Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard would have ruined canon for no reason

The more and more we hear about Star Trek: Picard, the more and more of a mess it really was. From executives not knowing what the show should really be about, to the constant change in leadership and now the revelation that the show sought to ruin one of the most beloved moments in Star Trek history.

In Star Trek: First Contact, it's established the first time aliens came to Earth, as Vulcans came down and revealed themselves to Zefram Cochrane and his associates. It was a moment so wonderful and beautiful that fans created First Contact Day from it, falling on April 5 each year. It's that crucial to the series' history, and had it been for Picard, it would've been wiped out all because the show wanted to do something different.

Picard showrunner at the time, Terry Matalas revealed in an interview with the Master Replicas Collectors Club Zoom (via TrekMovie) in February that he wanted to redefine the first moment of contact between humanity and aliens.

"The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening. So you had a lot more Star Trek happening in the backdrop of it. Ultimately, the powers that be at that time were like, ‘This is too much.’ But there were some really good ideas there that were pretty cool.”

As TrekMovie points out in their original article, this sounds like Men in Black and that's why the idea absolutely sucks, on top of the fact it would have altered Trek lore far too much. We have seen the lore get pushed on before, but never so abruptly. We know that on Enterprise, in the episode Carbon Creek, Vulcans come to Earth, but it's never officially stated one way or another if the story being told is true.

It was a great way to explore history without changing it. Some believe the Carbon Creek encounter happened, while others wonder if T'Pol, the Vulcan telling the story, was just trying to amuse her human colleagues. It's ambiguous and that's why it worked.

This wouldn't be ambiguous. The only reason the Guinan aspect worked in season two, being in multiple eras at once, was because it was established in The Next Generation, years before the First Contact film, that Guinan had quietly been on Earth for years. As she looks human, this couldn't be at all shocking.

Yet, to have an entire bar of what would be known aliens, as Matalas likes his cameos and callbacks, would have been too much. It would have diluted the actual First Contact event and minimized the moment by making a mockery of it. Almost as if to point and laugh at humanity and say "Ha ha, you didn't know!"

That seems unnecessary, which is a word that could be used for a lot of modern Trek.