Adam Kotsko, Late Star Trek (2025)

Adam Kotsko is a philosopher of, I guess, at least some repute, but I know him best for two things. One, he wrote a really sharp piece about the college literacy crisis, one that I actually assign in my 101 classes and students tend to respond to really well. Second, he is a prolific poster on Reddit, usually on the "Daystrom Insitute" subreddit, which is devoted to highly detailed analysis of Star Trek. (You might think this would be my jam, but after about a year of subscribing I left the sub because 1) they are too much focused on producing convoluted in-universe theories, and 2) they don't allow jokes!)

Thus he is the kind of person some call an "aca-fan." As an academic and a fan myself, I have read a lot of aca-fan work and seen a lot of aca-fan presentations at conferences... and to be honest, I mostly hate it. In my experience, there are largely two kinds of bad aca-fan work. The first are ones who are good fans but bad academics. Lots of enthusiasm for, say, Doctor Who, but little academic rigor; their fannish instincts overwhelm the analysis. Too many fandom comments or jokes, a lack of real engagement with the text in question. I once saw a presentation at a conference and when I asked a question applying one thing the presenter had said to a different aspect of the text, the answer was basically, "Well, it's just a tv show. It's for fun!" I mean, if that's your attitude, why are you here to begin with. (Literally while I was writing this post a friend texted me to complain she was at a talk that was "just heart eyes as a talk.")

But there's another type of bad aca-fan in my opinion, the one who is not actually a very good fan. They've watched some Doctor Who, but they seem unaware that there's a whole rich universe of fan discourse, they are unfamiliar with the production history or whatever; they just bring their academic framework of choice to the text but don't really engage with its nuances because they don't know it. To me, this one is almost worst, because why are you even doing this if you don't really know the thing you're analyzing? (A good example of both of these problems is the book Doctor Who in Time and Space, which I read and reviewed about a decade ago.)

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era
by Adam Kotsko

Published: 2025
Read: July 2025

I am pleased to say that Kotsko has produced a book that is characteristic of neither approach. Late Star Trek is a monograph about Star Trek that takes inventively as its unit of analysis the period from 2001 to the present: Enterprise, the novels produced while there were no shows on the air, the reboot film trilogy, and the streaming shows from Paramount+. Kotsko's argument is that this is the era where the people making Star Trek "made Star Trek that is about its status as Star Trek, rather than simply doing what people like about Star Trek" (27). The shows (and books and comics) became self-conscious in a way that sometimes paid off... but often did not.

Kotsko's approach is a careful one overall; he is attentive to both the details of the texts themselves and the nuances of their production. He knows his stuff as a fan (for the most part), but he also is never blinded by his fanboyism. I thought his analysis was overall quite strong—which might be to say, he usually says things that I agreed with! I was struck by his observation that basically every post-2001 incarnation of Star Trek has been about terrorism to some degree, a choice that made sense in 2001 but maybe not so much that we should still be making it twenty years later. I felt like there is probably more for some future writer to dig into here—is it an expression of our contemporary lack of belief in utopian futures? or an expression of the old Jameson canard about the end of the world vs. the end of capitalism? or frustration with the continuation of the surveillance state long past its supposed rationale?

His consideration of Enterprise is a good one, pointing out the ways in which the show was kind of misconceived, but kind of worked sometimes, and ultimately had to be reinvented two times across its four-year run. Many people think that the fourth season redeemed the show, and though he kinds of leans in this direction, he also points out its failings, such as the fact that it basically stopped pretending to even care about its characters, just turning them into observers for moments of fan service.

I did find the weakest part was his analysis of the so-called "novelverse," the interconnected web of novels that ran from 2001 to the debut of Picard in 2020 continuing the twenty-fourth-century shows beyond their screen end point. This is probably because he clearly is a fan of what they did, whereas I (as I have chronicled exhaustively in a series of posts on this blog) have largely been skeptical, if not exhausted, by many of the choices the so-called "Destiny-era novels" have made; I would argue they commit many of the same mistakes he later identifies in Picard, just differently.  In particular, it seems to me that the novels are just as suffused by the un-Star Trekky cynicism he criticizes Picard for (I write this in the middle of reading Available Light, where far too many characters seem to think carrying out coups against democratically elected leaders is just one of those things), but he doesn't discuss that.

I think probably Kotsko just has a different register of enjoyment than me when it comes to storyworlds—I think he's more into the building of continuity as an end in itself. Not to the extent of some fans, but you can definitely see it in the three "novelverse" authors he singles out for praise: Kirsten Beyer, Christopher L. Bennett, and David Mack. Beyer I can't really comment on (I only read the first of her "Voyager relaunch" novels and decided it wasn't for me, and it does seem like Kotsko considers it the weakest), but Bennett and Mack are probably my least favorite of the regular writers of the Destiny-era books, both having in my opinion a poor command of characterization. Still, though, I appreciate his detailed attention to the novels, and that it comes from a place of consideration and love; it was this part of the book that made me wonder what kind of "aca-fan" work I might pitch if I were to build a glass house for others to throw stones at.

He makes good points about the so-called "Kelvin timeline" films, especially their weirdly repetitive structure and self-referentiality (each one is about Starfleet needing to get back to doing Starfleet things... instead, you know, just making a movie about doing Starfleet things), and he rightly explains why Star Trek Beyond is the best one. I really liked his analysis of how the Kelvin comics (which I haven't gotten to yet except for Countdown, Nero, and Spock: Reflections) tried to make the flawed conception of the reboot films work as a basis for ongoing stories. I am doubtful there are more invested academic analyses of Star Trek comics out there than this!

I liked the whole book, as you can tell, but I found Kotsko's takes on Discovery and Picard particularly potent. Like me, he sees the first season of Discovery as its strongest despite its missteps; he sees the third season onward as competent but ultimately boring. Similarly, he thinks the original premise of Picard was its most interesting even though the way the first season ended was disastrous, and though everyone likes to dump on season two of Picard, I was gratified for his detailed takedown of the flaws of season three. As he says, each season of Picard is basically a new show that seemingly demonstrates contempt for the previous seasons of the show.

There are some small flaws, such as details gotten wrong: he calls Pocket editor Marco Palmieri "Mark," says there were three cancelled Kelvin timeline novels but there were actually four. The most egregious factual error is that the timeline in appendix 2 is completely useless because it gives all the twenty-fourth-century shows twenty-third-century dates and thus intermixes them with the original series. 

Probably the thing that bothered me most is that Kotsko's experience of Star Trek fandom is primarily based on Reddit, and reflects some of its idiosyncrasies seemingly without recognizing that they are idiosyncrasies, such as his use of the terms "alpha canon" and "beta canon," terms that really aren't used elsewhere, and which are misleading, since "beta canon" is definitionally actually not canonical! Obviously I'm biased, but the TrekBBS is mentioned/cited only a couple times (including a thread I myself participated in), but I think it has a more production-focused user base that would have counterbalanced the more lore-focused user base of Reddit. (And given him more insight into some areas he is interested in, such the reception of Enterprise season three. That said, I appreciate that a detailed discussion of Enterprise's famous season three episode "The Interregnum" is included in a scholarly work!)

Overall, this is an incisive piece of criticism; Kotsko is an academic and a fan, and in the best sense of both words. It gave me some good stuff to chew on, I zipped through it in just a day and a half, and I'm curious to check out some of the work he cites as well.

Star Trek: Picard: Second Self by Una McCormack

Star Trek: Picard: Second Self
by Una McCormack

I was not much into season one of Star Trek: Picard, and what little I've seen thus far of season two hasn't won me over much either. One of the things that hasn't worked for me has been the character of Raffi; she's fine as part of the ensemble, but the episode of the first season that focused on her was absurdly melodramatic and poorly written. There have been some good Picard novels, however, and I in particular think that Una McCormack is an excellent author with a great grasp on character. So after some early positive reviews, I went ahead and picked this novel up. It helps bridge the gap between seasons one and two of Picard, focusing in particular on Raffi and Elnor.

 

Published: 2022
Acquired and read: October 2022

It was a good gamble. McCormack's characterization transformed Raffi for me; seeing her from the inside makes her feel real in a way the show never really managed. She's just so very good at the small moments between people that make them come to life: Raffi and Picard, Raffi and Laris, Laris and Picard, Rafii and Elnor, Raffi and her old coworkers at Starfleet Intelligence. Seeing what each thinks of the other, how each uses the other, and how each feels the other is using them, makes them all click in various combinations and feel all the more real for it.

 

The book has a nested structure: parts one and five take place in the present of Picard, parts two and four follow Raffi right after the Dominion War, part three is during the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor. As always, McCormack also does a great job with the complexity of geopolitics. The book mostly revolves around a Bajoran colony annexed by the Cardassians; the Bajorans were driven out, and then during the Dominion War, Romulans occupied the colony, but then pulled out following the peace treaty; now the Romulans are returning as refugees following the explosion of their star. There's a lot of traumas and histories embedded in the history of the planet, which McCormack's novel explores in depth, along with the personal histories that get embedded in the social ones: who were these Bajorans, these Cardassians, these humans, these Romulans?

If you're a McCormack fan, then you'll know she has the best handle on Garak other than Andy Robinson himself, and the big hook for this novel is that Raffi is tasked with bringing Garak in to appease the Federation's Bajoran allies without aggravating their Cardassian or Romulan ones. In her novels in the so-called "Destiny era," McCormack developed a history for Garak after the show, but this goes in a slightly different direction though it seems to share commonalities up until the events of The Fall: The Crimson Shadow. As always, McCormack really gets Garak, but he also doesn't steal the show from Raffi; he fits perfectly into this story of compromising who you are and figuring out how to live with yourself. There's one passage that almost made me tear up, as McCormack briefly flashes forward from a young Garak to a DS9-era Garak to reflect on what the story's events meant to him. (McCormack's ability to actually have a perspective and narrative style are, of course, what makes her the best working Star Trek author. None of the other ones would dare abandon third-person limited past tense voice to do something interesting like this.)

The book is riveting reading; I think I allotted myself four days to read it, but ended up blasting through over half of the book in one day because I was enjoying it so much. The best Star Trek novel I've read since, well, The Crimson Shadow. (But when will she write her amazing original novel?)

Review: Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements by John Jackson Miller

Published: 2021
Acquired: August 2021
Read: October 2021

Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements
by John Jackson Miller

My reaction to Picard was mixed enough that its tie-in novels are not automatic buys for me. Rios was a character I think I could have liked, but the melodramatic—and highly coincidental—backstory we eventually learn about undermined the good work Santiago Cabrera did with his performance, and so I wasn't enthused about a prequel novel focusing on him. But 1) I do like Jack Jackson Miller, and 2) I heard the Iotians, from my favorite original series episode, were in it.

I wanted to like this, and I was into it at first—Miller has a good handle on what makes the people of the gangster planet fun—but at a certain point the book began to drag, even with its rapid-fire antics. Or perhaps even because of them. Why, exactly, should I care? The novel didn't always succeed in making its case, unfortunately, and it seemed to just pile on complication on top of complication to the point of alienation. It does all come together in the end... but I was never terribly invested in whether it did or not. Plus, I get that it's a tie-in to a series called "Picard," but the number of people Rios meets who had previously met Picard began to pile up to the point of improbability.

That said, the jokes about the holograms were good, I liked what we learned of La Sirena's previous owner, Rios himself is handled well as a character, and many of the original characters are good fun. I liked a lot of the ingredients, but this feels to me like a novel that demands to be blown through... and instead I kind of plodded. I am not normally an audiobook guy, but I would imagine that a sympathetic audiobook reading would do a lot to life the material here, turning it into the rapid-fire caper it so obviously wants to be.

Review: Star Trek: Picard: The Dark Veil by James Swallow

Published: 2021
Acquired and read: January 2021

Star Trek: Picard: The Dark Veil
by James Swallow

Like the early Discovery tie-ins, it looks like the Picard tie-ins will be prequel stories; this one is a story of Riker and Troi and their son Thaddeus on the Titan, about a year after The Last Best Hope and fifteen years prior to season one of Picard. It's not just a random adventure, but one which ties into the Romulan machinations of season one and sets up some aspects of "Nepenthe," the Picard episode featuring Riker and Troi.

The actual story is fine; to be honest, it's somewhat generic Star Trek stuff: an alien race with a secret, a battle against Romulans. Generic can sing with the right sparkle, and Swallow has shown himself capable of such sparkle in the past, but this one didn't quite succeed on that level. Maybe it's because I found most of the Titan crew pretty bland? I'm not sure I could point at something done wrong, but I found it hard to invest in the plot. I did like the original character of the Romulan commander, who was very interesting, and a good portrayal of a more open Romulan who was nonetheless recognizably of his culture.

Where the book does really succeed, though, is in its portrayal of the Troi-Rikers. I could imagine everyone one of Riker and Troi's lines being read aloud by Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, and the characters convinced as older versions of the people we saw on screen so long ago in The Next Generation-- this is what Riker would be like as captain and father, and what Troi would be like too. Thad was a pretty lively character, too, building on the hints we got about him in "Nepenthe." Probably my favorite scene is one where Riker's executive officer talks to him about how it's hard for him to be captain when his son is in mortal danger... but then Riker just goes ahead and does it anyway. It rang true. I'd be up for more Riker-Troi-Thad(-Kestra) Picard prequel novels. Even as I think Picard is the worst of the new CBS All Access Star Trek shows thus far, the Riker-Troi family is one of its strongest parts.

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part III: Television, 2017-Present

Continued from my discussion of The Next Generation tv show and films, plus Enterprise, three weeks ago...

After twelve years away, Star Trek finally returned to television (kind of) with the debut of Star Trek: Discovery (2017-present). Discovery featured a new logo with a new typeface:

Peters over at FontShop identifies it as a customized version of "Redrail Superfast." Here's how the logo would look if rendered in the actual Redrail Superfast:

The main change I can identify is the removal of the more finicky serifs: in the base font, almost every letter has these points that go out and then down, but in the Discovery logo, they just go out, if they're there at all. It is somewhat reminiscent of the original Star Trek logo... but I am not a fan. I think it's two things: those Rs look off to me, imbalanced in some way, and only clearly Rs because of the surrounding context. The other is that its finickiness means it doesn't read well from a distance, unlike most other Star Trek logos. I think about this a lot because I shelve my Star Trek trade paperbacks in the dining room and often stare at my bookshelf while trying to get my son to slowly work his way through a meal:

Maybe the coloring is partially the issue, but I don't think the Disco logo stands out as well as the Deep Space Nine or Enterprise logos to either side of it; the novel titles are also in the customized Redrail Superfast, and similarly hard to make out, something the S&S cover designer seems to have admitted when they changed font for the sixth Disco novel.

As I mentioned in part I, the Picard (2020-present) promotional materials used the classic Star Trek font:

The subtitle font could be a number of different sans serifs, but I am pretty sure it is "DIN Condensed."

However, the logo that appeared on literally every piece of Picard tie-in material and advertising was not the logo used in the actual show! The actual show's logo looked like this:

It maintains the DIN Condensed for the subtitle (and in fact, the whole title sequence uses DIN Condensed for credits), but the "STAR TREK" is in Redrail Superfast. This was used in the show's title sequence and, as far as I can tell, literally nowhere else!

I think what happened here is an attempt at branding cohesion that someone changed their minds on at the last minute, because when the cartoon Lower Decks debuted later in 2020, this was its logo:

We have the classic "Star Trek" font for the series title, combined with a unique font for the subtitle. I couldn't find anyone on the Internet stating what the subtitle font is, nor could I figure it out myself; I suspect it's a heavily customized version of something preexisting, if not bespoke. It's definitely going for a comedy vibe, but it's also a little reminiscent of the classic TNG font, I think, with the gaps in the R and the D. (Here's a good post at the TrekBBS where a poster imagines what the logo would look like if it used the actual TNG font.) I should note that for its credits and episode titles, Lower Decks uses the exact font TNG used for those things, "Crillee Italic."

So we have a bit of a pattern emerging in the CBS All Access era, with classic "Star Trek" title and unique subtitle. This would be confirmed when Discovery returned for its third season in late 2020, debuting an all-new logo:

Aha, it all fits together! "Star Trek" for the title; "Eurostile" for the subtitle. Eurostile is one of the fonts used for the livery of Starfleet vessels; it's pretty close to what was used for the Enterprise logo, in fact. Interestingly, though, when the season three premiere debuted on CBSAA, it still used Redrail Superfast for the "Star Trek" part, but later they went back and changed it. So it seems like someone decided they wanted a consistent logo, but late in the game, it was decided that the "Star Trek" font was a better choice for this than Redrail Superfast.

I agree, though there's something indelibly original series about that logo that makes it an odd fit for a universal Star Trek brand. Maybe if it had been used all along, but as I discussed in part I, it has pretty much been contained to the original show and things meant to evoke it. It just seems wrong having it attached to a show about Picard! Surely it should have been something like this:

(forgive my crude mock-up)

The next Star Trek show we know anything concrete about is Prodigy, the Nickelodeon cartoon, which will air in 2021. It keeps the theme going:

There's also the Captain Pike spin-off, Strange New Worlds, but no logo has been released for that yet. Based on the current conformity of the CBSAA era, though, I think we can guess pretty safely what font will be used for the "Star Trek" part of the title, at least!

Continue on to next month's discussion of the fonts of the books...

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part I: Television and Film, 1966-95

Star Trek has had a variety of fonts used in its title, many of them iconic. But many of them are not iconic and, indeed, often forgotten, even by the franchise itself. I want to talk about all of them. Partially this post draws on the excellent work of Dave Addey's Typeset in the Future and Yves Peter's "Typography: The Final Frontier: The Fonts of Star Trek."

The original Star Trek (1966-69) featured a distinctive font that Addey says is called "Horizon" or just "Star Trek." I'm sure you know it:

For a long time, this font was only used for the original Star Trek; none of the films or spin-offs made use of it. But in 2009 it got brought back in a non-italicized form as the basis for the three reboot films:

I can't say why it wasn't italicized, or what effect that that has. Does it seem less cheesy or something? I'm not sure. I will note that the posters for Star Trek (2009) actually used the 1960s italicized version: 

But the posters for Star Trek into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond matched how it was actually used in the films. (One thing that was pretty neat is that some posters for Beyond actually didn't put the words "Star Trek" at all; just "Beyond" in the Star Trek font with the Enterprise zipping by. Though maybe that strategy meant no one knew it was a Star Trek movie, as Beyond had a disappointing gross.) 

Interestingly, the original "Star Trek" font was used for the "Star Trek" part of the title of Star Trek: Picard...

...but only in promotional material and tie-ins. The actual title sequence of the show used a different logo, which I'll get to in a future post.

---

When Star Trek returned in 1979, it brought with it a new logo:

The font here is called "Star Trek Film" or "Galaxy," and was custom created for the film. Peters says the type "embodies many of the ideas people had about futuristic typography in the late ’70s," and Addey says that, like Star Wars, the logo "follows an emerging seventies trend: Movie names beginning with STAR must have long trailing lines on the opening S." It looks pretty rad on the poster for The Motion Picture:

Look at that cool rainbow border!

This is the logo that would form the basis of most of the rest of the original series films. Here's a table I made of Star Treks II through VI, with the logo used in the film on the left, and the logo used on the film poster on the right:

Interestingly, the Galaxy font is not used in the film for Star Trek II, but it is used on the poster, and thence in the film for every subsequent one. Peters argues, "By then [the time of Star Trek VI] the original movie logo had gone through several rounds of small tweaks, losing some of its charm in the process. Gone are the quaint abrupt contrast in the ‘R’ and the interruption in the middle stroke of the ‘A’ and the ‘E’, and the tiny serifs have almost disappeared." I tend to agree; I don't think any of the implementations here are as successful as the the original one.

One thing the designers clearly don't know what to do is with the long horizontal line that originally came off the K. For some of the logos (poster for II, film and poster for III), the line on the K is integrated with the bottom line on the Roman numeral. I think this looks okay; it is probably most effectively done in the film logo for III... but for some reason that logo doesn't elongate the S!

In others, the Roman numeral is given its own horizontal line. The film logos for IV and V both do this-- and to my eyes, both look particularly ugly. Why does every downward stroke in "STAR TREK" have a different stopping point in IV's film logo? I think they're trying to give the top row sort of a triangle shape on its bottom, but it doesn't work for me. And the imbalanced V in Star Trek V's almost looks like a mistake. I like what they did with the poster logos for both of those films, which I think integrate the (probably innately difficult from a design standpoint) Roman numeral in more effective ways.

The film logo for Star Trek VI, on the other hand, looks to me like someone just gave up and typed out "STAR TREK VI" in a word processor and applied some shading to it. Which is a shame, because I do like the poster logo a lot for Star Trek VI, which I think succeeds by using the VI as a background element and a different typeface for the subtitle. (Peters identifies it as ITC Bolt. It has a quasi-Soviet look to me, which seems appropriate for VI's heavy-handed Cold War allegory.)

Also why for the poster logos of Star Treks IV, V, and VI did they add a horizontal line coming off the R of "STAR"?

Oddest of all of these is perhaps the film logo for Star Trek II, which features a typeface that has never been used before or since in Star Trek, as far as I know. None of the tie-in merchandising for Star Trek II used this logo, even. There's a fan-made recreation of it called "Montalban"; I'm not enough of type guru to know if it has some kind of previous existence, or is based on something older. Neither Addey nor Peters even mention it! It has a very 1980s vibe I am fond of. Like, I think it should have been used in the logo of Blade Runner or something. (A commenter on Peters's post identifies it as "Corporate URW.")

The end of the original series films with 1991 didn't mean the end of "Galaxy," however. Even though Star Trek: The Next Generation used a different logo (more on that in my next post), "Galaxy" transferred over to the tv shows with the 1993 debut of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It's definitely the bulky, late-period form of Galaxy; it's also the first form (and only?) to feature a horizontal line dividing title from subtitle... one wonders why...

Star Trek: Voyager used a pretty similar logo in its 1995 debut:

Voyager brings back the long lines on the S and the K, hearkening back to the original use of this font for The Motion Picture. I don't think I ever noticed until now that it inverted the colors of the DS9 logo. The proportions are slightly different, too; I think this E is skinnier/taller than the E of the original Motion Picture logo. I like the thin elegance of the original better than this.

I'll talk about it more in a future post, I think, but to me this logo is the Star Trekkiest of them all, I guess because of its ubiquity when I was growing up in the 1990s... but for similar reasons, it also kind of feels like Star Trek at its most generic.

On to next week's discussion of The Next Generation tv shows and films and Enterprise...

Review: Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack

Hardcover, 322 pages
Published 2020
Acquired January 2020
Read July 2020

Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope
by Una McCormack

This prequel novel to Star Trek: Picard sets up the basic premise: that Picard undertook a massive effort to do the right thing, and lost. It covers about five years, from when Picard learns about the need to evacuate a massive number of Romulans because of an imminent supernova, up to when the renegade synth attack on Mars utterly destroys his plans. It's a quick, strong read, as you might imagine of Una McCormack. She has a good handle on Picard: one he sees what the right thing to do is, he pursues it utterly. What distinguishes Picard from The Next Generation is that every time Picard stands up for what's right in TNG, it works out for him. Picard is a tragedy, the story of the time Picard's moral convictions lead to his downfall. McCormack does a good job taking the base attributes of Picard from TNG and transposing them into a new situation, and also surrounds him with a strong cast of characters, a mix of ones from the show and ones original to this book. I really liked how she wove in and out of them: Raffi, Clancy, Tajuth, and Koli were my favorites aside from Picard. There are a number of good scenes, but I liked Raffi talking about Romulan music and the scene in Paris between Jurati and Maddox after the attack the most.

(Two objections: I don't buy the novel's revelation that Jurati is Starfleet, and I wish we had seen where Laris and Zhaban came from.)

McCormack is a top-tier tie-in novelist, and that's partially because she has a voice: almost every Star Trek novel (my own included) is told in a bland third-person limited format. McCormack The Last Best Hope has a neat retroactive, omnipotent voice that occasionally intrudes, telling us what happened to character years later. It adds to the sense of tragedy, and helps deepen the sense of character. To be honest, I feel like her talents are wasted on tie-in novels. Where's her original sf novel?

This novel kind of makes me mad, though, because I found that Picard abandoned its potentially interesting premise as it went on. The idea of Picard dealing with and confronting his great failure was downplayed in favor of a really dumb story about an ancient Romulan conspiracy and rogue androids that had no character weight at all. The Last Best Hope does a good job showing how the Federation could pretty justifiably let down the Romulans so badly. It does such a good job setting up Picard's failure that it made me mad about the show's direction all over again. Why wasn't it working with this material instead of doing... whatever the hell it decided to do?

All the Star Trek Stories You Need to Watch before Viewing Picard Season One

(Season one of Picard finished three months ago; I may or may not bother to write up a review of it. However, I started this post when the season was airing and so wanted to finish it off.)

from Picard 1x05: "Stardust City Rag"

Back before Picard started airing, my wife and I viewed a series of episodes I thought might give her context for Picard: she's seen little Next Generation and less Voyager. This definitely helped, but even at the time, I knew we'd left some stuff out-- and I was mostly just guessing based on the trailers and rumors. There were several other episodes I had not guessed would turn out to be relevant. (Definitely some random guest stars!)

So once the whole season was over, I sat down and figured out every episode you needed to see to understand the new show. Either because it directly fed into Picard, because it gave some useful character context, or because it set up another episode on the list. Now, you don't really have to see all of this (Hayley had seen only thirteen of them before Picard began, though we circled back to watch a couple more once I realized they were relevant), but they might help give you maximum enjoyment of the many callbacks and Easter eggs, and make you care about some stuff you wouldn't otherwise.

On the other hand, they might make you like it even less! (I found that some of the stuff Picard did did not ring true with "The Measure of a Man," for example.)

from TNG 4x02: "Family"

I've separated out my rationales into a separate list at the bottom of the post because knowing why some episodes fit in will spoil some aspects of Picard clearly designed to be surprising. Note that the list does assume you have a general familiarity with both The Next Generation and Voyager already: I did not go so far as to, say, include "Encounter at Farpoint" to introduce you to the Enterprise-D crew, or "The Child" to introduce Guinan and Pulaski, or "Endgame" to explain how Voyager got home.

1. TNG 1x13: "Datalore"
2. TNG 2x09: "The Measure of a Man"
3. TNG 2x16: "Q Who" 
4. TNG 3x16: "The Offspring"
5. TNG 3x26: "The Best of Both Worlds"
6. TNG 4x01: "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II"
7. TNG 4x02: "Family"
8. TNG 4x03: "Brothers"
9. TNG 4x11: "Data's Day"
10. TNG 5x23: "I Borg"
11. TNG 6x26: "Descent"
12. TNG 7x01: "Descent, Part II"
13. Star Trek: First Contact
14. VGR 3x26: "Scorpion"
15. VGR 4x01: "Scorpion, Part II"
16. VGR 4x02: "The Gift"
17. VGR 4x06: "The Raven"
18. VGR 5x15/16: "Dark Frontier"
19. VGR 6x16: "Collective"
20. VGR 7x02: "Imperfection" 
21. Star Trek Nemesis
22. Star Trek (2009)

from VGR 6x16: "Collective"

Rationales

1. Prerequisite for #8; first appearance of Lore; first discussion of Data's backstory
2. First appearance of Bruce Maddox
3. Prerequisite for #5; first appearance of the Borg
4. Data's first attempt at creating a daughter
5. Picard is assimilated
6. Continuation of #5
7. Continuation of #6; first appearance of Chateau Picard
8. Prerequisite for #11; first appearance of Soong
9. Data's friendship with Maddox established
10. Prerequisite for #11; first appearance of Hugh
11. Prerequisite for #12
12. Final pre-Picard appearance of Hugh
13. Picard re-encounters the Borg
14. First appearance of Seven of Nine
15. Continuation of #14
16. Continuation of #15
17. First exploration of Seven's backstory
18. Further exploration of Seven's backstory
19. First appearance of Icheb
20. Significant point in Seven and Icheb's relationship
21. Final pre-Picard appearance of all TNG characters; death of Data; first appearance of B-4
22. First mention of Romulan supernova

Preparing for Star Trek: Picard

My mom was here a couple months ago, and we were talking Star Trek: Picard; I mentioned that Seven of Nine was going to be in it.

"Who's Seven of Nine?" asked my wife.

Whaaaat! But it was true, Hayley had no idea who Seven of Nine was. And then I realized that she had only seen one episode of Voyager; when we marathoned Deep Space Nine, I slotted "Caretaker" in chronologically to give her a sense of what the Maquis arc was all for. That was literally it.

And then I realized that Seven of Nine wasn't the only returning character who would be meaningless to her. I remain flabbergasted that they are actually getting Jonathan Del Arco back as Hugh. So I worked up a plan: essential pre-Picard viewing.

All of this would have to be guesswork based on the trailers and other pre-publictiy. Next Generation-wise, we would clearly need to watch "I, Borg" and "Descent" to give context for Hugh. But "Descent" doesn't make sense if you don't know the lore of, well, Lore. So onwards and backwards. For Voyager, we needed a sequence of key Seven episodes; basically the ones relating to her backstory. But I also wanted to get one in that dealt with her just as a character, not as a backstory.

So here's what we did:

• TNG 1x13: "Datalore"
• TNG 4x03: "Brothers"
• TNG 5x23: "I Borg"
• TNG 6x26: "Descent"
• TNG 7x01: "Descent, Part I"
• VGR 3x26: "Scorpion"
• VGR 4x01: "Scorpion, Part II"
• VGR 4x02: "The Gift"
• VGR 4x06: "The Raven"
• VGR 5x15/16: "Dark Frontier"
• VGR 5x22: "Someone to Watch Over Me"

It wasn't perfect. Partway through a Voyager episode, she asked me how Picard was de-assimilated if everyone was insisting it was so impossible, and I realized that she'd never actually seen "The Best of Both Worlds," just First Contact. And then during "Dark Frontier," she asked how the Federation first encountered the Borg anyway, which made me think "Q Who" might have been of use. But by this point I was getting Borged out.

But I enjoyed it. Do you know, I'd never actually seen "Brothers"? TNG is the one Star Trek I've never watched systematically, so there are still a large number of random episodes I've never watched. (I watched the original and early DS9 on DVD; all the shows from DS9 Season 5 onward and Voyager as they aired.) And I know I saw "I Borg" after "Descent," and "Datalore" much later still, so I'd never seen these eps in their proper contexts.

Brent Spiner is great as Lore (and Noonien Soong). Greater than the scripts, to be honest; I think he plays the character more ambiguously than he is on the page, with an honest affection for Data. The actual stories he's in range from dumb to sort of pointless. Like, "Datalore" requires a lot of improbable leaps to work (the crew is not very smart), and "Brothers" isn't even a story; Data diverts the Enterprise, Soong dies, and they leave, the end. And like a lot of TNG two-parters, "Descent" sets up a lot of stuff it never really pays off because the two halves were written months apart; part I keeps asking if Picard is willing to put the Federation's survival ahead of his ethics... a dilemma never even mentioned in part I; in part I, Troi tells Data that he'd still be Data even if he was experiencing negative emotions... in part II, Lore can press a button and turn Data evil! And c'mon, Hugh doesn't even see La Forge again! And Spiner barely gets to do his Lore thing.

"I Borg" is the clear best of the lot, a great character piece for for a lot of the ensemble-- La Forge, Crusher, Guinan, and Picard all shine here. Del Arco is incredibly likable as Hugh. A good Star Trekkian piece of self-examination; how do we confront our own biases?

The Voyager episodes were interesting to watch, in that except for catching a few random ones on late at night during college, I've literally never seen a Voyager episode since the show went off the air. These episodes are now an astounding twenty years old!

They hold up. Voyager is an immensely inconsistent series, but "Scorpion" is probably as good as it got. Great action, great stakes/suspense. Surely the only episode to make a meaningful conflict between Chakotay and Janeway-- they both believe they are doing the right thing. Both the Borg and Species 8472 feel like real threats. And to go straight from "Descent" (1993) to "Scorpion" (1997) is a huge step up in quality of production in just four years. In terms of interior design, Voyager comes to life in a way the Enterprise-D just simulates. (Voyager was the first Star Trek show I watched regularly, and rewatching it, I realized that when I imagine the interior of a 24th-century Starfleet ship, I am always imagining Voyager.)

On the other hand, "Dark Frontier" is kind of dumb-- while "Scorpion" found a plausible way for Voyager to go up against the Borg and emerge intact, "Dark Frontier" can't do so again without defanging them. It's a pleasing blockbuster action film, but ultimately hollow. It's neat to see Seven's pre-Borg childhood, but the depth that was in, say, "The Gift" and "The Raven" is lacking.

I was glad I picked "Someone to Watch Over Me." Though it was more Doctor-focused than Seven-focused as I remembered, it's an episode that puts two of the three best actors on the show together, and makes something incredibly cute with them. How could you not love this, surely one of the best scenes in all Star Trek:

Jeri Ryan is excellent as Seven, something I didn't really appreciate when these episodes aired originally, determined to hate the character for her "sex sells" quotient.

We did note some continuity errors watching all these episodes back to back. According to Janeway in "The Gift,"

It took some digging through the Federation database, but I managed to find a single entry in the records of Deep Space 4. Her parents were unconventional. They fancied themselves explorers, but wanted nothing to do with Starfleet or the Federation. Their names were last recorded at a remote outpost in the Omega Sector. They refused to file a flight plan. Apparently, they aimed their small ship toward the Delta Quadrant and were never heard from again.

And then in "The Raven," Janeway says,

If you'd like to know more about your parents, there's information in the Federation database. [...] It seems they were fairly well known for being unconventional and for some rather unique scientific theories.

But in "Dark Frontier" (which also reveals that Tuvok and Seven somehow downloaded the logs of Seven's parents' ship off screen during "The Raven"), Seven's father says (in flashback),

The Federation Council on Exobiology has given us final approval. Starfleet's still concerned about security issues but they've agreed not to stand in our way. We've said our goodbyes, and we're ready to start chasing our theories about the Borg.

And her mother says,

We have deviated from our flight plan, crossed the Neutral Zone, disobeyed a direct order to return. Our colleagues obviously think we are insane. We have burned our bridges, Magnus.

They've gone from random explorers with no flight plans to people with "unconventional" but unspecified theories to Borg hunters with Starfleet-sanctioned flight plans and official endorsements from Federation organizations!

I don't think this is all a problem per se. I'm sure you can finesse it all if you want to, and this is just what tv does; as episodes need specific things to be true, they become true. One of the things that does work about "Dark Frontier" is the story of Seven's crazy, reckless parents, though it doesn't quite have the sense of trauma it originally did in "The Raven."

Anyway, this all kind of re-sparked my enthusiasm for tv Star Trek. I know it's all there on Netflix (and, one supposes, CBS All Access) but aside from rewatching DS9 with Hayley a couple years ago, I haven't watched much old Star Trek in a long time. We've gone on to watch some random episodes of the original, Next Generation, and Voyager since.

I'm excited to see what roles Seven and Hugh play in Picard (and the idea of them meeting seems quite neat!), and interested to see how right I got it. It'll probably turn out that I ought to have shown Hayley "Shades of Grey" and "The Disease"!