I’m not watching Picard until later. I think sometimes it drops early but it isn’t supposed to drop until Friday in the UK, and so I watch it with pizza at dinner time.

Buuuut I have something to ramble about which I have mentioned in the good Trek discord before, and it’s sort of General show so not really spoilers.

I am a writer. Probably not a good one and not currently very active due to mental health. I am supposed to be working on an original novel trilogy but I digress. Point being I have written stories and I am familiar with what I would consider some easy mistakes/pitfalls.

One of the big ones I noticed during revision passes of a prior novel is that time didn’t really move all that much for characters if I wasn’t with them. It’s like if they weren’t active in a scene they were basically on a shelf just waiting. Some stuff obviously happened plot wise off screen but it was big picture, and it in no way accounted for the amount of time there had been. There wasn’t growth, there wasn’t life, there wasn’t realism. It was just sort of frozen to where it was convenient for me (the author) to move them around like chess pieces. It made for what I feel was a shallow and less engaging story. It was hard for the characters to feel 3D/real when they hadn’t had actual lives.

Ever since Picard season one I have basically been like “really?” because it feels like most of the characters have basically been ‘on hold’ in between their screen appearances. They haven’t talked to one another, they have been stuck in one pattern. Picard bummed around his vineyard for 20 years. Now this I was semi-ok with because it seemed to be a plot point that he had just been “waiting to die” as he had left StarFleet and lost his purpose. Season 1 was about finding that again.

But that kind of logic can’t be the same for every single character always. I don’t know. I feel like I’m not explaining this right. It’s just this sort of frustration that I feel like they just dashed off a single line to explain what characters had been doing for the intervening 20 years and left it at that. Life is more than that. I get that screentime is limited and there isn’t time but they can hint at things. But just having all the characters stop talking to one another until the “next adventure on screen” and just do one thing and not grow, is dare I say lazy?

Anyway I’m not sure I have made my point, or been clear at all, but this is just bugging me. Characters are supposed to have lives, not just stop on pause in between screen appearances.