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IF they let Stewart and DeLancie act like they did during TNG, I could be down and could ALMOST forgive them for season 1.  I wanted a TNG reunion and the episodes with Troi, Riker and Data were always the strongest scenes/episodes of PicS1.

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  • 1 year later...

So did anyone get a chance to watch the second series? Just finished it up today and really enjoyed it actually. 
After the slow old first series, this was off at a good pace and elements I thought might have been a bit of padding at points turned out to have proper relevance.

Very enjoyable. 

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It was really weird and the continuity doesn't make any sense with established Trek at all, but then again, that's never really mattered before. I'm generally disinterested in time travel, but again, it's Trek, so of course there's time travel. It had an extremely strong finale and overall I did like it, but it was weird as hell.

Looking forward to TNG season 8 next year.

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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!

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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!
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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!

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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.

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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.
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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!

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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!

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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!

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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.
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  • 1 month later...

How does Guinan not recognize Jean-Luc when they practically were going to propose to each other at the end of Time’s Arrow?

Also, not being able to skip the recap is annoy AF.

And yeah, trying to finish this season finally.

So. Like Star Wars, a lot of the problems with these new Treks seem to stem from not letting go of past casts and characters. If they just were all new, it’d still be less like Trek than it should be, but at least I could just go… well this is the future’s future’s future. lol

Anyway, I guess I should get back to trying to watch this Star Trek: X-Men: Doctor Who: Mass Effect.

So Q is powerless again. I wonder if the show will have those TNG energy aliens attack him in this next episode whatever number Fly Me to the Moon is.

God damn, really? Picard is this fucking important to all of time? I guess these are the seeds sewn from All Good Things. lol

Wait. Seven is worried about beaming Rios out because of witnesses after they just beamed out of danger with witnesses? lol I know Trek is infamous for crazy shit like this, but…

Why am I watching this?

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I’ve seen Orville, excluding the new Hulu season. I thought it fought with itself over whether it was a parody or not. I thought the humor was tired. Ultimately I thought it was a lesser parody than Galaxy Quest, and a lesser science fiction series than OG Star Trek, so I dropped it.

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The problem with Orville was that MacFarlane pitched it as a Star Trek parody, but it was never that funny. As it went in, they decided to play it straight. For a minute it was refreshing because it was delivering Trek where Trek did not.

But I'll be honest, after SNW has come out, I could barely manage the new season of Orville. Now it basically feels like MacFarlane tricked Fox and now Hulu into spending millions to let him live out his Trek cosplay fantasies.

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After watching the first episode of season 3 of The Orville, my gut is that it’s guilty of too long of a hiatus, too much money, and not enough constraints. Season 2 was a good ending place, and season 3 also launched with a Very Special Episode with no real consequences. Season 3 showed us that the only time you need to worry about a character is it the actress dated MacFarlane.

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I watched the first few episodes of The Orville (‘17-?????) and gave up. Not funny! Less funny than its source material! Less funny than the episodes of Enterprise (‘01-’05) in which Seth MacFarlane cameoed!

 

There was maybe one half-decent joke — there’s a bit where the crew sees a magnificent vista and Doctor Kassidy Yates earnestly quotes something from literature and Seth MacFarlane pretends like he knows it and faux-wisely responds with something like, “Ah yes, Shakespeare.” and she corrects him that, no, wait, I’m completely misremembering the details here’s a link — and just lots of really sloppy writing. They introduce the crew (in this comedy! it’s a comedy!) by just having Seth MacFarlane walk up to each character standing at attention individually in a line and having earnest one-on-one conversation with each one without any sort of crosstalk or commentary or interruption or jokes of any kind whatsoever!???? A character is established as having superstrength in the pilot and then there’s an episode where that character doubts themselves and struggles with who they are and yet there is no, literally no, allusions to the fact that this character has superstrength!??? Yeah, it’s been years since I’ve seen this stuff and I still remember these flaws, I’m gonna die mad about the little bits of dumbness in what little I’ve seen of Seth MacFarlane’s Star Trek parody show (I love a good Star Trek parody show! I love Hyperdrive (‘06-’07)! I love Other Space (‘15-’15)!) because that’s the way I am.

 

I choose to believe that Seth MacFarlane is absolutely positively miserable making that show, though. I refuse to imagine a universe in which he’s happy. He was almost fourteen years old by the time TNG (‘87-’94) premiered! There’s no way he’s loving re-enacting it! That’d be like me loving re-enacting Enterprise! He’s a TOS (‘66-’69) guy! That’s what was on when he was a kid! That’s what he does all the impressions of! He wanted to make his Star Trek show but everyone he needs to make his Star Trek show is dead so he’s settled for making a copy of a copy of the Star Trek show he really wanted to do! There’s no way in his heart of hearts he wants to be Picard! He wants to be Kirk! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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13 hours ago, Spider-Man said:

I’ve seen Orville, excluding the new Hulu season. I thought it fought with itself over whether it was a parody or not. I thought the humor was tired. Ultimately I thought it was a lesser parody than Galaxy Quest, and a lesser science fiction series than OG Star Trek, so I dropped it.

It really stopped being a comedy near the end of season 1. Season 2 had a funny one line here or there (so did OG Star Trek), but the stories were very much good. It really started getting dark in the end of season 2 and season 3 is starting out pretty well.

 I tried to like Picard and thought that the 1st season was just okay. I really didn't had much of reason to like most of the characters, as they were just a bunch people that were ousted by Star-fleet and we were supposed to see them as a group of renegades. They couldn’t even sell that well.

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Yeah, I agree about Picard. I have enjoyed parts of Picard, but the whole is suspect. It’s like Picard is Star Trek because it’s official and they say it is, but at the same time is it tho? lol Ultimately I think the cast has been really let down. I think the talent and chemistry is there and the writing is not, in a manner that is probably similar to a Star Wars project other than the OG Trilogy.

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