One of the comments I’ve seen around what we used to call the information superhighway (hi, I’m old) about this episode is the hope that—given the 2024 timeframe and the use of Sanctuary Districts—we might see Sisko, Dax, and Bashir in some form, since they were wandering around 2024 California in DS9’s “Past Tense.” I have pointed out to some of those people that that isn’t really possible, since the Sisko and Bashir of this timeline are part of the Confederation and Dax probably never met them (I’m guessing Trill is one of the Confederation’s enemies—or subjects).
And then my instinctive response to Picard meeting Guinan in 2024 was, “Why doesn’t she recognize him, they met in 1893 San Francisco?” Then I remembered…
While Whoopi Goldberg could easily play the younger version of herself in 1992, that isn’t really practical with both Goldberg and Guinan having aged since, so Ito Aghayere is cast in the role. Aghayere does a very good job, mainly because she doesn’t ape Goldberg’s delivery precisely, because this is a younger, more bitter Guinan. Just as Goldberg herself played her 1893 iteration as younger and more excitable and enthusiastic in “Time’s Arrow,” Aghayere plays the 2024 iteration as angry and disillusioned.
On the one hand, I see what they were going for here. Both Guinan’s conversations with Picard and Rios’s odyssey through the hell of being a prisoner of ICE are very unsubtle commentaries on the state of the world in the early twenty-first century. However, it does use fictional constructs from past Trek iterations—not just the Sanctuary Districts from “Past Tense” but the Europa mission’s headquarters is in Jackson Roykirk Plaza, named after the creator of the early-twenty-first-century Nomad probe from the original series’ “The Changeling.”
On the other hand, it’s utterly impossible to miss what they were going for here, because it’s as subtle as a nuclear explosion. Between the poverty-stricken region that Guinan’s bar occupies and the ICE detention facility Rios is stuck in, it’s a pretty overt indictment of the state of the world. However, with Guinan in particular, it creates a bit of a disconnect. In “Time’s Arrow,” we saw her holding literary salons among the upper-class intelligentsia of 1893, despite her having the physical appearance of what the people of the time would likely refer to as a “Negress” (that would be the nicest word they’d use to describe her). Having lived in the era of Reconstruction, of Jim Crow, of the Civil Rights battle, not to mention having lived in a United States where someone of her gender couldn’t even vote, it’s now that she decides to be so bitter that she wants off the planet? Things are by no means good, but they’re still better than they were.
Buy the Book
Until the Last of Me
Well, maybe it’s the weight of the years of discrimination and disparity, and maybe it’s frustration with the fact that there’s been progress, but not nearly enough of it. Or maybe I’m being naïve.
Having spent three straight episodes establishing a new status quo, we finally in the fourth get to keep the previous episode’s status quo, which should move the plot forward. Except it doesn’t, really. At the top of the episode, Rios is in prison, Seven and Musiker are trying to find him, and Picard is trying to find the Watcher. At the end of the episode, Rios is still in prison, Seven and Musiker and still trying to find him, and Picard doesn’t find the Watcher until the very end of the episode after mistaking Guinan for the Watcher.
The episode shows a certain awareness of Trek’s history, which makes for some good moments. Besides the aforementioned Roykirk and Sanctuary District hits, there’s Guinan’s odd relationship with multiple timelines, as established in TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (and to a lesser extent in “Redemption II,” “Time’s Arrow,” and Generations). And we have a laugh-out-loud in-joke, as Seven and Musiker are riding a city bus, and have to ask a guy in a mohawk to turn down the punk music playing on his boom box. The guy in question—and yes, he’s played by Kirk Thatcher—goes white, puts his hand to his neck, and then very contritely turns the music off. It was totally self-indulgent, and truly this timeline’s Kirk and Spock are as unlikely to have come to 1986 San Francisco to save some whales as Picard is to have gone to 1893 San Francisco to rescue Data, but hey, I laughed.
That’s just the beginning of the Seven-and-Musiker Comedy Team, which leavens the seriousness of the rest of the episode. This includes Musiker trying to get information out of a beleaguered LAPD desk sergeant and then Seven driving a car, which she does with only a little bit more success than Kirk did in the original series’ “A Piece of the Action.” (This would’ve been a good place for another Trek reference, as Seven could have mentioned that she learned all about cars from one Tom Paris…)
We get some more hints as to Picard’s unpleasant childhood, with flashes of some violent occurrences mixed in with more detailed happy flashbacks to time with his Maman. These happen in a scene that confirms what many of you said in the comments last week: that Picard landed La Sirena in France near the Château Picard estate. This week explains why that was a good idea: after World War II (when occupying German forces used the château as a base), the property lay abandoned until some time in our future/Picard’s past. So Picard and Jurati go there to visit so they can light a fire (in a fireplace with fancy modern brickwork that is so very not pre-World War II), since apparently La Sirena’s cloaking device is working but its environmental control isn’t. Sure. And hey, it means they get to use an existing set and save money! (Sigh.)
Jurati gets to verbally fence with the Borg Queen some more. I’m loving the way Annie Wersching is playing the Queen, which is more than I can say for how she’s being written. For some reason, they’re leaning into the awful portrayal of her on Voyager as a mustache-twirling villain. Jurati begs her for help, and even makes her a compelling offer: someone to talk to. The Queen said last week that the silence was maddening, as she’s been cut off from the Collective, and Jurati offers to keep her company if she helps Jurati get the transporters online so she can beam Seven and Musiker out of their car chase.
Then when it’s over, Jurati pointedly leaves the room, and the Queen fumes. I was practically expecting her to shake her fist and cry out, “Curses, foiled again!”
Sol Rodriguez continues to be charming as Teresa, and her scene with Rios is quite nice, though I hope it pays off with something useful down the road, as it mostly feels like it’s there to give Rios something to do besides be imprisoned. Still, she’s cool enough that I don’t mind. (When Rios guesses that she opened her own clinic to help people, she corrects him and says she opened her own clinic because she’s a control freak.)
Honestly, the best part of the episode is the very end, as it teases something much bigger going on. At the aforementioned Roykirk Plaza, Q is observing a young blonde woman who is reading a book (which is yet another past Trek reference, in this case a Dixon Hill mystery titled The Pallid Son, written by Tracey Tormé, who wrote “The Big Goodbye,” the TNG episode that introduced Hill). Both Q and the blonde have the Europa mission logo emblazoned on their clothes. Q is carrying on like trash as usual about having doubts and worries and other such nonsense, and then he snaps his fingers—and nothing happens. “That’s unexpected,” a devastated Q says, “and most unfortunate.”
With luck, next week will have some actual forward movement, instead of playacting at it.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at HELIOsphere 2022 this coming weekend. He’ll be doing panels and programs and things, and also spending time at eSpec Books’s booth in the dealer room. Click here for his schedule.
– Whew, that punk on the bus scene was rough. I groaned out loud. Another one of those instances when your show is invaded by a bit from Futurama or Family Guy. Pick a lane, please.
– This makes me appreciate how well the Queen was written in First Contact and how well Alice Krige played her. More into seducing than tying you to the railroad tracks.
– I’m always a sucker for body-hoping/possession gags. Any guesses as to who the Watcher really is?
– I really enjoyed the first episode of this season, but these last three have really dropped off for me. Just not feeling it. Hopefully it picks up again.
Easily the worst episode so far this season. Unfortunately Season 2 of Picard is on a steady downward arc (for me anyway) where each episode is a little less entertaining than the previous one. Hopefully this is the typical flabby middle of modern serialized drama, and it picks up again toward the end. Like you I was very frustrated that basically nothing happened of note until the final 5 minutes of the episode.
I’m starting to think the season will be…for lack of a better way to describe it…schlock. But that might be okay, because one of the aspects of Discovery and Season 1 of Picard I didn’t like is how seriously it took itself. Matalas is obviously a showrunner who doesn’t mind adding hokey aspects if he thinks they work. I don’t think they always work, though I think the more lighthearted choices they’re making come across better than the attempts to confront “heavy issues” – as no matter how much they want it, this isn’t Past Tense part 3.
Keith, you keep talking about “this timeline” as if it were already the Confederation one, but that split doesn’t happen for another three days. At this point, they’re still on the lower part of the Y, the single path that’s the antecedent of both branching futures. So yes, this is the past that Picard visited in 1893 and Kirk and Spock visited in 1986. Though they won’t be running into Sisko and Bashir, since this is April 12 and the Bell Riots aren’t until September.
You also missed the big continuity tie-in: A Supervisor who’s secretly protecting people in the 21st century, who’ll bite people’s eyelids off if they offend her, who takes Picard through a swirling, smoky doorway at the end, and who appears to be disguising herself as Laris. That’s got to be Isis! The Aegis are back, though whether they actually use that name for them (which Howard Weinstein coined in the comics and several of us picked up in the novels) remains to be seen.
I liked this one more than the last few. It had some potent stuff with Rios facing the injustices of the system and Picard and Guinan debating whether humanity is worth saving. And while it’s still doubling and tripling down on the continuity porn (even showing a “21st Street Mission” logo on the charity kiosk, even though Edith Keeler’s mission was in New York City), the tie-in to the Aegis is the kind of continuity revisit I can get behind, the kind that fleshes out something underdeveloped and deserving fuller exploration, like the elements of the universe I’ve built on in my own Trek novels. It’s more than just continuity for its own sake in this case, because Gary Seven’s mission was all about preventing humanity from destroying itself as we faced our most turbulent and critical century. So it’s an appropriate element to bring into this storyline.
I wasn’t fond of the gratuitous car chase sequence with Seven and Raffi. I don’t like the way TV and movies treat insanely reckless driving on crowded streets as “fun,” since that sort of thing gets people killed in real life. Also, how does it make sense that a comm signal can’t get through without a relay to boost it, but a transporter signal, which is surely far more difficult and tricky to transmit successfully, can get through just fine?
As for Guinan, I think she does remember meeting Picard in 1893, given how she reacted to his name. She probably just didn’t recognize him until then because he’s much older. Anyway, their establishment of Guinan’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise” ability to sense the changed timeline as an El-Aurian trait conflicts with the intent in Generations that it was a result of her Nexus experience, but I think that was only mentioned in a deleted scene. The big thing that bugged me was establishing that she had a bar called Ten Forward in 2024. Ten Forward on the Enterprise was called that because it was Deck 10, forward section 1. I figured that when we saw Guinan’s LA bar in the first episode, it was named in honor of her old bar on the E. Having it be the other way around doesn’t make as much sense.
In an interview, showrunner Terry Matalas said this about Guinan not remembering Picard:
While this is a time before the split, the Kirk and Spock that would have gone back to 1986 came from a 2280-something after the split, and therefore wouldn’t have. It was a continuity error for the sake of an Easter Egg.
Also, establishing that the Picard family lived in England for many years before reviving the chateau was another instance of explaining something that didn’t need explaining. A Frenchman has been played by an Englishman for 35 years now, we really didn’t need his accent justified in the script.
The Borg Queen screaming for Agnes honestly reminded me of her counterpart in First Contact yelling for Data at the climax, so it made sense to me. But referring to the Collective as an army really makes me want to know more about how the Borg became a thing in the first place. The Collective and the Queen now seem like a chicken/egg situation, and I hope they dive into that.
But the most intriguing thing to me is WTF Q. Is this Continuum senility? Is the Watcher interfering with him because Watchers are also omnipotent? If the Continuum has a balancing/opposing force out there to prevent meddling, “protecting the destinies of certain individuals” I think they said, then that could very fun indeed.
Dunno. Would the probe not have visited Earth? Would they have been more able to overpower it? Or would they have to begrudgingly follow a similar plan to our Kirk and Spock and get them some whales?
Accepting the rationale Matalas gave at the Inverse link above and at Variety, I daresay there was a slightly-more-mean-spirited whale rescue, and I look forward to the inevitable IDW books that will portray it.
@3 ChristopherLBennett
Yeah, when they said “supervisor” I gasped loud enough my wife heard it across the house. I’m not necessarily assuming same character, but I’ve got to assume this is the Aegis (or whatever they’ll call them).
I liked parts of this episode, particularly the fun continuity references and the banter between Raffi and Seven. And the ending is quite intriguing. I wasn’t quite as sold on Guinan for many of the reasons who give, but I also wonder if it’s a result of the accumulation over time of negativity and seeing the worst of humanity. The subplot with Rios is a pointed commentary on current politics, which I didn’t mind, as it feels very much what one would expect from this kind of Trek storyline.
Honestly, the only thing that I wanted out of a meet-up with 21st century Guinan was the bit where she recognizes him from that mineshaft in San Francisco in 1893, and it didn’t happen, so I was pretty disappointed by that. They could even have her memory of the event be in superposition between the two different timelines or something, so she both remembers the event and remembers something different happening, depending on the outcome of the event in the next few days.
And much though I might ship Agnes and the Borg Queen, I agree that the latter was written more like Maleficent or Hexadecimal from Reboot (or even Seska from Voyager) than like the incarnation of a galactic hive mind. Part of that can be explained by the fact that this particular Borg Queen isn’t the incarnation of a galactic hive mind, but even so: since when do the Borg care about “flair”?
@4/Argus: (quoting Matalas) “This Guinan wouldn’t remember Picard because in this alternate timeline… “Time’s Arrow” never happened.”
Okay, that doesn’t really make sense. They’re supposed to be before the change. The whole point in being there is to prevent the change before it happens. So how can they already be in the altered timeline?
Well, I already knew from 12 Monkeys that Matalas’s view of how time travel works does not hold together logically. But then, hardly any fictional time travel ever does. (Although the movie version of 12 Monkeys was an exception, since its fixed, immutable timeline is the way physics says time travel would have to work — either that or the creation of a parallel history alongside the unchanged original.)
@5/JasonD: “While this is a time before the split, the Kirk and Spock that would have gone back to 1986 came from a 2280-something after the split, and therefore wouldn’t have. It was a continuity error for the sake of an Easter Egg.”
That’s not the way it should work. Like I said, the timeline is a Y. At the point the time travelers come back and make a change, it branches into two parallel paths, and travelers can come back from either one. The timeline before the split is part of the past of both timelines equally.
Look at Spock Prime and Nero. They came back from the Prime 2387 and created a timeline that unfolded differently from their own. But they weren’t “erased” from it; they continued to exist in a different timeline from the one they came from. They moved back along one path, created a fork in the road, and continued on the other path.
“A Frenchman has been played by an Englishman for 35 years now, we really didn’t need his accent justified in the script.”
I’ll never get why people think it needs justifying. That’s taking the shorthands of fiction too literally. People who learn two languages from childhood can usually speak both without an accent — look how Santiago Cabrera code-switches effortlessly between American English and Spanish. Since Picard was raised in a united Europe in an Anglophone Federation, of course he learned English from childhood, and logically he would’ve learned the version of English spoken in neighboring England. So it makes perfect sense that he speaks English with a British accent. It would only be a problem if he spoke French with a British accent (which he actually kinda does).
I’ve been watching Star Trek—first-run—since the very beginning. “Sledgehammer Metaphors” is the foundational operating philosophy of the show. (In that respect, it picked up where The Twilight Zone left off.) ST: Picard is doing all right by old grandpappy TOS as far as I’m concerned. If it was any subtler it just wouldn’t feel right.
How I understand the timeline issues:
1. The change has clearly already happened to cause the Confederation timeline. It had to, because Q put all of them into “Confederation bodies” with their Federation memories, and they hijacked a Confederation ship. If the TL change hadn’t happened, Seven would have her implants still…and for that matter, they’d all still be vaporized as a result of the explosion at the end of Episode 1.
2. The POD which caused the Confederation timeline however has been established as something which takes place on the 15th of April (in 3 days). If the protagonists do not fix it, they’re locked into this timeline (unless they somehow travel back in time a second time). But they can prevent it and reset the timeline to their own if they intervene.
3. The timeline change did not only change things which happened after 2024, but some things that happened in the past when time travel was involved. The Confederation Picard never went back in time to 1893, hence Guinan has never met Picard.
4. The Bus Punk thing is just an Easter egg. There is nothing he says or does which explicitly makes it clear he met Kirk/Spock (whether in their normal version or Confederation alters). Interpret it however you want, including he’s secretly an El Aurian and remembering the other timeline, but there’s nothing here to “prove” he met them before.
The core issue is not that different from First Contact, TBH. The Borg went back in time and assimilated Earth, and the crew had to stop it. But the Borg future was the “real” one until the moment they fixed things.
At least one Easter egg was in the newspaper, assuming that Brynner refers to the Christopher Brynner established in “Past Tense.” Turns out, his company’s not big into unionization (although this is happening months before he encountered Dax and had any change of heart regarding the way of the world).
The references to the Sanctuary Districts are OK, but they don’t seem the same as they were portrayed on “Deep Space Nine.” On DS9, people in the districts weren’t allowed to leave. On Picard, it appeared the characters could move through an area marked as a Sanctuary District unimpeded (although I’m not sure if they were actually within the district).
Time travel is confusing, but I wouldn’t think it’s impossible for different versions of our heroes to travel back to a point in the past. Yes, the tree of history has branched off, but they stem from the same trunk. I know that’s not a great analogy, but writers can find a way if they wanted to (but they don’t in this case, which is fine).
However, I would think it’s extremely unlikely for the Picard crew to run into Sisko, Bashir and Dax for the simple reason that “Past Tense” takes place in San Francisco in September 2024 and the Picard-os are in Los Angeles in April 2024.
Speaking of extremely unlikely, when they mentioned that the supervisor is a woman, I thought it would be nice to bring in Teri Garr (who appeared on “Assignment: Earth”). Unfortunately, she appears to have retired from acting some time ago due to health reasons.
However, that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t recast the role. I wonder if we’ll see Roberta Lincoln next week.
(11)
Does this story even count as metaphorical, though? So far they’re simply taking things from the headlines and directly commenting on them. I don’t know, maybe they’ll intertwine it with something more fanciful moving forward. We’ll see.
I was hoping that we would meet the Watcher and it would be Teri Garr, playing Roberta Lincoln again.
— Michael A. Burstein
Christopher thank you for the reminder…..
When I was writing this review, I had a glitch that caused me to lose three paragraphs of material that I was unable to retrieve. So I had to re-create it, and one of the things in that original material that I forgot when I was re-writing was this complaint……..
Why is Guinan’s bar’s address 10 Forward Avenue? Did they forget that Ten-Forward was called Ten-Forward because it was in the forward section of deck 10 of the Enterprise? Guinan naming a bar after it in 2500 makes sense as a nostalgia thing for her. It makes no sense for her to have a bar there 340 years before the Enterprise-D launched…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m starting to wonder how we are supposed to feel about the 21st-century characters. No matter how attached we get to the doctor, the mystery-reading woman, or anyone else, they all — except the dog — have decades of misery ahead of them. No happy endings.
Even in the “good” timeline, it’s going to get a lot worse for these people before it gets better. Is the intention of this show really to introduce a couple of sympathetic characters and then let us imagine how much they are going to suffer in World War III?
CLB:
You also missed the big continuity tie-in: A Supervisor who’s secretly protecting people in the 21st century, who’ll bite people’s eyelids off if they offend her, who takes Picard through a swirling, smoky doorway at the end, and who appears to be disguising herself as Laris. That’s got to be Isis! The Aegis are back, though whether they actually use that name for them (which Howard Weinstein coined in the comics and several of us picked up in the novels) remains to be seen.
Huh.
That’d be real neat and a nice deep cut.
I’m with O’Brien
The problem isn’t whether it makes sense. Having a bar called 10 Forward on 10 Forward St. makes sense. Having a bar called 10 Forward on the forward section of deck 10 makes sense. Having both is quite the coincidence.
To be fair, there’s nothing nonsensical about it. I can imagine Picard giving the location on the ship as a sentimental perk as easily as I can imagine Guinan considering the address a sentimental perk when picking a location. But it’s putting a hat on a hat. It’s giving us a second explanation for something that was already implicitly explained. It doesn’t hurt the first explanation, but it raises distracting questions about the seeming coincidence (including the question about whether the writers remember the original reason), and it’s just unnecessary.
@12/Karl: “The change has clearly already happened…”
Relative to the timeline of the characters in the alternate 2401, yes. But they’re in 2024 now. Subjective perception of the order of events should not outweigh objective chronology. The problem is that most people assume it does when they watch time-travel stories, and all too often when they write them.
“3. The timeline change did not only change things which happened after 2024, but some things that happened in the past when time travel was involved. The Confederation Picard never went back in time to 1893, hence Guinan has never met Picard.”
Yes, obviously that is what the story is claiming has happened, but it’s nonsensical. It shouldn’t work that way. By that logic, Spock Prime couldn’t exist in the Kelvin timeline because he would’ve been erased. By that logic, Sela couldn’t exist because alt-Tasha Yar would’ve been erased from existence when her timeline was unmade. Not to mention O’Brien in “Visionary,” who came back from an alternate near-future timeline that was prevented from ever occurring, but who still continued to exist. We have abundant proof that people can come back in time from a future that’s been altered, or from one of two coexisting parallels.
@13/QuesoGuapo: “On DS9, people in the districts weren’t allowed to leave.”
They said they were shipping Rios to a Sanctuary District on the border, and it was made pretty clear that he’d never be allowed to leave.
I also wondered if the Watcher might be Roberta, but my understanding is that Teri Garr has never been a fan of Trek or science fiction, so even if she were still acting, she’d have to have changed her opinions a lot.
You know, I have this idea bouncing around in my head, that comes from Kirk gently pointing out to Spock that “it’s a forgone conclusion that none of these people have ever seen an extraterrestrial.” And I remember thing, ‘yeah, right. The is the 80’s. We are aliens on our own planet, losing our minds and coming up with things like padded shoulders, coked-out Wall Street folks, and nouvelle cuisine. And then I think of all of the dramatic irony/congnitive dissonance that goes on when there is time travel, universal translocation. The idea that there are aliens walking around in broad daylight, looking just like us, becoming us, and trying to help us see ourselves to becoming better tomorrow than we were today. And, of course, you all know some of these aliens are just totally fucking with us. When I think of the body-hopping watcher, so many possibilities come to mind. It’s either Isis, and the body hopping is a trompe-l’oiel, because she is rapidly hanging her form, or it’s an Organian, maybe. Or a Prophet. Maybe even a pan-wraith. When acting as the Watcher, the entity seems to being to each body a physiological effect that we have seen before. It happened to Commander Stamets after he executed some close-to-two hundred rapid sequence jumps. His eyes turn milky white and there is a synaptic firing patter going on that is just probably a little bit of meta-consciousness, or transient uplift. El-Aurians. Vulcans. Ferengi. Humans from the future. The Aegis. And what if it’s someone like Redjac? I love the idea that aliens will blend in perhaps a little more seamlessly with the diversity of cultures and tribes that people are representing in their daily lives, and if people only knew… they’d probably shrug and say, “I could have told you that, man.” Or “right on!” And they’d look at their friend or mate and say “told you so. Can I get my fifty dollars now?” And a lot of people would have won that bet. And it is such an awesome juxtaposition at work here: every other mission, some officer, or another has to deal with the moral outrage of having their hands tied by the Prime Directive, which seems to apply everywhere but on Earth, where alien people come for no other purpose than to interact. But some to specifically just to intervene. How ironic is that?
@21ChristopherLBennett,
Trek has been incredibly inconsistent in terms of how it portrayed time travel. At times it showed strict causality loops, at times branching alternate universes, and at times “wibbly-wobbly.” But I think we’re supposed to take Picard at his word in the second episode that the Confederation timeline “overwrote” their own, which is quite different from the Kelvinverse, which was established as a new alternate reality separate from what came before (so it didn’t invalidate the rest of Trek). This is the reason why Spock could continue to exist and not be instantly winked out of existence. I’m not sure what the issue with Sela existing is, but it could be seen (similar to First Contact) as coming down to being onboard a ship at/near the point of the temporal anomaly, which stopped it from ceasing to exist when the TL changed.
I think it’s also important to remember that the Picard who went back in time to 2024 isn’t “our Picard” except in “spirit.” Q seems to have decanted the consciousnesses of the core cast into the bodies of their Confederation alters. Hence you can’t argue that Picard’s earlier time travel is somehow protected, because that Picard is utterly gone (save for the memories in the alternate timeline golem’s head).
@23/Karl: All you’re doing is restating what the show intends to portray. I’m aware of that and don’t need it restated to me. I simply disagree with it. It doesn’t make logical sense as presented. If the timeline is already different, how the frack can they prevent the change? That’s a contradiction in terms.
Notwithstanding the incremental progression of the plot, this was presumably the season’s primary comedy episode. Like our reviewer, I thought the fun parts of the episode worked pretty well.
I have to say that it is a huge improvement over last season’s attempt at light-heartedness, “Stardust City Rag”. A disturbing, nihilistically tone-deaf hybrid of heist comedy and gruesome, dark drama about people having to kill those they loved.
Christopher is 100% right. The only reason they even came back in time was to prevent the confederation from happening. If the time stream has already been changed so that Guinan doesn’t remember Picard, then they didn’t go back far enough.
The whole thing is jacked up.
I’m still enjoying it, but it’s jacked up.
Does anyone else’s head hurt after reading the comments? This is why I HATE time travel!
“I hate this!”
“More?”
“Please.”
Rios’ quip that the guard had a “face like a Ferengi” was hilarious, but it is surprising to hear that kind of racist belittlement from a Starfleet character.
@24 Chris
I don’t see how the scenario here is different from First Contact. In that movie, the Borg went back in time and assimilated Earth, changing the 24th century in the process. The Enterprise crew must go back in time to “fix” things and reset the timeline to normal.
Do you think that all of the time travel depicted in the other Trek shows happened in the Borg timeline? Where would this Kirk, Picard, Janeway, and Archer have come from?
@27. Austin:
https://youtu.be/TZQk8Buamak
@26/Philip R.: “If the time stream has already been changed so that Guinan doesn’t remember Picard, then they didn’t go back far enough.”
Basically, yes. Although I still think what we were shown is consistent with Guinan remembering Picard from 1893, regardless of what Matalas says. It’s been 131 years for her, after all, and it was a traumatic set of events for her and she only met Picard for a short time, and he was, what, 32 years younger? So maybe she just didn’t recognize him until he said his name, which she definitely did recognize (although I guess the intent was that it was another of those future echoes she was feeling).
I assumed the time travel mechanics the same way @32 Chris did.
I don’t think we need a huge explanation why she doesn’t recognize Picard. It’s been over a 100 years. I can’t remember students I taught from 15 years ago, for example, and I saw and interacted with them a lot more than just a few days.
Well I’m enjoying myself watching this. I’m not saying it’s amazing television (though the critics have been big on it), but it’s more fun than last season. As for CLB’s certainty that the watcher is Isis, I must have missed something because I did not get that at all. Hopefully it will all make sense next week.
@34/David Pirtle: “As for CLB’s certainty that the watcher is Isis, I must have missed something because I did not get that at all.”
Isis or a member of her species. Guinan said the Watcher called herself a Supervisor; Gary Seven was Supervisor 194. She said the Watchers protected certain people important to the future, or something like that, which isn’t far from the intended format an Assignment: Earth series would’ve had, according to its pitch document. The rectangular “doorway” of swirling smoke that Not-Laris took Picard through at the end resembled Gary Seven’s vault transporter effect. And I didn’t catch it myself, but someone on Facebook observed that Not-Laris was wearing a collar like Isis’s.
What is the point of this pantomime?
(HUGE missed opportunity to have Sir Patrick say “charade”)
I liked the interaction between Agnes and the Queen. You can see Agnes’s fear and when the Queen points out that Agnes has always felt disconnected and alone, we realize that part of Agnes’s fear is that a part of her can see the upside to assimilation.
I also loved the part where Rios tells the ICE officer the truth about who he is; it reminded me of Braxton. However, while Braxton fully expected everyone to believe his wild (but true) story, Rios knows this officer thinks he’s full of crap.
I’m glad you brought up the ST: Voyager Home callback because I would have totally missed that.
Regarding Guinan’s bitterness, I think it’s just finally weighed her down. Yes, things were very bad before, but she still had hope that humanity would evolve. I’m sure in 1893 she was convinced that things would get better. Unfortunately, 130 years later, while they are better, they’re still plenty bad. It reminds me of two quotes from SWAT;s :”3 Seventeen-year Olds” “Twenty-eight years ago, it was Rodney King. Twenty-seven years before that was Watts. History says we’re a year overdue for another storm.” and “See, it’s a generational wound that just keeps… getting picked at every few decades because we refuse to learn the lesson.”
So, I don’t think it’s implausible that Guinan would just give up on mankind ever learning the lesson.
Despite some complaints I read on Twitter about them disregarding Time’s Arrow, I actually saw it the same way Christopher did. It did seem like she recognized his name. So, I’d say she remembered him, just not on sight.
BTW, early this year I resolved to go into episodes blind and I’ve kept to it! Sure, I’ve read some spoilers but I haven’t read any full recaps before watching.
It is funny how I’ve read others come up with elaborate explanations for the Punk bus scene. I thought the scene was pretty straightforward: Seven uses very similar language that Kirk did which caused the Punk to remember the last time someone told him to turn it off in that manor, so he chooses to listen this time b/c he is afraid of getting nerve pinched.
I enjoyed it. I’m enjoying the season.
I don’t know who the watcher is, but could it be nicer versions of the Q? I don’t know. But they got my interest. The smokey door thing effect wasn’t a clean effect. Something looked off.
Thought the subliminal 15 thing was a great subtle callback to “Cause and Effect,” a trope that would tickle fans without interfering with the story for first-time viewers.
What if this Guinan is younger than the Guinan in “Time’s Arrow”? There’s nothing saying she can’t be time traveling either.
This week’s wasn’t probably my favorite episode of the season, but it was fun. I loved the bit with the punk (and wondered if it was the same guy so thanks KRAD). An sas like, “Did they just retcon Picard’s accent?” Didn’t hate it.
I think what I’ve loved the most about this season is the chemistry in the pairings they been doing. Rios and Teresa, Picard and Young Guinan, Seven and Raffi, and Jurati and the Queen all worked for me this week. I also love Rios’s hero streak. Man, it isn’t working for him, but he just keeps trying.
And when #22’s mentioned of the Prophets I was like… Wait a minute… I mean, we know they went to Earth at some point, this Sisko’s existence. And they have been known to possess people and make their eyes glow. (Although the white light eyes really seems more like a Vorlon thing XD). Plus they are established as existing outside of time, so… maybe?
Still not convinced that Q caused the divergence. Honestly, the apparent loss of his powers might give more credence to the idea that he was injured, either by the splitting of the timeline or Picard’s self-destruct.
Also, is it possible the watcher doesn’t just look like Laris, but is Laris? Guinan said the Watchers keep an eye on the destiny of a particular person (which again feels very much like a Prophets thing) and seemed to recognize Picard’s name in that context. Perhaps, the Laris we know is the same as who he’s seen in the past. It was after all his conversation with her, which ended negatively at the start of all this. Plus, she’s in the main credits, right?
Whelp, this is easily the longest comment I’ve ever posted on here. So much to unpack.
The first time I heard “watcher” I thought Wesley Crusher. Traveler/Watcher ? Same thing right ?
@33 Even though its been a hundred years, I would think the events of TIme’s Arrow would be so momentus that she would remember
Like the reference to Edith Keeler’s mission.
Someone mentioned the woman at the end Q was observing was Renee Picard, the cousin mentioned at his speech to Starfleet Academy , not sure if this was established or just a theory
Mention of the word “supervisor” – a possible watcher connection to my namesake…hmmm
@42/Christine: It occurs to me that the thing about the Picards moving to England isn’t just about his accent (which, as I’ve said, shouldn’t need justification any more than Rios’s American accent does), but about his fondness for English things like Shakespeare and tea, Earl Grey, hot.
The scene with Elnor being gratuitously beaten by the evil cops of the Confederacy… At this point it looks more an more like a contemporary metaphor as well
@15: unfortunately, I believe that Ms. Garr’s health issues might prevent her from reprising her role.
Whether Picard met Guinan on Earth is solely a matter of whatever the fiction writer wants because there is no logical answer with the way Star Trek time travel has consistently worked. It’s a straight up paradox.
The past is supposed to be fixed and the future is changeable, but if you make a past event contingent upon choices made in the future then it can’t be fixed, which messes with our heads because reality doesn’t work that way.
@43 Man, I could use some Wil Wheaton. Love his Instagram.
@45 Yeah. Characterwise it just seemed to fit. That’s probably a big part of it.
The reviewer covering this show at the New York Times is also a political reporter, and he has been doing a good job of unpacking some of the political subtexts in these episodes.
One nuance he caught that I had missed in Seven and Raffi scene at the clinic:
(from: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/arts/television/star-trek-picard-season-2-episode-4-recap.html)
The seams are showing a bit with this episode, if only because the repeated oscillations between the Raffi/Seven, Rios/ICE, and Picard/Guignan sequences quickly felt redundant – everyone was basically rewording things they had already expressed each time we returned to one of those scenes. Unfortunately, that repetitive cycle formed most of the episode. Still, trim a good 10 to 15 minutes and this was a worthwhile if largely motionless episode in terms of plot development. I just hope this isn’t indicative of a return to the uneven pacing that plagued season 1.
I tend to think that the “Picards living in England” thing was intended more as an in-joke than as an attempt to explain his accent, given that seems like, no matter how long a family may have lived in Britain, the first generation of them to be born in France will still wind-up with French accents.
@53/Iacomina: They’ll end up speaking French with French accents, sure. But if they learn English from childhood, there’s no reason they couldn’t speak it with an English accent, the same way that Santiago Cabrera can speak English with an American accent despite being a Chilean born in Venezuela and raised largely in England. People code-switch between accents and dialects all the time in real life.
Is it really subtext if you comment out loud on specific issues? Pretty sure that’s just text.
So far I’m dissatisfied with this season because I can’t tell if it’s badly written, or is still setting things up — I’ve read novels like that. Are there meant to be parallels between Picard’s fear of prolonged intimacy, the UFP’s fear of the Borg, the Confederation’s xenophobia, and 2024-U.S. xenophobia — parallels that will produce a catharsis? Are the oddities about the Borg in episode 1 (shape of the ship, opening to reveal a green core, its oddly-shaped emissary who stunned instead of killed the Stargazer’s bridge crew) red herrings, or tied into Q and the timeline damage?
Re: the Borg queen being unusually individualistic — I’m interpreting that as “she was an assimilated individual like every other drone, and without the Collective, her original personality is emerging.” Or possibly “she’s adapting to the situation by using words as weapons.” But nobody’s hung a lantern on it, so again: badly written or intentional?
Re: “they shouldn’t be able to beam from France to California” — I also noticed that. I surmise the writers are so accustomed to “transporter as plot device” that they forgot it has limits (range, line of sight, blocked by too much rock, etc.), in the same way other writers have cars or planes hopping between cities and continents much too quickly.
@56/phillip: The Queen didn’t start talking like a melodrama villain until she linked with Jurati, so I figure that when Agnes took data from her, the Queen got some of Agnes’s personality in return.
@56,
So far I’m dissatisfied with this season because I can’t tell if it’s badly written, or is still setting things up — I’ve read novels like that
Yeah, same. All the enthusiasm I had for Season One — all the excitement at coming back to the TNG era for the first time in 18 years and weaving together threads from Nemesis and the 2009 film — isn’t here.
Even with DeLancie back as Q, I’m just not feeling it — and like I said last week, more and more I’m feeling PIC should’ve just been a limited series.
55/ArgusO’Ray:
Oh yes, absolutely. I think that that is what our reviewer means by a sledgehammer, and it really goes to the heart of the question of what elevates something as art rather than mere communication.
I’m beginning to think the writers on this series would have created a far more enduring and powerful expression of values if they hadn’t had the characters visit 2024 at all.
But there are elements subtext here as well. I thought the the New York Times reviewer had interpreted the scene with Seven and the assistant at Dr. Teresa’s clinic correctly. I didn’t realize it at first but it makes sense that the point of that bit of dialogue is to compare the authorities in 2024 to the Borg. In an earlier review the same writer had pointed to the Eradication Day festivities as a stand-in for the rallies of a certain populist politician in the United States; that would also be subtext. There are other examples as well.
A Few thoughts…
Guinan’s Bar – isn’t it just called ’10’ – rather than being ’10 Forward’ – it’s a perfectly reasonable conceit to name your bar/restaurant/establishment after the address – quite a few places do it – it’s just, coincidence that she’s run two establishments with the same address (or close to it) – and no reason why she couldn’t have owned the same building under an alias from 2024 until the 2400s when we saw her in episode 1?
Transporters/Line of sight etc. – I seem to recall at least one Voyager episode where Voyager hung out behind a moon and yet beamed away teams on/off planets with nothing more than the equipment on the ship… technology does advance – after all, we’ve seen the ‘walk into the gates and beam off somewhere without naming the location’ across Picard and Discovery – why not the ability to do emergency transports/limited transports beyond line of sight? They couldn’t grab a moving target, and the rotational technobabble was off which is why they got separated?
Not-Laris – no reason why Isis wasn’t projecting an image of a tall dark beautiful woman from Kirk’s past when she appeared in Assignment Earth – equally she could be doing the same now, taking an image from Picard’s memory of a beautiful woman and appearing as her.
Guinan trusting Picard when he gives her his name – I’m afraid I saw that more of ‘fine, you’ve trusted me with your name, I’ll give you some help’ – rather than recognition of the name itself.
Young Woman at the end – Amazon’s cast list in X-ray does indeed name her as Renee Picard; presumably the ‘great great cousin’ who was ‘instrumental in exploring the solar system’ – after all she’s wearing the Europa Mission logo and reading a Dixon Hill novel – maybe that’s how he got into them!
Guinan’s Age – established in episode one that El Alurian’s can look the age they wish to – so presumably if you were on a non-Galactically aware world, you’d need to explain why you weren’t aging, so periodically you’d look younger and ‘age’ in order to be accepted without needing to constantly move from place to place… Doesn’t necessarily mean that because she looks younger, she is younger.
Apologies if some or all have been mentioned already – I have to admit I’m enjoying the series so far, and look forward to seeing the Supervisor & Aegis returning next week!
59. Sarek
That’s a good point about the current setting being an issue. There was certainly more room for metaphorical elements in the bad future, or the Biff Future as I like to call it, haha, than in 2024. A greater contrast there.
Which brings to mind another issue I have, and that’s the language used by our heroes. It’s not only the casual profanity but also the sort of 2022 snark and quippy delivery they use. With that, I don’t find much difference in the people from the 25th century and those in the 21st, honestly. A slight criticism, of course, but it does stick out to me.
Never thought I’d appreciate the culture clash of “double dumbass on you” so much, but there we have it.
I’m finding the arguments for being unable to communicate/transport because the relay structure is not in place in this century to be kind of weak. Think about every episode of Star Trek , any series. THe.y always had the ability to go to any unknown planet and transport to any part of the planet and communicate – unless there was some storm or adversarial force. None of these new unchartered planets had “relays” or some type of structure in place to assist with communications or beaming.
@Gary, Well, in those other planets the spaceship was in orbit, no? Not crashed in France while everyone is in LA. I still don’t get how they can beam to LA but comms are a no no. Comms surely use way less data and power. :shrug:
The Queen is clearly trying to manipulate Agnes Jurati, so I would imagine that she’s behaving in away that she thinks Agnes will respond to–a combination of threatening compliments and flattering threats.
Communicators are less powerful, and with a weaker signal than transporters, so it stands to reason they might be more susceptible to certain types of low-ish level interference.
I like time travel creating wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey effects outside human intuition. The physicist in me thinks time travel impossible, it’s just no way for a universe to behave. How would time travel “really” work? It won’t because it doesn’t so it can’t. Thus if it shows up in fiction I don’t mind it seeming to have strange effects. We would have no evolved sense of how it would behave, just as we have no evolved sense of intuition for relativity or quantum mechanics, so I’m fine with weird. Events in 2024 are affecting the future which will affect the past because of who can travel back from the future. A sort of grandchild paradox. Very wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey, so entirely fair enough.
I’m just loving this series though. Yes it’s not exactly subtle in places, but in our real world both democracy and the inhabitability of our planet are under real threat. We’re long past the time when subtlety is the best path. Whack it with the sledgehammer Picard, whack away.
“Events in 2024 are affecting the future which will affect the past because of who can travel back from the future.”
I’ve just remembered who directed this episode! Ha!
@60/Tom: “Guinan’s Bar – isn’t it just called ’10’ – rather than being ’10 Forward’”
It’s number 10 Forward Avenue, the address of the establishment. But Picard did call it “Ten Forward” when speaking to Guinan this week, and she didn’t question his use of it as the name of the place.
“it’s just, coincidence that she’s run two establishments with the same address”
The implied intent appears to be that Guinan named her Enterprise bar after her original one, which disregards why it was called that according to TNG. Perhaps she chose Deck 10, forward section 1 as the site of the bar because of the name, but it’s still changing the original intent.
If it were coincidence, that would just be silly and lazy writing.
“no reason why Isis wasn’t projecting an image of a tall dark beautiful woman from Kirk’s past when she appeared in Assignment Earth”
Except Kirk never saw her human form; only Roberta Lincoln did.
Also, from the photos I can find online, I don’t think April Tatro is tall.
@62/Gary7: “I’m finding the arguments for being unable to communicate/transport because the relay structure is not in place in this century to be kind of weak… None of these new unchartered planets had “relays” or some type of structure in place to assist with communications or beaming.”
The problem is that this episode claimed explicitly in dialogue that they couldn’t communicate from Labarre to Los Angeles without a relay. That’s not coming from us, it’s from the actual episode. However, the same story also claims that they can beam from Labarre to LA without a relay. That’s the problem — the internal inconsistency of the story asserting that they can do one but not the other.
@65/jmwhite: “Communicators are less powerful, and with a weaker signal than transporters, so it stands to reason they might be more susceptible to certain types of low-ish level interference.”
But if your communication signal is interfered with, you just get static. If your transporter signal is interfered with, you could die. Indeed, the way Michael Okuda explained it to me once, the actual transporter pattern that tells the beam where to put the particles when it reassembles them is encoded in the interference pattern of the beam. So if that pattern isn’t aligned just right, you could lose the reassembly information. So I’d think that you’d need a much clearer, more reliable carrier wave in order to transport safely.
“The physicist in me thinks time travel impossible, it’s just no way for a universe to behave.”
Current physical theory allows for time travel; there’s nothing about the arrow of time that’s irreversible, and the temporal relationship of different reference frames is relative anyway. It would simply have to be self-consistent, so that any interaction with the past would create the same future it came from (or branch off an alternate timeline in parallel) rather than undoing it and creating a causal paradox. In other words, “Assignment: Earth” or Voyage Home time travel works, “City on the Edge” or First Contact time travel doesn’t.
John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that information routinely comes back from the future in the form of advanced waves and contributes to the outcome of interactions in the present, which is how a photon can “know” in advance which slit it will go through in an experiment, say.
Alright, this series never yet lost me, but hand me an episode with a big, muscly bull terrier being an absolute teddy bear (having experience of the breed, they’re more likely to bruise your legs with a wagging tail than bite you, at least when properly brought up), Guinan being prodigiously charismatic, Rios being dashing in close confinement AND a strong hint of ‘Assignment Earth’ at the close?
I AM IN (and that’s only the shortlist of what I liked).
Oh, and I assume that the key reason Tom Paris wasn’t name-dropped is because STAR TREK fans could hear Seven thinking his name so very loudly when she gets behind the wheel – though I’m not sure if it’s “Thank You, Tom Paris” or “I blame you, Tom Paris”.
Oh, and @krad, could the environmental controls have been sacrificed precisely so that Out Heroes could get/keep the cloak running?
Given the team are humans on planet Earth, it’s a logical court of action (Especially since the Admiral knows exactly where they are).
Can someone confirm or explain the flaws otherwise in my intepretation of how the events of 15 April 2024 will change the timeline. My line of thinking is that if the timeline changes on 15 April 2024 and it leads to the Confederation rather the United Federation of Planets then none of the storylines that we have seen in all the Star Trek series, films, etc will take place as the universe will not exist in the way it has been described to us. Because Kirk might not exist or will not act in the same way there will be no travelling back in time to the 20th Century as shown in TOS and in Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home, Sisko would not gone back to intervene in the Bell Riots (which is after 14 April 2024 anyway). And Picard would not have been there (at least in the same way) to meet Guinan in 1893 in the episode Time’s Arrow. If Time’s Arrow did not happen then Guinan would not have known Picard exept that given that an El Aurian can detect all sorts of inconsistencies in the timeline she seemed to become aware as she spoke to Picard and he revealed things that something strange was afoot. Is this interpretation valid given that all time travel stories can lead one to mind blowing circuits of thinking of what might be and what might have been?
I guess Terry Matalas’ explanation kind of makes sense of why Guinan doesn’t recognize Picard, but it feels more like they soft-retconned “Time’s Arrow” out of existence. Similar to how Lal was soft-retconned out of season 1 when they were talking about Data’s daughter. And didn’t someone make a comment in season 1 about how bad Picard was with kids or he said he never had kids, which kind of soft-retconned “The Inner Light” when he lived an entire life where he had a family.
Anyway, it’s easy to nitpick the retcons. Those are the low hanging fruit. I’m talking to you RLM!! They’re trying to make the best possible story and successfully navigating through hundreds of episodes and movies of content to make sure everything fits together perfectly is impossible.
I’m enjoying this season a lot. So far I think it’s the best start to a season of any of the new live action Trek series.
Language and accents can result in strange and unusual ways. I have no problems with Picard speaking English with a British accent, or even that his French may have a British accent even if he learned it as a first language.
My maternal grandparents were immigrants for Sicily. Though they quickly learned English they continued to speak Italian in the home. My mother, and her sisters, learned both English and Italian from infancy. They all spoke with a Sicilian, (Lindini to be precise) accent.
When my mother entered high school a foreign language was a requirement. The choices were Spanish, French, and German. She chose Spanish on the theory it would be easier since she was quite aware that Spanish and Italian are closely related.
After she took the course, she was unable to speak either Italian or Spanish. The two had become completely confused in her mind. She could still understand her parents and relatives perfectly when they spoke Italian, which they still did at home, but couldn’t speak it herself. That was part of the reason she never taught us to speak Italian; and while we saw our grandparents every three weeks or so, that wasn’t enough exposure to learn; something I regret to this day.
My youngest brother did take Italian in college and had issues with the differences with the differences in accent. The few Italian words we did know were pronounced quite differently than the mainland accent his teachers used.
Quick thought on the comments about how Guinan is acting differently in 2024 compared to 1890. Why is she so bitter, for example…
The insinuation is that the writers made a mistake. I disagree. Her attitude is suitable to the time.
Perhaps it’s the Times Arrow characterization that’s wrong.
I guess Terry Matalas’ explanation kind of makes sense of why Guinan doesn’t recognize Picard, but it feels more like they soft-retconned “Time’s Arrow” out of existence. Similar to how Lal was soft-retconned out of season 1 when they were talking about Data’s daughter. And didn’t someone make a comment in season 1 about how bad Picard was with kids or he said he never had kids, which kind of soft-retconned “The Inner Light” when he lived an entire life where he had a family.
Anyway, it’s easy to nitpick the retcons. Those are the low hanging fruit. I’m talking to you RLM!! They’re trying to make the best possible story and successfully navigating through hundreds of episodes and movies of content to make sure everything fits together perfectly is impossible.
I’m enjoying this season a lot. So far I think it’s the best start to a season of any of the new live action Trek series.
Late, as usual. Picard episodes always take a couple of days to arrive here. Now, I’m caught up.
I’m still trying to make sense of Time’s Arrow era Guinan’s not recognizing Picard. I don’t think Picard’s advanced age is a good enough excuse. Bruce Maddox hadn’t seen the man in over 30 years and still recognized him! The way I see it, it’s possible that Picard’s current artificial body would throw Guinan’s sixth sense astray. She wouldn’t be as able to recognize him that fast, and it has been 130 years since the era of Samuel Clemens!
What I do appreciate from this episode is that Picard’s plea for Guinan to not lose faith in humanity connects quite nicely to Guinan’s story on TNG’s Booby Trap. The reason she’s attracted to bald men, explaining to Geordi that a bald man once helped her when she was hurting. I feel Picard’s presence here will affect her far more significantly than what we’ve seen on Time’s Arrow.
I really like this version of Guinan. I can identify with that kind of anger, especially in this post-COVID era where we’ve realized just how many selfish people put their wishes ahead of the greater good, and how many others employ wishful thinking and willful delusion over solid facts. This gives her a clear arc to eventually becoming her older, wiser, cheerful self (and I imagine mankind helping her and giving her a home after losing her world to the Borg in the next 200 years will also contribute to that evolution).
I appreciated the episode as a whole (especially the Rios and Picard sections; some nice Seven/Raffi banter as well), but I do agree everything seems to be running in place without actual forward motion. We’re already four episodes done. There’s too much that needs to happen. And with Q’s newfound lack of powers, I’m beginning to think this story is going to carry over to the next season.
Regarding the time travel mechanics, I share @Christopher ‘s view on this. The change won’t take place until April 15th. I’m pretty sure Kirk Thatcher’s punk bus dude did in fact get neck pinched by Spock, 38 years before. I don’t buy Matalas’s explanation for Guinan’s lack of knowledge at all. It makes no sense.
I’m finding it difficult to reconcile a world in which isolationist, divisive and prejudicial laws and actions, exemplified by the experiences of Rios with ICE and the conversation between Guinan and Picard, are so prevalent (in other words, our world) with a society looking forward to a mission to Europa (Trek’s world). It feels like the writers are cherry picking from two worlds to illustrate points rather than building a cohesive, plausible world.
This is a bit off topic but did anyone recognize Uncle Dale? He’s part of the Impractical Jokers and his name is Brian Quinn but he goes by the name Q. I was so surprised to see him so randomly and so quickly that I can’t help but wonder if it’s just a fun detail that they included someone named Q to play a character? Just seems amusingly coincidental
77.
How is that different than any other great event in space exploration happening during a time of societal turmoil? We first landed on the Moon in 1969. Many people looked forward to it. Now think about what else was happening during that time…
@74/M: The Guinan of “Time’s Arrow” lived in a time when humans who resembled her were treated unjustly, but she had the good fortune of associating with humans like Samuel Clemens who were more fair and progressive and were fighting to change things for the better. So that could explain her optimism at the time, along with the fact that she hadn’t been on Earth that long. By 2024, she’s seen more than a century of continued oppression and injustice, and though there have been major advances made, the injustices and hate have persisted, just taken different forms. And it seems she’s now living among the people who are getting the worst of it, instead of hobnobbing with the idealists at a cozy remove from the problems they profess to be working to solve. So I can understand her having gotten more disillusioned and cynical.
Incidentally, I found out last night that Ito Aghayere is 33, the same age Whoopi Goldberg was when she first played Guinan, and was born less than six weeks before the debut of “The Child,” Guinan’s first episode, 33 1/3 years ago. So there’s a nice symmetry there.
@77/jasmine: The world you’re describing is no different from our own. The world has always been divided between the dreamers and the regressives, and it’s just a question of who’s ahead in the race at any given time. And heck, the same billionaires who are on the cutting edge of making human spaceflight and interplanetary travel a reality again, like Bezos and Musk, are also the billionaires who are dodging 100% of their taxes and worsening economic inequality and injustice. It’s two sides of the same coin. Progress has always been unevenly applied.
@67/ChristopherLBennett “…if your communication signal is interfered with, you just get static”
You seem to think the confederation communicators are analogue devices. :) Those of us that use digital signals to receive information, be them via mobile phones, or digital radio or TV, will know that it’s far more common that you are either receiving the information as intended in a way that can be successfully error corrected and decoded, or you’re not. As I’m driving around listening to my DAB radio in the car you don’t get “static”, you’re either hearing everything perfectly, or you’re not hearing it at all.
“Current physical theory allows for time travel…”
That’s not strictly speaking true, it’s more accurate to say we haven’t ruled it out yet. It’s allowed up until the point when you say “OK, the Great Fire of London was an event in 4D spacetime, how do I travel there”, and at that point people start inventing things that either impractical to the point of being fantastic, or things like exotic matter that we have no evidence do or even could exist. If I had to wager everything I have on it I’d say that when we have a true theory of quantum gravity the time-travel pathways that general relativity theoretically allows will be snapped shut.
I’m fairly aware of John Cramer’s work, though it’s been a while since I’ve read his papers. He’s spent a good chunk of his career trying to work out how quantum nonlocality can be used for faster than light communication, and sadly (for him and us because it would be really cool) failing.
The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, or something like it, is part of my head-canon on what is behind what is called subspace in the Star Trek universe. It’s also a cool idea, but it’s to say the least not the favoured interpretation of the majority, or even a substantial minority, of physicists in our universe.
I firmly believe that that neither faster-than-light, nor time travel, inextricably linked as they are, will ever be nor could ever be a reality. Which is a pity, because they’re really cool concepts. Sadly the real universe is under no obligation to be cool.
I have to agree with Christopher’s interpretation of the temporal mechanics at work; at this particular moment, the timeline should be accessible from both (or for that matter, many) possible futures. The alteration won’t happen until the 15th. That said, aside from the recasting, I feel everything’s close enough to pass the squint test. As others have noted, there’s any number of reasons Guinan wouldn’t immediately recognize Picard.
It occurs to me that one of the reasons I’m loving this season of Picard is that it manages to canonize one of my abandoned headcanons.
Back before Enterprise (which established that the Mirror universe’s history was significantly different from our own), I had the thought that the point-of-divergence between the mainstream and Mirror universes was somewhere in the “present day;” that we-the-audience are active players, with the ability to choose the future our descendants will inhabit. It makes Star Trek feel less like the disposable bit of pop culture it was created as and more like the roadmap many fans feel that it should be.
In a way, we are all time travellers from the future. Starfleet officers, Aegis operatives, and alien observers. We have seen the Federation, dreamed lives within it, and know to be horrified and appalled by what present day Earth considers normal and acceptable. We’ll never be able to travel to “our” proper time and place, but we can at least nudge the timeline to where it should be.
@81/jmwhite: “You seem to think the confederation communicators are analogue devices.“
Don’t take one word so literally. The point was that a communications signal getting disrupted or scrambled is less of a problem than the transporter pattern that tells where your molecules belong getting disrupted or scrambled. So I’d think that if there’s a source of interference, it would be less advisable to use transporters than communications.
“That’s not strictly speaking true, it’s more accurate to say we haven’t ruled it out yet.“
Which is what “allows for” means. The difference between “allows” and “allows for” is that the latter doesn’t mean it actually happens, just that the thing or circumstance you’re referring to permits the possibility. For instance, if you leave your front door unlocked, you’re not allowing burglars to come in and take your stuff, but the fact that the door is unlocked allows for that to happen, because it doesn’t preclude it from happening.
“I firmly believe that that neither faster-than-light, nor time travel, inextricably linked as they are, will ever be nor could ever be a reality.“
As depicted in fiction, probably not. But that doesn’t preclude some kind of physical interaction such as advanced waves that operates outside our conventional notions of causality and linear time. I don’t believe anyone will ever be able to hop in a phone booth or gullwing car or step through a stone donut and go back to kill Hitler or whatever, but I can believe that plasma falling into the ergosphere of a rotating black hole might follow a closed timelike curve, without creating a paradox because that event was “always” part of the timeline.
* Guinan is the canary in the coal mine. When time is fixed, she’ll remember the 1893 incident.
* Rios’ situation would be weird in that he’s in no one’s database. What country would this ICE send him to?
* Regarding Kirk and Spock and 1986, transparent aluminum is just being noted on the 2024 newspaper! So does this mean it hasn’t already been around for 30+ years? Might suggest the solution to the Probe played out differently.
* Isis? Interesting but I’ve always thought Laris was almost literally a guardian angel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lares
Rumor has it, next episode we get the revelation that LaForge once lived at 36 Engineering Boulevard, O’Brien had an apartment at The Transporter Estates, Room 3, and Troi was raised in a castle made of chocolate.
Important questions get answered on Star Trek: Picard!
Suspecting the future cloaked Borg “queen” is cloaked so we can’t see it’s Agnes…
I’m not sure about that. I’m not physicist enough to examine it properly. However, on my digital cable signal while receiving the image clearly or not at all aren’t the only choices. I have occasions when I get a signal that skips, or displays one static image at a time, say for a second or two, then skips to another. Or pixilation, when I have a severely distorted picture and warped sound. I would think that would qualify as interference as it is being used in this discussion.
Back in the day, I had imagined that the reason Picard was a Frenchman who sounded British was that as a result of globalization or other events sometime before the 24th century, France had been subsumed within the British sphere of influence, at least culturally. Make sense in a galaxy where everyone apparently speaks the English language!
I like the explanation and backstory given in this episode better.
Did I miss something, or did Seven and Raffi leave Rios’ communicator behind in the clinic? Couldn’t that potentially change the trajectory of Earth’s technological advancement?
67/ChristopherLBennett:
I don’t think it was the outgoing transmissions from the ship to the combadges that needed boosting; it was the signals in the other direction, from the commbadges to the ship, that weren’t strong enough.
Maybe.
As far as Terry’s explanation on how this time-change timeline works… Star Trek has always wrote time travel rules to fit the particular plot of the week and none of it is consistent, so I’m fine with this. As for Kirk Thatcher, I can roll with this for the sake of the Rule of Comedy trope. Although I like the humorous suggestion that he is in fact an El-Aurian as well.
Rios light racism did conspicuously stand out to me, although to be fair, he was trying to act like a mid-21st Century human so… If you go back through Star Trek (including DS9) there’s lots of dialogue generalisations made about alien races that would be considered racism now, and in particular in comments made towards the Ferengi in multiple episodes which are uncomfortable when you consider some of the racial/religious/stereotype coding that could be read into them. There’s a infamous example of a human Starfleet officer referring to Cardassian as “spoonheads” which did cause a few production memos to be sent when they realised it was a line that broke Gene’s Rules For Humans that had been left in.
@91/Paul Anderson:
Rios light racism did conspicuously stand out to me, although to be fair, he was trying to act like a mid-21st Century human so… If you go back through Star Trek (including DS9) there’s lots of dialogue generalisations made about alien races that would be considered racism now, and in particular in comments made towards the Ferengi in multiple episodes which are uncomfortable when you consider some of the racial/religious/stereotype coding that could be read into them.
I was also thinking of the “Spoonhead” slur and the discomfort with that at the time, as well as Picard’s affectionate but racialized moniker for Laris in the first episode (“Cheers, Big Ears!”). Imagine him saying something like that but using a distinctive physical characteristic of a nonwhite human group.
Good article last month on the anti-Semitic motifs in European culture that the Ferengi appeal to: https://gamerant.com/star-trek-ferengi-anti-semitic-stereotype/. A more general exploration of the topic from 2018 is at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/08/14/science-fictions-anti-semitism-problem/.
Unlike some here, I actually liked the bit where Agnes asked Picard where his family went after having to abandon the château during World War II and him saying “England”.
And that was it. They didn’t discuss that any further, instead moving on. But in that instance they provided a very small kernel of explanation for why Picard, a French man, has a British accent (as played by Patrick Stewart). (And it was a perfectly valid question for Agnes to ask him at that point, where they had relocated to.)
”Why does that need to be explained for some people?” It doesn’t “need” to be. However, I can say that I’m one of the “some people” who appreciated it.
David Young
@84/David: ” Guinan is the canary in the coal mine. When time is fixed, she’ll remember the 1893 incident.”
I doubt it. Even with all the continuity porn, they’re still remembering the basic rules of storytelling and not making the plot impenetrable to people who don’t get the references. Anything significant to the story is explained, and extraneous details are left as Easter eggs, things that still work as part of the story without being explained (although the Punk on Bus scene is a borderline case).
The backstory of Guinan having met Picard in 1893 would be a complicated digression to explain to novice viewers, which I assume is why they avoided addressing it in the story. So I doubt they’ll make it a plot point in the finale. If they intended that, they would’ve set it up here by having Picard remind her of it to provide exposition to the audience.
“transparent aluminum is just being noted on the 2024 newspaper! So does this mean it hasn’t already been around for 30+ years?”
Or it just took that long to develop the technology to manufacture it cost-effectively and put it on the market. Just knowing the chemical formula for it doesn’t magically solve all the other problems. And there could’ve been economic pressures preventing its acceptance, conventional manufacturers lobbying politicians to put up roadblocks to its development, like fossil fuel companies have done with green energy or the auto industry has done with rail travel.
If anyone has seen the promo for next week, 4 seconds in, there is a rocket launch, where the rocket launches and the support structure falls as it should, this launch clip appears to be from Assignment Earth
I think the answer to why the continuity isn’t functioning properly can be summed up in one letter. Q. The disruption to the timeline wasn’t the reason why Picard and company were dumped into the Confederation timeline memories intact, that was Q. So if he forcefully overwrote the Federation timeline then Time’s Arrow may not have happened, at least not in the same way. I would imagine the Confederation’s response to the Devidians would’ve been a bit more exterminate than neutralize. To say nothing of the fact that Data likely didn’t exist, or if he did, had the attachments that our Data did. There’s a lot of thread pulling to the tapestry of this life. If this was a normal time travel mission to prevent a temporal incursion than I would expect Time’s Arrow to be vividly represented in Guinan’s memory. But I don’t think we’ve traveled to before the Y. That implies there’s a split in the timeline. I think Q completely diverted the river. Much the same as he created a private continuity to test Picard in in All Good Things. The fascinating thing is Q’s powers being the fritz. The question is now raised can he set right what he has set wrong?
I will say I’m greatly enjoying this season, vastly more than season 1.
I get why they sent Seven on the mission instead of having her deal with and chime in on Queenie, as the focus for Seven’s character is how people perceive her when she’s all human, and also how she perceives herself.
I’m also for some reason deeply intrigued by Agnes and the Queen becoming besties. I do fully understand that they’ve basically written every conversation with the Queen as if she’s the Devil Herself, which I find somewhat appropriate. It reminds me a bit of WandaVision where a villainous character still provides a surprising amount of therapeutic assistance for a protagonist even while trying to subvert them.
Sol Rodriguez’s Dr. Teresa is delightful and I totally get why Rios would abandon all common sense to try and help her. While people are thinking of her as his Rain, I was thinking more of a Gillian, her son aside.
It’s also pretty funny that while Seven can pilot a starship she has no concept of acceleration and deceleration as it pertains to grounded modes of transportation. They also took a quick second to insult LA drivers which was expected.
As for Guinan, I thought Ito knocked it out of the park, though I kept getting very strong Maria Rambeau vibes from her. I do love how they kept Guinan’s I will blow you to kingdom come character trait. Guinan not only believes in firepower, but heavy firepower, no matter the time period.
As always and per our community guidelines, please keep all comments on topic, especially when it comes to current politics and political issues, so as not to derail the conversation. Thanks!
@91/Paul Anderson:
Here is the “spoon head” story from DS9 that you were referring to, as related on the Trek wiki Memory Alpha [“Empok Nor (episode)”]:
@98/Mr. D: “But I don’t think we’ve traveled to before the Y. That implies there’s a split in the timeline. I think Q completely diverted the river.”
I still think the assumption that Q caused the change is a red herring. Q himself complained that Picard was blaming Q for something Picard (or humanity?) was somehow responsible for. And this timeline seems to be having a deleterious effect on Q.
Besides, if the whole thing is just another of Q’s games, what is even the point? If this entire reality is just an artificial set of circumstances he set up to teach Picard another lesson, then that makes it all feel arbitrary and irrelevant, the whole thing a pointless exercise. I can live with one episode of Q sticking Picard in an artificial reality to teach him a lesson, but stretching it out to a whole season would be unsatisfying.
First Picard says that Q doesn’t look well. Then we see Q lose his powers. I’m convinced that the penance Q mentioned in the first episode is his own. We know from the Voyager episode Death Wish that there is precedent for a Q dying. Is this entire timeline switch a way for him to achieve deathbed atonement? And for which of his actions?
@102/DrDredd: Ugh, I hope not. Q is more than 5 billion years old. The probability that the date of his death would occur during the lifespan of the human species, let alone Jean-Luc Picard, is minuscule. It’s comparable to the ludicrous improbability of, say, the Dark Matter Anomaly randomly happening to materialize precisely between Earth and Ni’Var. I’ve already had to put up with one such unlikelihood this season.
@101: I am starting to wonder if we might be seeing a “Day of the Daleks” scenario unfolding. In the Day of the Daleks serial, both the Doctor and the human resistance assume the Daleks were directly responsible for sparking the nuclear war that weakened Earth to the point the Daleks could just roll in and hoist a flag. The human resistance sent someone back with a bomb to kill the man they thought betrayed humanity. The resulting explosion was what sparked the war and let the Daleks conquer Earth.
We could see something similar here. Team Picard, in an effort to save their timeline actually changed it because they misread Q and/or mishandled meeting the Watcher/Supervisor. Q sees the change, loses his temper and yanks Team Picard into the “world of their own making” as punishment. Of course that might suggest the Q we saw in this episode is “younger” from a standpoint of causality than the Q we saw at the beginning of the season.
That’s my theory for now. All errors are my own.
The Federation Temporal Agency mist hate Picard as much as they hate Kirk.