This is a pure heartfelt splurge... I just had to write this. Please forgive me if it seems straying, but after finishing Picard season one it has bubbled up so much in me that I wanted to get out.
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There are two types of people in the world, and I’m sure you know them. Something has gone bad, or is worrying. You will have the one that will lift you up: look for the positives, acknowledge the issues, ultimately give you hope that it’ll be okay. The other – not through any malice – will drag you down. They’ll look to the negatives, analyse them, dwell on them, inflate them. They almost deal with their own anxiety through this process and placing it upon you.
Unfortunately, I feel writers in general but particularly in Star Trek are falling into the latter.
Star Trek fundamentally was about hope. That tomorrow offers a brighter future. That we will get there.
Yes, Star Trek: TNG was criticised for being anodyne and lacking conflict. But guess what? It was hugely, hugely popular. Undoubtedly the most profitable show for the studio.
It almost seems a distant memory that this faltering show found its legs in season three, became a cultural phenomenon and spawned two spin offs and a movie franchise.
Deep Space Nine demonstrated perfectly that you could muddy it up, give it rougher edges, be less perfect yet still deliver a highly entertaining and uplifting show. It’s hard to rationalise, I admit, that a show ravaged by a devastating war could still ultimately be a positive show. But I think that was because at its heart its characters were good, and despite knocks we had found our way as a species. That even the external main characters were fundamentally decent. Quark is a toad, but he’d have your back as he’s a good person.
Star Trek in its roots was a show that positively influenced the lives of so many. From Whoopi Goldberg inspired by Uhura on the bridge to go into acting, to Mae C. Jemison who was inspired to go into space by this show. Countless actor interviews will tell you about people inspired to go and be doctors and scientists and all sorts.
For me personally, I’m nowhere near as notable as them but TNG had a huge impact on me. Huge. It shaped who I am and it got me into website design (my first Star Trek site in 1997, aging myself there!) which in turn shaped my career and connected me with friends that I know decades later.
What upsets me is that there is nothing really like that today. It’s as if the writers of Star Trek now – the ones who grew up and benefited from the Star Trek of old – are being selfish.
They want to take that childhood toy, and make it theirs. They don’t want to share. They want to update it and modernise it and make it more edgy because they want an adult Star Trek. They also let their own fears and insecurities manifest through this work.
I know TV changes over time and modernises. Voyager is not TOS. But Voyager has much more of TOS in its DNA than Discovery and Picard do now from Voyager.
It starts off with the obvious. Swearing. And graphic violence. There is part of me as an adult that thinks admirals swearing at others is reasonably believable. Humans are not robots. They are emotive. People shouldn’t be perfect automatons. But… is it necessary in Star Trek? Is it necessary to have Icheb being mutilated and killed in such a graphic way? Does that Admiral need to say fuck? I just don’t think it is.
I’ve held the suspicion for a while that as writers steal Star Trek from being a family show, they are also manifesting their fears. After 9/11 the American psyche – at least from my perspective as a TV viewer – seemed to shift. And that fear and anxiety still runs through as an undercurrent.
You’re not a “proper” show now if you don’t have dark, brooding menace and characters that either want to cut their wrists or cut other people.
Yes a lot of shit is going down. But it always was. TOS launched just 21 years after the end of world war two which tens of millions dead. To put that in context, that’s the same gap since Deep Space Nine stopped airing to us now.
It started four years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Three years after the assignation of JFK. It was against the backdrop of the cold war. The fears were very much present.
Yet those writers went out and wrote something that inspired Whoopi and Mae and gave us some inkling that tomorrow would be better. We have to work for it, it won’t be perfect, but there is hope. They posed danger in most episodes, but the show ultimately had a good crew that were evolved and positive and exploring and learning. The writers almost had a self imposed duty that they upheld even as the world seemed like it was perilously close to the end (sound familiar?)
I get none of that with Star Trek now. Picard was by far a terrible show. I enjoyed quite a bit of it. There were some nice speeches. I feel some of my feelings of Discovery are certainly seeping into this ‘essay’.
But where is that show that the nine year old can watch and be inspired? To poke around that star and see what’s out there?
Now it’s just angst and danger. Unrelenting danger. Episode after episode. The Federation is corrupt. Our hero has been fired. People drink and take drugs and swear and exploit each other. No one is exploring or dare I say ‘boldly going’. We naval gaze instead.
And that’s what upsets me most… that the writers have taken Star Trek that they enjoyed and basically made it an adults only club. There is no attempt to life people up.
I feel the end episode of Picard is entirely fitting. They have taken new shows, and put Star Trek on it and hope that it passes for Star Trek. But it isn’t, really. It may look like it and talk like it, but it’s not it.
Which is appropriate as they have killed off the beloved Jean Luc Picard and copied his mind to an imitation that they’ll label Picard. I am distraught. Not just that they killed Picard, but that they are clearly going to market a Xerox in his place. They’re all making out without a care in the world while Picard’s corpse cools back on the planet without any of his beloved crew that formed his family.
The Picard that I assumed had Irumodic Syndrome. That was the Picard we saw in the future from All Good Things… that if he meets Beverly Crusher she will chastise and care for him like she did then. Because he’s an infallible human, with a health condition. That has the scars from the Borg implants. And the artificial heart, that was from his fight with a Nausican. That Doctor Pulaski fixed to save his life. The mouth that blew the Ressikan flute from a dead civilisation, then kissed Nella Darren.
Now? Nope. Fixed that. No problem. All gone. You’ll live a decent life now, guaranteed. No ailments, no history. And by you, I mean a copy of your mind.
What a gross abuse of one of Star Trek’s greatest characters.
I feel in these times, more than ever, we need that positive Star Trek again. Yes it may be slightly rose-coloured glasses, but we need some rose colour. And that’s almost a dereliction of duty of the writers of today. Perhaps not just in Star Trek, but in the wider television market.
Yes you’re worried. Yes you’re not happy with the world out there. But now more than ever, turn your pen to something that lifts us up. All of us of all ages and all walks of life.
Bashir, Life Suppor": “Nerys, if I remove the rest of his brain and replace it with a machine, he may look like Bareil, he may even talk like Bareil, but he won't be Bareil. The spark of life will be gone. He'll be dead. And I'll be the one who killed him.”
