Picard and the "Cult of Death"

The new Picard series inspires a lot of thoughts.

It is not exactly Trek, is it? Like a lot of the new Trek out there, (the Abram’s movies, Discovery) it is a little more action-flash, a little less thought and ponder.

A ten-part story is a tough concept for an intellectual property built on episode of the week formats. The first several episodes took a while to build up to a story and shake of a “creaky bones” feeling. Then the final few episodes almost went by too quickly and were overwhelmed by action.

The most moving episode was “Nepenthe” (Ep. 7), and that was more for nostalgia and connections we had made during TNG than anything else.

But the big thought, the troubling idea, came at the very end when the story is over. And it involves the increasingly pervasive “Cult of Death” in pop culture.

And this goes beyond the idea of the “Cult of Death” written about before. That was about the fascination with violence, revenge and death that pervades America like an epidemic. What we have here in Picard is the continuing development of the idea that death is good… that life has no meaning without death. And the idea is illogical, irrational, and probably evil.

We have seen other, similar ideas before in pop culture that were not bad. For example, in Harry Potter, we explore the idea that doing anything and everything to avoid death is bad. In that story, we see the hope of an afterlife and the nobility of self-sacrifice. Those are different concepts.

In Picard, the idea is different. There is no afterlife, no eternity. And yet, death is still something—it is argued—we should embrace. Life is only good, worth living, and meaningful if we die. There is no explanation or defense for the thesis being proposed. At best, it might be argued that life becomes tiresome in the end. It is a horrifying materialistic proposition.

And it is an argument that the story itself undercuts.

Warning Spoilers ahead:



At the end of the last episode, Picard dies in a noble moment of sacrifice. (Well, almost. He was dying anyway and made sure his last actions helped others.). But do they leave him dead? Well, in a convoluted—and itself terrifying scenario—they bring him back. Is death preferable to life? Of course not!

And a note on the trick they used to bring Picard back. It is something in the materialistic world view of Trek that is itself horrifying. Anyone who has given the slightest thought to the way the show portrays the “transporter” knows that every character in Trek is dead several times over and all we are really watching are copies of copies of the original people. But, since there is no soul or intrinsic meaning in Trek’s view of humanity, a mere copy of a person in effect continues that person’s life. In Picard, that is what they do with Jean Luc. They make an exact copy of his brain’s structure and activity in the moment right after death and imprint that onto an android model. Is Picard still alive? Of course not.

*Shudder*