The first season of Star Trek: Picard was far from perfect.
But it worked for me.
Despite its flaws and failings, it was carried by its performances, by some truly affecting
scenes, and by a sprinkling of fan service that, I admit, I am a total sucker for.
But it worked on another level beyond those things, a level on which it probably wouldn’t
have succeeded with me if I had watched this series as a younger person.
Next month I turn forty.
It’s not that I’m old, it’s that – in the immortal words of Thomas Magnum – I’m
not young anymore.
And as such, I’m a lot more aware of the passage of time than I was in, say, my teens
and twenties.
I imagine this awareness will only grow more acute as the years roll by and eventually
bloom into a full-blown existential crisis when I hit, say, age 70 and mortality begins
closing to within striking distance.
Doesn’t that sound like fun?
I can hardly wait!
Time is a constant presence in Star Trek: Picard.
It’s practically a member of the cast.
It’s impossible to look at Patrick Stewart and not be aware of how long it’s been since
we last saw him play what is – with all due respect to Mark Antony and Professor X
– his signature character.
Stewart is still a magnetic onscreen presence, and Picard is every bit the hero he always
was, but the passage of time has taken its toll on both.
This series is unlike any Star Trek project before it in one very important respect: we’ve
never revisited a lead character, played by the same actor, in a show where they were
also the lead character, after such a lengthy hiatus before.
Someone might want to make a case for Leonard Nimoy returning to play Spock in the 2009
Star Trek film, having last played the character in 1991, and that’s fine except that Nimoy’s
Spock wasn’t one of the leads in the ‘09 Star Trek film.
Spock was a lead, but the younger version of Spock played by Zachary Quinto – Nimoy’s
Spock has a very important role in the story, but he doesn’t even show up until deep into
the film and only has a handful of scenes.
Perhaps you consider that to be too fine a distinction.
It wouldn’t bother me.
And anyway, I only wanted to mention it – this video isn’t about Spock.
The longest such hiatus that meets my arbitrary criteria before Picard’s was the ten years
that passed between the end of Star Trek: The Original Series and the premiere of Star
Trek: The Motion Picture.
The interval between Star Trek: Nemesis, the last time we saw Patrick Stewart as Picard
before this, and Star Trek: Picard, was seven years longer.
And, watching the Picard series, it feels like it was even longer than that.
The Classic Trek films acknowledged the passage of time and allowed us to grow accustomed
to the characters aging and moving in different directions as the years went by.
Kirk confronting his own mortality was a major theme in Star Trek II, and Star Trek VI was
largely about how important it is to deal maturely and gracefully with life’s inevitable
changes.
Kirk goes from a captain to an admiral, then back to a captain.
Spock leaves Starfleet for Vulcan, comes back, becomes captain of the Enterprise, dies, comes
back to life, resumes his former duties as first officer.
Chekov serves as navigator and security chief on the Enterprise, and also as first officer
aboard the Reliant.
Uhura and Scotty are reassigned to other postings at certain points, albeit briefly.
Sulu eventually gets promoted to captain of the Excelsior.
Hell, they even do a whole movie where they don’t have an Enterprise at all until the
very end.
In other words, things change for the Classic Trek cast throughout their film series.
A lot, in some cases.
By comparison, the TNG characters spend their years on TV and in the movies frozen in place.
Geordi moves from the conn to engineering, but other than that, everybody finishes more
or less where they start.
Riker does finally get promoted to captain in the last film, but we don’t actually
see any of that – he doesn’t leave for his new assignment until almost the end of
the movie.
Hell, they even blow up the Enterprise in Generations, and by the next movie, First
Contact, they’ve got a brand new ship, with everybody back doing the exact same jobs they
were doing on the old ship – even Worf, who had joined a completely different series
by that point!
That is one stubborn status quo.
As a result, when we left the TNG crew at the end of Nemesis, we weren’t just leaving
them where they were – we were leaving them where, for the most part, they had always
been.
Sure, everyone was older than they had been when TNG started, but we noticed that the
same way we registered that our classmates were older our senior year of high school
than they were when we started middle school.
It seemed normal, because we’d watched each other age along the way.
Lots of things were different, but nothing seemed different.
So, if I wanted to stick with this metaphor, we could look at Star Trek: Picard like our
twenty year high school reunion.
I never actually went to any of my reunions because, as my Dad said, “I didn’t like
most of those people back then – why would I want to see ‘em now?”
But I bet if I did, I would be a little taken aback at first to see how everyone looked
– not because I didn’t expect them to age, but because the picture in my mind is
of them as they were then.
Before the new series, the picture I had in my mind of Picard looked like this.
Now, Picard looks like this.
By the same token, the picture I had in my mind of Will Riker looked like this, and now
looks like this.
And Seven of Nine is in the new show, too, so I could do one of her, as well, but honestly,
does she look any different?
Maybe a bit.
How does everyone else look like it’s been twenty years, and she looks like it’s been,
I dunno, maybe five?
Mark my words, there’s a cursed portrait in her attic that looks like shit.
It’s not that Picard, or Riker, or Deanna Troi, or any of the returning characters played
by their original actors look bad – they all look great, in fact.
But they look different.
They look noticeably older (most of them).
They look . . . not young any more.
These characters have been away from us for awhile.
And now they’re back.
For most of us, regardless of how we might reckon the quality of the show itself, it’s
a very welcome comeback.
But the thing about that is, as Bob Dylan said, you can always come back, but you can’t
come back all the way.
I feel like I’m quoting people a lot in this one.
Is that something you do more often as you get older?
Or have I always done that, and I’m only now noticing it?
Or, as Forrest Gump said, “Maybe it’s both.”
Anyway, Picard came back.
But not the same Picard.
The writers of the show very wisely put him in a very different place in his life than
we last saw him – he went from commanding the Enterprise to being not merely retired
but estranged from Starfleet – but even if they hadn’t placed him in such drastically
different circumstances, he still wouldn’t have been the same Picard.
Not exactly.
It’s not that the Picard we knew back then is gone.
He’s still here.
He’s just . . . not the same.
Just like we’re not the same as we were twenty years ago.
We’re still here, we’re still ourselves.
But we’re not the same.
We might wish we were.
And I’m not just talking physically, either.
Sure, we might look at ourselves in the mirror, see the gray hairs that weren’t there before,
see the wrinkles.
We might notice we can’t do things we used to do, take longer to get going, tire out
faster, and wish we still had the body we had back then.
Why can’t I have the body I had back then now, when I know what to do with it?
I can’t relate to that personally – I’ve held up pretty well, all things considered,
and I look fantastic, obviously.
But we might also wish that we could go back to who we were back then in other ways.
We might wish we could see people who aren’t there anymore, recapture fleeting experiences
that are gone now, rekindle old relationships with people who have since moved on, as we
ourselves have moved on – or mostly moved on, as the case may be.
That I can relate to.
It’s not that my life right now is bad – it’s wonderful, I could hardly have wished for
better.
But it’s not like it used to be.
And there are parts of it – just certain parts – that I sometimes wish weren’t
so . . . different.
That’s why Star Trek: Picard, at its best, strikes such a bittersweet note with me.
Like my own life, it’s good the way it is, but it also reminds me of the way part of
me wishes things still were.
The efforts of the producers to turn back the clock for certain key elements of the
series only serve to amplify this effect.
Look at Data.
He’s the only character in the series who is literally frozen in time.
We see him in dreams at the start of the series, and in a quantum simulation near the end,
where he is meant to appear as he did at the moment of his death.
And the visual effects team does a fair job of de-aging Brent Spiner back to a reasonable
approximation of where he was in 2002.
And Data’s final scenes with Picard in the quantum simulation are lovely.
But when we look at him, we can tell he’s not the same as he was.
We know some digital trickery is at work.
The creators of Star Trek: Picard are trying their best to recreate the past, and what
they accomplish is impressive, but we’re acutely aware the entire time we’re watching
that it isn’t perfect.
How could it be?
The past they’re attempting to conjure is gone.
When Picard visits Riker on Nepenthe, I feel joy at seeing these characters (and actors)
together again.
I treasure their interactions.
I feel privileged to get to experience their chemistry and their relationship again after
so long.
Watching it makes me happy.
But it makes me sad, too, because even though this is great, it reminds me of this, and
of the fact that this couldn’t last forever, no matter how much I wish that it could.
You probably won’t get many people comparing Star Trek: Picard to The Great Gatsby, and
that’s as it should be, since for the most part the two works are nothing alike.
But they do have one thing in common: they both contain the same truth – that the past
is a place to which we can never truly return, and from which we can never truly escape.
I’m not sure how much credit to give the producers of Star Trek: Picard for this, because
the series was destined to have this quality, regardless of the story they decided to tell
with it, by virtue of the simple facts that it was being made and that so much time had
passed since the last time we saw these actors play these characters.
But ultimately, I watch the show and I feel what I feel, so I don’t think who gets the
credit really matters.
What does matter is this: we’re here now.
We are who we are.
We can’t stay the same.
But we can stay.
Not forever – but for a little while, anyway.
We hope.