R.CAllen

There’s also one where the guns are arranged so it looks like they’re sort of cresting in a wave behind the person being photographed!?!?!? There’s a lot of these photographs. A lot of people getting their digs in on the people in the photographs. I can’t really criticize! I’m one of the former people(s)! I posted my dig right here!

There are these photographs of people in and outside their homes surrounded by their gun collections which have been all over the social media. Not sure where/when they’re from — assume they’re from some news story, looking up one of them makes it clear they’re at least a month old, oh wait, it’s from here, taken by Gabriele Galimberti for The Sunday Times — but my thing is that I’ve seen one of them (there are others, there’s one where the guy is sort of trapped inside his own little gun room while his spouse sits far away in the kitchen, there’s one where the gun guy isn’t a gun guy it’s a gun girl, a little teenager, a gun child!?!?, there’s one where the guy and girl are on a bed in their underwear!?!?) probably a dozen times --- it’s this one ---

--- people pointing out the guy looks super duper old, people pointing out the lack of helmet on the kid riding the bike, that sort of thing.

But I only just just just just juuuuust noticed the roof. Look at the roof! I’ve seen that photograph a lot a lot and never noticed up until now the guns on the roof. I laughed! You gotta laugh. Or not.

Saw the 4^th episode. I’m still on board! The dialogue in these things is still kind of rough any time it strays outside treknobabble but on the whole this was a good’n! Love to see the ship! Love to watch the people on the ship nobly sacrifice themselves for each other!

* I didn’t put it together before this episode but if this show has a single touchstone in prior Trek it’s actually not TOS. That’s right, you guessed it, it’s Season 4 of ENT. Think about it! Aenar! Augments! Gorn! The folks at Paramount+ know what the fans want, what the fans NEED, they’ve done the research, they’ve done the testing, and they’ve decided to go with continual references to everyone’s favouritest Star Trek spin-off and everyone’s particular favouritest season of that spin-off. The fans love Captain Jonathan Archer! (Real talk : it’s just that they’re so unoriginal the franchise itself has already been unoriginal in EXACTLY the same way they’re doing now. They’re tripping over their own unoriginality from years before! It’s like how VOY is just a copy of a copy. But I shouldn’t complain. Hope this show ends up as good as VOY, honestly!)

* in 1000% percent agreement w/you on the suits issue, Spider-Man. No, actually, like 10000000%! They should wear an EVA suit and another EVA suit on top of that EVA suit. Maybe also those life support belts from the animated series too. Safety first! Can’t be too careful! After all it’s like Captain James R. Kirk famously said, “Risk is not our business.” (Yeah, sorry, I don’t know why I’m making fun. I have my own peccadilloes! Every time they use the bridge screen in a way that I dislike and personally register as a kind of breach in the established grammar of the series — talking to people inside the ship itself; demonstrating things I’d prefer to see on some other screen elsewhere or in some other room entirely — it makes me feel like I’m watching the first season of TNG and they haven’t yet figured out how to do what they gots to do.)

* re: the crew quarters thing, well, that’s been on my mind since last week and thinking of the Scotty episode of TNG where he has that line about how even his paltry guest quarters on the 1701-D would’ve been fit for an admiral back in his time. I don’t care, really, can’t fault the show for wanting to have things look good for locally accepted values of good, can’t fault the show for not wanting to be a braindead 1-to-1 correspondence with the exact dimensions of the sixties show (if you want to see that sort of thing there are fanfilms and stuff like that, v. impressive stuff), anybody sufficiently nerded up about all this should also be able to recall that it’s established canon back in Pike’s time his Enterprise had ~half the crew it does in Kirk’s.

* But wait, omigosh, speaking of fanfilms! I just put two and two together here! There was a fanfilm a few years ago. Walter Koenig was in it! It was called something like Renegades or whatever. It featured Khan’s granddaughter! The show, which is in and of itself a wholly unoriginal exercise, is so committed to scraping the bottom of its particular barrel that the tools it’s using to do this were first held by the hands of the very audience members it’s pandering to! I mean, c’mon already! They may as well just have Lt. Mary Sue Smith, aged 15½, beam aboard!

Yeah? Probably, yeah. If it’s the sort of thing that everybody did all the time as kids and the joke is that he’s a grown-up just taking it unusually seriously, sure. (Feel like that’s the type of gag they’d do fairly often, actually? First sketch that comes to mind w/that premise is the one with a bunch of people on a bus singing ♫ NOBODY LIKES US ♫ EVERYBODY HATES US ♫ LET’S JUST GO EAT WORMS ♫ and then they actually do it.)

There’s a thing about that bit that they show actual footage of in the documentary (which is fantastic!) which makes it clear that ... it’s something they used to do on stage!?!?!? I don’t understand how it’s funny if you can’t actually show through forced perspective that he’s crushing their heads. But apparently Mark McKinney used to get laughs at the Rivoli long before the TV show even existed just sitting up there and doing it to the audience. I guess the people there would imagine what he was seeing!?

I waited for the trade on this one. Except ... there is no trade!?!?!? Can’t buy it on DVD. Can’t buy it on Blu-Ray. Disney doesn’t want anyone to buy any of its Star Wars no more. They spent four billion dollars for Star Wars and have no desire whatsoever to earn any of that back through the home media market. Disney just wants you to pay them a little walking around money every month so they can pipe Star Wars into your home 24/7. Seems like they’re leaving cash on the table maybe? Probably a good idea for someone out there like The Asylum to put out “Star’s Book of War Feats” and “The Patagonian & Baby Yoga” so confused grandmothers rushing towards big-box store checkout lines can plunk down ten bucks and get their grandkids a nice little gift.

Watched it over Passover. Didn’t really leave much of a lasting impression on me, I guess. No real memories. No real opinions. I think that’s got to be due to a point raised in one of those Behind The Scenes books (I’m not talking about the ones that tell you how many B1-series battle droids fit inside those elephant-looking thingies; not the Visual Dictionaries, these are the The Art Of books, the Phil Szostaks, the account they offer of the production of these things is probably just as much a contrivance as the “Valorum decicreds are worth the same amount of Muunilunst fiat currency as Palpatine coinage” stuff but they’re still fun to look at and there’s the occasional tidbit of behind-the-scenes info that feels vaguely close to some kind of reality) about how these TV shows have less time and less money to make more hours of footage than the movies. I mean, I’m blaming them for being unimpressive but maybe it’s on me for being unimpressed??? Maybe if I’d watched this stuff week to week like everybody else it’d have stayed inside my skull longer. Maybe it’d have hit me deeper. No way to know for sure now one way or the other, I suppose!

Anyway, the Obi-Wan show is coming up soon so I figured I’ve got to now share what floated through my brain at the time or forever hold my peace. The fact that the spoiler tag seems to have returned to easy functionality (it was gone for a while after the big UBB update!?!?!?) makes it feel more reasonable to dump this out.

ep1

May as well post my short-but-filled-with-spoilers review of the movie!

Omigosh! Amazing!

Saw it. I didn’t much like the movie!

11 hours ago, CoLA said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Ugly Sonic

was the best!

On 5/20/2022 at 8:14 PM, Spider-Man said:

I don’t think M’Benga was talking to his daughter while she was in the buffer. He explained you can keep a person in the buffer indefinitely if you rematerialized them for a period between stasis. As such I think the indication here is that he rematerialized her, for a story and chat, then puts her back in stasis.

I missed that! In my defence, the actor’s accent is fairly thick and also the explanation itself raises a lot of questions — he’s routinely rematerializing somebody with a degenerative disease? won’t that just mean the disease will continue to progress forward during the time the patient is rematerialized? like, if someone is dying of space cancer and you keep popping them out of the transporter buffer won’t the cancer continue to grow during those periods you’ve rematerialized their body? He’s not buying time to save her life! He’s just killing her slowly-er on his own personal schedule! — but I definitely missed that bit. That’s not on them. That one’s on me!

I saw the third episode!

I still don’t like how there’s no identification of the character’s names and ranks in the title credits. And no episode titles in the upper left hand corner of the screen after the credits, too! But I guess those days are over — LD excepted for the latter, though.

Episode is ... about as good as a fairly crummy VOY or ENT episode!? But that is now, in and of itself, a pretty high level of quality for Star Trek to reach? Like, the premise is pretty awful (“Oh no! We’ve been infected with a disease!? But perhaps the TRUE disease is p-p-p-p-prejudice?”) and the execution isn’t up to snuff but because of how good the SFX are nowadays and of course the always attendant truth of how this is the Enterprise the whole thing feels way better than it would’ve otherwise. Loved to see the detailed diagram of the ship’s interior on a screen! Loved to see all its external running lights blink out!

I appreciated the craftsmanship of having that scene with the Andorian engineer guy doing his thing with the transporter beaming up a piece of the planet’s mantle in a way that it wasn’t actually there there yet in order to set up the bizarre ending scene where Dr. M’Benga can ... talk to his daughter while she’s in the transporter buffer!? That’s not how the transporter works! Scotty didn’t spend decades just waiting around on the transporter pad of the USS Jenolen for the Enterprise-D to show up! My point is this : the show understood that it had to make it clear to the audience that the transporter works in a way it doesn’t work BEFORE it decided to show the audience the transporter working in a way it doesn’t work. Gotta give them credit for that.

Oh, and I liked Spock’s line pointing out the oxymoronishness of the phrase “Looks like they’re gone.” Kind of more of a Data thing than a Spock thing (there’s a lot of overlap there, yeah, I know) but still pretty good.

I don’t have a Tik Tok account (is that how it works?) but sometimes I see individual Tik Toks out there on the wider Internet or wherever.

Here are some of them :

- the one where the girl is hornt for General Grievous (here!)

- the one about the critical reactions to TLJ and RotS (here!)

- a (deliberately???) cheesy/corny rap about how to make cereal on שבת (here!)

- I can’t find this and it might not even have been a TikTok but it was a scene from IasiP where Charlie sings a song and the characters on the show were labelled as various political factions in the Democratic Party and Danny DeVito was labelled as Danny DeVito

- a bit where Kylo Ren’s dialogue in TLJ is a line Adam Driver said on Girls, I think (here!)

- can’t find this one but it’s a guy chasing his duck around his attic and screaming “GO TO BED JERRY” at his duck!?

- can’t find this one but it’s a guy sitting in his parked car while it’s raining and saying something like “Communism is a lot like rain. At first it seems like it’s going to be okay but then you go outside” and he gets out of his car and screams “AND THEN IT’S EVEN BETTER!”

- can’t find this one but it’s a girl in class playing with her glasses synced up to part of this song

- a garden hose spraying water set to Elton John’s Rocket Man; uch, can’t find this one either

- a teacher in a classroom telling her students that the Earth is flat and the North Pole doesn’t exist

- a guy saying the name Kyle three times into a mirror and a Kyle appears out of nowhere and says “¡Ay mami! What’s popping?” and the guy screams

- just a bunch of kids dancing in their basement to Toto’s Africa

- just a bunch of guys clapping for their very very very very pleased dog

- a girl singing but her camera uses facial recognition to automatically focus in on part of her t-shirt and she bowls over laughing at the mistake, pretty sure the song was a Tenacious D song

- girls pranking a girl named Allison with that thing where you tell them to put their feet flush up against the wall and then stand on one foot so they fall over, classic, wish I could find it!

- really mad I can’t find this one! A woman with her sheep and she’s singing to them in Arabic (???) and they’re baaing at correct times with the song. Translated, from memory, it was something like : “Oh my sheep – baaa! baaa! - you are my life – baa! baa! - walk with me – baa! baa! - sing with me – baa! baa!”.

- okay, found one that I actually have a working link to; it’s the one where General Grievous and Threepio and ... .... .... the droid voiced by Alan Tudyk in R1 are dancing to ... The Killers? Idk? (here!)

- cats! oh, wait, this might not actually be a Tik Tok though. (here!)

- “Boromir. sword.” (here!)

- there’s something I can’t find any specific examples for at the moment but that’s absolutely commonplace and I like it lots and lots. It’s the thing where a user can match or synchronize or stitch (don’t know the exact terminology!) their video with other user’s videos so you can make your video a part of their video. Almost like it’s a panel on a comics page. But it also makes use of certain kinds of cinematic language : so, sometimes it’s like you’re showing what’s just outside the range of their camera or whatever. But sometimes it’s like you’re showing the opposite perspective of their camera!? I wish I had examples on hand to explain this better.

Yeah, it’s great!!! Haven’t seen the documentary --- I think it’s actually not even out yet, coming out the day after tomorrow, maybe!?

Favourite bits : 60 On The Pole (I think this is the one that just demonstrates the sheer ridiculousness of what they’re doing, it’s a note they hit a lot over the course of the season of course but still, still, still!), the one with the slippery babies, Ambublamce, when they brought back “I’m CRUSHING your head!”, oh, the cops, love the cops, there’s this thing where Mark talks about being unable to find his friends in a crowd and then they all have flags that I think is maybe a parody of Guy Maddin, in general I just love it when Bruce McCulloch gets very serious and earnest in his demeanour, oh wait the sketch where Dave Foley is a post-apocalyptic morning show DJ who only has one song to play!, they brought back the waiters (I think the waiters were on the old show, right? There’s a sketch — looked it up, “Dipping Areas” — where everyone in a restaurant’s kitchen is just incredibly nice and kind and patient with each other while the customers wait. They do it again this time with the Employees Must Wash Hair Before Pooping sketch and I think maybe another one earlier in the season?). [edit : okay, yeah, I remembered! The one about the pie/tart!]

I’m undecided on whether or not I want them to do a Season 7 right away or wait ANOTHER THIRTY YEARS and do it when they’re all ninety!?

I thought the pilot simultaneously :

• wasn’t very good! Part of that can be chalked up to me just being a real grimace, a groucho, a grindy grumblegus, I just don’t like anything no more. Really little teeny tinsy things bothered me (literally, only me, they shoot part of the show in a place that doesn’t bring back fond memories for this guy — I’m watching the show and seeing Spock & Co. walk through parts of the York University campus I used to trudge through real sad, real unhappy), things like odd use of colons in the chyrons and inconsistent labelling terminology (Why is it “Bear Creek: Montana” but then “Vulcan: Raal”? Pick a lane!) and some other stuff that I wrote down after watching it but the document I dump my TV thoughts into experienced some sort of hiccup and that day is gone!? I guess it couldn’t have been too bad if I can’t remember my complaints at a distance of one week since viewing. Oh well! [Oh wait, now I remember. I disliked parts of the pilot for extremely tedious political reasons! Oh yeah, it’s alllll coming back to me.]

• was the best pilot of any Star Trek spin-off so far!?!? I think it’s better than DS9, I think it’s better than VOY, I think it’s better than ENT, I think it’s better than DSC, I think it’s better than PIC, I think it’s better than either of the two animated ones! It’s obviously better than TNG but that’s no biggie since every Star Trek spin-off’s pilot has been better than “Encounter At Farpoint”. Partly it’s so good because so much of the work of a television pilot has been done for it way ahead of time either a few years before it aired thanks to the 2^nd season of DSC or TOS and the movies, y’know? But it does what it needs to do. It’s just kind of got the bumper rails up on the bowling lane because what it needs to do is tell a story about Captain Pike, Spock, Number 1, Nurse Chapel, Uhura, Transporter Chief Kyle, Dr. M’Benga, and Khan’s Einekle (she’s a major part of the story! they spend a lot of time on her character and her feeeeeeelings!) and their adventures on board the original Enterprise.

The second episode is real good, real fun stuff, I mean, I gotta say, I do not like how they used the bridge’s main screen in it (Don’t brief the crew with the main screen! Sit everybody around a table in a conference room like proper Star Trek! What are we, animals!?!? Also, later, when they’re hanging out over the comet itself the main screen is displaying a previously recorded image of the comet from a distance!?!?!? What!? Why!?) and I missed Dr. M’Benga (I guess part of the problem of having such a big cast is that everyone’s going to miss out on screen time every now and then!) and I kind of don’t get the urge of modern Trek to make Uhura into a linguist (an urge that’s got plenty of canonical back-up for it, though, seeing as it’s something some of the books have done for years and years + it’s something that Nichelle Nichols wanted to emphasize — she was mad at the joke in VI where it makes it seem like she doesn’t know the language of the Federation’s major enemy; I’m probably in the wrong here on this one, I’ve accepted it, I’m learning to deal with, I’ve been mulling it over since ‘08 and slowly coming to terms with it) but overall I liked it way more than the pilot. Looking forward to the next one!

s2 e10

I can’t find my notes on the finale but you get the gist, right!?!?

s2 e9

• The ship can make a hologram out of anyone who’s ever been on board (but, wait, last year and in the other timeline didn’t they establish that Cristobal had to, like, upload a scan of himself in order to fit the ship with its multiple emergency holograms!?!?) and so, of course, for its model Alison Pill has chosen ... someone who has been grievously injured (and then dead!) the entire time he’s been there!? Did the ship’s computer just remove the gaping chest wound? Is it, like, a thing where the computer has a generic wireframe and just puts an overlay of whatever you choose on top of it!? Yeah, this is a quibble. I’m quibbling! But if the show is going to continuously streeeeeetch to find a way of integrating its cast into its storytelling (because for every previous Star Trek show its been a pretty basic conceit : the cast IS the crew! but for this one the cast is, like, memories and ancestors and flashbacks) I’m going to notice the that stretching!
• okay, it hasn’t bothered me before but at this point enough is enough! Where is Picard’s brother!? Where is he!? Just mention him in one line of dialogue! Please! I’m begging you! This is NOT like the bit in V where Kirk says something like, “I had a brother once and lost him. But then he came back!” re:Spock and dumb dumb fans went apewire because they couldn’t deal with the fact that the franchise had possibly implicitly ignored that one episode of TOS – the Armageddon Factor? the Season 1 closer, right? - where we see Kirk’s dead brother. This is NOT like Sisko’s sister who is mentioned once and then never again comes up even as Sisko’s father becomes a recurring character and the circumstances of Sisko’s very conception are called into question. Those are excusable and understandable, those make sense to me. This doesn’t make sense to me! At all!
• Raffi and 7 plunging a knife into this recently Borgified soldier’s throat (I think episodes of VOY and ENT established that assimilation can be reversed if it’s been soon enough since it started; besides for the obvious point that for Picard and 7 herself it was clearly possible too!) crossing all sorts of ethical and temporal lines. I guess they were hoping that guy’s descendants all died off in the post-atomic horror anyway so it makes no difference to their future whether he lives or dies??? Raffi, pretend for a minute that this guy has pointed ears and someone anyone will miss him if he dies and so instead of killing him just do the right thing, do the merciful thing. Knock him unconscious and tie him up!!!!1! Give him a debilitating concussion!!!!1!

• “Just because we anaesthetized your wound doesn’t mean your arm is fine.” The thing this show choose to care about! The things it assumes matters to the audience!!

• Why does the gun work!? I’m not saying the gun wouldn’t work (because, of course, it wouldn’t!) but that’s not my complaint, really. Picard picks up a gun, fires a couple bullets which hit NOBODY, then throws it away! That’s the act break! So the only thing these actions accomplished would be to call to mind in the attentive viewer the question of whether or not a pistol left abandoned in a cellar from before WWII would still fire eighty+ years later!!! Why not just have the gun be pointed straight at Brent Spiner and then have it click click click AND that’s the act break!?!?
• 7 beaming these soldiers into the very walls of Picard’s family home!
• Come on, TV show. Would it really have been LESS traumatic for the show’s purposes to have a young Picard see his mother attempt suicide!? To have her die (just as he himself has died! so many times!) but be revived by science!? Man, what other episodes did Jean-Luc just straight up hallucinate!?!? (Oh wait, this is actually canonically accurate. Sorry!) Is the reason his brother is never referenced, the reason his brother in that episode was played by the same actor who played by his father, is that his brother is makebelieve too!?!?

• Just taking the show on its own dramatic terms this makes Picard’s acquiescence to Data’s request to commit suicide at the end of Season 1 borderline incomprehensible. Even more than it already was! A young boy sees his mother die at an early age, thinks that he himself is responsible, and grows up to be a man who feels tremendous guilt over the death of his co-worker. For years and years! He then discovers that his co-worker is actually alive yet wishes to die. He euthanizes his co-worker!?!? Really!? Does that track? Aren’t we seeing a story here and now about Picard travelling back in time to help his mom (NOTE FROM THE FUTURE DATE OF 2022-05-12 :  my inability to do strikethrough text in this format is really hampering me getting my point(s) across! augh!) great-aunt!?!? Shouldn’t he have wanted to keep Data alive in the same way he wanted to keep his great-aunt alive!?!? The way that little boy surely wanted his mother to live!?!? What the #$% is going on here?
• What even is this story!? A man dies and one of his exes is sooo jealous of the fact that the man gets to die before HE does that he brings him (and some, but not all, of his friends!) back to life in an alternate universe. In the alternate universe another one of these man’s exes sends this man (and his friends!) back in time explicitly so he can meet up with the ancestor of a woman whose affections he has just rebuffed.
• The show kind of has lib-brain in that it views ICE as morally repugnant, it is both seed and branch of the nightmarish alternate future, yet for some reason the show also chooses to see the FBI as, like, a well-intentioned traumatized shlub accountant.

s2 ep8

gotta be honest, kinda disappointed this guy is a working stiff G-man who met some Vulcans when he was a kid instead of the role played by the actor previously

cracking up @ Kore’s “You need to get in there” said out loud and to herself while she is alone, just to make sure we don’t lose the sleepiest and least attentive viewer

John DeLancie reverting to his role in the computer game where you’re a guy whose father was killed at Wolf 359 and he sends you back in time to save your own pops; I think it was literally called Star Trek : Borg

Jay Karnes’ line of “Look, the launch is in 19 hours. If you don’t give me something now I’ll call mission control myself” is awkwardly inserted in after-the-fact to establish stakes; c’mon

look, this whole episode is awkward AF (opens w/a flashback, then eventually has a different flashback, then returns to that same flashback) on a lot of different levels but I’m inclined to give them some slack on the Vulcan transporter thing; it’s needed to establish a link between what he sees Picard do on camera and his memories as a kid. Maybe the ship in 2086 had a broken pattern buffer!?!?

Jurati/Borg Queen’s lines about Dr. Soong’s future — also awkwardly inserted after-the-fact!

2 ep 7

oh hell yeah! Gaius Baltar on Star Trek! yeah! yeah yeah yeah! (no, wait, he’s his dad!? what!? I thought his dad was the same actor who played his brother?)

uch, dropping a paraphrase of a line from IV! Not good! How old were all these producers when that movie came out!? Feels pretty indefensible to me.

buncha morons drinking replicated coffee from the Borg-infected ship and beaming stuff out from and into the Borg-infected ship!!!

wait she’s a Romulan ancestor!? I don’t get that! I feel like the idea of Dr. Soong and Dr. Soong’s ancestors and Dr. Soong’s descendants all being played by Brent Spiner is solid (even if you ignore the implicit truth that they’re all literal clones) and the thing with Data’s Daughter ties into that somehow. That’s good. But going through with it again this way doesn’t feel good, it’s like something out of Back to the Future III where Marty McFly’s paternal ancestor is played by Lea Thompson, director and guest star on this very show, oh wait, I guess it does fit after all...

will the season/series end with Picard having a romantic relationship with a woman AND her great-grandmother!? Less because Romulan live longer lives than humans! Tallin is probably Laris’s mom! Wait, is Picard going to end up being Laris’s ancestor too!? Zhaban is rolling in his grave at the thought of his widow hooking up with this withered pervert vintner!

why are they going to nu!Guinan to summon Q!?!? Just go visit Adam Soong’s house and ask him to hook them up with Q’s deets! Picard knows that Soong has met Q! They had a whole conversation about it before Soong ratted him out to security!

yeah, that actor is the same guy as the guy from the episode where 7 gets recruited by the time people and the character he’s playing is Agent Wells so I’m going to assume the obvious here!

season 2 ep 6

V. early into the ep I cracked up @ the foleyed/ADR’d line from Tallin of “And then we won’t have to worry about facial recognition once we’re inside.” Just no trust in the audience, like, at all!

Okay, now that Picard has told his great-great-aunt “Look up” I am revising my previous predictions re: Masked Borg Queen. Putting all my chips into it being Renée Picard! I think that’s actually playing fair on their part too because he mentions that character in his speech to the Academy so it all works out as far as mystery rules are concerned.

Okay, credit where credit’s due, the thing where Picard gives his great-great-aunt a pep talk is v. well done.

Raf’s line of “His brain is comatose for a reason” is dubbed so badly!

“The only person who knows anything at all about said god is comatose on this table” c’mon, man, 7 is right there! She’s met Q! She’s met Q Junior!

Picard season 2 ep 5

Okay, the show is back in the saddle again. Back in the zone. Back in the crease. It’s not that the show is any good per se, of course, it’s just that it has settled comfortably into a kind of not-half-badness that feels soothing and familiar. Like, sure, our cast has been integrated into the fictive context in a way that is wildly contradictory and overlapping and clashing – which is to say that everyone is either :

1) there inhabiting an alternate version of their familiar characters

2) there as intermittent hallucinations perceived by the other characters

3) there as an as-of-yet-unexplained mystery whose ultimate resolution is currently out of sight

4) there as the ancestor of their own character

but at least that selfsame cast is doing things and wanting things and solving problems, y’know? Things are happening. The plot is occurring. The episode ends on a cliffhanger where we find out there’s an obstacle to this “buck up Picard’s great-aunt (or is she his great-great-cousin!?) and keep her from feeling the sads” heist plan and that obstacle is dunn dunn dunnnn ... space lesbianism !?!? Okay, sure.

• That is the actress Lea Thompson on the review panel along with Worf’s adopted father’s ancestor. Timeline changes means she has a different name, that’s all. And apparently went to medical school!?!? Good for her!
• I’ve been rewatching some of the episodes Patrick Stewart directed for TNG. There’s one, it’s one of his Data ones, where Sigmund Freud makes an elaborate holodeck cameo. holo-Sigmund gives Data absolutely useless advice! Deanna Troi even comes right out and says that Data should come to her instead of him. I’m choosing to believe there’s an intentional thematic connection between that and Q’s whole therapist shtick. Sir Patrick Stewart has a lesson, he has a message, he wants to convey it to the audience and it’s that therapy = bad for you.
• I’d settled down into a dumb half-mute moroseness on the Guinan issue up until the moment that the show bothered to give Rios an unnecessary line questioning the fitness of Agnes for the heist mission versus either Rafi or Seven (we’ve just established that she’s the best one for the job! the season opener already made it clear that him and her have the sort of relationship where he knows she’s super duper smart!) and that just set me off a’running again. This show is so stupid! This show thinks its audience is stupid! What this show thinks needs to be explained and what needs to be OVER EXPLAINED and what needs to be ignored does not in any way accord with what I think re: those three areas! Why doesn’t Picard bring it up – he should remember the two-parter! he lived through the two-parter! - at all, to anyone, ever!? Why would Guinan recognize his name if they’ve never met yet?
• Oh wait they killed the Borg Queen and Brent Spiner is making regular reappearances on the show I just put it together why it was necessary to scratch out the Time’s Arrow two-parter! They can’t have Data’s head there! If Data’s head is there along with Samuel Clemens’ watch and the gun then they’ve got their way home sorted. Data is surely as smart as Spock, as smart as the Borg Queen, so they’ve got to come up with a reason why they can’t use his head (or, I don’t know, it’s got to be left there so the 1701-D crew can reattach it again to Data’s body – maybe replicate it? temporarily merge his consciousness with Adam Soong or Kore?) to get home. Oh wait, once they’ve restored the timeline to its original state then the Time’s Arrow two-parter will occur and then the head WILL be there!!! I’m going to cautiously give this dumb show the benefit of the doubt and hope against hope that this entire balagan will be resolved in a semi-satisfactory fashion. Will Picard go back to that dumb bar in 2024 in the season finale and this time it’s Whoopi Goldberg!?!? Maybe!?!?!?
• wait the Romulan widower is meant to be the actual factual Romulan from the evil timeline!? but they’ve already established that her and her husband, by name, were among the listed dead! There was a whole scene where Picard talked about this with his android slave! So did the Gary Seven aliens – the Archons (???), no, I forget what they’re called, the Aegis, not going to look it up – who abduct people from different planets and force them into servitude as timeline protectors did they, what, go through the bother of making sure that this woman, Talon, who they grabbed had a cover story for a different name and fate made up years after the fact!? Is her name Talon or Tal One!? Did they do that for Gary!? Is there a record of him dying as Paul So-and-so!? Are her bosses, the Aegis, are they okay with sending one of their agents on a mission whose eventual fulfillment would mean the erasure of that agent from existence!?!?!? Hence jeopardizing the mission itself!?!?!?!?
• everyone’s all like, man, that Terry Matalas! what a guy! his time travel show sure was good! But, hey, I didn’t watch it! I’ve got nothing to go on! Maybe he’s a genius! I don’t have a lot of trust there’s a good resolution coming down the pike here. What I’ve seen so far don’t impress me much! And, besides, as far as I’m concerned any kind of track record isn’t worth anything when it comes to nu!Trek. Lots of guys who have done work I’ve really really enjoyed (let’s see here, uh, Damon Lindelof, Nicholas Meyer, Michael Chabon, Walter Mosley, probably forgetting one or two – oh, wait, Bryan Fuller!) have ended up fumbling the ball when it comes to nu!Trek. It’s probably not their fault, sure, plenty of blame to spread around. Whatever. I look forward to the interview and/or Medium post from any of the creative forces dishing out the goods on what happened in this here time travel Star Trek story.

Picard season 2 ep 4

kinda funny that the “Last Time On Picard” recap at the beginning scrubs away Alison Pill’s pottymouth

did they ... did they explain away why the most British man alive has been playing a French guy for decades!?!?!?

okay, I checked. The DS9 2024 two-parter takes place from August 30 to September 3rd. April 5th is First Contact Day – I thought before I doublechecked that they were maybe going for a thing where the central events of the series took place on that day but nope no dice.

okay, this is the first piece of blatant fan-service that I actually enjoyed

Commander Rafi’s stifled outcry of “Jesus!” in frustration at 7 of 9 seems kind of inapropos to her character and Star Trek in general. I mean, there’s an article somewhere out there where Kirsten Beyer rejects a line from Jason Isaacs where he says “Oh god!” at something or other, for example.

was expecting Alison Pill to correct the Borg Queen’s compliment of “Bravo” with a curt “Brava” because it’d be funny and would also underline the Borg Queen’s assessment of her as smart but then again that sort of thing always raises questions about the Universal Translator, so, well, on the whole it’s okay that it’s not in there – (some small digression, I do wonder if maybe we’re supposed to read this character as trans)

why would Guinan be younger in 2024 than she was in 1893!?!?!?!?!? did they establish in an earlier episode that El Aurians could manipulate their outward aged appearance not to excuse away the minuscule amount Whoopi Goldberg has aged since we last saw her onscreen as Guinan in Nemesis but to allow for the character to be played by a younger actress!?!?!?!? wait, she MET him for the first time then and he met her for the first time later, we’ve never actually see that meeting or had it precisely nailed down, this is previously established as fact in that two-parter!? what is going on!?!? is this Guinan time travelling too!? is she going is this going to be addressed within the episode at some point!?

it hasn’t been so far! Picard should remember meeting her in 1893!!! Every other time this dumb series has butted heads with some established piece of prior lore (literally, sometimes Lore) it has gone out of its way to acknowledge it with an out-of-place line of dialogue or whatever. Why does the show remember the existence of Yesterday’s Enterprise but not Time’s Arrow!?!?

Rafi’s tone being sometimes flippant “you’re killing it, 2024” and “I hate everything” and sometimes so mournful and despondent is yet another in a long line of confusing decisions the show has decided to make about her character. No consistency! Not between scenes and sometimes and not even in each and every individual scene itself!

Omigosh! Nu!Guinan has a line about being on this planet a lot longer than Picard. They’re doing it! They’re just totally ignoring a seminal piece of these two characters interrelationship because they want to tell the story they’re telling and any existing elements that this story might clash with or might have to be addressed in order to tell that story are considered too irrelevant to matter. What’s next!?

having some of the scene dressing be references is better than it being things people say, I think. Can’t fault them for Jackson Roykirk Plaza!

going to have to rewatch Time’s Arrow to be sure, I suppose

yeah, they meet, they address each other by name, the whole shebang. The show is suitably obsessed with Trek minutiae and such generally poor dramatists that I can only assume the inconsistency will be attended to in upcoming episodes. So we’ll find out why Guinan doesn’t recognize Picard on sight and also why Guinan deaged herself in the 21st century but eventually reages herself once she rejoins her people and then her and Malcolm McDowell become refugees from the Borg in the 23rd century. See! continuity errors are nothing new for Star Trek!

omigosh did ... does this mean that they name Ten Forward after the bar’s address rather than the other way around!? Picard Season 3 is going to have an episode where the gang time travels and breaks into the Utopia Planitia Shipyards to alter the blueprints and designate that part of the ship the officers’ lounge for the Galaxy-class, bet!

does it make sense because there is no Enterprise-D in this timeline!? just the Worldrazer!? but they’ve said the timeline only diverges in three days!? I don’t know, that’s just an explanation I’ve cooked up to cover up their dumbness. I mean, it’s clear that they don’t expect the majority of their audience to have seen those episodes. They bother to do a whole thing with a dog to explain why Guinan should trust Picard!!!!

now that we’ve seen nu!Guinan I genuinely think that the presence of two actresses on the show who closely resemble Marina Sirtis (I’m talking about the Romulan lady who is recurring and also the crimeboss from last season who 7 of 9 was involved with) isn’t some sort of coincidence. They’d recast all the roles if they could get away with it! They were probably planning on recasting Deanna Troi!

ep 4 addendum

Gahhhh! If the timeline has already diverged then why is the punk rocker chastened by the memory of Spock doing the Vulcan neck grip on him!?!? You’re telling me Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home (‘86) happened but the two-parter ‘Time’s Arrow’ on TNG didn’t!?!? Why!? Did, I don’t know, General Kirk and General Spock time travel back in a Klingon Bird of Prey to save the Confederation from the Probe!?!? Wouldn’t the fascist authoritarian nightmare society of the future just blow up any kind of weird threatening alien anomaly the moment it entered Confederation space!? Evil Jane Weidlin should have destroyed that thing long before it reached Earth! Geordi’s Mom and the Efrosian guy should’ve blown it up in the U.S.S. Saratoga before the credits even started!!!

Look, I don’t demand continuity. I just demand consistency. This episode did three things in quick succession over the course of its length :

• Remember this!? Remember that!? Just an unending sequence of allusions and references to existing pieces of Star Trek, over and over again, every prop and piece of set dressing was out of TOS or that one two-parter on DS9 or whatever. Dixon Hill gets namedropped more than once!!!!1!
• Clearly establish a situation for our characters and what they have to do to change the situation. If the situation had been something like “Oh no! A spaceship is going to crash into Earth! We have to stop the spaceship from crashing into Earth!” it’s not an irrevocably nerdy response to wonder why the spaceship our characters have at their disposal can’t, I don’t know, fire phasers at that other particular crashing spaceship. Or use its tractor beam. Whatever. It’s the equivalent to watching a cop show and wondering why the cops won’t just arrest some guy!
• Violate the parameters of the clearly established situation. It’d be like having one character turn to the other and say something like “The crashing spaceship is in our upper atmosphere. It’s travelling at a speed of maximum warp! At that velocity we only have a few days to stop it from crashing into the Earth.”

episode 4 addendum again

Maybe for some audience members having Guinan simultaneously be younger than she’s ever been onscreen both before and after we’ve seen her at her established age AND having no memory of ever meeting Picard AND somehow also recognizing Picard by name AND having her be so un-Guinan-like generally speaking (Guinan cry? Guinan give up? Guinan afraid?) isn’t a bridge too far for them. Maybe it doesn’t count as violating the parameters of the clearly established situation. But it does for me! Maybe I could accept what I’m seeing as happening on its own terms (again, I don’t demand continuity! just consistency! if Picard was giving a speech about the need to always do your best no matter what and he illustrated this moral lesson by describing him failing to place first in an Academy footrace on Denalius II or whatever it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest that I remember something or other about him being the first freshman to win that marathon! like, I don’t care that we see a photograph of Tom Hardy as Young Cadet Picard in Nemesis!) if the show wasn’t spending all its time trying to get me to remember bits and bobs of semi-extraneous Star Trek stuff at the same time!

It could be that this all rope-a-dope and we’re being set up for a message about the future and the past not being separate, about how our destinies are intertwined, I don’t know, how the simple dichotomy of “I was once one way and now I am another way” versus “I am the way I am and always have been” are both insufficient explanations for the mysteries of our lives. But I’m guessing not!!!1! I think we’re just headed towards a revelation that Picard’s dad was a domestic abuser and definitely to some stupid overly elaborate Michael Chabon nonsense about Listeners and Watchers and three or four other classes of cosmic pseudo-angels. Just some Gershom Scholem soup skimming dumbness.

Picard season 2 episode 3

Not too bad! The episode itself is somewhat sloppy – overlaboured dialogue, stakes made clear again and again even while the details of the situation itself are ill-defined (where’s the ship? and, uh, why wouldn’t it be automatic that restoring the timeline would save the Romulan kid’s life? I mean, he’s on the Excelsior when Picard blows up the Stargazer, right!?), and if anything the specifics of how slingshot time travel is accomplished is even less clear now than it was in IV – but I’m giving it a pass. It’s a proper piece of Star Trek! Characters are forced into a crazy sci-fi situation and argue about how to solve it then split up into teams to try and fix the problem. It ends on a nice cliffhanger!

Picard Season 2 ep 2

- Still pretty bad! I don’t think leaning in to the obvious criticism of the show as a project is a good choice. Yes, this show has felt a lot like a nightmarish alternate version of the Picard we know and love and of the Star Trek we are familiar with. So literalizing that and making the show itself about an actual nightmarish alternate version of the Picard we known and love and of the Star Trek we are familiar with is a way of making the show what it is on every level, yeah, I get it. I just don’t think it works. I understand what we’re seeing with the slave Romulans in the château, the artificial intelligences as servants, the hexagonal sky, the crowd shouting “Picard!” over and over, even the inferrable criticisms of our own selves from certain lines in Seven’s speech. I just don’t much care for it.

- Gul Dukat, Martok, Sarek, Sisko. Like, some of these references feel apropos (for example, having him execute Sarek rather than be the one to save his life) but some of them just feel dumb. Why would an alternate universe Picard be deeply entwined with parts of DS9!? What does that mean? Who is that for? (Wait, 2024!? That’s the year Sisko & Co. went back to on DS9! Okay, scratch my complaints if it’s soft set-up for that.)

- Is Data’s Daughter a part of the show anymore!? Is, what’s her name, Isa Briones (born January 17 1999! Oh no! Oh no no no!) still in the cast? There’s a bit where we see a giant holographic statue of Brent Spiner and hear him say something like “A safe galaxy is a human galaxy” and the statue has a holographic label of Adam Soong. So I have to assume that we’re going to get more Data stuff, more of her somewhere down the line. Or maybe not? Who knows.

- Patrick Stewart is sort of playing the role of real Picard pretending to be evil Picard as a cross between his role as Sejanus in I, Claudius and when he was a neo-Nazi in Green Room. It’s good stuff! It’s fun to watch! I’m glad that we’re getting more of it next week, I assume, because they didn’t jump back to the past (2024? the future?) this week.

- Look, they shouldn’t go back to 2024. They should go back to 2004 and get the help of Archer and T’Pol. Or, no, go back to 1997 and recruit the rest of the crew of Voyager to help. Or, they could go all the way back to 1986 and get the help of Kirk and the rest. We know they know about that. They explicitly reference them doing that sort of thing! Hey, WHY DOESN’T SEVEN OF NINE JUST CONTACT HER FRIENDS ON BOARD THE TIMESHIP RELATIVITY AND GET THEIR HELP WITH THIS TEMPORAL PARADOX!?!?!?

- I think one of my big complaints with the show in general is too much hugging. Everybody’s hugging each other every which way! Rafi is hugging Elrond, last week Picard is hugging Guinan (wait!? why doesn’t he go to Los Angeles this episode to get her perspective on this!?), last season Picard and Hugh are hugging. Too much hugging! Star Trek isn’t about the hugs! Star Trek is all about speeches and phasers going pew pew! The show occasionally has phasers going pew pew (and, uh, Elrond Elden Ring (NOTE FROM THE FUTURE DATE OF 2022-05-12 : I don't know how to do strikethrough text in a messageboard format anymore!?!?) Elnor just slitting throats!? why!? well, I guess once they’ve reset the timeline those deaths won’t really amount to much of a crime, ethically???) but most of the speeches so far have been real bad.

First two episodes : addendum

Oops, forgot about predictions for who the Borg Queen from the first episode will be revealed to be. Uh, let’s see, in descending order of likelihood :

• Literally just the Borg Queen. Played by the same actress as the Borg Queen in the second episode – and, one presumes, subsequent ones – and so her face being hidden from the audience and the characters isn’t some big mystery. It’s just spookiness for spookiness’ sake and/or budgetary reasons and/or covid restrictions and/or some other explanation. I don’t know. Was the voice the same as the voice of the Borg Queen?
• His mom! Keep things simple! It might technically be his mother from the Evil Universe, though.
• A member of our main cast! Seven, obviously, but I’d lay good odds on it being Data’s Daughter or Alison Pill or Commander Rafi. Gotta cover the spread! And if you consider comments Patrick Stewart has made in the past about how Picard’s relationship with Q is really just Picard’s repressed homosexuality or femininity coming to the fore there’s a possibility that it’ll be literally Picard himself. Could be Picard’s reanimated flesh corpse from Copellius! Could be the end state of General Picard from the Evil Universe! Could be time travel shenanigans. Generally speaking, yeah, and particular to Picard himself too, of course.
• They won’t address it this year! That’s next season’s problem!
• It’ll be somebody we haven’t met yet. Somebody from 2024 maybe? I don’t know. That doesn’t seem quite fair, overall, which is why I think of as it being the least likely possibility. But if it turns out to be the case then I’m counting this as a victory. Least likeliest is also most likeliest! It’s always the guy you least suspect! I learned that particular truism from a Hercule Poirot parody sketch in an episode of Muppets Tonight (‘96-’98) hosted by Jason Alexander. Oh, wait, I forgot to include Jason Alexander! Jason Alexander, final answer. He’s the Borg Queen!

12 hours ago, Rogue 3 said:

So did anyone get a chance to watch the second series?

Yeah, I did.

I thought it was pretty pretty pretty bad. Real rough stuff. Probably the first time in the history of Star Trek that a second season has been worse than the first. I think it’s a real low point, actually, makes Insurrection (1998) and Generations (1994) and Nemesis (2002) look like beautiful works of art fully fitting form and function together into an awe-inspiring whole.

I checked and it seems like I have ... oh no ... twelve pages of complaints!?!? I would watch the episodes and afterwards tippy type my thoughts. Sometimes I’d make a note of a line or a plot development during the episode, too.

Here you go ---

[uh oh! it won't post all in one go! going to have to divide it up! sorry!]

Picard Season 2 opener

- It’s bad! After last season’s ridiculous creative decision (one of many!) to do a sequel to Nemesis and Star Trek (2008) they’ve decided to make the equally ridiculous creative decision to do a thematic sequel to Generations!? Oh boy, why doesn’t Picard have a family? why doesn’t Picard have someone to love? These aren’t compelling questions to ask! I don’t care about the answers to those questions! It’s like asking why he doesn’t have hair!

- The other material they’re going over isn’t inherently boring — how does Picard feel about the Borg? how does Seven feel about the Borg? how does how they feel about the Borg reflect on how they feel about themselves? — it’s just somewhat boring because it’s something that’s been addressed so many times (within this very series itself! and decades and decades ago too, over and over!) that I don’t have a lot of faith they’re going to pull the rabbit out of the hat and find something new about the rabbit. But it’s still a decent magic trick to do. Can’t fault them for deciding to play the hits.

- Two tea earl grey hot jokes!? Just pick one! You don’t need two! The one from the Romulan lady was good enough! Keep that one! Ditch the other one!

- The episode goes to great lengths to get you up to speed on who everyone is and where they are and what happened. Sometimes to unintentional comic effect, like, when Picard stops in the middle of his speech to identify one of the characters by name and let everyone (and us!) know who he is and what’s his deal. There’s no need to do that! Just show us the sight of him in the audience! They talk later! They have a whole conversation! Have a little faith in us! We can put two and two together! Hilariously, however, all this effort in making sure we need to know where all the pieces are (there’s a little mini-Zoom call from unpromoted schizophrenic drug addict lesbian grandma just so we know the Excelsior is part of the fleet!) leaves one of ‘em off the board! Duela Dent, Data’s Daughter! They left her behind on the Deltan planet! Why didn’t she just beam up with Alison Pill?

- Just a full nerd exercise. Guinan, Q, Borg Queen, book by Spock, ship named after Sulu, the Grissom, Saurian brandy, Kobayashi Maru, Excelsior, Stargazer, all the extremely minor characters in familiar make-ups (Trill! Bajoran!), the Deltans, just a real dumb game of spot the reference. Are they adapting, like, a Michael Jan Friedman novel!?!?

- This is not an original thought on my part but I think it bears repeating. Guinan has to wear the hat but Q’s not in his outfit from Encounter at Farpoint!?!? What he always wears if he’s not in uniform like the rest of the cast! Put him in the outfit! If he’s going to quote himself from All Good Things then he should wear it! Even other Qs who are not Q himself wear the outfit! If they’re going to make Whoopi Godlberg wear the hat then John de Lancie can’t get away with not wearing the balaclava and the chain and everything! If we don’t see him in the outfit before the season’s over I’m going to be real mad! Going to stomp my feet! Steam is going to pour out of my ears!

- episode begins in media res and then flashes back to earlier! stupid! dumb way to do non-action drama! I’m reserving judgment on this, however, because if every episode of the season is structured in this fashion then as far as I’m concerned it’s forgivable!

I basically have no predictions whatsoever for what will happen to who. Outside of, of course, y’know, obvious stuff that’s demanded by the constraints of this being a prequel to already established events we’ve seen for ourselves. The show’s had such a consistent capacity to successfully and satisfyingly surprise both in terms of able execution of storytelling gambits which I would’ve assumed before the fact to be absolutely totally no go areas — things like a secret origin story for Mike, or bringing Gus Fring into things in a substantial fashion, or offing Chuck — and also just the standard meat’n’potatoes kind of stuff that it does so well.

BUT

If forced to actively and futilely speculate as to where they’re going to go I’m going with the obvious and guessing full tragedy. Kim dead at Lalo’s hand probably after painfully breaking off the relationship (to protect Jimmy?), (oh wait!? what if Mike kills her! I’m putting my chips into death by Mike on Gus’s orders!), Lalo alive to deal with Jimmy/Saul/Gene in the present day, Howard Hamlin better off than ever. I mean, whatever happens, it’s going to look great!!!1!