Picard

[Khaldun]

Some of the writers for the first two seasons of TNG complained that Gene Roddenberry's understanding of how to do optimism was so intellectually shallow and phony that they weren't really able to write compelling plots or characters. I think it was Ron Moore who argued that rather than contesting Reaganism, in some ways Roddenberry's version of the Federation and Starfleet was so plastic and falsely anodyne that it actually echoed Reaganism--it was the optimism of the boardroom. It was the kind of optimism that a human resources department has: trust exercises, positive thinking, everybody's special and valued. Every time the writers tried to create any kind of tension or conflict between characters--or a conflict within a character that was more than just a temporary circumstance of a single episode plot--he would shut them down on the argument that in the near-perfect future of the Federation, people didn't have conflicts like that any more. (He let them have Worf be the character who wasn't perfect yet--but also that meant that Worf always had to be wrong in his recommendations.)

Also, bracket to one side Roddenberry's dirty-old-manism--I keep waiting for someone to really give him the MeToo treatment. Stuff like Lt. Ilia, planet of the bald people who fuck everyone; the Ferengi, who want women nude all the time; the sex cult planet where everyone wore almost nothing; the femdom planet where Riker is assigned six mistresses, etc., that's all straight from Roddenberry, along with stories of how he pretty much put the moves on most of the women around him or told them dirty stories all the time.

The TNG that everyone likes was only possible when Roddenberry stepped away from it. And the TNG that everyone likes began to make the Federation actually earn its optimistic reputation in a more human way. That's the thread that has continued through into DS9: that it's not easy to make a better civilization, to have progress.

I want Trek to be optimistic but I don't want that to be treacle or to be shallow. I want drama; I want struggle. I want conflict that is not just "Good liberals vs. misguided aliens with bumpy foreheads". So it's right and proper that the Federation should have to struggle against its weaknesses and contradictions. I don't mind if this show eventually has Starfleet and the Federation coming out looking like they represent a better world. I do mind if that's unearned or uninteresting.

As a sidebar, though, I wouldn't mind if it also ended up with Starfleet being a mite less vulnerable to infiltration, and some kind of command hierarchy that doesn't habitually promote the worst and weakest people to authority. That's been a consistent hallmark of Trek all the way back and while it's as funny in its way as red-shirt deaths, it's also kind of head-scratching *particularly* when it happens in the most upbeat and simplistically utopian eras in Trek history.

[eldaec]

It was definitely star trek - you could tell because it said 'star trek' and everything.

I think the reason people say silly things like 'this star trek show is not star trek' about this and Discovery because they heavily stress character point of view to an extent only DS9 came close to before.

But nothing in Picard so far really changes the principles that TNG worked to. There is a legitimate problem. More than one group appears to have good faith answers of varying degrees of rightness and the show seems like it is going to explore the extent of how right they are with some incidental pew pew and soap opera along the way. DS9's Maquis and religious nutters already showed us that politics is still a thing in star trek. And if you are going to make a show about how we should all act like grown ups in 2020, it really should be about internal and not international politics else what the fuck are you doing.

I don't mind if this show eventually has Starfleet and the Federation coming out looking like they represent a better world. I do mind if that's unearned or uninteresting.

Exactly - you make the show about how it is hard and takes competence to represent a better world, you don't just rely on 'its good because my side say so', almost all good trek does this.

I'm guessing in the end the good guys are going to help the federation do the right thing. Obviously.

Some of the writers for the first two seasons of TNG complained that Gene Roddenberry's understanding of how to do optimism was so intellectually shallow and phony that they weren't really able to write compelling plots or characters. I think it was Ron Moore who argued that rather than contesting Reaganism, in some ways Roddenberry's version of the Federation and Starfleet was so plastic and falsely anodyne that it actually echoed Reaganism--it was the optimism of the boardroom. It was the kind of optimism that a human resources department has: trust exercises, positive thinking, everybody's special and valued.

To fair to Roddenberry's box, it is also the reason TNG avoided falling into manufactured conflict or plot by incompetence - which other trek occasionally falls victim to. Being so strict early on meant TNG had to earn their conflict right through the run, and as a result actually looked like a bunch of smart people trying to solve a hard problem all the way through.

Having to have a bunch of script meetings and debates every time you want members of an established successful professional team to have an on screen argument isn't a bad way to get some discipline in the writing.

[jgsugden]

Do you need to earn a starting premise?

I find it sad that people think it is impossible to tell compelling stories about heroic, moral people. 

[eldaec]

Wait, what? Who do you think this show is about if not the single most moral and heroic individual in the franchise?

[Khaldun]

Seriously. Picard is fucking heroic in the extreme here.  He's going to dig up heroism in people who are like him, kind of disenchanted.

High Noon is a compelling story about heroic, moral people.

If you mean "is it impossible to tell compelling stories about heroic, moral SYSTEMS where most people working for them are heroes", well, watch any old cop show or detective show or show about military guys, and you'll get a fucking assload of that. Most cop shows are about SYSTEMS where every cop and every prosecutor and every judge is presumed to be basically good. JAG or any number of other military shows have the soldiers and commanders being basically good and the system being good.

I mean, there has been an asston of that stuff on TV. Most of it is not very good because it's too busy being propaganda for the cops, the prosecutors or the military. The problem here is that Starfleet is actually kind of mixed outside the bottle of the Enterprise crew, who are all great people.

[Teleku]

Yeah, Picard is pretty much the only Captain that I'd say falls into the Lawful Good category of Trek Captains.  Kirk being being Chaotic Good, and Sisko/Janeway falling into some form of Neutral Good.  I haven't watched any of this yet, but I assumed the premise was 'old righteous man yells at clouds righteously and does righteous things.'

[jgsugden]

And yet people were just arguing that you can't make a series about a moral Star Fleet with an optimistic outlook....

[Khaldun]

The optimism is in the outcomes. If your hero and his pals have nothing in their way except sinister aliens and the occasional insane admiral, that's a kind of heroism, I guess--of the Zapp Brannigan kind. Bad guys safely defeated every episode, etc.

I am more drawn to Atticus Finch. Picard in this series is in that mold. He's going to fucking tell the truth and do what he has to. I think actually that Kirk and Sisko and Pike and Spock have all been cut from that cloth on some level--they will do what is right, even if that's against the regulations. Janeway was meant to be, she was just written so badly that you can't really see that in her.

[eldaec]

And yet people were just arguing that you can't make a series about a moral Star Fleet with an optimistic outlook....

Nobody argued that. They argued an infallible starfleet is a problem.

[Abagadro]

Heh, Starfleet admirals have been one of the main villains of the shows for 55 years.  Starfleet as a concept is noble but always fucks everything up in practice because of its leadership. Righteous Captains out on the frontier are the only true heroes (because remember, the show is "Wagon Train in space"). That's why it was significant that Picard offered to bust himself down to Captain.  The Federation is the more noble part of the deal but even then gets into bad territory on occasion.

[eldaec]

Even the antagonist admirals are usually noble but wrong about something.

If you really think about it, the federation is in practice a military dictatorship with no obvious civilian oversight. So honestly I think starfleet is granted a very favourable write up by the shows.

[Abagadro]

A good portion are just bugfuck crazy.

[eldaec]

Oh sure, but noble at the same time.

They really believe super hard in starfleet's ideals.

One of the downsides of giving unlimited authority to an independent military I guess.

In all seriousness, this is why I think trek would struggle to do a show not about starfleet. You'd have to define the relationship between starfleet and the new protagonists, and that would quickly demonstrate that viewed from the outside starfleet is an unaccountable authoritarian oppressor. Possibly a benign unaccountable authoritarian oppressor, but an unaccountable authoritarian oppressor nonetheless.

At best the federation is Rome.

[Tebonas]

I've watched a different Star Trek than some of you.

Starfleet command comes across as either dimwitted idealists that have to be protected from themselves or infiltrators all the time, or obstructive bureaucrats that have to be circumvented. And once in a while one or more of them go crazy and have to be stopped by down-to-earth captains. Even Nonprotagonist captains lose their street smarts and have to be stopped and/or rescued after they get promoted.

So, Starfleet in Picard continues a proud tradition of both clueless Admirals and malignant foreign infiltrators in perfect canon fashion.

[Khaldun]

Pretty much. You get your occasional Admiral in Trek who is competent and well-meaning but usually for a bit part or for upper-level redshirting, like the guy who gets waxed at Wolf 359. DS9 had a few competent admirals show up in the war-related episodes.

We almost never see the civilian hierarchy of the Federation in canon Trek series. Usually only as diplomats and emissaries, occasionally as really annoying bureaucrats (the dude in The Trouble With Tribbles). I don't believe there's ever been anything at all about Federation elections or cultural/political movements in any Trek ever (Federation ones, that is): only Bajor and the Klingons seem to have anything like complex internal politics. Maybe in Enterprise, I guess, but I'm not watching it all to see. The only thing we really know about the Federation is which directives/laws govern Starfleet that were made by the Federation government rather than Starfleet proper. I guess we know there's some kind of written constitution, that there's a sort of familiar executive/legislative set up, that member planets have their own autonomous administrations. I suppose we know through Bajor and a few other episodes that adding a new planet to the Federation is a big deal and may cause some controversy. Picard says there's no money, but there was money of a kind in TOS, so maybe that's something that happened in between TOS and TNG.

So the optimism, etc., has never really been about the system, except for Kirk, Picard and Sisko's frequent insistence that the Federation/humanity is living under vastly better conditions today than in the past, something that TOS and TNG directly verified on occasion via time travel/suspended animation--that internal war between human cultures on Earth is a thing of the past, that medicine is advanced and free, that transport is instantaneous, that there are major terraforming/geological projects on Earth, and that people seem to have a lot of time for leisure. The justice system seems kind of barely better than ours judging from a few episodes; there still seems to be lots of room for scientists and technologists to do seriously dumb fucking shit without anybody stopping them. Judging from the first two episodes of Picard, there is still something like Fox News around. Culture seems pretty stagnant--nobody ever talks about writers, intellectuals, artists etc from between 2050 and the 23rd Century except for Picard citing a few political theorists and Kirk citing a future poet to impress Edith Keeler.

Most of that, by the way, seems as true in Picard as any other time. People still seem to be living pretty good peaceful lives with good medical care despite a number of serious attacks on Earth in the 23rd and 24th Centuries.

[jgsugden]

Go back and read what Roddenberry intended for Star Fleet to be. 

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.”

Star Fleet is the group that reached this enlightenment and reached out into the stars.  It was intended to be - and was - a hopeful and optimistic view of the future. While some individuals failed to live up to the ideals of Star Fleet, the organization as a whole was intended to be a just, righteous and moral organization working towards the betterment of the future.

If you play D&D - it is Lawful Good.

People are afraid to tell stories about moral and justi people these days - but that is what both the original and TNG Star Treks were about.  That is the core of Star Trek.  DS9 was good - but it wasn't the same premise.  Voyager and Enterprise had other premises as well, although Voyager did a better job of honoring the idea, even if it failed in so many other ways.

All I was saying - I'd like to see someone tackle Star Trek in the same vein that TOS and TNG did - with an organization that was (overall) just and moral.  One that was working to do the right thing and that people were proud to be representing.  It would be a nice change of pace from the countless shows that show people overcoming a corrupt government.

[Khaldun]

The more sophisticated version of Trek is Iain Banks' Culture novels. I admire all of the representatives of the Culture in those books--and the idea of the Culture--but Banks is pretty alive to the downsides of an advanced, quasi-utopian galactic culture that is determined to stay that way.

Just coloring inside Roddenberry's lines is dramatically inert and kind of smug after a while--it's the story of enlightened, self-satisfied California liberals doing their best to uplift Romulans, Klingons, Ferengi, Cardassians, Bajorans etc.--all the complicatedly *human* drama is off-loaded onto those other cultures. The Federation doesn't actually seem to have much of a taste for genuine difference or diversity--almost everybody inside of Starfleet behaves basically similarly. The few times there's someone in Starfleet who is a different kind of personality they all like assholes to him or her (Barclay) until he/she finally proves worthy. There's almost no real religious or ethical diversity--the Vulcans are the closest to that (and again therefore get a ton of attention, because Federation humanity is just kind of there). It's easy to be tolerant when everybody is the same. I know, I know, back in the 60s saying that blacks and whites and Asians and Scots and Russians would all serve together in a single crew and not even be slightly aware of racial or ethnic or national differences felt a bit more radical. But even by the 1980s, that seemed kind of old hat. I mean, shit, they couldn't even really find a way to make a crew member who came from a planet of violence and rape have a really different perspective than the rest of them.

[jgsugden]

That is one way to tell the story.  There were a lot of TOS episodes and TNG episodes that did not follow your recipe.  And, as for characters having different perspectives... seriously?  You think Bones and Spock, Kirk and Uhura, Picard and Data, etc... had the same perspectives? (Why the fuck does my spell check recognize Spock, Kirk and Picard … but not Uhura?)

And Trek is not the be all, end all, model of this idea.  You see collections of just and moral people working together to create a better future throughout a lot of older literature and entertainment.  DC's heroes, for example, were mostly boy scouts, as they say.  Nobody has had the guts to try to put them on the screen as pure symbols of hope and optimism since Chris Reeves in the first two Superman Movies.  I'm kind of hoping Marvel takes a shot at it with the Fantastic Four by telling some of their earlier stories rather than the crap where Sue becomes Malice, Ultimate Reed becomes a villain, or any of that other shit.  It would just be a nice break to see someone competent try to inspire with storytelling rather than fear monger  with the same repetitive cautionary tales.

[eldaec]

Still enjoying this - but it is really emphasising how weak Trek has been at worldbuilding outside of Starfleet. There is nothing wrong with what the show is doing but it fascinating how simple things like civilian travel and the how that guy with a bird of prey can exist seem surprising and slightly weird on a star trek show.

[Surlyboi]

Trek has always strived to be, in its best instances, a mirror of where we were as a society.

From the race relations allegory of "Let that be your last battlefield" (Black on the left white on the right vs black on the right white on the left) to the Cautionary tale of "The Omega Glory" (Khoms fighting Yangs in the aftermath of nuclear war), Star Trek has pointed out our failings and tried to say that we could be better.

That continues in Picard. Freecloud? That's pretty much an amalgam of The Caymans and a bunch of other tax havens for the rich today. It's Trek's Canto Bight.

Picard is finding himself disillusioned with a Federation and Starfleet that he fought and bled and sent others off to die for that isn't living up to the reputation that he's sold himself and so many others on. It's a once-impressive and seemingly inclusive and benign government that has found itself catering to its baser instincts and being helped along by infiltrators from a once powerful enemy that has now collapsed but is still rife with former espionage agents looking to bring down their old enemy from the inside. If that's not an indictment of Trump's America and the influence of Putin, I don't know what is.

And to echo Khal's sentiment, yeah, a lot of this is shades of The Culture and you can tell the writers are familiar with Banks' work. Hell, Rios's costume in the last episode is almost straight out of Excession.

[Khaldun]

I'm actually really liking it. And yeah, the world-building really has been terrible. Until now.

Like:

We've seen our first Federation drug addict. And our first indication that no, not everybody gets to own a vineyard (though rather hilariously finding out that the poor person lives at the *actual* Vasquez Rocks was very clever).

Almost our first civilian pilot, yeah. The only other ones? Harcourt Fenton Mudd and Cyrano Jones, I think. Maybe a few others from DS9. No real sense of what the economics of civilian starships are, but so much for the "The Federation has no money" bullshit, because Picard is sure as fuck paying the dude.

Honestly, Trek is much more interesting when it's not purely a bottle show. This makes being a hero both more important and much harder. Picard is only really seeing the flaws now because he has to--and he's seeing his own flaws, what the "I just want to go to space" was covering up. It kind of adds another layer to that mudfight with his brother after the Borg episodes--that Picard has been so much the idealist and optimist operating in a situation where his idealism had commanding force that he's never really had to see what lies beyond it.


"A promise is a prison" was a nice memorable line, by the way.

[jgsugden]

Thanks to the free month they're offering (code GIFT), I watched the season. 

While the early episodes felt like they grabbed the crumbs of the Star Trek universe and tried to build something with it, the final episodes would fit right in as modern TNG episodes.  Star Fleet does the right thing in the end, with the right leadership pulling it in that direction.  I'm very curious what they do in the future.  Curious enough to buy a month of their subscription here or there to do a marathon. 

Assuming we don't lose the star of the show to the virus.

[eldaec]

My feeling was the show really needs to lose its lead. This story was enough about Picard that it was good and showed how the films should have been done.

But what I'm interested in seeing more of is non-star-fleet people in a world dominated by this all powerful unaccountable even if mostly benevolent military junta.

The inevitable Pike show will cover my star fleet fleeting needs.

[jgsugden]

My feeling was the show really needs to lose its lead. This story was enough about Picard that it was good and showed how the films should have been done.

But what I'm interested in seeing more of is non-star-fleet people in a world dominated by this all powerful unaccountable even if mostly benevolent military junta.

The inevitable Pike show will cover my star fleet fleeting needs.

I don't think we need to lose Picard to tell that story.  We just need him to remain retired and more of a diplomat than Star Fleet proper.  They're set up to explore synthetic life rights (like Humans (tv series)) attempted - that is something they could do entirely outside the Federation.

[Surlyboi]

This. Picard staying on is fine. The interpersonal stuff and the character development of the rest of the crew has me intrigued.

[Tale]

 

[Khaldun]

They just announced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, with Anson Mount as Captain Pike plus Spock and Number One. Good idea! They will face the complicated problem that we know what's coming for Pike and Spock, but every other Enterprise character we don't really know about. We don't know in canon if Sulu and Uhura were assigned to the Enterprise before Kirk. We don't know about any of the other characters on board, really. So there's lots of room to play.

[Abagadro]

It's kinda amazing how much output that IP has had without putting out anything not tied to all the original stuff (i.e. prequel, sequel, or reimagined) since 2001. 

[jgsugden]

And they've established they can tell 10 years of stories before Kirk shows up - and I do not think we've even seen Kirk's first days aboard the vessel, have we?  They could have Kirk on the last couple seasons of a 12 year show.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, there is no in-canon story of Kirk on the Enterprise--we don't know if he was brought over as captain immediately after Pike was injured, if he was on board for some period of time before Pike was injured, etc.

I think Scotty is on the Enterprise already by "The Cage"? But we don't know if he was a lower engineering officer there who was promoted or if he came over as Chief Engineer.

But basically Mount established Pike as a terrific example of the humane, optimistic Starfleet captain, so I am looking forward to a show produced in that spirit.

[jgsugden]

...
But basically Mount established Pike as a terrific example of the humane, optimistic Starfleet captain, so I am looking forward to a show produced in that spirit.

It is the core of Star Trek - hope.  I'm still not on board with the aesthetic of Discovery/SNW... but I'll put that aside if the shows are good.

[eldaec]

And they've established they can tell 10 years of stories before Kirk shows up - and I do not think we've even seen Kirk's first days aboard the vessel, have we?  They could have Kirk on the last couple seasons of a 12 year show.

The one place we have seen Kirk's first days on the enterprise demonstrates why this wouldn't be a great idea outside of wacky what if or mirror universe episodes.

I'm just happy for more spock.

[Khaldun]

Yeah,  the interesting thing about the casting on the Abramsverse Trek is that Pine (who is a pretty good actor) is the weakest recast but I think that's because nobody can really do Kirk without either doing a Shatner imitation (bad idea) or being nothing like Shatner in the role (also bad idea). Spock and McCoy are more schtick that other actors can get right while also having their own spin on it, and Uhura etc. have so little base personality that new actors can make them better as characters. But Kirk, man, that's hard. I guess if we're now buying that Discovery and Strange New Worlds are in fact in the main ST universe, not the Abramsverse (Klingon debacle notwithstanding), the Kirk who is in this timeline presently on the Farragut (I think) is a more serious, intellectual and regulation-following person. I think they could probably have an arc where the Farragut and the Enterprise are on the same mission or something and cast someone who can play the "stack of books with legs" version of Kirk.

[jgsugden]

And they've established they can tell 10 years of stories before Kirk shows up - and I do not think we've even seen Kirk's first days aboard the vessel, have we?  They could have Kirk on the last couple seasons of a 12 year show.

The one place we have seen Kirk's first days on the enterprise demonstrates why this wouldn't be a great idea outside of wacky what if or mirror universe episodes.

I'm just happy for more spock.

Those movies, outside ruining the end of Spock, can be ignored at this point.

Our three Spocks are all very different.  I think the Kirks can be as well and we'd survive.  You can put a hint of Shatner into a younger Kirk - a subtle nod to his over the top style - and be fine with it.  Regardless, I'd be shocked if the series (if successful) did not slowly show the change to TOS for the Enterprise and end with Kirk taking command after Pike's accident. 

[jgsugden]

Out of curiosity - If they announced that Season 2 of Picard was going to feature him going to DS9 and would pick up some threads of that show - would you be excited?  Curious?  Worried?