Captain's Blog: Patrick Stewart is finally done with Professor-X and the X-Men. After some six appearances and 18 years he returns to the only other role you know him from. Callbacks to Stewart's last appearance (Nemesis), the reboots (Star Trek, 2009) and fan favorite episodes like, "The Offspring," "Family," "The Measure of a Man," or "All Good Things" do more than pad the premier with fan service, they flesh out a world we forgot how much we missed visiting. "Remembrance" Growing up, my dad used to wake me at midnight to watch reruns of TNG on CBS. I still remember the pilot episode of Voyager, or waiting in line to see First Contact seeing one of the ushers wear a Starfleet uniform opening night at the theater. Every year for my birthday I rewatched "The Best of Both Worlds" on a two-part VHS set. I took my future wife to see the 2009 JJ reboot and I'm proud to say when it came out on DVD she made all her roommates watch it with her. This is the kind of stuff I live to blog for. When I titled this thing "Captain's Blog" I had no idea how much actual new Trek I'd get to write about. In fact, there wasn't any Trek at all. Rumors of Discovery were still in the distance and even the new movies seemed to be sputtering out. Now we're on the cusp of a full blown Trek-topia (Trekolution? Trekassance?) Discovery Season 3 is due later this year (I still stand by it!), there are rumors of a new Christopher Pike prequel series (yes please!), multiple cartoons, copycats like The Orville and that one great Black Mirror episode (USS Callister), and even Tarantino wants to direct a film! CBS is basically building a streaming platform purely off the marketing power of the Trek brand alone, and it's so lucrative they're making their biggest competitor Netflix foot the bill for only a slice of it! Needless to say, it's a great time to be running the Captain's Blog, and don't think for a second my new day job is gonna get in the way! Let's do this: We open with an absolutely stunning starscape, reminiscent of the old show intro but with a level of definition and richness they could never have afforded before. That's when we see her, the ship, the one from our childhood, the Enterprise-D, a perfect beauty shot. We zoom into Ten-Forward to a scene that seems like it could've picked up right where the show last ended: Picard playing poker with his pals. I don't know if they used any trickery or just good makeup to make Data look... "younger" (or at least approximate to his last appearance), but hearing Brent Spiner's stilted and aloof robot-voice again was worth ten times those expensive special effects. Of course it's a dream. Mars explodes, and Picard wakes up at his family winery, Chateau Picard (from which you can get real wine, now, I guess!), a place he has sought solace in the past. He's hiding here, again in a way, until the media catches up to him and manipulates him into an exposition arm-wrestling match until we all understand the premise of the show. The short version: The Romulans' sun went supernova (see Star Trek, 2009) and Picard fought to relocate them because he's a good guy like that, but in a completely unrelated incident some Synthetics (robots, I guess, of which we've never really heard before) attack Mars and kill some people and blow up some ships. Star Fleet bowed to pressure to ban Synthetics and abandon the Romulans, and Picard resigned in protest. For those with their heads in the sand, this is a metaphor for the world's current refugee crisis and right-wing protectionism and xenophobia. The robots represent... Well, sometimes it's just cool to add robots, they don't always have to mean anything. Other stuff: We meet a girl. I forget her name (it doesn't matter). Some Romulans try to kill her. She activates into Jason Bourne and pew-pews them. She has a convenient vision that tells her to go to Picard. I guess this was more succinct for the writers than actually coming up with a reason. They chit-chat over "Tea, Earl-Grey, Decaf," and then she leaves again so she can find him a second time (seriously, this could've been tightened up in a second draft). But it gives Picard time to visit his nerd-vault where he stores all his fan-service (anyone else remember Captain Picard Day?! I do, I do! See Season 7 episode "The Pegasus") so he can discover she has a connection to Data. And also that he has a bad memory. If my best friend was a robot and he painted me two identical pictures called "Daughter" because he always wanted a daughter, and I put one in a super-sci-fi-safety-deposit-box and the other IN MY OWN HOME, I should think I would remember it. Picard looks at it like he's never seen it before. Perhaps this is a major plot point! Picard is going crazy. I'm calling it right now, my hot-take of the week: Picard is living out some kind of alzheimer's fantasy, and things aren't what they seem. And it probably involves our old frenemy Q (notice Data's poker hand in that dream sequence? All Queens? All... Q's?) You heard it here first. Anyway... The girl comes back, kicks more ass, and then explodes when she's spit on. The fight scenes are actually pretty good. Picard runs like a legit old man, and in three seconds he is winded and overklemped. Her death prompts him to go to that Daystrom Institute they'd been referring to all episode where they are not only forbidden from building synthetics anymore, but also apparently from reallocating their classroom desks and chairs to other uses (post-scarcity indeed!). They name-drop some deep-cut fan service like Dr. Maddox (the guy who didn't think Data was a real "person" in Season 2 "The Measure of a Man" until Picard ultimately prevailed in one of future-history's most heavy-handed and legally dubious lectures (seriously, you gotta click these links!) Anyway, turns out the guy kept trying to build more "Datas" and now he's disappeared!. We're given just enough info to believe this dead girl had a twin and that she might be Data's daughter, but my red-herring detectors are blaring. My bet is that she's something else. And since we know the actor who played Hugh is returning from "I, Borg" (Season 5) I suspect she may actually be his daughter. Either way, we cut to said sister with nary enough time to show that she's hanging out with refugee Romulans and they're building a cliffhanger in the shape of a Borg-cube. I rest my case. Conclusion: That was a whole episode? I watched it twice and it still seemed fast. The show moves quickly, even as it decompresses the former "adventure of the week" episodic structure into today's saga-centered serialized storytelling. It's clear we're going to have to experience this particular adventure one chapter at a time, but if it's going to look this rich and vibrant, I won't complain. The cinematography and production value is every bit as good as any of the movies, if not better. The storytelling feels more self-confident than Discovery first did in its pilot. Namely, it's not trying so hard because it doesn't have to. Patrick Stewart exudes confidence at all times, even in self-pity and regret. I don't think he's quite pulled himself out from the shadow of Professor-X and the avuncular empathy more appropriate to that character, but there was one moment when he got stern with the reporter that I saw the Picard I remember. The one who gets angry with a righteous authority and lectures you about morality. That Picard is perhaps deliberately pressed under the surface of this languished old man, and I'm curious how much of him we'll see rise to the occasion this season. His arc may not be so different from Luke Skywalker's in The Last Jedi, an old hero mired in the muddy reality of his own imperfect and futile successes, who rouses himself for one last purposeful return to stature. The show makes a bold choice not to put our hero on the bridge of a ship where we best knew him, not to put him in charge of anything at all, or to surround him with his supportive crew. There is no space anomaly, or ship battle, or alien encounter to solve in under forty minutes. We spend more time on future-Earth than most of Trek history combined. Yet it all works. It all feels connected to that same past that we remember. Whether you're a tried-and-true Trekkie, or a casual channel flipper who's been known to peruse an episode here or there on reruns, Star Trek: Picard will feel like a warm visit home. I suspect it will keep moving slow, and like a gentle wood flute, lure us to it's own tempo. Captain's Blog Supplemental: -Has no one ever seen two circles on a necklace before? Who's in charge of production design?! -The intro music was a little bland, to me. I think they were trying to evoke the wooden flute music from "The Inner Light" episode (Season 5, one of Steward's favorites) but it just felt amorphous and empty. Meanwhile Discovery's is still stuck in my head. Missed opportunity to homage the more momentous TNG opener. I'm pretty disappointed. -Dunkirk. Good, timely reference. Christopher Nolan made sure a new generation will always get that reference. -So there were two metaphorical stand-ins for refugees and xenophobia? Romulans and Synthetics? This seems redundant. Some rogue faction of Romulans should've been the ones to bomb Mars. That would've paralleled more accurately the real-world complexities of the Mid-East refugee crisis after 9/11. -And where did all these Synthetics come from anyway? I don't see any reference to them in my Start Trek Encyclopedia (1994 or 1999 editions). They are supposed to be robots, right? We don't really get to see them, I just want to make sure we're not supposed to think Synthetic drugs are what attacked Mars. Like a bunch of methamphetamines. -Was the Federation of the future ever really so progressively humanist? Or was it always just Picard, and our lens was tainted because he was always on camera? This explains a lot of episodes... and basically all of DS9. -The dog's name is Number One. Whoever wrote that patted themselves on the back and took an early lunch. -Was Picard planning to hire all the Romulan refugees as Maids and Butlers? Or are these two House-Romulans just an anti-thematic coincidence? Don't forget to Like and Retweet!
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