Picard - general discussion [spoilers]

[Crazedwraith]

Q said Picard caused this. I wonder if you he was meaning humanity in general, something he did in episode 1 or whether there's going to be an All Good Things style twist where them timetravelling to stop the confederation causes the Confederation. (Pogo paradox as relativity puts it)

[Formless]

According to Dave Blass, the production designer, the fleet consisted of Sovereigns and Inquirys (like the Zheng He from last season), an "Excelsior II class" called Excelsior (Raffi's ship I guess), a couple Luna class ships (same class as the Titan but she didn't show up) and a couple of ship classes from ST: Online.

I have no idea why they would refer to an "Excelsior II" class of starship, because the ship that appeared in the fleet was clearly an Obena class starship from Lower Decks. Literally the only difference between the two models (other than Lower Decks' art cell shaded art style) is the color of the deflector dish. The two ships share the same oval saucer section inspired by the Soverign, the same nacelles, the same bridge tower. I looked at the Memory Alpha page's claim that the Excelsior II class is just 588 meters long, but that's clearly untrue because the damn thing is longer than the Sovereign class ships that appeared in the same fleet (which are 600 meters long). This is consistent with the Obena class being scaled at 700 meters in Lower Decks. And besides, why the hell would they bother creating a new model anyway when they could simply go over the Lower Decks model and change the textures to match the live action aesthetic? This reeks of one artist trying to steal credit for another artist's design work, all the more insulting when the Obena class is actually named after the art director of Lower Decks!

Sorry, this was getting extremely annoying to keep seeing people say they are different ships when they clearly aren't.

[tezunegari]

I have no idea why they would refer to an "Excelsior II" class of starship, because the ship that appeared in the fleet was clearly an Obena class starship from Lower Decks.

I have to disagree on the Obena/E-II being the same class.

While similar they appear to be distinct enough, at least to me.



LEFT
Obena class:
sovereign style nacelles and deflector dish
Excelsior style saucer
Constitution-Refit straight pylons
Excelsior-Refit "mutton chops" secondary hull

RIGHT
Excelsior-II:
Vesper class nacelles
Excelsior style deflector dish
Sovereign style saucer
Ambassador class angled pylons
Excelsior "clean shave" secondary hull

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Looks pretty damn ugly to me, they should have gone with the Resolute Class if they wanted to base something on the Excelsior design instead of mashing together parts of two different classes and creating something that looks like the unholy offspring of the Excelsior and the Sovereign.

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

Episode 2x3 was directed by Lea Thompson and I had to resist the urges to compare it with Back to the Future. Starting from a character getting killed, getting chased, then time travelling XD

[EnterpriseSovereign]

GHETTO EDIT: Last link didn't work.

[Galvatron]

Why do I get the feeling that this show is going to...

Spoiler

tie Q to QAnon in some way?

[Crazedwraith]

The threads marked spoilers. So I am not using tags. Don't read on if you don't want them.


So I don't think Elnor is going to remain dead? They have a borg queen. Seven raised Neelix from the dead with magic nanoprobes. Picard has seemed oddly hesitant to reference Voyager more than absolutely necessary even with Seven as a member of the cast.

Ds9 though is getting impressively well referenced with them ending up in the Sanctuary camps from Past Tense as expected. I've been enjoying Seven and Raffi's banter what glimpses we get of their relationship. Raffi being sharp and pissed off with everyone is understandable but not very fun to watch, the show seems to be going back to people ripping into Picard frequently. (It's genuinely not his fault he's Q's plaything after all. And they didn't seem to make a conscious decision to sacrifice Elnor for the queen.)

I find what they are going with Seven very interesting. She obviously enjoys her fully human appearance and that every here has a good first impression of her. The scene with the little girl and then her and Raffi charming the security guard were very fun. I wonder where it's going.

Likewise Rios getting dropped from a height, put in a clinic and then get arrested by ICE was a very nice interesting plot line. I liked him and the doc and his interactions with the kid were all fun.

Jurati getting one over the Queen also good. So no complaints here other than not liking Raffi's plotline.

etA: oh and starship watch, the Confed ships at the start looked Nova and Steamrunner esque?

[bilateralrope]

I wonder if Prodigy has something to do with the lack of Voyager references.

As for the DS9 references, there was a bajoran artifact in one of the season 2 trailers. That led to some speculation that Sisko could show up. There was a line referring to a Sisko while they were in the Confederacy. He would make sense as the Watcher they are looking for.

[Crazedwraith]

I wonder if Prodigy has something to do with the lack of Voyager references.

As for the DS9 references, there was a bajoran artifact in one of the season 2 trailers. That led to some speculation that Sisko could show up. There was a line referring to a Sisko while they were in the Confederacy. He would make sense as the Watcher they are looking for.

I'd read that Avery Brooks was very much disinclined towards reprising Sisko but it would make sense either him as a prophet or tying into Past Tense somehow.

Oh something i liked but didn't mention in episode 1: there an "indian" bajoran on Stargazer. I do like how Picard is slightly more inclined to use old species with tng era makeup styles in comparison to say Disco.

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

etA: oh and starship watch, the Confed ships at the start looked Nova and Steamrunner esque?

Yes they are the respective classes. And named after admirals who were kind of the bad type (well Quinn had a brain bug so…)

https://mobile.twitter.com/DaveBlass/st ... 2185248768

[Formless]

I'd read that Avery Brooks was very much disinclined towards reprising Sisko but it would make sense either him as a prophet or tying into Past Tense somehow.

No, according to his fellow cast members (especially the guy who played Jake Sisko), the reason he hasn't gotten any acting work since DS9 is that he's been blacklisted in Hollywood. Apparently he can't get an agent in Hollywood, and studios don't want to offer parts to him. They've not gone into details, but they've said that it has to do with Hollywood politics. It could be something about his views, the way he works with directors, or good old fashioned racism. Uppity black man doesn't want to act "mainstream" enough for white people, releasing a spoken word album all about race issues, etc. We all know the studios are full of troglodytes, I could totally see that being the reason even at Paramount.

[Solauren]

Details on what Cirroc Lofton said and win -

From Wikipedia -
In a December 27, 2020 interview with The 7th Rule Podcast on the YouTube channel Orville Nation, Cirroc Lofton indicated Brooks was not retired as an actor and would return to acting if offered a role, saying he has been blacklisted from Hollywood and is without any agent or agency. This prompted fans to start the hashtag "#WeWantAvery" on Twitter to boost support for the actor in hopes of a resurgence in Hollywood.

[Crazedwraith]

Dang, well that sucks.

[Solauren]

On the other hand, apparently he's been teaching acting as a professor.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - when it comes to art, I don't care about someones personal issues or criminal actions when judging the art itself. And I thought Avery Brooks portrayal of Captain Sisko was amazing.

[blahface]

I had high hopes for this season after episode 2. I was disappointed in episode 3, but still hopeful. Now, I'm just massively disappointed. It appears that the writers haven't seen Time's Arrow although it could be that Guinan didn't recognize Picard until he said his name. Either way, it is really hard for me see this Guinan as Guinan. It isn't just the looks, her mannerisms are just off. She was around when Americans were a lot more racist and NOW she is just so disgusted with humanity that she has to leave? I'm not one of these anti-SJW dipshits, but I feel that the writers desire to do politics is ruining the show. I don't necessarily mind inserting politics here and there, but don't do it at the expense of the story. Make it interesting.

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

My rationalization for Guinan not recognizing Picard is that in this timeline probably the Time's Arrow episode happened extremely different. There's a lot of wild changes to the original timeline as shown in Picard's collections as well as mentioned by Q. Likely the El-Aurian refugees (including Guinan) would've probably ended up getting killed or enslaved after their encounter with the Enterprise-B (or whatever it's called in this timeline).

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

Of course that might beg the question regarding how the bus punk kind of felt his neck and complied when asked to turn down his music. How would the Confederation would deal with the Whale Probe?

[aerius]

Apparently the Picard verse is so shit and lacking in stories that they're already going with the Borg and alternate timelines in season 2. FFS, I could write a better storyline than this shit and I don't even qualify as a hack writer.

There's so many things to explore, like what were the Romulans doing with their Borg reclamation project? Why does Picard have Romalan housekeepers, and what events led to that setup? Or hell, what is the geopolitical situation with the Federation and its relation with other races? And WTF are we gonna do with a planet of android AIs? Are we going to explore & flesh out this universe? Nah, let's do some fucking Borg time travel, with a side helping of Q.

I struggled through season 1 in the hopes that it would get better, and this is the shit we get for season 2?

[Crazedwraith]

I agree that the main plot of the season isn't what I hoped. But it's actually being written and performed pretty well by my reckoning.

-

Episode 4 was pretty strong. They recast Guinan which is probably less distracting and definitely a lot cheaper than CGI-ing a Young Whoopi, the show probably doesn't have Disney miniseries money behind it after all.

Time travel is a bit wibbly wobbly with apparently TVH having happened with the prime crew but Time's Arrow not. I wonder if the divergence accelerates further they go through the timeline. (Tangentially I wondered if the son Sarek was executed in front of was Spock or Sybok, given the unlikelyhood of hybrids in the Confed timeline)

I like all the plots, still Picard's probably least. And as meaningless gripe: Ten Forward on TNG was the literally name of the compartment it was housed in. Literally the most forward bit of Deck 10. Guinan having a bar called that pre-TNG makes no sense. The mention of guardian angels and destiny is also kind of hokey even though they down play it.

Jurati and the Queen, Seven And Raffi and Rios all seemed much stronger to me. Rios' is cool in that they are pulling no punches in criticising Immigration and ICE while not demonising the time period as whole, we see plenty of 'helpers' doing their best to help complete strangers, run food banks etc even though government and law enforcement sucks.

I do like Seven/Raffi, they seem to have very similar forceful personalities, so it's interesting Seven being the voice of reason and level headedness and dealing with people better than Raffi is at the moment. And yet the dynamic flips a bit into the car while Seven is reckless driver and Raffi understands traffic laws better for some reason.

Q's scene was interesting: i wonder what he was trying to accomplish, he seemed to be trying to stop that women doing something but whether that was to start the new timeline or prevent it. I'm still going with the theory that Q genuinely did not kick this off from his comments in the second episode.

[Mange]

And one thing that annoyed the heck out of me in episode 4. They had no energy for the transporter in the previous episode so they used energy from the life-support system, which should've much less energy, to power the transporter. In episode 4, Jurati is freezing so she and Picard walks to Chateau Picard but before that Picard engages the ship's cloaking device! It's been established that cloaking devices uses enormous amounts of energy. Either they have energy or they don't.

And what was the implication at the end with Q? I really liked Kirk Thatcher's cameo. If the shitty writers only had taken note of Kirk's and Spock's discussion following the first encounter.

[Crazedwraith]

And one thing that annoyed the heck out of me in episode 4. They had no energy for the transporter in the previous episode so they used energy from the life-support system, which should've much less energy, to power the transporter. In episode 4, Jurati is freezing so she and Picard walks to Chateau Picard but before that Picard engages the ship's cloaking device! It's been established that cloaking devices uses enormous amounts of energy. Either they have energy or they don't.

From the dialogue I think they had restored power but the systems were going up and down for self-repair as a separate issue from the lack of power. That the teleporter was properly repaired recalibrated was why Picard was beamed exactly where he need to go rather than scattered like the others.

[Galvatron]

I had high hopes for this season after episode 2. I was disappointed in episode 3, but still hopeful. Now, I'm just massively disappointed. It appears that the writers haven't seen Time's Arrow although it could be that Guinan didn't recognize Picard until he said his name.

It's altogether possible that Data was never created in this timeline. If that's the case, the Enterprise and Picard may never have had that Mark Twain episode.

[Crazedwraith]

FFS do we really need another Brent Spiner played Soong? OtoH no explicit references to the Eugenics War but by ENT Continuity the Soong family were geneticists at this point.

[bilateralrope]

FFS do we really need another Brent Spiner played Soong? OtoH no explicit references to the Eugenics War but by ENT Continuity the Soong family were geneticists at this point.

Yeah, they could have easily used characters with another name and/or actor.

Tallinn/Laris might have an interesting payoff from using the same actor for both. But I have a lot of doubts about the Soong family.

Does Brent Spiner have some blackmail material on the production team ?