Once, there was a vision that was Star Trek.

A hopeful, inspiring vision that humanity could develop to the best of its potential, and become a vital cog in a galaxy-wide enterprise where reason, logic and justice would prevail over unreasoning hate, greed and pettiness.

Sure, it became a little restrictive at times, with the guiding principles of both its creator

Gene Roddenberry and the aforementioned enterprise – the United Federation of Planets – sometimes getting in the way of great storytelling.

But overall, Star Trek in its many incarnations clung firmly to a message of hope, and inspired generations of fans to dream.

That was the vision, once.

And there was a moment, at the end of the third episode of Star Trek: Picard – the new series featuring Patrick Stewart’s esteemed Jean-Luc Picard from The Next Generation – when that hope was rekindled.

If you’ve been following this show, you would know it: that moment when, after assembling a rag-tag crew to go off into space on a bold new adventure, Picard utters the command: “Engage!”

Nostalgia. Excitement. Eagerness. So many feels, as you whippersnappers might say.

That was two whole episodes ago, and while I had some issues with the uneven, lazy setups (and the inexplicable abundance of swearing) in the first three installments, I was totally unprepared for how fast and hard the whole thing would come crashing down in just two weeks.

‘Despite what the pointy ears and designer facial fuzz may lead you to think, I am not Star Trek: Discovery’s Spock.’

ST:P is set roughly two decades after the events of the fourth TNG feature film, Nemesis.

Picard has left Starfleet partly because of his own hubris (thinking he would be considered indispensible) and also his employer’s less-than-humane handling of a humanitarian crisis faced by the Romulans – seemingly, the very same supernova described in JJ Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot.

It just seems that many storytelling corners were cut to place Picard in the situation we find him at the start of the series: unhappily out of Starfleet, sitting around his chateau overseeing his vineyards and quietly waiting to die.

Stewart inhabits this desolate personal space perfectly, imbuing even the scenes of daily routine with a tangible sense of the restrained discontent you would expect from a person of such accomplishments forced into merely existing.

All that changes when a young woman named Dhaj (Isa Briones) shows up in need of help, fleeing from death squads sent by a secret chapter of the Romulan secret police (gotta hand it to those Romulans).

She is somehow connected to the late Data (Brent Spiner), who frequently haunts Picard’s dreams – the lingering echoes of a deep friendship, formed mostly off-screen, and a great sense of loss on our main man’s part.

Denied assistance from Starfleet, Picard has to put together a rag-tag team to unravel the mystery of this enigmatic figure: two former Starfleet officers, a crew of emergency-application holograms, and a wide-eyed scientist.

‘And I thought that hairdo went out when Kathryn Janeway retired.’

I liked about 70% of the first three episodes, from the central mystery (involving Dhaj, as well as other synthetic beings and why they attacked all those Romulan refugees) to its peripheral ones.

The most interesting of these is a Borg cube reclamation project being overseen by, of all people, the former Borg drone Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco), first seen in the fifth-season TNG episode I, Borg.

This is an example of the neatest aspect of ST:P – how it references people and events from throughout franchise lore, keeping viewers curious about which of the many supporting characters to date are newcomers and which are Trek veterans.

So, that was up to the point of “Engage!”

Then I came to episode four, a somewhat protracted trip to the past and to a bleak resettlement world where Romulan refugees were dumped – just to introduce a new character, a warrior bound to Picard’s hopeless cause.

It culminates in a completely pointless and totally un-Trek-like swordfight, which leads to the callous beheading of some poor sap whose only crime was hating Picard for leaving his people to rot and die.

(There’s even a line of dialogue that sounds a lot like the speaker was paraphrasing “Ancient weapons and hokey religions are no match for a Romulan disruptor.”)

It got worse the following week, with the opening sequence featuring a rather gruesome scene of torture porn where some heartless individual removes Borg implants without anaesthesia from a familiar supporting character in Trek history.

All this, just to give a returning Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan, still one of the most spectacular beings from the franchise) from Voyager a reason to hate the very people Picard needs to deal with in the episode.





Did I mention that Seven now belongs to some sort of peacekeeping militia known as the Fenris Rangers? When did we veer into Babylon 5 territory? Been there, done a lot better.

Oddly enough, for all the bleakness in this dystopian corner of space that Picard and crew have ventured into, it’s nothing compared to how isolationist, paranoid and just plain shady the Federation and Starfleet have become.

Nothing is sacred when it comes to the new frontiers that this current batch of Trek stewards (Treksploiters, let’s be candid) is opening up.

Before the fourth and fifth episodes, I was still somewhat stoked about the show.

After that, however, I no longer looked forward to Fridays for fear of the latest abomination that will be thrust upon us.

Call me old-fashioned, call me a cranky old coot, but this is just how a seasoned Trek fan (been watching since 1968) feels about the state of the franchise on TV/streaming platforms today.

It may take a little more thinking on the creative team’s part, but there are certainly better ways to expand the franchise horizons than resorting to the shock-and-awe(ful) tactics employed so far.

Hardly the best of times, more like the worst of times.

Star Trek: Picard is available on Amazon Prime Video.