Star Trek: Picard

Now is the time to regret not spending more of the past years thinking about Star Trek. The renaissance of always-popular franchise on Netflix is followed with a bold, ambitious series that was good enough to lure Patrick Stewart back to the role of Jean-Luc Picard. The new Amazon series has made much of Picard and his dog, Number One (Deniro the Dog), living in retirement at the family vineyard which will ring a bell if you watched The Next Generation back in the day.

Stewart is back, so Picard must have a reason to stop tending the vines… The lavish futuristic looking series moves between this rural idyll and the bustle of ‘Greater San Francisco' where an abduction and murder sends a mysterious young woman looking for the only man she knows will help: Admiral Jean-Luc Picard.

Picard has turned his back on Starfleet and the politics around this event sound so current. He doesn’t believe that Starfleet is Starfleet anymore—almost as if it’s not he that left, it’s them. The power of a man whose moral centre and whose self-belief is big enough to say such things and have an impact. Patrick Stewart has the power to carry it off because he is a trained theatre actor whose face and posture is full of gravitas, and the character is part of our culture now because Gene Roddenberry’s original vision has proved itself to be adaptable. 

From Episode 1 it’s not possible to tell where the series is going, but there are so many references to other Star Trek episodes and some of the films. Like the rebooted film series, much care has been taken but in this case new characters take on existing ones, and hopefully this will run for a few seasons. Visually it’s mostly Earth-bound at the moment, and the imagined future is beautifully rendered urban organised chaos. There are some sequences off of Earth which harken back to an earlier Star Trek storyline. 

Aside from Stewart and a cameo from Brent Spiner, the stand-out cast member is Alison Pill. She is a charming presence, playing a scientist here with her usual perky humour and well-delivered sarcasm. Dahj, the woman who seeks out Picard is played by young British actress Isa Briones: she’s intense and physically up to the pretty bad-ass role.

In a difficult world it’s good to have new Star Trek. It’s good to know that there’s stories about how the right person—the right people—are still standing there making sure that nobody oversteps. There’s a media interview at the beginning of this episode, where Picard is questioned by someone who clearly isn’t up to the job of holding anyone to account, and the utopian vision of Star Trek lives on again in Jean-Luc Picard’s moral courage. I expect his great age will be an internal enemy, among what look to be some powerful adversaries and amoral characters; I expect a different type of Star Trek written for our times now. That is what Star Trek always does. I never expected to see Picard again on screen, and I am very happy with Episode One.

More about the dog: https://heavy.com/entertainment/2020/01/picard-dog-breed/