Star Trek: Picard

tom hardy in star trek: nemesis

https://i.imgur.com/LNtxOh2.png

nada

western?

rewatch i guess

Insurrection was the TNG movie that I flat-out didn’t like, but it did bring up the idea that factions within the Federation were up to some shady shit. The execution was just insanely corny.

Insurrection was not well-executed but introduced actual changes in the status quo (Troi and Riker get married, Riker leaves to command his own ship at the end, Data’s dead) and the Picard writers have been leaning on those plot points

Obviously I meant to type Nemesis at the beginning of that second paragraph oops

I miss when Starfleet wasn't filled with incompetent functionaries.

I rewatched the movies in the last couple of weeks.

None of them were great but Insurrection was particularly bad. Felt like it should have just been a two parter of TNG rather than a movie that had an actual theatrical release.


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I did like the Ferengi, just the right level of scenery chewing without falling into cliche or racist caricature.

that was the dude from the 12 Monkey’s tv series which i v much enjoyed

yeah he did great in this i thought!

the ferengi facial prosthetic change could have used more ridges, but was otherwise a great update!

so far, raffi plot thread very similar to the stinky discovery s1 finale.

Agreed on the Ferengi! The one thing I found off about DS9 was Quark and co. I know thats the whole idea, but the sexist money grubbing comedy gurning was offputting for me. Esp Wallace Shawn's Grand Nagus, it felt like he was playing it for laughs.

This guy had genuine mercenary malice, I liked it.

I hated the Quark episodes when I was a kid but have been enjoying them on the rewatch. In a way perhaps Quark is the most relatable adult on the show? And maybe my sense of humour has gotten broader in middle age

The Grand Nagus was meant to be extremely offputting imo

skeezy man who unabashedly is a proponent of capitalism, isn’t actually that great at it, and somehow ends up being the leader? could never happen irl

Why would the Federation still have “junkies”?

Well they made a Blade Runner planet, gotta have junkies there I guess.

all that shit floating around in the air at that club i wanted people to be randomly sneezing or like waving it out of their face etc

And maybe she sent him to prep school and he turned out to be a ne'er-do-well scalawag, thus his various jackanapes

― Ned Raggett, Friday, February 24, 2023 6:29 AM (six days ago)

FUCKING fuck.

yuuuup

friends are iffy about the actual enemy reveal, but I felt like the overall federation threat from that series never quite had its due. very creepy!

if the plot threads, it’d be really funny if they targeted Picard as one of the few dudes who would notice ~that threat~

Rather!

idk i’m kinda excited for this storyline now

So are we going for Dominion war II ? I thought this ep was weak, but was stoked to see changelings!

nah, I think it’s going to be messier and weirder than that

They really should have shaved junior's head instead of going with the accent.

I think it's going to be much more banal, similar to how they made the Borg boring. Like, oh great, yet another rogue faction that wants to kill humans, which completely throws away the uncanniness of the Great Link. Whatever happened to "the drop becomes the ocean, and the ocean becomes the drop"? All my clamoring for the rest of Trek top acknowledge the stuff that happened in DS9 and this is what we get? Maybe they'll pull something interesting out of this thread but I doubt it.

Starting to think Bev warned against trusting SF not because she suspected a mole but because they're now staffed by incompetents. All that time they spent in the nebula and they didn't even try to come up with a decent plan. Can't believe this show is making me miss deus ex machina technobabble!

can't argue with that at all

a) i don't care about the kid
b) i don't care that he's picard's kid
c) i don't care that bev has hidden (this 33yo actor) from picard
d) might be rude to yield the kid to amanda plummer in an effort to save the other 500 people on the titan, but also i don't care
e) i resent shaw being written as an incredible asshole when he was correct
f) i resent picard being written as manic attack guy just to create conflict with riker, who was correct
g) i don't care about rafi, or the resurfacing of rafi's addictive nature as a plot point. although if worf keeps calling her rafaela i will inevitably cave
h) oh no a ~biological~ gravity well! certainly no one has ever encountered that before!

never got a good look at amanda plummer's crew, but they certainly *sound* like the insectoid xindi from enterprise. that's no doubt a bit much to cram in whilst honoring every other possible tangent tho

They must be stretching out the plot again because vintage Trek would've used the biological gravity well this episode instead of what I'm guessing will be the next to make their escape.

Nu Trek largely seems content on cherry-picking only the high level lore established in previous series (the Dominion War), and ignoring the finer details that made the world alive (the Bajoran officer saying God instead of the Prophets).

Thing I'm keeping in mind here re all plot shenanigans is that the trailers revealed we're getting Moriarty back at some point.

I think mookie and I are mind-melded because I thought Riker was happy that Jack (btw why would Bev name him after her other husband?) went to sickbay because that meant getting JL off the bridge.

medical science has gone way downhill in the last 3 decades, huh. the scanner can't even detect internal bleeding. they've gone back to defibrillators to treat arrhythmia.

bring back the salt shaker

I did find that whole scene odd, when the other Dr got snotty at Beverley as if she had no clue how to doctor. Something about "things change a lot in 20 years". Really lady?

the trailers revealed we're getting Moriarty back at some point

and lore too, right? i fear the worst

honestly just give me worf, son of mogh, house of martok, solving mysteries

i’d settle for Barclay and call it good

Okay the new one is the honest to god best episode of the season, maybe of this whole series.

Episode 4 has been the shark-jumping point for the first two seasons, maybe they decided to flip that trend on its head?

Some of the old TNG magic came back when they had actors retelling dramatic events rather than clumsily showing it, which was directly contrasted to them clumsily showing dramatic events in the same episode.

I'm down for Lone Worf and Cub spinoff.

Lone Worf & Q’uhb, perhaps?

"You're only ever really as good as those around you" -- sums up Picard the TV show pretty well

This two-parter was very BSG remake season 1 and that's a good thing to imitate.

It was nice to see another mid-season arc conclusion. Star Trek seemed to forget about it after Disco S1.

nice callback to voyager with the 'we can literally harness energy from space mom's contractions but the holodeck is untappable'

"did you just.... throw an asteroid at them?!" was a great line.

Wow we almost got a CRAZY deep cut...but I have always wondered:

https://gizmodo.com/star-trek-picard-season-3-changelings-conspiracy-tng-1850214543

But while the Changelings were an early part of Matalas’ plans for season 3, for a brief moment they were almost replaced by another hidden Star Trek villain, this time directly from Picard’s roots in TNG—the parasitic bugs from the infamous season 1 episode “Conspiracy.” In that episode, Picard and Riker uncover a plot by a race of alien bugs to infiltrate Starfleet command, burrowing into their unfortunate hosts and killing them, puppeting them in secret. Which was, for Matalas, the problem with bringing them back.

“I do like the conspiracy bugs, I did consider for a hot minute, the conspiracy bugs,” Matalas continued. “The issue with the conspiracy bugs is they kill their host. So that would mean anyone that you saw with a bug in them was dead, and you wouldn’t be able to do the paranoia thriller that you wanted to do if it was somebody you loved, that meant they were dead. So there (were) about three storylines I couldn’t do without killing legacy characters.”

did I, for a moment, wonder during the interrogation of that guy at the hands of Worf and Raffi if that was going to be the reveal? maaaaybe

how funny would it have been if instead of looking sick and then being revealed as a changeling, we got one of those bugs bursting from the guy’s chest Alien-style

Side question - does watching this season spoil the end (or parts) of DS9? I’m only on season 3!

not so far

Oh wow, so the nubbins _WERE_ considered as the Star Fleet conspiracy. The hosts of the Greatest Generation/Trek podcast would be so proud their jokey prediction was more accurate than expected

Having only just finished watching DS9 in toto I found it helped. But I dont think its neccesary.

The pot thing bugged me though. That always seemed like an Odo-specific item, I dont see why another rogue changeling (I assume, one of the ones released like Odo was years earlier to "explore"?) would have the same kind of pot, given they all usually live in the Link, and the outliers... dont even know what they are initially if DS9's anything to go on?

indeed. and even odo -- who didn't know what he was, and therefore couldn't have known to create a special pot -- could at a pinch, liquidate himself in the . . . embrace of a friendly betazoid

It also bugged me that Seven found it so quickly hidden in a compartment!? I mean the titan is a fucking huge ship with multiple levels.

i realize that i'm complaining a lot and i don't really *mean* to do that

but!

if these producers are masterful enough to pull out changelings plus the rumored moriarty and/or lore, they should be better about the other, perhaps 'smaller' things that seem off