R.CAllen

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!

Now that it’s on Home Box Office Maximum™ I’ve seen this movie. What’s my verdict? Well, here you go ---

Movie terrible! I got real bored about an hour and sixteen minutes into it and just spent the rest of the movie living in that boredom, really feeling out the edges and contours of the boredom, kept expecting the boredom to let up every once in a while like for instance, say, during a car chase or whatever but ... NOPE! It was just all boredom all the time. They made a Batman movie boring! How!?!?!?!?

• Entire movie is just Batman going back and forth between the same handful of locations doing the exact same thing he did the last time he was there!?!?!? Watching the movie wasn’t like watching a movie, really, it was more like watching somebody play a Batman video game badly. Buddy, we’ve already been to this level! We’ve gotta move on to the next one! There’s nothing new here for us!
• The movie is a vague-ish adaptation of Sale and Loeb’s The Long Halloween except instead of having a nerd boner for The Godfather they’ve swapped in Fincher’s Se7en!? To quote the Lonely Island guys, “Not better”. I don’t know. It’s not a good fit for me. It feels like less of a Gotham City movie than Se7en felt like!1!
• Were drops and what Batman injected into himself to give himself rage strength during the final battle (Venom maybe!?) the same thing!? Why’d they have a repeated Two-Face motif (that guy as part of the subway knockout game gang; the twins at the club) but no Two-Face or Harvey Dent!? Why wasn’t Grant Morrison credited at the end when I’m pretty sure he’s the first guy to set up the whole thing with the Waynes having a tawdry and/or perverted past — the rest of the credits seemed pretty thorough to me!? Why didn’t The Riddler ever say “Riddle me this”!? You gotta play the hits! Why was The Riddler absent from long stretches of this long-ass movie!? Why was Alfred absent from long stretches of this long-ass movie!?
• Everyone kept saying Jesus! Dialogue in general for this film was pretty rough but that really stood out for me. Watch this movie and take a drink every time somebody says any among the following words : Jesus, drops, rat, vengeance, Martinez, renewal.
• The movie felt like scenes were missing even though, well, it’s a three hour long movie so it’s got scenes piled upon scenes piled upon scenes. We don’t see Bruce Wayne meet with his accountants!? They spend half the time talking about Sal Maroni (oh wait, add that to the list of Two-Face stuff!) over and over but we never see him!?
• Things I liked : uh .... Pattinson, I suppose!?!?!? I think there’s something a little bit neat-o in trying to integrate this stuff into a quasi-realistic mode (e.g. Catwoman’s little tufts on her balaclava, Penguin’s waddle in cufffed legs) but I don’t think they want far enough with it. Should’ve had a big dinosaur skeleton in the Batcave! I liked when Batman ate a blueberry and I liked when The Riddler said he had just ordered a slice of pumpkin pie. I liked the absence of flashbacks (okay, yes, there is technically one or two flashbacks maybe : like, for example, in the bit where Alfred gets injured that is I suppose a kind of flashback but you get what I’m going for here, I think), for a movie that’s obsessed with these characters’ pasts it showed a great deal of restraint (although, clearly, not enough — 3! hours!! long!!!) to keep things headed forward at all times no matter what. I liked how they did Batman’s rappelling hook thingmabob gizmo. I liked how Jim Gordon just called Batman “man”.
• How much time did Michael Giacchino have to do the score!?!? Not enough!? Or was it too much!?!? Whichever way you slice it, well, I did not care for the final result! There’s something in one of the themes that sounds too close to the Imperial March but never quite resolves into anything sufficiently distinct or even pleasingly imitative, y’know, it just seems like someone got halfway towards to doing their memory of the Darth Vader music but gave up in the middle. Bad!

addendum : thought I was maybe being too harsh. maybe I was setting my expectations too high! I gave Matt Reeves’ two Apes a rewatch. Nope! They’re still masterpieces; just the absolute pinnacle of what the modern sci-fi make’em’up blockbuster ‘stravaganza has to offer. Beautiful, moving too, capable of striking every note and tone as needed, the perfect match between form and content (say, for example, the expository dialogue in them stands as a dual necessity of both the mass market medium and the communication needs of uplifted primate non-obligate collaborative foragers!), a richly layered text on the cloven nature of sapience — everything that brings us together drives us apart! So my dull distaste for his Batman isn’t all on me but then again maybe it’s not all on him either. I know he can deliver much much better than we got! Maybe if the studio had let him go all out with it I’d have liked the movie more. Maybe if it had been weirder, if they’d really put their backs into these guys as real nutjobs and not just ooh-Hollywood-scary nutsos. Maybe if it had been more cynical, it’s plenty cynical as it is (it’s literally a superhero movie where the villain wins! The Riddler’s plan basically goes off without a hitch! he’s just mad because Batman won’t be his pal once it’s over!) but there’s still a ray of hope in an unsullied character being given the reins of power at the end (I wonder if Bella Reál was the stool pigeon in other drafts? sure seems like her name might be anagram-y enough to be the solution for one of the riddles!) and, y’know, Alfred survives. Maybe if it had been longer, yeah, I know I complained about the length. But can you imagine if the movie had been 4 hours instead of 3? What if that scene where Pattinson was shirtlessly trying to understand the plot by spraypainting “SINS OF MY FATHER” on his own floor was, like, eleven minutes longer and was also set to increasingly atonal string music?

1. Yoda Stories.

2-10. also Yoda Stories.

Honourable mentions : the podracing one, X-Wing of course, TIE Fighter of course, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter absolutely, don’t think I ever played X-Wing Alliance tho, Rebel Assault and Rebel Assault II, Dark Forces yeah, Dark Forces II heeeeell yeah, Mysteries of the Sith, Jedi Outcast, don’t think I ever played Jedi Academy, probably only played the freeware demo of the first Rogue Squadron game, only played a v. little bit of the first KotoR, same deal w/Battlefront, played The Force Unleashed on Wii, probably only got the first level of Shadows of the Empire as a demo, Force Commander’s score was incredible in my memory but revisiting it now on YouTube, uh, not so much no.

Hope you feel better, obv.!

There’s a non-negligible chance that the speech kills some of the attendees. Still! Now! Like something out of a history book!!!!1!

They fired Tom Shippey, all the promo pics look like slightly well photographed cosplay or a mid-tier CW series at best, they made the bewildering decision to recast Galadriel and Elrond, they’re apparently going to be truncating the timeline so they can fit most of the events into a single human lifespan, but if Tom Bombadil shows up before the first season finale then all is forgiven.

Lots of people who no longer post here and haven’t been around here for years (decades?) still loom large in my memory. Mostly the people who were roughly around my age : JangRail, Padawan_Learner, Darth Whoever, Darth Sockimus, Randall00, spike, I’m forgetting the precise user names of a few individuals (and maybe I’m a little confused about who is who) but there’s one or two more.

Is that something nice? I don’t know. Wish I could say something nice about the people who still post here and are around here but those people mean nothing to me, they are less than dirt in my eyes, I do not care about them at all. Please don’t tell them though! I don’t want to hurt their feelings! Keep my secret for me!

Oh no! More nothing!

Nothing #5

The apocalypse! Brought to you by Applebee's! Again! The Onion had this bit that they did where Applebee’s was making advertisements for ironic hipsters to attend their restaurants as just a goof for them to make fun of it AND ALSO sincere well-meaning patrons who just wanted something to eat in this awful world. Applebee’s! Come enjoy our nonexistent salad bar!

Nothing #6

“Let me make this perfectly clear. Putin is both Chancellor Palpatine and Darth Sidious. The Ukrainian people and all those who stand up for democracy around the world and here in America are Rey Skywalker — canonically the child of a clone of Putin and the assassin lady from Killing Eve. No, not Sandrah Oh. We’re all not the daughter of Eve herself! We’re all the other one’s kid! We’re all Putin’s grandchildren. Are we on the same page so far? Okay, good. Now bear with me because here’s where it gets tricky. We’re also all Jyn Erso. We’ve been dead for decades now because our father Hannibal Lecter was forced to make a superweapon as part of Putin’s nefarious schemes. No, not Anthony Hopkins! No, not Brian Cox! The guy! The guy! Mads Mikkelsen! Putin is our grandpa and Mads Mikkelsen is our dad! Look, it’s simple. We’re all part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor. Take us away!”

Nothing #4

He keeps doing this thing where he gathers together a large group of cronies in a big big room (it looks like they’re on the planet Naboo! it looks like they’re debating what they should do about Nute Gunray’s latest plot! it looks like those dumb scenes from TPM and AotC where they’d sit around in a semi-circle and calmly argue in cool but stentorian tones about something or other! the ones with Sio Bibble!) none of whom get to sit at an actual table and sort of advises/admonishes them about what’s going to happen next.

At the last time he did this – before the war itself technically started – one of these dumb dumbs said something like “I agree! Russia should occupy Donetsk and Luhansk!” and he just casually dismissed that as not being what’s up for discussion and then the dumb dumb immediately turned on a dime and said “Yes! We should recognize their independence!”. BUT THEN it turned out that Putin’s announcement of the invasion was filmed on Monday (because of what he’s wearing and because of the metadata that remained unstripped from the video) so the dumb dumb was just getting a little over the skis. Just looked a little bit ahead in the playbook!

Nothing #3

Sean Penn!? Uh oh! Stay safe, Spicoli!

Nothing #2

Oligarchies don’t function like, I don’t know, S.M.E.R.S.H. in the movies. There’s not one big guy at the top with absolute control giving orders to obedient underlings. Putin is the tip of the spear. He manoeuvred himself into a position of power on behalf of existing interests. Some of whom he immediately betrayed once his position was secure!

What he’s doing now makes no sense (asides from being, of course, evil! The making of unprovoked war by one country upon another was adjudged by the Nuremberg Tribunals to be the supreme crime!) so it’s best to see this as the standard truism of all politics, even foreign politics, being at their heart local. It’s a play to his domestic constituency. It’s a show of strength on the world stage made to impress ordinary Russians and not to actually gain any advantage in the long-term.

I don’t buy the argument that he was sincerely scared of Ukraine. I don’t buy the argument he even wants an additional 35 million Russians in the Russian Federation. I think the entire point of this for him is to have a war he can declare victory over. Go in, blow things up, say that he has established a few viable client states (it doesn’t matter to him if they collapse once Russia leaves), have a parade for the returning heroes.

It must be that his standing is far more untenable than most people other than him have thought (does he think that maybe somebody somewhere was about to kill him and blame covid-19 for it!?) because the only thing that could push him to such a rash action would be the belief that he was vulnerable. I mean, it’s entirely possible that the West gets its act together and puts together a package of responses that genuinely threatens him. They could seize every asset by a citizen of Russia valued at a high enough number, freeze every full enough bank account, they could squeeze everyone and everything outside of Russia, revoke all those investors’ visas, really deal with the global kleptocracy as a whole. I wouldn’t bet on it, of course, but it could happen. And there’s no way it ever would have happened before but now it’s a genuine possibility! If that does go down then it’s very possible he goes down too and gets replaced with someone pliant.

The very thing he’s done to make it impossible for them to get rid of him now makes it slightly more possible that they’ll get rid of him.

Nothing #1

I understand that looking for consistency among these sorts of people is a lost cause (e.g. “So much for the tolerant left!” or “Christian values much!?” is kind of dumb; seeming hypocrisy or apparent incompatibility among moral stances taken by ideological outsiders always always always have an explanation that to the ideological outsider themself is convincing and obvious and immediate — and, in any case, what are we doing here, this isn’t debate class, there’s no referee, there’s no umpire, who cares if someone you disagree with has taken incommensurable positions. if you’re getting kicked in the face no way now how will a sneering “Umm, logical fallacy! You kick me in the face even though YOU YOURSELF would not want to be kicked in the face!” stop your face from getting kicked in) but I don’t understand how a certain species of right winger — your Tuckers Carlson, your Candaces Owens, your Charlies Kirk — have come to the conclusion that Justin Trudeau is an evil power hungry tyrant but Vladimir Putin is making some good points when you actually listen to him.

I mean, surely it’s got to be either they’re both bad or they’re both good or the super obvious normie position regarding which one’s good and which one’s bad!? There are four available opinions here on this matter, here you go :

1) Justin Trudeau good, Vladimir Putin bad

2) Justin Trudeau bad, Vladimir Putin bad

3) Justin Trudeau good, Vladimir Putin good

4) Justin Trudeau bad, Vladimir Putin good

I feel like they’ve chosen the one that makes the absolute least sense. Opinion 4 is so dumb!

I thought I had nothing really to say about it, no opinions, but a quick check of my notebook shows more than a little nothing. Like a couple heaps of nothing. Three or four nothings, at least! Here you go!

[Edit : Each time I try to post I get an error message. Going to try and divide my post up a bit into multiple posts. Trying to see if whatever the problem is (hyperlinks? the image?) sneaks through that way. You're welcome and/or I'm sorry.]

[Edit : yeah, it was some of the links in the very last part! Or one particular link? Whatever, I dumped most of the links from there. You can suss out the context on your own!]

short answer : no, not me

less short answer : I can recall reading and enjoying Kieron Gillen & Dwayne Harris’ Warhammer : Crown of Destruction and Kieron Gillen & Jacen Burrows’ Warhammer 40,000 : Marneus Calgar (which ganks a twist from, of all things, Paul Jenkins and Adam Kubert’s Origin; not sure where those guys ganked that twist from but it’s a good one, it’s solid, it’s serviceable, it’s maybe kind of the Saving Private Ryan (1998) twist). I’m sort of familiar with the broad strokes of the franchise but I don’t think I’ve read much else. Haven’t played the games or the toys or the figurines or whatever that is.