Picard season three…

Based on the first episode it… doesn’t suck???

After the godawful STD, the first 2 seasons of STP and even the supposed “return to form” that was the first season of Strange New Worlds, there was little reason for any Star Trek fan to hold out any hope for anything resembling “quality Star Trek” from season 3 of STP, but the first episode was actually pretty good. It actually came across as actual Star Trek… for the most part. It’s kind of a weird mishmash of Next Gen and the TOS movies, but hey, I’ll take it.

There is some strange stuff. Picard and Riker hop a ride on Rikers old ship the USS Titan. But the Titan is a completely different vessel: the Titan has been seen elsewhere, such as (repeatedly) on Lower Decks, and is a well-known “Luna Class” design. But it has gone through a refit, much as the Enterprise did between TOS and TMP. But the issue here is that the refit resulted in a *completely* different ship. The configuration is utterly different, like turning an F-15 into an A-10. There was no good reason for this; had the new Titan simply been a replacement for the earlier Titan, written off as destroyed or retired off-screen, that would have been perfectly fine. Oh, well.

Picard and Riker are the main characters in this episode, and they come across pretty much as they should… Riker is especially true to his established character. 7 of 9 it in it for a bit; she’s the first officer of the Titan, and she hates her job. And her bad attitude about it is a pretty good callback to her character on VOY. Sadly, Raffi is still lurking about declassing-up the joint, bringing her little bit of anti-Trek gloom and despair to the screen, but at least she’s only there for a bit.

There’s a dandy scene of this seasons as-yet unseen badguy using a giant “portal gun” to not just destroy a building by opening a portal under it and dropping it in, but opening the other end of the portal a few blocks away and dropping said building onto another part of town. It’s effectively horrifying, complete with the sound of thousands of people screaming in terror (as one does).

If the rest of the season sticks with it, this could actually be decent. Too late to course correct STD and SNW, of course.

So color me shocked.

So, let’s say the rest of the season holds up, and we *finally* get some good live-action Trek for the first time in going on twenty years. If this season is not just good  but financially successful, that *might* incentivize the IP holders to make *more* good Trek. And that would of course be a good thing. But it would also be somewhat enraging: the difference between good and bad Trek is not about production quality, or acting, or even dialog… it’s about writing. And good writing doesn’t cost more than bad writing. This would show that since the first moment of STD, we *could* have had good Trek, but the powers that be decided otherwise. Bajillions of dollars and numerous years thrown down the toilet. A franchise spat upon in the name of pursuing some new market that was never going to care. A fandom driven away. And it didn’t need to happen.