Star Trek Thread: Set Picard to Stun (spoilers)

[sifth]

36 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I suspect the main reason they favour older incarnations of Trek is to do with the treatment and presentation of the female characters, which was altogether more to their liking and way of thinking.

I am of the mindset that some people on this forum are looking at the 1990s Star Trek output with glasses tinted so rose that they've turned outright black and absolutely nothing will satisfy them apart from Brannon Braga coming back and shovelling 26 hours of "subspace anomalies" back on the screen, but there you go.

So basically you're using guess work to explain your prejudice remarks. I suppose this is the reason why I don't take your opinions seriously, since in your mind liking older Trek = "liking women being treated like crap". I suppose a case could be made for TOS, but all of the other shows....................really..............really? Your mindset is truly a toxic one I must say.

Alex Kurtzman has really done wonders with his female characters when it comes to Picard though. One of the ladies on Picard's crew is a drug addict who's constantly drunk and the other murdered a man in his bed and got away with it. The other two are evil Romulan's who like to kill people. If this is how you believe strong women should be portrayed, it certainly explains a lot.

So what your saying is all shows in 2020 should be violent, lack hope, dark and not intelligently written? Better Call Saul and the Good Place are two of my favorite shows right now and somehow are able to have intelligently written stories without being insanely violent. Something you believe Trek should not be it seems, since nearly all of Alex Kurtzman's Trek has solved it's problems using extreme violence.

 

[Macklunkey]

I'm all aboard the Pike hype train.

[Werthead]

 

 

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So basically you're using guess work to explain your prejudice remarks.

I explained in detail RLM's history of racism, xenophobia, sexism and misogyny, which I note you completely ignored.

 

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I suppose this is the reason why I don't take your opinions seriously, since in your mind liking older Trek = "liking women being treated like crap".

This statement is nonsensical gibberish, and not remotely responding to anything I have said in this thread.

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Alex Kurtzman has really done wonders with his female characters when it comes to Picard though. One of the ladies on Picard's crew is a drug addict who's constantly drunk and the other murdered a man in his bed and got away with it. The other two are evil Romulan's who like to kill people. If this is how you believe strong women should be portrayed, it certainly explains a lot.

This statement is also nonsensical gibberish, and not remotely responding to anything I have said in this thread.

I will also caution against personal insults being made.

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So what your saying is all shows in 2020 should be violent, lack hope, dark and not intelligently written? Better Call Saul and the Good Place are two of my favorite shows right now and somehow are able to have intelligently written stories without being insanely violent. Something you believe Trek should not be it seems, since nearly all of Alex Kurtzman's Trek has solved it's problems using extreme violence.

I've been quite thoroughly taking apart Alex Kurtzman's crimes against Star Trek at some considerable length since 2009. He is a poor and insipid writer and apart from co-creating Fringe (and immediately handing it over to much better writers) he has done very little work I would consider to be of value.

My final position on Picard now that it is finished is that it had some very good elements and ideas set up in the first couple of episodes, most of them coming from Michael Chabon, and those ideas were sabotaged by Kurtzman. We know from Chabon's interviews that he laid down a whole section of the script which would dwell on the Dominion War and the Federation's trauma at seeing millions of its best and brightest slaughtered which would compromise the utopian ideals of the Federation and explain many of the "darker" elements in Picard, but that Kurtzman overruled him because he didn't believe anyone had watched Deep Space Nine (a show which got consistently higher ratings than Voyager and massively higher ratings than Enterprise through its run) and banned all references to it. I think it's fairly clear that this problem with interference continued to recur throughout the season and probably impacted Chabon's hasty impact once the season was finished. A lot of very good actors were wasted because of inconsistent writing and characterisation, and repeating Discovery's bizarre Season 2 plot which felt like it was leaning into Mass Effect for absolutely no apparent reason.

Was it the worst season of Star Trek ever made? No. At least three seasons of TNG, one of TOS, four or five of Voyager, most of Enterprise and both of Discovery were far weaker. At least it had some kind of thematic element revolving around loss, nostalgia and hope that it was trying to address but dropped the ball on. The inconsistencies in plotting and worldbuilding were grating, although hardly unprecedented (outside of DS9, Star Trek has always been bad at worldbuilding, or at least sticking with a fact once it was established). It's just harder to excuse now.

[Toth]

5 hours ago, Werthead said:

RLM rose to fame with a dissection of The Phantom Menace that leaned very heavily into mocking kidnap and rape culture. They spearheaded the campaign against the 2016 Ghostbusters movie because it had women in it and no other reason (and then did a bizarre "autopsy" video in which they claimed that misogyny was not a driving force behind the pre-release blowback by obfuscating it with post-release reviews, which was straight out of the Gamergate playbook, which they also refused to condemn).

Okay, I must admit, I haven't watched the Mr. Plinkett reviews because I don't like that kind of humor, so I can only speak for the reviews that aren't done by some silly character.

But I did look up Ghostbusters on their account and wonder what makes you think that they 'spearheaded' anything. They made a one minute video mocking trailer review videos, then had the autopsy video you mentioned, a Mr. Plinkett review and a serious Half in the Bag review, all three after the movie was already out. I also made a quick Google sweep trying to find out whether you want to say that they had a serious trailer reaction video that they erased, but I found nothing whatsoever.

I did watch the Half in the Bag and the Autopsy video though. I am still absolutely stupefied by your weird accusations. The Analysis video was there to show how Sony Pictures fanned the flames about the whole Ghostbusters Reboot outrage. Granted, their numbers game about the thousand random comments I found a little vague as well, but I the whole idea was not to excuse misogynists jumping on the hate-wagon, but on Sony cynically creating this whole media buzz to promote their dreadful movie. Which is basically a point that really, really, really, really needs to be adressed even in this fucked up political climate.

Allow me to take a step backwards and speak frankly here: Big media corporations are not champions of social justice. They want profits. And are willing to do every cynical marketing stunt available to get people to spend their money on their shit. I think that much should be obvious to everybody, shouldn't it? And viewed under that lense the whole push for representation and half-assed progessive talking points makes quite a lot of sense. Even when you make a shitty product, it still gets bought because you can point to how you are pushing for new forms of wokeness. With that you make a vocal minority of people very angry while another vocal minority feels the need to take your side in order to oppose the former vocal minority at any cost, regardless of how shitty the execution of your fake woke product actually is, and the whole thing spirals up to a media buzz that gives your shitty product lots and lots of headlines and make people speak about it that otherwhise would never care. And you only have to sit at the sidelines and fan the flames by having your hired staff pat their shoulders for how progressive they are and how toxic all the detractors are. And suddenly those criticizing the glaring flaws of a product aren't allowed to do so anymore, because if they do they are siding with the misogynists and racists. Even though it is the other way around, the misogynists and racists and ESPECIALLY the alt-right have seen the opportunity right there to go recruiting by making their own channels where valid, much-repeated criticism get mixed together with hints towards vague 'leftist' conspiracies to undermine traditional values and make the frogs gay. And if they get even a fraction of those who wonder why something so bad is being defended at all costs, then they have already won.

The problem I see here is that you yourself stand here throwing around damning accusations that are pretty much entirely guided by the idea that someone who has racists and misogynists agree with them must be just as bad. And with that you just keep fanning the flames, you are turning media criticism into an 'us vs. them' debate at a place where it is nonsensical to do so. If I say "Nobody wants a female protagonist" and misogynists agree with me, then that's because I am likely a misogynist. But if I say "This female lead is a product of shitty writing" and misogynists agree with me, then I dare to say that I am not necessarily a misogynist when I refuse to change my opinion. It sucks that they will inevitably derail the discussion, but this female lead is still shit and should be called out as such.

Please, don't be an idiot...

Look at the female characters in Star Trek Picard. The fake wokeness can be seen by how it has lots of women and every single one in positions of power. You have the evil admiral having power by putting down Picard, you have the evil security chief who has power by being the head of a conspiracy, you have the evil sociopathic Romulan incest-sister who kills a ton of people, you have the angry black drug-junkie who keeps putting down Picard, you have the brilliant scatterbrained scientist who murders her boyfriend without any consequences, you have the drinking sociopathic revenge-driven Seven who brutally murders a ton of people (Janeway would be so proud...), you have the Romulan ninja-assassin nun leader with the obnoxious no-filter rule that was actually pretty cool and therefore disappered immediately, the badass Tal-Shiar housekeeper who murders a ton of people and also was pretty cool and therefore disapperead somewhere never to be mentioned again and finally the daughter Data never had that somehow is the chosen one for some reason.

How come 90% of these characters fail utterly as any kind of role model? They are either obviously evil villains or characters with a personality so shitty we could mistake them for villains. And that in a STAR TREK show, where Roddenberry made it a conscious point to have a diverse cast and show them as equals. How come that those female characters we are supposed to relate to derive their power from putting down others and flaunting their superiority obnoxiously? Because the writing is shit and the writers equal power with dominance because it's easy enough for the dumbest audience to make that connection! And because it feels dramatic. And feelings are easier to grasp than logic. It's all a very cynical concept, really. This is on Kurtzman, this is on lazy corporate writing filling out checklists of today and so far I have seen Red Letter Media only pointing out these kind of issues without the usual warning signals. It is still your absolute right to call big media corporations out when they use diversity as a fucking marketing tool, especially when the writing is so bad that it nullifies any message people might get from it.

Sorry for the rant, but... I guess at some point it just had to go out. I am sick of discussions like this, I am sick of pointless namecalling and that people calling shit out as it is nowaday have to undergo a purity test. There are enough shitheads out there who need to be warned of, labeling everyone who disagrees with you as all kinds of evil in the end only plays into their hands because they love to portray themselves as the victims of a witch-hunt after all.

[Aemon Stark]

On 4/6/2020 at 4:20 PM, Werthead said:

My final position on Picard now that it is finished is that it had some very good elements and ideas set up in the first couple of episodes, most of them coming from Michael Chabon, and those ideas were sabotaged by Kurtzman. We know from Chabon's interviews that he laid down a whole section of the script which would dwell on the Dominion War and the Federation's trauma at seeing millions of its best and brightest slaughtered which would compromise the utopian ideals of the Federation and explain many of the "darker" elements in Picard, but that Kurtzman overruled him because he didn't believe anyone had watched Deep Space Nine (a show which got consistently higher ratings than Voyager and massively higher ratings than Enterprise through its run) and banned all references to it. I think it's fairly clear that this problem with interference continued to recur throughout the season and probably impacted Chabon's hasty impact once the season was finished. A lot of very good actors were wasted because of inconsistent writing and characterisation, and repeating Discovery's bizarre Season 2 plot which felt like it was leaning into Mass Effect for absolutely no apparent reason.

I mean... can we still have that show? It's always kinda remarkable that people that succeed best in TV industry often are the worst writers, with the most poorly-thought-out ideas. I liked Picard a lot in the end. It didn't all work, of course, but I dug the actors and characters and bringing dimension to the Romulans who previously typified the "planet of hats" model of alien cultures. Always a game of chess with them, however. 

Kurtzman doesn't seem all that different from Berman insofar as "disrespecting the audience" goes. We could have had a post-Dominion War show that didn't feature a single DS9 character, yet drew upon that setting for stories and characters nonetheless. It's not as though Picard didn't require a prequel Short Trek and fairly extensive (if mostly well placed) exposition for the completely novel circumstances we got. 

[red snow]

At least i now know why chabon left the show. I'd be pretty miffed if i had my ideas changed to something stupid

[Aemon Stark]

Really though. Kurtzman is a tool. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

I finally finished my selected Enterprise rewatch (cutting a lot of it out) and now on the fourth Discovery episode (I’m doing a chronological Trek watch). Gpod so far though will be strange to from season 2 Discovery to season 1 TOS, even with the blu-ray’s cgi

[SpaceChampion]

Star Trek: INTakes -- fan edit of outtakes into scenes of TNG.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcc12dTxY_U&list=UUSDclEtPITbpWRqmC2Un3oQ

 

[Lord Varys]

I've doing my own (re-)watch of Voyager right now. Can anybody explain how it makes sense that Seven's parents were looking for the Borg before the Federation knew about them? How the hell is that making sense at that time?

Also, man is that episode weird where Janeway doesn't suffer Kim to have a romance with a woman from an alien species. Who came up with that shit?

[sifth]

7 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I've doing my own (re-)watch of Voyager right now. Can anybody explain how it makes sense that Seven's parents were looking for the Borg before the Federation knew about them? How the hell is that making sense at that time?

Also, man is that episode weird where Janeway doesn't suffer Kim to have a romance with a woman from an alien species. Who came up with that shit?

Well the Borg showed up in Star Trek Enterprise, so the Federation clearly had some knowledge about them, prior to season 2 of TNG.

[Lord Varys]

3 minutes ago, sifth said:

Well the Borg showed up in Star Trek Enterprise, so the Federation clearly had some knowledge about them, prior to season 2 of TNG.

Yes, yes, I know how the retcon stuff goes. 'First Contact' also helps with that to a point, but unless I'm mistaken it was quite clear that Q introduced the Federation to the Borg at this point in time, and the whole story about the Hansens just doesn't make any sense timeline-wise, or does it?

[Toth]

1 minute ago, sifth said:

Well the Borg showed up in Star Trek Enterprise, so the Federation clearly had some knowledge about them, prior to season 2 of TNG.

Nah, the episode specifically made it a plot point that they never found out about the Borg there to not mess up Q Who.

That was actually a thing that bugged me about seven back then as well. A 5 minute Memory Alpha search resulted in that the Hansens went to search for the Borg in 2353 even though the Enterprise encountered the Borg for the first time in 2365. It could be argued though that there was some obscure knowledge that the Borg exist thanks to their victims. The El-Aurian refugees the Enterprise B saved in Generations likely told the Federation what they were fleeing from in 2293.

[sifth]

1 hour ago, Toth said:

Nah, the episode specifically made it a plot point that they never found out about the Borg there to not mess up Q Who.

That was actually a thing that bugged me about seven back then as well. A 5 minute Memory Alpha search resulted in that the Hansens went to search for the Borg in 2353 even though the Enterprise encountered the Borg for the first time in 2365. It could be argued though that there was some obscure knowledge that the Borg exist thanks to their victims. The El-Aurian refugees the Enterprise B saved in Generations likely told the Federation what they were fleeing from in 2293.

True, but it did show Starfleet that there was a powerful race of cyborg people, who live in the Delta Quadrant.

[Toth]

3 minutes ago, sifth said:

True, but it did show Starfleet that there was a powerful race of cyborg people, who live in the Delta Quadrant.

The Hansens were not Starfleet though, so that doesn't matter. I guess I like my ad-hoc headcanon better that this couple of rogue scientists with an interest in hive minds got the idea from still very alive El-Aurian refugees giving a detailed description of who and what invaded their homeworld 60 years ago rather than an obscure isolated incident with a never specified species that was never seen again on Earth 200 years ago.

[sifth]

20 minutes ago, Toth said:

The Hansens were not Starfleet though, so that doesn't matter. I guess I like my ad-hoc headcanon better that this couple of rogue scientists with an interest in hive minds got the idea from still very alive El-Aurian refugees giving a detailed description of who and what invaded their homeworld 60 years ago rather than an obscure isolated incident with a never specified species that was never seen again on Earth 200 years ago.

Archer clearly mentioned they were sending a signal to the Delta Quadrant in the final scene of that episode. Is there any reason given in the episode why he wouldn’t report this info to his superiors? Also I was under the impression The Hansens were hired by Star Fleet to investigate. In fact, even the wiki page makes not, that the Federation Counsel funded their project. 

[Toth]

20 minutes ago, sifth said:

Archer clearly mentioned they were sending a signal to the Delta Quadrant in the final scene of that episode. Is there any reason given in the episode why he wouldn’t report this info to his superiors? Also I was under the impression The Hansens were hired by Star Fleet to investigate. In fact, even the wiki page makes not, that the Federation Counsel funded their project. 

Mmh... I just read in the wiki that they applied for funding, not the other way around. Starfleet was very reluctant to give them a ship and send them on their way. I was also very much under the impression that the Hansons knew that they were looking for the Borg, not just some unknown kybernetic species.

I never doubted that Archer reported this, I just doubt that this would cause anyone to suddenly want to investigate it 200 years later when there are more obvious ways for a mid 24th century person to find substancial information about the Borg.

[RumHam]

When you think about it it's super weird that the El-Aurians didn't warn Starfleet about the Borg after being rescued.

The timing is also weird cause the Enterprise-B couldn't have been that far from Earth when it rescued the refugees, but then it takes the Borg like 80 years to get to Earth. I guess you could argue the El-Aurians have really fast ships. but then so do the borg. So much about Star Trek doesn't make sense if you think about it. 

Edit:

  

12 minutes ago, Toth said:

I never doubted that Archer reported this, I just doubt that this would cause anyone to suddenly want to investigate it 200 years later when there are more obvious ways for a mid 24th century person to find substancial information about the Borg.

Yeah, but Archer specifically notes that the signal will take 200 years to reach it's target and that they've only delayed the conflict. So you'd think someone might have made a note along the lines of "hey in 200 years some cyborg people are gonna come for us. Rotating your phase pistol frequency is effective but only until they adapt." 

[sifth]

2 minutes ago, Toth said:

Mmh... I just read in the wiki that they applied for funding, not the other way around. Starfleet was very reluctant to give them a ship and send them on their way. I was also very much under the impression that the Hansons knew that they were looking for the Borg, not just some unknown kybernetic species.

I never doubted that Archer reported this, I just doubt that this would cause anyone to suddenly want to investigate it 200 years later when there are more obvious ways for a mid 24th century person to find substancial information about the Borg.

I'm just saying there is a in universe reason, why humans could be aware of the Borg, prior to Q introducing Picard's crew to them. There's even a theory that the Borg in that Q episode were responding to the signal made from the Borg in Enterprise; Archer does mention the receiver wouldn't get the message for a few hundred years. 

[Toth]

2 minutes ago, RumHam said:

When you think about it it's super weird that the El-Aurians didn't warn Starfleet about the Borg after being rescued.

The timing is also weird cause the Enterprise-B couldn't have been that far from Earth when it rescued the refugees, but then it takes the Borg like 80 years to get to Earth. I guess you could argue they the El-Aurians have really fast ships. but then so do the borg. So much about Star Trek doesn't make sense if you think about it. 

To be fair, we also don't know either when the El-Aurians were assimilated or where their homeworld is located. I'd place them somewhere next to Romulan space between Beta- and Delta quadrant (we know the Romulans border to Hirogen space, so there is plenty of room there). We also know that Guinan was casually hanging out on 19th century Earth for vacation or something, so getting to us seems to have been no issue for them (then again, through their absurdly long lifespans even reasonably slow ships should be of little issue for them).

7 minutes ago, sifth said:

I'm just saying there is a in universe reason, why humans could be aware of the Borg, prior to Q introducing Picard's crew to them. There's even a theory that the Borg in that Q episode were responding to the signal made from the Borg in Enterprise; Archer does mention the receiver wouldn't get the message for a few hundred years. 

The problem is just that this specific incident wouldn't make them aware of the Borg, it would make aware of something. In the meantime the name the Borg could have only been known at the time when the Federation started taking in refugees and even then they were not really taking it seriously as this was all stuff happening comfortably far away.

To that specific theory I would just say that this isn't supported by the episode in question. Firstly: The Borg was already scouting Federation space in the TNG season 1 finale when Picard and the Romulans were accusing each other of picking neutral zone outposts clean. Secondly: The Enterprise was blatantly placed by Q directly in the path of a Borg cube to scare the Federation into making precautions, the Borg cube in question must have been baffled to find a Federation ship deep in their home territory. I guess it makes more sense to theorize that the Borg probing Romulan Empire and Federation in the TNG Season 1 finale was triggered by that signal and them coming to scout the area. This would actually also explain Q's behavior because he knew that the Borg were coming anyway and that the Federation was hopelessly unprepared.