Picard disappoints with sloppy, lazy writing

 We can't kill butterflies.

But apparently, we can bring advanced tech into 21st-Century Los Angeles, beat up and rob muggers and take on ICE agents as they raid a medical clinic, getting ourselves arrested in the process.

Dr. Agnes Jurati gives a wonderful speech early in the third episode of Picard, Season 2 (STP) about how careful they have to be, how they can't bring phasers with them as they search for the Watcher, about how they have to be careful not to kill even a butterfly for fear of negatively impacting the timeline.

The speech makes you feel like maybe this time Star Trek will actually do time travel right.

And then they go and ignore everything Jurati said and pollute the timeline in amazing ways.

Meanwhile, Picard and Jurati get into a pissing contest with an increasingly powerful Borg Queen even after they have agreed that they can, and should, disconnect the Queen now that they have the information they need.

In fact, at the end of the episode, they walk away from her, leaving the Queen fully conscious, growing in power, alone in the heart of their ship. She's connected to the ship in a variety of ways and still, I would expect ,capable of shooting out some nasty old Borg techno-snakes to assimilate them all.

But they just walk away, feeling pretty chuffed with themselves at having been able to outsmart the Queen.

And then there's the fact that their ship crash-landed in a blaze of destruction onto a planet with 21st Century technology, which is capable of tracking their approach, monitoring their crash and having heavily armed flying machines and hundreds of soldiers to the crash site in a matter of minutes.

But apparently no one notices the crash landing.

Not even the people living in the chateau that stands about 100 yards from the ship's final resting place.

Star Trek, as a whole, is better when top quality science fiction writers produce the scripts. Maybe Akiva Goldsman and Michael Chabon are accomplished writers -- both have some pretty impressive credits to their name -- but they are clearly not top quality science fiction writers. 

Or, perhaps worse, they are top quality science fiction writers who, when writing scripts for Star Trek's flagship show, don't care enough to do it right.

STP has the same look and feel of the gawdawful ST reboot movies helmed by J.J. Abrams. They are all, in my humble opinion, half-baked, derivative drivel, more comic book than Star Trek,  and don't even bother to reach for the thought-provoking depth that earlier Star Trek achieved.

If you can watch STP this season without regularly shouting at the screen, you are a better person than I am. And if you enjoy a series with the name Star Trek attached to it that deifies a single human character and rejects any thought of trying to be intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking, choosing instead to focus on cheesy one-liners and cartoon action sequences...

You are welcome to Star Trek: Picard.