I recently binge-watched all of Season two of Picard in two sittings of many hours. It was a hoot and a wheeze, and many other things besides, however, I can see why it has generated discussion on numerous forums across the internet, and why there is some critique of its (alleged tendency to wokness or the appeasement of therein). There is some incongruity, a dash of carelessness, a sprinkle of trite tripe, a fair bit of navel-gazing, self-referencing with formulaic in-jokes and some po-facedness.
There is also the predilection to overlay the “current thing” cultural mores where may hap’s a few edits could have made it tighter. However, from an actors `actory’ perspective and with a view to plumbing the depths and breadths of experience as some, if not all concerned with the plot cruise towards agedness, a certain infirmity, but in the light of; the accrual of wisdom and its deployment to solve problems -where once actions were always the answer- I find myself having got it and enjoyed it.
And who is to say in the future that Picard and the entire Star Trek universe occupy, that some if not all of our prejudices are flattened off relative to the expanse of alienness encountered in the wider galaxy (from their imagined perspective).
Prejudices do still exist in our time, we are not that far removed from, homosexuality being a crime or the Victorian attitudes to sex (outwardly at least). I know this from growing up around my own grandmother who I now know looking through the lens of hindsight made prudery an artform, just by social convention. And that a general closed-mindedness and disgust dragged on like a social anchor to a dead past, until at least the swinging Sixties, through a fair part of the Seventies, Eighties', slowly ablating away through the Nineties, to the Noughties to where we are now.
Clearly, I could write an entire piece on the evolution of sexual freedom that has occurred in the exact fifty-five years I have walked the Earth, from the summer of love in 1967 (my birth year as an arbitrary placeholder) until now, (and recently a certain renaissance of repression via the new puritans emerging as a consequence of actual wokery. Which will be hilarious to watch evolve and eat itself as it ties itself in a Gordian knot of contradictions).
However, let's stick to Picard, if you are a Trekky, then this is a good dose of entertainment, and after all, that's the point is it not? Leave your preconceptions at the door, it isn't your universe (either of them), or your time frame.
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