Star Trek: Picard

Someone shows up? What? Who? 'They evolve past a certain point and then consider humanity redundant' makes more sense.

So it was 'someone shows up' after all. I like my idea better. I doubt TNG actually featured more of that kind of existential threat than plain vanilla big baddies, but it feels like it might have done.

jlp: "it feels like i'm looking at data!"
the viewer: "it feels more like i'm typing data into a spreadsheet"

i am happy to accept this is mean but the dialogue very much delivered the open goal

I doubt TNG actually featured more of that kind of existential threat than plain vanilla big baddies, but it feels like it might have done.

The longest plot arc in TNG, which began in the very first episode and ended in the very last, was that humanity has evolved so far that the Q continuum has come to judge it and see if it's fit to go on.

Yes but you'd hardly know it as it's mostly played for laughs.

This was the first odd-numbered episode that I liked! I rolled me eyes at yet another secret Soong but Sutra (or was it Soji?) saying fascinating was just a delight.

This felt more like a TNG episode than any of the previous ones.

A first season one at that. I was wondering what was going to happen if one of them stepped on a plant. (That said, still enjoying the general flow of the whole season.)

that gold-skinned version of our android kid seemed like a threat from the get-go

ehh

a billion times better than part one

It was okay, and I loved that they found a nonviolent solution to the conflict in the spirit of TNG... But it still felt like every plot beat you expected to happen did: of course Starfleet will ride in as the cavalry, of course Picard's illness is gonna kick in right at the moment of climax, and of course they're gonna download him inside the android body they conveniently introduced last episode. The one thing I didn't expect was Data still being "alive", but OTOH the scene with him felt like total fanservice, just repeating the same points they already made when he died in Nemesis.

The fight between Seven of Nine and the Zhat Vash was completely extraneous and pointless, like did they really have to go for action movie of "good guys' tough girl fights the bad guys' tough girl in the end"? They could've just had SoN shoot her and still get the same ending for her.

Also, why the heck did all the Starfleet ships leave as soon as the Romulans left? Shouldn't one or two of them stayed behind just to oversee the situation, and to make sure some less diplomatically inclined Romulans wouldn't still try a sneak attack on the androids?

Uggghhh, this was so bad. I lose points for following it through to the end.

Felt like I was that meme of Picard facepalming while watching most of this episode

yeah it was ok but like Tuomas said a bit too neat, wrapping everything in perfect bows, it got a little rmde

and like with Picard dying they leaned so hard on the “sadness” like THIS IS SAD ARENT YOU SAD OH ITS SO SAD and it left me kinda cold

Also, the football

Anyway next season will be “Oh yeah what happened to that Narek guy?” and it’ll be ten episodes of him wandering the cube going “Huh.”

feel like the advanced picard manoeuvre will not stop as many spacerays as he imagines and they have to land somewhere and the planet is right there

omg get on with it

*turns back into yoda as is proper*

I definitely won't be watching the next season of this. I just thought it was rubbish. There were so many cool Borg connections and possibilities that they just left on the table, which just made me wonder why they bothered bringing the Borg into it at all. All very frustrating and dull.

Lot of justs, there. Really a lot.

Agree with the Borg disappointment. Since the theme of the season was synthetic life, and the Borg themselves are semi-synthetic, I was expecting that to tie in with the main plot, but it never did. The whole thing with Hugh and the XB's and Seven of Nine was pretty much irrelevant in the end. They didn't event get to use the Borg cube for anything, so what was the point of bringing it to the android planet?

when i looked at them all sitting eagerly like picardians! assemble! right at the end my heart just sank and never stopped

from a none-too-elevated starting point

Resurrecting him at the end really cheapens the sacrifice he meant to make, doesn't it?

I don't know why but the writing on nu Trek has been so awful and scattered. Moral lessons undermined or unearned, plot holes galore.

Crashed borg ship looking tempting as beachfront luxury high rise condo; just needs some TLC

lol at 'let's get drunk with a stranger' and/or 'let's weep in the arms of a stranger'

tbf rios honestly had better chemistry with seven -- perhaps because his badass cigar was elsewhere -- than with our wee murderer, whose eyes are too damn close together. also raffi is the absolute worst and she's gonna drag seven down with her

This was quite bad.

They should just stop making trek stuff

I disagree, because I like Discovery. Even if it did go off the boil towards the end of the second season.

I just can't get over how they threw the Borg away like that. How was Jean-Luc's tumour nothing to do with his Borg implant, when it so easily could have been a shadow of that? How was the scary entity that crosses dimensions when it learns of a group of high-functioning synthetic beings not the Borg? That is absolutely a thing they would do. How is Jean-Luc Picard totally fine with having his consciousness put into a non-human body without his permission? Surely that would be one of his great nightmares? I would expect it to be in his will! "No pissing about with my consciousness after my body dies." And why wouldn't you make his synthetic body younger? I know there are production reasons for that, but it makes no sense in context.

Mind you, the special effects in this were very impressive. I especially liked the space orchids. I also liked the fact that neither terrible Romulan boyfriend nor Rios appear to have bothered getting super-swole for their tank-top scenes. I mean, I'm sure they hit the gym that week, but it wasn't an all-out gun show.

This was bad. I got very annoyed with it after a few episodes. Just as with Discovery the show tries to be too many things at once without doing any of them particularly well.

How was Jean-Luc's tumour nothing to do with his Borg implant, when it so easily could have been a shadow of that?

TBF, Picard's brain disease was already introduced in the potential future seen in the last episode of TNG, and no Borg connection was mentioned there... But you're right, they still could've easily retconned it so that there is such a connection.

i liked that the borg were sidelined in this, that the ideological differences between them and the extra-dimensional ancient synths that were stuck in the romulan brains literally disabled the cube like a virus.
what i didn't like was that the big bad guys ended up being third rate flying spaghetti monsters.

they could have also let picard spend some of next season goofing off in the black lodge having tea with other killed-off characters before resurrecting him.

Never seen this TNG ep and hate that I haven't:

The TNG episode where Data goes off pic.twitter.com/kG8hHW0hba

— klon peags (@tembeep) April 11, 2020

data's examples are mexico's war of independence, ireland, and one made-up rebellion. i think the writers put too much credence into duck you sucker.

i am almost done with a complete star trek watch/rewatch and i went back to picard just after i finished tng—i had stopped a couple episodes in because it seemed kinda unnngh

but it turned out alright after that! on a par with discovery.

i liked how the narrative ended up reviving the idyllic-colonists/natives storyline repeated ad nauseam in tos and tng but centered it on the synthetics. it was kind of lol though that after all that the romulans just gave up. it was like their core belief! tested with its worst possible scenario!

presumably the possibility of going on means that they have a lot of borg stuff in their pocket to use in a second season.

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2020 season is nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

And look who's back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk9F90wklRQ

sure is a lot of lens flare goin in that office

“I don’t really need a second season of this show”
*watches teaser*
“Eh, what the hell, I’ll watch this”

WHOO BORG QUEEN.

pretty into a new Q story tbh

Oh fuck your "cant watch this in your country" you tube!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHMti7u9TBE

You know Q has aged surprisingly well!

Also, interesting that season 1's crew is back again -- and the return of his Romulan helpmates! -- especially because I didn't think that Jeri Ryan's commitment would extend beyond that handful of epsidoes.

Trying to keep my expectations in check, though, lest we get a repeat of what happened last year.

It’s a charismatic cast that works well together, I’m up for it.

Dug the Romulans and 7, not that excited to see the rest of them.

I still haven't seen last year's series finale - I guess we just forgot about it?

I watched the Discovery pilot then bounced. I think I mainly enjoy old mainly-episodic comfort food Trek, the new more serialized high-stakes-all-the-time variety doesn't work for me, never checked this one out cause it seemed to be a similar style

If you don't like Discovery, this is more of the same except worse. I don't mind Discovery though - but still haven't seen S3.

I didn't realize that Chabon (still on the writing staff) isn't show-running for season 2 -- instead, it's the 12 Monkeys guy.

He was also involved with Voyager and Enterprise I think

Was not expecting a dark gritty reboot of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home -- or a certain returning character -- but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUhBOmtFYr8