Rewriting Star Trek Picard's first season

If you read my review of Star Trek: Picard, then you know that I was thoroughly disappoint and borderline offended by it. I had so much to complain about in that review, that I didn't have much time or energy left to write about the few merits that were present in the season. Yes, there are some decent ideas in this 10 hours of otherwise-garbage TV. If you were to ask me "Well Mr. smarty-pants self-described-'Trekkie', what would you have done?", then I would say that I would take those few good ideas, and turned them into episodes of Star Trek that are more consistent with the style, philosophy, and character of the show that I know and love.

On a recent recording for the Let's Play channel On the Branch, I spent some time pitching these ideas for a rewrite of the entire series. I had literally come up with the ideas a night or two before that recording session, and so the ideas were not very well thought-out. They were mostly just big-picture concepts. Now that I've had more time to think about them and further flesh them out, I've decided to record them here on the blog for posterity.

I tried to take the few ideas that I actually liked from the version of Star Trek: Picard that CBS actually put on the air, and use them to construct episodes and a season that I feel would have been more in-line with what I would have expected from Star Trek. So this isn't just me rambling about my own pie-in-the-sky ideas here. I'm actually taking the ideas that Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsmith, Michael Chabon, Kirsten Beyer, and the other writers and producers came up with, and trying to turn them into something that is actually faithful to the spirit of Star Trek, and consistent with the philosophy and characters that we've seen in the TV shows as I understand them.

The good ideas

So first of all, what were the few actual good ideas that CBS's writing staff came up with for Star Trek: Picard. Well, I identified three of them:

1. Romulans as environmental refugees after nova of their sun.
2. The Borg Reclamation Project attempting to de-assimilate and rehabilitate former Borg drones.
3. Data's consciousness being trapped in a quantum computer, awaiting a suitable positronic brain.

The best ideas of Picard involved the Romulans and es-Borg as refugees.

I think there's some genuinely good ideas there for some thoughtful, high-concept sci-fi stories that would fit well into Star Trek's canon and philosophy. It's too bad that none of them were more than minor subplots in Picard that were never thoroughly explored, or treated with any degree of thoughtfulness. These good ideas were sadly squandered by being sidelined compared to the larger, less intelligent plots that dominated the season.

These ideas were certainly better than the apocalyptic plot about conspiracies to destroy all life in the galaxy. Seriously, can we get some smaller, more down-to-earth stakes for our TV shows? There's only so many "end of all life as we know it" plots that can be told before they get stale.

I would stay as far away from apocalyptic, inter-dimensional robot tentacle monsters as possible.

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