Star Trek: Picard, the new reloading of the Star Trek: The Subsequent Technology (TNG) universe, explores modern disasters—refugees denied havens, racist paranoia, journey bans, genocide—however, if I could, I’d prefer to land into this world on its smooth furnishings. One typically disappointing ingredient in science fiction is the lack of heat, homey décor. The interiors of the distant future are usually glassily austere, as cozy as a skyscraper boardroom. TNG did supply some creature comforts, however let’s simply say Architectural Digest’s 24th-century editors gained’t be hailing the Enterprise-D for a YouTube tour. If you happen to watched the previous present, you’ll keep in mind the standard-issue puce armchairs, puce banquettes, puce mattresses. You may need gotten a glimpse of iridescent bedding earlier than your favourite crew member bolted up from an uneasy dream. I’d have nightmares, too, if my pillow and comforter appeared like I’d descaled a mermaid.

However the set designers of Picard, which concluded its first season on Thursday, have some critical hipster style. We rejoin Captain Jean-Luc Picard, performed as soon as once more by Patrick Stewart, 18 years after the occasions recorded in the fourth and last TNG movie, Nemesis. He has retreated to his ancestral French chateau, full with winery. We discover him awaking from uneasy goals. He lifts his head from a snow-white pillow whose excessive thread depend you possibly can sense empathically by the display. There’s a cream sofa in the nook and uncovered brick partitions. Even the shadows are good-looking.

All of this loveliness, although, can’t make Picard overlook his troubles. “I haven’t been dwelling; I’ve been ready to die,” he says churlishly. He has resigned from Starfleet below a cloud, after a calamitous try and evacuate the Federation’s longtime enemies, the Romulans, from their dying house world. For unknown causes, a gaggle of artificial life-forms went berserk throughout the rescue, costing 1000’s of lives. Since then, a Federation-wide ban has been positioned on the improvement of synthetic sentience. Picard’s last mission is to guard a surviving synth, Soji, who, alongside along with her twin sister, was born from one of his previous buddy Commander Information’s positronic neurons.

To assist Soji, he should discover a ship, so he enlists a fellow ex-Starfleet officer named Raffi to assist. She lives in a modest eco house in the desert. On her porch, shells strung with twine waft humbly in the heat air. On this assembly with Raffi, class variations between previous pals are made express in a manner they by no means had been in TNG. She brings up a current media interview Picard gave about the Romulan catastrophe. “I noticed you sitting again in your very wonderful chateau—huge oak beams, heirloom furnishings,” she says bitterly. “I’d present you round my property, but it surely’s extra of a hovel.”

These few phrases inform us we’re in a panorama very totally different from TNG. In Picard, persons are riven with human frailties, so that they want a bit of style to consolation them. The previous present was in a position to sidestep questions of social equality as being too vulgar to ask. Because of the replicator, a expertise that turns vitality into the matter of your selecting, life was blissfully moneyless: Anybody may have a chateau in the event that they wished, which meant that people may spend their time worrying about loftier issues, like propagating Diomedian scarlet moss, mending tectonic plates, and delivering delegates to far-off peace talks.

In the TNG two-parter “Time’s Arrow,” Samuel Clemens, a.okay.a. Mark Twain, comes aboard the Enterprise from 1890s San Francisco. Realizing he can’t get cigar onboard, he lashes out, asking Counselor Troi impolite questions on who paid for this flashy vessel. He assumes that the affluence of the ship is constructed on the exploitation of different races and the oppression of the poor. In a turbolift—that whooshing field of transport and self-growth—Troi explains that “poverty was eradicated on Earth a very long time in the past. And so much of different issues disappeared with it—hopelessness, despair, cruelty.” Clemens is shocked; he explains to Troi that he comes from a time when prejudice is commonplace. “You’re telling me that isn’t how it’s anymore?” he asks. With all the earned smugness of her developed century, Troi replies, “That’s proper!” To which Clemens grunts and remarks that every one this social justice is “perhaps value giving up cigars for in spite of everything.”