So at its best, Star Trek is a franchise that makes one think. About moral, ethical, philosophical, anthropological, humanistic, and scientific questions.
Which is why I think I found Picard season 3 to be SO frustrating. Everything else aside, it seemed to be a season that *aggressively* didn’t want the audience to think. Not about the simplest questions (where is Troi and Riker’s daughter? Why wouldn’t you contact that other Borg Queen that is your friend? Why are the changelings working with the Borg anyway?) and *certainly* not about anything morally or ethically complicated, about, say, war crimes, or the securitization of the Federation, or the implications of everyone just going along with something as jingoistic as “Frontier Day,” or about whether there might be any solution to a problem besides just killing your enemies.
There was no thought in that season. It was nostalgic blither that quieted everything queer, that quieted any meaningful growth the TNG characters had beyond TNG (the only exception being the world’s most boring nepo baby who was The Most Important Thing). It didn’t want you to think, it didn’t want you to ask questions, it certainly didn’t want you to imagine a better world.
It was profoundly disappointing.
And it’s frustrating because it could have talked meaningfully about the implications of, say, the attempted genocide on the Changelings. But it didn’t seem interested in fleshing it out beyond a “Hey, remember that thing from Deep Space Nine? Here it is again!” kind of a way.
(via the-goofball)
#sighing forever#I am so salty#I do think about all this stuff and I think a good chunk of the reason season 3 sucked so much is because the characters didn’t#like that’s storytelling 101 if you introduce something there needs to be a payoff#if there are no consequences then why plot? it doesn’t have any gravity or weight and is ultimately meaningless