“Picard makes a decision which will be quite shocking to a lot of people,” said the great Patrick Stewart (pre-knighthood), referring not to his new show in 2020, but 1998's Star Trek: Insurrection. “Shocking” was generous— the big decision Picard made in that movie was resigning his Starfleet commission (sort of) for a few hours of movie time, during which he takes out some dopey looking bad guys while wearing slightly less-drab clothes. His uniform, ship, crew, commission, are all back before you know it.

Bless our beloved Sir Pat Stew now and forever, but I fear he’s too close to the franchise he’s largely defined for decades to know what’s “shocking” or, possibly, what’s exciting or good. The talking points on his PR tour for Picard have been consistent— some variant of “I wasn’t going to come back but the idea for the show was good enough to win me over” or “this isn’t the Picard you knew from TNG,” and so on. All of which sounds potentially cool and none of which is.

Is Picard bad? Not quite, if only ‘cuz there’s just enough good stuff to barely keep it afloat. Sir Pat Stew’s all-in performance as the aged Admiral Picard buoys a production otherwise sinking under the weight of cheesy villainy and Bourne-again action cliche. His Romulan sidekicks are neat and quiet moments with old friends even reach poignance.

But really, this is the same tale with Trek we’ve seen for the last decade — shows and movies earnestly produced, enthusiastically promoted, boringly written. Picard exists in a time when good and bad in Trek are effectively meaningless — the franchise’s last decade-plus is a wasteland of missed opportunities and empty storytelling. None of that matters, though, because the transmedia content engine keeps humming with warp-speed efficiency; PR tours, Short Treks, new shows, books, comics, social media, conventions all nakedly working in lock-step to send viewers into the gaping Doomsday Machine maw of CBS All Access, everyone’s 10th favorite streaming platform just 100 million subscribers shy of being a real boy.

Maybe Picard will get fun later, so far it’s damn dull. Another competent product of the “Star Trek Universe”—once a powerful device used to tell human stories, now producing stories to extend the empty life of a device.

Update July 22, 2020:

Everything I said above is true, except Patrick Stewart giving a good performance, and the idea of that performance being enough to keep the show from being bad. Sir Pat Stew was comfortable and hammy in this show, and it was definitely, 100% pure gold-pressed latinum bad.