When he was approached by Secret Hideout to revive the role of Jean-Luc Picard, Sir Patrick Stewart reportedly did not wish to just do a sequel to The Next Generation, but wanted to explore new horizons with the character. Whatever the flaws of Star Trek: Picard’s first season, it did do that. Then we had the unfocused mess that was season two, and now here we are in season three of Picard, which is the very sequel to TNG that Stewart allegedly didn’t want to do.
And I still don’t know how I feel about it.
On the one hand, as someone who loved TNG for all seven seasons that it was on the air and for all four movies the crew starred in (for all that three of the four of them were really terrible), and as someone who has written these characters in multiple works of prose fiction, I’m thrilled at the notion of revisiting them two decades after we last saw them.
On the other hand, I totally get where Stewart was coming from in his reported initial objection. And the first season of Picard gave us a very nifty supporting cast that was then mostly dismantled or ignored, with two notable exceptions, one of whom was an already-established popular character from the same era as TNG, the Voyager character of Seven of Nine played by Jeri Ryan. The other is Raffi Musiker, played by the magnificent Michelle Hurd, and while she’s still here, her plot isn’t (yet) connected to our main story of bringing the band back together. (Okay, and Orla Brady, but she’s been reduced to a guest star, and is used decently in the opening scenes and then shuffled off. It’s clear she’s only there because Picard chose to be with her at the end of season two, so they have to at least write her out convincingly, but she’s definitely being written out, given Brady’s removal from the “opening” credits. (I put “opening” in quotes because Picard is joining the idiotic trend in recent times to put all the credits at the end, a tendency I utterly despise and wish would reverse. (At least the other Trek shows don’t do it. (At least not yet. (I don’t know why I’m nesting so many parentheticals here. (Probably just being self-indulgent…))))))
I will give show-runner (and writer of this first episode) Terry Matalas credit for this: he’s slow-rolling the reunion. We don’t get the entire gang in this one, just Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), who is only really in the opening scene, and the return of Jonathan Frakes as Captain William Riker. We don’t see any of the rest of the gang yet, though both La Forge and Troi are mentioned. This is, to my mind, the right approach, not overloading the viewer and giving every character a chance to be reintroduced on their own.
We open on Crusher, who is flying around on a ship with just one other person, who we find out at the end of the episode is her son. She’s listening to the log report Picard recorded in “The Best of Both Worlds,” and is being chased by alien ships. They board and Crusher is rather bloodthirsty in killing them. Yes, she’s defending herself, but still, this is icky. But she’s also very obviously exhausted and frightened and at her wits’ end.
She contacts Picard, and does so by using a frequency that is specifically designed to be picked up only by Picard’s old Enterprise-D combadge, encrypted with a codec that Picard would know to use, and also using a code that was used on the Enterprise-D when the Borg messed with their computers.
The latter is something Picard needs Riker for, as he was busy being Locutus when they came up with that code, which is called “Hellbird.” They meet at Ten-Forward, as Riker is in town to give a speech on Frontier Day.
This is also the first Picard—or, based on his conversation with Riker, any of the gang—have heard from Crusher in twenty years. She cut herself off from everyone some time shortly after Nemesis, and nobody knows why, nor expected not to hear from her at all for two decades.
Crusher’s message urges Picard to not trust anyone, an instruction Picard immediately ignores by first sharing the message with Laris, then by contacting Riker. Crusher also says not to involve Starfleet. Riker’s solution is to try to commandeer the Titan. Which is a Starfleet ship.
That moment threw me entirely out of the episode. Riker offhandedly says it’s too far and too dangerous to charter a ship, a comment that makes absolutely no sense. It especially makes no sense on a TV show large chunks of which have taken place on La Sirena, a civilian ship that Picard chartered for an unauthorized mission. Instead, La Sirena is being used by Musiker for her side plot. (Remember, the version of La Sirena they used in season two to go back in time that the Jurati Borg Queen made off with was the one from the alternate timeline of the Confederation. The main timeline one is still around, as we see here.) But even stipulating to that, there have to be tons of civilian ships they could have hired without having to ignore Crusher’s wishes.
But no, Picard and Riker go to Titan for a surprise inspection, and the hope that they can trick/convince a Starfleet captain to go to Crusher’s coordinates. Instead of, y’know, hiring a ship on which they can instruct the captain what to do with no questions asked. Sure, that makes sense.
Once we arrive at Titan‘s berth in Spacedock, I’m thrown out of the episode for a second time. This isn’t the Titan that Riker commanded, as seen in Lower Decks and in several novels, both of which used the design created by Sean Tourangeau, who won the design-the-Titan contest that Simon & Schuster held in 2005. No, this is a new Titan, which is “neo-Constitution-class,” whatever the hell that means. It’s less interesting than Tourangeau’s design, and all I can think looking at the new ship is that it’s an attempt at pseudo-nostalgia by making it look sorta-kinda like Kirk’s Enterprise, at the expense of Tourangeau’s much better design. (At least we still have it on LD.)
The good news is that Titan has a friendly face as her new first officer: Seven—or, rather, Commander Annika Hansen. After season two’s events, Seven decided—at, according to her, the urging of both Admirals Picard and Janeway—to join Starfleet. Her experiences on Voyager were enough to give her a commission at the rank of commander, and she’s been assigned to Titan under Captain Liam Shaw.
Since the title character is an admiral, we can’t do the Evil Admiral cliché, so we substitute with the Evil Captain. Shaw, played with gleeful smarm by Todd Stashwick, is in the tired tradition of Decker, Tracey, Garth, Esteban, Maxwell, Ransom, etc., ad nauseum. The deck is so totally stacked against him it bleeds into the absurd. He insists that Seven refer to herself as Hansen, a cruel and unnecessary insistence. He invites Picard and Riker to dinner, but starts eating before they arrive—and also leaves before they finish, which would be appallingly rude even if they weren’t VIP guests. At the gift of a bottle of Château Picard, he dismissively says he prefers Malbec (a Spanish wine), and he also makes his disdain for jazz clear, commenting that he had to delete all the jazz Riker had in the databanks when he took command. And finally, the guest quarters for an admiral and a captain that he provides is a single room they have to share with bunk beds, which is a protocol violation of the highest order.
Oh, and he refuses to change course as Picard requests, as Picard is a retired admiral, and Riker isn’t captain of this ship anymore. I mean, he’s right, but that doesn’t make him any less of a dick.
Luckily, the first officer is on their side. Picard takes her into his confidence, mostly by her bullying him into it. When she snaps at Picard, Riker snaps right back, asking if that’s how she talks to an admiral. Seven tartly retorts that that’s how she talks to a friend. Picard explains the mission, and only after that do they find out that Seven had already changed course to the coordinates Picard got from Crusher.
Seven also facilitates their stealing a shuttle, and they head over to Crusher’s ship, only to find the good doctor in stasis and a young man on board who identifies himself as Crusher’s son. He berates the two of them for leading “them” to us, and the episode ends with the same bad-guy aliens from the top of the episode showing up.
We don’t know who this guy is, but he’s around twenty years old and speaks with a British accent, so it looks like we’re going to live the cliché and have him also be Picard’s kid. That’s my guess, anyhow, and I hope it’s wrong, because that’s just too obvious…
Crusher (and maybe Picard?) is not the only one with a surprise kid. They also pull a Demora-in-Generations and have the Titan conn officer be Ensign Sidney La Forge, Geordi’s daughter, played by Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut. On the one hand, I like this showing that the crew of the Big E finally have done other things with their lives. On the other hand, if we find out that Leah Brahms is Sidney’s mother, I swear I will riot. Or, at the very least, rant at great length on the subject in the review I write of the episode where that is revealed…
Speaking of families, we also have a troubling line from Riker. When Picard apologizes for taking him away from his family, Riker gravely says, “Deanna and Kestra will appreciate the time away from me.” That sounds ominous and not a lot of fun, and completely unnecessary. But I’ll reserve judgment until that’s more than a single line of dialogue…
Buy the Book
Wild Massive
There are some wonderful bits in this episode. For starters, there’s the double act of Stewart and Frakes. The producers of TNG recognized the value of this pairing early on, first seen overtly in “11001001,” and which continued to be a strong captain/first officer relationship throughout TNG and the four followup films, not to mention Riker’s prior appearances on Picard. It’s in full bloom in “The Next Generation,” and much of the joy of watching this episode is seeing these two together again.
(Also what is it with the recent trend to lazy season premiere titles? First Strange New Worlds decides that the title of their first episode will be “Strange New Worlds,” and now the debut of the season of Picard that will reunite the crew from The Next Generation is called “The Next Generation.” You can do better than this, guys…)
In addition, we have some little touches like the souvenir Enterprise-D models in Ten-Forward. Picard and Laris are looking at some of the things he has around the house, including a painting of the Enterprise-D (which Picard says is his favorite, a bit of fan-service that I call bullshit on, and would direct folks to the holodeck scene with Picard and Scotty in “Relics”—the Stargazer was his favorite, dagnabbit), and the Ressikan flute from “The Inner Light,” which he clutches fondly. And I must confess to loving that the episode opens with “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” by the Ink Spots…
However, it’s telling that the part of the episode I found most compelling were the scenes with Musiker. When we first see Picard’s former aide, it seems like she’s fallen off the wagon, desperate to get a fix. Luckily, that’s not the case—she’s just working an undercover op for Starfleet Intelligence, though she doesn’t know who her handler is (and neither do we). She’s trying to track down the Red Lady, and while she does figure it out eventually, it’s not soon enough, as a Starfleet facility is destroyed. (In a nice touch, the facility was about to have a dedication of a statue of Rachel Garrett, the captain of the Enterprise-C, seen in “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”) Musiker is also struggling, as she is an addict, and even in the twenty-fifth century, it’s easy to be tempted to go back to the substances that made you temporarily feel good. Hurd plays it brilliantly, both the initial viewing of Musiker where we think she’s back to being a junkie, and then her angry and plaintive conversation with her unknown handler about how difficult this assignment is.
In the end, my feelings on this premiere match my feelings about this show in general, which I summarized in my review of the second-season finale, “Farewell”:
“There are parts … that I adored. There are parts where I cheered loudly. There are parts where I wanted to throw my shoe at the screen. There are parts where I was just staring at the TV wondering WTF I just watched. And there are parts where I just yelled, ‘Oh, come on, really?????’”
We’ll see if that’s still the case next week, when, presumably, we’ll see more of the gang…
Keith R.A. DeCandido has a new Trek story coming out in April: “You Can’t Buy Fate,” which will be in issue #7 of Star Trek Explorer.
According to the subtitles on Paramount+, the code word Crusher uses is “Hellbird.” Minor nitpick.
Also, I would be willing to bet good latinum that Raffi’s handler is Worf, since the text messages called her specifically a “warrior.”
JasonD: I was very confused by your comment, as I know it was “Hellbird,” but my fingers typed “Hellguard” for some reason. Sigh. It shall be fixed…
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m guessing the Daystorm Institute theft in Raffi’s subplot’s going to be the mechanism for bringing in Lore and Moriarty later in the Season.
In the old literary continuity, Lore’s remains and Moriarty’s Cube were stored there if I remember right. Makes sense the same would hold true for the Prime Reality canon.
If so, the question then becomes why Vadic needed them. Were they grabbed randomly, or do they hold a specific place in her plan?
I’m also really enjoying the score. Jeff Russo did fine, but I won’t deny hearing new co-composer Stephen Barton’s rendition of Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner’s themes left me with a
I’m also really enjoying the score. Jeff Russo did fine, but I won’t deny hearing new co-composer Stephen Barton’s rendition of Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner’s themes left me with a big, goofy grin on my face.
Sorry, didn’t realize it had been cut off until after it was posted.
I liked it. I think it’s unfair to assume that Shaw is evil. A jerk certainly, but you don’t grt court martialed for that. And given that Beverly says explicitly that she’s being hunted and is clearly frightened and wounded, I think it makes total sense that Riker would suggest taking a Starfleet ship rather than a lightly armed transport like La Sirena. Notably, Picard himself wanted a starship when he was going after Maddox; he only settled for hiring Rios after Clancy told him to go to hell. I absolutely agree with you about the design of the Titan though; it’s such a waste.
Beyond that, disappointed though I was that they kicked most of the original characters to the curb and shelved the open plotlines from the first two seasons (What’s going on on Coppelius? What did Q die of? Who made that transwarp conduit? What are the repercussions of the Federation allying with Jurati’s Borg?), I must admit that Patrick Stewart has much better chemistry with Jonathan Frakes than he had with any of the new actors. And I’m glad that they’re finally doing something halfway interesting with Raffi, as she’s always been least favourite. I’m calling it now, I think Worf is her handler.
@1+3 – Fixed, thank you!
Well, I liked this more than anything Picard has offered us so far.
Okay, the Raffi plot so far does nothing for me. Just seems to be another exercise in futuristic and alien people speaking to one another like they’re in a gritty cop or spy movie from 2023, and that’s never what I tune into Star Trek for.
But then there’s the Picard and Riker buddy movie, and that is a delight. More please!
Wanted to add: disappointed by the lack of the Russo theme, which I think is just a beautiful piece. And I lived that they dedicated it to Annie Wersching.
I think the code was called Hellbird, not Hellguard (which was Saavik’s birth planet in the novels).
So, yeah, it’s nostalgia like crazy, which is exactly the opposite of what Star Trek: Picard was intended to be. I suppose I can see the value in putting a coda on the TNG cast’s stories, but they’re overdoing nostalgia in other, unnecessary ways, like rehashing the movie Spacedock scenes (with Goldsmith’s TMP drydock sequence score) and just generally relying way too much on greatest hits and homages in the music rather than letting the composer assert his own style.
And ugh, “Trust no one.” I’m so sick of conspiracy stories. At least the episode makes a point of showing how wrong that is, that you need people you can trust to succeed.
Shaw not letting Seven use her preferred name is unconscionable. That’s got to violate Starfleet regulations.
Although the dumbest moment was when Shaw was awakened by the sound of thunder coming from the nebula outside in the vacuum of space.
When is this set? If it’s the 250th anniversary of Starfleet, that’s got to be 2411. But that would be a whole decade after season 2. The returning characters don’t seem to have advanced that far in the interim. Okay, maybe it would plausibly take Seven a decade to reach first officer status after joining Starfleet. But it doesn’t feel like that much time has passed.
As soon as I saw Raffi acting like a junkie, I said to myself, “She’s undercover for Starfleet Intelligence.” It was a stock misdirect introduction scene, too cliched a plot device to fall for. And it felt contrived that her cover story was designed to trick the television audience into thinking she’d fallen off the wagon. Also, the moment where she opened a communicator and identified herself by name as an intelligence officer? That was the clumsiest bit of exposition imaginable. It would be insane to do that in public where people might be following her. Why not wait until she was back on La Sirena to show her making contact with SI?
As for this horrible “quantum tunneling” weapon… it doesn’t really seem that different from what a really big transporter could do. Trek has always overlooked the weapon potential of transporters. Although the effect was reminiscent of a wormhole, which makes me wonder if there’s a DS9 connection.
@3 – You forgot to say something about being thankful for the edit function…
The Titan confused me. The behind-the-scenes interviews said it was a new ship, the Titan-A, but Riker said here it was a refit. But it’s a refit that looks absolutely nothing like the Titan that canonically appeared in Lower Decks. So maybe Riker lost the original Titan at some point, then commanded its successor, which was then refit under Shaw?
@4/Mr. Magic: Didn’t we see Lore’s disassembled remains at Daystrom in season 1? Or was that B-4? Anyway, if B-4’s were there, it makes sense Lore’s would be too, and ditto for Moriarty’s cube. You’re right on both counts. (Moriarty was probably stored in the evil-computers wing along with AGIMUS and Peanut Hamper.)
@9/jaime: Wasn’t the season 1-2 main title theme Russo’s arrangement of one of Jay Chattaway’s Ressikan flute pieces from “The Inner Light”?
As soon as Raffi’s handler told her “speak freely,” I was very confident as to his identity (the trailer showing Worf and Raffi together helped a lot as well). He makes sense, since he can definitely understand what it’s like to be the worst parent in the galaxy.
I greatly enjoyed the episode overall. I’m willing to take Riker at his word about that region of space being too dangerous for a civilian ship, especially since he’s obviously going to be proven right. Shaw is 100% a dick (proving John C. Reilly’s Guardians of the Galaxy character wrong once and for all), but I’m pretty sure we’re going to find out that he has good reasons for being so. He seems to be an engineer at heart, and given his obvious hatred of anything related to the Borg I’m guessing he’s a Wolf 359 survivor. The end credits, which are packed with Easter eggs, show a ship called the USS Constance that was lost on Stardate 44002.3, which is the date of the battle. I’m guessing that was Shaw’s ship. He probably also fought the Dominion, so I totally get why he feels the need to impose order on whatever he can control. I’m interested to see where he goes.
I get that not everybody loves it, but the Constitution refit is my all-time favorite ship design and I’m plenty happy that they’ve decided to create a new version of it. It’s not without precedent, just think about the retro-future stylings of the Ford Mustang or the Camaro.
Lastly, I suspect that destroying a Rachel Garrett statue is not just a reference, but actually has some bearing on the plot.
@10/12 CLB:
When is this set? If it’s the 250th anniversary of Starfleet, that’s got to be 2411. But that would be a whole decade after season 2. The returning characters don’t seem to have advanced that far in the interim. Okay, maybe it would plausibly take Seven a decade to reach first officer status after joining Starfleet. But it doesn’t feel like that much time has passed.
I guess you could hand-wave it away by it meaning the Earth Starfleet (i.e. Archer and the NX-01). But, eh, it’s the dating of the Eugenics Wars troubles DS9 ran into all over again.
Speaking of…
As for this horrible “quantum tunneling” weapon… it doesn’t really seem that different from what a really big transporter could do. Trek has always overlooked the weapon potential of transporters. Although the effect was reminiscent of a wormhole, which makes me wonder if there’s a DS9 connection.
Matalas has said the events/legacy of DS9’s a major element of the Season’s narrative. Could be (although the obvious exploration of that fallout is on the Dominion War’s impact on Worf’s newfound pacifism).
Didn’t we see Lore’s disassembled remains at Daystrom in season 1? Or was that B-4? Anyway, if B-4’s were there, it makes sense Lore’s would be too, and ditto for Moriarty’s cube. You’re right on both counts. (Moriarty was probably stored in the evil-computers wing along with AGIMUS and Peanut Hamper.)
It was B-4; I don’t believe Lore was mentioned in the Pilot.
But yeah, it’s not a stretch to imagine that if B-4 was there, so too was Lore. And since Moriarty was likely stored in the ‘Evil AI’ vault, I would love if they gave us brief life-action renditions/cameos of AGIMUS and Peanut Hamper.
Yeah, I know it’ll never happen, but I can dream, LO.
@10 and 12 The Star Trek Logs Instagram account fills in some of the details on the Titan in particular. It says that she was launched in 2402, and Shaw says that he’s been captain for 5 years, putting this episode in 2407. That would mean Starfleet as we know it was founded in 2157, between the creation of the Coalition of Planets and the Federation, or just after the beginning of the Romulan-Earth War. That actually makes a lot of sense to me.
And the log also says that the new Titan started as refit of the old one, but turned into basically a new ship with stylings based on the original Titan from the 23rd century that was commanded by Captain Saavik.
@13 / Chase:
Lastly, I suspect that destroying a Rachel Garrett statue is not just a reference, but actually has some bearing on the plot.
Yeah, Vadic’s grudge and personal hatred of the 1701-D/E alums (and Matalas’ hints) indicate her crusade’s rooted in something that happened during the TNG era (and which Picard and company are linked)
If the Garrett Statue and her legacy are clues, that implies “Yesterdaty’s Enterprise”, but if so, how? Are they survivors of the 1701-C?
Or is it all a red herring and misdirection? Wouldn’t rule that out.
@12/Chris I think it quotes Batai’s theme towards the beginning.
@16 It could be misdirection, but I kind of doubt it. I suspect that Vadic has a connection to the Enterprise-C, and that she found out about the “Yesterday’s Enterprise” incident from the one person who has firsthand knowledge of it and also has a hatred of Jean-Luc Picard….
@18 / Chase:
It could be misdirection, but I kind of doubt it. I suspect that Vadic has a connection to the Enterprise-C, and that she found out about the “Yesterday’s Enterprise” incident from the one person who has firsthand knowledge of it and also has a hatred of Jean-Luc Picard….
Yeah, Sela’s one of the loose ends of the entire era.
And we know from Matalas that Tasha and her legacy will be acknowledged in some capacity, so…
Oh yeah, and I got the feeling the “son” might be more than a natural offspring. Just a wild theory, but could he be a clone of Jack Crusher? An android? A time traveler? There’s got to be something sci-fi with him, right?
But yes, I will be disappointed if they pull a David Marcus and he’s simply Beverly and Jean-Luc’s love child.
@18 Who is Vadic? I don’t recall that person being in the episode or in Krad’s writing.
Back before the first season aired, I had this idea that all the kids from the Enterprise-D would be adults by this time, and many of them would be in positions of authority throughout the Federation, and they’d be more than willing to bend rules or look the other way to help Picard out. That really would’ve come in handy for an episode like this. Replace Captain Shaw with the little girl from Disaster and suddenly it takes a lot less effort for Picard to commandeer a starship.
I didn’t see a credit for Jay Chattaway’s flute pieces in this episode, so I think the theme is different for the season.
So, maybe no flute music, but the Ressikan flute did make an appearance in this episode.
This episode definitely leaned heavily on memories, but also included Picard saying he wanted to create new ones. For now, I can’t take that as a mission statement on the season because there was a lot of callbacks… perhaps too many. However, maybe the theme for this season is to resolve the spectres of the past while moving on.
I love the movie theme music, but it was perhaps too in the nose. Lower Decks’ parody of movie sequences was over the top, but at least the music was unique while paying homage.
For this episode, Goldsmith’s themes were very present, but I thought I heard a bit of an homage to Horner’s TWOK score as well.
One thing that was presented as nostalgia, but probably is more a budget-saving device is the Neo-Constitution class Titan. In-universe, it doesn’t make too much sense — although arguments can and will be made, especially with the Akira and Olympic classes around.
I think it’s a hand-wavey way to justify redressing the Discovery/SNW sets yet again. After all, those sets are supposed to be from the 23rd century and the new class justifies why they look so “retro.”
Last two things about Titan-A — the open hail sound is reminiscent of the one used in Undiscovered Country and did Starfleet forget to pay the electrical bill? That ship’s interior was crazy dark — definitely not retro.
@21 Vadic is the name of Amanda Plummer’s character, who’s been billed in the promotional materials as the season’s main villain. I suspect we will meet her (or at least hear about her) next week.
I was sure that Riker would suggest they hire the pirate ship captain that his daughter was talking to in Season 1. That seemed relevant when they mentioned it in that episode, but it never came up again.
I agree with @Chase’s observation in #13 that Captain Shaw’s intolerance for Seven’s preferred name, as well as his disparaging remarks about Picard’s history with the Borg protested by Riker the dinner fiasco, are meant to portray an anti-ex-Borg animus on the part of this character. I was reminded of another premier where the writers introduced a new CO by placing him at loggerheads with Picard of his role in the Wolf 359 disaster.
Was that a female changeling in that first scene on the Titan bridge?
@26 / Sarek:
I was reminded of another premier where the writers introduced a new CO by placing him at loggerheads with Picard of his role in the Wolf 359 disaster.
Yeah, but adifference there is context and perspective. We got to sympathize with Sisko and where he was coming from during “Emissary”.
If Shaw is indeed a Wolf 359 survivor, then I’m sure these bits will get re-contextualized on the re-watch. But with only the context we have, Shaw is coming off as a d**k.
The little 1701-D replicas in Ten Forward are an example of Off-The-Shelf set decorations: they were produced by Eaglemoss as licensed collectibles and can still be purchased on Amazon today. The company actually closed in June 2022, so I’m glad to see they’ll be back in business by 2407!
@26 27
I said to my wife that I think he’s basically Ben Sisko if the latter had never gotten help from the Prophets to move past Jennifer’s death and has just carried that pain for 20+ years.
@15/Chase: ” That would mean Starfleet as we know it was founded in 2157, between the creation of the Coalition of Planets and the Federation, or just after the beginning of the Romulan-Earth War. That actually makes a lot of sense to me.”
Looks like they’ve finally done something that contradicts my Rise of the Federation novels, then. Although it’s fairly minor.
“… commanded by Captain Saavik.”
Sigh. Once more, there are no significant people in the universe beyond the tiny handful we know from previous productions. Not everything has to be a reference, showrunners!
@22/Sean: “Replace Captain Shaw with the little girl from Disaster and suddenly it takes a lot less effort for Picard to commandeer a starship.”
Oh, no. That would be too reminiscent of the infamous bad fanfic series where that girl became a legendary Mary Sue-ish starship captain while still in her pre-teens.
@26/Sarek: “Was that a female changeling in that first scene on the Titan bridge?”
I don’t know who you’re referring to. Memory Alpha mentions a Bajoran named Mura, a Vulcan named T’Veen, and a Haliian (Aquiel Uhnari’s species) named Esmar.
@30 While I generally agree that not everything has to be a reference, I’m perfectly okay with this one because I’ve always hoped for something official on Saavik’s later years like we got with Uhura last season. Plus, it’s not being thrown in our faces on screen, so it’s not too glaring to me.
I also thought of that fanfic, but I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up. :-)
@30/ChristopherLBennett: at 24:54, there’s a character that bears a distinct resemblance to the humanoid form taken by Odo and others of his people
How about Susanna Leijten from Identity Crisis as the Mother of Sidney La Forge. She is Gordie’s friend (and helped save his life in Identity Crisis). Perhaps they got together after the events in Nemesis.
#27
Such is one of the drawbacks of “ten-hour movie” seasons of television. We’ll probably get an explanation for the chip on Shaw’s shoulder, but we’ll have to wait and wait and wait.
See you in March, character backstory!
Were you given advanced access to the first six episodes KRAD? Seems like this time around Paramount sent them along to every single random Star Trek youtuber. I take it as something of a sign of confidence they sent out six this time, not two like with season 2, as indications seem to be that the series picks up steam instead of rapidly deflating. I guess we will see.
Regardless, personally, I enjoyed it, other than the dialogue being pretty startlingly weak given the rave advanced reviews the season has been getting. I mean, Trek has a long, storied history of expository dialogue, to the point that a lot of episodes (really, most TOS ones) can be followed radio play style without looking at the screen. But the extreme violations of show not tell in a lot of the scenes really grated, where in some cases they came as close to “as you know Bob” as can be without saying it outright. Worse yet, it wasn’t even generally in the service of like interesting worldbuilding or technobabble. There were so many moments when a character didn’t really need to say anything, or could have said half as much, because it was really about the feelings rather than the information being conveyed.
@27 I actually think they’ll tell us what’s going on with Shaw fairly quickly, like within the next two weeks.
One other thing that caught my attention about him was what he said before leaving the room: “I love you. I do. I love reading about your wildly-exciting and equally irresponsible adventures.” I honestly think that he was being totally sincere when he said that, which is a hint that there’s a lot more depth to him than his first impression presented.
“Don’t trust anyone and don’t involve Starfleet”
immediately Trusts people and involves Starfleet because the show is named after him and he has plot armour.
I almost stopped watching at that point, at least for a little while. He’s never seen Crusher terrified like this so he’s going to ignore her warnings? Sheesh.
And it’s fortunate that Picard just happened to be going through his belongings when the call came in or else the combadge would have been in storage with nobody to hear it. Was it luck or did she somehow know he was preparing for a yard sale?
Picard couldn’t have been chancellor of the academy for very long if he’s now retired. A year? Maybe two?
It seems like they’re getting the “What the?” Moments out of the way in order to set up the plot. We don’t actually know a lot about what’s going on yet.
Strange aliens who click for speech. Maybe they’re related to the subspace aliens from Schisms. Unlikely but who knows?
I’m hoping that Geordi’s daughters have some new character as their mother. Or that they’re secretly androids. One or the other.
I’m about as bored with this episode as I was with Season 2.
Hope it picks up.
I’m so relieved. I didn’t have subtitles on and what I heard was “Helbert” which I thought sounded like a really stupid name for something that was said with such breathless importance.
I loved the first long opening shot meandering through Crusher’s ship, with the Ink Spots soundtrack, then was immediately disappointed with the hackneyed firefight at the very beginning of the episode. Complete with the Star Wars-era shootout where the bad guy has her basically standing right there and an entire barrage misses her, she takes one lunging shot back- bad guy disintegrates. Although I admit it was a bit intriguing to see, as Riker and Picard surmised later, how she dispatched the second wounded one with alarming clinical precision given that she is trained as a physician. I assume we’re going to find out a bit about that later….
And I know everybody loves to harp on the fact this series hasn’t turned out to be the New Adventures of Picard much as fan service, but I unabashedly love it. To be honest I was never that taken with many of the new characters they brought in, with the exception of Raffi, who is here.
And speaking of new characters, I really dig Shaw. Yes, he’s over the top, but deliciously so. He has been introduced as such a consummate d-bag I suspect he’s going to have his big moment later in the series where he goes against type to do something spectacularly against regulations to save everyone.
As I’ve said in other comments about Trek, it’s a sci-fi show but I watch it primarily because the showrunners have generally done a good job, sometimes an exceptional job, in casting and creating characters that I want to know and love and hate. And the interplay here between and among almost everyone is a pleasure to watch. I’m looking forward to Worf and Laforge and god knows who else they want to bring back. This is the last season anyway, and it’s too late to worldbuild a brand new set of truly compelling good guys and bad guys, so as far as I’m concerned, If they feed me some tasty leftovers I’ll be just fine with it.
And lastly, the episode was worth watching just for the timing of Stewart’s delivery of the last line here:
Uh, don’t you think we should alert engineering that we’re going to Warp 9.99?
That’s no longer protocol on the newer models of the fleet. It’s all automated now.
Uh, of course. ( clears throat ) You’re gonna be a captain before you know it,C ommander Hansen.
Excellent recovery, Admiral.
Shut it, Will.
@00 / KRAD
On the topic of VOY, there’s a really neat Easter egg in the credits.
On the Athan Prime Fleet Museum Graphic, there’s a very familiar Intrepid-class ship listed as part of its collection.
Since we know from the pre-release interviews that Geordi’s now curating the Fleet Museum, I expect we’ll get to physically see Voyager itself for the first time since “Endgame” (as a cameo during the inevitable establishing shot).
Sigh. This is why, even with it’s issues, the first season was far better than the second and why this one will trundle along in needless mediocrity. Deadly dull mediocrity.
And it won’t change because the mainstream reviews are eating it up. See NPR’s for an example: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1156567803/star-trek-picard-soars-by-embracing-the-legacy-of-the-next-generation
They’re even talking more seasons of the same as this.
I’ve been getting really tired of the folks complaining about the “New Trek” but comparing this to, say, Prodigy does give me a feeling of wanting to scream “Get off my lawn” at Picard.
@31/Chase: “While I generally agree that not everything has to be a reference, I’m perfectly okay with this one because I’ve always hoped for something official on Saavik’s later years like we got with Uhura last season.”
My other problem is that both of those references established those people as ultimately becoming captains. It’s a lazy habit of Trek fans and writers to assume every single officer has to eventually become a captain. That’s not the way the military works. There’s a finite number of openings for command positions, and most people only make it to a lower rank before mustering out or retiring. Not everyone wants or needs to be a captain, since command is a specific discipline. Being a chief engineer, chief science officer, CMO, or whatever is a sufficient “top of the pyramid” achievement for someone in a different discipline. Having everyone end up becoming a starship captain is simplistic and silly.
Although I guess my problem is more with the Uhura reference, because Saavik was introduced as a command-track officer in TWOK/TSFS and was established as an eventual captain in the novels. Still, can’t anyone we haven’t heard of already get the chance to do something important from time to time?
@44 I do agree about Uhura, it seems odd that she would wait until so late in her career to command a starship. That might be better than the books that made her the Federation spymaster or whatever it was, though.
I would prefer to see Uhura go on to excel in another field, like as a diplomat or maybe even Federation President. I mean, why not? She’s charming and a good communicator, not pun intended. I’d vote for her.
Another thought about using the Titan instead of a hired ship: the Titan goes 9.9- is it possible that a hired ship wouldn’t go that fast?
One other thing about this episode that’s unfortunately become a cliche these days is the use of a disaster-porn terrorist attack invoking 9/11. Bad enough that it did that, but it did so in a manner that felt almost throwaway, like it was a casual thing, or just an obligatory going through the motions. I had my fill of CGI mass urban destruction as an action trope the year Man of Steel and Star Trek Into Darkness came out.
Also, the trail of bread crumbs Raffi followed didn’t make much sense. If “the Red Lady” was meant to be the target of the attack, why did the Orion say he heard the Red Lady was “on the move?” Unless that was a reference to the statue of Rachel Garrett (and why was a statue red?) being “moved” by the quantum-tunneling/wormhole weapon, but if so, that’s really labored.
Re: The mystery of Beverly’s estrangement with the 1701-D/E alums, I realized this does retroactively answer that mystery from “Maps and Legends”” Why didn’t Picard ask Crusher to perform the medical evaluation? Why did he have to ask his old Stargazer CMO?
Now we know: They hadn’t spoken in 20 years and he had no idea where she was.
@47 – Picard said he’d be gone just a few day before Will came up with the plan for the Titan. I don’t think the 9.9 was necessary to get to the edge of Federation space of it’s less than a week there and back
The plot device about stolen tech from the Daystrom Institute immediately reminded me of “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus” on Lower Decks, though I imagine they were going for Wrath of Khan
@49/Mr. Magic: If Picard and Crusher have been out of contact for more than 20 years as of 2407, it would’ve been closer to 12 years in season 1, which was 2399.
It’s pretty unusual for a TV series to have such big time jumps between seasons — two years between seasons 1 & 2, six years between 2 & 3. The only other show I can think of offhand with time jumps that big between seasons is Young Justice. There’s also Red Dwarf‘s recent revival seasons, but the gaps there largely reflect the ones that pass between seasons in real time.
That also makes Picard the first Trek series whose primary time frame has been in a different century each season — season 1 was the 24th, season 2 was mostly the 21st, and season 3 is the 25th.
#48
I agree. I could go many years without having to see another building destroyed, particularly in such a detached way. I couldn’t tell you what that building was, nor anything about anyone in that city, whatever its name was. The scene had all the empathetic value of the video game Rampage.
—
Another thought I had, anyone else reminded of the last Ghostbusters movie with Beverly/Egon cutting off their friends for many years? That’s not Gozer on the big ship, is it?
I suspect that by the end of the season, 7 will be captain of the Titan-A and that the crew of the ship is the actual “Next Generation” of the title (or at least one of them), which actually makes it quite clever IMO. There have been interviews with the creatives that suggest the series could introduce the next Next Generation. I’d be fascinated to see Captain 7 of 9 and the crew of the Titan-A in a series of their own.
@@@@@#53: When someone asks you if you’re an Admiral, you say YES!
S
A legendary star fleet admiral goes to the edge of Federation space to save his ex who is under attack by a mysterious and powerful enemy with links to their past and discovers the ex has a son…. Where have I heard this before?
I grew up with TNG and am glad that the crew get one last ride in the saddle doing trek as opposed to what the movies were which weren’t really Trek nor were they good. As such I expected a lot of nostalgia. This may have been a bit much though: it’s the painting! The flute! The combadge! A souvenir galaxy class! Hey it’s that guy and that thing! There’s a good level of fan service and we’re already pushing it.
Plus the episode doesn’t make a lot of sense. Beverly has a mystery and fell off the face of the galaxy 2 decades ago? Does this seem consistent with her character? Bashir yes, but Crusher no. Regardless she’s in trouble because Starfleet seems to like doing high level research as remotely as possible and with as little support as possible- see the Pegasus. So she sends a message to Jean Luc that can only be received on his ancient combadge? I liked the codex and hellguard aspect since in the show Starfleet sucked at data security but still this seems risky. Picard does get it and is told don’t trust anyone in starfleet. Except his lover isn’t in starfleet and is a former Romulus intelligence agent who is super trustworthy and skilled so he leaves her behind?
That part really annoys me because wasn’t the point of last season was for Picard to not live in the past and make new connections? Didn’t he learn anything? I mean doesn’t she seem like the perfect person to tag along?
In any case he and Riker come up with the worst plan ever to get to the edge of space (this makes the addictive game to brainwash everyone to take over starfleet plan look genius). Where they meet the single biggest dick character written in Star Trek. He’s condescending, rude borderline harassing (he’s telling his first officer what to call herself?) and impersonal and there is no possible way any starfleet captain has those traits. He’s a straw man and that’s just poor writing. I suppose that’s so whatever happens to him later we will feel no remorse about. But seriously- with over a century of starfleet experience being super captains he and Riker come up with this? The entire thing is only so we have an excuse to have the Titan show up on screen as early as possible.
Also, Riker decides to embarrass his friends daughter on the bridge of a starship in front of her crew mates and makes them think she’s the worst helmsman in Starfleet? Since when was he that guy
The Raffi subplot was at least unpredictable bc it at least leaves you wondering what happened, is she in starfleet, is she using, etc. Although I have a feeling she’s either getting played by this seasons big bad or we are about to reintroduce control back into the universe, maybe to set up the Section 31 show with Michelle Yeoh?
The only other thing I want to give credit to is the self awareness when Picard and Riker come upon the ashes and ask if this is massively out of character for her. (Yes it is) This at least gives the viewer the opportunity to wonder what the hell happened to her.
I want to trust that this show was just setting up the chess board but two seasons of the show leave me seriously in doubt.
The only thing that took me out of the episode was the fact that the guy playing Crusher’s alleged son is way, way too old to pass for 20 or so years old. He looks more like 30.
Other than that, I was fine with everything. I don’t have any emotional attachment to the Titan’s old design, and I kinda like the new look of the ship. And yes, it would have made a lot more sense for Picard to hire a ship, but this is a franchise that revolves around Starfleet, so I’m not going to be too upset when it features a new Starfleet ship. I agree with the commenters who say they think Raffi’s handler is Worf, and I think you’re being too hard on the Titan’s captain by calling him evil. He’s awful, but that doesn’t make him evil. That word gets tossed around way too much these days about people or places or political parties we don’t like.
@57/David Pirtle: “The only thing that took me out of the episode was the fact that the guy playing Crusher’s alleged son is way, way too old to pass for 20 or so years old. He looks more like 30.”
Ed Speleers is 34, but Walter Koenig was 31 when he played the 22-year-old Ensign Chekov.
Anyway, this season is in 2407, which is 28 years after Nemesis. That still qualifies as “over 20 years.”
Guinan is mentioned too, BTW.
@48 I rewatched the scene between Raffi and the Orion. He doesn’t say the Red Lady is “on the move.” He says that “something is going down with the Red Lady.” That fits what actually happens.
I’m hoping it’s not his son, but it certainly looks that way. In the Ready Room, I thought I heard his name as Jack, which really seems weird to me if he’s Picard’s son. Also, the phrasing seems to suggest nothing happened. Laris mentioned “you tried to be lovers” which Picard agreed to. I would say sleeping with someone makes you a lover, right?
@14/Mr. Magic – As long as somebody kept props from “The Quality of Life” 30+ years ago, we should definitely be able to get a live-action Peanut Hamper.
#56 Yeah. Leaving Laris behind is dumb, both artistically ad continuity-wise. Non-Starfleet intelligence operative! Take her along! SEE HER BOUNCE OFF THE OLD ENTERPRISE-D CREW!
Now, THAT would have been fun—but the writers’ room seem too intent on their TNG nostalgia wankfest to even try that.
@60/Chase: Thanks for clarification on the Red Lady thing.
@61/M: “Laris mentioned “you tried to be lovers” which Picard agreed to. I would say sleeping with someone makes you a lover, right?”
If it’s on a regular or ongoing basis, yeah. Maybe technically it could be used to refer to a one-time or brief partner, but I really don’t think that’s how Laris meant it. She meant they tried to make a relationship work.
A fine and charming start for the most part. I love this cast, so even if this turns out to be just ok, it’ll be a treat. Though, I was hoping they’d bring Laris along and into the crew.
That being said. The pump action phaser rifle in the opening was sure something.
Just one more thing and I’ll shuffle off. I liked the detail of Picard’s log entry from “The Best of Both Worlds” playing in the opening scene. At first I thought it was there only for nostalgia reasons and was ready to roll my eyes. Then I realized Crusher was looking it over to get ideas in how to hide from these hunters, just as the Enterprise-D hid from the Borg in a nebula.
One of the better uses of a TNG shout-out, I think.
Very minor nitpick, Malbec grapes originated in France, but have become primarily associated with Argentina, not Spain.
Also, Shaw is an ass, but has good taste in wine.
The reviews on Trek Core and Trek Movie were so glowing they made me wonder if we’d seen the same show. So thank you, Keith DeCandido, for saying that parts of this episode were good but parts of it were stupid or obvious or tone-deaf.
I love TOS, but that doesn’t mean that I want to see the TOS movies remade with Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes. An Easter egg or two is fine, but when half the show seems like it’s remaking the TOS movies, that’s WAY too much. Remember that boldly going where no one has gone before? Well, it would be nice if the WRITERS did that, too.
Please, please do not let the Crusher kid be Picard’s son. I hated the idea of David Marcus, and repeating that with Crusher … just no!
One reviewer said that this was the best first episode of any of the new Trek seasons. Um, no, I’m afraid that was SNW’s “Strange New Worlds.”
Keep telling the truth, Mr. DeCandido! Some of us appreciate it!
Corylea: I’m not telling the truth, and neither are TrekCore or TrekMovie. We’re telling our opinions. I’d like to think they’re informed opinions — I’m fairly certain mine are — and the important part is that they make people think.
To that end, I’m loving that we’ve got almost 70 comments in the 10.5 hours this post has been live. You guys are the best.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Why do all the characters keep repeating that Dr Crusher’s location is “outside Federation space” or “at the edge of Federation space”? Unless it’s meant as a measure of distance, which based on the context doesn’t seem to be the case, it implies that Starfleet vessels are reluctant to venture outside the borders of the Federation. Has the galaxy changed that much since TNG?
Sarek: I have no idea, but it’s not that the galaxy has changed since TNG, since an episode of SNW had that same notion, that going outside Federation space was a crazy dangerous thing. I don’t get it at all….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m embarrassed that it took me as long as it did to figure this out, but the written music shown during the credits is “Pop Goes the Weasel.” I wonder if that’s a clue to how Lore fits into this season?
This first episode carries over the tone and visuals from the past 2 seasons: Which means that it’s dark. Again we get a plot where Starfleet seems to be the bad guys. The show seems to be packed in with as many references and fan service as a Lower Decks episode. At least the Riker/Picard chemistry is still there. We’ll see where this season goes but despite the appearance of TNG characters, so far it feels like more of the same.
Do they really not run these scripts by a test audience or something? That whole first scene with crusher had like 100 WTF moments.. Are star fleet communicators -that- connected to the people who wear them? Someone needs to track down whether picard ever had his communicator confiscated or blasted. Do the communicators work on some non-starfleet network that would keep her message from being intercepted from the people she is afraid of? What writer thought this method of communication was going to past the smell test with fans? How did 7 of 9 as a character change so much?..she now just a human with face decoration. Her anger and borgness has poofed. Who would pitch the script where Picard would try and steal a star ship as oppose to 1000 better more realistic options? Dont the writers know how absurd that is? At least pick one with a friendly captain. Its like these people learned nothing from the last 2 seasons.
Agreed that the nearly unanimously glowing reviews seem odd, unless the first episode is an outlier and it gets a lot better. Engadget had a review of this episode called “‘Star Trek: Picard’ lacks substance beyond callbacks and continuity porn” which is pretty close to my impression of it.
@23:
I noticed the similarity in design as well, but Discovery and SNW are filmed in Toronto (actually, Mississauga, about 12 kilometres from my current location in the west end of Toronto) and Picard is filmed in Los Angeles. I think they just used the same design concept for the bridge. Which makes sense, since Starfleet ships should resemble each other to a high degree, even if they’re of different classes.
@70:
I felt the implication was that there was a hostile power – or at least a dangerous one – whose territory abuts the Federation in that area.
@72: Thank you. I didn’t record the episode, and that bit went by too quickly for me to be able to read the music and figure it out. I’d been curious as to what it was. (I used to play trumpet, many years ago, and nearly as long ago I did an arrangement of “Sergeant Pepper” for the musical theatre company I belonged to, but I’m really rusty.)
“Sidney La Forge, Geordi’s daughter, played by Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut. On the one hand, I like this showing that the crew of the Big E finally have done other things with their lives. On the other hand, if we find out that Leah Brahms is Sidney’s mother, I swear I will riot.”
Sidney is cannon and was introduced in the final episode of TNG, “All Good Things” in a flash-forward where Geordi mentions his children that he has had with his wife Dr. Brahms.
@77/78: The same “flash-forward” where Troi’s dead, Data isn’t, Picard and Crusher married and divorced, Crusher’s a captain, Riker’s an admiral and the Enterprise-D is still in service? I think it’s safe to say that’s a different timeline. That said, it does make sense that Geordi would give his daughter the same name, especially if it was an old family name or one he’d always liked. Or Leah’s choice…
General: (Man, I am currently doing a lot of mental gymnastics to see how I can fit this in with my stories with minimal fudging. I had Picard and Crusher speak only about 10 years earlier, so her period MIA is going to have to be a lot shorter. She left the Enterprise in 2380, Picard was on Earth with her for much of that time but there’s wiggle room to fit a secret son in. Geordi was on the Enterprise until about 2392 but didn’t appear much in the 2380s so could have had a child in that time…)
I find Crusher “using a frequency that is specifically designed to be picked up only by Picard’s old Enterprise-D combadge” a pretty good trick. How does that work exactly?
“The Next Generation” does make sense as a title if it’s a reference to the reveal of Beverly’s son, with Sidney as a bonus, plus of course a wink to the old new series. Given that “Lower Decks” is an episode title from a past show used for the name of a later one and “Strange New Worlds” got used for the debut episode of the show of that same name, “The Next Generation” being the name of a past show used as an episode title for a later one completes the trifecta of tenses.
Picard had to at least involve Riker or someone else who’d figure out the Hellbird reference, despite Crusher’s warning to not trust anyone, which Crusher would likely have known unless she forgot that he wouldn’t understand it.
I strongly recall the rather stagily surprised way Picard intoned “Seven of Nine” when she popped up in Season One and would utterly adore hearing him put the same spin on “Peanut Hamper”…
@70/71 – I suspect that, despite Starfleet’s mission to “Boldy Go”, the past thirty years has seen Starfleet pull back. We’ve had the Dominion War, the Vau N’Akat attack, the destruction of Mars, the Supernova all within the span of a decade. Leaving aside the massive loss of ships and personnel, I get the impression such regular, intense, hits had a quelling influence on the Federation as a whole, perhaps giving rise to an isolationist policy. I suspect that Starfleet’s mission to explore has been scaled back considerably, with only select vessels sent outside Federation space and only after the missions are vetted for possible risk. The rest of Starfleet sits comfortably inside Federation borders, either surveying the systems already charted or just on patrol.
This is, alas, the sort of cultural change that is difficult to walk back unless the culture makes serious, prolonged, effort to do so. Picard’s actions in PIC Season 1 as well as his subsequent tenure as commandant of Starfleet Academy might have given the Federation a nudge in the right direction, but he is one man trying to move a civilization, and doing so several years after the withdrawal began. Attitudes might be too entrenched by now.
This might also explain some (though by no means all) of Captain Shaw’s assholery. Shaw is of the “new generation” of Starfleet officers, one more comfortable with the “explore only when safe” attitude.
On another matter, to wit: Beverly’s new “bloodthirstiness”. I interpreted it as more desperation myself, and possibly something Beverly knows about her attackers that we don’t. I deeply hope I’m wrong about this, but I’m wondering if our as-yet-unintroduced enemy has some means of rapidly “turning” people. It’s something we’ve seen more than a few times in Trek: Ceti eels, bluegill parasites, brainwashing games and Borg assimilation being the obvious examples. Beverly’s fear might be that, whatever it is, she can’t afford to even leave behind a body, as whatever-it-is might jump to her or her son.
@81/Andrew Crisp – I think that the Bluegill Parasites are a likely candidate for why Beverly says Picard can’t trust anyone. It would also connect the season back to a dangling plot thread from TNG.
@82 – And that is why I deeply hope I’m wrong about this hypothesis. I leave “Conspiracy” out of my TNG rewatches for a reason.
@81,
Yeah, the Novel Verse went down a similar road before Coda.
Even without the lingering fallout of Wolf 359 and the Dominion War, the 2380s were brutal for the literary UFP.
The Fall mini-series was very much about this – about Starfleet and the UFP being at that cultural crossroads and the older, pre-TNG generation like Picard and Riker vs. the post-Wolf 359/Dominion War next generation whose values and view of what Starfleet ‘should’ be were shaped by these trials.
In a way, it’s basically the pre-9/11 generation vs. the post-9/11 generation.
With better hands at the control board, I’d relax and expect all these glittery puzzle pieces and anomalies to reassemble into a coherent whole by the end of the season. But I suspect these are more like the glittering antimatter spread Riker fired at the Borg cube in “Best of Both Worlds,” brief distractions doomed to dissipate.
@74. Evrett You’re right that the entire thing is very very contrived and head scratching. The Picard communicator thing has like 800 points of failure starting with “What happens if Picard isn’t where his communicator is?” and building from there. As far as the Titan, it’s all in service of introducing the Titan as early as possible and establishing a plausible reason for Riker to command her again. We have a huge dick who we’re all going to cheer when he’s blown up, or had his blood sucked out by a green cloud of mist, or is killed by Armas or has his head lopped off by a Vulcan going through Pan Farr or whatever else the writers do to kill him off- never mind the fact that such an individual couldn’t be captain in the first place. Considering “Infinite Diversity in Infinate Combinations” has been a thing since TOS do we really believe that any Starfleet academy graduate who has risen up the ranks to command would be able to tell their first officer she can’t call herself by whatever name she wants is and would be the rude to guests. I get that we’re supposed to not like the guy but it seems heavy handed.
As far as the edge of Federation space i could figure it as one of two things- either it was a contested space with some other power that we just didn’t want to name (the breen, the kishnaya, etc) and the writers didn’t need to go into all of that or it’s that as other people say, it’s that Starfleet is a lot more conservative and is less the exploratory arm we saw in the mid 2300s (remember Farpoint would have been almost 50 years prior in 2364) and more of a space navy guarding the borders and prepping for whatever war comes next, which is a very interesting debate to be having and which the pre-Coda novels (now pruned) explored very well. Unfortunately I think the answer is neither and the writers were just trying to cheaply create risk and up the stakes. The could have done the same thing with about two lines of dialogue: “We’re going to that system? That’s pretty dangerous because of gravitational rifts/nebulas/space pirates/it’s near the planet from Code of Honor with the weird racist politics and the deadly megaman gloves!” It does the same thing in a way that doesn’t make our heroes look like a bunch of wimps.
There’s a lot of good potential here but bad writing is crippling.
I don’t think it’s fair to just call it “bad writing” because it’s not what some people consider to be “airtight.” Criticizing Beverly’s actions, for example. It’s not like she planned this whole thing out. It’s pretty clear she and her son have been on the run for some time, so they’re totally improvising. It reached a point of desperation where Beverly pulled out her “break glass” maneuver: send a message to Picard. Obviously, we can make up a ton of ways that could’ve failed, but that’s how it is with most stories. I’m sure when Crusher is revived, she’ll be very relieved that it actually worked.
And maybe I’m alone on this, but I didn’t actually dislike Shaw himself, and I honestly don’t think he’s going to be redshirted. He explains his way of thinking right off the bat, and it fits everything else he does. His obvious animus against ex-Borg is awful, but last season made it clear he’s hardly the only person in Starfleet to feel that way and the first season showed that even Picard is not immune from that way of thinking. I enjoyed the scene on the Artifact with Hugh where Picard finally remembers that most drones are victims as well. I don’t think Shaw will fundamentally change over the course of the season, but I do think he will show why he’s a Starfleet captain who was trusted with such a ship.
@10 “Although the dumbest moment was when Shaw was awakened by the sound of thunder coming from the nebula outside in the vacuum of space.”
To be honest, the way I saw that scene, Shaw was already starting to wake up prior to the last bit of (unnecessary, purely for the viewer, I also took it) thunder sound effect. Before we heard the sound, I was taking it that it was the bright orange light coming into his quarters via the windows.
What, by the way, is the Uhura reference you and someone else were talking about? I must have missed that one (or forgotten it now).
@88 In the first episode of the entire show, when Picard goes to his archive to look for the painting Data gave him, there’s a certificate in there that’s dated April 4, 2327 commemorating his first flight at warp speed as a cadet aboard the USS Leondegrance.
In the first episode of season 2, one of the ship plaques at the academy that Elnor is examining is for the Leondegrance. The plaque says that Uhura commanded the ship in the early 24th century both on active duty, and as a training ship until she retired in 2333. I guess there were some early plans for a Short Trek that would have showed Cadet Picard serving under Captain Uhura, but it was sadly never made. I would have enjoyed that.
@13/Chase:
Maybe, and that would be nice… or maybe just obliquely name-dropping “Yesterday’s Enterprise”… by this point our heroes’ ships (D or E) are exactly that, and presumably some action of that crew will be shown to have an essential bearing on the plot.
***
If one facet of “The Next Generation” title refers, as it seems, to the progeny of the Enterprise crew, I do hope that the one child whose upbringing and fate form a part of original TNG canon — Alexander — ends up receiving some kind of satisfying payoff as well…
What is written here about 3 of the 4 TNG movies being ‘terrible’ is simply not true. I just watched all 4 of them again recently and I liked all of them.
Especially the two that were directed by Johnaton Frakes (Riker). Writing that they are ‘terrible’ is absurd, has the author even watching these movies??
I enjoyed this for the most part. It seems like tthey’re easing us into the story which I think is good.
So, this is 2411? Ten years later? I wasn’t happy Thursday when people were suggesting it was 2407. I don’t know why the jump is necessary. I think one year would’ve sufficed.
As for involving the Titan–I think when Beverly said “no Starfleet” she meant officially. Picard and Riker hitching a ride doesn’t really count.
Shaw’s a jerk but he is an interesting jerk. I”m interested in learning why he is this way. What’s his beef with the Ent-D.
Raffi back in Intelligence is nice. I’m interested in this mystery.
Krad said: Sarek: I have no idea, but it’s not that the galaxy has changed since TNG, since an episode of SNW had that same notion, that going outside Federation space was a crazy dangerous thing. I don’t get it at all….
As a student of history, I kind of handwave it with the idea that the “great powers” of the galaxy have either formally or informally carved out “zones of influence” that are contiguous to their borders for exploration. Hence, we’ve seen the Enterprise exploring “uncharted” territory within a space that it is the Federation’s right to be exploring – and the difficulty coming about when you leave that area and head into a true “no man’s land.”
@70/71/81/84
Isn’t the galaxy pretty hostile from what we know? The majority of episodes and films feature threats of varying scope, from ethical quandaries with wide reaching effects, to phenomena both natural and manmade that threaten all of existence – what they all have in common is that average crews couldn’t hope to solve or survive them. Viewed episodically, various casts are relatively nonchalant about going boldly, but viewed as a whole, there’s every reason to conclude that it’s dangerous as hell outside of Federation space, and pretty fraught with danger inside as well. There’s honestly been a bit of a tonal mismatch in the past – given all the crazy things various heroes have been through, they should have always been this wary about crossing Federation borders – there’s always a conflict waiting wherever they go. Might not gel with Rodenberry’s vision, but then, reality doesn’t.
@92 I think there’s still a lot of ambiguity about what year this season takes place. Could be anywhere from 2402 to 2411. I hope we’ll get some clarification as the season goes on. Knowing what exactly Frontier Day is supposed to celebrate might help.
Hang on, I’m going to ask Terry Matalas on Twitter.
General comment: We’ve gotten no onscreen evidence pointing to the exact date anywhere in this episode, as the only time indicator is the opening caption that reads, “In the 25th century.” Nobody says how long it’s been since last season or anything like that.
Quoth Sarek: “If one facet of ‘The Next Generation’ title refers, as it seems, to the progeny of the Enterprise crew, I do hope that the one child whose upbringing and fate form a part of original TNG canon — Alexander — ends up receiving some kind of satisfying payoff as well…”
Um, there’s another child whose upbringing and fate form a part of original TNG canon, and he was listed in the opening credits and everything (and he’s already appeared once on Picard)…..
Quoth Graham Farrell: “What is written here about 3 of the 4 TNG movies being ‘terrible’ is simply not true. I just watched all 4 of them again recently and I liked all of them.
“Especially the two that were directed by Johnaton Frakes (Riker). Writing that they are ‘terrible’ is absurd, has the author even watching these movies??”
First of all, opinions can’t be true or untrue. Secondly, it’s spelled “Jonathan.” Thirdly, I’ve watched those movies lots of times, and wrote about all four of them for this very site:
Generations: https://www.tor.com/2017/06/27/star-trek-the-original-series-rewatch-star-trek-generations/
First Contact: https://www.tor.com/2013/04/12/star-trek-first-contact-rewatch/
Insurrection: https://www.tor.com/2023/02/13/picard-season-3-prelude-rewatching-star-trek-insurrection/
Nemesis: https://www.tor.com/2023/02/15/picard-season-3-prelude-rewatching-star-trek-nemesis/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It was ok — I’m interested enough to keep watching. Can’t wait for Worf!
But, my suspension of disbelief was broken when Seven just blatantly disobeyed orders. Wait until Cap’n jerkwad is asleep and then just do the thing anyway? Very clever! They didn’t give her any real motivation for destroying her career other than “loyalty.” The old Seven would have been both loyal AND smart.
@93/twels: “As a student of history, I kind of handwave it with the idea that the “great powers” of the galaxy have either formally or informally carved out “zones of influence” that are contiguous to their borders for exploration.”
That’s a good idea. There was something like it in the 1975 Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph Schnaubelt. The galactic maps depicted a “Treaty Exploration Territory” that was far vaster than the Federation itself, and the boundaries with Klingon and Romulan space were the boundaries of that (literal) sphere of influence, rather than of the UFP itself.
@94/Transceiver: “Isn’t the galaxy pretty hostile from what we know? The majority of episodes and films feature threats of varying scope, from ethical quandaries with wide reaching effects, to phenomena both natural and manmade that threaten all of existence – what they all have in common is that average crews couldn’t hope to solve or survive them.”
That’s just the selection bias of fiction. There may be countless starship missions that are totally routine and untroubled by danger — indeed, Captain Shaw implied that was the normal state of affairs for the Titan under his command — but those routine missions aren’t interesting enough to tell stories about. So we only see the minority of cases where things go wrong badly enough to produce exciting or engaging stories.
It’s like… if you only knew about car travel or plane travel from watching the nightly news and seeing reports of fatal crashes, you might conclude that it was insanely dangerous to travel by car or plane. Unless you understand that what gets reported on the news are the exceptions, not the rule, because the vast majority of cases where nothing goes wrong aren’t newsworthy. Fiction and the nightly news are both biased in favor of narratives that are exceptional enough to be worth our attention.
Although that logic is undermined somewhat in an episodic series where a ship has to experience a couple of dozen mortal dangers or wrenching ethical dilemmas every year, making it feel more the norm than the exception. It’s easier to justify in today’s era of shorter seasons. I mean, in Picard, the title character has had only three notable adventures in the past several decades.
@98 – Car travel, flight – these are safety regulated industries that operate within known parameters. The natural dangers of space as witnessed are far less predictable – regardless of the safety standards of Star Fleet, there are countless more unknown variables in space, and that’s not even including the factor of interaction with other unknown species.
Further, we have no fly zones on Earth – would you feel safe driving in Ukraine right now, or flying in its airspace? I’d argue the federation has borders/no fly zones for similar reasons. Their forces can’t match the danger inherent in expanding territory further, including territory violations that would involve them in wars they want no part in, for example.
In America, we have an established system for ranking the risk factor inherent in visiting other countries – civilian travel is prohibited to some areas. There are varying risks inherent in crossing various borders. The violent crime rate per capita in the US is extremely low, similar to the percentage of uneventful Star Fleet missions within Federation borders, but some countries have a very high per capita violent crime rate – cross into those and your chances are much higher of getting involved in something.
DS9 takes place over 6 years. The crew faces countless crises, the number of which are remarkable even given the number of uneventful days that passed in that same period. The same can be said for any trek series. Picard hasn’t encountered many crises in the past decades because he’s been at home, where the risk is very low.
I agree with @80 that the episode title was probably a reference to Beverly’s son, or maybe to any kids (such as the Rikers’ and Geordi’s) that we may see this season.
As others have mentioned, there were a lot of callbacks to the movies, but am I the only one who got a Star Trek III: The Search for Spock vibe from the way they commandeered the Titan-A? Shaw even reminded me of Captain Styles. I’m hoping Jack Crusher (Jr?) isn’t one of those callbacks and that they’re not doing the David Marcus thing. I joked to my son as we were watching it that if he’s Picard’s son, he must have inherited the accent from his dad.
I assumed Raffi’s handler was Worf, as others have mentioned, and I still believe that to be true. But (having seen the season trailer) my son said, “Maybe it’s Lore,” which I thought would be a very interesting twist. Intelligence agencies are known to employ shady individuals, after all. I highly doubt it, though.
I totally get the complaints about the episode and made many of them myself while watching it. But, maybe I’m just a fan-service junkie or something, because it has me excited for this season.
A lot of well-reasoned arguments made here.
At this point, I have to say I’ve pretty much given up on Star Trek to deliver an intelligent story that’s intricately plotted with character motivations and world-building that completely make sense. It took me a long time to get here, but I think I’m here. The mechanism has gone out in this Swiss watch… if it ever really was a Swiss watch. Maybe a Swatch Watch at best.
BUT, if they can continue delivering the camaraderie we see here with Picard and Riker, like the kind we’ve seen in countless lesser movies and episodes that still made them watchable (Insurrection, Final Frontier, anyone?), I’m pretty sure I’ll be enjoying this season.
That is… until they pull a Trip Tucker and needlessly kill off a main character and I throw my shoe at the screen.
@97/a_risch: You make a good point about Seven of Nine. Even given her history with Picard, it doesn’t make sense that she’d violate her oath as a officer and endanger her whole career by committing actual mutiny to take the ship where Picard asked. I mean, maybe if she knew the stakes were galactically important, which they surely will be, she would’ve done so, but at this point, it’s just an ill-defined concern about a friend of a friend. It doesn’t feel like a plausible character choice. Especially since she’s only had, like, two past adventures with Picard. It’d be more plausible if it were Janeway or Naomi Wildman asking for her help, say.
@99/Transceiver: “Car travel, flight – these are safety regulated industries that operate within known parameters. The natural dangers of space as witnessed are far less predictable…”
Obviously space travel is often dangerous. I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’m just saying that the ratio of dangerous missions to routine missions is probably much lower than it appears based on the curated selection of examples presented in fictional narratives, which are specifically biased in favor of the most dangerous or interesting situations and thus cannot be legitimately taken as a statistically representative sample.
“DS9 takes place over 6 years. The crew faces countless crises, the number of which are remarkable even given the number of uneventful days that passed in that same period.”
I already remarked how the nature of series fiction with a large number of installments creates an artificial need to keep the characters in a more constant state of danger than would be realistically plausible. In real life, many police officers go their entire careers without having to fire their weapons outside of the practice range, but fictional police officers tend to get into shootouts every week, because of the artificial demands of adventure fiction.
You’re talking about that fictional contrivance as if it were “evidence” of how dangerous space is, as if what we were seeing had some objective reality rather than being an artificially constructed narrative for our entertainment. That just doesn’t follow. In fiction, whether a given thing is dangerous is a function of whether the story focuses on it. Captain Shaw has been able to go five years as Titan‘s captain without excitement or danger because he hasn’t been onscreen during that time. It’s not about whether one place is more dangerous than another, it’s just about whether there’s an audience watching. So there is no objective logical conclusion you can draw from it.
Shaw makes Jellico seem like a care bear as far as interpersonal skills go. And his Ex-Borg line was completely out of line. You’d think unlike other civilizations in the Delta Quadrant everyone in Starfleet would know that every Borg is a victim and shouldn’t be blamed for being Borg. And what moron in Starfleet Personnel decided to assign Seven of all people as his XO? That doesn’t look like grounds for a good working relationship.
I don’t mind Beverly going the full Rambo she’s clearly been in survival mode for a while. Seems like the type of situation where she tried mercy and compassion a long time ago with these people and it bit her in the ass, so shoot to kill has become de facto.
And that kid had a lot of nerve calling the E-D the fat one.
I’m personally revolted by the Titan-A’s retro design, though Certified Ingame on Youtube did a great break down detailing how apparently the ship is a rework of the Shangri-la class Titan, which helps a little bit. Frankly the Shangri-La was gorgeous, the Neo-Constitution refit made it worse. But in general the idea that Starfleet is reverting back to Pre-Dominion War, Pre-Borg style ship designs turns my lip into a sneer. It breaks the idea that Starfleet ship design is continuously pushing forward with more advanced designs and technologies. Furthermore, this isn’t a Pre-Dominion War, Pre-Borg style, which would be like the Galaxy and Intrepid, it’s a 23rd century style.
I am thrilled though that more Star Trek Online ships are being canonized even if they are a decade ahead…but if this season is in 2407 then that’s actually right on time for some of them. So perhaps it’s a stop gap measure after the Attack on Mars and the events of Prodigy. But there were way more shipyards than Utopia Planitia, so I feel it’s a bit of a cop out for people who just want everything to be TOS era focused visually.
And are there Remans in Starfleet, that seems the only way to justify the fact that they’ve turned off all the lights.
I loved the episode. Re the villains. 2 theory’s spring to mind. Doc Bev’s son said their faces always look different made me think they were shapeshifters, but that’s more specific to DS9. My favourite theory just now after the “Trust Noone” comment, is the parasitic aliens from TNG episode Conspiracy. They said they were coming…
The comments about Crusher’s “bloodthirstiness” toward her attackers and the fear of some sort of bluegill takeover or similar contagion do address why she might have been using a weapon that reduces her targets to ashes while their rapid-fire phaser rifles do relatively little damage. Locking the son away on the other side of the hatch makes some sense if the fear is a direct biological contact, though transporter technology should make it fairly trivial to beam nanites or bluegills or whatnot to the other side of a closed door (which isn’t going to stop a phaser drill for long anyway).
(Though it still doesn’t make sense that the ship isn’t set to automatically warm up the engines upon detecting the hunters, or that no one has automated defense systems that can say, shoot or stun unauthorized personnel coming in through the airlock, or that the hunters don’t have access to better stunning technology if their goal is capture.)
It’s also a little hard for the viewer to worry that Beverly Crusher is in serious personal danger when we just discovered only minutes earlier in Picard storytelling (from the final minutes of season two) that her son, Wesley, has access to all of time and space and could rescue her in an instant.
96/KRAD: I had to laugh, you are absolutely right. I do expect that we will be surprised by another visit from that character this season, and I hope that his appearance will work better in S3 than it did in S2.
Is Riker’s admiration for Seven platonic, or did anyone see the scenes where they interact as laying the groundwork for a potential Seven/Riker romance?
Season 1 was “ok”. Season 2 was a wreck. Season 3….oh boy.
@106 Riker clearly has a history with Shaw, so likes that Seven was willing to stick it to him. He’s still a married man, whatever nonsense is going on at home.
@106/Sarek: “a potential Seven/Riker romance?”
No way. Not only is Riker still a husband and father, but I see no reason to believe that Raffi’s allegation about her girlfriend dumping her is any more truthful than the rest of her cover story. I’m going to assume she and Seven are still together until I hear differently in a non-undercover context.
Apparently Terry Matalas, in answer to a question on Twitter, said that Season 3 takes place a “little over a year” after the end of Season 2. I know some commenters were wondering about that.
@110 Matalas hasn’t answered me yet, but I did find an old tweet where he said that: https://twitter.com/terrymatalas/status/1523435905788170241?s=46&t=0gwBI3VeJ3Cyv_1QFPQ0iw
@97/102 – A thought that popped into my head was that maybe Seven had already made the choice to torch her career before Picard showed up. From the scene in the Observation Lounge, I get that Seven has spent some months under Shaw’s command (maybe longer, but until we have a definitive year locked down, I can’t be sure), and that Shaw’s behavior towards her and his “honored guests” is the rule, not the exception, with him. Her tone and words certainly suggest she was either at or close to a breaking point. She’d spent a lot longer as a Fenris Ranger than a Starfleet Officer and I figure she was planning to go back at the first opportunity.
But, her current position as XO of the Titan on the run-up to Frontier Day limits her options if she wanted to leave without, say, shaming the ship. She might wait until after Frontier Day and then hand in her resignation (Of course, if Shaw ticked her off enough, she might skip the resignation letter and go out by relieving Shaw of his teeth…)
Then Picard and Riker show up, trying to get to a certain location under the guise of a surprise inspection, no explanation given. If she’s planning to leave Starfleet anyway, why not do it by helping a friend?
Oh geez, this was a disappointment. Another conspiracy, dark and huge dangers blah blah blah and of course a totally idiotic, evil and stupid captain on the Titan….
And Hellbird and virus and whatever during Locutus times? I can’t seem to recall anything like that from TNG….
So far for me – not great, not terrible…let’s see how it will go in the next episodes.
There’s a difference between an evil cabal in Starfleet (like Section 31) and Starfleet running a leaky ship (think of the Founders running around easily on Earth in DS9’s Homefront)
I do wonder if it’s the aliens from Conspiracy… seems like the type of dangling plot thread that a TNG super fan like Matalas might be tempted to pull on.
After suffering through the first two seasons, I was willing to give this reunion season a try, begrudgingly.
But I. The first two minutes, Dr. Crusher, a woman who respects all life, is seen double fisting an assault style phaser rifle while shooting people once to knock them down and then shooting them a second time at point blank range to vaporize them.
A minute later, Raffi is crying to a dealer about being strung out.
I turned it off.
I don’t know wtf this garbage is but it isn’t Star Trek.
I get where they were they are going with this. But paradigm shifting without a clutch was not the way to do it. Add 4 episodes into the season. Run the first half to tie up Picard and set the table. Make the second half TNG season 8. Instead it feels like a blatant fanService attempt to pacify the ‘Picard was not real Trek’ gatekeepers….
Thanks for pointing out that “Picard” is filmed at a different studio than “Discovery” and “Strange New Worlds.” The corridors looked similar, so I made an assumption.
I keep coming back to Shaw referring to Seven as “former ex-Borg.” At first, it seemed almost like a double negative, sort of calling Seven a Borg in a roundabout way. The general sentiment is that Shaw’s a jerk and his comment was inappropriate, but perhaps referring to Seven as a former ex-Borg was his way of trying to _force_ Seven to be someone beyond her identity as an ex-Borg (hence his insistence that she go by Hansen on his ship).
Encouraging personal growth is usually a good quality, but if that’s what Shaw is trying to do, he’s obviously going about it the wrong way (especially compared to what Janeway and Picard have done working with Seven). However, I don’t think Shaw’s character is irredeemable (yet).
@115/Joe T.: “But I. The first two minutes, Dr. Crusher, a woman who respects all life, is seen double fisting an assault style phaser rifle while shooting people once to knock them down and then shooting them a second time at point blank range to vaporize them.”
We also saw her coldly killing bad guys in “Sub Rosa” and “Suspicions” and commanding the Enterprise to destroy an entire enemy ship with possibly thousands of people aboard in “Descent, Part 2.” And her behavior here was specifically called out by Picard and Riker as unusually violent, so the mystery was why she’d act that way — a question that was answered at the end of the episode.
“A minute later, Raffi is crying to a dealer about being strung out.”
Which was just her cover story for her undercover intelligence mission. Seriously, am I the only one who thought that was an obvious fakeout from the start?
@118/CLB
I didn’t think that it was obvious, but I had hoped that it was a lie because it seemed lazy to blithely reset Raffi’s character development.
@118/CLB: It was an incredibly obvious fakeout, so much so that Michelle Hurd gave a master class in acting like someone acting like a junkie. At no point did I think that was real – Raffi was playing a junkie about as well as I would, with my lack of acting school. And THAT is well done on Hurd’s part.
BTW, I caught a 47 in this episode. Delighted that they’re still at it.
Finally able to watch this yesterday.
I liked:
– The Picard / Riker bromance and bantering (“road trip!”), it felt natural and relaxed.
– Everything with Raffi: I didn’t get her in Season 1, but Michelle Hurd does an amazing job and was probably the strongest actor in the episode. Such an evocative performance.
– No Brent Spiner. We’ve overdone the Data/Soong stuff, it was nice to not have to sit through more.
– The music; they knew what they were doing, it worked.
I didn’t like:
– I am not just concerned by the Shaw order for Seven to go by her pre-assimilation name, I find it repugnant. I doubt that a USN or RN captain could make such an order, arbitrarily, now without consequences. I didn’t hate Shaw as much as others on here, I viewed him as deeply suspicious of Picard and Riker and perhaps a bit resentful of having his command invaded for the visit, but the “Commander Hanssen” order was a step too far. We’re clearly now a long way from starships where “leave bigotry in your quarters” is the order of the day. Identity and self-identification is such a hot topic atm, this had better be handled well going forward.
– I don’t think that Patrick Stewart has ever really ‘become Picard’ in this series; he still feels slightly ‘off’, and not quite in character.
– The whole use the Titan thing felt very silly and contrived. While I am not particularly bothered by the design of the ship I find it odd that they felt the need to depart from the design seen almost everywhere else.
– This falls into the Discovery bin of not feeling like Star Trek, again (as did Seasons 1 and 2). I don’t know if it’s the effects team, or the set designs, but it doesn’t feel like the Star Trek I have adored for over 30 years.
Please, please don’t:
– Make Beverley’s son Picard’s (I’m hoping it’s a red herring, after all accent is not genetic and if he has never met Picard he would have presumably learned his words from his North American accented mother). Just please, don’t.
– Create a pointless marital issue between Troi and Riker (as some have suggested the comment from Riker could mean). I’m now worried that as reward for his action in chasing off the Romulans in Season 1, Dr Soong made a Minuet android for Riker which Deanna has just discovered.
– Put Geordi with Leah Brahms. Please don’t go there.
EDIT: Corrected “Geordie” to read “Geordi”. Am pretty sure La Forge is not from the North East of England.
I think that there might be more to the Shaw thing than him just ordering Seven to go by “Annika Hansen”; like, I think that he probably has some backstory with the Borg and Seven herself was willing to go along with it in spite of her own desires in a vain attempt to smoothe out her interactions with him. But yeah; even if it weren’t a deadname, compelling your subordinate to go by a particular name other than their own seems like something that should be reported to whatever the Starfleet equivalent of an HR department is.
(Of course, that said, I seem to recall one episode of Voyager where Seven started calling Harry Kim by a Borg designation and it was played for laughs in spite of what an absolutely toxic work environment that would be)
No doubt, the episode used and abused every nostalgia trick in the book, and Riker’s Titan strategy was flawed at best. And yet, I haven’t felt this giddy and involved in a season opener in a long time. I just couldn’t sit still at all for every single of those 50 minutes. The episode really sold the ‘call to adventure’ aspect of the story. In that sense, it was already a far more effective season opener than last season’s protracted premiere, though I like it that they’re taking it slow with the ‘gathering the old crew’ aspect of the story.
Raffi’s side of the story is pretty effective so far. Yes, I could see the drug addict misdirection coming from a mile away (I’ve watched too many spy films to not see the signs), but I’m intrigued to see who or what is responsible for bombing that facility. As far as mystery plots go, this is a good enough setup that makes me invested to see what’s next.
Whatever the end result we get this season, this opener – if anything – shows that Terry Matalas has a degree of passion and reverence for Trek history that dwarfs his former bosses’ (speaking of which, we’re getting to review a Matalas-written episode of Enterprise next week).
I loved it. Great start to the season. Yes, originally this show was just going to focus on Picard and how he’s changed and bla bla, and we got to do that already for two seasons. But the masses have really wanted to see the rest of the TNG characters and learn what they’ve been up to, as well as see a reunion of everybody. So I’m ecstatic about that. I have a feeling this will be a much more fitting send off for this gang than Nemesis was. How wonderful to start of the season with Crusher and give her something so interesting to do as she was underutilized in the TV series and marginalized in the movies. She’s going to get her just due. And it may be cliché that Crusher’s son is also Picard’s and that’s why she’s hidden the son from him (à la David Marcus in Star Trek II) but I like it. What better reveal than to learn that Picard has had a son all this time to in a sort of way carry on his legacy. Can’t wait to see where the season goes from here!
Can somebody please turn on the lights on the Titan bridge?
Terry Matalas has clarified the time period. He said that the season is in fact set in 2401, that the launch date in the Instagram logs for the Titan is incorrect, that Capt. Shaw’s five years in command include the “old” Titan and overseeing the refit, and that Frontier Day commemorates the launch of the NX-01.
Thank you, TrekMovie: https://trekmovie.com/2023/02/18/exclusive-picard-showrunner-explains-the-star-trek-enterprise-roots-of-mtalas-prime-and-frontier-day/?fbclid=IwAR0E0NJ064FbR4hN8FabTXtw_sZKfIVQCFs5oP2UMbVDVg4iPB_qZJLIR2w&mibextid=ykz3hl#leadan8ajchgjo3s1s
@130/Chase – Wait, so it’s just a few months after the previous season? I don’t know how to feel about that.
I suppose it makes sense that Seven could have been fast-tracked into an officer position, given that she effectively served as Voyager‘s science officer for four years, and as fleet-commander during negotiations with the Borg.
@130/Chase: Okay, there’s no way both season 2 and season 3 could be in 2401. Season 2 began on the last day of harvest season at Picard’s vineyard, which in that part of France would most likely be October. But this episode opened with a reference to spring cleaning, and if the upcoming Frontier Day is the anniversary of NX-01’s launch, it would have to be April 12.
I suppose climate change could’ve moved the harvest season in France from what it is today, but it’s hard to believe Seven could’ve made it all the way to first officer in just 2-3 months.
@131/jaimebabb: Janeway has immense pull as demonstrated on Prodigy when she got the alien kid’s positions on her ship as trainees or something, and bypassing the academy route.
@132 I thought the same thing. Maybe they’re also retconning season 2 back to 2400? Or do they definitively state that S2 was in 2401?
But we do know that Earth is climate controlled in the future, so maybe harvests happen at different times.
Since decades are also reckoned in a nonsense way, as in the 90’s being from 90-99 instead of 91-00, making the first decade CE only nine years long, maybe they reckon centuries the same way, and the first year of the 25th century is 2400?
I’m seeing a lot of fond Lower Decks references here, perhaps I should give it another try. I found the name tough to digest simply because it is a comedic series that references one of the saddest episodes of TNG ever (the kind you have to be in a certain mood to watch, completely the opposite of, say, a Moriarty ep).
If I had to guess what this season is all about, based on what I’ve seen, maybe Sela is Yar’s second daughter and a lovechild with Lieutenant Castillo was brought to term. And then somehow the Borg invasion accentuated a personal hatred for Picard. It would be sad if that is the case because “the child of” plotlines get close to the tropiness of that “other” star franchise.
All in all, I thought the TNG movies were mostly trash. I think other than SNW (and Anson Mount’s beautiful presence on Discovery) modern trek isn’t All that great either. S1 an S2 of Picard were mostly unwatchable. It’s really hard to love a franchise and see it mostly squandered. So I am hopeful for a proper treatment with S3. Wil Wheaton seems genuinely excited, so I will give it the benefit of the doubt. They should have done this two seasons ago.
Cheers
@130 / Chase:
Matalas has an interesting observation on Shaw in that interview:
“It is up to a captain to pick their first officer. So clearly, [Shaw] saw something within [Seven]. I think he believes in her on many levels, but I think he definitely has some unspoken resentment about her past.”
So I’m more interested now in seeing that fleshed out.
@135/JasonD: “Since decades are also reckoned in a nonsense way, as in the 90’s being from 90-99 instead of 91-00, making the first decade CE only nine years long”
There was no “first decade CE.” The Julian calendar wasn’t even invented until 525 CE and wasn’t consistently adopted until the tenth century, and it was then replaced by the Gregorian calendar in 1582, recalculating the dates in a way that conflicted with the Julian calendar. So what’s nonsense is treating the arbitrary, mutable human construct of the calendar as if it were some rigid absolute.
It makes perfect sense to define the nineties as the years that begin with ninety. That’s literally where the name comes from. And by the same token, it makes more sense to define the century by when the 100s digit changes rather than the ones digit. That’s why there was a gigantic global celebration of the dawn of the 21st century on January 1, 2000, with only a minority of calendar pedants waiting until a year later. So I’m sure most people will see 2400 as the start of the 25th century.
And so what if the (hypothetical) first decade is retroactively defined as nine years long? At least that’s a unique exception to the usual rule, as opposed to adding an extra day every four years, or having months ranging from 28 to 31 days. And a year is 52 weeks and 1 day long, so that doesn’t come out evenly either.
The idea that a ship in the 25th century would be a retrofit of a ship from the 23rd century is completely ridiculous and insulting. It’s absurd that a 25th century saucer section would mimic that of a Constitution Class circa TMP. I literally couldn’t handle it and stopped watching immediately after the space dock sequence, which was already a nauseating replay from ST:VI. FFS, clear all moorings and proceed at 1/4 impulse – at least the conn didn’t try to dictate protocol while in space dock! This is a show written by VFX people or something and completely ignores canon law established in ST:LD. The design of the Titan A is awful and makes zero sense. The Jeffries and the Probert designs are magnificent exercises in simplicity of form. Whoever came up with this mess is way too much into the idea of additive design. 4 impulse engines? All the superstructure behind the bridge models? What a mess. Can’t even.
@132 “it’s hard to believe Seven could’ve made it all the way to first officer in just 2-3 months.”
Geordi went from Lt. Jg helm officer to Lt. Chief Engineer to Lt. Cmdr. in two years. compare that to how long it took Worf to reach the same rank.
Kirk went from cadet to Captain in a matter of days (he still had the scars). It’s obvious that promotions and assignments in Starfleet are much more flexible than in the present day.
For some reason, Seven was placed in a command position with little to no training for the job.
Seven’s being granted the rank of Commander is entirely commensurate with her experience under the tutelage and sponsorship of two of Starfleet’s greatest CO’s, and as a transfer officer from a foreign service (the Rangers). Presumably she underwent some brief training in Starfleet protocol and philosophy but (like Kira in the final arc of DS9) this is someone with extensive skills and command experience who has been working with Starfleet for a long time and there is no reason that upon being sworn in she wouldn’t be commissioned at a command rank.
Presumably as the service arm of a large and constantly growing Federation of worlds, Starfleet regularly integrates personnel from its member worlds’ internal agencies and those of newly admitted planets, and is always interested in the recruitment of highly qualified personnel from outside the Federation as well. I would imagine that it has a highly streamlined process for vetting, evaluating, and training such personnel.
I could see her coming in as a Lt. Commander based on prior experience. However, to be immediately placed as second in command doesn’t make any sense, particularly when ypu look at her lack of leadership abilities. Sure, if season three were two or three years after season two it might work but not if it’s just been a couple of months.
It takes time and training to lead a large and diverse crew. Just plunking her there based on the say so of Janeway and Picard is closer to nepotism.
@142 But as Terry Matalas said, Shaw personally chose her to be his XO. Picard didn’t even know she was there.
Is it just me, or is personally requesting an ex-Borg XO so that you can deadname her and subject her to microaggressions even worse than just doing those things after having one sent to you against your wishes?
There are all kinds of problems here. I just assumed that Shaw had Seven forced on him as a condition under which he got command of Titan. If he chose her and then decided to deadname her and treat her like garbage, then jaimebabb is correct, he’s an even bigger piece of shit than presented…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Keith I think Shaw might be what redeems the season in the end. Just a fantastic actor playing the bad guy role. Think back to the episode from the Klingon Civil War with the actor that hated Data. That actor absolutely NAILED it, right? Shaw has been set up equally well.
@145 Other than the name thing (which I think we’ll learn is due to his Locutus-induced trauma), has Shaw actually done anything horrible to Seven? Seems to me like a lot of their conflict is Seven chaffing under a very rigid captain instead of serving under one who’s willing to commit war crimes or destroy an entire timeline to save her life.
Also, I think one of Picard, Riker, or maybe even Crusher is going to call him out on the name thing before too long.
@144/jaimebabb: I hesitated to use the deadnaming analogy myself, since I don’t think Seven has entirely rejected the name Annika Hansen or had it legally changed. In VGR, she preferred not to be addressed as Annika, but in “Dark Frontier,” when she rejected the Borg Queen’s attempts to win her back over, she said “I am Annika Hansen. Human.” In “Unimatrix Zero,” we learned that her alternate self in the virtual world of Unimatrix Zero had grown up thinking of herself as Annika. And in “Author, Author,” when her aunt Irene called her Annika, she was “slightly uncomfortable” (as Memory Alpha puts it) but didn’t correct her. And in PIC season 2, as far as I recall, she didn’t seem bothered by using the name of her alternate-timeline counterpart, President Annika Hansen.
So I think Seven still acknowledges Annika Hansen as part of her identity, maybe even still lists it as her legal name, though she prefers to be addressed as Seven. I don’t think she would’ve tolerated Shaw’s use of her birth name if she’d abandoned it completely.
@CLB 148 – I have to disagree on that. In Voyager, she was still transitioning back to human after growing up as a Borg, and so her human name was a part of the identity she was looking to reclaim, even if she was “slightly uncomfortable” using outside of situations like telling off the Borg Queen. But she has now had 20 plus years to settle into who she is as a person, and there is no indication she has called herself anything beyond Seven of Nine in the interim. (The situation in Picard Season 2 where she was deliberately trying to hide her true identity in an alternate timeline doesn’t change that.) And she is clearly not happy with having to use the Annika Hansen name here. Really, that alone should be enough, whether she bothered to legally change her name or not.
I’m not sure I see what the problem is with Shaw. The show isn’t endorsing what he’s doing to Seven. Obviously, he’s a heel. So, he’ll either die or see the error of his ways. I mean, that is if they bothered to write a coherent story this season.
Pretty sure they won’t be erecting a statue of him at the end, anyhow.
@149/northman: “In Voyager, she was still transitioning back to human after growing up as a Borg, and so her human name was a part of the identity she was looking to reclaim, even if she was “slightly uncomfortable” using outside of situations like telling off the Borg Queen.”
I think it’s misunderstanding Seven’s journey to call it “transitioning back to human.” Rather, she defined her own identity which incorporated both human and Borg. That’s why she chose to call herself Seven rather than Annika — because she was a different person from Annika Hansen. But “Dark Frontier” and “Unimatrix Zero” suggest that she came to accept that Annika Hansen was part of who she was, just not all of who she was.
“But she has now had 20 plus years to settle into who she is as a person, and there is no indication she has called herself anything beyond Seven of Nine in the interim.”
No indication she hasn’t either. The thing to do in the absence of hard evidence is to stay open to all possibilities, not arbitrarily pick one.
Although as I said, I don’t believe either Seven or Starfleet would allow Captain Shaw to call her Annika Hansen if she’d completely rejected the name. I mean, it’s Seven. She doesn’t take crap from anyone. She’d stand up for her rights if it were a question of rights. The fact that she goes along with it is evidence in itself that she’s willing to accept being addressed by that name, even if it’s not her first choice.
So I think the most logical interpretation is that Annika Hansen is still her legal name, the name she uses for official purposes, and that Shaw is a stickler who insists she use her legal name instead of her preferred nickname.
@150/Winslow: “I’m not sure I see what the problem is with Shaw… Obviously he’s a heel.”
That is the problem — that he’s written as too caricatured a heel. He’s a straw man set up to be an obstacle for the characters, and is obnoxious in ways that don’t make logical sense — for instance, there’s no way a starship captain could get away with forcing a senior captain and a retired admiral to sleep in junior officer bunks.
@148 I’ve had similar thoughts. Given Starfleet’s reluctance to admit her at all, maybe one their requirements when they eventually allowed her was that she had to join under her human name. Shaw, because of both his anti-Borg animus and his general inclination towards structure and order, naturally insists that she use it.
Personally, I never really liked that she stuck with her Borg designation in the first place. That a name imposed on her by her kidnappers and enslavers who destroyed her family. I’d always hoped that at some point she would feel comfortable in reclaiming her real name as she became more human.
I dont play this game but Star Trek Online recenetly released a “season” with Mcfadden voicing the Beverly charterer named “Mirror Beverly”. The mirror character has very similar visual appearance to Rambo Beverley and maybe a ship from the mirror world would have weird shotgun phasers?
This one was FUN! (It was especially amusing to see Captain Shaw prove that LOWER DECKS is an exaggeration, rather than an outright fabrication; it was rather charming that Captain Riker’s Titan served well enough to inspire a namesake; it was amusing to see that Geordi LaForge managed to people well enough to acquire a little LaForge; and it was downright hilarious to look at Doctor Bev’s second son, then look at Picard, then just giggle as the maths hit the cerebellum*).
Also, in all humility, I should confess that it took me longer than it should have to recognise the name ‘Rachel Garret’ as the late captain of the Enterprise-C.
*I know, I know, HACK HACK HACK – but it still amuses me.
By the way, @krad, it seems only fair to point out that one man can have many favourites: I took Picard’s remark about Enterprise-D as meaning it was his favourite Enterprise, not necessarily his favourite starship period.
As somebody who’s reaction to seeing a certain Sovereign-class cameo in the opening rainbow was utter glee I’m tempted to say the man was objectively wrong, but since dear Admiral Picard has lived on both classes and I’ve only ever admired them from a distance, I’m willing to allow him the benefit of the doubt.
@155/ED: I’m pretty sure the starship featured in the tag before the episode begins is the Titan (the hero ship of this season of Picard) and not the Enterprise-E.
Long time (re)watcher, first time commenter, as I’m finally able to join in real-ish time after a decade of reading dating back from the TNG recaps…
One possibility I’ve been mulling is that the new boy might be an adopted son. I just hope it’s not revealed that the Ferengi or whoever were messing with his DNA to make his accent resemble a British Frenchman’s, like a late-seventh season plot device.
I did still smile at the use of the ST:WOK titles for the update of “In the 25th Century…” and the riff on the original Spacedock exit music.
@152/Chase: “Personally, I never really liked that she stuck with her Borg designation in the first place. That a name imposed on her by her kidnappers and enslavers who destroyed her family. I’d always hoped that at some point she would feel comfortable in reclaiming her real name as she became more human.”
As I said, I think she feels that she isn’t really Annika Hansen anymore, and I think that the Voyager crew’s willingness to let her go by Seven of Nine while she was still shaping her identity is something she appreciates as the first time she was given a choice in defining who she was. So I think she associates the name with that more than with her time as a Borg.
I mean, Borg drones rarely speak or are spoken to, despite the idiocy of the scenes in seasons 6-7 where the Queen was shown giving verbal orders to drones. They’re a hive mind. They’re cells in a single body. They think and act in concert and have no need of verbal speech among themselves. So as a rule, Seven never needed to refer to herself aloud as “Seven of Nine.” She didn’t need to say it; it just was. It wasn’t even a name, just a part number for an interchangeable cog. It didn’t become a personal name until after she was separated from the Collective and became a person again. So it stands to reason that she’d associate the sound of her name more with her Voyager experiences than her Borg experiences.
@159 And that makes sense to me. I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable that she would stick with Seven of Nine (especially since she never considered herself human while on Voyager), it’s just a choice that I personally dislike and disagree with. I recently re-watched “The Impossible Box”, and Hugh explains how the “ExB” name is helpful in their recovery, and that he learned the power of a new name from the Enterprise crew. It just seems strange to me that Seven has chosen essentially the opposite approach.
#151
Well, that is a problem — if you still expect subtlety and well written characters in Star Trek. Frankly, I think I’m past that point. The title of this article has it right. “If I were you, I’d lower my expectations.”
Looking into my crystal ball here, this season is probably going to be a cartoonish journey through very familiar territory where the characters and the plot points don’t always add up and the best you can hope for are some moments that’ll look good as Youtube clips. In other words, another season of modern Star Trek.
So I’m going to try to enjoy it, finally, for the low grade 10-hour B-movie that it is.
#151
“I think it’s misunderstanding Seven’s journey to call it “transitioning back to human”’
I agree my wording there was less than elegant. She was, as you say, defining a new identity for herself after being subsumed by the Borg at a young age. However, the point that she only really used her Annika designation to rebel against the Borg Queen while otherwise calling herself Seven of Nine remains on point.
‘No indication she hasn’t [used the Annika name in the interim] either’
Well, only if you ignore the last two seasons of Picard where she solely used the Seven name, and the fact that she seemed less than happy about using Annika when she cut off Picard to introduce herself to Riker. If she continued to use the name off-screen without any issues, why act so upset about using it now?
‘I don’t believe either Seven or Starfleet would allow Captain Shaw to call her Annika Hansen if she’d completely rejected the name’
I’d agree for the Star Trek and Starfleet of the TNG/DS9/Voyager era. This one doesn’t seem nearly as IDIC-friendly. Sure, it does seem out of character for Seven (or should we start calling her Annika as well?), but it would hardly be the first time they ignored character consistency to ram through a plot point.
Also, I know most people have been using this as a callout for trans “deadnaming”, but I also have been thinking about two other instances of naming issues and “legal” names with this situation. One is for immigrants who often Anglicize their names to something easier for English speakers to say and use (although one of my former co-workers also used a French version of his name while working in Quebec, so he technically had three versions of his name running around), even if they might prefer to use the name they grew up with. And second, I happen to live in an area with a large First Nations population, whose traditional naming conventions have little to do with how us colonists treat them, and whose legal names are, well, something more or less imposed on them by people who were real sticklers for their kind of rules as well. And they are still pretty much forced to use those “legal” names for everything, since in many cases, databases, government and otherwise, won’t even recognize the symbols they use to write out their “actual” names. (That is starting to change a little bit for some groups in some jurisdictions, but remains an issue overall.) In short, someone being a stickler for “legal” names doesn’t hold nearly as much water for me as it used to.
‘So I think the most logical interpretation is…’
Listen, I’d love there to be a logical explanation as well, but if Seven (Annika) was happy to use Annika as her “legal” name, why act so upset when using it here? Because that doesn’t seem too logical to me. And I’ll note your very next paragraph in answer to Winslow notes that there is a complete failure in logical sense regarding Captain Shaw and his actions. Which, I guess I have to say I agree with.
On Picard’s “favorite” ship: I had the same thought re his conversation with Scotty, but it’s possible that the admittedly short time Picard spent post-“Relics” and even post-finale on the Enterprise-D tipped the scales. Given where “All Good Things…” left off he may have bonded all the more with the crew and the ship; the intervening years may also have colored that stretch a certain way. It’s still a shame that everything has to come back to the Enterprise-D at the expense of the Stargazer or the larger breadth of his life.
@162/northman: “Well, only if you ignore the last two seasons of Picard where she solely used the Seven name,”
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I almost never use my middle name, and most of my friends that I’ve known for decades probably couldn’t tell you what the “L.” stands for. But it’s still my legal middle name and I have no objection to it being used (it’s Leslie). It’s just not my habit to use it.
“and the fact that she seemed less than happy about using Annika when she cut off Picard to introduce herself to Riker.”
That only proves preference for one alternative, not complete rejection of the other. A lot of people aren’t crazy about being addressed by their full given names, preferring to go by nicknames or initials or whatever, but they still use their full names on official forms and documents and such.
“If she continued to use the name off-screen without any issues, why act so upset about using it now?”
I didn’t say she used it without any issues. I said that there’s a big difference between not preferring to be addressed a certain way and actually changing one’s name and identity. You’re trying to reduce this to a straw-man binary, that either she’s “happy” with the name Annika or absolutely rejects it, and that’s ignoring the gradations in the middle. I’m not saying she likes the name; I’m saying there are different degrees of disliking it.
“it would hardly be the first time they ignored character consistency to ram through a plot point.”
No, but we don’t yet know that’s the case here. In the absence of more hard data, we should keep our minds open to every possible interpretation of the data, without bias, and wait for more evidence to support or refute a given interpretation, rather than jumping to a conclusion either way. That’s just basic critical thinking.
@164 – Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? Okay, but critical thinking also means dealing with the evidence we do have. And what evidence we do have is that Seven, post-Voyager, has been calling herself Seven, until Captain Shaw, who we both acknowledge is a compete ass acting in ways that defy logical sense, insisted that she use Annika Hansen instead, and she seems quite unhappy about that. That’s the evidence and the data. Now that evidence might be limited, but it is definitely there. And against that, we basically have that absence of evidence you mentioned. Do we need to keep our minds open? Absolutely. And it is true that as the series progresses we might find out more and that could support a different interpretation? Also a definite yes. But right now, all the actual data we do have points to this being a more significant issue than Shaw just being a stickler for “legal names”. You are free to continue speculating, but it is not bias or a lack of open-mindedness to reject interpretations that rely on that speculation until there is some actual data to support them. As such, I remain comfortable with my, admittedly provisional, conclusion as fitting what evidence we do have.
@165/northman: ” Okay, but critical thinking also means dealing with the evidence we do have.”
Which is exactly what I’m doing, by recognizing the limits of that evidence and not making assumptions beyond it.
Yes, we know Seven dislikes being called Annika Hansen. But it is hasty to equate that to “deadnaming,” and potentially insensitive to trans people to misuse that analogy for something that might be less extreme. It is important not to co-opt that word recklessly or use it in the wrong way. It might turn out to be analogous, but until we know for sure, I’m going to be cautious. I’m going to have the humility to recognize that any assumption I make could be wrong and thus I should question everything. It is rarely wrong to be patient and wait for more data.
FWIW, Christopher, I’m on northman’s side of this argument. Annika Hansen is the name Seven was born with, and one she has continually rejected in all the time that she’s had a choice in the matter as an adult, from her four years on Voyager all the way to the turn of the 25th century, when the woman she loves and is in a relationship with calls her “Seven.” As northman said, she obviously really really hates the fact that Shaw insists on her using Hansen. Deadnaming, pretty much by definition, is calling someone by their birth name when they’ve changed it, which is exactly what’s happening here…..
And I prefer to go with the harsh term because what Shaw is doing here is reprehensible. It is not up to him what Seven chooses to call herself, and to force her to do otherwise is against the principles of the Federation and Starfleet.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Have to agree with Krad and Northman here. The right to your own identity is among the most fundamental of liberties. One can speculate about How adamant Seven is about this, but It’s pretty clear from what we’ve seen and heard on screen that Shaw’s insistence on using Seven’s human birth name is more than just a minor annoyance to her. The scriptwriters used this in particular to hammer home what is supposed to be our initial disagreeable impression of Shaw even before meeting him.
@167/krad: Well, I’m not going to assume “deadnaming” is the correct analogy until I have more information, because I’m not trans and I don’t feel I have the right to co-opt that concept for my own purposes. Just because something might look similar to that, from my perspective as an outsider, does not entitle me to assume it is the same as that. It’s not my term to use, certainly not without a lot more information and consideration.
The fundamental problem is that you, northman, and others keep defining this as an argument with “sides.” The truth is not a competition. It’s not about taking sides or betting on a winner. It’s about keeping an open mind and following the evidence. I’m not advocating a “side.” I’m saying we shouldn’t rush into picking one side or the other until we have more information. I initially thought it was deadnaming too, but then I took the time to question my own assumption and ask if there was another possible way of interpreting what we saw. That’s all I’m trying to do here. I’m not “taking a side” — I’m acknowledging the room for uncertainty, enumerating the possible alternatives.
Quoth Christopher: “The fundamental problem is that you, northman, and others keep defining this as an argument with ‘sides.’”
That’s probably because you keep arguing about it. *wry grin*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@170/krad: That’s misconstruing my intention. As I said, I initially thought it was deadnaming too, but then I questioned that. What I’m doing is not disagreeing with others, but second-guessing myself, stopping to consider whether there are other possibilities beyond my first impression. I’m just trying to enumerate the alternative possibilities that haven’t already been brought up, because it’s important that they all be on the table. I’m not saying that any of them have to be right. I’m just cautioning against rushing to the conclusion that they aren’t.
The most important thing is to be able to question ourselves. If we can’t do that honestly, we have no business questioning anyone else.
That seems like a good place to wrap up this particular back-and-forth–as alway, we really appreciate how earnest and respectful these Trek-related discussions tend to be, even when the participants are expressing differing opinions. Thanks to everyone on this thread for your thoughtfulness and civility, which feels all too rare…
From https://trekmovie.com/2023/02/22/season-3-of-star-trek-picard-is-100-certified-fresh-more-images-and-behind-the-scenes-details-revealed/:
I call Beverly’s kid as a clone of her husband Jack, especially given the DNA helix and nucleotide base pairs shown in the closing credits.
I felt the same way about a lot of this episode. I REALLY wanted to like it, but parts just left me scratching my head. And one HUGE difference between this show and TNG: the lighting! Is there an energy crisis in the 25th Century? The Enterprise-D was lit up like a corporate boardroom. The Titan (and pretty much everyplace else) is looks and feels like an unlit dungeon.
And I am having visions this is some weird Khan/Nemesis mashup–Beverly’s kid is somehow another Picard clone. Gosh, I hope not.
I liked that Shaw wasn’t impressed by Riker and Picard’s film flam act, and even that he pointed out that they were loose canons at the best of times, fun to read about, but a nightmare in the flesh. I’m perfectly happy with a by the book captain, but as Ben Stiller’s character points out in Walter Mittey, he “didn’t need to be a dick about it.”
Both Picard and Riker make some cringeworthy moves. Picard’s roasting of the ensign on the bridge was uncalled for, and just made him look like a senile uncle that’s embarrassing to have around. Riker’s takedown of Crusher’s son after he’d already been talked down by Picard was just petty and missed a great opportunity.
In my remake, Riker lets the kid unspool his story, then looks to Picard for a go-ahead, which he gives by shrugging resignedly. THEN Riker does a classic disarm move and they point out that they’re the good guys and they’re here to help, so let’s all be friends, OK? This establishes that the grown-ups have arrived and let’s get on with it.
But I’m in for the next episode.
Good points all Keith.
I have to admit that when I saw the starbase being destroyed my very first thought was “OMG Portal!” I swear that effect looks EXACTLY like what you see in the Portal video games!
I fail to understand why the Guinan of 2024 didn’t recognize Picard, since she first encountered him in the 19th century — in fact, the Guinan on the Enterprise told Picard that he MUST go on the away mission, or they might never meet at all.
I think this is a mistake, the writers clearly forgot that episode of TNG, when Picard and other crew members time-traveled to the 19th century and first met Guinan.
Bad, writers; bad!