Terry Matalas' handling of Jean-Luc Picard highlights the issues with modern writing

Star Trek has long been a pretty impressive piece of science fiction storytelling. Often able to stand above the trappings of modern trends, Star Trek doesn't follow in the shoes of other franchises. Instead, it creates the path that many others end up walking. That is until J.J. Abrams got his hands on the franchise. Starting with 2009's Star Trek, the series became far more like its contemporaries than it had ever been in the past.

It would only get worse with the recent set of shows, moving further away from the Star Trek-branded storytelling techniques and turn itself into the same joke-heavy franchises currently burning their audiences out. Franchises like MCU.

In the third season of Star Trek: Picard, Terry Matalas (via SlashFilms) in his attempt to create a meme, destroyed the credibility of Jean-Luc Picard's wine-making abilities with a throw-away gag. The thing that defined Picard's family so much was burnt down (no pun intended) in an instant just for a joke. A bad one at that. And why? So Matalas could have a meme-worthy moment.

""We ran a gag that Château Picard isn't the best wine. It doesn't taste the best. I didn't think anybody would really pick up on it and people really, really picked up on it." 



Terry Matalas"

Many will just say "Hey, it's funny, no big deal" but long-time fans of the franchise will remember how much pride the Picards had in their vineyard. In fact, Jean-Luc and his brother Robert had a falling out because Robert thought Jean-Luc viewed himself as too good for a life tending the vineyard. The fallout was so bad they barely spoke and when they did it often times ended in fights.

To minimize the importance of such an event for a weak joke highlights how bad modern writing has become. Star Trek hasn't always been perfect, but it strived to be better than this. The third season of Picard was a marketed improvement from the first two but writing like this highlights why that doesn't mean the third season of Picard was good.

Nostaliga blinded a lot of fans to the serious issues that the third season had, and many fans wanted to just ignore that because of "lol reunion". It wasn't a good season, and it was highly problematic.