Anyhow this season was bad. The story wasn't great but it was filled with tone shifts and tangents and so much nonsense that I just stopped caring. It was all just a slog to get to a finale, which was ultimately unsatisfying. The best thing was Wesley Crusher showing up and saying he once made a joke that screwed up history or something, because now I can choose to believe that all of the new era of Trek takes place in Wesley Crusher's Joke Universe. That explains all the continuity errors and character changes.
Jurati's story is maybe the most interesting story of the season, but then we also have this Picard ancestor story that is apparently the most important event in the universe but also gets lost in the shuffle and forgotten about for several episodes. There are decent ideas floating around Q but it feels half baked to me. There just isn't enough focus on anything this season. If you want to be serialized like this, you need focus, and this show seriously lacked focus.
Picard's past trauma is awful completely wrongheaded to me. It just doesn't feel like the universe of Trek I'd like to live in. A world where fathers solve mentally ill mothers by locking them in rooms. The 24th Century is supposed to be enlightened and deal with mental health in more mature and effective ways. The writers of this show don't care about all that, they are just make generic drama. They are too dumb to actually try to work within those confines that Roddenberry had imposed. Gene wasn't a perfect human, but his guidelines for the kind of future Trek represented on TNG forced writers to think outside the box, and find new ways to write conflict. Kurtzman era has thrown all that out..and everyone is a broken shell of a person, and everything is dark and gritty, and the hopefulness of Trek is only given lip service while most of the shows are violent and gross. They make the characters not ideals of a brighter future, but just basically 21st century nightmare people...because the people behind this show can't see beyond their own front door.
The good news is that none of this negates the old shows. They are still there, and they still rule. I can revisit TNG and DS9 and TOS anytime I want and feel the warmth of a brighter future, and know that all of these awful shows are just because Wesley Crusher accidentally fucked up the universe because that kid was bound to screw stuff up someday.
NEXT TIME: The Reunion everyone actually wanted finally begins!
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