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Star Trek: Picard S01E02 Maps and Legends
Picard begins investigating the mystery of Dahj as well as what her very existence means to the Federation. Without Starfleet's support, Picard is left leaning on others for help, including Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) and an estranged former colleague, Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd). Meanwhile, hidden enemies are also interested in where Picard's search for the truth about Dahj will lead.
There's apparently a long-running Butlerian Jihad, though why the jihad never showed up before is, of course, a common problem with the unfortunate trope of introducing ancient secret societies. I would have hoped that, instead of being nefarious villains with sinister voices, they might be introduced with justifications and nuance. There could certainly be room for it. Do the jihadists see a Culture-like future society as enslavement, and themselves as a guard against it, at the comparatively minimal cost of preventing some research and destroying some projects? Do they see the creation of what would amount to another species as inherently competing with others, damning everyone else if it is allowed to take hold? Do they have evidence that synthetic lifeforms pose a vulnerability to the Borg in some fundamental and unavoidable way? Discovery, with the Klingons, at least tried to avoid this problem, and here, where there is a real opportunity for a good justification, one could hope that they would be real people with real motivations.
But no. They're nefarious villains with sinister voices, clearly labelled as the people we should dislike.
Overall, the series so far has been quite disappointing. One could have hoped that it would have been ambitiously speculative, thoughtful, and dialogue-driven, like the best of Star Trek. Stewart would certainly be suited to such a show, and I had originally thought that that was the point of Picard.
But so far, it lacks what much of what I used to think distinguished Star Trek from other science fiction television series. So often, in the better episodes, the central conflict was not with a villain, but with the unknown, or the poorly understood, or with competing ideas. The drive of the protagonists was not war, but exploration, discovery, and understanding. The plot often progressed through cooperation, diplomacy, and thought, not bashing away at things. This, so far, is space opera, and stereotypical space opera at that. There's the nefarious secret plot, the damsel in distress as Call to Adventure, the bureaucracy insisting that the protagonist is delusional, the rag-tag band of heros fighting against the system, the foreshadowed particular weakness of the protagonist...
It does not seem poised to offer anything more. More generally, Star Trek seems to have become this as of late, particularly with the recent films, but also, largely, with Discovery.
Agreed. I'm not hopeful Picard is a return to more inward thinking Star Trek that defined the genre. It seems like it might offer slightly more than Discovery did/does, but that's really not saying much.
Voyager had its good days.
This is so well put! I agree with all you said.
While I like the premise and the story so far, I find it a bit too rushed - I won't comment more than this. What do you think?
While there was still a lot that happened in this episode, i think the pacing felt better than E01.
I liked this episode, we learned about who the antagonists will probably be. There was a little exposition, but not too much, and it was all made more interesting by the apparently diverging goals of Commadore Oh and Laris. I really want to learn more about the Borg Artifact, and who Narek actually is.
I kinda get the feeling that it's more prequel than Discovery in that it's trying to build into an already imagined status quo for the future of the universe. Normally that's a good thing, but I can't shake the vibe that this feels a lot like a Caprica to a Battlestar Galactica coming down the line. (All contemporary sci-fi is Battlestar, fite me.)
Also, secret people having secret conversations in secret for the audience kinda miffs me off. Supposedly the third episode completes this chapter, hopefully it has a good mission statement.