Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[TangledThorns]

OK, makes sense and I think Google understood this early on when they ditched creating content and went for live streaming with YoutubeTV instead.

[David Hingtgen]

I'm 3 episodes in, and are they really just not going to mention at all that Dr Jurati murdered her mentor last season?  Everyone on the Stargazer was just cool with her hanging out on the bridge?

[Seto Kaiba]

14 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

OK, makes sense and I think Google understood this early on when they ditched creating content and went for live streaming with YoutubeTV instead.

YouTube hasn't completely abandoned YouTube Originals... it just massively scaled back its ambitions there in favor of its much more profitable digital library streaming service, since they have enough clout to ensure they can offer products from competing networks and studios in a single marketplace at reasonable prices.

It's kind of unfortunate that CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount decided to make Star Trek the flagship series of CBS All Access/Paramount+.  Ultimately, it means that they'll have to fly the Star Trek franchise into the ground before they'll admit to themselves that a proprietary streaming service was probably a mistake.

 

2 minutes ago, David Hingtgen said:

I'm 3 episodes in, and are they really just not going to mention at all that Dr Jurati murdered her mentor last season?  Everyone on the Stargazer was just cool with her hanging out on the bridge?

They did... it was back in "The Star Gazer".

Dr. Jurati mentions that she was cleared of a murder charge in relation to the death of her ex-boyfriend Dr. Bruce Maddox when she's trying to shoo away a man who's attempting to flirt with her by explaining her relationships don't last long and end badly.  From her description, charges were dropped because she was suffering deliberately and maliciously-induced psychosis from her mind meld with the Romulan agent operating as "Commodore Oh".  Essentially, she was easily forgiven because she was brainwashed and crazy.

 

 

All in all, I definitely feel like Picard is out of ideas and is desperately trying to sail onwards by sheer force of in-jokes, references, and contrived coincidence.  Discovery already did the Mirror Universe thing to death TWICE, once in season one and once in season three, and it wasn't any fun on either occasion.  The TOS and DS9 Mirror Universe episodes were fun because they weren't taking themselves seriously.  They were an excuse for the cast to really ham it up like the villains from the kind of old school sci-fi serials that the likes of Tom Paris found so amusing.  Enterprise, Discovery, and now Picard miss the point of them entirely by taking the subject matter completely seriously.  Yeah, actually living in such an unpleasant universe would be awful but the audience doesn't want to see that... they were a chance to get some cheap laughs out of the cast being simultaneously aghast at the state of affairs in the Dimension of Stupid Evil and leave no piece of scenery unchewed playing the locals.  Enterprise, and more prominently Discovery, deemphasized the bit about Stupid and emphasized the bit about Evil, which just made it an exercise in misery for the audience that failed to escape the fact that for Discovery it was an attempt to get Burnham out of the role of Villain Protagonist.

Picard's sojourn into an even worse Mirror Universe where humanity is a successful xenophobic evil empire is just agonizing to watch because it's not even trying to make sense anymore.  It's increasingly obvious it's an ill-considered stunt.  This really hits a glaring point with the return of the punk guy from Star Trek IV.  Why does he act like he remembers being assaulted by Spock when, in this timeline, there would not have been a trip back in time to recover whales and Spock would not have been on a Confederation ship in the first place?

[pengbuzz]

13 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Picard's sojourn into an even worse Mirror Universe where humanity is a successful xenophobic evil empire is just agonizing to watch because it's not even trying to make sense anymore.  It's increasingly obvious it's an ill-considered stunt.  This really hits a glaring point with the return of the punk guy from Star Trek IV.  Why does he act like he remembers being assaulted by Spock when, in this timeline, there would not have been a trip back in time to recover whales and Spock would not have been on a Confederation ship in the first place?

You have GOT to be kidding me.....

[David Hingtgen]

Oh, I guess we were supposed to pay close attention to her rapid-fire turn-down-the-guy-at-the-bar spiel, because it quickly explained how she got away with murder. 🙄

[Seto Kaiba]

17 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

You have GOT to be kidding me.....

I wish.  Yeah, they found and brought back punk-rock-on-a-bus guy from Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home for a bit part in episode 2x04.

His appearance doesn't make any sense for the reasons I explained, but then he's one of a bunch of cases of that in this series... and unfortunately this episode also undermines the idea that 2024 is where the timeline diverged because Guinan is clearly upset by having experienced centuries of humanity at its worst in this episode, meaning sh*t went off the rails MUCH earlier than this supposed 2024 flashpoint.

I'm really not sure what's worse, the terrible out-of-place nod to Star Trek IV, Guinan trying to draw a connection to "Assignment: Earth", or the fact that...

Spoiler

"The Watcher" appears to be Laris for some reason... or someone who looks exactly like Laris, played by the same actress.

They could afford to recast Guinan after bringing Whoopi back for an episode but not find someone new to play "The Watcher"?

 

2 minutes ago, David Hingtgen said:

Oh, I guess we were supposed to pay close attention to her rapid-fire turn-down-the-guy-at-the-bar spiel, because it quickly explained how she got away with murder. 🙄

Yup.

Were you honestly expecting a member of Star Trek: Picard's dysfunction junction to accept the consequences of their actions?  All of them have backstories that involve blaming others for their problems, and that clearly isn't going to stop anytime soon.

[pengbuzz]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I wish.  Yeah, they found and brought back punk-rock-on-a-bus guy from Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home for a bit part in episode 2x04.

His appearance doesn't make any sense for the reasons I explained, but then he's one of a bunch of cases of that in this series... and unfortunately this episode also undermines the idea that 2024 is where the timeline diverged because Guinan is clearly upset by having experienced centuries of humanity at its worst in this episode, meaning sh*t went off the rails MUCH earlier than this supposed 2024 flashpoint.

I'm really not sure what's worse, the terrible out-of-place nod to Star Trek IV, Guinan trying to draw a connection to "Assignment: Earth", or the fact that...

  Hide contents

"The Watcher" appears to be Laris for some reason... or someone who looks exactly like Laris, played by the same actress.

They could afford to recast Guinan after bringing Whoopi back for an episode but not find someone new to play "The Watcher"?

 

Yup.

Were you honestly expecting a member of Star Trek: Picard's dysfunction junction to accept the consequences of their actions?  All of them have backstories that involve blaming others for their problems, and that clearly isn't going to stop anytime soon.

Okay.... I found it:

And now the end of the world can commence...

[Big s]

Not gonna lie, I kinda like that song too. Totally beats most of the music most people are blasting these days.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

And now the end of the world can commence...

Sadly, this meant a golden opportunity for a much better joke was missed...

He could've been listening to "Faith of the Heart".

[sh9000]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

... they're really reaching to defend this mess, aren't they?  

This is the best they could do grenade-fishing for praise for Star Trek: Picard?  A handful of sites known to be paid shills for CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount, a few of which are owned and editorially managed by the same company, and at least one of which has former Paramount executives running its editorial department?

[pengbuzz]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Sadly, this meant a golden opportunity for a much better joke was missed...

He could've been listening to "Faith of the Heart".

ROFL!!!!!!!!! 🤣

[Roy Focker]

I don't buy Jurati's murder defense.  She was shown a possible end of times vision and acted on it thinking it was the only way to stop things.  How many times in the other series were characters faced with a horrible choice to make but stood by their morals? 

They could started the season with her in mental hospital and have Picard request her to be released to his custody to do science stuff.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

ROFL!!!!!!!!! 🤣

As much as Trekkies hate that bloody song, that is probably the biggest missed opportunity in Picard so far...

 

 

1 hour ago, Roy Focker said:

I don't buy Jurati's murder defense.  She was shown a possible end of times vision and acted on it thinking it was the only way to stop things.  How many times in the other series were characters faced with a horrible choice to make but stood by their morals? 

They could started the season with her in mental hospital and have Picard request her to be released to his custody to do science stuff.

In all fairness, what Jurati was secondhand-subjected to was a psychic message from an ancient machine race that biological life was so profoundly ill-equipped to process that it was mistaken for a vision of unsurpassed apocalyptic horror.  An experience so absolutely soul-shatteringly destructive to the psyche that it was shown to drive multiple hardened Tal Shiar operatives - people who are used to murder, assassination, and attempted genocide - so profoundly insane that they were driven to immediately take their own lives after experiencing it by any means available.  Something so horribly traumatic that the Romulans who survived contact with it developed a pathological fear of artificial life so profound that they indirectly murdered a billion or more of their own people and collapsed their own government by sabotaging the Federation relief effort rather than risk the possibility of sentient artificial life emerging in the Federation.  Whatever it was was bad enough it gave what's left of the Borg collective enough of a bad vibe to sacrifice a cube to un-know it.

As a murder defense, being exposed to something that soul-destroying even secondhand makes a pretty good defense... (and Voyager had at least one plot where it was shown that mind melds could be used to implant or activate something like posthypnotic commands, so it's possible she wasn't even acting of her own volition when she killed Bruce Maddox.)

Albeit I agree she should've been in a mental hospital... but not because of the murder charge.  If exposure to the admonition is enough to send all but the hardest Romulans from the Imperial Bureau of Genocide, War Crimes, and Assorted Atrocities to the madhouse if they're tough enough to not simply blow their brains out or cave their skulls in on the first rock they find, a wimp like Jurati should have spent the rest of the season in a straightjacket to keep her from putting one of Rios's antique phasers in her mouth and the remainder of the series in a mental institution getting serious help and enough tranquilizers to sedate a baseball team. 

That she's just fine a year after that AND having murdered her ex-boyfriend is pretty damn hard to buy.

Almost as hard to buy as that Starfleet just forgot that Musiker got a bad conduct discharge for substance abuse and reinstated her with a promotion...

(I doubt it'll ever occur to them, but I guess she could be getting constant doses of antipsychotics from an implant the way Zefram Cochrane was treated for bipolar disorder in the years before World War III left him without refills and having to self-medicate with alcohol.)

Edited March 29, 2022 by Seto Kaiba

[Thom]

Jurati was basically mind-raped by 'Commander Oh.' She was almost literally out of her mind. I have no problem with them finding her innocent because of that. But as @Seto Kaiba points out, for her to be up and around just a few years later is either, hard to swallow, or the results of a damn fine psych program! I could use a back-story where she went to Vulcan for a few months and had them rummage about and put her back together again, mentally.

 

Thom. (original acct needs fixings!)

[pengbuzz]

10 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

As much as Trekkies hate that bloody song, that is probably the biggest missed opportunity in Picard so far...

 

 

In all fairness, what Jurati was secondhand-subjected to was a psychic message from an ancient machine race that biological life was so profoundly ill-equipped to process that it was mistaken for a vision of unsurpassed apocalyptic horror.  An experience so absolutely soul-shatteringly destructive to the psyche that it was shown to drive multiple hardened Tal Shiar operatives - people who are used to murder, assassination, and attempted genocide - so profoundly insane that they were driven to immediately take their own lives after experiencing it by any means available.  Something so horribly traumatic that the Romulans who survived contact with it developed a pathological fear of artificial life so profound that they indirectly murdered a billion or more of their own people and collapsed their own government by sabotaging the Federation relief effort rather than risk the possibility of sentient artificial life emerging in the Federation.  Whatever it was was bad enough it gave what's left of the Borg collective enough of a bad vibe to sacrifice a cube to un-know it.

As a murder defense, being exposed to something that soul-destroying even secondhand makes a pretty good defense... (and Voyager had at least one plot where it was shown that mind melds could be used to implant or activate something like posthypnotic commands, so it's possible she wasn't even acting of her own volition when she killed Bruce Maddox.)

Albeit I agree she should've been in a mental hospital... but not because of the murder charge.  If exposure to the admonition is enough to send all but the hardest Romulans from the Imperial Bureau of Genocide, War Crimes, and Assorted Atrocities to the madhouse if they're tough enough to not simply blow their brains out or cave their skulls in on the first rock they find, a wimp like Jurati should have spent the rest of the season in a straightjacket to keep her from putting one of Rios's antique phasers in her mouth and the remainder of the series in a mental institution getting serious help and enough tranquilizers to sedate a baseball team. 

That she's just fine a year after that AND having murdered her ex-boyfriend is pretty damn hard to buy.

Almost as hard to buy as that Starfleet just forgot that Musiker got a bad conduct discharge for substance abuse and reinstated her with a promotion...

(I doubt it'll ever occur to them, but I guess she could be getting constant doses of antipsychotics from an implant the way Zefram Cochrane was treated for bipolar disorder in the years before World War III left him without refills and having to self-medicate with alcohol.)

Maybe they had a Vulcan make her forget what the machine implanted (Like what Spock did to Kirk in a particular episode)?

[Seto Kaiba]

23 hours ago, TET said:

But as @Seto Kaiba points out, for her to be up and around just a few years later is either, hard to swallow, or the results of a damn fine psych program! I could use a back-story where she went to Vulcan for a few months and had them rummage about and put her back together again, mentally.

Not even a few years, just one year.

That the meek, mild, and generally wimpy Dr. Jurati all but no-sells a psychic brown note that was making some of the most hardened psychopaths in the galaxy kill themselves in sheer terror definitely is way less excusible than being easily forgiven for committing a murder while under mind control.

[pengbuzz]

On 3/30/2022 at 7:58 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Not even a few years, just one year.

That the meek, mild, and generally wimpy Dr. Jurati all but no-sells a psychic brown note that was making some of the most hardened psychopaths in the galaxy kill themselves in sheer terror definitely is way less excusible than being easily forgiven for committing a murder while under mind control.

I guess the explanation then consists of three words:

Poor story writing.

[Roy Focker]

It is 2022.  Picard season 2 takes place in 2024.

How do we develop force field technology so fast?

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I guess the explanation then consists of three words:

Poor story writing.

You could whittle that down to two... it's just "poor writing" in general.

Like I said a few posts back, consequences are for other people... Picard and his band of misfits exist in a world where they are free to believe everything wrong in their lives is the fault of someone else, some external conspiracy, and the story will tie itself in knots to avoid any of them experiencing any lasting consequences for their actions even while parts of it freely lampshade that their denialism is a load of sh*t.

 

47 minutes ago, Roy Focker said:

It is 2022.  Picard season 2 takes place in 2024.

How do we develop force field technology so fast?

Wait, you mean you don't have one?

I've been using it to keep the rabbits out of my back garden.

(Seriously though, it's just more evidence NuTrek is not actually in the prime timeline.  In Enterprise, they established pretty clearly that force fields were still a WIP in the early 2150s.)

[renegadeleader1]

5 hours ago, Roy Focker said:

It is 2022.  Picard season 2 takes place in 2024.

How do we develop force field technology so fast?

Chekov's phaser.

[pengbuzz]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

You could whittle that down to two... it's just "poor writing" in general.

Good point; I was trying to be generous to them.

 

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Like I said a few posts back, consequences are for other people... Picard and his band of misfits exist in a world where they are free to believe everything wrong in their lives is the fault of someone else, some external conspiracy, and the story will tie itself in knots to avoid any of them experiencing any lasting consequences for their actions even while parts of it freely lampshade that their denialism is a load of sh*t.

I remember in the TNG episode The First Duty, when Wesley and his fellow cadets were involved in an accident that killed one of their team. Picard said:

"The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based, and if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform."

I think that sums up one major problem with Picard: none of them (including Picard himself) seem to believe that about their own lives.

 

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Wait, you mean you don't have one?

I've been using it to keep the rabbits out of my back garden.

(Seriously though, it's just more evidence NuTrek is not actually in the prime timeline.  In Enterprise, they established pretty clearly that force fields were still a WIP in the early 2150s.)

If you can spare one, I have more than a few uses for it (such as keeping people from running me over in the store while I'm shopping! Those folks with grocery carts are MEAN!!! And don't even get me started on the ones with the mart carts!!! O.o )!

[JB0]

11 hours ago, Roy Focker said:

It is 2022.  Picard season 2 takes place in 2024.

How do we develop force field technology so fast?

I mean, the Eugenics Wars ended in 1996. I think we're clearly off the Star Trek timeline at this point either way.

This is probably for the best, as World War 3 is scheduled for 2026.

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I remember in the TNG episode The First Duty, when Wesley and his fellow cadets were involved in an accident that killed one of their team. Picard said:

"The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based, and if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform."

I think that sums up one major problem with Picard: none of them (including Picard himself) seem to believe that about their own lives.

Picard himself certainly set the tone for the series when he drew a very incorrect parallel between the Dunkirk evacuation and the Federation's relief effort on Romulus.  He was an archaeologist, historian, and Starfleet officer... he has exactly ZERO excuses for getting history THAT wrong.  The Dunkirk evacuation was an enormous undertaking to rescue BEF troops in danger of being wiped out by the Germans in France during World War II, which was supported by not only the British Navy but also British civilian ships and a handful of French and Canadian Navy ships.  It was a wartime rescue operation that had broad government and civilian support.  The Federation evacuation of Romulus was nothing like it... being a peacetime humanitarian mission to the Federation's oldest enemy who shouldn't even need the help undertaken purely by the Federation's de facto military (Starfleet) that was done over the objections of a decent percentage of the Federation populace.

If Picard's willing to lie to himself, and others, like that just to allow himself to believe he holds the moral high ground... well... that definitely says a lot, doesn't it?

(Though I guess it's also pretty awful that Picard believes he's saved the galaxy at the end of season one... when it wouldn't have been under threat at all if he'd left well enough alone.)

 

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

If you can spare one, I have more than a few uses for it (such as keeping people from running me over in the store while I'm shopping! Those folks with grocery carts are MEAN!!! And don't even get me started on the ones with the mart carts!!! O.o )!

Sounds like you'd get more use out of a phaser, TBH.

[TehPW]

On 3/29/2022 at 4:17 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

... they're really reaching to defend this mess, aren't they?  

This is the best they could do grenade-fishing for praise for Star Trek: Picard?  A handful of sites known to be paid shills for CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount, a few of which are owned and editorially managed by the same company, and at least one of which has former Paramount executives running its editorial department?

I did not recognize any of those 'Journalism links' but i only watched the trailer , looking for TrekMovie (whom i know is very much a shill site on ST's teet...)

[pengbuzz]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Picard himself certainly set the tone for the series when he drew a very incorrect parallel between the Dunkirk evacuation and the Federation's relief effort on Romulus.  He was an archaeologist, historian, and Starfleet officer... he has exactly ZERO excuses for getting history THAT wrong.  The Dunkirk evacuation was an enormous undertaking to rescue BEF troops in danger of being wiped out by the Germans in France during World War II, which was supported by not only the British Navy but also British civilian ships and a handful of French and Canadian Navy ships.  It was a wartime rescue operation that had broad government and civilian support.  The Federation evacuation of Romulus was nothing like it... being a peacetime humanitarian mission to the Federation's oldest enemy who shouldn't even need the help undertaken purely by the Federation's de facto military (Starfleet) that was done over the objections of a decent percentage of the Federation populace.

If Picard's willing to lie to himself, and others, like that just to allow himself to believe he holds the moral high ground... well... that definitely says a lot, doesn't it?

(Though I guess it's also pretty awful that Picard believes he's saved the galaxy at the end of season one... when it wouldn't have been under threat at all if he'd left well enough alone.)

Well said.

 

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Sounds like you'd get more use out of a phaser, TBH.

Got one I can borrow?

[sh9000]

 

[pengbuzz]

That borg queen just doesn't look all that great, makeup-wise.

[Seto Kaiba]

13 hours ago, TehPW said:

I did not recognize any of those 'Journalism links' but i only watched the trailer , looking for TrekMovie (whom i know is very much a shill site on ST's teet...)

It's the usual suspects that CBS - now Paramount - would call up when they needed some gushing, effusive, puff piece written to defend a controversial or poorly-received creative decision in the public forum.  For some, especally CBR, CBS/Paramount was far from their only content creator they indulged in that for.  Needless to say, those sites all engage in fawning praise for Star Trek's current direction while the more reputable news outlets tend to take a much more neutral or negative view.

 

2 hours ago, sh9000 said:

 

The Borg Queen Returns... for no reason other than that Star Trek: Picard's first season was such a stinker that the best they could come up to salvage the series was a season-long string of callbacks to classic Star Trek episodes wrapped up like a burrito in a First Contact-esque plot Borg Queen-and-Time Travel plot.

This is - or at least, I hope this is - the culmination and conclusion of the Borg Collective's badass decay.  An unbroken trend of humiliation and humbling defeats for what was once the Federation's most intimidating, inscruitable, and indomitable foe.  First Contact utterly demolished a lot of the Borg's mystique by turning the Borg drones into zombies and then putting an actual (unborrowed) face on the Collective in the form of the Borg Queen, who acted much too human and much too much like a standard Evil is Hammy movie villain so Picard would have someone to defeat.  Voyager made it worse by making the Borg a familiar face who suffered repeated defeats at the hands of Species 8472 and then by a single Starfleet science vessel, proving in the bargain that not only was resistance not futile... it was all but an excuse to shake the Borg down for increasingly powerful tech.  That ended with a future Admiral Janeway destroying the Borg Queen, disrupting the Collective, and wiping out the Borg transwarp network in one fell swoop.  Enterprise made it even worse in its turn, by having the 24th century Borg defeated by 22nd century technology and Dr. Phlox even coming up with a cure for Borg assimilation. 

Star Trek: Picard may have rescued the Borg from extinction, but they're worse off than ever.  Not only are they suffering from a special effects failure so bad they look worse now than they did in a late 90's TV series with a much smaller budget, we're treated to a scenario where the Borg are apparently desperate for humanity's help and a timeline where the Borg were wiped out by mid-24th century Starfleet and the Borg Queen is just a disembodied torso awaiting execution.  Their humiliation is complete, and they've been reduced to an ineffectual reminder of traumas Picard has apparently gotten over.

[pengbuzz]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's the usual suspects that CBS - now Paramount - would call up when they needed some gushing, effusive, puff piece written to defend a controversial or poorly-received creative decision in the public forum.  For some, especally CBR, CBS/Paramount was far from their only content creator they indulged in that for.  Needless to say, those sites all engage in fawning praise for Star Trek's current direction while the more reputable news outlets tend to take a much more neutral or negative view.

 

The Borg Queen Returns... for no reason other than that Star Trek: Picard's first season was such a stinker that the best they could come up to salvage the series was a season-long string of callbacks to classic Star Trek episodes wrapped up like a burrito in a First Contact-esque plot Borg Queen-and-Time Travel plot.

This is - or at least, I hope this is - the culmination and conclusion of the Borg Collective's badass decay.  An unbroken trend of humiliation and humbling defeats for what was once the Federation's most intimidating, inscruitable, and indomitable foe.  First Contact utterly demolished a lot of the Borg's mystique by turning the Borg drones into zombies and then putting an actual (unborrowed) face on the Collective in the form of the Borg Queen, who acted much too human and much too much like a standard Evil is Hammy movie villain so Picard would have someone to defeat.  Voyager made it worse by making the Borg a familiar face who suffered repeated defeats at the hands of Species 8472 and then by a single Starfleet science vessel, proving in the bargain that not only was resistance not futile... it was all but an excuse to shake the Borg down for increasingly powerful tech.  That ended with a future Admiral Janeway destroying the Borg Queen, disrupting the Collective, and wiping out the Borg transwarp network in one fell swoop.  Enterprise made it even worse in its turn, by having the 24th century Borg defeated by 22nd century technology and Dr. Phlox even coming up with a cure for Borg assimilation. 

Star Trek: Picard may have rescued the Borg from extinction, but they're worse off than ever.  Not only are they suffering from a special effects failure so bad they look worse now than they did in a late 90's TV series with a much smaller budget, we're treated to a scenario where the Borg are apparently desperate for humanity's help and a timeline where the Borg were wiped out by mid-24th century Starfleet and the Borg Queen is just a disembodied torso awaiting execution.  Their humiliation is complete, and they've been reduced to an ineffectual reminder of traumas Picard has apparently gotten over.

I figure the only way to fix this is to "reveal" that the Borg Queen that Picard/ Janeway"defeated" only managed a smaller "collective" and that the main collective not only still exists, but is far more terrifying than the tiny branch the Federation has encountered thus far. Borrowing from Macross: what they beat was a branch fleet and not a main fleet. Underline this fact with a Borg cube from the main decimating several worlds in a matter of hours, then more than one fleet sent to stop them, and finally, wipe San Francisco off the map along with Adm. Clancy.

Of course, there's no way Paramount/Viacom/CBS/ the fiddle and the spoon/ whatever is going to do anything like that. And to be frank: it would probably come across as hokey and a fake out anyways.

Edited April 3, 2022 by pengbuzz

[sh9000]

 

[David Hingtgen]

Is anyone else less "concerned" about 2024 having drone-based force-fields, and more by the fact that it was turned off about 5 secs after she was injected?   Genetic lung/skin defects cured before a single cell had time to replicate?  Heck of a stress-test too.  Instead of being in a dark room with filtered air, and slowly seeing how she reacts to increasing exposure----just throw everything at her at once, and hope she lives!

[Magnus]

I've given up trying to argue with people about Kurtzman Trek.  I often feel like i'm on crazy pills actually.  What seem to me to be glaring plot-holes, poor characterization and nonsensical writing doesn't seem to matter to the people who are fans of this show.  When I point them out they're dismissed - is this what gaslighting is?  I truly do not understand how these shows are as successful as they seem to be, or what the fans of these shows love so much about them.  I'm not trying to be an a-hole, I genuinely do not get it.  

[azrael]

I'm willing to overlook some issues like drones making an electrical sun-umbrella, but the "Time's Arrow"-flub reminds me why I don't like Kurtzman or anyone who came from the Abrams-group. The Lower Decks writing group seems to be the only ones who respect the continuity.

[sh9000]