Star Trek: Picard has been struggling and stumbling over its own legacy

Vulture

The new characters on Picard have some intriguing, thorny complications, says Angelica Jade Bastién. "But while the basic sketches of these characters hold promise, the writing is often starkly blunt, making me wish Picard placed more trust in its actors to flesh out their characters’ unspoken qualities, and trusted its audience to pick up on them. Bastién adds: "The tension between the Picard we remember and the Picard we’re presented with today is ripe for exploration. The show stumbles in ways both aesthetic and narrative in covering this ground, but Patrick Stewart has such a handle on the character — imbuing tender loneliness and regret into every gesture and line reading — I couldn’t help but be mesmerized, at least momentarily. Now more than ever I could use a good Star Trek property; the franchise has the uncanny ability to interrogate the present by exploring a possible future while retaining an essential hope about humanity that I desperately need to believe in right now. And I need to believe that Picard will find a way to scale the same heights of intellectual exploration and moral complexity as its predecessors."

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