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Star Trek: Picard

I liked it, but it feels more like we are watching the actors not the characters, Picard was never so huggy.
 
whisky said:
I liked it, but it feels more like we are watching the actors not the characters, Picard was never so huggy.
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Its 20 years after Next Generation. And he's trying to reclaim the bits of his humanity that the Borg stole from him. He never joined his crew in poker either until that last episode of Next Generation.
 
I've been quiet for the last couple of weeks because whilst I am enjoying the show in parts I've probably had more negative things to say than positive ones... but fuck it, I feel like a mini-rant.

Killing off important characters for weak shock value isn't clever or deep.

Icheb getting offed in gratuitous fashion probably had something to do with Manu Intiraymi being a twat in real life but it still didn't feel right to see the character just butchered like that after everything Icheb went through to get to the Alpha Quadrant. Felt cheap.

Killing off Hugh though was fully unearned. What does his death serve? To remind us that the most obviously evil character is evil? Utterly pointless. This show seems to go out of its way to toss aside good characters in favour of inferior ones.

Does anyone honestly want Raffi and her heavy-handed "junkie" storyline over Hugh? Would you rather emotionally unstable weepy Jurati or Zhaban and Laris?

I think heavy-handed and unearned are two things that the show has fallen victim to a number of times, tbh.

I thought to have an old Romulan Bird of Prey show up was an intriguing scenario but it also ended up being just meaningless. We get some exposition about some random warlord owning it and a short battle to introduce Seven and that's it. We never even get to see them. In favour of what? 30 minutes of Picard not acting ANYTHING like Picard at all?

Despite the silliness of getting Elnor into the show I did actually like his personality and how he interacts with everyone else. He'll probably die next!

Picard, Hugh, Elnor, Rios, Zhaban, Laris and Seven as the main crew would be a way better show.

I have to agree with Picard not feeling like Picard at this point as well. I'm totally fine with him not being the exact same as the TNG days and having softened around the edges a bit but it's an actual struggle to find anything from the established character in this show. It's just not Picard for me and whilst I got a big kick out of seeing Seven back it didn't feel anything like her character either.

So yeah, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been quite disappointed in parts so far but I don't HATE it. I just wish it was better. TNG is one of the most important shows ever to me so maybe I'm being overly precious about staying true to the characters but it does bother me.

I did really enjoy seeing Marina and Jonathan back and I thought Riker actually did feel like Riker so that was positive and shows that it is possible!

As far as plot goes I'm pretty confident in the theory that Soji is the Borg Queen in one potential future time-line and that given some temporal shenanigans former borg like Rhamda that used to be connected to the collective would have some knowledge of this. The Romulans being the original progenitors of the Borg seems to still be firmly on the table as well.

Eh... I'm still fully invested in watching where they take the rest of the show but the writing has a lot of room for improvement.
 
Mentalist said:
Killing off important characters for weak shock value isn't clever or deep.
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That's my #1 rant too. Don't get us all pumped up with returning characters only to fucking kill them off a minute later to piss us off. Jonathan Del Arco should have been made a regular, his presence and his take on latter-day Hugh was fantastic.

BUT, I will say I'm willing to cast a wider net on accepting how Picard is being portrayed now. I totally accept the extra hugginess with former crewmates, because he's not only been dealing with reclaiming his humanity, he's been dealing with the loss of his real family (talk about the ultimate gratuitous kill-off in GEN). The Enterprise crew are his only family left, and they all seem to be retired, so they all feel more comfortable displaying the affection they held back while in their uniforms. Picard never married (that we know of yet), and his sister-in-law doesn't seem to live on the family estate anymore. He's a lonely old man who cut himself off from an ungrateful Starfleet. I think he would gush over seeing any familiar faces at this point.

If they kill Seven, I'm done.
 
I'm not against him being emotional seeing the old crew, a lot of time had passed and major events have happened to Picard, he's not going to be the same. That's fine. But it just seems like a different character altogether at times. The whole handling of the Romulans on Elnor's planet felt really off to me.

A lot of it I can handwave away because I'll happily watch Patrick Stewart reading the phonebook but the further we get into the show the more glaring it's becoming.

As for killing off Hugh. I'm not close to OK with it. Jonathan Del Arco has been one of the best things about the show and his portrayal was nailed on. The character is just inherently compelling and he would have been perfect to become a regular on the show. What a completely wasted opportunity. It wasn't even a death that moved the plot or established a big bad. We knew Narissa was an irredeemable baddie before this. She's just killed a bunch of ex-borg in front of Hugh only for him to escape to get... killed? It's bad writing and it just wrote off one of the best assets of the show.

Sometimes you kill off a big character if it's pivotal to move the story but this didn't do any of that.
 
They are in such a killing frenzy they even had to kill Rikers son, can't anyone have any happiness in this show?
 
But... but it's Dark & Gritty(tm)!

On a more serious note, maybe that's why it only faintly and only occasionally feels like Star Trek. There's almost no optimism for a better future in it.
 
Minor nitpicky question: WTF happened to the Romulans' foreheads? They went from "can't tell them apart from Vulcans" in TOS to "foreheads with ridges that match the eyebrows" in TNG/DS9/VOY, back to "can't tell them apart from Vulcans" in PIC.

Were the forehead ridges some kind of cosmetic affectation, like nose rings?
 
whisky said:
They are in such a killing frenzy they even had to kill Rikers son, can't anyone have any happiness in this show?
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The Rikers seemed relatively happy and accepting of their son's death. Shit happens to everyone (having him die of a computer virus or something was pretty weird though.)
 
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A slightly more major nitpicky observation: Picard mindfucking Soji was totally out of character. Unless they're planning to tie behavior like that into the cognitive condition they mentioned in the pilot, that was actually amazingly bizarre in its dickishness for him.
 
The Highwayman said:
Minor nitpicky question: WTF happened to the Romulans' foreheads? They went from "can't tell them apart from Vulcans" in TOS to "foreheads with ridges that match the eyebrows" in TNG/DS9/VOY, back to "can't tell them apart from Vulcans" in PIC.

Were the forehead ridges some kind of cosmetic affectation, like nose rings?
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Irish housekeeper mentioned the ridge romulan come from the North, lots of planets have a North.
 
Mentalist said:
Icheb getting offed in gratuitous fashion probably had something to do with Manu Intiraymi being a twat in real life but it still didn't feel right to see the character just butchered like that after everything Icheb went through to get to the Alpha Quadrant. Felt cheap.
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I have to agree with Picard not feeling like Picard at this point as well. I'm totally fine with him not being the exact same as the TNG days and having softened around the edges a bit but it's an actual struggle to find anything from the established character in this show. It's just not Picard for me and whilst I got a big kick out of seeing Seven back it didn't feel anything like her character either.
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I'm pretty sure the idea is that the brain condition has changed him. They keep having characters mention it so I think it's definitely what they intend. The problem is I'm wondering what the endgame for all this is. At the start I assumed Picard would be out of sorts for a while since it's been twenty year but eventually he'd get his shit together and kind of become something close to the old Picard. He'd have some big moment where he made a speech that made everyone look at him and go "okay, I see why that guy is so popuar!" But since they've made such a point of him having a terminal brain condition that's eating away his brain or whatever, logically he can only get worse as the show goes on and we'll never get that big Picard moment I dreamed of. We'll never get something like him turnin the tables on Gul Madred from 'Chain of Command' because his brain is too far gone for him to be capable of that. So that could be a problem! I mean they could have Q show up and heal his brain but that would be pretty cheap so they shouldn't really do that.
 
[Googles what an "Icheb" is]
Meh.

Truth be told, if they announced they were going to horribly torture to death everything related to ST:VOY, I'd almost be tempted to get a Netflix subscription.
 
Volpone said:
[Googles what an "Icheb" is]
Meh.

Truth be told, if they announced they were going to horribly torture to death everything related to ST:VOY, I'd almost be tempted to get a Netflix subscription.
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I'd be fine with that. All of them except Seven, gotta leave her alone because... well, because.

The Highwayman said:
Yep, that part was good. Hugh ugly-crying over some drones seemed stripped of needed context and therefore resonance, though.
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Pretty much everything that's been going on with the Artifact has been the low point of the series. Not gonna complain too much because it's still 1000x better than the turd that is Discovery.

Here's a caveat, though. If the Big Secret somehow winds up tying in with that stupidly convoluted Control storyline from Discovery s2 I'm probably going to get angry enough to set my own house on fire.
 
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