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Star Trek Picard season 2

whisky said:
I don't know about Picard in a coma, this episode nearly put me in one. If this was the penultimate episode where is the build up for the finale, where is the excitement?
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10 episode run - 3 to go.

Sorry.

It seems to be the same formula across both shows: ep.1 & 2 set up the stakes, followed by a fuck-ton of filler in which the writers stack up more shit ideas and confuse themselves, followed by the last two episodes that resolve the plot in a half-baked manner. Rinse and repeat.
 
I thought it was a bit better than the last two since at least it tried to be about something. Even though I'm not sure how Picard's childhood trauma relates to the current situation.

Not sure either why Guinan would have the exact bottle from the Q peace talks. Semes like they'd keep that on the El Aurian homeworld. Having the FBI walk in at the end was a big groan since now next episode is going to have tedious scenes of the FBI saying "are you from space?" and Picard saying "no."
 
CaptainWacky said:
I thought it was a bit better than the last two since at least it tried to be about something. Even though I'm not sure how Picard's childhood trauma relates to the current situation.

Not sure either why Guinan would have the exact bottle from the Q peace talks. Semes like they'd keep that on the El Aurian homeworld. Having the FBI walk in at the end was a big groan since now next episode is going to have tedious scenes of the FBI saying "are you from space?" and Picard saying "no."
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Then Jurati will gain control of her body from the Borg Queen somehow the next episode and use Borg nanoprobes to mind wipe the FBI agents.
 
I was waiting for Picard to enter a train, or be faced with a cellular peptide cake. With mint frosting.

Picard's head tales had a weird Dark Page meets The Visitor meets Haunting of Deck Twelve vibe, but not the good parts of any of them.

Nice call-out to STIV:TVH when Rios says - "No, I'm from Chile. I just work in outer space." Also to "Q-Who" when Guinan did the Wicked Witch thing with her hands preparing to call a Q.
 
Still not minding it too much, although wondering how they're going to wrap things up well in 3 episodes.

The Gaius and Jean-Luc parts were pretty fantastic, those two played off each other really well and it was nice to see James Callis again.
 
They did play off each other well; Stewart had to put his acting boots back on, which was nice.

I watched a bit of TNG earlier today - Remember Me - the one where Beverly was stuck in Wesley's warp bubble experiment and everyone started disappearing. I don't watch much of the old stuff nowadays, but it was so fun just to watch some good ol' Trek with a well-defined beginning, middle and end. And, Patrick Stewart was still playing Jean-Luc Picard, not Patrick Stewart.

Writers: Mr. Stewart, we've got a hell of a plot for this new season. It's got the new USS Stargazer which encounters a spatial anomaly, and a massive new Borg ship appears from it and-

PS: My father used to beat my mother, you know.

Writers: What? Oh. God. Sorry, that sounds awful. Ok anyway so then Q transports you and the gang to an alternate timeline and have to battle an authoritarian genocidal version of the Federation where you're like space Hitler and-

PS: He would drink and come home in a violent rage. I would put my body between them to protect her.

Writers: Jesus that's, uh, terrible. But if we could just get focused on the new season cos we're on a deadline here... so to undo this new dystopian future you have to convince the Borg Queen to help you travel back in time to LA in 2024 where there's this ancestor of Dr Noonien Soong and your ancestor is an astronaut and-

PS: We need to write about Picard's mother and father.

Writers: What?

PS: We need lots of flashbacks about them. They need to be dark and vague and mysterious. And Picard needs to face his demons and confront his father. That's what this season should be about.

Writers: Ummm... ok well I'm not sure the story has any room for this type of-

PS: Oh, did you say that I go back in time to meet my ancestor who's an astronaut?

Writers: Yes! Yes, Mr. Stewart, she's the key to the whole thing! See, her mission launches in 3 days and she-

PS: Give her depression.
 
Yeah, I've spent more than a few hours pre- falling asleep trying to figure out what one would call a self-insert character who's the opposite of a Mary Sue / Marty Stu. One where the self-insert character, instead of being literally flawless and exempt from a growth / redemption character arc, utterly sucks balls and is incapable of traversing a growth / redemption character arc.

That's this version of Picard. He went from an introspective, confident, decisive leader of men of damn near statesman-like stature to being a frail geezer who gets bitched out, outshone, and metaphorically planted on his ass by every woman he meets. Not sure how much of that is a woke writers room and how much of it is Stewart cramming his mommy issues into the material.
 
I'm trying to figure out what I watched yesterday. NuGuinan, (fuck it, I don't know, maybe El Aurians regenerate like Time Lords do; Whoopi Goldberg in the 1800s turns into Felicia in the 2020s, then regenerates back into Whoopi Goldberg in the 2290s) who exuded both maternal warmth and stoic calm at the same time, even in the most trying of circumstances -- a woman who can with perfect calm flatly dust a Klingon Security Chief on the firing range -- goes full tilt Cackling Kamala when asked if she and Picard are E.T.s (which she is, of course) as a way to dodge the question.

Meanwhile, the writers have now made it explicit that Q has lost his powers. Which raises the question of how the hell he inserted himself into a V.R. simulation; last I checked, normal human beings can't do that. Or how he's able to exercise accurate enough clairvoyance to know that that's a thing he should do, or to whom he should do it, or manufacture a cure for the girl's genetic defects ex nihilo...

Spiner's performance was the highlight of the episode, as it usually is. I'm still trying to figure out how this current character is intended to tie in with Adam Soong's descendants -- the non-Confederation timeline has had Soongs in it -- so where'd they come from if he didn't take over the world and then died with no children. To me, that still only leaves the explanation that he actually doesn't have descendants -- he just changes his given name and appearance once a generation, like Connor MacLeod in the original Highlander film.
 
Maybe he doesn't have kids, just clones of himself, would explain how they all look the same.

I wish more had happened this week.

It's like they watched the bit from tomorrow is yesterday where Kirk was being interogated and decided that two minute scene could be stretched to a full episode.
 
They really are stretching what could have been a taut feature-length film or 2-part miniseries into a 10-episode season...

QueenJurati only managed to travel a few blocks in the ~12 hours since she trashed the bar? The guy had time to fix the window...

Replicated cake shouldn't give you a tummy ache.
 
whisky said:
Maybe he doesn't have kids, just clones of himself, would explain how they all look the same.

I wish more had happened this week.

It's like they watched the bit from tomorrow is yesterday where Kirk was being interogated and decided that two minute scene could be stretched to a full episode.
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Eggs Mayonnaise said:
They really are stretching what could have been a taut feature-length film or 2-part miniseries into a 10-episode season...

QueenJurati only managed to travel a few blocks in the ~12 hours since she trashed the bar? The guy had time to fix the window...

Replicated cake shouldn't give you a tummy ache.
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FBI guy is doing this "off the books" and "nobody knows" he has Picard and Guinan in the basement, yet last week he had a full team of FBI agents with him when he arrested them. I'll always love Patrick Stewart but he's totally phoning it in this season(other than in scenes with de Lancie) and all that stuff just had me checking how long there was left in the episode.

Jurati and the Borg Queen's scenes were good in previous episodes because Annie Wersching and Alison Pill had such great chemistry together. Jurati Queen just running about doing evil Borg stuff on her own is not as interesting. Pill was good when she got to talk at the end at least.

Brent Spiner and John de Lancie did good acting but I still hate this thing where every (male) member of the Soong family is a mad scientist who look identical. Q dying and trying to teach Jean-Luc one last lesson is by far the most interesting idea in the show and should be getting a lot more screentime.

I still haven't got a handle on Raffi's character after almost two whole seasons. I think she's just a bad character? The thing about her emotionally manipulating people felt like it was just made up for this episode, complete with flashback scene to prove it.

"Is this a dream...OR A NIGHTMARE" was a really bad line.
 
CaptainWacky said:
Q dying and trying to teach Jean-Luc one last lesson is by far the most interesting idea in the show and should be getting a lot more screentime.
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If Q is dying, it might be an interesting angle to fill in that the reason he's dying is because he's so damned entwined with Picard, and Picard hasn't got much time left, either, so... Q doesn't want to outlast the love of his life? I mean... ordinarily I'd piss on that as "wokeness", but in their case, it makes perfectly solid narrative sense.

(Notwithstanding, of course, that the Continuum fought a literal civil war as a result of one of their own offing himself, so it seems... weird that they'd be willing to let another of their own die as easily as seems to be happening here.)
 
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