f13.net

https://youtu.be/IGijGIZrGKc

Show about a wine making guy.

Has Patrick Stewart, how bad can it be?

I'm excited to see what they do here and will sub to CBSflix for this day one. I'm hoping to knock out the back episodes of the new Star Trek series with that sub, too.

I don't really think of myself as a Trekkie, but TNG is in my memories the same way Mr Rogers or Sesame Street is.

If it's a character-driven show with a retired Picard puttering around in a vineyard, that actually sounds quite a bit better than him doing space action schlock.  I don't know what will actually happen on the show but I'm more interested in finding out than in watching the latest movie in the JJverse or whatever is currently representing the brand.

Maybe it'll be a talk show where he interviews other characters from the various series?

 :grin:

I think the trailer implies the show is mostly about the bad thing that happened involving spaceships 15 years ago, which as this is supposed to be 2397, would mean events a few years after the films of which we do not speak.

I will remind you that Patrick Stewart played the poop emoji in the Emoji Movie so... that bad.

I almost feel like my joke prediction that this would be Star Trek: Chateau Picard is coming true.

"Next week on Star Trek: Chateau Picard, Jean-Luc and his old friend Admiral Data race against time to find a cure for Andorian phylloxera before it completely destroys the oldest cabernet vines on the east ridge. In the meantime, a sinister plan to replace Chateau Picard wines with Cardassian kanar at Sisko's Creole Kitchen unfolds. Guest-starring Brent Spiner and Cirroc Loften."

I had... successfully forgotten that....

Supposedly this isn't actually connected to TNG at all, but a different timeline Picard (rights issues or something weird, I don't remember exactly what the deal is, just that there were a lot of rights issues surrounding Star Trek and that this wasn't a TNG sequel).

It could be interesting, but I'm not that interested, personally. Picard was never my thing when it came to Star Trek. Has a better shot of being good than Discovery (which I guess got better? Don't know, I dropped it pretty quick in disgust/boredom).

"Tell us, why did you leave Starfleet, Admiral?"

"Uh, because I'm like 95 years-old"

I am not sure I like this idea, but then again I have no idea what it is.  I am a Picard/TNG fan more than I am a trekkie as such, but I am not sure this is something we need.

Its murky but from what I can tell, CBS has complete control of Star Trek TV rights (which includes streaming).  Paramount the movie studio has rights over feature movies which are now basically dead after the Abrams/Lin trilogy although Tarantino still wants to make one.

So this show is well within the TNG timeline/continuity.

Sort of. From what I understand the Picard series will be incorporating the destruction of Romulus from the J.J. Abrams movies. So.. part of the Kelvin timeline, but only sorta? https://www.thewrap.com/star-trek-picard-everything-we-know-about-patrick-stewart-return/

There's also been rumours (no idea if true/false or confirmed/denied) that Picard's Enterprise crew in this new-ish(?) timeline was not the same as the TNG crew (thus meaning there won't be a crew reunion of any sorts on the show in the way some fans seem to be hoping).

this is weird

Is it just me, or is that voice over just horrible?  It's so over-dramatic and fake sounding.  And if it's meant to be someone actually speaking to Picard, that just makes it worse.  Nobody in any universe real or imagined would speak to someone like that.

The only way it feels right is if it's some kind of dystopian or inhuman questioning. If that's meant to be an actual human, it's really off and really clumsy.

It’s probably just a poor trailer.  Discovery had a bad teaser. Stewart will be good to great even with drek.

It's Patrick Stewart. It's Star Trek. The floor is entertaining, the ceiling is classic.

Maybe for the season ender we'll find out how many lights he sees?

If it's post the destruction of Romulus, it should still be in the prime universe.

You know, the easy way out for them on the ST: Reboot is that Nero and Prime Spock travelled to an alternate universe--not the Mirror Universe, just a different one--and mistook it for a simple time jump.

We already established in the TNG episode "Parallels" that every time anyone makes a decision it creates a new parallel universe, so you can say that any given episode occurs in its own reality if you want.   :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, except there's a lot of canon episodes that seem to contradict that (not to mention a Starfleet agency that runs around trying to keep the timeline from being damaged).

You say this like the TNG films never happened.

If Picard has his dune buggy and Worf's purple space bazooka, I'm all in.

Or just never mention Nero or Prime Spock or JJ Abrams.

Pretty awesome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FySrgrKJguE

Hmmm. To be honest it gave me a TNG movie vibe.

I'm just assuming the TNG people are just in the first episode for 10 minutes. Good trailer though.

I thought it was pretty great. I'm genuinely interested now.

As a child of a ToS Trekkie and surviving a childhood of conventions, I became a huge fan of TNG because reasons. This trailer definitely has my attention, but CBS Access can still go fuck itself.

oh wow Fan Service: The Next Generation

Working as intended. (still won't get me to subscribe to CBS though)

He named the dog Number One.  :grin:

Initial wobble for me was the heavy handed Data scene.

But it properly lost me with no context 7 of 9 pew pewing the corridor with primary colour lighting and telling us she was a TNG movie rather than TNG series character.

By the Riker part where they tried to play back the whole Farpoint fan service thing I was long gone.

Assuming this is on UK Netflix I'm going to watch it anyway. Low expectations can't hurt.

7 of 9 was Voyager porn. There was nothing of TNG in her. Picard would never have known her. The only reason she would be there is FAAAAN SERVICE!!!

Voyager returned a year before the events of Nemesis. It's very likely Picard did know who she was while he was still commanding the Enterprise.

I expect he's also had a lot of contact with "Admiral" Janeway over the years discussing the Borg. They're the two leading experts right? I figure he met Seven through that.

I have no issue 7 of 9 being in this. It seems like a better idea than TNG character.

Considering Picard and 7's unique history with the Borg, both being part of the collective at one point, I'd think it actually stranger if they didn't know each by this time.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (2364-2370)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (2369-2375)
Star Trek: Voyager (2371-2378)

Voyager returns to earth only 8 years after TNG ends or whatever that means. So is Picard like 20 years in the future from then so it's like 2390?

I'm not a huge trekkie but I just googled this.

There were definite elements of fan service in the character but the actress was good and they gave her some good storylines eventually. They didn't turn the fan service to 11 until Enterprise with the Vulcan constantly getting rubbed down with oil or whatever.

That said, 7 of 9 could easily know Picard. They have a lot in common with the whole Borg thing. Honestly, it'd be weird if they hadn't worked together. They are probably the two that scream the loudest anytime the Borg poke their heads up. I could also see them giving speeches at Starfleet Academy about the Borg and meeting that way.

Not that any of this matters, I'm not getting CBS All Access. But this is a good time to ask, what is people's experience with using VPN to watch Netflix and/or Amazon Prime "in a different country." Do you just select, say, England then log in and and it goes "oh, you're in England now, here are the shows you can watch in England."

Finally caught the trailer.

It feels dirty and wrong that I'm interested in this.

That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through to watch Star Trek The Old Generation.

Yes that's how it works except that Netflix tries to detect VPNs so not all services will be able to connect properly and many don't have good enough bandwidth to handle that kind of streaming load so you'll need to do some research to figure out which ones work well with Netflix/Amazon Prime.

Yeah. I tried accessing PIA through the London server and Netflix just laughed at me and kept giving me the strictly Canadian shows.

Anyone watch this yet?  Reviews are not great so far.

I don't know, the review I've seen so far have been positive. The main complaint is that it's a slow burn.

I enjoyed it. I think we've at least confirmed the identity of the girl now. Trippy's right though. Having to put up with a slow once a week reveal of a streaming series is very irritating.

Folks I know who like TNG and DS9 are reporting liking it a lot. Gonna watch tonight.

I saw it and it’s kind of a mess.  Plot is all over the place and very rushed.  They went though about 3 episodes of plot in one show.  Having the action adventure hero being an old man hindered by age is just weird.

Sadly it reminds me of STD.

That sounds bad, might want to see a doctor :awesome_for_real:

But seriously it's the same group of people that did/do Discovery so that's not surprising.

Discovery has been really good.

Wut?

I don't agree with this at all.  They have to establish some stuff, but they didn't really move through much "plot".  It set up where things stand, created the stakes, and set the action in motion.

I really enjoyed it and my wife (a TNG and Jean-Luc super-fan) loved it.  As for "reviews" it has a 93 percent on RT.

Saw the first one, looks good.

I'm not usually a massive fan of the 'jumping in with known characters after they've suffered trauma but barely tell us what it is' format. But it is well enough done I got over it. They gave me just about enough.

Stewart himself is very much holding it together, and 'Picard, but an old person' was good on its own.

I only watched Discovery for the first half of the first season. I forgot to watch the rest. I should probably go back.

I'm looking forward to watching Picard when I get time. Glad to see it's decent at the least.

I hated the first 2 episodes of Discovery so much that I didn't watch for the rest of the season. I started hearing good things about it and tried it again just before season 2 started. I skipped the first 2 episodes and found that the show improved steadily after that.

Discovery's next season has a tough challenge in front of it, though. They are going to have to do what Voyager couldn't, which is imagine a setting that is still "Trek" but that works differently enough that it feels alien both to the characters and to us.

Yeah, the recent manipulation of the audience scores for TROS tells you can’t believe anything from RT.

The first 2 episodes are really not even a little bit representative of the show for... reasons.

So far the absolute worst, almost unforgiveably bad, blunder for Discovery is all the stuff on the Klingons. If they'd stuck with the standard make-up and kept them a bit closer to canon, it would have been fine. But they made an ugly mess that made it impossible to figure out what the relationship between Discovery and *any* other Trek is. Season 2 showed they'd figured out how to slide into canon and be fun in their own way (mostly).

If the worst thing in a show is make up, they were doing ok.

Eh, it wasn't *just* makeup.

The Klingons is why I did a hard pass on Discovery. I'm not a fan of prequels that come 40-50 years after the original show or movie. But to utterly redo an iconic alien race at the same time is just asinine.

I was citing the profession reviewer's percentage not audience.

I have absolutely no dog in this race, but of course they do.

Yeah, as a person who grew up watching TNG/DS9, I'm shamelessly in the tank.

I thought this was good.  It's even better considering that Nemesis will no longer be the last depiction of Picard in television/film.  To that end, I'm glad we're getting a proper send off of the TNG crew, and even some others of the era.  Even if this show never reaches those heights, and I don't expect it to, it looks like we'll get a decent yarn and a final look at characters a lot of us grew up with.  This show also seems to be embracing the morals/message of Roddenberry's Trek more than other NuTrek shows/films, which could be fun.

Likely because there was a conspicuous lack of Rick Berman in the credits.

First episode is up (temporarily apparently) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PPm5l3o2zw

I have liked it. It feels more like good TNG than the movies did (even though it's drawing on Nemesis and the JJA Trek, for pete's sake).

But you know, when you connect it with Discovery's 2nd season and all that stuff on Control, there's kind of an interesting and not terribly coherent history taking shape of how the Federation has related to AI and synthetic life. I almost want them to do some world-building to make it all make sense in some kind of grand unified theory. Like what if the Borg are sort of like Skynet--always putting pressure from some kind of "event horizon" of the possible future to push civilizations towards making AIs and androids and then getting those to turn towards the Borg. Maybe that's why Kirk was always blowing up sentient computers--he and Spock (who fought Control directly!) have a secret directive from Starfleet to always destroy sentient AIs if possible. Maybe that's why Daystrom was sent to the Enterprise to test M-5: so Spock could quietly sabotage M-5.

I saw the pilot.  It was enjoyable for what it was, but it was not Trek.  Star Trek and TNG were about the hope for the future.  Star Fleet was a success story.  These depictions are of a government that can't be trusted.  It is cynical and devisive. 

It would be great to see someone actually make a Star Trek show that features a Star Fleet that inspired people rather one that reinforced the  pessimism and pain we celebrate.  When TNG hit the airwaves, it was a counterpoint to the negative depictions of greed and fascism of the 80s.  I wish someone would have the guts to do it again today.

Some of the writers for the first two seasons of TNG complained that Gene Roddenberry's understanding of how to do optimism was so intellectually shallow and phony that they weren't really able to write compelling plots or characters. I think it was Ron Moore who argued that rather than contesting Reaganism, in some ways Roddenberry's version of the Federation and Starfleet was so plastic and falsely anodyne that it actually echoed Reaganism--it was the optimism of the boardroom. It was the kind of optimism that a human resources department has: trust exercises, positive thinking, everybody's special and valued. Every time the writers tried to create any kind of tension or conflict between characters--or a conflict within a character that was more than just a temporary circumstance of a single episode plot--he would shut them down on the argument that in the near-perfect future of the Federation, people didn't have conflicts like that any more. (He let them have Worf be the character who wasn't perfect yet--but also that meant that Worf always had to be wrong in his recommendations.)

Also, bracket to one side Roddenberry's dirty-old-manism--I keep waiting for someone to really give him the MeToo treatment. Stuff like Lt. Ilia, planet of the bald people who fuck everyone; the Ferengi, who want women nude all the time; the sex cult planet where everyone wore almost nothing; the femdom planet where Riker is assigned six mistresses, etc., that's all straight from Roddenberry, along with stories of how he pretty much put the moves on most of the women around him or told them dirty stories all the time.

The TNG that everyone likes was only possible when Roddenberry stepped away from it. And the TNG that everyone likes began to make the Federation actually earn its optimistic reputation in a more human way. That's the thread that has continued through into DS9: that it's not easy to make a better civilization, to have progress.

I want Trek to be optimistic but I don't want that to be treacle or to be shallow. I want drama; I want struggle. I want conflict that is not just "Good liberals vs. misguided aliens with bumpy foreheads". So it's right and proper that the Federation should have to struggle against its weaknesses and contradictions. I don't mind if this show eventually has Starfleet and the Federation coming out looking like they represent a better world. I do mind if that's unearned or uninteresting.

As a sidebar, though, I wouldn't mind if it also ended up with Starfleet being a mite less vulnerable to infiltration, and some kind of command hierarchy that doesn't habitually promote the worst and weakest people to authority. That's been a consistent hallmark of Trek all the way back and while it's as funny in its way as red-shirt deaths, it's also kind of head-scratching *particularly* when it happens in the most upbeat and simplistically utopian eras in Trek history.

It was definitely star trek - you could tell because it said 'star trek' and everything.

I think the reason people say silly things like 'this star trek show is not star trek' about this and Discovery because they heavily stress character point of view to an extent only DS9 came close to before.

But nothing in Picard so far really changes the principles that TNG worked to. There is a legitimate problem. More than one group appears to have good faith answers of varying degrees of rightness and the show seems like it is going to explore the extent of how right they are with some incidental pew pew and soap opera along the way. DS9's Maquis and religious nutters already showed us that politics is still a thing in star trek. And if you are going to make a show about how we should all act like grown ups in 2020, it really should be about internal and not international politics else what the fuck are you doing.


Exactly - you make the show about how it is hard and takes competence to represent a better world, you don't just rely on 'its good because my side say so', almost all good trek does this.

I'm guessing in the end the good guys are going to help the federation do the right thing. Obviously.


To fair to Roddenberry's box, it is also the reason TNG avoided falling into manufactured conflict or plot by incompetence - which other trek occasionally falls victim to. Being so strict early on meant TNG had to earn their conflict right through the run, and as a result actually looked like a bunch of smart people trying to solve a hard problem all the way through.

Having to have a bunch of script meetings and debates every time you want members of an established successful professional team to have an on screen argument isn't a bad way to get some discipline in the writing.

Do you need to earn a starting premise?

I find it sad that people think it is impossible to tell compelling stories about heroic, moral people. 

Wait, what? Who do you think this show is about if not the single most moral and heroic individual in the franchise?

Seriously. Picard is fucking heroic in the extreme here.  He's going to dig up heroism in people who are like him, kind of disenchanted.

High Noon is a compelling story about heroic, moral people.

If you mean "is it impossible to tell compelling stories about heroic, moral SYSTEMS where most people working for them are heroes", well, watch any old cop show or detective show or show about military guys, and you'll get a fucking assload of that. Most cop shows are about SYSTEMS where every cop and every prosecutor and every judge is presumed to be basically good. JAG or any number of other military shows have the soldiers and commanders being basically good and the system being good.

I mean, there has been an asston of that stuff on TV. Most of it is not very good because it's too busy being propaganda for the cops, the prosecutors or the military. The problem here is that Starfleet is actually kind of mixed outside the bottle of the Enterprise crew, who are all great people.

Yeah, Picard is pretty much the only Captain that I'd say falls into the Lawful Good category of Trek Captains.  Kirk being being Chaotic Good, and Sisko/Janeway falling into some form of Neutral Good.  I haven't watched any of this yet, but I assumed the premise was 'old righteous man yells at clouds righteously and does righteous things.'

And yet people were just arguing that you can't make a series about a moral Star Fleet with an optimistic outlook....

The optimism is in the outcomes. If your hero and his pals have nothing in their way except sinister aliens and the occasional insane admiral, that's a kind of heroism, I guess--of the Zapp Brannigan kind. Bad guys safely defeated every episode, etc.

I am more drawn to Atticus Finch. Picard in this series is in that mold. He's going to fucking tell the truth and do what he has to. I think actually that Kirk and Sisko and Pike and Spock have all been cut from that cloth on some level--they will do what is right, even if that's against the regulations. Janeway was meant to be, she was just written so badly that you can't really see that in her.

Nobody argued that. They argued an infallible starfleet is a problem.

Heh, Starfleet admirals have been one of the main villains of the shows for 55 years.  Starfleet as a concept is noble but always fucks everything up in practice because of its leadership. Righteous Captains out on the frontier are the only true heroes (because remember, the show is "Wagon Train in space"). That's why it was significant that Picard offered to bust himself down to Captain.  The Federation is the more noble part of the deal but even then gets into bad territory on occasion.

Even the antagonist admirals are usually noble but wrong about something.

If you really think about it, the federation is in practice a military dictatorship with no obvious civilian oversight. So honestly I think starfleet is granted a very favourable write up by the shows.

A good portion are just bugfuck crazy.

Oh sure, but noble at the same time.

They really believe super hard in starfleet's ideals.

One of the downsides of giving unlimited authority to an independent military I guess.

In all seriousness, this is why I think trek would struggle to do a show not about starfleet. You'd have to define the relationship between starfleet and the new protagonists, and that would quickly demonstrate that viewed from the outside starfleet is an unaccountable authoritarian oppressor. Possibly a benign unaccountable authoritarian oppressor, but an unaccountable authoritarian oppressor nonetheless.

At best the federation is Rome.

I've watched a different Star Trek than some of you.

Starfleet command comes across as either dimwitted idealists that have to be protected from themselves or infiltrators all the time, or obstructive bureaucrats that have to be circumvented. And once in a while one or more of them go crazy and have to be stopped by down-to-earth captains. Even Nonprotagonist captains lose their street smarts and have to be stopped and/or rescued after they get promoted.

So, Starfleet in Picard continues a proud tradition of both clueless Admirals and malignant foreign infiltrators in perfect canon fashion.

Pretty much. You get your occasional Admiral in Trek who is competent and well-meaning but usually for a bit part or for upper-level redshirting, like the guy who gets waxed at Wolf 359. DS9 had a few competent admirals show up in the war-related episodes.

We almost never see the civilian hierarchy of the Federation in canon Trek series. Usually only as diplomats and emissaries, occasionally as really annoying bureaucrats (the dude in The Trouble With Tribbles). I don't believe there's ever been anything at all about Federation elections or cultural/political movements in any Trek ever (Federation ones, that is): only Bajor and the Klingons seem to have anything like complex internal politics. Maybe in Enterprise, I guess, but I'm not watching it all to see. The only thing we really know about the Federation is which directives/laws govern Starfleet that were made by the Federation government rather than Starfleet proper. I guess we know there's some kind of written constitution, that there's a sort of familiar executive/legislative set up, that member planets have their own autonomous administrations. I suppose we know through Bajor and a few other episodes that adding a new planet to the Federation is a big deal and may cause some controversy. Picard says there's no money, but there was money of a kind in TOS, so maybe that's something that happened in between TOS and TNG.

So the optimism, etc., has never really been about the system, except for Kirk, Picard and Sisko's frequent insistence that the Federation/humanity is living under vastly better conditions today than in the past, something that TOS and TNG directly verified on occasion via time travel/suspended animation--that internal war between human cultures on Earth is a thing of the past, that medicine is advanced and free, that transport is instantaneous, that there are major terraforming/geological projects on Earth, and that people seem to have a lot of time for leisure. The justice system seems kind of barely better than ours judging from a few episodes; there still seems to be lots of room for scientists and technologists to do seriously dumb fucking shit without anybody stopping them. Judging from the first two episodes of Picard, there is still something like Fox News around. Culture seems pretty stagnant--nobody ever talks about writers, intellectuals, artists etc from between 2050 and the 23rd Century except for Picard citing a few political theorists and Kirk citing a future poet to impress Edith Keeler.

Most of that, by the way, seems as true in Picard as any other time. People still seem to be living pretty good peaceful lives with good medical care despite a number of serious attacks on Earth in the 23rd and 24th Centuries.

Go back and read what Roddenberry intended for Star Fleet to be. 

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.”

Star Fleet is the group that reached this enlightenment and reached out into the stars.  It was intended to be - and was - a hopeful and optimistic view of the future. While some individuals failed to live up to the ideals of Star Fleet, the organization as a whole was intended to be a just, righteous and moral organization working towards the betterment of the future.

If you play D&D - it is Lawful Good.

People are afraid to tell stories about moral and justi people these days - but that is what both the original and TNG Star Treks were about.  That is the core of Star Trek.  DS9 was good - but it wasn't the same premise.  Voyager and Enterprise had other premises as well, although Voyager did a better job of honoring the idea, even if it failed in so many other ways.

All I was saying - I'd like to see someone tackle Star Trek in the same vein that TOS and TNG did - with an organization that was (overall) just and moral.  One that was working to do the right thing and that people were proud to be representing.  It would be a nice change of pace from the countless shows that show people overcoming a corrupt government.

The more sophisticated version of Trek is Iain Banks' Culture novels. I admire all of the representatives of the Culture in those books--and the idea of the Culture--but Banks is pretty alive to the downsides of an advanced, quasi-utopian galactic culture that is determined to stay that way.

Just coloring inside Roddenberry's lines is dramatically inert and kind of smug after a while--it's the story of enlightened, self-satisfied California liberals doing their best to uplift Romulans, Klingons, Ferengi, Cardassians, Bajorans etc.--all the complicatedly *human* drama is off-loaded onto those other cultures. The Federation doesn't actually seem to have much of a taste for genuine difference or diversity--almost everybody inside of Starfleet behaves basically similarly. The few times there's someone in Starfleet who is a different kind of personality they all like assholes to him or her (Barclay) until he/she finally proves worthy. There's almost no real religious or ethical diversity--the Vulcans are the closest to that (and again therefore get a ton of attention, because Federation humanity is just kind of there). It's easy to be tolerant when everybody is the same. I know, I know, back in the 60s saying that blacks and whites and Asians and Scots and Russians would all serve together in a single crew and not even be slightly aware of racial or ethnic or national differences felt a bit more radical. But even by the 1980s, that seemed kind of old hat. I mean, shit, they couldn't even really find a way to make a crew member who came from a planet of violence and rape have a really different perspective than the rest of them.

That is one way to tell the story.  There were a lot of TOS episodes and TNG episodes that did not follow your recipe.  And, as for characters having different perspectives... seriously?  You think Bones and Spock, Kirk and Uhura, Picard and Data, etc... had the same perspectives? (Why the fuck does my spell check recognize Spock, Kirk and Picard … but not Uhura?)

And Trek is not the be all, end all, model of this idea.  You see collections of just and moral people working together to create a better future throughout a lot of older literature and entertainment.  DC's heroes, for example, were mostly boy scouts, as they say.  Nobody has had the guts to try to put them on the screen as pure symbols of hope and optimism since Chris Reeves in the first two Superman Movies.  I'm kind of hoping Marvel takes a shot at it with the Fantastic Four by telling some of their earlier stories rather than the crap where Sue becomes Malice, Ultimate Reed becomes a villain, or any of that other shit.  It would just be a nice break to see someone competent try to inspire with storytelling rather than fear monger  with the same repetitive cautionary tales.

Still enjoying this - but it is really emphasising how weak Trek has been at worldbuilding outside of Starfleet. There is nothing wrong with what the show is doing but it fascinating how simple things like civilian travel and the how that guy with a bird of prey can exist seem surprising and slightly weird on a star trek show.

Trek has always strived to be, in its best instances, a mirror of where we were as a society.

From the race relations allegory of "Let that be your last battlefield" (Black on the left white on the right vs black on the right white on the left) to the Cautionary tale of "The Omega Glory" (Khoms fighting Yangs in the aftermath of nuclear war), Star Trek has pointed out our failings and tried to say that we could be better.

That continues in Picard. Freecloud? That's pretty much an amalgam of The Caymans and a bunch of other tax havens for the rich today. It's Trek's Canto Bight.

Picard is finding himself disillusioned with a Federation and Starfleet that he fought and bled and sent others off to die for that isn't living up to the reputation that he's sold himself and so many others on. It's a once-impressive and seemingly inclusive and benign government that has found itself catering to its baser instincts and being helped along by infiltrators from a once powerful enemy that has now collapsed but is still rife with former espionage agents looking to bring down their old enemy from the inside. If that's not an indictment of Trump's America and the influence of Putin, I don't know what is.

And to echo Khal's sentiment, yeah, a lot of this is shades of The Culture and you can tell the writers are familiar with Banks' work. Hell, Rios's costume in the last episode is almost straight out of Excession.

I'm actually really liking it. And yeah, the world-building really has been terrible. Until now.

Like:

We've seen our first Federation drug addict. And our first indication that no, not everybody gets to own a vineyard (though rather hilariously finding out that the poor person lives at the *actual* Vasquez Rocks was very clever).

Almost our first civilian pilot, yeah. The only other ones? Harcourt Fenton Mudd and Cyrano Jones, I think. Maybe a few others from DS9. No real sense of what the economics of civilian starships are, but so much for the "The Federation has no money" bullshit, because Picard is sure as fuck paying the dude.

Honestly, Trek is much more interesting when it's not purely a bottle show. This makes being a hero both more important and much harder. Picard is only really seeing the flaws now because he has to--and he's seeing his own flaws, what the "I just want to go to space" was covering up. It kind of adds another layer to that mudfight with his brother after the Borg episodes--that Picard has been so much the idealist and optimist operating in a situation where his idealism had commanding force that he's never really had to see what lies beyond it.


"A promise is a prison" was a nice memorable line, by the way.

Thanks to the free month they're offering (code GIFT), I watched the season. 

While the early episodes felt like they grabbed the crumbs of the Star Trek universe and tried to build something with it, the final episodes would fit right in as modern TNG episodes.  Star Fleet does the right thing in the end, with the right leadership pulling it in that direction.  I'm very curious what they do in the future.  Curious enough to buy a month of their subscription here or there to do a marathon. 

Assuming we don't lose the star of the show to the virus.

My feeling was the show really needs to lose its lead. This story was enough about Picard that it was good and showed how the films should have been done.

But what I'm interested in seeing more of is non-star-fleet people in a world dominated by this all powerful unaccountable even if mostly benevolent military junta.

The inevitable Pike show will cover my star fleet fleeting needs.

I don't think we need to lose Picard to tell that story.  We just need him to remain retired and more of a diplomat than Star Fleet proper.  They're set up to explore synthetic life rights (like Humans (tv series)) attempted - that is something they could do entirely outside the Federation.

This. Picard staying on is fine. The interpersonal stuff and the character development of the rest of the crew has me intrigued.

 

They just announced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, with Anson Mount as Captain Pike plus Spock and Number One. Good idea! They will face the complicated problem that we know what's coming for Pike and Spock, but every other Enterprise character we don't really know about. We don't know in canon if Sulu and Uhura were assigned to the Enterprise before Kirk. We don't know about any of the other characters on board, really. So there's lots of room to play.

It's kinda amazing how much output that IP has had without putting out anything not tied to all the original stuff (i.e. prequel, sequel, or reimagined) since 2001. 

And they've established they can tell 10 years of stories before Kirk shows up - and I do not think we've even seen Kirk's first days aboard the vessel, have we?  They could have Kirk on the last couple seasons of a 12 year show.

Yeah, there is no in-canon story of Kirk on the Enterprise--we don't know if he was brought over as captain immediately after Pike was injured, if he was on board for some period of time before Pike was injured, etc.

I think Scotty is on the Enterprise already by "The Cage"? But we don't know if he was a lower engineering officer there who was promoted or if he came over as Chief Engineer.

But basically Mount established Pike as a terrific example of the humane, optimistic Starfleet captain, so I am looking forward to a show produced in that spirit.

It is the core of Star Trek - hope.  I'm still not on board with the aesthetic of Discovery/SNW... but I'll put that aside if the shows are good.

The one place we have seen Kirk's first days on the enterprise demonstrates why this wouldn't be a great idea outside of wacky what if or mirror universe episodes.

I'm just happy for more spock.

Yeah,  the interesting thing about the casting on the Abramsverse Trek is that Pine (who is a pretty good actor) is the weakest recast but I think that's because nobody can really do Kirk without either doing a Shatner imitation (bad idea) or being nothing like Shatner in the role (also bad idea). Spock and McCoy are more schtick that other actors can get right while also having their own spin on it, and Uhura etc. have so little base personality that new actors can make them better as characters. But Kirk, man, that's hard. I guess if we're now buying that Discovery and Strange New Worlds are in fact in the main ST universe, not the Abramsverse (Klingon debacle notwithstanding), the Kirk who is in this timeline presently on the Farragut (I think) is a more serious, intellectual and regulation-following person. I think they could probably have an arc where the Farragut and the Enterprise are on the same mission or something and cast someone who can play the "stack of books with legs" version of Kirk.

Those movies, outside ruining the end of Spock, can be ignored at this point.

Our three Spocks are all very different.  I think the Kirks can be as well and we'd survive.  You can put a hint of Shatner into a younger Kirk - a subtle nod to his over the top style - and be fine with it.  Regardless, I'd be shocked if the series (if successful) did not slowly show the change to TOS for the Enterprise and end with Kirk taking command after Pike's accident. 

Out of curiosity - If they announced that Season 2 of Picard was going to feature him going to DS9 and would pick up some threads of that show - would you be excited?  Curious?  Worried?

I'd love that. DS9 is the Star Trek series with the fewest followups. Voyager was a tub of crap compared to DS9 and their crew just goes on and on and on.

Considering the last time I saw Avery Brooks he seemed like he was out of his damned mind (The Captains) I'm not sure how that would go.

That said, I think DS9 got the most definitive ending of the series between TNG and ENT.  It doesn't feel like it needs to be revisited.  TNG didn't either if it had actually ended with All Good Things....  I think the existence of Nemesis made this show much more appealing because...that's not a good way to go out.  DS9 went out rather well.

Plus, Rene Auberjonois is dead.  As is Aron Eisenberg. 

I guess if Worf is going to be in the next season it'd be natural for them to pick up some DS9 threads, but I don't feel any great need for a continuation of that story.

If you need a DS9 follow-up, read the novels. Good stuff.

I don't think S2 Picard needs to do more 90s Trek-reminiscing. It was fine for S1 to help re-establish things and hand-shake to the modern era. Let's go on a new adventure.

If Patrick Stewart can keep going, this show will bring back: Q, all the original cast INCLUDING Denise Crosby and Wil Wheaton, and various characters from every other show, including Enterprise.  They'll probably find Archer's fucking beagle.

Good money is on someone on the ship having a connection to a TNS character.  They're going to mix the new in with the old.  I'm not saying it will be the best thing for them to do, but they'll do it.

Whatever they decide to do I'm interested in seeing where Picard goes next.

Note: I don't see them ever taking Wil Wheaton back. He seems almost pathetically desperate to get back on Trek but he must have pissed them off somehow from the way they're treating him.

Stewart was on the View and asked Whoopie to come back.

Picard S1 was mediocre at best if you can ignore all the plot points from all the previous episodes and only concentrate in the literal moment.

It was so bad RLM made a Mr Plinkett about it. It's like 1.5 hours long.

We were joking that the deus ex machina in the last episode of Picard was gonna be Wesley.

Considering how he left, you could in fact actually do an interesting return for him. Either Picard was surprisingly indifferent to Wesley going off with a highly advanced pedophile and that comes home to roost or maybe Wesley ends up having some other kind of interesting world-building thing going on, some other loose end.

With DS9, you could probably handle Avery Brooks being a complete pothead weirdo in his portrayal of Sisko considering that Sisko is still caught up in all the weirdness of the wormhole aliens and their enemies etc.

I do like the idea of the show being used to do some better world-building and to really engage the rougher edges of the Trek universe. A return to the Klingons and Worf seems like one promising direction but they'd have to decide what to do about Discovery's colossal fuckup of the Klingons. I'd love for them to think about a genuinely alien crewmember--a Gorn, an Andorian, hell how about a Horta?

Maybe something that dives way more deeply into the Q and the entire trope of "godlike aliens" that threads through Trek. I really wish Voyager had been something like Vernor Vinge's space operas--that as the Voyager went deeper into the Quadrant, closer to the galactic core, it was intruding into the space of more ancient 'godlike' civilizations that are terrified of the Borg's ascension (hence why Q accelerated the Federation's encounter with the Borg--because he and his compatriots actually believe in the potential of the Federation to overcome what various 'gods' cannot or will not confront)--that it was almost like the 'fast zone' of Vinge's novels. I could get behind a season arc that fleshed all of that side of Trek out a bit more and made it more complex and twisty and coherent.

I think Q is too off the charts weird for Picard. Despite it also being a gaping hole for Q not to show up and take the opportunity to fuck around with him.

It did best looking at how characters that are not star fleet or equivalent fit into the world. It needs to stay grounded to do that.

He has a blink and you'll miss it scene at the wedding in Nemesis.  Apparently, even the Traveler wanted to get rid of the kid.

Considering the people who are making (re: completely fucking up) Picard its funny to posit that they may come up with interesting sci-fi stories rather than more grim-dark, cookie-cutter space garbage.

I though the set-up was good but it went to shit really fast and then went sub-shit in the last few episodes.

I like Chabon as a writer and I actually liked most of this. I wasn't wild about the wrap-up--the planet of the synthetics looked to me too much like the planet of the Extremely Northern California People in Star Trek: Insurrection. That was where they really needed to whip out the imagination--what is a small culture of all synthetic people like? etc. The Borg-synthetic connection was also shockingly unexplored--they seemed to be setting that up thematically and then, pffft, nothing.

I think there will be a lot more borg / synthetic in the coming seasons.

I hope they kill this show and start making Star Trek again. Like just kill the timeline and move forward 50-100 years and start over again with slightly better technology and exploring again. You can travel farther and faster now so like different quadrants and stuff. You can make up new factions etc.

They already have the problem of technology being too advanced.

I think I've mentioned it before somewhere, but I remember Stracynzski talking to fans on an old Babylon 5 message board when B5 first came out and the usual contentious subject of whether DS9 was trying to imitate B5 came up. Someone asked JMS what he'd do if they asked him to do a Trek show.

He said, "I'd make it a real first-contact show, where every season was one, maybe two first-contact arcs. I'd take away the transporter. I'd take away the instant contact with Starfleet. I'd make the distances genuinely vast--where they were beyond any hope of quick rescue. I'd take away the replicators, so that they had to resupply from the civilization or planet they were in contact with. I'd make the crew small, so that everyone had to be involved directly in planetary exploration, first-contact research and diplomacy, etc. I'd make the aliens alien. I'd take away the translator."

I thought that was a fucking great proposal, but that it was essentially a reboot. Voyager could have done most of that--damage the ship badly enough that they don't have transporters, replicators, holodecks, and that something doesn't work right about the translator, make them have to trade, etc. But even then, not quite what JMS was proposing.

I suppose you could do something like Star Trek: Andromeda--an experimental drive takes a Federation ship (on purpose) to a neighboring galaxy; the drive has to collect dark matter very slowly via a scoop for five years before it can be used to return. No replicators because something something technobabble; the translators don't work until several years of contacts produce enough commonalities; life is not "humanoids with bumpy foreheads" but some really really different organisms, societies, etc.

It's all fun and games until the nazi space lizards show up.

So you're saying the stole 2 show ideas from him because that was the essential pitch for Enterprise. 

Pretty much--that was how some fans looked at it (and why JMS said that the lawyers on retainer for B5 told him to stop talking online about ideas he had).

There's also a lot of overlap there with Voyager, for that matter.

Didn't Stargate do something like that?

Yeah, no writers could possibly work with advanced technology.  That’s why the Culture series is such shit.  🙄

Yes, and it was beautiful.

But apparently the approach didn't get the ratings they wanted. Plus they also hit the same problem as Star Trek; too much of a thing/saturation diminished the value of the brand overall.

I think Picard shows you can bring the Federation and Starfleet into view a bit more and benefit from it. But yes, if they really want to do that, and not cover a ship or a station "out there", they've just got to go more in the direction of Banks. What does a better, largely post-scarcity society look like? Especially right at this moment in the Trek timeline--they've had a bad scare (the Mars attack) and now they know it a misdirect. But they've also had to deal with the umpteenth infiltration of Starfleet--Tal Shiar, the goobers from "Conspiracy", the Founders--which should give them all a lot of pause. They've got really incoherent civilizational ideas about life (synthetic life bad or ok to use as a tool even before the Mars attack; but near-AI disembodied computers largely good or ok). Their ideas about pluralism have the same classic problems that our ideas do (Starfleet is ok with your values and ideas as long as they're within the same narrow band as Starfleet/Federation orthodoxy, but stray much outside and you get told to go mind your own business back on your own world). All of this is super relevant to the present day, so they can keep the tradition of using Trek to comment on and think about our moment.

Season 2 save them whales!

https://youtu.be/xkEC1FIGqXQ

It not what I'd hoped for. The best thing about S1 was seeing something of trek outside of starfleet.

It looks like it is just going to be more people pulling weird shit out of the box. Fine I guess.

Wow, that is a fucking disappointment. So much for strange new worlds, new life and civilizations. Star Trek just never seems to get close to its potential for more than a little while, and certainly not in its afterlives following DS9 and Voyager's final seasons.

Also, "Q makes everyone a fascist" is a little too meta right now.

Seriously. Look, they've already GOT the Bell Riots--they've got a moment almost identical to ours at exactly our moment. Go in and show us how you get out of fascism in this slightly better world.

Or don't. How about doing more with Picard's time, you lazy fuckers.

We got started on this last night.

The first episode isn't bad. I didn't mind them moving ahead a bit to a new status quo for all the characters, but I wasn't wild about Picard himself just slotting back so easily into Starfleet, let alone Raffi, who has spent a long and bitter time in exile. I wish for once we could see Starfleet in relationship to the Federation where folks have to actually have some real fucking arguments about Starfleet's perennial problem with its leadership. That feels like it would have been a better job for Picard to have taken on in the interval between the last series and this one--to be something like an inspector general or to head up a major commission appointed by the Federation government to reform and restructure Starfleet. That would also have more thematic resonance with what comes next, if my understanding of the rest of the season is correct.

Of all the nuTrek shows in recent years, though, this show has by far the best range of new characters. Discovery is just so uneven (in this respect and others). We'll see with Strange New Worlds. But I actually kind of like Picard's oddball set of new associates--they've got real personalities and interesting backstories.

Shit on this show all you want but Alison Pill doing “Shadows of the Night” is fucking fantastic.

If the third season is bringing back the original NG cast (except for Wil Wheaton), I hope this convinces the brass that a Worf follow-up series would be good.

I do like the Jurati character and Pill is doing a good job with her.

I still haven't been motivated to subscribe to CBS to watch any of the new Trek stuff, but a Worf series would do it as long as they wrote the character well (which I think is much easier than writing for Picard).

They've such a good lock on Worf as a character, barring a few misjudgments like Alexander. He's a classic case of an adopted foundling who rediscovers his birth culture and is then a hyper-exaggerated "more X than X" devotee of the culture to the point that he both annoys and shames the people who've grown up in it.

I could see a Worf series that goes deep into where the Klingons are at after the Dominion War and after the destruction of Romulus.

Watched last episode. It went from "it could be good if they got the writing" and it just kept slipping. Its not enough to have a few good moment when you got so much bad stuff happening.

We almost quit outright in the mushy middle where it became a less funny Star Trek IV The Voyage Home but also just throughout the jury-rigging has been so so aggravating. "Let's do the time-travel dingus around the sun even though it's so really hard and dangerous that only Mr. Spock can do it right but now the Borg Queen because she suddenly acquired plot-necessity powers" etc. Like it's been AGONIZING to watch the showrunners try to contrive everything into place for the sake of a decent idea about Picard's own past that's clearly kind of service to Stewart himself as he gets ready to make his peace with the world.

I would have preferred:

a) a rollicking adventure with Picard's Season 1 folks that ends up their time together decisively
b) a time-travel adventure narrowly focused on the Borg's origins and Picard's personal history

Not a mash-up of the two.

Especially not with Soong thrown in there, though I would guess this presages some return of Data/Soong in the context of synthetic life in Season 3; but that will end up pointing to the most potent unravelled/undealt with material from Season 1--there's really been no reckoning with Earth/the Federation's experience with synthetic life, and the further linking of Soong to the same threads that produced Khan/Eugenics makes that even more potent/more a dropped shoe that no one has reckoned with.

It's too bad Avery Brooks went off the deep end. Because I would have killed for Sisko to reappear, and him and Picard to have a buddy cop adventure.

Insert jaunty tune

One of them is messy
One of them is neat
They're the two best captains
In all of Starfleeeet

3rd (and apparently last) season has begun.

You can really feel Akiva Goldsman's complete inability to tell a story that isn't a remix of someone else's successful story, right down to specific story beats. I honestly thought for a minute that Picard and Riker were going just go ahead and take over Captain Asshole's ship and start off the Wrath of Khanning that is plainly about to get rolling. Plus there's probably going to be some "who is working for the conspiracy and who isn't" going down. If Crusher's kid turns out to be Picard's son, there's another Khan reprise.

But anyway, ok, I'm happy we will be seeing all these characters again. I just hope it's a halfway decent story.

From what I've heard, prior seasons have followed a progression of "this seems like it could be interesting or could be really stupid, let's see where it goes" followed by "oh no it got really stupid".  So I wouldn't hold out high hopes for this one.

Honestly that has been true of all new trek to a greater or lesser extent. (Except for lower decks which is just awesome throughout)

All of it is dumb fun.

Occasionally just dumb.

I'd argue Strange New Worlds has bucked this trend as well. Whether or not it holds up in later seasons is still an open question sadly.

I loved SNW except for the extremely hack-handed ripoff of Aliens.

Worf fucking saved this whole thing almost single-handedly. Every single line delivery is perfect and they wrote some great fucking shit for Dorn to deliver.

"I am Worf. Son of Mogh. House of Martok, son of Sergey, House of Rozhenko, Bane of the Duras family, Slayer of Gowron.

I have made some chamomile tea. Do you take sugar?"

well fuck.  If my wife finds out about this we're gonna be stuck with a Paramount+ subscription.

Maybe see if this trial is still active. (https://slickdeals.net/f/16441246-free-month-of-paramount-with-showtime-for-30-days?attrsrc=search%3Aterm%3AParamount%2B%7Csearch%3Apage%3A1%7Csearch%3Aposition%3A1%7Csearch%3Aresult_type%3Athread%7Csearch%3Aresult_id%3A16441246&src=SiteSearchV2Algo1)

I actually enjoyed the Aliens ripoff. It was obvious that that was exactly what it was but it was well executed and fun so I gave it a pass.


I saw an interview with Michael Dorn and when they asked him to return he suggested that Worf had become essentially a samurai who was on a bit of a spiritual journey and they ran with it. This is possibly my favorite portrayal of Worf if I'm honest.

The rest of it. Woo boy. Why is the ship so dark? Why is the red on their uniforms so dark it almost looks black? When will we get some straight answers about why Beverly's son is being hunted? Why is Jonathan Frakes the only one that seems to be having fun? Who hired Amanda Plummer? They deserve a raise because she steals every scene and has eaten every bit of scenery that gets within arms reach.

On one hand, I fucking loved Patrick Stewart's portrayal of Picard as fucking disgusted by Beverly's patently stupid and morally insane explanations for why she has kept out of touch and kept Picard's son hidden from him. You could see it on Picard's face: I had sex with you? You were a valued member of my crew? And what I especially liked was that it wasn't just "I have a SON", wasn't just self-centered--he was nauseated by her incoherence.

On the other hand, I'm kind of hoping that Beverly sounded as insane and incoherent as that because she's hiding something much worse, much deeper and is trying to throw Picard off the scent. Like, maybe Jack is not in fact Picard's son and she's using his assumption to get him to protect Jack. Or maybe she's done forbidden genetic manipulation on him (whether he's Picard's son or not). It would be more depressing if she was just that stupid and awful. Jack getting a vision while dying from the gas might be a sign that he's the key to something bigger and that's what she's hiding.

I haven't watched it, but Crusher having a Picard bastard and naming him Jack after her husband who died under Picard's command is just all kinds of fucked up.  Is that something that's addressed or is it a case of the writers knowing that she loved someone named Jack but not knowing the rest of that backstory?

I don't remember it coming up. It may have come up in the scene Khaldun mentioned which is one of the few times Patrick Stewart didn't look checked out IMO. His acting in that scene is pretty on point and he calls out her stupidity to her face which I did like.

Yeah, a fair amount of the time Stewart just looks really tired, to the point that you almost feel sorry for him. But man he really dials it in hard in that one scene with McFadden.

Picard does not reference the fact that the son is named "Jack" but I kind of assume it's one of the things on his mind. That's always been part of the weird relationship between Crusher and Picard--that vague sense that she's cheating on him despite the fact that her husband is long dead. It's why some folks decided a long time ago that Wesley is maybe Picard's illegitimate kid--the sense that Crusher and Picard cheated on Jack Crusher even when Jack was still alive. Even if they didn't, Crusher has made clear a couple of times that the two of them were hot for each other even back then, sort of.  So naming the kid "Jack" even if it's actually Picard's son is definitely fucking psycho.

Um, Dr. Crusher called that explosion in the nebula a "birth", but you know what I saw? Rhythmic pulsing of energy waves and then a really huge energy wave that distributed millions of small white glowing space-squids all over the place. Not only was that a cosmic ejaculation that the Titan rode to escape, Riker grabbed a kidney stone on the way and flung it at the Shrike.

In other news, why the writers feel the need to use the holodeck (except for cheap parallelism of then-and-now, as if we wouldn't figure that out) and even worse explain that the holodeck has a separate power source, I dunno. Unless the money they were getting for that really over the top product placement of Jameson was just crazy high.

Yeah, the holodeck having its own power source seemed really weird to me. It's not that important guys.

I did like that we finally got some character growth for Captain Shaw beyond "asshole" and his reaction to Picard makes more sense now. Dude basically has severe PTSD. But I also wonder how he wound up in command in the first place with his obvious issues.

I kind of wish we hadn't had a Wolf 359 callback and he just basically went off on Picard and Riker because they came aboard his ship in a way that showed zero respect to him or his crew and got them mixed up in some very dangerous shit without letting him have a say in it--that they acted like the main characters and like he was an NPC. That seems more dramatically valid and more interesting.

The holodeck having its own power source seemed fine to me in itself, but opened up the thought, 'so if that is affordable why doesn't everything have an equivalent emergency backup?'.

But that is fairly normal star trek.

Show seems better than the last 2 seasons though. And far better than.the TNG movies.

I quite liked this latest episode. It felt like the plot finally got interesting and seeing the nostalgia guest star was cool as I liked her mini-arc in TNG.

Yeah, that part of the episode was good.

I'm just kind of annoyed that we're going to the shapechanger/infiltration well again, with all the standard tropes: are you a shapechanger? NO U! etc. But also Starfleet infiltrated again--and yeah, they tried to plug the plothole desperately in this episode, unconvincingly--oh yes Starfleet has anti-infiltration protocols now only wow these meaty changelings can beat them, how about that. This is two seasons AFTER Starfleet Intelligence was revealed to be controlled by a Romulan who manipulated the entire command hierarchy into doing all sorts of dubious shit AND managing to smuggle other Romulan agents and assassins onto Earth. At this point, blood tests and scanner tests plainly aren't enough.

I'm guessing that was the plot of Season 1? I skipped the first two seasons because I heard nothing good about them and this one drew me back purely on the promise of a TNG reunion of sorts. We're close, only need Geordi to show up at this point I guess!


I'm curious where they go from here. The problem with this plot is it'll be hard for them to build much of a coalition as they won't trust anyone. Also, I'm really enjoying how Worf has been the opposite of how he was in TNG. Poor dude got his butt kicked constantly in TNG it felt like and so far this season Worf has been awesome. I love this version of Worf as I mentioned earlier.

Give me a new series with Samurai Worf please. I'd even take a Kung Fu ripoff where he goes from planet to planet righting wrongs and defending those who can't defend themselves.

And Elnor as well.

Elnor: "Please, choose life."
Worf: "Today, it looks like he chooses death."

Samurai Worf and Elnor plus Seven going back to being a Ranger and shooting things when the other two fail at talking.

How about a series where they decide to clean up Section 31 once and for all? Maybe introduce a child of Bashir and Garak who has been exquisitely trained to destroy Section 31 but thus the other three can never trust him/her?

I'd watch this...

Oh god I fucking hated the efforts to set up a new series with Jack Crusher being the big deal.

He's more unlikeable than Wesley at his most insufferable. Dr. Crusher is like the Echidna of Star Trek, mother to monsters.

This was fanservice as cancer--I mean, ok, you want to fanservice us to Patrick Stewart's death, ok! I will go there. But no, they want to fanservice us into the not-final frontier of making money. Star Trek: Legacy Masturbation!

What an incoherent series these three seasons have been. So at odds with each other. Some great original ideas that they almost immediately walked back, some terrible pandering.

I actually really liked the series finale. It hit most of the right notes for me and my only "complaint" was the nerd in me going "the Galaxy class is basically a giant whale, there's no way it could fly like that..." It had some really good character moments though I do kind of wish they'd had the guts to go ahead and let Picard die a heroes death or something.

Speaking of Picard, the finale was really the only time Patrick Stewart seemed to really be "present" other than the occasional scene here and there.

I don't mind the idea of 7, Raffi(?) and Jack Crusher being a potential spin-off on the new Enterprise. I'd have preferred Shaw but I do like how he got some final words in his own way. I don't actually dislike Jack Crusher either though I'm not sure what "special counselor to the Captain" means. Maybe 7 is just a cougar.

I've only seen bits and pieces of the first two seasons but he was definitely present in the scenes with Q.

Speaking of which, poor Q really traded down. From Captains to Commanders and now in his old age he has to settle for Ensigns.

I wasn't too cross with the finale until the credits, but linking Q to this turd of a character really makes me fear that Jack Crusher will have more of a place in the new series than he deserves.

It was SUCH a horrible attempt to force the character: OH YOU SPECIAL BOY.

I suppose I could maintain a head canon that this Q is like Hitler in Jo-Jo Rabbit, he's just in Jack Crusher's fantasies. Maybe Jack isn't even actually on board the Enterprise-G, this is just his own little fanwank Holodeck scenario in whatever mental hospital he's in while he recovers from being Borgified.

I skipped the first two seasons and have no interest in ever watching them if I'm honest. I've heard nothing good about them, especially season 2. Season 3 was fun but even its best episode (which for me was probably the finale) wasn't as good as the worst episode of Strange New Worlds season 1. It often felt too forced and despite only being 10 episodes it felt like they dragged things out. Amanda Plummer saved the season to be honest and if I'm totally honest, I think I liked the finale because it felt like a proper goodbye for the characters after the travesty that was Nemesis.

Just got access to Paramount recently & binged season 1.

It's a mixed bag, some real clunkiness & ham fisted deus ex machina plot moments, but enjoyed it on the whole. After just finishing the latest season of Pedro Pascal & the Magic Child, I liked this better (though 1st season of Mandalorian is far better, admittedly).

Have watched most of TOS & TNG, but none of the stuff after appealed to me. And the movie reboot over the last decade left a sour taste in the mouth.

That’s more or less where I’m at with it having just finally gotten around to watching it. It’s pretty poorly paced and is a mish-mash of fan service cameos and callbacks, but it’s also a better send-off than Nemesis as you said.