Season 2 has come and gone, and it’s abundantly clear that my opinions of what Trek is about vs what the creative minds of this show consider the heart of Trek are in completely different places. The season opened with a couple minutes of gloriously blurry spaceship scenes with all the lense flairs you could fit into a single frame, trying to capture that money making spirit that the 2009 movie had, but alas, it all felt too cheaply filmed, and too cheaply presented to actually look good on screen. This second season is 10 long meandering episodes that are paradoxically both too short for the content they want to explore, and too long with the content that they ended up exploring.
Spoilers from here on out:
The main plot involves the Borg (gasp!) ripping through a dimensional rip in the fabric of space, taunting the Federation with a demand to speak to Picard, who then arrives and is quickly kicked back to the far past for him, but sorta future for us, along with a group of randomly selected crew from the ship he was on (the same people from season one somehow, hm) where they have an unbelievable number of contrived plots lines all running at the same time. Immigration, politics, health care, childhood trauma, predestination, destiny, adoption, finding birth parents, adult loneliness, why Picard has the accent he does, meeting your gods, gods making mistakes, and many many more. All of them touched on, none of them really handled in a way that made me feel like the correct amount of time was spent on them.
This was always meant to be a three season look into how Picard became the man that he ended up being and how that man we saw from the TNG television series changed for better or worse after the lessons he learned while commanding that ship. As such, it’s not really a space opera with fantastical spaceship battles, so as I mentioned, not up my alley. From the other reviews I’ve read, there’s definitely an audience for the show out there, but it isn’t me.
I’ll be back for season three though.
It seemed to me that Kathleen Kennedy got her claws of wanton destruction into Star Trek as well as Star Wars.