Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[Seto Kaiba]

5 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

"Oh...the horror..." sums it up pretty much...

Honestly, the trailer for the next episode is easily the most horrific part of this episode... 

This episode was merely awful, that trailer promises a viewing experience so painful it contravenes laws on the humane treatment of prisoners of war.

[pengbuzz]

40 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Honestly, the trailer for the next episode is easily the most horrific part of this episode... 

This episode was merely awful, that trailer promises a viewing experience so painful it contravenes laws on the humane treatment of prisoners of war.

*shudders in sheer terror*

[Lolicon]

I don't listen to so-called Trek "fans" who think they're some kind of authority on what "real Trek" should be. It's pretty obvious when someone hates something before it even started.

On another note, that trailer for the next episode was goofy as hell. Though not really any goofier than any past Trek where the crew had to dress up and "go local" (was never a fan of such episodes).

Edited February 14, 2020 by Lolicon

[tekering]

1 hour ago, Lolicon said:

On another note, that trailer for the next episode was goofy as hell. Though not really any goofier than any past Trek where the crew had to dress up and "go local" (was never a fan of such episodes).

Some of the funniest stuff from TOS came out of such scenarios ("A Piece of the Action" immediately springs to mind), and some of the most haunting (like "Return of the Archons").  TNG had some solid examples as well (notably "First Contact" and "Unification"), but too many pointless holodeck adventures.  Nothing similar from Voyager, DS9 or Enterprise comes to mind -- not that I considered any of those series particularly memorable -- but I'm pretty certain, just from the next episode teaser alone, that Picard ep.5 is going to be the worst hour of Star Trek since "Run Along Home."    

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, tekering said:

Some of the funniest stuff from TOS came out of such scenarios ("A Piece of the Action" immediately springs to mind), and some of the most haunting (like "Return of the Archons").  TNG had some solid examples as well (notably "First Contact" and "Unification"), but too many pointless holodeck adventures.  

None of that involved clownish levels of cosplay though... even on the part of the local Planet of Hats.  Even on the wackier holodeck adventures or when Q decided to throw everyone into a recreation of Robin Hood folklore, it didn't cross the line into looking completely ridiculous the way "Stardust City Rag" did.

 

8 hours ago, tekering said:

Nothing similar from Voyager, DS9 or Enterprise comes to mind -- not that I considered any of those series particularly memorable -- but I'm pretty certain, just from the next episode teaser alone, that Picard ep.5 is going to be the worst hour of Star Trek since "Run Along Home."    

Voyager had one really good, silly one involving that 19th century Irish town holoprogram Tom Paris created that was used in a few episodes.  The period dress was taken completely seriously, but in "Spirit Folk" the program's built-in weirdness censor that kept the holograms from noticing out-of-character/setting behavior failed and they became convinced that their visitors from Voyager were trickster faeries and tried to exorcise them.

As far as lurid dress, there was that one Hawaiian shirt that Tucker wore that even T'Pol snarked at... but even that doesn't come close to this:

 

Incidentally, didn't we last see this bouncer in Hellraiser?

[mechaninac]

Wow!... bohemian douche bag Picard, zoot suit pimp (professor Farnsworth did it better), and a bipedal turd... or a poor homage to Sloth...

--//--

Enterprise actually had a couple of pretty good "dress up like the locals to blend in and avoid discovery/contamination" episodes, too:  North Star, the episode where they encounter 19th century cowboys who turned the tables on their Skagaran captors, and Carbon Creek, where it is a crew of stranded Vulcans who must go incognito in 20th Century America after their survey ship crashes (my personal favorite episode of the STE series)... there are a couple others, but these were the most memorable/outstanding ones.

Edited February 15, 2020 by mechaninac
19th (late 1800s) century, not 18th.... duh!

[Lexomatic]

I've been separately following discussion on TrekMovie and (more civilly and cogently) Tor.com under KRAD. (I've screened the first ep, free on YouTube, but I'm waiting to binge on CBSAA-via-Prime.) People have intuited what the show is trying to say, but I'm wondering if (a) the production staff doesn't have the chops to do a story of this kind, in this medium; and (b) there's hero-worship of Sir Patrick which prevented necessary criticism (see also: "you want to drive a truck? sure!" from Nemesis).

Michael Chabon has "created by" and "executive producer" credits (there are 21 producers of various stripes). He's mostly a short fiction author (ISFDb) and his TV credits are sparse (IMDb) -- did anybody actually ask "do the talents of one translate to the other?" ST:DSC s1 similarly has a lot of junior writers. (Have any of us actually read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2001) or The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007)?)

Is the show trying to be an allegory for our times? Yes -- Trek has always done that. Is it doing so in a ham-handed way? Apparently. There's a recurring tension in SF, when worldbuilding collides with allegory -- you may have created circumstances in which the a simply-framed allegory doesn't ring true; instead, you have to adjust it in some way. (Like splicing together musical motifs without transposing to a compatible key.) A comment on "haves and have-nots" will be less convincing in a world that is otherwise presented as post-scarcity. A comment on a society fallen from its ideals has no resonance if we've never actually seen that society at its reputed best (and 90% of Trek has been about the microcosms of starship crews).

Edited February 15, 2020 by Lexomatic
+"credit", +Chabon's most notable novels.

[CoryHolmes]

Despite all the naysayers, I found I enjoyed the first three episodes despite their pacing issues.  But this one just didn't interest me; it's yet more set up and yet another character introduction; not very good in that we're now halfway through the 10-episode season and we're STILL getting the crew together and not actually boldly going yet.  Tick tock, producers, time's a-wasting.

 

On the plus side, I really like how they acknowledge the fact that Picard is old now.  His fencing isn't there, he can't run up a building of stairs despite being the only freshman to win the Academy marathon, and in this episode he outright says it.  "I'm an old man, and you're a young one."  In a series were Kirk was running with Photon torpedoes and climbing mountains until his toupee fell off, this is a beloved character who has been allowed to grow old.  Lets see what he can do with that*.

 

 

 

 

* epically inspiring Shakespearean speech pls.

[pengbuzz]

On 2/14/2020 at 10:31 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

None of that involved clownish levels of cosplay though... even on the part of the local Planet of Hats.  Even on the wackier holodeck adventures or when Q decided to throw everyone into a recreation of Robin Hood folklore, it didn't cross the line into looking completely ridiculous the way "Stardust City Rag" did.

 

Voyager had one really good, silly one involving that 19th century Irish town holoprogram Tom Paris created that was used in a few episodes.  The period dress was taken completely seriously, but in "Spirit Folk" the program's built-in weirdness censor that kept the holograms from noticing out-of-character/setting behavior failed and they became convinced that their visitors from Voyager were trickster faeries and tried to exorcise them.

As far as lurid dress, there was that one Hawaiian shirt that Tucker wore that even T'Pol snarked at... but even that doesn't come close to this:

 

Incidentally, didn't we last see this bouncer in Hellraiser?

Okay... so Picard is a French artist/pirate, another guy is some futuristic metrosexual zoot-suiter, and we have (for all intents and purposes) a human booger.

Is CBS hiring the same writers now as Harmony Gold? O.o

[pengbuzz]

On 2/13/2020 at 11:49 PM, Lolicon said:

I don't listen to so-called Trek "fans" who think they're some kind of authority on what "real Trek" should be. It's pretty obvious when someone hates something before it even started.

It's just like rotten fruit: I don't need to taste it to tell it's going to royally suck.

On that note: there's a major difference between folks "who think they're some kind of authority on what 'real Trek' should be", and those just giving their opinions based on experience. But to be fair, there's a lot of fans who have been betrayed at several turns by TPTB with "visions" of what those powers perceive to be Star Trek, only to find out that it is instead either a bland pastiche of sci-fi leftovers or inane ideas all smashed together with a barely-cohesive plot (if any). So with all due respect, I don't listen to "fans" who just want people to be silent because their opinions offend them.

And with that, I'm done on that point.

[Lexomatic]

I've seen the first ep, out of curiosity I jumped to the fourth, and it just didn't hold my interest -- not past the banter between Jurati and Rios. "Turns out, space travel is really boring."

(I finally subscribed to CBSAA via Prime, only to discover it's prohibited from playing on my Xfinity X1 set-top box. Apparently there's a new CBS-Comcast agreement in the works to resolve that, "later this year".)

I'm bothered by the number of glowing blue engine apertures on La Sirena. That's a very Star Wars aesthetic, whereas on a Trek ship, you've got (a) the photon spill apertures for the warp nacelles, and (b) the impulse exhausts, which are usually two different colors and pointed in two different directions.

I'm also bothered by the tiny size of the La Sirena-logo comm pin. A classic TNG combadge is big enough to plausibly contain a battery and transceiver suitable for ground-to-orbit, but something the size of a tie tack? This seems to be part of a trend with the wardrobes, starting with DSC's "make the rank insignia nigh-invisible braille-dots on the edge of the Starfleet chevron".

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

I've seen the first ep, out of curiosity I jumped to the fourth, and it just didn't hold my interest -- not past the banter between Jurati and Rios. "Turns out, space travel is really boring."

When a series only has ten episodes in a season, it needs to hit the ground running to have any chance of getting anywhere in that short span of screen time.  Star Trek: Picard hit the ground like a centenarian with a broken hip and promptly took off at a blistering pace rivaled only by the East Fort Myers zimmer frame relay team. 

Next episode is the halfway point in Star Trek: Picard's first - and, great bird of the galaxy willing, only - season and they've only just finished assembling the main cast.  Never mind that none of the original characters are developed at all, and that there's been zero sense of direction to the story thus far.  It's a random series of events connected only by a sad and elderly Jean-Luc Picard saying how sorry he is over and over again to a succession of people we neither know nor care about.

 

3 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

I'm also bothered by the tiny size of the La Sirena-logo comm pin. A classic TNG combadge is big enough to plausibly contain a battery and transceiver suitable for ground-to-orbit, but something the size of a tie tack?

Really, I'm kind of surprised that La Sirena has a commbadge at all... that's a gimmick that was always reserved for Starfleet or the militaries of the Federation's neighbors.  You'd expect a civilian freighter like La Sirena to be using something more primitive, like a handheld communciator or a wrist-mounted one like the Cardassians had in DS9.

 

3 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

This seems to be part of a trend with the wardrobes, starting with DSC's "make the rank insignia nigh-invisible braille-dots on the edge of the Starfleet chevron".

Or covering the Discovery blue pajamas uniform with tiny brass starfleet chevrons?

[sh9000]

I liked episode 5.  Hope to see more of 7 of 9.  Jeri Ryan is still hot.

[tekering]

54 minutes ago, sh9000 said:

I liked episode 5.

Well, I found "Stardust City Rag" as cringe-worthy as I was expecting, but in a *completely* different manner.  Certainly, attempts at humor were mercifully brief.  Despite some familiar characters and techno-jargon, however, Picard no longer resembles Star Trek in any way, shape or form...  

The producers of this series ought to expect a visitation from the vengeful ghost of Gene Roddenberry, The Grudge-style. 

[JB0]

35 minutes ago, tekering said:

The producers of this series ought to expect a visitation from the vengeful ghost of Gene Roddenberry, The Grudge-style.

One can only hope.

[Lexomatic]

Episode 5, "Stardust City Rag" (written by Kirsten Beyer, directed by Jonathan Frakes)

I definitely found it more engaging than Ep 4. But let's get this out of the way: an opening scene of <spoilered because it's gross>

Spoiler

Icheb's cyber-eyeball being surgically extracted.

UGH UGH UGH. Was this too much network interference ("we've got a TV-MA rating, we have to be edgy!") or too little oversight of a bad decision by Frakes? Who do I complain to at CBS?

Icheb, you may recall, was one of four juvenile Borg rescued and re-socialized by Voyager, The other three were eventually fostered out to local species, but he became Seven's protégé, had aspirations to join Starfleet, and courageously donated his cortical node when hers failed. In this ep, Seven calls him "the closest thing to kin I will ever have" (fair 'nuff, since she didn't manage to de-assimilate her parents) and "son" -- but I had always interpreted their relationship as more younger-sibling.

Seven ultimately kills the killer of Icheb (using the phaser setting "reduce to a bloody mist"), but arranges the final confrontation in a way "not to disillusion [Picard]". Mentor-Janeway would be so disappointed -- or would she? She's a more vindictive type than Picard, and Icheb was part of her crew/family.

Re: Bruce Maddox and protégé Agnes Jurati, and the way she described their relationship when she first met Picard. "Romantic?" the audience immediately guessed. "A male-female relationship in drama doesn't have to be romantic," other people said. Turns out <sigh> yes, it's romantic. But at least milieu-appropriate cute (Jurati reviews a home video in which she's flummoxed by Maddox baking cookies from replicated ingredients).

Jurati surreptitiously kills Maddox while alone in La Sirena's sickbay. She clearly doesn't want to, but she's absolutely terrified by unknown-something shown to her by unknown-somebody -- presumably she can't allow him to continue his work in Synths, because Ragnarok, or something.

On other boards, people wondered if the flamboyant disguises had any social meaning ("has Federation fashion become more sober in the wake of several decades of war, and Stardust City is a counter-reaction?") and if so, is that meaning too subtle (given our limited knowledge of UFP civilians)? Nothing so nuanced. It's specifically an affectation by the disreputable go-betweens known as "interfacers" ("facers"), as concisely explained by Raffi.

Separately, Raffi tracks down her estranged son and his pregnant Romulan wife Pel, who are at a fertility clinic. This is one of the few instances in onscreen-Trek to imply that interspecies procreation requires some assistance. (In VGR, Tom and B'Elanna also needed help.) It might be the same sort of edge-of-legal place that performed the genetic resequencing of young Julian Bashir.

[Seto Kaiba]

Haven't watched the episode yet, thank goodness, but this prompted some thought from me...

2 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

Separately, Raffi tracks down her estranged son and his pregnant Romulan wife Pel, who are at a fertility clinic. This is one of the few instances in onscreen-Trek to imply that interspecies procreation requires some assistance. (In VGR, Tom and B'Elanna also needed help.) It might be the same sort of edge-of-legal place that performed the genetic resequencing of young Julian Bashir.

There are actually a fair few instances in Trek implying that interspecies pregnancies occasionally require a helping hand from genetic medicine.  DS9 and ENT were the ones to lay it on real thick, with Bashir cautioning Dax that getting Trill and Klingon DNA to play nicely enough to have a baby might not even be possible and ENT showing an unsuccessful binary clone child that was half-Vulcan.  That was never depicted as illegal or even questionably legal though.  Bashir was able to proceed with Dax and Worf's fertility treatments without any kind of special permission or pushback from Starfleet or civilian authorities.  (Tom and B'Elanna didn't need genetic engineering help to have a kid tho, they needed it to correct a Klingon birth defect that ran in B'Elanna's family.)

[Seto Kaiba]

OK... just cleared a tough-AF work week, and now it's time to sit down and give Star Trek: Picard the beating it so richly deserves this week thanks to "Stardust City Rag".  

Perhaps future Star Trek conventions can replace autograph lines with "punch the producers" lines?

 

The Good

Spoiler

For the first time in a while, we see a special effect that doesn't look like arse... the zoom in on "Planet Vergessen" looks like rather a nice place, prior to the reveal that it's the location of a Borg organ-harvesting operation.  Can't have anything nice, can we?

 

The Bad

Spoiler

... why does every episode open with a flashback?  This one's to 13 years ago (2386).  Did the writing team just not realize it's possible to handle exposition by other means than flashbacks?

After some unnecessary gore we jump to... a dwarf playing piano in a tacky dress at a place called Stardust City, apparently a gathering place for fashion disasters of all species.  It says a lot that Bruce Maddox is the only halfway normal looking one in the joint, and he's looking like a hobo.  He's there to tell some low-rent TNG S1 Deanna Troi cosplayer that his lab was totally destroyed with a "molecular solvent", and he thinks it's the Tal Shiar.  His drink is predictably drugged, and he passes out and his apparent backer plots to sell him out to the Romulans.

Y'know, when Reg Barclay tried to live in a holodeck people said he was mentally ill.  Jean-Luc Picard is now living inside of a holosuite.  It seems like the budget for this show is so embarrassingly low that they have to keep flogging that winery they've used as a standin for Chateau Picard.

Dr. Obnoxious is sitting in her cabin, because apparently she doesn't rate a holographic mansion to live in, watching a holo of Dr. Maddox baking cookies with replicated ingredients like this is somehow an amazing novelty?  So it seems that she has a personal stake in finding Bruce Maddox because she's his lover.  Yay.  

The conclusion to our grand quest for Bruce Maddox's location is... Raffi finds him being advertised on a space BBS.

So apparently if you're a go-between on Stardust City, you're expected to dress like a complete f*cking retard.  That is their entire excuse for dressing Rios like pimp and Picard like he's a representative of the Republic of French Stereotypes.

Raffi's cyberstalking some guy named Gabriel Hwang at Reproductive Health Services.  Turns out it's her son, and it's super f*cking awkward.  I mean, it helps cover up the fact that neither actor can act worth a damn but seriously.  Is nobody in this mess allowed to have any happiness?  This galaxy is so miserable.  She announces that she's off the drugs and feels good again... and it turns out living like paranoid trailer trash destroyed her marriage and drove her family away.  Her son's got an awful lot of repressed baggage about that (and understandably so).

While Picard and Seven are being menaced with cheap drugstore raygun toys, Dr. Obnoxious is back on the La Sirena having some kind of nervous breakdown severe enough to automatically trigger the ship's EMH.

Seven and the evil Troi cosplayer exchange unpleasantries for a bit in a terribly cliched manner.  Oh no, Seven wasn't entirely candid with Picard, she's here to murder the Troi cosplayer for carving up Icheb.  I know she learned human behavior from Janeway, but that's still a pretty extreme reaction.  Elnor has to ask if everyone is done pretending.

We get treated to another really cliche exchange of unpleasantries about how sh*tty the galaxy is between Seven and the evil Troi cosplayer, then Seven just straight-up vaporizes her and walks away two-handing phaser rifles, rapid firing at the bar's security staff... a scene that looks twice as stupid as it sounds.

Bruce Maddox is dying the La Sirena's sickbay, apparently Dahj and Soji were deliberately sent into harm's way by Maddox to discover the truth behind the ban on synthetic lifeforms.  Maddox and Dr. Obnoxious have a brief reunion, and then there's a really awkward bit of dialog between them.  The acting is TERRIBLE, and then Dr. Obnoxious turns off life support and then the EMH, allowing Maddox to die, claiming that she wishes he knew what she knew.  This is just getting stupid.

 

The Ugly

Spoiler

... and we're opening on a doctor on some backwards world dissecting Icheb, the nice boy from Star Trek: Voyager who was Seven of Nine's surrogate little brother.  Is absolutely nothing sacred to these screenwriters in their quest to twist Star Trek's future into a dystopian hellhole?  

Also, why is this mysterious Borg implant-harvesting operation removing Icheb's left eye?  That's not a Borg implant, that's a Starfleet-issue cybernetic eye that was replicated for him by Voyager's EMH when his Borg implants were removed.  That's a totally gratuitous and unnecessary gore shot.

Then, of course, we have to watch Icheb dying in pain in Seven's arms, literally begging for death, before she pulls a phaser and ends his suffering.

Why the flying f*ck was this in this show?  WHY?  This is not Star Trek.  This is just some cinematic atrocity.  I sincerely hope the ghost of Gene Roddenberry hounds everyone involved in this, Frakes and Stewart included, to an early and shallow grave.

... and Seven of Nine has joined the cadre of broken Star Trek characters pushed into this ridiculous farce of a story.  She's a lot less starchy, but she's still an incredibly caustic person who also seems to have a lot of irrational hatred for Picard and is no doubt going to be won over by his pathetic apologies.  Because no returning character is allowed to have any kind of nice life, she's living hard as a Space Ranger (lol) from Fenris (lol).  This is bad fanfic levels of writing here.  I mean, it was before but this is actually descending the scale of bad fanfic.  I expect we'll hit My Immortal somewhere around episode nine.  The best part is how they feel compelled to have Rios and Musiker fill the audience in on her origin story by talking her up like a bad fanfic writer explaining why their ORIGINAL CHARACTER DO NOT STEAL is super awesome.

Oh my f*cking machine god, Freecloud has holographic pop-up ads that invade the La Sirena's holographic controls.  Just think, the reason the all-green screen backgrounds look like arse is because the writers couldn't live without a cartoon red Bolian advertising warp core maintenance or Dr. Obnoxious being assailed by a Rock 'em Sock 'em Robot.  Somehow, this scene is rendered even more cringeworthy when Romulan Legolas is visibly upset he didn't get assaulted by an advert.

... how is it that Stardust City manages to look like a cheap visual effect even compared to the decades-old CG of Coruscant in the Star Wars prequel trilogy?  This is just bad. 

We have hit peak cringe, people.  Peak.  Cringe.  This looks like a low-rent revival of The Fifth Element crossing over with The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  

Oh god, the props.  The ugly reptile turd man's phaser looks like a drug story toy.  It looks like one of those little chromed-plastic space blaster toys that make a couple different noises and have strobing lights.  He's supposed to be intimidating waving that thing in Rios's face, but I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING AT HIS SHITTY PROP.  It's like a toy from a fair booth, and the "camera flash charging up" sound effect doesn't help!

I WAS WRONG.  I WAS WROOOOOOOONG.  Peak cringe occurs at 20:26, when Patrick Stewart does his very worst French accent, informing Raffi that he thought he looked sinister with his eyepatch and goofy scarf.

... and Romu-Legolas is SUPER STOKED to play pretend.  UGH.  It's just narmy at this point.  Someone wrote this and thought "this'll be fun and cool" and they were VERY wrong.  The only moment of amusement is Seven backhandedly telling him to STFU.

Patrick Stewart's atrocious French accent completely robs the proceedings of any semblance of dignity they might've had.  You can almost see the moment Jeri Ryan's mortal soul makes a desperate bid for freedom from this hell.

Picard tries to give a Picard Speech to Seven of Nine while his party have taken an entire nightclub hostage at gunpod and Seven is threatening to strangle the evil Troi cosplayer.  Once again, he's immediately on the receiving end of a The Reason You Suck speech, this time from Seven.  Is anyone in this show NOT going to tell Picard he's a little bit sh*t?  There needs to be a fan supercut of all the times characters spend five minutes or so telling Picard how much he sucks and how much the galaxy sucks because he let the rescues stop.  Picard tries to give her one of those "if you murder a murderer the number of murderers is unchanged"... apparently forgetting the corrolary that it's possible to murder a bunch of murderers and have the net number go down.

How f*cking many times is someone going to say "get them out of here" and they stand around talking instead?

The phaser rifle props that Seven grabs before beaming back down to Freecloud appear to be almost totally unmodified rifle props.  

Next episode seems to promise that not only will Picard visit a Borg cube for the first time since "Best of Both Worlds", that visit will coincide with the Borg on the ship reactivating somehow... because apparently that wasn't obvious enough when they gave that safety briefing about running if the badges turn green a few episodes back.  We're back to cyber-zombies, the lowest common denominator bullsh*t Trek has.

 

[Roy Focker]

I think Rich Evans was right.

Why does this show have to be so bad?

Let's put one of our greatest living actors back in one his most iconic roles and toss him in this generic edgy sci-fi show.  This most recent episode seemed like it was trying too hard to be an episode of Firefly but without the charm. 

[renegadeleader1]

6 hours ago, Roy Focker said:

This most recent episode seemed like it was trying too hard to be an episode of Firefly but without the charm

Not Firefly. This whole thing reeks of a poor Blake's 7 knockoff.

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, Roy Focker said:

Let's put one of our greatest living actors back in one his most iconic roles and toss him in this generic edgy sci-fi show.

Bad Robot and Secret Hideout have been trying to turn Star Trek into a generic edgy sci-fi property since Star Trek '09... and doing a pretty sh*t job of it, which makes it all the more perplexing that people keep giving them money to try the same bad idea over and over again.

[pengbuzz]

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

OK... just cleared a tough-AF work week, and now it's time to sit down and give Star Trek: Picard the beating it so richly deserves this week thanks to "Stardust City Rag".  

Perhaps future Star Trek conventions can replace autograph lines with "punch the producers" lines?

 

The Good

  Hide contents

For the first time in a while, we see a special effect that doesn't look like arse... the zoom in on "Planet Vergessen" looks like rather a nice place, prior to the reveal that it's the location of a Borg organ-harvesting operation.  Can't have anything nice, can we?

 

The Bad

  Hide contents

... why does every episode open with a flashback?  This one's to 13 years ago (2386).  Did the writing team just not realize it's possible to handle exposition by other means than flashbacks?

After some unnecessary gore we jump to... a dwarf playing piano in a tacky dress at a place called Stardust City, apparently a gathering place for fashion disasters of all species.  It says a lot that Bruce Maddox is the only halfway normal looking one in the joint, and he's looking like a hobo.  He's there to tell some low-rent TNG S1 Deanna Troi cosplayer that his lab was totally destroyed with a "molecular solvent", and he thinks it's the Tal Shiar.  His drink is predictably drugged, and he passes out and his apparent backer plots to sell him out to the Romulans.

Y'know, when Reg Barclay tried to live in a holodeck people said he was mentally ill.  Jean-Luc Picard is now living inside of a holosuite.  It seems like the budget for this show is so embarrassingly low that they have to keep flogging that winery they've used as a standin for Chateau Picard.

Dr. Obnoxious is sitting in her cabin, because apparently she doesn't rate a holographic mansion to live in, watching a holo of Dr. Maddox baking cookies with replicated ingredients like this is somehow an amazing novelty?  So it seems that she has a personal stake in finding Bruce Maddox because she's his lover.  Yay.  

The conclusion to our grand quest for Bruce Maddox's location is... Raffi finds him being advertised on a space BBS.

So apparently if you're a go-between on Stardust City, you're expected to dress like a complete f*cking retard.  That is their entire excuse for dressing Rios like pimp and Picard like he's a representative of the Republic of French Stereotypes.

Raffi's cyberstalking some guy named Gabriel Hwang at Reproductive Health Services.  Turns out it's her son, and it's super f*cking awkward.  I mean, it helps cover up the fact that neither actor can act worth a damn but seriously.  Is nobody in this mess allowed to have any happiness?  This galaxy is so miserable.  She announces that she's off the drugs and feels good again... and it turns out living like paranoid trailer trash destroyed her marriage and drove her family away.  Her son's got an awful lot of repressed baggage about that (and understandably so).

While Picard and Seven are being menaced with cheap drugstore raygun toys, Dr. Obnoxious is back on the La Sirena having some kind of nervous breakdown severe enough to automatically trigger the ship's EMH.

Seven and the evil Troi cosplayer exchange unpleasantries for a bit in a terribly cliched manner.  Oh no, Seven wasn't entirely candid with Picard, she's here to murder the Troi cosplayer for carving up Icheb.  I know she learned human behavior from Janeway, but that's still a pretty extreme reaction.  Elnor has to ask if everyone is done pretending.

We get treated to another really cliche exchange of unpleasantries about how sh*tty the galaxy is between Seven and the evil Troi cosplayer, then Seven just straight-up vaporizes her and walks away two-handing phaser rifles, rapid firing at the bar's security staff... a scene that looks twice as stupid as it sounds.

Bruce Maddox is dying the La Sirena's sickbay, apparently Dahj and Soji were deliberately sent into harm's way by Maddox to discover the truth behind the ban on synthetic lifeforms.  Maddox and Dr. Obnoxious have a brief reunion, and then there's a really awkward bit of dialog between them.  The acting is TERRIBLE, and then Dr. Obnoxious turns off life support and then the EMH, allowing Maddox to die, claiming that she wishes he knew what she knew.  This is just getting stupid.

 

The Ugly

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... and we're opening on a doctor on some backwards world dissecting Icheb, the nice boy from Star Trek: Voyager who was Seven of Nine's surrogate little brother.  Is absolutely nothing sacred to these screenwriters in their quest to twist Star Trek's future into a dystopian hellhole?  

Also, why is this mysterious Borg implant-harvesting operation removing Icheb's left eye?  That's not a Borg implant, that's a Starfleet-issue cybernetic eye that was replicated for him by Voyager's EMH when his Borg implants were removed.  That's a totally gratuitous and unnecessary gore shot.

Then, of course, we have to watch Icheb dying in pain in Seven's arms, literally begging for death, before she pulls a phaser and ends his suffering.

Why the flying f*ck was this in this show?  WHY?  This is not Star Trek.  This is just some cinematic atrocity.  I sincerely hope the ghost of Gene Roddenberry hounds everyone involved in this, Frakes and Stewart included, to an early and shallow grave.

... and Seven of Nine has joined the cadre of broken Star Trek characters pushed into this ridiculous farce of a story.  She's a lot less starchy, but she's still an incredibly caustic person who also seems to have a lot of irrational hatred for Picard and is no doubt going to be won over by his pathetic apologies.  Because no returning character is allowed to have any kind of nice life, she's living hard as a Space Ranger (lol) from Fenris (lol).  This is bad fanfic levels of writing here.  I mean, it was before but this is actually descending the scale of bad fanfic.  I expect we'll hit My Immortal somewhere around episode nine.  The best part is how they feel compelled to have Rios and Musiker fill the audience in on her origin story by talking her up like a bad fanfic writer explaining why their ORIGINAL CHARACTER DO NOT STEAL is super awesome.

Oh my f*cking machine god, Freecloud has holographic pop-up ads that invade the La Sirena's holographic controls.  Just think, the reason the all-green screen backgrounds look like arse is because the writers couldn't live without a cartoon red Bolian advertising warp core maintenance or Dr. Obnoxious being assailed by a Rock 'em Sock 'em Robot.  Somehow, this scene is rendered even more cringeworthy when Romulan Legolas is visibly upset he didn't get assaulted by an advert.

... how is it that Stardust City manages to look like a cheap visual effect even compared to the decades-old CG of Coruscant in the Star Wars prequel trilogy?  This is just bad. 

We have hit peak cringe, people.  Peak.  Cringe.  This looks like a low-rent revival of The Fifth Element crossing over with The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  

Oh god, the props.  The ugly reptile turd man's phaser looks like a drug story toy.  It looks like one of those little chromed-plastic space blaster toys that make a couple different noises and have strobing lights.  He's supposed to be intimidating waving that thing in Rios's face, but I CAN'T STOP LAUGHING AT HIS SHITTY PROP.  It's like a toy from a fair booth, and the "camera flash charging up" sound effect doesn't help!

I WAS WRONG.  I WAS WROOOOOOOONG.  Peak cringe occurs at 20:26, when Patrick Stewart does his very worst French accent, informing Raffi that he thought he looked sinister with his eyepatch and goofy scarf.

... and Romu-Legolas is SUPER STOKED to play pretend.  UGH.  It's just narmy at this point.  Someone wrote this and thought "this'll be fun and cool" and they were VERY wrong.  The only moment of amusement is Seven backhandedly telling him to STFU.

Patrick Stewart's atrocious French accent completely robs the proceedings of any semblance of dignity they might've had.  You can almost see the moment Jeri Ryan's mortal soul makes a desperate bid for freedom from this hell.

Picard tries to give a Picard Speech to Seven of Nine while his party have taken an entire nightclub hostage at gunpod and Seven is threatening to strangle the evil Troi cosplayer.  Once again, he's immediately on the receiving end of a The Reason You Suck speech, this time from Seven.  Is anyone in this show NOT going to tell Picard he's a little bit sh*t?  There needs to be a fan supercut of all the times characters spend five minutes or so telling Picard how much he sucks and how much the galaxy sucks because he let the rescues stop.  Picard tries to give her one of those "if you murder a murderer the number of murderers is unchanged"... apparently forgetting the corrolary that it's possible to murder a bunch of murderers and have the net number go down.

How f*cking many times is someone going to say "get them out of here" and they stand around talking instead?

The phaser rifle props that Seven grabs before beaming back down to Freecloud appear to be almost totally unmodified rifle props.  

Next episode seems to promise that not only will Picard visit a Borg cube for the first time since "Best of Both Worlds", that visit will coincide with the Borg on the ship reactivating somehow... because apparently that wasn't obvious enough when they gave that safety briefing about running if the badges turn green a few episodes back.  We're back to cyber-zombies, the lowest common denominator bullsh*t Trek has.

 

I wonder if there's a market for really bad sci-fi comedy?

Aside from that, i wonder if the reason the androids on Mars went berserk is that they was all the episodes of Picard in advance and just couldn't take it??!!

Edited February 22, 2020 by pengbuzz

[mechaninac]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Aside from that, i wonder if the reason the androids on Mars went berserk is that they was all the episodes of Picard in advance and just couldn't take it??!!

I like that theory...  They stared into the abyss.  It stared back.  And they went mad from the experience.

[JB0]

58 minutes ago, mechaninac said:

I like that theory...  They stared into the abyss.  It stared back.  And they went mad from the experience.

The first law compelled them to exterminate humanity before it bore witness to the show, as death was the lesser harm.

[CoryHolmes]

I`ve thoroughly enjoyed the series up until this episode.   This was just bad.  Almost "Shades of Grey" or `Move along Home", or god forbid "Angel One" bad.  Just completely awful.

 

Until the ending, when crap went sideways REAL fast.  Alison Pill did an amazing job at the end, and I can confidently say that the acting of this has been completely top-notch from all the actors.  So while I hated this episode, I'm looking forward to seeing where the plot goes next.

[Seto Kaiba]

16 hours ago, mechaninac said:

I like that theory...  They stared into the abyss.  It stared back.  And they went mad from the experience.

That would certainly explain the smiles...

[Atheonyirh]

On 2/18/2020 at 9:54 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Next episode is the halfway point in Star Trek: Picard's first - and, great bird of the galaxy willing, only - season

It already got a second season approved.

 

On 2/21/2020 at 12:18 AM, tekering said:

The producers of this series ought to expect a visitation from the vengeful ghost of Gene Roddenberry, The Grudge-style. 

Roddenberry would probably be wondering where his check was and not much more, honestly. And if his TNG era ideas are anything to go by, let alone the bullshit he did during TOS' production, he wouldn't have room to speak anyways.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 minutes ago, Atheonyirh said:

It already got a second season approved.

Well, yes and no... CBS announced that they were planning to renew Star Trek: Picard for a second season, but because they aren't the ones picking up the check for production it means virtually nothing.  If Amazon does what Netflix almost did after Discovery's second season and refuses to put up a budget to produce season two, the show is cancelled whether CBS likes it or not.

This is why Section 31 hasn't gotten produced thus far.  CBS's brain trust green lit it, but nobody was willing to put money into it.

 

3 minutes ago, Atheonyirh said:

Roddenberry would probably be wondering where his check was and not much more, honestly. And if his TNG era ideas are anything to go by, let alone the bullshit he did during TOS' production, he wouldn't have room to speak anyways.

Quite the opposite... if he reacted anything like he did to the marginally more military Starfleet in the last couple TOS movies, Gene Roddenberry would be suing CBS.  Paramount was only rescued from that looming lawsuit when he up and died.

[pengbuzz]

On 2/23/2020 at 7:35 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Well, yes and no... CBS announced that they were planning to renew Star Trek: Picard for a second season, but because they aren't the ones picking up the check for production it means virtually nothing.  If Amazon does what Netflix almost did after Discovery's second season and refuses to put up a budget to produce season two, the show is cancelled whether CBS likes it or not.

This is why Section 31 hasn't gotten produced thus far.  CBS's brain trust green lit it, but nobody was willing to put money into it.

Unless CBS puts money down (fat chance); At the rate things are going, ST:D is bound for a dose of  antibiotics.

  

On 2/23/2020 at 7:35 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Quite the opposite... if he reacted anything like he did to the marginally more military Starfleet in the last couple TOS movies, Gene Roddenberry would be suing CBS.  Paramount was only rescued from that looming lawsuit when he up and died.

You means Star Trek V and VI?

 

[Seto Kaiba]

29 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Unless CBS puts money down (fat chance); At the rate things are going, ST:D is bound for a dose of  antibiotics.  

CBS's chief obstacle in this current generation of Star Trek properties is that they're so expensive to develop and produce that the network is unwilling or unable to put up the vast sums of money required to do it all themselves.  It's too big of a risk.  They sank vast sums - reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars - into just the development of Star Trek: Discovery.  The demand for such a vast number of high quality CG sequences and digital VFX sequences, combined with set-building, props, and location shooting meant that production was going to cost a second king's ransom.  The production budget was $8-8.5 million per episode, and a number of actors have indicated they were over budget on practically every episode due to reshoots and producer shenanigans.  That's about $250 million for just the 29 episodes produced so far.  Seven seasons, assuming season length stays the same as season two, would incur production costs of nearly $875 million.  Factor in development costs, actor negotiating raises, and so on... and you're talking about an undertaking well in excess of a billion dollars.

(CBS's quarterly net earnings only total around $1.5 billion, to give you an idea about why a sum like that might make them a bit gunshy, based on their published earnings for FY2019.)

 

29 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

You means Star Trek V and VI?

Star Trek VI was the one where Gene was preparing to sue and died before the lawsuit could be filed.

[Focslain]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Star Trek VI was the one where Gene was preparing to sue and died before the lawsuit could be filed.

Ouch and VI is my favorite of the movies. I'm guessing that the militaristic faction was originally the majority in the Federation instead of just a small group as in the final cut?

[Seto Kaiba]

17 minutes ago, Focslain said:

Ouch and VI is my favorite of the movies. I'm guessing that the militaristic faction was originally the majority in the Federation instead of just a small group as in the final cut?

Nah... Gene was unhappy the militaristic aspect of things was present at all.

Rene Auberjonois' character, Col. West, was all but completely cut from the film on Roddenberry's insistence for that reason. 

According to Shatner, after viewing the theatrical cut of the film, Gene Roddenberry had his lawyer start preparing a demand for a further fifteen minutes of material to be cut from the film.  He passed away two days later, and the demand went undelivered.

[Lexomatic]

IIRC, the more overtly militaristic take on Starfleet was introduced in Wrath of Khan by director Nicholas Meyer. The original series wasn't clear on Starfleet's mission, or whether it had peer organizations within the Federation with complementary functions, and later productions haven't improved things -- so people (writers, audience) tend to fall back on contemporary analogs. Is the Enterprise like the U.S. Navy, or the U.S. Coast Guard, or the research voyages of Captain Cook or the HMS Beagle from the British Navy? Or some novel combination that lacks single-planet parallels? The UFP might be like the UN, but the UN doesn't charter research ships.

(This is apart from the common mistake of conflating Starfleet, the Federation, and the Federation's central government. Pike's line from the 2009 movie, "the Federation is a humanitarian armada," is the worst of the lot.)

Gene Roddenberry had dementia in his last years, and some directives delivered by his lawyer may have been initiated by his lawyer. That's a whole other sordid kettle of fish.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Lexomatic said:

IIRC, the more overtly militaristic take on Starfleet was introduced in Wrath of Khan by director Nicholas Meyer. The original series wasn't clear on Starfleet's mission, or whether it had peer organizations within the Federation with complementary functions, and later productions haven't improved things -- so people (writers, audience) tend to fall back on contemporary analogs.

Sort of.  Starfleet's "mildly military" nature was present from a fairly early point in Star Trek's development due to, ironically, the influence of Gene Roddenberry.  A lot of inspiration for the organization was drawn from the US Navy from the outset - which is why almost every Constitution-class ship in TOS are is named for a World War II-era aircraft carrier - but Gene would paradoxically insist it was not a military organization and then liken it to the (US) Coast Guard (which IS one).  He'd also contributed to a number of stories where Starfleet were depicted as responsible for the Federation's border security (e.g. TMP) and even the general defense of the Federation in wartime (e.g. TOS "Errand of Mercy").

EDIT: Perhaps one of the most blatant items being that the initial Starfleet Tech Manual Gene was so proud of contained things like Starfleet DREADNOUGHTS.

Meyer and Moore essentially just acknowledged what was already there... that one of the many hats Starfleet wears is that of the Federation's de facto military, though the organization isn't explicitly military in nature like its counterparts in the Klingon Empire, Romulan Empire, Cardassian Union, Dominion, etc.

 

Quote

Gene Roddenberry had dementia in his last years, and some directives delivered by his lawyer may have been initiated by his lawyer. That's a whole other sordid kettle of fish.

Gene wasn't a particularly consistent fellow even when he was in good health, TBH.

Edited February 25, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[Dynaman]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Gene wasn't a particularly consistent fellow even when he was in good health, TBH.

He got far worse the older he became.  My personal opinion, with nothing but the public record to go by, is that he thought of Star Trek as a salve for his own failings.  TNG preached the hippy dippy way to an extreme that TOS never did, at least till Gene passed away.