Here is my big effortpost on Star Trek: Picard, a show you should under no circumstances pay money for.
TL;DR - It's basically the Mass Effect 3 script with the serial numbers filed off, and enough plot points yoinked out of place like Jenga blocks so you'll think there's a mystery to it.
I am also convinced that the writers of this show have not watched a single episode of Star Trek, by which I mean any of the TV series. They definitely watched the JJ Abrams trek, and probably the shitty TNG movies, but none of the shows.
The most obvious problem with the show is the plot, in which a large number of key plot points were clearly written in as 'TBD', and then they went back and figured out what the SHOCKING TWIST was later. It's a LOST-style mystery box in a mystery box that never really makes any sense. There are so many things that are just lazy cliches from other genres, that make no sense when transplanted into Star Trek.
I can't possibly summarize the whole thing with all its stupid misdirects and plot threads that go nowhere, but I'll try and chart a course through the important bits.
As a fun play-along-at-home game, I've highlighted the thrilling mysteries the show has to offer. See if you can tease out this tangled web of intrigue, and figure out which questions have non-stupid answers!
SO
We start with a dream sequence. It's about 20 years after Data died in Star Trek: Nemesis, and Picard is super duper sad about it. Note that the writers are hanging on something that happened in what is arguably the worst Star Trek movie as the emotional core of their show. Nemesis made less than
Maid in Manhattan its opening weekend, but that's what the writers have chosen to build off as the emotional cornerstone of the show.
From there, we go to San Francisco of the future! A lady is in her apartment, making out with an alien who is just... a black dude, but he has eyes that blink sideways. He doesn't even get any bumpy forehead makeup. JUST THEN! Goons transport into the apartment and put a bag over the lady's head, killing the black guy
with a throwing knife. The goons are yelling at each other, and they're scanning the lady with the bag on her head, saying how lucky they are that she hasn't "Activated" yet. Then, bagged lady gets "Activated", and starts suddenly displaying super Kung Fu skills, killing all the goons.
- Mystery 1: Who are these goons? They're Romulans, but it's stupider than that.
- Mystery 2: Who is this lady? Why does she have kung-fu powers? She's secretly a robo lady, and she doesn't know it.
- Stupid Mystery: If these fuckers can transport down into somebody's apartment, why can't they transport somebody *out* of the apartment? Why do they have to go in with *throwing knives*? The goons never put, like, a device on her to help beam her out, but even if they did have to do that, wouldn't that be easier to do when she was asleep? Why THROWING KNIVES?
So, long story short, girl (name of Dahj) sees Picard talking on the future-tv, and she decides that she needs to go to him for help (why she thinks to do this is never clearly explained). She's actually a robo-clone made from Data's brain who has been programmed to think that she's human.
- Mystery 3: Why was this robot lady programmed to think she's human? This one never makes sense. It's later stated that she was sent to Earth to "try and uncover a conspiracy in the Federation", but she doesn't seem to know that she's supposed to be investigating anything, she's just smooching a dude in her apartment, and she never seems to know anything or investigate anything.
So, the goons show up again, and it turns out they're Romulans. They kill the *shit* out of Dahj, and then all suicide themselves in various ways before anybody can figure out why they're doing what they're trying to do. Thankfully, Dahj has an identical twin who basically fills in for her for the rest of the plot, so it doesn't really matter!
- Mystery 4: Why are Romulans suddenly so hell-bent on killing robo lady?
This one is so stupid you'd never guess it in a million years, but it is in fact the center of the show's story.
The Romulans have a secret society in their government. No, not the Tal'Shiar,
another secret society. There's a double-secret super-illuminati in Romulan society called the Jad'Vash, which somehow has never ever been brought up.
I have to wonder why the writers decided to take the Romulans, who already have a well-established KGB-style secret police, and decided to add a second entirely unrelated secret group that has nothing to do with the first.
My theory is that the writers only know about the Romulans because they watched the 2009 JJ Abrams movie, in which a Romulan dude was the villain. They decided they wanted a secret society in the Romulans that was doing something evil, but then later somebody (probably the intern who they made watch TNG for them) mentioned that the Romulans already had a secret society. Then they decided they didn't give a shit.
- MYSTERY WHATEVER: Okay, so why does the double-secret Romulan illuminati want to kill this robot lady?!
Here's where we get double-stupid.
A long long time ago, the Romulans found this beacon on some random planet, which beams these horrifying images into your brain of what will happen if androids get too advanced. And by 'horrifying images', I mean random shutterstock clips. No, that's not a joke:
These horrifying images drive most of the people who touch the beacon to suicide, and the rest are fanatically devoted to wiping out all artificial life forms.
For those of you who don't play a ton of video games, this is literally just the beacon from Mass Effect, a game in which an ancient alien beacon beams a series of broken images into your brain to warn you about a coming race of evil machine-organisms.
Anyways, it turns out that the message from the beacon says that there are a bunch of super-AI space squids lurking outside of our reality, and if sufficiently advanced AIs receive the message, they should build this beacon whose blueprints are included in the message, and call the space squids to kill all organic life in the... solar system? Galaxy? Universe? this is never explained. This is because the robo-squids have decided that organic life and artificial life has no chance of coexisting, and will always inevitably destroy each other.
Yes, again, that is literally just the plot of Mass Effect 3.
THEY STOLE THE PLOT FROM MASS EFFECT 3. THAT'S THE BIG REVEAL TO ALL THE SECRETS. EVERYTHING WAS MASS EFFECT 3 ALL ALONG. SPECIFICALLY, THE MASS EFFECT THAT EVERYBODY HATED THE ENDING TO BECAUSE IT WAS STUPID, AND THE WHOLE MOTIVATION FOR THE EVIL SPACE SQUID ROBOTS WAS STUPID. THEY STOLE THAT PART.
Anyways, so there's a secret planet of androids, which I think were all 'derived' from Data like Dahj. the Romulan double-illuminati is trying to track down the planet so they can kill all the androids. Picard, and Dahj's twin sister Soji, have to figure out how to get to the android planet and save them. And that's basically the plot of the show.
HERE IS A LIST OF SOME MORE STUPID THINGS THAT DON'T MAKE SENSE:
- Remember that famous episode of TNG where Picard argues in court for the personhood of Data, on the grounds that if they are wrong, they risk creating a new slave race? Well, in Picard, the writers didn't watch that episode! So the Federation made a whole slave race of androids to work in the spaceship factories on Mars. They get hacked by the Romulans to blow up Mars to get the Federation to ban androids.
But the spaceship factories the robo-slaves are working in are building rescue ships to save Romulans. Why they would make the androids blow up ships that were set to save their planet is never explained.
Also also, the spaceship factories are run by, like, stereotypical blue-collar construction workers? I get the feeling that spaceship construction is pretty technical stuff, but they wanted to have, like, uneducated racist construction workers to be mean to the slave robots?
I don't even think that the writers of the show realize that they made a slave race of workers (probably 'cause they didn't watch the Star Trek episode where they talk about that). - There's a Romulan ninja who joins Picard. He's just a ninja. He says cool ninja things and cuts people's heads off.
- The Romulan fleet is showing up to kill the androids, and the writers clearly couldn't figure out a way for Picard and his shitty little ship to defeat the Romulan fleet, so they fucking invent a magical-space-dildo-wand that can do anything, and it makes a giant holographic fleet appear. It looks so much like a sex toy that imgur rejected the original upload and I had to re-crop the image.
- In the last episode, turns out Data is alive, and living in six USB sticks. He says hi to Picard, and then asks to die.
- At the very end, Picard dies of a brain tumor, but then they put his consciousness into an identical robot body, which they say has been specifically programmed to simulate aging at a normal rate, and die in another 20 years. Bringing somebody back from the dead in a highly technologically advanced but basically identical body is also STOLEN FROM MASS EFFECT.
There is still so much more stuff. There's Picard's drug-addicted gun toting loner friend, there are the weird incest-sibling Romulan villains, there's the GORY EYEBALL REMOVAL TORTURE SCENE that starts episode 5.
I am gonna say, sometimes trashy stupid sci-fi TV that doesn't make a whole lot of sense is fun, but please do not give CBS any more money for shit like this. You just can't repackage your shitty Mass Effect fanfic as Star Trek and expect it to work.
EDIT: Also, I think I just had a realization why the hack writers decided to make the Romulans super racist against robots. In the JJ Abrams movie, Romulus gets destroyed, so now the Romulans are, like, nomad people. In spite of the fact that the Romulan Star Empire is fucking *huge* in Star Trek, and so presumably the Romulans have hundreds/thousands of other planets to live on, it reminded somebody of the Quarians from Mass Effect, and the Quarians are racist against robots because they accidentally created the Geth, a race of machines who kicked them off their planet and made them nomads.
