So, I've been binge watching a couple of shows in the last month because of reasons here goes:
Star Trek: Picard
This is significantly better than Discovery. The show appears to realise that being part of a franchise means acknowledging the lore and continuity of previous shows. It then builds on it and shows a facet of Romulan society that hasn't been seen in other franchises and does the whole social commentary using sci fi as a metaphor that I'm fine with and we are all pretty used to.
Being better than Discovery doesn't automatically make it good. In fact it's still pretty terrible.
What HBO realises (usually, shut up) and Alex Kutzman doesn't is if you are only having ten episodes in a season, those episodes had better be tight, well polished episodes. Picard has absurdly long action scenes that don't really progress the plot that much, which means after every episode you are asking questions about what you just saw instead of what you just saw means for the characters. The majority of call back characters in the series are "one and dones" that come off as
fan fiction instead of meaningful in any way. The crew of Picard's ship are more fleshed out than the ones in Discovery, but I still couldn't tell you who they are or what they're about. Compare that to the other Trek shows and after their first season you could give a quick blurb on who Chakotay or Garak or Scotty were and what they're all about. This goes back to a lot of the episodes being wasted on filler and unresolved plot lines (Tal Shiar have a Borg cube that they are sharing with the Federation. How and why?)
Basically, this show has Alex Kurtzman's fingerprints all over it. Every character must be simple one dimensional archetypes, pay the barest of lip service to what has come before, throw a couple of fucks in to sound edgy and adult and have a soundtrack that's hammers into the audience exactly how they are expected to feel with all the grace and subtlety of a 1950's John Wayne war movie. Hans Zimmer or Bear McCreary wouldn't go near this score with a fifty foot pole. This best I can say about it is that it isn't the Enterprise theme.
What pisses me off the most about the show is how lazy it feels. Star Trek has never been hard Sci-Fi, but its hand waving has been used to explain away issues like gravity in space teleportation etc. It has never openly butchered existing scientific consensus before and in one episode Riker asks Picard about "Newtons fourth law of thermodynamics". It's that level of stupid. But the piece de resistance is the final confrontation in the last episode. Remember in Deep Space Nine during the Dominion War the battles had a range of
Federation, Romulan and Klingon Ships against a variety of Dominion ships?
Behold the wonders of copy and paste!
Give it a miss and wait of Axanar to come out instead. This show is pretty forgettable.