Star Trek: 10 MORE Behind The Scenes Decisions We Can't Forgive

You have to commend Star Trek: Picard for trying and (mostly) succeeding at doing something different. By telling the story of a retired Jean-Luc Picard and a motley crew of civilian characters aboard a civilian ship, Star Trek: Picard opened the Star Trek Universe to a new, ground-level perspective. While a lot of us might've hoped for a Star Trek: The Next Generation revival, the producers opted to take the more realistic and ultimately more satisfying path, telling us Picard, Riker, Troi and the rest of the crew were real people who wouldn't be doing the same thing they did 35 years ago, no matter how iconic that might've been.

Unfortunately, despite opening the Star Trek Universe to different types of stories, Star Trek: Picard's first season was still produced in the CBS All Access era of higher and higher stakes. So while the show was advertised as a character study of an aged Jean-Luc Picard, the producers were obliged to give us an extinction-level threat and end the season with a CGI-cluttered bang.

Worse, the realism of the show itself was undercut by linking nearly every character to the overarching storyline revolving around the Romulan plot to get synthetic lifeforms banned in the Federation.

Somehow, in the stretch of just a few episodes, Jean-Luc just happened to run into Doctor Agnes Jurati, whose lover, Bruce Maddox, was at the center of the conspiracy. It also turned out that JL's former first officer, Raffi, was a Synth ban truther whose life was destroyed by her quest for answers. Raffi herself directed Picard to a pilot, Cris Rios, who, it turns out, had a chance encounter with Synths that ended in the suicide of his father figure. Oh, and Riker and Troi's young son Thad died because the Synth ban also prevented the use of a positronic matrix to cure life threatening medical conditions.

The reason the writers connected the main characters of Star Trek: Picard to the ongoing storyline is clear: If there's a personal connection to the plot, it makes it matter. Unfortunately, these connections rested on coincidence and flimsy plot contrivances. And while the show's new perspective widened the world of Star Trek, these coincidences served to condense the universe, making everyone's life revolve around plot more than character; a weird thing for a show advertised as a character study.