Star Trek: Picard

also the PREVIOUSLY ON title makes me irrationally angry

deanna joking about being space-raped by a changeling was kind of odd, no? it's beverly who's into that stuff

also the PREVIOUSLY ON title makes me irrationally angry

Yeah, disappointed they didn’t use a clip of Majel Barrett’s voice

Clearly this episode was written by a cat person.

As meh as I am about a lot of this, I am enjoying this new version of Worf.

loved his line about sending each of the crew the heads of his enemies

So much of this particular season is about parents and children, isn’t it

You mean like last season?

kind of like the title "The Next Generation"

This season has done a good job of pretending that previous seasons of Picard don't exist, then addressing the continuity issues a few episodes later. e.g. finally acknowledging that Picard is a synthetic, or that Data wanted to be dead.

‘somehow, data returned’

Well that was a heck of a rabbit to pull out of the hat.

Some really funny lines in this one!

[h]"I hope we die quickly!" killed me.

"Obviously, we can't use the Enterprise-E" "That was NOT my fault!"
- this one I laughed at but didnt get, and turns out its a Prodigy reference so no wonder.

Didn't twig this til I had a squiz at Reddit but someone pointed out Ro was avoiding transporters when she showed up, I guess we know why now! (not to say she knew per se, just that something was wrong)[/h]

oh ffs, I had ALL of that in the hide tags, sorry

Tried to fix the tags but didn't work. Hmm. (Also you were using HTML formatting originally I think?)

no i used a [ h ] then a [ /h ] I think it doesnt like para breaks?

Thank fuck I didnt include my really spoilry comment, so I'll do that here.

If Kriege is back as the Borg Queen is this intentional or out of neccesity bcs of the other actor's death?

They're packing a lot in each episode but also wasting a lot of minutes reiterating to the audience what we were shown in exactly the previous scene.
At the same time, if they're going to tie in last season's socially awkward rogue borg alliance as a deus ex they're being pretty negligent in not setting that up, almost conspicuously so.

I'm struggling to recall last season - Jurati became a (not THE?) queen, and then what happened? was that just all an alt timeline that doesnt count cos it was a Q fuckup and they fixed it?

Last season did seem like a setup for a future resolution but it's bizarrely unclear whether this supposed final season of Picard is part of it.

Also, they're really casually killing characters off left and right at a real finger-snapping pace. At this rate, they'll probably kill Data off two or three times during the finale.

So if I haven't seen any of these and can now access them, can/should I start with season 3?

I want to say yes bcs it feels like S3 is a bit seperate, more fanservicey too. But there is some stuff in S1-2 that happens that S3 will be confusing if you dont know.

Even though a lot of the show is written as if it's really inconvenient to them that S1 & S2 happened, if there are any good 5 minute season-summary videos, I would recommend watching those before S3.
Also, if you haven't seen DS9, a brief summary of that might be in order as well.

A lot of prereqs for this course!

Oh right Voyager as well. I'd lay 2:1 odds we get a Janeway appearance, something that they actually did take the trouble to leave multiple breadcrumbs for.

I haven't seen S1 or S2 either, but jumped into S3 easily with a few minutes of Memory Alpha reading.

You would think that Starfleet would have given up on all-encompassing control systems after the M-5 incident... Section 31 naming their black site after M-5's creator is perverse, even for them.

I wonder how often the carpeting needs to be replaced on Galaxy-class bridges?

LOL when Picard said "you know what I missed" re the carpet, I said "WESLEY" at the screen.

I just kept thinking "I wonder if Geordi replaced the broken dome over the captain's chair with something tinted."

I thought this twist was a possibility when I first saw Jack's vine dream (being something like Picard's Borg dream in First Contact) but I dismissed it as too stupid for the show. Oh well.

I was expecting the Borg bcs I could swear we'd discussed that here but I must've seen that on Reddit I guess. I'm still a little unclear on the changelings/Vadiks role here. Organic borgs they were saying? If they'd been able to infect everyone under 25 who used a transporter (lol what a deus ex) then what was the point of the changelings? given everything else this season was TNG, that now feels out of place. Perhaps I missed something in all that exposition.

Ha, Memory Alpha has already been updated with spoilers

Also, yeah, this season has been weirdly paced. They’re doing some reveals that seem like you’d want an additional episode or more to chew on

A lot of the fanservice winks are a little too ham-handed (and I echo Philip's sentiment), but seeing the bridge and hearing Majel Barrett's voice gave an actual thrill.

That said, I was hoping that the red door thing WASN'T Borg-related, because post-BOBW Borg stories, especially those involving the Queen, have generally resulted in middling Trek, and Picard's writers are bad at Trek, and as it turns out two wrongs do not make a right. Also, is Jack the Borg Prince?

I have the same questions as Trayce. If it turns out that the motivation was just petty vengeance, MEH. Also, is Vadik's boss a reconstituted Borg Queen?

Great story about how they put this together (I'm assuming everyone at least knows this much by now):

https://variety.com/2023/artisans/news/star-trek-picard-enterprise-d-bridge-set-1235580496/

Another thing that bothers me about this season's spate of cameos is that they just bring characters back to kill them off, which is really kind of selfish and I dunno, lazy? Selfish because now they're effectively off-limits to other series )(unless there are more secret Soongs with synth bodies that they could get downloaded into), while we have Data killed off three times and Picard once. Lazy because they're barely integrated into the plot beyond, "Hey, here's someone who was on the show 30 years ago, love it, nerds." Shelby could've been anyone, aside from the one line that does a LOT of heavy lifting to remark on how out-of-character the whole dumb plan was. Also not a great look that the ones who've been killed have been women, assuming that Shelby is indeed dead.

No one's ever truly dead in this show while the Q exist tbh.

From pop culture journalist and overall good egg (he was the guy behind the excellent Random Roles column for AV Club) Will Harris with this just now:

Just watched a screener of the series finale of PICARD in preparation for a chat with showrunner Terry Matalas tomorrow and...wow.
That's all you get. Just...wow.

Could mean anything!

I should add I was able to get IMAX tickets for the Wednesday night screening here in SF so bring it on.

Just started watching, from S1, nice to have on whilst working and eating easter eggs.

But S2 started off with a doom scene and then jumped to a "48 hours earlier" made me want to vomit all my chocolate up.

S2 was a mess all the way thru imo

Well that was lovely. And a nice live chat after too.

I didn't care for the main conflict -- fate of the galaxy stories tend to go the way you suspect, not to mention that picard's decisions were questionable, or that selected protagonists can now opt out of the borg hivemind -- but i liked the afterward.

idk -- i didn't hate it, but also it was pretty lame. the shaw arc could not possibly have been more predictable. jack magically absconding with a shuttle, and jack *wanting* to find the borg, and jack magically *finding* the borg was all absurd. if only all those millions of people assimilated by the borg had had a kickass dad!

appreciate the confirmation that it literally takes just seven people -- or merely one, if it's bev -- to run a starship

as for the mid-credits scene -- i would totally watch seven running a ship. i can vaguely envision being interested in Q despite them having done nothing good with him in 30 years. could not give less of a shit about jack

anything stemming from this absolutely requires worf tho

zen worf is a gift

i demand Captain Seven spinoff immediately (plz kill off Jack by ep 2)

i mean really, jack unassimilating because he loves his mom, or because he's hot for geordi's pilot daughter, or because the showrunners thought him charismatic doesn't make much sense

so Agnes and her posse were too busy guarding the mystery transwarp conduit wherever (which is not the conduit seen in this season) to show up and help or...

there's not a lot of between season continuity going on here

There's not even scene-to-scene continuity going on -- didn't Worf just take two full on space laser body blasts? and there's not even an insert of Riker quipping, "shake it off, Worf, it's just a flesh wound" to bridge the fact that he seems perfectly fine 10 seconds later.

Does the Picard golem have a usborg port in his neck? Or was it there from his prior assimilation? I guess all that cyberpunk armor is just for show.

Yeah, Borg stories hopefully are put to bed now because this, like every story following "I, Borg," has made them such stock villains that have almost none of their original alienness -- how banal it was that Queenie (and Vadic) were simply motivated by revenge.

Health and Wellness Worf is still a treasure. Philip, I kind of wonder if Klingon redundant physiology explains why he was able to shake off the phaser blasts.

I did completely hate Will's decision to keep Picard company, dressed up as loyalty but really just a cheap way of amplifying the stakes, in a way that doesn't make sense. He and Troi still have a daughter, or did she get conveniently forgotten?!

But I did like:

The shot of the nebula that's a straight homage to TNG's opening credits
Riker's "I miss that voice."
Poker game at the end -- stud, rotating aerial shot, etc.