Just wanted to pop in and say after 3 episodes in of Picard I am happy to be watching Patrick Stewart back on TV reprising his old role despite the lack of the prior cast this is so much better than Star Trek Discovery; and I am very much enjoying it - diverse female alien robot women and all hah!
Not watching Discovery is better than watching Discovery. Game of Thrones was one I was going to watch, but, I was going to take my time and wait for it to end, so I could binge watch the whole thing in the shortest period of time as possible. After the reaction here and everywhere else, AND with relatives of mine that had been passing on comments over the years about how awesome it is...man, so glad I never dove in. Discovery, in contrast, was so utterly terrible in its writing and Kelvinism-treachery that I could not stay silent whilst, the very same people on these hallowed pages gushed over it with resubstanciationates of collecularitesicisms that I got more warnings from mods than is, was and should be; necessary. I wanted Discovery to be good. I wanted this to be good. It's not the end of Star Trek, but you can see it from here. Doohan, gone. Kelly, gone. Nimoy, gone. Barrett, gone. Khambatta, gone. Butrick, gone. Montalban, gone. Roddenberry, gone.
Amazing, this is exactly what I am talking about, is this odd in ability for so called 'fans' to look at the thing they like and admit that sometimes it's not quite as good as they thought it was. I am a huge fan of TNG, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that the show had a few plot lines that were exactly as I described 'stupid and convoluted' and 'The Battle' is exactly that. It doesn't work as a plot line to disgrace or kill Picard and it is needlessly convoluted and stupid. It would require his crew to be so incompetent in their task as to some how miss the falsified log from the Stargazer, miss the glowing muguffin in amongst their former Captains personal effects, you know the muguffin that looks nothing like any tech they have and is hidden in amongst the stuff that has just come from a ship freely handed over to them with no strings attached, freely handed over by someone from the same race that 3 episodes earlier had raided a Federation outpost to steal a power convertor but an entire Starship, nah you can have that back free of charge and the entire crux of the premise leans on the crew of the Enterprise hanging around the Stargazer until the plan can be enacted and then just opening fire on the Stargazer with the intention of destroying her, they would have to destroy her it's the only way to hide evidence of it all being a stupidly convoluted set up. Of course assuming that the flagship of the fleet doesn't get called away to do something far more important than tow some old scrap back. Then you have the back story. The Stargazer so damaged the crew had to jump ship, float around waiting for Starfleet to rescue them and then Picard gets court marshalled for jumping ship. All fine and dandy if the ship was so damaged it ended up breaking up or if the ship was utterly lost but that's not the case. Picard knew where the ship was when he order evacuation, did Starfleet just not bother going to look for her, just left her floating around in deep space for the best part of a decade? They'll punish her commander for losing her but did nothing to recover her, confirm exactly what happened? Then what, the Ferengi just find her, this ship so badly damaged that the crew had to abandon her, did they fix her? They must have because when she's shown in episode she has life support, weapons, a degree of power and the ability to jump to warp, oh and the ability to do all this with a single person controlling the ship, did Bok do this? well no because he says that all his 'life savings' were spent on acquiring the muggufins. Did the Ferengi get the ship fix this ship from an alien race they have had limited to no contact with and then just handed it over to a subordinate to go off and enact a personal revenge plan with, seems more likely they would strip the thing for any and all tech, knowledge and wealth
After four episodes, the only real gripe I have is that Picard gave up fighting to help the Romulans and this seems totally out of character. It would have been better if he had been prevented by Starfleet from helping them even privately. Instead it looks like he just slinked off into the night after he lost the battle with Starfleet. And by the way, since when does Starfleet even get a say in any of this? I thought they took their orders from the UFP. Shouldn't he be appealing to them?
That is mostly true, but serves to highlight the very same problem/conundrum that Discovery had: IF a new sci-fi show had the exact same story, but was nothing to do with the Star Trek universe; would it be any good? Y'see people, this is the overriding point of contention - if all they were going to do (Discovery and Picard) is write a generic sci-fi plot, that has the emotional depth of dregs of backwash left-over in a can of Irn-Bru...they why did they use the Star Trek fictional universe to do it? I'm sure, in fact I know, there are many things in popular culture that no matter what drugs you inject into me, I will not enjoy but that does not make it bad/poor/sucky, it is just my own aesthetically lack of appreciation. Some people like rock and roll, some people like drum N bass. Fine. Just because YOU do not like Star Trek and YOU think it lacks...something, does not mean it is perfectly okay to go ahead and take it apart to recombobulate it into something that YOU want to watch. So, back to the big "IF", because IF it is the case that it would not be any good, then why is it okay to trash Trek, and expect the sheer awesomeness of Trek to carry the weight of bad writing to pull it over the line? If you want to make a sci-fi show CBS, just write a new one, make it a good one and who knows, if you do a good job, you might produce something that makes a Billion dollars...anything is possible, but not if you keep doing stuff like this. It's an American institution, Star Trek. The original Star Trek NCC1701 Enterprise is in a museum next to The Kitty Hawk, and The Spirit of St.Louis FFS. Trashing this, is like trashing great American Heroes and pioneers. Kinda, Sorta. Bit of a reach, but my heart is in the right place. Sue me for wanting to protect something Americans should be proud of... Being restored for exhibit. Yes, it's bigger than you thought it was. One day, I will touch it. One day.
Seems not, the last reference to UFP and SF operational structure is SF policy is the sole concern of SF command only answering to either the UFP President or UFP council. I would assume that if SF Command made the decision and it has stuck then it had the approval of the UFP council. Then again the way the UFP and SF is shown in the various shows is two organizations that kind of have ties to each other but for the most part operate within their own confines only having crossover references when the plot requires it. If you really look in to the whole UFP and SF structure it becomes very odd. SF is very much an Earth based force. It was set up prior to the formation of the UFP and was made up of three different subsets which eventually all got rolled in to one with the formation of SF. Here's the thing why is SF still wholly Earth based? why are the ship designs Earth based, why are the main facilities all based on Earth, why are the ship yards all based around the Sol system? If SF is a wing of the UFP then surely the likes of Vulcans and Andorians would have a significant influence on the design and set up of SF At the time of the UFPs formation the two races obviously had their own independent equivalents of SF; including their own ship designs, facilities and construction yards, all of which were vastly superior to whatever Earth and SF was bringing to the table at the time, yet for some reason all of these just disappeared, did they just give it all up and move the lot over to those less develop Earthers? They can build the ships and we'll give them some tech and or people but that's it? All evidence would suggest so given that the later battles in DS9 seem to show no other vessels taking part other than SF ones. If the UFP is at war then wouldn't you call everything you have to arms not just the SF vessels? Any it's all a bit odd if you think about it to hard.
It's like an abusive relationship, or living next to an airport, after a while you just kinda switch off and go to your happy place. My happy place involves a shovel, rope and a shallow grave...whilst I hum the theme tune of Blakes Seven: Spoiler Can anyone think of a better theme tune to get someone to dig their own grave to?
You know what I always thought Star Trek lacked? Hot teen inter-species sex. No, wait, it's -- ...that's what she said! (badum-cha)
Well, I sat through this thing and what can I say except mixed feelings at best. I enjoyed some of the fan service of seeing old faces make a return, albeit brief ones and... that's about it. There were times I was entertained sure but just entertained, by which I mean I wasn't completely bored to a point that I would switch it off. The thing that destroyed it though was the utterly hopeless script that felt like it was making things up as it went along. Providing solutions to the characters predicaments almost literally out of thin air at times. Events and action that sort of just happened without much if any build up, thus removing any tension from them and worst of all, a bloated cast of characters, some of which were at times interesting but had little to do in the end so it felt like the writers had to force things into the script for them to do. Speaking of the characters: - Sir Pat Stew: You can tell that the man is just tired and there wasn't a whole lot of energy in his performance. Almost as if he was drugged up out of his skull with anti-depressants. Not gonna lie though, it was great to see him back in the role. - Rafi: I think her character was probably one of the better realised ones in that she had her flaws and personal issues whether one cares for them or not but ultimately she just exists in the show and that's about it. Didn't mind the actress either but that whole "JL" thing annoyed me probably more than it should have. - Poor Man's Han Solo Captain person ( because I'm too lazy to google the characters name that I can't remember ): I liked the guy and he had a nice rogue'ish vibe to him without veering too much to the Han Solo territory. They should have kept his personal issues to a minimum though as I enjoyed the character more when it was more mysterious. Once again though, this characters only task appeared to be to just fill the captains seat, wave about a bit as if steering the ship and show us how many different English accents he could pull off in the form of the holo's of the ship. - Android Girl: Its always a ballsy move to give a relative newcomer a central role in a big series. She handled it well enough I suppose and that's about it which is fine as this is the character ( and actress ) with probably the most potential for development but we'll see how that goes. - Samurai Boy: I was initially looking forward to see how this guy and Picard would work together with Picard being a the mentor type and Samurai Boy his body guard of sorts but then they ruined that by dumping the kid on the Borg cube to sort of do his own thing and just like that we had another character who had little to do from there on. - Science girl: This character served no real purpose and the actress was annoying about 85% of the time. What annoyed me even more was that she killed off a guy that was meant to be important to the plot only to just sort of come out of it all "soz guys, I done bad but I'm really sorry about it ok? all forgiven ? cool!". Thats some of my issues listed, its always tough to judge a 1st season of a new show as its often just introducing the characters. Problem now is that as the writing of season 1 was so lazy, they'll have to play catch up and try to remedy it with season 2 but I'm not hopeful that'll happen. In the end I guess the show boldly went where no one really wanted it to go.
I personally would have loved more back story, character development. eg. Picard what happened, how did he end up in France, who were the 2 romulans serving him. We didn't see the attack on mars, or raffi serving with picard. Rios serving with his captain, killing the android then shooting himself. Elnor seeing how he trained and succeeded the trials to become a qalankhai. Maddox research in creating the androids and relationship with Dr. Agnes. Riker and his family were OK, same as with soji , cant reveal too much of her since it has to stay a mystery. Seven of Nine was awesome though, She still looks hot and looks brutal when armed in both hands. I loved the romulans, Narissa was sexy and brutal. Narek should have been as well i feel. he was too much of a pretty boy. There was actually one moment (which i forgot where BTW) where the violence was actually gross , i had hoped for more of this. political correctness is something that belongs in the previous century IMHO. All in all it was entertaining , but it did kind of feel cut short due to the above mentioned points. and the last episode was really bad. id rate that 4/10 alone. all in all id rate the whole series 6.5/10
I liked the show, the cast was brilliant, and their performance excellent. Visual effects, cinematography, music all great. The whole idea of the season was to put together a cast of misfits for Starfleet which in itself sounds quite interesting. Picard was a bit in the same spot at Luke Skywalker by the end of the original trilogy: a character of autority, with a lot of expectation behind him, 'with a lot of power'. Unless you're planning to start a serie by describing the downfall - depress everyone - and do only one season in the end, you have to put those charaters in a more dramatic place aka Spoiler dying, isolated, discredited by Starfleet . The show is heavier on dialogue than what we're used to in Star Trek overall - does'nt bother me on the contrary: it's a change, an originality. Some weak point for me was the useless Ninja Boy which ended up not being worth the time invested in it, and the ' a bit too much' fan service. Otherwise the show is solid and i would recommend it.
Acting: 7 out of 10, Some of it was a bit rough, but the script was partly to blame for that. Story: 5 out of 10. I liked about half of the ideas, and the others were as people have already pointed out. Writing: 4 out of 10. Some of it seemed true to form for the old characters, and some of it seemed clumsy and written by someone who wasn't a big Star Trek fan. Much of it seemed influenced by TV execs trying to grab a certain age group or something. In the last episode they did the ol' confusing deflectors with shields trick. I mean who understands any of this sci-fi hooey anyhow, right? Fans probably wouldn't even notice! I was also disturbed by the large number of "f7cks" in the script which doesn't usually bother me but there were in fact so many in every episode, I couldn't help but become annoyed and a little offended. This is Star Trek, after all. Nostalgia: 8 out of 10. I hope they cram more old characters in in the next season. Overall Entertainment Value: 6 out of 10 -- I probably wouldn't watch it over again, but I'm happy I got to see it. It still beats the heck out of the reboot movies.
