Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[Dobber]

Seto, are any of those series good? I’m not familiar with any Trek novels except Shatners trilogy from the 90’s.

Chris

[TehPW]

57 minutes ago, Dobber said:

Seto, are any of those series good? I’m not familiar with any Trek novels except Shatners trilogy from the 90’s.

Chris

and STO: what is going on with that? Its been years since I stopped playing but STO's storyline isn't cannon as I vaguely recall?

I wouldn't go as far as call JJ Trek a failure but more still borne if anything. JJ Just lost interest because the $$$ he hoped for didn't materialize... and the shitty story telling in part 2, mostly.

[Seto Kaiba]

51 minutes ago, Dobber said:

Seto, are any of those series good? I’m not familiar with any Trek novels except Shatners trilogy from the 90’s.

Chris

Well, there's so much cross-pollination between them that it wouldn't be a stretch to say the TNG, DS9, and VOY relaunches feel like a single series.

IMO, the Enterprise relaunch is pretty strong once you get past the parts about...

Spoiler

... Commander Tucker going undercover as a spy/saboteur in the Romulan Warp 7 program and then for Section 31 to protect the Coalition of Planets and later the Federation.  "Trip Tucker, Secret Agent" is about the most ridiculous premise I think I've ever seen in a Star Trek book... like a James Bond movie if Bond were a stereotypical moron from the American deep south.

The Romulan War duology is excellent, if rather dark, and the whole The Rise of the Federation arc currently in progress has been pretty great as well.

Spoiler

IMO, the Enterprise relaunch really hit its stride once the titular ship was damaged beyond repair and its crew split up to their own new assignments.  You get some pretty good character drama between Archer and Shran as they basically try to shape Starfleet policy, particularly on first contacts and intervening in the affairs of non-aligned worlds.  T'Pol's kind of out of focus after landing her own command.  Malcolm Reed gets a fair amount of development after gaining his own command, and the coping with an illness acquired from overuse of the transporter.  Sato and Mayweather both kind of end up out of focus, and Mayweather really just takes a BEATING.  Several of the new characters are pretty fun, especially the duo who are implied to be James T. Kirk's grandparents.

The series revisits a number of plot points from Enterprise's run, like the political and social consequences of the virus that created the TOS Klingons (and why the TOS Klingons are the dominant party on the Empire's borders), and that creepy damn repair station ends up being the genesis for an entire story arc.

 

The The Next Generation relaunch is definitely much better in its standalone installments than its serialized ones.  I would consider the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy that wrapped up the Borg business to be the overall low point, but there are some pretty fine moments as well.

Spoiler

Picard and Crusher finally tie the knot, so there's that, right?  It gets into some heavy political intrigue at a few points, where the Andorian crisis and the actions of a particularly corrupt Federation President are involved, but a lot of the stories are the episodic sort of stand-alone adventures that feel like they should be proper TNG episodes.  

Just don't get attached to any woman Worf dates... the man's girlfriend fatality rate rivals James Bond's.

 

The Deep Space Nine relaunch has some really excellent moments when it's doing its own thing, but it often gets bogged down in how many members of its cast ended up as figures of religious significance.  Lots of really great high concept sci-fi adventure and astropolitical intrigue occasionally broken up by waxing lyrical about religion.  Like the TV series, some of the best stories are the ones focusing on the alien cast members like Quark or Garak... especially Garak.  

Spoiler

Sisko being revealed to be part-Prophet, the Emissary of the Prophets, etc. but writ large and for other people.  He actually got out of the gig more or less scott free.  Odo has to contend with being one of the few founders left in the Dominion after their god (a planet-sized changeling) gets killed by one of the Prophets other WIPs.  Kira suffers on levels previously reserved for Miles O'Brien, getting promoted to station commander, being excommunicated from the Bajoran religion for refusing to let a book of prophecies by the Bajoran atheist sect be hidden from the public, to being almost killed, to being believed dead for a time, to being sent through time by the Prophets, to becoming a Vedek because every goddamn Bajoran becomes a Vedek at some point it feels like.  Sisko's kid may or may not be the Bajoran messiah.  Some of the new characters, like Commander Vaughn, are pretty awesome.  Ezri's story arc is a mess, though, a really contrived reason for Julian to hook up with someone else for the sake of a Section 31 story.

 

The Voyager relaunch is like pulling teeth.  It's bad.  REALLY bad.  

Spoiler

If you thought O'Brien suffered a lot, holy crap brace yourself because the multiverse seems to have a grudge against anyone and everyone who served on USS Voyager... but especially Janeway.  Janeway... oy... you'd think they had something against her.  Chakotay gets his ass handed to him on the daily as Voyager's new captain, culminating in a breakdown that leads to him becoming a recluse.  Tom and B'Elanna get wrapped up in that Klingon messiah schtick when a Klingon cult decides that they need to be killed.  Harry... is Harry, he's still the designated buttmonkey of the series and is getting beat down even worse now he's got Tuvok's old job.  The Doctor's having mental breakdowns over Seven, Seven's still a Mary Sue who just trades one set of swiss army molecules for another when the Borg are wiped out.  Basically everyone's traumatized 24/7 except, oddly, Reg Barclay... who presumably hit his trauma quota back in TNG and kept the receipt.

 

The worst of the lot is Star Trek: Titan, though.

Spoiler

All aboard the USS White Man's Burden.  What the f*ck were the writers thinking?

Will Riker spends about 1/3 of his time worrying that his command of Starfleet's most species-diverse crew is exactly that... human imperialism.  The second 1/3 of his time is occupied with family drama thanks to his wife being on the same ship as his diplomatic officer, and she's got a nasty case of O'Brien syndrome (a contractual obligaion to suffer dramatically).  That last 1/3 is the actual plot, which largely follows 1 format:  Riker forgets the Prime Directive is a thing, interferes in the affairs of an alien species, destabilizes the culture of said alien species, and then spends the remainder of the book trying to undo that f*ckup.  He was such a bad captain he was kicked upstairs even more velocitously than Kirk was... with Admiral Akaar basically chaining him to a desk for the sake of the rest of the galaxy.  If it weren't for the supporting cast being a real treat (honestly they're wasted on this series and deserve far better), I'd say skip it.  

 

[Seto Kaiba]

47 minutes ago, TehPW said:

and STO: what is going on with that? Its been years since I stopped playing but STO's storyline isn't cannon as I vaguely recall?

It's more or less treated as being its own separate timeline... which is to say, not canon.

They were also more or less treating Bad Reboot's kickoff to Star Trek '09 as a separate timeline along with the relaunch novels.

 

47 minutes ago, TehPW said:

I wouldn't go as far as call JJ Trek a failure but more still borne if anything. JJ Just lost interest because the $$$ he hoped for didn't materialize... and the shitty story telling in part 2, mostly.

Really, I think it's reasonably fair to call the J.J. Abrams movies a failure.  They generated very little licensing - scarcely more than what Star Trek: Discovery managed - and their lackluster performance at the box office meant that the studio was arguably losing money on them internationally.  Most fans didn't like them, and the audience that did pay for tickets didn't stick around.  Is it unfair to declare a project a failure when the investors say "this is a bad investment, I'm out" and bail on it?

[mechaninac]

Agree or disagree, it is a hilariously salty take, based on the past performance of those involved.

Edited July 21, 2019 by mechaninac
To add the disclaimer at the bottom.

[Sildani]

Marina Sirtis confirmed Troi and Riker are in Picard. 

https://twitter.com/Marina_Sirtis/status/1152889561359572992?s=20

[Daedalus]

Man, as funny as Doomcock is, it seems there's no pleasing these guys.  I dunno, i'm going to give them a chance. 

Edited July 21, 2019 by Daedalus

[JB0]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Kind of a slam dunk there for the fans, given that killing Data off back in Nemesis was so wildly unpopular that all three extant Star Trek continuities persisting after the film undid it right away.

In all fairness, NEMESIS undid that right away. The final scene of Nemesis grabs the audience by the ears and screams "B4 IS BECOMING DATA" in their face.

[Seto Kaiba]

28 minutes ago, Daedalus said:

Man, as funny as Doomcock is, it seems there's no pleasing these guys.  I dunno, i'm going to give them a chance. 

Well, yes... but guys look Doomcock wouldn't be funny if they were pleased.  The entertainment value comes from them being such massive curmudgeons.  

As Dr. Bashir would have it: "Nothing makes them happy!  They are dedicated to being unhappy and to spreading that unhappiness wherever they go!  They are the ambassadors of unhappy!"

 

6 minutes ago, JB0 said:

In all fairness, NEMESIS undid that right away. The final scene of Nemesis grabs the audience by the ears and screams "B4 IS BECOMING DATA" in their face.

Well, yeah... there's no way a Star Trek movie was going to kill a main character without setting the stage for a potential Search for Spock-style return in a future film.  They just never closed the loop on it because Nemesis ended up being the last TNG movie and the last proper Star Trek film... so it wasn't until Cold Equations (in the novelverse) or STO's B4 Matrix event that Data got brought back to life YEARS after he "died".

(Insurrection and Nemesis were kind of a big comedown, going from beating a mad doctor and Klingon renegades and then the Borg Queen herself to beating up a dying man as interpreted by Salvador Dali and then Picard losing a fistfight to his own clone wearing a rainbow-oil pleather onesie.  If they'd done another one, it would've been two hours of Picard arguing with a dozy rent-a-cop about validating the parking for his shuttle.)

[sh9000]

 

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If they'd done another one, it would've been two hours of Picard arguing with a dozy rent-a-cop about validating the parking for his shuttle.)

I'd watch it. 

[sh9000]

 

[Dynaman]

12 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

  If they'd done another one, it would've been two hours of Picard arguing with a dozy rent-a-cop about validating the parking for his shuttle.)

All I got is a title but...  "My Dinner with Picard"

[JetJockey]

20 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Give it time... folks are so keyed up to see the return of familiar characters like Jean-Luc Picard, Plenty of Two Seven of Nine, and Data that they've forgotten Star Trek: Picard is developed, produced, written, directed, filmed, and edited by the same Bad Reboot clown college responsible for the Star Trek: Discovery series they so thoroughly loathed.

This is what CBS and Bad Reboot were counting on to sell the series in its first season, or at least its first few episodes.  Trot out familiar characters from parts of Trek the fans don't hate and rely on that borrowed gloss from better shows to keep the Trekkies from noticing any signs of the franchise's Kurtzmanitis infection going septic.

Not a lot of original thought on display, IMO... this wouldn't even be the first time Bad Reboot's bad actors toyed with the notion of un-killing Data.  They did the same in the prequel comic they did to set up the Kelvin-verse, in which Data's copied mind takes over B4's body and he goes on to become captain of the Enterprise-E.  Kind of a slam dunk there for the fans, given that killing Data off back in Nemesis was so wildly unpopular that all three extant Star Trek continuities persisting after the film undid it right away.  I can't say I'm all that psyched for Seven of Nine either.  She had some good episodes in late Voyager, but she was meant mainly to arrest a ratings plummet by being more decorative than other women on the cast and became a bit of a black hole swallowing up plots later on, with a lot of them feeling REALLY forced like her relationship with wooden indian Chakotay.

 

 

While it lasts, I suppose... 

For my part, I'm going to keep my expectations as low as possible in the hopes that I'll be pleasantly surprised for once.

I'd really like to be wrong, and for Star Trek to be good again.

 

 

The Star Trek relaunch novels are one of the three coordinated efforts to keep Star Trek going after Nemesis spun in... the other two being Star Trek Online and the J.J. Abrams reboot trilogy flop.

They're essentially an Expanded Universe line of novels that pick up after the ends of their respective shows ("relaunching" those storylines) and continue forward, managed by a single creative team as a coordinated shared universe development.  There are a few TOS side stories, but the relaunch novel-verse focuses on the relaunched stories of Star Trek: the Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise.

  Reveal hidden contents

Star Trek: Enterprise's relaunch picks up...

  Reveal hidden contents

... pretty much immediately after Trip's "death", which is revealed to have been a coverup for him being sent out as a deep cover infiltrator to sabotage the Romulan warp 7 program in the runup to the Earth-Romulan war.  The series continues in that direction, covering the Romulan War and its conclusion that resulted in the formation of the Neutral Zone, then with the rise of the Federation as it confronts the astropolitical ramifications of a power bloc like that suddenly appearing to unite the previously hostile powers that had dominated the region.  The Orion Syndicate feature pretty heavily in that as antagonists, working to undermine newly-imposed Federation law and order.

Star Trek: the Next Generation's relaunch picks up...

  Reveal hidden contents

... right after Nemesis, getting into the political and strategic fallout from the assassination of the entire Romulan government by Shinzon.  The Romulan Empire has a civil war as factions in its military try to split off to form a new government called the Romulan Republic.  Dr. Soong is revealed to have been Alive All Along and transferred his own mind into an android body the way he did with his ex-wife, he brings Data back to life by rescuing his mind from B4's brain and dumping it in his own body, giving Data all his memories as well as the highest specs of any Soong android to date.  The series then escalates considerably into a final resolution to the Borg alongside the Voyager relaunch in which the Borg collective's origins are revealed (it's all humanity's fault), there is a major Borg invasion of the Federation intended to exterminate rather than assimilate it, and the collective is finally defeated once and for all with all Borg everywhere being liberated by the deletion of the Borg queen.  The Federation's losses embolden its enemies to form a rival alliance called the Typhon Pact, uniting the Romulans, Breen, Gorn, Tholians, Tzenkethi, and Kinshaya into a single (heavily dysfunctional) government.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's relauch picks up...

  Reveal hidden contents

... pretty much right where the show left off, with new staff coming on board to take over for the personnel who had left the station.  Ro Laren becomes a regular as Odo's replacement, Kira takes over command of the station, etc.  It veers off into strange places at times, like revealing the parasites who tried to take over the Federation in TNG season one are just another scandal the Trill government swept under the rug, blowing the lid on the Trill symbiosis scandal, getting heavily into the idea that the Prophets guided other species including the Cardassians and a Bajoran atheist sect who believed the Prophets are just benevolent wormhole aliens.  Bajor eventually joins the Federation, immediately ends up in a huge scandal when a collaborator gets elected to the Federation presidency and turns out to be a total dick.  Sisko comes back after less than nine months.  Deep Space Nine is destroyed and replaced by a Federation-designed station, Sisko becomes captain of a Galaxy-class ship, and they real heavily into a story arc where Andoria secedes from the Federation because the Federation withheld data on advanced genetic engineering that could cure an ongoing fertility crisis on their homeworld.  Bashir goes rogue, manages to destroy Section 31 with the help of Control (whom you might remember as the bad guy from Star Trek: Discovery season two) who is not actually evil.  Cardassia becomes a democracy, etc. etc.

Star Trek: Voyager's relaunch picks up...

  Reveal hidden contents

... with the Voyager crew dealing with the consequences of having missed most of the momentous events in the recent past like the Dominion War, the fallout of future Janeway's having dicked with the timeline, more Borg shenanigans from the get-go.  The Borg launch a new invasion that ends in a massacre worse than Wolf 359, Janeway is assimilated and becomes the new Borg Queen, then is killed.  There's another (final) Borg war after that that ends with the extinction of the Borg, then Starfleet promptly tells Voyager and its crew to f*ck off back to the Delta Quadrant (no really), though this time with a small support fleet where every ship has a quantum slipstream drive.  Janeway is brought back from the dead by Q Junior to stop an anti-Q from ending the universe early and has to deal with coming back from the dead, and from then on is about a 50-50 split between original adventures in the Delta Quadrant TNG-style and revisitng old plots from the TV like the Krenim (who are still dicks), and finding a sort of Delta Quadrant equivalent of the Federation that has some serious values dissonance.

 

 

 

Thanks for that. I didn't know about any of those books. I guess I really checked out on Star Trek. I do agree about Seven of Nine. I never watched all of Voyager. I got into Voyager late right before Seven of Nine showed up. I thought that costume was silly. But I kind of want to watch those early seasons I missed to see how the show started.

 

17 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's more or less treated as being its own separate timeline... which is to say, not canon.

They were also more or less treating Bad Reboot's kickoff to Star Trek '09 as a separate timeline along with the relaunch novels.

 

Really, I think it's reasonably fair to call the J.J. Abrams movies a failure.  They generated very little licensing - scarcely more than what Star Trek: Discovery managed - and their lackluster performance at the box office meant that the studio was arguably losing money on them internationally.  Most fans didn't like them, and the audience that did pay for tickets didn't stick around.  Is it unfair to declare a project a failure when the investors say "this is a bad investment, I'm out" and bail on it?

I still haven't seen the last movie. After the first two reboot movies, I'm not sure I really want to. I think I kind of spoiled a bit of the story a while back because I was curious about Idris Elba's character.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Dynaman said:

All I got is a title but...  "My Dinner with Picard"

Eh, at least the wine'll be top-notch.

 

3 hours ago, JetJockey said:

Thanks for that. I didn't know about any of those books. I guess I really checked out on Star Trek. I do agree about Seven of Nine. I never watched all of Voyager. I got into Voyager late right before Seven of Nine showed up. I thought that costume was silly. But I kind of want to watch those early seasons I missed to see how the show started.

If you go on Memory Beta and search "relaunch novels timeline", you'll get a LONG timeline that shows how they all fit together chronologically... except for the ENT relaunch, which is set like 200 years before all of them.

 

3 hours ago, JetJockey said:

I still haven't seen the last movie. After the first two reboot movies, I'm not sure I really want to. I think I kind of spoiled a bit of the story a while back because I was curious about Idris Elba's character.

You didn't miss much, it's basically Star Trek Nemesis 2.0... literally the same crap about a macguffin weapon that causes people to rapidly decay on a subatomic level (because quarks totally know if they're part of organic matter, right?) being used by a Federation-hating human xenophobe to destroy Earth.

If you like dirtbikes and the Beastie Boys, it might be slightly better than Nemesis.  Otherwise, they're both eminently skippable.

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

You didn't miss much, it's basically Star Trek Nemesis 2.0... literally the same crap about a macguffin weapon that causes people to rapidly decay on a subatomic level (because quarks totally know if they're part of organic matter, right?) being used by a Federation-hating human xenophobe to destroy Earth.

If you like dirtbikes and the Beastie Boys, it might be slightly better than Nemesis.  Otherwise, they're both eminently skippable.

It also has the best Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty interactions of the entire reboot too.  The bad guy was a terrible waste of a great actor though.  

[Chronocidal]

For what it's worth, Beyond felt to me about like a middling quality TOS episode.  While the plot, writing, villain, etc weren't really very good, the characters themselves sold it pretty well, and were fun to watch, which was basically the only thing the Kelvinverse ever seemed to have going for it.

Granted, I think Nemesis is just about one of the lowest points of cinema as a whole, rather than just of Trek, so it's not hard to top it, but I think if Beyond had happened before Into Darkness, it would have done better at the box office.

Edited July 22, 2019 by Chronocidal

[Thom]

Beyond is far better than Nemesis! Yes, there were very similar plot points and villains, but if you look past that you'd probably enjoy it. It's a shame that it suffered because of Into Darkness, as it was worthy of having a good run.

[Dobber]

1 hour ago, Thom said:

Beyond is far better than Nemesis! Yes, there were very similar plot points and villains, but if you look past that you'd probably enjoy it. It's a shame that it suffered because of Into Darkness, as it was worthy of having a good run.

Agreed

[Kanedas Bike]

On 7/21/2019 at 4:13 AM, JB0 said:

I'm less upset than when the rumor was "Captain Picard helms Section 31, leader of a band of extra-legal rogues, cutthroats, and murderers". It no longer defiles one of Trek's most beloved characters and tarnishes him with the same edgy sociopathic brush they've swept across the rest of the franchise. This has taken it from pure revulsion to ... well, apathy. It isn't enough to make me want to watch it, but it is enough that I no longer feel an automatic instinctive hatred.

 

And that brings me to the most beautiful thing about this. No one is forcing me to watch it, and I don't actually have to care. This liberating revelation kept me out of theaters for The Last Jedi* and Ghost in the Shell(the most recent one), and it will likely serve me well here. If it is awful, then ... oh well. Not the first awful Star Trek tale(or even entire series). I can just ignore it and get on with life.

If it is fantastic, people who DID watch it will tell me, and then I'll seek it out.

 

 

*And I really must thank JJ Abrams for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It was a disjointed and unsatisfying mess, and I spent a lot of time contemplating the idea of investing myself in ANOTHER bad trilogy of Star Wars films afterwards. The realization that I didn't actually HAVE to watch The Last Jedi, or any other sequels, prequels, remakes, sidestories, or events... that I wouldn't become some sort of social pariah for not being in the loop on pop culture... it was liberating. I wish I'd been mature enough to accept it after The Phantom Menace, or Transformers: A Micheal Bay Film.

 

On 7/21/2019 at 8:23 AM, Dobber said:

Well said. When people go on and on about how much they hate something, I never understand why they watch it. Opinions are valid and allowed obviously, but when it’s said “then don’t /you don’t have to watch it is said it’s not to be dismissive just helpful really. Trek really has been struggling lately and that’s a shame as it it’s such a good and hopeful franchise, or should be anyway, so I want to be hopeful for this new series as well.

Chris

Very much agreed, apathy, or even just the feeling of "it's okay/not the end of the world" is SO liberating. 

On 7/21/2019 at 8:26 AM, Dobber said:

Feel the fresh air! Lol

 

I still love all (most) of you guys and gals.

On 7/21/2019 at 11:15 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Give it time... folks are so keyed up to see the return of familiar characters like Jean-Luc Picard, Plenty of Two Seven of Nine, and Data that they've forgotten Star Trek: Picard is developed, produced, written, directed, filmed, and edited by the same Bad Reboot clown college responsible for the Star Trek: Discovery series they so thoroughly loathed.

This is what CBS and Bad Reboot were counting on to sell the series in its first season, or at least its first few episodes.  Trot out familiar characters from parts of Trek the fans don't hate and rely on that borrowed gloss from better shows to keep the Trekkies from noticing any signs of the franchise's Kurtzmanitis infection going septic.

Not a lot of original thought on display, IMO... this wouldn't even be the first time Bad Reboot's bad actors toyed with the notion of un-killing Data.  They did the same in the prequel comic they did to set up the Kelvin-verse, in which Data's copied mind takes over B4's body and he goes on to become captain of the Enterprise-E.  Kind of a slam dunk there for the fans, given that killing Data off back in Nemesis was so wildly unpopular that all three extant Star Trek continuities persisting after the film undid it right away.  I can't say I'm all that psyched for Seven of Nine either.  She had some good episodes in late Voyager, but she was meant mainly to arrest a ratings plummet by being more decorative than other women on the cast and became a bit of a black hole swallowing up plots later on, with a lot of them feeling REALLY forced like her relationship with wooden indian Chakotay.

 

 

While it lasts, I suppose... 

For my part, I'm going to keep my expectations as low as possible in the hopes that I'll be pleasantly surprised for once.

I'd really like to be wrong, and for Star Trek to be good again.

 

 

The Star Trek relaunch novels are one of the three coordinated efforts to keep Star Trek going after Nemesis spun in... the other two being Star Trek Online and the J.J. Abrams reboot trilogy flop.

They're essentially an Expanded Universe line of novels that pick up after the ends of their respective shows ("relaunching" those storylines) and continue forward, managed by a single creative team as a coordinated shared universe development.  There are a few TOS side stories, but the relaunch novel-verse focuses on the relaunched stories of Star Trek: the Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise.

  Reveal hidden contents

Star Trek: Enterprise's relaunch picks up...

  Reveal hidden contents

... pretty much immediately after Trip's "death", which is revealed to have been a coverup for him being sent out as a deep cover infiltrator to sabotage the Romulan warp 7 program in the runup to the Earth-Romulan war.  The series continues in that direction, covering the Romulan War and its conclusion that resulted in the formation of the Neutral Zone, then with the rise of the Federation as it confronts the astropolitical ramifications of a power bloc like that suddenly appearing to unite the previously hostile powers that had dominated the region.  The Orion Syndicate feature pretty heavily in that as antagonists, working to undermine newly-imposed Federation law and order.

Star Trek: the Next Generation's relaunch picks up...

  Reveal hidden contents

... right after Nemesis, getting into the political and strategic fallout from the assassination of the entire Romulan government by Shinzon.  The Romulan Empire has a civil war as factions in its military try to split off to form a new government called the Romulan Republic.  Dr. Soong is revealed to have been Alive All Along and transferred his own mind into an android body the way he did with his ex-wife, he brings Data back to life by rescuing his mind from B4's brain and dumping it in his own body, giving Data all his memories as well as the highest specs of any Soong android to date.  The series then escalates considerably into a final resolution to the Borg alongside the Voyager relaunch in which the Borg collective's origins are revealed (it's all humanity's fault), there is a major Borg invasion of the Federation intended to exterminate rather than assimilate it, and the collective is finally defeated once and for all with all Borg everywhere being liberated by the deletion of the Borg queen.  The Federation's losses embolden its enemies to form a rival alliance called the Typhon Pact, uniting the Romulans, Breen, Gorn, Tholians, Tzenkethi, and Kinshaya into a single (heavily dysfunctional) government.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's relauch picks up...

  Reveal hidden contents

... pretty much right where the show left off, with new staff coming on board to take over for the personnel who had left the station.  Ro Laren becomes a regular as Odo's replacement, Kira takes over command of the station, etc.  It veers off into strange places at times, like revealing the parasites who tried to take over the Federation in TNG season one are just another scandal the Trill government swept under the rug, blowing the lid on the Trill symbiosis scandal, getting heavily into the idea that the Prophets guided other species including the Cardassians and a Bajoran atheist sect who believed the Prophets are just benevolent wormhole aliens.  Bajor eventually joins the Federation, immediately ends up in a huge scandal when a collaborator gets elected to the Federation presidency and turns out to be a total dick.  Sisko comes back after less than nine months.  Deep Space Nine is destroyed and replaced by a Federation-designed station, Sisko becomes captain of a Galaxy-class ship, and they real heavily into a story arc where Andoria secedes from the Federation because the Federation withheld data on advanced genetic engineering that could cure an ongoing fertility crisis on their homeworld.  Bashir goes rogue, manages to destroy Section 31 with the help of Control (whom you might remember as the bad guy from Star Trek: Discovery season two) who is not actually evil.  Cardassia becomes a democracy, etc. etc.

Star Trek: Voyager's relaunch picks up...

  Reveal hidden contents

... with the Voyager crew dealing with the consequences of having missed most of the momentous events in the recent past like the Dominion War, the fallout of future Janeway's having dicked with the timeline, more Borg shenanigans from the get-go.  The Borg launch a new invasion that ends in a massacre worse than Wolf 359, Janeway is assimilated and becomes the new Borg Queen, then is killed.  There's another (final) Borg war after that that ends with the extinction of the Borg, then Starfleet promptly tells Voyager and its crew to f*ck off back to the Delta Quadrant (no really), though this time with a small support fleet where every ship has a quantum slipstream drive.  Janeway is brought back from the dead by Q Junior to stop an anti-Q from ending the universe early and has to deal with coming back from the dead, and from then on is about a 50-50 split between original adventures in the Delta Quadrant TNG-style and revisitng old plots from the TV like the Krenim (who are still dicks), and finding a sort of Delta Quadrant equivalent of the Federation that has some serious values dissonance.

 

 

To be honest, I had really low expectations for Picard, mostly because I wasn't at all hyped to watch any of the new Trek series, I caught the first episode of Discovery when it aired on TV but haven't watched, nor have I subscribed to CBS All Access. Not so much because of the negative reviews, but more because there hasn't been enough positive word of mouth to get me to spend the money.

The recent preview for Picard puts me in the category of "color me interested", I'll likely wait to see what the early impressions are, BUT, I'm on the cautiously optimistic side for now.

-b.

 

And sorry for the late reply, had no internet access for a few days. 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Kanedas Bike said:

To be honest, I had really low expectations for Picard, mostly because I wasn't at all hyped to watch any of the new Trek series, I caught the first episode of Discovery when it aired on TV but haven't watched, nor have I subscribed to CBS All Access. Not so much because of the negative reviews, but more because there hasn't been enough positive word of mouth to get me to spend the money.

Star Trek: Discovery's quality aside, CBS All Access on its merits as a service just isn't worth what they're asking per month for the subscription.  I can't speak to the iOS side, but the CBS All Access app for Android and my Smart TV are amateur hour nonsense.  The playback quality's pretty good when it wants to work, but it's really bare-bones.  Autoplay can't be turned off, for instance, so when you hit the end of whatever you were watching it starts playing the first episode of a random show.  Updates were bricking the Smart TV app on a pretty regular basis too.

If they had a catalog of shows worth watching it'd be just frustrating, but if you're only in it for the one show it's just not worth the pain.  Throw Discovery's pretty terrible first season and initially promising but ultimately even worse second season into the mix and it's like paying to be waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay.

 

1 hour ago, Kanedas Bike said:

The recent preview for Picard puts me in the category of "color me interested", I'll likely wait to see what the early impressions are, BUT, I'm on the cautiously optimistic side for now.

Yeah, I'm going to be taking the wait-and-see approach myself.  Though in my case it's going to be because I've seen CBS use this same exact strategy before to promote Star Trek: Discovery's second season.

Star Trek: Discovery promoted season two on the return of a familiar captain from a classic Star Trek show (TOS) and other major returning characters were heavily promoted (Spock, Number One).  It looked like a really promising return to form for two or three episodes and then the bottom fell out.  The returning captain was a toothless caricature of the original depiction and was treated like dirt by the show's original characters (the disrespect was real and shocking from Starfleet), and the others were more or less advertised extras until just before the end.  The plot went from feeling like real classic Star Trek to a disjointed mess like the first season that had a season-breaking plot hole that somehow went unnoticed by the writers to the completely literally-unnecessary conclusion.

So I'm kind of taking the "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" route with Picard.

 

1 hour ago, Kanedas Bike said:

And sorry for the late reply, had no internet access for a few days. 

Seems to be a thing that's happening all over lately.

[JB0]

2 hours ago, Kanedas Bike said:

And sorry for the late reply, had no internet access for a few days. 

A truly harrowing situation. Glad you made it through.

[Kanedas Bike]

19 hours ago, JB0 said:

A truly harrowing situation. Glad you made it through.

YES, it truly was. And thank you  / .

 

@Seto Kaiba, can't argue with any of your logic. And I wasn't aware that the CBS All Access app was such a joke. I'd watch via PlayStation 4, but if it's a pain to use, on top of not having a strong portfolio of content there's no way I'd waste my money or my time.

-b.

[Keith]

I think you can tack it onto Amazon Prime.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Keith said:

I think you can tack it onto Amazon Prime.

AFAIK it's only available on Amazon Prime outside the US... CBS wants to keep it exclusive to their CBS All Access service in the US for the time being, though once it comes out on home video it hits the usual suspects.

[Keith]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

AFAIK it's only available on Amazon Prime outside the US... CBS wants to keep it exclusive to their CBS All Access service in the US for the time being, though once it comes out on home video it hits the usual suspects.

Look under channels, CBS All Access is an add on for the Prime subscription.

[Graham]

I'm actually really excited about Picard after watching the trailer.

Looking forward to seeing Seven of Nine again.  I'm actually watching Voyager at the moment, currently halfway through season 5.

[Dobber]

7 hours ago, Keith said:

Look under channels, CBS All Access is an add on for the Prime subscription.

Yeah you can watch through you Amazon devices, that’s what I did. You still have to pay extra for the channel though. It’s not included with your prime subscription in the US. 

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Dobber said:

Yeah you can watch through you Amazon devices, that’s what I did. You still have to pay extra for the channel though. It’s not included with your prime subscription in the US. 

Ja... as I said, you can only get it through Amazon's service directly without paying extra outside of the US.

You have to be a CBS All Access subscriber, one way or another, to watch the show in the US... which is not worth it, IMO, given how bad the service is.

[TangledThorns]

I hope Q makes a return!

 

[Chronocidal]

That scene is probably my favorite bit of him in the entirety of Trek.  ¡Olé!  

[Dynaman]

Nothing tops "Worf:  EAT any good books lately?"

 

[peter]

Q was one of my favorite characters 

[Dobber]

Loved that scene too. Looking back, I can’t help but think Riker was putting on a show for Picard but if he was alone he’d be more than happy to oblige. 

Chris

[JB0]

7 hours ago, Dobber said:

Loved that scene too. Looking back, I can’t help but think Riker was putting on a show for Picard but if he was alone he’d be more than happy to oblige. 

Chris

Nah. Riker's thinking "I had better last week. Q owes me more than second-rate."