Star Trek ended in 2005.

After hours of attempts to watch the Abrams movies and the scattershot Kurtzman series, and once the first season of Picard finally proved that not even the return of the legendary captain and friends could redeem the franchise's producers, those words were the first things to cross my mind which finally felt right.

Since that revelation, I turned for the first time to other people who loved Star Trek for what it once sought to convey. Some bore the effort of reviewing the new series and comparing their soul to the soul of the proper series. The kind of fulfilment and enjoyment I felt back then, I felt again by ignoring each episode and instead reading and listening to what these people had to say.

Then came the announcement that the primary TNG cast were reuniting for the final season of Picard. Because modern Trek's leaders had wrecked everything they'd touched, and even with the peaceful detachment I'd found, I felt the familiar sense of dread more deeply than ever.

The pattern is so old and so well-trodden now. The studio ineptly conceives and produces a series, fans are disappointed and their trust wears away, and the studio perhaps scrambles to adjust course and makes a desperate annoucement of a beloved cast member, ship or staple in hopes that viewers will instantly forget all missteps to that point. Repeat.

I'd never before attempted to extend my ears to other fans, never aspired to go to conventions or anything like that. But the exploration introduced me to one Robert Meyer Burnett, whose phrasing often differs from that in my head, but as he would say when it comes to evaluating modern Star Trek, we park our shuttlecraft in the same shuttlebay. A man of Hollywood, Burnett now makes something of a living as a self-spun leader of a well-executed online community of "imagination connoisseurs." I didn't immediately recognize him as the guy who interviewed TNG's cast in its definitive Blu-ray release, and would learn he was the main producer of it. He's been unafraid both to rave and rant, articulately and plainly, about the lucid contrast between Star Trek old and new. His viewers varyingly agree, which he welcomes, and for all of that they respect and trust him.

If you follow this kind of thing, you know where this is going. Since his first privileged sneak peek at season three of Picard, which finally launches tonight, Burnett has insisted that something has finally gone right, that he loves it, that this is good Star Trek. He's been its cheerleader, but also thoughtful enough to tell viewers not to take his word for it, but to make up their own minds – not that that isn't also a form of promotion.

Do I believe him?

Critical to the underpinning of this claim is that season three was handed directly to a new showrunner named Terry Matalas. Terry worked on proper Star Trek during Rick Berman's time, and evidently knows more about that era of episodes than Kurtzman and friends, who seemed week after week to know next to nothing. To make a show that feels believably like a continuation of that era, I've long thought that's the very least that must happen, as these recent years have shown that the actors are not Star Trek (as sincerely as I nod to them and as well as I wish them), but the imaginers and writers are.

However, the trailers have not been discernably more promising than any other trailers for modern Star Trek, full of the same old detached platitudes of phrasing, action shots, and dark sets. (The one tech-related situation in which I'd like to prioritize something other than a dark mode.) One of the short clips they've shared – anything is better than one of those trailers – shows Picard riffling through several collections of objects using an unimpressive modern-style series of quick cuts.

What in the trailers hasn't been dismayingly cookie-cutter? Well, a little generic dialogue from Worf and Riker actually sound not completely unlike Worf and Riker. And the return of Lore is a "finally" that makes sense on paper, though on its own it's no reassurance Lore won't somehow be ruined along with everything else. But this merely reminds viewers how low the bar has dropped: regular-sounding dialogue has become not a basic requirement to be expected everywhere, but a rare high point.

So, I trust Burnett a great deal, but to this point I don't believe him. I already know that Star Trek ended.

But I know other things too. I think I know the TNG cast are friends, and each would agree without fail that their mix of commitment, humour and lightheartedness wove a sense of family between them, and that it might be nice to see them playing together again. That alone doesn't resuscitate my will to treat it fully as fiction, but it's a point in favour of at least coaxing me to watch the show at some point, perhaps all at once during a free trial after it's fully out. I needn't believe Burnett to do it, because I'll know afterward.

Maybe, I've thought, if Matalas is indeed the first deserving Star Trek showrunner since 2005, perhaps I can suspend disbelief and imagine a window from the timeline of TNG which bypasses everything since, and opens directly into the events of this season. If I can summon it, and if the show invites me to do so in a way none other has of late, I'll attempt to give it that much of a chance.

What seems logically impossible, though, is what the studio has seemingly craved with each iteration of "the pattern": for the fans to perceive and believe that one gruellingly-awaited triumph somehow redeems their cumulative stack of failures and fixes everything. Unfortunately, the damage is long done, and so vast.

But there is one thing in the trailers, and that's what this post is about.

Of note is Daniel Davis returning as "Moriarty," initially defined by La Forge as a holodeck character capable of intellectually defeating Data. After years of trapped consciousness while deactivated, Moriarty appeared to have miraculously escaped the holodeck, when in fact he had deceived some of the crew by using the holodeck to weave a false version of reality around them, and his game of wits made for a typically good episode of TNG. Also in the recent trailer, Crusher admonishes Picard with extremely sincere emphasis to "trust… no one."

In a sentence, the prior events of Picard, those which finally killed the last glimmer of my ability to indulge in this era of fictional tradition, could actually be reversed by this mechanism. This inept, imitative and self-contradicting tumbleweed of confusion occurring at the level of the fabric of sensibility and culture could be revealed as a deliberately nonsensical illusion woven by Moriarty around Picard spanning the duration of those two seasons. In Trek's actual tradition, it would not be the first (nor even the second or third) years-long illusion around which a plot was effectively based.

It wouldn't undo Discovery or Strange New Worlds, but it's the only way on the table in which the current gods of the franchise could essentially backpedal and say "a great deal of this turns out not even to be real."

I've thought that to truly and fully redeem itself in preparation for its next true golden age, modern Star Trek needs to be officially crossed out, called peripheral to canon or its own twisted timeline, what have you. Not the actors, but someone in charge of the show, must do something like what Berman and Braga once did: stand up, look people in the eye, and say "we're sorry, we let you down, we tried to create shows we barely understood, and we're going to make these changes to address that." That would be a start. Not this plaintive and pitiful "pattern" of defensive, blank-faced producers insisting to the camera they care about Star Trek before setting their publicity and marketing team to clap, cheer, and pander while denigrating the years of insightful and deserved criticism exchanged by those who are more deserving of their jobs.

Picard's third season is not positioned to execute that kind of full and true redemption, of course. It's only an attempt to follow a troubled narrative with an improved one. Is that going to be sufficient to enough people?

I believe Terry Matalas cares more than Kurtzman does, and is better suited to be in charge. I've listened to him speak and say what he could about the series. But the question I'm wondering about is whether he had the combination of initiative, clarity and courage to go further, to make that move with Moriarty, and to actually try to apologize and make up for some of what's passed. It still wouldn't fix everything narratively within this universe. One person couldn't anymore.

But if that one particular thing does happen, it would be nice to be able to say that one person who chanced upon a little power and control in this utterly confused era of Star Trek rose above the dysfunction and did more than what one person might be expected to do.