So, it's come to this.

• Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Cast Announce

In an earlier time, a time that modern Star Trek has made feel like a hazy and idealistic memory, the reunion of Star Trek: The Next Generation's original cast for a television series would have been cause for unreserved, unanimous and confident rejoice. It would have meant more than a television announcement should mean. It would have meant that the conveyors of some of the purest, most accessible, and most beloved allegorical writing would return once again to inspire, once again to invite viewers to escape from the buzz, hype, pettiness, and shock value of everyday entertainment, and once again to analyze and consider real problems – problems that might plague even an unrecognizably alien species – from the tranquility of a more isolated, more basic, and more abstract frame of mind.

But we no longer live in that dreamlike time. Thirteen years of production have elapsed under J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman and others which can be no more charitably described than as misguided, short-sighted, oblivious to the idea of fictional continuity, and almost entirely reliant for enthusiasm on references to characters and stories they could not have conceived, and do not understand. Whenever they borrow credibility in this way, they prove they shouldn't have. The Star Trek reboot movies, Discovery, Lower Decks, and Prodigy. Strange New Worlds, which was announced as though motivated by "love from the fan base" and hasn't even aired, is already undermining itself. And Picard showed that even the long-deferred return of the compassionate and deeply respected Shakespearean master who played the captain of the Enterprise-D wasn't enough to free modern Trek from the sullying influence of its undeserving rights holders.

One round of this was enough to shake the confidence of those who had waited for so long. But as we near a half-dozen rounds, we've learned to respond to the announcement of a returning figure not with confetti, but an increasing sense of dread. And with this announcement: it means more than dread. It means that the characters once played by this beloved circle of colleagues, those who would have inspired and invited us to detach and contemplate as enlightened citizens of the future, stand to be similarly trampled and disfigured.

An Internet neighbour phrased it like this on Twitter:

I can't believe Kurtzman has managed to make me hate that they're bringing the full cast back next season.

The people who don't get it, who don't internally wince at this announcement, believe the return of this respected cast equals the return of the characters, and, more importantly, the return of the principles they would exemplify episode after episode. Among those who don't get it, as though it were their continuing mission to demonstrate it, are the aforementioned creative stewards.

Christopher Monfette, co-executive producer, made the first tweet I found after the announcement:

… Loads of surprises await. New characters & old. And one helluva villain.

I was preparing a tweet of my own a while ago, remarking that of the original movies – which at that time, seemed the most vulnerable to the temptation to cater to cinema clichés – my favourite ones lacked villains. (The Motion Picture, rewly remastered and also launching this week, is my favourite, largely for that reason.)

But generally superior were the episodic stories: one of classic Star Trek's purposes and greatest strengths. The modern leadership has proven so allergic to writing episodically that confirmation wasn't needed to suppose Picard would be at minimum that fundamentally unlike The Next Generation, but the emphatic focus on a villain seems to provide some.

I will always respect the cast for their work in contributing so unsuspectingly to what became a worthy fictional reality to which to aspire, and into which so many have eagerly escaped and placed themselves. I've enjoyed their personal commentary ever since, appreciate their interactions, and certainly don't blame them for doing all they can to reunite, please those for whom their mere presence is enough, and earn some more money. (Dave Blass points out that many TNG designers are involved too.)

But the fact becomes clearer with each attempt at this routine, like an archaeologist's brush steadily revealing an artifact: the crux of Star Trek was never just the names of the characters, or the actors, the respectable prop-fashioners, or the acoustic musicians. It was the creative core of the thing: the writers, the imaginers, the definers of parameters within which all else was placed. That is what has gone so sorely missed. Melinda Snodgrass, D.C. Fontana, René Echevarria, Joe Menosky, Ron Moore, Brannon Braga, Jeri Taylor, and so on. And of course, Gene Roddenberry, whose original writing guides for Star Trek and The Next Generation would function as garlic concentrate to the current screenwriting Draculas.

It's been so long since it was possible to watch without being regularly thrust, as though through a blowhole, from any sincere suspension of disbelief by this immature, ungrounded, unconsidered, and internally discontinuous material. To this point in Picard, it's been nice to see Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner, Whoopi Goldberg and John De Lancie again, but the experience has thus been reduced to the act of enjoying their genuine chemistry as real-life friends and artists playing together on sets and locations, not the imaginative indulgence in anything resembling the embraceable and believable future its writers have persistently chipped and shattered.

Stewart appeared in interviews clear that his intent in returning to the role of Picard was not to retread TNG. Three years later, the Paramount powers have placed the returning cast and production team in gold across Twitter, halfway through the airing of the preceding season. Evidently this strategy was, like others sharing its pattern, concocted as a remedy. As ever, I can sincerely say "I hope it's good," as though a top secret new Band-Aid, bigger and better than any before, had some chance of providing total reconsructive surgery. But the fact something so monumental as the reunion of TNG's principal cast could occur, and the knowledge that the best we can hope for is more spectatorship of their camaraderie fully divorced from the enjoyment of a fictional adventure, only underscore the extent and depth of the damage that was done well before it was applied.

If official Star Trek is ever truly to be repaired, and the good will of those who loved its competently-crafted tales restored, it is now clear the solution must dig even more deeply than this. It seems impossible at this point, but may that day someday come.

Meanwhile, though, today has proved an especially sharp reminder of two more heartening things. Firstly: the classic series, with the crux firmly in place, remain available for those who always loved them, and for those newcomers who somehow find their way back to them through today's comparative tangle. And secondly: nobody owns the rights to Star Trek's deeper principles, which have been abandoned anyway. The spirit of Star Trek belongs not to anyone mentioned in any legal document, but lies in the hearts and minds of those who cherish it. They need not wait for others to create something for them.