Star Trek

I think Picard S1 was watchable. It had some neat stuff in it. But it is not a high point for the franchise by any means. It felt like an adaptation of some Arthur Clarke doomsday short story or something but stretched out until the breaking point.

S2 left a bad taste in my mouth. It was just kind of pointless and dumb. I enjoyed the characters very much, but the actual story was pretty damn rough. Storylines involving any kind of time travel are nearly universally awful across the whole genre and the mirror dimension getting played for anything other than camp makes me a bit queasy. At some point, I wondered if they were just trying to undo some of the damage Voyager did to the Borg lore, but they were actually spending more time doubling down on it so that can't be it.

Also, the world felt SO small. Star Trek always makes the galaxy feel smaller than it means to just because of the natural limits of casting, writing, and fandom, but Picard S1 and S2 are both excruciatingly tiny universes with so few important players. As a result, I haven't watched S3. I'm hearing it's way better, but I have to work myself up to giving it another try.

Both share a flaw with Discovery: it just doesn't feel like Star Trek. All three shows are trying to be big, dramatic, high-tension, cliffhanger-ending space epics for binging. Modern streaming shows, basically. And the best of Star Trek is nothing like that. My sibling could never get into Star Trek. Started with TNG. Their complaint was that it felt like watching stage plays at the local theater. That they were constantly aware of how this was just a bunch of people talking at each other on a set. There was all philosophy and cerebral-ness and drama and very little action, and the plotlines often resolved without an unambiguously right answer. They're totally right, and that's what makes me love the show and why I don't feel strongly about Picard and Discovery.