Take a Pass

The first episode of the new Star Trek: Discovery show was not enough to make me buy CBS's streaming service and continue watching it. Nothing I've read about the ensuing seasons has made me think I got that wrong.

But recent trailers and publicity for another Trek-verse show on the streaming network, Star Trek: Picard, interested me. Patrick Stewart is a top actor and he made the character of Enterprise-D Captain Jean-Luc Picard far more interesting than the dated and often repetitive show he inhabited. Stewart played the role in four big-screen movies, the final one of which did enough damage to the franchise that it stayed off the big screen for seven years until J.J. Adams' rebooted Star Trek in 2009.

Picard looked interesting in the trailers, which seemed to have set aside the 1980s atmosphere of Gene Roddenberry's dippy utopian vision for the more realistic aura of the Deep Space Nine television show and the First Contact movie. So I have to say I was considering a test-run of the CBS All Access streaming network to watch the show.

Then I read Stewart's Vanity Fair interview -- in which he says that one of the guiding understandings of the new show “was me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump and feeling, ‘Why hasn’t the Federation changed? Why hasn’t Starfleet changed?’ Maybe they’re not as reliable and trustworthy as we all thought.” And he further opines on which nation -- the U.S. or the U.K. -- is currently more "****ed." And with my earlier concerns now confirmed I said, "Nope."

It's not because I like or dislike the British vote to leave the European Union or the US election of Donald Trump. Yes, the current EU is a trainwreck and any smart nation would bow out until or unless it fixed its problems. But the president is a lousy human being with next to no sense of what he should be doing in office, even on the infrequent occasions he stumbles into the right thing to do. So I guess technically, Sir Patrick and I split on those things. But as a more conservative person politically I am well-used to the idea that actors, actresses, musicians, directors, writers and interns who get the director coffee think I am a knuckle-dragging troglodyte who should probably be kept indoors and away from sharp objects.

No, I've lost all interest in the show because I want five bleedin' minutes of entertainment that doesn't comment on or reference Donald Trump and what show executives think is so wrong with the world that people elected him. It doesn't matter that the creators of most popular forms of entertainment aren't really good at that sort of thing. Many of the various and sundry Important! Statements! creators made against former President Bush are horribly dated now, especially since they all told us he was the worst thing imaginable and now, surprise, he's not. Bereft of their Deep Political Meaning they have a shallow sameness and are mostly just boring.

What matters is that both the president and his haters agree that he needs to be at the center of everything, and anyone who thinks differently just gets steamrolled by them working together to make their shared vision a reality.