Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[sh9000]

 

[CoryHolmes]

I'm a little behind, but I have to say that this episode was of middling quality.  The character bits between the TNG crew was outstanding, and I found myself impatient with the new crew bits because they took screentime away from the Old Crew bits.  The acting was top-notch, which is something I've come to appreciate about this show, and even Frakes didn't have stumble despite this being his first film role in how long?

 

One thing I really do like is Narek didn't fall for Soji and swear to protect her, like the Trope says he should've.  He's slimy and refreshingly focused on his job.  And I love Narissa   She's enjoyably evil and it looks like the actress is having a blast playing her!

 

The only part that annoys is that my recording cut off the last 10 minutes of the show, so last I saw the New Crew bangers were deciding whom was betraying whom.  And I think Agnes' adorkable moments are equal parts cute and horrifying 

[Lolicon]

I'm enjoying the show more now that things are actually happening, but goddamn the pacing of this show is terrible.

Only after watching this most recent episode I realized that I've been doing the Data head tilt for years. This is what happens when you watch TNG from a super young age. 

[Seto Kaiba]

Remember when the Star Trek: Picard showrunners said that returning characters from previous shows were going to be confined to mere cameos and guest appearances?  Yeah, that was a bald-faced lie.  This and more garbage on See? BS All Access.

So now, "Broken Pieces".

The Good

Spoiler

The first moment of genuine entertainment in this episode is about 15 minutes in... when Space Druggie sits down to grouse at Rios and, after talking for several minutes, she finally notices the Rios she's talking to is not an unkempt space bum but a neatly dressed, well-groomed, Irish-accented emergency hologram... the Emergency Navigation Hologram "Enoch".   This bad gag was a LONG TIME COMING, given that all the emergency holograms look like Rios.

They're pretty committed to this gag... I wonder is Space Druggie is going to have to talk to all the different holograms before she finds the real Rios, or if the real Rios will screw with her by pretending to be a hologram too.  The engineering hologram's doing an INCREDIBLY unconvincing Scottish accent.  It sounds less like Scotty and more like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers 2: the Spy who Shagged Me.

She then runs up against the hospitality hologram, who informs her she disabled alcohol service in her quarters so she can't order any booze.  He talks like a cruise ship director.

Despite being reinvented as a macho action girl who grows generic threats, Seven has an actually appropriate reaction to the idea of reactivating the Borg transcievers of the drones on the ship to use them as soldiers against the Romulans.  Janeway would be proud.

Oh sweet machine god, Space Druggie has rounded up at least five Rios holograms and is attempting to psychoanalyze them.  Talk about a boondoggle.

 

The Bad

Spoiler

Flashback time~!  We're flashing back to 14 years ago... again.  This time, it's to Discount Spock's creepy sister's memories of being let into the Zhat Vash's big secret.  Apparently they go to a planet in a star system that has EIGHT SUNS (like that's not going to raise eyebrows) called Aia.  Helpfully subtitled "The Grief World".  As the alleged home of a species that apparently went extinct long before the rise of the modern galactic powers, the Aia Board of Tourism apparently have been out to lunch for too long to make a better slogan stick.  They did, however, leave behind some kind of magical memory device that looks a lot like an ordinary waist-high freestanding safety railing of the type you'd find on an outdoor staircase... just covered in a very cheap-looking green "glow" effect right out of TOS and standing in an ankle-deep reflecting pool.

From Commodore OhNo's narration here, it sounds like the Zhat Vash are an all-female secret society like the Romulan ninja monks that RomuLegolas trained with.  Incidentally, she's giving this narration IN PERSON to Zhat Vash recruits... how does the head of Starfleet Security jaunt off to Romulan space without anyone noticing she's entering enemy territory?

So... crazy Borg Professor from a few episodes ago is a Zhat Vash agent.  Yay.  

Apparently the Zhat Vash's crazy rampage nuts desire to kill every artificial lifeform in existence is prompted by voluntarily driving themselves insane by interacting with this alien artifact of unknown providence that they THINK shows them what happened to the species that created it.  All that freaky sh*t from last episode is just clips from this one, all the Zhat Vash agents committing suicide after touching the alien artifact.  

Jump cut forward to the present day, with Discount Spock's creepy sister talking to Borg Professor.  Borg Professor is their aunt, who raised the two creepy little sh*ts herself after their parents died. 

RomuLegolas decided to hide from the Tal Shiar/Zhat Vash in the one place they'd never think to look for him... inside Hugh's office, in plain sight.  He's briefly disabled by a flashbang that appears to be one of those Glade battery-powered air freshener things covered in white LEDs, and then he has to beat up an entire squad before Seven inexplicably shows up and guns them all down to save his whiny arse.

After the OP, Rios is freaking out and apparently has tinnitus or something at the sight of Miss Generic?  I know she's boring and unlikeable, but that's a bit of an extreme reaction.  Whatever he saw so unsettled him that he's throwing Picard off of his ship at Deep Space 12.  Space Druggie is apparently also totally freaked out, and actually pulls a phaser on Miss Generic, as she insists that all Picard knows is that she was made from a specific neuron.  Turns out they found the glowy tide pod that Commodore OhNo made Dr. Obnoxious eat, so now she's freaking out about double agents.  Apparently until Dr. Obnoxious attempted suicide trying to remove that tide pod from her body, it never occurred to anyone to ask the f*cking EMH how and why Bruce Maddox died despite the fact that he's the ONLY QUALIFIED MEDICAL TECHNICIAN ON THE SHIP.  Picard tries to insist that Dr. Obnoxious must've been hysterial or something when she flat-out killed Bruce Maddox, which nobody on that ship takes seriously because everyone else apparently decided to be genre savvy today.

Picard decides to try to recover some face by rubbing the Starfleet C-in-C's face in his revelations, then demands a squadron of Starfleet ships for support.  He IMMEDIATELY gets rude with her AGAIN, and says that if she says rescuing androids in a neutral system isn't a job for Starfleet then she's a waste of space.  She drops ANOTHER F-bomb, telling him to shut the f*ck up (and golly, I'm warming up to this Admiral).  Proving that she's actually more reasonable than Picard, she actually sends the bloody squadron.

How does the ENH on a private civilian spacecraft have access to ancient Romulan star atlases?  

Seven of Nine decides to commit Grand Theft Borg Cube?  Apparently you can just completely take the thing over from the Queen's chamber.  We get a lot of this Minority Report handwaving computer BS as she apparently has to manually resize a control window several times... then we get to revisit the cheap lighting VFX from TNG season one!

Miss Generic and Picard have a discussion in the mess.  Picard delivers an incredibly pendantic speech that comes off more as patronizing than helpful, in attempting to help Miss Generic deal with his sense of dissociation from her fictional past.  He steers the conversation to Data so he can natter on about his dead friend... and does an incredibly poor job of explaining who Data was and what he was like.  

... wait, what?  ALL of La Sirena's holograms don't just look like Rios, they're modeled on his brain too?  That's a little creepy... he's living alone on a starship in a full blown Me's A Crowd situation.  We see the genuine article digging around in some old footlocker that contains his old Starfleet uniform (apparently you get to keep those when they kick you out?) and some other odds and ends.  We get our first hint of the Ibn Majid from this scene when we see him remove a case badged with the ship name and designation... USS Ibn Majid, NCC-75710.  The ship silhouette looks distressingly like the Discovery, or maybe it's something like a smaller version of the Sovereign-class.  But hey, forget these hints of his past... he's digging for an old cigar box containing a Voyager-era commbadge, a lighter, some random rank pips, and a photograph of himself and his old captain (in which he looks like Chris O'Dowd/Roy from The IT Crowd).  

So, the Emergency Tactical Hologram in Space Druggie's little counseling session is intimating that Rios's old captain went out the Kurt Kobain way, albeit with a phaser?  So she's trying to interrogate five or more uncooperative instances of Rios to figure out why the hell Captain Vandemere killed himself, because apparently Rios had a breakdown about it that led to him winding up discharged.  Starfleet apparently doesn't do counseling sessions anymore in this bold new future.  Was Troi the only one in Starfleet?

Dr. Obnoxious lives... and you have no idea how disappointing that is to me.  She wakes up to Jean-Luc Picard's disappoving glare, and he tells her she's going to be arrested for the murder of Bruce Maddox (yay).  She spills the beams on Commodore OhNo, revealing that she's had her mind tampered with... revealing that the Romulans are dealing with some kind of historical tragedy caused by rogue AIs, and Miss Generic blunders in to reveal that she's the cause of it all (maybe?).

... and we're back to grimdark, courtesy of Rios.  Apparently his old Captain and father figure is a cold-blooded murderer?  Apparently he invited a pair of alien ambassadors aboard the Ibn Majid, had them to dinner, then killed them with a phaser.

We have to sit through some really cringeworthy fangirling by Dr. Obnoxious after she meets Miss Generic 2399... it's really REALLY badly written.  

So apparently Captain Vandermeer murdered two alien ambassadors on orders from Starfleet Security, who said that if he didn't they'd attack and destroy the Ibn Majid?  WTF.  Apparently Vandermeer told Rios this then committed suicide with his phaser.  Rios covered it up, and it apparently led to him getting cashiered out of Starfleet on a psychological charge.  Space Druggie hypothesizes that the ambassadors were actually androids.

We get another F-bomb, this time from Dr. Obnoxious as she apologizes for being a massive buzzkill and literal murderer.

So now we get some very bland exposition that reiterates what we already know... except that we find out Commodore OhNo is actually half-Romulan half-Vulcan, and that hey hey the Zhat Vash were probably behind the attack on Mars.  

Miss Generic hijacks the La Sirena.  Apparently she knows about the Borg transwarp conduits... which were destroyed back at the end of Voyager but apparently the writers forgot that... so she's taking the ship to one.  Rios overrides the controls using a nursery rhyme, and then Picard takes over the ship because hey we're arbitrarily changing plans anyway right?  Then he rather shamefacedly admits he doesn't actually have a clue how to fly it, and has to yield to Rios.  

Seven is now manipulating the ex-Borg to attack the Romulans, which comes off even more like a lame zombie routine than the post-First Contact Borg usually do.  They corner Discount Spock's creepy sister but again she conveniently beams away before they can... actually what ARE they trying to do?  It looks like they're just waving their hands in her face or maybe just feeling her up.  

Conveniently enough, Rios's dead captain was the protege of one of Picard's academy friends... Marta Batanides.  Picard immediately makes the conversation about him and his judgement of Starfleet and the Federation.  Rios is apparently the only one smart enough to raise the concern that Miss Generic hacked his ship in five minutes flat, and that a whole planet of bio-androids could be a gargantuan security risk.  Picard blows him off with a hypocritical speech about optimism... basically all the values that this show DOESN'T pay any heed to.

The La Sirena enters a Borg transwarp conduit but somehow misses noticing a Romulan ship that was parked in plain sight of the entrance, which immediately follows them.  

Next episode, the planet of the Androids... 

 

The Ugly

Spoiler

We now know how the Borg cube that came to be The Artifact was disabled.  Borg Professor was SO DEPRESSED after seeing the visions from touching that glowing painted handrail (lead paint mitigation is SO important) that when the Borg assimilated her and her ship she gave the Borg cube a terminal case of sad and it died.  This isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Borg Professor isn't Marvin the Paranoid Android.

The Borg cube's regeneration looks like crap.  Instead of the smooth regrowth of hull sections and unmaking of damage like the cube was healing itself organically, it's just covered in a bunch of little glowing green mothlike drones that apparently are conducting repairs.  

Discount Spock's creepy sister strolls right into the ex-Borg living quarters and just starts randomly gunning people down.  This ain't Star Trek, boys and girls.  We get to see some badly CG'd robo-tentacles stab Seven in the ass, making her the new head of the Borg Collective aboard the ship just in time for creepy girl to flush all the remaining drones into space.  I wonder if the writers remembered that's not actually lethal to Borg drones?  There's a really cheap, awful looking special effect where Seven's eyes turn black and start glowing green.

 

 

[renegadeleader1]

So...

That's it? The big plot reveal of the baddies is a ripoff of Mass Effect's plot?

[pengbuzz]

I wonder if this is all just some sort of expensive parody or something...

[JB0]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

some badly CG'd robo-tentacles stab Seven in the ass

I've read this fanfic!

...

Oh, wait, you're not talking about a fanfic. Never mind.

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

So...

 

  Reveal hidden contents

That's it? The big plot reveal of the baddies is a ripoff of Mass Effect's plot?

 

Is it?  I've never played Mass Effect... 

 

 

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I wonder if this is all just some sort of expensive parody or something...

Perhaps unintentionally... due to the crap quality of the writing.

 

 

5 hours ago, JB0 said:

I've read this fanfic!

...

Oh, wait, you're not talking about a fanfic. Never mind.

... no, this is definitely a Thing That Happened.  She's also got a light-up spinal column like a Cylon from the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

Edited March 13, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[Hikuro]

Well maybe just maybe next Thursday will be better?

[pengbuzz]

On a side note: with the f-bombs that Admiral keeps dropping, can anyone imagine what it must have been like serving on a ship she captained?

Helmsman: "Captain, we've dropped out of warp."

Captain Foulmouth: "About f***ing time!"

[renegadeleader1]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Is it?  I've never played Mass Effect... 

 

The plot of the first Mass Effect game involved interacting with things called Prothean beacons, ancient relics from a long extinct species that gave flashes of an impending doom from outside the galaxy should civilisations become too advanced.

 

The main bad guy is special forces intelligence operative corrupted by these visions and brainwashed by coming in contact with a ship left behind by the impending doom into doing their bidding instead of preventing it. You initially try to stop him, but no one in the high council believes you at first until you rescue a mysterious girl and end up with a small ragtag crew on a tiny ship to stop him.

 

There's also a race of people called the Quarian who have lost their homeworld and are bitter no one is helping them with a mysterious connected past to a race called the Geth a synthetic hivemind lifeform who assimilate their enemies, but end up not being so bad in the end.

 

Did I mention yet that true A.I. is banned and punishable by death?

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

On a side note: with the f-bombs that Admiral keeps dropping, can anyone imagine what it must have been like serving on a ship she captained?

Helmsman: "Captain, we've dropped out of warp."

Captain Foulmouth: "About f***ing time!"

So... like Janeway, but without coffee?  (EDIT:  Actually, I'd pay to watch that... a truly cantankerous Starfleet captain, as if Gordon Ramsey decided to go into the hard sciences instead of culinary arts.)

Fleet Admiral Clancey is rapidly becoming my favorite character in Star Trek: Picard.  It seems that, in her minimal appearances, she's the only one who really properly understands what a load of crap this plot is and how completely full of himself Picard is.

 

 

1 hour ago, renegadeleader1 said:

The plot of the first Mass Effect game involved interacting with things called Prothean beacons, ancient relics from a long extinct species that gave flashes of an impending doom from outside the galaxy should civilisations become too advanced.

 

The main bad guy is special forces intelligence operative corrupted by these visions and brainwashed by coming in contact with a ship left behind by the impending doom into doing their bidding instead of preventing it. You initially try to stop him, but no one in the high council believes you at first until you rescue a mysterious girl and end up with a small ragtag crew on a tiny ship to stop him.

 

There's also a race of people called the Quarian who have lost their homeworld and are bitter no one is helping them with a mysterious connected past to a race called the Geth a synthetic hivemind lifeform who assimilate their enemies, but end up not being so bad in the end.

 

Did I mention yet that true A.I. is banned and punishable by death?

... jeez.  So we're watching Michael Chabon's Mass Effect fanfic acted out with Star Trek action figures then?

 

 

4 hours ago, Hikuro said:

Well maybe just maybe next Thursday will be better?

... why does this sound like an abused wife trying to convince herself that her husband really might mean it when he says he's changed this time?

Edited March 13, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[Focslain]

29 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So... like Janeway, but without coffee?  (EDIT:  Actually, I'd pay to watch that... a truly cantankerous Starfleet captain, as if Gordon Ramsey decided to go into the hard sciences instead of culinary arts.)

You can get a little of that as Kate plays the AI Nagatha in the Expeditionary Force: Homefront audio drama. Course after listening to it you might want to snap off Zachary Quinto's thumbs. I know I did.

[Dobber]

3 hours ago, Focslain said:

You can get a little of that as Kate plays the AI Nagatha in the Expeditionary Force: Homefront audio drama. Course after listening to it you might want to snap off Zachary Quinto's thumbs. I know I did.

Awesome! Another Ex-Force fan! So looking forward to the next book after Valkyrie. I did like Kate as Nagatha...she was the only alternate voice that I actually liked in that audio drama. I’m too use to R.C. Bray’s voices.

Chris

 

[JB0]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So... like Janeway, but without coffee?  (EDIT:  Actually, I'd pay to watch that... a truly cantankerous Starfleet captain, as if Gordon Ramsey decided to go into the hard sciences instead of culinary arts.)

I'd watch that too.

 

"Captain, we're being accelerated past warp ten!"

"We d*mn well aren't, do you not understand the f*cking concept of infinite speed?"

[pengbuzz]

On 3/13/2020 at 2:36 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

So... like Janeway, but without coffee?  (EDIT:  Actually, I'd pay to watch that... a truly cantankerous Starfleet captain, as if Gordon Ramsey decided to go into the hard sciences instead of culinary arts.)

ROFL!

Captain Ramsey: "Ensign! What the F*** do you think you're doing!! This Beef Wellington is BLOODY RAW!!'

Ensign Crusher: "Sir, Respectfully, I have to protest! You're just disregarding me because of my age--"

Captain Ramsey: "Here, take this com-badge.... NOW GIVE IT BACK TO ME AND F**** OFF!!"

Edited March 17, 2020 by pengbuzz

[sh9000]

[sh9000]

 

[tekering]

And, just when you thought it couldn't get any worse... here comes episode 9.  

Far beyond mere scripting issues, this was disjointed, poorly edited and badly directed.  I wasn't really expecting it to get better, but I didn't think it was going to get this bad...  

I actually have higher expectations for Discovery season 3 at this point.

 

Mind you, that Sutra chick was HAWT.  

[Seto Kaiba]

45 minutes ago, tekering said:

I actually have higher expectations for Discovery season 3 at this point.

... woah, now that level of negativity is just uncalled-for.  

I did see a fun little video on YouTube earlier today about how Jean-Luc Picard has become an incredibly manipulative old man in Star Trek: Picard.  He's a classic toxic senior citizen.

[derex3592]

Buddy at work got me the 1st 6 episodes of Picard on a hard drive. I guess...since I have nothing better to do this weekend...thank you covid19--- I guess I'll try it and see what all the fuss is about. 

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, derex3592 said:

Buddy at work got me the 1st 6 episodes of Picard on a hard drive. I guess...since I have nothing better to do this weekend...thank you covid19--- I guess I'll try it and see what all the fuss is about. 

I just want to say in advance... I am so very sorry for what you're about to go through.

[derex3592]

. Yehhhh....I know...as an avid TNG and huge Patrick Stewart as an actor fan, I'm probably going to regret this....

[Focslain]

On 3/13/2020 at 6:34 PM, Dobber said:

Awesome! Another Ex-Force fan! So looking forward to the next book after Valkyrie. I did like Kate as Nagatha...she was the only alternate voice that I actually liked in that audio drama. I’m too use to R.C. Bray’s voices.

Chris

 

True, at least they had the brains to keep RC Bray as both Bishop and Skippy.

Also awaiting the next book in either the main line (damn Valkyrie ended darkly) or more Mavericks.

And if you looking for more like Craig Alanson, check out John Ringo. Especially his Looking Glass and Troy Rising series.

Edited March 20, 2020 by Focslain

[sh9000]

I wonder if A.I. Soong is

Lore.

Edited March 20, 2020 by sh9000

[Seto Kaiba]

Well... CBS initially promised that Star Trek: Picard was going to focus on new characters and that returning Star Trek cast members would be used sparingly and limited to small guest roles.

Nine episodes in, the content of the show has determined that was a lie.  If we're charitable, it might constitute a massive course correction instead in the face of audiences finding the new cast to be underdeveloped, cliched, and generic enough to blend into the background better than a Jem'Hadar.  They literally don't matter to the plot at all, except as vehicles for dialog Picard can't deliver to himself.  Soji is literally the only original character who has any real relevance to the plot.

Spoiler

Even the planet of the androids is the handiwork of another bloody identical relative of Noonian Soong played by Brent Spiner.  Either that family does a LOT of illegal cloning or they're more inbred than the Hapsburgs to keep producing identical children.

 

Edited March 20, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[renegadeleader1]

On 3/13/2020 at 2:36 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

... jeez.  So we're watching Michael Chabon's Mass Effect fanfic acted out with Star Trek action figures then

After seeing episode 9? I would say yes.

[sh9000]

 

[pengbuzz]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Well... CBS initially promised that Star Trek: Picard was going to focus on new characters and that returning Star Trek cast members would be used sparingly and limited to small guest roles.

Nine episodes in, the content of the show has determined that was a lie.  If we're charitable, it might constitute a massive course correction instead in the face of audiences finding the new cast to be underdeveloped, cliched, and generic enough to blend into the background better than a Jem'Hadar.  They literally don't matter to the plot at all, except as vehicles for dialog Picard can't deliver to himself.  Soji is literally the only original character who has any real relevance to the plot.

 

The new cast may as well be rejects from BSG Reboot: gritty, but no direction. Much like dirt in a windstorm.

  

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

  Hide contents

Even the planet of the androids is the handiwork of another bloody identical relative of Noonian Soong played by Brent Spiner.  Either that family does a LOT of illegal cloning or they're more inbred than the Hapsburgs to keep producing identical children.

 

AllIi can say is:

 

But instead of the Hapsburg Jaw, they got the Soong receding hairline and protruding nose

Edited March 20, 2020 by pengbuzz

[Seto Kaiba]

It's been a long and depressing week full of news of rampant disease, death, corruption, and congenital idiocy... and to put the cherry on that sundae of suck, there's the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Picard, a series that has boldly gone where no Star Trek has gone before.  Straight to the bottom.

"Et in Arcadia, Ego" Part 1.

 

The Good... it's such a relative term, isn't it?

Spoiler

Hey, there's only one more episode of this trash to sit through before it rots on the rubbish heap of history for all time, right?

 

The Bad... there's just so much of it.

Spoiler

La Sirena emerges safely from the Borg transwarp conduit that absolutely shouldn't exist if this series is in continuity with the rest of real Star Trek, and conclude they've beaten the Romulans to the android homeworld.  Dr. Obnoxious immediately pops up to remind everyone she's supposed to be under arrest for First Degree Murder and set to spend some considerable quality time in the brig aboard Deep Space 12.  Miss Generic and the rest of the crew have suddenly forgotten that Dr. Obnoxious is Not To Be Trusted, and inform her the planet is called Coppelius.  

Why does La Sirena have a red alert?  She's a civilian freighter.  We get some badly stilted Spanish profanity from Rios after Discount Spock's ship pops out of the conduit and immediately starts chasing La Sirena.  The goofy automatic seatbelts from the J.J.-Trek movies are back, but apparently they couldn't afford actual props so these just look like outsized normal seatbelts or the rig for a parachute.  It looks like they couldn't afford to mount the set on a gimbal, so we're back to old school leaning around.  At least the stabilized version of these scenes should be entertaining.

Woah... when did Miss Generic become the voice of reason?  Paranoid Space Druggie inexplciably wants to help the guy that was, mere seconds ago, attempting to kill them and it's up to Miss Generic 2399 to remind her this guy was trying to kill them a few seconds ago and has therefore brought his fate upon himself.  Picard gives another holier than thou speech that is IMMEDIATELY subverted when it turns out Discount Spock was faking the whole time and starts shooting again.  Then suddenly, a Borg cube!  Seven of Nine apparently hijacked The Artifact and got it self-recovering to the point that it can fight.  Then some giant flowers come out of nowhere and grab La Sirena with glacially slow maneuvers that it never occurs to anyone to attempt to evade.  Power goes out, and apparently triggers a strobe light so we see flashes of people's faces.  They get just long enough to ask what the hell that was, with Miss Generic offering no useful input as usual, and then we see these things are dragging all the ships down to the surface of the planet, then something blows up and Picard thanks everyone for coming?

Oh no, Picard thanked everyone for coming and now we're getting flashbacks!... to previous episodes.  He wakes up in sickbay, where he's being treated by Dr. Obnoxious and drops more hints that he's going to die soon.  It sounds like even an old school medical tricorder can tell he's got irumodic syndrome.  He announces that he's going to return Miss Generic to her people and warn them the Romulans are coming, and then casually announces he's been diagnosed with a terminal brain ailment and immediately says he will brook no discussion of it.  Why bring it up then, shitwit?  He warns them anyone who treats him like a dying man will piss him off.  You could've kept your mouth shut, you has-been.

The dialog has gotten so bad that Picard literally has to invite Miss Generic to go on an expository monologue... where she reveals she basically knows nothing useful anyway.  Nice contribution, Soji.

They grab phasers, and Space Druggie (the last person who should be trusted with a lethal weapon, IMO) takes some time to needle Miss Generic about how her Romulan BF DiscountSpock was an arsehole before handing her a pistol that looks for all the world to be an Airsoft H&K P08 spraypainted black.  They wander outside and notice that the Borg cube Seven was flying crashed a short ways away, so Picard finally remembers RomuLegolas and The One Real Star Trek Character Hugh are on it and decides to check in on them.  A few jump cuts later, they're already there despite it being many kilometers away.  The interior looks like someone built a wall of cardboard boxes covered in black duct tape... set building was clearly done painfully cheap.

We get another scene of snarky action girl Seven of Nine, this time dumping corpses off a ledge while dispensing some generic action girl dialog.  They gloss over the fact that Hugh got murdered, and dwell instead of the fact that it took some massive evil to make Hugh want to defend his own kind.  

Miss Generic takes the time to visit her old quarters aboard the Borg cube in a desperate attempt to lend some kind of poignancy to the proceedings by crying over some old photos she threw around the room after discovering she wasn't real.  Picard, meanwhile, sends his "Crew" on ahead while he orders RomuLegolas to stay with Seven and help the Borg get their weapons running again because getting their sh*t wrecked pretty much instantly by a giant space flower wasn't a real great indication of how that's gonna work out for them.  He whines a bit about being left behind again because Picard is dying.  Picard, being a manipulative prick. gets him to stay by telling him how proud he is of him.  They lay it on real thick that Picard is GOING TO F*CKING DIE.  

Another jump cut and some badly timed fades, and we see our crew of bland and uninteresting characters looking over what appears to be a thoroughly modern convention center where people are... doing tai chi or some sh*t.  Everyone are twins, and everynoe's dressed like they're at the space renaissance fair or stole their clothes from the Star Trek wrap sale after Enterprise ended.  Miss Generic is welcomed back by a girl whose dialog reads like it was written by a pre-New Hope George Lucas, who is apparently named Arcana because hey subtlety is just f*cking dead right?  Just in case it wasn't clear this is the planet of Soong Type Misfit Toys, everyone has Data's golden eyes.

I take it back, Arcana talks like the narration of Metroid: Other M... like a woman who's coming off a heavy dose of dental anesthetic and feels compelled to state aloud every thought and feeling she has.  

 My decision to label Soji as Miss Generic was apparently prophetic... she and Dahj apparently aren't even the only androids built to that physical template.  We see another one, because budget apparently requires the actors to play as many characters as possible.  This one is apparently the sister to the one that Rios's old captain murdered in cold blood before the Ibn Majid was destroyed.  Her name is Sutra, because we're warming to a theme, eh?  Considering what happened the last time a Soong started naming androids for unreliable forms of information (Lore) it ended rather badly.  Now he's apparently made a planet of androids named for information of dubious reliability.  

Topics change with another abrupt lurch as Sutra switches to interrogating Dr. Obnoxious about her decision to murder the everloving crap out of Bruce Maddox.  Her actress manages to fail to emote, like someone who overdosed on novocaine and can't move their face.  They immediately start setting up an obvious twist, that the Romulans who've been taking this ancient historical record as a warning against synthetic life Got It All Wrong and have been unnecessarily torturing themselves with a source of data that was meant for the more sophisticated processing capabilities of an artificial mind.  Five'll get you twenty this means the admonition is a warning TO synthetics about hostility from organics.

So golden genericness apparently taught itself to mind meld despite a mind meld being a TELEPATHIC ability and her being a MACHINE.  How the hell does THAT work?  The mind meld "vision" here is so badly rendered it looks like an early 2000's recruitment video for a Starfleet-run community college, complete with the generic white-faced robot that was in EVERY technology school advert back when I was in high school... just with the Starfleet delta on its chest.  

Beyond time and space (how?) there is an alliance of synthetic lifeforms who outlived the civilizations that created them, who apparently show up whenever persecuted robots call them and genocide the organic lifeforms persecuting them.  Yay.  So, technically speaking, the Zhat Vash are completely correct for the wrong reason... synthetic life forms ARE an existential threat to organic life, but not because they themselves exist.  It's because they summon older forms of synthetic life forms who believe in Kill All Humans to commit genocide on their behalf.  In one fell swoop, DiscountSpock and his sister are the good guys and Dr. Soong is unwittingly inciting the extinction of humanity.

Dr. Soong scolds Dr. Obnoxious for murdering Bruce Maddox, and then immediately attempts to enlist her help with a "golem".  Apparently, since she mentions mind transfer, we're talking about recreating the technology the Old Ones of Exo III (TOS: What are little girls made of?)... the ability to dump an organic mind into an entirely artificial body.

Miss Generic argues with her other self about whether or not they should phone up the ancient Genocide Squad and commit a good old fashioned holocaust, which kind of directly validates literally everything the Zhat Vash have been talking about.  Sutra clearly feels nothing is wrong with wiping out organics to preserve androids.

"You're many things, Agnes P. Jurati.  Forgettable is not one of them."  That's where you're wrong, Mister Rios. I literally didn't remember her name was Agnes until he said it, she's the very epitome of forgettable.

They send space druggie off with a device that fixes things "if you use your imagination", to repair the La Sirena.  Apparently Barney and Friends are moonlighting in starship repair now?  There's a terribly forced "goodbye and thank you" scene between Picard and space druggie, considering it's been only a few weeks since she tried to shoot him simply for setting foot on her property.

We have to watch DiscountSpock beg an android for water, which is a blatant trap that Miss Generic prevents him from springing.  He makes an incredibly forced attempt to manipulate her that he delivers with all the emotional depth and complexity of off-white laminate flooring.  It just pisses her off.  

Miss Generic drops by Picard's attempts to contact Starfleet in Maddox's old room, which seems to be a mixture of IKEA furniture and prop surplus science equipment from a hospital set.  Meanwhile, Gold Generic drops by DiscountSpock's cell in a desperate attempt to build dramatic tension, then offers to free him from his cell for some reason... which results in one of the other generic androids being killed (how?) with a decorative brooch to the eye.  Gold Generic seems to be Generic Evil, apparently as manipulative as Lore was.  She gives a speech essentially justifying her end goal of summoning the ancient synthetics to massacre ALL organic life.  Picard's counteroffer is to evacuate all of the androids present on the La Sirena.  He makes a lot of dubious promises about advocating for them with the Federation and ending the ban because the Federation will listen to him... when they've basically spent the entire series telling him on no uncertain terms to f*ck off.  

Dr. Soong gives a speech praising Picard and talking about how noble his appearance is...and you can tell Patrick Stewart wrote it to jerk himself off.

Dr. Soong then follows up by pointing out the obvious, that neither Starfleet nor the Federation council paid Picard a blind bit of notice after the incident on Mars.  

Miss Generic gets her turn at giving Picard a The Reason You Suck speech, informing him that they're not going to be his redemption and signing on with her evil twin's plans for a galactic holocaust.  

 

 

The Ugly... it's omnipresent.

Spoiler

Previously... on this godawful mess of a show...  flashing back to the worst aspects of the previous episode, like Seven of Nine getting an emergency Borg colonoscopy to take over a Borg cube and immediately get all the drones aboard killed, random portents of stupid doom, a Borg transwarp network that somehow still exists despite Janeway and company having explicitly destroyed the entire network back in 2378.  That's over 20 years ago, for those who are counting.

We open with Dr. Obnoxious under a desk in the crew quarters, whinging herself inside-out because she's upset the ship is shaking a bit while it travels at speeds 20 times faster than Warp 9.6.  It really reinforces both what a useless character she is and how obnoxious she is as a person.  She's contributed so little to this series that I'm not sure she can be classified as a character.  She's more like ballast.

Coppelius?  The planet's name is Coppelius?  Usually Star Trek's references are more subtle than this.  They might as well have just called the f*cking place "The Robot Planet" and had done with it.  The planet is named for Coppélia, a French ballet from the late 19th century about an inventor named Dr. Coppelius who creates life-sized mechanical dolls, including a ballerina model called Coppelia whom a rather dim young man named Franz falls in love with.  Franz nearly ends up a human sacrifice in Coppelius's insane attempt to use black magic to bring Coppelia to life, and later has to bribe Dr. Coppelius to leave him and his new wife alone after he marries the girl who rescues him by the simple expedient of pretending to be Coppelia brought to life.  Either Dr. Soong has a sick sense of humor, or he really doesn't see androids as people.  Coppelius's dolls are simply machines, mindless automata enacting pre-programmed dance routines that are mistaken for living but are mere objects.

So... the Zhat Vash are supposed to be a secret organization, right?  The Tal Shiar were able to muster just FIVE D'deridex-class warbirds for the joint operation with Cardassia's Obsidian Order, and the combined forces of the two most potent espionage organizations in the quadrant mustered just twenty ships between them.  How the hell does the Zhat Vash have the resources to mobilize 218 warbirds all on their own AFTER the destruction of Romulus and the loss of their headquarters?

So, yeah... it turns out it wasn't Bruce Maddox who was responsible for the generic twins and all there other androids.  There's another f*ck-mothering Soong running around, naturally played by Brent Spiner.  Dr. Alton Inigo Soong, the son that was never ever mentioned at any point in Star Trek: the Next Generation when his father Noonian Soong explicitly mentioned he had no children except for his androids.  His mannerisms, combined with what he chose to name the planet, suggest he doesn't quite see the sentient androids he created as equals.  

So... the version of Miss Generic that came with the gold body paint option is basically a weeb, just for Vulcan culture.  Dr. Soong claims she taught herself how to mind meld... which is all kinds of impossible.

 

 

Long story short, it turns out the Romulans were right all along... sentient artificial intelligence is evil and prone to hold organic life in contempt.

If Picard had stayed on Earth and left well enough alone, he'd have prevented the means for galactic genocide from falling into the hands of deranged killer robots.

[Roy Focker]

Episode 9 reminded me of those 1st season episodes from the Next Generation.  Where they go to some lame backwards planet where all the people wear a goofy uniform like baggy silk underwear and a vest  made out of banana leaves.  From the production design this episode is spot on but it doesn't match the rest of the series.  Was it one of the lost scripts recycled?  Same goes for the Riker family episode.  The show's not great and these episodes kills whatever forward movement it had.  Nobody knows what they are doing.

[Beltane70]

I swear someone on the writing staff was watching Gargantia when they wrote this scene. 

[JB0]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Beyond time and space (how?) there is an alliance of synthetic lifeforms who outlived the civilizations that created them, who apparently show up whenever persecuted robots call them and genocide the organic lifeforms persecuting them.  Yay. 

I realize that it is probably accidental continuity, but could these beings be the reason for the galactic barrier that the USS Enterprise(no bloody A, B, C, or D) crossed WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY back in "Where No Man Has Gone Before"?

 

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Coppelius?  The planet's name is Coppelius?  Usually Star Trek's references are more subtle than this. 

Usually, yes. But we can always look to "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and it's bi-color aliens for symbolism and metaphor delivered with all the subtlety of a brick of nitroglycerin to the face.

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

I realize that it is probably accidental continuity, but could these beings be the reason for the galactic barrier that the USS Enterprise(no bloody A, B, C, or D) crossed WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY back in "Where No Man Has Gone Before"?

Wouldn't that keep them out, though, given that the barrier is so incredibly destructive to ships?

 

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

Usually, yes. But we can always look to "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and it's bi-color aliens for symbolism and metaphor delivered with all the subtlety of a brick of nitroglycerin to the face.

Yeah, but it's usually on-message.  This reference to Coppélia is basically the polar opposite of where Picard is trying to go with its aesop about synthetic life.  Doctor Coppelius wanted very much to bring his mechanical doll Coppélia to life using black magic and human sacrifices, but ultimately failed and his creations were doomed to remain lifeless automata.  To call the planet Coppelius, a name presumably chosen by Soong, implies that contrary to his stated beliefs he doesn't actually see androids as people.

[sh9000]