Star Trek - Picard show

[Wonderful Butternut]

Jesus Christ that was GRIM.  Fuuuucking Hell
I can see the point people are making about it "not being Trek" now.  Like, I was never one for overreacting to DS9 or thinking the Rodenberry Optimism was sacred, but this is Eastenders level shit.

Pirate Picard was fun though.

Spoiler alert

Opening the episode with Icheb having his fucking eye ripped out and Seven having to euthanise him was way further with the grit than I think anyone thought they'd go. I assume Seven is going to resurface at some point and this might have some meaning. Cos as it stands it just looks like the writers showing how hardcore and edgy they are by having an established former guest character graphically die. Which is pathetic.

[close]

I have no problem fapping to with graphic violence or stuff with grim horrible endings. I love Black Lagoon where characters are pathologically unable to stop swearing and are Nihilistic as shit, loads of people get shot, the gradual corruption of the one normal guy is the overarching thread, and half the guest characters have their personal arcs end horribly.

But that sort of stuff doesn't feel like Star Trek. Yeah, I know full well that crime, drinking, drugs, revenge, murder, flawed Starfleet Officers etc. etc. have all been in Star Trek before, but Picard is taking these elements which were all on the fringe and making them the driving force of the entire story. It does not work as Star Trek for me. It'd work as an independent IP, so it doesn't feel like it's pissing all over a legacy established over a 50 year period. Now maybe Jean-Luc will score a massive win that puts everything back on a "Trek" footing. But somehow I don't think that interests the writers.

[grainger]

Well that was not good. A rubbish

Spoiler alert

heist episode where they got out of it by a guy standing nearby just shooting the henchman.

It wasn't totally boring - I kept watching - but I couldn't give a shit about what happens next.

And I agree with Wonderful Butternut - they couldn't resist telling everyone that Picard (the character) is an idiot for being optimistic (or at least not totally cynical and murder-happy). Most of the rest of his crew are actual killers now, aren't they?

Is anything going to actually happen? I don't agree with posters saying something finally did. This felt like a side adventure. Seven showed up, did some stuff and buggered off again. So much for modern serial TV.

[close]

I suppose I keep watching because part of me can't believe they would make a show this cynical and have the gall to call it Star Trek, but I also know that I'm wrong.

Leaving aside the betrayal of the source material, it just doesn't feel like quality TV. Example: the poor dialogue: "Well that was disturbing". You don't need to spell everything out, scriptwriters.

[oy vey]

Get on it! Its so good.

Just did The Wounded. Now that's proper pathos. Fuck fuck, I'm souring on this new series.

[Lemming]

Yeah, the amazing thing about Discovery and now Picard is that even if you can manage to Stockholm syndrome yourself into thinking they're not that bad, seeing literally any halfway decent episode of TOS/TNG/VOY/DS9 blows the whole illusion apart and makes you remember what was so good about Star Trek in the first place, and how it's completely missing now.

The more I think about the last episode, the less I like it, and I didn't really like it at all when I watched it.

[Attila]

Hollow Pursuits is the episode which introduces Barclay and his holodeck addiction.

The episode with Saul Rubenik is The Most Toys.  That is a sad fact though, he would have been good.

I love Jonathan Frakes when he grins at something stupid.

Gah! OOps -- I apologise for the daft gaffe -- I've spent the last three days with a crap cold and my brain is one big haze at the moment.

I recall reading that Rappaport had filmed a couple of scenes, but no idea if they've ever seen the light of day.

Hollow Pursuits is a favourite -- Wesley's 'WHAT?!' always gets a laugh.

[Lemming]

Interested to see the reviews coming in.

Jammer's Reviews and Ex Astris Scientia both agree that the tone is depressingly unlike Star Trek. Tor liked the episode a bit more. In this review he says that Seven's line about Picard having "hope" was meant to praise Picard and grimly diminish Seven, but I read it the same way as other people here - ie, the show stopping just short of calling Picard a senile ignorant dipshit who doesn't know how Dark and Edgy life is OUT HERE ON THE FRONTIER - like Sisko's rant about people on Earth not always fully understanding the situation with the Maquis, except worse and culminating in a shootout.

People in the comments section of Jammer's Reviews are pointing out that Stewart and Kurtzman have both made a big thing of how "optimistic" and "hopeful" Star Trek is in interviews. At the 50% mark of this series, it's got to be fair to ask where the fuck any of the optimism is, surely. Big turnaround in the last five episodes maybe? Picard disarms the CONSPIRACY with a speech about friendship?

[Alberon]

You've got to expect the series to end on a high and Picard winning, Druggie Mom's mad conspiracy theories proving real for once, that sort of thing. It's always darkest before the dawn.

If it ends with everyone dead bar Picard and him stranded on a broken La Sirena drifting in deep space waiting for the coldness to claim him then you might have a point.

The eye thing and the casual swearing is unneccesary though, it doesn't add anything. Star Trek should be a family orientated show, this feels a little like Torchwood trying to prove itself grown-up.

[Zero Gravitas]

Why would an Englishman who has lived about being French (very badly) his entire life attempt that accent as part of his disguise. I think he wanted them to get caught.

[Wonderful Butternut]

Yeah, the amazing thing about Discovery and now Picard is that even if you can manage to Stockholm syndrome yourself into thinking they're not that bad, seeing literally any halfway decent episode of TOS/TNG/VOY/DS9 blows the whole illusion apart and makes you remember what was so good about Star Trek in the first place, and how it's completely missing now.

Yeah, I was watching a mid season 2 ep of Disco when it was out and thought "yeah, this isn't bad. Maybe they can recover it.". Then I decided to watch "Cause and Effect" from TNG, and immediately saw Emperor Discovery's lack of clothing.

On an associated note, there's a lot of revision going on about how bad Enterprise is. Whilst it's desecration of established canon and tone pales in comparison to what's going on now, it was still a terrible show and the only reason Abrams and later Kurtzman & Co. got in the door was because Ent's shitness nearly killed the franchise.

If it ends with everyone dead bar Picard and him stranded on a broken La Sirena drifting in deep space waiting for the coldness to claim him then you might have a point.

Well there's a fan theory that

Spoiler alert

season 1 will end with Picard dead and La Sirena will be renamed in his honour and the series continues under Rios and Raffi. Although I personally think that's unlikely given Sir Patrick invited Whoopi Goldberg to reprise Guinan after season 1 was shot. What's she going to be coming for if Picard is dead, to mourn at his graveside? Not to mention he's the selling point of the fucking show because he's about the only thing linking the series to Star Trek

[close]

But it doesn't need to go as far as everyone dying pathetically and Picard drifting through space to die for the series not to end on a high and recover some "Trek spirit" cos it's already pissed all over itself so much.

I'm expecting something along the lines of Soji sacrificing herself to prevent whatever huge evil the Tal Shiar think she's part of, and to expose Oh and her co-conspirators. Starfleet root out Oh and may belatedly accept they were wrong and offer to recommission Picard, Raffi and maybe Rios, but they say no because Starfleet is full of bad flawed people who are bad. Leaving us on a bit of a bummer, as the crew of La Sirena continue on their grimdark adventures in future seasons whilst the Federation slowly breaks apart because the writers want to show the progression towards the smaller, split up Federation we're going to see in Discovery Season 3. Even though that's unnecessary and borderline non-sensical when the 800 year gap is accounted for.

[Cloud]

I missed the first time around that it was

Spoiler alert

Icheb

[close]

. I remember when he was

Spoiler alert

that kid in Voyager

[close]

and am now even more depressed :(

[oy vey]

Nice article on TNG's Yesterday's Enterprise: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/star-trek-episode-saved-next-generation-1280374?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Cracking episode.

[Edley]

I'm struggling to get a handle on this guy, anyone picked up on any clues as to his disposition?

[oy vey]

Question... Is

Spoiler alert

Icheb's death

[close]

more un-trekky than David's death in ST3: The Search for Spock? You could argue we didn't exactly see the klingon ripping his

Spoiler alert

eye

[close]

guts out, etc. I think the problem is the graphic depiction rather than plot choice.

Horrible shit does happen in Trek. This freaked me out the first time I saw it...

[Cloud]

Always did like Jammers Reviews.  He can be a little negative sometimes but on the whole I agree with what he says especially about that episode.

Interesting reading the comments there, it seems to be pretty black and white whether people cared about how grim it was.  Afraid I did, the more I think about it the more disappointed I am in the gratuitous violence with Icheb, what they've done to Seven's character and just the way Picard seems to be pissing into the wind with his sense of humanity.  I'm not ready to throw the towel in and respond with "IT WAS NO LONGER STAR TREK" when someone quizzes me in a few decades as an old man on why I stopped watching it, but it was still the most depressing episode of any (including movies etc) I've seen in the entire history of the franchise.

There's a theory/rumour going around that Captain Edgelord is

Spoiler alert

also a hologram himself

[close]

and that maybe it's one way to nudge at the obvious question of

Spoiler alert

why no one cares that holograms may be synthetic life forms sometimes like the Voyager EMH or that weird entertainer guy from DS9

[close]

[bgmnts]

I hope Picard ends with it all being a classic bit of Q japery.

[Edley]

I understand next week's episode begins with Spot falling victim to the Croydon Cat Killer and ends with Data napalming all of South London. Obviously a bit of a departure from the Star Trek we know and love but brave of the writers to ask the hard questions about how a post-scarcity utopia might actually work.

[Chairman Yang]

I'm not accusing anyone here of this, but it seems like Picard is thriving on people obtusely claiming Star Trek was both cruel and violent all along, and was a twee anachronism that needs to get with the times. Tone isn't a superficial part of fiction. The whiplash of going from a torture scene to a whimsical heist with silly disguises is evidence that the grimness isn't part of a coherent creative direction, it's just exploitative.

That one Voyager episode where there's two Toreses is a good example. The guy who's butchered for his face as a seduction attempt is gruesome and horrifying. This is just pathetic.

[Wonderful Butternut]

I'm not accusing anyone here of this, but it seems like Picard is thriving on people obtusely claiming Star Trek was both cruel and violent all along, and was a twee anachronism that needs to get with the times. Tone isn't a superficial part of fiction. The whiplash of going from a torture scene to a whimsical heist with silly disguises is evidence that the grimness isn't part of a coherent creative direction, it's just exploitative.

Yeah I've seen the "well X, Y and Z was always in Star Trek!" as an excuse alright. Technically true but X, Y and Z wasn't the entire fucking content of Star Trek as it seems to be now. I feel like there's a vocal minority of Star Trek fans who actually only watched the Dominion War episodes of DS9 and Season 3 of Enterprise and think all Star Trek was dark and gritty.

What you say about tone is also correct.

In terms of viewer numbers, it's succeeding because most Star Trek fans, even ones who have big ass problems with the tone are giving it at least the first season to see where it goes.

[Alberon]

It's arguable that TNG, while not pointlessly graphic as the latest Picard episode, has a worse torture storyline. The dehumanising of Picard in the 'four lights' episode is brutal.

Picard is it's own show, but it still feels more Star Trek than Discovery ever will to me.

[Cloud]

As Jammer says.  It's not that Star Trek doesn't have a place for darkness or that it's never been done, it's just that even in DS9 (fake edit: or the TNG Cardassian episode) it had some kind of intelligence to the writing and wasn't just grim for the sake of grim and wasn't this kind of exhausting unrelenting cynicism.

[Wonderful Butternut]

It's arguable that TNG, while not pointlessly graphic as the latest Picard episode, has a worse torture storyline. The dehumanising of Picard in the 'four lights' episode is brutal.

That happened to an established character partly to show the horror of torture, and partly to demonstrate what ordinarily civilised, educated people can be capable of if they believe in their own supremacy. It had a purpose.

Spoiler alert

Snuffing Icheb

[close]

was just gratuitous, at this point seemingly for the sake of being gratuitous. I can't imagine what sort of Seven of Nine payoff up the road is going to make it meaningful and necessary.

Picard is it's own show, but it still feels more Star Trek than Discovery ever will to me.

Not unreasonable, but Disco is a low bar. It tries, but it's just a giant explosion of anti-logic.

[Alberon]

As Jammer says.  It's not that Star Trek doesn't have a place for darkness or that it's never been done, it's just that even in DS9 (fake edit: or the TNG Cardassian episode) it had some kind of intelligence to the writing and wasn't just grim for the sake of grim and wasn't this kind of exhausting unrelenting cynicism.

Maybe. We're halfway through the series now, so we'll have to see where it goes from here. From the 'next episode' trailer it looks like they get a lot more pro-active. I think Picard is meant to be the
beacon of hope for a Federation that has lost its way, not a deluded old man.

The

Spoiler alert

Icheb bit

[close]

was a mistake though and I don't defend it.

[Lemming]

Spoiler alert

Snuffing Icheb

[close]

was just gratuitous, at this point seemingly for the sake of being gratuitous. I can't imagine what sort of Seven of Nine payoff up the road is going to make it meaningful and necessary.

I fear the intended payoff, such as it was, might have been the shooting spree in the bar.

They

Spoiler alert

brought him back and instantly killed him

[close]

just to justify another subsequent unnecessary and uninteresting scene of violence in the same episode.

Picard is it's own show, but it still feels more Star Trek than Discovery ever will to me.

Discovery vs Picard is an interesting debate to have. I'm finding myself securely on the Discovery side, which is shocking because Discovery sucks absolute shit. The first third or so of season two was the closest we've come to recapturing Star Trek in two decades, I think, but it was still a thousand miles wide of the mark.

[grainger]

You've got to expect the series to end on a high and Picard winning, Druggie Mom's mad conspiracy theories proving real for once, that sort of thing. It's always darkest before the dawn.

If it ends with everyone dead bar Picard and him stranded on a broken La Sirena drifting in deep space waiting for the coldness to claim him then you might have a point.

The eye thing and the casual swearing is unneccesary though, it doesn't add anything. Star Trek should be a family orientated show, this feels a little like Torchwood trying to prove itself grown-up.

The thing is, even if Picard does complete his quest (and I presume he will, at some point), that doesn't make the show one iota less depressing, because the world depicted is so grim by ST standards. All Jean-Luc's doing is trying to stop the world from getting even worse. Baseline for the world of Picard is still incredibly depressing (utopian society has not so much turned to shit, as turned out to never have been much better than our own one anyway), and all he's doing is trying to maintain it at (or return it to) baseline.

The problem with the show isn't that bad stuff has happened - of course that was always the case in ST, otherwise there'd be no story or drama (yes, even in early TNG). The problem is that the writers have  taken a hammer to the optimism in TV's only optimistic SF world.

But the most fundamentally depressing thing about it is unintentional, unconscious. The world as depicted is just like our own. Same decor, same vernacular, same clothes, same vaping, same financial system. Nothing will change in hundreds of years, and by the way, it hadn't actually changed while you were watching previous ST shows - and if you imagined it had changed when you were watching them, you were clearly wrong. While the TOS and TNG crews were doing their thing, there was still rich and poor on earth, there were still slums, people still commuted to work like drones. What did you expect? That's just the way things are. Things can't ever be any different to how they are now.

[Alberon]

Discovery failed right out the door using the Kevinverse films as its visual cue.

After a poor first half of the first season it lifted a bit with the Mirror Universe section. It improved again with the first part of the second season. Then it all went to shit with the rest of that season. Tilly turned permanently into Ensign Fluster and Burnham carried on, IMHO, being more irritating than Neelix.

Now they've finished screwing up the past of Trek they're off to fuck over its future.

[grainger]

I couldn't even watch Discovery. Based on the early episodes, it was just a person running around being an action hero, unilaterally, without discussing anything with anyone, getting bollocked, and carrying on doing more of the same[nb]Note: it's now a distant memory, and it may well have not been quite like this.[/nb]. Pretty much the antithesis of TNG and even the more "shoot first, talk later" TOS. It may well have got less like this as it went along, but it was so fundamentally uninteresting to me that I watched two or three episodes and gave up.

[Cloud]

Maybe. We're halfway through the series now, so we'll have to see where it goes from here. From the 'next episode' trailer it looks like they get a lot more pro-active. I think Picard is meant to be the
beacon of hope for a Federation that has lost its way, not a deluded old man.

The

Spoiler alert

Icheb bit

[close]

was a mistake though and I don't defend it.

Yeah... as I say, not writing it off or anything.  From what Sir Pat said before it started, it sounds like it's meant to do this and then send a message that things can get better if you stand up for what's right.  But I do criticise this bump in the road along the way.

And I wonder how "Picardness" will prevail - we've seen that so far his Friendship Speeches (see also Naruto and MLP) all seem ineffective.  If the king of Trek diplomacy can't lecture the world into being better then I wonder how it would be achieved.

[Edley]

The thing is, even if Picard does complete his quest (and I presume he will, at some point), that doesn't make the show one iota less depressing, because the world depicted is so grim by ST standards. All Jean-Luc's doing is trying to stop the world from getting even worse. Baseline for the world of Picard is still incredibly depressing (utopian society has not so much turned to shit, as turned out to never have been much better than our own one anyway), and all he's doing is trying to maintain it at (or return it to) baseline.

The problem with the show isn't that bad stuff has happened - of course that was always the case in ST, otherwise there'd be no story or drama (yes, even in early TNG). The problem is that the writers have  taken a hammer to the optimism in TV's only optimistic SF world.

But the most fundamentally depressing thing about it is unintentional, unconscious. The world as depicted is just like our own. Same decor, same vernacular, same clothes, same vaping, same financial system. Nothing will change in hundreds of years, and by the way, it hadn't actually changed while you were watching previous ST shows - and if you imagined it had changed when you were watching them, you were clearly wrong. While the TOS and TNG crews were doing their thing, there was still rich and poor on earth, there were still slums, people still commuted to work like drones. What did you expect? That's just the way things are. Things can't ever be any different to how they are now.

Yeah, I agree with all of this. The people making Picard think they're very clever for rising above what they perceive as TNG's naivety. They're doing this by reducing its faith in diplomacy to an impotent righteousness that we're meant to celebrate in the character of Picard while very sensibly accepting that his position is only tenable because he's surrounded by good guys with guns (or a sword).

If Thatcher's greatest achievement was New Labour, Sloan's was Alex Kurtzman.

[Zero Gravitas]

They

Spoiler alert

brought him back and instantly killed him

[close]

To a certain flavour of ideologically possessed ST fan he was the perfect character to bring back, gratuitiously torture and then with a teary eye phaser in the heart.

But I'd hope the production doesn't have its ear so close to that kind of popular pulse it influences the plot.



The violence of it wasn't awful compared to the famous tng phaser meltings in Conspiracy, and it was practically an instant compared to the shit they put Colm through.



No I'm not suggesting that the excellent fake prison memory episode compares in any way to this dross, but the franchise is no stranger to using and abusing characters as it sees fit. Focusing on the violence or characters out of nowhere going through some shitty stuff is besides the point a much worse crime is that it didn't say anything.

[pancreas]

+1.

Of course the imagination's there, it's just been focus-grouped to death.

Or we're in the middle of an large-scale imagination collapse.

I suppose it is possible.