There are parts of the Picard season-two finale that I adored. There are parts where I cheered loudly. There are parts where I wanted to throw my shoe at the screen. There are parts where I was just staring at the TV wondering WTF I just watched. And there are parts where I just yelled, “Oh, come on, really?????”
So very much like the rest of the season, really…
Let’s start with the two moments when I cheered, because I really did love them both so much.
The first was a complete surprise, and in this age of social media, 24/7 pop-culture coverage, and so on, the fact that Wil Wheaton’s one-scene appearance as the Traveler Formerly Known As Wesley Crusher was a kept under wraps until Wheaton approached Isa Briones in what appears to be Griffith Park (the address Kore is given to meet at doesn’t actually exist in Los Angeles, as there is no Lowry Avenue, though there’s a Lowry Road just south of Griffith Park, so I’m assuming) is quite the feat.
First of all, this confirms that Wes has remained a Traveler, despite his appearance at the Riker-Troi wedding in Nemesis. The original script for that film had an additional scene with Wes reporting to Titan as a junior officer under Captain Riker, but that scene was cut, which means nobody is beholden to it. Your humble reviewer was actually tasked with reconciling that scene with Wes remaining a Traveler in the novel A Time for War, a Time for Peace, since the whole point of TNG’s “Journey’s End” was that Wes was destined for being something greater than a button-pusher on a starship. To have his remaining so canonized, as it were, is a great relief.
Plus the scene is a delight. We find out that the mysterious benefactors who sent Gary Seven and Tallinn to keep an eye on Earth are, in fact, the very same Travelers like Wes and the guy played by Eric Menyuk in TNG’s “Where No One Has Gone Before,” “Remember Me,” and the aforementioned “Journey’s End.” Wheaton is wonderful as a Traveler who is doing for Kore what the Traveler did for him on TNG, and Briones beautifully plays her response. Kore has been trapped and in danger of dying her entire life, and for the first time she’s free. But the moment when she realizes that—while sitting in a library having remotely wiped Soong’s entire computer system—she has a look of completely befuddlement on her face. She can do anything, but she has no idea what to do. And here comes this higher being offering her a really cool adventure that will take her all through time and space, after she’s been trapped in the same house her whole life. Of course she says yes!
The second thing was that Seven and Musiker finally have an onscreen kiss. This may not seem like much, but considering it’s still only a third of the number of kisses Ramirez and Rios got…
A lot of different things happen in this episode, and as a result it all seems very quick. The Jurati/Borg Queen statement that Renee Picard would have to live and die is interpreted by Tallinn as her using her fancy-shmancy Traveler-provided technology to disguise herself as Renee and allow herself to be killed by Soong, making him think he’s solidified his place as the father of the fascist future. Meanwhile, the real Renee pootles off to Europa.
It’s not a good day for Soong. His backup plan was to use drones to destroy the Europa rocket, but Musiker and Rios are able to technobabble their way into getting control of them and destroying them in true Trek fashion. I particularly love when Musiker realizes the drones are booby-trapped against tampering, Rios asks if that’s it, and Musiker turns around and says, “Hell no” and asks for tools so she can do what Starfleet officers do best: fix the unfixable.
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The City Inside
Brent Spiner plays Soong’s assholishness perfectly, and there’s a certain satisfaction in watching his whole plan fall apart, and not just because it prevents the Confederation from happening. Spiner’s performance is so gleefully evil—from his snotty dismissal of the Europa mission administrator to his calm murder of Tallinn disguised as Renee—that you really enjoy seeing him lose just for its own sake.
Which is good, because the two people who were set up as the villains of the piece in the early going aren’t so much. One is expected: the Borg Queen we met on the Stargazer in “The Star Gazer” who took over the fleet, who contacted Picard directly, is, in fact, the Jurati Queen. And as hinted at in that season opener when all the Starfleet officers were just stunned, she’s still the kinder, gentler Borg Queen from four hundred years earlier. She needs the fleet to stop a thing, and she needed Picard there because he was the only one she could trust.
This, by the way, was one of the WTF moments. Because after seven-and-a-half episodes of wandering around the early twenty-first century, the gripping climax is, um, a technobabble battle against a giant spatial anomaly that is dropped in out of nowhere and threatening all life in the sector in 2400. Yes, a fifth-season TNG plot just wandered in to provide some kind of action-y climax-y thing. Okay, then…
The other villain is Q, who turns out not to be one. Exactly. Entirely. It’s a little confusing.
So apparently, Q set all this up as a favor to Picard. He wanted him to absolve himself of the guilt he felt over the death of his mother. He doesn’t reveal this until Picard actually puts the skeleton key back in the wall where his little-kid self will find it three centuries hence, rather than try to change history by destroying it.
The best Q scenes are always the ones that put John deLancie and Sir Patrick Stewart together, and this penultimate conversation between them in the solarium definitely qualifies. Picard keeps trying to find the larger meaning in all of it, and Q patiently explains that it’s simpler than he thinks. A mother died and it broke the universe of this one little boy. Eighty subjective years later, Q is helping him finally put it back together again. Q is truly dying and this is his parting gift to Picard. “Even gods have their favorites, Jean-Luc, and you’ve always been one of mine.”
How this can be reconciled with the Q who defensively said that he had nothing to do with Picard coming back in time, who angrily said Picard had to do penance, who smarmily planned to do something nasty to Renee but couldn’t, who desperately wanted to disintegrate Guinan is apparently left as an exercise for the viewer, because I sure have no clue. I can accept certain elements as part of Q’s larger plan to get Picard to forgive himself for his role in his mother’s suicide, but that doesn’t explain the stuff with Renee and Guinan.
Regardless, with a snap of his fingers, Q sends them all back to 2400.
Well, okay, not all. Rios decides to stay behind. He never fit anywhere in the Federation, but being with Ramirez and Ricardo feels right to him. So he remains in 2024. This is hinted as being the right thing to do, in part because Picard recalls that there were bullet holes in Château Picard when the family reclaimed it and the placement of the bullet holes from the mercenaries last week perfectly matches Picard’s recollection of where those holes were in the historical records.
Except this isn’t the same timeline, he says now getting to the part where his footwear collided with the television. They traveled back in time from the Confederation, using the Confederation’s version of La Sirena, and Guinan didn’t remember meeting Picard in the nineteenth century because in that timeline, General Picard never went back into the past to stop the Devidians.
It’s not like the episode doesn’t acknowledge alternate timelines, since Q comes out and mentions other timelines when Tallinn never meets Renee. And yet, when our heroes return to the future via Q, Guinan reveals that she remembered everything and knew what was going to happen because she remembered it. She points out the picture of Rios, Ramirez, and Ricardo on the back wall of the bar that Picard never noticed, and tells Picard what became of them. (Ramirez died of old age after becoming a hugely successful humanitarian doctor. Rios died in a firefight in Morocco trying to procure medical supplies. Ricardo grew up to be one of the scientists who made use of “Aunt Renee’s” discoveries on Europa.)
That infodump from Guinan occurs back in Ten Forward, where Picard, Musiker, and Elnor are having a drink. Yes, Elnor survived. Q restored him, and put him back on Excelsior in the middle of the fleet. Yet, for some reason, Musiker was on the Stargazer, and of course there was no sign of Rios or the pre-Borg Jurati on the Stargazer.
The last scene is Picard back at his winery trying (and presumably convincing, though she never actually says yes) Laris to not bugger off but stay behind and make sweet nookie-nookie with him. This is worth mentioning for a number of reasons, mainly because it’s the first thing Picard actually does in the second-season finale of the show named after him. He spends plenty of time being lectured at, mind you. First there’s Tallinn, reminding him that she is a grownup who can make her own decisions about how she’s going to live her life and do her job, and won’t be talked out of a self-sacrifice by some old fart from the future that she’s only known for a couple days. Then there’s Q, explaining his motivations and declaring his love for Picard (which will probably prompt at least as many Picard-Q slashfics as the scene with the two of them in bed in TNG‘s “Tapestry” did). And then there’s Guinan doing the “where are they now?” coda for Rios, et al.
But the actual plot movements are all done by other people. Musiker and Rios stop Soong’s drones, Tallinn stymies Soong’s plan, Kore wipes Soong’s hard drive, and it’s Seven and Jurati who take charge for the final technobabble nonsense. (Okay, Picard is the one who gives Seven the field commission to captain to command the Stargazer.)
The season actually comes to a somewhat satisfying conclusion from a story and character perspective. Picard does get up off his ass and make a move on Laris, Seven and Musiker seem to be in a better place, and Jurati’s Borg are now provisional Federation members.
We even have a potential story for season two set up with a transwarp conduit now open where the technobabble thingie was. Queen Jurati plans to guard the hub to see what will come of it, though Alison Pill recently said that she isn’t in Picard season three, so whether or not that will be the plot is up in the air. Then again, the actor budget was probably blown by bringing the entire TNG cast back…
I’ll be back next week with an overview of this most uneven second season.
Keith R.A. DeCandido also reviewed the premiere of Strange New Worlds, which is also publishing here on Tor.com today.
I think Q’s statement of “must everything be of galactic importance” is undermined by the fact that he:
A. Possibly redeemed the Borg
B. Built a transwarp conduit
C. Saved an entire star sector
D. Created the predestination paradox that led to a lot of this in the first place.
But Q is a lying liar who lies so it all makes sense.
(And he’s a good patch for any temporal inconsistencies because here he finally calls himself a god. It’s a handwave but it’s a handwave that makes sense in-universe)
Overall, I felt this episode managed to tie-in everything that I had previously thought had been disjointed plot points and overall brought the season to a satisfying conclusion. We now have an overall narrative theme about overcoming trauma and how that relates to both the individual (Picard, naturally) and society as a whole (we will get past this period of our history’s struggles). Also, I have been hoping for a return of Wesley Crusher for DECADES and I am very happy that he managed to be incorporated this way. Hell, I’m even shipping him and Soong’s daughter now.
Seriously, I want a Christopher Bennett “Department of Temporal Investigations” novels about Season 2 of Picard and their desire to arrest Wesley.
There’s some questions to be raised. Was Borgati hiding with her tiny faction of the Borg (like the Cooperative) in the Delta Quadrant this entire time or did the Borg Queen become evil again (we assimilated the empathy you taught us, Boimler). In which case, Jurati was offline for 400 years and only returned to power recently? The later might explain why the Borg have been quiet as she’s been cleaning up their mess since Endgame.
I have some disappointments but they’re minor. Rios staying in the 21st century makes no sense to me and removes the possibility of any further adventures with him (my headcanon is he’s going to try to keep his family away from WW3’s fallout–and I mean that literally) but at least is consistent with the rest of the season. I also don’t know if I love or hate the fact Soong is apparently the man who designed Khan and the Eugenics Wars did happen in the 1990s. Star Trek being confirmed by this season as taking place in what is effectively a Marvel Comics-esque alternate universe. Better technology and weird wild events but MOSTLY similar.
But yes, I loved all of it.
It certainly has felt uneven, as you say, and it really never came together in the end for me. This makes two seasons in a row that I really enjoyed the beginning of but felt let down by the last couple of episodes. I really hope this won’t be the case for season 3, since it will really hurt to get my hopes up with the entire original cast returning, only to be let down in the end for a third time.
Shouldn’t the year be 2400 instead of 2500?
I can’t believe I forgot to mention this in the review, but Soong being involved in the Eugenics Wars fits with what we’ll see on Enterprise in the fourth season with Arik Soong and a bunch of Augments.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
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I also actually liked Soong’s dogged tenacity. What happens when he has presumably countless terrabytes of genetic data wiped from his servers? He just immediately goes back to his hard copies from the Nineties. Which humorously means Khan was the early model and not the latest as well as greatest.
It’s not linear.
In a season with glacially slow pace at times, why the hell did they use a three-act structure to cover three episodes worth of story:
Act 1: Defeating Soong. Ends up trivially easy, though maybe it isn’t a surprise that it’s not hard to defeat one elderly 21st century guy working alone. Also really tropey (ticking time bomb, wires, etc) and has some of the worst dialogue in the season. All done in about 16 minutes – less really considering a major portion of that was the extended death scene of Tallinn (who got a big farewell despite being killed by a quick neurotoxin). This could easily have been an entire episode of its own with a few added twists/turns, and not quite such a breakneck pace.
Act 2: 21st century denouement, more or less. I think the scenes with Soong, Kore, and Wesley (WTF?) were a bit unnecessary dramatically speaking. There’s no real conflict here, which makes this the hardest act to turn into an episode, but I could see this working as an episode if they made the “search for Q” into a big deal.
Act 3: Back to the “present” of Picard, and mostly more denouement, though we get that inexplicable last-second spatial anomaly which is presented as a problem, and solved, in what seemed like 60 seconds. This easily could have been its own episode, and been a bone they could have thrown to those unhappy with how much time was spent in the 21st century otherwise.
If this was episodes 8/9/10, they could have cut out much of the useless filler that comprised most of the real mid-section of the season.
The “prophecy” that one Renee needed to die seems silly … Tallinn’s sacrifice was an effective tactic, sure, but in the cosmic scheme of things what mattered was foiling Soong and making sure Renee made it onto the mission and that could presumably have been accomplished in any number of ways.
Wil Wheaton was having way too much fun for me to enjoy his performance, but it was great that his character was given some respect after all this time.
I found the Rios arc somewhat abrupt… his romantic relationship with Dr. Teresa was certainly established well over the season, but what was portrayed so emphatically at the season’s beginning — his experience of the cruelty and primitivity of present day Earth for someone who doesn’t truly belong — is left dangling. On a practical level, does Raffi hack him some US citizenship papers offscreen, or is he going to take his chances again with 2024 ICE and the Sanctuary Districts? Also, when we last saw him in the 25th century, he was a successfully and happily integrated elite, a Starfleet captain, not alone on a cargo ship. We’re pleased to seem him find happiness in a way that our earlier Trek captains were not able to in their time travel stories (thinking of “City on the Edge of Forever” and First Contact), but the choice isn’t really well supported by what preceded it.
There’s another point: butterflies, or the “Temporal Prime Directive”. I think it’s safe to say that this season of Picard is throwing the classic Trek concept of “non-interference” as an ideal completely overboard. The themes in this story are all about daring to connect, and interfere, and not being afraid to follow your heart. Only in that context does Rios’s choice seem to be a good one; and of course his sacrifice is what allows Elnor — killed out of hand for being an alien — to live.
(At one point, I speculated that the stilted dialogue Tallinn emphasizes that she allows herself no contact or connection with Renee and Picard worriedly asks her “Who watches over you?” — that is, the “Watcher” — was a deliberate name-drop reference to the TNG episode of similar name, similar to others distributed throughout this season. More than any other, that TNG episode was one where Picard rejected blind obedience to the Prime Directive, ultimately choosing intervention and connection for a greater good…. I think this is a theme with these writers.)
@7
To be fair, I would have gladly watched an entire episode about Wesley the Traveler and having him meet with Picard and be responsible for a lot of the time travel shenanigans.
A much better finale than Season One – which is damning with faint praise.
After two seasons of this and the dreck of Discovery, the Pike series looms as the only possible bright spot for this franchise.
Ironic footnote: Today, the debut day for this episode, is also Santiago Cabrera’s birthday!
(Also, while I happily would have considered writing a second Rios novel after how much fun the first one was, it should be clear things went in a different direction.)
@10/OldDarth
Similar pacing problems to the S1 finale… the actual plot resolution is almost an afterthought and most of the focus is on a powerful final dialogue between main characters
Wil’s giddiness is off-putting, but it does kind of work as someone who loves and is amazed by the universe.
I felt like this wrapped up things better than I had anticipated, both in terms of the plot and character threads that had been introduced, though I was also not entirely convinced by Q and his explanation of his motives. Unless one assumes that Q was still able to monitor various timelines despite his diminishing power (which he more or less confirms towards the end), and thus his actions were designed to keep pushing events into the direction needed to put Picard eventually where he needed to be. Which is a lot of hand-waving.
Loved the Crusher appearance and the connection between Soong in this episode and the eventual events with the Augments on Enterprise. I also enjoyed seeing Seven and Raffi finally getting that on-screen moment. I was less thrilled with the sudden appearance of a galactic threat, though I suppose it sets up the potential threat for the third season.
But I anticipated a great deal of disappointment at the end of the season, given the uneven nature of everything that had come before…and yet, I’m largely satisfied. I’m even tempted to go back and rewatch the season to see if it hangs together better, knowing the outcome.
KRAD wrote:
Point of copyediting: Do you mean season three?
Thanks for the season of reviews. With my parents I’ve viewed episodes 2.01 to 2.03, then returned to season one (which I abandoned midway in 2020, after the Icheb scene), but waited for the remainder of season two before committing to it (“does this ultimately go anywhere satisfying?”).
@1 I think the implication is that Queen J’s cooperative has been hiding out for the last 400 years, while the Borg Collective went about its usual business until it was time to meet up with Picard and co.
@8 To me, the “prophecy” was given because while there were other ways to prevent Soong from killing Renee or stopping the launch, the Queen knew that Tallinn’s sacrifice was the correct way to do it to restore the original timeline.
I actually enjoyed that the final problem with the spatial anomaly was so easily resolved and that we didn’t really get answers to some questions (like why Q was dying in the first place), because that kind of thing was obviously never the point of the season and I usually like being able to come up with my own theories. Explaining every little detail ultimately would have detracted from the emotional story they were trying to tell. I can respect that.
**I’m going to just go ahead and repost the thoughts that I’ve already written on my personal blog here.**
Picard should have died at the end of season one.
I’m serious. The whole series was supposed to be a character study on Jean-Luc; the first season, whatever problems you might have with it, *was* that. We got to see him go off on one last mission, reconnect with a few old friends, work through his regrets, and ultimately give his life to save innocent people with the highest stakes that we’ve ever seen in the franchise. That should have been it. I would still have been annoyed with some of the plotting decisions, and I would be salty at the absence of Dr. Crusher and Guinan, but you know, I could live with that. Maybe throw-in a postscript with Q showing up to personally escort Jean-Luc into death.
Then, in stead of having a second season, you could have a spin-off about La Sirena and its crew. You could even incorporate some of the same plot points into that series as we got in Picard season 2 (the Borg reformation in particular, which is a plot that I will absolutely defend unto death, I don’t care what anyone else says).
But instead Picard gets resurrected in a Synth body. Now…I don’t actually have the same visceral hatred of the plot point that a lot of people seem to. But the thing is that the show is supposed to be a character study; and they’ve already resolved Jean-Luc Picard’s character arc. So how do they move forward with him as a protagonist?
Well, very much to my chagrin, their solution is to tack on an extra Bonus Level of traumatic backstory that has never before been mentioned or even hinted at, save perhaps in one single scene in a first season episode of TNG, and then, only if you squint. And so we decide that, instead of merely having had an unhappy childhood because he was a dreamer and his dad was a curmudgeonly, old-fashioned vintner, Jean-Luc’s childhood was *literally a Gothic Victorian drawing-room drama, complete with a mentally ill mother who gets locked up in a room before dying a beautiful, poetic death by artistically arranged suicide*, and may I say, UGH! UGH! UGH!
Even worse, Jean-Luc, at very nearly a century old, has a sudden need to work through this trauma, which he has apparently borne in stoic silence through all of those decades of getting impaled and assimilated and tortured and having his family die in a fire; his therapists, I guess , just forgot to ask about it (A+ counselloring there, Deanna!).
And because the series is supposed to be, first and foremost, a character study, Picard working through this wholly ginned-up trauma has right of way over the actual *plot* of the season. Half the cast doesn’t even get character arcs because the story needs to keep grinding to a screeching halt for Picard’s introspective character moments. “We’ve got a Borg Queen loose in 21st century Los Angeles!” Oh, well, we’ll deal with that after Jean-Luc wakes up from his full-episode Flashback Coma. “Q is dying!” What of? Who the hell knows, probably something from next season; back to Jean-Luc’s mother. “The Borg Queen has teamed up with Dr. Soong and is trying to steal La Sirena!” Alright, let’s settle this in a big action climax interspersed with random childhood flashbacks.
And it’s *so* annoying, because the thing is, there are aspects of this season that I honestly really loved. Like, I alluded to it before, but I *ADORED* Jurati’s character arc and how it resolved itself, and I think that it’s the best development of the modern Trek era and *easily* the most interesting thing that has been done with the Borg since the first appearance of Hugh back in 1992. But I honestly don’t know if I can defend it in the face of the bulk of this season, and I have this unpleasant feeling that they’re just going to drop it like hot garbage going forward and never reference it again, as they seem to be going for the TNG Reunion Special format for season 3 and apparently Allison Pill is not coming back.
Anyways, the whole thing is deeply frustrating.
I took the anomaly at the end to represent Q’s death…?
Hence everything Q did in the 2nd season was meant to put everyone in place to prevent his death from destroying the sector, while providing closure and help to various characters at the same time? I don’t know. Just trying to make sense of this season…
@18 Ooh, I really like that idea, because while I didn’t really care to know what was killing Q, I did think it a little odd he just snapped them home and then died offscreen. I don’t get how a dead Q would create a mysterious transwarp conduit, but whatever.
As to Rios’s fate, it’s nice that it’s in words from Guinan, who could very easily have said what she thought PIcard wanted to hear. The happy ending is there for now, but should a different direction be required, it’s an easy matter to paper over, especially if Rios instructed her not to reveal anything.
I consider it the “It Never Rains In Southern California” option. “Tell the folks back home I nearly made it…”
I’ll try to be positive here. So, how about that Strange New Worlds?!
Hehe, seriously this was a mess. What’s most frustrating is that they’ve got (mostly) good acting and a few interesting concepts. But good writing this ain’t. And, much like last season, this really would’ve worked better had they thrown out twenty subplots, focused on one or two good meaty character studies, and simply made it a two-hour event… uh, I think they used to call them “TV movies.”
(I know, I know, the CBS-streaming-subscription-television-industrial complex doesn’t currently allow that, but one can dream.)
Oh well, on to season three…
In terms of more general episode issues, like a lot of the series, I thought this had great concepts, and dodgy execution. So many things happened through dramatic shorthand here, from Soong somehow hacking the transporters to get back to Los Angeles, to Elnor (a lowly ensign!) answering a hail, to Guinan just offhandedly explaining at the end why Renee’s microbe was so important after all.
Oh, and do they really need to queerbait the Picard/Q relationship still? For fuck’s sake, it’s Q’s swan song, let him tell Picard he loves him or kiss him or something. Don’t keep it all as lightly veiled subtext.
There were some emotionally satisfying moments, but the story doesn’t hold up well to analysis. Q and Picard reconciling was sweet and sentimental, but hard to believe in light of all their history. And it’s contradictory to say “Must it always have galactic import?” and then promptly reveal that it does, that the whole time-loopy thing was necessary to create Queen Agnes so she could stop the sector-shattering kaboom. (The visual for which was ridiculous, by the way. A spherical englobement around an eruption in all directions would’ve made more sense for something supposedly endangering the whole sector, not just one narrow corridor. Also, people light-years away were able to see it in the sky in real time, apparently.)
Wesley’s return was kind of a nice surprise, but I’m not crazy about the revelation that the Travelers are behind Gary Seven and Tallin. For one thing, it seems like a major retcon of their portrayal in TNG as people who, well, travel and explore. For another, I hate the small-universe syndrome of having everything in the Trek universe caused by something the TV audience has seen before. The galaxy is so immense that everything we’ve seen in the past 55 years of Trek should be the most infintesimal fraction of what’s out there. Not only that, but it’s a weirdly random way to resolve Kore’s arc.
And yes, Keith is right about the contradiction of saying they’ve been in an alternate 2024 all along and then say that their actions created their correct timeline to begin with. Fortunately, I remain convinced that what they said about that in interviews not only makes no damn sense logically or narratively (since if the timeline’s already changed, then nothing they do afterward can prevent the change), but is not actually required within the story we see. The only thing it really affects is Guinan apparently not remembering meeting Picard in 1893, but heck, I’ve forgotten plenty of people I’ve met over the years, and it was more than 130 years ago for her.
@1/C.T. Phipps: “I also don’t know if I love or hate the fact Soong is apparently the man who designed Khan and the Eugenics Wars did happen in the 1990s.”
That looked like a pretty old file, so I’m going to interpret it as Soong having originally based his own cloning work on the work done with Khan in the past. After Kore wiped his computer data, he went back to the original source so he could start again. It also helps set up Arik Soong on Enterprise.
I do have a problem with calling it “Project Khan,” though, because Khan was just one of dozens of Augments who took power worldwide in the ’90s. He was the most effective conqueror/ruler of the lot, but still just one of many.
@11/JJM: “(Also, while I happily would have considered writing a second Rios novel after how much fun the first one was, it should be clear things went in a different direction.)”
There are just over 2 unchronicled years between seasons 1 & 2 of the show (season 1 was shortly before the annual grape harvest at Chateau Picard in 2399, and season 2 began on the last day of the harvest in 2401), so there’s plenty of room for a novel about Captain Rios’s adventures on the Stargazer during those two years (minus however long it takes to get him there from the end of season 1).
@22/Karl Zimmerman: “Oh, and do they really need to queerbait the Picard/Q relationship still? For fuck’s sake, it’s Q’s swan song, let him tell Picard he loves him or kiss him or something. Don’t keep it all as lightly veiled subtext.”
Q being romantically interested in Picard makes no more sense than him being romantically interested in Janeway. He’s not actually humanoid. That’s just an illusion he projects. Picard, as they established in a TNG episode once, is basically Q’s favorite pet. That’s love, but it’s certainly not romantic love.
Apart from my thoughts of this season as a whole, I actually liked this resolution quite a bit. It worked a lot better than what I expected after last week, and I actually really loved the personal, intimate stakes for Q (even if I hope that they’ll eventually explain what he died of). The only part that had me rolling my eyes was Soong drew a dossier labelled “Project Khan” out of his desk. I get that this is an established part of the Soong family legacy, but if I could make, one single rule for all of Star Trek going forward, it would be a twenty-year moratorium on all references to “Wrath of Khan.”
It seemed pretty evident that Q was giving Picard a gift during his chat with Guignan when she was detained. As for Q’s contradictory disposition, the only explanation I can think of is that Picard wouldn’t have done the sincere therapeutic lifting necessary to make good on Q’s gesture if he didn’t think there was a sinister obstacle to overcome. I was fine with the writing here between Picard and Q, although the hug was well over the top.
Kudos to whoever predicted the Rios plot perfectly, down to the picture in the bar, a few weeks back in the comments. I’ve personally found it difficult to predict where some elements of these newer series are going, largely because the tone and intention is often so uneven and nonsensical – I find that when it defies narrative expectation it often does so in the name of incongruent fan service concepts, heavy handed dramatics, or both, and it doesn’t leave me pleasantly surprised, but rather disappointed.
I don’t have anything nice to say about this episode. The nadir for me was absolutely everything about the Wes Crusher scene. Felt like he was channeling Joel Osteen, and I for one have never spent a moment of my life wondering what happened to that character, nor did I need closure on Kore’s insubstantial story. I’m happy that we won’t have to see Pill’s Borg Queen in the next season, as all of the charm or intrigue surrounding her duality of character was dispelled here in favor of 2D camp throwaway lines, notable only because they were cute lines delivered with zero emotion or gravity – not the stuff of a compelling character. For the cinematic notes it clearly wanted to hit, I’d ultimately rate this season just above Insurrection. It’s unfortunate – it really felt like it could’ve been a top notch story in the start.
I think we could’ve used a link to the present time in the narrative – similar to how the growing threat of the future anomaly was constantly revisited throughout “All Good Things…” Could’ve made that wrap up feel less rushed and out of left field, if very reminiscent of “All Good Things…”
#26
Joel Osteen! Yes! I couldn’t put my finger on why Crusher was weirding me out, but you nailed it. He really didn’t seem like the character from before. I guess being a Traveler turns you into a salesman? Dear lord, run away Core!
@17 Iacomina – Outstanding comment, and I completely agree! (Only difference really is I am one of the ones who hated the synth plot point – if Picard was going to continue to live, they should have used the synth technology just to cure his brain defect).
What even was Kore’s story, other than as a motive, initially, for Dr Soong? Who is she and why is she important? Or is the point just that time is cyclical and weirdly reincarnated? Maybe something from Greek mythology? I expected to see a cameo from Wesley in the finale due to his exclusion from the Season 3 promo, but I thought it would fit more organically into the plot. I just don’t have the first idea what to do with this plot thread.
Decided I couldn’t wait for my usual Sunday-morning watching Picard, if for no other reason than I didn’t want to wade through over a hundred comments before posting.
I agree with most that the series was uneven, and I’m still annoyed that it took until the last episode before they let Seven have any serious interaction with the Borg. Heck, she’s even met Q, and her reactions were almost as channeled through Raffi.
My musing is this: I really need to explain why, after 9.5 episodes of timey-wimey capers and mind games, we end it with a big-ass bunch of ships forming a giant shield around a something to protect us from something else. Here goes my attempt. If we remember from Voyager‘s “The Q and the Grey”, the deaths of Qs during their civil war was producing supernovas. What if Q’s death was going to produce something massive, in part because of his significant involvement in the universe’s affairs? What if he was trying to ensure the fallout from his demise could be contained? Who better to call on than “mon capitaine“?
OK, that’s my head canon. Normal dissection may resume.
@30/David: I assume the new conduit is a setup for season 3’s story arc. As I understand it, they wrote and filmed seasons 2 & 3 back to back, so this is probably foreshadowing what’s ahead. Although that doesn’t raise my hopes that season 3 will be any more coherent than season 2 was.
@30 – I like that theory! Which means it probably won’t happen. It’s more likely tied to some nonsense about alternate reality Tasha Yar’s secret love child with Data, which Geordi carried and died giving birth to, and which Barclay and Dr. Crusher raised as their own – she also looks just like Kore/Dahj/Soji.
This may have been mentioned in the comments, I didn’t read them all—sorry.
I got the impression that when Q mentions the “Galactic event” stuff, and then we see one; it could suggest that was the result of his dying.
I agree with almost everything you wrote, throughout these reviews and look forward to reading your take Strange New Worlds!
When Wil Wheaton was all “Guys…CHILL!!!” when people were pissed about him not being on the call sheet for season three, I thought to myself, for like half a second, “He’s totally showing up in season two,” then I promptly forgot I’d thought that. I did not expect it to be THAT clever. That does lead me to another speculation…
Coming soon, “The Travellers” starring Wil Wheaton and Isa Briones. I’d watch that show!!
@22/Karl Zimmerman:
Technically I think Elnor is a cadet on field assignment here, so not even an ensign. I don’t think the ceremony that we saw in the season premier was necessarily a graduation so much as an end-of-term assembly. And isn’t the gray uniform that he wears an Academy uniform?
The (unintentionally?) funniest thing, to me, was near the beginning, when Soong wanted to break quarantine just before the launch, and they were like, “Uh, protocol,” and he was like, “Uh, big donor,” and they were like, “ok, fine.”
I was kind of hoping that it would turn out that a human neurotoxin might not prove quite so deadly to a Romulan, but I guess this is one of the episodes where we forget that aliens aren’t just humans with facial prosthetics.
Back on the bridge of Stargazer, I was like . . . the nuBorg really buried the lede, huh? Why not open with “Hey I’m actually Jurati. Picard, you’ve got some stuff to work through, and we’ll get there, but for now let’s take a leap of faith and go make a wall in front of the emergent threat that should be showing up on your scanners . . . now.” I mean it seems pretty antagonistic to pop through, hide your identity, and assimilate the fleet. But I guess whether that works depends on whether Jurati is counting on the time loop or not. I also halfway expected, for some perverse reason, for Excelsior’s problem to go critical and Elnor to die in front of Raffi’s eyes again. Not that I *wanted* that but it felt like that’s where it was going, somehow.
And yeah, the resolution of the Q stuff made no sense in the context of his words and actions through the rest of the series. I wonder if they changed the ending at some point and then forgot to rewrite all earlier stuff, or whether those were deliberate red herrings.
I did find it interesting that Jurati ended up behaving a lot more like the embodiment of an impersonal hive mind than did the “classic” Borg Queen earlier in the season.
@31 / CLBB: I assume the new conduit is a setup for season 3’s story arc. As I understand it, they wrote and filmed seasons 2 & 3 back to back, so this is probably foreshadowing what’s ahead.
Right. It’s not unlike Legend of Korra and Books 3 and 4 being green-lit and written back-to-back.
So I wonder how Season Two of Picard will play in hindsight once we have the second half of the overarching narrative. Will it be stronger? Weaker?
@23 / ChristopherLBennett: Oh, certainly there are many years in Rios’s career unchronicled — I only worked within two years of the decade of the 2390s, and probably only described about three months in detail. But it’s easier to market a backstory of an active character — or so one would assume. ROGUE ELEMENTS goes to trade paperback next month, so that’ll be interesting to watch.
#39
As much as I love your other work, JJM, I would KILL for another Rios the Tramp Freighter Captain novel.
@40 / C.T. Phipps: Thanks very much. I’ve never had more fun writing a novel; the only experience close was “The Ride” novella I did for Star Wars: Canto Bight, which was low-stakes screwball craziness.
The Strange New Worlds book is fun, too — as with Rogue Elements, the stakes kind of sneak up on you.
Well, all right then, series.
Now give us Star Trek: Kira or Star Trek: Sisko.
So Keith and commenters have done the usual brilliant job of dissecting nonsensical plot points and inconsistencies and so forth, but as I think CLB said earlier, there were some great individual scenes here and to me it was all worth it. I’m a sucker for drama and sentiment, and literally shed a tear when Picard leaned in for a hug with Q. De Lancie played it beautifully. A little confused, definitely touched. I thought that was a lovely moment.
And I’m going to quibble with Keith about Picard being generally impotent for this episode. To the contrary, when he stepped onto that bridge back in the future timeline and started barking orders at the Helmsman to pay attention, and deftly giving Seven her field commission– that was the first time in the entire two seasons that I saw the man I thought Picard would have aged into.
I agree the performance by Wil Wheaton was a bit breathless but isn’t that exactly how we would expect Wesley to act? I mean, he was always an overexcited theme park host when he was jazzed about something.
I bid a sweet farewell and kick in the pants to Rios and Ramirez. That whole thing ended up being just filler. I mean, she started off as this badass doctor, really quite a force of will and a great character. As soon as Rios unnecessarily transported she and her son up to La Sirena, it’s like the kid disappeared as a character and she was relegated to playing hide and go seek with him while the man of the house did all the heavy lifting and important stuff. I honestly never perceived any tangible chemistry between them,, but I’m glad they had a nice life together. And all three basically lived lives where they would have won Nobels for either science, peace or whatever. I thought that was a little over-the-top but hey it’s Star Trek, and characters generally don’t get to die having lived relatively nondescript lives just being good people on a blue ball orbiting one of a billion stars.
Ok. I need to start with my favorite part. The return of Wil Wheaton. Not that I think Wesley Crusher was a great character (he’s always felt forced to me) but because I’m a huge fan of Wil Wheaton the man. His emotional honesty, his unabashed enthusiasm for Trek and his role as the fans ambassador on the Ready Room has made him someone I am glad is a part of my fandom.
OK…. On to the WTF portion in no particular order… apparently astronauts just wander around all by themselves all the time with no guards and escorts? And administrators on the day of the most important launch in history just drop everything for random dudes coming in? And the leave the suit up room (by themselves) and just stroll on board a ship like they’re boarding a cruise? And why is she a mission specialist? Isn’t she the commander or pilot? If she isn’t why are they making her do all the drills? And where exactly are they launching from with mountains? It isn’t Florida, or White Sands Spaceport, or Brownsville, Texas or Kazakhstan, or anywhere else we launch in the modern day (yes I know Trek has a slightly different history than ours). Why exactly did Tallinn have to die? We couldn’t just stun soong?
So to Queen Agnes of Borg? I’m assuming she’s NOT the same queen who was tormenting Picard, Janeway, First Contact and the rest. So is there one Queen? Successive queens?
Why is Elnor opera
John de Lancie. That moment with Patrick Stewart. The hug. Bringing me to tears. I’m so happy Q’s motives turned out to be what I was hoping.
Though I’d already accidently read a spoiler today, it was so great seeing Wesley! Plus, the Travelers are the aliens from Assignment: Earth? I love that idea! We do know that the Travelers know that space, time and thought are connected so it’d make sense they’d be able to see any changes across the various timelines. I love it. Plus, I’m glad Wesley remained a Traveler. While I wasn’t fond of the idea when it happened, him being back in Starfleet (in Nemesis) just seemed like a giant step backward.
2. I cheered when Soong’s work was deleted. Plus, him being in charge of the Khan Project was a shock (in a good way)
3. I was right! Rios decides to stay in the 21st century. I’m glad. I mean, I’ll miss him but the story with him and Ramirez works better that way.
4. Borg/Agnes. So, the Borg contacted the Federation at the start of the season because there was a destructive galactic anomaly that needed to be stopped. Alrighty-then. I’m glad the Borg are benevolent now thanks to Agnes but it’s not like the timeline was changed. So, this is either a time paradox situation or Agnes/Borg Queen just jumped ahead 400 years. (I actually prefer the latter idea since we don’t want to undo the Borg episodes we’ve seen through the years)
5. I admit Q’s conversation with Picard was very touching. He’s always had this fondness/fascination with Jean-Luc so it’s nice that he did this for him.
6. I’m not sold on the skeleton key though. So, we’re supposed to believe that young Jean-Luc just *happened* to find the key to his mother’s room? He didn’t see his father hide, his mother didn’t tell him where it was, no, he just happened to find. I’m sorry. It’s hard to believe.
7. I’m still confused on the “one Renee has to live and the other must die” premise. Just so we have 2 different timelines? A correct one and a wrong one (the splinter) I don’t know. This entire time travel arc didn’t work for me very well. The episodes were interesting, but the overall arc seemed pointless.
8. Kind of bummed we didn’t see more of young Guinan this season. Also, it didn’t seem like Seven and Raffi had much to do. Yes, they were together the whole season working as a team but, I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t that invested in what they were doing. Still, I did love that kiss at the end. (and Seven has a battlefield promotion!!)
As to the critiques of Wheaton’s performance, maybe Wesley was trying to emulate the often wild-eyed, manic archetype for such conversations.
“Come travel with me trough time and space! I can’t guarantee your safety, but you’ll see the most incredible things!”
Sure, Doc. Where the blue box?
@28 / Kallie – I regard Picard’s synth body the way that I regard the fact that Data’s head is canonically 500 years older than the rest of his body or the fact that Harry Kim is technically from an alternate universe: it’s a bizarre bit of trivia and not fantastic writing, but it doesn’t affect the plot in any way.
Mind you, I wonder of part of the reason why Jean-Luc suddenly needs to deal with his childhood memories is because he’s essentially had his entire consciousness decanted into a new body and it has stirred up things that had been settled for decades.
@46 / Mary – I think that the implication is that Agnes represents a separate collective of Borg from the one that we’ve seen previously (hence why their ships look so different). At the end of the previous episode, she even said, “The future will have no need of a Borg Slayer; at least not from us.”
Presumably they went off and established themselves in some uncharted corner if the Galaxy to stay away from their own timeline, and the original collective is still out there somewhere.
@Mary/46 Regarding “one must die” to me it actually makes sense. Soong had to think he succeeded so he’d leave the space center and thus no longer be a threat to the real Renee. The “must die” part comes from knowing that Soong’s neurotoxin was going to be incurable.
@MikeKelm/44 Although launching an interplanetary mission from there doesn’t really make much sense, I took the spaceport to be Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. There are mountains aplenty around it:  
So, ultimately, how does the Confederation timeline work?
Presumably the significant change to the past is Renee failing to discover the microbe that heals the environment. As a result Soong’s solar shield drone tech keeps the planet on life support. I follow that far.
How does the pollution problem lead to the hyper-militarization of Earth, or the successful conquest of every civilization near and far? Was there anything in the dialogue about this or was it just left to the imagination?
@51/Sarek – I think it’s a more general problem of society being strongly influenced by the ideology of a dilhole like Soong.
@6 Sarek: Exactly. It is not linear. I let the story unfold without being bound.
A meh ending to a meh season. Putting Wesley Crusher in the episode and connecting him to the Watchers which is connected to that Assignment: Earth episode of TOS is all so silly. Star Trek is getting “small universe” syndrome which is where everything in the universe is connected to the relatively small number of characters that we the audience know.
That’s just a nitpick though. The season was a mess, with 3 different villains: Soong (again with Brent Spiner?), Q and the Borg and it all got wrapped up in a rather perfunctory manner.
I want to be excited for season 3, with the rest of the TNG cast coming back, but after 2 seasons of mediocrity, I can’t say that I am. I would love if they did an age-appropriate story for these characters but I know they won’t. In Star Trek VI, the crew was old but the story was mostly about diplomacy, with major scenes taking place in a dining room, a court room and a conference hall. The final battle involved Kirk barking orders from a chair and McCoy and Spock modifying a torpedo. But I’m sure it’ll be old man Riker and Picard with guns blazing or something silly like that.
I’m really hoping Strange New Worlds can bring some life back into this franchise as the shift to serialized story telling has hurt it very badly.
“And here comes this higher being offering her a really cool adventure that will take her all through time and space, after she’s been trapped in the same house her whole life. Of course she says yes!”
All The Traveler really needs now is a blue box that’s bigger on the inside…
I agree with what most everyone here has said. What a shame to make TV that will predictably receive this kind of disappointment mostly, when so many of us would write or sketch a better script, happily and without too much difficulty.
Soong was more interesting early on when he was less 2D.
Borgati (love that) would totally not only have led with her name, rank and serial, but she would have been able to present more pleasantly and used her own Federation knowledge to take over without literally smashing through the controls with her tentacles! In the orig timeline, she had only just vanished.
If the anomaly is Q’s death, which I think it is, they could have made that clearer. For all the terribly obvious, overly lampshaded, add-line highlighted plot points, that was one that was never clear.
I honestly don’t know why they didn’t introduce the beginning of the anomaly in S2E1. Then we would have thought it was the Borg’s fault.
Picard’s sweater. Wtf.
The Kore plot had a lot of potential, and she did the best she could with it, but was so dumb. What was her life really like, all those years? How does she get around now? What is her reaction to the outside world she’s never seen? Does the sun freak her out? Are her eyes okay in bright light? There’s a whole series in there but instead, she’s just hanging out at the library somehow and… most everything about this series makes just no sense.
Watching Raffi poke random buttons, in closeup, at a sound mixing board to try to control drones … I can’t.
The super obvious brick that doesn’t even sit in the wall at the right depth.
The first look at Borgati’s face with the mask off, with the OTT music.
The way the chateau’s dark scary underbelly looked like the well-lit, wheelchair compliant line to get on the Indiana Jones ride.
The whole thing just falls apart. It was all a decent first draft. But somehow never got punched up into something really special. Yet look at “The Inner Light” – that did more in forty something minutes than this show has done in whole seasons.
Sad to lose Allison Pill but it’s sweet of them to give her all that acting/singing/smashing business to leave with. She’ll get more work, and hopefully better scripts.
Oh and yeah, Dr Ramirez, like so many great female characters, starts off strong and interesting, falls in love, and becomes boring. On some subconscious level, it reminds me of the nonsensical expectation that a man will find a hot, fabulous woman and expects her to stop being so fabulous because she’s got him now. Or back in the day, would go to college to get her “Mrs” degree.
I’m sure they didn’t mean to do that, but it’s an unfortunately long-honored tradition, and I would hope Star Trek would do better. In some ways, even TOS did better at feeling evolved into a better wiser future than today’s Trek series.
I think that the reason why Queen Borgati didn’t just introduce herself upon first appearance was because she had already lived through the event 400 subjective years ago and knew how it had to go if she were to exist at all.
@46/Mary: “I’m not sold on the skeleton key though. So, we’re supposed to believe that young Jean-Luc just *happened* to find the key to his mother’s room? He didn’t see his father hide, his mother didn’t tell him where it was, no, he just happened to find. I’m sorry. It’s hard to believe.”
It was behind a pretty obvious loose brick, and Picard was an inquisitive child. It would be perfectly natural for a child to want to explore every nook and cranny of their house, anything that looked interesting or out of place or inexplicable. Exploring is what children do.
@51/Sarek: “How does the pollution problem lead to the hyper-militarization of Earth, or the successful conquest of every civilization near and far?”
I think the idea was that in the Prime timeline, it was an alien microbe from Europa that let Earth save its environment, and that made humanity more receptive to the benefits of cooperation with aliens. In the Confederationverse, that didn’t happen. Also, there, humanity had to struggle to survive on a dying planet, which could’ve given them a harsher, more zero-sum mentality, seeing aliens as rivals for finite resources rather than beneficial allies.
@56/jofesh: “Oh and yeah, Dr Ramirez, like so many great female characters, starts off strong and interesting, falls in love, and becomes boring. On some subconscious level, it reminds me of the nonsensical expectation that a man will find a hot, fabulous woman and expects her to stop being so fabulous because she’s got him now. Or back in the day, would go to college to get her “Mrs” degree.”
I didn’t get that impression. Rather, Guinan’s account made it sound more like Rios followed Teresa’s lead, helping her with her work to help her community.
Wesley’s a Traveller again? Okay, something else I need to factor into my stories… You could say that Nemesis missed the point of “Journey’s End” by having him back in uniform, but then you could also say that “Journey’s End” missed the point of “Where No One Has Gone Before”: He was supposed to be a scientific prodigy, not some sort of chosen one destined to ascend to a higher plane of existence and become master of space and time and not actually need any of that stuff the Traveller told Picard to teach him. Guess he’s having trouble deciding on a career. Or maybe someone felt they need to even up turning Seven, the ultimate individualist who thought command structures were for other people, into yet another Starfleet wannabe.
cap-mjb: What makes you think he ever stopped being a Traveler? One brief silent cameo in Nemesis is low on real information about Wesley’s status.
Anyhow, I covered that in my novel A Time for War, a Time for Peace. *cheeky grin*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@58/CLB:
Both theories could make sense and are a good fit with the general assumptions and aesthetics of Trek. As does Iacomina’s reading above (@52) that Earth changed due to the Soong’s prominence and the influence of his personality and philosphy on Earth’s culture.
I do think that a point so pivotal to both the plot and implications of a ten-part narrative could have been developed a bit less airily.
@61/Sarek: Episode 2 did establish that Adam Soong is revered in the Confederation, with that holo-statue in San Francisco Bay intoning “A safe galaxy is a human galaxy.” (I was going to say episode 2 made it clear, but it was a throwaway detail I almost missed.) But I don’t see the logical throughline there. I mean, Soong’s whole deal was that humans should alter their genome and become more than human, which seems to contradict the notion of human purism that drove the Confederation.
Makes about as much sense anything in this season, I guess.
Given that Q’s entire plot arc for this season is grounded in him being swallowed up by entropy, can we be really sure they he’s compos mentis throughout all this? (His having good days & bad days would definitely help explain the disconnect between certain of his actions).
Also, one would like to state my considerable disappointment that we have had many little winks to ‘Assignment Earth’ but have yet to see a SINGLE shape shifting alien catwoman.
We was robbed!
On a less batty note, I must admit to liking quite a bit of this season but rather getting the impression that the production team might have benefitted by limiting themselves to fewer episodes, since this would have allowed them to present a more focussed whole rather than giving them room for the sort of interesting, but not always useful stuff they whipped up to fill out a whole season.
Having said that, this line of reasoning might have cost us an all-singing, all-dancing Alison Pill, so it wouldn’t be all good!
Oh, one more thing – is it possible that ‘Project Khan’ was a spin-off from the project that created the Augments, rather than the project responsible for the creation of Khan Noonian Singh? (Project KHAN makes even more sense as the name for a “These dudes are terrifying, let’s work out how to beat them at their own game” sort of project, after all).
@62
I think you actually missed a few points that Picard was clever with, Christopher, and it’s a rare opportunity to point these out to you.
1. Adam Soong invented the Sun ShieldTM that protects the entirety of the Earth from environmental disaster in the 24th century. Which is something that we see he’s already invented in miniature form for his daughter in the 21st century.
2. The Confederation has problems but it’s not as virulently anti-transhumanist as the Mirror Universe (or Federation for that matter) since it regularly employs androids as well as allows robot “shells” (Ghost in the Shell perhps) that are treated as the same as the original person. Which fits with a society where Soong is their version of George Washington and Albert Einstein put together.
3. Adam is made aware of the existence of aliens by the Borg Queen so him becoming like Zephram in the Mirror Universe (which used to be the point of divergence but DISCO utterly changed that) makes sense.
C.T. Phipps: Cochrane wasn’t the point of divergence between the two universes. The universes diverged long before that, but that’s the part that was relevant to Federation/Terran Empire history.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
CLB @58: It was behind a pretty obvious loose brick, and Picard was an inquisitive child. It would be perfectly natural for a child to want to explore every nook and cranny of their house, anything that looked interesting or out of place or inexplicable. Exploring is what children do.
Yes, but why would this obvious hiding place have gone undiscovered for so long? Was this the first time he was in that house? It was *so* obvious it was screaming “Look here! Look here!”
@62/CLB:
All good points. It seems to be a nod to the (real and Trek) history of eugenics and idea of the Übermensch; but all very vague.
It’s interesting because I suppose this season’s narrative depicted the journeys of not one but three putative “Master Races”: humans, in the Road Not Taken and as embodied by Soong and rejected by Picard; the Borg Queen, outsmarted and reformed by his protege; and Q, who never quite stops believing in his own superiority but is finally able to come to a point of shared understanding and purpose with his favorite pet human.
Powerful and literary and profound; but I wish it hadn’t come at the expense of developing the plot more logically.
@46
Mary,
1. My inclination is the Confederation timeline is basically a brief “bubble” created purely for a short while before the timestream looped back around. Q *always* meddled and *always* created the Federation timeline because he’s outside of time. Which adds an interesting element to Q and Picard’s relationship because this means he always knew Picard was influenced by himself. The Prophets are probably the only people who could figure out how that kind of 4th dimensional thinking works. But a disturbing idea is that without Q, the Confederation might have been the “real” timeline. Which might explain some of Q’s skepticism of Picard’s claims regarding humanity’s evolution.
2. Depending on whether the Borg are ever going to be used as enemies again, I think they could go with either Agnes being a splinter collective or she and the Queen had a falling out only for Agnes to become the NEW Borg Queen after Endgame.
3. I’m assuming that Picard’s mom and dad found the key long before this. Its just they left it behind the brick because, well, that’s where they assumed it was “meant” to be like leaving a key under the mat. It’s more symbolic than anything as Picard accepting that he can’t change the past and must accept it.
4. “One Renee must die and One Must Live” isn’t anything to do with time travel or separate timelines, that was just fan speculation. It’s just the argument that the only way to get Renee safely on the mission is for Doctor Soong to think that he’s succeeded. The thing is that a lot of the things they COULD do to save Renee Picard are the sort of things that would get the mission scrubbed and Soong has a lot more avenues for that kind of disruption than they do.
Also, I just remembered having read that the team creating gene-edited babies is at the Southern University of Science and Technology, in Shenzhen.
Random thought:
Note that Q doing this saved a star sector from being destroyed, redeemed the Borg, and also made happy endings for a lot of individual people in Picard’s life. It also is the predestination paradox that saved humanity’s environment post-WW3.
So when he says it’s small potatoes, he’s lying his ass off.
Notably, it actually works in character because Q destroyed the Borg by introducing them to the Federation and traumatized pIcard by introducing him to the Borg. This bizarre circuitous route he took actually fixes most of the damage Q caused to everyone. Which justifies him taking such a non-linear (hehe) path.
It makes sense as his grand bow as well as “atonement” for all of the evils he did.
I gotta say, I hate the whole “one Renee must die” business. There’s no sense to Tallinn having to sacrifice her life to protect Renee. I mean, she’s got super-advanced Aegis Traveler technology at her disposal! And Soong didn’t wait around to actually see her die. Once he was gone, she could’ve beamed back to her loft and whipped up an instant antidote. Or just used her transporter’s biofilter to edit out the toxin. So there was absolutely no need for her to die. It was sheer, gratuitous fridging, killing a female protagonist to motivate the male lead.
@73
I don’t think that qualifies as “fridging” Christopher Bennet because it’s a female character dying to protect another female character. It’s also something that Picard isn’t the focus of but her desire to protect her daughter equivalent and after she says it’s her choice to do so.
It would be like saying Spock was fridged.
Yes, Picard is effected by the event but the focus is not on Picard’s pain but on Tanlin’s love of Rene. Platonic guardian angel love or not.
That sound you all heard was me screaming about timelines and temporal paradoxes. LOL.
@70/CT Phipps
But a disturbing idea is that without Q, the Confederation might have been the “real” timeline. Which might explain some of Q’s skepticism of Picard’s claims regarding humanity’s evolution.
Now, THAT’S a very intriguing idea!
This show is terrible.
And why does Q say that in every timeline, Tallinn dies? Like, is she just fated to die? Is her assignment always Renee Picard? (Dialogue implied as much. ) Is there always someone obsessed with hurting Renee/stopping the Europa Mission that requires her to sacrifice her life to fulfill her duty?
Re @71 and Shenzhen: See Nature, “Genome-edited baby claim provokes international outcry”, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07545-0
So Evan Evagora has confirmed he’s exiting the show alongside Allison Pill and Santiago Cabrea. Isa Briones’ status is still up in the air (as is Ola Brady’s).
So, unless they come back, Hurd and Ryan are the only surviving Seasons 1-2 cast members joining the TNG reunion in the final Season.
I have mixed feelings. Obviously, I wanted to see the TNG characters appear as much as anyone (and at the right time if/when it had earned). But it had been interesting seeing Picard separated from his team and having to form a new surrogate family. It kinda does feel like they’re being shunted off to the budgetary considerations.
@74/C.T. Phipps: “I don’t think that qualifies as “fridging” Christopher Bennet because it’s a female character dying to protect another female character.”
But that’s just my point — she doesn’t have to die to save Renee, because it would’ve been easy for her to beam back and cure herself after Soong left. And the writers could easily have chosen to let her save Renee in a different way that didn’t require her death — say, by beaming Soong to Outer Mongolia, or just using her servo to put him to sleep for a few hours. With the resources at her disposal, it should’ve been ridiculously easy to defeat an old guy whose only superpower was his donations to the project. So there is absolutely no damn sense to the premise that she couldn’t have saved Renee any other way than getting herself killed. The only reason the writers had her sacrifice her life at all was so she could die dramatically in Picard’s arms while urging him not to let himself lose her future lookalike the way he’s losing her. So hell, yes, it absolutely was fridging of the worst kind.
My interpretation is that Picard is also taking a somewhat linear view of things. Tallinn is going to be dead by the time of Picard’s life because it’s four hundred years in the past from his perspective. All mortals die eventually after all.
Presumably Q also means that even if they hadn’t been involved, Soong would have killed her.
If the writer’s intended this season’s story as a commentary on the Nietzschean Übermensch, much as Season 1 was meant to explicate Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, that might open a window on what the writers thought they were doing by using the same actors to play characters in the 21st century vaguely similar to those in the 24th: Picard’s Romulan mother-figure, the scientist madly preoccupied with remaking man but in reflection his own self-worship, the innocent daughter lost and shocked by the truth of her identity.
Another theme in Nietzche’s work is the “eternal recurrence“, the idea that the same events are re-enacted again and again. If I recall there was dialogue in the scene with the FBI interrogator to that effect.
This is the relevant passage:
#79.
Yep, most of this season already had budgetary concerns written all over it, from the extended stay in 21st century LA to the sometimes bizarre reuse of actors already on the payroll. While watching Strange New Worlds, I kept thinking, ‘oh, so this is where the money went!’
Hopefully the grand finale next season will get a bit more to spend, because this discount Picard: LA: NCIS wasn’t cutting it.
I don’t know; I really feel like this series is being hijacked by the TNG cast. I can only hope that those persistent rumours of a Seven of Nine series prove accurate and that it also picks up all of the supporting cast.
So basically all this temporal displacement and drama was really about resolving Picard’s mommy issues? And what an issue! Hanging yourself in front of your young. son is horrible and barely extenuated by major mental issues. Yvette definitely spent time in purgatory for that.
@84 / Iacomia:
I don’t know; I really feel like this series is being hijacked by the TNG cast. I can only hope that those persistent rumours of a Seven of Nine series prove accurate and that it also picks up all of the supporting cast.
I mean, again, we all expected this was coming eventually from the moment the series was announced.
As I said, I was fine with if it had been earned and…well, I’m not sure it has been. I don’t think I’ve been so dissatisfied by the sophomore Season of a modern show since Daredevil or Jessica Jones (which, in the case of the former, is actually ironic given Michelle Hurd was part of Hornhead’s Cast that year too).
That being said, Stewart’s now in his Eighties and the rest of the TNG Main Cast is not far behind him (in their 60s or 70s). So, if you’re gonna get the band back together and seize a second chance to give the franchise’s other most iconic crew the sendoff that Nemesis should have been…well, it’s now or never.
@85
Yvette’s story should’ve been more touching that it actually was. It could’ve been poignant, but it didn’t work for a lot of us. (Some, like me, appreciate what they were trying to go for while others flat out hate it)
As for the suicide, it is a real issue. One that many families, including my extended family have dealt with. So, I can’t condemn the show for shing a light on a real-life issue. As for “hanging herself in front of her son”, technically, she didn’t. Her son’s the one who just happened to find her. Granted, one could easily argue that since that was her and Jean-Luc’s special place that she should’ve known but she was in emotional turmoil at the time. I can’t fault her when she, obviously, wasn’t thinking clearly.
For me this was the best episode of an entirely rubbish season. I’m still upset, because the show has good actors, reasonable directors, visual and sound effects etc, but the story is just horribly dumb, but this episode improved it a tiny bit. I personally don’t mind the complete randomness of Q’s behaviour, that’s a pattern also from the past. I was happy to see Wesley, because Wil Wheaton is a cool guy and i even liked Wesley’s character when i was a kid (rewatching TNG as an adult, he’s much more annoying for sure:D), but i wished he would fit the storyline slightly less randomly…
Meh, i’ll still watch the next season anyway because of Patrick Stewart. :)
Wow, first impressions – I enjoyed it, sorry, but it did wrap things up nicely.
As ever, a few thoughts – from across the series;
Guinan not recognising Picard – I spent yesterday rewatching Time’s Arrow, simply because UK, so had to wait to today for Picard! Lots of comments about how she should have recognised Picard – but how would she know that for Picard, Time’s Arrow had also taken place? All she knew, in both cases, from the dialogue – is this is someone from the future, who has travelled back in time and needs her help, and that they are ‘more than friends, more than family’ in that future. Equally for Picard, how would he know, because of course she didn’t tell him in the future, that this meeting would take place for both of them after Time’s Arrow? My ‘head canon’ is perfectly happy that both of them had met before, but aren’t saying anything about it at the time, in case it hasn’t happened yet for the other one! (Temporal Prime Directive time!)
10 Forward/10 Forward Avenue – People were saying that it’s unlikely that the bar’s would all be called the same thing, but why not they’re all named after her original LA Bar (which she still owns!)? When she came aboard the Ent-D, maybe she requested that specific location because it reminded her of her bar – or are we saying it is the “only” bar/observation deck on the Enterprise? I’m not disputing that the designers would’ve put an observation deck at the front of the saucer, or that that space would be on Deck 10 – but if I had the choice been Deck 10, Forward Section; or Deck 35 Starboard side, or Deck 3 Rear Lounge etc. I know which I’d’ve picked! (Chris – what was the Bar in the Regnancy of the Carnelian Throne in the Lost Era – I’ve not found it in my copy yet – was that another 10 Forward reference or did you go down a different route?)
Q/Pre-destination Paradox…. Q is dying… why, not really important (but I like the though that for all he’s omnipotent, there’s a limit to that omnipotence – as with energy – and he has a set amount, normally more than enough, but with his frivolity (as punished by the Q Continuum in TNG) maybe he’s burned through it more quickly than the other ‘bored’ natives of the Q-Cont. did prior to Quinn’s death) anyhoo …when a Q dies, a star explodes – Voyager established that, but this is Q! The irrepressible Q! No mere star for him, no… a sector-quashing anomaly (undetected because BORG!!! BORG!! Panic…Panic…. etc.)
I’ve never perceived Q as evil, and since he ‘has to set an example for the little guy’, fatherhood would hardly let him grant one last lesson to his son (assuming Junior hasn’t been killed by the Omega Continuum at this point); that in dying you wipe out untold billions – no, if you must die, then do so responsibly…. so how to protect those lives… well with the tools at hand you need some ships with shields, and a Spock-level intellect to harmonise those shields together (and one final show of fatherly example, throw all the backwash from your death into a single direction) – how many of those are lying around the universe currently…. well the Borg could do it (‘Don’t provoke the Borg….Daddy needs them for when he dies…they might not help me if you annoy them Junior!”), but who in Starfleet is going to TRUST the Borg… Seven (not likely), Icheb (dead, how inconvenient), Picard…. Picard…. well he’d be more likely to than Kathy or Benjy, but not really….
So…
Problem 1 – Need to save Sector from own Death
Solution – Borg to Harmonise Shields, Starfleet to Provide Shields, Jean-Luc to be chief cheerleader to death.
Problem 2 – How to get Jean Luc to trust the Borg
Solution – Make the Borg Queen his friend (previous version tried to seduce him, maybe try a different tact) – that will mean her being trustable and altruistic enough to want to save the Sector from my death
Problem 3 – How to make the Borg listen to an influence that would make them trustworthy and altruistic
Solution – find a Borg Queen from an alternative timeline who is the last survivor of the Borg, have her assimilate a single individual of strong enough character that they will listen
Problem 3b – how to make the Borg Queen listen to that individual
Solution – isolate Borg Queen from easy technology – throw back in time
Problem 4 – How to get the Borg Queen back in time… she’s hardly going to go there herself, and if I snap my fingers, that’ll waste more energy than I can afford
Solution – Save Picard at the moment of his death, with some companions else he’ll never manage alone, a monkey must have it’s organ to grind, and move him sideways to alternative timeline, he’ll then ‘escape’ to seek to put right ‘my interference’ and take Borg Queen back in time.
Problem 5 – Picard is going to seek to ‘save the future’ not realising that the Trap is not being in the past, but not being open to move forwards – to trust the Borg
Solution – give memories a push to relive his trauma of Mother’s Death and his role in that – (which frankly, you let out your mother who kills herself, I’d say that’s something which would influence you and also not be something you’d talk about, even to your half-Betazoid Counsellor) – but…distraction needed
Problem 6 – Picard needs to be distracted away from Borg Queen to give Jurati a chance to ‘bond’ with her…
Solution – ensure root of the Confederation (alternative timeline) is prompted into Picard’s perceptions… offer Soong a cure for his daughter and manipulate him into becoming a ‘threat’ to the true timeline.
Problem 7 – Daughter Kore now mad with father for his involvement…
Solution – whisper in the ear of Wesley that another Companion/Supervisor might be found on Earth
Problem 8 – I’m going to die, have I left an example for Junior
Solution – encouraged Picard (my favourite mortal, after all he does do speechifying so well) to absolve himself, ensured no loose ends (Kore with Travellers, Taillin dead, Guinan…Imp….she’ll be no trouble her bottle’s empty now anyway), Borg Queen merged with Jurati and off waiting for 400 years to pass, Picard et. al. returned to Stargazer….
Problem 9 – I’m dying…
Solution….
————
The Key – there was a line that ‘it moved all around the house that key’ – but if Picard destroyed it in the past, then it wouldn’t exist to move around, so he wouldn’t have found it wherever it was at the time to let his Mother out – so by accepting that it wasn’t his fault, he needed to hide the key so it had a chance to survive to the future – even if it did migrate in between times
Transwarp Conduit – they’ve already said Season 3 is a road trip … who better to send down the rabbit hole than Picard and his team? (Maybe on the stargazer with Capt’n Seven & Raffi?)
Sorry I’ve rambled a bit, and not perfectly I know, but I’ve enjoyed this season and I think I’ll binge 10 hours tomorrow and see how it flows in one single sitting!
@79,
So, update: Isa Brones has confirmed her exit from Picard as well. Orla Brady’s status still isn’t confirmed.
So, that leaves Hurd as the last of the original Season 1 Cast carrying over into Season 3 (Seven was technically recurring in that Season).
That being said…it’ll be interesting to see Raffi play off Riker (given they were both Picard’s XOs).
@90/Tom: “All she knew, in both cases, from the dialogue – is this is someone from the future, who has travelled back in time and needs her help, and that they are ‘more than friends, more than family’ in that future. Equally for Picard, how would he know, because of course she didn’t tell him in the future, that this meeting would take place for both of them after Time’s Arrow?”
What? It would be obvious for Guinan that their 1893 meeting is in Picard’s relative past, because he’s visibly decades older here. And it would be obvious for Picard that the event is in Guinan’s relative past, because she’s not a time traveler and it’s 2024.
“(Chris – what was the Bar in the Regnancy of the Carnelian Throne in the Lost Era – I’ve not found it in my copy yet – was that another 10 Forward reference or did you go down a different route?)”
It never occurred to me to use the name “Ten Forward” for anything other than Deck 10, forward section 1 of the Enterprise-D. I don’t believe I ever established a name for the bar, though, so it theoretically could have been called some variant of Ten Forward. Pretty dull name for a bar, though.
“when a Q dies, a star explodes – Voyager established that”
No, it didn’t. Quinn’s death didn’t cause any supernovae. Lady Q explained in “The Q and the Gray” that the supernovae there were the result of spatial distortions in the Continuum caused by the fighting. Q called them “galactic crossfire.”
@84 I think it’s worth remembering that, in the end, the show is Star Trek: Picard. Everybody else is really there to service Jean-Luc’s story, and I think we’ve kind of reached a dead end with almost the other cast members. I’m actually quite convinced that some of them (Isa Briones and Evan Evagora in particular) were only in this season for contractual reasons. I, like many of you, was puzzled as to the ultimate point of the Kore storyline or the Elnor flashbacks/ECH, but they make a lot more sense if they were obligated to give those actors a certain number of appearances this season.
@92 I don’t think Quinn’s death is very illustrative, because he was no longer a Q when he died. If Q had been killed before Henry Spencer came to restore his powers, it would have been unremarkable as well.
In the spirit of Trek nerdery, I am going to offer a solution worthy of Doctor Who.
“Guinan of Time’s Arrow is actually the future of 2024 Guinan” – We have all been assuming that Picard and Guinan have met by this point but time travel is very common among space travelers. In fact, at some point in the future of 2024 but before the events of “Generations” Guinan will travel back into the 19th century where she meets Picard and company. She plays coy because she recognizes their timelines are not yet in sync. Which is, since we can’t accept things like recasting. why she looks like Whoopi Goldberg despite Guinan aging in the “present.”
@92/Chris
Guinan/Picard aging – True, but when you meet someone who is ‘older’ than you when you are younger, and you both age in the intervening time between meetings, you don’t always notice their aging relative to when you last saw them, they always appear to be the same age away from you until you have a reason to believe otherwise; we don’t really know how ‘young’ Guinan was in 1893 (especially as El-Aurians can Age/De-Age to suit themselves!), relatively speaking 30 years for a Human could be 150-odd years for an El-Aurian in perspective – but true, I am grasping at straws somewhat!
Naming the Bar – Yep, it is a lousy name for a bar – but as a personal call-back to the address of your Bar ’10’ on Forward Avenue – that’s plausible – and as a reason to choose that location on the Enterprise to set up shop. After all – it’s a big ship!
Q Dying – except Quinn wasn’t a Q at the time (much as Amanda’s parents were Human when they died); and those spatial distortions could have been caused by the death of a Q, rather than their ‘weaponry’ discharging into the surroundings
I haven’t been reading the NY Times reviews of Picard regularly, but I was a bit curious to see what a legacy media publication made of it so I clicked on over. I had to laugh a little at this:
I’m so not worked up about the bar thing. Guinan is an El-Aurian, she’s deeply intuitive and hears resonances across time and space. Of course she picked that location as soon as she saw it, the name meant a lot to her in the future.
@93,
I think it’s worth remembering that, in the end, the show is Star Trek: Picard. Everybody else is really there to service Jean-Luc’s story, and I think we’ve kind of reached a dead end with almost the other cast members.
Good point.
It kinda reminds me of Legend of Korra and how Book One was conceived and executed as a limited series…and then they got renewed and struggled to carry the character arcs forward through the remainder of the series (though they eventually got here).
@94/Chase: “I don’t think Quinn’s death is very illustrative, because he was no longer a Q when he died.”
Beside the point. What matters is that “The Q and the Gray” did not say that the supernovae were caused by Q dying, but by spatial distortions from the fighting. It’s basically the equivalent of skyscrapers being knocked down by a kaiju battle.
@96/Tom: There’s no indication that El-Aurians can de-age as well as allow themselves to age. Ito Aghayere is 33, the same age that Whoopi Goldberg was when she started playing Guinan. So essentially Guinan has been portrayed as the same physiological age in the 1890s, 2020s, and 2360s.
“those spatial distortions could have been caused by the death of a Q”
There’s no basis for that. Lady Q said they were caused by the fighting; Q called them “galactic crossfire.” That seems to be saying they’re the collateral damage of the Q weapons that were referenced later on. The suggestion that they have anything to do with Q deaths is completely ad hoc speculation based on nothing but a misremembering of the episode. You might as well conjecture that they’re caused by Q sneezes or Q orgasms or Q souffles falling; it’s just as much pulled out of thin air.
And the people wanting to see the climactic event as the result of Q’s death seems to be missing that it wasn’t just an explosion, it was the formation of a transwarp conduit. So drawing an analogy with supernovae is a non sequitur. It’s a totally different phenomenon. The conduit is clearly a setup for season 3.
@99 I forgot to include in my comment that Picard was also originally pitched and marketed as a “limited” series, which I think caused the exact same problems as they had with The Legend of Korra. Rather than try to make it all work though, the Picard producers seem to have just thrown their hands up and said “Let’s just bring back the geezers and have fun.” I am very supportive of that plan.
@101,
I also wonder how much of bringing back Team 1701-D/E was motivated by knowing that the final Season would overlap with TNG’s 35th anniversary and trying to piggyback on that.
@101/Chase: Good point. Most of this season felt like it was flailing for an excuse to tell another story with this cast. And I don’t think it really found one.
Yes; much though I loved Agnes this season, I really don’t see how they could bring her back for more than a supporting role. She can’t exactly be on their crew if she’s off being the Borg Collective, and I don’t want her to stop being the Borg. Still, I do hope that she turns up elsewhere in the future. They could probably work her into Discovery next season.
@104,
Still, I do hope that she turns up elsewhere in the future. They could probably work her into Discovery next season.
That could work. The fate of the Borg is definitely a thread DSC could explore and using the Queen in Black, heh, would be a neat way to tie together the two eras.
Actually, from what Akiva Goldsman dropped in this week’s episode of The Ready Room, there had been discussions of having Wesley-as-a-Traveler cross over onto one of the other current shows (it’s unclear if it was meant to be DSC/SNW or LD/Prodigy). Bur the PIC team fought to get custodianship of Wesley, arguing (correctly) that it made more sense that his return should come from whence it came (i.e. the TNG corner).
@103 / CLB:
Most of this season felt like it was flailing for an excuse to tell another story with this cast. And I don’t think it really found one.
Yeah, for all its flaws, Season One’s narrative was at least interesting. There was plenty of goodies to whet the appetite, from the long-awaited return to the 24th Centur to more world-building with Romulan culture than had ever been done on the preceding shows.
This? I mean, obviously, I wanted to see Q again (and the El-Aurian world-building was nice), but I was unenthusiastic about Trek doing yet another ‘Dark Timeline’ and ‘Set Right What Once Went Wrong’ narrative. And all my concerns were ultimately vindicated.
There’s just a massive disconnect between S1 and S2 and I wonder how much of that is because of Chabon’s departure.
I also wonder if they went into S2 knowing they’d get the TNG Cast (or if they only found out late in the game, which prompted re-working the trajectory from scratch much like DSC S2).
Based on absolutely no inside knowledge whatsoever, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the disconnect between seasons one and two is very much related to Michael Chabon’s departure and the arrival of Terry Matalas, who got his start working on Voyager and Enterprise twenty years ago.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@106/Mr. Magic: “There’s just a massive disconnect between S1 and S2 and I wonder how much of that is because of Chabon’s departure.”
It does seem to me like Terry Matalas was just rehashing a lot of the stuff he did in 12 Monkeys. Iffy time-travel logic, saving the world from an apocalyptic timeline, unexplained resonances between eras, James Callis and Jay Karnes playing guest roles, etc.
Will Wheaton said he might show up in other Trek shows sometime. I hope he shows up in Lower Decks and I know they’d be ecstatic to have him.
Matalas has a Delorean as his Twitter heading. The guy loves him some time travel.
@109 That could be fun. So could having him show up in Prodigy. with all the kids.
You know, I think I might be coming around to the idea of the Travelers being behind Gary Seven. It is small-universe plotting, but it makes sense in a vague sort of way. Gary Seven was sent to subtly guide humanity through its turbulent adolescence, and you could say there’s a sort of loose parallel between that and how the Traveler subtly nudged Wesley onto the path that would lead to him becoming a Traveler, or the way he was hanging in the background and letting Kozinski take the credit for his warp improvements. And we saw in “Journey’s End” that the Traveler could shapeshift, sort of like Isis. It’s a bit of a stretch, but there’s enough resonance that it doesn’t feel completely random or forced.
And I suppose it doesn’t necessarily conflict with the tie-ins’ portrayal of the Aegis as the group behind Gary. We never saw the guiding species behind the Aegis. (We saw them in John Byrne’s Gary Seven comics, but he didn’t use the Aegis concept from the DC comics and the novels.) They’ve been assumed (at least in my own DTI books) to be the shapeshifting species that Isis belongs to, but nothing requires them to be a single-species operation, I suppose.
On a related note, I suppose what Tallinn said about how some Supervisors are assigned to guide a single important person through their lives may have been a hint as to their identity, because it’s similar to how the Traveler focused on Wesley. Maybe there were times he helped out Wesley unseen, like Tallinn did with Renee.
@108,
It does seem to me like Terry Matalas was just rehashing a lot of the stuff he did in 12 Monkeys. Iffy time-travel logic, saving the world from an apocalyptic timeline, unexplained resonances between eras, James Callis and Jay Karnes playing guest roles, etc.
Ah. I’ve never seen the TV remake, so I didn’t know he was basically riffing on his own stuff.
If that’s his bread and butter, he must’ve been at home on ENT during the Xini arc.
Probably to the interest of absolutely no-one…I think I just had a…Reverse Robert Knepper Moment? Was watching the first season of Dangerfield on DVD last weekend, saw that the main guest actor for the two-parter was someone called Orla Brady, thought she was vaguely familiar but never got around to looking her up…then looked at this thread and went “****”.
Crikey, she was young in it. Guess that reinforces my realisation on seeing Moray Watson in the first episode that the stuff I watched as a teenager is now really really old, with half the people in it now dead and the other half 20-30 years older…
krad: I have read A Time for War, a Time for Peace, and I appreciate what you did in terms of dealing with Wesley’s cameo as quickly as possible and getting him back where the novelverse wanted him, but I have a hard time accepting it as what “really” happened. The film shows him in a Starfleet dress uniform, and unlike Worf (who’s also back in uniform with no explanation in the theatrical release), he’s got a higher rank than the one he held before becoming a Traveller. A throwaway “We only have lieutenant’s uniforms available so I’m giving you a temporary promotion” works as a gag but doesn’t explain why they couldn’t just take one of the rank pips off rather than having him costumed with a rank that, in novel continuity, he’d never held. The very fact that he’s there at all suggests that it’s no longer a case of “You’re a higher form of life now who must leave them to their own affairs.”
First time commenter, long-time lurker here. This is gonna be kinda long but this episode really prompted some thinking.
I find it interesting that Q can be dead and not dead. At least, not be dead in the traditional sense. It was his reaction to what Rios said about time being a funny thing that got me thinking… as we know Q is capable of time travel, it is entirely possible that Q can be both dead and yet may still appear to be popping up and doing stuff in the universe, because of time travels Q did before dying.
Something I couldn’t put out of my mind was that a Q with reduced powers either has reduced control of the situation or is able to maintain it by being able to know what the results of actions will be. If the former is true Q couldn’t guarantee that Soong attempting vehicular homicide wouldn’t actually kill Picard, or that the Borgified soldiers wouldn’t, for example. Should this be true, the methods employed were rather risky, compared to say, use of a chemical or electronic means to induce the state that saw Talinn enter Picard’s mind. Given what Q is able to do (i.e. Kore’s freedom vial) and that Q told Soong to go after Picard (and did not provide specifics on how to go about it), Q’s choices seem remarkable.
The alternative also has a problem. Guinan detects emptiness and fear which Q admits while loathing her empathy. Should Q retain temporal awareness, Q can safely manipulate Picard via elaborate methods but Q should know the result is Q not dying alone. Fear makes sense if Q cannot have certainty, by the future being in motion, but that would again call the less straightforward methods used into question. If it is fear of death itself given the manner of death, whether the cause is just wasting away, or some very advanced disease or attack I can’t help but think other Q would take an interest in it.
We saw Q intervene only after the self-destruct but in the last episode Picard averted the self-destruct and events proceeded differently, removing the event that caused Q to intervene in the first place … so we don’t have a perfect loop. Unlike every other time Q has intervened in time, Q did something to affect Q’s own past/future
But if Q’s death (or of some version or part of Q, depending on how Q may span across timelines) was from getting trapped in a time paradox Q couldn’t back out of, this seems to me to make Q’s words and choices more coherent, from claiming this was not a lesson but Picard’s penance and blaming Picard’s fear for the situation to the choice of methods Q used, Q’s not having sent Picard to the past and what Q ended up saying at the end.
To me it may make more sense if Q blamed Picard for the result of intervening in a temporally messy situation (whether Q intervened immediately after the self-destruct or not) then helped Picard find absolution and/or trying to escape the trap of death and then moved on to accepting a purposeful death to save Picard (and the warm glow of meaning in saving/restoring a timeline) but ending another one or section of one in the process.
@114/cap: I probably first saw Orla Brady as Walter Bishop’s wife in several episodes of Fringe, and first really became aware of her name in the short-lived 2012 British Sinbad series, where she made a striking impression as the main villainess. She also had a significant supporting role in Matt Smith’s final Doctor Who episode.
@115/cap: Wesley’s uniform in Nemesis is a throwaway detail that gets no attention paid to it. The mere existence of Strange New Worlds proves that one can’t dwell too much on superficial details, because they’re always subject to change. Heck, we’ve known that since James R. Kirk became James T. Kirk and UESPA became Starfleet.
I increasingly remind myself these days that Gene Roddenberry apparently approached Star Trek as merely a Dragnet-style dramatization of Kirk’s logs (he got his start in TV writing up real police cases for Dragnet), so that inconsistencies like the Klingons changing appeearance in TMP were, in his mind, simply correcting errors and imperfections in previous dramatizations. It helps a lot to resolve minor inconsistencies if we assume they’re just adaptational errors.
“must everything be of galactic importance” is exactly the question many people have been asking about NuTrek season arcs. Why not a gentle tale of Picard sorting out his mommy issues against a backdrop of his work as commandant of the Academy? Think of the variety of cadets passing through his hands and all the potential secondary plots!
Orla Brady was also magnificent in Into the Badlands.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, unabashed ITB fangoober
princessroxana: But then they couldn’t save all that money by filming in contemporary Los Angeles!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I will go against the grain and be the minority and say I did enjoy “Farewell” more than the SNW premier. And I liked SNW, too.
It’s all Star Trek.
@121/M: “It’s all Star Trek.”
Of course it is, but every Trek series has had good and bad episode. I think people who complain about the new series’ problems tend to forget how many lame or mediocre episodes TOS or TNG had — and how many entire seasons of past Trek were weak overall, like TOS season 3 or TNG season 1. The great stories that made us love the shows were not the majority, but the ones that stood out from the pack.
So criticizing an episode or a season has nothing to do with whether it’s Star Trek. Of course it’s Star Trek. That’s right there in the title. But it’s still valid to criticize the parts of Star Trek that don’t work for us, and people will often disagree on which parts those are.
@122
That’s true. There is room for valid criticism. But over at Twitter, I’m seeing a lot of “this isn’t real Star Trek.” I just saw a petition the other say wanting to make Kurtzman-era Trek non-canon. I wanted to reply that I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen.
@123
If it makes you feel any better, I can almost guarantee that in 10-20 years, those people’s future counterparts will be talking about how this was a golden age of classic Trek, unlike the shit that “nu” shit. The wheel turns.
My comment of “It’s all Star Trek” is a specific reference to people claiming any Trek they don’t like isn’t Trek.
CLB’s point about other Trek shows is spot on. I don’t even know how many Trek episodes from TNG S1 I would even recommend for a non Trek fan to watch.
@123 My comment is always, “I remember your PARENTS making the exact same comments when TNG premiered….”
Well, I do remember quite a lot of Star Trek in the distant past being bad to mediocre. Doesn’t change my opinion that quite a lot of the Star Trek in the past few years has been bad to mediocre, too.
If a person is sitting in a boat during a flood and complaining about it, that doesn’t mean they’re saying water was just invented.
@126,
I wonder if any of those TNG-era fans are cognizant of the irony of coming full circle with their TOS-era parents 35 years ago.
For me, Trek is not unlike Batman. Each new generation of creators/fans are constantly reinterpreting the cultural icon and doingtheir own spin and take on the mythology, themes, iconography, etc. for their era.
As someone who grew up with the TNG era, obviously I don’t fully agree with some of those spins and interpretations. But it’s no different than how I view the Star Wars ST as someone who grew up with the OT and PT.
Or, as Star Trek III put it…
“Aye, and if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon!”
“Come, come, Mr. Scott. Young minds, fresh ideas. Be tolerant!”
@127/Sketchy: “Well, I do remember quite a lot of Star Trek in the distant past being bad to mediocre. Doesn’t change my opinion that quite a lot of the Star Trek in the past few years has been bad to mediocre, too.”
It doesn’t have to change it, just put it in perspective. Trek has always been a mixed bag quality-wise, so the fact that the modern stuff is a mixed bag too is par for the course. Some of it is good, some is okay, much is forgettable, some is brilliant, some is dumb as hell. So it has always been and so it will continue to be.
That’s why the people who say “It’s not Trek” are being so silly. They’re looking at past Trek through rose-colored glasses, defining the best parts as the whole thing, and forgetting that there was just as much crappy Trek in the 1960s or 1990s as there is in the 2020s.
I do think this season of Picard has been quite possibly the weakest season of Trek in the Secret Hideout era, but it’s balanced by season 4 of Discovery being perhaps the best season of Trek in the SH era. Good, bad, in between, it’s all Trek. We don’t love it because it’s flawless, but because of the diamonds in the rough.
@120, Oh, yes of course. That is the real purpose of time travel isn’t it?
CLB, I never say ‘It’s not Trek.’ Just ‘I really don’t like this!’
@120/130,
It never ceases to amuse me that a franchise focused upon and championing a post-economic future is ironically a source of revenue and at the mercy of finances in the real world.
It’s not unlike Star Wars being about a fight against an evil empire…and the franchise now being, heh, owned by an evil empire from a certain point of view! ;)
I personally think that this season is still better than the first of Discovery. Probably the second as well, though I remember surprisingly little of that one.
Really, I think that the problem is structural. The writers made the decision to set Picard’s mother’s suicide as the emotional centerpiece of the entire season. If you can buy the idea that that trauma makes sense in the context of Jean-Luc’s established character (which I can almost manage) and think that it was handled well (which I definitely do not), then I think that the season probably works pretty well as a whole. Otherwise, you might be able to find a few things you really like, but it’s like finding diamonds in a lean-to.
What I especially love is the people saying that the Secret Hideout shows aren’t real Trek, like the stuff that aired up until 2005, either ignoring or forgetting that there was also a vocal contingent of the fan base who said the exact same thing for the exact same reasons about Enterprise in 2001, yet now it’s gleefully embraced as part of the “good” Trek shows. Sigh.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@133/krad: Not to mention all the people who said TNG wasn’t real Trek because Kirk and Spock weren’t in it. Or the people who said TMP and TWOK weren’t real Trek because the ships and aliens looked different.
The final Q and Picard scene was fantastic, and it will go down for me as one of the best scenes in Trek. I loved how it was the natural evolution of the Q of Tapestry and All Good Things.
@133 That’s certainly not unique to Trek, KRAD. There is a very large contingent of Star Wars fans who have let their problems with Disney’s movies convince them that the prequel trilogy movies were masterpieces. I’ve also seen a ton of Marvel fans say that they hope Spider-Man: No Way Home will get fans to reassess the “totally underrated” Amazing Spider-Man movies.
@136/Chase: Too true. There are too many people who mistake familiarity for quality.
Although I can understand that attitude better among fans of Star Wars, a franchise whose entire reason for existence is to be nostalgic comfort food, than I can among fans of Star Trek, a franchise whose literal mission statement is to boldly seek out the new and unfamiliar.
Given THE CLONE WARS and the massive EU material written about them that has become the basis of an entire generation of children’s childhood the same way Star Wars was for my adulthood, I’d argue the issue with the Prequels is that George Lucas’ vision exceeded the reach of his grasp due to the fact he was doing 13 years worth of storytelling in three movies.
@138/C.T. Phipps: I’ve always felt the issue with the prequels was that Lucas had come to believe his own reputation and thought he could do it all himself, rather than collaborating with more capable writers and directors as he did on the original trilogy. (Despite the credits, the final draft of the original film’s screenplay was largely by script doctors Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, and I gather that its producer Gary Kurtz was effectively Lucas’s co-director on a lot of it.) He’d been master of his domain at Lucasfilm for so long that there was nobody around him able to tell him when his ideas weren’t good enough and push him to be better.
On your point about TCW, I realized a few years ago that there’s probably a whole generation now to whom Star Wars is an animated TV franchise with a handful of live-action movies appended to it, since the screen time of the animated content vastly outweighs that of the live-action content. Although now it’s a live-action TV franchise too, so that’s shifting the balance back.
And surprisingly, Picard sticks the landing. The plot is still a mess, but every character goes through some form of closure. I’m guessing the season was built character first, plot second. In terms of serialization, I can understand that choice – the characters are the one constant thing from episode to episode. But not having some kind of planned arc for the overall plot leaves us with this. A season that was constantly lacking focus and pacing (which I’ll get more into on the season recap).
But the episode itself works. Parts of it remarkably well. Renee Picard remains a plot cipher, but at least it gave us an emotional farewell with Tallinn, as she ends her path on her own terms (though I feel the show could have made that more of a personal loss for Picard himself – as it is, I feel his last-minute reunion with Laris lacks that connection). I was happy for Rios’s own choice, and I was caught 100% unawares by Seven/Raffi’s kiss. I knew they were close friends, but not that close (maybe I’m just bad at picking up the signs).
Q also has that emotional farewell with Picard that DeLancie really sells with gravitas (I knew he was up to it, given his performance on Breaking Bad). Part of me wishes he had had a similar moment with Janeway.
I was particularly pleased by the Borg resolution. It more or less closed the process of humanizing the Borg that began 30 years ago with Hugh’s first appearance on TNG’s I, Borg. I’m glad Jurati didn’t end up a casualty on what could have been another Borg zombie retread. This was a far better choice.
Though the choice of plot to unite Starfleet and the Borg could have been better developed. Having just come out of Discovery‘s fourth season with them trying to convince Species 10C to stop the DMA, it feels poorly timed and redundant. Species coming together to face a galactic threat is a classic Trek staple, but it could have been better realized. Also, it’s more or less the same problem Picard faced in season 1 with the ban on synths/Romulan Zhat Vash prophecy issue coming down to a bunch of metal tentacles emerging from a wormhole.
And then there’s Wesley Crusher AKA The Traveller. What a joyous comeback for Wil Wheaton (he never looked more comfortable in the role)! It finally gives us an idea of what he’s been through over the past 28 years. If there’s a character we needed to revisit, it was him. I guess his guest spot on Nemesis was a ‘visiting mom and the crew’ moment between his multiverse/time travelling shenanigans, and not really re-enlisting on Starfleet (because that never felt right; I’m glad that was relegated to deleted scenes on that film).
Wesley’s appearance also taught me a lesson: stay the hell out of social media between Wednesdays and Fridays. I saw Wesley Crusher trending on Twitter, but Picard episodes don’t air here until Friday. I had hoped it was some random fandom fanfic trending inspired by something else in the episode – but no, it was a full fledged spoiler. Lesson learned.
I was immensely satisfied with Soong’s defeat (I’d forgotten how good Spiner is at being villanous – Lore being the obvious example). And I love it that it connects naturally to the Augments story thread on Enterprise.
Well…Q and Picard’s farewell made me cry. Quite a bit actually. So it was emotionally satisfying. I was what? Six when TNG Premiered, so having literally grown up with the Picard-Q relationship I still wasn’t expecting it to hit like that. I kind of had an inkling that this was basically Q’s extended therapy session because as he said, Picard was always his favorite. But since Q’s morality is in no way dictated or bound by human morality or even good taste, Q doesn’t have any problems killing Picard’s crew, putting the Federation in danger, or screwing around with timelines. It’s all in his toolbox, all in good sport, and aside from Picard himself all remarkably a small part of his vast life. I’ve never forgotten these words, “You get a little bloody nose and you want to run home and hide under your bed? It’s not safe out here. It has wonders to satisfy desires both subtle and gross…but it’s not for the timid.” Q believes that the danger is the point. The challenge and the risk. As Kirk would say, “Risk is our business.” So Q has little interest in playing a game where there’s no possibility that his players could lose big. He’s the Dungeon Master that wants to get the total party kill and a good laugh from it, and is thrilled when they beat his scenario. But here, in the end. There was no big play and it wasn’t even about the trial. He saw a friend suffering and decided as his last act, he was gonna kick him in the rear and get him back out into the world. Not so he’d be the great Jean Luc Picard again…but so that he’d stop letting chances at happiness and love slip through his fingers. The whole episode might not have even happened if Picard had just said yes to Lariss in the first episode of the season.
I’ve always thought that someone should tell the Borg Queen about herself, that she has not and never will be seen as the vanguard of perfection, but as a virus, a plague on the universe. Jurati taking a Queen at basically her lowest, also pointing out that while connected to her she was able to use her transtemporal awareness to point out that the Borg always lose ultimately. (an interesting note as a similar argument was used in a breaking speech against Emperor Georgiou in Disco S3). But Jurati reversing the Borg Queen’s “you could be so much more” on her was a very Star Trek choice. I agree that there should’ve been more argument about it though. But a Collective of Sevens was a very nice touch.
Provisional membership in the Federation made no sense though. An alliance perhaps, but Federation membership? No. It isn’t necessary for the goal they have.
As for where she’s been, I got the impression that Queen Agnes hopped in La Sirena and took the long way to the Delta Quadrant, assimilating people in need who voluntarily joined building her own collective as she went. Taking about 400 years to make it to the Delta Quadrant where she knew the Borg would be defeated and in disarray and then quietly taking over, if at all. Her last words about not needing a Borg Slayer indicates that we likely have two competing collectives going. Three if you count the Cooperative.
@141/Mr. D: “Provisional membership in the Federation made no sense though. An alliance perhaps, but Federation membership? No. It isn’t necessary for the goal they have.”
I think it is. The goal is not merely to guard the big hole in space — it’s the guard the big hole in Federation space. They’re within UFP territory and intend to stay there indefinitely, as long as they’re needed to guard the thingy. A hostile power coming to UFP space to stay would be an occupation. Even an allied power doing so would be kind of iffy. But Federation membership gives them the right to be there, as well as being an agreement to submit to Federation law and authority while they’re there.
Even if it’s not strictly necessary to go that far, I think that’s the point. Committing to full membership is a more powerful gesture. Alliances can be broken, after all — just ask Admiral Janeway about how well her alliance with the Borg went. But coming in and saying “We submit fully to your authority and laws” is a much more emphatic statement.
@136,
That’s certainly not unique to Trek, KRAD. There is a very large contingent of Star Wars fans who have let their problems with Disney’s movies convince them that the prequel trilogy movies were masterpieces. I’ve also seen a ton of Marvel fans say that they hope Spider-Man: No Way Home will get fans to reassess the “totally underrated” Amazing Spider-Man movies.
It’s the same with any long-running franchise, be it comics, Films, or TV. Mark my words, Indy 5 next year — and regardless of yay or nay reception — will have a people proclaiming KOTCS was a genius, misunderstood masterpiece.
That said, I think the Star Wars PT is a little more complicated example.
Those films are not masterpieces. Don’t get me wrong on that score. And I get those championing the Disney-era backlash seeking comfort in the Episodes they grew up with (which ironically brings them full circle to the OT fans who rejected the PT 20 years ago.)
But..I do think part of that modern reevaluation of the PT is because they play differently now than they did at the turn of the millennium. Lucas’ narrative and themes — about the subversion of institutions and democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, dark theocratic machinations — understandably have more resonance now because of what the United States just endured over the last half a decade.
Contrary to what a lot of fans seem to believe about Alex Kurtzman, I actually think that the Secret Hideout era could benefit from more editorial oversight to preven duplication of effort. As @140/Eduardo notes, the threat from thus new transwarp conduit seems awfully similar, at least in principle, to the DMA from Discovery.
@143/Mr. Magic: “Lucas’ narrative and themes — about the subversion of institutions and democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, dark theocratic machinations — understandably have more resonance now because of what the United States just endured over the last half a decade.”
They had resonance when they first came out, for those who were paying attention and saw how the “security” measures the Bush/Cheney administration passed in response to 9/11 were dangerously authoritarian and undermined personal rights and freedoms. That controversy existed at the time, and Lucas was doing an allegory about it, a commentary on how the state could use security as an excuse to erode liberty, and how it could eventually lead to full-blown fascism.
Heck, for me, that was the part I respected most about the prequels even then. I thought Lucas did a hamfisted job with their writing and direction, but he was making a valuable statement about an important social issue. It’s no accident that the prequels have resonance today, because what’s happening now is the direct, predictable result of what happened then, the very result Lucas was trying to warn us about. So the resonance was always there, intentionally so. It’s just that a lot of people didn’t recognize or agree with the allegory. Like the people of the Old Republic, they accepted the erosion of their liberties out of the belief that it was necessary for their security.
@144/Iacomina: “the threat from thus new transwarp conduit seems awfully similar, at least in principle, to the DMA from Discovery.”
Only very superficially. The DMA is central to the arc of DSC season 4, an ongoing catalyst for everything that happens in it, from the episodic first half exploring various distinct consequences of the threat to the serialized second half focusing on the quest to contact its creators. The transwarp conduit is almost incidental here, a mystery that’s set up in the first episode and then forgotten about until the last half of the final episode, where its nature and relevance to the story is explained in a very hasty, slapdash manner. How the devices are used narratively is more important to me than whether their physical effects are similar. And DSC uses its cosmic threat far better.
@145
I suspect that the conduit is only setting up the plot for the third season. But, on the other hand, if that were the case, then Allison Pill would probably be returning, which we know she’s not.
@146/Iacomina: She may not return as a regular, but she might make a brief appearance in the first episode, perhaps. Or the Borg could be referenced as still guarding the conduit without Queen Agnes actually appearing onscreen. I’ve seen plenty of shows write around actors’ unavailability by referring to their characters doing things off-camera.
@145 / CLB:
They had resonance when they first came out, for those who were paying attention and saw how the “security” measures the Bush/Cheney administration passed in response to 9/11 were dangerously authoritarian and undermined personal rights and freedoms. That controversy existed at the time, and Lucas was doing an allegory about it, a commentary on how the state could use security as an excuse to erode liberty, and how it could eventually lead to full-blown fascism.
Oh, absolutely. I was in high school. James Luceno especially leaned into the 9/11-era commentary/parallels in his ROTS prelude novel Labyrinth of Evil (from the sneak attack on Coruscant to Palpatine labeling several key Separatist worlds a ‘Triad of Evil’ in a State of the Republic speech).
I wonder if one reason why people weren’t paying attention at the time was because we were right in the thick of it during the early 2000s. People wanted to go to theaters to see Star Wars! We’re here to see fun sci-fi adventure and not want to have to think about politics and terrorists and blah blah blah.
It’s no accident that the prequels have resonance today, because what’s happening now is the direct, predictable result of what happened then, the very result Lucas was trying to warn us about. So the resonance was always there, intentionally so. It’s just that a lot of people didn’t recognize or agree with the allegory. Like the people of the Old Republic, they accepted the erosion of their liberties out of the belief that it was necessary for their security.
Bingo.
And like the Republic citizens, too many people also accepted or felt it would never happen here, that the institutions would hold, that centuries of legacy and the status quo would not come crashing down, etc.
I think we have been more than disabused of such notions now — or at least I hope. But that’s a Lewis Black-esque political rant for another time.
@148:
Oh, absolutely. I was in high school.
I meant to add, .”..during the PT and even at 15 I got it. Hell, my sister was 12 and she got it, too.”
Actually, on a side note, fun High School anecdote: I protested the Second Gulf War with Trek.
In the dead of night, I hung up protest flyers on campus with a picture of Spock proclaiming an invasion of Iraq was illogical (I was at a boarding school during my HS years).
The next morning, the HS administrators called me into their office and demanded I explain why I had done this.
For context, I was well known as the upper class nerd. Nonetheless, I innocently asked them why they thought it ’twas moi.
They gave me a look that just screamed, “Are you seriously trying to bulls**t us? Of course it was you!”.
This season finale was certainly better than I thought it was going to be with some very moving moments, but was overall still all over the place with lots of silliness and illogic like most of the season that preceded it.
The moments that moved me were Talinn’s heart to heart with Renee, Talinn’s dying moments with Picard, and Picard’s scenes with Q including their hug.
Though it was telegraphed throughout the season, I didn’t like Rios staying behind in the past because of practical reasons. He’s known Ramirez for what, like all of a week? Of course for TV romances they’ve already fallen deeply in love with each other. But all I could of think of from a realistic real-world perspective is how resentful Rios would be for being stuck in the 21st century without anyone he knows when he and Ramirez eventually break up because maybe she can’t stand his smoking habit or maybe she snores too loudly in her sleep. But this TV make believe so Guinan is there to tell us that they all lived happily ever after together. So much for non-interference with the past.
Q’s powers or lack of powers sure seemed to be inconsistent. He couldn’t finger snap Renee or Guinan out of existence but then all of a sudden he can transport Picard and gang back to the future?
I was actually kind of disappointed when Picard and gang were snapped back to the future when the Borg Queen was assimilating the Stargazer, but Rios and human Jurati weren’t there. It would have been cool to see Jurati see the Borgified version of herself. And seeing Rios there would at least mean there’s a version of himself in the present as well as the past. Weird that Raffi would end up on the Stargazer but I guess then otherwise she wouldn’t have her emotional TV moment of seeing that Elnor was still alive back on the Excelsior.
The whole thing with the spatial rift anomaly threatening the sector just seemed very random and abruptly solved. You’d think that this would lead into a plot line for the third season what with Queen Jurati guarding the rift but Allison Pill won’t be back next season so I would assume that potential story thread is out.
Seems like most of the cast was disposed of to make way for the TNG cast to come aboard next season. Looks like it’s just Laris, Seven, and Raffi that’ll remain.
I think perhaps the reason for all of the budgetary issues on this season of Picard is just that Stewart’s salary takes up most of the budget? So getting all of the TNG cast to join next season and surely having high salary demands of their own would necessitate having most of the existing cast to get the ‘ol heave ho.
It was nice that Wil Wheaton/Wesley made a surprise appearance which felt like a moment after the end credits in MCU movie. However, it did feel like it was Wil Wheaton playing Wil Wheaton, host of the Ready Room, and not Wesley Crusher. Apparently this is just a one and done appearance for him as he wasn’t announced as joining the other TNG cast next season and also because Isa Briones isn’t coming back either.
@150/garreth: “I didn’t like Rios staying behind in the past because of practical reasons. He’s know his Ramirez for what, like all of a week?”
Three days or so, in fact. They said in “Watcher” that they had only three days to prevent history from changing.
“So much for non-interference with the past.”
Since Guinan remembered it after the timeline was restored (and she wasn’t complaining about the timeline being “wrong”), that means it was always part of the timeline. This was what had already happened to create the Federation timeline, a necessary time loop like “Yesteryear.” The impression I got was that the charitable work Rios and Teresa did was part of what set humanity on the right path, along with Renee’s discovery at Europa. So getting him back there to stay was as important a part of the mission as getting Renee on the ship and letting Agnes assimilate the Queen.
“Q’s powers or lack of powers sure seemed to be inconsistent. He couldn’t finger snap Renee or Guinan out of existence but then all of a sudden he can transport Picard and gang back to the future?”
First off, if Q was trying to do Picard a favor with all this, then he can’t have intended to snap Picard’s ancestor out of existence. He probably had something else in mind, and we were just misled. (Maybe he just intended to snap up fake psychiatric credentials or transform himself into a double of her therapist. Once that failed, he had to infiltrate by more conventional means.)
Second, I think the inconsistency was the point, that his powers were failing him and coming and going — like how an ill or elderly person feels stronger on some days than others. Although I think that sending them back to the future used up the last of Q’s energy and killed him (or whatever happens to Q at the end of their normal existence), so he must’ve been drawing on his last reserves.
“Weird that Raffi would end up on the Stargazer but I guess then otherwise she wouldn’t have her emotional TV moment of seeing that Elnor was still alive back on the Excelsior.”
Except that the Excelsior was her ship, which she requested him for, so she would’ve seen him if she’d been there. Presumably it was done simply because they didn’t have the budget to shoot a whole scene on a different bridge, or because they wanted the core characters together in the climactic scene.
“You’d think that this would lead into a plot line for the third season what with Queen Jurati guarding the rift but Allison Pill won’t be back next season so I would assume that potential story thread is out.”
Not necessarily. I heard that season 3 has a “road trip” format, so it could be about going through the transwarp corridor and finding what’s on the other side. The Friendly Borg could still be guarding the near end of the corridor offscreen while that’s going on.
“However, it did feel like it was Wil Wheaton playing Wil Wheaton, host of the Ready Room, and not Wesley Crusher.”
I think it makes sense that he didn’t try to replicate Wes’s teenage personality. Not only has Wes matured and undergone who knows what transformative experiences since we last saw him, but when we did last see him (not counting his NEM cameo), he was realizing that the Starfleet cadet identity he’d pursued for seven years was not the right path for him after all, and was not who he really was at the core. So it’s appropriate that he’s quite different now.
@151,
I think it makes sense that he didn’t try to replicate Wes’s teenage personality. Not only has Wes matured and undergone who knows what transformative experiences since we last saw him, but when we did last see him (not counting his NEM cameo), he was realizing that the Starfleet cadet identity he’d pursued for seven years was not the right path for him after all, and was not who he really was at the core. So it’s appropriate that he’s quite different now.
Same.
Yeah, it took a little getting used to (since Wesley’s TNG-era characterization is how we think of him — especially people like me who grew up with TNG).
But I’m glad Wheaton and company went this route, as it sells this isn’t the Wesley as we left him 30 years ago. He’s changed as much as Picard did between NEM and Seaosn One.
It would be really weird if Wesley had the same personality at 50 as he did at 20. And we don’t know how old he subjectively is: for him, it could have been thousands of years since “Journey’s End”.
@143 I certain wouldn’t call Indy 4 “genius,” or a “masterpiece,” but I will say that I think it’s misunderstood.
The SW Prequels would have worked a lot better if other people had had more input, as others have said. I think the biggest thing that needed to be done was combining most of the story of Episodes I and II, then having the new Episode II cover the Clone War period so we can see more of how the war affected Anakin. The cartoon is brilliant and helps flesh out the movies, but it doesn’t actually make the films themselves any more watchable. IMO, George Lucas simply has a hard time understanding human emotions.
Chase: Actually, I’ve found that the final season of Clone Wars makes Revenge of the Sith a great deal more watchable. It’s still a mediocre film, but adding in what happened in the final half-dozen CW episodes makes it all work so much better….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@154,
I certain wouldn’t call Indy 4 “genius,” or a “masterpiece,” but I will say that I think it’s misunderstood
I mean, there was a 19 year gap between TLC and KOTCS. As Episode I proved, you have to accept that you can never meet insanely high expectations. Better to please some than none, for you cannot please everybody.
And it never ceases to amuse me that you had, and still have, people b***hing about the Roswell Greys and Nuking the Fridge, etc. And yet, none of these same people batted an eye in the previous 27 years over cultists ripping out hearts, a magic box that shoots lightning, and, oh yes, Indy somehow managing to ride a Nazi submarine on its periscope across the entire freaking Mediterranean Sea without falling off or victim to the elements.
Yeah, I mean, I liked it. I didn’t like it as much as the original films, but it was fun and at least it gave Indy a happy ending. We’ll see how Indy 5 goes, but for me, I may end up treating that as the end of the series (much in the same way I ignore the post-Gore Verbinski Pirates).
Speaking as a USC Cinema Writing graduate, one of my enduring beefs with KOTCS is the script. The story itself is…technically fine. You couldn’t use the Nazis again (between Ford’s age and Spielberg not wanting to go down that road again after Schindler’s List). Updating it for the 50s B Sci-Films tone/narrative was the natural evolution of the Adventure serials (as Lucas argued). And I liked how it tied together the El Dorado legends and the Roswell Incident (with the clever twist about the Grey’s not actually being aliens).
And to be fair to David Koepp, he did the best job he could with the story Lucas and Spielberg handed down (and the challenge of tackling one of the most beloved cinematic characters of all time). But Koepp ain’t Larry Kasdan or Jeffrey Boam (who I wish hadn’t passed away in 2000, because TLC’s script is underrated and I always wanted him to have another crack at Indy). But the film just reinforced Koepp (who I hadn’t especially liked since The Lost World) is not a favorite screenwriter of mine.
The SW Prequels would have worked a lot better if other people had had more input, as others have said. I think the biggest thing that needed to be done was combining most of the story of Episodes I and II, then having the new Episode II cover the Clone War period so we can see more of how the war affected Anakin. The cartoon is brilliant and helps flesh out the movies, but it doesn’t actually make the films themselves any more watchable. IMO, George Lucas simply has a hard time understanding human emotions.
Yeah, I can only imagine how the PT might’ve turned out if Rick McCallum had stood his ground instead of being a ‘Yes Man’ (but, he was trying to protect his job and livelihood, so at the end of the day, eh, I can’t fault him for that).
It makes perfect sense that Wesley Crusher would behave differently now.
But why… like that? Why does he act like a former TV host who beamed in to tell you the good news about Traveling, and would you like to buy a subscription to Cat Fancy while we’re here? How about encyclopedias? Aluminum siding? Scientology? How about a pre-owned, low-mileage Buick LeSabre?
156.
The only real issue I had with Indy 4 was them showing us the aliens. I mean, the previous movies didn’t show us the gods, only their powers, and that gave them a great deal of mystery and intrigue. But when the bug-eyed being looks down the camera, something is lost.
Oh, and telling us beforehand how many times the waterfall drops was a mistake, in my opinion. Come on, guys, let it be a surprise!
Other than that, it’s a fine B-movie.
@156/Mr. Magic: “one of my enduring beefs with KOTCS is the script.”
I read Darabont’s early draft of the script, or what purported to be it, and I thought it was much better than the final film.
“And I liked how it tied together the El Dorado legends and the Roswell Incident”
Which is an anachronism if you’re trying to homage ’50s B-movies, because the “Roswell Incident” wasn’t part of UFO lore until the 1980s. Yes, the actual weather-balloon incident happened in 1947, but it was one of a spate of similar false alarms that swept the country in the weeks after Kenneth Arnold reported seeing “flying disks” following his plane and started a frenzy in an America whose citizens had been conditioned throughout WWII to watch the skies for enemy aircraft and needed a new focus for that free-floating habit of vigilance. It was promptly found to be a false alarm and forgotten, until it was dredged up in the late ’70s by a UFO researcher who imposed her prejudice that “flying disk” had to mean “alien spaceship” rather than just “unidentified round thing in the sky,” and thus deluded herself into thinking the identification of the round thing as a weather balloon was some kind of retraction and cover-up of an earlier admission that it was a spaceship. Her popularization of the Roswell story was reinforced by the similarities with the plot of the movie Hangar 18 that came out around the same time, so the idea started to catch on through the ’80s and was then etched into the public consciousness in the ’90s through things like The X-Files, Roswell, and other pop-culture references.
When I was a kid in the ’70s, I was gullible enough to be really into UFO lore, the Bermuda Triangle, and all that nonsense, until I learned enough science and critical thinking to know better. And I never heard of Roswell at the time. But these days, the Roswell story has metastasized to the point that virtually every UFO story anymore is Roswell this and Roswell that, and it is so damn boring and repetitive compared to the more flexible UFO mythology of my youth.
@157/Sketchy: It didn’t seem to me that Wil Wheaton was doing anything other than being Wil Wheaton. If anything, what I’ve seen of his persona as the Ready Room host is more annoying and gushy than this was.
Wheaton is at his best when he plays a snide, condescending jackass, much like John DeLancie is. I don’t think that persona would’ve helped Wes convince Kore to sign on, though.
@158,
Oh, and telling us beforehand how many times the waterfall drops was a mistake, in my opinion. Come on, guys, let it be a surprise!
At least it gave us that priceless image of a resigned Indy pitifully holding on to his Fedora as they made the final drop. Always makes me snicker.
I thought the whole point of putting Rios in the captain’s chair on the Stargazer was to show that by the end of Season 1, he had worked out the memories that haunted him and his issues with Starfleet… were there any indications in the season premier or throughout the season that he was still unhappy or unfulfilled in the 25th century?
159.
I think Wheaton, if he returns again, would be better served by emulating the original Traveller to some degree. I forget the actor’s name, but I liked how he played it with a mix of melancholy and wonderment. I find that far more interesting than a gushing sales pitch, anyway.
@161 I think he’d worked out his issues with Starfleet, but that doesn’t mean he was actually ready to be a lifer again. I was struck immediately in the premiere that he had his cigar out on the bridge. He didn’t light it, because he’s always been a stickler for regulations, but the fact that he still had it made me think he was still not comfortable being back in the chair.
Sketchy: Gee, if only the article you’re commenting on mentioned the name of the actor in question…………..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, laying on the sarcasm
PS: It’s Eric Menyuk.
@163/Chase: Yeah, wondering if that’s what the cigar on the bridge was meant to be all about.
@157/Sketchy: I love that assessment of Wheaton’s over-enthusiastic performance and I concur.
If this was indeed a scene leading into a spin-off called The Travelers starring Wil Wheaton and Isa Briones and was knowingly over-the-top and whimsical, maybe I could get into it.
So I missed this when viewing the finale, but on a video clip that Paramount released on the topic of Wesley’s appearance, one of the showrunners states that one reason for the Wesley scene — besides the cameo opportunity — was to find a way to have Kore survive yet preserve the timeline.
Which is a decent point, albeit marred by all the fuzziness around all the other major actions the characters take without too much worry about unintended ramifications.
Still not clear what Q’s interest in helping Kore was.
164.
Thanks!
Hey, I read that article several days and nearly 170 comments ago! I’m lucky to remember my own name at this point. The memory… it’s sketchy. ;-)
@167/Sarek: “Still not clear what Q’s interest in helping Kore was.”
Very little about this story arc is clear, but maybe it was to leave Soong with nothing so that he’d have nothing to lose and be less likely to back out due to moral qualms. Or something. Soong did become more of a one-dimensional Bond villain once Kore was out of the picture.
Alternatively, maybe the Q and the Travelers are chummier than Wesley implied, and Q was doing Wes a favor.
Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Even though Q has been called the God of Lies (per DS9: “Q-less”), he has a thing for pushing people to confront uncomfortable truths for their own good, e.g. that Starfleet isn’t equipped for all the dangers they may encounter, or that Picard’s youthful recklessness was more of an asset than he likes to admit, or what he pushed Picard to work through here. Maybe he was doing the same for Soong and Kore, cutting through the lies that defined their relationship and dragging out their dirty laundry, because that’s just what he does. Maybe a higher being who’s (relatively) omniscient is just impatient with humans’ deceptions of themselves and others and likes to tear them down for the hell of it.
Picard started facing his truth only after Soong hit him with the car. Q knew that a simple chat wouldn’t bring it out of him. Plus, although the show doesn’t hint at it, it would make sense if Q slightly altered Tallins appearance to make her appear to Picard like a doppelgänger to Laris.
I give up, MikeKelm @44. Why is Elnor opera? 8°)
The hug was too much — at least as presented. I don’t want to feel that way, but I do. Maybe if Jean-Luc had opened his arms with the same goofy grin and Q tentatively approached him to complete the embrace instead?
I didn’t take the Khan folder as Soong necessarily having been in charge of the initial Augments stuff but having proposed or even just been looped in on a follow-up to it named for Khan as ED suggested @65.
Excellent use of decanted, Iacomina @48.
Wesley did have an oddly beatific manner to him, perhaps apropos for the character in his Traveler incarnation but still off-putting to me. I gather that Wil Wheaton is a real mensch, though, so it’s hard to complain.
I agree with ChristopherLBennett @80 about there being plenty of ways the writers could’ve and should’ve had Tallinn survive the neurotoxin and still been able to convince Soong that Renée died. My thoughts went to a plot twist in Nicholas Meyer’s Time after Time, amusingly enough. When is it appropriate to chastise the authors versus accepting that they wanted things to work out like this? is a frequent conundrum for me, because at a certain point it becomes a different story altogether.
The viewpoints here as usual are much appreciated. I wasn’t able to see the episode right away due to family stuff, and it took even longer to get around to the post, but the conversation here — on the whole so knowledgable and mostly civil — has become an essential part of watching Trek for me.
It makes no sense that Tallinn was Romulan and assigned to a planet not only populated by humans but was unaware of alien life. We know of four Supervisors, Gary Seven, his two predecessors and Tallinn. Of those four, three died on Earth.
We know Seven was originally from Earth and it’s reasonable to assume that 201 and 347 also were since there was no concern shown that they were uncovered as extraterrestrials in the reports of their car accident.
Now, not only is Tallinn “not of this Earth” but she’s also dead. How did Picard manage to smuggle a dead alien off of what was supposedly a high security base
“How did Picard manage to smuggle a dead alien off of what was supposedly a high security base”
He had a clipboard?
Didn’t they beam in using Tallinn’s smoky-door transporter? Presumably they beamed out the same way.
Does Picard have the ability to use it?
regardless, placing alien agents onto a planet that is unaware of alien life is just asking for them to be uncovered. Pretty dumb for a group that likes to operate from the shadows
@175/kkozoriz: “Does Picard have the ability to use it?”
As I recall, Tallinn gave Raffi a duplicate servo so her team could beam to Soong’s place while the other team beamed into the launch center. So yes, the servo can be operated by anyone.
Just before Picard hugs Q toward the end, I can’t get my eyes off what appear to be splotches on Q’s coat, on his left breast. I tried in my head to make them a design feature of the clothing. But it sure looks like Q splattered a little soup or milk on his coat.
There’s been a bit of a delay in the season two overview of Picard, but it’ll go up next week. Sorry about that….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I look forward to it, KRAD!
Re: Soong’s fate in each timeline.
Before the point of divergence, Soong had recorded in his personal logs that Kore would be his final effort. I took that to mean he’d lost faith in his ability to improve upon the human genome. If Kore wasn’t viable, then he assumed it just wasn’t possible and he would stop wasting his time.
In the Confederation timeline, there was no cure for Kore. He therefore became a human supremacist: he couldn’t improve upon the human genome, hence no one could, ergo the human genome was obviously already at its pinnacle. After all, it was his “merely” human intellect that invented the shielding that “saved” humanity from environmental catastrophe. It was almost unintentional as a side-effect of trying to protect his daughter. So his legacy that shaped the confederation was one of human supremacy.
In the Federation timeline(s), [more on that in another comment] Kore was cured. Her act of rebellion by erasing his his entire database (nothing says mad genius than not having an air-gapped off-site backup) was his proof of concept, re-igniting his belief that humanity could successfully be augmented without the mental instability of the Project Khan subjects, who presumably had left Earth on the Botany Bay by this point, leaving behind data in that hard copy Manila file Soong had, or the physical instability of Soong’s Olympian subjects. Thus his passion reignited, he goes back to first principles and creates the Soong family history we already know
Re: the skeleton key.
Jean-Luc Picard said he remembered the key migrating all over the house. Those memories could only form if the key was found and hidden multiple times after the Picard family moved back to Chateau Picard.
I also thought the narrative suggested that Chateau Picard had been uninhabited between the Nazis being ousted in WW2 and the Picard family returning when Jean-Luc was a small child for the sake of his Mother’s mental health. It seemed to infer she fared better in the secluded Chateau than wherever they were before, and they deliberately moved “back” in the hope it would. That would explain why Jean-Luc would be the one to find the key in such an obvious hiding place, and why he remembered the bullet holes because they hadn’t been repaired “since WW2” when they moved in
Re: Q
They made some weird choices for Q. It didn’t convince me he was responsible for the divergence. For instance, Jean-Luc listens to something like 10 seconds of a counselling session, and decides the counsellor, before he recognises Q, is trying to convince Renee to withdraw from the mission. That’s a big leap. It could easily have been simply been part of a conversation exploring the consequences if she were to give into her doubts. Here is the destination you predict, so you want to take those first steps? It’s overly simplistic to call it reverse psychology, but you get the gist. If we assume Q didn’t alter the timeline, from a certain point of view all Q’s actions could have been to manipulate people into setting it right. Of course, that then leads to the question of what did change the timeline…
@145
There was a reason the first book about the United States being taken over by fascists was called “It can’t happen here.”
Re: Kore
I believe Q gave her freedom from Soong for a reason Q said in the Star Trek: Borg visual novel: “Because I can.” He’s a god and whimsical. Since he was already tampering with the timeline to guarantee that Rene Picard would be on that shuttle, he figured he might as well do Kore a solid.
Not everything has to be of galactic importance.
Its like lifting an overturned turtle off the ground and putting it back on its path.
Re: timelines
Star Trek has used a few different models of time travel. I have no problem with that, as in real life there’s frequently problems that have several possible engineering solutions, but with different side effects. The trick is to chose the solution, or combine solutions, to solve the problems while having side effect that best (or least-worse) suit your needs.
ST:PIC seems to opt for a combined solution. First there’s two divergent timelines triggered by something happening (or not happening), with a group of people hopping from one timeline to another, but retaining the memory of their origins timeline. The other solution seems to be, Quantum Leap style, the time travellers memory of “their” timeline alters as they change the past, possibly setting up a third timeline.
In the original, let’s call it the Federation, timeline, Renee Picard goes to Europa. In the path not taken, possibly caused by Q, let’s call it the Confederation timeline, Renee Picard withdraws from the Europa mission, and her backup doesn’t make the same discoveries. Without Q or the Borg Queen’s intervention, Soong would never have tried to stop Renee Picard going on the Europa mission.
Then Picard and crew, in the Confederation timeline but with memories of the Federation timeline, time travel and start screwing around with the timeline, potentially creating a third timeline by creating a third Borg faction. However, Picard remember’s (Bill and Ted style) to hide the key where he’ll find it as a child, remembers bullet holes exactly where borgified mercenaries made them, etc, suggesting his memories of the Federation timeline are being altered as the time travellers alter the past. Potentially in the original Federation timeline it wasn’t Borgatti at all, but an evolved Borg Queen trying what Borgatti succeeded in doing in the altered Federation timeline. Which means in the unaltered timeline the Stargazer blows up and the evolved Borg Queen fails to stop the stargate-like plume that takes out a bunch of inhabited star systems, but Borgatti has to mimic the events leading up to the auto destruct being triggered (as I think KRAD suggested in another comment) because she believes she has to repeat the events as she remembers them to prevent a paradox (even though she doesn’t).
I can’t help thinking of Terry Pratchett’s Trouser of Time theory…
Question for all you people who don’t hate fictional temporal mechanics:
Once Picard and crew finally protect Renee the Europa Missiona and set the timeline to rights, does Young Guinan remember having met him in the 19th century?
Given the STIV joke, I’m going to go with the fact that was a continuity error and they should have gone with another explanation. Either the Guinan in Time’s Arrow is someone who is actually from 21st century Guinan’s future (why not) or she simply didn’t connect events to that period.
But I would assume so.
Re: the Traveler formerly known as Crusher recruiting Kore.
Could there be an ulterior motive for her recruitment? Yes, their organisation gets an augmented human as an agent, but presumably they only recruit people that would otherwise have no influence on the timeline. In the unaltered Federation timeline, Kore I guess must have remained alive but in practical captivity to be her father’s muse. In the altered timeline, Q has freed her, but her subsequent actions re-motivated Soong to keep him working on Augments. Is it reasonable to assume someone like Kore, who seems charismatic, and who presumably has augmented intelligence and other physical aspects, to have a completely ordinary and unremarkable life like Crusher predicted? Or was he making her the offer to control her impact on the timeline without having to resort to an “Edith Keeler ‘accident’”?
I mean, 1/3rd of humanity is probably going to die in 2-3 years in the show’s timeline.
I feel like it was a bad time for Picard to be all incredibly optimistic.
It’s also why I think Rios was staying behind to do a Kyle Reese and make sure his new family survives the nuclear holocaust.
@188/C.T. Philips – I deliberately used the Edith Keeler reference because of how big an impact on the timeline she could have. I’m thinking “avoid a third of the human population dying” big. <shrugs> just speculation, though.
As for the choice to set the time travel shenanigans when they did, it’s not such a strange choice when you think about how many people now are looking to the future and seeing just a dark, apocalyptic fate for humanity. Highlighting how the Star Trek timeline has a dark age just before our “now”, but makes it through to a successful future, seems like the ray of hope some people might need, as is the rather heavy-handed point that what happens now determines whether our future is one like the Federation or the Confederation
Re: Picard’s psyche
The fact that the trauma of his mother’s suicide wasn’t dealt with by Star Fleet counsellors does raise the question of how competent they were. However, here’s a more sinister explanation: they deliberately left it there, unresolved, just like the way they don’t seem to have dealt with his stabbing by the Norsican. Both events are pivotal moments that make him suited to the role of Captain. The stabbing makes aware of his mortality and to live life to its fullest. The childhood trauma drives him out into the stars. It means he keeps himself from being to intimidate with his crew and people in general, meaning he’s willing to risk them in a way another person might not. Fully emotionally reconciling with either or both events would mean he’s more mentally healthy, but less suited to be Captain, and may result in him leaving Star Fleet altogether. Looked at it like that, and the purpose of the ship’s counsellors aren’t to make sure that Star Fleet personnel are the most mentally healthy people, but the ones whose mental state is best suited to carry out their role.
Which is not to say Star Fleet is completely heartless. I’m sure on leaving the service former Star Fleet personnel are referred to civilian counsellors to help them be mentally healthy and resolve the traumas that would have let them be good Star Fleet crew but less good civilians. It’s just we can see in Picard and Raffi that they perhaps reject the help and resort to unhealthy coping mechanisms.
@185/Sarek – probably, but it’s based on a lot of assumptions.
If we assume the Federation timeline is the original timeline, and the timeline they return to is a slightly altered timeline, then we can assume everything that happened in TNG happened the same way. So in the Confederation timeline, Time’s Arrow didn’t happen, since the Soong family (I assume) never began research into synthetics, and Data is an integral part of the plot. Hence Guinan never met Picard. But in both the Federation and altered Federation timeline, Data was created and thus Time’s Arrow happened, and Guinan met Picard, ergo she then remembers all of their meetings on when Picard and Co returni to the ST:PIC “present”.
Okay, I am not going to be able to get through nearly 200 comments but for now, initial thoughts:
I actually liked this episode way more than I thought I would, since I’ve been increasingly disappointed with the season as it’s gone on. As I said to my husband, this would have worked way better as maybe at two hour episode/two parter, or maybe something like a 6 season limited season. It just felt SO drawn out but also simultaneously rushed.
For example, I’m still unclear on what role Soong/Kore really had in any of it – it seems like that entire sub plot could have been totally excised. (That said, I did in fact squee a bit when I saw Wesley show up because I had JUST BEEN THINKING that I wondered what his character was up to and why he never got to show up.)
My husband and I both joked that this whole thing literally seems to be some Q/Picard fanfic. So…apparently all of this is because Q loves Picard, wants him to move past his guilt and also wants to make sure Picard gets laid at some point? (And as I said in my previous episode comment, I still kind of resent that the whole point of this is that it’s seen as this HORRIBLE FAILING that Picard isn’t romantically involved. It would be one thing, I guess, if I felt like his character was unhappy or purposefully holding himself back, but he always seemed self sufficient to me and with perfectly healthy friendships, etc. Maybe that’s just my own bias though. I’m married and even a romantic in a sense, but I’m also totally fine with the idea of being alone.)
To be clear – I’m totally into the whole interpretation that Q has this fixation on Picard, because I think that is definitely the case, and I’ve always enjoyed that angle. But as the review points out that also seems at odds with some of Q’s other actions during this show, such as meddling with Renee and egging Soong along? Again, what was the point of all that? Was it just to create more obstacles for Picard to overcome, or to nudge things in the right direction? It just doesn’t fit in well.
I do enjoy the general theme of working through your own trauma/guilt, absolving yourself, and all that (although I have to admit, I don’t know if I could have put the key back either…it’s one thing to absolve yourself, and another to try and prevent something if you DO have the chance. But in the end I probably wouldn’t want to meddle much with time. Then again…Rios just stays behind so meddling with time is not a concern). When Q said something about how absolving and choosing yourself as you are means you are also worthy to be chosen…it was actually a beautiful line. Despite my complaints, I did still feel a bit emotional by both their last conversation and the final farewell to Q.
But again, it just seemed very unnecessarily drawn out over 10 episodes.
I did also like the way the Borg were just coming to help BUT MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE LEAD WITH THAT. Like, she comes in all dramatic and masked and using their cybernetic arms to bust open the ship instead of just…showing her face and asking for help like she always had the ability to do? It just seemeed way over the top dramatic. For that matter, if she can encrypt a message saying ‘help me Picard’, why can’t she just include a REAL message? (Which is of course not even touching on…before the timeline shenanigans…was it still the Jurati queen? I guess the fact that she played that specific song is meant to hint at that, unless the Borg just grabbed it from his memory)
I actually did chuckle at the fact that it ended up being a very TNG style anamoly.
Sorry if this is repeating what others have said.
(Minor correction: one of my sentences should say – the Borg were coming to SEEK help…but I can’t edit the comment as it’s still in the mod queue!)
@192: “For that matter, if she can encrypt a message saying ‘help me Picard’, why can’t she just include a REAL message?”
Fair question, along with the others you ask.
Theory: After 400 years of assimilation and functioning as a Borg Queen, perhaps Jurati’s own individual personality is pretty deeply submerged. She exists much more as the sum total of her Collective. And considering its purpose it’s very likely that that Collective is regulated by its Queen in a much more collaborative and egalitarian manner: the individual voices are harmonized by the central will of the Queen but not bent to that will. All of which would mean that it might be a struggle for the Jurati-consciousness part of the collective to assert itself articulately until it is jogged to the forefront by the reunion with her old mentor and friends.