I have been a Trekie for a long, long time. I was hopeful when Sir Patrick Stewart agreed to reprise his Trek role. Though I was ultimately disappointed with Star Trek: Discovery (I won’t be watching season 3, they lost me), I thought maybe Star Trek: Picard might be better. Well, it turns out that there were a LOT of things to not like about Picard. In no particular order:

1. Starfleet stopped being Starfleet for no good reason. Their abandoning the Romulans doesn’t really click with the story Spock tells in the Kelvin timeline. When Spock Prime explains what happened to Kirk Kelvin, he says “We outfitted our fastest ship.” Surely “we” was not the Romulans or Nero wouldn’t have blamed Spock personally. “We” must have been Starfleet or Vulcan. Starfleet sends its fastest ship, that fails. They start building a fleet to evacuate Romulus (which is problematic too. How much lead time do they get for supernovas?) and when the synths destroy Mars they totally give up. Why?
2. I am not okay with Raffi calling Picard “JL” and I don’t think the Jean Luc from The Next Generation would have been okay with it either. Perhaps we’re not dealing with the Picard of TNG, but still.
3. And while I’m on Raffi, I don’t much care for her character. She seems VERY un-Starfleet and not really believable as an actor in that role. I think she was miscast.
4. STILL speaking of Raffi, what is up with her and Seven holding hands at the end of the season? They barely spoke the entire season and now they’re in love? Did the writers realize at the last minute how heterosexual the season was? Dahj and her boyfriend, Laris and Zahban, Riker and Troy, Narek and Soji, Soji’s parents, etc. At the last minute they felt they had to throw in some homosexuality and it just felt forced.
5. And speaking of Seven, I never cared for her in Voyager but thought she was great in Picard. Or she could have been had she not been totally underutilized. Okay, so she goes Borg Queen and even though I was never okay with the idea that the Borg having a queen, when she said “We are Borg” I thought we had the old groove back! That could have gone somewhere! Yet it quickly didn’t.
6. And why did they even include the Borg? I thought that would make a real interesting twist in the plot line of opposition to synths since they’re kind of halfway between but that just never developed. There was potential for some real science fiction but no.
7. And speaking of the Borg, why oh why did they kill Hugh? He was one of the most interesting people in that season! His death was pointless.
8. And the end of the season was a real let down. Here come the super synths! OOoooh scary! Till Soji has a change of heart and they just slither back out. Here come the Romulan fleet! Till suddenly Starfleet is Starfleet again FOR NO REASON and they let a retired captain take command of a brand new type of ship and chase the Romulans off. It just felt like the writers got to that point and forgot everything they’d been saying all season so they could wrap it up
9. Space flowers.
10. Commander Oh. Half Vulcan, half Romulan somehow makes it to the top of Starfleet security (yet only attains the rank of commander?) and then she turns around and commands the Romulan fleet. You can tell Starfleet security sucks because they have a full-blooded Romulan working with her for a bit till she puts her ears back on and torments her brother.
11. Bruce Maddox. There could have been an interesting and complicated storyline with deep roots in TNG lore. I found his big episode, “Measure of a Man” really thought provoking. Even wrote an article about it for a fanzine I read at the time. Yet Maddox dies after a few minutes on screen. ANOTHER blown opportunity for some real science fiction.
12. Soji/Dahj. Okay, how did Maddox get anything from Data since he was obliterated in Nemesis? I had a feeling that maybe Maddox got a hold of Lore since at the end of Descent Part 2 he is deactivated and we never see him again. That would have made Soji a real question mark. Can she be more than Lore was? Instead, we stick with Data as her dad and got a very sweet end to his story instead.
13. Gratuitous cursing.
14. Too many holos. And isn’t AI a form of synth? Wouldn’t they have been banned too in that doesn’t-really-make-sense-if-you-think-about-it ban?
15. Back to Data. His end was sweet but at the same time WHAT? The most human thing to do is die? Everything dies! That doesn’t make humanity unique. And they kept him in a box? That’s not just lame, it is cruel.

Added:

16. Elnor. A summary. Romulan orphan befriended and abandoned by Picard. Grows to be an excellent fighter. “Bind your sword to my cause?” “OK.” “Never, ever use your sword for my cause!” “But?!” “And stay on the ship while I beam down to immanent danger!” “You suck. I’m going to hang with the Borg.”