Star Trek: Picard frontloads fanservice so it can get on with going boldly

Enlarge / The character Picard's first impulse is to be comforting and safe. The show Picard's first impulse is to slowly tear down the sense of comfort and safety the audience starts with. (credit: CBS)

The first Romulan you meet in Star Trek: Picard speaks with a soft Gaelic accent and wears a comfortable, practical cardigan. She is the very model of a classic cozy housekeeper, an archetype made instantly recognizable by her bearing and manner, and yet in the same breath she's utterly foreign and unexpected.

This marriage of familiar with unfamiliar-this attempt to take what you know but then tilt it to one side and jiggle it around a bit to throw you off-balance-is as good a metaphor as any for what Picard seems to be doing. This is not the comfortable, well-worn world of Star Trek I was born and raised in and am now sharing with my own child. This is something different, and based on the first episode at least, I badly want to follow this path and see where it leads.

(Mild spoilers for the first episode of Picard, "Remembrance," follow below.)

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