Maybe the Origin of The Borg is the techno machine creatures from Dimension X seen in season one crossed over long ago and assimilated a species.
And the premise of season 2 is that before all the Borg fuck off to be with their ancestors, they wanted to thank Picard and crew for making this possible.
Not sure how Q fits in. Maybe cause Picard blew up some chick who was just delivering a thank you card…Q is mad at the lack of ‘progress on Picards part’.
I was going to start a Picard Season 2 thread but I guess the discussion is here. I have a lot of complaints about Picard season one and the season two premiere was better but not great but season 2 episode 2 might be my favorite episode of live action trek since Deep Space 9. I am a sucker for alternate universe stories and I really enjoyed this one.
I liked how they mentioned slingshot time travel for the first time since ST IV. In fact…their never mentioning it and being stuck in a time period over various series without mentioning it…made me think that it wasn’t possible anymore.*
As for their explanation of the difficulty…i’ll allow it. I’ll also allow how famous Kirk and Spock are for doing it, in that both Picard and Agnes are familiar with the details.
*Unfortunately it wipes out my theory that the Q changed universal physics to prevent its possibility.
Edit: Just had a dumb thought…maybe Picards penance is not for blowing up the ship…but for turning down that hot Romulan chick.
I finished ep2 - It actually surprised me in the pace and execution. I’ll continue to watch and see what they do.
I think that the Picard in Picard is the Picard from the Kelvin Timeline. But that’s just me.
Except they say that it is a something that happened in 2024 timeline.
I will say its funny the reverence and arrogance (As an exec producer) shown for Picard/Stewart is astounding. I enjoy what i see last season and this…but can you imagine Shatner/Kirk in these situations? Well i guess you don’t have to imagine but some things go beyond even Shatner
Stewart: “So, I die after saving the day with a great speech. And everyone wails and cries and holds my head…even though most have known me for a few days.”
“Ok…so this Borg queen appears, and everyone starts shooting! And the Captain keeps yelling at everyone to stop shooting! But no one listens to him!! So they turn to me! And everyone keeps saying 'Picard!! Picard! We can’t let them have the ships! Picard do something! Picard! I want everyone to say my name! And then I blow up the ship! Cause no one else can do that!”
"Then Q appears cause he’s mad at me about something. Its something I did. And I know what it is. And he knows! But no one else does. And because of something I did he turns the entire galaxy upside down! And we’re gonna go back in time and…wait for it…!
…somehow Trump (Or a standin) got reelected in 2024 leading to climate change run amuck and the Earth becoming a fascist galactic power!! And I have to stop that happening!!"
People in Alex Kurtzman Star Trek shows talk in riddles, or so he wants you to think; the truth is closer to just meaningless blather. I could not for the life of me tell what Q wanted Picard to serve penance for; it could be blowing up the ship (although that doesn’t make sense to me) or turning down the Romulan lady, or creating the Borg, or getting his Mom assimilated (which is so stupidly melodramatic that it’s probably that) or something else.
So anyway now we’re in another goddamn Mirror Universe, just like we’ve seen in Discovery. I realize it is not technically THE mirror universe but come on, that’s basically what it is. Yawn.
No - first season made it clear that this was the original timeline - and the event that caused the kelvin timeline had taken place.
The real dumb thing is that Starfleet are using Borg tech that can be hacked in 60 seconds.
Janeway comes back with all this amazing Anti-Borg tech that should have made The Federation the strongest power in their half of the galaxy, and they go with Borg tech!??
Again though I do want to point out I enjoy the production value, the characters and the actors. Greatly.
Why ARE Star Trek writers so in love with fascism? I mean, I get that it’s just a plot device, but…
In the alt-timeline of “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, the Federation is facing inevitable defeat by the Klingon Empire, and the only way to stop them is for the Enterprise-C to go back in time and be destroyed in a heroic but futile defense of a Klingon colony, so the Klingons will make friends with the Federation instead of conquering it.
The Federation, even with the Klingon and Romulan Empires as allies, was facing inevitable defeat by the Dominion until Our Heroes collapsed the Bajoran Wormhole and cut off the Dominion forces in the Alpha Quadrant from their base in the Gamma Quadrant.
And while the Federation is a voluntary association of dozens or hundreds of planets and species, the Klingon and Romulan Empires rival or exceed it in power despite each being run by a single planet/species.
And of course, the ultimate totalitarians, the Borg, routinely thrash the Federation are only served temporary and local defeats through heroic last-ditch efforts.
But Earth by itself, in the Mirror Universe and apparently this new alt-timeline in Picard, conquers most of the galaxy because it went fascist.
Again, I get that it’s a plot device, which has led to some of the best Star Trek stories, but overall, the “fascists can beat everybody - they’re so powerful and cool” trope in post-Roddenberry Trek is genuinely kind of disturbing.
Couple notes, well one really…this rest would be nitpicking.
This isn’t spelled out anywhere, in fact, I’ll bet Trek writers arn’t even aware of it. But its my head canon and thats how its gonna stay.
First the ENT-Disco Mirror Universe is a different timeline then TOS Mirror Universe. It diverged the second the Tholians in the Mirror Universe brought back the (TOS) Defiant. Its not a predestination thing, because we see TOS Mirror Universe tech is exactly the same as Prime timelines. While DISCO Mirror tech is way ahead of TOS
Anyway…the point is that Earth got a 100 year jumpstart when they got The Defiant. In fact, in ENT we see the ‘Empire’ is in serious trouble until they get the Defiant. Anther thing we see in TOS Spock saying that fascism is not a sustainable policy. But that was TOS optimism for you…meanwhile when we get to DS9 we see that it was Mirror Spocks good intentions that got the humans enslaved.
That’s clearly not the intent. A Federation that’s evil is fascist because that’s evil, and human-centric because bigotry is evil, and a conquering race because that’s evil.
I never got from the Klingons and Romulans that they were fascist. The Klingons are militaristic, but seem more feudal than anything else. The Romulans are kind of secretive, I never got a sense of what their system was.
Yes, I get that it’s not the intent. That’s why I very clearly and deliberately stated twice in my short post that I get that it’s a plot device, and said that it led to some of the best stories in Star Trek. I find the cumulative effect of all those stories kind of disturbing.
Well, I did, until I read your excellent rebuttal below.
For the Romulans, I don’t know how you’d describe a militarized pseudo-Roman surveillance state managed by a ubiquitous secret police force as anything other than fascist. But frankly, I’m not interested into getting into an internet spat over that, much less whether the Klingon political system as portrayed in various iterations of Star Trek technically should be classified as “fascist”, or whether their militaristic quasi-feudal society is sufficiently different to obviate my larger point.
So, you win. I withdraw my comment.
In the end the methodology of dictatorships is all the same. What makes one fascist and another one something else is that underlying philosophy for which that methodology is put into service. Having said that, yeah, the Rommies pretty much qualify.
Have you not watched Q episodes in TNG and also later in Voyager? Thats exactly how Q operates.
I find the mirror universe episodes of Star Trek nearly unwatchable. I think it’s just personal preference, but it just seems like the characters are driven by some requirement to be nasty - without any particular reason why that’s useful or deeper motive to do it. It’s like ‘in this universe, our style choices are mostly black and red, and also, let’s do something evil, because we are the bad guys’
They’re OK if you don’t take them seriously - if you see them as silly little “joke” episodes where the cast can cut loose and have some fun. That’s what the DS9 ones felt like, at least.
Yeah, probably. I just don’t seem to be able to do that.
I don’t suppose it’s very different to a whole load of other tropes in ST (for example Klingon cuisine appears to be driven almost entirely by the aesthetic ‘must be unpleasant to humans’)
What frustrates me about both last season and the current one thus far is that there are a lot of good ideas and really interesting backstory stuff they could draw on, and yet all the execution [sic] is really hamhanded and clunky.
Take the need to stall the Borg Queen execution to give the others time to sort out the shields, transporters etc. Should Picard A) stop to give a long rousing speech to the crowd like he is clearly capable of doing, or B) stand there like an idiot with his arm out, obviously stalling while Seven stares blankly at him, and then just start shooting his own troops? For a character that has always been “talk first, shoot later”, that whole scene is just clumsily out of character and stupid.