Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[sh9000]

Season 3 Episode 10 clip.

The Ready Room.

[Seto Kaiba]

20 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Wow... that was such an a$$pull that they must have reached clear up to their brains trying to find something to grab!!!

That presumes there is something up there to reach.

I think the writing in this last episode demonstrates rather succinctly that they're groping about in a void.

 

6 hours ago, CoryHolmes said:

But he said it SO MUCH BETTER HERE! In S1 it was more of a nostalgia thing, a "I used to do this here" thing.  Here, it's because he is BACK!  No more the Admiral in an office, waiting for his time to die.  This is the man picking up where he left off and ready to save the galaxy again.  His voice was stronger, and I swear he stood a little straighter before sitting in his chair.  Ladies and Gentlemen, the Captain has returned.

It's easy to get swept up in cheap nostalgia - like the characters themselves are doing - but it's a fast-fading high that's quickly replaced with the realization that we're still watching a version of Star Trek so senselessly bleak that even the characters themselves are indulging in escapist reminiscing about the "better days" when they were younger.

(Never mind that the writers had to bend over backwards and engage in more moon logic than any previous Star Trek story for these characters to be in any way relevant to galactic goings-on.)

 

4 hours ago, Thom said:

Clearly, Geordi was feeling very nostalgic! Though I don't think they could do a saucer separation, unless Geordi automated the hell out of that. They have barely enough crew just to man the main bridge.

That actually gets a pass.

It was established way back in the TNG Season 1 writers materials that the Enterprise-D was so heavily computerized and so advanced that it's theoretically possible for one person to operate the entire ship in at least a basic capacity.  This premise was used in a few different episodes including TNG "11001001" and VOY "Message in a Bottle", as well as a Star Trek board game.  Living crew can just do the job with greater flexibility and precision than a wholly-automated starship, and the crew are needed for things like maintenance and repair.

There are a bunch of other problems with the whole idea of dusting off the Enterprise-D:

• The Enterprise-D isn't even the best option available in the Fleet Museum.  They have access to a newer, smaller, faster, more defensible, dedicated anti-Borg warship which can operate far more flexibly with far fewer crew in the USS Defiant.  That Worf never points this out is honestly a bit odd, since she was HIS command for several years.
• Geordi is the curator of the Fleet Museum.  Who in the nine hells received a requisition for photon (and possibly quantum or even transphasic) torpedoes from a non-combat, non-fleet posting and was just like "Yeah, that sounds legit."
• Come to that, who approved the Fleet Museum's requisitions for enough deuterium and antideuterium to power a Galaxy-class ship?
• Why is any ship in the Fleet Museum outfitted with live weaponry?  These are DISPLAY pieces.  You'd think they'd at least have disconnected the phaser arrays and stripped any classified technology before putting the ships on display.
• The Enterprise-D really isn't any less networked than the ships that the Borg took over.  All any of the assimilated ships has to do is run her prefix codes and seize control of her computers remotely and it's game over.

 

4 hours ago, Thom said:

Thoughts exactly. Their officer corps has been decimated! It's a good thing the Romulans are still on their heels after losing Romulus and the Klingons are now allies. But it will be a very turbulent decade following this.

I wouldn't be surprised if the entire TNG crew ends up back on the E-D helping to train-up and rehabilitate the ranks. One thing is for certain, Picard will not be the only one now living with that kind of guilt!

I've got a feeling the writers copout for that is going to be that only the area immediately around Earth was affected, and that Starfleet in the other ~150+ systems and innumerable space stations and planetside installations were unaffected.  If that were the case, they've maybe lost a few hundred senior officers... not decimation of the ranks but still problematic with the fleet around Earth losing a lot of experienced officers.

There's a much bigger problem in that thousands and thousands of junior officers will have had to endure the trauma that comes with assimilation, not just mentally but very likely physically too by the time the old farts get back to save the day.  

Spoiler

The really stupid way out that I'm afraid they're going to pull is that somehow, Jean-Luc will hook his robo-brain up to the Collective and seize control of it from the Borg Queen...

 

[pengbuzz]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

  Hide contents

The really stupid way out that I'm afraid they're going to pull is that somehow, Jean-Luc will hook his robo-brain up to the Collective and seize control of it from the Borg Queen...

 

 

Spoiler

And we end up with a whole bunch of young Borgermeisters all enjoying Te, Earl Grey. Hot.

 

[Thom]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That actually gets a pass.

It was established way back in the TNG Season 1 writers materials that the Enterprise-D was so heavily computerized and so advanced that it's theoretically possible for one person to operate the entire ship in at least a basic capacity.  This premise was used in a few different episodes including TNG "11001001" and VOY "Message in a Bottle", as well as a Star Trek board game.  Living crew can just do the job with greater flexibility and precision than a wholly-automated starship, and the crew are needed for things like maintenance and repair.

Just cruising from Point A to Point B is easy, it's going into battle and expecting the ship to operate at full capacity without a full crew is where the problem comes in. Ships need their crews. Now split the few people they do have between the saucer and stardrive section and they'd be dead in space in minutes. Or less.

That's real world, anyway. Maybe Geordi seeded replicators  throughout the ship to replicate any damaged section back into existence. or maybe there is a whole contingent of androids in deep storage. (sarcasm)

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

There are a bunch of other problems with the whole idea of dusting off the Enterprise-D:

• The Enterprise-D isn't even the best option available in the Fleet Museum.  They have access to a newer, smaller, faster, more defensible, dedicated anti-Borg warship which can operate far more flexibly with far fewer crew in the USS Defiant.  That Worf never points this out is honestly a bit odd, since she was HIS command for several years.
• Geordi is the curator of the Fleet Museum.  Who in the nine hells received a requisition for photon (and possibly quantum or even transphasic) torpedoes from a non-combat, non-fleet posting and was just like "Yeah, that sounds legit."
• Come to that, who approved the Fleet Museum's requisitions for enough deuterium and antideuterium to power a Galaxy-class ship?
• Why is any ship in the Fleet Museum outfitted with live weaponry?  These are DISPLAY pieces.  You'd think they'd at least have disconnected the phaser arrays and stripped any classified technology before putting the ships on display.
• The Enterprise-D really isn't any less networked than the ships that the Borg took over.  All any of the assimilated ships has to do is run her prefix codes and seize control of her computers remotely and it's game over.

 

I'm thinking the D can probably take a hit better than the Defiant, and it wasn't the TNG ship.

Replicators! Whose to say they can't replicate entire torpedos?

I'm assuming they just have it on-hand, at least for maintenance and short system runs. All of the ship  appeared to be fully powered in their enclosures.

?

Though Enterprise-D is networked, I doubt it is to the extreme as the modern Starfleet ships. Plus, they have Data and warning that the other ships might try to hijack their computers.

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I've got a feeling the writers copout for that is going to be that only the area immediately around Earth was affected, and that Starfleet in the other ~150+ systems and innumerable space stations and planetside installations were unaffected.  If that were the case, they've maybe lost a few hundred senior officers... not decimation of the ranks but still problematic with the fleet around Earth losing a lot of experienced officers.

There's a much bigger problem in that thousands and thousands of junior officers will have had to endure the trauma that comes with assimilation, not just mentally but very likely physically too by the time the old farts get back to save the day.  

  Reveal hidden contents

The really stupid way out that I'm afraid they're going to pull is that somehow, Jean-Luc will hook his robo-brain up to the Collective and seize control of it from the Borg Queen...

 

That's one thing they didn't specify. Jack is all the way other 'there' far, far away from Earth but the system still worked - however they for some reason needed the entire fleet in one spot. If distance is not a problem, then they didn't need to do that, though I wouldn't put it past the Changelings to have wanted that.

I haven't written them out yet, as I don't think the Borg were behind the Face Vadic was taking orders from.  I could be wrong, but in that event, I'm hoping that the Changelings have a way of short-circuiting the Borg, perhaps this being a part of their plan, that could open a window for Picard and Crew to wrangle a win through.

[Mommar]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

There's a much bigger problem in that thousands and thousands of junior officers will have had to endure the trauma that comes with assimilation, not just mentally but very likely physically too by the time the old farts get back to save the day.  

  Hide contents

 

That's actually a checkmate scenario.  Best case you save most of them and they're nearly all broken from the trauma.  At worst you just wiped out an entire generation of junior officers forcing more senior in rank and age or wildly young, inexperienced and untrained to take up those positions.

[Dynaman]

A good "Soong" is like the single Blackadder from the Christmas Carol parody they did.  So doing a Dick move is nothing special for them.

[Dobber]

It would be ironic if now all the young officers have a new appreciation for how Shaw and other senior officers felt about the Borg and possibly his hesitance to use Seven’s Borg name and what it represents.

Chris

Edited April 15, 2023 by Dobber

[sh9000]

https://www.startrek.com/gallery/star-trek-picard-enterprise-d-cast-portraits/star-trek-picard-the-original-crew-aboard-the-uss-enterprise-d-5298/9

Portraits of TNG cast on the Enterprise-D.  Beautiful.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Thom said:

Just cruising from Point A to Point B is easy, it's going into battle and expecting the ship to operate at full capacity without a full crew is where the problem comes in.

This is certainly true... though flying and fighting on at least a basic level can be done by the computer.  With expert hands on the main systems, their main problem is going to be battle damage taking down automations and manual repairs to critical systems.

 

3 hours ago, Thom said:

I'm thinking the D can probably take a hit better than the Defiant, and it wasn't the TNG ship.

The Changelings weren't a TNG antagonist either, but here we are.

I'm pretty sure the Defiant can take more punishment since she was built as a warship and was uparmored and upgunned to fight the Borg and then the Dominion while the D was built as a deep space explorer.  She's also a much smaller target.

 

3 hours ago, Thom said:

Replicators! Whose to say they can't replicate entire torpedos?

Seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager for starters...

 

3 hours ago, Thom said:

Though Enterprise-D is networked, I doubt it is to the extreme as the modern Starfleet ships. Plus, they have Data and warning that the other ships might try to hijack their computers.

The only difference we've seen has been the Fleet Formation system that has twice now allowed the Borg to seize control of entire fleets.

It's been established since Wrath of Khan that Starfleet ships are heavily networked and that it's possible to remotely override systems by connecting to those networks from the outside.  (The explanation given for how prefix codes work is that the consoles aren't just linked to the computer using fiber optics, they're also connected through the use of some short-range subspace communication systems that allow them to communicate with the computer faster than light. This subspace communication is what the external computer taps into by authenticating on the network using the same encryption key that the ship's own consoles use. In that way, they can send commands to the other ship's systems as if they were operating a console directly aboard that ship. The inherent weaknesses of this system were also a major plot point in the Star Trek Enterprise relaunch novel series with the Romulans using a computer virus to infiltrate the systems of Earth's ships and take the ships over remotely.)

Exactly what this fleet formation system does is not entirely clear, it just seems to mean that all the computers of all the ships in the fleet are linked together constantly instead of on-demand. In practice, that's a terrible idea and whoever came up with it is kind of a dimwit. Then again I am a network engineer so I have strong opinions on that particular topic colored by my professional experience.

 

2 hours ago, Dobber said:

It would be ironic if now all the young officers have a new appreciation for how Shaw and other senior officers felt about the Borg and possibly his hesitance to use Seven’s Borg name and what it represents.

Yeah, that seems pretty likely.

Probably going to undermine the whole point they were going for regarding Shaw's refusal to use anything but her legal name.

[Thom]

59 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

This is certainly true... though flying and fighting on at least a basic level can be done by the computer.  With expert hands on the main systems, their main problem is going to be battle damage taking down automations and manual repairs to critical systems.

Exactly, and that will happen as soon as battle commences. But I don't see the Ent-D getting into a knock-down, drag-out fight with the assimilated fleet. Even with a full crew she should be dog meat. Their best bet, barring intervention from an allied source, will be subterfuge and whit.

59 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Changelings weren't a TNG antagonist either, but here we are.

True, but this isn't DS9 either. Personally, whether the Changelings are more a DS9 thing or not matters little to me. It's all Star Trek in the end.

59 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm pretty sure the Defiant can take more punishment since she was built as a warship and was uparmored and upgunned to fight the Borg and then the Dominion while the D was built as a deep space explorer.  She's also a much smaller target.

We'll have to differ. I think the Galaxy class, being larger will be able to take more of a punishment even if it doesn't have more armor. Weapons still have to get through shields first and as long as those hold you don't need more armor. As for weapons, if they are working, the D has a lot to bring to a party. The Defiant looks like it should be part of wolf-pack rather than a ship of the line.

 

59 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The only difference we've seen has been the Fleet Formation system that has twice now allowed the Borg to seize control of entire fleets.

It's been established since Wrath of Khan that Starfleet ships are heavily networked and that it's possible to remotely override systems by connecting to those networks from the outside.  (The explanation given for how prefix codes work is that the consoles aren't just linked to the computer using fiber optics, they're also connected through the use of some short-range subspace communication systems that allow them to communicate with the computer faster than light. This subspace communication is what the external computer taps into by authenticating on the network using the same encryption key that the ship's own consoles use. In that way, they can send commands to the other ship's systems as if they were operating a console directly aboard that ship. The inherent weaknesses of this system were also a major plot point in the Star Trek Enterprise relaunch novel series with the Romulans using a computer virus to infiltrate the systems of Earth's ships and take the ships over remotely.)

Exactly what this fleet formation system does is not entirely clear, it just seems to mean that all the computers of all the ships in the fleet are linked together constantly instead of on-demand. In practice, that's a terrible idea and whoever came up with it is kind of a dimwit. Then again I am a network engineer so I have strong opinions on that particular topic colored by my professional experience.

So it would seem that all they did was remove the override. The D probably still has that.

3 hours ago, Dobber said:

It would be ironic if now all the young officers have a new appreciation for how Shaw and other senior officers felt about the Borg and possibly his hesitance to use Seven’s Borg name and what it represents.

Chris

They might be more likely to see it from Picard's perspective. Every single one of those young officers, if they survive being un-assimilated, will be bearing the guilt of having been made to kill fellow officer and friends.

 

 

Edited April 16, 2023 by Thom

[borgified]

I guess you guys have seen this one as well? 
 

Edit: Reposted after a major screw up on my part.

Huh… So does this mean Mica and Ashley are still not part of the family in this regards? 

Edited April 16, 2023 by borgified

[Seto Kaiba]

46 minutes ago, Thom said:

We'll have to differ. I think the Galaxy class, being larger will be able to take more of a punishment even if it doesn't have more armor. Weapons still have to get through shields first and as long as those hold you don't need more armor.

Against any other foe this might be a pretty good argument.

Where it falls down a bit is that draining a ship's shields in a matter of seconds using their tractor beams or some other weapon is pretty much the Borg collective's signature move. Once the shields are down you're working with the strength of the outer hull. The Defiant's reinforced hull and ablative armor make it much more resilient without shields.

And if you're looking to sneak about, the smaller ship is kind of the common sense choice. If it can also punch way the hell above its weight class the way the Defiant can, so much the better.

 

58 minutes ago, Thom said:

They might be more likely to see it from Picard's perspective. Every single one of those young officers, if they survive being un-assimilated, will be bearing the guilt of having been made to kill fellow officer and friends.

Considering the previous season depicted an alternate timeline where Starfleet had wiped the Borg out entirely and were planning a public execution for the Borg Queen... the Borg Queen may be entering the find out phase of **** around and find out. Starfleet is about to have an awful lot of extremely pissed off people with a bone to pick with the Borg collective.

(Assuming that Admiral Janeway and Captain Janeway blowing up that transwarp hub in the late 2370s doesn't count as the start of that phase.)

[CoryHolmes]

12 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's easy to get swept up in cheap nostalgia - like the characters themselves are doing - but it's a fast-fading high that's quickly replaced with the realization that we're still watching a version of Star Trek so senselessly bleak that even the characters themselves are indulging in escapist reminiscing about the "better days" when they were younger.

(Never mind that the writers had to bend over backwards and engage in more moon logic than any previous Star Trek story for these characters to be in any way relevant to galactic goings-on.)

You have a good point.  But I'm enjoying this so much that I have to unleash my ultimate counter-argument.

 

*ahem*

 

LALALALALALALALALALALA!  I CAN'T HEAAAAAAAR YOUUUUUUUU!

[lechuck]

15 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

There are a bunch of other problems with the whole idea of dusting off the Enterprise-D:

• The Enterprise-D isn't even the best option available in the Fleet Museum.  They have access to a newer, smaller, faster, more defensible, dedicated anti-Borg warship which can operate far more flexibly with far fewer crew in the USS Defiant.  That Worf never points this out is honestly a bit odd, since she was HIS command for several years.

 

8 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm pretty sure the Defiant can take more punishment since she was built as a warship and was uparmored and upgunned to fight the Borg and then the Dominion while the D was built as a deep space explorer.  She's also a much smaller target.

I see this sort of defacto argument so often for the Defiant to be THE Wunderwaffe against the Borg. It might have been designed for that intent, but its ineffectiveness was pretty much proven in First Contact. This so called Borg busting starship was actually being busted up by the Borg, heck even in DS9 the Defiant often times was struggling against Jem'Hadar attack fighters for all its supposedly superior firepower and defensive capabilities.

[Mog]

. . . And one “little” Jem’Hadar attack fighter took out a Galaxy class ship with one kamikaze hit.

The Defiant is still an ass-kicker that’s proven its mettle against a variety of different enemies, including other Starfleet ships.

. . . Of course, Geordi would’ve had to call O’Brian out of retirement to figure out all the modifications and upgrades they did to her.

[pengbuzz]

One nitpick I have (though it most likely has nothing to do with anything): The Enterprise Bridge is wrong:

I know people shrink a little as they get older,  but unless it's scoliosis of the spine, it's not by THAT MUCH:

https://uamshealth.com/medical-myths/do-people-shrink-as-they-age/

What I mean is: they made the "ramp" from the rear of the ship to the front way too steep,which puts the con and ops consoles far lower than the rest of the bridge. It also throws everything else off a pic, as I show in the picture.

Additionally, Levar Burton himself confirmed the ramp being "too steep":

"We went back to our bridge, and it wasn’t exactly, the ramp was a little steep, but the feeling it evoked in us, that sense of coming home was real. It was like being in a time machine, we were trasnported back to the 19, to the late 80’s."

Source:- ttps://trekcentral.net/yes-the-enterprise-d-is-back-for-picard-season-3/

Not to mention: why is Picard giving Data helm orders when it's Geordi  who's at the helm console?

 

Edited April 16, 2023 by pengbuzz

[Roy Focker]

Well the guy who rebuilt the Enterprise's bridge was blind.

[pengbuzz]

12 minutes ago, Roy Focker said:

Well the guy who rebuilt the Enterprise's bridge was blind.

[lechuck]

3 hours ago, Mog said:

. . . And one “little” Jem’Hadar attack fighter took out a Galaxy class ship with one kamikaze hit.

The Defiant is still an ass-kicker that’s proven its mettle against a variety of different enemies, including other Starfleet ships.

. . . Of course, Geordi would’ve had to call O’Brian out of retirement to figure out all the modifications and upgrades they did to her.

...On the Federation's first Dominion encounter with a ship not purposely built for attack or defence against a certain species, not having enough time for a counter measure against phased polaron beams that broke down their shields and most of all not expecting the Jem'Hadar going full suicide attack on their retreat. If it wasn't for that last bit the Odyssey would have actually survived - the Galaxy class swallowed all that prior beating despite not having any fancy ablative armour or adequate fire power.

And let's not forget that the same Galaxy class became Starfleet's backbone in the Dominion war tasked with providing firepower against Cardassian, Breen and Dominion battleships.

[kalvasflam]

caught a little bit of this.  Boy, is Patrick Stewart egotistical... everything has to revolve around Picard.  Even JLP's dead body is a weapon, surprised they didn't extract something from Picard's balls in the process, and don't even get me started on how much contortion and twist of logic you have to have to get to this fleet wide assimilation BS using Picard's DNA. 

Why Picard's DNA, considering how many humans the borgs have assimilated, why not just some random schmuck who had been previously assimilated, surely the collective can find one human within their big borg ship to scrap off the DNA in his lobes?

What is the time frame that passed between the start of this magical operation by the changelings to now?  They sure worked fast pushing all of Picard's DNA to every ship in the fleet...

I think one of the problem with STP is the fact that they try to use a season arc for story line instead of a bunch of one offs.  They try to build it up to the next big thing, and inevitably all of it falls flat.  And someone really needs to finally put the Borg out of the Star Trek misery, they've gone back to that well so often, it's amazing that there is still a well left. 

[Seto Kaiba]

6 hours ago, lechuck said:

I see this sort of defacto argument so often for the Defiant to be THE Wunderwaffe against the Borg. It might have been designed for that intent, but its ineffectiveness was pretty much proven in First Contact. This so called Borg busting starship was actually being busted up by the Borg, heck even in DS9 the Defiant often times was struggling against Jem'Hadar attack fighters for all its supposedly superior firepower and defensive capabilities.

I'm not sure that argument tracks.

Sure, the Defiant didn't solo the Borg cube in First Contact... but then, it was never meant to.  It was meant to fight as part of a fleet, and as a small escort warship aggressively min-maxed for combat it was meant to punch way above its weight class with disproportionately heavy armament and tank hits that would cripple or even destroy Starfleet's larger and less specialized ships so that it could hang in a fight as long as possible instead of being one-shotted.  That's exactly what we see in First Contact, and in its prior appearnaces in the DS9 series.  The Defiant was part of the fleet that intercepted the Borg cube and it hung on in that fight all the way to Earth, tanking hits from weapons that we'd previously seen one-shot Starfleet ships at Wolf 359 like a champ.  So much so that she's noted to still be spaceworthy and repairable after the fight ends.

The Defiant occasionally was shown struggling against Jem'Hadar attack fighters, but mainly because there are just so bloody many of them.

 

2 hours ago, lechuck said:

...On the Federation's first Dominion encounter with a ship not purposely built for attack or defence against a certain species, not having enough time for a counter measure against phased polaron beams that broke down their shields and most of all not expecting the Jem'Hadar going full suicide attack on their retreat. If it wasn't for that last bit the Odyssey would have actually survived - the Galaxy class swallowed all that prior beating despite not having any fancy ablative armour or adequate fire power.

And let's not forget that the same Galaxy class became Starfleet's backbone in the Dominion war tasked with providing firepower against Cardassian, Breen and Dominion battleships.

By the same token, let's also not forget the many times the Galaxy-class was depicted as a one-hit-point wonder in TNG or that newer classes like the Sovereign-class were developed specifically to address the Galaxy-class's deficiencies in a defensive role. 

It's probably even worse now, since the Enterprise-D is 30+ years out of date technologically and literally built from reclaimed garbage and war surplus parts.

 

... actually can we muse for a moment on how completely F'ed up it is that Geordi spent twenty years painstakingly reconstructing the Enterprise-D.  If it were anyone else there would not be Unfortunate Implications, but as it's Geordi in a series that's depicted every member of the TNG cast as broken and miserable... is reconstructing the Enterprise-D for the Fleet Museum Geordi's way to "atone" for having inadvertantly caused the ship's destruction in Generations?  How much time did Geordi take away from his family over TWENTY YEARS to painstakingly restore the totalled saucer section, replace the stardrive section, and repair the whole mess using salvage and war surplus parts?  

The crew are basically flying Geordi's midlife crisis project car into battle with the Borg.

 

 

52 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

caught a little bit of this.  Boy, is Patrick Stewart egotistical... everything has to revolve around Picard.

In all fairness, the series IS titled "Star Trek: Picard".

It is still pretty damned awkward that EVERYTHING has to revolve around Jean-Luc Picard, his incredibly skewed and self-centered perspective, and his post-retirement struggles for relevance.

(Like in the first season where he makes a ludicrously inaccurate analogy comparing the Romulan resettlement effort to Verdun and gets angry because everyone else refuses to subscribe to his personal morality)

 

52 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

Even JLP's dead body is a weapon, surprised they didn't extract something from Picard's balls in the process, [...]

*points to Jack Crusher, Picard's bastard son and this season's plot-critical MacGuffin*

They... they kinda did.

 

52 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

and don't even get me started on how much contortion and twist of logic you have to have to get to this fleet wide assimilation BS using Picard's DNA. 

It's so ill-considered that it not only goes against how transporters work and how Borg assimilation works, it literally forgets that there was nothing special about Picard being able to hear the collective after his implants were removed.  Seven of Nine did it frankly all the freaking time in Voyager, as did several other one-episode characters.  The only ones who didn't were Janeway, Torres, and Tuvok, who had some magical anti-assimilation drug they got from the Doctor when they went undercover on a Borg ship in "Unimatrix Zero".

(The previous explanation was simply that it's more or less impossible to remove 100% of the Borg's nano-hardware from the body, so rescued former drones still have some small residual link to the collective at short ranges.)

 

52 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

Why Picard's DNA, considering how many humans the borgs have assimilated, why not just some random schmuck who had been previously assimilated, surely the collective can find one human within their big borg ship to scrap off the DNA in his lobes?

Moreover, why does this DNA work on literally everyone regardless of species?  

(And how did permanent changes in Picard's DNA get missed when Starfleet routinely performs genetic scans of its personnel as part of physicals?)

 

52 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

What is the time frame that passed between the start of this magical operation by the changelings to now?  They sure worked fast pushing all of Picard's DNA to every ship in the fleet...

Only a couple months!  They couldn't have started before stealing Picard's remains from the Daystrom black site.

 

52 minutes ago, kalvasflam said:

I think one of the problem with STP is the fact that they try to use a season arc for story line instead of a bunch of one offs.  They try to build it up to the next big thing, and inevitably all of it falls flat.  And someone really needs to finally put the Borg out of the Star Trek misery, they've gone back to that well so often, it's amazing that there is still a well left. 

We thought they'd done exactly that last season, when Dr. Jurati became the new Borg Queen and the Borg applied for Federation membership.

[pengbuzz]

12 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's so ill-considered that it not only goes against how transporters work and how Borg assimilation works, it literally forgets that there was nothing special about Picard being able to hear the collective after his implants were removed.  Seven of Nine did it frankly all the freaking time in Voyager, as did several other one-episode characters.  The only ones who didn't were Janeway, Torres, and Tuvok, who had some magical anti-assimilation drug they got from the Doctor when they went undercover on a Borg ship in "Unimatrix Zero".

(The previous explanation was simply that it's more or less impossible to remove 100% of the Borg's nano-hardware from the body, so rescued former drones still have some small residual link to the collective at short ranges.)

One thing to note: Picard shouldn't be able to hear from them anymore, given his Borg-nanites are back with his old, dead, wrinkly body.

[Mog]

Considering his girls are both in Starfleet, I wouldn’t be surprised if Geordi had a few Bring Your Daughter to Work Days, umm, Weeks, erm, MONTHS.

“Hey kiddo, can you reroute the EPS manifold to Plasma Conduit 12 so it can draw power from Substation D?”

[sh9000]

100% recreated from scratch except the original dedication plaque.  Awesome.

[Seto Kaiba]

25 minutes ago, sh9000 said:

100% recreated from scratch except the original dedication plaque.  Awesome.

... and yet, ironically, still wrong.  They recreated the bridge from partway through TNG, not the bridge the ship actually had when she went down on Veridian III.

Yet, for all that and despite how dated it looks, this is far and away the nicest-looking set NuTrek has produced so far.  Everything else - from the Discovery to La Sirena to the Titan-A - is so dark and so grey and miserably depressing-looking because the sets are so under-lit.  It's a bit garish, but this looks like it would actually be a nice place to work while every other ship in the fleet seems to have the dimmer switch stuck at "Red Alert" the entire time.

One has to wonder if Picard's delight at seeing the carpet again is him actually missing the carpet, or just missing a light level higher than "half-dead flashlight".

(Dear Starfleet, when Captain Picard said there were only four lights you need to understand he was being tortured by the Cardassians not giving interior design advice.)

[JB0]

9 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

One nitpick I have (though it most likely has nothing to do with anything): The Enterprise Bridge is wrong:

I know people shrink a little as they get older,  but unless it's scoliosis of the spine, it's not by THAT MUCH:

https://uamshealth.com/medical-myths/do-people-shrink-as-they-age/

What I mean is: they made the "ramp" from the rear of the ship to the front way too steep,which puts the con and ops consoles far lower than the rest of the bridge. It also throws everything else off a pic, as I show in the picture.

Additionally, Levar Burton himself confirmed the ramp being "too steep":

"We went back to our bridge, and it wasn’t exactly, the ramp was a little steep, but the feeling it evoked in us, that sense of coming home was real. It was like being in a time machine, we were trasnported back to the 19, to the late 80’s."

Source:- ttps://trekcentral.net/yes-the-enterprise-d-is-back-for-picard-season-3/

Not to mention: why is Picard giving Data helm orders when it's Geordi  who's at the helm console?

 

I know it was a lot harder, but it makes me sad that they nailed the original bridge for Relics for a single scene, and years later they stumbled on recreating the -D bridge for two episodes.

[sh9000]

Lovely.

[borgified]

Phhtt… The old gang plus a few more misfits minus Gen Z. 

[Thom]

21 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Against any other foe this might be a pretty good argument.

Where it falls down a bit is that draining a ship's shields in a matter of seconds using their tractor beams or some other weapon is pretty much the Borg collective's signature move. Once the shields are down you're working with the strength of the outer hull. The Defiant's reinforced hull and ablative armor make it much more resilient without shields.

And if you're looking to sneak about, the smaller ship is kind of the common sense choice. If it can also punch way the hell above its weight class the way the Defiant can, so much the better.

That's if they are going against Borg ships. The tech we are seeing is biological rather than technical, and AFAWK it is still just assimilated crews with standard Starfleet ships.

9 hours ago, kalvasflam said:

caught a little bit of this.  Boy, is Patrick Stewart egotistical... everything has to revolve around Picard.  Even JLP's dead body is a weapon, surprised they didn't extract something from Picard's balls in the process, and don't even get me started on how much contortion and twist of logic you have to have to get to this fleet wide assimilation BS using Picard's DNA. 

Why Picard's DNA, considering how many humans the borgs have assimilated, why not just some random schmuck who had been previously assimilated, surely the collective can find one human within their big borg ship to scrap off the DNA in his lobes?

What is the time frame that passed between the start of this magical operation by the changelings to now?  They sure worked fast pushing all of Picard's DNA to every ship in the fleet...

I think one of the problem with STP is the fact that they try to use a season arc for story line instead of a bunch of one offs.  They try to build it up to the next big thing, and inevitably all of it falls flat.  And someone really needs to finally put the Borg out of the Star Trek misery, they've gone back to that well so often, it's amazing that there is still a well left. 

It's not strictly his DNA they were after, but the bio-tech 'seed' planted inside of him by the Borg while he was Locutus. It's what was misdiagnosed as Irumodic Syndrome. And it's what was needed to be disseminated through the transporter network in order for Jack's fully evolved form of bio-assimilation to work on the others.

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm not sure that argument tracks.

Sure, the Defiant didn't solo the Borg cube in First Contact... but then, it was never meant to.  It was meant to fight as part of a fleet, and as a small escort warship aggressively min-maxed for combat it was meant to punch way above its weight class with disproportionately heavy armament and tank hits that would cripple or even destroy Starfleet's larger and less specialized ships so that it could hang in a fight as long as possible instead of being one-shotted.  That's exactly what we see in First Contact, and in its prior appearnaces in the DS9 series.  The Defiant was part of the fleet that intercepted the Borg cube and it hung on in that fight all the way to Earth, tanking hits from weapons that we'd previously seen one-shot Starfleet ships at Wolf 359 like a champ.  So much so that she's noted to still be spaceworthy and repairable after the fight ends.

The Defiant occasionally was shown struggling against Jem'Hadar attack fighters, but mainly because there are just so bloody many of them.

Exactly. As I mentioned above, the Defiant class was created to be part of a wolfpack. I cannot envision one lone Defiant taking down one Borg cube. It was designed to work with a squadron of sister ships, of which there are no longer. Sure, she's fast and tough, but not Galaxy class tough. Not that I expect the Big D to stand toe to toe with the assimilated Starfleet ships. Each hit would be killing innocent Starfleet crews and she wouldn't last long anyway against the entire fleet. But I still say she'd last longer than the Defiant.

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

... actually can we muse for a moment on how completely F'ed up it is that Geordi spent twenty years painstakingly reconstructing the Enterprise-D.  If it were anyone else there would not be Unfortunate Implications, but as it's Geordi in a series that's depicted every member of the TNG cast as broken and miserable... is reconstructing the Enterprise-D for the Fleet Museum Geordi's way to "atone" for having inadvertantly caused the ship's destruction in Generations?  How much time did Geordi take away from his family over TWENTY YEARS to painstakingly restore the totalled saucer section, replace the stardrive section, and repair the whole mess using salvage and war surplus parts?  

The crew are basically flying Geordi's midlife crisis project car into battle with the Borg.

How is Geordi broken and miserable? We can assume he has a good relationship with his wife, loves his job and has, except for a slight misunderstanding with Sidney, a good relationship with his kids.

I still don't see why people want to see them as 'broken and miserable.' Sure they have problems, but so does everybody. Just as often they are smiling and joking with each other and overcoming their problems just like normal people, and even just as they were on TNG. And why would anyone think Geordi rebuilt the Big D out of some sense of guilt? Where did that come from? Because I see it as him recreating a memorable part of his/their past, and no different than old sailors tending a retired battleship. You can see he did it for the love of the ship.

And considering how devoted one daughter is to his path and that the other was estranged for an entirely different reason, it's probably safe to assume taking some time to rebuild the D didn't adversely effect his family at all.

3 hours ago, sh9000 said:

100% recreated from scratch except the original dedication plaque.  Awesome.

A thing of beauty. And if it is slightly different from the original in slight proportions, then so what? It's the entire picture we're looking at rather than focusing down and picking at little miss-sizings. C'mon, the plaque is literally just six inches higher! (or thereabouts, as I did not take a ruler to it.)

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

... and yet, ironically, still wrong.  They recreated the bridge from partway through TNG, not the bridge the ship actually had when she went down on Veridian III.

Yet, for all that and despite how dated it looks, this is far and away the nicest-looking set NuTrek has produced so far.  Everything else - from the Discovery to La Sirena to the Titan-A - is so dark and so grey and miserably depressing-looking because the sets are so under-lit.  It's a bit garish, but this looks like it would actually be a nice place to work while every other ship in the fleet seems to have the dimmer switch stuck at "Red Alert" the entire time.

One has to wonder if Picard's delight at seeing the carpet again is him actually missing the carpet, or just missing a light level higher than "half-dead flashlight".

(Dear Starfleet, when Captain Picard said there were only four lights you need to understand he was being tortured by the Cardassians not giving interior design advice.)

I would say it's not wrong at all. Extra consoles or not, it is still the Big D's bridge, just redone to an era slightly before she crashed. It's such a little thing, I mean the next thing you know, people will start saying the accent carpet is too red... Damn, I did not mean to point that out!

But as to style/lighting opposed to Disco or La Sirena, the Galaxy class was the epitome of Starfleet technology during the golden age of the Federation. Classically beautiful, open and bright, just like the Federation was at the time. And it was a far more peaceful time, when they had the luxury of designing for pleasing aesthetics above merely for form and function. Then they had the resurgent Romulans, and the Klingon War and the Borg, and then Dominion, and the Borg again...

I don't think we'll see brightly lit and comfortable bridge's like the Big D's until some Star Trek show comes along that shows a renaissance of that golden age.

 

 

Edited April 17, 2023 by Thom

[Seto Kaiba]

7 minutes ago, Thom said:

That's if they are going against Borg ships. The tech we are seeing is biological rather than technical, and AFAWK it is still just assimilated crews with standard Starfleet ships.

Did you forget about the Borg cube? The one the Borg Queen rode in on? The one they're going to have to confront to get Jack back?

Mind you, that may no longer strictly be true depending on how long those ships have been left alone in the care of the Borg. As we saw in First Contact, it doesn't take much for one Borg drone to start assimilating an entire ship and its crew. It wouldn't take much for the Borg to start properly assimilating all of those ships and their crews considering all the surviving crew are already drones minus the implants. They would just need to beam a couple drones over to each ship and within a couple hours they'd have to worry about actual Borg drones capable of conventional assimilations and armed with Borg weaponry and shields. Not to mention the Borg might have started upgrading those ships with proper Borg hardware.

 

7 minutes ago, Thom said:

Exactly. As I mentioned above, the Defiant class was created to be part of a wolfpack. I cannot envision one lone Defiant taking down one Borg cube. It was designed to work with a squadron of sister ships, of which there are no longer. Sure, she's fast and tough, but not Galaxy class tough. Not that I expect the Big D to stand toe to toe with the assimilated Starfleet ships. Each hit would be killing innocent Starfleet crews and she wouldn't last long anyway against the entire fleet.

If DS9 is any indication, she's a hell of a lot tougher than Galaxy-class tough and on more than one occasion was shown to fight on an even or superior footing against far larger ships.

I don't expect the Enterprise-D to square up with that armada for the far simpler reason that she would get absolutely bodied by even one of those new, more advanced, far more powerful starships. The Enterprise-D was a heavyweight in her day, but her day was three decades ago and not only has she not had any upgrades she's literally been rebuilt with surplus and salvaged parts and still has visible damage from the crash landing that ended her the first time.

 

7 minutes ago, Thom said:

I still don't see why people want to see them as 'broken and miserable.' Sure they have problems, but so does everybody. Just as often they are smiling and joking with each other and overcoming their problems just like normal people. And why would anyone think Geordi rebuilt the Big D out of some sense of guilt? Where did that come from? Because I see it as him recreating a memorable part of his/their past, and no different than old sailors tending a retired battleship. You can see he did it for the love of the ship.

It's pretty openly shown in the series so I'm not sure why you have trouble seeing it.

Putting aside for a moment that this is quite literally Jean-Luc Picard's Unresolved Emotional Baggage: the Series, Will Riker and Deanna Troi quit Starfleet and ran away to live as recluses on a frontier planet because they couldn't cope with the loss of their son, with this season revealing that they still haven't processed the trauma because Deanna's used her empathic powers to prevent her husband from processing that trauma. Data is a twice dead software revenant who is now technically actually Lore with Data's memories, a literal walking corpse that was suffering from a violent form of multiple personality disorder and is joking about wanting to die quickly. Geordi was not only estranged from part of the crew and part of his own biological family, he's been using his position as a museum curator to privately rebuild a ship that was destroyed because of him... a hobby which does not speak well of his mental state. Worf at some point lost the Enterprise-E and is now a loner working in intelligence... considering the implication that he was the ship's captain as he was in the novels, that likely means he was unable to secure another command. Beverly Crusher got pregnant by her boyfriend and ran away into deep space to avoid her child's father for 20 years, living for her job and raising a son who is a criminal wanted by a laundry list of Federation and non-Federation governments for crimes like gun running and the transportation and sale of controlled substances. Raffi is a nominaly clean former junkie who was cashiered out of the service for being such a massive failure that the only thing keeping her in was Jean-Luc Picard, and her family wants nothing to do with her. Rios was traumatized by the murder-suicide his mentor and Captain committed and became a stereotypical heavy drinking troubled space trucker before the crew literally abandoned him in the past. Elnor was a Romulan orphan with abandonment issues. Seven of Nine was a hard-drinking space vigilante on a quest to avenge the murder of her surrogate son at the hands of a trusted friend and possible former lover before joining Starfleet to become the executive officer to a captain who actively resents her existence. Jack Crusher, for his part, has all kinds of issues thanks to having the Borg collective in his head and having seen his own biological father say that Starfleet is the only family he needs... and that's not getting into all the crap he got up to that led to a substantial number of outstanding warrants for his arrest.

It seems pretty evident that nobody here is happy. They're smiling and joking, but it's over things like being snubbed by their juniors who don't have the proper reverence for them and as a way to cope with the incredible stress of the nightmare scenario they're currently in.

The reason I hypothesized that Geordi might be motivated by guilt in part or in full in his restoration of the Enterprise-D is that there's really no other rational explanation for it. We know that Starfleet had to remove the wreckage of the saucer section from Veridian III for prime directive reasons, but the ship was explicitly a write-off. She was space garbage and not worth the time or effort to try to repair for Starfleet itself. That the wreck ended up in the museum itself is questionable. That, instead of being preserved in its final state, he spent 20 years repairing it on the sly and even went so far as to appropriate the drive section from a different starship in order to fully restore it raises an awful lot of awkward questions. If this were posterity project sanctioned by Starfleet it would not have been a secret. Certainly it would not have been a secret kept from the ship's former captain on prior visits to the museum.

 

7 minutes ago, Thom said:

And considering how devoted one daughter is to his path and that the other was estranged for an entirely different reason, it's probably safe to assume taking some time to rebuild the D didn't adversely effect his family at all.

For the record, I didn't even suggest that that was the cause of any kind of trouble for his family. Just that he clearly would have to take a fair amount of time away from his family in order to work on that ship clandestinely the way he did.

 

7 minutes ago, Thom said:

I would say it's not wrong at all. Extra consoles or not, it is still the Big D's bridge, just redone to an era slightly before she crashed. But next thing you know, people will start saying the accent carpet is too red... Damn, I did not mean to point that out!

Odds are the bridge is probably not the original bridge either in in-story terms. It was probably replaced by another bridge module taken either from a Galaxy-class ship that was sent to the breakers or from surplus.

It's just an interesting note that, for some reason, the bridge was not restored to the state that it was in before the ship was destroyed.

 

7 minutes ago, Thom said:

But as to style/lighting opposed to Disco or La Sirena, the Galaxy class was the epitome of Starfleet technology during the golden age of the Federation. Classically beautiful, open and bright, just like the Federation was at the time. And it was a far more peaceful time, when they had the luxury of designing for pleasing aesthetics above merely for form and function. Then they had the resurgent Romulans, and the Klingon War and the Borg, and then Dominion, and the Borg again...

I don't think we'll see brightly lit and comfortable bridge's like the Big D's until some Star Trek show comes along that shows a renaissance of that golden age.

Considering what these ships are supposed to be for, you'd expect them to all still look like bright, open, pleasant places to be.

These are not warships. These are diplomatic and exploratory ships that also happen to double as security force. The kicker of course is that we see other ships from the 2380s and beyond that still look like this. That are still bright and open and comfortable places to be. Just not in these shows. They're so obsessed with being gritty and dark that you almost miss those massive JJ Abrams lens flares. At least that was illumination.

[pengbuzz]

Let's start with you, Thom.

And before we continue bro: I  want to come out and say that I respect your opinion, and understand where you're coming from on these things. I may see it a bit differently, but you're a good friend and I think well of your opinion no matter where I stand on this issue.

So, my take on this in reply to your comments:

10 hours ago, Thom said:

That's if they are going against Borg ships. The tech we are seeing is biological rather than technical, and AFAWK it is still just assimilated crews with standard Starfleet ships.

It's not strictly his DNA they were after, but the bio-tech 'seed' planted inside of him by the Borg while he was Locutus. It's what was misdiagnosed as Irumodic Syndrome. And it's what was needed to be disseminated through the transporter network in order for Jack's fully evolved form of bio-assimilation to work on the others.

 I wonder if that means he could regain his old body if they remove the Borg "seed" in it?  If that's the case, then which one is Picard?

I do think this is a rather cheap way to assimilate people, but then again, the Borg are know for being a bit cheap.

 

10 hours ago, Thom said:

Exactly. As I mentioned above, the Defiant class was created to be part of a wolfpack. I cannot envision one lone Defiant taking down one Borg cube. It was designed to work with a squadron of sister ships, of which there are no longer. Sure, she's fast and tough, but not Galaxy class tough. Not that I expect the Big D to stand toe to toe with the assimilated Starfleet ships. Each hit would be killing innocent Starfleet crews and she wouldn't last long anyway against the entire fleet. But I still say she'd last longer than the Defiant.

That depends on a few things, though the E-D has taken a bit of a beating and is cobbled together (albeit by Geordi). Also, Geordi does say her "hull needs a lot more work" amongst other things, so she's not in prime condition. But I suspect that blazing into battle wouldn't be the first thing they would do; even in her prime, she was not exactly a match for a Borg cube and won by subterfuge and strategy.

Even the E-E was not a match alone against a Borg cube (per First Contact); she needed a fleet for assist.  None of this is to say a Galaxy class isn't tough: it's just that in the subsequent 30+ years since her launch, the rest of Starfleet and everyone else got a whole lot tougher.

 

10 hours ago, Thom said:

How is Geordi broken and miserable? We can assume he has a good relationship with his wife, loves his job and has, except for a slight misunderstanding with Sidney, a good relationship with his kids.

While his relationship with his family may have been good, men do compartmentalize things. And Georgi probably compartmentalized the destruction of the E-D, blaming himself for the wreckage/ destruction of it.

 

10 hours ago, Thom said:

I still don't see why people want to see them as 'broken and miserable.' Sure they have problems, but so does everybody. Just as often they are smiling and joking with each other and overcoming their problems just like normal people, and even just as they were on TNG. And why would anyone think Geordi rebuilt the Big D out of some sense of guilt? Where did that come from? Because I see it as him recreating a memorable part of his/their past, and no different than old sailors tending a retired battleship. You can see he did it for the love of the ship.

I'll agree to an extent about restoring the E-D, but the thing is: his "welcome" to Picard and gang wasn't all that warm. The Geordi we knew wouldn't have hesitated, as he knew if Picard came to him in trouble, it was going to be for one hell of a reason.

As an addendum: the salvaged ship's computer cores would have had record of the battle, and how the incoming shots from the Duras sisters' KBoP bypassed the shields. That plus an examination of Geordi's VISOR would have determined how that happened. Even though Geordi wasn't at fault he should have had a better examination post-release), I can see how he would have felt responsible.

 

10 hours ago, Thom said:

And considering how devoted one daughter is to his path and that the other was estranged for an entirely different reason, it's probably safe to assume taking some time to rebuild the D didn't adversely effect his family at all.

That depends upon how personally involved he was in rebuilding the ship: much of it would have been automated I assume.

10 hours ago, Thom said:

A thing of beauty. And if it is slightly different from the original in slight proportions, then so what? It's the entire picture we're looking at rather than focusing down and picking at little miss-sizings. C'mon, the plaque is literally just six inches higher! (or thereabouts, as I did not take a ruler to it.)

I did! And it's off by six inches!! SIX WHOLE INCHES!!! That's like 2 milimeters on a 1/32 scale model bro!! I'd get my kitbasher's license pulled if I let that go!! This is an OUTRAGE! THIS IS A TRAVESTY!!! THIS IS...

..erm... uh... really bad Klingon Drama? Anyone buying any of this?  

In all seriousness though (I hope it's clear I was only clwoing around a moment ago!) : I pointed out about the plaque because folks had been making bones about "how exact the bridge was", when Picard looked like he shrank by nearly a foot!

 

10 hours ago, Thom said:

I would say it's not wrong at all. Extra consoles or not, it is still the Big D's bridge, just redone to an era slightly before she crashed. It's such a little thing, I mean the next thing you know, people will start saying the accent carpet is too red... Damn, I did not mean to point that out!

It should be burgundy. (runs)

 

10 hours ago, Thom said:

But as to style/lighting opposed to Disco or La Sirena, the Galaxy class was the epitome of Starfleet technology during the golden age of the Federation. Classically beautiful, open and bright, just like the Federation was at the time. And it was a far more peaceful time, when they had the luxury of designing for pleasing aesthetics above merely for form and function. Then they had the resurgent Romulans, and the Klingon War and the Borg, and then Dominion, and the Borg again...

I agree, but how in the world does anyone see anything?!

10 hours ago, Thom said:

I don't think we'll see brightly lit and comfortable bridge's like the Big D's until some Star Trek show comes along that shows a renaissance of that golden age.

You mean like SNW?

Edited April 17, 2023 by pengbuzz
too long!

[pengbuzz]

 Now to you Seto: I also consider you a good friend and respect your opinion on this matter. I may disagree here and there, but I see where you're coming from on this too-

  

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Did you forget about the Borg cube? The one the Borg Queen rode in on? The one they're going to have to confront to get Jack back?

Mind you, that may no longer strictly be true depending on how long those ships have been left alone in the care of the Borg. As we saw in First Contact, it doesn't take much for one Borg drone to start assimilating an entire ship and its crew. It wouldn't take much for the Borg to start properly assimilating all of those ships and their crews considering all the surviving crew are already drones minus the implants. They would just need to beam a couple drones over to each ship and within a couple hours they'd have to worry about actual Borg drones capable of conventional assimilations and armed with Borg weaponry and shields. Not to mention the Borg might have started upgrading those ships with proper Borg hardware.

Sounds like they're trying (futiley) to undo a couple of decades of villain decay. Maybe the previous writers should have let the Borg win and actually assimilate part of the Federation, Klingon and Romulan Empires, forcing the other 3 to have to work together to defeat them.

To the other point: Assimilation is downright scary when you think how fast they can do it.

 

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I don't expect the Enterprise-D to square up with that armada for the far simpler reason that she would get absolutely bodied by even one of those new, more advanced, far more powerful starships. The Enterprise-D was a heavyweight in her day, but her day was three decades ago and not only has she not had any upgrades she's literally been rebuilt with surplus and salvaged parts and still has visible damage from the crash landing that ended her the first time.

Not sure how well salvaged/ surplus parts would hold up (like anything, depends upon use and condition), but I wonder if Geordi has made any changes since rebuilding the ship? Like I said to Thom: Geordi said there were still issues with the hull and stuff.

 

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Putting aside for a moment that this is quite literally Jean-Luc Picard's Unresolved Emotional Baggage: the Series, Will Riker and Deanna Troi quit Starfleet and ran away to live as recluses on a frontier planet because they couldn't cope with the loss of their son, with this season revealing that they still haven't processed the trauma because Deanna's used her empathic powers to prevent her husband from processing that trauma. Data is a twice dead software revenant who is now technically actually Lore with Data's memories, a literal walking corpse that was suffering from a violent form of multiple personality disorder and is joking about wanting to die quickly. Geordi was not only estranged from part of the crew and part of his own biological family, he's been using his position as a museum curator to privately rebuild a ship that was destroyed because of him... a hobby which does not speak well of his mental state. Worf at some point lost the Enterprise-E and is now a loner working in intelligence... considering the implication that he was the ship's captain as he was in the novels, that likely means he was unable to secure another command. Beverly Crusher got pregnant by her boyfriend and ran away into deep space to avoid her child's father for 20 years, living for her job and raising a son who is a criminal wanted by a laundry list of Federation and non-Federation governments for crimes like gun running and the transportation and sale of controlled substances. Raffi is a nominaly clean former junkie who was cashiered out of the service for being such a massive failure that the only thing keeping her in was Jean-Luc Picard, and her family wants nothing to do with her. Rios was traumatized by the murder-suicide his mentor and Captain committed and became a stereotypical heavy drinking troubled space trucker before the crew literally abandoned him in the past. Elnor was a Romulan orphan with abandonment issues. Seven of Nine was a hard-drinking space vigilante on a quest to avenge the murder of her surrogate son at the hands of a trusted friend and possible former lover before joining Starfleet to become the executive officer to a captain who actively resents her existence. Jack Crusher, for his part, has all kinds of issues thanks to having the Borg collective in his head and having seen his own biological father say that Starfleet is the only family he needs... and that's not getting into all the crap he got up to that led to a substantial number of outstanding warrants for his arrest.

All good points, though I wonder (as aforementioned) just how much Geordi had to be away if he was using automation?

As for the rest: much of it seems like the TNG characters forgot who they were and had a near-inversion of their personalities.

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It seems pretty evident that nobody here is happy. They're smiling and joking, but it's over things like being snubbed by their juniors who don't have the proper reverence for them and as a way to cope with the incredible stress of the nightmare scenario they're currently in.

The reason I hypothesized that Geordi might be motivated by guilt in part or in full in his restoration of the Enterprise-D is that there's really no other rational explanation for it. We know that Starfleet had to remove the wreckage of the saucer section from Veridian III for prime directive reasons, but the ship was explicitly a write-off. She was space garbage and not worth the time or effort to try to repair for Starfleet itself. That the wreck ended up in the museum itself is questionable. That, instead of being preserved in its final state, he spent 20 years repairing it on the sly and even went so far as to appropriate the drive section from a different starship in order to fully restore it raises an awful lot of awkward questions. If this were posterity project sanctioned by Starfleet it would not have been a secret. Certainly it would not have been a secret kept from the ship's former captain on prior visits to the museum.

That's the one thing that gets me the most about the series: it is devoid of the joy that TNG had. How would the series be different if they had that level from TNG in it?

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

For the record, I didn't even suggest that that was the cause of any kind of trouble for his family. Just that he clearly would have to take a fair amount of time away from his family in order to work on that ship clandestinely the way he did.

I would have to wonder since Geordi said "drones are loading photon torpedoes as we speak" if he utilized a number of automated drones in his rebuild of the E-D?

 

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Odds are the bridge is probably not the original bridge either in in-story terms. It was probably replaced by another bridge module taken either from a Galaxy-class ship that was sent to the breakers or from surplus.

It's just an interesting note that, for some reason, the bridge was not restored to the state that it was in before the ship was destroyed.

I can almost certainly guarantee it's not the original bridge; in Generations, the entire center section of the bridge broke free of the deck and slid forward right into the main viewer (see 2:08 in following video):

 

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Considering what these ships are supposed to be for, you'd expect them to all still look like bright, open, pleasant places to be.

These are not warships. These are diplomatic and exploratory ships that also happen to double as security force. The kicker of course is that we see other ships from the 2380s and beyond that still look like this. That are still bright and open and comfortable places to be. Just not in these shows. They're so obsessed with being gritty and dark that you almost miss those massive JJ Abrams lens flares. At least that was illumination.

Agreed; I imagine by the end of this, everyone's eyes will be bad because of all the dim light reading. O.o

 

Edited April 17, 2023 by pengbuzz

[Dobber]

To be completely fair and objective regarding the dimly lit bridges, it is not like many…if not most Star Fleet ships were dimly lit if not down right utilitarian even in the “heyday” of TNG.

Even the shared parts of the Nebula class. Remember when Data took command of the USS Sutherland?

In his Command chair

Looking at the tiny view screen:

 

Voyager was pretty dim too:

as was the Ambassador class:

Now I do like the more brightly lit bridge of the D but I think we may be forgetting what even our beloved TNG era has already clearly demonstrated. Honestly the Galaxy class seemed to be the aberration and not the standard. 🤷🏻‍♂️

They all did have carpeting though. 😎

Chris

Edited April 17, 2023 by Dobber

[JB0]

47 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

To the other point: Assimilation is downright scary when you think how fast they can do it.

It was scarier when it took time. They took you to their ship, fully-conscious, and it was implied that assimilation was a surgical process. Presumably one that took hours(it's a LOT of cutting), without anesthetics(They are borg). Pain is irrelevant. Mercy is irrelevant. Screaming is futile. You will be assimilated.

First Contact's introduction of nanomachine-touch assimilation just made them more like garden-variety zombies. They bite you, you're dead, you come back as one of them. Whoo.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

 Sounds like they're trying (futiley) to undo a couple of decades of villain decay.

It does.  It's a shame, because it's going to achieve the opposite effect.

Perhaps more than any other alien species introduced in TNG, the Borg were truly alien.  Their culture, their way of thinking, and their priorities were utterly alien and antithecal to the Federation's... yet they were not depicted as evil.  "The Best of Both Worlds" took it to an interesting and unique place by having the Borg (via Locutus) express confusion that anyone wouldn't want to be assimilated because they saw assimilation into the collective as elevating primitive cultures to a higher quality of life.  Instead of being just The Corruption and having a singleminded desire to consume, the Borg were almost an anti-Federation that took the idea of unity to its logical extreme and still believed they were actively making your life better by integrating your species into its interstellar community.

First Contact was the true start of the Borg's villain decay, when they went from a sophisticated interstellar culture that had merged biology and technology to the point that it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began to being grotesque cyber-zombies literally rotting around their implants trying to infect everyone with Borg-ness.  The repeated defeats at the hands of a lone, lightly-armed science vessel only accelerated that decay.  Then Picard revealed the Borg Queen just wants a BFF, and now we're going to see what's remaining of the Borg taken down by a half dozen senior citizens tooling around in midlife crisis ship.

 

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Maybe the previous writers should have let the Borg win and actually assimilate part of the Federation, Klingon and Romulan Empires, forcing the other 3 to have to work together to defeat them.

Isn't that kind of what just happened, more or less?

 

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

To the other point: Assimilation is downright scary when you think how fast they can do it.

IMO, making the assimilation process faster makes it a lot less scary.

In TNG, Picard was subjected to hours of surgical mutilation and it's strongly implied by "The Best of Both Worlds" that he was conscious and aware the entire time.

From First Contact onward, you get what amounts to a shot (or zombie bite) and within a minute or so you've already suffered a Grand Theft Me and a lot of the hardware is grown by the nanoprobes.  It eliminates a lot of the horror aspect of it, since all the really do after is potentially amputate an arm and install the black bodysuit full of LEDs.

 

3 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

That's the one thing that gets me the most about the series: it is devoid of the joy that TNG had. How would the series be different if they had that level from TNG in it?

It'd be watchable, for one.  Even in its more cringeworthy moments, TNG never lost the sense of fun and adventure that is totally absent from grimdark NuTrek shows.

 

 

2 hours ago, Dobber said:

To be completely fair and objective regarding the dimly lit bridges, it is not like many…if not most Star Fleet ships were dimly lit if not down right utilitarian even in the “heyday” of TNG.

Even the shared parts of the Nebula class. Remember when Data took command of the USS Sutherland?

... my good chum, you literally grabbed four screenshots that all show starships with the lights dimmed at alert status.

Kind of the point of my earlier joke, actually... that the NuTrek ships are all so dark they look like they're PERPETUALLY at alert status.

(Never mind that the Sutherland is literally unfinished, and the Enterprise-C is suffering from a lot of battle damage.)

 

 

2 hours ago, JB0 said:

Pain is irrelevant. Mercy is irrelevant. Screaming is futile. You will be assimilated.

You forgot the big one... DEATH IS IRRELEVANT.  The Borg actually SAY that one in BoBW.