Watching Star Trek: Picard makes me wrestle with the fundamentally temporal nature of existence more than I’m comfortable with.
Star Trek is a universe where the clock stopped nearly half my life ago. Sure, there’ve been fits & starts—a handful of movies, flash forward clips in prequels, and a lot of delving into the past.
But it has mostly stayed frozen, while real time marches on.
Suddenly, tonight, an entire universe hop-skipped twenty years and lurched back to life.
It feels like a cord back to my childhood.
It feels, for lack of a better reference, like Jake Sisko desperately catching up with his father in The Visitor.
An experience outside of time.
And look at that—Star Trek is so fundamental to the way I process life, I can’t even make sense of the feeling that a new series is causing me without comparing it to a situation in a decades-old episode from a different series.
A few years ago, I’d have been out of my mind excited about Star Trek: Picard, ready to figure out how to adore it or twist myself up trying.
But now, the wave of emotion I know it will cause me—in one form or another, whether I watch it or not—is bigger than I want to ride.
Sometimes loving something is too much, and I wish I could just like it. But I’ve never been very good at having a medium-setting on my emotions.