Patreon Letter: 25th January 2020

Hey everyone,

Jackson here with the Patreon Letter! This week I assumed I'd be extra delayed what with Outer Wilds to play but no, I made it in time in the new schedule we're using (so long as a letter goes up before the next person's week starts on a sunday, we're in. too many AM things land on a weekend for us to be any more consistent) so I will be counting that as a win. Victory for time management.

That is the only thing I will be counting as a win. Because today I come to you to talk about Star Trek Picard.

If you have not watched Picard, then I would suggest not reading past this paragraph. I am going to spoil the first episode. And also a few other old Star Trek things. We'll see how this letter goes.

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Star Trek Picard is exactly as bad as I knew it would be. The fact that it actually did the exact same scene as The Newsroom complete with Picard owning a clasically sorkin dumb lady who didn't even know what Dunkirk was, simply just the cherry on top. Being correct in such minor, technical ways is very funny and I guess darkly satisfying. Mostly though, it's just depressing to see Star Trek, a series I loved growing up and - even if it is more fraught now that I'm an actual real deal communist - still honestly do, be the lowest common demoninator worst version of itself. 

The second Picard was announced - even before the casting documents did the rounds - Em and I sat on skype calls going ahhhh I dunno what if it's a show where Picard comes out of retirement to do some secret black ops shit that the Federation just isn't willing to do. And that's exactly what it is. Look, Seven of Nine is holding two plasma rifles like she's Master Chief. 

It sucks to be able to look vaguely in the direction of something, project your snide expectations with as little generosity as possible, and turn out to be completely justified. It is never fun to have your own cynicism proven correct. 

Anyway time for more specifics. I watched it the other day and for those of you just reading here's the story in the first episode. It will be just the facts. I will add my trek fan commentary in brackets. Letss go.

Picard - against the greater wishes of the Federation (dumb but understandable) - spearheaded an armada to relocate as many romulans as possible before the Supernova from Trek 09 destroyed the Romulan system. However this armada was entirely wiped out when Utopia Planitia (you know! from Star Trek!) was attacked by Rogue Synths (we'll get to that) burning a fire in the Mars atmosphere that still burns to this day. In response, Starfleet banned synthetic lifeforms. Disgusted by this situation, Picard retires to Chateau Picard (which has presumably been rebuilt from when his entire family burned alive in it!!!!) because Starfleet has abandoned its principles and made space ICE.

It is ten years later. Picard has a dog called Number One (come ON) and the plot begins. A girl named Dahj shows up at Chateau Picard saying she knows in her heart he will help. A lot of faffing about happens next so I'll skip to the end: she is, Data's daughter (gah), cloned from Data's neural net (GAH) by Doctor Maddox (GAHHHHHH), as part of an experimental procedure to figure out why Data was so special as the Only Good Synth (this is where i actually died watching this) and attempt to make good synths again. Dahj is assassinated by some black ops Romulans with acidic alien blood now who are hunting her for reasons we'll find out eventually, but Picard realises they made two so she has an identical twin that they need to find. Which brings us to the ending: the twin is with the Romulans, who are rebuilding a Borg Cube! (from STAR TREK). Credits.

So obviously I expected the insidious and evil idea that Picard is the good starfleet captain who represents the best of us, here to tell the bad current administration the ways that they have lost their way. Let's talk about that first.

It is a mode that Star Trek operates in regularly, and sometimes it pulls it off better than others. If you want to see it done well I'd gesture to Star Trek Insurrection of all things - which is a weird and not great movie that ends with a terrible action scene - but does allow for the reading that Picard is wrong. He is one man standing on the most expensive ship in the fleet yelling at an Admiral that "this is not who we are" while at this very moment, Starfleet is engaged in a war with a rival empire that is about to lead them to commit a biological weapons attack on a scale that is almost unimaginable. 

Or All Good Things, which I just rewatched yesterday. He's arguing with Q as to the value of the human race, rather than with an Admiral, but the content of the scene is strikingly similar. Q asks what humans have done that is so enlightened and Picard's response is pitch perfect: "We've journeyed to countless new worlds, we've contacted new species, we have expanded our understanding of the universe." Q basically laughs in his face. Picard literally stands in front of a god and goes "we're not primitive! we've done so much colonialism!!" 

While TNG is unquestionably a fantasy of liberal imperialism as this benign and ultimately positive force because it and the audience can't imagine any other structure for equality and justice, it is also important when making a fucking sequel to it that it in reality was often distrustful of idea and contained areas of potent critique. This is often attributed to DS9 as a unique property but honestly the writing teams have such overlap that I would just say it's a function of 90s Trek. I have not seen Voyager all the way through, but through TNG - DS9 - ENT, it is not as committed to its vision of a colonialist utopia embodied in Picard as its cultural reputation suggests. Nor are certain elements as scathingly anti-imperialist and self-critical as their reputation suggests. It is an episodic TV show in conversation with itsellf, and so politics and worldview could swing wildly week to week.

But the point is, it was messy and interesting ground and there's stuff you could do there. Star Trek doesn't have to be bad. But unfortunately, despite being littered with blink-and-you-miss-it references to names and places only Star Trek turbonerds would recognise, when Picard invokes 90s Trek it invokes the idea of it and not its reality. Picard was truly the best of us. Data was one of the good ones. Why have you gone and made space ICE. Why would you do that.

A lot is made online in the wake of the war story that was season one of Discovery (which was - now especially in hindsight - very good) as to whether Star Trek should, as it always has done, imagine a utopia. Show us, the people mired in an awful present, the better future we could attain. This discussion irks me because Star Trek was never a utopian show. It was a marketing pitch Roddenberry made up to revive interest in Star Trek in the 70s, framing it as something more than a TV show. And it worked, then season one of TNG tried this and it was unwatchable. Despite no Star Trek since being close to this description, this myth of what Star Trek is has only grown in its absence, compounded by Bob Orci's False Flag 9/11 Power Hour and sent into overdrive by Discovery's initial "The Federation Are Kinda The Bad Guys War Story."

Which positions Picard weirdly because while it doesn't bring this imagined utopian science fiction show back, it does engage with that question directly. It wants us to ask where has Picard's Utopia gone? And to be blunt, it wants us to answer that Trump stole it. Remember when America helped refugees? Aren't we a nation of immigrants? Now we've built a wall to keep the damn synths out!! It sucks. 

Oh right. The Synths. I guess I should mention them before I finish.

All of that politics stuff I saw coming from a mile away. Star Trek is a franchise made by rich liberals, and rich liberals are have been having somewhat of a normal one these past few years. This is a lot of this level of pop culture now, just as a factor of who gets the jobs and how, a fantastic argument for reading some books made by some actual poor people. 

What I did not see coming is the part where on top of all that, Star Trek Picard has out of nowhere done a hard left turn into Mass Effect? The synths have gone rogue and started doing all this terrorism. So is it racist to ban them? In the same breath, it draws a direct parallel to us immigration policy while also making it canon that its stand in for mexicans actually do have magic hacking terrorism powers. This is a classic slip up for people writing racism metaphors, X-Men is very popular.

However what really confused me is the episode's insistence on the specialness of Data. Obviously Soong's androids were technological breakthroughs and Data was a fairly unique individual, but that was mostly from the perspective of human technological development. Synthetic life forms were not uncommon in Star Trek! Is Moriarty still on a usb stick somewhere or did they destroy that one just in case? What about Vic? If we're talking holograms now what about The Doctor? In fact, do holograms count as synths or does synths just mean neural net androids? None of these questions are asked let alone answered, all we get is a throwaway line about how B4 sucked too much and died five minutes after Nemesis, because Data was just too special to for his puny brain to comprehend. 

This idea that Data - the one good synth - had somehow unlocked the secret of what it meant to be a functioning person and chasing that through his daughters/clones/whatever is going to be the thematic macguffin of this show is such a shocking spit in the face to what Star Trek was before that it legitimately caught me off balance. Like I said, I saw the politics coming, but completely redefining a central element of Star Trek in order to rip off Mass Effect, which was itself someone poorly understanding and trying to recreate Star Trek, is truly an oroborous of top tier dumb shit. Cherry on the cake.

And then the romulans are doing shady shit in a borg cube now because fuck it, nothing matters. 

Before I go I want to talk about probably my second favourite Star Trek book we covered when we were doing SOS. It is Avenger, and it is the third Shatnerverse novel. As far as I can tell these books are written by Shatner walking into a room with a list of Cool Guy Things that he wanted Kirk to do in this novel, and then the Reeve-Stevens were free to do whatever they want. I'm not going to summarise the whole thing but what they do in this novel is genuinely extremely cool. It's about the Federation almost collapsing like a house of cards in the face of how entirely unprepared they are for an ecological crises caused by their own rampant colonisation. Kirk works radically to save the day while Picard, king cop, toes the Federation line by empathetically trying his best to follow orders he doesn't realise are doomed. It's honestly a pretty good way to set the two heroes of Star Trek against each other.

Eventually everyone works out the truth and they team up and save the day from the ecological disaster. Hooray! But the scene that matters here comes right at the end, where Kirk stares Picard in the eye and flat out tells him that the Federation is going to die. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in two hundred years. But something like this is going to take it out, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Picard is aggreieved and refuses to admit it, the structure can alway self-correct if the people within it act in good faith. Kirk just sadly smiles like "ah, to be young" and that's how the fucking book ends! It's one of my favourite Star Trek things. The icon of all Star Trek, having lived through enough of it, says that the Federation deserves to die. Maybe something better can take its place. And he (according to the cover at least) wrote it! 

It's a good critique beacuse unlike In The Pale Moonlight or Section 31 in DS9 it isn't a gotcha reveal about the hidden bad shit that keeps the Federation functioning behind its facade. It is a novel honestly about how the structures that Star Trek portrays are not good, or healthy, and maybe if they died the galaxy would be a better place. And more importantly, it argues those structures are never what Star Trek was about in the first place. 

If a tie-in novel credited to William Shatner that only exists to resurrect Kirk can have this sense of thematic imagination and ambition it is a spit in the face that Star Trek Picard can only look backwards onto its own myth and sell it back to us in a badly written TV show. Stories can be good! And even if they don't hit that stories can be interesting and ambitious and beautiful in their failure. I don't think that's too much to ask for. But it is too much for Star Trek. And unless they get radically different people to make it, it might possibly be for a long, long time.

-Jackson