Wow This Looks Cheap
The trailer for the new season of Picard has dropped…
And.
It.
Looks.
Awful.
I don’t watch Kurtzman Trek. A few YouTube masochists do so, but I don’t see the point myself.
It’s not meant to be entertainment at all. It’s certainly not meant to be a Star Trek and it is absolutely not for Star Trek fans. The purpose of Kurtzman Trek is to raise Alex Kurtzman’s status within The Club and enrich himself personally while providing a content farm for Viacom. Forget storytelling, forget entertainment.
Content is all that Kurtzman Trek is.
You know it’s not being watched.
I know It’s not being watched.
And Alex Kurtzman knows it’s not being watched.
Being watched, let alone enjoyed, is not the objective here. The objective is simply to produce anything, and I mean anything at all, on someone else’s dime and then stuffing it into the Paramount + streaming library.
What little narrative thought that goes into Kurtzman Trek is geared towards pleasing The Club. That is where the Woke storylines come from. That is why they are there. He makes certain that what little plot his shows have, are all saying the things The Club wants said.
The Club (in case you are wondering) are the great-grandchildren of the men who started Hollywood at the start of the 20th century. Red blood has long since run thin, but this cabal has managed to stay in power in Tinseltown by looking after each other’s interests. And keeping everyone else out of The Club, except for the chosen few who rise to the very top.
Alex Kurtzman is not a member of The Club but he enjoys their protection. He knows his place and serves their interests.
Paramount is in terrible shape. Most of the other studios have alternative means of income or are owned by MegaHuge Corp Int. Paramount, however, is owned by ViacomCBS. While they have decent revenue, their capital outflow is slightly larger, so they are bleeding to death. Their stock price was inflated after the Biden bailout checks went out, but then it crashed again. Except for Star Trek and Transformers, the only franchises Paramount owns are things like The Bad News Bears, Crocodile Dundee and Paranormal Activity. There are a few individual films that look promising but Top Gun for instance, is NOT a franchise.
But that doesn’t matter so long as content can be provided on the super-cheap, and super cheap means someone besides Paramount is paying for it.
At first it was Netflix, and boy did their lawyers screwup. Kurtzman’s lawyers had some kind of trap in waiting with regards to early cancelation. The Big Red N went to the cleaners in arbitration when they told Kurtzman STD was canceled and they weren’t paying for any more of it. Netflix has however, given Star Trek in all its forms the final finger of farewell. Although, it says a lot about what Kurtzman Trek has done for the franchise’s popularity that at the end of September Netflix is done streaming Star Trek in all of its iterations after ten years of consistent renewel.
Then it was Amazon’s turn to pay for Star Trek’s production in exchange for foreign rights. And Bezos clearly had better lawyers because when Secret Hideout slunk away from the negotiating table that was the end of it.
Now it’s Playmates Toys that are footing the bill and it doesn’t look like they are paying much for their Trek. The costuming is what had me laughing the hardest. I have never (outside of George Lucas film) seen costuming so blatantly designed with the toy market in mind. Most of this season of Picard appears to take place in the early 21st century, a period of time when you don’t have to spend a lot of money on sets and costuming. These costumes look so much the Mego Star Trek toys from the Seventies that I’m honestly of the opinion that the show’s costumes were designed by Playmates and they just told Kurtzman, “this is what you WILL use.”
And Alex Kurtzman had no objection whatsoever so long as the check cleared. He’s not trying make anything good, he’s just producing content and calling it Star Trek.
Okay, I’m done here.
