PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*
SUPER HEAVY SPOILERS
Before venturing into this review, I wrote this essay to demonstrate that any nostalgic appeal for the STTNG series the producers hoped to evoke with PICARD was all but absent in me. In part I wrote:
In the 1980s, as Roddenberry saw the franchise he'd created taken over by other hands, TNG gave him his last chance to infuse a teleseries with his guiding ethos. Yet this time he didn't want a series that stressed heroic action and character conflict. As many TNG critics have observed, Roddenberry wanted characters who had advanced beyond personal interest, not least with regard to that old devil sensuality. As the characters lacked personality in those early years, the players couldn't do much except to pontificate-- though always with the most earnest attitudes possible. For me, as a viewer not much impressed with TNG's early years, the culmination of this tendency appeared most egregiously in the first-season episode "Skin of Evil," which I call "The One Where Picard Has Righteous Conversations with an Oil Slick."
What little online criticism I'd seen of PICARD had been negative, and I had little reason to extend the show any benefit of the doubt, given that PICARD's producer Alex Kurtzman also had his fingers in the Trek TV shows DISCOVERY and STRANGE NEW WORLDS and in two of the last three TREK theatrical movies. All of these I deemed garbage whose only merit was to make even the weaker TREK entries of the Rick Berman years look like genius. So when I liked PICARD, I can only posit that the crucial difference for me was Season One's showrunner was novelist Michael Chabon. For me, Season One's ten episodes bring out the Liberal political themes of TNG better than any ten episodes of the original series-- though of course PICARD has the advantage of presenting a unified narrative.
It's quite possible that some reviewers didn't like Chabon's labyrinthine storyline, and I must admit that I don't think it fully tracks, though that doesn't invalidate other qualities. Chabon drew strongly upon two TREK narratives I've not revisited since their theatrical debuts-- NEMESIS (2002), the last movie to spotlight the TNG cast, and the 2009 STAR TREK, which did not involve the TNG mythos but which Chabon seems to have retconned into said continuity, at least with respect to one event. Since I think Chabon's reworking of the TNG mythos was key to my enjoyment of the season, in this review I'm going to focus less on the story's dramatic twists and turns than on the phases of the Chabon timeline-- hence, SPOILERS.
PHASE 1-- In the distant past, a mighty civilization is destroyed by their populace of androids, usually called "synthetics." Though the organics die, they exile the synthetics to another dimension, and leave behind a recording, known as "The Admonition," to warn other sentients of the consequences of empowering synthetics.
PHASE 2-- At some later millennium, the Romulans discover the Admonition. A secret society, the Zhat Vash, dedicates itself to the prevention of another synthetic uprising.
PHASE 3-- The events of TREK NEMESIS transpire, culminating in the death of the synthetic Federation officer Data. As I recall, in that time-frame synthetics are not prevalent.
PHASE 4-- The events of TREK '09 transpire, though the only event referenced in PICARD is the destruction of Romulus, the Romulan homeworld. Chabon asserts that this event takes place in TNG time, and that Admiral Picard leads a humanitarian effort to rescue the imperiled denizens. However. not all Federation officials approve of succoring the Federation's rivals, and for that reason, the Zhat Vash takes an action that some might deem counter-intuitive. Apparently synthetics are being used in greater numbers at the time, so Romulan operatives somehow mess with a large number of synthetics on Mars. The synthetics revolt, which somehow impairs the Romulan rescue effort. Reactionary elements in the Federation use the revolt as an excuse to both shut down the rescue effort and to legislate against the further creation of synthetics. Picard opposes both measures and seeks to reignite the rescue effort by threatening to resign-- only to have his resignation accepted. Picard does succeed in rescuing a large number of Romulans and relocating them on the planet Vashti, but then the former Admiral goes into seclusion.
PHASE 5-- Unbeknownst to Picard, Data, prior to his death, created at least two twin female androids, Dahj and Soji, with the help of human scientist Maddox. Both are separately raised by human families without their even knowing they're synthetics, probably to keep them from being destroyed under the new laws. Maddox, wanting to continue his synthetic research, emigrates to another planet with some like-minded associates and populates that world with an android population. (It's a fine touch that the world is named Coppelius, after the robot-making mad scientist of Hoffmann's story "The Sandman.") The Zhat Vash wants to annihilate all the synthetics, but they don't know where Coppelius is. But they are able to locate Dahj and Soji. For some reason, agents Narissa and Narek track Soji to her workplace-- an abandoned Borg cube-- and seek to tap her memories to learn the location of the homeworld that Soji has buried in her subconscious memories. Other agents of Zhat Vash seek to abduct Dahj for similar treatment, but her cyber-skills activate and she kills them. Other memories surface, leading Dahj to seek out Picard-- who then has to learn all of this continuity in reverse order.
Though many details of the scenario are weak, they serve quite well to advance the political ethos of the story, which coheres admirably with a running trope from TNG: "androids are people too." PICARD is almost lyrical in its efforts to champion synthetics as not just an underclass in need of rescuing, but as a species of "children" that deserve the kindness and amity of all sentients. And while the Romulans are "the bad guys" for choosing to make synthetics into scapegoats, they are not, as in many TNG episodes, totally wrong. Toward the latter half of the season, the inhabitants of Coppelius are aghast to learn that a Romulan fleet seeks to destroy their world. Picard and his new crew cannot save them, but the synthetics can reach out to the extradimensional androids to save them. Picard is naturally just as much opposed to a Holocaust of organics as of synthetics, and he manages to sway the Coppelians to renounce the alien synthetics (who are seen briefly as some sort of tentacled Cthuluoids).
Speaking of the support cast, PICARD includes two characters from TNG, Troi and Ryker, and one from VOYAGER, Seven of Nine, but they play only small, though resonant, parts. Picard engages a new motley crew to aid him in his investigation, and while none of them are compelling, they all serve their purposes well enough. The only crewmember that shows potential is the Romulan youth Elnor, who views Picard as the father he never had but resents the admiral for having absented himself. The two villains Narissa and Narek are much better than most TNG foes, though. Narek inserts himself romantically into Soji's life to probe her memories, and his sister Narissa is visibly jealous of the hookup, threatening Narek to make sure he sticks to the mission. Narissa gets a solid demise in a battle with Seven of Nine-- one of several well-choreographed fight-scenes in this season-- but Narek's fate, that of being apprehended by Federation forces, was left on the cutting room floor.
But inevitably the show wouldn't work if Patrick Stewart didn't bring his A-game. I reject critics who said Picard is just "carried along" by events, for he's clearly the moral linchpin of Season One. Stewart's Picard is just as intermittently righteous and self-deprecating as he ever was in TNG, but here he's dealing with an issue far more substantive than most of those seen in the old show. (And I say that as a person that doesn't automatically validate the many Liberal permutations of the save-the-marginalized trope.) PICARD is a rare example of a sequel that improves on the original-- though I see that Michael Chabon may not contributed as much to ensuing seasons as to this one.
