Seto Kaiba

If you're looking for a deeper reason than "crappy writing" you are looking in vain. ... that is quite astonishingly sexist. Shame on you. Well she has spent the last twenty years living rough on a beat-up, secondhand, junker of a starship she got under the table from Starfleet Medical on the edges of Federation space and occasionally having to content with Federation and non-Federation law enforcement trying to arrest her criminal son. It's not surprising she'd have become quite practiced with starship-based and man-portable weapons. (It does raise some awkward questions about her adherence to the Hippocratic Oath though... something something do no harm.) (And last we saw our boy Miles O'Brien he was headed to take up a teaching job at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco... odds are he's the one she called to straighten out Starfleet's transporter mess. It'd certainly explain why he's celebrated as the greatest Starfleet hero of all time in the far future.)

That one was already a posthumous ship before it ever appeared though. Only if it comes out on Tuesdays.

Yorktown was the first/original name proposed for what eventually became TOS's USS Enterprise. Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise lists the Enterprise-A's original name as USS Ti-Ho (NCC-1798), a newly-built Constitution-class ship constructed for the transwarp program that didn't pan out and renamed before ever formally being launched. The FASA RPG lists it as USS Atlantis (NCC-1786). I did a bit of research, and found that AMT/Ertl's model kit did claim the Enterprise-A was the USS Yorktown (NCC-1717), but that wouldn't tally with it being a new-built ship since the Yorktown was one of the original twelve. Kind of a dick move to introduce a new Enterprise and then

In all fairness, that's never stopped them before. The USS Defiant we saw in the fleet museum was originally the USS Sao Paulo. Several different explanations of the Enterprise-A's origin indicate she was also a recently built but rechristened ship and cite her original name as USS Ti-Ho or USS Atlantis. There have been a few mentions of the various Enterprises being slated to take other names before the previous one bit the dust and being formally commissioned under a different name than intended.

Well, Picard has drunkenly stumbled to its long-overdue and largely undignified conclusion. I know I won't miss it. It's not the complete dumpster fire I was expecting from Picard... but it's still an ugly mess full of weak and occasionally nonsensical writing that relies entirely too much on blatant fanservice. It reminds me of nothing so much as The Rise of Skywalker, with that uncomfortable, stilted, written-by-committee screenplay penned to accommodate bringing back a legacy antagonist because the writers couldn't think of another way to tie off the bloody stump of their story. All in all, the Borg's brief Villain Renaissance ended so quickly you'd question whether it ever truly began. They've received their most humiliating defeat yet and everything that's happened except the deaths has been conveniently undone in the space of less than a year. Even the stakes of the final confrontation turn out to be BS, with the writers forgetting that Earth is just the Federation capital, not the entire Federation the same way they forgot the Romulan Empire is more than just Romulus and the Klingon Empire's more than just Qo'nos. For a series finale, "The Last Generation" feels both rushed and oddly insubstantial. There's really not a lot here. There's a form letter confrontation with the Borg that repeats a lot of the same plot beats from last season, and then it's just over and the status quo ante is immediately restored. It's better than the previous two season finales, but that's damned by faint praise at best. If I were to sum it up in one word, it'd be "bland". It's not offensively bad, like seasons one and two... it's just... not laudably good either. It is a thing which exists. That doesn't track with what's in the previous seasons of this very show... if such convenient drones existed, Starfleet would not be staffing its shipyards with massive numbers of Soong-type androids from Maddox's lab.

Ah, yes... I made those same points in a couple earlier posts. TNG "The Wounded" and DSC "Terra Firma" confirm that prefix codes are very much still a thing on Starfleet ships even into the late 32nd century, so the possibility definitely exists for the Borg to simply run the Enterprise-D's prefix codes and tap into her systems remotely. It's been discussed a few times in connection with Wrath of Khan that the prefix code's override can itself be overridden, but Khan's lack of familiarity with the Reliant prevented him from doing so (because he wasn't even looking at the right console). Whether the writers even remember that this is a thing that can happen or not... well... it's going to be one elephant among many in the room for "The Last Generation". At the very least, it seems likely the Enterprise-D won't suffer the same kind of failures the original Enterprise did in Star Trek III because it's actually DESIGNED to be automated so heavily. As with the auto plant example, the case here is rather overstated. Yes, robots are used in specific roles to assist in manufacturing and the amount of work they do (in terms of person-hour equivalence) is substantial... but they're only actually used in a couple of narrow roles. The exact same ones as in auto plants, coincidentally... structural welding, priming, and painting. The structural members to be welded are placed and aligned by humans, and all of the actual fittings and equipment that make the ship function are put in by humans. ... you're missing a rather more obvious explanation. Starfleet may have lost 39 ships at the Battle of Wolf 359, but they lost zero shipyards and training facilities. Based on the content of various dedication plaques throughout the years, Starfleet in the 23rd/24th century has at least nineteen shipyards and a bunch of different campuses for Starfleet Academy. Ships lost at Wolf 359 were replaced by ships that were already under construction and new ships that were developed afterwards based on lessons learned, while the 11,000 officers and enlisted who perished in the battle were replaced by promoting existing officers and graduating recruits from the academy. I'm warming to a theme here, but there is (again) a simpler explanation right out of the tech manual you're referencing: Transporter and replicator spam. All Geordi would really have to work on directly would be the frame, the outer hull, and key systems. The bits that aren't (and can't be) replicated like the warp drive. Internal spaces like the bridge, the crew quarters etc. are modular by design and can be removed and exchanged for replacements, upgrades, or mission specific options by transporter and they're built using industrial replicators. Even the wrecked bridge is just a module that could be popped off and replaced... which is how the franchise has explained changes in set design between seasons since the 90's. After repairing the spaceframe and patching the hull, most of what Geordi would have to do is just beaming wrecked modules out and beaming in new or salvaged replacements then connecting them up to the EPS and ODN networks. There are some systems and materials that can't be replicated, but a lot of those are a part of essential systems like the warp drive that were noted to be salvage parts. Oh, I hope not. Leah Brahms was a really creepy moment for Geordi... developing a crush on a hologram of a married woman and then having her find it and confront him about it. They got together in the novelverse, but it felt really creepy and unnatural there too.

I'd watch that... as long as it was prime!Georgiou and not Emperor Georgiou. I've got no interest in The Continuing Adventures of Girl Space Hitler: Secret Agent. Prime!Georgiou was the only character in Discovery's first season who acted like she belonged to the Starfleet and Star Trek we know and love.

Which, come to think of it, is really out of place in the last episode. Starfleet's become Borg drones, the Federation's at the brink of doom, and they're cracking jokes about the carpet and missing their old chairs? (It's especially weird seeing Geordi banter with Not!Data, considering his daughters JUST got assimilated.) Someone who cared about their career would not want that job. Someone who's just running out the clock before retiring, however... Of course, given what he went through at Utopia Planetia, a posting to the arse end of nowhere managing a little-visited museum would probably be some blessed peace of mind. Especally if it came with little-to-no actual responsibility. That's a huge and unfounded leap though. The Exo-Comps were so capable and multifunctional because they were prototypes built so smart they became sentient. That's NOT comparable to a service robot, and we saw that Starfleet's kind of cooled on the idea of AI helpers after the Soong-type androids went berserk and burned Mars. Even then, they apparently needed something as complex as a Soong-type android to be practical assisting living workers at the shipyards. It's also a point... people overestimate how much automation influences things like manufacturing. You're assuming that robots do a lot of the heavy lifting... but there's no evidence that's ever been the case. The Discovery had some robots capable of doing minor work like hull painting, but we're never shown a robot capable of assisting in actual starship construction. They were using Soong-type androids for that prior to them going berserk, but even then the staff we see is predominantly flesh and blood. Every shipyard scene we've seen in previous shows also had the work being done principally if not exclusively by living engineers. Considering these are some of Starfleet's greatest living heroes and some of the most principled officers to ever don the uniform... something a bit more helpful to the galaxy and quite a lot less depressing than what we got. If not for the writers obsession with misery, you'd expect these characters to have gone on to be very important people in Federation society as many of them did in "All Good Things". Picard has presented the late 24th and early 25th century Federation as a pretty dark and miserable place and given how pivotal they've been in protecting the Federation's founding principles in the past it's not hard to get the feeling it probably wouldn't be that way (or at least not that bad) if they hadn't just given up the way they did. That's the single most out-of-character thing in the entire show... Jean-Luc Picard gave up and let his principled stand fall to bureaucratic indifference. But really, having all your childhood heroes be depressed senior citizens who've given up is kinda depressing in and of itself. (It's especially bad for Worf, who no matter what seems to always get a Happy Ending Override in every Trek universe. Whatever happened to him being Ambassador to Qo'nos and leading a happy life with his son as part of the House of Martok? I suppose we should probably count our lucky stars that Raffi hasn't started dating Worf, since Worf's girlfriends die violently with alarming frequency in the novelverse they've started cribbing from.) If you're gonna build your TNG reunion on DS9, might as well go all-in. Which doesn't really make sense, given that there are MANY ships in the museum that shouldn't be equipped with the Fleet Formation system due to their age... but the Enterprise-D is the only one he mentions because that's the only thing the showrunners could think of. (They do imply the Enterprise-E could be used, had something not happened to it that Worf denies responsibility for.)

To be fair, I have the same feeling sometimes when you start talking about how cheerful they are... 😅 I'm not saying there's a problem with it, per se... but his assignment IS a dead-end posting which is generally not a sign of good times. ... my good chum, have you ever been inside a modern auto plant? I've spent an awful lot of time in them, and I have to say you're assuming something that's untrue. Even today, almost none of the assembly work is actually done by robots. Using Ford DTP as an example, there are only really three jobs done by robots: spot welding body panels together after humans fit and align them, spray painting the undercoated body, and installation of the windshield. Everything else is done by humans... who are very much NOT drones, and will likely take exception to being referred to as such. (If you're ever in the Detroit area, DTP is actually open to the public via the Henry Ford Museum... just be sure to visit the tour on a weekday so you can see the plant in actual operation.) The Exocomps were a new and untried technology when they were introduced, and seem to have never come into common use after they were determined to be prone to develop sentience. Geordi's probe was a custom job. The Discovery repair drones are an anachronism, but even then we only get a good look at the 32nd century versions while the 23rd century ones are only shown repainting the hull. Warships would naturally be inclined to have more weaponry not just better weaponry. Weapons technology and related defensive technologies are naturally going to improve and be upgraded to keep pace with the current standard. Or possibly because, unlike the others, he had an outlet to work through his personal demons called the Enterprise-D... where everyone else has either been dead, on the run, or just hiding out somewhere feeling sorry for themselves. When? The Enterprise-D first faced a Borg cube that wasn't even trying and was massively outclassed in "Q Who". They only survived because Picard threw in the towel and told Q what Q wanted to hear about being in over his head. Then in "The Best of Both Worlds" they were still outclassed and unable to deal meaningful damage to Locutus's cube (which led to the Wolf 359 massacre) and only managed to survive through the use of Confusion-Fu to abduct Locutus and exploit a weakness in the Borg hive mind's software that, by accident, resulted in the cube self-destructing. It was actually the most heavily armed and most defensible starship Starfleet had at the time, and to the Borg it didn't even rate as a threat... which was its saving grace. And that was to the Borg three decades ago. Why would they trust their lives to a ship that's slapped together out of salvage over one that was never crashed into a planet and needs a lot less resources to run? There's familiarity and then there's practicality. The Enterprise-D is the familiar choice, the Defiant is the practical one. You missed an important detail. The Defiant did fight the recently-modernized Lakota to a standstill, but the Defiant was explicitly holding back and the Lakota was explicitly not. The Lakota's captain and crew had been told by Admiral Leyton that the Defiant had been commandeered by changelings and that they should destroy it at all costs. The Defiant's crew knew the Lakota's crew had been lied to, and were actively trying to minimize the damage to a friendly ship that'd been deceived into attacking them.

We have literally three seasons of rock-bottom rated Discovery episodes to show why this is a bad idea... but Kurtzman's ilk do not learn from their mistakes.

Not a clue... there's virtually no information about any of Macross Delta's mechanical designs outside of the VF-31 and Sv-262.

... by all accounts, that's basically what Picard considered himself to have done in the entire first season. Season three retroactively made season one the same for Riker and Troi. Beverly spent twenty years apparently living in fear for her and her son's lives. This is well above and beyond the bounds of normal trauma and the regrets of aging. It's more or less self-evident from his circumstances. Geordi La Forge is an active-duty Commodore. An officer of his rank would ordinarily be commanding a starship or starbase, serving as superintendant of a shipyard, occupying an administrative position in Starfleet Command, or joining the faculty of Starfleet Academy. Instead, Geordi's occupying a position that would ordinarily be held by a civilian historian: curator of Starfleet's version of a naval museum. Its out of the way, it's completely disconnected from the day-to-day operations of the fleet, and it doesn't even appear to have any security contingent of its own. It is, by any rational standard, a do-nothing job... which likely explains how Geordi had the free time to restore the Enterprise-D. Lower Decks actually offered an explanation of the flag officer career path in its attempt to explain why Starfleet Command seems to produce so many Insane Admirals. The flag officers only really have two options open to them: you either resign yourself to obscurity and irrelevance in some minor administrative role until you retire or you try to make your presence felt with some major contribution to the fleet. If you succeed in the latter case, you get promoted to a more important and relevant position. If you fail, you're the latest "Insane Admiral" to face a court martial. Geordi took the safe route and landed a quiet, out-of-the-way administrative posting to wait out his remaining service with as little actual responsibility as he could get away with. (Kind of the ideal last gig, really, since he should have the bare minimum number of direct reports to worry about and can possibly keep the same job in a civilian capacity after retiring from Starfleet.) That's quite a leap, though... from "drones can move cargo" to "drones can build starships". I'm just picking nits there, lol... normally when a decommissioned ship is acquired to become a museum ship, you try to keep it in the condition it was in when it was retired from fleet service (restoration work aside). Yeah, but with few exceptions these ships aren't really carrying more weaponry than their predecessors. Quantum torpedoes seem to be the only new weapons development that's stuck around, while everything else is just newer, more powerful versions of the same phasers, photon torpedoes, and shields that Federation starships have been working with for 200+ years. In a few places (e.g. the Titan-A) it seems to have actually gone backwards with ships having fixed phaser banks instead of the more flexible phaser arrays.

Given how it's described, it seems very unlikely that the Borg DNA is capable of assimilating a person biologically/anatomically too... it just seems to have connected everyone to the Borg hive mind. The cube probably needs to beam over several drones to get the ball rolling on fully assimilating all the mind-controlled victims. That said, given the sheer mind-boggling consistency with which the Borg Queen is left holding the Idiot Ball (or Idiot Sphere?) whenever she puts in an appearance I'd expect the show's rushed happy ending will involve her having conveniently forgotten to actually do this basic bit of due diligence and relied entirely on the Borg DNA to keep Starfleet crews under her control. I'm not talking about just within the context of the show, where they're at least happy to renew acquaintence with each other... the backstories of all of them between the events of the Star Trek: Nemesis movie and the Picard series make it clear NOBODY has had a good time. Picard resigned in a huff and spent over a decade leading an aimless life doing an awful job of running the family vineyard, Riker and Troi became recluses and still (as in "during the show") haven't properly processed their son's death, Beverly spent twenty years living in fear of assassination in a rickety old ship she borrowed from Starfleet Medical, Geordi narrowly escaped death at Utopia Planetia and has since been resigned to working in a virtue sinecure at the fleet museum secretly rebuilding the Enterprise-D for some reason, Data's died three separate times now and the fourth Data is actually just Lore under the influence of Data's memories and without a head full of busted wiring, Worf had already been through more trauma than the rest of them before he lost the Enterprise-E... it's pretty ugly. The show's pretty unambiguous in declaring that these characters have not been leading happy lives between Nemesis and the present day. Where to start? Geordi is a survivor of the Utopia Planetia massacre, and would have had a front row seat to seeing an army of Soong-type androids destroy the shipyards where he worked, killing thousands and rendering the planet uninhabitable. His current assignment is a sinecure... a do-nothing posting as the curator of a museum. He spends his free time restoring the starship he was unwittingly responsible for the destruction of in secret. That doesn't strike me as a particularly healthy chain of events. (Not to mention he was already not in the best of spirits at the outset since his best friend died.) The process of loading torpedoes is... nobody mentions drones in connection with the restoration work on the ship itself. That's the point though... it wasn't restored to the state it was in before the ship's destruction. He fitted a much older bridge module. Eh... partially true? The new classes of starship that Starfleet developed after the Wolf 359 massacre were definitely engineered with a greater emphasis on defensive ability, sure. I'm not sure that's enough to say they're more warship-like. They're still engineered for space exploration and other peaceful operations first and foremost. That, and the later Dominion War, simply forced Starfleet to abandon the complacency they'd fallen into after making peace with the Klingons and striking an uneasy border agreement with the Romulans in the late 23rd and early 24th centuries. The only thing they've really done to make them more warship-like is stop sending civilians into harm's way... though even that seems to only apply to the ships operating in a defense role or deep space exploration role (given the alleged presence of children and schools on the Cerritos in Lower Decks).

... Prospera Mercury and Rusty Venture have a LOT in common, morally speaking. Because I am cursed to be a completionist by nature. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to stop watching/reading a story before the end. I'd rather see the story through to the end even if it's bad so I can fairly critique the completed work than stop halfway. There are very few shows that have been so awful, so odiously unwatchable, that I could not bring myself to continue watching to the end. The only two that leap directly to mind are Stratos4 and Strike Witches. The former because it turned out to be a borderline Excuse Plot for a lot of yuri fanservice, and the latter because I found the series so blatantly skeevy that I honestly started to wonder if further viewing would end in Chris Hanson busting through my wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man. G-Witch has not yet reached the point where it's so bad that I have to drop the series in utter disgust. It's bad, but it's still potentially recoverable. The main problem is that the series doesn't really feel like it's invested in its own premise. We're 14 episodes in and there is STILL little (if any) indication of an overarching plot. The story has so little in terms of buildup or foreshadowing that many plot developments come out of nowhere and are then promptly forgotten or swept under the rug within an episode or two. All the problems are resolved easily by outside circumstances so the protagonist feels almost uninvolved in the series she's starring in. Part I had a scene that's beautifully illustrative of the fact where Miorine's arguing with Shaddiq over changes to the rules for startup companies that were made specifically to undermine her, and Suletta - the one person whose actual fate is on the line for that - literally doesn't even have a seat at the table. It's certainly not helped by the fact that the heavily advertised yuri romance between Suletta and Miorine is nonexistent and the actual relationship between the two is frequently exploitative and downright toxic with Miorine treating Suletta like a dogsbody, useful idiot, or meatshield. Even the animation has started taking a dive as of the most recent episode. All in all, it gives me a vibe similar to the movie version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince... that feeling of a story so disjointed between its key elements that it feels like two completely separate stories being intercut with each other for no clear reason. G-Witch is trying to have both a (badly composed) drama about severe economic inequality and the socioeconomic consequences of same and an almost Yu-Gi-Oh! GX-esque story about the children of the world's rich and famous attending Space Hogwarts to learn about Mobile Suits and engage in fantastic duels over matters of honor, pride, and love because Mobile Suits are apparently the one thing driving the world economy.

It does. It's a shame, because it's going to achieve the opposite effect. Perhaps more than any other alien species introduced in TNG, the Borg were truly alien. Their culture, their way of thinking, and their priorities were utterly alien and antithecal to the Federation's... yet they were not depicted as evil. "The Best of Both Worlds" took it to an interesting and unique place by having the Borg (via Locutus) express confusion that anyone wouldn't want to be assimilated because they saw assimilation into the collective as elevating primitive cultures to a higher quality of life. Instead of being just The Corruption and having a singleminded desire to consume, the Borg were almost an anti-Federation that took the idea of unity to its logical extreme and still believed they were actively making your life better by integrating your species into its interstellar community. First Contact was the true start of the Borg's villain decay, when they went from a sophisticated interstellar culture that had merged biology and technology to the point that it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began to being grotesque cyber-zombies literally rotting around their implants trying to infect everyone with Borg-ness. The repeated defeats at the hands of a lone, lightly-armed science vessel only accelerated that decay. Then Picard revealed the Borg Queen just wants a BFF, and now we're going to see what's remaining of the Borg taken down by a half dozen senior citizens tooling around in midlife crisis ship. Isn't that kind of what just happened, more or less? IMO, making the assimilation process faster makes it a lot less scary. In TNG, Picard was subjected to hours of surgical mutilation and it's strongly implied by "The Best of Both Worlds" that he was conscious and aware the entire time. From First Contact onward, you get what amounts to a shot (or zombie bite) and within a minute or so you've already suffered a Grand Theft Me and a lot of the hardware is grown by the nanoprobes. It eliminates a lot of the horror aspect of it, since all the really do after is potentially amputate an arm and install the black bodysuit full of LEDs. It'd be watchable, for one. Even in its more cringeworthy moments, TNG never lost the sense of fun and adventure that is totally absent from grimdark NuTrek shows. ... my good chum, you literally grabbed four screenshots that all show starships with the lights dimmed at alert status. Kind of the point of my earlier joke, actually... that the NuTrek ships are all so dark they look like they're PERPETUALLY at alert status. (Never mind that the Sutherland is literally unfinished, and the Enterprise-C is suffering from a lot of battle damage.) You forgot the big one... DEATH IS IRRELEVANT. The Borg actually SAY that one in BoBW.

Did you forget about the Borg cube? The one the Borg Queen rode in on? The one they're going to have to confront to get Jack back? Mind you, that may no longer strictly be true depending on how long those ships have been left alone in the care of the Borg. As we saw in First Contact, it doesn't take much for one Borg drone to start assimilating an entire ship and its crew. It wouldn't take much for the Borg to start properly assimilating all of those ships and their crews considering all the surviving crew are already drones minus the implants. They would just need to beam a couple drones over to each ship and within a couple hours they'd have to worry about actual Borg drones capable of conventional assimilations and armed with Borg weaponry and shields. Not to mention the Borg might have started upgrading those ships with proper Borg hardware. If DS9 is any indication, she's a hell of a lot tougher than Galaxy-class tough and on more than one occasion was shown to fight on an even or superior footing against far larger ships. I don't expect the Enterprise-D to square up with that armada for the far simpler reason that she would get absolutely bodied by even one of those new, more advanced, far more powerful starships. The Enterprise-D was a heavyweight in her day, but her day was three decades ago and not only has she not had any upgrades she's literally been rebuilt with surplus and salvaged parts and still has visible damage from the crash landing that ended her the first time. It's pretty openly shown in the series so I'm not sure why you have trouble seeing it. Putting aside for a moment that this is quite literally Jean-Luc Picard's Unresolved Emotional Baggage: the Series, Will Riker and Deanna Troi quit Starfleet and ran away to live as recluses on a frontier planet because they couldn't cope with the loss of their son, with this season revealing that they still haven't processed the trauma because Deanna's used her empathic powers to prevent her husband from processing that trauma. Data is a twice dead software revenant who is now technically actually Lore with Data's memories, a literal walking corpse that was suffering from a violent form of multiple personality disorder and is joking about wanting to die quickly. Geordi was not only estranged from part of the crew and part of his own biological family, he's been using his position as a museum curator to privately rebuild a ship that was destroyed because of him... a hobby which does not speak well of his mental state. Worf at some point lost the Enterprise-E and is now a loner working in intelligence... considering the implication that he was the ship's captain as he was in the novels, that likely means he was unable to secure another command. Beverly Crusher got pregnant by her boyfriend and ran away into deep space to avoid her child's father for 20 years, living for her job and raising a son who is a criminal wanted by a laundry list of Federation and non-Federation governments for crimes like gun running and the transportation and sale of controlled substances. Raffi is a nominaly clean former junkie who was cashiered out of the service for being such a massive failure that the only thing keeping her in was Jean-Luc Picard, and her family wants nothing to do with her. Rios was traumatized by the murder-suicide his mentor and Captain committed and became a stereotypical heavy drinking troubled space trucker before the crew literally abandoned him in the past. Elnor was a Romulan orphan with abandonment issues. Seven of Nine was a hard-drinking space vigilante on a quest to avenge the murder of her surrogate son at the hands of a trusted friend and possible former lover before joining Starfleet to become the executive officer to a captain who actively resents her existence. Jack Crusher, for his part, has all kinds of issues thanks to having the Borg collective in his head and having seen his own biological father say that Starfleet is the only family he needs... and that's not getting into all the crap he got up to that led to a substantial number of outstanding warrants for his arrest. It seems pretty evident that nobody here is happy. They're smiling and joking, but it's over things like being snubbed by their juniors who don't have the proper reverence for them and as a way to cope with the incredible stress of the nightmare scenario they're currently in. The reason I hypothesized that Geordi might be motivated by guilt in part or in full in his restoration of the Enterprise-D is that there's really no other rational explanation for it. We know that Starfleet had to remove the wreckage of the saucer section from Veridian III for prime directive reasons, but the ship was explicitly a write-off. She was space garbage and not worth the time or effort to try to repair for Starfleet itself. That the wreck ended up in the museum itself is questionable. That, instead of being preserved in its final state, he spent 20 years repairing it on the sly and even went so far as to appropriate the drive section from a different starship in order to fully restore it raises an awful lot of awkward questions. If this were posterity project sanctioned by Starfleet it would not have been a secret. Certainly it would not have been a secret kept from the ship's former captain on prior visits to the museum. For the record, I didn't even suggest that that was the cause of any kind of trouble for his family. Just that he clearly would have to take a fair amount of time away from his family in order to work on that ship clandestinely the way he did. Odds are the bridge is probably not the original bridge either in in-story terms. It was probably replaced by another bridge module taken either from a Galaxy-class ship that was sent to the breakers or from surplus. It's just an interesting note that, for some reason, the bridge was not restored to the state that it was in before the ship was destroyed. Considering what these ships are supposed to be for, you'd expect them to all still look like bright, open, pleasant places to be. These are not warships. These are diplomatic and exploratory ships that also happen to double as security force. The kicker of course is that we see other ships from the 2380s and beyond that still look like this. That are still bright and open and comfortable places to be. Just not in these shows. They're so obsessed with being gritty and dark that you almost miss those massive JJ Abrams lens flares. At least that was illumination.

Wow. This week's episode is an absolute goddamn disaster.

... and yet, ironically, still wrong. They recreated the bridge from partway through TNG, not the bridge the ship actually had when she went down on Veridian III. Yet, for all that and despite how dated it looks, this is far and away the nicest-looking set NuTrek has produced so far. Everything else - from the Discovery to La Sirena to the Titan-A - is so dark and so grey and miserably depressing-looking because the sets are so under-lit. It's a bit garish, but this looks like it would actually be a nice place to work while every other ship in the fleet seems to have the dimmer switch stuck at "Red Alert" the entire time. One has to wonder if Picard's delight at seeing the carpet again is him actually missing the carpet, or just missing a light level higher than "half-dead flashlight". (Dear Starfleet, when Captain Picard said there were only four lights you need to understand he was being tortured by the Cardassians not giving interior design advice.)

I'm not sure that argument tracks. Sure, the Defiant didn't solo the Borg cube in First Contact... but then, it was never meant to. It was meant to fight as part of a fleet, and as a small escort warship aggressively min-maxed for combat it was meant to punch way above its weight class with disproportionately heavy armament and tank hits that would cripple or even destroy Starfleet's larger and less specialized ships so that it could hang in a fight as long as possible instead of being one-shotted. That's exactly what we see in First Contact, and in its prior appearnaces in the DS9 series. The Defiant was part of the fleet that intercepted the Borg cube and it hung on in that fight all the way to Earth, tanking hits from weapons that we'd previously seen one-shot Starfleet ships at Wolf 359 like a champ. So much so that she's noted to still be spaceworthy and repairable after the fight ends. The Defiant occasionally was shown struggling against Jem'Hadar attack fighters, but mainly because there are just so bloody many of them. By the same token, let's also not forget the many times the Galaxy-class was depicted as a one-hit-point wonder in TNG or that newer classes like the Sovereign-class were developed specifically to address the Galaxy-class's deficiencies in a defensive role. It's probably even worse now, since the Enterprise-D is 30+ years out of date technologically and literally built from reclaimed garbage and war surplus parts. ... actually can we muse for a moment on how completely F'ed up it is that Geordi spent twenty years painstakingly reconstructing the Enterprise-D. If it were anyone else there would not be Unfortunate Implications, but as it's Geordi in a series that's depicted every member of the TNG cast as broken and miserable... is reconstructing the Enterprise-D for the Fleet Museum Geordi's way to "atone" for having inadvertantly caused the ship's destruction in Generations? How much time did Geordi take away from his family over TWENTY YEARS to painstakingly restore the totalled saucer section, replace the stardrive section, and repair the whole mess using salvage and war surplus parts? The crew are basically flying Geordi's midlife crisis project car into battle with the Borg. In all fairness, the series IS titled "Star Trek: Picard". It is still pretty damned awkward that EVERYTHING has to revolve around Jean-Luc Picard, his incredibly skewed and self-centered perspective, and his post-retirement struggles for relevance. (Like in the first season where he makes a ludicrously inaccurate analogy comparing the Romulan resettlement effort to Verdun and gets angry because everyone else refuses to subscribe to his personal morality) *points to Jack Crusher, Picard's bastard son and this season's plot-critical MacGuffin* They... they kinda did. It's so ill-considered that it not only goes against how transporters work and how Borg assimilation works, it literally forgets that there was nothing special about Picard being able to hear the collective after his implants were removed. Seven of Nine did it frankly all the freaking time in Voyager, as did several other one-episode characters. The only ones who didn't were Janeway, Torres, and Tuvok, who had some magical anti-assimilation drug they got from the Doctor when they went undercover on a Borg ship in "Unimatrix Zero". (The previous explanation was simply that it's more or less impossible to remove 100% of the Borg's nano-hardware from the body, so rescued former drones still have some small residual link to the collective at short ranges.) Moreover, why does this DNA work on literally everyone regardless of species? (And how did permanent changes in Picard's DNA get missed when Starfleet routinely performs genetic scans of its personnel as part of physicals?) Only a couple months! They couldn't have started before stealing Picard's remains from the Daystrom black site. We thought they'd done exactly that last season, when Dr. Jurati became the new Borg Queen and the Borg applied for Federation membership.

Against any other foe this might be a pretty good argument. Where it falls down a bit is that draining a ship's shields in a matter of seconds using their tractor beams or some other weapon is pretty much the Borg collective's signature move. Once the shields are down you're working with the strength of the outer hull. The Defiant's reinforced hull and ablative armor make it much more resilient without shields. And if you're looking to sneak about, the smaller ship is kind of the common sense choice. If it can also punch way the hell above its weight class the way the Defiant can, so much the better. Considering the previous season depicted an alternate timeline where Starfleet had wiped the Borg out entirely and were planning a public execution for the Borg Queen... the Borg Queen may be entering the find out phase of **** around and find out. Starfleet is about to have an awful lot of extremely pissed off people with a bone to pick with the Borg collective. (Assuming that Admiral Janeway and Captain Janeway blowing up that transwarp hub in the late 2370s doesn't count as the start of that phase.)

This is certainly true... though flying and fighting on at least a basic level can be done by the computer. With expert hands on the main systems, their main problem is going to be battle damage taking down automations and manual repairs to critical systems. The Changelings weren't a TNG antagonist either, but here we are. I'm pretty sure the Defiant can take more punishment since she was built as a warship and was uparmored and upgunned to fight the Borg and then the Dominion while the D was built as a deep space explorer. She's also a much smaller target. Seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager for starters... The only difference we've seen has been the Fleet Formation system that has twice now allowed the Borg to seize control of entire fleets. It's been established since Wrath of Khan that Starfleet ships are heavily networked and that it's possible to remotely override systems by connecting to those networks from the outside. (The explanation given for how prefix codes work is that the consoles aren't just linked to the computer using fiber optics, they're also connected through the use of some short-range subspace communication systems that allow them to communicate with the computer faster than light. This subspace communication is what the external computer taps into by authenticating on the network using the same encryption key that the ship's own consoles use. In that way, they can send commands to the other ship's systems as if they were operating a console directly aboard that ship. The inherent weaknesses of this system were also a major plot point in the Star Trek Enterprise relaunch novel series with the Romulans using a computer virus to infiltrate the systems of Earth's ships and take the ships over remotely.) Exactly what this fleet formation system does is not entirely clear, it just seems to mean that all the computers of all the ships in the fleet are linked together constantly instead of on-demand. In practice, that's a terrible idea and whoever came up with it is kind of a dimwit. Then again I am a network engineer so I have strong opinions on that particular topic colored by my professional experience. Yeah, that seems pretty likely. Probably going to undermine the whole point they were going for regarding Shaw's refusal to use anything but her legal name.

That presumes there is something up there to reach. I think the writing in this last episode demonstrates rather succinctly that they're groping about in a void. It's easy to get swept up in cheap nostalgia - like the characters themselves are doing - but it's a fast-fading high that's quickly replaced with the realization that we're still watching a version of Star Trek so senselessly bleak that even the characters themselves are indulging in escapist reminiscing about the "better days" when they were younger. (Never mind that the writers had to bend over backwards and engage in more moon logic than any previous Star Trek story for these characters to be in any way relevant to galactic goings-on.) That actually gets a pass. It was established way back in the TNG Season 1 writers materials that the Enterprise-D was so heavily computerized and so advanced that it's theoretically possible for one person to operate the entire ship in at least a basic capacity. This premise was used in a few different episodes including TNG "11001001" and VOY "Message in a Bottle", as well as a Star Trek board game. Living crew can just do the job with greater flexibility and precision than a wholly-automated starship, and the crew are needed for things like maintenance and repair. There are a bunch of other problems with the whole idea of dusting off the Enterprise-D: The Enterprise-D isn't even the best option available in the Fleet Museum. They have access to a newer, smaller, faster, more defensible, dedicated anti-Borg warship which can operate far more flexibly with far fewer crew in the USS Defiant. That Worf never points this out is honestly a bit odd, since she was HIS command for several years. Geordi is the curator of the Fleet Museum. Who in the nine hells received a requisition for photon (and possibly quantum or even transphasic) torpedoes from a non-combat, non-fleet posting and was just like "Yeah, that sounds legit." Come to that, who approved the Fleet Museum's requisitions for enough deuterium and antideuterium to power a Galaxy-class ship? Why is any ship in the Fleet Museum outfitted with live weaponry? These are DISPLAY pieces. You'd think they'd at least have disconnected the phaser arrays and stripped any classified technology before putting the ships on display. The Enterprise-D really isn't any less networked than the ships that the Borg took over. All any of the assimilated ships has to do is run her prefix codes and seize control of her computers remotely and it's game over. I've got a feeling the writers copout for that is going to be that only the area immediately around Earth was affected, and that Starfleet in the other ~150+ systems and innumerable space stations and planetside installations were unaffected. If that were the case, they've maybe lost a few hundred senior officers... not decimation of the ranks but still problematic with the fleet around Earth losing a lot of experienced officers. There's a much bigger problem in that thousands and thousands of junior officers will have had to endure the trauma that comes with assimilation, not just mentally but very likely physically too by the time the old farts get back to save the day.

By Jove! Truly my roguish mischief knows no restraint or penalty! The only reason it came to mind at all is that that's one of the few details that just keeps coming back. Almost every time cloning has come up as a topic (for sentient beings), there is mention of a gene sequence degradation that is a product of the cloning process that can easily out someone as a clone and that keeps someone from being cloned over and over again forever. I have the same question. Jurati merged with an alternate timeline's Borg Queen after that timeline's Borg Collective was wiped out and came back to her original universe where the Borg Queen was dead and took over that Borg Collective to ally with the Federation as a new, benevolent Borg. What sofa cushion was the original Borg Queen hiding under all this time? Especially one deep enough to fool the other version of herself in the alternate universe who had multi-dimensional awareness. Yeah, all in all changing antagonists with just two episodes to go is... problematic... for the writing. Especially since the new antagonist they chose was largely declawed by Star Trek: Voyager and has had no prior involvement with the antagonist they went with for the first eight episodes.

At this point, I don't think there's any non-bullshit way for the writers to salvage this one. The is a literal museum piece that is at least 30 years out of date compared to the rest of Starfleet. As it was intended for display and nothing more, it would be quite odd for the ship to be fueled, never mind equipped with live weaponry like photon torpedoes. It lacks the advanced weapons and defensive systems developed to fight the Borg that manifested in the ships of the Dominion War era and beyond. It's designed for a crew of a thousand, and it's being operated by seven senior citizens and a middle aged ex-Borg drone. For their part, I can't see a way out of this that doesn't involve some never-before-seen bullshit or an incredibly weak attempt to sweep this all under the rug.

And there it is... the lurching, cadaverous wretch called Star Trek: Picard violently crap itself and died. Next week, emergency services arrives to tag 'em and bag 'em. We're not just back to the same trash-tier writing that has been Picard's stock in trade for almost its entire run, the writers were apparently so desperate for some way to put a bow on this turd and hope we wouldn't notice the stench that they forgot the existence of the entire previous season. Mind you, the entire previous season was pretty forgettable even by the standards of NuTrek, but still... this is 1/3 of the total runtime of the Picard series they apparently forgot about! This turdburger of a series literally cannot be retconned out fast enough for my taste. What a goddamn mess. This might actually be worse than Discovery's first season. As per their usual idiom, this season has amassed quite the body count. The series as a whole has killed off more legacy characters than any other by an enormous margin: The entire Romulan Star Empire Hugh Bruce Maddox Data's recovered consciousness Jean-Luc Picard The Borg Queen of the Confederacy timeline All Borg Queens everywhere in the multiverse (via destiny) Agnes Jurati Cristobel Rios (via time travel) Q Ro Laren Alton Soong Data's recovered consciousness (again) Lore's recovered consciousness Lal's recovered consciousness Alton Soong's recovered consciousness and now... I'd be OK with that explanation had Star Trek not established on multiple prior occasions that repeatedly cloning the same individual leads to fatal genetic degradation in a lot shorter timeframe than what we've seen for the identical Soong family history.