Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[Seto Kaiba]

1 minute ago, Chronocidal said:

See.. can we just abandon any attempt at a serious plot, and turn Discovery into the Star Trek version of Tag and Bink?  I'd actually pay to watch that.

Isn't that basically what Lower Decks is shooting for when it's not trying desperately to be Rick and Morty?

[Chewie]

I got super sidetracked work, didn't mean to let that fall off. Wasn't much left to say except I am a pretty casual Trek fan, so perhaps that is why I enjoy the newer stuff, and I may have been a bit holier than I meant to be. 

[Dobber]

7 hours ago, Chewie said:

I got super sidetracked work, didn't mean to let that fall off. Wasn't much left to say except I am a pretty casual Trek fan, so perhaps that is why I enjoy the newer stuff, and I may have been a bit holier than I meant to be. 

It’s all good Chewie, appreciate it.  Differing opinions are always welcome. 

Chris

[Keith]

I sat down this week & watched through the season 1 blu-ray set (still refuse to bother with CBS All Access), and honestly I have no idea where all the rage in this topic comes from. This show fit perfectly as a TNG epilogue.

Seeing the Federation in the same kind of corrupt apathy as the U.N. Spacy is hardly a surprise. I can't even count how many episodes + movies combined through the franchise history revolved around upper brass conflicting with the ideals they were supposed to be upholding. When you stack that with the late TNG/DS9 conflicts (the Borg, Dominion, Cardassian Wars etc, not to mention the darkening state of things from First Contact straight through Nemesis & subsequent heavy losses, it's pretty easy to see the Federation going the way of Zeta's Titanss

[tekering]

1 hour ago, Keith said:

I have no idea where all the rage in this topic comes from.

 

Well, if none of our comments were enlightening, perhaps you'd find die-hard Trek fans Mike and Rich more illuminating:

 

[renegadeleader1]

Nevermind long time Trek fans, I'm pissed the lazy hack writers ripped off the first Mass Effect game's plot right down to using a million year old beacon to summon a giant space robo tentacle monster that will wipe out all life in the galaxy.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Keith said:

Seeing the Federation in the same kind of corrupt apathy as the U.N. Spacy is hardly a surprise. I can't even count how many episodes + movies combined through the franchise history revolved around upper brass conflicting with the ideals they were supposed to be upholding.

To be fair, while Star Trek does use that trope a fair bit its actual degree of usage is almost as oversold among fans as the "redshirts are doomed to die" meme.

The actual number of cases of flag officers deliberately acting contrary to Federation law/ideals is pretty low.  Seven if you count future!Janeway, who retrocausally doesn't exist... which was her entire plan.  (The so-called "insane admirals" who didn't make the below list were omitted due to acting under alien influence, diagnosed mental illness, or simple incompetence.)

Spoiler

• Fleet Admiral Cartwright - who conspired with General Chang's faction to keep Federation-Klingon hostilities going.
• Vice Admiral Kennelly - who was manipulated into assisting the Cardassians in an attempt to wipe out a Bajoran terrorist cell via a false flag attack on a Federation colony.
• Rear Admiral Pressman - conspired to cover up illegal cloaking device research in violation of the Treaty of Algeron.
• Admiral Leyton - conspired to launch a military coup out of paranoia, believing changelings had infiltrated the Federation at every level.
• Admiral William Ross - collaborated with Section 31 to get a Federation-friendly Romulan official promoted to the highest level of Romulan government.
• Admiral Janeway - breaks the everloving hell out of the Temporal Prime Directive.
• Admiral Dougherty - secured permission to relocate the Ba'ku under false pretenses.

Where Picard differs from those previous examples is in the fact that those previous antagonistic flag officers were always presented in a way that made it clear that what they were doing would be considered completely unacceptable by the rest of Starfleet, by the Federation Council, and by the general populace.  They were always presented as Bad Guys who were brought to justice by the ideal-upholding Starfleet rank and file or at least killed by the injustice they'd perpetrated directly or indirectly.  Only William Ross walked away with his rank and his freedom, though he was only an accessory to the crime not its architect.  The best example of someone "defending" the Federation without upholding its ideals is Director Sloan of Section 31, who is undone by the two most idealistic members of Deep Space Nine's crew and kills himself in a bid to "protect them from themselves".

The attitude we see from Starfleet in Star Trek: Picard is very much against the grain of what you'd expect from Star Trek.

 

 

1 hour ago, Keith said:

When you stack that with the late TNG/DS9 conflicts (the Borg, Dominion, Cardassian Wars etc, not to mention the darkening state of things from First Contact straight through Nemesis & subsequent heavy losses, it's pretty easy to see the Federation going the way of Zeta's Titanss

Eh... I don't know about that.

I mean, Deep Space Nine did A LOT to emphasize that Starfleet and the Federation were NOT going to sacrifice or compromise their ideals in the name of victory over the Dominion and the protagonists were clearly shown to abhor the unlawful activities of Section 31.  First Contact was pretty dark, but that was Picard up against his personal nemesis and a very personal set of psychological issues in a very confined space... and the Borg turned the lights out too.  Insurrection made it really clear that the Federation Council had been kept in the dark about the real nature of Dougherty's plan and that heads would roll when they found out.  Nemesis had the Federation jump at the chance to open friendly talks with the new head of the Romulan government (even if it was a trap), and ended with a relatively positive note with the Romulan military thanking the Enterprise crew for their help against Shinzon and sending over shuttles with additional medical personnel and supplies to assist in triage.  Voyager ended with the implication that the two Janeways had destroyed the Borg collective or at least crippled it beyond repair, freeing billions of drones from the hive mind's control and destroyed the transwarp network.

Some dark and depressing things happen, but even the TNG movies generally reaffirm that Starfleet and the Federation are committed 100% to their high-minded ideals when the dust settled in 2379 with the Borg comprehensively defeated, Shinzon thwarted, the Dominion War over, and so on and so forth.

Picard - like most new Trek - had to do some pretty drastic and jarringly off-base things to make its darker, more depressing and dystopian story work.  Retcons abounded, and no small number of plot holes were opened.  They couldn't even make it work with the previously-established prime timeline plot that set up the failed soft reboot trilogy, and needed to retcon the cause and circumstances of Romulus's destruction (opening dozens more plot holes along the way).  Consequently, this dark, defeatist vision of the Federation kinda comes out of nowhere for most fans.  It comes off as excessively dark even compared to the rather action-heavy Relaunch Novelverse.

[Dynaman]

In the real world things change and we accept it.  In Star Trek, over decades, things change and it is absolutely impossible for that to happen.

Edited October 18, 2020 by Dynaman

[Chewie]

12 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

They couldn't even make it work with the previously-established prime timeline plot that set up the failed soft reboot trilogy, and needed to retcon the cause and circumstances of Romulus's destruction (opening dozens more plot holes along the way).  

What did they retcon about it?

I am out of the loop. Is it not still accepted that some Romulan tomfoolery led to the supernova?

[pengbuzz]

7 hours ago, Dynaman said:

In the real world things change and we accept it.  In Star Trek, over decades, things change and it is absolutely impossible for that to happen.

...

Edited October 19, 2020 by pengbuzz
Seito Kaiba's explanation is far better.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

In the real world things change and we accept it.  In Star Trek, over decades, things change and it is absolutely impossible for that to happen.

In the real world, stable societies are very slow to change for better or for worse.

In pre-Abrams Star Trek, the United Federation of Planets was a very stable post-scarcity society.  Altruism had become second nature to people who grew up in a civilizaton where everyone was treated with dignity and respect and everyone's needs were met.  Everyone was fed, clothed, and housed.  Everyone had unrestricted access to education, to medical care, and to entertainment.  Everyone was able to contribute to society or even voluntarily abstain from doing so without restraint or penalty.  

Over two centuries of social progress don't suddenly come undone overnight even in a comparatively unstable society like our modern one, never mind an advanced civilizaton like the Federation's.  Racism doesn't just suddenly become OK again in a society where it's been unacceptable for centuries.  Substance abuse doesn't just suddenly become a thing again in a society that abhors it but treats it properly as a mental health issue instead of a crime and had long since invented non-habit forming, non-harmful alcohol substitutes that'd become the standard.

 

1 hour ago, Chewie said:

What did they retcon about it?

I am out of the loop. Is it not still accepted that some Romulan tomfoolery led to the supernova?

Almost everything.

• The cause of the supernova was changed from a Tal Shiar screwup to unknown.
• The star that went supernova was changed from the remote Hobus system to Romulus's own star.
• The supernova event itself was changed from a sudden and unexpected event to something with enough lead time for a mass evacuation to be planned and carried out.
• The supernova explosion was changed from a galaxy-threatening, physics-defying event to a normal supernova that just destroyed the Romulan system.
• The Federation's role went from not providing any aid until it was too late to immediately constructing the biggest rescue armada ever constructed and carrying out a mass evacuation and resettlement of Romulus's populace until the evacuation fleet's ongoing construction was sabotaged by a secret organization inside the Tal Shiar.
• Data went from Captain of the Enterprise-E during the events of the supernova after being resurrected in B-4's body to being permanently dead and entirely uninvolved.

The only aspects of it that didn't change were the bizarre insistence that destroying Romulus was the same as destroying the Romulan Empire even though they're an interstellar civilization on par with the Federation in every prior TV series, and Spock having disappeared while on a mission to save Romulus (kicking off the Kelvin timeline, though Spock's chosen method would have been just as deadly for Romulus as the supernova now that it was just a normal supernova).

All in all, they managed to write around the problems with J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek movie in a way that was detrimental to both stories.

Edited October 18, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[Dynaman]

Yup, yup.  our difference of opinion (and despite the wall of text that is all it is) is noted.

 

EDIT - knock, knock.  The Weimar republic is Happy to know that things will change very slowly over the next decade or two...

Edited October 19, 2020 by Dynaman

[Seto Kaiba]

38 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Yup, yup.  our difference of opinion (and despite the wall of text that is all it is) is noted.

Uh-huh.  Sure.  

 

Quote

EDIT - knock, knock.  The Weimar republic is Happy to know that things will change very slowly over the next decade or two...

...
...
...

You... um... weren't a very good history student, were you?  The Weimar Republic was about as far from stable as it was possible to get.  It's like trying to compare a building made out of concrete to one made out of cake.

Edited October 19, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[Chewie]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

snip quote thing and stuff

I had no idea. I went to the wiki earlier, and it might've been the wrong one, but none of that was mentioned. 

That is pretty trashy. 

[Seto Kaiba]

5 minutes ago, Chewie said:

I had no idea. I went to the wiki earlier, and it might've been the wrong one, but none of that was mentioned. 

Hm... which Wiki did you use?  Memory Alpha is, AFAIK, more or less the go-to for Star Trek official setting materials.  Memory Beta's good for the non-canon expanded universe stuff like novels, comics, etc. though it can be confusing to read since it doesn't separate the different takes on things into different articles.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Romulan_sun

 

5 minutes ago, Chewie said:

That is pretty trashy. 

It's definitely not a great bit of writing... but the smartarse fan would note it's still not the worst writing Trek has ever had.  That honor still debatably belongs to either "Code of Honor", "Threshold", "11:59", or Star Trek V.

It does open up some rather unpleasant plot holes in Picard and in Star Trek '09 though.

The three biggest plot holes are kind of intertwined...

• Why did Nero insist that the Federation "did nothing, and allowed [his] people to burn while their planet broke in half" after being transported to the Kelvin timeline, when Jean-Luc Picard successfully orchestrated the construction of a rescue fleet of unprecedented scale and the evacuation of countless Romulans to planets like Vashti?
• Why did the Romulan Star Empire even need the Federation's help with the evacuation if the supernova only threatened one star system?  
• Why did losing only one star system, even if it was the capital, cause the entire Romulan Star Empire to collapse?

The Abrams/Kurtzman-era Trek writers seem to rather consistently forget that antagonists like the Romulans and Klingons are every bit the interstellar achievers that the Federation is, and aren't limited to one homeworld.  Discovery's first season rather perplexingly asserts that destroying Qo'noS would wipe out almost the entire Klingon species, and Picard's makes the loss of Romulus out to be enough to collapse the empire and reduce the remaining Romulans to near-powerless refugees.

[Mommar]

42 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Abrams/Kurtzman-era Trek writers seem to rather consistently forget that antagonists like the Romulans and Klingons are every bit the interstellar achievers that the Federation is, and aren't limited to one homeworld.  Discovery's first season rather perplexingly asserts that destroying Qo'noS would wipe out almost the entire Klingon species, and Picard's makes the loss of Romulus out to be enough to collapse the empire and reduce the remaining Romulans to near-powerless refugees.

It’s because they don’t know or care about the property.

[slide]

3 hours ago, Mommar said:

It’s because they don’t know or care about the property.

It's not only a lack of knowledge regarding Star Trek, it's a complete lack of thought.

 

@Seto Kaiba nailed it: this is all JJ Abrams fallout

[Keith]

Wait, Data as captain of the Enterprise E? Have you guys been mad about novel events being ignored this whole time?

[Seto Kaiba]

13 minutes ago, Keith said:

Wait, Data as captain of the Enterprise E? Have you guys been mad about novel events being ignored this whole time?

Well, no.

First, I can't honestly recall a single instance of having seen a fan complain about that.

Second, that wasn't from the novels.  That was from Star Trek: Countdown.  A (lamentably bad) four-issue limited comic that written as a prequel/tie-in to the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie.  It was written to do all the backstory exposition the movie didn't do... like the details of Romulus's destruction, Nero's circumstances, how a civilian mining ship ended up covered in Borg tech, where the Narada and its crew were during the film's timeskip, etc..

Spoiler

Data's resurrection in the Star Trek relaunch novelverse is quite different, but not exactly what you'd call "better". 

Spoiler

Dr. Noonian Soong - who escaped death by transferring his consciousness into a Soong-type android - transfers Data's memories from B4's brain into his own so Data inherits his creator's super-advanced Soong-type body and then goes off the grid with the revived Lal and one of the Mudd-type androids for various reasons and ends up doing such lame things as working as a fry cook in a diner before getting roped into the operation to destroy Control and Section 31... the plot Discovery's season 2 ripped off.

 

 

[Keith]

So in otherwordd, there aren't many "real" retcons at all. Aside from the Romulans having an ancient technophobia, which I'm ok with.

[tekering]

16 minutes ago, Keith said:

So in otherwordd, there aren't many "real" retcons at all.

Sure, if you discount how they retconned shuttle design, holographic technology, and starship control mechanisms back to 22nd century levels. 

 

[Dynaman]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Uh-huh.  Sure.  

 

...
...
...

You... um... weren't a very good history student, were you?  The Weimar Republic was about as far from stable as it was possible to get.  It's like trying to compare a building made out of concrete to one made out of cake.

So even a historical precedent is not acceptable.  Then again I figured that would be the case.

[Mommar]

10 hours ago, slide said:

It's not only a lack of knowledge regarding Star Trek, it's a complete lack of thought.

I'm going to disagree.  They're thinking.  The thought is that Star Trek is a recognizable brand they can leverage to extract money and put out whatever convoluted ideas they have without actually needing any sort of real creative talent to create a property.

[pengbuzz]

10 hours ago, Dynaman said:

So even a historical precedent is not acceptable.  Then again I figured that would be the case.

Were you to present a correct one, it might have. But you picked an unstable regime that was patched after the Kaiser's defeat in WWI. That's akin to recommending using protomatter to build a table and chairs...

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, Keith said:

So in otherwordd, there aren't many "real" retcons at all. Aside from the Romulans having an ancient technophobia, which I'm ok with.

Eh... the new Trek showrunners seem to disagree that there aren't many "real" retcons given the amount of time and effort spent explaining/justifying them in live segments, interviews, etc. 

(In all fairness, while Star Trek does not generally consider comics to be canon they made an exception for Countdown because it was done specifically to promote the movie and its lore was corroborated by creator interviews.)

 

10 hours ago, tekering said:

Sure, if you discount how they retconned shuttle design, holographic technology, and starship control mechanisms back to 22nd century levels. 

To be fair, it's not like there isn't a small solar system's worth of precedent for Starfleet keeping century-plus old ship classes in continuous service with regular upgrades.

The Miranda-class and Excelsior-classes that were seen so often in the Dominion War were, respectively, at least 111 and 93 years old at the time the Dominion War ended in 2378.  The tugs - semi-officially called Helios-class - being only marginally older than the Miranda-class (at least 121 years) isn't that unbelievable IMO.  The other tug class we saw in shots of Mars, the Wallenberg-class, didn't appear in Discovery and might be new or at least newer.

(Having old, decommissioned Starfleet shuttles be repurposed for civilian commuter use isn't all that hard to believe either.)

 

10 hours ago, Dynaman said:

So even a historical precedent is not acceptable.  Then again I figured that would be the case.

If you'd cited an actual stable society, it would have been fine.

Weimar Germany was a trashfire for the entirety of its short life... marked by the succession crisis after Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and just kind of decided it was a republic, the creation of a national assembly and a new constitution, the hyperinflation of its currency, the burden of war reparations, two restructurings of its national debt, abandonment of territorial claims, the Great Depression, and violence from far-right political extremists.  THAT'S NOT STABLE.

 

4 hours ago, Mommar said:

I'm going to disagree.  They're thinking.  The thought is that Star Trek is a recognizable brand they can leverage to extract money and put out whatever convoluted ideas they have without actually needing any sort of real creative talent to create a property.

J.J. Abrams' goal was to make Star Trek more like Star Wars in the hopes of increasing its mass market appeal so he could make the jump to Star Wars proper... so you could say it was willful stupidity.

[pengbuzz]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

J.J. Abrams' goal was to make Star Trek more like Star Wars in the hopes of increasing its mass market appeal so he could make the jump to Star Wars proper... so you could say it was willful stupidity.

And made a mess out of both in the process. If someone is going to make a movie, they need to at least act like they care about the source material . JJ did so in neither franchise.

Edited October 19, 2020 by pengbuzz

[Chewie]

On 10/18/2020 at 6:27 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Hm... which Wiki did you use?  Memory Alpha is, AFAIK, more or less the go-to for Star Trek official setting materials.  Memory Beta's good for the non-canon expanded universe stuff like novels, comics, etc. though it can be confusing to read since it doesn't separate the different takes on things into different articles.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Romulan_sun

I was on the Romulus page on Memory Alpha, misread(reversed) your first reply about Hobus and the sun. We're good. Thanks!

[Kanedas Bike]

Honestly with franchises that are as long in the tooth as Star Trek and Star Wars you're bound to run into issues like this. Inconsistency in story from show to show, movie to movie and medium to medium (film to novels to comics to games). 

I'm sure someone can keep me hones on this point but I can't think of any series that has kept everything air tight across decades of storytelling. 

I say that not to excuse the issues that have been articulated here, but to me the less egregious inconsistencies are almost to be expected. 

-b.

[JB0]

I just want to point out that, regardless of the actual nature of his resurrection, the idea that Data is dead-dead for reals flies in the face of the final scenes of Nemesis, which strongly imply Data's ALREADY starting to reawaken in B4's body(despite that not making sense because of how primitive B4 is).

And I'm pretty sure he was the cast member chosen to die in Nemesis precisely BECAUSE it was easy to justify resurrecting him in the next movie. A movie which obviously didn't happen, because Nemesis was a dumpster fire and I'd be happy with future Trek just ignoring it entirely.

[tekering]

6 hours ago, JB0 said:

he was the cast member chosen to die in Nemesis precisely BECAUSE it was easy to justify resurrecting him in the next movie.

Oh, absolutely.  It was even more obvious than the casket-lands-intact-on-the-genesis-planet ending.  

6 hours ago, JB0 said:

Nemesis was a dumpster fire and I'd be happy with future Trek just ignoring it entirely.

I'd rather Picard was ignored, personally.  Third-rate Trek is still Trek, but Picard... commits even greater sins. 

[Seto Kaiba]

15 hours ago, Kanedas Bike said:

Honestly with franchises that are as long in the tooth as Star Trek and Star Wars you're bound to run into issues like this. Inconsistency in story from show to show, movie to movie and medium to medium (film to novels to comics to games). 

I'm sure someone can keep me hones on this point but I can't think of any series that has kept everything air tight across decades of storytelling. 

Quite true.  IMO, Star Trek had/has a pretty sensible containment strategy in considering licensee-created "expanded universe" materials non-canon and having a single creative team running the show (literally) for much of the franchise's life.

Not an airtight strategy by any means, but one that shielded the franchise from the kind of issues that its spiritual sibling Star Wars encountered with its pseudo-canon expanded universe.

 

8 hours ago, JB0 said:

I just want to point out that, regardless of the actual nature of his resurrection, the idea that Data is dead-dead for reals flies in the face of the final scenes of Nemesis, which strongly imply Data's ALREADY starting to reawaken in B4's body(despite that not making sense because of how primitive B4 is).

And I'm pretty sure he was the cast member chosen to die in Nemesis precisely BECAUSE it was easy to justify resurrecting him in the next movie. A movie which obviously didn't happen, because Nemesis was a dumpster fire and I'd be happy with future Trek just ignoring it entirely.

IIRC, killing off Data was something Brent Spiner wrote into Nemesis because he felt he was aging out of the role of the theoretically immortal and unaging Commander Data.  Even today's VFX tech wasn't enough to convincingly de-age him back to even where he was when Nemesis was filmed.

(Copying his mind into B4 was a way to bring him back later if he changed his mind.)

Bringing Data back just to kill him again was a dick move on Picard's part.  Killing off Picard and bringing him back to life as an android with artificially-implanted memories and emotions?  That was a Philip K. Dick move.

 

2 hours ago, tekering said:

I'd rather Picard was ignored, personally.  Third-rate Trek is still Trek, but Picard... commits even greater sins. 

A lot of fans seem to feel that way about it.  Most of its sins could've been forgiven if only the show hadn't been so damn determined to drag Starfleet Saint Jean-Luc Picard's name through the mud.

 

[Thom]

At the time, the thought of Data coming back was a good avenue to leave open. Personally, I liked Nemesis, at least far better than Insurrection. Shinzon was a good villain with a great back story that just really failed with the standard 'destroy Earth' syndrome. As for B4 becoming the new Data, if they had followed that up in another movie then it would have worked out. But many years later now, I see it Picard smiling while B4 sings as proof to him that some bit of Data still lived on.

...at least until they took B4 apart and stuck him in a box...

[pengbuzz]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Bringing Data back just to kill him again was a dick move on Picard's part.  Killing off Picard and bringing him back to life as an android with artificially-implanted memories and emotions?  That was a Philip K. Dick move

So basically: what's to prevent them from creating an army of Picards using copies of the memories and a slew of pre-built bodies. Just do a PXE-type mass install and you're good to go...

[JB0]

8 hours ago, tekering said:

I'd rather Picard was ignored, personally.  Third-rate Trek is still Trek, but Picard... commits even greater sins. 

We can ignore multiple things. I'm cool with ignoring Threshold and Spock's Brain too, while we're cleaning up.

[Seto Kaiba]

32 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

So basically: what's to prevent them from creating an army of Picards using copies of the memories and a slew of pre-built bodies. Just do a PXE-type mass install and you're good to go...

Fear of them collapsing into each other to form some kind of singularity of extremely insincere misplaced regret?  Or concern that they might drown in a tidal wave of crocodile tears.

Maybe Soong can build one with a bit of the original Picard's backbone?