Whatever one might say about this season of Star Trek: Picard, it absolutely has people talking. This season has achieved quite the Q-rating (far more than the season with Q in it). This is purely anecdotal, but I’ve been seeing a lot more people talking about this season than they have the other seasons, or even the other current Trek shows—more to the point, I’m seeing people who almost never talk about Star Trek talk about this season of Picard.
After this episode, they’re going to be talking even more…
Honestly, part of me wonders what even is the point of reviewing episodes of Picard season three, because this is pretty much entirely fan service occasionally broken up by plot. Mind you, it’s really really good fan service, which is good, because it is not a really really good plot. And I watch each episode and enjoy the hell out of it, and I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the next bit every week.
But hey, I’ve come this far…
Three important things happen in this episode, and it’s probably what all the conversations will be about for the next week.
The first is that we fucking finally find out what’s behind the red door in Jack Crusher’s brain meats: it’s the Borg. Yes, somehow Jack inherited Borginess from his old man. When Troi discovers this during their telepathic hypnotherapy session, she immediately breaks their connection and runs to Picard, not just to tell him about what’s happening with his son, but also to initiate protocols that are in place for how to deal with someone compromised by the Borg. Marina Sirtis does these scenes very well, and I have to say that the writers of Picard have done a better job with her as a therapist in this episode, in “Nepenthe,” and in “Surrender” than the writers of TNG did for the seven years that show was on the air.
Devastated by this news, Jack—aided by his telepathy—steals a shuttlecraft. I want to complain about how ridiculously easy it is for Jack to do so, but that ship sailed (so to speak) in Trek years ago. I mean, a de-powered Q stole a shuttle, er, somehow in TNG’s “Déjà Q,” and at that point it became obvious that a bored paramecium could steal a Starfleet shuttle without a problem, so, y’know, whatever.
Jack listens to the voices that are still in his head, and finds himself a Borg Cube. Just as his old man was Locutus, Jack will be Vox—the voice of the Borg. (Why they need a voice is unclear.)
The explanation for this almost makes sense. We’ve already seen that these versions of the changelings are evolved, and the Borg have also evolved in a way: altering their drones’ biology instead of simply changing them by grafting technology onto them. Picard’s Irumodic Syndrome happened, not because of his genetics, but because of how the Borg altered him when they assimilated him in TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds.” Specifically he was altered to be the Borg’s mouthpiece.
Those alterations conveniently explain a retroactive plot hole. In First Contact, Picard was able to hear the voices of the Borg (in much the same way Jack has been hearing voices), and yet we met several other ex-Borg on Voyager—the primary example being Seven of Nine, of course, as well as Icheb and the other kids rescued in “Collective,” not to mention the ones encountered in “Unity”—who did not hear the voices of the Collective the way Picard did in the 1996 movie. Yet Picard was only assimilated for two-and-a-half seconds, while Seven (to give one example) was part of the Collective for twenty years.
This alteration to his parietal lobe is what the changelings were after, and the fact that he passed it on to Jack is why they’re after him, too. Apparently, the rogue changelings were working with the Borg, infiltrating Starfleet in order to make alterations to Starfleet transporters so that Picard’s altered DNA would be made part of the transporter architecture.
The end result of this is that anyone whose brains aren’t fully formed yet—in humans, it’s anyone under the age of twenty-five—becomes assimilated by the Borg. These newly created drones proceed to attack the older officers, while the newly networked fleet is now entirely under Borg control.
Conveniently, this means that most of our main characters—not just the Big Seven, but also Shaw, Musiker, and Seven—are spared. For a little extra angst, La Forge’s two daughters are not spared. Neither are Mura or Esmar, and seeing a Borgified Esmar sitting in the command chair declaring Titan to be under Borg control is just heartbreaking.
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How much sense this makes is, um, questionable. First of all, the notion that the changelings would just be lackeys working for the Borg is ridiculous. Yes, this is just a batch of rogues—Worf made that clear when he explained back in “Seventeen Seconds” that Odo warned him about these changelings, who were not part of the Great Link any longer—but still, it’s a real come-down for them.
And the Borg targeting Starfleet, on the one hand, makes absolutely no sense for the Borg as they were created and established on TNG. Back in “Q Who” when we first met them, Q described them thusly: “They’re not interested in political conquest, wealth, or power as you know it. They’re simply interested in your ship. They’ve identified it as something they can consume.”
On the other hand, it’s in keeping with the rather boring direction Voyager took them in, turning the Borg Queen into a mustache-twirling villain who views Starfleet as a foe they need to torment and take out. Which makes nothing like sense for a massive collective of drones, to whom Starfleet should be, at best, a minor annoyance, and who anyhow shouldn’t be concerned with revenge or nonsense like that.
By the by, we see—or, rather, hear—the Borg Queen in this episode, and it’s one of two more past actors brought back for a guest shot, following Michelle Forbes in “Imposters” and Tim Russ in “Dominion”: Alice Krige. Unsurprisingly, we only get Krige’s voice. Krige had already proven willing to voice the Queen again (in Lower Decks’ “I, Excretus”), but for Picard season two, the live-action role was re-cast with Annie Wersching, likely because the now-nearly-seventy-year-old Krige didn’t want to go through the process of being made up like the Queen. Wersching, however, died tragically of breast cancer earlier this year, and instead we get Krige’s voice and a shadowed figure that’s supposed to represent the Queen.
The other is a delightful surprise, though like Forbes’ Ro, she appears to come to a tragic end: Elizabeth Dennehy as now-Admiral Shelby. (In a nice touch, she’s given the first name of Elizabeth, which is the actor’s first name, and also the name she was given in the New Frontier novels by Peter David in which she was a main character. She also worked her way up to admiral in those books, so this is even consistent with that!) Shelby is in charge of the new flagship of the fleet, which is introduced during Frontier Day: the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC 1701-F.
And then she’s shot by the assimilated members of her crew. The transmission of her distress call is cut off before we see the end result of her being shot, but she is shot, and the drones are unlikely to be using the stun setting.
Shelby was introduced as a Borg expert in TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds,” and has consistently been a favorite among the show’s guest stars, so it’s nice to see her back, though her ending kinda sucks. Riker even comments on the irony of her, of all people, introducing a networked fleet, a very Borg-like technological advancement.
Realizing they need to get the hell off the ship, our heroes gather on the maintenance deck to try to snag a maintenance shuttle because shuttlecraft aren’t part of the fleet-wide ship network. It’s not clear why the shuttles aren’t, except, I guess, that the plot won’t work otherwise.
The crew has been in a running firefight with the assimilated Titan crew (with the good guys all firing on stun), and the action is set up in such a way that it contrives for Shaw, Seven, and Musiker to stay on board while the TNG Reunion Gang all board the shuttle.
Shaw is then killed, which is the second of the important things that I think people will be talking about. His last words are to finally call his first officer “Seven of Nine,” which he does while saying that the ship is now hers. Given that the ship is under Borg control and most of her crew is either assimilated or dead, that’s kind of a dick move on his part, but that’s in keeping with the character.
While I absolutely adore Todd Stashwick’s work in playing Captain Liam Shaw, I really intensely dislike the character. Yes, he got a lot of the best lines, but he’s also an asshole, and he shouldn’t have waited until he was on his metaphorical deathbed to stop dead-naming Seven.
It’s to Stashwick’s credit that a large chunk of the fanbase were all “who’s this asshole?” in “The Next Generation” and will likely be all “you killed Shaw, you bastards!” this week. But still, I’m kinda glad the door is more or less closed on there being a Shaw-focused Titan series on Paramount+. (And the door is open for a Seven-of-Nine-focused Titan series, which I’d be all for…)
Then, finally, we have the big moment at the end—the third important thing people will be talking about, and possibly the thing people will be talking the most about. Back in “The Bounty,” La Forge père et fille discussed something in Hangar 12, and we find out what that is: La Forge has, in his spare time during his tenure as head of the Fleet Museum, been reconstructing the Enterprise-D. It’s not connected to the fleet network.
(Apparently, the Enterprise-E is unavailable. When La Forge mentions that, Worf defensively says, “That was not my fault.” Given that Worf is now wearing a Starfleet uniform with captain’s pips, it’s likely that Worf was given command of the E after Picard’s promotion to admiral, and now we know something pretty dang serious happened to it….)
Of course, my first thought is, “Why the hell are you going on the D, when the Defiant is right there?” As it is, it’s not even remotely clear what one forty-year-old ship is supposed to do against an entire Borg fleet. Achieve victory through the power of nostalgia?
All right, let’s be fair. That was not my first thought; it was my fourth or fifth. My first thought was, “Damn, they re-created the bridge perfectly,” and my second thought was, “Damn, it’s good to see them all on that bridge again,” and my subsequent thoughts were all other forms of fangoobery glee before my critical brain finally jumped in and pointed out the logic flaws.
I do like the fact that, while they’re talking on the bridge about how they’re family, Troi makes sure to remind them that Jack, Sidney, and Alandra are also their family, and they need to be rescued. This almost makes up for the fact that La Forge seems utterly unconcerned about his daughters once they arrive at the Fleet Museum. It’s frustrating, as LeVar Burton has generally done his best work as Geordi La Forge in this season, but his lack of concern for his daughters once they left Titan stands out, and not in a good way.
Oh, we get one more bit of fan service on the bridge of the Enterprise: the computer voice, which is Majel Barrett’s. It’s obviously pulled from earlier recordings of the late actor’s work doing the voices of Starfleet computers (which is why the title character is referred to as “Captain Jean-Luc Picard”), but it’s still nice to hear Barrett’s voice one more time in a season that has been all about seeing folks one more time.
One final bit of fan service: we get a screen showing the fleet gathered for Frontier Day (which is explicitly established as the anniversary of the launch of the NX-01 in Enterprise‘s “Broken Bow“). Among the ships are the U.S.S. Okuda (named after Mike & Denise Okuda, co-authors of the Star Trek Encyclopedia, and Mike also did scenic design work on the first wave of spinoffs and several of the movies, including creating displays very much like the one showing all these ships), the U.S.S. Drexler (named after graphic and technical artist extraordinaire Doug Drexler), the U.S.S. Sutherland (the name of Horatio Hornblower’s ship in C.S. Forrester’s novels, one of Gene Roddenberry’s primary inspirations for Star Trek), the U.S.S. Tourangeau (after Sean Tourangeau, who designed the previous iteration of the U.S.S. Titan, as seen on the Titan novels and on Lower Decks), the U.S.S. John Kelly (named after the astronaut played by Phil Morris in Voyager‘s “One Small Step“), the U.S.S. Ibn al-Haythem (named after Hasan Ibn al-Haythem, the medieval astronomer), the U.S.S. Zheng He (named after Zheng He, the Ming Dynasty mariner, and also the ship Riker was in command of in “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2“), the U.S.S. Hikaru Sulu (named after George Takei’s character on the original series), the U.S.S. Forrest (named after Vaughn Armstrong’s character on Enterprise, who was himself named after DeForrest Kelly, who played Doctor McCoy on the original series), the U.S.S. Huygens (named after Christiaan Huygens, the seventeenth-century astronomer), and so many others that lots of fans will have fun pausing their playbacks and picking out…..
Somehow, this is all supposed to be tied up next week. Not really clear as to how, though I’m willing to bet real money that the running time will be a bit longer than the usual 45-50 minutes…
Keith R.A. DeCandido wrote the TNG novel A Time for War, a Time for Peace in 2004, in part to be the coda for the TNG crew that Star Trek: Nemesis utterly failed to be. The book was a USA Today best-seller and stayed in print for the better part of two decades, so he can’t complain too much that his notion has been bigfooted by Terry Matalas and the gang…
I think the line by the Majel computer voice was from Chain of Command Pt. 2 when Jellico transfers command back to Picard.
This episode might have my favorite use of the TNG leitmotif all Season.
Or, as I put it on TV Tropes:
“The TNG theme, which quietly sounds off when the 1701-D is first unveiled, starts building with the reveal of the restored bridge, and then finally surges into a triumphant fanfare as the USS Enterprise 1701-D clears the Fleet Museum and flies among the stars (and with her command crew) for the first time in thirty years — and to save the Federation again one last time.”
Wow. That was a lot. At least we have Discovery in the 32nd century to assure us that Starfleet survived!
No! Shaw! I’d been mentally preparing myself since I had a feeling he was going to die. I mean, if we get Star Trek: Legacy, I think people want to see it with Seven in command. But I’m going to miss Shaw so much. Him, in his dying breath, giving the conn to Seven and actually using her name. That was so beautiful.
The red door revelation–I kept seeing the Borg theory but discounted it as unlikely. But I was wrong. While the secrecy reveal was totally scary, I’m still confused. So, the Borg planted something in Locutus’s DNA so that he’d essentially sire a child who’d become a Borg mouthpiece. That’s an awful long con–plus what if Picard never procreated? But let’s set that aside since maybe that wasn’t indented. However, I’m confused about the transporter contamination. It seems like the transporter system automatically logged Picard contaminated DNA. Somehow the evolved Changelings discovered this and used it to destroy Starfleet? That seems like a stretch but I guess we’ll go with it.
Speaking of which, I hope all the young Starfleet officers who were assimilated end up okay.
Shelby! FLEET ADMIRAL SHELBY! I knew we were getting a cameo and had theories. But I never guessed it be her, since at this point, I thought it’d be a larger character. It was awesome seeing her even though she was taken away so soon.
It was nice seeing the Enterprise D again. I don’t get as nostalgic about stuff like that as other viewers, but it was nice moment.
It was a good episode, though I’d say the weakest of the season. That might because I expected the plot to come together more coherently. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Season 2 but it wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped.
I think that I might have been on board with the Borg plot (mostly) if this had been the first time that we’d seen them since the end of Voyager, but as it is, my primary thought was: Where’s Jurati?
I understand that Terry Matalas isn’t really interested in writing most of the characters original to this series, and I understand that a lot of people really dislike the second season, but surely to God, if you have a friendly Borg Collective on hand, this should become relevant when an unfriendly one is attacking! And indeed, attacking them in exactly the same way that Jurati did last season. Why the hell are they still networking starships together when Jurati used that very feature to hijack an entire fleet within seconds just a few months earlier in canon (in an episode that Terry Matalas co-wrote, no less!)? And if you have a character whose entire shtick is accepting voluntary recruits into a hive mind, maybe someone should bring that up when someone has a genetic predisposition towards Borgishness (if only to shoot the idea down).
Ugh. I worry that the whole plot has been soft-retconned out of existence, and I hate that, because it has been far and away the most interesting thing that this series has done, and a far more interesting thing to do with the Borg.
Also, am I the only one irritated that they went back for the classic Season 3-era Enterprise-D Bridge rather than just sticking with the Generations redesign?
@5/Mr. Magic – Personally, I’ve always hated the Generations redesign, so no.
Back after taking last week off from reviewing. To make a long story short, I was on vacation in the UK, and found I couldn’t access Paramount Plus there – nor could I find Picard for free on Amazon Prime, despite being told it was a standard part of service there. I guess P+ thought I was a UK viewer, but Amazon still thought I was in the U.S. Regardless, didn’t get to see the previous episode until Sunday, at which time my two cents would have been pointless.
This is a stronger episode than the last one, but I still have decidedly mixed feelings here – I have to disentangle how well done the episode is from my personal feelings about it. This is the first competently-done mystery box in modern serialized Trek…but I just was kind of unimpressed with what happened to be inside of it.
Don’t get me wrong, thematically speaking, using the Borg makes great sense. TNG had lots to do with the Borg, and nothing to do with the Changelings. It’s bound up in the personal trauma of Picard as well. My issue is just this is a well we’ve gone to in both Seasons 1 and 2. It’s not Matalas’s fault with the first season, but he was involved in Season 2 to some extent, so I don’t understand why he told two Borg stories in a row, with this one even undoing a good deal of last season. I pretty much knew that the Borg were somehow involved, but I had hoped the Changelings and some third party (whoever was behind The Face) were working together to exploit a Borg remnant in Jack. Instead we have Crusher just declare “the Borg and the Changelings have been working together all along!” and then the half-dead queen confirm it. Thus all nuance is pretty much gone, and it’s down to defeat the bad guy…again. Only I don’t think it works emotionally as well as with Vadic, because the motivations of this Queen haven’t been established onscreen…she’s an 11th hour antagonist. I guess she was The Face, and we’ll never get it explained?
I also understand thematically what they were going for with the only under-25s getting assimilated thing (even if all the actors portraying the characters were in their late 20s or 30s). I have to say that whole sequence was hard for me to suspend disbelief on however. Shaw’s entire bridge crew other than Seven were a bunch of inexperienced n00bs? That’s…that’s nuts. Looking online at U.S. Navy demographics, while it is true that nearly half of enlisted are under 25, only 14% of officers are – and bridge crew should be officers. If anything Starfleet should skew older, given advances in medical technology and it not being as rigorous of a job. Ships like the Titan should also be plumb assignments which tend to skew a bit older as well.
An aside: Has Starfleet been totally decapitated even if Picard & Co win? We’re told this is the entire fleet, and surely nigh every senior officer on a ship has now been killed. Weird thing to put in the penultimate episode; particularly because it’s an unforced error – Matalas didn’t need to say the entire fleet was there!
On the plus side, the emotional beats hit well here, and aside from some awkwardness in early-episode technobabble (and the weirdness that Deanna of all people gives a lecture about protocol) this was a well crafted, acted, paced, and even scripted episode. It did the job well. I’m just left hoping for more, and am really worried with one episode left we’re going to have a pretty shallow conclusion to this arc.
The biggest open question for me – is Jack going to die? The finale is titled The Last Generation, which could be seen as meaning “the previous generation” – how the oldsters need to save Starfleet with the youngins taken out – but there’s another meaning I can parse out here. Indeed, given all good climaxes come at an emotional cost, and Matalas had said he is intentionally making a TOS movie rendition for the TNG cast…well, we know how it ended for Kirk’s son.
Nostalgia value aside, though, may I say that it’s nice to finally get a set that has proper lighting on this series?
Did you ever see those made-for-TV reunion movies back in the day? They would allow you to catch up with most, if not all, your favorite characters in Mayberry and the like. That’s how I felt watching this episode. It wasn’t particularly good, but I did have a good time watching it. Does that make sense? It was cozy. Kind of stupid but cozy.
My enjoyment might also be due to this season finally going somewhere. Looking back, a big chunk of this has felt like a very long first act. I mean, all that buildup to… the most obvious villain of them all? Hey, Batman, did you know there’s a psychotic clown in town? Whatever.
I think the only part that made me cringe was the death of Shaw. Not the fact that they killed him off; I don’t like the character, either. It was that ‘I’ll finally respect you on my deathbed’ bit of hokum. Gimme a break. That was tiresome in war movies 50 years ago. Oh yeah, we got another little of that from the captain of the Excelsior: “Tell my fam—“
Yeah, speaking of family, oh brother.
After enjoying “Surrender,” I was deeply disappointed by this one. I saw everyone on social media desperately warning about avoiding spoilers for this episode, but they needn’t have bothered, because everything in it that the episode built up suspense for as a huge, startling revelation was exactly what the fans predicted would happen weeks in advance. It’s the Borg behind the door. Shaw finally acknowledges Seven’s name as he dies. The secret in Hangar 12 is the E-D. All incredibly predictable and by the numbers, which made the attempts to treat them all as big impressive reveals seem laughable.
And yes, there’s a ton of fanservice, but I don’t want to be fanserviced. I don’t want new stories to just remind me of old stuff I was a fan of — I want them to give me new stuff to be a fan of. Modern franchise fiction is so obsessed with drowning us in nostalgia that it carries no weight anymore. It was cool to see Kirk’s Enterprise again in “Relics” and “Trials and Tribble-ations” and “In a Mirror, Darkly” because most of those shows were not about nostalgia, so it was an exception. Now it’s just cliched and predictable.
It didn’t help that the story was so blatantly and illogically constructed to center on the TNG seven at the expense of everyone else. I mean, Seven and Raffi are supposed to be lead characters, but they were both marginalized here to a degree that actively offended me. Why the hell wasn’t Seven included in the briefing about Borg stuff?????? And Raffi barely had five lines. I have a similar sentiment about the La Forge sisters. The show spent weeks building up Sidney as a sympathetic character, but then she got reduced to Jack’s love interest and fighting puppet, and now she’s reduced even further to a mindless damsel in distress. It shouldn’t be necessary to treat the new characters (or Seven) so unfairly in order to focus on the core TNG cast.
Also, are we supposed to believe that everyone on the Titan other than the core characters is under 25? Where are all the career officers in their 30s or 40s? Also, why are there still so many people on the Titan? The crew was mostly evacuated a few weeks ago, and it sounded last week like Vadic’s forces were killing most of them off. There should hardly be anyone left aboard by now.
I’ll grant that the concepts behind the Borg plan were interesting. The explanation for how the Borg engineer drones’ genes to help them connect, leaving behind a residual imprint, was interesting. (Although, Keith, I didn’t get the sense that it was unique to Picard. Other ex-drones probably have it too, but they also have residual tech in them, so it’s not a mystery how they could still hear the Borg, unlike with Picard.) And the idea of hacking transporter patterns to write malware into people’s genes was quite clever. But I’m just tired of Borg stories and I’m tired of Save the Federation from Destruction stories.
It’s also disappointing that the plot thread of the Changeling victims of Section 31 torture has apparently just been dropped. I guess we won’t get any payoff for that or all the questions it raised, because it’s all just shallow plot mechanics. I saw the producers touting these last two episodes on Twitter as the ultimate TNG movie we never got, but that’s the wrong thing to aim for. The TNG movies (and the TOS movies) were much shallower and less intelligent on the whole than the show was.
Speaking of lack of intelligence, I just can’t get past the inanity of the idea of assembling the entirety of Starfleet in one place. Even aside from the obvious strategic folly of that, don’t these ships have jobs to do? I mean, good grief, half the fleet should be exploring so deep in space that it’d take them months or years to get back to Earth (although the modern producers tend to assume any distance in the galaxy can be covered within hours). And many of the rest should be busy patrolling hostile borders or dealing with planetary disasters or engaged in sensitive diplomatic missions or doing any number of other things that can’t be interrupted for a holiday. It’s an utterly nonsensical premise and it makes me wince every time they mention it.
I’ve found this season to be utterly disappointing, far more than I found either season 1 or 2, in part because it has been such a cynical exercise in using nostalgia and a small world syndrome to tell such a dreary, uninteresting story.
“What if Picard had a son who happened to be a secret Borg, but to get there we have a massive diversionary conspiracy that we have no interest in following up on, and squeezing the story we really want to tell into no time at all”.
I just do not get the adulation for this season, it’s like a McDonaldisation of the franchise, with no interest in anything new. It’s Rise of Skywalker – “somehow the Borg returned”, but also somehow Data returned, somehow the Enterprise returned, somehow X, somehow Y. All in service of reducing anything intelligent or deep about this setting. It is beyond frustrating, like children were let loose in the story breaking, and then some adults tried to actually write it, but didn’t really succeed in hiding it’s childish origins. I just don’t get how this is being praised.
I realise in many ways treklit spoiled me – it just had the depth of time and characterization to in general make even the more derivative of ideas work
but crikey, what I would have given for Ira Steven Behr, Ron Moore and others, especially given their successes with Outlander and For All Mankind in recent years as well as What We Left Behind, to have done Picard instead of what we got.
* Edit – by invoking Behr and Moore, it was in the context of “if we were going to go back and hire old Trek writers to do a revival, what I would have given….”
All fan service all the time is right, and it’s not actually terribly good fan service. Bringing back legacy characters just to kill them in increasingly shallow ways, blowing an inordinate amount of the budget of this already cheap feeling show recreating the bridge of the Enterprise D, ditching every character that wasn’t on TNG so we can get a shot of the original seven on the bridge…
Oh, speaking of the original seven, ignoring for a moment Keith’s excellent point that the Defiant would have been a more logical choice to take to fight the Borg from a technological advancement point of view, Galaxy class starships have a crew compliment of what, a thousand people? Wouldn’t the Defiant have made a better choice if for no other reason than it needs less people to operate? (I mean, yes, seven is still less than fifty, but it’s a lot closer!) Hell, I’m confused why Worf didn’t try to advocate for taking his old ship. Or if we’re going to ignore crew compliment, why not take Voyager? It looks like it still has the ablative armour modifications, I suspect that’ll hold up better in a firefight than forty year old shield generators.
I get that they’re trying to give people the joy of seeing the old crew back on the old bridge, but come on. Either set the stakes ridiculously high, and have the heroes act reasonably, or set up a plot where the Enterprise D was *actually* the only choice.
Also, Jack took his stupid pills this morning. So the plot could happen. Cool.
One other thing, the Borg take over Starfleet by secretly getting into the minds of young people. See, I knew it all along…
The Borg is TikTok.
So it’s almost like after being the boogeyman for 8 episodes that the changelings didn’t matter anymore. I kind of could get that the Borg Queen is on a vengeance kick because it at least tracks with Voyager (even if it doesn’t track with who they are prior to that series) but why did they partner with the changelings. Why wouldn’t they have just assimilated the changelings- isn’t that what they do? “We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” Outside of the short lived alliance to combat Species 8472 we’ve never seen the Borg in partnership. For that matter what exactly are the changelings get out of this- it seems they’ve done all of the work of infiltrating Starfleet command, inventing a need for the entire fleet (!) to be back at Earth, possibly convincing the fleet to network all the ships together, reprogramming transporters to assimilate anyone under 25 (this must have been a recent thing because presumably all the 26 year olds went through the transporter previously) and generally being evil. So now that they’ve done all this work they get what exactly?
Speaking of that, what exactly is Beverly talking about- we haven’t seen the borg in 10 years? Where did all the ex-borg wandering around in season 1 come from and what about the Jurati Borg who the last time we saw them were hanging out near a different transwarp conduit which I don’t think is that far from Earth. Did Beverly mean the mainstream borg collective or did the writers brain cramp on their own recent history? In fact that’s a good summation of a recurring Picard problem- the writers are so good at continuity with other series seems to discard it’s own characters in favor of this nostalgia trip. While I’m not quite as distressed as CLB @12 about the fanservicing, it seems like we’ve discarded Lariss, Jurati and her Borg Crew, Seven (the ex-borg) and Raffi all of whom could actually be useful.
Quick note- I do want to give credit to the writers for one thing which is to continue to bring Star Trek Online (which i suppose is it’s own tangential universe) somewhat into the fold as the Enterprise-F is both internally and externally what has come out of that game. After the copy/paste fleet at the end of Season 1 it’s a nice continued touch.
The Enterprise-D looks amazing, and I suppose it was inevitable this is where we were going with Chekhov’s Hangar having been dropped earlier this season. I’m not sure how you run a starship with 7 people but oh well- hopefully they don’t need to repair any damage along the way. The writers/Geordi’s explanation that it was the recovered saucer mated to another ships stardrive section actually made sense but the line that he was fixing it for 20 years didn’t unless it means that after Nemesis that Geordi basically just went to the fleet museum and stayed there, which is kind of sad and if so probably should’ve come up somewhere along the way.
I get that this is all fan service and as such I’m just going to go with it, but I do hope that the writers haven’t put the future of the franchise in trouble given that apparently we just offed everyone in the fleet over age 25…
@5 The Generations redesign was too dark. The bright lights and beige walls are just what we’ve needed since this new generation of Trek began! ;D
Alice Krige!!! I THOUGHT the whispery voice sounded a bit like her, when it didn’t sound like Beverly.
“I hope we die quickly!” Nice reminder that Data is just as terrified of the Borg as everyone else. Old Man Data is a delight. XD
I’m hoping that Fleet Admiral Shelby was, in fact, a Changeling infiltrator who just learned that “eliminate the unassimilated” means ALL the unassimilated. (That’s the only reason I can think of why she, of ALL people, would green light such a STUPID idea as a networked fleet. It’s as bad as Starbase Yorktown in Star Trek Beyond!)
The D is PERFECT. *chef’s kiss* Hello, my dear old friend. The only ship that has given the Borg as much grief as Voyager is back in action!!! (If this doesn’t end with Picard and Co. flying off on the D to their well-earned retirement, I will be VERY disappointed.)
I felt the same way when the Enterprise-D bridge recreation came to my local convention and I got to SIT AT OPS: “Hello, chair!”
Now I REALLY want to know what Worf did to the E, LOL! (LOVE the E, but the D will always have my heart. The F looks fantastic, though!)
After all the depressing grimdark character arcs in this and that OTHER Star franchise, I welcome the loving, joyous nostalgia with open arms. Bring on the cameos and happy tears!!! <3
@13 – Yes on Jack. He definitely took his stupid pills in the worst possible way “I’m going to show them who I am” and walk right into the trap. This guy has apparently been running from this vision in his mind his hole life and somehow he now decides to say “F It!” and beam right into them? Of course all of this could’ve been avoided if the expositional Voltron team of Beverly, Riker, Data, Deanna and LaForge had bothered to, I don’t know, explain what the Borg Plot is to Jack rather than literally send him to his room and tell him they’re shipping him off to Vulcan. I’m guessing if someone told him “They want to use you to assimilate all of starfleet” he might have not gone there?
Hey! Wait a minute! What happened to Dr. Jurati being the Borg queen? Did that whole story line just get dropped??
@18 Jurati is the queen of an offshoot of Borg she started back in the 21st century which despite probably having assimilated people and doing other borg things along the way are somehow good guys. The Alice Krige guys are supposed to be the same line of evil Borg we saw in Voyager and first contact.
I’ve been waiting all season for the other shoe to drop, and now that it has, I find that I don’t really care, because the plot was never what this season was about. I knew that going in. After the mess that was season 2, and then the announcement that the TNG core cast were all getting back together for season 3, I told myself I was just going to enjoy the heck out of all the nostalgia, and I have. The genuinely great character moments for Worf and Riker and Troi and Data have all just been icing on the cake. So I don’t care that the plot has become as schlocky as any of the films. I’m just here for it.
Why did they use a STAR TREK TOS music cue, when the Enterprise D was shown? Shouldn’t they have used a TNG musical cue?
Also, do the Borg have multiple queens? I mean we got a new and friendly Borg Queen in PICARD Season 2, but not we’re back too the Alice Krige Borg Queen.
Finally, why would ANYBODY think it would be a good idea to put every ship in Starfleet in the same place at the same time and very publicly? Or thing that it was also a good idea to interlink all of Starfleet’s ships so that they could all be controlled from one source, meaning that if someone could hack that system they could control every ship in Starfleet? (Did I say, “if?” I should have said, “when.”
Also, given that assimilation has been shown to give you a lingering hankering for the hive mind at best and debilitating PTSD at worst, is anyone going to deal seriously with the fallout of having an entire generation of newly minted XBs when the Borg inevitably get defeated next episode?
“Also, do the Borg have multiple queens? I mean we got a new and friendly Borg Queen in PICARD Season 2, but not we’re back too the Alice Krige Borg Queen.”
I have always thought the Borg Queen was just the manifestation of the will of the Borg, and that every ship can have a queen if the Borg decide it’s necessary for the Queen to manifest herself.
“Also, given that assimilation has been shown to give you a lingering hankering for the hive mind at best and debilitating PTSD at worst, is anyone going to deal seriously with the fallout of having an entire generation of newly minted XBs when the Borg inevitably get defeated next episode?”
Maybe they can just run everyone through the transporter again?
I even noticed a USS Pulaski (second reference of her since season 2 ended I think?)
Turns out that there wasn’t a pony behind the red door after all. I only wish that wasn’t the worst of it.
Even with my lowered expectations for this season, “Vox” is a dumpster fire. There are no words, really. Bad enough that this revelation was a dismal payoff for an endless narrative tease, and that bringing back the Borg for the umpteenth time was just creatively bankrupt. The plot’s endgame is shallow and trite, with a (clumsily revealed via exposition dump) far-fetched Borg/Changeling alliance set to disrupt a major event where thousands unwittingly gather together to be slaughtered. We’ve seen this tired trope a million times on TV and the movies, only done far better. It’s also preposterous, as in having Starfleet‘s latest grand defensive strategy hinging on linking all of its ships together into some kind of an interstellar flock, ripe for the plucking. (What, are copies of “Battlestar Galactica” unavailable for viewing in the 25th Century, as a warning on the perils of networking everything when you have a cybernetic enemy?) And need we address the silliness of having the 1701-D, fitfully reassembled over decades as a museum exhibit, serving as a functional gunboat where the heroes make their last stand?
Even the dialogue, which had been a real strength of this season up till now, was off-kilter, with characters trading quips about missing the carpeting and suchlike after a colleague’s daughters had just been lost to assimilation. (And nerds wonder why no one takes genre fare seriously as drama when the statues are handed out.)
Oh, and yeah: they kill-off their best character, one of the highlights of the season.
But again, that’s not the worst of it. It’s with Jack’s speech on what he perceives as the awfulness of humanity, with its bigotry, violence and corruption, that this show marks the end of Trek — or at least anything that ever made it meaningful, in spite of its frequent silliness and manifest flaws, to millions of people all over the world. Befitting our own sour era, it’s the death of hope that we might one day put our worst impulses behind us to build a better (if still imperfect) world, where at the very least and at long last we’re all free to be our best selves. Even the Vulcans aren’t spared the revelation that their planet apparently hosts black sites where prisoners are endlessly mind-raped.
Well. In the end, it’s just a TV/movie franchise, and life goes on. Even so, by my lights this sucks big time. Thanks, Mr. Matalas.
As much as I appreciated seeing the Enterprise-D again, I was distracted by how dark everyone’s clothing was while standing on the still bright and cheery bridge. That pretty well illustrates how Trek has changed since 1987, doesn’t it? Looked like a geriatric ninja squad from the Mirror Universe stepped onto the living room set of The Brady Bunch.
@15/MikeKelm: “reprogramming transporters to assimilate anyone under 25 (this must have been a recent thing because presumably all the 26 year olds went through the transporter previously)”
Rather, only people under 25 are susceptible to the genetic modification because their brain structure hasn’t completely settled in yet. Which is based on a real medical fact but doesn’t really make sense. If transporters take you apart and reassemble you on a subatomic level, they should be able to edit your structure at any age — see “Unnatural Selection” or “Rascals.”
“I’m not sure how you run a starship with 7 people but oh well”
They couldn’t find a chimpanzee and two trainees.
“But again, that’s not the worst of it. It’s with Jack’s speech on what he perceives as the awfulness of humanity, with its bigotry, violence and corruption, that this show marks the end of Trek — or at least anything that ever made it meaningful, in spite of its frequent silliness and manifest flaws, to millions of people all over the world. Befitting our own sour era, it’s the death of hope that we might one day put our worst impulses behind us to build a better (if still imperfect) world, where at the very least and at long last we’re all free to be our best selves.”
Hyperbole aside, I think you’re forgetting that Jack has spent his life outside the bounds of the utopian Federation. The franchise has never portrayed all the galaxy as having “put our worst impulses behind us.”
Passing thought, but is the Starfleet decision to network their ships perhaps in someway tied to the Prodigy finale when the ships were all taken over by the weapon on the Protostar?
The Sutherland may be a reference to the Horatio Hornblower novels, but in-universe it’s at least the second ship to bear that name, the first being the one Data commanded in Redemption Part II. Memory Alpha lists a bunch of references to it in DS9, so presumably it did something during the Dominion War to make it worthy of having the name recycled.
@15 – “Speaking of that, what exactly is Beverly talking about- we haven’t seen the borg in 10 years? Where did all the ex-borg wandering around in season 1 come from and what about the Jurati Borg who the last time we saw them were hanging out near a different transwarp conduit which I don’t think is that far from Earth.”
Yeah, that was the moment my brain seized from an overflow of the WTF stack. Nobody thought to say, Uh yes we have. Just last year as a matter of fact.
After an interesting start, Picard season three has turned into fan-fin with a budget. So much stupid plotting just to make the “plot” work. And even then it doesn’t work. Apparently we’re just supposed to accept everything and wallow in the nostalgia.
#32. Apparently we’re just supposed to accept everything and wallow in the nostalgia.
That’s the feeling I get. A little nostalgia can be emotionally rewarding, of course. I’m reminded of McCoy strolling the decks of the Enterprise-D with Data long ago. That was a warm fuzzy. Most importantly, it was short and sweet. Emphasis on short.
But when they hit you over and over and over with theses moments within a single episode — sometimes within a single scene — it stops being charming to me. I get the impression of being treated like a seal, slapping my flippers and begging for another sardine.
@ 29. David Pirtle:
Hyperbole aside, I think you’re forgetting that Jack has spent his life outside the bounds of the utopian Federation. The franchise has never portrayed all the galaxy as having “put our worst impulses behind us.”
I may be misremembering this, but wasn’t part of Jack’s backstory that he was educated in London, where he picked up his accent? In any case, I think it’s notable that Picard, who back in the day gave stirring Roddenberry-esque speeches about the nobility and potential of mankind (even while in dire straights) does not even try to disabuse his son of the notion that humans largely suck. Or, maybe it is hyperbole; I’m not a happy camper today.
@28 / CLBL:
“They couldn’t find a chimpanzee and two trainees.”
Thank you, Mr. Bennett. We’ll try not to take that personally.
Speaking of TSFS, I guess stealing the Enterprise in any era’s a rite of passage.
Honestly, this whole season has played like the kind of story I would have played out with my action figures when I was ten years old. And people are *raving* about it! I don’t understand.
I was a bit bummed they did not retcon The Borg. I wanted them to be like how they were in TNG prior to the introduction of the “Queen” in First Contact. I would have been fine with post Hugh Borgs or “Best of Both World’s” style Borgs. In addition, unlike prior episodes, my sense of urgency dropped as the episode went on. The odds were already so ludicrous, that throwing even more problems in to the mix does not add anything for me, Borg, whole fleet stolen, large portions of Federation citizens turning into drones, Jack going rouge,etc.
With that said though, after the intro segment with the Borg reveal, I slowly started to get into a familiar yet new zone. At some point I thought to myself: “I am watching an episode of TNG…not just one I have not seen 15 times but one I have never seen….wow”. Then, when they get to the bridge of the D and the lights slowly get brighter, almost teasing the audience with how long they take to reach full illumination…yet they do.
Holy goosetoad!
Picard: “Make it so!”
Me: “Hell ya!”
-Kefka
“I may be misremembering this, but wasn’t part of Jack’s backstory that he was educated in London, where he picked up his accent? In any case, I think it’s notable that Picard, who back in the day gave stirring Roddenberry-esque speeches about the nobility and potential of mankind (even while in dire straights) does not even try to disabuse his son of the notion that humans largely suck. Or, maybe it is hyperbole; I’m not a happy camper today.”
Sorry, I meant his working life. He’s spent years with his mom ministering to war-torn worlds outside Federation space.
I have some thoughts about some of the issues that have been brought up:
Assuming the Changelings were in on the entire plan, then presumably they would have concentrated on killing whatever older Titan crew members were left after the evacuation, no? The younger ones were needed in order for the assimilation plan to work. This may also at least partially explain why Vadic chose T’Veen to kill, assuming she was older (as most Vulcans on the shows tend to be, despite their appearance).
@21 Bob (and others who mentioned this): If I’m not mistaken, Geordi said that the Enterprise-D was the only functioning Starfleet ship not networked with the rest of the fleet. That leads me to believe that the other museum ships are not in working order, and that the D only is because it’s his personal pet project.
As far as the number of crew, he mentioned that drones were loading up the torpedoes, so it sounds like in “modern” Starfleet, drones are capable of doing tasks that would have been handled by crew members in the past. But, either way, it’s obviously a callback to Star Trek III, when the stars of the original series took the Enterprise for a spin on their own.
It’s unfortunate that Shelby seemed to meet a quick end so soon after they revealed that she had a similar path to (and same first name as) the one Peter David gave her in New Frontier. It would have been cool to see her help defeat the Borg somehow, given her knowledge of them.
@10 CLB says:
For the second time in less than 48 hours, I find myself agreeing with every word CLB says. Must be some kind of planetary alignment. But yes, exactly: This season has periodically hinted at interesting new characters and thought-provoking plotlines, but given the choice between those threads and fanservice they have chosen fanservice Every. Single. Time. Everything that should have made the show good is just dancing on the puppeteer’s strings of what somebody ^^^^^ appropriately said was the equivalent of preteenagers playing with their action figures. For all the individual good bits — Old Man Data foremost, with the android awkwardness still visible under the newly human mannerisms — it’s just swamped by showrunners and writers trying to give 55 year old dudes like me what they think we want. Enough.
S
There is one element about the Borg that I find haunting…. in the conversation between Jurati and the Borg queen from Picard Season 2, we learn that the Borg queens can sense other versions of themselves in other universes (a side effect of assimilation of the El-Aulerian species) and never succeed against humanity in any of those iterations. All of the Borg queens we have seen have tried to thwart this by either going back in time to avoid the head to head, using a human (Picard or his son) as a trojan horse, etc and still fail. The choice to use a biological solution to route around the problem reminds me of the sort of problem solving AI or biological systems like slime molds do.
Museum ships are often non- or barely functional. All the museum WWII ships I have visited have their armaments removed, no ammo on board, and maybe not even any working engines. They use shore power for lights and bilge pumps and tugboats when they need to be moved. All those other fleet museum starships should at the minimum, have their torpedoes offloaded, their phaser emitters removed, and their fuel tanks drained. LaForge specifically kept the E-D at operational readiness out of nostalgia, probably off the books and against regulations.
@15 MikeKelm
That timeline issue speaks to a great deal of confusion over *when* this is occurring. For some time it was established that this was taking place in 2411, with the Titan being launched in 2402. That would then likely place Jack as thirtyish. It would also mean the last Borg encounter was Juratiborg…a decade earlier.
Then someone rethought this, and the timeline was yanked back to 2401, which makes no sense at all in context.
it’s been bothering the hell out of me.
Quoth jaimebabb: “I think that I might have been on board with the Borg plot (mostly) if this had been the first time that we’d seen them since the end of Voyager, but as it is, my primary thought was: Where’s Jurati?”
I asked that question, too, but I held it back from the review because next week’s episode hasn’t happened yet. Jurati could still very easily show up. Indeed, I’m hoping very much that both Alison Pill and Kate Mulgrew are in the finale…….
Either way, I’m not (yet) going to ding them for not doing something when there’s still time to do it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@43 Yeah, I feel like they screwed up the timeline just so that they could get the feeble nostalgia hit of setting this on the 250th anniversary of Captain Archer’s mission. Par for the course, unfortunately.
(But even then, it wouldn’t really make sense! it’s not like the Jurati-Borg showed up and went away; they were left guarding the gate, and presumably were admitted as provisional Federation members. Surely that should have had some ramifications? “That weird shit on the Stargazer” indeed)
Since Season 3 was filmed back-to-back with Season 2, isn’t it possible that Annie Wersching could show up as the Borg Queen again next week? Please?
Well, since the fan-service dial is already turned up to a thousand, and all the 25-and-unders in Starfleet are borg now, I’ll resign my fan commission if the finale doesn’t give us Kate Mulgrew and whatever other Trek alumni they could have rounded up.
Actually, it really makes me kinda sad to remember Aaron Eisenberg’s passing, and what could have been for the first Ferengi member of Starfleet…
Interesting to see people here being a bit more critical of the season than other communities online.
I agree with the critics, the fan”service” is unbearable self-indulgence, and the focus on the TNG cast at the expense of the new characters is utterly galling. Shaw being sidelined on his own ship for the past few episodes has been laughable, not to mention the exclusion of Seven from a meeting about the Borg simply because the show wanted to keep up the tedious “look, the whole TNG cast are back together in a room!” stuff. Poor Raffi seems to have been more or less completely written out at this point, her only purpose being to get Worf on the Titan so the TNG crew could all stand together in several different rooms and talk about how it’s just like how they used to stand in rooms back in the day. Really lazy stuff.
The pivot to the Borg is annoying because Vadic, after so many episodes of being a cackling cardboard cutout, finally made her point. The crimes committed against her by Section 31 really gave the heroes something to think about and, crucially, a way to sympathise and reason with her, to see her side of things, to reach out and offer the hand of peace and reconciliation. Unless the finale has something planned in that vein, it seems that she and her Changelings (who Worf has been emotionlessly executing without a care for the whole season) have, like so many other plot points and characters, been shoved into the background and forgotten so that the show can dangle yet more reheated TNG stuff in front of us while going “remember this???”.
I don’t see why this show is better received than Discovery; it bears many of the same storytelling shortcomings. The TNG coating of paint can’t really disguise it.
I dunno. I think I need to quit all or most of my online Star Trek fan communities, to be honest. Call me a gatekeeper, but I’m so dismayed by the blowback from a certain contingent of fans lately that it’s starting to manifest in my life with actual grief symptoms. :(
I’ve seen so much Star Trek in my life (every episode a half-dozen times or more, except for the new stuff, only because I haven’t yet had time to watch them a half-dozen times or more…) that I speak fluent technobabble. Star Trek lore takes up something like 40% of my entire brain.
I guess I can see flaws just as well as anyone, but my love of Star Trek must be unconditional, because I just don’t care about disecting it too much. If something, like Star Trek, isn’t bringing you joy anymore (this isn’t directed at any particular person), then wouldn’t it be a good idea to go out into this big, beautiful world and find something else that makes you happy? Life is too short to be so publicly angry and miserable about something you claim to love, or at least used to love.
In the meantime, I guess I’ll just stay offline more often and keep looking forward to the next opportunity to bask, relatively uncritically, in the next piece of Star Trek I’m given, just feeling happy and grateful that it’s being made at all.
@43/StevenEMcDonald: Yeah, the timeline discrepancies have been very confusing. Jack was explicitly conceived after Nemesis and thus could be at most 21 in 2401, but they say he’s 24-5 and he’s played by an actor in his 30s. Although it’s worse than that — season 2 explicitly took place at the end of the French wine harvest season in 2401, which would be October, yet now season 3 is explicitly in April 2401, six months earlier. And somehow Seven has gone from new Starfleet enrollee to starship first officer in negative six months. It’s a total mare’s nest.
I initially thought as you did, that they’d planned on this being years later while they filmed it and redubbed some stardates and things in post-production to push it back to 2401 for some reason. But now we have them explicitly saying in the episode that it’s 35 years after “Best of Both Worlds” and 250 years after “Broken Bow,” 2401 in both cases. So they must’ve known during filming that it was 2401, which makes it inexplicable how there could be so many references that contradict it. Or why it contradicts the dating of season 2 when they were filmed back-to-back.
@48/Descent: “I don’t see why this show is better received than Discovery; it bears many of the same storytelling shortcomings. The TNG coating of paint can’t really disguise it.”
Unfortunately, many fans would rather have their cozy nostalgia buttons pushed than be challenged with new stories and ideas. And unfortunately, many creators these days indulge that desire, thereby reinforcing it and creating the mistaken impression that feeling good because you’re reminded of something you recognize is the same thing as feeling good because you’ve been told a good story.
@49/Gilbetron: “If something, like Star Trek, isn’t bringing you joy anymore (this isn’t directed at any particular person), then wouldn’t it be a good idea to go out into this big, beautiful world and find something else that makes you happy?”
Don’t generalize, please. A lot of Star Trek is still quite enjoyable. Discovery has really come into its own these past two seasons and I’m looking forward to season 5. Lower Decks, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, it’s all fun and satisfying and fresh even despite the overuse of nostalgia. The fact that most of Trek these days is generally satisfying is exactly why it’s so frustrating and disappointing that Picard settles for cheap nostalgic pandering and shallow action-movie writing rather than living up to its original aspiration to be a more thoughtful drama.
#49. I think the problem is that you’re framing this as love it or hate it situation, when most of the comments I’ve seen on Tor.com and other fan sites have been fairly nuanced about this particular episode. There are things to enjoy and things to criticize. That’s not a “miserable” experience. Not for me anyway, because I enjoy the analysis of what works and what doesn’t for different people.
But in closing I’ll give you a positive, a positronic positive — I think all the stuff with Data has been magnificent.
“I hope we die quickly!” That made me laugh.
First off: The ship. That voice. A tear in my eye. And we got a 7 of 9 out of him.
My assumption is Jurati has the bulk of the borg with her. The Queen of this timeline only has a vastly dimished rank. That’s why last episode the voice was faint, and this one we saw what? 1 borg drone asleep.
I also assume the D is not going to fight the fleet. That’d only kill themselves and their own. Besides, the ship may work, but it’s not fully manned. No, they’ll find the signal. Go to the Queen, beam over, and deal with the situation, one way or another.
00 / KRAD:
First of all, the notion that the changelings would just be lackeys working for the Borg is ridiculous. Yes, this is just a batch of rogues—Worf made that clear when he explained back in “Seventeen Seconds” that Odo warned him about these changelings, who were not part of the Great Link any longer—but still, it’s a real come-down for them.
Eh, I can kinda buy it.
Team Vadic was a minority within the Great Link — without official Dominion sanction or access its resources. It was a handful of them against impossible odds and they would’ve been desperate to find any avenue or means of revenge. And if it meant going as far as striking a devil’s bargain with the other existential threat of the 24th Century era? So be it.
That by aiding the Collective, they were endangering the Dominion and Link in the long-term either didn’t enter their minds or they didn’t care (or they arrogantly assumed the Dominion could handle the Borg). All that mattered to Vadic was burning Starfleet and the UFP to the ground.
Incidentally, one more weird thing is the title — they put a tilde over the “o” in “Vox.” I looked it up — it should be a macron, a straight line to indicate a long vowel. Or it’s perfectly fine to omit the diacritical mark altogether, as in vox populi.
I know that the Borg are central to Picard’s life and BOBW is THE most lauded TNG episode but I am so over them. Making so much of the mystery of Jack’s nature was foolish if the main baddies were going to be those same old, same old. Their plan was pretty cool but I wonder how they managed to connect with and rope in the rogue Changelings.
@54 CLB: I wondered about that too. According to Dr. Wikipedia, “o” with a tilde is a letter in a handful of languages including Estonian and the Romagna dialects, is a common miscoding of the double-acute-o in Hungarian, and is a diacritical to indicate a particular pronunciation in Portuguese and Vietnamese, none of which I assume are intended to be major influences on the Borg. Assuming it wasn’t just a glitch on somebody’s part, I really wonder what they were going for.
S
@/55 – Yes, this kind of reminds me of one of those RTD-era (or I guess I should say first RTD-era) Doctor Who plots where they’d set up a whole, season-long mystery arc and then the answer ended up being: “It was the Daleks!”
@@@@@ 55 / Ina Hark:
I know that the Borg are central to Picard’s life and BOBW is THE most lauded TNG episode but I am so over them. Making so much of the mystery of Jack’s nature was foolish if the main baddies were going to be those same old, same old. Their plan was pretty cool but I wonder how they managed to connect with and rope in the rogue Changelings.
My hope is the final episode will take the same approach as David Mack’s Destiny Trilogy from the now-defunct TNG Relaunch and serve as the Borg’s Omega.
It makes sense. They’ve emerged as the closing Big Bad of PIC and the 24th Century-era. It’s the TNG crew’s last hurrah…and what more fitting final triumph for them — and Picard in particular — than ending the Borg threat once and for all?
Plus, they kinda have to. The cybernetic Sword of Damocles can’t keep hanging over the Galaxy’s necks — and more the Borg have been overused and run their course at this point.
Man, oh man. This week’s episode was such a mashup of things I both liked and things I didn’t like but the shear power of the nostalgia bits tips the episode in positive territory in my opinion.
The biggest gripe I got to get out of the way first is the use of the fucking Borg again as the mystery behind Jack Crusher and as the main antagonist. Again, the Borg, after the prominence in seasons 1 and 2 of Picard, not to mention making other appearances on Prodigy and Lower Decks. Let’s try to find a new or less played out villain for once! It is nice to hear Alice Krige again though. I guess if she’s unwilling to get under makeup for the role again there’s always using a CGI version of her. Or they could have just gotten Susanna Thompson to play the role again.
A great but also bad thing I like was seeing Shelby again. She was a character I was really hoping to see pop again because she was so dynamic on TNG. But it sucks because just like all of the other prominent characters from TNG-era’s past (Maddox, Icheb, Hugh, Ro), she’s summarily offed in quick order. Boo!
Shaw kicking the bucket wasn’t a surprise nor was him finally calling Seven by her proper name – this was all telegraphed from a million miles away. And while Todd Stashwick played the character very well, the moment of his passing and finally respecting Seven didn’t exactly make me emotional which is what I think the writers were going for by the dramatic swelling of music. This does leave Seven in prime position to the captain of the Titan for her own series, although a series where she’s still the Number One to Shaw would still have been plenty interesting.
I also couldn’t help but notice how tonally off it felt for the TNG gang to be joking around and taking their damn time strolling around the bridge of the Enterprise while Jack has gone to the Dark Side, multiple people have died on the Titan, and Sydney and Alandra have been Borgified, not to mention the fact that Starfleet has been taken over by a Borg/Changeling alliance and the universe is ending as we know it. It’s as if the characters know everything will be alright knowing that the season wraps up in one more episode.
That said, the gang is back aboard the Enterprise-D and it’s beautiful as is the stunning recreation of the hero ship bridge. So that’s where the season’s budget went! So all is forgiven for all of the episode’s other missteps lol!
Oh, and I thought the Spacedock/Fleet Museum was in orbit of Earth but I guess it was moved since Star Trek III: TSFS. Because I was very confused why everyone is warping to Earth when I thought they were already right there. It’ll be interesting to see how everything is wrapped up with one episode to go. Bring on Janeway!
#58. But does “once and for all” still exist in popular culture? Did it ever exist?
We’ve already seen closure seemingly brought to the Borg at least a couple of times. Not only that, we’re currently on the third farewell tour of the TNG crew.
I dunno, I doubt we’ve seen the last of any of these people. They’ve already hinted around about possibly more Picard, not to mention a Legacy spinoff series. If so, would they have the restraint to not use the Borg again beyond this point in the timeline? I’m going to say… no.
@59/garreth: “Oh, and I thought the Spacedock/Fleet Museum was in orbit of Earth but I guess it was moved”
No, Spacedock is still in Earth orbit, and the Borg-controlled all-in-one-place Starfleet was about to attack it when we last saw them. The Fleet Museum is a different station of the same basic design, distinguishable by the ship display rings around its perimeter. We’ve seen multiple space stations of that design in the TNG era, thanks to TNG recycling stock footage from ST III.
@60 / Dingo:
I dunno, I doubt we’ve seen the last of any of these people. They’ve already hinted around about possibly more Picard, not to mention a Legacy spinoff series. If so, would they have the restraint to not use the Borg again beyond this point in the timeline? I’m going to say… no.
True.
But thematically, I think it would work. Matalas has stated this Season’s their Star Trek VI and grand sendoff. TUC resolved the Klingon Empire as a threat and, at least chronologically, allowed the franchise to explore new avenues with them now as UFP allies.
Same thing could happen with the Borg here — and ending the Borg wouldn’t necessarily take them off the table. David Mack dissolving the Collective in Destiny opened up new avenues for the fate of the ex-drones, the future of the Delta Quadrant, etc. There’s your potential Seven spinoff catalyst.
#62. Alright, I can go along with that. IF they can be bothered to explore new territory with the Borg. I thought the first season of Picard was that opportunity with the cube artifact, but they pretty much squandered it. Now we’re back to Grand Evil Plots again. Hopefully this is the last.
The more I read the comments the more I hope that the Borg get the David Mack Treatment. Dodgy timeline aside we’re at the start of a new century, the Klingons are our Allies, the Romulans and Cardassians are pacified. Eliminating the last borg and changeling threat will allow us to close a door on this generation of shows and start a new one with a relatively clean slate
I’ve come to a place where I feel this show is immune to nitpicking. You start poking at it and it’s so pervasively nonsensical that there’s nowhere to stop.
Is there a term for something that lies on the farthest edge of fanservice? Nostalgia porn? That probably works on multiple levels here—the showrunners feel we’re just here for the fanservice so any excuse of a story works as long as they keep putting that sweet sweet nostalgia onscreen. That doesn’t work for me personally. I feel pandered to and it’s kinda insulting.
I don’t know that it’s come up a lot but my pet peeve to add to the pile is that Starfleet != Federation, which is a mistake this show seems firmly committed to.
Assuming we’re setting some new rules down here, wouldn’t the existence of biologically based Borg technology mean that the Borg could actually assimilate Changelings now in a way they couldn’t though mechanical means? So no team up required.
The only reason for the fleet to gather together is so the heroes can go to a single location to solve the problem. As shown in this episode there is no part that I can see that required all the ships to be in proximity. The new drones were able to take over each ship independently and were already in place. Nothing had to spread from ship to ship.
I will give them points for the idea of assimilation through transporters. That was really clever and is feasible within the rules laid down in the franchise. Which is not a high priority so extra kudos to whoever thought that one up and got it into the script.
I want to ding them on the “only affects young people” gimmick but that’s a pretty Trek scenario.
Boy, the D bridge looked enormous back in the day, didn’t it?
I think that Captain Worf was commanding the Enterprise-E in the season finale of Prodigy when it got badly damaged by the living construct. That would explain Worf saying that it wasn’t his fault.
@65/kurtzwald: “Boy, the D bridge looked enormous back in the day, didn’t it?”
Which was an illusion due to its open layout. I believe the set was actually slightly smaller than the TOS bridge.
It actually looked smaller to me here than it did on TNG, and it just struck me that that might be because the screen is wider now, so the image takes in the full width of the bridge and that makes it look less spacious.
I’m going to be honest… I got kind of teary-eyed there toward the end, both when they were approaching the Enterprise-D and then when they were on the bridge.
Also, probably due to the much stronger lights on the Enterprise bridge versus the sets we’ve been used to on the Titan and the Daystrom Station, I realized today that Data’s skin is now a natural color and artificially pale like it had been previously. I’m sure Brent Spiner appreciates not having to get made up every day for filming. I also noticed that he got the first “Special Guest Star” billing in the closing credits ahead of Levar Burton; previously, the cast had been listed alphabetically.
The Enterprise-D bridge may have looked bigger this time because they made a point of showing that they’d re-created all 360° of the set when we usually only saw it as if it were a stage. We never saw the front wall with viewscreen unless the scene specifically called for it.
Some tangentially related-thoughts to this episode and season in general:
1. I think there is real thirst in the fandom to see the TNG crew again based on all of the adoration and response to this season. But I think it makes financial sense, not mention very pleasing to the fandom, if the next feature film starred the TNG cast again. I think enough good will has been built up over the last 20+ years to forget/forgive Nemesis. I would wager more Trek fans would prefer this to another Kelvin-timeline film.
2. Worf as captain of the Enterprise-E would have been a wonderful TV series to see. Kurtzman said he was open to doing things like Trek mini-series or TV movies so why not something that is a flashback to a Captain Worf era? Michael Dorn is still in great shape and he could be de-aged with makeup, plus I’m sure he would just to die to do a production where he is the top-billed star.
@59/garreth: “Oh, and I thought the Spacedock/Fleet Museum was in orbit of Earth but I guess it was moved”
@61/Christopher:Bennett: “No, Spacedock is still in Earth orbit, and the Borg-controlled all-in-one-place Starfleet was about to attack it when we last saw them. The Fleet Museum is a different station of the same basic design, distinguishable by the ship display rings around its perimeter. We’ve seen multiple space stations of that design in the TNG era, thanks to TNG recycling stock footage from ST III.”
Although it’s pretty clear that Todd Stashwick’s line in “The Bounty” made it pretty clear to the unwashed TrekLit-hoi polloi that the Athan Prime Fleet Museum was indeed the original 1984 ILM The Search for Spock Spacedock, now reloacted to another star system (indeed, the scale of the spacedoors seen in TSFS would never have admitted a starship of the Galaxy-class’s dimensions, and that as we saw in this episode, a brand-new spacedoor had to be “sawed” out of the 23rd century Spacedock’s hull just to allow the 24th-century Enterprise-D to pass through unharmed).
During the intervening 100+ years since The Undiscovered Country, following the relocation to Athan Prime (and its presumable-decommission, given many TNG-era vessels’ dimensions, which became clear in TNG: “11001”), Starfleet evidently added the Fleet Museum facilities/rings following its relocation to Athan Prime from Earth.
^ “Pretty clear,” followed by “pretty clear”..yup, I’m basically typing this on double-bourbons tonight. Too bad I can’t edit.
My problem with the idea of using Spacedock or an equivalent station as the Fleet Museum is that the dang thing is gigantic. At least according to fan blueprints, it’s more than 2 miles tall and more than a mile and a half in diameter. It must have hundreds and hundreds of decks. It’s way too big to be just a museum; it’s more like a small city.
It’s not that unbelievable. Compare it to the size of the Air & Space Museum, both the one on the National Mall and the Udvar-Hazy Center. Now scale it up from aircraft to starships. Imagine that a large part of the interior, particularly the mushroom cap and the skirt, also hold ships. Toss in display space for non-ships, perhaps a display for each ship that’s served for the past 250 years. Add some administration, restoration and storage space and you’re filling a fair chunk of space. And, don’t forget, Spacedock itself is an exhibit.
@CLB. One could argue space dock itself is historic and therefore worthy of historic preservation. I’m not saying it’s the perfect solution but if you think of it as part museum, part restoration facility (for BIG starships) and part automated warehouse it makes sense. If you think about the Smithsonian Aur and Space Museum it has over a million square feet of display space in two museums and probably 5 times that in storage space. You might even have an element of it as recycling/decommissioning area. Yes Spacedock is huge but I could easily see it being used for any number of purposes. Which does make me wonder where exactly Geordis crew was that day…
I don’t mind the fan service but I wish it had been done with a little more subtlety. As others have mentioned, The gang having been reassembled on the bridge of the Enterprise D is way cool, but I think it would have been that much more interesting for our first glimpse of that classic bridge to be while they scramble to get her up and running. The way they portrayed it reminded me of the interminable scenes in TMP where they panned to and fro over the ship with glacial speed until everybody in the theater was snoring.
The Borg. Yawn. First, for me the Borg ceased to be interesting or truly terrifyingly villainous when they introduced the Queen. What made the Borg so scary was their relentless, meticulous, dispassionate mission to assimilate. When the Borg became personified by a scene stealing queen they gave the Borg a face. And in one fell swoop everything that made the Borg unique was moot.
Quoth bgsu98: “I also noticed that he got the first ‘Special Guest Star’ billing in the closing credits ahead of Levar Burton; previously, the cast had been listed alphabetically.”
Not quite. If you look closely, in the previous episodes, Spiner got an “And” before his credit, which is a slightly “higher” credit than just being in the list. But since Alice Krige also got an “And” credit as part of the special guests, Spiner got listed first this time.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Tactically, it’s “strength in numbers” and so it would have made more sense (and been super cool) if all of the grown-ups still left on the show (the TNG big seven plus Seven and Raffi) split up to take command of several of the fleet museum ships. So not just Picard on the E-D but Worf on the Defiant, and Seven on Voyager, and that works out to three officers per ship. But yes yes, we need to have the big seven all on the Enterprise-D for nostalgia.
The nostalgia is real. But so are my problems with this season (I think). Is this the best season of Picard? For me, it is. Easily. Do I enjoy most of it, yes I really do. But I have issues with it too. Or at the very least I have questions.
“250 years ago today, the Enterprise NX-01, the first warp five capable vessel to be constructed by Human hands, made its maiden voyage.” – Elizabeth Shelby
My partner and I are currently re-watching all of Trek in chronological order (or that’s what we’re trying to do) and we’re on Season 2 of Enterprise and we’re both loving it; so as a fan of Enterprise, I’m loving the shoutout to that series…but I’m also finding it very confusing. The present day events of Season 2 of Picard (which didn’t amount to much if I remember correctly) were set in 2401. And all of Season 3 have been set in 2401. And the Enterprise NX-01 launched in April of 2151 – so all of present day Season 2 and all of Season 3 happen over 4 months? And I’ve blocked a lot of Season 2 of Picard out because it was my least favorite season of modern Trek by a longshot…but Seven wasn’t in Starfleet in Season 2, right? And now she’s captain of the Titan? In less than 4 months? I love Seven and I love the idea of her being captain of the Titan…but the timing just doesn’t seem to make any sense to me.
And Beverly Crusher says something about how nobody has seen the Borg in something like 10 years (or some amount of years, I don’t quite remember), but in Season 2, which was apparently less than 4 months ago, some part of the Borg collective (with a new queen) joined the Federation – or did I just imagine that? I really don’t remember the details. Now, maybe Beverly doesn’t know about those events but Picard should. I also seem to remember that the Borg were watching for something at the end of Season 2 and for a minute I thought this ending Borg reveal was going to tie into that.
I also don’t understand how this group of Changelings and the Borg would form an alliance but that’s less a contradiction than just something I can’t quite imagine happening. But maybe that will be explained?
I figured that Shaw would be calling Seven by her chosen name by the end of the season but I expected the moment to feel earned, only here it felt weird and oddly inappropriate. I thought that he disrespected Seven and Picard because of PTSD related to the Borg, but now he calls her Seven when the Borg (through Picard’s genetics) have overtaken the fleet and basically proven all of Shaw’s fears were valid? It’s not a good excuse for him being an ass but I don’t see any reason for him to stop being an ass in this moment. It doesn’t make sense to me unless he’s saying it as an insult because the Borg have taken the ship and he’s saying the ship is Seven’s now because she’s a Borg. But if that was the intent, it didn’t seem to play that way. It played like it was meant to be a positive, IMO, and it doesn’t make sense that way, to me. But I’m clearly in the minority because people are raving about this moment and I’d love to be happy with it. Maybe when I re-watch the series it will click for me.
Am I making any sense at all? I really do love a lot of what I’m seeing and hearing and feeling as a result of the fan service going on. I’ve never liked the Enterprise-D; it’s my least favorite iteration of the ship, but seeing it again was like seeing an old friend. And hearing Majel Barrett Roddenberry again as the computer and Alice Krige as the Borg Queen, seeing Shelby after all of these years and my confusion at her not being brought back – all of it gave me the feels. But a lot of it doesn’t actually seem to make any sense to me. I’d love to be wrong though.
@75/fullyfunctional: I agree with everything you said. I think my favorite scene from ST III is the Enterprise heist from Spacedock scene. That same spirit and energy would have been much more fitting in this episode than what we actually got.
And yes as well regarding the defanging of the Borg ever since the introduction of the Borg Queen as they were always more scary when they weren’t personified or mustache-twirling (or sexed-up) villains. That’s why I’ll always love the Borg from “Q Who?” and “The Best of Both Worlds” two-parter. Sure, the Borg don’t really need a voice in Picard/Locutus and making humanity as something special to have the distinction of having a spokesperson. But just the reveal that the species could violate someone (in this case, our stalwart captain) by assimilating them was plenty disturbing.
@78/Jason Wright: No, you’re making complete sense. Best not to overthink it, especially the chronology of this series (maybe you can just imagine season two was all a dream? Lol). And Shaw dying and finally calling Seven by her chosen name did nothing for me either.
I’m an enormous fan of TOS, but while there are many TNG episodes that I love, most of the TNG characters have always seemed bland to me. I like Data, Worf, Guinan, and Troi. (I’m a clinical psychologist in real life, which is why I have more affection for Troi than most people do. :-D) Jean-Luc Picard generally seemed grumpy and charmless to me, and I disagreed with several of his important decisions. Riker was rather a jerk in the first few seasons, though he did become less so over time. Crusher was so bland that I often forgot she even existed; ditto LaForge. So although I love “The Measure of a Man,” “Darmok,” “Chain of Command,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” and a few others, I don’t have the immense love and nostalgia for TNG that many Trek fans have.
This season of Picard for someone withOUT lots of TNG nostalgia? Mostly disappointing. I’m glad we got a version of Data back, and it’s nice to see Worf again. But listening to a character talk about the poverty and bigotry and horribleness of civilization made me wonder where Star Trek had gone. Also, the constant focus on enemies is boring and trite. “The Measure of a Man” and “Darmok” were about serious ideas and didn’t require villains to be fascinating. But there was a lot of talking, and nothing blew up, so I guess those aren’t what Paramount wants from a series?
I hope Shaw stays dead, since his character did NOT seem like someone who should be given command of a Starfleet ship. I thought the actor played the character extremely well, but the actor is not the character, and I want the character gone.
I’m looking forward to the second season of Strange New Worlds, since most of the first season of SNW felt like real Star Trek to me. I wish all of it did; I WANT to love this season of Picard, but it seems to be mostly for those who adored the TNG characters. Well, there is Data, but … not really enough.
When you have characters who repeatedly assert they’re rational people in a rational universe and they’re trying to piece together clues to solve a mystery, it sticks out intrusively when the story elements they’re drawing your attention to don’t fit together.
I can only echo most of the continuity glitches that have been raised, but I do want to note that my normally less-critical wife perked up when she heard Crusher say the Borg hadn’t been heard from in 10 years. “What happened to last season?” she asked. “If they don’t explain that they’ve really jumped the shark.”
The Borg played a key role in Picard’s Season Two, and only about 1.5 years have passed since the new Borg queen said they would hang out at that spot where they first appeared asking for Picard. Yet Crusher says in this episode that it has been 10 years since anyone has heard from the Borg. I don’t think so.
At least they remembered that the lighting on D was bright. Maybe since all the ships will have to be serviced after the conclusion they’ll hire a proper electical engineer this time?
My favorite bit of what the heck is this lighting is the scene where Picard tell Jack about the door. So Jack is locked in a room on the Titan with no exterior windows, yet it has small window-like lights high up, like a basement? And they are purposely lit so that light slants down into the room? I mean COME ON lighting on nuTrek shows have been abysmal (except SNW) since the beginning, but this takes the cake of stupidity.
In general I’ve enjoyed parts of this (mostly the nostalgia button pushing bits), but like everyone has said the plot is well….doo doo. None of it makes sense, random threads are dropped because really it’s just plot device, and the idiot ball is passed around like it’s candy. Though to be fair Picard carried the idiot ball at the beginning and must have passed it on to Jack seeing his choices here.
But at least we got to see the Enterprise D again, plot be damned. One thing I’ve noticed here is that regardless of how everything turns out this season will suffer greatly in hindsight. It’s being recieved so well right now because it’s been 30 years since we last saw the crew together, but imagine rewatching this, or more importantly, imagine children having TNG passed on from their parents who grew up watching reruns. You binge TNG and love it, you watch the movies and then this? None of this works without 30+ years of nostalgia.
@81/Corylea
Agreed, I never found the TNG characters to be too exciting for their own sakes’ either (and, like you, I’d single Worf, Guinan, and Troi out as favourites).
I like Worf a lot in TNG, but I like him because of the stories he’s involved in and the world he inhabits, rather than simply because he’s Worf. Similarly I like the Enterprise-D, but I like it because of the stories that play out involving it, rather than simply because it’s the Enterprise-D.
So when “Star Trek: Picard” takes (ostensibly) the same characters and puts them on the same ship, but does so in a plot and incarnation of the setting that feels devoid of almost everything that made the 90s shows appealing… I’m left wondering what the point is. The characters and the ship are now just symbols, stripped of context and existing purely for their own sake, or for the pop cultural history they represent. The one exception is Data, who I felt got a plot that actually did deal with the themes and ideas central to his character in TNG.
But otherwise, seeing the same actors playing the same characters on the old bridge leaves me cold, because I don’t care about any of these people or locations if they’ve been removed from the contexts and ideas that made them appeal to me in the first place. I liked TNG when it was about big sci-fi ideas, heroes acting reasonably, and with leanings towards pacifism and utopianism. Take the same actors and have them play the same characters in a really boring action movie plot where they all yell at each other and dismember and vaporise opponents as a matter of course, and any appeal they once had is gone, no matter how many obscure Memory Alpha articles Terry Matalas can quote, and no matter how accurately the set designers can recreate the D’s bridge. The TNG movies evoked a similar feeling, especially First Contact which I’ve always really hated.
Other people have made the observation in more eloquent ways than I can, but a lot of pop culture in general seems to be going the same way these days – writers just grab random things people fondly remember and stick them in generic point-missing new stories and contexts, because everything that was once original and fresh is now seen as viable plunder to offer up to nostalgia-hungry audiences. The Enterprise-D was once a device to allow for the telling of interesting and varied stories; here it exists simply for its own sake, a pop culture icon, deployed in the hopes you’ll smile as you remember the completely different, better stories you saw play out on it in a separate show from thirty years ago.
Karl Zimmerman wrote:
I watched episodes 3-7 in the UK. You have to log on via amazon.co.uk, not amazon.com. They drop the episodes one day later.
@77 I suspect rebuilding the bridge of the Defiant and Voyager was never on the table, given that they spent the vast, vast majority of the budget on the cast, and (presumably), rebuilding the bridge of the E-D. Hence the show looking like it was made for twenty five cents and the lint in Patrick Stewart’s pocket.
Still would have been cool, and made more sense though.
First off, I have to say that I’m in the camp of those absolutely loving season three. It’s by far my favorite season. Not that I can’t understand the criticism of those not digging it. But, yes, I’m a sucker for nostalgia and “fan service”, I suppose.
A few thoughts, though:
1) I have to say, I was with Shaw when he asked the obvious as they were high tailing it to Earth: “And then what???” They knew they were flying into the entire fleet all gathered together and, not only whatever the Changelings and Borg have planned, even without that they are a fugitive Starfleet vessel. Picard wasn’t sharing whatever plan he had for once they got there (after insisting to Shaw that they have no alternative), and when they did it seemed to just be to open a channel to the fleet and yell danger! You’ve been compromised!!!
And I got the exact same feeling as they started heading in the Ent-D back to Earth. What does Picard plan to do when they get there?? (Of course, in the end it’s going to have to do something with Jack saving the day. But Picard and company can’t possibly know that.)
I caught Beverly’s mentioning that no one’s encountered the Borg in ten years. Could they be saying that it’s really been that long since season two? Or is she meaning since the time before that? (And didn’t someone in the second season premiere also say something along the same lines about how long it’s been since they’ve dealt with the Borg?)
Honestly, it didn’t specifically occur to me why they didn’t take the Defiant. At first I was wondering which ship on the outside ring they might take: the Enterprise-A? Voyager? (Less likely with Seven not with them.) Picard’s Stargazer?
However, when LaForge took them to the closed hanger, that took any of those ships out of possibility. I was honestly surprised to see the D. I had thought about their maybe reassembling the saucer section but had never really considered attaching it to the stardrive section of another Galaxy-Class ship.
LaForge does say that the D is the last ship in Starfleet not to be connected to that networked system. I interpreted that to mean last operable one. That the Defiant, Enterprise-A, and all the others there at the museum were not operational.
I do kind of wonder at a Galaxy-Class being operated by only seven people. Just powering it up and flying it out of dock and on a course at warp speed, I guess most of that can be mostly automated (and the Galaxy-Class always did have a powerful main computer). However, once they get into a combat situation and systems start going offline, what are they going to do then? Send La Forge running down to engineering by himself? (And I wonder if there’s really any chance that we even will see any parts of the D besides the bridge, what with how much it must have cost to do the bridge alone. Would they also spend the money on an engineering, sickbay, transporter room, or Ten Forward set, too?)
And does anyone besides me find it a bit odd that the fleet museum would even *have* actual live photon torpedoes to load up the D with?
I loved Worf openly preferring the E though. And I don’t know if anyone mentioned it already but the Worf “That was not my fault” bit did what I was hoping and that was canonize that Worf had become captain of the E after Picard was transferred to leading to Romulan relief mission, as per the novel The Last Best Hope (and also at least a mention in second Picard novel, the one with Riker, Troi, and the Titan) and also the Star Trek: Picard: Countdown comic book.
@88:
And does anyone besides me find it a bit odd that the fleet museum would even *have* actual live photon torpedoes to load up the D with?
I mean, I assume the Museum has them for defensive purposes. All the moored vessels are priceless historical relics and I can imagine they’ve had to deal with their share of attempted heists over the years (or anti-Federation renegades and extremists trying to blow ’em up for symbolic purposes).
I feel the Borg drop by, born from my daddy’s probes – Jack, as he’s being assimilated
For me. this has the feeling of Picard season 1, in which the last two episodes marred my impression of the entire season as the plot holes that accreted over the season came together in a not-good Matrix-y in which the intergalactic sentinels were going to overrun the galaxy. s/sentinels/Borg/g for this episode, with the threat physically manifesting an episode earlier than in season 1. As keen as I thought the psychological development was in the last episode, I’m annoyed by the characterization holes in this episode. Troi just running out of her session with Jack? “Protocols”? The seeming universality of the “rule of 25” as the cross-species “brain maturity” hard line?
Speaking of holes, holey transporter shenanigans! Lots of commentary has flown around about Trek‘s tenuous grip on evolution and genetics before, but this…this was too much to bear. I suppose it makes neurobiological sense for an abnormality allowing Picard to hear the Borg to have been in the temporal lobe (rather than, say, the occipital lobe) and disguised as Irumodic syndrome, though it also made me wonder why the rewritten DNA in his organic brain would have killed him. It’s an intriguing side effect foreshadowed by Jack’s neuron visions, though I wish they would have played with Jack’s abnormalities being occipital in origin given his visions. And maybe parietal-frontal to encompass motor cortex and his telepathic/kinetic control. But rewriting all of the transporter “normal DNA” with the Borg-injected sequences? It’s a nice way to explain why Ro didn’t want to take the transporter, but it was still a poor execution.
“We haven’t heard from the Borg in 10 years” – the strongest evidence yet of the inconsistent timeline in this season, and in my mind, the gap between seasons that should have been all along, as @43 aptly stated and @50 explicated. To believe that line is true would mean having to forget Season 2 existed – or that the find-and-replace in the scripts missed that particular line when the timeline got shift back authorially.
Like @26 and @30, I couldn’t help but groan to learn that despite other fiction out and in this universe, respectively, someone thought it was a great idea to link up all the computers. Picard lampshaded how bad an idea it was, especially for Shelby to be the one introducing it given her Borg experience. It felt like it flew in the face of what Starfleet would have learned from battling the Borg previously, to say nothing of how the fleet was suckered by a simple auto-repeat of a distress call in Prodigy. Alas, poor Shelby; I knew her, Riker!
I agree with @78 that Shaw’s final naming of Seven was as unbelievable as it was predictable. Again, it breaks the psychological truth of his PTSD for a convenient moment of aww for a death scene. I had hoped that the would give him such a line in the last episode while still alive to reflect some healing with Seven serving at his side, not while Borg were bearing down in a frontal assault in which he was mortally wounded!
Then we have Geordi…somehow reconstructing the entire Enterprise-D…without detailing how he jury-rigged the entire ship to fly with a skeleton crew, even with it in his custody for 20 years. I get the saucer’s recovery, which did make some plot sense, but it’d have to be a lot more donated than just the engine and nacelles to make an entire stardrive section. In a station that wouldn’t admit a ship the size of the D’s saucer. At this point, we wouldn’t have the excuse that “I didna plan on taking her into combat” if things shorted out, and I don’t see them spending money to recreate all the necessary D sets to make repairs plausible as they go Borg cube hunting.
And yet.
Frisson hit me at least three times when I saw the Enterprise-D bridge. When I heard the musical cues swelling with the crew’s camaraderie and nostalgia. When I saw it fly out of the Fleet Museum. I know I took a massive ‘memberberry hit, but hearing Majel’s computer spring to life brought all the most joyful feelings. Or was that just the sense of appreciation in the value of the old Playmates Enterprise-D playset?
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Message, Spock?
None that I am conscious of; except, of course, Happy Frontier Day. Surely, the best of times?
Well. I’m good with Nostalgia Porn, though I would’ve preferred the E to the D myself. I’m a little sad that she’s underarmed at the moment since I have a serious pet peeve with people believing the Galaxy to be a weak ship. On the other hand, bringing her out at less than full power reinforces that they’re not gonna be able to win via straight force in this conflict. They did a wonderful job on the ship model and the bridge recreation was perfect. But that start up sequence. I love that they were able to go back and fully animate the old okudagrams under glass, it was just that little added umph to the scene. I also appreciated the escalating remix of the theme as they got under way.
And I can see why they didn’t take the Defiant. None of them besides Worf are familiar with the Defiant. That wasn’t their ship, their home, the Enterprise was. Also Defiants were never designed to take on the Borg by themselves, they were meant to fly as a squadron. A single Defiant against a Borg Cube isn’t going to work.
Admiral Shelby getting dropped like that it is just. Dammit. Again, we’re right to not want any guest stars on this show. Supporting cast on Picard exist to be killed, to the point that even Q got taken out. No one is safe.
While everyone is complaining about the networking the fleet issue (and you’re all correct) and the bringing the entire fleet to Earth for Frontier Day being stupidity beyond bureaucracy (and you’re also correct) my gripe is the size of the fleet. There’s no way that’s all of Starfleet even after the Vau N’Akat Incident. There were more Inquiry class ships that showed up at Coppellius, there were more ships in the fleet for Operation Return on DS9. Ron Moore said in the DS9 era that he wouldn’t be surprised if Starfleet had about 30,000 ships. That’s 30,000 ships 30 years ago, spread out across a volume 8000 light years in diameter. If you want to bring tens of thousands of ships to one place, I get how it would have an awe inspiring appeal for a big holiday. But that’s not what we have here. This Starfleet is anemic. There were 7000 ships in the fleet in Season 2 of Discovery. And I understand that it would be crazy expensive to animate that many ships. Which is why there’s a practical production reason NOT to say that the whole fleet is at Earth. Since any given ship can General Order 24 a planet, having several dozen starships with no competition is more than sufficient to bring Earth to its knees.
The Borg. I mean, I called this last week, with Picard’s DNA being restructured by the Borg, so I’m not surprised. Them using the transporters to gene edit thousands, probably millions of Starfleet Officers…didn’t see that coming.
Jack. Oh Jack. Jack saying he was going to show the Borg who he is reminds me of Picard’s break down in Family. Crying about how he couldn’t stop them. Jack didn’t take that news well, and he had the worst possible reaction. So if he can’t surpass his old man and override Queenie’s control in the finale, I don’t see how this ends well for anyone. When they pull him out of the Collective however he is going to have an intimate understanding about what it means to be used to kill and destroy and not be able to stop them, better than anyone else Picard knows. The son becomes the father. After having the Queen in his head he will wish for the peace of a Vulcan “Institution”.
But I have to say the horror story radio forcing us to hear all these people be murdered was very effective for me.
Dropping the Changeling angle is weird.It was their plot, they did all this leg work and had all this animus.Though if the Borg actually already have assimilated some of them then it does make some sense. But, floaty melty head doesn’t. The Borg typically don’t make death threats to people. And why did the Changelings do an analysis of Picard’s corpse? If the Borg had told them what the Irumodic Syndrome tumor was, then why would they think his corpse would work? And why extract that part? Were they just going to install his parietal lobe in a changeling?
I’d have preferred if Shaw stuck to his guns and called her Annika instead of Seven. Have him say that he didn’t want to call her what they made her. It wouldn’t have been OK, but it would’ve been more meaningful if that was his way of showing respect rather than being intentionally disrespectful. Having him do it on his death bed doesn’t really carry the weight that they think it did. I was actually thinking he was going to survive long enough to be a part of the Borg being defeated here to both grant him his revenge and see the answer to his question “Why me?” To grant him some peace with what happened to him so he could grow again.
So what is the point of Jack???
Because he wasn’t needed to assimilate everyone.
I guess there will be some resolution next week but meh so over it
Meatface? Will we find out about that? Or was that character just a cheap excuse for justifying self-harm unnecessarily to a small group of fans?
Keith has already said that he hopes we see Jurati and Admiral Janeway. In addition to that, I’m really hoping that we get a surprise appearance by Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher, reuniting him with his mother and having he and Jack meet (Beverly made another Wesley reference in this episode). I know that Wheaton has said that he isn’t in season three, but, then again, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield both said that they weren’t going to be in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
I also hope that we get to see the real Tuvok, that he survived being a captive of the Changelings. Perhaps have Janeway and a few other former Voyager officers like Chakotay show up at the end explaining that they missed most of the action because they were off rescuing Tuvok.
I know they can fit everybody in, but any others people are hoping to see in the last episode? (Maybe an assimilated sword wielding Elnor?)
After this, the “fat one” will be the hottest seller of the ship minis.
@53 These changelings were severed from the link. I recall Vadic speaking of a new link or somesuch. Assimilation is the reward these changelings seek.
@92 Jack was Vox – the voice. He was needed to link all the assimilated starfleet personnel to the Collective. The other assimilees could only act as receivers.
@74/MikeKelm: “Yes Spacedock is huge but I could easily see it being used for any number of purposes.”
Which is my point. It should house considerably more than just the Fleet Museum, yet the show implies that’s all it is. I mean, okay, its residential levels would probably include hotels and restaurants and such for people who come to visit the museum, but even that would use very little of its available space.
@78/Jason Wright: Good point about Shaw calling Seven by her name not feeling earned. It was more just an obligatory deathbed conversion, checking off boxes rather than letting the character get there naturally. I think too much fiction uses characters’ deaths as a shortcut for giving them a semblance of closure without really doing the work to resolve things.
Really, I think the whole arc with Shaw and Seven’s name was badly handled. Ideally they shouldn’t have done it at all, but at least they should’ve had Shaw come around when he saw Sidney call her Commander Seven out of respect, rather than dragging it out artificially. Or they could’ve let Shaw and Seven have an actual conversation about why Shaw’s uncomfortable with her Borg designation and why she chooses to use it — start with the name thing and then use it to delve deeper into the characters, instead of just keeping it on the surface level for the whole season.
@88/David Young: “I caught Beverly’s mentioning that no one’s encountered the Borg in ten years. Could they be saying that it’s really been that long since season two?”
The Borg we saw in season 2 were a separate group of Borg that evolved from an alternate-timeline Queen, so I guess Crusher wasn’t counting them as the Borg of this timeline. And the XBs from season 1 don’t count because, well, they’re ex-Borg.
“I do kind of wonder at a Galaxy-Class being operated by only seven people.”
This doesn’t bother me. The Search for Spock showed that a starship could be automated and run by five people, and the level of automation on the E-D was 80 years more advanced. The original TNG writers’ bible spelled out the show’s philosophy of “Technology Unchained,” the idea that the tech had become so advanced that the ship basically ran itself — which is why the bridge was more of a conference lounge with a few monitor stations than an elaborate control center, and why there was no regular chief engineer in season 1 since it wasn’t thought that they’d need one.
Which makes it ironic that this show is now painting the E-D as the old-fashioned “analog” ship that isn’t as computerized as the rest…
@91/mr_d: “Also Defiants were never designed to take on the Borg by themselves, they were meant to fly as a squadron. A single Defiant against a Borg Cube isn’t going to work.”
But that doesn’t mean the E-D will work any better. It was designed to be a deep-space exploration vessel, a university village and research campus in space. It was a product of a peacetime era (never mind the retconned-in Cardassian wars) in which Starfleet considered combat a low priority, and its armaments were strictly for defense. The Defiant was literally designed to fight the Borg. Even if a single one isn’t enough, it’s probably better-suited for the task than a Galaxy-class ship.
“If you want to bring tens of thousands of ships to one place, I get how it would have an awe inspiring appeal for a big holiday. But that’s not what we have here. This Starfleet is anemic.”
I just decided I’m going to fall back on the same assumption I used to deal with the discrepancy between the Battle of Wolf 359, where 40 starships were said to be a large chunk of “the fleet,” and the Dominion War, where there were numerous “fleets” with dozens of ships apiece. My handwave there is that there were multiple fleets: a “home” fleet that operated within Federation space and defended its borders, and a number of deep-space fleets that explored the galaxy, handled diplomacy with distant powers, etc. I figured that only the home fleet ships could reach Wolf 359 in time, but in the early months of the Dominion War (between seasons on DS9) they had time to call back the deep-space fleets and assemble a larger fighting force.
So maybe we can assume that when they talk about “the entire fleet” being at Earth, they just mean the entire home fleet, excluding the deep-space fleets. I still don’t buy that even the home fleet could feasibly abandon all its responsibilities and assemble in one place, but it’s less absurd than what we’re being asked to believe, that literally every Starfleet ship in the galaxy is in one place.
I would also point out that the enormous fleets that we saw during the Dominion War were the result of wartime production. Presumably, you don’t need as many ships when there’s not a major conflict claiming dozens of them each week.
@96/jaimebabb: Not exactly wartime production — I figure that after Wolf 359, Starfleet went into production on defense ships to prepare for further Borg attacks, so they already had a fair-sized fleet ready to go when the Dominion came. I doubt they could’ve built such a large fleet in a matter of months if they’d been starting from zero. The TNG Tech Manual said it took 13 years to build the Enterprise-D. I presume the process got faster once they were in regular production, but still, it’s hard to believe they could get to the point where they could churn out ships twice the size of an aircraft carrier in a matter of weeks.
Although I figure that’s why the Dominion War fleets consisted so heavily of older ship designs instead of newer stuff like Intrepid or Sovereign class — because the old, established designs were quicker and simpler to build, and retired ones could be refurbished. Similarly, in the Romulan War novels, the authors posited that Starfleet churned out large numbers of older, simpler ship models like the Daedalus class instead of enlarging the NX-class fleet.
I have to admit that I had the desired reaction when Seven referred to Data as “the robot”, and his reaction to that (I laughed). Despite me not really quite buying it as she spent years on Voyager with the holographic Doctor but never referred to him as “the hologram”, and also how she knows that Picard is now also in a positronic “robot” body.
So many distracting unforced errors.
@95CLB:
”Which makes it ironic that this show is now painting the E-D as the old-fashioned “analog” ship that isn’t as computerized as the rest…”
I highly doubt they’ll bring it up, but it feels important to mention that it was discovered in TNG S. 7 that the E-D’s main computer had become sentient. The show ended shorty afterwards so the implications were not explored, but now that Geordi has resurrected it (and the computer obviously recognizes Picard) it feels like it’s something that needs to be addressed. What if the ship doesn’t *want* to fly into danger and risk assimilation? But as I said, it almost certainly won’t come up; it’s become clear that the writers aren’t really interested in telling a creative, compelling story, instead going for pure fanservice.
@100/Echthelion: Rather, “Emergence” established that a sentience had formed within the Enterprise computer, but its sole purpose was to use the ship’s systems to give birth to a new life form, and the sentience in the computer “died” upon giving birth, so no trace of it remained. After all, this was still the era when TV was mostly episodic and everything had to reset to the status quo at the end.
Wow, I had forgotten all about “Emergence.” Wouldn’t it have been cool to see that life form return in some fashion? Okay, that’s pretty much doing V’Ger again, but I think that would’ve been a far more refreshing retread of an antagonist than the Borg. Plus there would be an even better reason to feature the Enterprise-D. It’s… Momma!
I agree with the general comments about nostalgia, fan service, etc. However, I liked the bit about the transporter, mainly for the horrifying implications. Basically, Dr McCoy was right when he was reluctant to use transporters. From what Data said, the transporter doesn’t actually move you, it just starts out with a generic template then copies across individual variations (e.g. hair colour), discarding the original. If the transporter can be subverted to replace parts of your brain, and nobody noticed any difference, what else might have changed?
@85/Descent — Well said! I agree almost completely, though I do think Michael Dorn is so excellent as Worf that I do have some affection simply for the character, not just for the stories that featured him. But in general, yes — hear, hear!
@95, CLB,
The Galaxy class is still a battlecruiser in strength, according to the Klingons at least. She should be plenty strong. I have a hard time saying the Defiant is more powerful. The Defiant is just exceptionally overpowered for her compact size. That’s just me though.
I’d be fine with it just being the First Fleet. It’s just another symptom of small universe syndrome going on.
@91:
Dropping the Changeling angle is weird.It was their plot, they did all this leg work and had all this animus.Though if the Borg actually already have assimilated some of them then it does make some sense. But, floaty melty head doesn’t. The Borg typically don’t make death threats to people. And why did the Changelings do an analysis of Picard’s corpse?
Even discounting I’m a DS9 guy first and foremost and biased, yeah, it was a little weird. But there’s still one episode left — and we know Tuvok has to be resolved, so I expect the remaining Changelings will be adressed.
At the very least — and as sick as I am of the Borg — using the Changeling as red herrings was actually kinda clever and Dominion-esque in-story and on a Meta level.
It goes back to what Keith’s said in earlier episode reviews about the Founders being — to borrow from TV Tropes (and I’m paraphrasing my own argument on the TV Tropes Recap’s Fridge page) — masters of the Kansas City Shuffle and pulling the big stunt so you miss the smaller, more crucial play.
And that’s exactly what Vadic did all Season long. She and her faction kept all the attention on them and made the characters (and audiences) alike think they were dealing with renegade Founders out to avenge the Dominion’s defeat in the War. By the time she goes down and everyone finally realizes it was really the Borg running the show all along, it’s too late.
Worf and Raffi were right: The Founders were doing a Kansas City Shuffle, they just didn’t consider there might be more than one in play…
@103/John C. Kirk: “From what Data said, the transporter doesn’t actually move you, it just starts out with a generic template then copies across individual variations (e.g. hair colour), discarding the original.”
No, it scans your molecular pattern, disassembles you into particles, sends them through subspace, and reassembles them according to the scanned pattern. However, it is possible to edit or disrupt the pattern during beaming, as seen in episodes like “The Lorelei Signal” and “Unnatural Selection” where it was used to restore artificially aged people to normal, “Rascals” where it turned adults into their child selves, “Tuvix” where it merged two people into one, etc.
But apparently it saves on data storage by using a generic template for those specific elements of a body pattern that are universal and identical in everyone. They never said those elements constituted the majority of the pattern, and indeed I’m sure they don’t. They’re probably things like the molecular structure of organic molecules, proteins, and bone crystals, parts of the DNA lattice that are universal and non-coding, that sort of thing.
@105/mr_d: “The Galaxy class is still a battlecruiser in strength, according to the Klingons at least.”
Klingons are hardly unbiased observers. They assume it’s a battlecruiser because their narrow view of things doesn’t allow them to recognize that other types of starship can exist. It was designed to be a science vessel with sufficient defensive capability to keep the crew safe, but battle was always a last resort when all else failed. The Defiant, by contrast, was the first Starfleet vessel in generations to be designed exclusively as a battleship, to specialize in combat and nothing else, and it was designed specifically to fight the Borg. It makes no sense to assume that a generalist vessel with secondary combat capabilities is somehow a better anti-Borg battleship than a vessel that was expressly designed to be an anti-Borg battleship. Jack of all trades is master of none, after all.
“I have a hard time saying the Defiant is more powerful.”
Power is by no means the only thing that matters in a fight. The Defiant has much more robust shielding and ablative armor, for one thing, and is much more maneuverable and agile in combat. Its more compact design offers more protection to the bridge and nacelles. According to the DS9 Technical Manual, 55 percent of its computer core is devoted to tactical and intelligence functions. It has pulse phasers and quantum torpedoes, which are more advanced and, yes, more powerful than the E-D’s weapons.
I’m enjoying the fan service induced nostalgia a lot and I don’t want to sound like I’m hating on the show because I’m not…but I’m unclear how this season makes any sense in a timeline sort of way. We’ve been hearing that this Frontier Day was the 250th anniversary of the launch of the Enterprise NX-01 which checks out given that the show is apparently set in 2401, 250 years after the beginning of Star Trek: Enterprise. But Shelby says that this is the 250th anniversary of the exact day that Enterprise NX-01 launched…which was in April of 2151. All the future present day stuff from Picard Season 2 was set in 2401 and now all of Season 3 is set there, but not only does it seem weird that all of this stuff fits within that 4 month timeframe, it raises questions about how Seven went from not being in Starfleet to the Captain of Titan in less than 4 months time? And we also have Beverly saying that the Borg have not been heard from in over 10 years, but in Season 2, less than 4 months ago, a division of the Borg with a Queen and everything, joined Starfleet. Am I misremembering things? I also assumed from the beginning that Shaw would refer to Seven by her chosen name by the end of the season, but felt like when it happened here, that it didn’t make a lot of sense. Supposedly, his attitude with Picard and Seven had to do with his PTSD from his experiences at Wolf 359, but he’s suddenly willing to refer to Seven by a Borg designation when much of Starfleet and his ship have been taken over by the Borg he feared, through the genetics of Picard / Locutus, who he’s been against since the beginning? It just felt like an odd choice to me, and not the earned moment that I was hoping for and that I see others describing as this beautiful catharsis. Maybe that’s just me though. I’m also hoping they wrap up the Season 2 cliffhanger (which I don’t quite remember) and explain how these rogue changelings joined forces with the Borg, because I’m stumbling over how that might have happened.
Forgive me. I posted basically the same thing twice but don’t see how to delete it. I thought I’d posted last night but didn’t see the post today and wrote a more concise version – only to then see a response to what I had written last night so it must be here somewhere.
Since the networking of the fleet is redundant to a storyline that involves taking over the fleet by networking *the fleet’s crew,* presumably the resolution in next week’s finale will involve hijacking the ship-networking system. I just don’t want to see yet another iteration of family members appealing to the possessed hero to “resist,” “I know there’s still good in you,” or “think of puppies.”
On another note, there’s no particular reason why Picard has to be at the center of this Borg plot. In Best of Both Worlds they wanted Picard for his knowledge and leadership skills, but there was nothing particular to his biology. Sure, adding in a seed that would generate a transmitter in future children decades down the line is a clever back-up plan for the Borg to dominate humanity, but having developed this biological technology why would the Borg only apply it once? As we’ve seen, finding one transmitter-child on deadline proved to be a hassle, so why not make dozens or hundreds of candidates?
@91: “…he wouldn’t be surprised if Starfleet had about 30,000 ships.“
Not to pick on RDM specifically, just to comment on it generally, there’s been a tendency post TOS to crank the dials up on any number the showrunners can lay their hands on.
30,000 ships, and lowballing the crew numbers at 400 per, would require about twelve million crew members. To be in Starfleet in peacetime I think a few things need to be true. You have to be willing to join. You need to be qualified. You need to be trained. Even considering the total population of the Federation might support the raw numbers, turning 12 million of them into members of Starfleet is a huge undertaking.
It’s part and parcel with making the ships oversized or giving them dozens of shuttlecraft. It’s a one upsmanship that’s been going on for decades now.
It’s just my opinion, but having a huge number of starships is detrimental to storytelling. It means any particular ship is less critical, and of the number of problems the Federation faces each day each ship has a fractional chance of being in the right place at the right time to participate. It makes more sense for Kirk’s Enterprise to have an interesting week when there are only 12 or so starships of its type. With a huge Starfleet, having a POV hero ship that’s always in the right place to have an adventure becomes a bit of a stretch.
We may be reaching an upper bound though as I think the main driver is to look cooler than the last time we saw a lot of ships. Even with better TVs the ships are getting small enough where they become hard to distinguish onscreen.
One of my friends just made a good point that didn’t occur to me.
Geordi was indirectly responsible for the destruction of D; it was his compromised VISOR that let the Duras sisters bypass its shields and inflict fatal damage.
So, it’s ironic and fitting that having been the catalyst for the D’s destruction, it’s Geordi who’s labored to refurbish and restore her.
I see all this talk about fan service. Speaking for myself–I love it. I love all the nostalgic callbacks. I live for stuff like that. However, I’m more concerned with the story making sense. That’s really my issue with Picard–the plot just doesn’t make sense. It’s just too convoluted.
This season is very re-watchable. I’m loving the character arcs. I just wish the plot held together better.
@111/kurtzwald: “30,000 ships, and lowballing the crew numbers at 400 per, would require about twelve million crew members. To be in Starfleet in peacetime I think a few things need to be true. You have to be willing to join. You need to be qualified. You need to be trained. Even considering the total population of the Federation might support the raw numbers, turning 12 million of them into members of Starfleet is a huge undertaking.”
On the contrary. According to online stats, there are currently about 28 million people serving in the military worldwide, and that’s just one planet. The Federation has hundreds of planets. Proportionally, the total number of personnel in Starfleet could be in the billions. (Which is why it’s so absurd that Starfleet Academy is presumed to have only one main campus.)
Keep in mind, also, that the Federation is a post-scarcity society where people don’t have to work for a living and are free to do whatever they want. And in that kind of society, if people want to make a meaningful contribution, to exercise their potential, to have adventures or face challenges or develop new skills, Starfleet is one of the best ways to achieve that. You say “in peacetime,” but you’re forgetting that combat is the least of Starfleet’s functions. It’s primarily a scientific and exploratory body as well as a peacekeeping and diplomatic service. It’s on the vanguard of exploration and has cutting-edge research capabilities. If anything, it would be a much more inviting career prospect in peacetime.
“It’s just my opinion, but having a huge number of starships is detrimental to storytelling.”
It’s all proportional. A civilization that encompasses hundreds of planets would have to have a huge number of starships, and a huge number of everything else. It would be bigger than we can comprehend. But there would just be so many things going on simultaneously in such a huge civilization, let alone on the frontiers beyond it, that even a huge number of ships would still be spread pretty thinly, and what we see in the shows would only be a minuscule fraction of everything that’s happening.
Which is why I can reconcile the early seasons of TNG portraying a peacetime Federation with the later seasons that retconned in a Cardassian war during the same period. I’m thinking of how Poul Anderson portrayed a vast interstellar civilization in his fiction, pointing out that it would just be too huge for any one person to be aware of everything happening in it. So a border war with Cardassia could be a major event in the region where it happens, yet have little or no impact on the rest of the gigantic Federation.
@105: In the Deep Space Nine episode “Paradise Lost” an upgunned Excelsior class ship pretty much fought the Defiant to a stalemate. If the Defiant can barely handle a modified Excelsior, it should be hopelessly outclassed by a Galaxy class ship. The Defiant is extremely formidable for a ship of its size, but it is still just an escort vessel whereas the Galaxy class ships have always been treated as full blown capital ships and thus should be far more powerful than the Defiant.
And it’s not like it was just the Klingons that considered the Galaxy class ships as capital ships. The Federation itself used them in that role during the Dominion War. It was mentioned in “Sacrifice of Angels” how the Federation was operating entire “Galaxy Wings” during Operation Return and they sure seemed to form the heart of the Federation battleline in that episode.
At any rate, given that the Borg have taken control of the entirety of the rest of Starfleet, it’s clear the solution to beating them is going to have to come by some means other than just shooting them a lot. As such a versatile ship like the Enterprise that possesses vast scientific and medical capabilities is likely to be far more useful than a ship like the Defiant which lacks those capabilities.
@115/bguy: Yes, obviously a lot of Galaxy ships were made for the war and were no doubt equipped as combat vessels, but that doesn’t mean the Enterprise-D was. Just because it’s the same class of ship doesn’t mean every one is exactly the same. The E-D was designed and built in peacetime as an explorer ship. It was wrecked years before the war. So there’s no reason to think it would be equipped for combat in the same way as the later Galaxy ships produced during the war. Presumably the wartime ships had more weapons, tactical capabilities, combat sickbays, troop barracks, etc. put in where the E-D had science labs and arboretums and holodecks and Cetacean Ops and so forth.
Indeed, it always frustrated me that the wartime Galaxy ships had saucer sections at all. They should’ve been just the stardrive section, since that was specifically designed to be a lighter, faster, more effective combat vessel once it shed the enormous mass of the saucer and was free to cut loose. Or else they should’ve had a different design of saucer, something more compact and specialized for battle.
“As such a versatile ship like the Enterprise that possesses vast scientific and medical capabilities is likely to be far more useful than a ship like the Defiant which lacks those capabilities.”
All right, that’s something I can agree with, but it’s the exact opposite of mr_d‘s argument that it was more powerful as a battleship. Although I would question how useful those capabilities would be when there are only seven people aboard. Its “vast scientific and medical capabilities” at this point are essentially just Data, Geordi, and Beverly.
@116: Wouldn’t the saucer section still be enormously useful during wartime just by virtue of it enabling a Galaxy to be able to carry so many people/supplies? A Galaxy without her saucer section is an excellent warship, but a Galaxy with the saucer section is still a very good warship while also being able to simultaneously serve as a troop transport, a hospital ship, a mobile, fortified supply depot, and giving you massive search and rescue capabilities.
And yeah the Enterprise=D obviously won’t be at full capacity with such a small crew, but it’s sensor and computer capabilities should still be very formidable and especially when wielded by people as capable as Data, Geordi, and Beverly.
Thinking ahead to next week’s episode/series finale and how everything could be possibly tied up where good triumphs over evil, I think the solution will ultimately lie with Jack. I think he’ll overcome the pull of the dark side and uses the networked Borg drones to eliminate all of the Changelings in Starfleet, before restoring the drones back to their pre-Borg state. And then Admiral Janeway will appear from her cloaked ship (in a nice callback to the alternative future timeline of “Endgame”) to finish the job with a final showdown with the Queen.
@117/bguy: “Wouldn’t the saucer section still be enormously useful during wartime just by virtue of it enabling a Galaxy to be able to carry so many people/supplies? A Galaxy without her saucer section is an excellent warship, but a Galaxy with the saucer section is still a very good warship while also being able to simultaneously serve as a troop transport, a hospital ship, a mobile, fortified supply depot, and giving you massive search and rescue capabilities.”
Except that’s an abandonment of the intentions of Gene Roddenberry, Andrew Probert, and everyone else involved in the original design of the E-D. The stardrive section was literally designed to be more effective as a battleship when separated. That was the entire point. I mean, if the ship really worked better in combat unseparated, then it wouldn’t have been designed to separate for combat in the first place.
The only reason that was retconned was because the VFX team found the separating miniature too large and cumbersome to work with, so they just dropped the whole idea. Which is exactly why I’m frustrated that they didn’t revive the saucer separation idea in DS9, by which point they were using digital ship models and no longer had a practical reason not to use a stardrive-only version of the Galaxy Class. They just used the intact version because it was familiar to the audience, which was a missed opportunity to finally use the concept the way Probert intended it.
@118 / Garreth:
Yeah, and that’s why I’ve been making the comparisons to David Mack’s Destiny Trilogy — and how this is a chance for this Season and the finale to serve as the Canonical Borg’s Omega.
I think Jack and his unique abilities may end up fulfilling the same role Erik Hernandez and the Caeliar did in Lost Souls and the dissolution of the Collective.
Also, on a random black comedy note, this Official Frontier Day Complaint on Twitter made me LMAO last night. XD
Can I just say as a fan of the early ‘New Frontier’ Novels how unsettling the quick dispatch of Elizabeth Shelby was.
#118. I’m wondering if Picard may sacrifice himself to save Jack from the Borg. Although, they wouldn’t have him die a second time in this series, would they?
@122 / chadefallstar:
Can I just say as a fan of the early ‘New Frontier’ Novels how unsettling the quick dispatch of Elizabeth Shelby was.
Yeah, I never really got into NF, but I still had a similar sentiment.
Ro’s death was one thing — and that I was actually (mostly) fine with in the context of her arc and relationship with Picard. I actually liked the irony and twisted symmetry of Ro — someone who’d betrayed Starfleet and going a group of renegades she’d infiltrated — got killed by a group of renegades who’d infiltrated Starfleet.
But Shelby’s death just felt gratuitous after Ro’s and a waste.
On the one hand Frontier Day was absolutely delightful for the nanoseconds it was allowed to be a celebration of all things Starfleet along with all things Federation (NX-01 REPRESENT! sang through my brain).
That and Mr Worf standing up for the honour of Enterprise-E (My personal favourite to date) buy the production team just enough goodwill from me to avert any demands on my part for the writing staff to be liquidated.
I am so, so sick of the Borg and being obliged to accept them as Big Bad of this season has left my interest in this season gut-shot and on life support.
ALSO: I’ve said it before and will state it again – Owen Shaw absolutely belongs on LOWER DECKS (Which is, conveniently, set long before PICARD).
Hopefully the character will show up there and get his chance to be something other than … Fifth wheel? Sixth wheel? (Entertaining as he was, neither he nor any character dating from later than the early ‘90s seems to be getting much of a chance to shine).
Well, Matalas is confirming Jurati won’t be returning for the Finale.
To be fair, it could be misdirection — but I don’t think he’s lying.
I just wish the rest of the original PIC Cast beyond Raffi — excluding Rios — had some presence in the final Season. Frontier Day esp. was a missed chance to bring in Elnor (and I’m still pissed we’ll never get to see him and Worf meet).
@bguy 115. The Defiant was pulling its punches for a lot of the fight as Worf was reluctant to attack another star fleet vessel.
in general I always felt the Enterprise-D took a little too much damage but that was probably a writers choice to force the crew to either out think their enemy or find a diplomatic solution. I imagine the later galaxy-classes, especially the war time era ones were upgraded beyond the Enterprise D which was after all, the third version off the line. I can imagine they would retain the saucer section even in war time for two reasons- redundancy is nice in a combat ship, it’s easier to keep producing the sane thing than redesigning and you can probably haul A LOT of ground troops in one. Also as the saucer would give you the ability to haul a flag officer and staff (in WW2 an Admirals staff could be 50-75 people) as well as serve as a resupply vessel for smaller ships in the fleet. You’d lose a lot of that capability without the saucer
@124/Mr. Magic: Yeah, it seems being a guest star from the TNG-era and brought back for a guest role/cameo on Picard is basically a kiss of death given the track record (series regulars like Tuvok don’t count and I think are untouchable given that they’ll probably survive to appear on other series such as Star Trek: Janeway lol). But what was done with Shelby was especially mean-spirited and cruel. I actually felt like I was watching some kind of spoof. If it were someone like Jellico I could get it, but Shelby, although she initially came on strong, ultimately achieved mutual respect among the Enterprise crew. She didn’t even get to exchange any dialogue with the former Enterprise-D officers and she was made out to be a dummy because she really should have known better than to cheer on the networking of Starfleet vessels because of her history with the Borg and the Cylons and Skynet and such. Just so sad.
@127/Mr. Magic: It’s also quite possible Elnor is dead as the Excelsior, his posting, was destroyed by the Changelings in this most recent episode.
@129 / Garreth:
It’s also quite possible Elnor is dead as the Excelsior, his posting, was destroyed by the Changelings in this most recent episode.
Matalas has officially confirmed Elnor wasn’t on Excelsior when it blew up.
Of course, ah, that doesn’t exactly improve his chances much between the attack and his own likely assimilation.
@130/Mr. Magic: If Matalas confirmed he was safe, I’m pretty sure Elnor will show up as the new science officer on the Titan alongside Sydney, Alana, and Jack in Star Trek: The Generation After Next; or, he’ll be recruited by Georgiou for his bad ass sword skills on Star Trek: In the Shadows.
@108- Jason, I see your point about how Shaw’s turnabout in finally acknowledging Seven’s chosen name wouldn’t follow given that the Borg are the villain here, but I would look at it another way. Perhaps Shaw realized that notwithstanding what the Borg have perpetrated, Seven and Picard have been fiercely loyal to Starfleet in attempting to repel them (it? I’m never quite sure If it’s plural or singular), And that it was unfair of him to associate them with what was perpetrated upon them.
And on the subject of the Borg, For me they were never quite as scary as when they were truly focused on assimilation. Dispassionate, relentless, undeterred. As soon as they developed the queen as a personality They became just another emotional dastardly villain. Everything about them is rather boring to me now in comparison to the awestruck terror they represented back in season 3 of TNG. Cute little Hugh, etc. They managed to recapture a little bit of that when seven showed up on Voyager, but ultimately The borg are now just another run of the mill guest star villain that shows up every now and then like Lore. Even the depiction of the borg cube was underwhelming, shrouded in some kind of weird mist and with the little green lights shining out of it, I found it all rather underwhelming compared to the stark, dark beauty of the original Borg cube.
Back to Shaw’s finally calling Seven by her chosen name .. I guess I find it less objectionable than most of the rest of the commenters. Yes, we knew it was inevitable and as soon as he had that glazed look in his eyes and we all knew he was going to die we all knew it was coming.
But I still find some meaning in it and some measure of redemption. To analogize it to the concept of Christian grace, No matter what you’ve done in your life,, you’re never beyond the gift of grace as long as you accept it. Shaw was a monumental ass, but he was also fiercely starfleet and did not hesitate to put his life at risk for seven and the rest of his crew and our heroes.. And at the last moment, looking into the eyes of the woman He disrespected for so long, He relented from his supreme dickishness in what I found to be a rather poignant, If ridiculously predictable, dying breath moment as far as they go, and of course we’ve seen thousands of them dramatized over the years in all the shows we’ve watched. Seemed to me That seven acknowledged and appreciated his gesture. If she can, so can I.
As a father, I completely agree it’s very strange to watch Geordi calmly taking care of business and leisurely getting a kick out of introducing everyone to the reincarnation of Enterprise D, while both his daughters have essentially been assimilated. I would be a basket case.
It’s too late now for them to do anything to try and convince me that I should give a crap about Jack. Sorry, I just don’t. Regardless of what he’s been saddled with through no fault of his own, I just don’t care about him or his glowy red eyes, or even that he’s the child of Picard and Crusher. Meh
As has been noted, they keep bringing back characters I love, or at least that I found interesting and compelling, and then killing them off right away. Why wouldn’t they do the same thing for characters I had no use for? I admit I’d kind of like to see Neelix, Sisko, and Alexander all dispatched in a terrible shuttle accident.
< shrug > I’m going to go rewatch the first season. At least they tried to do something new and interesting then. It’s been all downhill with a rocket booster attached to the toboggan and Wiley E driving ever since.
@128/MikeKelm: Even if you can argue there are good reasons for the saucer, wouldn’t it make more sense to have some ships with saucers and some without, to get the respective advantages of both configurations? After all, the ability to haul large numbers of troops and the ability to be fast and maneuverable in a shootout are separate and somewhat conflicting benefits, so surely it would make sense to include both instead of going for one to the exclusion of the other.
I mean, everyone raves about the Prometheus and the way it could split into three pieces, so why is there so much hostility to the idea of the Galaxies splitting into two?
Heck, it would’ve just been nice to see the producers acknowledge that the separated form of the ships still existed, something that should’ve been easier once they switched to CGI ships. And it would’ve added a bit more visual variety to those shots of armadas made up of just the same few familiar classes over and over.
@132/fullyfunctional: “in attempting to repel them (it? I’m never quite sure If it’s plural or singular)”
Well, singular “they” is catching on these days (really, it’s been standard English since before Chaucer, but the artificial rule against it is on the way out), so referring to the Borg as they/them covers both bases.
@128/MikeKelm: That’s true, but the Lakota was also pulling her punches during that fight. (Captain Benteen says that her orders were to disable the Defiant, not destroy it, and she disobeys Admiral Leyton’s order to use her quantum torpedoes on the Defiant.) With both ships holding back, I would call that a fair fight, and it saw the Lakota give almost as good as she got.
@131 / Garreth:
If Matalas confirmed he was safe, I’m pretty sure Elnor will show up as the new science officer on the Titan alongside Sydney, Alana, and Jack in Star Trek: The Generation After Next; or, he’ll be recruited by Georgiou for his bad ass sword skills on Star Trek: In the Shadows.
I just hate how he was written out (and not just because Evan Eangoria’s pretty AF, lol).
Again, it just pisses me off that we didn’t get to see Elnor and Worf meet and interact. That would’ve been a perfect way of demonstrating Worf’s character development: Bonding with the young man — a fellow warrior no less — of a people he’s traditionally despised during TNG and DS9. I’m sure he would’ve seen a lot of his TNG-era self in Elnor.
And now it’s too late.
I liked the first few episodes but they’ve been getting stupider, more Kurtzmanesque, as the season wore on. Not looking forward to how dumb the finale will be.
@137/Marcus: I question “Kurtzmanesque,” given that the other current Trek shows that Kurtzman executive-produces are generally smarter than this show has gotten. I mean, I’ve never been a huge fan of Kurtzman as a showrunner, going back to his and Roberto Orci’s terrible showrunning debut on Hercules and Xena, but there has been a lot of good Trek produced under his oversight. Kurtzman has been in charge of Picard from the beginning, but it’s only gotten this lowbrow and fanservicey since Terry Matalas came aboard.
By the way, the term “fanservice” seems to have shifted in meaning in American usage. The term originated in Japanese manga and anime (ファンサービス, fan sābisu) and referred primarily to gratuitous sexualization of female characters. By the original definition, fanservice in Star Trek would be something like Seven of Nine’s catsuit or T’Pol’s decontamination scenes. Or Kirk’s frequent shirtlessness in TOS, to extend the definition. Although it could also be used to refer to excessive action to service action fans, or extended shots of giant robots to service robot fans. By that definition, the ST:TMP Enterprise flyby was pure fanservice.
I guess it shows how self-referential media have become that “servicing fans” has now come to mean servicing their fandom for a series’s own past continuity, rather than for more general things like sex and violence.
Yeah, I’m interested in a spin-off series with Seven of Nine, but honestly I would much rather that someone else showran it.
But, hey, this season is doing massive numbers and getting unaccountably good reviews, so it looks like the future of Trek is action figures banging into each other forever.
@119 – One reason for keeping the saucer is that it is able to absorb damage that might have hit the star drive section instead. Better to blow up sone unoccupied quarters and cargo bays than engineering. Also, the saucer has the two largest phaser arrays on the ship.
@140/kkozoriz: ” Also, the saucer has the two largest phaser arrays on the ship.”
But they can only fire in one direction at a time, so that doesn’t really make much difference. They’re only that large because they have to provide wraparound coverage for a very large object. The smaller stardrive section only needs a proportionally smaller set of emitters to provide the same coverage.
Again, the stardrive section was specifically designed to be the part of the ship that was specialized for battle. It makes no sense to argue that the ship is better at combat when intact, because if that were the case, it would never have been designed to separate for combat. It’s like arguing that a sword is more effective if you keep the sheath on.
@136/Mr. Magic: With Star Trek, I have learned to never say “never.” Worf has proven as popular and entertaining as ever, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s brought back in the near future in another production. He’s proven to have good chemistry with Raffi so she could be joining him. Elnor, of course, has a connection to Raffi, so the opportunity for a scene(s) between Worf and Elnor would be a possibility as well. You’d just have to be patient about it.
This is a great article on the love and care that went into reproducing the Enterprise-D bridge set (and it wasn’t scrapped after production concluded!):
https://variety.com/2023/artisans/news/star-trek-picard-enterprise-d-bridge-set-1235580496/
@142 & 143 / Garreth:
True. With the Raffi connection, I could definitely seeing the Cadet go on “Field Trips” with his teacher and her grumpy partner.
Yeah, I saw that Variety article yesterday. Really interesting hearing what it took to recreate the set with modern materials and with a surprising amount of archival materials not even preserved. With how much the fandom documents and revers these sets, it’s easy to forget that isn’t necessarily the case with the real-world production crew.
And I’m glad they haven’t scrapped the rebuild set, too. It deserves to be on permanent display in a museum (much like the Cheers set).
Speaking of recreations, here’s also an interesting video comparing/contrasting Team Picard’s return to the 1701-“D to the first time Picard set foot on it in “Encounter at Faripoint”.
I haven’t re-watched that episode in a long time, so I didn’t realize Matalas had homaged specific shots (the final push in on Picard in particular). That’s a nice touch and way of bringing TNG full circle.
I’m reluctant to single out and get angry at Alex Kurtzmann when Trek goes off the rails. I think it’s usually a mixed bag when it comes to these things, and the specific problems we’ve seen with this season, like the excessive nostalgia, poor pacing, and over-reliance on mystery boxes and so forth, are endemic to the industry at this time, particularly on the blockbuster side of entertainment.
Why bother to change, though, if audiences aren’t giving them a reason? The viewership is there, and the nostalgia lovers are eating it up. According to news outlets, this season of Picard is in the Nielsen top ten for streaming series. If that’s the case, well then, I expect we’ll see William Shatner playing zombie Kirk any minute now…
@144/Mr. Magic: Nice video – thanks for sharing. It’s always easy to forget how in the pilot, Data and Geordi’s stations were reversed before they took their usual positions (before Geordi’s engineering promotion) from the second episode on. Also, Brent Spiner (in a blink-or-you-miss-it moment) does a funny fingertips flexing motion with his hands as Picard is surveying the bridge. Why would Data need to flex his hands lol?
The ratings (and overall critical) success of this season is wonderful to hear and surely now Paramount+ isn’t going to just let these characters gallop off into the sunset. But I think it’s all the more reason that this cast be given another shot at a feature film rather than more aborted attempts to use the JJ-verse crew.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/streaming-tv-rankings-march-6-12-2023-2-1235373784/amp/
@CLB,
You have raised many accurate points, and I agree a mix of Galaxies in the Dominion War with and without Saucer and flying separated mode would’ve been ideal. The Phaser Arrays of the Galaxy can fire more than one shot at a time, this was shown in Conundrum. A curious note on what the base combat capabilities of the Enterprise-D might currently be, the ship’s rebuilt out of several other Galaxy classes all of which would more than likely have seen action in the Dominion War. So while the Saucer is the original recipe, the remainder would be the from Galaxies that had been upgraded. There are other reasons to keep the saucer though, including the massive shield grid she has. For the purpose of survivability, having the additional shields, hull, and general matter on hand is useful. And you can always separate if you need to.
While the ship is designed to operate at peak combat efficiency while separated the primary reason for separating the saucer was to protect the civilians and the bulk of the crew onboard. Slightly ill conceived since they didn’t put a warp drive in the saucer section though.
The Phaser Array size…oh man this debate always raises its ugly head like a cobra. For the uninitiated, The tech manual says that any one segment of the array can handle the full fire power, but that the firing sequence involves pulling the energy from each segment building up to firing. So the idea has always been that the more segments in the phaser array strip you have the more powerful the phaser beam.So the Galaxy’s big guns are on the saucer.And that’s generally backed up by what we seen on screen, since the D’s heaviest hits were always with that big wind up audio cue from the saucer arrays. The sound is even used for the Beam Overload attack in Star Trek Online.
Then there’s the counter argument, the The Motion Picture. Phaser power is routed directly from the warp core, meaning that phaser banks no longer need to be charged, and they have the general punch of being directly hitched to main power. Meaning that it doesn’t matter if the phaser arrays are bigger, the Stardrive has the warp core so that’s the end of it.
I tend to believe both are true. The difference in warp power vs impulse power means that the Stardrive’s phasers are just as powerful because they have the warp core, but the Saucer has the more powerful phaser banks so even at low power they have good punch even if the ship is caught alone, at the cost of things like rate of fire and sustained firing time.
On the subject of Fanservice, 100%. Continuity Porn is the actual term that would apply to this season, but Continuity Porn is now considered a form of Fanservice.
On the subject of the Prometheus I hear more people calling Multi-Vector Assault Mode stupid than saying it was a great idea. I’ve always liked it myself.
@128, Mike Helm
That’s exactly it. The Enterprise-D was never shown as a tough ship because the idea was that the solutions to problems wouldn’t be tactical in nature of but diplomatic or scientific.
Which ultimately did the ship, crew, and setting a disservice in my opinion as many have complained that Starfleet sent civilians and families out into a dangerous Galaxy with little to no protection. It aggravates me to no end that people think that the Galaxy class is this feckless pacifist reflection of an idiotic complacent Starfleet when it’s an incredibly robust and capable design that made other local powers in the Galaxy clench their butt cheeks and pay attention whenever one showed up. And I say this as an Enterprise-E kinda guy, the Galaxy class while incredibly complex is one of the best designs Starfleet ever fielded.
@141 – The main reason it was designed to separate was to keep the families out of combat. Sure, the star drive section is more combat capable, having both sets of torpedo launchers, but it was not designed as a battleship that just happened to carry a saucer.
As to why they stopped doing saucer sep, perhaps it was found that the entire ship had a greater survivability that splitting it up. And the saucer phasers offer top and bottom coverage with about 270 degrees of firing arc.
Also, splitting the ship doesn’t really keep the families safe if the star drive section is heavily damaged or destroyed. Then the families are stuck in the middle of nowhere with just impulse engines to get to safety. A larger ship with more weapons and power (The saucer was shown to be capable of combat in BOBW) is more survivable than two, smaller ships.
#147. I think they would’ve been better off making another TNG movie in the first place. I don’t mean just this season; the entirety of Star Trek: Picard might’ve been a more streamlined, coherent story had they only a couple of hours to tell it. But then two hours isn’t the prolonged hook to keep people subscribing.
@145/Dingo: “I’m reluctant to single out and get angry at Alex Kurtzmann when Trek goes off the rails.”
Yeah… it’s the same thing I said about Rick Berman in another thread somewhere very recently. It’s fashionable to blame him for everything you don’t like, but that ignores the fact that he’s also responsible for most of the stuff you do like, because he’s the guy with the final say on every decision in the shows.
@148/mr_d: “While the ship is designed to operate at peak combat efficiency while separated the primary reason for separating the saucer was to protect the civilians and the bulk of the crew onboard. Slightly ill conceived since they didn’t put a warp drive in the saucer section though.”
That’s because the normal way of using separation was meant to be like what we saw in “The Arsenal of Freedom” — the saucer gets left behind somewhere safe before the stardrive section goes into a combat situation. The “Encounter at Farpoint” version of separating in mid-pursuit was supposed to be the exception, not the rule.
But I have often thought that it would’ve made more sense to have at least two separate ships, a large science vessel captained by Picard and a smaller, more heavily armed escort ship captained by Riker. It doesn’t really make sense for an FTL starship to operate alone, since if its FTL engines and communications fail, it may be stranded for years or decades. Always good to have a backup. (Though I guess that’s less of an issue if you have warp-capable shuttlecraft.)
“On the subject of the Prometheus I hear more people calling Multi-Vector Assault Mode stupid than saying it was a great idea. I’ve always liked it myself.”
I’ve never been fond of it. Jack of all trades is master of none. Something designed to be a single ship will work better as a single ship, and something designed to be three ships will work better as three ships. Trying to work both ways entails too many tradeoffs. It’s excusable in the Galaxy class because only one piece is meant to go into battle while the other remains passive (though I still say it would make more sense as two separate ships), but the Prometheus just seems like a gimmick to me, an attempt to do Voltron in reverse.
#151. Exactly. It’s the same with Kathleen Kennedy. Alright, so maybe most of those movies weren’t so great, but I loved Rogue One and The Mandalorian for the most part. I don’t think she was on vacation when those were made. Give them the hits with the misses.
Hi all. i almost never post here anymore, but just jumped on to say only one more Trek-nostalgia-drop is needed to totally save the day now…V’Ger!
People have been speculating that Star Trek is going to follow up on V’Ger my entire life. Nothing has ever followed up on V’Ger.
Didn’t V’Ger and Will Decker merge and leave this universe forever? What’s to follow up on?
#155. If they do, they definitely won’t be following up with Stephen Collins, I’ll tell ya that much…
@156: Bwahahahaha! Will Decker can always be recast though like Icheb.
@154 / jameiebabb
“People have been speculating that Star Trek is going to follow up on V’Ger my entire life. Nothing has ever followed up on V’Ger.”
Yeah, at this point, V’Ger is to Trek what “Fetch” is to Mean Girls.
Either way, it’s not happening.
I *LOVED* this episode. I have loved all of new Trek, and all of Picard, but this episode – I *LOVED* it. Things can’t just be “fanservice” (a daft term if ever I heard one), but man alive, I’m a heck a fan, feel free to service me from time to time. Loved it.
For some of the points above, I see some argue that the Borg aren’t as they were initially portrayed. You can say that’s inconsistent writing if you wish, I call it evidence that the Borg were changed by their encounter with the Federation – how could they not be? They encountered a society that time and again showed them that resistance could be astonishingly fruitful. The Borg are a collective mind, how could that mind not be driven a little nuts by it?
Why aren’t shuttles part of the fleet-wide ship network? Because if the fleet was acting as one during a battle then having shuttles – which aren’t of much military use – able to act independently would obviously be useful.
Why the ‘D not the Defiant? Geordi said that he hadn’t plugged the ship into the fleet network yet because he’d not finished working on her. That implies the fully restored museum exhibits are still networked, perhaps in case they are ever needed.
Why not just take the ‘D stardrive section, and why wasn’t it seen commonly being used in battle? Presumably for the same reason we stopped seeing it separated in TNG – perhaps the envisaged battle strength of the stardrive section alone didn’t materialise. As ever, if something can be explained in one line of dialogue it isn’t a plot hole – it’s something you don’t know.
And finally – the villains of this episode at the end were youngsters who brook no resistance to their hive mind, whose rational thoughts are being suppressed by those who wish to impose unity of ideology, to do away with individual liberal pluralism. They need saving from themselves by older uninfected heads. I wonder if the usual grumblers who complain that Trek is too political these days will find much fault to pick with that?
Loved it!
I think they have made a brilliant 3rd season (leaving aside the unknown ending for the time being).
The one big thing on my WISM-scoreboard (WISM being short for “what inevitably struck me”) was the moment of the Enterprise-D reveal. It sits there like an emotional hole, if you ask me. Our heroes and heroines have just witnessed the takeover of the entire fleet in earth orbit, the death of countless of people, the loss of their children — and as soon as they board the Enterprise D, all that is kind of forgotten for this – admittedly wonderful – moment of fan-service. We don´t even have to single out La Forge here, as our humble reviewer did. Even though it is most obvious with him. These characters, in their right mind, cannot possibly show that much of nostalgic optimism and confidence after what just happened.
It was a bit too much for me.
My thought now: They should have introduced the old Enterprise earlier, maybe after their first visit at the fleet museum. Then this great nostalgic moment wouldn´t have felt so out of place emotionally with the rest of the events.
@156–
I know and that kind of peeves me off. If Collins hadn’t have done bad things, he’d be perfect to play Matt Decker in SNW.
@158…just saying, trek has had chekov’s deus ex machina on the shelf for over 40 years now. come on already…
@159/jmwhite: “For some of the points above, I see some argue that the Borg aren’t as they were initially portrayed. You can say that’s inconsistent writing if you wish, I call it evidence that the Borg were changed by their encounter with the Federation – how could they not be? They encountered a society that time and again showed them that resistance could be astonishingly fruitful. The Borg are a collective mind, how could that mind not be driven a little nuts by it?“
I find that a short-sighted argument. The Borg have been around for thousands of years and have territory thousands of times vaster than the Federation has explored. I find it impossible to believe that the Federation is the first civilization in history to pose any real challenge to the Borg.
I mean, consider that Voyager didn’t encounter the Borg until shortly after they passed the territory of the Voth, an incredibly advanced civilization millions of years older than ours. I tend to assume that’s because the Borg were unable to get past the Voth no matter how much they tried. In this vast and ancient galaxy, there must be many civilizations immensely more advanced than the Federation and easily able to slap down the Borg. And there must be many civilizations like the Federation, multispecies coalitions that are imaginative and adaptable and able to resist successfully. It’s the height of arrogance to assume our own civilization is unique in that regard.
And the problem with the way the Borg have changed is not about in-story consistency, which is by far the most superficial, least important level of fictional critique. The problem is that they’ve gotten less interesting. As originally conceived, they were something profoundly alien, dangerous because they simply didn’t perceive life the same way we did and thus there was no common ground. Now, they’re just another generic bad-guy race led by a monologuing supervillain.
@162/fss: “just saying, trek has had chekov’s deus ex machina on the shelf for over 40 years now. come on already…”
If it’s Chekov’s, then absolutely they will not interfere with it.
Anyway, a Chekhov’s Gun is something set up early in the story to pay off at the end. V’Ger already paid off at the end of TMP; the plot was decisively resolved. Therefore it is not a Chekhov’s Gun. Also, a deus ex machina is something you generally want to avoid using, because it’s a cheat to provide a random solution out of nowhere rather than allowing the characters to earn their victory through their own efforts.
#163.
If it’s Chekov’s, then absolutely they will not interfere with it.
Ha! I’m laughing way more than I should be at that, but thank you.
@138/CLB – I am not sure where you found a definition of ファンサービス that refers to sexualization of female characters in manga. It actually refers to celebrity meet-and-greets, handshake events, etc.
@163/CLB: “It’s the height of arrogance to assume our own civilization is unique in that regard.”
The Federation isn’t our civilisation. It’s the civilisation humanity should aspire to be. You might think the Borg’s evolution has made them less interesting. I disagree, but that’s fine, we’re not the Borg.
The on screen depictions of our galaxy don’t point towards thousands of larger, more advanced, civilisations. Our well explored portion is at least in the single figures % of it. Federation starships can easily move across 1% of it in a year, and a 5 year mission takes you to a couple of percent across. If there are just 1000 far more advanced civilisations then they would be just a couple of 1000 light year apart on average – and that would make the politics of the Alpha/Delta/Gamma Quadrants *very* different to what we’ve seen. The Star Trek universe points to there being a technology bottle neck at roughly the level of the Federation/Klingons etc, and that the overwhelming majority of civilisations are either at it or below that level.
Equally the Borg can’t have territory thousands of times larger than the Federation within our galaxy otherwise they’d have assimilated about all of it. Scorpion/The Gift point to then having expanded on to a few multiples of the Federation at most.
Your Voth idea is interesting – I’d always just assumed the Borg hadn’t gotten to them yet – but the idea that the Borg were perviously almost invincible, found the Federation to be a unique problem, and rapidly changed to try and defeat them as a result, well, it just fits with what we’ve seen on screen perfectly time and again.
@163 / CLB:
And the problem with the way the Borg have changed is not about in-story consistency, which is by far the most superficial, least important level of fictional critique. The problem is that they’ve gotten less interesting. As originally conceived, they were something profoundly alien, dangerous because they simply didn’t perceive life the same way we did and thus there was no common ground. Now, they’re just another generic bad-guy race led by a monologuing supervillain.
Right. It’s just like the return of Gozer in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and why it bothered me.
The first time around, yeah, she was terrifying because she was the ultimate outside context problem for our heroes: An actual, all-power entity rather than the ordinary ghosts they’d been busting. How in the hell are they gonna beat that?
Second time around? Been then, done that, roasted the Stay-Pufts. Even the O.G.s weren’t taking her seriously anymore (at least until she started kicking their asses).
Same thing with the Borg — and again, this is why I’ve been citing David Mack’s Destiny Trilogy throughout he talk-back.
I think Jack and his abilities — and the themes of this Season re: legacy and connections — are the chance to try and end the Canonical Borg the way Mack used Hernandez and the Caeliar to dissolve the Literary Borg. And as this is it for the 24th Century. ending this era’s greatest threat once and for all would be one hell of a last hurrah and final sendoff.
Plus, if they don’t, then where the hell do you go with the Collective after this? It’s kinda hard to top simultaneously assimilating all of Starfleet (then again, so was changing human history in First Contact and ‘Borg Genetic Malware’ is a worthy, if long-delayed follow-up).
I honestly think that the last season’s promise of a Federation with a benign Borg Collective in its midst could have been a fascinating way to proceed with them as a species (and certainly better, in my opinion, than the Destiny option), but apparently we’re just ignoring that now.
@166/jmwhite: “The Federation isn’t our civilisation. It’s the civilisation humanity should aspire to be.“
The point is, it’s the civilization that humanity belongs to, and it’s narcissistic to assume that humanity, or a coalition including it, is uniquely capable of something that none of the other millions of civilizations in the galaxy have ever achieved. It’s also simply a failure of imagination to assume that the Borg never encountered any noteworthy challenges in the thousands of years they were around before meeting us.
“The on screen depictions of our galaxy don’t point towards thousands of larger, more advanced, civilisations. Our well explored portion is at least in the single figures % of it.“
Your second sentence shows that the first is irrelevant. Since the depictions we’ve seen only cover a tiny, tiny fraction of the galaxy, we can’t assume something doesn’t exist just because we haven’t seen it yet.
Also, you’re forgetting that Trek has historically depicted an abundance of ancient, hyper-advanced civilizations far beyond us — Thasians, Organians, Trelane’s people, Metrons, Melkot, the Edo god, Nagilum, the Douwd, etc. Trek used to depict a galaxy littered with civilizations far, far more ancient than ours — which it logically would be, given that it’s 13 billion years old and our civilization is less than a millionth of that in age. The modern tendency to depict it populated mostly by civilizations at a comparable level to the Federation is, again, a gross failure of imagination.
“Equally the Borg can’t have territory thousands of times larger than the Federation within our galaxy otherwise they’d have assimilated about all of it.“
Well, what I actually said was “vaster than the Federation has explored.” Obviously the territory explored by the Federation is immensely larger than the territory politically governed by it. And going by this map, what I said was hyperbolic, yes. But Borg territory is easily thousands of times larger than actual Federation territory. Even that little black dot inside the white circle on the linked map is larger than the UFP and all its immediate neighbors put together. (Keep in mind also that space is 3-dimensional, and volume goes up as the cube of linear distance while area only goes up as the square.)
“but the idea that the Borg were perviously almost invincible, found the Federation to be a unique problem, and rapidly changed to try and defeat them as a result, well, it just fits with what we’ve seen on screen perfectly time and again.“
Aren’t you forgetting Species 8472? They were totally trashing the Borg until Janeway made the highly questionable decision to help the Borg develop a counterweapon against them. So it’s certainly not at all unique for the Borg to be defeated. 8472 did immensely more damage to the Collective than Starfleet ever managed to do prior to “Endgame.”
Besides, there is nothing unique about the Borg changing to find new solutions. That has always been their defining trait since they were introduced: that they adapt to overcome any new challenge they’re faced with. That’s what they always do, one of their original defining traits, so it’s bizarre to think that it’s somehow an exception. They’ve never been “invincible” — they just learn from their failures and methodically try again until they succeed.
#168. I agree. Though I wasn’t wild about how it was executed, I appreciated they were trying to do something new with the Borg in season 2. I’m still hoping we’ll see a twist in the finale, that the Borg have changed in yet another new and interesting way, and that it won’t end with a simple pew-pew-pew or Data hacking their system again, but I have my doubts.
Maybe I should lower my expectations and watch it as a fan would a convention video, with all our favorite people on stage one last time. I think I’ll try to make the most of that.
@168 / aimebabb
I honestly think that the last season’s promise of a Federation with a benign Borg Collective in its midst could have been a fascinating way to proceed with them as a species (and certainly better, in my opinion, than the Destiny option), but apparently we’re just ignoring that now.
Who says they can’t? Jurati isn’t going anywhere.
Obviously, the franchise isn’t gonna get rid of the Borg indefinitely or entirely; they’re too iconic and popular, even with VOY’s Villain Decay.
Look at Doctor Who when the revival began. At first, it was, “Oh, the Daleks wiped themselves out in the Time War”, then gradually survivors popped up and finally they (more or less) came back in full.
Same thing here. But with the setup from Seasons Two and Three, there’s your way to have your cake and eat it.
If Matalas does what I think he’s gonna do with Jack next week, that allows them go, heh, Mack-ian and pull a Destiny and dissolve the original Collective for good.
And that existential threat has to be resolved sooner or later, regardless; the Borg’s schitck has run its course. IIRC, Mack recognize all this too, which is why one factor in the Destiny pitch being the Collective’s Alpha and Omega.
But Jurati’s faction allows you to keep the Borg around while doing something completely new. It’s no different than TNG abandoning the Klingons as their TOS-era Big Bads and revamping them as UFP allies. That opened up all kinds of new storytelling avenues without losing what made the Klingons the Klingons.
Jurati, if done right, offers the same possibilities.
@170/171 – My main concern is that, to do it justice, it seems like you would need a Star Trek with an anthropological/world building focus that we haven’t really seen since Deep Space Nine, but there seems little appetite for that if this season is anything to go by; plus, this particular episode seems to point to a quiet retcon (again, the Borg already hijacked a fleet of ships using their interoperability last season; surely, someone should have brought this up); and despite my fervent hopes, Terry Matalas has once again indicated on Twitter that Jurati will not be appearing in the finale.
Buy yeah; my main point of reference is the Klingons who, in my opinion, only became interesting after TNG opened the door to doing plots about things other than fighting them. I think that the Borg could similarly benefit (and these ones seem to have a little more personality, which is also useful from a writing perspective).
@143 / Garreth,
One more fun addendeum to the Variety article — the icing on the cake, if you will.
According to Blass, the entire Bridge was rebuilt from scratch.
But the Dedication Plaque? That was the original prop.
On that same Tweet thread, Blass even invited Herman Zimmerman and Dan Curry back to tour the rebuilt set. Must’ve been surreal for Zimmerman too, being back on his signature contribution to the franchise almost 40 years later.
@173/Mr. Magic: I’m surprised more of the TNG bridge wasn’t preserved. I recall that when they were rebuilding the TOS bridge for “In a Mirror, Darkly,” one of the team brought in a bunch of the original buttons that had been salvaged from the 1960s sets.
I recall that after “Generations”, there were a bunch of behind-the-scenes books that made a point of saying that the wishbone-shaped tactical railing had survived for use on the Enterprise-E (but of course it wasn’t actually used in its design). I assume it was probably auctioned off a long with everything else after Enterprise ended.
So first post here.
In the final episode, they’ll find Miles O’Brien hanging out in the transporter room. He’ll use the Enterprise D’s unaffected transporters to transport all the borgified starfleet crews and revert them to normal. Thereby saving the day and earning his statue.
@174 / CLB:
Yeah, it does seem strange, doesn’t it? Esp. given TNG’s impact even then in the mid-1990s.
(And jaimebabb, I remember that anecdote about the Wishbone railing too from The Art of Star Trek.)
I wonder if the lead-up to VOY may be part of it. They wrapped shooting Generations by…I think it was late May 1994, then had to immediately clean up and start redressing the D’s sets for filming “Caretaker”.
The D Bridge had to be struck for VOY’s Bridge to be constructed in its place on Stage 8. And of course, this was in addition to the crews doing concurrent pre-production on DS9 Season Three.
It’s possible preserving more of the TNG Bridge simply got overlooked in all the chaos, or people were too exhausted.
Given they intentionally trashed it for Generations Crash Sequence, there may also not have been enough salvage-worthy memorabilia left.
@173. On the dedication plaque, I was kind of bummed that when Picard saw it in episode 9 he didn’t stand there with his hands clasped behind his back then reach up and run his finger along the top of it to check for dust like he did in Ensigns of Command. Such a perfect flex.
@178 – I loved Ensigns of Command, but honestly the scenes on the Enterprise-D bridge already felt like they lacked the urgency that they should have. Like, I literally said “Millions of people are dying, Jean-Luc!” to my laptop screen when he made the joke about the carpet.
@179/jaimebabb: I know what you mean. On the one hand, my brain is thinking, “This is such a lovely, beautiful moment that has been carefully orchestrated to reunite this cast 20+ years since we last saw them together, on a set elaborately constructed to resemble the one they were last standing on about 29 years ago,” and I’ve got a big grin on my face; and on the other hand I’m thinking, “No, no, no! This jovial and leisurely reminiscing among these dear friends is completely inappropriate and ill-timed given the utter horror and devastation of what has just happened and is continuing to happen around them.” It would be as if I gathered my friends for a picnic lunch on the grass in Central Park, NYC on 9/11. Matalas (the showrunner, and writer/director of the episode) should have really analyzed the flow of this story and had the reunion on the Enterprise-D take place prior to the Borg takeover of Starfleet to avoid the incongruity of the characterization with the events at hand.
@176. JacksEmptyWallet — When I first read your comment I missed the word “out” and I was barely fazed that you suggested “they’ll find Miles O’Brien hanging in the transporter room”…
@180 / Garreth:
I completely agree.
Now that I’ve come down from the sugar high, so to speak, the lack of urgency in that scene (Geordi especially with both his daughters assimilated) really was a misstep.
Anyway, on a random music note: Given this Season has dug deep into Trek‘s Musical Library, is anyone else disappointed that co-composer Frederik Wiedmann crafted a new Borg leitmotif instead of reusing Ron Jones’ TNG-era theme?
The Jones Borg leitmotif’s always been my favorite (even over Goldsmith’s from First Contact), and bringing it back for Picard would’ve been the icing on the cake.
@183/Mr. Magic: I guess they blew their budget rebuilding the E-D bridge and couldn’t afford to license more music cues than they did.
Although they could’ve fallen back on the old trick of pastiche. Like how Ron Jones’s Klingon motif in “Heart of Glory” and later episodes sounds similar to Jerry Goldsmith’s Klingon theme but is distinct enough to count as original.
Once again, I feel like Geordi’s emotional depth is undermined by his role as the guy who does technical exposition. That said, if anything’s going to take his mind off of both of his daughters being turned into drones and the immanent assimilation of his home planet, it’s going to be his engineering hobby-horse.
@184 / CLB:
Ah, yeah, that’s good point about the music budget.
Eh, it would’ve been nice, but it’s alright.
And I’ve been a fan of Frederik Wiedmann’s since The Dragon Prince, so he’s a nice compliment to Stephen Barton’s scores this Season (I think Barton said he needed additional composing help once they got into the second half of the Season).
@180 – They did the same thing during the break in at the Daystrom Institute. They made it clear that they only had an hour at most before they guards discovered what they were doing. So, what happens? We get some nice, slow scenes at the fleet museum. There was no sense of urgency in that sequence at all.
I’ve been annoyed for 20 years that the last episode of St:Enterprise was turned into a ST:TNG holodeck episode. So excuse me for being smug over the fact that the antepenultimate episode of Picard is a replay of the opening of Battlestar: Galactica.
@188/Larry: Don’t you mean the penultimate episode? Ante- is the one before that.
@188,
Yeah, the TV Tropes Recap page for this episode has made obligatory Cylon jokes, too. Made me chuckle.
But I do wonder if this narrative was Matalas’ intentional tribute/homage to Ronald D. Moore? RDM left his mark as one of the key creators of the TNG era — and they would’ve developed Season Three during 2022 and knowing it would be hitting the same year as nBSG’s 20th anniversary.
And speaking of TNG-era alums, I would’ve been very interested in how Michael Piller would’ve received Picard (and seeing stuff he unknowingly planted in “Best of Both Worlds” paying off 30+ years later)
#190.
I remember seeing an interview with Michael Piller once where he recounted pitching a story idea to Gene Roddenberry. “What’s the story about?” he asked. Piller then went into a long explanation with this convoluted plot about Klingons and Romulans, to which Roddenberry stopped him. “No, what’s it ABOUT?”
With that in mind, I do wonder what Piller and Roddenberry might make of this season. There’s been an awful lot of plot red string stretched across the board, but I’m struggling to pin down what it’s really about. Something about a legacy, I guess. I dunno, it all seems rather murky to me.
@191,
Oh, Gene would’ve absolutely f*****g hated it. There’s no doubt in my mind there, between his aversion to character conflict and buying into his own philosophy too much by the final years. At the very least, he’d have hated the directions the TNG characters went after his death.
Piller, by contrast…I don’t know. He’d probably have been critical of the lack of narrative and thematic focus. He also believed in Gene’s themes and ideals, so…I mean, he admitted in his memoir Insurrection ultimately was his tribute to Gene as part of his Trek swansong.
At the same time, he also always struck me as someone willing to innovate and try something new if the narrative warranted it; DS9 conceptually proved that. I think he’d probably have bought into the season’s legacy theme’s and seeing the legacy of his own most iconic TNG story still reverberating across 30 years.
So, I give Piller 50/50.
I don’t think this season is true to either Roddenberry’s or Piller’s vision of TNG. It’s got little if anything in the way of optimism, it’s barely got any philosophical or thematic point (Data defeating Lore through yielding and giving being the one exception I can think of), there’s too much focus on action and mystery-box plotting, and the character exploration isn’t as deep as it could be (for instance, the very superficial way the Shaw/Seven conflict was treated, reduced to his use or non-use of a name and resolved cheaply with a cliched deathbed conversion, instead of being explored through actual conversation and earned growth).
Also, Roddenberry preferred to move forward rather than look back. Fans-turned-creators of a thing love to pay tribute to what the original creators did, but when the original creators look back, they usually only see the flaws and disappointments, the parts they didn’t get right and want to do better. He wanted to see Star Trek tread new ground and take new chances, not dwell on its past. And he certainly wouldn’t have liked how much the season has homaged The Wrath of Khan.
@193 CLB
Its DS9 tone with the TNG cast. To narrow it down more, it is DS9/TOS movie’s tone/feel. My Star Trek is TNG the show tone & style, but I am watching Picard S3 and more and more thinking of it as the good TOS films TNG never got.
This might have bothered me more if not for the fact that Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and Lower Decks all have that classic hopeful, optimistic episodic tone that reminds me of TNG. This season of Star Trek Picard is not my Star Trek, but like season 3-6 of DS9 or some of the TOS films, I still like it. I know it won’t end like my hypothetical final scene of a TNG movie would be. That is dozens if not hundreds of years in the future, we see the Federation is going strong and Data is adding a hologram memorial of the great-granddaughter of Laforge to his “collection” of friends throughout his life, including the first, Tasha Yar then we zoom out a bit and see Guinan then a bunch of look-alikes that are implied to be relatives of the TNG cast looking on at what came before.
@Everyone
Most others comment sections/reviews I am seeing of Picard are happy that season 1 and 2 are ignored. I am very pleased regarding the downplaying and/or outright retconning of this season from the prior two seasons. But I am interested in what Tor commentators think and to amplify their views on this subject. I very much dislike the TNG films and the 1st two seasons of Picard, I wish even MORE was ignored. Thoughts?
-Kefka
@194/Kefka – Say what you will about the first season, but it’s meaningful. In fact, Rios says explicitly what it’s about in the fourth episode: “the existential pain of living with the consciousness of death and how it defines us as human beings.” Pretty much all of the character arcs are about different reactions to this, and the supposed “grimdarkness” of the setting reinforces this point; the Federation has become reactionary and xenophobic because it was a utopia that experienced mass death right on its doorstep for the first time in living memory. The conflict with the Synths is ultimately rooted in the fact that we die; they don’t. The fact that the finale was called “Et in Arcadia ego” really just telegraphs this; “Even in Arcadia [utopia], I [Death] am.”
And the second season, for all its many flaws, carries this theme forward, proposing that love, togetherness, and companionship are the only meaningful candles in the dark. Q is dying; he awaits meaning, and he doesn’t find it. And so he opts instead to do one last favour for Jean-Luc so at least he can spare his favourite mortal from his own fate of dying alone. Jurati is able to connect with the Borg Queen because she recognises that her own motivation is something similar: the Queen can feel herself dying across infinite realities and she doesn’t want to be alone. Seven and Raffi find each other; Rios gives up his entire life for a shot at love. It’s an infernal mess, a budget-saving exercise in want of a plot, but I’m going to be honest: I kind of adore it. I think it’s beautiful for all its flaws.
Throughout the first two seasons, we have serious contemplations of transhumanism and identity in the face of death. Picard escapes death using technology, even as his friend, a living machine, embraces his end as a necessary part of being human. Soji loses her identity even as she gains knowledge of herself as an immortal android. Jurati too embraces transhumanism and, to some extent, loses her identity by so doing, but–in an interesting twist for Star Trek–this is not stigmatized; her choice is framed as what’s best for her. All of this is philosophically rich, high-octane fuel for thought, as speculative fiction should be.
The third season, meanwhile–for all that I have loved (some of) the nostalgia hits injected directly into my veins–bugs me because of how absolutely lightweight it feels. Death is gone. Not just as a theme, but gone from the narrative. Sure we kill off Ro, and Vadic, and Shelby, and Shaw, but it feels like nothing. Death holds no dominion; Data is back; so’s the Enterprise-D; Kirk apparently is alive again, resurrected offscreen sometime after Generations and kept in a covert warehouse awaiting new adventures. Apparently Terry Matalas has already formulated plans for bringing Todd Stashwick back if when he gets his “Legacy” spinoff. I’m half-surprised that they haven’t revealed that Romulus magically popped back into existence in a background Okudagram somewhere. The Federation is as “grimdark” as it has ever been depicted, but unlike the first season, this is never seriously interrogated or problematised. We go through the motions, cargo-cult-like, of moral debate in episode 7, but it’s not connected to anything. We hear that Vadic was the product of Section 31 war crimes; Picard looks shaken up by this, but then he and Beverly immediately decide to commit some war crimes of their own by executing her. This is never mentioned again. The whole exercise feels perfunctory, as I have said above: like ten-year-olds playing with action figures. It doesn’t feel like Picard, and frankly, for all of the surface detail it gets right, it feels even less like TNG.
So no; I’m not pleased that the first two seasons were ignored.
Yeah, I don’t think this current season of Picard is really about anything other than a big scoop of nostalgia pie. For a moment there was a glimmer of it being about something when Vadic monologues about how the Changelings are seeking retribution for having been experimented on and tortured by the Federation (specifically Section 31). So the theme could have been about cycles of violence and breaking that pattern through some kind of reconciliation, like Picard trying to prove to Vadic that not all Federation-types are bad people. But then Borg Queen. Ugh. However, this generous helping of nostalgia pie is shiny and sickly sweet so I’m still enjoying myself.
@195 / jaimebabb:
Yeah, the thematic through-line between Seasons One and Two is, for all its flaws, at least consistent.
But Matalas…similarly to what Garreth was saying, I get what he’s trying to do — and they actually aren’t bad ideas. But the hand-over doesn’t really work.
In a way, you could argue Season Two was the end of Picard as we knew it (and how it was originally conceived by Chabon and Goldsman). It was the last Season with the original Cast before they split off Rios, Jurati, Elnor, and Soji — and speaking of Soji, there’s another missed opportunity like Elnor and Worf: Soji finally meeting her “father”.
I mean, I do consider Season Two the real end of Picard and this Season as Matalas intended it: The coda and finale to TNG.
And as frustrating as it is — and like Garreth, recognizing it’s a heaping helping of nostalgia pie — ironically I’m fine with it. I mean, yeah, we’ll have to see how it plays on the re-watch (and I already know elements won’t hold up). But I’ve hated for 20 years how Nemesis didn’t give our team the sendoff they deserved. So I’m still invested even in this final hour in this last ride and seeing how they take their last bow.
Season three might not be as bad as the first two, but it’s still not good. If Jack can control borg drones, why do the Borg need him? He’s a risk factor and will surely use his ability to save the day. I’m also not a fan of Ed’s acting. It’s over the top.
Stewart’s performance is a bit better. There’s lots of Fan Service, which helps turning a blind eye on the plot holes. I just hope we see an Admiral Janeway taking control of the fleet.
what I like most about this episode is the score when Enterprise D departs Spacedock and goes to warp.
It’s great to have the cast back together. I wish they would’ve done an actual revival rather than this one off season, especially when the entire cast is only really together for 2 episodes. I also felt that Patrick Stewart really felt like Picard during his scene with Jack. Unfortunately, he is so old at this point that he has lost a lot of the qualities that made Picard great.
The plot this season is a bit of a mess. The first arc of them escaping the nebula worked well as a self contained story. The second arc fighting Vadic was good too and now we have a 3rd arc of the Borg invasion. But I just feel like the season should’ve been episodic.
Another disappointment is that they’re using the borg again. I know they’re central to Picard’s story and they’re cool villains but they’re overused at this point. We have another mystery box that yet again doesn’t really pay off.
I loved seeing Shelby again but she got the same treatment that Icheb, Hugh, Maddox and Ro got…show up and then die. And Shaw is dead too though I assume they will bring him back if they ever do that Star Trek: Legacy show (please don’t though).
Despite all the issues, the fan service works well enough to make me enjoy it and not really think about those things. I just hope that Star Trek gets away from fan service and references and easter eggs and tries to tell interesting stories that don’t rely on memberberries and nostalgia. Though given the reaction to this season (and the demand for a Star Trek: Legacy series) I’m not hopeful. In the meantime I will hopefully enjoy the last episode and the final voyage of the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D as much as I enjoyed the last 10 minutes of this episode.
@194/kefka: “Its DS9 tone with the TNG cast.”
I wouldn’t agree with that at all. Superficially, they seem similarly dark, but DS9’s darkness had a point to it; it was a challenge to the Federation’s values that the characters had to wrestle with and rise above. That tone has been explored already in modern productions like Discovery season 1 and Picard season 1. But this season is just using darkness and grimness as a stylistic indulgence; it isn’t actually saying anything about it, just wallowing in it. Like jaimebabb says in #195, there’s no real meaning to it. Every potentially interesting thing they’ve set up that could’ve been explored more deeply has been forgotten by the next episode.
@197/Mr. Magic: “I mean, I do consider Season Two the real end of Picard and this Season as Matalas intended it: The coda and finale to TNG.”
Which makes it sound like “These Are the Voyages” on Star Trek: Enterrprise, and I’d say that’s a regrettably appropriate comparison.
They still have an opportunity to do an absolute God-level troll in the finale by framing the whole thing as an infotainment holodeck program being run hundreds of years hence by the crew of Discovery. They can reach the climax and just declare “Of course, we all know what happened next–” and just leave the holodeck.
I realize this is the tiniest of nits to pick, but was there no audio recording anywhere of Majel Barrett saying “Admiral” that they could have spliced into the computer’s greeting to Picard aboard the D at the end?
@202/ I think that the implication is the computer still has the same information that it had in 2371, and has no way of knowing that Picard was promoted more than 20 years ago
I have to say, I can’t argue with the tone of most comments. The reunion on the Enterprise was a bizarre tonal shift, there was absolutely no reason why Seven and Raffi should stay on the overtaken ship (except to allow them to be in that position to pay off the plot next episode), and Jack’s departure is just very weird – it could have easily been dealt with by having him surrender to Vadic and would have felt much less forced.
Really this series operates on the same level as the Doctor Who anniversary stories. It pushes all the right buttons for me as a fan of the show, to the point where the story almost doesn’t matter, but it would be nice if it was a little bit stronger (and I’d argue it is stronger than Day or Power of the Doctor). There is a maturity to the portrayal of the characters of Deanna and Will and Data that suggests deep thinking about the environment that is very satisfying. I’d really like to know what it’s like to live in the 25th century, from a perspective other than Starfleet. But as mentioned the story could have been about so many things and isn’t really. The closest thing I can see is something about rugged individualism versus connection, with much seeming to indicate that connection and inter-reliance is bad, but that flies in the face of Q giving Jean-Luc a hug, or bringing the old gang back together. Equally individualism is shown to be unhelpful in Jack’s isolation and Jean-Luc’s ego – his love of his own legend is there in several episodes and shown to have been detrimental to his connections to others, like Beverley and Jack.
I had hoped (but knew it very unlikely) that the ancient thing in Jack would turn out to be Q, or at least the power of Q to give some more meaning to All Good Things, which I’d always assumed was the next thing, for the human adventure to develop into something more than the politics of travelling the stars.
Ideally the ending would be Jack out of control and his parents reaching him to bring him back to himself, which thinking about it is probably exactly what will happen.
@200 / CLB:
Which makes it sound like “These Are the Voyages” on Star Trek: Enterrprise, and I’d say that’s a regrettably appropriate comparison.
…That hadn’t even occurred to me, but wow, you’re right.
@198 / Daniel:
what I like most about this episode is the score when Enterprise D departs Spacedock and goes to warp.
On Twitter, Matalas has stated that track’s “Make it So” on the forthcoming Soundtrack Album (which will be out simultaneously with the finale’s premiere on Thursday).
(He’s, naturally, guessing that’s going to be the most downloaded music cue of the Album.)
@200/CLB: Yes, I’m afraid that occurred to me a week or so ago. They start a new show with new characters, get us to invest in them and want to see their storylines continue and come to a satisfying conclusion, then push them all to the side (in the case of Rios, Jurati, Soji and Elnor, the characters we got to know and like in Season 1 and wanted to see more of, pushed out of the show completely) and hand the climax of what was supposed to be their show over to some characters from TNG that we’ve already got 100+ episodes of. I guess it’s more justified in this case by the fact that the lead character of Picard was a TNG character originally, but this does not feel like the ending of the show that we started watching. Honestly, they may as well have been honest and called this TNG Season 8 instead of Picard Season 3.
Anyway, on TV Tropes, we’re joking — and this is very black comedy — about how this episode vindicates McCoy, Pulaksi, Barcaly, Archer and Hoshi, Jankom Pog, and everybody else who’s ever been paranoid about using the Transporter.
Heh, suddenly the Transporter paranoiacs ain’t looking so paranoid anymore, are they?
But it got me thinking about the long-term societal repercussions for Transporter technology in the UFP after this. After centuries of being told it’s the safest way to travel, this happens. I assume we’ll see a significant drop-off of Transporter usage as civilians and Starfleet alike will, quite understandably, be twitchy about ever using it again.
I mean, yes, it won’t last. They’re still in operational in the 32nd Century, so enough of that stigma will fade. But I assume the transporter paranoiac fringe will be very busy, active, and influential in the years to come.
@207,
I wonder how much of the pre-Matalas cast would’ve been retained had they had a larger budget and not had to reallocate Rios, Soji, Jurati, and Elnor’s salaries to booking Team TNG.
Then again, apart from Raffi, I don’t think Matalas was especially interested in playing with any of Chabon’s characters; Season Two demonstrated that.
I think it was a mistake. Having the PIC characters play off their leader’s old command crew — of the two generations coming together — would’ve been fun (Soji/Data, Worf/Elnor, Riker.Rios).
At least we’ve gotten the Raffaela Musiker and Worf Rozhenko [Black] Comedy Variety Hour.
@208/ Mr. Magic – Honestly, the image that immediately occurred to me after the Borg took over the fleet was of Kate Pulaski off sitting in a rocking chair somewhere, being like “I warned you about the goddamn transporters…”
@207/ cap-mjb – Absolutely agreed. I honestly loved the characters from the first season, and it honestly hurts that they refuse to even reference them, even when it would be natural. Raffi learning to fight with melee weapons from Worf might have been a good opportunity for her to bring up her adoptive son, the Romulan swordsmaster, who presumably might have given her a few pointers; and I’ve already expressed my peevishness that Jurati wasn’t even mentioned in this episode. Hell, it’s not even clear where they put La Sirena after episode 5, given that Worf and Raffi came on board the Titan via transporter. Maybe they just dumped it somewhere on Planet M’talas. I feel like that’s a metaphor for something…
I’m struck by the different reactions to this season between here and Twitter. On my Twitter feed, nearly all the commentary about this season is that it’s the greatest thing ever and that it fixed everything wrong with the previous seasons. Here on Tor, though, the reactions appear to trend far more negatively. I wonder what there is about Tor.com commenters that selects for different attitudes than the Twitter audience.
@208/Mr. Magic: “But it got me thinking about the long-term societal repercussions for Transporter technology in the UFP after this. After centuries of being told it’s the safest way to travel, this happens. I assume we’ll see a significant drop-off of Transporter usage as civilians and Starfleet alike will, quite understandably, be twitchy about ever using it again.”
That’s not gonna happen. Did people stop using computers when major hacks and information leaks started happening? No, because computers were too integral to everyday life and had too many benefits. It’s the same reason people didn’t abandon air travel when planes started getting hijacked. The response to an abuse of a technology is not to abandon the technology; it’s to develop better safeguards against future abuses. What the Borg did was literally a software hack of the transporter system, so it will be responded to like any other hack, by developing better defenses.
You’re right that those few who are already afraid of transporters will latch onto this as vindication. But it’s not going to change the minds of the majority who rely on transporter use in their everyday lives. They’re just going to demand better transporter data security so their lives can go back to normal.
@210 / jamiebabb:
Honestly, the image that immediately occurred to me after the Borg took over the fleet was of Kate Pulaski off sitting in a rocking chair somewhere, being like “I warned you about the goddamn transporters…”
Yeah, I swear, I could hear the spirit of Leonard McCoy cackling in the ether during that bit.
@211 / CLB:
Yeah, that’s a very good point about comparing them to airplanes and the public reception: Make ’em hack-proof!
Anyway, the other thing about the closing episodes that just struck me is that PIC is basically doing The Rise of Skywalker.
We had the Dominion renegades serving as the main threat, like the First Order…only, whoops, nope, it was the Borg/Sith all along? We even brought back His/Her Royal Heinous Highness and Queenie’s just as much of a strung-corpse as Palpy! Hell, even the special kiddo (Jack/Rey) is, for all intents, the grandkid.
And the funny part? The weird paradox?
For all my quibbles about Season 3’s narrative, it’s not bothering me as much as it did with Rise of Skywalker. I’m not sure why.
I think it’s probably because, despite all its missteps over its run, PIC hasn’t screwed the pooch as badly as the Sequel Trilogy did (i.e. the legacy characters didn’t get thrown under the bus to ). It at least moved things/the post-TNG era forward enough before retreading old ground vs. copying ANH out of the gate and remixing the OT’s greatest hits.
@211/CLB
I think that it might have something to do with modes of media consumption. This is basically the website for a publishing house, and so I think that most of here probably read a lot of science fiction in addition to watching it. I think that reading is fundamentally a more thoughtful experience than watching TV, in that it’s not really something that you can do passively. Probably more importantly, I think that it makes us more likely to deploy the modes of literary analysis that we might have learnt in school; what are the themes? What are the character arcs? What is the tone? Etc. People on Twitter are also critical, but they tend to look at different things: Is this a plot hole? Is this in character? Does this look impressive? The sorts of things, indeed, that a lot of YouTube review channels tend to focus on.
Plus it probably helps that we have moderators willing to shut down pointless discussions about whether something is too “woke” or whatever
I was on vacation with my family all last week, so I’ve missed all the discussion here, but wow is this way more polarizing than I could have expected. When it comes to the story logic and all of that, I generally agree with KRAD and some others I’ve seen (like Jammer): I don’t care anymore.
Was a lot of the setup for this season a contrivance to get the TNG core cast back on the bridge of the Enterprise-D? Absolutely. Am I fine with that? Also absolutely. Have the majority of the plot points been utterly predictable? Sure has, as evidence by the fact that I accurately guessed many of them in these very comment sections. Is that a bad thing? No, I don’t think so. The point of this season in particular is the journey (or trek, if you will), not the destination.
I am very much a “character” guy when it comes to stories like this, and that has always been the best parts of this season. I want to see stories about people that I care about, and I care about these people very much. An intricate and “clever” plot would have likely come at the expense of these people, so I’m satisfied that they took the most straightforward route possible: our heroes having to defeat their greatest enemy one more time in order to save the galaxy. I’m very excited to see how they manage it (on Friday, unfortunately).
One more thing: going into it, I was expecting that the reveal of the Enterprise would have been accompanied by either Jerry Goldsmith’s “The Enterprise” from TMP or by just the straight-up TNG theme. So I was disappointed at first by the new music that accompanied it. But I’ve now re-watched that whole sequence several times (and will probably do so several more times), and I have changed my mind. It’s a really great modern version of some of the best film music ever written. It’s very heroic and triumphant, which is what the situation called for.
@211, the selection bias you note is something I’d only noticed with respect to reactions about the episode last week. Then again, last week was the only time I’d followed Twitter threads about Picard since the first episode of Season 1. I think @214’s suggestions are right on the money: This site is a more niche operation than Twitter, and its narrower reach also means that relatively effusive praise to maintain camaraderie among entertainment professionals isn’t required here.
Besides the modes of literary analysis that were mentioned, we all gather around a synopsis and review space here, so a lot of thoughts are available to spur a tapestry of discussion. Discussions here aren’t threaded to create somewhat isolated branches of thought; instead, the communal ethos of maintaining threads among post(er) numbers while having a linear unspooling of comments affords us the option to take in all that’s been said before to enrich our proffered opinions.
Finally, I think the commentariat here have the head- and character count-space to explore critiques more fully than Twitter threads might admit. By offering the ability to explore these issues more deeply on a site dedicated to literary explorations of SF, the quality of thought is likely different here compared to other fora, and the sorts of people drawn to comment are eager to use more words to support and nuance their positions.
@211 – “But it’s not going to change the minds of the majority who rely on transporter use in their everyday lives.”
I wonder how many people on Earth have been Borgified. Remember the transporter arch that Picard used in Season 2? If those are all over the planet and the Borg managed to hack into that system then a large percentage of the population are now Gen Borg.
@217/kkozoriz: Wasn’t it specified that only Starfleet transporters and personnel were compromised?
@218 I don’t think it was explicitly stated that only Starfleet transporters were affected, but I think that’s a reasonable inference based on the entire situation.
@218 – 219 – why would they limit ot to just Starfleet? Sure, they’ve got the firepower buf if the idea is to assimilate Earth, why not make as many drones as possible?
@@@@@ CLB
TNG is the most popular Star Trek show, old school fans like me always only wanted a TNG reunion cast to make up for the movies, instead we got some of the least like episodes I have ever seen of anything. Season 2 of Picard may well be my least favorite season of any show I have seen., I think it is abysmal in everyway, I hate all the characters (including Picard, but Raffi the most) Look at popular YouTubers like Angry Joe and Red Letter Media that despise Picard S1/2 And Red Letter Media hates the movies as well. Many fans did not want what Picard offered.
The people on Tor.com are more hardcore ST/Sci-fi fans in general, but many on Tor are not as fond as TNG as a lot of other fans. The Tor crowd is highly educated and tends to be both more contrarian and more critical in general about any given episode of TNG compared to say a more general crowd like on IMDB where only 3 episodes of TNG are rated below average. 8.7 avg overall. You have to go to the episode ranking list at 166 to get a rating of a 6, still an above average score, and only about 10 episodes are rated lower than that. To be fair, “normies” don’t generally rate very harshly. This season of Picard is only on average about 2.5 points higher than season 2, but look at the episode “Vox”. 9.5. Easily the highest rated episode of the show. People just want more TNG.
Furthermore, look at how long people’s post are on Tor.com. Another by product of an educated crowd, one that also serves to give more chance for negative comments to arise than the shorter “sound bite” nature of twitter. Also the great modding team and deep engagement by members here. The fact that people actually respond to points in a meaningful manner gives rise to more debate and back and forth, and thus seemingly an even more split view.
But overall, at least for me the most important point is the matter of perspective and what you wanted going in. I wanted a TNG reunion with TNG characters that acted like their character in the show. I got that I am happy. Likewise, I feel it is like the TNG cast but with the tone and feel of DS9/ TOS films. Which is basically the best I could have hoped for (a new 10 episode TNG season that was episodic I just did not think would happen).
Outside of Tor. Places like: YT channels, YT comments and a few articles/videos here and there it also seems to be what the overwhelming majority of TNG fans wanted with Picard season 3 in the first place. Look at the Super Mario Bros, movie critics ripped it apart, fans loved it. I thought it was great as it was true to the games. That is what I wanted, that is what we got.
Another example: Critics and many people bashed on The Lion King remake. Before the film came out I and many others said it if is just The Lion King shot for shot just redone to look like real animals great, no problems. It came out, it was basically just a shot for shot remake with only a small number of changes. A lot of critics said it was pointless, blah blah then it went on to make 1.6+ Billion. No other Disney remake has come close (nor have most other film in general). The film was made for people like me who liked the original and also happen to enjoy wildlife and animals in the real world.
(This is a bit all over the place, but I wanted to get my thoughts down)
-Kefka
One nitpick that occurred to me that if the Borg had this big elaborate plan that they knew when it would kick off, why didn’t they have a Cube standing by to start upgrading the bio-assimilated officers into proper drones. I mean, aside from the fact that it would probably prevent whatever miracle rescue they pull off in the next episode.
The more I think about it the more the plot with the borg assimilating the younger generation just strikes me as a copy of an unused plot for Wrath of Khan where Khan would have gotten free and enraptured the hearts and minds of the Federation’s younger generation and gotten them to revolt against the Fed.
@195 – I had a similar thought, albeit my ‘take’ is that it’s a group of friends / students gathered around a TV, watching their favourite episodes and making their ‘wish list’ of “wouldn’t it be cool if…”
– wouldn’t it be cool if Picard and Beverley put the Barry White on, downed a lot of Chateau Picard, and had a son.
– wouldn’t it be cool if the son ‘caught Borg’ from Picard’s assimilated / borgified lil’ swimmers.
– wouldn’t it be cool if we brought back Ro and Shelby! Ro and Picard can have the resolution that they didn’t get in TNG Season 7. She can then have a tragic death. Oooh! Oooh! Shelby can be killed! Yeah!
– wouldn’t it be cool if Worf becomes a kind of senior samurai figure.
– wouldn’t it be cool if the kids of some of the cast become Borg drones.
– wouldn’t it be cool if we bring the changelings back.
– wouldn’t it be cool if the Borg used the transporters against Starfleet.
– wouldn’t it be cool if we bring Data back. (cough) We did that in Season 1 (cough). Yeah, so let’s do it again.
– wouldn’t it be cool if Seven is now the Exec of a starship, with a Wolf 359 veteran for a CO who can’t deal with her. Oooh! Oooh! (downs his beer), let’s give him a redemption journey. Ooooh! Oooh! (snaffles Doritos – other snack varieties are available) Let’s put them on (sort of) Riker’s old ship.
– (thud on table as fist slam down). Guys, I’ve got it (downs alcopop of dubious quality). This. Is. It. We put them on the Enterprise D. Geordi has been secretly building it in the fleet garage for, well, reasons.
Much of this, as has been said, is immense fun. But the plot is threadbare and I struggle to understand what the hell this means for the Trek universe unless some major resets take place next episode. I also protest at the corruption of Star Trek’s key values, that life will get better and that our journey is a positive one. I’m also horrified at the glib waving away of the redshirting of so many Starfleet crew, particularly the Titan crew who, I think, have been massacred at least twice now. But hey, we have a new 1701-D bridge so all is well, right?
Question for the authors on the forum, as it has bothered me for decades. Did the losses on the Enterprise E in STFC ever get any form of coverage in the novels? Presumably the crew (certainly in Engineering) suffer huge losses, but it is barely acknowledged in the onscreen ending. Thank you, in advance.
@223 – I feel that the fear of youth rebellion is perennial, for obvious reasons.
@221/kefka: “People just want more TNG.”
That’s not a good enough answer. I’m a fan of TNG myself, and it’s because of that fandom that I feel this season is a complete failure as a tribute to TNG. TNG is not just the cast and characters and the starship and the continuity porn. That’s all just the surface. What made TNG work was the ideas, the intelligence, the optimism. TNG was important because it was smarter, more thoughtful, and better-made than its contemporaries. It raised the bar of quality for science fiction TV enormously, and paved the way for SFTV as a whole to get better and more sophisticated.
But this season isn’t aspiring to be smart or complex or thoughtful. It’s pandering to the lowest common denominator, trying to be a big dumb action blockbuster and rely on cheap sentiment and formulaic mystery-box plotting rather than nuanced storytelling. That’s not “more TNG.” That’s enormously less than TNG. It’s not satisfying to bring back the characters if they aren’t given a story worthy of them. The only character beats here that have felt worthy to me have been Worf’s maturation into the calm, wise sensei and Data’s gentle triumph over Lore. But they’re isolated parts in a whole that hasn’t come together.
@226 CLB
You are one person, who clearly holds a minority view among the fandom and about what made TNG work. You may not like the answer, but you see it yourself on Twitter and I have seen it clearly expressed on YouTube videos and comment sections. I am a massive TNG fan and this is what I wanted or at least this has worked for me very well*, numerous other folks have also expressed that same view. This is what the TNG fanbase wanted, even on Tor.com which is a more critical venue many folks are saying I am happy to see the cast on the bridge of the D again, so good. The cast and the ship are at the heart of TNG for many fans (including me) seeing them back together is wonderful.
There is a reason “Vox” is the highest rated Picard episode on IMDB standing at a 9.5, it gives us what the fans want most. The original cast (acting like themselves) and ship. It’s the reasons so many Trek YouTubers/others are happy about it. Some examples: Angry Joe Show, Red Letter Media, Jesse Gender, Trek Shipyards, Robert Meyer Burnett and strangely all the hater anti woke channels (though I don’t care much about what they say but many claim or do seem to be legit fans of TNG, like Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Dave Cullen, etc )
Again, most TNG fans don’t agree. Perhaps because they do think this it is a good story or the story does not matter as just having the old crew and good individual character moments makes up for it. Maybe for any number of others reasons. I love the old cast interactions, I enjoyed the Changeling stuff, grew to very much enjoy Vadic and Shaw, I have liked a lot of the space scenes, thought the acting was fantastic throughout, loved the music perhaps more than any other Trek including TNG, loved upping the fight choreography to be more realistic and less silly than in prior Trek, like how similar to Lower Decks and Prodigy made the Trekverse seem more coherent and actually part of a greater thing that made my many hours of viewing a wide range of Trek stuff seems more meaningful.
And last but not forgotten, they turned one of my most disliked characters in fiction (Raffi) into a perfectly reasonable member of the crew then made Wolf show her up all the time, make her look stupid and then barely have her as part of the show. Well done, Terry Matalas. Many fans are thanking you for that.
-Kefka
*(that seemed plausible to me)
**(I think the story is fun but like DS9 or the films it is not my Star Trek,I can still enjoy it, though I would have preferred a TNG 2.0 that is episodic, not dark, not horrible Star Fleet, not Borg w Queen,etc but never even considered that a realistic possibility).
#227.
I’m not sure it’s the best way to counter critical reviews by referencing a consensus of other reviews, ratings, and online comments, not to mention pointing to box office numbers in the case of The Lion King remake. The latter is hardly a dependable marker of quality. Populism, yes. Quality? Hmm…
Think of your favorite movies from 10, 20, 30 years ago. Do any of us really care what the critics and audiences thought at the time? And unless we were investors, do we care how much they made at the box office? I know I don’t. At best, they’re trivia. So, should we care now, too?
Go read the reviews of professional critics. Those folks aren’t referencing what Youtube thinks for a good reason. Art isn’t an arena sport.
@227/kefka: “You are one person, who clearly holds a minority view among the fandom and about what made TNG work.”
“Clearly” is hardly a valid word to use there, given my point that one’s impression of the majority opinion is quite different depending on whether you view Twitter or read comments here. The commenters on any given forum are self-selected and therefore not a random sample, and the difference between Twitter and Tor shows that any given sample may be biased differently from another. Therefore, no statistically valid conclusions can be drawn from such samples.
In any case, holding a minority opinion is nothing to be ashamed of. People willing to settle for superficial shlock will always outnumber people who value quality and sophistication. That’s why intelligent SFTV was so rare until Star Trek came along and raised the bar. Its secret was that it appealed on both levels — it provided the action and adventure and fun characters and crowd-pleasing stuff like that, but it also had substance and intelligence and a message. And that’s the part that this season missed.
No offence, but if I ever change my opinion on a work of art to align with the emergent consensus of a YouTube comments thread, it will be because someone someone has thrust a steel beam through my skull
@231 this.
Pandering to the lowest common denominator can be ratings gold, but, at least in my experience, it is rarely memorable. I don’t regret watching Picard season 3. But I’m pretty damn sure I’ll never watch it again.
Also for 228 Dingo and CLB:
Rotten Tomatoes: Picard season 1: 86% RT score critics, 52% audience, Season 2: 85/29. Then season 3: 98/90. What evidence do you have to counter the fact that most fans like this season way more than the first two. But the critics like it more as well.
-Kefka
@226 – Yup.
I just posted this in reply to someone who just watched season 2 and was pleasantly surprsised after all the shrieking…
“Season 1 was the best. They actually tried to do something new and different.
Season 2 wasn’t bad. Falling back a bit too much on tried-and-true ST tropes but acceptable.
Season 3 is nostalgia and fan service. Story? We don’t need no stinking story!”
The nostalgia porn gets me to react. I understand why people love it.
But….
The season lost me early, with a Bev Crusher that makes no sense to me, and the really stupid plot points, gratuitous deaths (which are strike taped with the Big Stakes Here sign) and general sloppiness in construction has turned me off (and I consider myself a pretty undemanding viewer).
This discussion seems to be getting personal, as well as off topic in terms of discussing this episode–let’s agree to disagree, here, and move on… Our moderation guidelines, as always, can be found here.
@236 – Yeah, Crusher executing people that she’s stunned was a shock. Why didn’t the Shrike use the portal device to keep the Elios from escaping? Why did they only send over a few crew to capture Jack? Vadic had to be portrayed as totally incompetent in order for the “plot” to unfold as it did.
we know from Lower Decks that Picard has the means to acquire a ship. Why involve Riker when Crusher explicitly told him to trust no one? Hire a ship. Find the Crushers and then, and this is a big one, don’t t hang around talking, just get the hell away.
What’s the season overall about? It’s clearly about providing an emotionally satisfying conclusion to the journey of this beloved group of characters. I have loved these fictional people for just about as long as I’ve been sentient. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be about anything more than that. Indeed, making it about anything “more” would detract from that. It doesn’t need any more. That’s enough. It’s, for example, why I adore the finale of “Lost” so much.
It’s each to their own, but clearly from the reaction of many it’s doing it *brilliantly*. Now that may not be your thing, and that’s fine – again, each to their own – but something not being your thing does not make it objectively bad. Indeed, something making this many people so happy makes it objectively good. Hats off to all involved with this, you’re making a lot of people very happy indeed.
@240/jmwhite: “It’s clearly about providing an emotionally satisfying conclusion to the journey of this beloved group of characters… Sometimes it doesn’t have to be about anything more than that.“
To me, Star Trek isn’t emotionally satisfying if it isn’t intellectually satisfying as well — if the story doesn’t make enough sense or respect its audience’s intelligence enough to earn my emotional investment.
And nostalgia does not satisfy me emotionally anymore. Maybe once it would have, but it’s become such an overused, predictable thing in franchise media these days that I’ve gotten sick of it. What would satisfy me emotionally is seeing these characters actually grow and change and take on new roles in life. Worf’s journey this season, for instance, has been very satisfying. Data overcoming Lore with love was very satisfying. Seeing the crew artificially regressed to where they were 30 years ago, sitting in the same chairs on the same bridge? That’s not satisfying, that’s contrived and manipulative. Geordi’s daughter coming into her own as a worthwhile character was satisfying; seeing her reduced to a mindless Borg-puppet damsel in distress so Geordi can take the lead again was not. Picard and Seven building on their rapport from seasons 1-2 was satisfying; Seven getting left behind for no good reason because she’s not part of the core seven (ironically) was not. (Although they can make up for that in the finale if they let Seven and Raffi have some good interplay that culminates in them getting back together.)
@240: I agree with you and what someone else commented about that this season isn’t really about plot (or it’s lack thereof) but instead about the reunion of the beloved TNG cast and the journey mattering more than the destination. That said, aside from the reunion itself there is plenty of characterization that I’m loving and in some cases feel is an improvement on the original series: Worf has definitely shown a lot of character growth and is throwing out hilarious one-liners left and right; Frakes as Riker is showing off the best acting of his career as this character because he’s using his lived experiences as a father and a husband and director to inform his acting choices; Data has evolved to be both the lovable android we all remember but now something more now that he feels; Burton get to show off his powerful big eyes and come across more as a real person now that he’s a father and a husband and someone getting to reconnect with his best friend back from the dead; Troi wasn’t used all that much but seems to be making up for it now in the last 1/5 of the season portraying a very competent therapist (and I disagree with Krad that she didn’t really effectively show off her therapist chops on TNG when I can recount numerous examples like her counseling sessions with Barclay, helping Geordi recover his missing memories after he was a Romulan sleeper agent, helping several crew members reconstruct their memories after being abducted and experiment on by aliens from another dimension, and guiding another officer through the grieving process of losing her husband even while Troi herself had temporarily lost her empathic powers; though I can agree that Troi should have been doing all of these types of things more often than merely hanging out on the bridge as cleavage-baring window dressing; Crusher gets to be a mother again and an action-oriented mama bear; and of course, Picard finally gets to be a father and will protect his son from harm to the best of his ability.
Unfortunately, Jack himself has been a big nothing burger of a character and is really just a McGuffin to get the story rolling along. He’s got to be an idiot to just willingly giving himself up to the Borg Queen. He’s got like, what, thousands of lives all dead and he’s responsible for once the Queen used him to activate all of the young sleeper Borg drones and kill off the seniors?
I think the story could have been made even more personal, not to mention more interesting, among these characters by making the plot McGuffin another family member, specifically Wesley Crusher. Substitute him for Jack as the key that the Queen needs to defeat the Federation: something about assimilating a Traveler in order to become all-powerful.
#240.
If it’s only about providing an emotionally satisfying reunion, then it didn’t need to be ten hours long. It should’ve been a movie.
Speaking of, though this recent announcement about Section 31 getting the green light gets a big eye roll from me, I am happy to see the powers-that-be deciding to make what they used to call “made-for-TV movies” again. Well, I hope they make more than just the one with that terrible emperor character. Something more like Star Trek would be nice…
Anyway, if they’re going to make more reunion specials, which I’m guessing they’re going to do for DS9 and Voyager to some degree, then better to keep down to a couple of hours. Short and sweet (and hopefully better written).
@245 With luck, part of cutting back to a movie will mean it ends with them wiping out Section 31.
@244/garreth: “I agree with you and what someone else commented about that this season isn’t really about plot (or it’s lack thereof) but instead about the reunion of the beloved TNG cast and the journey mattering more than the destination.”
First off, I don’t understand how that can be seen as a defense instead of a criticism. Why in the world should it be a zero-sum choice between plot and sentiment? Any capable storyteller should be able to achieve both. If getting one part of your story to work requires undermining another part, you’re doing it massively wrong. The elements of your story should complement each other, not negate each other.
Second, saying the journey matters more than the destination here sounds backward to me. I’d say they’ve prioritized the destination (getting the band back together on the E-D) over the journey (a coherent storyline that’s actually about something).
@245/Dingo: I agree — I’ve thought for a long time that TV movies would be a good way to explore a variety of facets of Trek history. The last two seasons of Picard would probably have worked better as movies, or at most 2-part movies, 4 hours in 2 installments (what they used to call miniseries, though they barely qualified).
@245 / Dingo:
Anyway, if they’re going to make more reunion specials, which I’m guessing they’re going to do for DS9 and Voyager to some degree, then better to keep down to a couple of hours. Short and sweet (and hopefully better written).
Yeah, Limited Series are probably not a bad route moving forward.
I think budget will necessitate it, anyway; too; every streamer’s bleeding money right now.
Honestly, a lot of Picard would have been better in movie (or maybe four-part miniseries) format.
@245 Personally I’m far more excited by the idea of more Galaxy Quest. That’ll be more Star Trek than this Star Dreck (to shamelessly riff on Mad Magazine ;) has been. I’d love a Worf/Raffi show. Instead we’ll get more Section 31 … stuff…
@248 – We’re already basically getting limited series. TNG had around 25 episodes per season. We’ve now got 10 episodes per, less than half. Cut it down to 8 and we’re basically getting a third of a broadcast season.
I’ve been writing for this site since 2011. I’ve written more than 1100 posts that have gone up on this site. But this is only the tenth time a post has had more than 200 comments.
If you’re curious, the others are my rewatches of Avengers: Endgame, the original Star Trek‘s “A Taste of Armageddon” and “Amok Time,” Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek Generations, and the 2009 Star Trek, and my review of Picard‘s “Stardust City Rag.”
I suspect the post that goes up this afternoon will join that club……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Catching up on the penultimate episode. Skynet WOPR The Borg take over a military that’s had all its weapon systems placed under the control of a single computer entity. The Changelings really must have infiltrated to the highest echelons for ANYONE to think that was a good idea.
The series has been so far seriously insulting intellectually, the story is just too silly. Seeing the old crew on the Enterprise again is awesome, but they could have done it in a meaningful way. for instance – not needing to save the world from Yet Another Huge Conspiracy That Threatens the Federation/Universe, but maybe just Geordi showing the ship to the old crew?
And i keep repeating myself – it’s always annoying when it’s obvious that you DON’T have a story to tell…this was my problem with season 2 already and season 3 isn’t doing any better.
BTW, what happened to that Romulan girlfriend of Picard? Laris or something…we closed Season 2 with her and Picard and now i don’t recall anyone even mentioning her…
Oh, now i rechecked, Laris was there in the first episode…ehh, my memory is not the best. Still, shouldn’t we care more about her as she is supposed to play an important part in Picard’s life now?