Star Trek: Picard

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

surely when Odo went back to the great link he shared his knowledge of the specific model of small bucket that serves as the perfect changeling resting vessel and they’re all replicating it when they visit the federation

Agreed that this was a good episode but it took a lot of exasperation to set the characters up on the chessboard in a way to make the story work, the most anti-Trek example of which is making Shaw an anti-Borg bigot who thinks little of dead naming 7. I'm not a "no conflict in Starfleet, ever" purist but you can make a jerk Trek captain (Jellico 4ever) without making him a stupid goon.

Whew...and I thought *last* week was good.

Yeah this was a great episode. I think I can see where things are panning out now, though Ive been wrong plenty before!

And we still have some key characters yet to surface! I do have half a guess myself but yeah I'm just content to let this play out some.

Great guest star this episode. I didn't expect how good that character resolution was.

I can read the changelings Conspiracy as being a meta-commentary on how the people running Trek behind the scenes are completely different now, resulting in Trek series that feel like imposters.

agree this was a pretty great episode

loved the guest reveal, and the storyline fitted them well i thought

can worf just kill rafi now
i’m still incredibly tired of her

Worf needs Raffi around so he can do his Weird Dad Worf thing.

:/

fantastic guest but we should have gotten more

although i have to say that said guest having rejoined starfleet feels unlikely to me

https://www.memorygongs.com/worf_bloodloss.png

farkn why cant I post any images succesfully lately.

agree re unlikelihood

they're not making it easy for themselves having to compress 20 years of backstory of what happened to Ro in 30 seconds of dialogue but amnesty for any maquis left after getting butchered in the dominion war who are willing to use guerrilla tactics against the Cardassian-Founder axis under some black ops section 31 shenanigans seems plausible enough but the writing doesn't really sell it, being 3/4 baked (which is still an improvement over how half-baked most of the earlier seasons were).

Yes that was my only issue - i guess we're still spoilerizing this are we Picard makes it clear he has Had It with Ro, she's dead to him because of what she did, he seems quite bitter about it in fact (and I have to be honest I don't recall her leaving TNG being THAT acrimonious?). Then she turns him around completely in one quick conversation? I get they had to speed things along but it was a little wham-bam.

oh, i don't doubt that starfleet might ultimately take ro back -- i mean two seasons ago a romulan spy was their chief of intelligence; their security is historically awful. i just don't think *she* would do it, particularly when a free bajor needed rebuilding

the whole interaction was necessarily speedy, but i do buy the general sense of it. he really liked and respected (at least??) her in TNG and was torn up when she defected. it's kind of funny how riker, who actually hooked up with her and later sympathized with her defection, was left out of it, but i guess the show isn't called 'riker'. (also beggars belief that these starfleet legends were unaware of her return while she built her career back up to commander, but whatevs)

Despite myself and the narrative whiplash and what is imo still kind of a boilerplate story, I agree that this was a genuinely good episode. They even made Worf an interesting character! To Mookie's last point, she said that she even went to the media, yet somehow Picard and Riker were still blindsided by her resilience.

Also, I'm really torn about how quickly Ro got reintroduced and disposed of, like was Michelle Forbes' availability limited to a one episode guest shot? In which case the slack dithering of the first 3-4 episodes feels a lot more egregious.

i def agree w that, it felt like too good of a “get” to be one and done.

I don’t know if I’ll continue to enjoy it if it stretches further, but the “revelation” that Picard was never this stoic figure, that he was very emotionally involved in his crew and his relationship to them, plays pretty well. Old man in his dotage, maybe. I thought for a minute that Picard and ~spoiler character~ were being implied as having a deeper bond offscreen, but I think it’s shown in the TNG episodes that he felt tested!

It’s not really revisionist per se, but just showing us what it meant to be Captain Jean-Luc Picard. They had to stick to the character and only show brief cracks or absolutely break him (see: Locutus) to make him fallible, and now we’re just getting all cracks

^^^ it was interesting and well-done to see the contrast between picard's interaction with sisko re: wolf 359 in the DS9 premiere (instantly went stiff and icy) vs. that with shaw last episode (sad but no excuses)

otm

they should throw a wrinkle in it and make it canon that Picard disliked Wesley, though

it's not?

I just want to hear someone say his name and see Picard noticeably grimace

they did the facepalm this episode. they could do "shut up wesley" too.

So episode 6 is another memberberry festival, like s3e1. Moriarty turned out to be another unexplained callback instead of a main villain.

I think Worf has said he's a pacifist in every episode he's been in. You'd think at least one writer would notice that the word isn't being used correctly.

There's something gross and unsettling about Picard's casual way of strip-mining fan nostalgia when
they literally have Kirk's corpse on display in a CIA Section 31 museum and if it ends up being actually intentional self-hating meta-commentary from the writer's room, I am down with it!

Also digging Plummer's power move in refusing to pronounce Picard anglo-style.

As I was saying on FB, they take Kirk's skeleton to the Enterprise-A, pose it in the captain's chair and take selfies with it -- "Hanging with the legend!"

Also digging Plummer's power move in refusing to pronounce Picard anglo-style.

Ha yeah that made me giggle. "Picarrrrr"

Some thoughts:
- Moriarty was basically just a security key aka fanservice cameo? Were we meant to think Sec31 set him up or he just decided to protecc the archive himself, like why would he use a melody only Riker would know?
- I kept thinking that I didn't like how the changelings goo looks now (lol not that it looked good in DS9), but it occurs to me now that it looks bad because it looks... diseased. On Reddit someone speculated that maybe they never quite cured everyone, and the disease mutated so they effectively banished the incurable from the greater Link, and its those changelings who are bitter and want revenge. Who knows, but its a theory I like!
- on this note, might we see the return of the breen? I doubt the Vorta will reappear. Though lol - good excuse for an Iggy cameo.
- the ref to a hangar where Geordie cuts his daughter off, is speculated thats the Ent-D being repaired, and that'll come into play because now clearly they need a ship that isnt networked to the compromised fleet.
- Expected Spiner to put on the schizopersonality thing, and we were clearly informed - TWICE - that the bot has "all the personalites unintegrated in there". So it was annoying when he shifted to a clearly Lore expression and said "I'm Lore!" ffs

- "We will not be prey. We will be ... friendly energy."

"I don't understand the world anymore."

i definitely was left a tad deflated by this ep vs the last one

but i do love the thread of family dynamics running through this season, like Geordi’s admission that as a dad he’s now fearful for his daughter over circumstances he himself would have embraced as a young crewmember - even just having him at odds with her is interesting to watch

and 7 talking about her Voyager family was v moving

Yeah "I was reborn there" was lovely.

and it led to our Voyager rewatch skipping to season 4 so we can watch her arc :D

which i only partly saw once so i am excite to revisit

When Sooong started talking about embracing the future I thought they were going to blow up all the old relics. Go full Last Jedi on them. But no, they were just there for nostalgia.

Thought parts of the latest were too crammed with so-so zings, which compounds the wonky pacing of this season. I wish they spent more time fleshing out Sydney's character more before this episode because she's kind of been a plot device before now and her actor still seems a little tentative.

Loved the clips show style callback to the actual TNG 'Shades of Grey' clips show episode.
(that was a tough sentence to write)

If it hadn’t been posted here yet, there’s a fun interview with Jonathan Frakes that Tawny Newsome and Paul F Thomkins did on the official Rod cast

https://www.audacy.com/podcast/star-trek-the-pod-directive-a7faf/episodes/the-actors-director-with-jonathan-frakes-1d9b7