Star Trek: Picard

About four years ago, I was quite happy to hear about a new Star Trek series: Discovery, after a 10+ year break from the former, Enterprise. However, I turned unhappy only after 5 episodes - that's the amount I beared watching, given the senseless development and the bunch of cliches typical to the latest years trend to turn pretty much each production into a manifest for current social issues (but it mainly was the lack of sense). That's why I didn't expect much last year from the release of Star Trek: Picard. Now, I finally decided to give it a chance...

I'll try to be brief - the first season is too after all. You can feel the same trend as above, but here is kept within some decent limits in comparison to the SciFi contents, which is probably the main reason to choose watching Star Trek (unlike for instance the latest nominees list for Oscar best picture). The subject revolves around a secret plot of exterminating an entire "race" of androids, starting from a pair of twins seemingly spawned from the "genes" of Data, a familiar character for anybody old enough to know about "The Next Generation", or the Star Trek movies of the 90s. Actually the current series seems to be a tribute for the TNG fans, bringing back to screen many of the original crew members on that Enterprise, besides obviously Patrick Steward, acting again as Picard, ready to come back from retirement for a last mission. Add to that also Seven-of-Nine from Star Trek Voyager, and we have a clear homage to the ST period before year 2000.

To move also a bit beyond the above, what ST: Picard tries, is probably to make the chronological step to the next Next Generation. We have a new crew, this time with a longer mission, about 10 episodes time, but, spoiler alert - apparently ready to take new steps to "where no one has gone before" in the next season. Somehow this blending between the old and new formula works this time, mostly because the new cast, or actually the characters seem much more... "Star Trek" then the Discovery attempt (just looking at the new ship captain, a guy with multiple virtual clones as crew members it's already enough to catch your attention). Another good point about ST: Picard is that the writers of the first season seemed to know from start how the whole thing should end, which brings a certain coherence in the action development, not like other cases where it's obvious that the script struggles to move on by adding new random stuff from episode to episode, just to make it somehow to the end. Anyway, there are parts here too that are far fetched, but still safely far from ridiculous. In any case, after watching "The Expanse" it became quite hard for me to accept the attention (or lack of it) given to details in other SciFi series, so probably I'm not objective enough.

Overall, ST: Picard is not a masterpiece, but it's quite refreshing in the Star Trek universe, despite the contradiction with recycling old characters. As production value, it has enough budget to satisfy the most exigent expectations. And also the nicest score I've heard in a series for quite a while (not that I'm watching too many). Hopefully it won't go bad during season 2... Fingers crossed.