Other than the first episode that CBS dumped onto YouTube, all I know of the “Picard” series comes from reviews. Reviews, of course, must be taken with big grains of salt, especially when they come from “mainstream” media sources and are glowingly, slobberingly positive. When they come from reasonably well established fan sources they seem to be a bit more trustworthy.

Here’s one that discusses one of the main ideas from “Picard,” that the Federation has become nasty, xenophobic, downright Trumpian in the wake of a supernova taking out the Romulan homeworld. Picard left Starfleet because Starfleet abandoned nine hundred million Romulans to their fate. But the show itself argues that Picard is just dead wrong in his analysis. To support the evacuation, Starfleet was building a rescue fleet of TEN THOUSAND starships at the construction facilities around Mars. Apparently the fleet was close to being finished and ready to go when the Cylons showed up, hacked the Martian defense network and blew up not only the fleet but the construction yards themselves, and apparently utterly trashed the infrastructure of the entire planet. After that, Starfleet gave up on the idea.

But Starfleet giving up on the idea seems entirely practical. Those ten thousand starships were doubtless a major investment in resources, in manpower, in skills and talent, and in whatever the Federation uses for money… and it all went up in smoke. The construction yards, gone. Presumably the people doing the actual construction, gone.

So far as I’m aware, the timeline of just what’s going on on Romulus has not been given, but it seems that the supernova in question came as something of a surprise. Clearly there was enough warning time to build a massive armada… but was there time to build a *second* armada, after also building up another planet-scale starship construction infrastructure? Seems dubious. In all likelihood, once the armada was trashed, the Romulans were just plain doomed. Of course, what a “Star Empire” would need with a Federation armada to rescue a relatively trivial number of its own people for is at best unclear. If, say, an asteroid five hundred feet in diameter was spotted heading straight for Washington, D.C. with an impact time of “this time next week,” I suppose the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force might be able to provide some assistance in evacuating the D.C. area… but the actual evacuation would be the responsibility of the *US* government. And, of course, the civilians in the D.C. area.

It kinda seems to me that if this review is accurate, and if these trends continue, the best way to explain the “Picard” series is that when the evacuation fleet was destroyed, Admiral Picard kinda broke. And in the years since… he’s gotten old. Senility and Irumodic Syndrome have led to him being paranoid and unable to see the world for what it really is. As with modern day SJW’s, an elderly and mentally incompetent Picard sees an imperfect government as somehow fascistic, racist, dystopian simply because his pet concerns are not the top priorities. His failures are now the Federations failures.

Couple this inability to understand their own plotline with the Picard production using Discovery era designs  as post-TNG, 25th century modern designs and I just can’t see Picard as being any kind of “good.”