{"id":3065,"date":"2020-02-16T12:28:46","date_gmt":"2020-02-16T12:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3065"},"modified":"2020-02-16T12:28:46","modified_gmt":"2020-02-16T12:28:46","slug":"an-embarrassment-a-blowhard-a-triumph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3065","title":{"rendered":"An embarrassment, a blowhard, a triumph"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Watching Star Trek: Picard for New Scientist, 24 January 2020<\/a><\/p>\n

Star Trek<\/em>\u00a0first appeared on television on 8 September 1966. It has been fighting the gravitational pull of its own nostalgia ever since \u2013 or at least since the launch of the painfully careful spin-off\u00a0Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/em><\/a>\u00a021 years later.<\/p>\n

The Next Generation<\/em>\u00a0was the series that gave us shipboard counselling (a questionable idea), a crew that liked each other (a catastrophically mistaken idea) and Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, who held the entire farrago together, pretty much single-handed, for seven seasons.<\/p>\n

Now Picard is back, retired, written off, an embarrassment and a blowhard. And\u00a0Star Trek: Picard<\/em>\u00a0is a triumph, praise be.<\/p>\n

Something horrible has happened to the \u201csynthetics\u201d (read:\u00a0robots<\/a>) who, in the person of Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner, returning briefly here) once promised so much for the Federation. Science fiction\u2019s relationship with its metal creations is famously fraught: well thought-through robot revolt provided the central premise for\u00a0Battlestar Galactica<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Westworld<\/em><\/a>, while\u00a0Dune<\/em><\/a>, reinvented yet again later this year as a film by\u00a0Blade Runner 2049<\/em>\u2018s Denis Villeneuve, is set in a future that abandoned artificial intelligence following a cloudy but obviously dreadful conflict.<\/p>\n

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And there is a perfectly sound reason for this mayhem. After all, any machine flexible enough to do what a robot is expected to do is going to be flexible enough to down tools \u2013 or worse. What\u00a0Picard<\/em>\u2018s take on this perennial problem will be isn\u2019t yet clear, but the consequences of all the Federation\u2019s synthetics going haywire is painfully felt: it has all but abandoned its utopian remit. It is now just one more faction in a fast-moving, galaxy-wide power arena (echoes of the\u00a0Trump<\/a>\u00a0presidency and its consequences are entirely intentional).<\/p>\n

Can Picard, the last torchbearer of the old guard, bring the Federation back to virtue? One jolly well hopes so, and not too quickly, either.\u00a0Picard<\/em>\u00a0is, whatever else we may say about it, a great deal of fun.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

There are already some exciting novelties, though the one I found most intriguing may turn out to be a mere artefact of getting the show off the ground. Picard\u2019s world \u2013 troubled by bad dreams quite as much as it is enabled by world-shrinking technology \u2013 is oddly surreal, discontinuous in ways that aren\u2019t particularly confusing but do jar here and there.<\/p>\n

Is the\u00a0Star Trek<\/a>\u00a0franchise finally getting to grips with the psychological consequences of its mastery of time and space? Or did the producers simply shove as much plot as possible into the first episode to get the juggernaut rolling? The latter seems more likely, but I hold out hope.<\/p>\n

The new show bears its burden of twaddle. The first episode features a po-faced analysis of Data\u2019s essence. No, really. His\u00a0essence<\/em>. That\u2019s a thing, now. How twaddle became an essential ingredient on\u00a0The Next Generation<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 and now possibly\u00a0Picard<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 is a mystery: the original\u00a0Star Trek<\/em>\u00a0never felt the need to saddle itself with such single-use, go-nowhere nonsense. But by now, like a hold full of tribbles, the twaddle seems impossible to shake off (Star Trek: Discovery<\/em>, I\u2019m looking at you).<\/p>\n

Oh, but why cavil? Stewart brings a new vulnerability and even a hint of bitterness to grit his seemlessly fluid recreation of Picard, and the story promises an exciting and fairly devastating twist to the show\u2019s old political landscape. Picard, growing old disgracefully? Oh, please make it so!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching Star Trek: Picard for New Scientist, 24 January 2020 Star Trek\u00a0first appeared on television on 8 September 1966. It has been fighting the gravitational pull of its own nostalgia ever since \u2013 or at least since the launch of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,620],"tags":[318,86,788],"class_list":["post-3065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-robots","tag-science-fiction","tag-star-trek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3065"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3066,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3065\/revisions\/3066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}