Star Trek: Picard season two is over, I’ve heard a lot of hate about it, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely.

You guys gotta remember, I’m not that guy. I can see the problems people have, and I understand where the new Trek, old Trek crowd is coming from, because I have a very similar story. A lot of mine has to do with Discovery, truthfully, and with where I was in my head when it showed up. Discovery was exactly what it sounds like: discovering the new version of what they’re trying to do. With four seasons behind it now, I think you get a better idea of that in retrospect.

I talked a little about Picard season one a couple weeks back on Trek Talk Tuesdays. Season one wasn’t bad. Season one also wasn’t great. It did a lot of what it was trying to do and misstepped in some other places.

Time Travel Is Home Turf

Season two was more in line with what I actually thought season one was going to be, which is a lot more to do with space and storylines of that nature. And all of it felt very familiar. The whole Star Trek time travel angle, having to go back and fix things, is not unfamiliar territory. Heck, there were episodes with the time agents, the temporal Starfleet so to speak, who were always talking about James T. Kirk. Oh, he was the worst, he always broke things. Time travel is very common in this franchise.

So you get into this season, and immediately the first question a lot of folks were asking was, what about the episodes with Guinan in the past? What about some of the things that were already established?

I don’t know expressly that these things break canon, per se. Once we dive off the cliff that is canon, that alone is a place where you sit there and go, okay.

For me it’s always been about moving the story forward. The last thing I’d seen was “All Good Things,” and then the movies, so technically Nemesis was the last thing I’d seen. Then you get into the J.J. Abrams movies, the Kelvin universe, and you see there’s a connection from The Next Generation that ultimately goes back in time and informs that whole loop. Time travel plays a big part in all of it, and that’s really everybody trying to stay nice and clean with the storyline, the canon so to speak.

Nothing That Comes Out Now Touches What I Love

I’ve finally come to realize that nothing that comes out now is affecting my love of Star Trek, or my love of the genre, or my love of that style of storytelling. Nothing at all.

I can always tell when things come around that I want, that I like. And the things that sometimes don’t work, that’s okay. You just move on with life. It’s storytelling. It doesn’t affect my enjoyment of stuff. I’m here for all of it, I really am. I’m sort of a convert, and the story of how that happened belongs to Discovery.

Victory Laps for Jean-Luc Picard

I think the series is taking the opportunity to take some victory laps with Jean-Luc Picard, and to give us some final storytelling beats with him. I didn’t hate them. I kind of liked them.

I know there were some questions about last week. Oh well, they’ll just completely wash away “Where No One Has Gone Before.” That’s the episode with the Traveler, back in season one of The Next Generation, where he sees a vision of his mom. But in Picard they actually give us that. He says there are times he’s envisioned seeing her, wanting to sit down and have a cup of tea with her as an old woman. It wrapped it with a bow in a way I was okay with. It gave it a nod. It said it exists, it’s a thing, it was respectful, and it moved on with life.

I feel like there’s nothing wrong with that approach. It helps a lot when it comes to storytelling to be able to say, hey, these are the stories we’re trying to tell, and let’s not lose a whole lot of crazy sleep.

Where the argument sometimes begins to fall a little flat is that these are established characters. So it becomes, are we doing something we shouldn’t? I think I have an easier time with Discovery than I do accepting some parts of Picard, only because Picard’s existing story is made of stories I knew. Even the stuff with Pike now in Strange New Worlds, I’m not super affected by, because it’s all before what happens.

Robo Picard and the Stakes They Gave Away

So, season three. Mrs. Know-It-All and I talked about it. (By the way, she’s getting her uniform too. I’ve ordered new uniforms, so I have a First Contact uniform coming and some other things. ADHD, I apologize.) I’m showing her more and more Star Trek, and the one thing she said was that she’d love to see where everybody is today. That’s really what I think she wants to get from all this.

I feel like they’re trying to give Picard these moments that he hasn’t really had an opportunity to deal with. I think they kind of brushed away the Irumodic Syndrome concept that was laid out in “All Good Things,” the Next Generation finale. But I also feel like they paid it off a little bit with some of the brain stuff they dealt with in Picard season one.

Turning him into Robo Picard wasn’t my favorite move, because I feel like you lose stakes. You could easily have had that be a thing floating over his head. It’s a futuristic version of some sort of neurological disorder that’s going to begin to degrade his neural pathways, some future version of Alzheimer’s, a breaking down of some kind. I think that would’ve added tension and stakes to everything he’s doing. If you wanted to, you could’ve ended season three and had it be the ending of that particular journey.

I feel like by shying away from old age and dying and the things that happen, you’ve dehumanized Picard a little bit. But then again, that doesn’t really hold up too much, because here comes season two, and I thought there were many, many human moments in it.

So I’m enjoying the ride. I’m enjoying seeing these classic characters that I’ve loved for so long. I’m very much a friend of the show. Look, man, I’m gonna go with you guys. I’m gonna go with you wherever you are.

If It Makes You Angry, Stop Watching

As a series, I like it. Season one I loved because it gave us something new. There were things I loved and things I didn’t, whatever, but I loved it overall. Season two I’ve also loved. There were some big areas where I called them on the carpet, some things I thought weren’t that great, but it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the show overall.

When you hold something up as a paragon and then behave as if it can never change, as if it can never be altered, first off, you’re right. It can’t be altered and it can’t be changed. If you don’t like what’s coming out, stop watching it. It’s okay. You don’t have to participate if it’s going to make you angry.

I understand the algorithms here on social media are all about telling us, hey, here’s all the stuff you hate. I’m not about that. If you just want to hate it, then hate it, whatever. But I don’t feel like it’s my responsibility or my job to poo poo, if you will, on other people’s parade. You want to enjoy it, enjoy it.

Film and television are both extraordinarily subjective mediums. What I got from Sliders as a TV show is something totally different than what everybody else got. My fan fiction was very different than everybody else’s fan fiction when it came to things like Sliders, or Lost in Space, or even Star Trek for that matter.

Everybody Onboards Somewhere

I feel like we get an opportunity to enjoy Star Trek and, if nothing else, to enjoy other people’s onboarding.

My daughter had never seen anything except the J.J. Abrams movies and a little bit of Picard and Discovery, and now she’s watched some Strange New Worlds. I had an opportunity to say, hey, here’s T’Pring from Strange New Worlds, let me go ahead and show you where that came from. We watched “Amok Time,” and next thing you know she’s asking me to watch some other classic episodes.

It’s the same reason she enjoys The Orville. It’s the same reason she’s stopped while walking through the living room when I’m doing my rewatch of some Next Generation episodes. And I’ve already primed the pump, if you will, for Deep Space Nine. I told her, yeah, Deep Space Nine’s amazing, especially when you get into the Dominion War.

So there’s a place for all of it, for sure, and we need to remember that everyone’s onboarding somewhere.

Take Star Wars. Regardless of how people feel about the prequels, the prequel movies were an entire generation’s first exposure to Star Wars. That didn’t stop that generation from discovering and enjoying the original movies. And the sequels are another generation’s Star Wars.

Same thing with us. My Star Trek was The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager. I fell off at Enterprise. But I’ve always enjoyed TOS, I’ve always enjoyed the original series films, and those weren’t my Star Trek, per se.

Same thing with this stuff.

Where did you onboard into Star Trek, and where did Picard season two land for you? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.