Star Trek: Picard; Et Tu, Next Generation?

I have, for the most part, ignored Star Trek since the untimely but unsurprising demise of Star Trek: Enterprise. I have seen the first two of the post-reboot films, but none of the shows. Because of the decision of CBS to consign the shows to streaming rather than network TV--making it a matter of subscribing or not looking at all, rather than possibly, casually glancing at something a flip of the channel away--I did not bother, especially given the predictably unpromising characterization of Discovery as having walked away from everything that, to a Trek traditionalist, made the show great. (Indeed, that so much of the first season was spent in the Mirror Universe seems very suggestive.)

Still, one could take it all for something removed from the original, "real" set of series', which I thought had been safely set aside--but soon enough there came word of Star Trek: Picard. I was unenthusiastic, because I suspected that we would see its intellectual, socially critical and utopian elements dispensed with in favor of something fashionably "darker."

The little I have bothered to read about it confirms me in that expectation. Where at the height of the Reagan era, with Ayn Rand fanboy Alan Greenspan newly appointed to the Federal Reserve and orienting monetary policy to the fostering of speculative bubble after speculative bubble, with Gordon Gekko declaring that "Greed is good," with Mike Nichols gone from The Graduate to Working Girl (instead of cringing at "Plastics," we were supposed to glory in the thought of a career on Wall Street), Captain Jean-Luc Picard looked financier Ralph Offenhouse in the face and told him that "People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy"--but as Lee Parsons wrote,

[t]hese ideas are mostly gone from Star Trek: Picard. By way of explanation, Mr. Stewart argues that the world has changed a good deal in the interim.

As Stewart explained in a recent interview with the CBC, "the world that we find ourselves living in now, because it's a very, very tough world indeed," such that in refusing to return to the role for many years he now supposes that he

wanted a different man in a different world with a different set of values perhaps . . . This is a disturbing and frightening and sad time for many thousands of people.

He is still more explicit in an earlier piece that ran in Variety, remarking that the new show "was me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump" (thoughts he details using several of what Captain Spock referred to as "colorful metaphors"). It seems that Stewart himself could no longer believe in the role he had acted so persuasively three decades ago.

It is not in me to altogether blame Patrick Stewart for feeling disheartened. These have been a WRETCHED few decades from the standpoint of the kind of hopes the show represented. But it is still an unhappy thing to see Star Trek "get with the times" in this way; to see one of a very few candles in the darkness snuffed out.