Remembrance
Picard offers us something new in its lack of newness. To one extent or another, Voyager, Enterprise, and Discovery are all about looking backward. Picard is something different, though: a sequel series.
As such, a dialogue with what has gone before is inevitable. The question that raises, though, is whether that conversation actually gets us anywhere.
Picard Hit Hard
Picard is a show concerned with legacy; that of the title character, that of his departed friend Data, and that of both the show and film series that chronicled their adventures. Specifically, it's the fear that legacy is all that's left, with irrelevance just the quietest form of death. If a once-lauded hero spouts off on live television, and literally no-one gives a shit, then did he make a sound?
If we accept that Picard was worth creating at all (a question we'll return to more than once, I've no doubt), it's hard to see how that could have been fully escaped. As I covered in my essay on The Motion Picture (available in the first IDFC book, if you're wondering), it would be odd if returning to characters over a decade after their heyday didn't involve awkward questions about why we'd come back to them at all. Indeed, this was such a feature of Kirk's post-show life that it stretched over four films [1], before seemingly being wrapped up in the final moments of The Voyage Home.
It emerged again in the final TOS film, though, mostly so it could be deconstructed. The question changed from whether Kirk could regain the captain's chair, to what the success of that quest implied for Starfleet as a whole. Would he be able to let go the lessons learned in a darker past? Or would he cling to them so tightly, he'd stop the entire Federation from sailing into a brighter future?
Picard inverts this, picking up fourteen years after Jean Luc tried - and failed - to act as an anchor to stop everything from tumbling downhill. Where Kirk was asked whether he could let go of his mistrust to help an old enemy survive a civilisation-threatening disaster, Picard has to decide how to respond to wanting to help in a similar situation, only to find no-one else with power feels the same way.
Picard's dilemma is a much darker one than Kirk's. Perhaps that's unsurprising, considering the difference in historical contexts. Certainly, Picard - the first Trek show to be conceived after Trump beat Clinton - feels like it belongs perfectly in a political era in which the only choices we're allowed is endless mortifying compromise with amoral bullies, or actual literal fucking fascism. What do you do when you realise the people you give your all to are just going to stand by and let things collapse? Do you stay and fight, hoping to use your position within the system to reverse the damage, or at least mitigate it? Or do you jump out of the wagon, and try to slow the careen downhill by pushing from the outside?
It's at least implied here that Picard made completely the wrong call. He resigned immediately upon the reversal of the decision to help in the evacuation of the Romulan home system, only to find himself left with no leverage when an entire category of life is declared illegal. Having failed to save Data, he then fails to save the very idea that Data should have been allowed to live.
Faced with these multiple defeats Picard doesn't even try to push back against the descent, choosing to remove himself almost entirely from society. This is a gutsy move from a show founded on the assumption that people will want to know what Picard got up to after Nemesis. This is close to the lowest ebb we've seen Jean Luc at. He's stewing in guilt and grief, truly alive only in the comforting dreams where he still commands the Enterprise-D, and can play poker with Data (while, in perfect dream logic, Data wears the uniform he died in, and which was never worn aboard the D). The most he's managed since retiring is a series of history books apparently aimed as passive-aggressive swipes at Starfleet, like a singer-songwriter releasing endless bitter songs about unnamed exes.
And it's made him miserable. Picard used to command the Federation flagship; these days even his dog won't listen to him. Even the dreams he claims are better than reality are poisoned, with him losing everything he has because his opponent (here both the later stages of his Starfleet career, and the memory of his dear departed friend) won't "behave like civilised men", and hits him with an unbeatable hand from a rigged deck. He's so desperate for any kind of victory that he claims his outburst in a television interview - two decades too late for it to do any good - constitutes some kind of contribution to his life's work. "There's no legacy so rich as honesty", he insists, though only to his dog, who can't argue. Really, though, the most honest thing he says in the entire episode is that all he's been doing is waiting to die.
Bad News
That's our set-up, then. It's inescapable where we're going, here: this will be a story about redemption. When Zhaban asks Picard to be the captain "they" remember in his imminent interview, he's referring to the show's audience just as much as viewers of the Federation Network News. In both senses, Jean Luc fails to the job done. Even more than Dahj's activation, Picard's clash with the unnamed FNN interviewer is where the story really gets going, but it's also where things start to go wrong.
One of the most frustrating aspects of Picard, across all three seasons, is how little interest it has about anything that's happening or has happened outside Jean Luc's direct influence or experience. To some extent, this is much more my problem than the show's. I'd always been keen to see where the Alpha Quadrant ended up post-Deep Space Nine. In nineteen years, all I'd got along those lines was the occasional glimpse courtesy of the last two seasons of Voyager, and then Nemesis.
Picard was the first opportunity in over twenty years to be able to pick up that story. How had the UFP and Klingon Empire dealt with the colossal loss of life and materiel over three years of interstellar conflict? What was post-war life like for Cardassians, and what was their relationship to their former (current?) Dominion masters? How had the Romulans leveraged their comparatively undented power, as they took full advantage of three of their largest competitors being in various stages of convalescence or collapse?
Picard has precisely zero interest in any of that. It concerns itself with just three post-Nemesis events - the evacuation of the Romulan system, the synthetic attack on Mars, and Picard's resignation from Starfleet. Each of these are barely explored beyond the broadcast-as-exposition-dump, and not at all outside of how they affected Picard himself.
And look. The decision not to offer a potted history of the last twenty years of fictional occurrences isn't objectively wrong. Indeed, insisting the show should fill the gaps in the timeline is just one more way for fans to demand the franchise prioritise its past over its present (this is clearly a huge problem with Picard itself, actually, but we'll come to that).
It's also worth noting that TNG was always far less interested in the wider picture than was its first spin-off. The Enterprise-D didn't always fly clear of the affairs of state, but these were infrequent visits to unfamiliar stars. It was still rarer that such stories spent much time considering situations outside the direct perception of at least one of its characters.
Even so, though, there's something remarkably crass in framing the destruction of (at least) two inhabited planets, with a death toll of around one billion, if not more, as a crisis for someone nowhere near any of it. The interviewer, and through her Picard itself, considers this colossal stellar tragedy exclusively in terms of its effect upon a white guy's career. At least when they did something similar with Wolf 359 (as apparently they're just going to continue doing ad nauseum), Picard was present, and in some sense even responsible. This is just making a tragedy all about the feelings of the people who watched footage of it on TV.
Also: what the Romulan fleet up to during all this? Thinking this needed an answer isn't nitpicking; it's an awareness of dramaturgy. If you want to set up a situation in which the Federation's "oldest enemies" are simultaneously helpless charity cases and sending out elite kill teams across the galaxy, and you're doing it all with your source show's most common antagonists, you need to actually sketch out the dimensions of what's been going on.
Sure, we can do this ourselves, if we like. Maybe the Romulan fleet was badly mauled in whatever followed the assassination of their entire Senate, and the brief reign of Shinzon. Or perhaps those nine hundred million people were a tiny proportion of the home system's population, and also people the Romulan government were actually quietly happy to leave to die (this would certainly explain why Starfleet didn't fear meaningful reprisals from deciding all those people would simply just have to burn). We can make it work, is what I'm saying. The absence probably doesn't reach the level of the dreaded, unforgiveable "plot hole", those lapses of logic lazy critics count up each episode, hoping to pass their tally off as analysis. It's still odd no-one realised "we let nearly a billion Romulans die" was an extremely heavy plot beat, and so needed placing carefully into the narrative to make sure it didn't rip a hole clean through it.
One can counter all this by noting how this is all being revealed in an interview which is a) specifically centered on Picard, and b) being conducted by a journalist given exclusive access to the home and thoughts of a Federation hero. Of course she doesn't spend any time on the broader picture; her goal is to get as much out of Picard as she can before his lawyers pull the plug over breach of agreement [2]. Falling back on the interviewer's approach doesn't really help matters, though, because it highlights the other major stumbling block in the scene: a 24th century journalist who's not just willing to lie about their intentions in order to secure an interview, but feels perfectly comfortable being nakedly racist on camera.
And yes, that's what we get here. There's no other honest way to describe the suggestion that the degree to which nine hundred million lives are worth saving varies according to the attitudes (whether historical or current) of the government those people live under [3]. As with Starfleet's descent, we might fairly ask why no explanation is given as to how Earth has been brought so low this kind of sentiment is publicly acceptable. During the TNG era, there was a consensus that all life was sacred, and that working with former or even current enemies to save lives was always the right call. What could possibly have happened in twenty years or so to delude society into believing some people are less deserving of not being left to burn alive than others?
In truth, though, I'm not particularly interested in how Starfleet specifically and the Federation in general has decided racism needed to make a comeback (and the answer is almost certainly "the Dominion War"). The justifications for the society-wide heel-turn concern me less than the simple fact that it's a terrible call. It's a slap in the face to everyone who enjoyed Trek in the first place because of its optimism about the future. Even worse, it's just a really boring set-up. Kirk having to prove himself worthy of the future is a story. The future no longer proving itself worth of Picard is the Principal Skinner meme played straight, and with phasers.
It's not even as though the episode actually makes Picard out to be all that much better than the people who are pissing him off. How well does he come off here, really? How many cookies will he want replicated for bailing from the broadcast? He doesn't even bother picking the interviewer up on her casual racism, apparently considering her ignorance of Dunkirk as a bigger issue than her eagerness to counterpoint the idea that point nine billion people cooking to death is bad. It's hard to believe this is what Zhaban had in mind when he asked Picard to be the captain they remember. Nor should it pass unnoticed the show sees no reason to show Laris and Zhaban's response to the broadcast. Doubtless they discussed it, but they'd have done it out of Picard's hearing (Zhaban wants to keep his job, as he says [4]), and so the show dismisses it as irrelevant.
A Spectre Is Haunting Europe
The only exception to the solipsism is Dahj (and Soji, though in this episode she's not so much a character as a cliffhanger with a job description). To begin with, anyway. It's notable that, until the episode's conclusion, Dahj's introduction scene is the only one to neither feature nor mention Picard as a character (he does show up as a vision at the very end). Her mother and her own newly-rewired brain both push her to seek Jean Luc out, but the episode does at least recognise she has (or had) some existence outside of Picard's orbit.
This isn't nothing, sure. It also isn't very much. Isa Briones does the best she can with such thin material, but after sixty seconds of playing happy, she's not asked to do anything but ricochet between traumatised and confused, with brief detours into bad-ass. Every choice made with her between her activation and death is the most obvious one possible. No attempt is made to present her as a person; she's just one more clue to chew over, more talkative than Data's oil paintings, but functionally indistinguishable from them. Yes, she's almost the only character here not defined in terms of how to they relate to Picard, but she's defined by Picard in terms of how she relates to Data. It's extremely dispiriting watching Dahj unspooling over the nightmare she's been pitched into, while Picard keeps talking about how important he hopes she'll prove to him. "You're telling me I'm not real!" she says at one point, close to tears. "No I'm not", he responds, "If you are who I think you are, then you are dear to me in ways you can't understand". As that could possibly matter to her right now. As though the renewed hopes of a man she's just met should counteract the total destruction of those she had herself. To put it in real-life terms, Dahj is struggling to cope with the revelation she was adopted, and Picard's response is to talk about how awesome her biological father was, and how stoked he is that he gets to hang with a part of that legacy.
But then, Dahj isn't really a person to Picard, or to Picard. To Jean-Luc himself, Dahj is an opportunity. Through her he can hope (almost certainly subconsciously at this point, hence the second Data dream) both to feel part of his long-gone friend still lives, and to end the law that dishonours that friend's memory [5]. That's a lot to put on someone who's never even heard of Lieutenant Commander Data, and whose first thought when hearing the word android is the attack on Mars (oh, and who just saw her boyfriend casually murdered, and is on the run, and has developed super-powers, and...). It's broadly understandable as a choice, though, as part of selling how broken Picard was by his final years in Starfleet, and offering a sense of what it might take to put him back together again.
Where things go wrong is how totally the episode itself dismisses Dahj's life. The show is no less blinkered than the man. Dahj is nothing but a puzzle box, one to be casually smashed to provide cheap drama and a second action scene [6]. Her death - the agonising, terrifying final moments of a woman torn from everything she knew and loved - is briefly used as a way to galvanise Jean Luc into action, but by the time he's at the Daystrom Institute, he talks about having tea with her as though that were the most dramatic their short acquaintance ever got. Like the milk in the fridge matters more than the burned body. Because who cares, right? She's played her part to move the story on. Best we all forget her and move on to her twin sister (why the synths that are impossible to make are always impossibly made in pairs being one more idea thrown in without explanation, or justification).
Which means it isn't just Starfleet or the wider Federation that has forgotten compassion. Picard has precisely the same problem. It's easy to care about people in the present, right up until you have to let go of the past. What are living strangers, compared to the ghosts of dead friends?
It's all unlovely, and unsatisfying. An inversion of everything TNG stood for, Everything here is broken; a shattered mirror universe in which everyone is too tired to even make being unpleasant fun. And all that remains is the hope that there is hope. That the story knows what it needs to become. The flame of enlightenment that once warmed the Federation has guttered and died, snuffed out by years of bloody war and bloody loss. It must be lit anew. And who better than Picard to carry the torch, or better yet, to pass it on, as it was once passed to him?
Because surely that's where we have to be going with this.
Right?
Ordering:
1. Emissary
4. Broken Bow
6. Remembrance
7. Caretaker
8. The Man Trap
[1] It's least obviously present in Search For Spock, but it exists in the film's negative space. Kirk is given hope he might recover the one thing more important to Kirk than his career, and asked whether he's prepared to destroy that career as the price of keeping the hope alive.
[2] Even I don't believe the show should have gone into how one can enforce agreements about off-limits topics for interviews in a society which has no concept of money. I will confess though to be extremely curious about how that could possibly work.
[3] Free Palestine.
[4] This is a line that stings a little in retrospect, given the character's unceremonious off-screen death. I don't know that Jamie McShane was dropped so the show could turn Laris into a love interest, but I assume it's obvious to every single person who has watched all three seasons of Picard why I'm not giving the showrunners the benefit of the doubt on this.
(Oh, and while we're on the subject? The idea that refugees from Romulus might come to Earth, only to end up as house staff? That is a CHOICE.)
[5] A genuinely smart touch here is that, the day after the disastrous interview, Picard puts on a top and brooch clearly reminiscent of his TNG uniform. That's the legacy/honesty intersection. That same night, his dream of Data has them in the show uniforms, rather than the film ones. Whatever the relevance of Dahj, it's clear the pull of the past is now motivating to action, rather than permitting his brooding.
[6] A competently-done action scene, admittedly, though if we're reduced to praising the fight choreography on Trek, then something has gone badly wrong.
Plus, where does everyone go during the Romulan attack right beside Starfleet Headquarters? The area starts crowded, then becomes more sparse, and then is entirely empty, for no obvious reason but to save the show having to worry about witnesses.
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