Star Trek: Picard

[red snow]

30 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

What don't want him to do his classic action pieces? No dune buggy chases?

That could be fun as a tongue in cheek scene. 

[RumHam]

8 hours ago, red snow said:

What i find weird with kurtzman (and orci) is that they were showrunners of "fringe" which was great.

Which was mostly great. I was doing a re-watch recently and got to the part where Olvia starts doing the weird Nimoy voice cause she's...something something soul magnets and I just could not. I never went back to it. 

[Werthead]

9 hours ago, red snow said:

Was "that blond guy" the one who turned into a salamander with Janeway and started land based life on earth when he hit warp factor x? Or is that some weird nightmare i had?

What i find weird with kurtzman (and orci) is that they were showrunners of "fringe" which was great. Maybe other people were writing it or it was one of those cases where the writers' room clicked and was better than the sum of their parts

Kurtzman and Orci were co-creators and writers on Fringe, but the day-to-day showrunners were Jeff Pinkner (Seasons 1-4) and J.H. Wyman (Seasons 2-5). Kurtzman and Orci only co-wrote three episodes of Fringe, so they were not hugely instrumental in the show's success.

[Cron]

On 7/24/2019 at 9:16 AM, red snow said:

They are definitely in for a treat.

Cron makes a good point how long term trek fans may be on board for this show as a continuation of the next gen shows while they may not have bothered with enterprise or discovery. 

I know i didn't bother with the stargate prequel series last year but if there was an announcement of a show featuring the SG-1, Atlantis or universe cast I'd be fully on board with that show. 

Yeah.  I like Picard as a character, but he would not be among my top 10 favorite Star Trek characters, maybe not even top 15.

By the way, although I've only seen the 1st episode of Discovery (and thus i know very little about it), I've seen every episode of Enterprise, and there is excellent stuff in there, especially the Xindi War.   If you want to see Enterprise at its best, I'd say start with the LAST episode of Season 2, then watch all the way to the end of Season 3.  Fantastic stuff, on par with any other Star Trek I've seen, and better than most.

[Jaxom 1974]

1 hour ago, Cron said:

Yeah.  I like Picard as a character, but he would not be among my top 10 favorite Star Trek characters, maybe not even top 15.

By the way, although I've only seen the 1st episode of Discovery (and thus i know very little about it), I've seen every episode of Enterprise, and there is excellent stuff in there, especially the Xindi War.   If you want to see Enterprise at its best, I'd say start with the LAST episode of Season 2, then watch all the way to the end of Season 3.  Fantastic stuff, on par with any other Star Trek I've seen, and better than most.

Firstly: Picard not being a personal top 15 character? Interesting.  Wow. But everyone has their thing. 

Second: Enterprise did raise their stakes with season 3, and it was generally pretty good.  I'm not prepared to call it among the best runs of Trek. It had the story going for it, and some compelling bits and character developments, yes. But it suffers from stretching too long in the end.  But again, everyone has their thing. And I say this as an Enterprise partisan.  Everyone knows season 4 was better and it ended too soon. 

[Cron]

46 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Firstly: Picard not being a personal top 15 character? Interesting.  Wow. But everyone has their thing. 

I tend to favor the smartest characters, and that list alone would bump Picard down quite a bit.  Spock, Data, Wesley Crusher,, Seven of Nine, The Doctor, Julian, Jadzia, Phlox, T'pol, and Janeway (there are 10 right there) are all clearly much smarter than Picard, and I like them all better than Picard. (B'Lanna Torres and Harry Kim are both much smarter than Picard, too, but I guess it's not enough for me to rank them ahead of Picard) 

After that, just as a character, I find Kirk, Archer, Riker, Tom Paris, Q (who is far smarter than Picard in some ways, but not in others) to all be more interesting than Picard.  Worf is really cool sometimes, but not at others.

So, altogether, yeah, that's 15 just off the top of my head that I like more than Picard, and some others are really close.  I think Garak from DS9 is a fascinating character (also another character smarter than Picard, too).  I'd probably prefer a show all about Garak over Picard.

46 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Second: Enterprise did raise their stakes with season 3, and it was generally pretty good.  I'm not prepared to call it among the best runs of Trek. It had the story going for it, and some compelling bits and character developments, yes. But it suffers from stretching too long in the end.  But again, everyone has their thing. And I say this as an Enterprise partisan.  Everyone knows season 4 was better and it ended too soon. 

Well, this might explain why I didn't think Season 3 of Enterprise stretched on too long:  I binge-watched it all in FAR less time than it originally took to air (I watched it long after it originally aired).  Out of curiosity, did you watch it as new episodes were being aired?  If so, then I guess I could see how maybe that would seem to drag on for a long time (it does span 26 episodes, if I recall correctly, counting the last episode of Season 2, which clearly is the first episode of that run),  Not many "filler' episodes in there, though, maybe 2 or 3, I think, so I thought the story moved along well because of that, too.

[Maltaran]

Wesley? Seriously?

[red snow]

7 hours ago, Cron said:

Yeah.  I like Picard as a character, but he would not be among my top 10 favorite Star Trek characters, maybe not even top 15.

By the way, although I've only seen the 1st episode of Discovery (and thus i know very little about it), I've seen every episode of Enterprise, and there is excellent stuff in there, especially the Xindi War.   If you want to see Enterprise at its best, I'd say start with the LAST episode of Season 2, then watch all the way to the end of Season 3.  Fantastic stuff, on par with any other Star Trek I've seen, and better than most.

I gave up on enterprise at season 2 so restarting at the point you suggest would work. Thanks for the tip!

[Darth Richard II]

2 hours ago, Maltaran said:

Wesley? Seriously?

Yeah I had to read that three times to make sure I wasn’t asleep.

[Impmk2]

4 hours ago, Maltaran said:

Wesley? Seriously?

Yeah there's some odd choices and omissions in there. I mean Riker? The hell did he ever do aside from hit on anything with a pulse and screw things up. But each to his own.

Personally I preferred Sisko as a captain to Picard. But that's because he feels more conflicted and 'real' than the often overly idealistic Picard. But Patrick Stewart is an exceptional actor and really makes the role.

[RumHam]

9 hours ago, Cron said:

snip

Huh, intelligence seems like a weird metric for a favorite character in a TV franchise. Aren't they all more or less as smart or dumb as the plot requires in any given episode? 

Anyway I'm legitimately curious why you seem to have a relativly low opinion of Picard's intelligence. I mean compared to characters who are androids or Vulcans or former Borg or holograms or have lived half a dozen lifetimes or were genetically modified yeah sure. But Harry Kim?! Doesn't Tom Paris have to save him from getting scammed by Quark in Voyager's pilot? 

Edit: You know I just realized Picard is a former borg! He should have access to all the knowledge Seven/Annika does. 

[felice]

23 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Anyway I'm legitimately curious why you seem to have a relativly low opinion of Picard's intelligence.

Indeed. As I recall his academic speciality is archaeology rather than anything hi-tech, but he always seemed reasonably proficient in pretty much any technical or scientific field that happens to come up as well, not to mention diplomacy and all the people stuff captains have to do.

23 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Edit: You know I just realized Picard is a former borg! He should have access to all the knowledge Seven/Annika does. 

He doesn't have her implants, though.

[Jaxom 1974]

25 minutes ago, felice said:

 

He doesn't have her implants, though.

We're just going to leave the joke on the table here...

[Corvinus85]

3 hours ago, Impmk2 said:

Yeah there's some odd choices and omissions in there. I mean Riker? The hell did he ever do aside from hit on anything with a pulse and screw things up. But each to his own.

 

[Cron]

12 hours ago, red snow said:

I gave up on enterprise at season 2 so restarting at the point you suggest would work. Thanks for the tip!

I think here are a lot of episodes in the first two seasons of Enterprise that are really bumpy, sometimes even awkward.  Archer makes a lot of highly questionable (and I would even say "foolish") decisions that seemed really unrealistic to me (because I don't believe a captain with that personality would have been appointed to that ship, the first Warp 5 human ship, in the first place).   And he does just about all of that stuff directly against the advice of T'Pol, a Vulcan who is obviously far smarter, wiser, and more knowledgeable about the galaxy than Archer.

Also in those first two seasons, the writers were kind of experimenting with the characters to find out who they were, too, but I would strongly argue that the same is true of The Next Generation, too (re-watch the first season or two of TNG, and there's a lot of stuff like that in there, too, especially regarding Picard, who says a number of things that are flat out jarring, like shouting at Wesley to "Shut up, Wesley!")

 

But the Xindi War (starting with the final episode of Season 2 of Enterprise) was awesome, I thought with the writers really hitting their stride.

It starts with a huge bang in that episode, and almost never lets up, far as I'm concerned. 

But, different people prefer different stuff.  If you watch it, let me know what you think. (I also thought that Shran, the Andorian, was really great during this run, too.)

[Werthead]

6 hours ago, Corvinus said:

 

There is an excellent point made by Straczynski that Riker being a Commander for seven years would effectively mean his career is over (which is why he gave Ivanova a promotion in the first two seasons of Babylon 5). There's also the issue that Starfleet could just promote Riker and transfer him, and he wouldn't get any choice in the matter at all. In fact, we several times see Starfleet officers told to do something, they refuse and then resign because they can't do anything else (like Worf in Redemption). In fact, Starfleet would probably see Picard as an excellent resource for training skilled officers and spreading that knowledge through Starfleet, so there'd be a constant churn of first officer (and maybe other command staff) with people coming in for two seasons and then going off to other postings. 

One mistake the video makes - although the writers on various incarnations of the show get this confused as well - is saying that Starfleet is "the military" when it's been pretty clear throughout Star Trek history that it's more somewhere between the coastguard and the merchant marine. Starfleet can function as a military service, and does so very well, but only in times of outright war or threatened war. In fact, Starfleet as a semi-civilian organisation is presumably why Riker can turn down a promotion and stay where he is.

Quote

Also in those first two seasons, the writers were kind of experimenting with the characters to find out who they were, too, but I would strongly argue that the same is true of The Next Generation, too (re-watch the first season or two of TNG, and there's a lot of stuff like that in there, too, especially regarding Picard, who says a number of things that are flat out jarring, like shouting at Wesley to "Shut up, Wesley!")

I think that TV audiences have become way, way less forgiving of shows than they were in the 1980s. There's no way that people would give TNG three seasons to get its act together today - look at the criticisms Discovery got after its first episode aired - and I think that process was in play when Enterprise was on the air.

That said, I do think Enterprise was generally better than TNG's first two seasons and was always watchable (whilst, say, Voyager at its worst was not).

[Cron]

9 hours ago, RumHam said:

Huh, intelligence seems like a weird metric for a favorite character in a TV franchise. Aren't they all more or less as smart or dumb as the plot requires in any given episode? 

I understand that many people view this differently than I do and I respect that  Indeed, my guess would be that for most people, Kirk and Picard would rank VERY high on a list of all time favorite Star Trek characters.  I get that, I really do.

But I do not believe that all Star Trek characters are anywhere near the same level of intelligence, or that their intelligence (as portrayed) goes up and down as plot needs dictate.  Let's say I were to ask you to rank the top 15 smartest Star Trek characters of all time.  Are you saying you would not even know where to begin?   

In fact, we know a LOT about the background and capabilities of all the major characters, and they have different strengths and weaknesses. 

Are you suggesting that in any given episode, Worf or Tasha Yar (no offense to either, I like them both, but i picked them here because they were both relatively simple security officers) might be as smart or smarter than Data, Wesley Crusher, Spock, T'Pol, Seven of Nine, Julian Bashir, Jadzia Dax, The Doctor, Phlox, B'lanna Torres, Harry Kim, or Hoshi Sato?  If so, then sorry, but I don't agree with that at all.

9 hours ago, RumHam said:

Anyway I'm legitimately curious why you seem to have a relativly low opinion of Picard's intelligence. I mean compared to characters who are androids or Vulcans or former Borg or holograms or have lived half a dozen lifetimes or were genetically modified yeah sure. But Harry Kim?! Doesn't Tom Paris have to save him from getting scammed by Quark in Voyager's pilot? 

For part of what you wrote, I think you answered your own question.  It's not that I think Picard is below average intelligence for a human being.  Oh no, not at all, not even close.  Indeed, my opinion would be that among non-augmented humans, Picard would rank VERY high in intelligence.

It's just that, in the competition for top 10 smartest Star Trek characters, Picard's competition ain't ordinary human beings, as you basically allude to above.  Yeah.  Androids, partial Borgs, Vulcans, super-enhanced human (Julian Bashir's intelligence is literally super human, he was genetically engineered for it; he also has other superhuman abilities, too, like reflexes and hand-eye coordination), and aliens like Jadzia who NOT ONLY was super-smart to being with, but also draws on numerous "lives" of life experience through the Dax symbiote.

Regarding Harry Kim:  The incident you mention was brought on by inexperience and naivete, not low intelligence.   Tom Paris and Harry Kim become best friends in Voyager, but I believe anyone who knows them both would immediately say Harry Kim is far smarter (nothing against Tom Paris here, either.  I like the Tom Paris character, I think he's cool, and as, arguably, the greatest pilot ever produced by the human race, he's got to have some smarts going on, but as with Picard, the competition here is VERY elite, and Harry Kim is on a very, very high level.)

Possibly the most underrated intelligence in all of Star Trek:  B'Lanna Torres.   Her personality can be like nails on a chalkboard, but watch Voyager start to finish, and it will be seen that she is a major intellectual bad azz.  She is often ahead of just about everybody else in figuring stuff out and solving problems of many different kinds.

9 hours ago, RumHam said:

Edit: You know I just realized Picard is a former borg! He should have access to all the knowledge Seven/Annika does. 

Mmm, with respect, no.   My understanding is that Picard had ALL o the Borg technology removed, whereas for Seven of Nine, that is clearly not true. 

In early episodes after her initial appearance, The Doctor removed a lot of the Borg technology from Seven, but could not remove it all (because to do so would have killed her, because she had been Borg for so long).   Indeed, we can see this just by looking at her face (in the form of her "ocular implant").  Further, there are MANY Voyager stories involving Seven's nanobots, which are still heavily present in her system.

As such, Seven draws upon the knowledge of thousands of races, and has processing speeds and physical abilities FAR beyond a normal human. (Indeed, there is a Voyager episode that specifically states that Seven is likely the smartest human being who ever lived, at least out of humans generally known up to that point.)

None of that is true for Picard, though, cuz he had it all removed.

[Ran]

I think the problem is that Starfleet isn't exactly a military organization, despite the various trappings around it. It does not operate the same way as actual militaries do, and I always took this to be the TNG writers embracing the vision of the Federation as having a more holistic view of Stafleet's relation to the grander Federation social project of equality, self-actualization, etc. It's certainly the case that Rodenberry and his successors treated Starfleet crews rather differently than they had been treated back in TOS, with civilian-clothed Troi, Wesley running around, etc.

And I always thought it was clear that Riker refused commissions because he wanted to be captain of the Enterprise, end of story. He wasn't going to sour over Picard holding it for ages (Picard was turning down promotions as well!), so he was just happy to be first officer of the grandest ship in the fleet.

(I, too, find the IQ thing an odd way to choose characters, but that said, how is Janeway supposed to be so brilliant? I never got the impression from the first couple of seasons of Voyager I managed to get through.)

[Cron]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

I think the problem is that Starfleet isn't exactly a military organization, despite the various trappings around it. It does not operate the same way as actual militaries do, and I always took this to be the TNG writers embracing the vision of the Federation as having a more holistic view of Stafleet's relation to the grander Federation social project of equality, self-actualization, etc. It's certainly the case that Rodenberry and his successors treated Starfleet crews rather differently than they had been treated back in TOS, with civilian-clothed Troi, Wesley running around, etc.

I'm not sure why it might be a "problem" (as you say), but I believe you are correct that Starfleet is not military.   That is explicitly stated more than once in Star Trek canon.   (Also noteworthy is that we have seen future human military in Star Trek, and it is not Starfleet:  It is the MACO's, or space marines, of Star Trek Enterprise, and it is clear they are under a completely different command structure from Starfleet.)

2 hours ago, Ran said:

And I always thought it was clear that Riker refused commissions because he wanted to be captain of the Enterprise, end of story. He wasn't going to sour over Picard holding it for ages (Picard was turning down promotions as well!), so he was just happy to be first officer of the grandest ship in the fleet.

I would agree with all of that, but I do think it adds up to a conclusion that Riker just wasn't ambitious enough to rise above where he was at during that time period.  (Nothing wrong with that in my opinion, though, I like Riker fine as a character, even though sometimes he's a bit annoying, like when he's possessive of Deanna and jealous of other men she's with, even though HE (Riker) dumped HER (Deanna), but whatever. 

2 hours ago, Ran said:

(I, too, find the IQ thing an odd way to choose characters, but that said, how is Janeway supposed to be so brilliant? I never got the impression from the first couple of seasons of Voyager I managed to get through.)

Janeway was a science officer, unlike any of the other major captains that I'm familiar with, including PIcard.  I believe a viewing of Voyager from start to finish shows many instances where they rely on Janeway's brains far more than any other major captain that I"m familiar with (Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Archer).  How often did Kirk, Picard, Sisko or Archer assist in other technical areas (science, engineering, medicine) under their command?  To my memory, the answer is "almost never" (if not literally never), but Janeway assisted (or even led the way) in such matters on Voyager many times.

By the way, I don't think it's so unusual to favor intelligent characters.  Spock is incredibly popular from The Original Series, perhaps the most popular character from ToS.  Why? I've always believed it's because he's super-smart, and logical (just like many Star Trek fans, who thus identify closely with him).  Certainly, those are the reasons he is my favorite character from ToS.   What else could it be?  His ears?  Vulcan nerve pinch?  His winning personality? (Ha ha)  I don't think so.

And Spock is far from alone.  Seven of Nine is extremely smart, and extremely popular too.  Same for Data, Jadzia, The Doctor, Phlox, and others.

[Luzifer's right hand]

Miles O'Brien is the best character of Star Trek because the universe hates him. Data is the 2nd best but only because he is fully functional.