Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[Dobber]

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Makes me wonder if at the end of this series, everything "fades to white", and we see Dr. Crusher standing over his bed at the Federation Nursing home:

"Okay, I've sedated him, Will. It's been another episode of his Irumodic Syndrome. (re: All Good Things TNG S7 E25/26) I'm sorry it took us a bit to catch him before he did something dangerous..."

Will Riker: "Too late; he crossed the Romulan Neutral Zone in a private craft with some ragtag crew. When we finally took them under tow, he was shouting something about 'Data's Daughter'. I'm going to have one hell of a time explaining this to the Admiral."

OMG....that would be amazing. 
 

Chris

[Seto Kaiba]

1 minute ago, Dobber said:

OMG....that would be amazing. 

Alternatively, this entire series is just Sela gaslighting Picard for yuks... the Zhat Vash doesn't exist, Dahj and her sister are paid actors, and the whole thing's just a sham.

[Chronocidal]

17 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Alternatively, this entire series is just Sela gaslighting Picard for yuks... the Zhat Vash doesn't exist, Dahj and her sister are paid actors, and the whole thing's just a sham.

I feel like that's getting a little too meta.  

[Sildani]

There are FOUR plots!!

[sqidd]

 

[pablumatic]

Do we really need f-bombs in a series associated with The Next Generation? They should have kept that to Discovery, and preferably not there either.

Guess they're really trying to get that Tarantino edgy angle going somehow.

Edited February 5, 2020 by pablumatic

[Seto Kaiba]

25 minutes ago, pablumatic said:

Guess they're really trying to get that Tarantino edgy angle going somehow.

Yup... but it comes across more as that guy with the neckbeard, fedora, and katana saying "*teleports behind you* 'nothing personal kid'". 

Star Trek: Picard has a pretty high cringe quotient.

[sh9000]

 

[Dynaman]

18 hours ago, pablumatic said:

Do we really need f-bombs in a series associated with The Next Generation? They should have kept that to Discovery, and preferably not there either.

Guess they're really trying to get that Tarantino edgy angle going somehow.

Queue up that conversation between Kirk and Spock in "The Voyage Home"...

[tekering]

I'm very intrigued by the pacing of this series.  We're now three episodes into this ten-episode season, and our protagonist has only just left orbit... and while very little has been revealed about existing characters, we just keep expanding the cast week-by-week.  It's utterly unlike anything I've seen in Star Trek canon before.

And with the TNG movie uniforms having been introduced in First Contact, wouldn't it have made more sense to use them in the 2385 flashback sequence (as opposed to fabricating these ugly new throwbacks)?

Oh, and it bothers me a great deal that we keep seeing new Romulan characters -- guards, scientists, administrators, servants, spies, assassins -- yet none of them have anything resembling Romulan costumes or hairstyles.  Star Trek managed to stay relatively consistent with their depiction for over 30 years, but I guess J.J. threw that out the window in 2009.  

Admittedly, Nemesis had already muddied the waters a little, but still...

Edited February 6, 2020 by tekering

[JB0]

6 hours ago, tekering said:

And with the TNG movie uniforms having been introduced in First Contact, wouldn't it have made more sense to use them in the 2385 flashback sequence (as opposed to fabricating these ugly new throwbacks)?

Starfleet has an overabundance of tailors, and they gotta do somethin'. Apparently "radically redesign the uniform on an annual basis so no one's ever wearing the same outfit twice" is how they keep busy.

[Lolicon]

United Federation Tailors are a pretty powerful union.

[Seto Kaiba]

11 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Starfleet has an overabundance of tailors, and they gotta do somethin'. Apparently "radically redesign the uniform on an annual basis so no one's ever wearing the same outfit twice" is how they keep busy.

Truth in television... the United States Army has, in 244 years, modified or outright replaced its uniform design 39 times, at least a dozen of which were major changes to the design of the entire uniform.  They averaged about two changes per decade between 1810 and 2020, with the only skipped decades being the 1840s, 1860s, and 1980s.

Not counting its predecessor, Earth Starfleet, the Federation Starfleet has been around for approximately 238 years at the time of Star Trek: Picard (2399) from the inauguration of the Federation in 2161.  We've seen 15 or so different styles of Starfleet uniform (ENT, DSC, DSC-TOS, TOS Pilot, TOS, three major variants of the II-VI maroon uniform, three major variants of the base TNG uniform, the DS9/VOY uniform, the TNG Movie uniform, the Picard 2385, and Picard 2399.

Really, if anything's unrealistic it's that Starfleet held onto the iconic "maroons" uniform almost unaltered for nearly a century (2270s to 2350s) with the only change being the shirt that was worn under it.

[Seto Kaiba]

6 hours ago, tekering said:

Admittedly, Nemesis had already muddied the waters a little, but still...

What, do you WANT to see people parading around in rainbow pleather onesies?

Let's be honest, Garak was completely correct when he suggested the Romulans needed a good tailor.

Edited February 6, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[Hikuro]

So it feels like they're really taking to Rodenberry's legacy of a utopia 24th Century and just smashing it with Raffie's jealousy of Picards life style and home, vaping space weed and it seems as though, internet gambling is still a thing.

I guess on the plus side, they didn't drop the F Bomb again....

[Lolicon]

I consider destroying Gene's sterile communist utopia a good thing.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Hikuro said:

So it feels like they're really taking to Rodenberry's legacy of a utopia 24th Century and just smashing it with Raffie's jealousy of Picards life style and home, vaping space weed and it seems as though, internet gambling is still a thing.

I'm not sure that's really it in this case... Picard seems to be assembling a crew of burnouts, wastrels, and other people as broken as he seems to be.

Even the more idealistic setting of previous Star Trek shows had its share of do-nothings, leeches, and questionable characters like Harry Mudd, Cyrano Jones, that group of hippies in "The Way to Eden", literally everyone on Tasha Yar's home planet, the Orion syndicate's members, Dr. Bashir's parents, that quack doctor Geiger from "In the Cards", quite a few members of the Maquis, Tom Paris and Nick Locarno (who I only count as 1 because they were originally supposed to be the same guy), etc.

Musiker seems to be an unemployed former Starfleet officer, which probably doesn't afford as comfortable a life even in the Federation's guaranteed-basic-income social democracy as Picard was able to enjoy by retiring to manage his family's ancient and respected vineyard in France.  (Essentially, Picard seems to have still been technically working and contributing to society, where Musiker seems to be living on the fringes of society as a bum by choice.)

 

1 hour ago, Lolicon said:

I consider destroying Gene's sterile communist utopia a good thing.

It was never sterile, and debatably never communist... but the complaint is more about destroying that optimistic vision of the future where humanity had at least outgrown things like poverty, disease, and social inequality.  

 

[Roy Focker]

This 3rd episode was a stinker.

Picard's ragtag crew seems too much like a RPG player character party with everyone trying make the coolest character. 

"My character is rough around the edges, hot shot (blank), former Star Fleet officer with dark past."

"Wow mine is too!"

And the Rafi character.  Her past with Picard seemed forced and rushed.  We get one flash back and then see how she hit rock bottom years later.  The audience has no real invested interest in this character from Picard's past.   Now imagine if this character was replaced by any former character from STNG, DS9 or Voyager.  Even if this character never Picard on screen before we the audience knows them.   It is hard to care about the rift between her and Picard when we don't know her.

I have hard time understanding the Romulans and the Borg cube.  Is this a secret operation?  Seems somewhat out in the open.

What's with that whole Romulan hit team that was sent after Picard?   We all go in and get killed with no real plan.  Why does Picard have so many hidden phasers around the house?  Unlike the last hit team this time he's got a house full of dead Romulan assassins as evidence.  Call that News lady from episode one to come over.  Picard can get everyone to stop what they are doing and start a major investigation.

The teaser for episode 4 looks dreadful.  Is the entire episode going to be about them recruiting a black haired Legolas

Picard might be my favorite Captain but this series seems idiotic.  Every script decision seems based on what would make things exciting and not if it makes that much sense.

[pablumatic]

1 hour ago, Roy Focker said:

This 3rd episode was a stinker.

Why does Picard have so many hidden phasers around the house?  

 

Agreed.

Just want to address that question about the phasers. In episode two Picard's Romulan Tal Shiar helpers did note that Jean-Luc would be a target for whomever killed Dajh. It would make sense for them to put phasers everywhere.

Edited February 8, 2020 by pablumatic

[Seto Kaiba]

So... Star Trek: Picard episode 3 "This Embarrassment is just beginning".  Er... sorry, "The End is the Beginning".

 

The Good

Spoiler

What good?  This. Is. A. Mess.  

A stumbling, lurching, ungainly mess of a vanity project dedicated to Patrick Stewart's ego that is entirely too dependent on continuity nods to sustain itself.

 

The Bad

Spoiler

Starfleet's 2385-vintage uniform looks... ugly.  I especially hate how the coloring on the shoulders inexplicably peaks at the nape of the neck.  Like the other uniforms from 2399, they're unmistakably poorly tailored as though made in a great hurry after discovering that fans don't like Star Trek: Discovery's aesthetic.

The tablets that Picard and Musiker are holding are fugly too... it's like someone took the Voyager-era PADD prop and scaled the damn thing up to the size of a laptop.  It just doesn't make any logistical sense.

Oh wow, Jean-Luc Picard didn't just quit Starfleet in a huff over some moral dilemma, he quit because he literally attempted a "my way or the highway" on the rest of Starfleet Command and they didn't fall for it.  It's even lampshaded how they'd expect him to pull a win out his arse at the last minute and he just lamely reveals that he's given up.  Jean-Luc Picard, space boomer everyone!

Also, how the hell does Picard resigning mean that Musiker gets "fired" from Starfleet?  That doesn't make sense.  Like, is she on probation or something?  It's not like she's office equipment.  Starfleet didn't tell Picard "pack your Lieutenant Commander and go".  

Jonathan del Arco seems to have decided that the best approach to playing an older, less Borg-y Hugh is to play him as David from Prometheus but without the bad bleached-blonde look.  His leftover implants don't really look Borg though, the makeup makes him look more like he's got rocks embedded in his skin like that one guy from Star Trek: Enterprise who beamed up in the middle of a storm and the scar and milky eye make him look like he's attempting a bad Dr. No cosplay.

Commodore Oh - the Romulan Zhat Vash infiltrator who is apparently head of Starfleet security - is having a real bad day at makeup and wardrobe.  Her penciled-on eyebrows are VERY uneven, her haircut has her ears sticking out from her head at right angles, her rank tabs are crooked, and she's wearing what looks like a set of late 90's ray-banz sunglasses.  (Kind of a giveaway she's not a Vulcan, given that Vulcans were established not to need sunglasses in Enterprise.)

The great moments in the props department continue, with one of the Disordered playing with what is clearly a Rubik's cube covered in metallic spraypaint.

Seems like every new character they intend to introduce is a monument to this wretched, unhappy future they've created... Raffi is a drunk, drug-abusing, paranoid ex-Starfleet officer who was kicked out of the service for some unspecified reason, Rios is a hard-drinking, smoking, broken ex-Starfleet officer who was kicked out of the service for some unspecified reason when his entire ship was erased from the records, am I sensing a pattern here?

So here's a thought... artificial intelligences are illegal throughout the Federation now, yet Rios's ship has TWO sophisticated emergency holograms that appear to be not only self-aware but at least semi-autonomous.  The emergency navigational hologram spends quite some time scolding Rios and debating morality in a very half baked sort of way and is apparently so thoroughly interactive it tries to protest when he orders it shut off.  Did everyone collectively fail a spot check and forget the emergency holograms were intelligent?

There's an absolutely terribly choreographed fight scene where more Romulan assassins bungle their way into Chateau Picard and are immediately killed by Picard and his two housekeepers, accomplishing nothing but breaking some glass cabinets and generally irritating the housekeepers.  These are supposed to be crack troops from the Zhat Vash and they're taken down by an elderly man, two out of work Tal Shiar agents, and a Daystrom Institute researcher who's never so much as held a phaser before.  Also, why is Chateau Picard apparently brimming with concealed phasers?  Like, there's one bolted to Picard's desk, there's one under the sofa, they're in the china cabinets, it's ridiculous.  What, is France the new Texas in 2399?

 

... and The Ugly

Spoiler

Even before we get to the opening title, the writing STINKS.  We get a flashback to Starfleet Command c.2385 where Picard informs a junior officer that the rescue operations are suspended, a plan to resume them without the rescue ships by using mothballed Starfleet ships from surplus depots was rejected for manpower reasons, that all synthetic lifeform research is banned and all surviving synths disassembled with the reason for the Utopia Planitia massacre given as OS problems, and they jump IMMEDIATELY to assuming that this is all the work of the Tal Shiar.

Really?  The Tal Shiar?  Let's be honest here... the Tal Shiar do not live up to their hype in-universe.  They're supposed to be hot sh*t in intelligence circles but every time they appear they're either being infiltrated successfully by someone else (e.g. Troi's brief stint as a Tal Shiar Major, the Lovok changeling, the Tal Shiar chairman being a Federation operative, etc.) or they're just bloody incompetent (as in any plot involving Sela, their attempt to assassinate Garak leading Garak right to the Romulan-Cardassian joint fleet, failing to prevent the assassination of the entire Senate, the Tal Shiar vice-chairman being assassinated as part of a false flag operation to trick Romulus into joining the Dominion War, etc.).  These people SUCK at their jobs.  You'd be better off worrying about anyone standing within thirty feet of you than your own safety if the Tal Shiar's after you.  They're worse at their jobs than the average Imperial Stormtrooper.

Oh for F*CK'S SAKE... apparently Picard's adjutant is space trailor trash, living in a space trailer in the desert, vaping space weed, and very clearly resentful of the fact that Picard was able to retire to a nice home on his family's vineyard in France while she wasted her life being angry about some nonspecific thing.  Can we get any lamer here?  I dread the answer.  Oh, and she's supposedly got evidence that a senior Starfleet official was complicit in allowing the attack on Utopia Planitia.

Hugh introduces Dahj's convenient replacement to the Disordered, Romulans who had been assimilated and are apparently mentally ill after being liberated from the collective... which doesn't really tally with what we've seen before with respect to individuals liberated from the collective even after years as drones.  

So we get our first look at the amazing new ship Picard will apparently be using as his home base while carrying out feats of derring-do... and it's an ugly, boxy piece of sh*t that would look vastly more at home in Star Wars's prequel trilogy than in the universe of Star Trek.  We also get our first look at its captain, Rios, who is shirtless and has a chunk of metal sticking out of his shoulder, and is apparently so vain that he programmed his own ship's EMH to look just like him.  He reads like a ripoff of Han Solo, which is what he very VERY obviously is.  Correction... TWO holograms that look just like him, one of which does a simply awful fake Irish accent while the other is seemingly doing a terrible Robert Picardo impression.

Somehow, it never occurs to Jean-Luc Picard or his two much smarter Romulan housekeepers to call the Starfleet C-in-C up and show her the room full of stunned and dead Romulan assassins.  She denied that Romulan agents were active on Earth and he now has a literal room full of proof including at least one live prisoner and enough Romulan disruptors to arm a small platoon.  I especially love how they wake one for interrogation by spraying him in the face with a water bottle like he's been a naughty cat.  Given that he melts shortly afterwards like the Wicked Witch of the West, I can only assume that the Tal Shiar operatives are water-soluble.

The Mary Sue evidence around Dahj 2: Android Boogaloo there is piling up pretty high... now she's got ex-Borg she's never met dispensing prophecies about her, and Tal Shiar assassins wanting to kill her and hide her whereabouts, and she's besties with Hugh and has a massive knowledge of Romulan culture despite Romulans having never really shared their culture with the UFP... 

They try to jerk our heartstrings by having Picard say "engage" and playing the TNG theme while that ugly piece of sh*t they call a ship jumps to warp... what a mess.

The next episode trailer is pretty ugly too... looks like we're going to see Romulans living in camps like we saw the Bajorans doing in TNG, and Picard is basically there to recruit Space Legolas.

 

[mechaninac]

^ Oh, boy... if even half of your observations/complaints are even partly on the money, and I have no reason to believe that they aren't, STP is a fan-fic train wreck of a bad joke, made all the more pathetic by the incompetence of everyone involved in bringing this abhorrent mess to fruition.

[CoryHolmes]

He said it!  He said the line!  That makes everything better, he said the line! 

[Dobber]

10 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So... Star Trek: Picard episode 3 "This Embarrassment is just beginning".  Er... sorry, "The End is the Beginning".

 

The Good

  Hide contents

What good?  This. Is. A. Mess.  

A stumbling, lurching, ungainly mess of a vanity project dedicated to Patrick Stewart's ego that is entirely too dependent on continuity nods to sustain itself.

 

The Bad

  Hide contents

Starfleet's 2385-vintage uniform looks... ugly.  I especially hate how the coloring on the shoulders inexplicably peaks at the nape of the neck.  Like the other uniforms from 2399, they're unmistakably poorly tailored as though made in a great hurry after discovering that fans don't like Star Trek: Discovery's aesthetic.

The tablets that Picard and Musiker are holding are fugly too... it's like someone took the Voyager-era PADD prop and scaled the damn thing up to the size of a laptop.  It just doesn't make any logistical sense.

Oh wow, Jean-Luc Picard didn't just quit Starfleet in a huff over some moral dilemma, he quit because he literally attempted a "my way or the highway" on the rest of Starfleet Command and they didn't fall for it.  It's even lampshaded how they'd expect him to pull a win out his arse at the last minute and he just lamely reveals that he's given up.  Jean-Luc Picard, space boomer everyone!

Also, how the hell does Picard resigning mean that Musiker gets "fired" from Starfleet?  That doesn't make sense.  Like, is she on probation or something?  It's not like she's office equipment.  Starfleet didn't tell Picard "pack your Lieutenant Commander and go".  

Jonathan del Arco seems to have decided that the best approach to playing an older, less Borg-y Hugh is to play him as David from Prometheus but without the bad bleached-blonde look.  His leftover implants don't really look Borg though, the makeup makes him look more like he's got rocks embedded in his skin like that one guy from Star Trek: Enterprise who beamed up in the middle of a storm and the scar and milky eye make him look like he's attempting a bad Dr. No cosplay.

Commodore Oh - the Romulan Zhat Vash infiltrator who is apparently head of Starfleet security - is having a real bad day at makeup and wardrobe.  Her penciled-on eyebrows are VERY uneven, her haircut has her ears sticking out from her head at right angles, her rank tabs are crooked, and she's wearing what looks like a set of late 90's ray-banz sunglasses.  (Kind of a giveaway she's not a Vulcan, given that Vulcans were established not to need sunglasses in Enterprise.)

The great moments in the props department continue, with one of the Disordered playing with what is clearly a Rubik's cube covered in metallic spraypaint.

Seems like every new character they intend to introduce is a monument to this wretched, unhappy future they've created... Raffi is a drunk, drug-abusing, paranoid ex-Starfleet officer who was kicked out of the service for some unspecified reason, Rios is a hard-drinking, smoking, broken ex-Starfleet officer who was kicked out of the service for some unspecified reason when his entire ship was erased from the records, am I sensing a pattern here?

So here's a thought... artificial intelligences are illegal throughout the Federation now, yet Rios's ship has TWO sophisticated emergency holograms that appear to be not only self-aware but at least semi-autonomous.  The emergency navigational hologram spends quite some time scolding Rios and debating morality in a very half baked sort of way and is apparently so thoroughly interactive it tries to protest when he orders it shut off.  Did everyone collectively fail a spot check and forget the emergency holograms were intelligent?

There's an absolutely terribly choreographed fight scene where more Romulan assassins bungle their way into Chateau Picard and are immediately killed by Picard and his two housekeepers, accomplishing nothing but breaking some glass cabinets and generally irritating the housekeepers.  These are supposed to be crack troops from the Zhat Vash and they're taken down by an elderly man, two out of work Tal Shiar agents, and a Daystrom Institute researcher who's never so much as held a phaser before.  Also, why is Chateau Picard apparently brimming with concealed phasers?  Like, there's one bolted to Picard's desk, there's one under the sofa, they're in the china cabinets, it's ridiculous.  What, is France the new Texas in 2399?

 

... and The Ugly

  Hide contents

Even before we get to the opening title, the writing STINKS.  We get a flashback to Starfleet Command c.2385 where Picard informs a junior officer that the rescue operations are suspended, a plan to resume them without the rescue ships by using mothballed Starfleet ships from surplus depots was rejected for manpower reasons, that all synthetic lifeform research is banned and all surviving synths disassembled with the reason for the Utopia Planitia massacre given as OS problems, and they jump IMMEDIATELY to assuming that this is all the work of the Tal Shiar.

Really?  The Tal Shiar?  Let's be honest here... the Tal Shiar do not live up to their hype in-universe.  They're supposed to be hot sh*t in intelligence circles but every time they appear they're either being infiltrated successfully by someone else (e.g. Troi's brief stint as a Tal Shiar Major, the Lovok changeling, the Tal Shiar chairman being a Federation operative, etc.) or they're just bloody incompetent (as in any plot involving Sela, their attempt to assassinate Garak leading Garak right to the Romulan-Cardassian joint fleet, failing to prevent the assassination of the entire Senate, the Tal Shiar vice-chairman being assassinated as part of a false flag operation to trick Romulus into joining the Dominion War, etc.).  These people SUCK at their jobs.  You'd be better off worrying about anyone standing within thirty feet of you than your own safety if the Tal Shiar's after you.  They're worse at their jobs than the average Imperial Stormtrooper.

Oh for F*CK'S SAKE... apparently Picard's adjutant is space trailor trash, living in a space trailer in the desert, vaping space weed, and very clearly resentful of the fact that Picard was able to retire to a nice home on his family's vineyard in France while she wasted her life being angry about some nonspecific thing.  Can we get any lamer here?  I dread the answer.  Oh, and she's supposedly got evidence that a senior Starfleet official was complicit in allowing the attack on Utopia Planitia.

Hugh introduces Dahj's convenient replacement to the Disordered, Romulans who had been assimilated and are apparently mentally ill after being liberated from the collective... which doesn't really tally with what we've seen before with respect to individuals liberated from the collective even after years as drones.  

So we get our first look at the amazing new ship Picard will apparently be using as his home base while carrying out feats of derring-do... and it's an ugly, boxy piece of sh*t that would look vastly more at home in Star Wars's prequel trilogy than in the universe of Star Trek.  We also get our first look at its captain, Rios, who is shirtless and has a chunk of metal sticking out of his shoulder, and is apparently so vain that he programmed his own ship's EMH to look just like him.  He reads like a ripoff of Han Solo, which is what he very VERY obviously is.  Correction... TWO holograms that look just like him, one of which does a simply awful fake Irish accent while the other is seemingly doing a terrible Robert Picardo impression.

Somehow, it never occurs to Jean-Luc Picard or his two much smarter Romulan housekeepers to call the Starfleet C-in-C up and show her the room full of stunned and dead Romulan assassins.  She denied that Romulan agents were active on Earth and he now has a literal room full of proof including at least one live prisoner and enough Romulan disruptors to arm a small platoon.  I especially love how they wake one for interrogation by spraying him in the face with a water bottle like he's been a naughty cat.  Given that he melts shortly afterwards like the Wicked Witch of the West, I can only assume that the Tal Shiar operatives are water-soluble.

The Mary Sue evidence around Dahj 2: Android Boogaloo there is piling up pretty high... now she's got ex-Borg she's never met dispensing prophecies about her, and Tal Shiar assassins wanting to kill her and hide her whereabouts, and she's besties with Hugh and has a massive knowledge of Romulan culture despite Romulans having never really shared their culture with the UFP... 

They try to jerk our heartstrings by having Picard say "engage" and playing the TNG theme while that ugly piece of sh*t they call a ship jumps to warp... what a mess.

The next episode trailer is pretty ugly too... looks like we're going to see Romulans living in camps like we saw the Bajorans doing in TNG, and Picard is basically there to recruit Space Legolas.

 

Pretty much all of this.^^ Though I did appreciate the explanation for the different looking Romulan foreheads. Also that they (Picard and what’s her name) at least weren’t expecting StarFleet to BUILD a second fleet. 
 

The hamfisted, pro socialism white/class guilt nonsense was just....BAD. It looks like the refugee camp episode is next week. Sigh.. AGAIN, why are these refugees not on other Romulan planets!? Why is their own Empire not helping these people!? looks like the reviewers were right that Ep.4 on is when it just goes full WOKE.

This show could’ve been....something

6 hours ago, CoryHolmes said:

He said it!  He said the line!  That makes everything better, he said the line! 

Lol!

Chris

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, mechaninac said:

^ Oh, boy... if even half of your observations/complaints are even partly on the money, and I have no reason to believe that they aren't, STP is a fan-fic train wreck of a bad joke, made all the more pathetic by the incompetence of everyone involved in bringing this abhorrent mess to fruition.

I really, really, really really wish I was exaggerating for effect there... but I'm not.

Star Trek: Picard is just a bad series concept start-to-finish.  A disgraced Jean-Luc Picard putting together a new crew of misfits, outcasts, and nutjobs like he's forgotten he's not in an Ocean's movie, to go find Data's "daughter" and Bruce Maddox because he... actually, why IS he going to find Bruce Maddox?  We know he wants to find Dahj 2 because she's Data's "daughter" and wants to protect her, but why does he even care about Bruce Maddox?  It feels almost like an excuse plot.

It's also unmistakably being done a LOT cheaper than Star Trek: Discovery.  Except for Chateau Picard (actually in California's wine country) and Vasquez Rocks (playing itself for the first time in Trek history), there's very little location shooting.  Everything seems to be green screens and a lot of the green screened backgrounds look painfully fake.  I mean, DSC was bad but it at least was professionally bad.  This just looks and feels very amateurish by comparison... like a lot less effort was put into it at every level.

 

1 hour ago, Dobber said:

 

  Hide contents

The hamfisted, pro socialism white/class guilt nonsense was just....BAD. It looks like the refugee camp episode is next week. Sigh.. AGAIN, why are these refugees not on other Romulan planets!? Why is their own Empire not helping these people!? looks like the reviewers were right that Ep.4 on is when it just goes full WOKE.

Well, that was Patrick Stewart's aim here... he's trying to make this series into political allegory about the rabid and self-destructive nationalism and xenophobia that created Brexit and the current American political climate.

It says a lot that even people like me who actually share a lot of his political views find this show nigh-unwatchable due to the obvious and incredibly one-sided author insert narrative where you are either with Jean-Luc Picard or an objectively awful person.  It's not like the franchise's politics were ever particularly subtle, but this feels more like a strawman argument than anything.

 

Quote

This show could’ve been....something

With Kurtzman onboard?  I admire your optimism.

[Dobber]

26 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

....actually, why IS he going to find Bruce Maddox?  We know he wants to find Dahj 2 because she's Data's "daughter" and wants to protect her, but why does he even care about Bruce Maddox?  It feels almost like an excuse plot.

From what I’ve heard.....

Maddox is the “Orange-man” component of this story. 

[pengbuzz]

I would recommend that we "burn this with fire", but the "series" so far seems to be doing that all on its' own.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Dobber said:

  Hide contents

Maddox is the “Orange-man” component of this story. 

I've heard the same rumor... and I'm inclined to doubt it, unless it turns out that "Freecloud" is the only place in the galaxy that still practices spray-on tanning.

 

Spoiler

You'd think CBS would've realized that making characters obvious stand-ins for "Agent Orange" plays poorly... not because there's anything inherently wrong with lampooning an awful human being, but because making the stand-in a complete and utterly unrepentant monster dehumanizes them to the extent that it isn't poignant or meaningful, it's just silly.

Like how, in Star Trek: Discovery's first season, we were treated to the un-reveal that Captain Gabriel Lorca was an evil bastard (you don't hire Jason Isaacs to play nice people) and an accompanying explanation that Mirror!Lorca was so extreme in his insane bigotry that even the Genocidal Cannibal Space Nazi Empress thinks he's completely over-the-top... and then he immediately starts making MAGA references the minute he gets near the PA system.

 

Mind you, Star Trek already had a major antagonist who did an AMAZING job of embodying those same evils of rampant, socially-accepted racism, sexism, and xenophobia without also sacrificing the fact that the character was a person who made choices rather than a monster who was simply evil-by-nature.  That was Deep Space Nine's Gul Dukat.

[azrael]

So what I read is true. Episode 3 is part 3 of this series premiere. Episode 1 setup this show, episode 2 was all exposition, and now episode 3 is launching us onto this grand adventure(?). And we're picking up more strays next episode...

[Lolicon]

Getting antsy waiting for stuff to actually happen in the show. Then again it took about 12 episodes for anything to actually happen in Macross 7, so I suppose it could be worse. 

[CoryHolmes]

4 hours ago, Lolicon said:

Getting antsy waiting for stuff to actually happen in the show. Then again it took about 12 episodes for anything to actually happen in Macross 7, so I suppose it could be worse. 

Agreed.  This really needed to be a three-episode premier night, since it took so long just to get the actual story started.

 

And it doesn't matter how much hate it gets on here, I'm enjoying it so far.  Flaws, warts, and all.  So go ahead and decry it all you want, Imma still gonna enjoy it.  Do your worst! 

[lechuck]

13 hours ago, Lolicon said:

Getting antsy waiting for stuff to actually happen in the show. Then again it took about 12 episodes for anything to actually happen in Macross 7, so I suppose it could be worse. 

It took DS9 a full two seasons for stuff to actually start happening.

But I do agree that the pacing is way too slow. All previous shows were able to pull off introducing characters, some world exposition and providing us our first adventure within the space of 90 minutes. Anyway I have watched the first three episodes now and so far, so... ok I guess. I do not like the cursing, not a fan of how Starfleet is being portrayed or that again we have more uber secret societies to deal with, now the Rolulans have their own section 31... hur...rah... .

For that last one I really blame DS9 for making secret orders, intelligence and the whole espionage thing a central part of Star Trek. We have never recovered ever since.

[azrael]

7 hours ago, lechuck said:

...not a fan of how Starfleet is being portrayed or that again we have more uber secret societies to deal with, now the Rolulans have their own section 31... hur...rah... .

For that last one I really blame DS9 for making secret orders, intelligence and the whole espionage thing a central part of Star Trek. We have never recovered ever since.

The Zhat Vash seem more akin to a zealot society than Section 31. 

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, lechuck said:

It took DS9 a full two seasons for stuff to actually start happening.

Nah, stuff was already happening in Deep Space Nine right in the first episode.

What you're referring to is the point where Deep Space Nine started experimenting with augmenting the standard Star Trek episodic storytelling format with serialized storytelling in the form of season-long story arcs... and it's not fair to characterize the episodes before that point as "nothing happening", because an awful bloody lot happened in those two seasons.  They managed to set up their entire premise and introduce the entire cast in the space of a single two-parter.

 

9 hours ago, lechuck said:

[...] not a fan of how Starfleet is being portrayed or that again we have more uber secret societies to deal with, now the Rolulans have their own section 31... hur...rah... .

Nah, the way they're talked up the Zhat Vash don't come off as a Section 31-equivalent organization.  Section 31 was a separate organization from Starfleet Intellgence, and was so incredibly hypercompetent about its secrecy that you only knew about them from working for them.  The Zhat Vash supposedly run the Tal Shiar, making them more of an inner circle with its own agenda... plus they're as bad at keeping themselves secret as the Tal Shiar are, with rookie agents apparently swapping rumors about the Zhat Vash almost as an initiation ritual.

It's still corny as f*ck, mind you... and the idea that the Zhat Vash are death on all forms of AI doesn't quite work given that there was mention of cyberneticists on Romulus who'd love to study Data in Star Trek: Nemesis and their ship computers would have to be using some kind of AI for all kinds of tasks like voice recognition, target recognition, sensor fusion, that fancy forensic scanner from last episode, etc.

 

9 hours ago, lechuck said:

For that last one I really blame DS9 for making secret orders, intelligence and the whole espionage thing a central part of Star Trek. We have never recovered ever since.

I'd actually quite enjoyed it, both because it was pretty much inevitable that a group like Section 31 would exist in the Federation to do disavowable things and because it made for several great Bashir episodes where he learned to regret that spy fantasy of his.

[Graham]

Well, I'm enjoying it so far.

[Mommar]

17 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Nah, stuff was already happening in Deep Space Nine right in the first episode.

What you're referring to is the point where Deep Space Nine started experimenting with augmenting the standard Star Trek episodic storytelling format with serialized storytelling in the form of season-long story arcs... and it's not fair to characterize the episodes before that point as "nothing happening", because an awful bloody lot happened in those two seasons.  They managed to set up their entire premise and introduce the entire cast in the space of a single two-parter.

I was going to say DS9 is actually the only Star Trek series that hit the ground running.