Spoilers abound.
“Star Trek” has always sailed the cosmos on the unearthly wind of left-wing pieties, but a message more inhuman than mere collectivism and leftism emerges in “Star Trek: Picard.”
The original 1960s series hewed to the Prime Directive, an anti-colonialist maxim that, while never expressly stated, charged the voyagers of Starfleet to interfere as little as possible with whatever civilizations they might encounter.
The show, with its multi-species cast, gestured toward nuclear disarmament and featured what was probably broadcast television’s first interracial kiss.
So, too, with the first batch of “Star Trek” movies. Those of us old enough to have seen “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” in theaters will remember the thrill of Spock’s sacrifice, which allowed the Starship Enterprise’s crew to escape the doom of their enemies, who are consumed in an explosion moments later.
I wonder how many wept at a line he shares with Kirk: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” That is a noble sentiment, especially in the context of a desperate battle. As a general principle, though, it leaves something to be desired.
It is refreshing at first glance, then, that the most recent Trek series, “Star Trek: Picard,” which recently concluded on Paramount Plus, had anti-collectivist themes.
The show portrays a good bit of science-fiction cloak-and-dagger adventures, involving shape-shifting spies and sentient androids and so forth, before revealing the true villain: a shriveled, lonely Borg Queen, bereft of her Collective of shared minds and
