Star Trek Picard Review

They bring back Teri Garr (Who I believe historically doesnt even want to TALK about her Trek appearance)…i’ll shut up until the entire series concludes.

That said, I want to get in that I feel like they’ve bitten off more than they can chew if we are getting Borg Queen misadventures, mom trauma, Q and Gary Sevens race.

It’s a sequel song, like “Let’s Twist Again (Like We did Last Summer)”.

Latest episode was fun. Bus punk was a nice call back, but young Guinan was my favorite part.

Yeah, they’ve really mastered that de-aging software.

But Bell was only killed because of interference by Sisko and company, so…ah, who knows. The takeaway here is that changes in the present which prevent future time travel can change the past, which changes the present. Homeless Captain Braxton understood this. There was a Trek novel called “Engines of Destiny” which dealt with this concept (better conceived than executed IMHO). One thing that folks seem to have lost sight of is that Q said the change was all Picard’s doing so perhaps it results from something that he did or didn’t do during one of his earlier (or later) excursions in time.

(Shrug) maybe theres an Aegis-Q Time War? The two groups ‘missions’ would seem to be at odds with each other.

Another thing, maybe Q is around in 2024 just to fuck with Picard, and intended to pull his fat from the fire if Picard couldnt do it…and Q losing his powers is a serious “Ooooops” moment.

I think Q is ill or otherwise not his normal self (his powers seemingly not working right and his angry at times vs his normal playful demeanor being symptoms of that). Maybe all of this is a scheme to get Picard to cure him of whatever ails him?

Maybe Q is sick because of the insane paradoxes he’s created.

At first i was thinking, "What the hell is Picard doing telling Guinan to stay or go or whatever?? He probably got her killed in WW3. "…but if Picard never met her in the past, and The Voyage Home never happened…

And the Q are fine stopping the pacifistic (at the time) expanding Federation in Encounter at Farpoint but not in the fascist alternate reality?? I guess the Confederation became powerful enough to destroy the Whale Probe but also the Q?

Also, I guess that those Borg never thought to try to go back in time and off Zefram Cochrane?

I also find it interesting the writers, and as seen in First Contact (!) embrace a historical revisionism of “Humanity and the best of us and looking outward to the stars…blah blah blah…”

Picard was there!!! Cochrane was in it for the money. if anything its the VULCANS who saved humanity by appearing and showing Earth that they arn’t alone.

“Guinan, give humanity a chance! …ok YES, they are going to kill nearly a billion people in two years…and yes being the founder of the Federation was pretty much an accident. OK they ARE going to have a war with the Romulans…”*

*What is the obsession with time travel?? The first ep of ENT fucks everything up! That whole thing with the Xindi is tainted by time travel! The entire premise could have been subbed using the Romulans.

and would have been a much more interesting season/story.

FYI the phone number in the most recent episode works…

Well, so we’re getting half a switcheroo! Or possession, maybe?

Anyhow, there’s one thing I have to say really bothers me about this series: with the Europa-mission and a flying drone energy barrier, it makes it clear that Star Trek is no longer our future, because that 2024 is not our 2024. I mean, of course, many of the things predicted for the near-term future in Star Trek have proven false in the meantime, the biggest one probably being the distinct lack of Eugenics Wars in the 90s, but I’ve always been able to believe that at the time of broadcast, that might at least have been a possible future. But the 2024 of Picard doesn’t seem to be. And that feels like a loss to me: Star Trek always was a vision of a hopeful future (well, mostly), something one might want to aspire to. But now, that road is closed; there’s no way to get there from here.

Inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things, obviously, and it’s not like it ever was a particularly plausible future, but I find it odd that the writers should make this sort of choice when it would’ve been so easily preventable—just set things a few more years down the road, or change the setting a little. There really wasn’t any particular point for the drone shield that couldn’t have been served equally well by a sunroof (which just makes it all the more implausible, because the technology doesn’t just have to be around, it has to be commonplace enough—at least for someone like Adam Soong—to be just as available as a bit of tinted glass).

If I were the optimistic sort, I’d speculate that this is deliberate, that this actually isn’t the real point of divergence, but that the timeline already has diverged, and for some years, at that point—but I don’t really see any such twist coming.

So the mystery of the future Borg Queen seems like it’s Agnes.

I think she’s been a candidate since episode 2 or 3.

Last week’s episode was fun and full of adventure. This week seemed to drag a little. But we did get to hear Data/Dr Soong say the F-word. Well, bleeped, but still.

It was bleeped out for you? Weird.

Oh look, Agnes has turned evil. Must be Friday.

It was. CTV sci-fi. It wasn’t bleeped for you?

Nope. I thought it was only available via stream, I didn’t know it was also on old school television.

How quaint.