I haven’t seen it, so don’t blame me. But this reviewer *really* didn’t like it:

Don’t watch ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season three, it’ll only encourage them

The third season is yet another misguided waste of everyone’s time.

Whoa.

The previews look better than the first two execrable seasons, but that’s a low bar indeed.

I am reminded of a reaction video I recently saw. Even in my advancing decrepitude that’s not that big of a mental achievement, considering I saw this video yesterday:

The young lady in question watched “Galaxy Quest” without the benefit of being a fan of Star Trek. Without, in fact, the benefit of actually knowing much about Star Trek. And yet, with minimal exposure to TOS or TNG… she got “Galaxy Quest.” Maybe a few of the jokes skipped past her, but the main themes? Fully understood, accepted and appreciated. A point she raised that caught my attention: near the end when the nerd-kid is contacted and learns that his favorite show is actually real, the young lady stated that she thought that this must have been the dream of many Star Trek fans. Little does she know: whole generations of Trekkies and Trekkers  lived in the desperate hope of living in the world of Star Trek. For some this meant daydreaming about serving aboard the Enterprise. For some it meant doing what needed to to become authors or actors or film/TV show makers in the hopes of bringing their own dreams of trek to life (looking at you, Seth MacFarlane). For some of us it meant going into science and engineering in the hopes of starting mankind on the road to trekking the stars. And her realization got me thinking.

Over the last twenty-some years some “Galaxy Quest,” it has been almost universally hailed as one of the best Star Trek Movies. It is certainly one of the movies that shows most clearly a love and understanding of the original Star Trek. Within the movie, an alien race has picked up TV transmissions of the sci-fi series “Galaxy Quest,” and they decided to rebuild their entire society to conform to the vision of “Galaxy Quest,” and in doing so the saved themselves from oblivion and gave themselves hope and a new reason to go on. So… my thinking is this: the “Galaxy Quest Test.”

The test is simple: take a series or a movie that claims to be Star Trek, and imagine that it gets beamed out into space. It is picked up by an earnest alien race capable of understanding it. They have much the same ethics, hopes and fears as humanity, even if they don’t look anything like us and are really rather innocent, despite the fact they are being ground out of existence. What are the chances that these aliens will watch the show or movie and decide that the vision they’ve watched and understood is such a wonderful thing that they will choose to emulate it?

I can see this with TOS. I can see it with TNG. I can see it with Lower Decks and certainly Prodigy. I can see it with Voyager. I can kinda see it with Deep Space Nine. But the Kelvin movies? *Any* season of Discovery or Picard? Not a chance in hell.

So, when watching Star Trek Picard season three, keep this question int he back of your mind: “What would Mathesar think of this?”