Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. Decaf.

[Arneb]

Picard, the new Star trek spinoff by Amazon Prime. A 10-episode season telling a single continuous storyline. I loved it, and I commend it to the house.

It's some 20 or so years since Nemesis and Data's death. A lot has happened in between, most of it bad. Picard is still mourning the loss of his friend. It somehow became known in advance that the Sun of Romulus would turn supernova. Picard planned and partly executed a daring evacuation plan, but it was foiled when all the androids at Utopia Planitia space shipyard on Mars turned against their masters and destroyed the entire shipyard. No-one knows why. Picard tried to mobilise the entire Star Fleet to complete the rescue mission, but Star Fleet didn't dare to mobilise thousands of ships to save the archenemy. Thus, billions of romulans died when the supernova happened. Picard resigned his admiral post in disgust.

Picard is old now. so is everyone else we know from TNG. Most of the old crew have aged beautifully, and aging is a constant theme during the series. Patrick Stewart, in particular, is great at playing a man long past his prime, constantly aching with failure, a man whose former glories suffocate him.

Also, there's sex. Sword fighting. Yes, sword fighting, as in, splitting people in two. And an abandoned Borg cube. And a traitor. No, two, really. And Seven of Nine, also much older. And Data. And tears. And an unexpected ending. And, ah I loved it.

Science fiction is never about the future. Science fiction is always about its respective present. TOS, with its gung-ho, what price the world exploration enthusiasm and Klingons=Soviets logic was, TNG with its UN-like bringing peace and universal welfare everywhere culture was, DS9 with its rediscovery of war and strife was, and even Voyager, with its megalomaniac genocidal good-against-evil stuff fit the times around the turn of the millenium. Picard is perfect for the Trump years. What you aspired to has turned stale and corrupt from the inside, you can't trust the institution that was most trustworthy, and the one at the top is the worst traitor of all.

Watch it. It's great.

[Lance]

Nope, sorry. You lost me at "decaf".

[Arneb]

To be fair, that's an actual quote, not a charcterization of the series.

[Lianachan]

We watched it. Much better than expected, certainly in a different league from Discovery.