Return and Renewal: Star Trek-Picard (2 of 3) Djoymi Baker & Roberta Pearson
/Pearson
What did you think about the first episode of Picard,, Djoymi?
Baker
I hadn’t read those transmedia stories before seeing it, and I avoided the online news around it because I wanted to go in fresh. The location at Château Picard for me really harked back to the fourth season TNG episode “Family”, when Picard returns home to recover from being assimilated by the Borg, the alien cyborg collective. There’s a narrative arc in that episode that I think we see again at the start of Picard. In “Family”, Picard has lost his way, he’s not the man he thought he was. Because of his trauma, Picard is initially inclined to stay home in France. By the end of “Family,” he realises that his true home is space. This is mirrored in the beginning of Picard. There are different reasons why he feels disenfranchised from that world or why he’s distressed, but it’s that same kind of trajectory from a Picard who has withdrawn from the world in many respects, to one who re-enters it, or is somewhat dragged into it in this case.
Pearson
I hadn't thought of that. Then again, it also shows us how much he’s changed. He’s not wrestling with his brother in the vineyard as he did in “Family”. Early in the season, in the action sequences it’s Laris, Zhaban and Dahj who needs to protect Picard. It’s analogous to seeing your parents ageing. Your parents are meant to protect you, and then they get older and suddenly it’s reversed. Picard, who has been a really commanding and authoritative figure who protected others, now needs to be looked after, although of course he resents that.
Picard fights his brother Robert (Jeremy Kemp) in TNG’s “Family,”
Baker
There’s that wonderful part in one of the action sequences in Picard when he has to stop – along the lines of ‘Yes, I know we’re in deadly danger, but I just need a moment to catch my breath. I’ll be with you as soon as I can!’
Pearson
The actor himself is 79, and he’s in great shape for his age, but even so he is an old man. The Romulans are effectively his caretakers, they fuss over him. He’s now an enfeebled patriarch.
Baker
I know that some fans felt that his falling out with Starfleet combined with an isolationist Federation wasn't the Utopian future that Gene Roddenberry had imagined, and yet the trajectory of the first season of Picard is to get us to that final episode by which stage Picard has come back to the values he believes in. That there is still hope for that future.
Pearson
Isn't it interesting the way that the return to values inadvertently mirrors our current crisis? I don’t know about there in Australia, but certainly in the UK, in the context of COVID-19 there’s been a lot of talk about the welfare state, the NHS, and the BBC, which are all seen as being absolutely central to dealing with the crisis. There’s a master narrative that’s going on about returning to earlier values after the crisis is resolved. I know that Picard was made before COVID-19, but Patrick Stewart himself was very anti-Brexit. The rescuing of the Romulans due to the responsibility that strong and wealthy states or interplanetary federations have to migrants and refugees is an argument against being isolationist. This I think would very much have appealed to Stewart and may have helped to bring him back into the Trek fold. The Brexit resonance is deliberate, the COVID-19 resonance not deliberate but very telling now.
Coming back to fans who object to the depiction of the Federation in Picard, have they not watched Deep Space Nine (1993-1999)? Because I was such a huge TNG fan, I was one of those people who undervalued DS9 at the time of its original broadcast. I’ve recently re-watched the entire series and now realise why some fans make a claim for it as the best Trek ever. I still retain my allegiance to TNG but now very much admire DS9. My admiration stems in part from the fact that it broke with Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the future and critiqued the abandoning of the Federation’s and Starfleet’s values in the desperate bid to win the Dominion War. Even Captain Sisko has to let go of his principles. That being said, even TNG critiqued the Federation in the episode in which the Native American population on Dorvan V needs to be relocated due to the Federation agreement with the Cardassians. And of course, the origin of the Maquis who resist the Cardassian treaty is in TNG. So, fans who think that Discovery and Picard aren’t ‘true’ Trek need to reacquaint themselves with DS9 and TNG.
Baker
Some of the fan online debates about whether or not Picard is really Star Trek, come back to what you were saying that each new iteration is trying to maintain a fan base but at the same time make it Star Trek for a new generation. In Marketing the Myth of Star Trek, I talk about the way that J.J. Abrams’ 2009 feature film was marketed as “Not your father’s Star Trek”. (Just as an aside, I don’t know where mothers who watched Star Trek went in that). When we look at way in which Picard is put together, we can see the shift in industry trends. I know that DS9 in later seasons had a very serialised structure, but it’s still different to the shorter season streaming series structure. Picard has 10 episodes that the cast and crew discuss as being a “10-hour movie”, despite the weekly episode drop. We see that kind of comparison made again and again in the streaming era. That necessarily changes the dynamic.
I felt there was a lot of exposition, and perhaps because it was using the 10-hour-movie logic, often the pacing seemed off. Sometimes when the pace slowed down it was for reasons that as a nostalgic fan I appreciated, such as dropping in on old friends. I have no idea, though, how those episodes would have gone across for a new audience member. Why are we spending a whole episode…
Pearson
… making pizza!
Baker
Exactly!
Pearson
I absolutely agree with you and I think it was very interesting, particularly that episode, “Nepenthe”, when he drops in on Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Deanna Troi (Martina Sirtis) and their daughter Kestra (Lulu Wilson). Because my complaint about both Discovery and Picard is so much plot, so little time. The first episode of Picard is all about heavy chunks of exposition being dropped in. I remember fans commenting on that at the time, that it was quite slow, and when was the story actually going to start? In the first few episodes they set up so many multiple plot points they can’t resolve them at the end. Yet while it’s crammed full of plot, the narrative essentially pauses for a whole episode when Picard visits Riker and Troi. The episode gives the audience their backstory since their marriage and since Nemesis. But the death of their son Thad, who suffered from an illness that required them to move to the isolated planet, is not connected to the central narrative. An entire episode out of a 10-episode series is devoted to catching up on beloved characters, but could perhaps have been better used to forward the narrative, resolve some plot points and set up others. Riker, of course, does return in the final episode somewhat improbably as the commodore of the Federation fleet, when he is only a captain. Nonetheless, I loved the episode because of my nostalgic desires, and it delivered pleasure not pain. It was lovely to see the trio reunited.
Going back to the differences between TV2 and TV4, the former had longer seasons. And while most shows of the period had about twenty four episodes, the Star Trek series had twenty six. When we interviewed Brannon Braga for our book, he complained about that, saying that it put a heavy burden on the writers. But with twenty six episodes a year over a seven-season run, both characters and a sense of the everyday could be fully developed. One of my favourite TNG episodes is the fourth season “Data’s Day”, which as the title indicates does focus in part on the everyday lives of the Enterprise crew. While the A plot line focuses on some typical Romulan skulduggery, the B plot concerns Data’s preparations for O’Brien and Keiko’s wedding. It’s Dr Crusher teaching Data to tap dance that I remember, not the android’s solving of the supposed death of a Vulcan ambassador. And even though DS9 did become intensely serialised in its last season, across its seven seasons it had many episodes that were about the characters and their everyday lives on the station. One of my favourite episodes is when Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton) is trying to get his father Benjamin (Avery Brooks) back from an alternate spatio-temporal continuum in the fourth season “The Visitor”. It’s all about the depth of feeling between those two characters.
By contrast, the 10 episodes of the Discovery and Picard series leave very little time for character development or for exploring the relationships between characters. That’s one reason for the old fans’ disappointment in with Discovery, the sense that it wasn’t really Star Trek. There seemed to be none of the affectionate interaction between characters the TV2 series had accustomed us to. That’s why fans reacted so well to the Picard pizza episode. The new characters weren’t well developed and many of their interactions seemed to be hostile and aggressive, so it was a relief to see the old friends reunited.
Baker
I guess it comes back to that idea of feeling like you are living with characters and sharing their temporality with them. That sensation is more aligned with that larger series format when you have 26 episodes. For Picard, it’s working very hard to try to make us care about these new characters that are going to be on La Sirena moving forwards. Lots of backstory, but I couldn’t care less about Elnor (Evan Evagora). Even if I did, having set up this poignant history between Elnor and Picard, they then leave him in the Borg cube, and he seems inconsequential. There seems to be a lot of exposition set up for season two, in that Elnor doesn’t really have a function in season one.
Pearson
I have to get this on the record, Elnor seems like he’s drifted into Picard from the wrong franchise. He is straight out of The Lord of the Rings, with his long hair and his sword and even his name. He’s an elf! And the episode establishing Elnor and Picard’s backstory seems entirely wasted. Why do we need to know about a sect of warrior female Romulan nuns who aside from Elnor do not appear again? Like the pizza episode it might have been better used to advance the narrative, but as I’ve said the pizza episode at least delivers pleasant nostalgia while the Elnor episode simply introduces a very annoying character who seems to have no narrative function. I think he is the Wesley of Picard, the character the fans will love to hate. And poor Seven of Nine, getting lumbered with him on the Borg cube, while the action takes place elsewhere. She must find him very annoying!
But to be fair to the producers and the dilemma they face of attracting new fans and appeasing old ones, the new, younger characters such as Elnor have probably been included to appeal to a younger demographic. And many in that young demographic are accustomed to long haired sword-wielding heroes. And I suppose that the Picard/Elnor relationship picks up on a long running theme from TNG concerning Picard’s regrets at having chosen Starfleet and his career over family life, so there is at least that resonance with the character’s backstory.
Elrond or Elnor?
Baker
I do want to talk about the ex-Borg (or XB as they’re called here) Seven of Nine, because I did love what they did with that character as a whole.
She no longer has the shiny skin-tight suit she wore in Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) that caused controversy on and off the set. Instead, it’s replaced with earthy-toned street wear with an aesthetic of “natural minimalism”. (Stewart confesses he had no idea about the catsuit, which means that he didn’t watch Voyager!) Seven’s reimagining as a vigilante character who roams the lawless realms of space abandoned by the Federation is one of the more finely drawn of the series, I think.
Seven of Nine
I feel that the audience is encouraged to share Seven’s satisfaction in killing Narissa (Peyton List), one of the antagonists of the series. But following on from this, there’s a lovely scene in the final episode between Seven and Rios (Santiago Cabrera), when Seven reflects that she had gone against her promise to “never again kill somebody just because it's what they deserve, just because it feels wrong for them to still be alive”. Seven is rightly angered by the Federation’s hypocrisy but here is calling herself out as well, and the audience with her.
I didn’t love the way Seven is introduced to Picard in episode four, “Absolute Candor”, in that I think it reveals a persistent gender bias in both the early twenty-first and late twenty-fourth centuries.
When Picard’s hired ship, La Sirena, comes under attack from a Bird of Prey, an unknown, beaten-up little space craft comes to their rescue with some admirable manoeuvres. The pilot hails them:
Rios: Open a channel, put him on
Raffi: He’s asking permission to beam over. His ship’s breaking up… his shields are failing
Picard: Raffi, beam him in directly here.
Rios: Do it…
Raffi: Got him.
[Seven beams aboard].
Picard: Seven of Nine!
Seven: You owe me a ship, Picard.
Seven promptly collapses, and her tag line then appears all over the internet. It’s a terrific line.
I think the use of the masculine personal pronouns he/him before Seven appears is supposed to be funny somehow, because they’re all making this assumption it’s a male pilot, but to me that was just a cheap shot, lazy casual sexism. It’s out of place in both the contemporary and futuristic centuries. Why would so many of the crew members make the assumption that the “magnificent pilot” (to use Rios’ words) is male? Why would male pronouns be the automatic linguistic default, either among characters or the supposedly “universal” translator (which may or may not be in operation here given that several languages are used)?
At the end of the final episode, Seven appears to have joined the crew of La Sirena, inexplicably leaving the XBs. For a series so weighty in exposition, this seems like a jump that hopefully will get explained in season two.
Similarly, Seven’s intertwining hands with Raffi feels like rushed queer baiting, even though Voyager producer Jeri Taylor and fans had been advocating for Seven to be queer for years. If there’s going to be an attraction there, I want to see it on screen.
Having said all that, I really want to spend more time with the new Seven.
Pearson
I wanted a spin off about Seven as a Fenris Ranger although I will settle for her being part of Picard’s new crew. It will be interesting to see how the relationship between her and Picard progresses. They, along with poor Hugh, are one of the very few people who have been successfully reclaimed from the Borg collective. In one episode the two bond over their experience revealing that neither has ever felt fully human again. Of all the new crew she’s my favourite precisely because she is a returning character and one whom we got to know very well during the course of four seasons in Voyager. I hope that Picard might reveal a little more about her experiences between returning to Earth and rescuing La Sirena. Jeri Ryan is a really terrific actor and I must say with envy that she still looks great at 52 even if she has been liberated from the catsuit.
Baker
I have to say this show is doing a great job with hot middle-aged women and I love that.
Djoymi Baker is Lecturer in Cinema Studies at RMIT University, Australia. With a background in the television industry, she writes on topics such as streaming, genre studies, fandom, and myth in popular culture. Djoymi is the author of To Boldly Go: Marketing the Myth of Star Trek (2018) and the co-author of The Encyclopedia of Epic Films (2014). Her current research examines children’s television and intergenerational spectatorship.
Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the co-author of Star Trek and American Television (2014), editor of Reading Lost: Perspectives on a hit television show (2009) and the co-editor of several titles including Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Exploring Screen Narratives (2015), A Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory (2014) and Cult Television (2004).
