Someone has played Portal.
I thought exactly the same thing at that moment
I'd like to pretend that all the TNG movies didn't exist, except probably for Generations. Yeah it's the least loved in some ways but that film, despite huge flaws, was the only one to deliver a tiny piece of TNG-style themes and delivery from Picard, when it came to his desire for a family, death of his nephew, etc. First Contact was already too far gone into generic scifi action thriller and the franchise
never recovered.
It's still all dark mood lighting - wouldn't everyone in Starfleet ships have permanent eye strain living in barely lit environments? - with the plot appearing to be more Abrams-Trek superweapons, pointy giganto-ships and terrorist attacks on the Federation, with a soupcon of skulking around degenerate nightclub environments and silly mystery box naming conventions ('red lady', 'hellbird', etc.).
Those are the worst aspects of the season, to be sure, and already on full display. Everything tries to be darkly lit scifi again, which is just tiring; and the Abrams style trash writing is still
everywhere. Did Matalas secretly still use the old team for filling out the scripts? I hate this "magical mysterious keyword / key to everything" nonsense with a passion and it's extremely anti-Star Trek.
What the hell was that Hellbird "add 3 to every digit" nonsense? Crusher sends him a ridiculous keyword that requires he just happen to mention it to Riker? And she sends it to his old comm badge in a box which he very easily might not have heard sitting in a closet? All this extremely corny fate / mystery writing is just awful.
Don't get me started on "red lady," which also just happens to be in the Raffi scenes. I know they're not fully serious about fixing the problems of Picard S1 & S2 because they
brought Raffi back. What the hell is wrong with these people? Every scene she is in (and sadly it looks like they'll pair her up with Worf on a mini side adventure in upcoming episodes, ruining his scenes with her presence) is absolutely awful to watch, she's a bad enough actress and character to singlehandedly ruin an episode if you keep bringing her onto the screen.
Bottom line so far: it has all the hallmarks of recent Nu-Trek sadly,
but it is still infinitely better than S1-S2. Right now it feels like the OP title here, a "fifth TNG move." That's not a compliment, because TNG was ruined by its own movies. But this is clearly back in the range of those films (not right for the franchise, but mildly watchable with a few good moments), rather than being something as catastrophic and embarrassing as S1-S2.
Edit - I did appreciate the closing music and imagery, very nice. And other than being too dark, the production value of sets was good, nice little uses of things like LCARS. So much better than the designs from S1/2.
