Star Trek: Picard Catch-All [Spoilers]

Variety interview with Patrick Stewart.

“The Next Generation” presented a humanist future in which issues like poverty, race and class have long been sorted out, and conflicts are more often resolved through negotiation and problem-solving than at the point of a phaser pistol.

Stewart had no desire to go there again.

“I think what we’re trying to say is important,” he says. “The world of ‘Next Generation’ doesn’t exist anymore. It’s different. Nothing is really safe. Nothing is really secure.”

“In a way, the world of ‘Next Generation’ had been too perfect and too protected,” he says. “It was the Enterprise. It was a safe world of respect and communication and care and, sometimes, fun.” In “Picard,” the Federation — a union of planets bonded by shared democratic values — has taken an isolationist turn. The new show, Stewart says, “was me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump and feeling, ‘Why hasn’t the Federation changed? Why hasn’t Starfleet changed?’ Maybe they’re not as reliable and trustworthy as we all thought.”

This is probably going to come as a disappointment to people who were hoping for something optimistic.

As long as it follows from a logical place of DS9, Section 31, and the bits of Romulus exploding we got from ST09... maybe?

TNG almost never showed that type of world anyway. There were still corrupt people, Earth was maybe the only place in the Fed that had no scarcity, etc etc.

I'm not hugely precious about Trek, but I was not very pleased with all the phaser play in the teaser I saw.

Tagging in for discussion when this starts. I just got cold chills re-watching the trailer.

As a big Star Trek fan who loved the optimistic future of TNG, I don't have a problem with Stewart's statements. After all, it's easy to be a saint in paradise. Deep Space Nine was darker and took a more realistic look at the Federation while still staying optimistic. The new Picard show could do that too.

On the other hand, Patrick Stewart also thought dune buggies were a good idea...

Renewed already for Season 2. Plus, two more live action shows in the works. That number's on top of Michelle Yeoh's Section 31 spin-off from Discovery. I find it funny I first learned about all this on Twitter from Joonas Suotamo, aka Chewbacca.

Ok...

If one of those isn't a Pike spinoff I'll be shocked.

Djinn wrote:

If one of those isn't a Pike spinoff I'll be shocked.

I like the concept, but won't the constant beeping get annoying?

Apparently, I didn't need to worry...

Alan Sepinwall wrote:

"Stewart returning to the role would be reason enough to watch, but this is an actual show, rather than a greatest hits collection. By the time this older Picard actually says “Engage” in a scene, it is not in any way pandering, but something Star Trek: Picard and its great star have entirely earned. And it’s a joy to behold."

Some years ago, I saw B.B. King-- for those who don't know, quite possibly the greatest blues musician who ever lived-- in concert. He was in his eighties, diabetic and arthritic. Two stagehands walked him on stage, sat him down in his chair, and put his guitar in his lap, and I remember feeling trepidation. I didn't want my memories of this man's beautiful music, all of which came from recordings from decades ago, to be replaced by something... lesser.

Then he started to play, and it was beautiful. This man had spent his entire life perfecting his craft, and it was every bit as amazing now as it was on the recordings that I listened to, only now I was privileged to see it happen first-hand, in real time. He didn't have the stamina of a young man in his prime any more. He took long breaks in between songs to rest his hands, and it was a short set. But when he played, it was beautiful.

That's how I felt when Patrick Stewart delivered his first Captain Picard speech in the first episode of Star Trek Picard.

This series will probably not be much like that concert otherwise. During his breaks between songs, B.B. King would tell stories from his youth, growing up in the South during the Bad Old Days of racism, or from his long life traveling the country and making music. He was nearly as good a storyteller as he was a musician, and his stories were delightful.

The breaks between Captain Picard speeches, if the first episode is any indication, will be filled with the adventures of Ersatz River Tam, pretentious and thematically empty dream sequences, long and self-indulgent pan-and-zoom sequences, and the writing of the scare-quotes "talents" that brought us such scare-quotes "masterpieces" as Batman & Robin and The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

But I'll probably keep watching, because it's only ten episodes, and in each episode, there's a chance I'll get to hear Patrick Stewart deliver another beautiful Captain Picard speech.

Liked the first episode. There were a few this old man should be dead moments but whatever I still dug it.

Note there is a tie in to the last Discovery Short.

I watched it and liked it. I was worried they were going to overdo it on the nostalgia, but that was just for the ads. It looks like it's going to get spread out through the season, which is probably a good thing.

It made relevant connections to TNG episodes and Trek movies, and pulled them together into a new plot generator.

Picard can still give a Picard speech so well that you won't even know that you've just been hit by a Picard speech until it's over.

Spoiler:

When the image of Picard was superimposed over Dahj, I couldn't help thinking "Professor X"!

I really dug it. I’m also glad it didn’t just lean into nostalgia but is actually trying to tell a pretty compelling story.

I’m really into where they’re going with the story, at least based on this episode. I think I want to refresh my memory on some TNG stuff, but I’m itching for next week's episode already.

Man, that ending.

BRUCE MADDOX!

TOS ROMULAN MUSIC!

Rat Boy wrote:

BRUCE MADDOX!

TOS ROMULAN MUSIC!

Hes the arsehole who tried to have Data declared a non person so he could be disassembled and studied right?

Yes, and apparently Data sent him more than a letter on how his day went.

Half the time, Data's supposed lack of emotions feels like a bit of an informed attribute; he doesn't display them openly in the way a human would, and he might explain them using robo-speak, as when he defines friendship as his "mental pathways anticipating certain input patterns," but his actions are still motivated by things that appear as close to what we'd consider emotions as makes no difference.

His relationship with Maddox is a low-key but rather brilliant exception to that. None of the human (or human-with-weird-forehead) characters, no matter how enlightened we all supposedly are in the future, could possibly maintain a professional relationship with someone who had tried to have them legally declared property. Even Spock would have to raise an eyebrow and get in a suitably cutting dig to establish dominance.

But Data has no ego and is utterly incapable of bearing grudges. When his legal rights are threatened he defends them, but when the threat has passed, he transitions eerily smoothly back to, "Hey man, you're doing some neat science over there, can we get back to that?"

I love that about him. It's one of the few examples of an alien character acting actually, truly alien. It's attractive: wouldn't it be nice if we could all move past an insult like that while really, truly bearing no hard feelings? But it's also repellent: surely "hard feelings" must fulfill some sort of function for them to be baked so deeply into our psychology that it's difficult to be rid of them.

I rather hope we get to see Maddox again before the season is over; it would be neat to see if and how his attitudes have changed over the course of what was apparently a long correspondence with Data.

Rat Boy wrote:

Yes, and apparently Data sent him more than a letter on how his day went.

I must have missed something. I just assumed Maddox got Data's "DNA" from B4.

hbi2k wrote:

I rather hope we get to see Maddox again before the season is over; it would be neat to see if and how his attitudes have changed over the course of what was apparently a long correspondence with Data.

Agreed. It's hard for me to speculate right now. Is he a benevolent creator trying to create a race of sentient androids? Or did he snap and cause the Mars attack?

This show has easily given us more interesting Trek in a single episode than either Discovery or the Kelvin-verse movies ever did. I love that we're finally seeing "the future" of things we already know, and how interwoven they seem to be, while building an entirely new and interesting story.

PaladinTom wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

Yes, and apparently Data sent him more than a letter on how his day went.

I must have missed something. I just assumed Maddox got Data's "DNA" from B4.

He would also have at the very least seen Data's painting at some point if he was going to model Dahj/Soji after it. This would have had to have been before Picard locked it up in his quantum archive which I'm guessing at the latest was ten years prior to the episode when he ragequit Starfleet.

Quote is not edit

Rat Boy wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

Yes, and apparently Data sent him more than a letter on how his day went.

I must have missed something. I just assumed Maddox got Data's "DNA" from B4.

He would also have at the very least seen Data's painting at some point if he was going to model Dahj/Soji after it. This would have had to have been before Picard locked it up in his quantum archive which I'm guessing at the latest was ten years prior to the episode when he ragequit Starfleet.

Not if he was able to access them from Data's memory blippity blops. (engrams?)

That's why I think Picard was so freaked out.

hbi2k wrote:

But it's also repellent: surely "hard feelings" must fulfill some sort of function for them to be baked so deeply into our psychology that it's difficult to be rid of them..

this reminds me of a phrase is the expanse that is a belter idioms and makes up a fairly significant theme of the series: "Once is never, twice is always."

Have we seen those specific paintings in TNG or the movies before?

beanman101283 wrote:

Have we seen those specific paintings in TNG or the movies before?

Not that I can recall.

PaladinTom wrote:
beanman101283 wrote:

Have we seen those specific paintings in TNG or the movies before?

Not that I can recall.

Considering how the actor who plays Dhaj/Soji just turned 20 last week and that the only TNG work released in her life time to this point was Nemesis, that would have been a lot foresight on somebody's part.