Star Trek Picard and Strange New Worlds

[Tamas]

They really pushed the franchise-staple techno-babble deus ex machina to its zenith with the ACME Imagine In And It Will Happen Handtool.

What a shitty ending to an at best mediocre season.

[Josquius]

Have to wonder overall about this....
Why are robots such a big deal?
Discovery dealt with AI that could take over people's bodies a century beforehand.
Voyager showed holograms are fully sentient.
But... It's robots that are particularly bad?

[celedhring]

Have to wonder overall about this....
Why are robots such a big deal?
Discovery dealt with AI that could take other people's bodies a century beforehand.
Voyager showed holograms are fully sentient.
But... It's robots that are particularly bad?

Looking for in-universe coherence when you have hundreds of hours of TV and movie material is a fool's errand. I personally don't mind continuity holes that much, if what I'm given is engaging enough. Picard wasn't.

[Josquius]

There's comic book guy coherence like "OMG in episode 125 spock says he met Kirk in a Boston bar in 2265 yet in episode 354 its established Kirk was on a 3 year mission from 2264, like, how do you explain that! Show ruined forever!"
And ignoring core front and centre plot points.

[Tonitrus]

I think the things that have turned me off of Enterprise, and then Discovery...is way too much of the time-travel/mirror-universe schlock. 

The mirror universe was very cool as a one-off in TOS...maybe even worthy of a one-time revisit in a later series.  Then DS9 milked it too much, and Discovery went in did the milk challenge and puked it up everywhere.

TOS and TNG used time travel infrequently (and a bit lamely too), but never bugged out it too much.  I though the concept of Enterprise was actually a great idea...show a bit about how the Federation came together...but that concept was really built for a more episodic-format show like TOS or TNG were.  But unfortunately for them...the time of when the show came out was the start of the bridge from episodic shows to more story-arc shows, and they bogged themselves down into that silly "temporal cold war" crap, and my interest shut down.

[garbon]

Mess of a final episode, but I thought the season was entertaining enough. Sure their were plot holes galore but then Trek has always had many of those. I'd recommend over say watching the Generations film.

[Syt]

So I watched the show today while leveling my toon in Path of Exile.

I enjoyed it for the most part, though I think the whole story could have been trimmed to 8 episodes. It was interesting to contrast with Discovery (I finished season 2 yesterday, 8 or so episodes).

Picard seemed, on the whole, more lighthearted, and I quite enjoyed the motley assortment of characters that Picard collects around him. Discovery still often seems a bit dour, but I think Season 2 was a lot better in that regard than Season 1. Also, Picard got to make speeches, thumbs up for that. 

With Picard dying/resurrecting ... yeah, that was telegraphed when they showed the golem and pointed out that a mind could be uploaded to it. We know Picard is pretty close to death, so we kinda know what's happening. Also, I already thought that Discovery was overdoing it a bit with characters dying and being resurrected or replaced with mirror equivalents, but now this show does it too? Still, the final scene between Picard and Data was sweet.

Lots of continuity nods throughout the show which I appreciated, and I probably missed a lot. Especially loved them bringing back one episode characters like Maddox and Hugh. I liked the new crew, esp. Rios and his holograms. And new Seven of Nine seems like good evolution of her character. Do Rafi and her have a thing? They were shown holding hands at the end. I felt a bit of a Mass Effect 2 vibe about the crew, which is not a bad thing.

As was mentioned above it seems striking that Disco 2 and Picard seem to have the same underlying theme. In Disco 2 AI wants to wipe out organic life. In Picard synths almost summon powerful artificial lifeforms to wipe out organic life. I kind of expect those plots to intersect at some point. I'm rather curious about season 3 of Discovery where the ship will in the year 3186 according to this timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Star_Trek

Wouldn't surprise me if the evil über-synths from the end of Picard were to actually come from the future.

[Syt]

P.S.: I found it quite irritating that the Romulan spy had the same hair/beard as Spock.

[viper37]

Have to wonder overall about this....
Why are robots such a big deal?
Discovery dealt with AI that could take other people's bodies a century beforehand.
Voyager showed holograms are fully sentient.
But... It's robots that are particularly bad?

sentient robots =AI.  Starfleet had no big problems with them until Utopia Planetia.

Holograms can't reprogram themselves, they need someone to do it for them.

Robots are a big deal because the Federation thinks the one son Mars became sentient and destroyed their creators (we now know for sure it wasn't the case).
That at least makes some sense.

The rest of the finale...

[celedhring]

Finally caught up on the last episode (I had been postponing it after reading people's opinions).

Picard's death and resurrection was such a pointless part of the episode...

[ulmont]

Finally caught up on the last episode (I had been postponing it after reading people's opinions).

Picard's death and resurrection was such a pointless part of the episode...

Yeah, but at least they did signpost it to the extent it wasn't quite out of nowhere.  Still pointless.  I guess all it ends up doing is showing us that Data wanted to die permanently.

[celedhring]

We only learnt he was "alive" 5 minutes before his death too. No resonance whatsoever.

I'm willing to bet that at one point this plot device was intended as a way to replace Stewart with a younger actor, they just realized how terrible an idea would that be.

All in all, disappointing show. Only plus going forward is that I found the crew members likeable, which is always important in a Trek show.

[Josquius]

We only learnt he was "alive" 5 minutes before his death too. No resonance whatsoever.

I'm willing to bet that at one point this plot device was intended as a way to replace Stewart with a younger actor, they just realized how terrible an idea would that be.

All in all, disappointing show. Only plus going forward is that I found the crew members likeable, which is always important in a Trek show.

I guess if he suddenly dies (hope not. But he is old) it gives them a way to finish off the series with an easy "he is a robot so he can alter his appaearance" explanation

[viper37]

Only plus going forward is that I found the crew members likeable,

that's the drinking, smoking cigars and swearing for you

[Syt]

Not Picard related, but I found this fan theory quite amusing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/g4x9cn/star_trek_takes_place_in_the_same_universe_as_the/

Star Trek takes place in the same universe as the soap opera Days of our Lives.

I know what you're thinking. You're looking at the calendar and saying that this guy's high as a kite. Well, it isn't so. I'm sober as a judge, and I have evidence. Well, I have strong conjecture, but this is science fiction, so strong conjecture is just as good as evidence.

Yes, Star Trek is the future of the universe in which Days of our Lives is the present. It all hinges on a guy named Eugene.

On Days of our Lives, back in the eighties, there was a character named Eugene Bradford, who was a bit of a mad scientist. There were all sorts of weird sci-fi/fantasy plot lines surrounding his character, like magical Haitian talismans, mysterious prisms that could cure cancer, and other weirdness. He was on the show for several years, and when it came time for his character to depart the show, he wasn't killed off like so many other characters. He left in a time machine he had built. In the 1980s. He later came back with a synth replica of his wife for a while, but eventually left again in his time machine.

"That's all well and good," I can hear you saying, "But what does all of that have to do with Star Trek?" This is where things should start to become clear.

This is Eugene Bradford:

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/daysofourlives/images/3/3c/Eugene_Bradford.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140213002539

Yep. That's right. Played by John De Lancie. You know him better as Q.

We already know that a member of the Q continuum can bestow the powers of the Q upon humans, from the TNG episode "Hide and Q." We also know that people who seem human can actually be members of the Continuum, even without knowing it, as in the TNG episode "True Q." We also know that Q- our Q (let's call him Qgene for clarity's sake), isn't quite like other members of the continuum. He is, for one thing, overly fascinated by humanity. He is also extremely melodramatic for such a supposedly advanced being- just the sort of behavior you would expect from a being whose origins are from a Soap Opera.

Here's what I think happened- Qgene, after he left earth, obviously traveled into the future, where among other things, he discovered Doctor Soong's perfected synth technology. Either he was a Q all along, like Amanda Rogers, or the continuum took notice of a human from the 1980s who was intelligent enough to build a working time machine when his species was still 80 years from being warp capable. Either way, this soap opera weirdo became one of the most powerful beings in the universe.