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Picard Is Great Because It Does What Other Star Trek Shows Never Could
Star Trek: Picard is boldly going where very few Star Trek stories have gone before: into the moral weeds with deeply flawed characters. While Star Trek is generally held up as an optimistic, utopian bastion of positivity, Picard has struck a darker, more somber tone. Some fans have even questioned whether the show's cynicism and darkness has crossed a line for the franchise. Some of this has to do with the changing fads of television storytelling, but a not insignificant amount of historical revision is also at play.
Star Trek has always been about the Federation's idealism being tested by forces both outside and within. Star Trek: The Original Series courted controversy on a near weekly basis, telling timely moral parables through the sci-fi lens of starships and aliens. And Star Trek has always involved some level of violence, though the demise of a certain former Star Trek: Voyager crew member on Picard was particularly grisly.
And yet Star Trek: Picard is incredibly conscious of these issues; it is, in fact, the point of the entire series, as it deals with a Federation in decline and the growing sense of isolationism and fear overtaking principles and ideals.
The Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Good
Halfway through its first season, Star Trek: Picard has found its mantra - beware making the perfect the enemy of the good. Everyone aboard the La Sirena is looking for some sort of second chance; Rios (Santiago Cabrera) is trying to get past the tragic events of his Starfleet career, Raffi (Michelle Hurd) is grappling with substance abuse and the dissolution of her family, while Agnes Jurati's (Alison Pill) transgressions are only growing. The former Borg drone Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco) is giving literal second chances to the ex-Borgs liberated from their traumatic assault at the hands of the cybernetic zombies.
Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), in particular, is looking for a second chance. After failing to convince Starfleet to help the Romulan evacuation plan in the wake of the synth attack of Mars, Admiral Picard resigned in anger and shame, stunned that the organization he had devoted his life to could be so blind to the needs of those in peril. But as the series progresses, it's become obvious that Picard's sin wasn't his failure to rally Starfleet; it was the fact he resigned and gave up, so much the institutionalist that it never occurred to him to help the Romulans in some other way, like with Seven Of Nine and the Fenris Rangers. Picard couldn't make the ideal outcome happen, so he stopped trying altogether, which is an omission of arrogance, one of the few credible characters flaws one could attach to Jean-Luc Picard.
As Picard himself said, before Dahj Asha (Isa Briones) crossed his path he was simply waiting to die, having surrendered his career and ambitions. It's a mistake he's had to atone for with his new crewmates, like Raffi and Elnor (Evan Evagora), as well as with the entirety of the Romulan refugee population who largely live in squalor on the outskirts of the galaxy.
Picard Is About The Good In Flawed People In An Imperfect World
Star Trek - and in particular, Jean-Luc Picard's first series, Star Trek: The Next Generation - not only presented a better future; it presented a world that sometimes seemed to be populated by functionally perfect people. Addiction, mental illness, and bigotries of any kind were often loudly proclaimed things of the past on TNG, and judging by people like Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton), and Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), that rang true enough.
But Star Trek has explored deeply flawed characters before, perhaps most notably the cast of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Led by Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) - easily the most morally complicated lead in a Star Trek series - DS9 showed a Federation pushed to its limits by the Dominion War, to the point where state sanctioned genocide was on the table.
Even the iconic original cast had their brush with personal and institutional bigotry. In the 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when the Klingons suffered a catastrophic climate crisis that could potentially wipe them out, the traditionalist Captain Kirk's (William Shatner) first instinct is to "let them die," much to the horror of natural diplomat Spock (Leonard Nimoy). In addition to Kirk's personal failings, a conspiracy within Starfleet's highest ranks attempted to covertly prevent a peace treaty between the Federation and the Klingon Empire.
Star Trek: Picard's story is the most removed from the central story of Starfleet ever told in Star Trek, and with that distance comes some less than perfect crew members. But there's something to be said for these flawed people, earnestly battling through their own demons and shortcomings, which will certainly always be with humanity, even in a utopia. And just like every other Star Trek series, Picard is a product of the era in which it was made. Through the radical, experimental adventures of Star Trek the original series, to the warm moralism of Star Trek: The Next Generation, to the darker, morally complicated world of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, real world events always play a role in what Star Trek has to say. Objectively speaking, the world is in a relatively bleak place right now. Refugee crises, environmental catastrophes, capitalism run amok - it's all baked into Picard's tense, uncertain worldview.
And yet the man at the center of Star Trek: Picard is still Jean-Luc Picard, arguably the best and brightest Starfleet has ever produced. Even in his twilight years, with a soul weighed down by regret and loss, Picard is still a man worth rooting for and a man worth believing in. Showrunner Michael Chabon was recently quoted as saying, "Shadow defines the light," and make no mistake, Picard is still in the shadows. But it's clear to anyone paying attention that this is a story about redemption, about getting up off the ground after you fall. This ragtag crew will never be confused for the senior staff of the Enterprise, but that's the point - even when the Federation's idealism buckles, even when our heroes are deeply flawed people, Star Trek still gives us reasons to trust and invest in these people, because we know they're trying to get better every day, just like the rest of us. If that's not optimism, it's at least benevolent evolution.
