Star Trek Thread: Set Picard to Stun (spoilers)

[Relic]

Errr, if you guys are going to spoil new episodes can you please put a spoiler warning in the title? 

[red snow]

I enjoyed the episode. Spoilers for those around the world who won't get the chance to see episode until later. It probably should just be a spoiler thread.

i really can't remember if the person killed at the start was in voyager or for how long but it reminded me of just how forgetful voyager was. Seven seemed very different but i guess she's had 20 years to change. It felt very backdoor pilot for a seven lead "rangers" spin-off which i wouldn't be averse to and would arguably be better suited to our present obsession with cynicism and grim in our entertainment without overturning Roddenberry and Trek's concept of a brighter future where humanity has managed to shed most of their darker sides. A bit like how DS9 allowed for different approaches due to being on the frontier and later at war with non federation staff.

Elrond was a lot more fun in this episode and i liked how he was more outlandish in his usual get-up and constantly being the odd one out. 

Stewart even makes bad acting good acting as his pirate impersonation and accent seemed to be deliberately off in order to suggest acting isn't Picard's main skill.

So Maddox was played by a different actor? He looked quite different but again it's 30 years ago.

Agnes going evil felt too obvious. Firstly her cowardice/discomfort seemed too much, then there was the cliched focus on her reacting to conversations with her back to speaking characters and finally there was the fact the episode needed a "shock" to conclude.

Still, I'm interested in seeing how they combine the data/borg/cyborg/romulans together because at this point they have to be all connected.

I really hope that Data isn't based on Borg tech. Mainly because that should have been picked up in TNG whenever the borg encountered data/lore.

I also hope that the romulans aren't a species of organic cyborgs/replicants/cylons as that also seems too big a change. 

I don't think Rick and Morty s creators would have enjoyed most of the episode. [/Spolier]

[Werthead]

The guy at the start of the episode was Icheb, the Borg kid Seven freed from the Collective in Unimatrix Zero and was a semiregular in Season 7 of Voyager. They didn't bring back the original actor because he was a massive douchebag, in particular angrily attacking Anthony Rapp on Twitter about the Kevin Spacey incident and saying it was overblown, which isn't so much burning a Star Trek bridge as blowing it up with a thousand tons of dynamite whilst you're standing on it.

Overall a solid episode with some bizarrely random elements, like Picard's French eyepatch and costume. Not cutting away to the cube helped. I was quite startled to see that Picard knew about the cube. I assumed it was a top-secret project, although with so many people from different worlds working on it that would also have been a stretch.

I think Seven's characterisation mostly worked. Voyager made it clear she was never going to conform to working in the confines of Starfleet, and having her with various PTSD issues from her time in the Collective and then a traumatic journey on Voyager and a return to something approaching normality would have all been hugely difficult for her to deal with. Joining a small, dedicated team like the Rangers (and like the Voyager crew) is quite in-keeping with her MO.

Seeing some of the online criticism of the episode has been hysterical. There was one guy on Twitter angrily melting down because we never saw Seven and Picard meet or mention one another previously and thus they could not know about each other, ignoring the intervening 21 years since Voyager returned from the Delta Quadrant, during which time Other Things Could Have Happened. Also having a fantastic time watching people pick out "plot holes" in Picard who are then unable to answer any of the 60,000 considerably more egregious and massive plot holes and self-contradictions in previous versions of Trek.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

8 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Seems that the point was of Rafi's side trek to see her son was to allude to more of what Maddox also alluded to: that Mars was a conspiracy. 

Was her son's wife, I assume wife, a Romulan ornament Vulcan? I can't tell the difference any more...

I hope Seven is back for another episode or two, because otherwise her appearance feels like nothing more than fan service, no matter how great the performance, which was great...

And if the show was going to do fan service, even while telling its story, that they should have surrounded Picard with a few more Trek veterans...skip Rios and have it be a disillusioned Tom Paris or Chakotay, have the Rafi character be someone from the old Enterprise D like Ensign Rager...keep Jurati, but have the Space Elf Ninja guy be Worf's kid instead...

 

I think she was a regular Romulan, her hair was looked like the traditional Romulan cut and she had the TNG Romulan ridges.

[red snow]

45 minutes ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

I think she was a regular Romulan, her hair was looked like the traditional Romulan cut and she had the TNG Romulan ridges.

I thought she was Vulcan but i guess it fits eith this season's narrative of romulans being everywhere thanks to lack of a home.

I still think the Irish romulan on Picard's vineyard is part of the super secret (yet everyone seems to know of them) romulan group. Mainly because they keep reminding us of her during recaps and that it would make sense to have someone keeping tabs on anex borg and captain of data. Data daughter died pretty quickly after appearing at vineyard.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

The guy at the start of the episode was Icheb, the Borg kid Seven freed from the Collective in Unimatrix Zero and was a semiregular in Season 7 of Voyager. They didn't bring back the original actor because he was a massive douchebag, in particular angrily attacking Anthony Rapp on Twitter about the Kevin Spacey incident and saying it was overblown, which isn't so much burning a Star Trek bridge as blowing it up with a thousand tons of dynamite whilst you're standing on it.

Overall a solid episode with some bizarrely random elements, like Picard's French eyepatch and costume. Not cutting away to the cube helped. I was quite startled to see that Picard knew about the cube. I assumed it was a top-secret project, although with so many people from different worlds working on it that would also have been a stretch.

I think Seven's characterisation mostly worked. Voyager made it clear she was never going to conform to working in the confines of Starfleet, and having her with various PTSD issues from her time in the Collective and then a traumatic journey on Voyager and a return to something approaching normality would have all been hugely difficult for her to deal with. Joining a small, dedicated team like the Rangers (and like the Voyager crew) is quite in-keeping with her MO.

Seeing some of the online criticism of the episode has been hysterical. There was one guy on Twitter angrily melting down because we never saw Seven and Picard meet or mention one another previously and thus they could not know about each other, ignoring the intervening 21 years since Voyager returned from the Delta Quadrant, during which time Other Things Could Have Happened. Also having a fantastic time watching people pick out "plot holes" in Picard who are then unable to answer any of the 60,000 considerably more egregious and massive plot holes and self-contradictions in previous versions of Trek.

So was Maddox the original actor? Age suits him if so.

The online "rage" is always funny. I guess they are making up for the fact there wasn't the opportunity to bitch as much about TNG at the time. Thankfully their voices can now be heard.

 

[Werthead]

47 minutes ago, red snow said:

So was Maddox the original actor? Age suits him if so.

No. The original actor has retired but still does some teaching, so I'm assuming he was asked back but turned them down.

[Lord Varys]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Seeing some of the online criticism of the episode has been hysterical. There was one guy on Twitter angrily melting down because we never saw Seven and Picard meet or mention one another previously and thus they could not know about each other, ignoring the intervening 21 years since Voyager returned from the Delta Quadrant, during which time Other Things Could Have Happened. Also having a fantastic time watching people pick out "plot holes" in Picard who are then unable to answer any of the 60,000 considerably more egregious and massive plot holes and self-contradictions in previous versions of Trek.

LOL, that is an issue for people? Picard talks to Janeway in Nemesis, does he not? He even calls her Kathryn, no? If he is on a first name basis with her he would also know her officers, especially the ex-Borg. With his own past it is rather obvious that there would be quite some few things they may have talked once they first met. But even if they didn't have that personal baggage to bond over, Voyager had been in the Delta Quadrant. They met hundreds of new species, catalogued thousands of new stars and planets - everybody in Starfleet would want to talk them.

The idea that these two didn't knew each other on some level is just ridiculous.

[Werthead]

Picard a massive hit for CBS All Access.

Hopefully some of the imbecile websites will now shut up with their ranting paranoid conspiracy theories about how everything is terrible and the franchise is going to collapse and Ron Moore is going to come in and save the day (hint: he's not).

Appropriately, the Voyager rewatch reached The Voyager Conspiracy today. That was an entertaining and timely episode.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

46 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Picard a massive hit for CBS All Access.

Hopefully some of the imbecile websites will now shut up with their ranting paranoid conspiracy theories about how everything is terrible and the franchise is going to collapse and Ron Moore is going to come in and save the day (hint: he's not).

Appropriately, the Voyager rewatch reached The Voyager Conspiracy today. That was an entertaining and timely episode.

Midnight's Edge on YouTube is the worst of the worst and there are others I can't name.

 

I wish Ron Moore would come back but if he had a platform like either cable TV or a streaming platform those people have another thing coming if he didn't get dark as fuck or use dirty words.

[Werthead]

Yeah, I mean BSG is basically RDM's Voyager and he's been pretty honest about that (Pegasus is the Equinox story arc done properly). An RDM Star Trek would not be far off what we have now, if not far more grimdarky. His hypothetical DS9 reboot (seen on the documentary) starts off by killing off an established character and blowing up the Defiant (for keeps this time).

Just watched Pathfinder and it's a great episode, even if it does minimise the Voyager crew to focus on the guest cast (breaking Michael Pillar's maxim on how episodes should be structured, but mitigated by the emotional punch of the ending). It's a great example of a massive Voyager plothole that people just ignore: the Federation has not had any contact with Voyager since Message in a Bottle mid-Season 4. The ability to contact Voyager rests on them extrapolating Voyager's current location based on the ship's position in Message in a Bottle, two years earlier, and assuming they've travelled in a straight line at an average cruising speed. But they haven't, they've been ping-ponging all over the place.

In the first episode of Season 5 they get propelled across a void in space some 2,500 light-years across. In Timeless they travel a further 10,000 light-years via the quantum slipstream drive. In Dark Frontier they travel 20,000 light-years. Immediately before this episode, in The Voyager Conspiracy, Voyager travels 3,000 light-years thanks to a quantum slingshot. So Voyager should be a massive 35,500 light-years (roughly half the length of their journey!) further along the path to Earth. Starfleet would have absolutely zero idea of where to send their signal and Voyager would never have received it.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Got 7 episodes left of rrwatch Enterprise season 3 (skipped most of 1 and 2). Then season 4.

Then Discovery

Then blu-ray remasters of TOS

[DaveSumm]

Gotta side with Toth a little, I’m open to seeing darker elements of the universe and I don’t want Star Trek to be one thing and one thing only. But was it entirely necessary to have an immediate eye-gouging of an established character? No, Icheb wasn’t anyone’s favourite person but why not just leave us to imagine he lived happily ever after? What’s next week, Geordi gets his skin flayed in the opening seconds of the episode? Especially if you don’t have the same actor (for whatever reason), what did we really gain from that scene? Similarly, I don’t really see why they made this character Bruce Maddox if they don’t have the actor and they’re just gonna kill him after one episode. 
 

I still feel like we’re waiting to get to the point of the series, it’s just following a trail of breadcrumbs at the moment. I enjoyed the first few episodes where it seemed that Data would be relevant but not resurrected, but I’m not really into the meandering around the seedy back alleys of space. I agree that Seven’s arc seems appropriate enough, that she’s not in Starfleet but is doing something selfless. Kinda hope she has more of a point to her being here than this one episode though (and god I hope that wasn’t a backdoor pilot to Star Trek: Seven and The Fenrir Rangers).

[RumHam]

1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

But was it entirely necessary to have an immediate eye-gouging of an established character? No, Icheb wasn’t anyone’s favourite person but why not just leave us to imagine he lived happily ever after? What’s next week, Geordi gets his skin flayed in the opening seconds of the episode?

Have they established that Geordi didn't die in the Mars attack? The only way I could see him surviving was if he had off for First Contacy Day. 

I was hoping for a Naomoi Wildman appearance along with Seven (or at least reference to her,) but not if they're gonna torture her. 

1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

(and god I hope that wasn’t a backdoor pilot to Star Trek: Seven and The Fenrir Rangers).

Considering they've talked about spinning off a Section 31 show with Micheal Yeoh's character and a pre-Kirk enterprise show* with Pike and Spock I'd be really surprised if they haven't at least discussed it. 

*but what the hell would they call it? They can't use Enterprise....

[DaveSumm]

5 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Have they established that Geordi didn't die in the Mars attack? The only way I could see him surviving was if he had off for First Contacy Day. 

I haven’t seen any short treks (I don’t think I have the means in the UK...?) or read any prequel comics, so I’m not sure if there’s any relevant info there, but Picard’s Romulan buddy said a few episodes back something like “why don’t you round up all your old buddies, Worf, Georgi...” which would be a weird thing to say if he’d died.

[Mindwalker]

3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Gotta side with Toth a little, I’m open to seeing darker elements of the universe and I don’t want Star Trek to be one thing and one thing only. But was it entirely necessary to have an immediate eye-gouging of an established character? No, Icheb wasn’t anyone’s favourite person but why not just leave us to imagine he lived happily ever after?

I agree it could/ should have been less graphic. But I do think they had to kill off someone we already knew to make Seven's grief and motivation palpable. (I liked Icheb and am sorry for the character.)

So there were few possibilities, Seven was close to only a handful of people IIRC:

- Janeway, mentor/ mother figure, but they wouldn't kill off a main character, let alone a captain (I think).

- Chakotay, whom Seven was supposed to be in love with, but there are only approximately 17 people in the galaxy who bought that, so...

- Naomi Wildman, which would have been even crueler, because we knew her since she was a little child.

And neither of them would work with the Borg implants harvesting storyline anyway.

 

[Lord Varys]

Not sure what guys have against graphic violence - some episodes of DS9 depicting close contact fighting and killings are rather ridiculous in their bloodlessness. It is good that things are depicted as more real.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

13 hours ago, red snow said:

I enjoyed the episode. Spoilers for those around the world who won't get the chance to see episode until later. It probably should just be a spoiler thread.

 

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i really can't remember if the person killed at the start was in voyager or for how long but it reminded me of just how forgetful voyager was. Seven seemed very different but i guess she's had 20 years to change. It felt very backdoor pilot for a seven lead "rangers" spin-off which i wouldn't be averse to and would arguably be better suited to our present obsession with cynicism and grim in our entertainment without overturning Roddenberry and Trek's concept of a brighter future where humanity has managed to shed most of their darker sides. A bit like how DS9 allowed for different approaches due to being on the frontier and later at war with non federation staff.

Elrond was a lot more fun in this episode and i liked how he was more outlandish in his usual get-up and constantly being the odd one out. 

Stewart even makes bad acting good acting as his pirate impersonation and accent seemed to be deliberately off in order to suggest acting isn't Picard's main skill.

So Maddox was played by a different actor? He looked quite different but again it's 30 years ago.

Agnes going evil felt too obvious. Firstly her cowardice/discomfort seemed too much, then there was the cliched focus on her reacting to conversations with her back to speaking characters and finally there was the fact the episode needed a "shock" to conclude.

Still, I'm interested in seeing how they combine the data/borg/cyborg/romulans together because at this point they have to be all connected.

I really hope that Data isn't based on Borg tech. Mainly because that should have been picked up in TNG whenever the borg encountered data/lore.

I also hope that the romulans aren't a species of organic cyborgs/replicants/cylons as that also seems too big a change. 

I don't think Rick and Morty s creators would have enjoyed most of the episode. [/Spolier]

Melinda Snodgrass who created the Character of “Bruce Maddox” in The Measure of a Man is apparently not getting paid for the character she created as she is supposed to be under the Writer’s Guild rules.

[Toth]

6 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Not sure what guys have against graphic violence - some episodes of DS9 depicting close contact fighting and killings are rather ridiculous in their bloodlessness. It is good that things are depicted as more real.

I'll remind you of your words when they graphically disembowel Dr. Crusher next episode to have someone for Picard to grieve for.^^

 

Meanwhile the last episode inspired me to write a small program to predict the next events in Star Trek Picard and amuse myself with: http://www.mediafire.com/file/58zmyjvbiabmhuy/Picard_Plot_Generator.exe/file

(probably shouldn't have uploaded as as an .exe, I hope you don't think I'm trying to spread a virus...)

[sifth]

So that opening.......wow.......just wow.............They're treating Star Trek like it's A Game of Thrones now.............at least in terms of violence and swearing, wtf

 

I'm sorry, but much like how the Mandalorian and Empire are about as dark as I want Star Wars to get, DS9 is about how dark I want Trek to get. I use to be able to watch this show with my family, wtf

 

This might be the episode that killed the show for me. I might hold out for the rest of the season, since I usually try to give a show at least one season to improve before I leave, but I think I can honestly say I hate this episode.

 

The episode did have one moment that honestly did feel like Star Trek to me and it's when they were able to convince 7 not to take revenge.....................only for them to undo it 5 minutes later and have her kill the evil lady anyway. Really goes to show you just how far viewers have come in term of intelligent writing. Apparently things are only cool, when we see people get murdered these days.

 

[Lord Varys]

Guys, seriously, there are episodes in TOS and TNG where you can see that nobody is hitting each other in a brawl, and when people (mostly Klingons) are stabbing each other in DS9 there is no blood - neither at the so-called 'wound' nor at the weapons involved.

That's not something one can take seriously in our day and age.