Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[Roy Focker]

I agree with everything in this article. The show is garbage.  Fun to watch only because it so bad.  That dark present that they are trying to reverse isn't that much different from the dark present they presented in the 1st season. 

Edgy stories can be interesting but Star Trek is an optimistic dream of the future.  This show isn't that.

https://www.thegamer.com/star-trek-picard-is-garbage/amp/

 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Roy Focker said:

https://www.thegamer.com/star-trek-picard-is-garbage/amp/

Yeah, that's a pretty straightforward assessment of the series... 

For whatever reason, Star Trek: Picard's writers seem to sincerely believe that depth and misery are the same thing.

It's another way the influence of their obsession with Dune is making itself felt and heard in this sad mess of a series.  Frank Herbert was also a big believer that the future could only be interesting if it was completely awful in every way.

[renegadeleader1]

On 4/17/2022 at 10:43 PM, Magnus said:

Wow, these are very good observations.  I always had a nagging feeling that STD and Picard were being derivative of SOMETHING but I could never place what it was until I read your post. 

Claiming new Trek is trying to be like/ripoff Dune is honestly a massive stretch. Especially given how much Picard season one stole from the first Mass Effect game.

Edited April 21, 2022 by renegadeleader1

[Big s]

1 hour ago, renegadeleader1 said:

Claiming new Trek is trying to be like/ripoff Dune is honestly a massive stretch. Especially given how much Picard season one stole from the first Mass Effect game.

It’s probably the other way around since they probably went back in time and altered the future which is now our past again 

[TangledThorns]

I love profanity but the amount of colorful metaphors used in this series is dumb and out of place plus makes me miss the original Star Trek by a lot! 

 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

18 hours ago, Big s said:

It’s probably the other way around since they probably went back in time and altered the future which is now our past again 

They didn't go quite that far back... they went back to 2024, Dune was published in 1965.

 

3 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

I love profanity but the amount of colorful metaphors used in this series is dumb and out of place plus makes me miss the original Star Trek by a lot! 

It's especially out of place given that the story revolves around (a robot that thinks it is) Jean-Luc Picard.  It would've been way more believable from any other Captain, but Picard was a consummate diplomat and hands-down Star Trek's biggest stickler for maintaining composure and decorum and his series (TNG) used profanity so infrequenty that having Data say "crap" was a huge thing in their first movie.

 

 

Honestly, I've lost all hope for this series.  Calling it trash hardly feels strong enough.  

Having this all-important person without whom the future turns into (a slightly worse) dystopian nightmare conveniently be a hereforeto unmentioned ancestor of Picard's who was involved in a groundbreaking mission in prewarp space exploration despite Picard's previous insistences his family were a pack of borderline (or actual) luddites until he all but ran away from home to join Starfleet is just too convenient.  The last time Star Trek tried a story like that it was considered one of Voyager's very worst episodes (11:59), though at least that had the grace to end on a subversion with Janeway learning her family had massively oversold her ancestor's alleged role.  It's also way too damned convenient that Guinan is living and working in the immediate area - and at the same address she'll occupy four centuries later - so Picard can easily consult her and that there's another identical Soong also living in the immediate vicinity and working on the same banned genetic research that'll eventually get his descendant Arik arrested.  Six degrees of separation is fine and all, but in this story the whole world seems to be at one degree of separation at most.

The whole identical ancestor thing was always silly, but admittedly Picard has taken it to an absolutely ridiculous place.  Data and Lore were excusable because they were literally manufactured in Noonian Soong's image, but there's no damned excuse for every male Soong to look exactly the goddamn same.  Either someone out there is Duncan Idaho-ing copies of some unknown Soong into existence every century or so specifically so they'll carryout banned research projects or the writers are so out of ideas that they simply can't conceive of a Picard story without Brent Spiner to carry it.

Come to that, is Agnes Jurati the new Miles O'Brien?  Season one had her dealing with her life's work being banned by the Federation Council, her lover disappearing, being mind-controlled by a Zhat Vash agent inside Starfleet Security to commit a murder, and then had to dismember a dead bio-android and watch Picard die a painful death.  Between the seasons, she went on trial for murder and was acquitted due to extenuating circumstances.  Now she's a dysfunctional mess who had her mind hooked up to the Borg Queen's temporarily and then suffered a Grand Theft Me at the Borg Queen's hands, likely being the person who created the worse future in the first place.  If they don't kill her off in this season, she'd better be spending the remainder of her natural life in a cell somewhere very deep underground.  It's pretty telling that even the Borg Queen - an omnicidal maniac - thinks Jurati is a bit psycho.

[Thom]

I think I've heard of Renee Picard mentioned before, though I had assumed it was a man.

Def agree about the Soong family being so obsessed with genetics for more than three centuries! That's a hell of a long time for an obsession.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Thom said:

I think I've heard of Renee Picard mentioned before, though I had assumed it was a man.

You're probably thinking of René Picard - only one "e" - who appeared in TNG "Family" and Generations.  

He was the son of Jean-Luc Picard's brother Robert, who met his uncle when he visited the family home while recovering from his assimilation by the Borg.  He was mentioned as having died offscreen in a fire that destroyed the Picard family home in La Barre, France in Star Trek: Generations.

[sh9000]

I still got love for Brent Spiner.

[Thom]

10 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

You're probably thinking of René Picard - only one "e" - who appeared in TNG "Family" and Generations.  

He was the son of Jean-Luc Picard's brother Robert, who met his uncle when he visited the family home while recovering from his assimilation by the Borg.  He was mentioned as having died offscreen in a fire that destroyed the Picard family home in La Barre, France in Star Trek: Generations.

Thanks. I was aware of what happened to Rene and Picard's brother, but was confused by the naming. Maybe he was named after her...

As for Jurati and her journey...

Spoiler

I think the reason we did not see the Queen's face when she attacked the Stargazer, is that we would then be wondering why the actress playing Jurati is also playing the Queen..?

Just my assumption, but I think that's is where that's heading.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Thom said:

  Hide contents

I think the reason we did not see the Queen's face when she attacked the Stargazer, is that we would then be wondering why the actress playing Jurati is also playing the Queen..?

Just my assumption, but I think that's is where that's heading.

That'd make a sick sort of sense.

Though I'm increasingly bothered by Picard's insistence that the Borg Queen is an individual who exists separately from the Borg collective.

From her introduction in First Contact to her final "death" in the Delta Quadrant Unicomplex at the hand of the future Admiral Janeway, the Borg Queen was consistently presented (and self-identified as) a wholly-artificial contrivance of the Borg Collective.  The Borg Queen wasn't a drone and had no "original" identity of her own.  She was, as seen in her first appearance in First Contact, an almost entirely mechanical construct whose "consciousness" was a manifestation of the Borg's collective will.  In practical terms, the Borg Queen was little more than a ventriloquist's dummy the Collective used to talk to people when its usual "Voice of the Legion" wasn't achieving the desired effect.  Her repeatedly coming back from the dead was justified because she was never alive... the Queen was just a tool that could be scrapped and remanufactured as needed.

With the Borg Collective wiped out by the Confederacy in Star Trek: Picard's second season, there shouldn't BE a Borg Queen because the Queen only exists as a manifestation of the Borg Collective.  No Collective means no collective will to animate the mindless body that is the Borg Queen.

[Thom]

32 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That'd make a sick sort of sense.

Though I'm increasingly bothered by Picard's insistence that the Borg Queen is an individual who exists separately from the Borg collective.

From her introduction in First Contact to her final "death" in the Delta Quadrant Unicomplex at the hand of the future Admiral Janeway, the Borg Queen was consistently presented (and self-identified as) a wholly-artificial contrivance of the Borg Collective.  The Borg Queen wasn't a drone and had no "original" identity of her own.  She was, as seen in her first appearance in First Contact, an almost entirely mechanical construct whose "consciousness" was a manifestation of the Borg's collective will.  In practical terms, the Borg Queen was little more than a ventriloquist's dummy the Collective used to talk to people when its usual "Voice of the Legion" wasn't achieving the desired effect.  Her repeatedly coming back from the dead was justified because she was never alive... the Queen was just a tool that could be scrapped and remanufactured as needed.

With the Borg Collective wiped out by the Confederacy in Star Trek: Picard's second season, there shouldn't BE a Borg Queen because the Queen only exists as a manifestation of the Borg Collective.  No Collective means no collective will to animate the mindless body that is the Borg Queen.

I'm hoping that's what happens and

Spoiler

I don't mean as a separate person to Jurati, but Jurati herself becoming 'lost' in the past and then reappearing in their present as the Borg Queen. 

It would certainly be more daring than they've been thus far.

As to the Borg Queen, I would think she/it, is more of an individual than any other, perhaps having transcended from that version of herself as a simple mouth piece, esp having been called on more and more after their defeats by the Federation. She would have ended up being more of a Queen Bee, with complete control over all the drones, which is how she comes off now. Then, in the absence of the Collective itself, I would think the original consciousness would reassert itself even more, in whatever limited way it could, or into an entirely new 'individual.'

Edited April 22, 2022 by Thom

[sh9000]

@Thom I think you and I are among the few on this forum still watching this show and that’s cool with me.

[Thom]

@sh9000 It's an alright show. Not the best, but at least I am not hate-watching.

[Seto Kaiba]

I'm not sure what we're doing is hate-watching... there is an element of schadenfreude to it, but by in large it's like when you see a disaster and you can't look away?  

We already have doomscrolling and doomsurfing... I guess this is doomstreaming?  It's like when you're watching a horror movie and a character acts with that horror movie lack of a sense of self-preservation and goes off on their own.  You know they're doomed, they're telegraphing the hell out of the fact that they're doomed, so you're just waiting to see how their inevitable demise is going to arrive.

Hate would require me to still have an attachment to this mess or the people in it.  The best I can muster is a sort of dispassionate disgust like discovering your coffee's gone cold while you were distracted.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Seto Kaiba

[Thom]

@Seto Kaiba Just to be clear, I wasn't making any reference to anyone in particular, nor strictly on this forum. In a couple of others, I've come across those who seem to watch some shows just to find something to complain about. Basically, it hasn't gotten to the point where I'd stop watching.

[tekering]

1 hour ago, Thom said:

I've come across those who seem to watch some shows just to find something to complain about.

Star Trek, with its decades of continuity, technical manuals, compendiums, encyclopedias, visual dictionaries, databases and Web sites, is uniquely suited to that sort of fandom.

[sh9000]

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Wow, I guess I will not watch this show.  I didn't like s1 at all so I seems S2 is even worse.  Wake me up when I decent Trek is made.

[pengbuzz]

19 hours ago, Thom said:

@Seto Kaiba Just to be clear, I wasn't making any reference to anyone in particular, nor strictly on this forum. In a couple of others, I've come across those who seem to watch some shows just to find something to complain about. Basically, it hasn't gotten to the point where I'd stop watching.

Actually, I watch some parts just for comedy relief. 🤣

[Thom]

@pengbuzz Gotta find that pleasure in life!😁

@Hikaru Ichijo SL Star Trek Prodigy. 

[Seto Kaiba]

On 4/27/2022 at 9:13 PM, Thom said:

@Seto Kaiba Just to be clear, I wasn't making any reference to anyone in particular, nor strictly on this forum. In a couple of others, I've come across those who seem to watch some shows just to find something to complain about. Basically, it hasn't gotten to the point where I'd stop watching.

I didn't take it as such.  

I just felt clarifying my own position was merited, since I am known to be a rather cantankerous bloke at times... 

 

6 hours ago, sh9000 said:

 

This is about the most pathetic thing I've seen from this show, and that is SAYING SOMETHING at this point.

The show's property master claiming coming up with the new tricorder was one of the hardest things he's had to do... when all he did was build a bulky case with some white LEDs for an otherwise totally-unmodified Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 5G smartphone.  If that's as far as your professional creativity can take you while you're working on a series like Star Trek, it is well past time for a career change.  He couldn't even be arsed to change the default lock screen image.

Bragging about putting some LEDs and a custom grip on an airsoft pistol isn't much better, come to that.

 

4 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

Wow, I guess I will not watch this show.  I didn't like s1 at all so I seems S2 is even worse.  Wake me up when I decent Trek is made.

's your surname "van Winkle" by any chance?  You're going to be napping for a while at this rate.

 

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Actually, I watch some parts just for comedy relief. 🤣

If I could get a laugh out of it I probably wouldn't be as disgusted with it as I am.

Somehow, Picard feels even less dignified than when you see an aging rocker who's really let themselves go after a life of hard partying and harder drugs try to perform like they're still young.  At least those washed-up rockers aren't deliberately sh*tting on their past selves the way Patrick Stewart is on one of his most iconic screen roles.

[Big s]

6 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

Wow, I guess I will not watch this show.  I didn't like s1 at all so I seems S2 is even worse.  Wake me up when I decent Trek is made.

Futurama is making a comeback and it always kinda felt like a fun star trek , or there’s Orville 

[pengbuzz]

15 hours ago, Big s said:

Futurama is making a comeback and it always kinda felt like a fun star trek , or there’s Orville 

Strange New Worlds looks like it might be good...we'll have to see how the first season runs.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

17 hours ago, Big s said:

Futurama is making a comeback and it always kinda felt like a fun star trek , or there’s Orville 

I hope they do not screw up Futuruma.  Orville also has impressed me.

[sh9000]

[Seto Kaiba]

Wow.  I really have to hand it to Paramount, season two of Star Trek: Picard truly surpassed season one... in all the worst ways.

HEAVY-HANDED USE OF SPOILERS AHEAD.

What IS it with these showrunners and having to make everybody miserable, morbid, barely-functional wrecks of human beings (or aliens) and why are they so completely and utterly opposed to Star Trek having any kind of hope, light, or joy?

Seriously... the whole schtick underpinning the second season is...

Spoiler

... that Q is dying, and because he's dying alone he wants to make sure Picard doesn't.

So he's set up this elaborate and completely unrelated series of events involving an Even Worse Bad Future than the Mirror Universe (even the DSC Mirror Universe) and cast the cast as the very worst versions of themselves possible in order to have Picard work out some childhood trauma that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH IT AT ALL.

 

The one person upon whom the difference between the Even Worse Future™ and the Still Pretty Awful Future™ of Star Trek: Picard's 25th Century is conveniently one of Jean-Luc Picard's ancestors, and the man conveniently responsible for everything going wrong is Another Bloody Identical Soong.  Except this Soong isn't an insane hermit like Noonin, an incredibly naive moron like Alton, or an unhinged but theoretically well-meaning eugenics-advocate like Arik.  Adam Soong is just Saturday Morning Cartoon show levels of EVIL.

Spoiler

Seriously.  His portfolio includes unlawful genetic engineering experiments on humans, illegal cloning, casual murder, attempted multiple murder, and partnering up with the Borg Queen in order to become famous via some engineered heroics that ends up turning the world into a xenophobic sh*thole.

 

As per the usual, anyone who's not a returning Star Trek character or a newly-created relative of same might as well have stayed home for all the use they were in the story.

Spoiler

Rios spends the entire season faffing about with the local civilians, because Temporal Prime Directive be damned.

Spoiler

He's so unimportant to the story that they straight-up leave him in the 21st century at the end of the arc.

Raffi is just sort of... present.  She contributes almost nothing to the story.

Jurati just kind of hangs around with the Borg Queen until...

Spoiler

... the Borg Queen assimilates her and pulls off a Grand Theft Me to obtain a fully functional humanoid body.  This eventually results in the ego-death of Jurati, who is now a New Borg Queen, in the same sense as "New Coke", an unwanted replacement for something that didn't need replacement.

and Elnor just f*cking dies.

Spoiler

Q brings him back to life at the end, but he spends basically three quarters of the season as a corpse on ice aboard La Sirena.

 

 

Even Seven of Nine's not really contributing much this time around, except to handle "As you know" regarding the Borg.

The Borg Queen herself has it the worst of anyone, though.

Spoiler

The Borg Queen in Picard is somehow an individual person and not the "a form you are comfortable with" puppet being operated by the Collective.  She's a desperately lonely, pathetic loser who assimiliates people because she's sad and alone and wants company.  Apparently literally everything about the Borg up to Picard was untrue.

She's got some kind of multiversal awareness and over the course of the season reveal that the Borg Queen in the Even Worse Future™ is the last of the Borg, and that in the multiverse the Borg are literally fated to lose in every timeline. 

She's reduced to a torso and has to plug into La Sirena to do anything, until she hijacks Jurati's body and goes on a rampage to change the past ala First Contact.  At the end, the Borg Queen (Jurati/Pathetic Ver.) applies for the Borg to join the Federation.  Yes, you read that right.  THE BORG want to join the Federation.  Assimilation is now even on a volunteer-only basis!

I can just see Admiral Janeway sitting at Starfleet Command staring down Picard over this latest bullsh*t and asking "Am I a joke to you?".

 

I'm actually kind of impressed by their commitment to this terrible storyline.  The actors, writers, and directors are clearly out there trying VERY hard to take this seriously... which makes you wonder why nobody, at any point, put up their hand and said "Why are we doing this?  This is terrible."

[tekering]

10 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

season two of Star Trek: Picard truly surpassed season one... in all the worst ways.

While I would still contend that season one was worse, I was surprised by how poorly episode 10 concluded season 2.  Overall, there were fewer cringe moments in the second season than in the first, but the final episode was chock full of 'em.  From plot points to dialogue to visual effects, "Farewell" contained the worst scenes of the whole series. The resolution of Seven and Raffi's friendship felt unearned (if not forced), second only to the "you've gotta be sh!tting me" resolution of Kore's narrative.

I only hope to hell that Santiago Cabrera and Isa Briones are now free to pursue promising careers, rather than contributing to the necrophiliac gang rape of TNG that season three promises to be. 😒

 

[Mog]

If Tom Hardy can survive the first horrible even numbered Trek film, anything’s possible.

[sh9000]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Seems like everyone's bailing out of this one... Alison Pill, Santiago Carbrera, Isa Briones, and Evan Evagora have all been indicated to be leaving the series as of season two's conclusion.

That leaves Michelle Hurd and maybe Orla Brady as the only cast members left who are playing original characters.  I kind of expect to hear Michelle Hurd is also not coming back in the next few days.

[Thom]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Seems like everyone's bailing out of this one... Alison Pill, Santiago Carbrera, Isa Briones, and Evan Evagora have all been indicated to be leaving the series as of season two's conclusion.

That leaves Michelle Hurd and maybe Orla Brady as the only cast members left who are playing original characters.  I kind of expect to hear Michelle Hurd is also not coming back in the next few days.

Could be why more TNG actors are showing up for Three..?

I will say, this was a better written and acted episode than most in the entire season. and I am real glad they stuck with...

Spoiler

Jurati becoming the Borg Queen, though I wish she had destroyed the original queen outright. Her little pep-talk with the OG Queen shouldn't have worked as easy as that.

In the case of Rios..

Spoiler

I'm gonna miss him. I was fan-servicing-in-my-head a 'Captain Rios and the Stargazer' series. I feel he could have helmed the center chair quite well.

As for Q,,,

Spoiler

That's what Q does! Q has always been about the grand, universe sweeping actions - with absolutely no regard at all for the consequences. Mainly it's because he's never suffered those consequences, until the very end. It's a tremendous growth of his character that his final act in any universe was simply to help one person, simply because he didn't want that one person to face his end like Q was. Alone.

...for that, I thought his scenes with Picard in this last episode were exceptionally well done.

It wasn't the best season, but it was a good ending. All in all though, this could have been a five episode arc and it would have been tighter and faster paced.
 

Spoiler

They should have concentrated more on Renee and far less on Kora who, for all she did, could have been just another test tube on the counter that rattled each time Soong pounded it in frustration. For everything that rested on Renee going on the mission, they wasted a lot of time elsewhere. And that's only born out seeing how they had to write an ending for Kora that was on a whole 'nother tangent than anything else in the entire season.

In fact, bringing in the Travellers, Wesley, only begs the question of where was he during all these time-fooling shenanigans!? Couldn't he have helped at all..?

Oh well, since I'm already paying to see SNW, I'll see what season 3 of Picard will have in store.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Thom said:

Could be why more TNG actors are showing up for Three..?

Considering the showrunners for Picard spent a lot of their time promoting the series as focusing on the original characters and would absolutely NOT become a TNG cast reunion... that the series has had the actors of all but two of the original characters leave and are turning the third season into a TNG cast reunion is a pretty damning indictment of the show's concept, creative staff, and direction.  

Now we have one final season of Patrick Stewart directing the Federation Starship Titanic's dance band as the show slowly sinks without trace and they draw his curtains for good.

 

3 hours ago, Thom said:

In the case of Rios..

  Reveal hidden contents

I'm gonna miss him. I was fan-servicing-in-my-head a 'Captain Rios and the Stargazer' series. I feel he could have helmed the center chair quite well.

Eh... personally, I didn't find Great Value Han Solo from the United Federation of Latinx Stereotypes all that engaging TBH.  Why build a diverse cast if the characterization is mostly racial stereotype-tied tropes?

 

The problem with Q in this season is that Q is a top tier threat.  He is A-plot material.  You don't involve Q in your story unless Q is central to your story because he is just THAT big of a presence in Star Trek.  If he's trying to teach Picard and his crew a lesson, he's up in their faces about it and the stakes are as high as stakes can go.

What they did is the same thing Discovery's second season did with Spock.  They dangled him in front of the audience as the bait in a bait-and-switch, with him throwing Picard and his merry band of Great Value-brand ethnic stereotype stock characters into a scenario that he was all but completely uninvolved with.  The end, where he reveals his motivation and the "lesson" he was supposedly trying to convey with this season-long plot tumor is an embarrassing excuse that had NOTHING to do with the story arc at all.  It feels almost like an excuse, a last second "throw it in" because the writers forgot to come up with an actual coherent motive for Q's behavior.

 

3 hours ago, Thom said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

They should have concentrated more on Renee and far less on Kora who, for all she did, could have been just another test tube on the counter that rattled each time Soong pounded it in frustration. For everything that rested on Renee going on the mission, they wasted a lot of time elsewhere. And that's only born out seeing how they had to write an ending for Kora that was on a whole 'nother tangent than anything else in the entire season.

In fact, bringing in the Travellers, Wesley, only begs the question of where was he during all these time-fooling shenanigans!? Couldn't he have helped at all..?

 

I get the feeling that she was intended to be another "strong female character" like Dahj and Soji, but they couldn't work in any way to justify her being superhuman without outing Soong as a rogue geneticist immediately in a way that'd result in him being thrown in prison until doomsday.

The whole season is a plot tumor that has nothing to do with what is ostensibly its main plot, and this is just a plot tumor ON the plot tumor.  It's metastasized.

Spoiler

Season two's ending and the departure of all these actors is basically an admission that what little character development they attempted fell flat.

Rios and Jurati are both effectively killed off because audiences thought their barely-there romance subplot in season one was stupid and came out of nowhere.

Elnor joins Starfleet, is in all of one episode, dies, and quits Starfleet when he's returned to life.

Seven's attempt to explain why she's a part of the hilariously stupid-sounding "Fenris Rangers" as a boring, generic space vigilante and squirting generic "badass action girl" tropes out of every pore is a plot hole in and of itself.  Seven can't join Starfleet because she's an ex-Borg?  The writers apparently forgot that they'd made Icheb a Starfleet Lieutenant in the previous season while they were busy fridging him.

Picard's status as a synth was supposed to be a major part of his character arc.  Instead, it's almost immediately forgotten.

Despite one of the worst terrorists acts in the setting being perpetrated by synths, nobody seems at all perturbed to be playing host to a synth ambassador who'd recently been an accessory to the attempted murder of all organic life.

I'm wondering if season three will follow suit, and the writers will forget or "Threshold never happened" their way out of the events of the past two seasons.

It wouldn't be the first time... like when the ENT relaunch spent the entire introduction taking the piss out of "These are the voyages".

[pengbuzz]

44 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Considering the showrunners for Picard spent a lot of their time promoting the series as focusing on the original characters and would absolutely NOT become a TNG cast reunion... that the series has had the actors of all but two of the original characters leave and are turning the third season into a TNG cast reunion is a pretty damning indictment of the show's concept, creative staff, and direction.  

Now we have one final season of Patrick Stewart directing the Federation Starship Titanic's dance band as the show slowly sinks without trace and they draw his curtains for good.

 

Eh... personally, I didn't find Great Value Han Solo from the United Federation of Latinx Stereotypes all that engaging TBH.  Why build a diverse cast if the characterization is mostly racial stereotype-tied tropes?

 

The problem with Q in this season is that Q is a top tier threat.  He is A-plot material.  You don't involve Q in your story unless Q is central to your story because he is just THAT big of a presence in Star Trek.  If he's trying to teach Picard and his crew a lesson, he's up in their faces about it and the stakes are as high as stakes can go.

What they did is the same thing Discovery's second season did with Spock.  They dangled him in front of the audience as the bait in a bait-and-switch, with him throwing Picard and his merry band of Great Value-brand ethnic stereotype stock characters into a scenario that he was all but completely uninvolved with.  The end, where he reveals his motivation and the "lesson" he was supposedly trying to convey with this season-long plot tumor is an embarrassing excuse that had NOTHING to do with the story arc at all.  It feels almost like an excuse, a last second "throw it in" because the writers forgot to come up with an actual coherent motive for Q's behavior.

 

I get the feeling that she was intended to be another "strong female character" like Dahj and Soji, but they couldn't work in any way to justify her being superhuman without outing Soong as a rogue geneticist immediately in a way that'd result in him being thrown in prison until doomsday.

The whole season is a plot tumor that has nothing to do with what is ostensibly its main plot, and this is just a plot tumor ON the plot tumor.  It's metastasized.

  Hide contents

Season two's ending and the departure of all these actors is basically an admission that what little character development they attempted fell flat.

Rios and Jurati are both effectively killed off because audiences thought their barely-there romance subplot in season one was stupid and came out of nowhere.

Elnor joins Starfleet, is in all of one episode, dies, and quits Starfleet when he's returned to life.

Seven's attempt to explain why she's a part of the hilariously stupid-sounding "Fenris Rangers" as a boring, generic space vigilante and squirting generic "badass action girl" tropes out of every pore is a plot hole in and of itself.  Seven can't join Starfleet because she's an ex-Borg?  The writers apparently forgot that they'd made Icheb a Starfleet Lieutenant in the previous season while they were busy fridging him.

Picard's status as a synth was supposed to be a major part of his character arc.  Instead, it's almost immediately forgotten.

Despite one of the worst terrorists acts in the setting being perpetrated by synths, nobody seems at all perturbed to be playing host to a synth ambassador who'd recently been an accessory to the attempted murder of all organic life.

I'm wondering if season three will follow suit, and the writers will forget or "Threshold never happened" their way out of the events of the past two seasons.

It wouldn't be the first time... like when the ENT relaunch spent the entire introduction taking the piss out of "These are the voyages".

I spent the past 48 hours or so trying to assimilate (pardon the pun) all this info as I learned it via my own resources.

Frankly, the best thing they can do with this series right now is to flash to Picard lying in bed dead, with the OG cast gathered around him.

Dr. Crusher: "He's delirious...the Iromodic Syndrome is in it's final stages. I don't think he has much longer left."

Riker: "He kept mentioning something about 'pizza in the woods', whatever that means".

Worf: "Yes, and about a 'Borg queen' and "Q dying". He must be delirous."

*everyone turns to look at Q*

Q: "Well, don't blame ME; I certainly didn't give him Irumdic Syndrome".

 

[TangledThorns]

I'm trying to finish season 2. Ugh. However seeing Battlestar Galactica's James Callis is a welcome treat.