Wasn’t the *Admiral who, with Captain Sisko as his Chief of Staff, led the war against the Dominion a fairly descent guy? I don’t recall if he lived through the final battle, but I don’t recall him succumbing to any scandal.
*ETA: Admiral William Ross
Nope. Assdeep in Section 31.
That probably however is the least of the sins of Admirals on Trek
Based on the way the video chat with mom went, it sure seems like she’s just an implanted memory, with a phone number that connects to preprogrammed series of responses.
It’s fun to compare to how he was portrayed in alternate future timelines during TNG!
https://www.instagram.com/p/B74H0xPgRjZ/?igshid=1ub2krf3m9zqx
Ohhh…that was Ann Magnusen as Admiral Fucking Hubris. From Making Mr.Right and briefly in The Hunger.
Fleet Admiral Hubris wasn’t portrayed as entirely incompetent. She at least went through the motions of running Picard’s story by the senior intel officer, who, unfortunately, happened to be a Romulan spy, but that’s not her fault. Maybe she should have insisted Section 31 look into it, but I guess the point is that she was blinded by her hatred of Picard’s guts.
Okay, so the first episode was available as a promo on YouTube, and I watched it. Conclusion? Eh, it’s not bad. I’d watch the next episode if it were on TV or some other no-fee streaming service, but I really don’t feel like paying a monthly bill just to see it.
I still don’t buy the world (the xenophobic Federation) but there’s enough of a foundation to build off of, I suppose.
ETA: Oh, and I like the use of tactical transporting. It’s good to see a sci-fi franchise embrace, even if still not fully, just a little bit more of the technology it’s established. Unlike say, Star Wars, where it seems that hyperspace projectiles should have been in use for ages, but they only just decided to apply the principle as a throwaway kamikaze tactic in one movie and then never again. Nope, I’m never gonna let that one go.
In the second episode they show transporter gates that people walk through without pausing, like a wormhole.
As for being evil, she was apparently a proponent of cutting all the Romulan refugees loose, though certainly a bunch of politicians were behind that as well.
So far I’m liking it a lot. Probably mostly because of my emotional attachment to TNG and Picard himself, but that’s enough. If I separated out that, it’d probably be just a decent start to a space opera show… but that’s still a lot better than the start to most Star Trek shows.
Still enjoying it, although there are points when the writers get a little too clever and need a slap. Picard’s comment about not “getting” science fiction was one of them - it was jarringly stupid and reminded me of this exchange from Firefly:
Wash: “Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction.”
Zoe: “We live in a spaceship, dear.”
Not liking science fiction is one thing, but a starship captain who had an android as a friend ought to damn well get science fiction. Knock it off, writers.
The other jarring point was the ridiculously clumsy flirtation at the end of episode one. If men are still using “That’s a beautiful name” as a pickup line in the 24th century, we will have learned nothing (although it’s still a step above Riker’s “infinity never looked so beautiful”).
Not when–in his setting–he knows for a cold hard fact that 99.999% of it is wildly, hilariously inaccurate.
The only perspective we’ve ever seen of the Feds being some advanced, progressive holy institute is through Jean-Luc Picard’s eyes.
Everything else…Enterprise, DS9, ST: VI…shows otherwise. Even TOS when Kirk has a chance for peace and briefly finds himself arguing for the right to wage war.
Balance of Terror and Day of the Dove show feds exhibiting ugly bigotry…yes in Day of the Dove they were being influenced but still. The Hate Entity was just fanning embers.
Here’s the thing about that scene. She’s not wrong. Obviously she has some antipathy towards Picard, but that’s not what I mean. Ignore her past personal feelings.
You’re a senior admiral in Starfleet and some old fart who’s been retired for two decades (and btw just shit all over you on the news) shows up with a crazy mission idea. And he sits in your office and tells you he’ll “need” just a small warp capable ship!, and don’t worry, just a handfull of Starfleet’s finest young officers - you guys have a few spares, surely? Oh, and I understand if my being an admiral makes it totes awky. You can dEmOtE mE, wink-wink, c’est la vie!
Picard was an arrogant, head-up-his-ass, smarmy shitbag in that scene. Fucking hubris, amirite?
And if you don’t believe me, just ask Sir Patrick. It’s written all over his face. Because he’s an excellent actor and he knows exactly what that scene really is. It’s not about the admiral, it’s about Picard getting a much-needed dose of humility.
Now that’s a fair point, and I must admit my perception of the Federation is largely through the TNG lens, with that show as a “first run” series being one of my earliest TV viewing experiences (early model millennial, here). What with the franchise being both a product of and reaction to (sometimes progressively, sometimes regressively) its times, I suppose there’s just a chance that TNG was occasionally filtered through a Reagan-era “I don’t see color” kind of lens, where maybe it shouldn’t have been so dismissive of common human failings as potentially relevant to the future, even if not in the same way (eg: human fear of “the other” sees racism replaced by speciesism).
And how does he react?? He “sort of” threatens her!! Said something about peril and you’re going to pay for this. I know what he meant but she sure could have taken that the wrong way. MAN…that scene was so brilliant. Both actors.
What? No, that’s absurd.
That’s exactly like saying that people who live now would all get science fiction. There are things, now, that were science fictional within living memory. Yet, still, there are people who don’t ‘get’ science fiction - hell, the ‘we’re living in a world that would once have been science fiction’ contributes. To the extent that SF authors ‘predict’, they’ve been wrong more than they’ve been right, which tends to render the older stuff absurd to people who aren’t inclined to properly contextualize it. The book that prompted the exchange is a great example - Asimov’s robot series posited fully sapient robots being commonplace before humanity left the solar system. By Picard’s time, the opposite is true - interstellar travel is an everyday thing, but there’ve only been a handful of sapient androids, a fact driven home by the fact that one of them was his good friend. The book is, according to his own experience, ridiculous. He can, of course, intellectually acknowledge that the book came out before either of them were possible, but that’s not the same as actually ‘getting’ it.
Wash was right.
So if Picard doesn’t “get” science fiction, then why is part of his limited shelf space occupied by a copy of “I, Robot”? Why does he even own a hardback copy of it? My guess is that it was a gift which he keeps for sentimental reasons, not for the content. And the most likely gift-giver would be Commander Data, perhaps even as a sort of experiment in humor.
I imagine the title page is signed “I, Data”.
Apparently it was 5843 days, which is just over 16 years.
Which is rather interesting, because if Picard is set in 2399, and the Romulan supernova occurred in 2387, that means the Borg cube was captured (or salvaged) several years before the supernova.
Then again, maybe it means nothing, because an Earth year is probably not 365 Romulan days…
I assumed that the cube was from the Battle @ Wolf 359. (2367)
If memory serves - the First Contact cube (Battle @ Sector 001 - 2373) was destroyed.
That seems the most likely possibility to me, too.
Option 2 is he inherited a collection (from his brother, perhaps*) and couldn’t bear to break it up.