I’m still sorting out how I feel about the Captain Picard Show properly, but there were so many elements of the show’s world that fascinated me. Side characters, lines of dialogue, and locations that were only visited for a moment are still knocking around in my head.
By far the most significant one is Seven of Nine’s rogue peacekeeper group, the Fenris Rangers. I want to watch ten seasons of a show about a ragtag band of people who step in to save lives and protect the innocent when the Federation peaces out. I suppose that someone could argue that the Maquis were doing this, just as much as the Fenris Rangers. I won’t, but I wanted to acknowledge that the comparison could be made.
So, I’ve been collecting Star Trek action figures via eBay for a few months, and I present to you here the first installment of my version of this story. Star Trek: Fenris Rangers!
To borrow a phrase, engage!
(with each of these posts, I’m going to include the text of one, or maybe more, of my of-the-moment blog post reactions to each episode of the first season of the Captain Picard Show. I would like these thoughts to live on somewhere, so what better place than here?)
from January 27, 2020 (about Episode 1):
Because I apparently have a lot of time on my hands, I’ve gone through a variety of opinions about how to write reviews of television shows in the last few years. I largely don’t read them anymore, because I don’t think the (as I see it) prevailing format of episode-by-episode, plot-synopsis-followed-by-hypothesizing-about-what-happens-next way of writing is particularly illuminating for me. Conversely, waiting to write a piece about a show only until its season is wrapped ignores one of the biggest elements of television that separates it from movies (Netflix-ian whole season drops of episodes not withstanding). Plus… Star Trek. I can’t not write about Star Trek. So, I’ll start writing, and let’s just see what happens.
My earliest, most clear memory of watching TV is of the last few moments of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s third season finale, “The Best of Both Worlds (Part 1)” (SPOILER ALERT for a 29.5 year old episode of television, I guess). I learned a lot about TV on that day, when Ron Jones’ music got louder and louder, and the camera whipped around Commander Riker’s (Jonathan Frakes) face, as he tightened his jaw in defiance of everything Lieutenant Commander Shelby (Elizabeth Dennehy) had told him about “standing in the shadow of a great man” and not being able “to make the tough decisions” before regretfully ordering the death of the Borg-ified Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) to save the Alpha Quadrant. “Mister Worf, fire,” are three words burned into my brain, and when my father had to inform me that we had to wait ALL SUMMER before we could learn what happens next… I was not especially happy.
I don’t recall how I came to Star Trek originally, but I definitely had been watching both The Original Series and The Next Generation in reruns. They’d been on around 10:00 PM on Denver’s Channel 2 during the regular TV season, so I had to set up my parents’ VCR to tape them during the school year, but once summer vacation started, the reruns moved to 6:00, so I could watch them without needing a blank VHS tape. I still taped them, and watched them obsessively over the next 10 years. I am who I am, and apparently always have been. It turned out that television wasn’t just an amorphous mass of entertainment from which you could pull at any time (there’s an argument to be made that that’s changed, I reckon), but something that had to be made, by people, and that making it took time. The wait for BOBW 2 was worth it, I think, despite what Michael Piller, the writer of both episodes, said after the fact.
As I get older, the cracks in the foundations of the Federation become more and more apparent, and the more and more I find myself drawn to TOS, and its less performatively utopian presentation of the future. Enough has been written about TNG’s neoliberal DNA and its post-Fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall politics that I don’t need to rehash any of it here, but even as I find my personal politics more radical, one thing about my relationship with Star Trek remains constant: Jean-Luc Picard is still my favorite Starfleet captain. It’s his dedication to what the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet should be that endears him most to me. Well, that and the righteously indignant speeches, which frequently go hand-in-hand. Stewart’s as good at being angry as any actor in history, I think. I also think that Picard’s fundamental belief in the value of the institutions of the Federation formed the basis of the value I place in the institutions of our own government. Even when people weaponize those institutions for odious ends, Picard finds value in them, again and again. Too, I still think that there need to be rules, and proper ways to do things, and that doing things in those proper ways conveys a certain kind of respect for other people’s time, and your own.
(The above wasn’t necessarily meant to be a defense of monolithic, all-powerful institutions, what was written above, just an illustration of what Picard means to me.)
One thing TNG rarely shied away from was Picard’s awareness of many of his personal failings. Not all, as even in the 24th century, people aren’t perfect, but when he was able to see where he’d fallen down, Picard could be as hard on himself as anybody, real or imagined. From mourning lost loves in “We’ll Always Have Paris” in the first season, to reckoning with the trauma inflicted on him by the Borg in season four’s “Family,” to coming to value his imperfections in the sixth season’s “Tapestry,” and his grappling with his contributions, or lack thereof, to the Picard family legacy in the movies (but especially in GENERATIONS), Jean-Luc Picard proved that internal conflicts roiling within all of us made for storytelling at least as compelling as any exchange of photon torpedoes could be. Even when Stewart’s creative contributions led to Picard becoming more of an action hero in the vein of Jim Kirk, Picard’s greatest moments have always come when he insisted on words winning out over fists and phasers.
So, with my typical, comprehensive (and then some) prefacing out of the way, we come to this first episode of The Captain Picard Show, PICARD. Was I concerned that one of my favorite characters from fiction seemed to be getting dusted off for no particular reason? Yes. Do I trust Sir Patrick Stewart to be protective of his legacy as Captain Picard, and not just dust him off for a simple paycheck? Also, yes. Do I have a lot of faith in showrunner and award-winning author Michael Chabon, as dyed-in-the-wool a geek as they come? Also, yes. Does a broadcast network setting up its own streaming service shuffling its premium content off to that service make me angry? Yes, again. So, there were a lot of opinions bouncing around my head when sitting down to start the free CBS All Access trial and watch this episode.
I made a crack after the second or third trailer for the show that it looked like LOGAN, but with Sir Patrick playing both the Wolverine and Professor X parts. I had a dream that it might be an 8- or 10-hour long riff on TNG’s fourth season episode “The Drumhead,” where Picard has to reckon with his (I presumed) legacy of failing to save the Romulan people from the exploding supernova that destroyed their planet in 2009’s STAR TREK (the first of the “reboot” movies, with Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, et al). I try not to react to stories by comparing them to the unlimited-budget, no-restrictions stories I imagine on my own time, but sometimes, you can find yourself on the same wavelength as the creators of the stories you like, and those moments can be so magical that there’s no reason to ignore them.
Okay, really and truly now, the episode. Rather than hit every single beat struck by the premiere, I’ll do what I’ve been doing up until now, and explain what I took away from watching the show.
This first episode of THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW was, from where I sit, the most good-faith attempt to modernize Star Trek and maintain what was most special about it to those of us who grew up obsessed with it in the 20th century. As much as I love DISCOVERY (and I do, mostly), a prequel series by its very nature wipes away much of the history that a big, decades-spanning story possesses. History, seen and unseen, looks to be a driver in THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW, which is fitting, given the character’s obsession with history, archaeology, and classics. His legacy, that of his self-made family, the Federation, and its neighbors, have conspired to drag him back into the captain’s chair for One Last Mission. So far, despite what the trailers led me to believe, it’s not entirely a mission against the Borg! Hooray!
It’s as full a world as I recall seeing from Star Trek, in just this one episode of the show. Lives of people not pledged in service aboard a Federation construct get their time onscreen, and the consequences of the choices of those in uniform to those without. Jean-Luc Picard’s entire life has been lived in service to the ideals of the Federation, and to see him still struggle to reconcile those ideals with the disappointing reality is as affecting a scene of acting as any I’ve seen from Stewart. No longer going boldly (not a line from the show, I promise), the Federation has continued to slowly deflate, trading what remained of its ambition for less apparent danger. I wonder where they got that plot point from…?
One episode in, and I’m freshly reminded of what I have always loved about Star Trek, and want again to see where the future will take us. Just seeing that there’d be a future must have been a balm to the soul of worried viewers in the darkest days of the Cold War, and that, too, is in Star Trek’s legacy. Even in the darkness, there’s light. Jean-Luc Picard is, as he’s always been, a good man to protect that light, and nurture it. Here’s to him doing it once more (and perhaps once more, again, if he has a second season in him)!