The following contains moderate spoilers for the first three episodes of “Star Trek: Picard” season two, but not much more than what was seen in earlier teasers and trailers.
Picard’s first season was controversial to say the least. Many fans were happy to see old friends again; others have not been so excited about the grim direction of Starfleet and the Federation in the 1920s since we last saw their 24th-century incarnations. However, we looked at how technology is evolving, we met some intriguing new characters and in the end at least everything seemed to be fixed.
This is the brighter world where the second season of Picard begins, with synthetic creatures that are already legal – which is convenient, given that at the end of last season, Jean-Luc Picard was transferred to the body of an android. This made me and a large part of the audience wonder if and how this will affect future stories. The answer came pretty quickly in season two, now with new showrunner Terry Matalas at the helm. Actually it does not matter. It is not clear who knows and who does not know, but Jean-Luc Picard is still subject to the ravages of old age, while enjoying all the legal protections he would have as a creature of flesh and blood (he still owns a vineyard, from one side). Even Q, when he inevitably appears, treats Picard as the same being he always has been.
CBS
Viewers may be familiar with the thought experiment “Theseus’ Ship”, recently raised in the final of last year’s WandaVision. Basically, the idea is that if you slowly replace parts of a ship over time and then assemble the old parts into another ship, which one is the original ship? In Picard, they suggest that the essence of the human being is his intelligence, so the real Jean-Luc Picard is the synthetic being walking on Earth right now. The problem with this, though, is that Star Trek hasn’t always worked that way. While characters like Miles O’Brien and Harry Kim have been replaced by duplicate versions of themselves, Thomas Riker has certainly not been given the same kindness. Duplicates only seem acceptable when they replace someone we have otherwise lost.
In interviews with the press, even Patrick Stewart admitted that the problem with the synthetic body was a “real mess.” Fortunately, the show intelligently passes him by. At least a year and a half have passed since the events of the first season, which means that we are now in the 25th century. Picard returned home and took over as Chancellor of the Starfleet Academy. Both Rios and Rafi returned to the Navy, and even Elner now attends school as a cadet (as the first full-blooded Romulan at the Academy). This is the beautiful bright future we’ve always loved to see in Star Trek, complete with amazing costume design and fun updated technology. Last season, I noted how nice it was to see the sequel to the plot of “Synthetic Creature” that went through The Next Generation, and the deployment of all the characters in new positions leaves much room for exploring other aspects of technology and society in the 25th century.
CBS
However, Picard did not become a happy show overnight. A new crisis quickly arose, with the rupture in the subspace requiring Picard’s attention and putting the entire fleet at risk. This is where Q intervenes, transferring Picard and his countrymen to a changed timeline, where the genocidal Confederacy rules the Alpha Quadrant with an iron fist. This is not the Mirror Universe we are familiar with from previous shows such as the original series, Deep Space Nine and Discovery. In this version, the Earth is still very responsible after destroying many species with Borg next on its list.
In the first three episodes, it is not entirely clear how this alternate reality was created or why Q chose the La Sirena team over one of Picard’s friends from Enterprise-D. But in fact, it’s just a tool that allows the show to engage with another Star Trek: time travel. Instead of creating some new device or strange spatial phenomenon that sends the crew back in time, their method of passing through the centuries returns to the method observed in the original series, later repeated in The Voyage Home. The ship revolves around the sun, a technique that requires precise calculations that only someone like Spock can provide … or the Queen of Borg, in this case. It’s not necessarily scientifically accurate, but it’s a nice callback for a franchise spanning more than 60 years, especially when fans tend to try to compare any discrepancy with their own theories instead of just embracing chaos.
CBS
And chaos awaits the crew as they glide into a fair 2024, just one step ahead of our time, so there is very little difference in technology to worry about. Rafi and Seven are horrified by the poverty shown in 20th-century Los Angeles, which shows why the show’s writers chose this year instead of 2022 or 2023: 2024 is the date of the famous “Bel Riots”, as seen in Deep Space Nine’s “Past Time.”
At this point, poor and impoverished residents of San Francisco’s Snctuary Districts responded to the humiliating conditions in which they were forced to live, eventually causing higher-level change that would eventually lead to the Federation. which we all know and love. It remains to be seen whether Picard and friends will play a role in these key events, but the third episode hints at Rios’s sense of injustice as an undocumented Latin American – although undocumented for reasons of time travel, not immigration.
In general, the beginning of Picard plays like a drum with the biggest hits: we are treated to the return of classic bad guys like Q and Borg, other characters are mentioned in passing for some fun Easter eggs, and episodes of time travel from Star Trek are usually a blast. so I hope this will be a good plot. In a sense, this is a warm blanket of nostalgia to soothe the audience after the mess of the first season. But if you were really hoping to explore the galaxy and see more than the 25th century, the second season seems to be another disappointment.
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