At the age of thirteen, I wanted to grow up to be JRR Tolkien. Not literally, of course.
Scratch that.
At the age of thirteen, I literally wanted to grow up to be JRR Tolkien. At the age of thirteen, I understood nothing about World War 1.
I didn't grow up to be JRR Tolkien, obviously. To compensate for this abject failure of perseverance I have, in my adulthood, taken up the art of Dungeon Mastering. At embarrassingly irregular intervals, I narrate a series of high fantasy hijinks that my friends try to make sense of through the lens of fictitious characters they have constructed according to the rules of Dungeons & Dragons. Thus I am given an excuse to build worlds as rich in politics, history, and mythology as I have the patience for without any of the pressure of having to be one of the world's most brilliant philologists. As George W. Bush once said: mission accomplished.
One of the great advantages of telling a story through a medium which requires the participation of other people, each with their own perspectives and agendas, is that you are not the one telling the story. You are all telling the story. While the Dungeon Master certainly bears the lion's share of the burden constructing the framework in which the story takes place (did I just domesticate lions?), the Dungeon Master has almost no control over who the principal characters are, what they want, or what they will do. This is terrifying, but it makes the story better. It is almost impossible to get a half dozen people to tacitly agree to do something nonsensical just because "that's what's supposed to happen." Those decisions have to be made explicitly and with multiple reminders that they make no sense. Star Trek: Picard could use some players right about now.
At long last, Jean-Luc and the crew of La Sirena have arrived at the Artifact formerly known as the Romulan Reclamation Center. They have arrived on a very important day: the day that Boyfriend Romulan has decided to extract the information he needs from Soji's subconscious and then murder her. Jean-Luc doesn't really do much to stop the murdering. He spends so much time admiring Hugh's good works disassimilating XBs that, by the time they get around to actually trying to locate Soji, she is deep into the process of being murdered. Thankfully, Romulan Boyfriend has decided to murder her by locking her in a room and filling it with poison gas released from a Rubik's cube. This leaves Soji plenty of time to activate her robot superpowers and punch her way to freedom through the floor. That is actually what happens. It's not clear that Romulan Boyfriend is upset by these developments. He still got his information (apparently, the android homeworld has two moons and lightning, which, I guess, is enough information to uniquely identify it among the tens of thousands of habitable or barely habitable worlds in known Star Trek space), and he might actually be in love with Soji (I am saying this both because his sister, who has now spent so much time openly as a Romulan I am forced to ask why she ever bothered going to the trouble of making herself look human, has insinuated it, and because "that's what's supposed to happen"). Hugh leads Jean-Luc and Soji to the top-secret room where the Borg Queen kept her magical interstellar transporter from back in the day when the Artifact was a functioning Borg cube. Elnor joins them and murders some Tal Shi'ar goons. Jean-Luc orders Hugh to beam him and Soji to the planet where, based on the teaser for next week, the Riker-Trois are homesteading, and Jean-Luc and Soji beam out alone while Hugh and Elnor cover their escape. I get why Hugh did not join them. He has his good works to attend to. Why is Elnor still on the artifact? They have a transporter, an instantaneous means of travel, with a range of 40,000 light years. "Covering their escape" is almost meaningless, because the entire Artifact is crawling with Tal Shi'ar and their surveillance equipment. Everyone knows who helped whom escape where. Elnor stays behind "because that's what's supposed to happen."
Most things that have furthered the plot of this show happen because they were supposed to. In reverse chronological order:
Story arcs are hard. Worlds are big and conspiracies are complicated. Characters are harder. Each is their own little world of perspectives and wants, very few of which are likely reflect what the narrator says is actually happening or supposed to happen. While I have always loved Star Trek for its tales of interstellar politics moral quandaries, those quandaries were interpreted through characters I understood and trusted to behave in a self-consistent manner. This was easier in the framework of 1990s television. With the possible exception of Worf, the characters in the Next Generation did very little evolving over the course of seven years. In order to keep episodes perfectly interchangeable, it was important that characters begin each episode in the same emotional and intellectual space that they began the previous episode (how else do you explain Geordi's inability to learn the lessons of Booby Trap and Galaxy's Child in time to prevent the total disaster that was Aquiel?) Coming, as it does, in the age of Prestige Television, Picard cannot afford to be perfectly episodic, with episodes that can be viewed in any arbitrary order. Picard has to be presented to us as a handcrafted visual novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end that always must be thus. Circumstances and characters have to change, the more rapidly the better. One way to this effect is to create a world populated with characters who each want different things and see how they interact. Another way is to list out a series of beats designed to make a point and find the shortest path for your characters to take from point A to point C while still intersecting point B. The difference between the one and the other is whether anyone is standing up for the characters and pointing out to the narrator that "I don't think my character would do that." Some narrators are able to hold that advocacy in their own minds. Others get by with a little help from the players. Others choose to create a web of conspiracies so complicated that, they hope, their audience won't notice what is or isn't being done around them.
Scratch that.
At the age of thirteen, I literally wanted to grow up to be JRR Tolkien. At the age of thirteen, I understood nothing about World War 1.
I didn't grow up to be JRR Tolkien, obviously. To compensate for this abject failure of perseverance I have, in my adulthood, taken up the art of Dungeon Mastering. At embarrassingly irregular intervals, I narrate a series of high fantasy hijinks that my friends try to make sense of through the lens of fictitious characters they have constructed according to the rules of Dungeons & Dragons. Thus I am given an excuse to build worlds as rich in politics, history, and mythology as I have the patience for without any of the pressure of having to be one of the world's most brilliant philologists. As George W. Bush once said: mission accomplished.
One of the great advantages of telling a story through a medium which requires the participation of other people, each with their own perspectives and agendas, is that you are not the one telling the story. You are all telling the story. While the Dungeon Master certainly bears the lion's share of the burden constructing the framework in which the story takes place (did I just domesticate lions?), the Dungeon Master has almost no control over who the principal characters are, what they want, or what they will do. This is terrifying, but it makes the story better. It is almost impossible to get a half dozen people to tacitly agree to do something nonsensical just because "that's what's supposed to happen." Those decisions have to be made explicitly and with multiple reminders that they make no sense. Star Trek: Picard could use some players right about now.
At long last, Jean-Luc and the crew of La Sirena have arrived at the Artifact formerly known as the Romulan Reclamation Center. They have arrived on a very important day: the day that Boyfriend Romulan has decided to extract the information he needs from Soji's subconscious and then murder her. Jean-Luc doesn't really do much to stop the murdering. He spends so much time admiring Hugh's good works disassimilating XBs that, by the time they get around to actually trying to locate Soji, she is deep into the process of being murdered. Thankfully, Romulan Boyfriend has decided to murder her by locking her in a room and filling it with poison gas released from a Rubik's cube. This leaves Soji plenty of time to activate her robot superpowers and punch her way to freedom through the floor. That is actually what happens. It's not clear that Romulan Boyfriend is upset by these developments. He still got his information (apparently, the android homeworld has two moons and lightning, which, I guess, is enough information to uniquely identify it among the tens of thousands of habitable or barely habitable worlds in known Star Trek space), and he might actually be in love with Soji (I am saying this both because his sister, who has now spent so much time openly as a Romulan I am forced to ask why she ever bothered going to the trouble of making herself look human, has insinuated it, and because "that's what's supposed to happen"). Hugh leads Jean-Luc and Soji to the top-secret room where the Borg Queen kept her magical interstellar transporter from back in the day when the Artifact was a functioning Borg cube. Elnor joins them and murders some Tal Shi'ar goons. Jean-Luc orders Hugh to beam him and Soji to the planet where, based on the teaser for next week, the Riker-Trois are homesteading, and Jean-Luc and Soji beam out alone while Hugh and Elnor cover their escape. I get why Hugh did not join them. He has his good works to attend to. Why is Elnor still on the artifact? They have a transporter, an instantaneous means of travel, with a range of 40,000 light years. "Covering their escape" is almost meaningless, because the entire Artifact is crawling with Tal Shi'ar and their surveillance equipment. Everyone knows who helped whom escape where. Elnor stays behind "because that's what's supposed to happen."
Most things that have furthered the plot of this show happen because they were supposed to. In reverse chronological order:
- The crew of La Sirena did whatever you do with Bruce Maddux's body without bothering to ask the Emergency Medical Hologram about that time Doctor Jurati murdered him.
- Doctor Jurati and Captain Rios had sex. I'm not kidding.
- Romulan Boyfriend decided to just assume that poison gas works on androids and conveniently forgot that, when threatened, the Soji sisters become very strong and very good at hitting things.
- Bruce Maddux (whose name I intend to continue misspelling out of shear stubbornness) manufactured the Soji sisters out of "one of Data's neural pathways" and sent Soji to the Artifact "to learn the truth about the synth attack on Mars" (none of these things strike me as being terribly sequitur to anything).
- Seven-of-Nine decided to take a cruise around Vashti on the same day that La Sirena came under fire from a 22nd century Romulan Bird of Prey.
- Starfleet beamed Jean-Luc straight from the archives to his living room couch.
- Dahj fled Chateau Picard barely five hours after fleeing to Chateau Picard.
Story arcs are hard. Worlds are big and conspiracies are complicated. Characters are harder. Each is their own little world of perspectives and wants, very few of which are likely reflect what the narrator says is actually happening or supposed to happen. While I have always loved Star Trek for its tales of interstellar politics moral quandaries, those quandaries were interpreted through characters I understood and trusted to behave in a self-consistent manner. This was easier in the framework of 1990s television. With the possible exception of Worf, the characters in the Next Generation did very little evolving over the course of seven years. In order to keep episodes perfectly interchangeable, it was important that characters begin each episode in the same emotional and intellectual space that they began the previous episode (how else do you explain Geordi's inability to learn the lessons of Booby Trap and Galaxy's Child in time to prevent the total disaster that was Aquiel?) Coming, as it does, in the age of Prestige Television, Picard cannot afford to be perfectly episodic, with episodes that can be viewed in any arbitrary order. Picard has to be presented to us as a handcrafted visual novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end that always must be thus. Circumstances and characters have to change, the more rapidly the better. One way to this effect is to create a world populated with characters who each want different things and see how they interact. Another way is to list out a series of beats designed to make a point and find the shortest path for your characters to take from point A to point C while still intersecting point B. The difference between the one and the other is whether anyone is standing up for the characters and pointing out to the narrator that "I don't think my character would do that." Some narrators are able to hold that advocacy in their own minds. Others get by with a little help from the players. Others choose to create a web of conspiracies so complicated that, they hope, their audience won't notice what is or isn't being done around them.
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