I think the problem any Star Trek show going forward has is that it doesn’t just have to be good, it has to live up and outdo the expectations of any Star Trek fan. An episode of Picard, or Discovery isn’t compared to the actual quality of your average episode of TNG or TOS, it’s competing with the concept of ‘STAR…

The show suffers from wanting to do too much, so none of it really gets the time or attention it needs. Picard living a somewhat unsatisfied life on his vineyard? Perfect basis for a show. Examining the fallout of the collapse of the Romulan empire? I’d watch ten episodes of that.
A story about an ancient warning about…

I mean that bringing a noted novelist on board looked like an intention to add a little more depth to the show, making him showrunner even seemed like a signal that he would have some creative freedom.
Instead for the most part the show is pretty much identical to Discovery in terms of tone and lack of thinking. Chabon…

With the whole arc of the season now coming into full view, it’s hard not feeling like this is some very lazy writing. The show feels like a TNG two-parter stretched out through Lost-style mysterybox writing to the thinnest gruel. If you boil it down to its basics you could have a very solid story, however the way it…

I recently rewatched the Occupied station-arc again and it’s such a good run of episodes, that does so much more in those 7 episodes than Picard has over its whole season.
It makes me wish they had tried to get someone like Ronald D Moore back as a consultant.

There are plenty of Star Trek stories that do not hold up for more than five minutes, plenty of episodes that make little to no sense. But that was 45 minutes, and next week there would be something else entirely. Picard is so disappointing, because it keeps coming back every week to a storyline that as, bit by bit,…

The Qowat Milat episode annoyed me, because there was the foundation there for a proper Star Trek story about responsibility and what you owe people. Instead it was just some (pointless) worldbuilding and introductions.
Which is why this serialised format is holding the show back, because it allows for these half-baked…

I have no problem with what is essentially a TNG 2-parter amount of story becoming a whole season, if they do it right. If they use it to dive deeply into the characters, give us multiple angles, fill the whole thing out, so it doesn’t feel as thin and stretched out as this does.
Unlike Zack I didn’t hate this week’s…

A thing that came to me while walking the dog the other day, is that if we had gotten this show back in 2000 or so, we would have called it the best Star Trek show ever. However with 20 years of serialised storytelling between the end of Star Trek on tv and now, Picard just pales in comparison to what’s possible in…

Babylon 5 somehow managed to cover pretty much the whole range of this chart.

Star Wars was always a fairy tale in space, it’s at its best when it tries to be that. Star Trek was conceived basically as ‘take the most popular genre there is and put it in space’. It’s more malleable as a concept.
It can be good as just fun, but there’s nothing preventing it from being more than that.
There are…

Imagine Narek and Narissa getting the same treatment as the officers at the Rezidentura, or Rafi being as believably worldweary and paranoid as Stan.
Basically, what if the characters on Picard were treated like ‘human’ beings instead of cardboard cutouts.
Oh well.

It’s a definite shame that the opportunity to create a different kind of Star Trek show has been wasted on a show that mostly feels like Discovery, instead of something more sophisticated and introspective. Picard has the best of intentions in wanting to explore life at the edges of a Federation that has turned…

It’s why the swearing on the shows these days feels so off, Star Trek always had slightly formal language. If there was any swearing it was in Klingon.

Part of the problem here is the differences in backgrounds between the current writers and the older shows. There you had the influence of Roddenberry, and the formal restrictions of tv at time putting distinct limits on what kind of stories could be told.
We’re 30 years further now and the people writing Trek have…

Westworld isn’t very good at all, it’s just complicated and has a high budget.

Yeah, there’s some stuff there that’s just not very good like the Soji/Narek relationship, and the show doesn’t know how to play Rafi’s issues (you can’t go from funny drunk to tragic drunk that way).
But overall this was an improvement simply because stuff started happening.
The show is still too thin and shallow to…

Would it have been so hard to have included a brief scene of Elnor asking ‘what’s Freecloud’, and someone explaining it was a capitalist planet (or whatever else it was supposed to be)?

Yeah, that episode was a complete tonal misfire. I don’t just mean the wild shifts in tone between ‘comedy’ and gory drama, but it just did not feel like it was made by people who know what Star Trek is.
I’m willing to grant every creator their freedom, and each Star Trek show has put their own stamp on the concept;…

The whole thing was set up in a ‘how to write a heist for people with short term memory loss’ way. They kept introducing a threat/obstacle, and then flashing back to the work around.
It felt a little like an attempt at the sort of cleverness Steven Moffat liked to do on Doctor Who (not a surprising influence since…