Picard is Another Show Where the Ending Doesn't Add Up

Of the three (to present) Star Trek shows exclusive to Paramount+, Picard was the one I was actually least interested in.  I had seen the first three episodes on Pluto TV and wasn't really that impressed with it.  Like the Disney Star Wars movies the visuals are great, but I wish it had been done about ten years earlier when Patrick Stewart was a bit more spry.

And the whole thing revolving around "synths" wasn't really that great.  It's something that had been done already in the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Blade Runner and a bunch of other things.  Especially this idea that you have an android who doesn't know she's an android just like Sean Young in Blade Runner and like the at least 6 characters in Battlestar Galactica who found out they were actually Cylons.

But I was willing to go along for the ride as Picard recruits a ragtag group to go find this android named Soji who was made with technology from Data.  They go out to a Borg cube that was abandoned in Romulan space and is being studied by a combination of former Borgs (xBs), Federation scientists, and Romulans.  Along the way they stop to recruit a Romulan samurai guy who keeps bringing a sword to a disruptor/phaser fight and rescue Dr. Bruce Maddox (a somewhat obscure reference from a second season episode of TNG I wouldn't have remembered if they didn't frequently rerun it on Pluto TV) with help of 7-of-9 who's a "Fenris Ranger" patrolling the Neutral Zone or whatever.

(On a side note like the Star Wars sequels they just throw a bunch of shit at you like the Fenris Rangers that you don't really know about and they're not going to really take a lot of time to explain, so you have to just go along with it.  Romulus had a disaster--I think tying into the Abrams reboot movie--and the Romulan Empire fell apart and now we have Fenris Rangers.  OK, sure, whatever.  Moving on...)

They get to the cube but only Picard can go aboard and with the help of former Borg Hugh (a far less obscure TNG reference) he and Soji beam over to a planet where Riker and Troi are living with a daughter.  They had a son but he died of a disease that could have been cured if androids hadn't been banned--an obvious reference to stem cell research.

Eventually everyone goes to some planet in an 8-star system where there's somehow an Earth-like planet populated by Data's creator's real son and a bunch of androids.  The Romulans have a boner to kill all synthetic life because of some apocalyptic prophecy, which like in the old Greek style they're actually bringing about by trying to kill the synths because then the synths start building a device to signal to some mysterious group of synthetic beings who will apparently come to kill all organic life for them.

Now the annoying thing to me is this fleet of 218 Romulan ships warps in and Picard steals Rios's ship to go and meet them.  Meanwhile Soji is working on this beacon thing and everyone else...is doing absolutely nothing.  They tried to blow up the beacon with a bomb disguised as a soccer ball but that didn't work so they just stand around as Picard buys a couple of minutes with some goofy trick making it seem like there are 200 of  his ship and then Riker and a fleet of Starfleet ships show up.

(Another side note:  how the fuck did Starfleet get like 200 ships together so fast?  In every Star Trek show the Enterprise or whatever ship always had to work on its own because "they were the only ship in the area."  Now all the sudden in less than a day they can amass an armada of like 200 ships and fly out to nowhere to stare down a Romulan fleet?  I guess things really are different in the future.)

In the end Picard talks Soji into destroying the beacon just as some metal Cthulhu thing is starting to come through while the Romulans turn tail and Riker and all the Starfleet ships warp away, not even leaving one behind to do the actual thing they were supposed to, which was start diplomatic relations with the android planet. 

And then Picard dies but they put his memories into an android that looks exactly like his old body and has none of the cool android superpowers.  Um...sure.  Why not?

Anyway, what pissed me off about the ending was the same thing that pissed me off about watching Titans and Doom Patrol on HBO Max:  in the end 75% of the characters didn't actually matter.  Why did we need the Borg cube or 7-of-9 or the Romulan samurai guy?  None of that shit mattered in the end.  It had no bearing on the end at all.

Maybe someone would fansplain that the cube was where Soji met the Romulan guy but what difference did it make if it was a Borg cube or a Starbucks?  None!  But the Borg cube looks a lot spiffier than a Starbucks.

The Borg cube crashes on the android planet and just sits there at the end.  While other than being a set for the catfight between 7-of-9 and the Romulan chick, it contributes nothing to the end.  For all the screen time that cube got, there really was no payoff.

And like I said, in the end you have most of your characters just standing around.  Seven at least killed the Romulan chick but Rios, Raffi, and the samurai guy are just standing around with the androids while Picard and Agnes are momentarily distracting the Romulans until help conveniently comes.

(Fun Fact:  They call the Agnes lady "Aggie" but I already got there first in the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series 10 years earlier.  Suck it, Trekkies!)

What makes this especially irksome is that the show was created and mostly written by Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.  Sloppy storytelling from a hack like me is one thing but you're a Pulitzer-winning author and in the end you have a bunch of people standing around and a bunch of characters and plots that didn't do anything except take up space.

Maybe I'm more sensitive to this because I work in accounting, so for me things need to add up, to balance.  Maybe it's OK for audiences these days if things don't add up as long as it looks cool.  But back in my day, when you got to the final act, you didn't just have most of your characters standing around with their hands in their pockets.

I was going to use Star Wars as an example but then I remembered that Leia and 3PO were just standing around on Yavin during the Death Star attack so maybe that's not the best example.  Empire was better in that while Luke was fighting Vader, Leia, Chewie, Lando, and the droids were trying to escape from the Empire on Cloud City.  And then in Return of the Jedi you had Luke standing around with the Emperor for a while but he eventually fought Vader while Han, Leia, and Chewie were deactivating the shield and Lando was up with the fleet trying to survive and then blow up the Death Star II.

Another good example is The Lion King where Simba fights Scar while Nala and the female lions fight the hyenas, as do Pumbaa, Timon, and Rafiki.  So all your main characters are into it, not just standing around with their snouts up each other's asses.

Or in Endgame you had all the Marvel heroes eventually getting into the fight.  But for some reason you have these shows where they think it's OK to just have people standing around doing nothing.  If they're doing nothing at the end, why did they need to be there at all?  Well, how else could we have strung out 10 episodes?

Really I think this show could have used to be shorter.  If they had jettisoned the filler, it could have been done in 4-5 episodes.  Maybe just a 2-2 1/2-hour movie.

The preview of the second season kinda sucked too.  I mean, going back in "the past" to our present?  Lame.  It's been done so many times in Trek before.  Hello, Star Trek IV anyone?  City on the Edge of Forever?  That one where the original crew randomly goes back to 1968 to set up an unsuccessful spinoff show?  First Contact?  The DS9 two-parter where Sisko inadvertently becomes Gabriel Bell?  The Voyager where they went back to the 90s for some reason?  Enterprise had some episode called "Carpenter Street" or something where they went back in time for some reason.

To me this idea sounds like Paramount (or whoever) decided to cut the budget for season 2 so they're going to the present day to save money on sets and props and things like that.  Maybe in that season the end will actually involve everyone and not just have people standing around with their thumbs up their assholes.

But probably not.