Now, hear me out. This series is allegedly about Picard’s adventure to save Data’s twin cyborg daughters. Allegedly. In practice, though? By week four, it’s now a sort of Christmas Carol gauntlet, in which Jean-Luc is forced—mostly by women, I might add—to confront the self-involved Male Protagonist™ he’s become in the two decades since Data’s death (and let’s be honest, probably for a while before that, too).
First, it was the journalist asking him to answer for the Romulan rescue / Synthetics massacre stuff. Okay. Then, it was Admiral Kirsten Clancy, who rips him a new orifice when, not even a week after loudly criticizing Starfleet on Federation-wide television, he waltzes back into headquarters assuming they will be happy to temporarily reinstate him and loan him not only an entire ship but also a crew. (I love our Space Dad, you know I do, but he 1,000% deserved that dressing-down.) And then here’s poor Raffi, reminding him how, after his resignation got her fired, he basically ghosted her, letting her bake in relative poverty out in the desert, while he holed up in his family estate in the French countryside for over a decade.
And now, it’s Elnor, the qalankhkai-raised Rivendell—sorry, Romulan boy for whom Picard once promised to find a home, yet about whom he seems to have simply … forgotten? after the Synthetics attacked Mars. (He even invited two other Romulans, both former Tal Shiar agents, to live with him in his Terran vineyard paradise. Fuck them kids, amirite?) To say nothing of the crowd of justifiably angry Romulans at the cafe on Vashti, or of his all-consuming guilt about Data’s sacrifice.
Sure, one might argue that this is a very familiar storytelling framework: the embittered, aging warrior finding a way to redeem his failures in the twilight of his life! But I dunno, folks. Call me crazy, but it all feels very … oh, I don’t know … tribunal?
I ask you: WHO BUT Q would have such an acute desire to repeatedly slam Picard’s nose against the emotional grindstone like this? Consider:
What John de Lancie’s face would look like as Admiral Clancy boils under: “The. Fucking. Hubris.”
Q’s soft spot for gross flash mobs
The Q Continuum’s omnipotence/omnipresence throughout time and space, including, presumably, the CBS lot
That Q x Jean-Luc Picard is the best relationship Star Trek has ever seen, and to create a series named for the latter without including the former would be tantamount to a crime against the universe, one that Q would certainly feel obliged to remedy
Now, look, is this theory unlikely? Perhaps! Is it unreasonable? Certainly! Is the Q Continuum a fictional species created for a science fiction franchise that famously spawned a now-notorious fan archetype, the one that routinely fails to distinguish the boundary between fiction and reality, to the point where someone made a now-classic film satirizing this fact? I decline to comment! Instead, I must insist that Q guided the hands of Chabon and Co. while this show was being developed. I must request that you do not attempt to convince me otherwise.
Additional questions
Seriously, are Narek and Narissa fucking? Why, why, why, why, WHY are white male genre writers so obsessed with sibling incest? I assure you, there are myriad other types of uncomfortable relationship dynamics to choose from! You could also just make her his boss and, you know, not his sister?? Workplace harassment is hot right now, even! Besides, if you really needed to make some sort of weird sex thing happen on this show, Santiago Cabrera and his 50 emergency-hologram doppelgängers are right there.
Speaking of Cabrera, how many hologram doppelgängers do you think the good pilot has? If you said 100, I would then be compelled to respond, “Only 100?” Intellectually, I know Cristobal Rios is probably the result of Chabon, Kurtzman, et al. sitting around saying, “Hmm, we do need a new William T. Riker, but what if we made him a little more damaged and Han Soloesque this time?” I know he was engineered to fuck me up. AND YET. I don’t know what to tell you, except that the body wants what it wants, and by god, the body wants Rios saying “aguardiente” with a cigar in his mouth and a giant piece of shrapnel lodged in his shirtless torso. And you expect me to apologize for this?
Who came up with the qalankhkai? I would like to send them an Edible Arrangement. Maybe adorned with some cute little knife decorations. Deadly nun warriors who practice “absolute candor” and only take up with lost causes? Once again, I understand this is just a gender-bent reimagining of the tired samurai trope meant specifically to push the buttons of people like me, but god DAMN, if it isn’t finding every single button on the first try. If there isn’t a Short Trek about the qalankhkai in the works, I will be pulling a Bjo Trimble and launching a campaign.
…Really, though. Is Elnor supposed to look like sidewalk-bootleg Legolas? If so, one thousand earnest snaps for the costume and makeup departments. Long live Bootlegolas.