Amph "Engage!" - Star Trek: Picard Discussion Thread [Paramount+/CraveTV]

was skimming through Michael Chabon's instagram q&as and best answer I've seen from him is that with Picard's new golem body he doesn't have that artificial heart (well he's all artificial but why quibble?) so they've taken Picard's old artificial heart and wrapped it in synth and he brought it back to Earth to be a chew toy for Number One.

 

"wrapped in synth"

Oh, so that's what happened to Sutra

 

She's actually quite good, IMO. Had no idea that did Hamilton either, that's pretty impressive.

And I did notice on my first viewing that a few of the ships had what seemed to be a large hanger on the front, while others did'nt.

 

I liked the show better when it was called Battlestar Galactica.

 

I liked Voyager better when it was called Battlestar Galactica

 

And SG-1. And also Universe*.

Actually I'm resonably sure he, Hewlett, Tapping, Shanks and RDA are the only peaple to be on all three Stargate shows.

*or, as me and my freinds called it, BattleGate Voyager

 

Unsurprisingly, I generally agree with Vivec here... the whole point of things like "Conspiracy," or The Undiscovered Country, or Insurrection or most of Deep Space Nine was isolated incidents of Starfleet and/or the Federation attempted to be corrupted from within, or trying not to lose their identity, but ultimately still rubber-banding back to Starfleet and the Federation at the end.

Even dealing with the Klingons in TOS (despite the DISCO timeline not making sense) and treating with a race that almost wiped out the Federation a short period earlier, or helping Cardassia in Deep Space Nine, or forgetting that the Romulans not only were allies in the Dominion War, or with Spock actively working on negotiations and reunifications, or offering help during the Shinzon-crisis... what in the hell was this?

And what in the hell was with synths, given even the pre-Data androids ("What Do Little Girls Dream Of," and the follow-up novel Double, Double) were like Dahj, took over starships and murdered crews, and knew they were androids... I mean, seriously? We know they had to intentionally make them non-sentient, vis a vis the nanites in "Evolution" and Exocomps in "The Quality of Life" so it was like creation of slave labor... the one thing I appreciated in Episode 2 was the explicit showing that it didn't matter if you were nice to them or not, if the programming hack said "kill all humans" it did so efficiently and brutally.

They had that in Deep Space Nine, which we saw in wherever Joseph Sisko's restaurant was located, I believe.

My original horrible thought was that the sunglasses were because these people (as @Darth Guy reminds) love DISCO's first season so much and she was a Mirror Universe expat... fortunately, just a hidden conspiracy in the middle of Starfleet instead of a hidden conspiracy from the Mirror Universe in the middle of Starfleet (like DISCO S1)...

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So having finished, just some thoughts...

Things I loved:

• Patrick Stewart as Picard. This doesn't mitigate the complaints I have about the fundamental lack of understanding of Starfleet, etc. amongst the creators -- but watching PStew is always wonderful.
• How quickly they dropped the lingering B4 and Seven/Chakotay plotlines that were terrible to begin with. And then dropped the Monty Python 16-ton weight on them.
• Seeing so many of my favorite character actors (Michelle Hurd, Santiago Cabrera, Allison Pill, Jeri Ryan) in one place.
• Like Discovery (very end S1/most of S2) -- they got there in the end, with the utopian, optimistic values of the Federation somewhat finally being restored.
• Seven/Raffi -- we were watching and we were super-glad that Raffi/Rios were just a supportive set of old friends where there was no sexual tension, but were shipping Girardi/Rios, and then maybe Seven/Rios, then then Seven/Raffi happened and we were here for it...
• The deep-cut "Tapestry" reference in regard to Rios' former-Captain.

Things I did not love:

• So, so many things... but here are the worst offenders.
• That's not how Vulcan mind-melds work. An android can't do it, you know why? Because it's telepathic! Data can learn a Vulcan nerve pinch, sure -- but an android with no telepathic abilities cannot learn to mind-meld.
• The whole thing with synths, being banned, etc. You intentionally made them non-sentient, something went wrong -- so you not only ban synths (dumb), you deactivate B-4 (a sentient android, having nothing to do with synths -- really dumb), and you eliminate any positronic-matrix research, even if they're not put into synths or androids thus a) stopping research and b) eliminating apparently a fairly easy cure for a set of degenerative diseases (super dumb). Let alone, y'know, the slave labor. More on this later.
• As Guy has noted -- why in the hell do the Romulans need their own version of Section 31? Romulans are a culture of Section 31 -- secrets within secrets. But having a secret society that developed an internal secret police as a cover story to hide their raison d'etre as synthetic lifeform killers is... beyond weird.
• Apparently, Professor Soong had an hitherto unknown wife, and therefore son. As opposed to Juliana Tainer who we know was his wife, and we know they had no children -- you'd think this might be something she would mention, let alone whatever the F Altan was doing while Data was off serving Starfleet and they kept Lore in disassembly.
• Starfleet. Basically all of it, until the end. I do appreciate that the C-in-C ultimately does the right thing -- but none of this should be her call. Almost the exact scenario happened decades ago with the Klingons, and -- for some reason -- the Klingons (who were worse enemies for the Federation) got a brokered peace deal (even while dealing with the same Romulan/Vulcan/Federation conspiracy that affected the Romulan evacuation here) that was initiated by the Federation Council. Starfleet was brought in after Spock was tasked by his father (a member of the Council) to open a dialogue. FFS, the Romulans had more recently been allies than the Klingons were, were still needed if the Dominion ever came back, and had just dealt with a coup attempt in recent memory where the Romulan fleet commanders sided with the Enterprise over their new Emperor...

So, a bit more on the synths portion... I very much appreciated the visit to the past, in that this was a similar scenario to The Motion Picture to "The Changling" -- in that we have a "they are machines, but they are like children -- treat them like such." It's a good call-back. But we've already had so, so many androids and machines that looked and acted human ("What Do Little Girls Dream Of," "Inheritance") and AI that have been terrible (they still ran AI degrees, consortiums, learning courses, etc. after DISCO S2)... that the whole plotline really seemed to be nonsensical.

Having said all that, I enjoyed it. And Discovery S2 was the most radical course-correction for a horrible misstep of a first season I've ever seen, so I'm very optimistic for PIcard S2. I appreciated the "these are all broken people finding each other" portion of the crew storyline, just not how they had to tear (almost literally) everything else down in order to make them broken. So now that they're theoretically all together and with a common sense of family, I am interested to see what happens in S2...

EDIT: Also, I forgot: Kestra remains the best new character.

 

Yes, generally. I think it's the same issue @Lord Vivec had as well -- which is that any time this happened in the past (and, let's be honest, bad actors amongst the Admiralty is a TV Trope for a reason), it was treated as individual rot rather than the organization as a whole being rotten from the core.

In Picard it defiitely seems like not only Starfleet -- but the Federation as a whole -- was seemingly totally uncommitted to the stated goals and ideals of the Federation.

It's not things like Raffi living at Vazquez Rocks (which... hilarious), because I can see that even in a post-scarcity utopia... but it's things like being anti-science, anti-IDIC, anti-refugee, etc.

 

Starfleet, as a whole, apparently at the directive of the Federation Council, decided to abandon an ancient, spacefaring species to potential genocide -- yeah, I can absolutely make that call.

 

Considering that in TNG the Prime Directive apparently requires Starfleet to abandon a species to genocide, if it's pre-warp, and fails to send out any messages asking for help - it kind of makes sense that, under certain very specific circumstances, Starfleet officers be prepared to commit "genocide by neglect".

 

As a viewer that has always found the Prime Directive both illogical and immoral, but yet loved Prime Directive episodes for how interesting they are , I have to agree that the Prime Directive could have been used to justify all of the Federation's conduct in Picard. In fact, I wish that justification was used in the show explicitly.

 

Yes... but this wasn't that. This was Klingons and Praxus, redux...

 

And the Klingon treaty needed a Spock to push it through. It appears that there just wasn't enough political goodwill toward the Romulans, to overcome the fact that a bunch of Federation systems were absolutely against helping them.

 

Right, and that's a) the Federation Council (which Spock's father was a member of) which made that call, and b) Starfleet didn't ignore it (as the exploration/scientific/humanitarian relief arm of the Federation)... so, yes, I absolutely say Starfleet and the Federation are rotten.

 

A bunch of Federation systems were also probably against them helping the Cardassians but that's never been how the Federation makes decisions when it comes to life of death of another spacefaring country. It's this inconsistency without good reasoning that @dp4m and I have issues with.

 

And, of note, it was way sooner after the Federation/Cardassian war that the Federation gave assistance while still trying to reintegrate the Klingons who were reverting back to TOS Klingons...

 

To be fair, the Federation did commit a huge force to aiding Romulus. But when that force was blown up by "rogue synths" (actually the Zhat Vash) they gave up on helping the Romulans further.

 

They did not willingly give up on helping the Romulans after losing the evacuation fleet. They were forced to abandon the evacuation plan because following through with it would have permanently fractured the Federation. Big distinction.

 

The claim is that if this were true, then the Federation must be corrupt to be so fracturable. (And that Starfleet must be corrupt to place The Federation's Unity over Romulan Lives).

 

The Federation had a pretty strict set of guidelines a world had to satisfy for entry to the Federation. It seems like worlds threatening to leave if the Federation helps save the Romulans from mass death-by-natural-disaster would be the kind of worlds the Federation of old wouldn't even want.

 

... how? It's a Federation, with a voting Federation council. If they didn't have the votes, fine -- but it sounded like only a few members of many, many members didn't want this. Basically it sounded like they didn't put it up for a full vote and/or were giving in to the tyranny of the minority...