Season 3 of Star Trek Picard is pretty uninteresting as far as storylines go.

I haven't completely caught up with Star Trek: Picard. But, I've seen enough of season three to be a bit nauseated at how deep the nostalgia is going with this series. Look...I liked The Next Generation but I didn't love it. I preferred some of its spinoffs to the furthering adventures of Captain Picard, so maybe I'm part of the problem. Or maybe I just need to have my Trekkie card revoked. Either way, Picard is the worst of the new Trek shows, and I'm glad it is ending with season three.

Thus far this season we have a storyline that gives Picard the son that I guess he was incomplete without. That would have been fine on paper. I could have been on board with just that. But the reality is much more complicated. I dislike the character of Jack sooo much. He's annoying and the fact that they are treating him like some golden child in the vein of Wesley Crusher but with a much darker storyline potential just makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit. Why did Picard and Beverly Crusher's son need to be so "special" the whole story had to revolve around him? Because...nostalgia...right? And the character is deeply unappreciative of this position in the story, doing his best to be an unlikeable brat even though he's far too old to have that term thrust upon him. Additionally, the weird romantic tension with Geordi La Forge's daughter feels really awkward...like a forced diversity bit...wherein once more the white guy falls in love with the black woman.

And there are all of these really deep dives into Next Generation stuff. We've had two allusions to the pilot episode of The Next Generation. The first was watching the birth of a bunch of jellyfish like aliens from a nebula that reminded me of the jellyfish alien in Encounter at Farpoint. And then we had this callback of Riker whistling "Pop goes the weasel" in the Holodeck, completing a musical tune that was vexing a very young Data who was having difficulty finishing it on his own. It's made me do some eye rolls a couple of times and then say out loud, "Boy they really are going deep with some of this crap." Then of course there's the appearance of Moriarty again who (the last time I remember) was in a simulation that would never end and provide him with endless adventures via a computer that ran off a battery that would last hundreds if not thousands of years.

Anyway, maybe the whole point of Picard was to remind us of the things that fans liked from The Next Generation. Only...one of the things I loved about Trek was seeing things I hadn't seen before. I love breaking new ground, not retreading old ground over and over again. It's the reason why I haven't liked the last three Star Wars movies that happened after Return of the Jedi. But I have loved The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch, The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, and all the other tv shows that are on Disney +. Those shows go boldly into stories I don't know, and they expand on the lore. The Force Awakens on the other hand, just retread a plot we've seen before, and it wasn't all that original.

I want to like this show, but it's boring. Anyone else feel the same way? Or am I just completely wrong?

Season Three of Picard shows that Kirk is basically the prototype for every part of Jean-Luc's personality that even includes a secret son.

I heard a long time ago that the character of Picard was basically one half of James T. Kirk. They split that character in two. Riker got all the womanizer bits and Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) got all the caring and leadership ability (as well as a good dose of wisdom). Now that the first episode of season 3 of Picard have landed on Paramount +, I think I believe this more than I ever have before (spoiler alert).

In the first episode, we are introduced to Jack Crusher, Beverly Crusher's son that she had with Jean-Luc and kept secret for several decades. At least that's what I've figured out thus far. Honestly, I don't really care too much about this character yet. But I do think it is odd that there's this tradition of sons popping up for male Star Trek captains, and never a daughter. It's almost like there is a preferred "sex" to the offspring for a story being written starring alpha male captains.

Additionally these male captains are "too busy" to warrant being told about such things. Is it a tired trope that the "alpha man" wants a son and not a daughter? Honestly, if I'd been born straight and had a child I'd have wanted a daughter. They are more compassionate and caring for older folks (an observation I've had for a very long time). So, the chances I'd have a daughter who would care for me in my old age as opposed to a son who said, "eff off...I gotta go live my life" is much higher. Not saying it's a guaranteed thing...but just something I've observed.

Anyway, we saw this same thing happen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In that story, James Kirk (alpha male) finds out that he has a son named Marcus and that the mom, Dr. Carol Marcus, kept it secret "all these years." Then that kid ends up getting killed by a Klingon which kind of cements Kirk's hatred of the race in general. Picard rehashing the same kind of plot does seem to be a reinforcement of the idea that "Picard's personality flows directly from Kirk." I don't know if that's exactly what Michael Chabon intended, but it is what it is. I guess in the end I'm glad that Picard is ending with this season. The entirety of its run has not created anything new at all, which has been kind of surprising since every other series breaks new ground and forages ahead in unexpected ways.

There is one question I do have though that will probably get answered: Does Wesley know about his half brother? He probably does since he's a super being now (the Traveler). But it would be fun to get some acknowledgment of that. Anyone else watching Picard? 

Star Trek Picard is walking the disappointing road that the Star Wars sequels followed by killing the happy ending.

I'm a few episodes into Picard, the CBS All Access examination of what occurred after Picard's illustrious Starfleet career is over, and I'm beginning to think that what we have going on here is the same thing that seems to have happened with the continuation of the Star Wars movies. In other words, the happy ending didn't last and what was once good enough to be left alone has now been mined for visceral and emotional reaction to justify nasty changes in these beloved characters.

Spoiler Alert: I'm going to discuss "Stardust City Rag," which aired last week.

Case in point, the brutal killing of Icheb, who was a character I really liked in Star Trek: Voyager for about two seasons, was awful as soon as I realized who it was that was screaming while he was getting chopped up. I didn't need to see this, and I'm pretty angry with Star Trek not because of the gory death per se, but because it was Icheb. I liked Icheb a lot, and I know (because I'm a thinking adult who knows how stories work) that the director of this episode (it's Jonathan Frakes a.k.a. William Riker of Next Generation) called "Stardust City Rag" mined old content looking for ways to connect these present events to the past, stumbled upon Icheb, and was like, "I'm gonna kill off this character to motivate Seven of Nine."

It makes me shake my head in disgust.

Picard isn't Game of Thrones unless I missed a memo somewhere. Beloved characters do not need to be put on the chopping block in order to create visceral emotions for new stories. I honestly think that this is the laziest of storytelling...going for a character death in order to spur a major character onto a path that you want them to walk. There are a myriad of other ways that this could have been accomplished, maybe by devoting one episode (or several episodes) to a backstory following Seven of Nine's awareness of how the Federation has changed following the destruction of Mars, or following her own investigation into what exactly the Romulans are doing with that Borg cube.

It could be any number of things. My first guess as to what's going on with the Borg cube is that it's the one that was destroying Romulan colonies on the very edge of the Neutral Zone in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They never followed up on that, but it definitely had a "Borg foreshadowing feel" to it, as entire colonies had been scooped up and were missing. Maybe the Borg had a problem assimilating all of the Romulans...like there was something toxic or poisonous about Romulan genetics similar to what happened when the Borg attempted to assimilate Species 8472. All of the Romulans that are removed from the Borg ship (is the word "recovered" appropriate here?) seem to be crazy/insane...so there's obviously something medical (that's unexplained) going on here.

I think that the Borg decided to cut loose that ship and return to Borg space until Season 2 and the episode "Q Who," which introduced humans (and the Federation) to the Borg, which then was followed up in the season finale of Season Three "The Best of Both Worlds." And that's where that Borg ship that the Romulans are studying came from.

Anyway, I haven't been able to connect many of the dots in Picard, but killing Icheb seems cruel and unnecessary. There are plenty of things going on that are interesting enough to have brought in former beloved characters from Voyager, Next Generation, and even DS9 (if that happens at some point) without having to axe characters to give these people a reason to interact with the story. It seems gratuitous, and I don't like it.

At least Discovery is knocking it out of the ball park (in my opinion), by breaking new ground in tremendous thought-provoking ways.

I love the trailer for Star Trek Picard that debuted at San Diego Comic Con.

San Diego Comic Con had a bunch of surprises for me that I didn't anticipate. I guess I haven't been paying attention to entertainment as closely as I might have thought I was. One of the things that was a huge and pleasant surprise was all the Star Trek news that came out of Hall H. In particular, I loved the two minute plus sized trailer for Picard, which is slated to come out in 2020. I had previously thought it was due out in the fall, and I probably just misread that at the time. Still, 2020 isn't far away, and it's starting to look like 2019 will be the last time I can cancel my CBS All Access subscription for a few months to wait for Discovery to return. It's gonna be Star Trek all the time. Eh...there could be worse things, right? :))

In the trailer, which I'll link below, Picard has a dog, and we see some very familiar faces: namely Jeri Ryan reprising her role as 7 of 9 and Brent Spiner coming back as Commander Data. For the record, Data looks really odd (probably a combination of de-aging C.G.I. and other things--for one his cheeks are too fat for an android that doesn't age), but these things aside it's nice to see Data again. The trailer is filmed expertly. It instantly makes me want to know more, which is what a trailer is supposed to do.

At the same time though, it looks to be a much slower paced yet very thought-invoking exploration of the years following the last Next Generation movie, which are filled with tons of events like the destruction of the Romulan homeworld. If you are a fan of J.J. Abrams, you know that event in particular led to alternate timeline Trek where we have Chris Pine playing Captain Kirk three times (probably the only three times that will happen, sadly). However, Chris Pine does do television stuff...he was in a Black Dahlia mini-series filmed by the director of Wonder Woman. So there's always a chance that CBS All Access could approach Pine and say, "Hey...how would you like to play Captain Kirk and do a few seasons of television for us?" Just saying...that would be exceptionally cool.

But the trailer also seems to be infused with a bit of Blade-Runner noir-esque sprinkles. In particular the scene of the woman walking by the storefronts, and it's raining like hell outside. That scene strikes of Blade Runner, and I'm wondering where else we're going to get that kind of thing. I like it a lot. The atmosphere instantly draws you in, and gets the imagination firing on all cylinders.

If you haven't seen the trailer yet, I highly recommend you indulge yourself. Let me know what you think in the comments.