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Star Trek Thread: Set Picard to Stun (spoilers)


Werthead

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Solid episode. They cleared up a few things, but to be honest they were things that could have been established in Episode 1 and not drawn out for unnecessary tension. Oh being half-Romulan, half-Vulcan explains her issues fairly clearly as well.

Seven becoming a new Borg Queen, albeit temporarily, was cool, although I'm still a bit unclear on the drone thing. The Romulans ejected almost all the drones into space, but then a bunch more turned up to take down the Romulan villainess? Also, is the cube now fully regenerated and ready to kick ass or...what exactly? Are they just going to leave it there?

The ancient alien race being the forerunners of the Borg would be interesting (not confirmed but implied I believe), although they'd have to explain why it took 200,000 years in the meantime for the Borg to start being a threat.

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1 hour ago, Maltaran said:

I thought those were XBs that took out the Romulans - they’d ejected all the drones that were still in stasis but hadn’t finished killing all the previously revived ones.

Good point. I did think they were XBs, but I thought they'd been taken out at the same time.

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So... Picard directly lifted the plot of Mass Effect, then? Only instead of the galaxy as a whole evolving to a certain point in general, the big scary comes specifically when sentient machines progress sufficiently.

(But I'll add that it's a good story and I don't have an issue with them borrowing from it to tell to a wider group)

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2 hours ago, AndrewJ said:

So... Picard directly lifted the plot of Mass Effect, then? Only instead of the galaxy as a whole evolving to a certain point in general, the big scary comes specifically when sentient machines progress sufficiently.

(But I'll add that it's a good story and I don't have an issue with them borrowing from it to tell to a wider group)

Probably isn't the only or first one to use that storyline, like they say in the show it's similar to the warp drive rule and other shows/books have used stargates etc as triggers.

 

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

Good point. I did think they were XBs, but I thought they'd been taken out at the same time.

I thought they were xbs too but wouldn't that mske it hard/impossible to control them as they were being controlled by 7/9 at least the editing suggested that.

I like the idea that the borg might be anti-AI or some heavy handed gatekeepers theory.

I actually really enjoyed the episode with things tying together nicely. They've introduced the "get out of jail starfleet" card by saying romulans have infiltrated starfleet so this dark trek doesn't need to remain. Although it's a bit extreme how romulans guaranteed major loss of life on their homeworld with the mars attacks! That said they have a shit ton of fighter class ships still.

I loved the chats characters had with soji particularly Picard. That felt like trek to me when they were discussing sentience, memories and love. Doing so in the context of data was icing on the cake.

The only rubbish bit for me was rios happening to know another soji. What are the chances that would randomly occur eg there has to be an explanation provided for why otherwise it's lazy/convenient storytelling. I was even beginning to wonder if rios is a synth or just a hologram with an emitter eg the real rios was killed after that encounter and is just a floating spy unaware he's a copy.

This synth homeworld and soji having more than one duplicate. Does it mean noonan singh based everything on them and soji is just a built in memory of data's eg he didn't create her appearance. Or is it a planet full of Singh's creations?

 

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6 hours ago, AndrewJ said:

So... Picard directly lifted the plot of Mass Effect, then? Only instead of the galaxy as a whole evolving to a certain point in general, the big scary comes specifically when sentient machines progress sufficiently.

(But I'll add that it's a good story and I don't have an issue with them borrowing from it to tell to a wider group)

Mass Effect effectively borrowed its storyline from a mixture of Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica (who in turn were influenced by much older stories).

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3 hours ago, red snow said:

Probably isn't the only or first one to use that storyline, like they say in the show it's similar to the warp drive rule and other shows/books have used stargates etc as triggers.

 

Name 3 properties other than Mass Effect and Picard where an external force comes and wipes out a civilisation once they reach a certain technological threshold.

Actually, name three properties including those. Hint: the first two are Mass Effect and Picard. What's the 3rd? :P

And I reiterate, I'm not critical of them using the concept and introducing it to a wider audience - I'm just recognising the fact. :)

 

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4 minutes ago, AndrewJ said:

Name 3 properties other than Mass Effect and Picard where an external force comes and wipes out a civilisation once they reach a certain technological threshold.

Beserkers by Fred Saberhagen

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

The Tyranids in Warhammer 40,000 (although that's more to do with the use of warp space than technology per se)

The Borg in earlier iterations of Star Trek

The Shadows in Babylon 5

The Angels in Battlestar Galactcica don't wipe out a civilisation per se, but they get involved as observers and facilitators when they wipe themselves out.

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11 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Beserkers by Fred Saberhagen

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

The Tyranids in Warhammer 40,000 (although that's more to do with the use of warp space than technology per se)

The Borg in earlier iterations of Star Trek

The Shadows in Babylon 5

The Angels in Battlestar Galactcica don't wipe out a civilisation per se, but they get involved as observers and facilitators when they wipe themselves out.

Well, I reject the Borg, the Shadows and the Angels as examples of the same concept.

I'm not familiar with Berserkers, Revelation Space or Warhammer, so I concede that they could be (but you're not exactly batting 1,000).

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16 minutes ago, AndrewJ said:

Well, I reject the Borg, the Shadows and the Angels as examples of the same concept.

I'm not familiar with Berserkers, Revelation Space or Warhammer, so I concede they could be (but you're not exactly batting 1,000).

I would also argue the Tyranids aren't an example either. There are many factors why they are invading the Milky Way. It is implied that they are fleeing something worse and that they have been consuming galaxies throughout their flight all the time. What Werthead is referencing however is that they are attracted by the Astronomicon on Earth, which is basically a psychic lighthouse illuminating the Warp (the setting's hyperspace) to make travel safer. With the Tyranids being a swarm of constantly hungry alien locusts, the implication is that they are drawn to the light like moths, so it's not really a technological threshold, just the byproduct of a very specific technology the humans had to resort to using after the Horus Heresy broke any hope of establishing a human-created "Webway", which is the safest way to travel huge distances employed by one of the many precurser races in the setting. In fact I don't think any other race in the setting is ever seen employing such a thing (especially in how grimdark it is to maintain it by sacrificing thousands of people to it every day... heck, I seem to recall that even the Emperor wasn't keen on using it for that exact reason).

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1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Beserkers by Fred Saberhagen

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

The Tyranids in Warhammer 40,000 (although that's more to do with the use of warp space than technology per se)

The Borg in earlier iterations of Star Trek

The Shadows in Babylon 5

The Angels in Battlestar Galactcica don't wipe out a civilisation per se, but they get involved as observers and facilitators when they wipe themselves out.

Wert beat me to it. 

1 hour ago, AndrewJ said:

Well, I reject the Borg, the Shadows and the Angels as examples of the same concept.

I'm not familiar with Berserkers, Revelation Space or Warhammer, so I concede that they could be (but you're not exactly batting 1,000).

Okay so you don't count the ones you don't know about but want us to list examples outside the ones you know about?

None of us are arguing it's an original idea in Picard we just don't agree with your theory mass effect invented the idea. There doesn't need to be 1000s of examples - one that existed prior to ME would suffice.

That's not to say the writers of Picard got the idea from ME though :)

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2 hours ago, AndrewJ said:

Well, I reject the Borg, the Shadows and the Angels as examples of the same concept.

I'm not familiar with Berserkers, Revelation Space or Warhammer, so I concede that they could be (but you're not exactly batting 1,000).

The Borg assimilate civilisations - destroying them as independent entities, once they achieve a certain technological threshold and specifically ignore species below that threshold.

The Shadows ignore civilisations below a certain threshold of technological and scientific development. The ones above it they ferment war and chaos - often by just directly attacking them - to see if they survive and thrive. If not, they are left to be destroyed out of hand.

In Battlestar Galactica it is taken as immutable fact that once civilisations reach a certain level of technological development they destroy themselves through the development of synthetic life, which is pretty much exactly the same plotline that both Discovery and Picard are (somewhat randomly, as this should have been a concern 300 years earlier) leaning on very heavily.

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So are we to assume that the Zhat Vash didn’t know about Control in Discovery? I assume it was all classified along with Discovery’s existence. Sounds like precisely the kind of thing they’re worried about though. 
 

I’m struggling to se show they’ll wrap this up, the Zhat Vash can’t be right and yep, Data’s offspring should all be killed. So there’s gotta be some misunderstanding around the vision that they have, but to explore that, we’ll need to know more about the vision, and how do you satisfyingly answer the question of ‘what’s so awful that if you found out you’d immediately smash your own head in with a rock’? Should we remove all rocks from our surroundings for the finale?

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4 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

how do you satisfyingly answer the question of ‘what’s so awful that if you found out you’d immediately smash your own head in with a rock’? Should we remove all rocks from our surroundings for the finale?

I assume it's the visceral nature of the vision experience that drives people to kill themselves, not the simple facts it imparts. Feeling trillions of people being killed is a bit more overwhelming than just being told it happened.

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8 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

So are we to assume that the Zhat Vash didn’t know about Control in Discovery? I assume it was all classified along with Discovery’s existence. Sounds like precisely the kind of thing they’re worried about though. 
 

 

It's almost like the writers of Picard didn't know what the plot of Season 2 Discovery was - or more likely they didn't care (as I'm sure they share writers)

7 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

What's the cliffhanger shock gonna be...?  Data? The Enterprise?  Lore?

They'll take a page from Discovery and end with the enterprise. There'll be some geek-out reveal of the captain - hopefully not just Riker under temporary command.

I'm going for Noonan Singh being on said planet and he was a synth all along. Synths don't actually know how to build synths other than the birds and bees method and Data was his attempt at creating inorganic life.

I still think the Romulans are massively over-reacting to a past event. Like Picard stated the past does not dictate things will repeat. The Borg and dominion don't mean all wormholes should be closed and collective intelligence should be destroyed either.

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6 hours ago, red snow said:

I'm going for Noonan Singh being on said planet and he was a synth all along. Synths don't actually know how to build synths other than the birds and bees method and Data was his attempt at creating inorganic life.

That's good. It never made sense to me that this one guy was such a genius he invented something that seemed to be decades ahead of it's time and then no one else could ever recreate it. 

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10 minutes ago, RumHam said:

That's good. It never made sense to me that this one guy was such a genius he invented something that seemed to be decades ahead of it's time and then no one else could ever recreate it. 

It ties things up in a decent way and also allows for brent spiner to be in the show in various forms. It'd be interesting to have Rios describe the appearance of this "flower" guy who was with soji. 

Doesn't really solve holograms although i think that's merely my bias in thinking voyager's doctor was "real" - he was certainly more interesting/human than the rest of the cast. I think him and all the other holograms are just really good imitations rather than sentient though.

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