Star Trek: Picard starts today!
I’m excited & nervous. It feels like going to a family reunion w/aunts & uncles you used to be close to, but haven’t heard from in decades.
Will the connection still be there? Will you still like each other? Or will the changes just be too much?
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.
At some level—okay, most levels—even after two seasons of Discovery to prepare me, I still expected Picard to be a show we watched with the kids while eating dinner.
You know, without them running away to hide from the violence.
Why did Star Trek have to grow up? I haven’t.
What I want from Star Trek:
More queer and PoC. Less violent murders.
And I know, I know. If I’m not enjoying a show, I don’t have to watch it. But I tried that with Enterprise, and it felt like being estranged from a close family member.
That’s a feeling I’d like to avoid if doing so comes as cheap as watching an hour long show once a week.