This episode of “Picard” has a Vulcan in cool sunglasses, who non-consensually mind melds, which used to be a thing, and talks about 300 gigabytes of data (hashtag details), a Romulan in a Battlefield Earth fighter jet, discount Han Solo sucking on a cigar, a 23rd century Alexa, the Black woman in the cast calling herself “Auntie,” and… wait, I lost track. I was trying to work up to the stupidest thing in the episode and I lost track. Watching “Picard” is like drowning in stupid. Whatever awards Michael Chabon has won shouldn’t just be taken away from him, they should be shut down and all awards rescinded because those organizations clearly don’t know what they’re talking about.
Though I guess it’s kind of nice Marina Sirtis—who’s still rocking the cleavage they hired her for on “Next Generation” (hashtag feminism)–gives the one of the episode’s only not godawful performances. I mean, Jonathan Frakes is fine but he’s barely in it. Chabon and co-writer Sam Humphrey are profoundly uncomfortable writing Frakes with Patrick Stewart and instead focus on newly revealed Cylon Isa Briones bonding with Frakes and Sirtis’s daughter, Lulu Wilson.
Briones ranges from terrible to just bad, while Wilson’s in the aforementioned godawful category. There’s also some weird 23rd century cultural appropriation going on with the kid, but it’s nothing compared to how the show creates another, older Riker-Troi kid except he’s died off-screen already from a preventable rare disease if only the Federation hadn’t banned the androids and their miraculous android brains.
Also, the whole “Federation freaks out over the androids blowing Mars” thing is really xenophobic for the 23rd century too. It’s like the show forgot there were aliens in “Star Trek” except the Vulcans and Romulans.
Because of course they did because it’s terrible and dumb.
As far as going forward, this episode reveals Stewart is ready to live again because of his new mission, which ought to be a saccharine eye roll but “Picard”’s not even worth that amount of effort.
Who knew the worst thing about an episode from the director of Highlander 4 wouldn’t be the direction.
Oh… last thing—Peyton List is indescribably bad, which is an achievement. It’s “Star Trek” made by people who can’t even imagine “Star Trek” being good.
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