people have childhood trauma? Aren’t people sometimes depressed? Isn’t it okay to show such things on television? Yes—but Picard is, nominally, science fiction. Past Star Trek shows have successfully dealt with similar topics using actual scifi storytelling techniques: in the TNG episode Remember Me, a space anomaly causes everyone around Beverly Crusher to slowly disappear, until she’s the only person left in a bleak, tiny universe; in the DS9 episode The Visitor, Jake Sisko loses his father in a space accident, although Ben Sisko appears again at random moments throughout Jake’s life, much like a ghost. These episodes are about loneliness, fear, trauma, grief—but indirectly, through metaphor. “All fiction is metaphor,” writes Ursula Le Guin in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. “Science fiction is metaphor.” Science fiction isn’t just realism set on spaceships, and it’s not intellectual property that just so happens to take place in the future or involves some futuristic technology. It’s how a particular type of metaphor is used to describe reality.

I used to think that the worst kind of science fiction was the meaningless, machine-worshipping sort of “hard” sci fi, where events seem to occur mostly because they’re cool, stuff blows up a lot, and people’s guts spill out on rocky planetoids. Picard happens to be that type of sci fi, plus something else, something very much worse. Rather than stoically eschewing emotion altogether, the explosions are overlaid with manufactured feeling, expressed very dramatically but with all the depth—and language—of a Twitter thread. (Even the fucking Borg queen talks like a Twitter thread. “I’m trying to get you to understand that good things happen when you lose control…Don’t be ridiculous…You wanna help? Let’s help. Your friends need a distraction.”) Picard gives a depressed young woman a pep talk about how hard depression is, before being HIT BY A CAR and LAUNCHED INTO A COMA and FORCED TO DEAL WITH HIS OWN TRAUMA! I don’t know what this is, but it isn’t science fiction. It isn’t even art. Why even have art anymore? We can just have therapy.

To be clear, I have nothing against therapy. I’m in therapy right now, and I think it’s great for me. But if I filmed my therapy sessions and offered them up as a TV show, you would be bored to the point of murder (“the protagonist isn’t showing GROWTH,” ok yes but fuck you.) I also have nothing against characters experiencing trauma and depression; one of the best DS9 episodes features a traumatized Ensign Nog retreating into a holosuite after losing his leg during a battle. But no kindly authority figure ever says to him, “PTSD can be very hard to deal with.” Saying it this way is treacly, Very Special Episode-y, talking to the camera rather than the character. TNG is actually famous for its occasional heavy-handed “very special episodes”—the RedLetterMedia guys compare Picard to the TNG episode The Outcast, which was meant to be an allegory for gay rights (and ended up accidentally being a much better allegory for trans rights). Allegory and metaphor are the bread and butter of science fiction; the genre is built on images that are not identical to what exists right now, but evoke what exists in an indirect and often symbolic fashion. “The future, in fiction, is a metaphor,” says Le Guin, and doesn’t explain for what, because “[i]f I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel…”

Picard doesn’t deal in metaphors. It lacks any kind of artfulness, or sense of itself as a piece of art, because it isn’t one—it’s not trying to tell a story, but just sort of loosely associate pop-psychology cliches and progressive political stances. For example, when the characters travel back to 2024, we get a storyline about ICE, and how ICE is bad. It’s presented just as a naked political statement—there’s no real purpose, no greater sophistication, no ICE headquarters getting blown up by photon torpedoes (and you can’t tell me they didn’t have room in the explosion budget!) Star Trek has, of course, always been political: the dystopian 2024 of Picard isn’t unique to the show, but was first explored in the two-part DS9 episode Past Tense. But the DS9 episode aired in 1995, 29 years before 2024, and showed the future as it could be, not the world as it existed at the time. (The upper-class fashion of Past Tense is absolutely WILD, in 2024 we’d better be getting contrasting striped menswear and feathers in our hair.) The Bell Riots in the sanctuary cities of 2024 weren’t literally happening in 1995, but it was felt that they could and would happen in the future, if the cruelty of poverty continued on its current trajectory. This is what made the DS9 episodes set in this same “universe” a metaphor about reality, rather than a 1:1 depiction of it. (Incidentally, I don’t think Picard has mentioned capitalism, at least not so far. About some things, we remain indirect.)

“[S]cience fiction isn’t about the future,” writes Le Guin, a line which Picard showrunner Alex Kurtzman seems to have interpreted to mean “the purpose of science fiction is to depict the present, blandly and without metaphor.” What’s wrong with using the actual techniques of science fiction here? Why not explore what could be, rather than what is? “I've never been able to understand how a society could exist with so many contradictions and not collapse sooner than it did,” says one Picard character. Okay fine then! Show the collapse! In the Star Trek timeline, the 21st century is meant to be a chaotic mess; the utopian Federation is born from the ashes of many terrible decades. The plot of the second Picard season hedges around an important moment in time, during which if something goes wrong, the timeline will shift, and future humanity will become an evil fascist empire (no, not the Terran empire depicted in DS9, TOS, and Discovery: this is a different and much more boring mirror universe, without all the beards and bisexuality.) The ICE plotline exists very obviously to say that if we continue to have an ICE, we will have a fascist future; but given that we already have a fascist or borderline-fascist present, isn’t there a more thoughtful, more artful, more resonant way to demonstrate the terror of what we might become? Or would it possibly be braver, and much more interesting, to show us that utopian future instead, and give us a sense of how human beings worked to get there? Show a political movement abolishing ICE. Use that explosion budget and blow up those headquarters.

Given that, in science fiction, you can literally do anything you want as long as it fits the physics of your universe, why write Picard like this? Why rely on low-rent therapy-speak and painfully obvious, ‘Bad Things Are Bad’ political statements? “You can’t argue that any of this trash is smart,” says RedLetterMedia’s Mr. Plinkett in his Season 1 review. “It’s junk. It’s a dumpster fire.” Picard presumes that the audience is stupid, much too stupid to notice that the storytelling is lazy and nonsensical, that necessary character dynamics are often completely missing, that huge story elements frequently get left out and unexplored (giant pointless Borg cube in the first season, anyone?) The true villain of Picard isn’t the Borg or the evil fascist Federation: it’s cynicism. If you’re a showrunner and you’re quite lazy, you can fill your script with progressive political statements and cast a diverse group of actors, and then any criticism you receive can be blamed on racist fanboys (even if you yourself are a white man, which is usually the case). The openly-stated liberal politics, plus controversy caused by those racist fanboys, will help drive good reviews from progressive pop-culture fansites, which may in turn help drive viewership, because suddenly streaming Picard becomes an important act, Doing Good Politics by watching a TV show talk about ICE and depression in the absolute stupidest way possible. Honestly, you don’t even need to write a script. Just film ancient Patrick Stewart standing in front of explosions for 10 hours while a chyron at the bottom reads “ICE is bad! Depression is hard! Vote, dammit! Subscribe to CBS All-Access!”

There are a few episodes left of Picard Season 2, so I guess there’s time to turn this ship around (update: it did not get better)—but then the showrunners would have to be interested in doing that, or in the ship itself. They would have to care about what Star Trek is, and what that campy communist space utopia has meant to so many people for so many years. But they don’t. The RedLetterMedia guys have questioned how much money CBS/Paramount can possibly be making on these shows—the production values are gorgeous, and Picard and Discovery in particular must be quite expensive to produce. Stupid Trekkies like me will still watch (don’t worry, I’m not paying for it lol), out of love and loyalty, but the public response to these shows has largely been muted. Some people will tune in for the sake of being a good progressive, but not that many. Critics often love shows that many people don’t care about, and the glut of content means that viewership is more diffuse than ever. My guess is that the ratings for Picard and Discovery are probably quite bad, and in another situation these shows would have been canceled, except that they’re necessary to drive traffic toward CBS All-Access, which doesn’t have any other popular IP except cop shows for old people who don’t even know how to use streaming services. It would be easy to get depressed about Picard, except that the public indifference to it proves resistance is not futile, that many people still want good Trek and would know it when they see it. (Lower Decks is legitimately great, despite CBS’s best efforts.) It’s really only critics who are falling for this cynical maltreatment of our beloved story. The future, for us, is still a metaphor.