Star Trek: Picard

“Fly Me to the Moon”

2.5 stars.

Air date: 3/31/2022
Written by Cindy Appel
Directed by Jonathan Frakes

Review Text

"Fly Me to the Moon" is a course correction after the hugely uneventful "Watcher," in which a car chase featured no one chasing the car. (I just can't get over that one.) This outing is fine, but the season, which started out with two very entertaining and promising shows, is getting predictably mired in the bog that is its serialized nature, which features a lot of plot and characters but an unfortunate lack of curiosity. It's more about moving pieces around on a chessboard (although Picard has so far yet to become "the very board upon which this game is played," as was promised by Q) and setting various things in procedural motion.

This episode does so at a reasonable clip and it has its character-based pleasures, mostly involving Agnes (who knew?) and her new frenemy, the Borg Queen, who early in the episodes uses Rios' voice commands to tap into a cell tower and call the police. A police officer arrives, which the Queen seems prepared to assimilate (although I was wondering why she never used that handy Borg tentacle until this very moment), so Agnes shoots her dead with a shotgun.

This doesn't happen before the Queen is able to manipulate Agnes into getting close enough to inject her with nanoprobes, such that the Queen is able to survive within Agnes' mind, even though the Queen's body is dead. These revelations are not shown to us until the final moments, which is a serviceable little narrative trick that keeps us in the dark for a while, and the rest of the crew in the dark still. Retrofitting Agnes' character as a lonely wallflower who uses awkwardness and humor as a defense mechanism — and who is bizarrely and codependently drawn toward the Borg Queen until the moment she is joined with her — is one of the more promising things happening on this show right now.

Meanwhile, the young woman Q was trying to manipulate turns out to be Renee Picard (Penelope Mitchell), one of Jean-Luc's distant ancestors. The only thing known about her is that she is destined to discover a microorganism on Jupiter's moon Io, so maybe she's the very board upon which this game is played. We see her first here in a spacecraft simulator, where she cracks under pressure. Q has managed to insert himself into this world as her psychiatrist, where she mentions the creeping return of a crippling depression that is threatening her ability to go on the mission. But if she doesn't go on the mission, history may go all totalitarian sideways. Do I have that right? I'm not sure, because it's not clear yet exactly what happening or not happening will result in the timeline disaster.

Q's session is witnessed by Picard with the help of Tallinn, the Watcher character who looks exactly like Laris and is played by Orla Brady. She's actually a Supervisor in the same type of role as Gary Seven, the main character of the backdoor pilot that aired as TOS's "Assignment: Earth." Tallinn is assigned to ensure that the proper destiny plays out for Renee. The whole crew is brought into the plot (now that they're all reunited on La Sirena) to oversee Renee's movements and ensure she goes on the mission. To do so they must go undercover at a high-security gala in full-on heist mode. Hopefully this heist will prove more entertaining than the one in "Stardust City Rag."

Oh, yeah: There's also Adam Soong (Brent Spiner) and his daughter Kore (Isa Briones). Soong is a discredited geneticist and his daughter is sick with an illness that confines her to a life inside their house. Q needs Soong's help and worms his way into his life with an offer Soong can't refuse; the scenes between Spiner and de Lancie are the ones in this episode that have the most dramatic juice.

Barely worth mentioning here is the quick and easy rescue of Rios from the Homeland Security bus, which somehow makes "Watcher" look even more pointless. Raffi continues to be annoying with her angry impulsivity that's excessive against all reason and overplayed by Michelle Hurd. Seven appears to be the reasonable one trying to minimize the damage — until she proceeds to go along with freeing all the prisoners on the bus. This seems like (1) making a snap judgment call when you don't have all the facts and (2) clearly contaminating the timeline with unnecessary interference. Someone needs to answer to Lucsly and Dulmur from Temporal Investigations when this is all over.

So, yeah. There's a lot of plot plotting going on in here, and it's kind of amazing how efficient and manageable it seems overall (give or take a bus rescue), considering how busy and, well, relatively nonsensical it is. The running time is shorter than usual, which might indicate why this feels so brisk and breezy. Stuff happens and it's kind of fun as an adventure for the team. But this is not to be mistaken for a clean narrative, and because it's merely one chapter of the book, it's impossible to know if this is going to end up holding together at all. The heist doesn't even get underway before the clock runs out on the episode. But this feels a lot less pointless and more entertaining and informative than last week did, however inconclusive, so that's something.

"I don't have the measles. I'm not going to get the measles.":

  • Lea Thompson makes a cameo appearance, I guess because she was already on set to direct the previous two episodes.
  • Having all these actors playing different roles is weird. Spiner as Soong I can take as a given, but then also having Orla Brady and Isa Briones playing human characters feels like an added pile-on of strange complications. Are we meant to take it as "Q somehow did it" or simply an "all the world's a stage" artistic conceit?
  • Rios was being sent to a "sanctuary district," as in the ones from DS9's "Past Tense," which also took place in 2024. But the way they use Homeland Security and ICE only ends up being confusing. Is a sanctuary district now tied specifically to immigration, or is it about homelessness? Or what?
  • Renee is supposed to be going into space in three days, and her upcoming quarantine prior to flight is directly referenced, but going to a crowded party before a quarantine that only lasts a couple of days is not going to cut it. If there's anything the writers should've learned from the COVID pandemic and applied here, it's how quarantines work.

  • Is the Io mission actually supposed to be the one happening in three days? A manned mission to Io is far beyond current technological capability unless this version of 2024 is already beyond us (by far more than two years).
  • Casting Brent Spiner as Yet Another Soong Relative is either hopelessly silly or just a requirement at this point. This is now the fourth different member of the Soong family tree he has played (in addition to "Brothers," the "Augments" trilogy, and "Et in Arcadia Ego"), not to mention Data, Lore, and B-4. He's got to hold the record for the most (sorta different) characters played by one actor on Trek, right?
  • It now seems very obvious that Agnes is destined to become the masked version of the Borg Queen who attacked the Stargazer in the season opener. It's so obvious, indeed, that one wonders if there will be additional twists compounded upon this development. But even if not, the road to getting there and what it ultimately means should be interesting.

Previous episode: Watcher
Next episode: Two of One

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268 comments on this post

    So in 2024 we will be flying manned missions to Io, where there is apparently unicellular life, so that will answer THAT question before the Vulcans show up, I guess. Oh and we also apparently will have forcefield-projecting antigravity drones capable of flying in perfectly synchronized formation. Neat.

    Oh, and absurd gala security measures that would put Big Brother to shame. 'Kay.

    If the point of going back to 2024 is to go back to "our society," why so completely throw "our society" out the window like this?

    Well, at least the comically evil ICE agents are explained now. It's not our society.

    One of Picard's ancestors is flying the space mission WHERE EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE IS DISCOVERED FOR THE FIRST TIME, and he doesn't know about her? He knows all about his illustrious ancestors, including the one who was at Trafalgar, but not THAT ONE?!

    I just . . . what's the point of all this, right now? I figured going back in time would be to explore the consequences of choices, thematically. Another "this is your life, Jean-Luc Picard, as it might have been" and all that. "These are the things you don't understand about yourself. Are you so sure you still believe everything you've always believed?" But . . . where is that? Where is ANY of that right now! What the hell!

    Sigh.

    Okay, moving on to the more important things . . .

    Bold prediction: this story won't end at the end of the season. It will end with a cliffhanger. We will be back in the 25th century, right at that moment on the Stargazer, and the Queen will be revealed to be Jurati, and then we will fade to black. And next season the (hopefully) VASTLY MORE INTERESTING Borg plot, about them wanting to join the Federation, will begin.

    The writers clearly want Soong to be involved in the run-up to the Eugenics Wars, which means the writers are clearly going to move the Eugenics Wars to be part of World War III. And you know what? I'm 100% fine with that. They're laying the groundwork for it here: if the Eugenics Wars had already happened, no one would be hearing out Soong's presentation. The minute anyone got wind of him messing with human genetics, there would be jackboots kicking down his door and boots on his neck. And Picard already gave some flimsy line about this century being "pure chaos and we barely know what happened." So.

    It occurs to me that Khan's middle name is Noonien--and homage, will they make it?--and that there's going to be another Noonien-Singh on Strange New Worlds, so clearly the writers are super interested in the subject. You can just bet there will be connections here.

    I never understood this modern obsession with Khan. He was a good villain. For that story. And that story's been told. The concept just doesn't have endless dimensions to it. Am I wrong here?

    It's like the writers didn't do their Star Trek homework and only skimmed the reading material, and they all picked Star Trek II to sample because "that's the good one." Hence all the Khan-this, Khan-that lately.

    Okay, so not-Laris is a Gary Seven. Meddling aliens, then, not some cosmic force of timeline protectors. I still think it's dangerous ground, how they portray her, and that less explanation is more, but they seem to be okay so far.

    Oh look, Jurati is now a medical doctor and an antique computer scientist. 'Kay.

    Elnor will be back, because they paid him for this episode. If they were writing him out, they would have written him out.

    Oh hi, Isa Briones. You're still on this show?

    Seven continues to be entirely wasted since the first two episodes. Raffi and Rios too, but Seven is the bigger crime.

    I had to start and stop this episode so many times just to get through it. The "heist" music they played when talking about infiltrating the gala? Pure cringe. Picard's "oh my team is the absolute best" line while they come across his crew dragging the cop? Were we supposed find that funny? Dear lord.

    Listen, writers of future Star Trek episodes, I have a free tip for you: next time you have an idea to toss our characters into a casino heist cliche or an "infiltrate a black tie gala" cliche? Don't. Just don't. And yes, I know it was fun when Deep Space Nine did it, but guess what? You ain't Deep Space Nine.

    Oh, I wanted to add: Guinan's bar is located at number 10, Forward street. I don't think her bar in LA is called "10 Forward." As for why it's there . . . well, El-Aurians have weird time sense, right? Maybe she just got a strong feeling, when she saw the location, that that should be the spot. A feeling of something that would be important to her. Guinan was always having feelings about things. I don't have any issue with that choice by the writers. Nor with her being a bartender at the time we meet her again. A bartender is a natural profession for a race of "listeners" like El-Aurians. I would imagine she's been a bartender a lot in her life, though certainly not always. And I would imagine, when she isn't a bartender, she's playing a bartender-adjacent role in some social circle somewhere!

    Wasn't she some kind of socialite in the 1890s hosting salons with Mark Twain and the like in her home, according to Time's Arrow? In retrospect it was something that would've attracted a lot of attention to her.

    Jurati knowing some medicine and understanding 20/21st century comp sci is plausible, IMHO--a cyberneticist specializing in human-like synthetics would know something about human anatomy and physiology especially if she's trying to create artificial "pass as the real thing" versions. I'd also imagine that what we take as cutting-edge tech would be taught as an interesting high school elective lesson--like we teach our high schoolers when replicating mechanical physics and chem that was cutting edge hundreds of years ago. As a college freshman (two decades ago--oof), I had a biology lab module in which we got to snip and package up foreign DNA and inject it into e coli bacteria to decode and replicate--techniques that won the Nobel Prize only a few decades prior.

    Alan Turing and hundreds of scientists at Bletchley Park were dedicated to finding a way how to break the Enigma encryption used by the Axis powers during WWII. Teens now can buy kits to build their own modernized (chips and LEDs) replicas of the Enigma cipher machine or tinker with it on the computer using a python script.

    As far as the timeline goes--per the showrunner, the Confederacy 24th century Picard would not have gone back in time to the 1890's and met Guinan. That also means Data's head is not buried in a cave, and aliens were able to steal the life force of vulnerable humans unabated. That also means nobody went back in time to the 1980's to take two humpback whales named George and Gracie.** That also means the 2024 that Picard and co. are in a timeline that has already experienced deviations--butterflies and all.

    *Technically non-canon, but the novelization of the events prior to Picard S1 (written from background production notes and show bibles) depict Jurati as having been trained as an MD before cross-training into cybernetics, plausibly for residency.

    ** This also means alt-Scotty would not have given the formula for transparent aluminum to that plant manager, but it appears that aluminum oxynitride was independently being developed and patented in the 80's anyways.

    I'd like to know what Q's game is at this point. In previous episodes, Q's antics have had the purpose of testing humanity, whether it was showing they weren't ready for the Borg, or showing Picard the cost of the road not taken, or showing him the very possibilities of existence. Right now, it seems like Q's antics are chaos for the sake of chaos, and that doesn't feel true to how he's been in the past.

    We still have five episodes to see what the point is, so hopefully, there will be something there.

    This episode felt like more wheel-spinning. After two promising episodes to start the season, it feels like it's stagnated.

    What broke me out of the episode, was more mundane--after explaining that the Picards fled France during Nazi occupation, settling in Britain, they say that Renee Picard grew up in France, went to French schools, has a French passport, but has a British accent. That hurt my head.

    By the way, the 323-634-5667 number at the bottom of Q's 3D printed business card is a live number. Just FYI.

    @jeffreystube:

    You didn't watch the first episode of the season? In that one Picard gave a speech at Starfleet Academy and especially mentioned the Europa mission and Renee Picard.

    Yeah, it's not our 2024. I thought that was clear last ep? Maybe I'm confused. But I agree with The Chronek, to me the most interesting twist was Q's attitude toward Picard, who is "in his way." Q seems to be either dying or on the verge of being kicked out of the Continuum for good, and the first seems far more likely to me. He seems to be blaming Picard for some reason. Before, he has always kind of admired and liked Picard, but there seemed to be some real hate there this time.

    It seems obvious that Agnes will become the new Borg Queen, except I'm not quite sure how, because she's not connected to the collective. I'm sure they'll fudge a way. Pretty sure I read that this season will be another self-contained one, so I foresee them getting back to their own time, everything nicely fixed, by the 9th or 10th episode in time to explore the results of taming the Borg (which by the way could explain why they haven't come up in Discovery).

    I didn't think this was filler at all, I thought it carried all the main threads forward well. Not sure how they're going to make Elnor fit in, but I don't even care about him.

    Jeffrey's Tube, I hate you for pointing out that Jean-Luc should know about Renee if she's the key to everything. I can't think of an excuse for that little problem.

    @The Queen, your highness, I think it's more the issue of the writers wanting to lay out the time travel rules without having to explicitly draw it out like in Back to the Future or Avengers Endgame.

    With Q, allowing that he's able to see traverse time and timelines in all directions like we can move around in an open field, I'm guessing what Picard did with the self-destruct damaged the continuum or him specifically. This Q is angry, and I think if he can't get Picard to right the wrong--the chance he's provided by moving the team over, he's perfectly willing to snuff out the timeline that contained the Picard that messed him up.

    @Jeffrey's Tube I love how we are now officially waiting for Season 3 for this show to get good.

    I thought this was a big step up after a shaky (and sometimes bad) episode last week. There were a lot of subplots - a lot of balls being kept in the air - but most of them worked well, and a few of them actually offered some compelling character drama. Most importantly, after an episode of wheel spinning, there's actual forward movement in the plot, which is finally beginning to take shape (though I expect twists to come).

    Picard's stuff with Not Laris (Tallinn) was...okay. She honestly doesn't feel like a real character yet so much as a plot device, and she had to give the clunkiest exposition of the episode. However, the scenes involving Renee Picard was great, giving us an emotional connection to her struggles in a short period of time. I was also amused that right when I was wondering why the psychologist had such an awful fake European accent we pan back (so to speak) and find out it was Q. Well played.

    The buddy cop crap with Seven and Raffi is still hokey/interminably dull, but they get the rescue of Rios finished in less than 3 minutes, so I can't complain. And some of that run time is spent with Rios, whose scenes are better in every possible way. Good riddance to a clunky plot line.

    The stuff with Adam Soong, Q, and his daughter (Kore) is just wonderful. It's a very manipulative and cliche scenario - the father with a child with a terminal disease willing to do anything - but Spiner has the chops to pull it off and has amazing chemistry with DeLancie - something we never got to see on TNG because Data was such a dry character.

    Unlike a lot of viewers, I've not been feeling the Jurati/Borg Queen stuff this season. But I think the scenes in this episode are very effective, and there's finally some clear forward movement here, with Jurati having a coherent character arc which will unfold over the remainder of the season.

    And of course we end with everyone still alive in the La Sirena crew (plus Tallinn) getting together an planning the "heist" so to speak. Not sure where things are going yet, but I'm sure it's not as simple as it seems. I think the Renee Picard stuff may be a red herring to some degree, since we know it's Adam Soong who gets remembered by the Confederation. I'm wondering if it's actually something related to Jurati's assimilation (and whatever the 2024 reaction to the crisis is) that spurs humanity to become isolationist and xenophobic.

    There are some interesting implications of the worldbuilding of this episode as well. After playing footsie with the idea in the last two episodes this may be "our" 2024, this episode seems to put to bed the idea that Trek takes place in anything other than an alternate timeline, what with a manned mission to Europa and that drone force field the Soongs had. It also seems to retcon at least a bit of old Trek continuity, because there's no way Adam Soong could be doing the work he was if the Eugenics Wars took place during the 1990s. Trek has tried to have it both ways when it comes to the Eugenics Wars - DS9 tried to be fuzzy regarding the dates, VOY ignored them, and Enterprise embraced the original idea under Manny Coto, so it will be interesting to see what is done here.

    I think in the 60's and then again to a lesser extent in the 80's and 90's it was possible to cast the Eugenics Wars and WWIII as something that happened many decades into the future, but the closer we get to the supposed time frame of these events, the writers are increasingly boxed in. Trek from TOS up until most of DS9 made it seem possible, though in a fantastical way, that it was the future of our universe.

    At some point the writers are (or already may have) decided that the Prime Trek timeline is not ours. Past Tense places the Bell Riots in September 2024, and as bad as the homeless situation is, we don't imprison homeless or ship out of work people to sanctuary districts behind security gates. Hopefully the world will keep its nerve and the Russia Ukraine war won't snowball into WWIII.

    Our timeline will march on, and at some point it will be April 5, 2063, and we will or we won't make first contact with an extraterrestrial species.

    This episode was a real treat. De Lancie, Spiner, and Stewart all had great performances but there’s more to it than that. The ICE plotline was mercifully corralled in while at least three new story threads were created. The headliner of these was the Renee Picard mission which we know from last week Q is striving to derail. But Q has lost his physical powers, so he needs to manipulate people with his omniscience. This leads to the second story involving Adam Soong, whose daughter (played by Isa Briones) is suffering from a rare genetic illness. Soong’s need for a cure drives him into a corner. It seems only fitting then that Q can use his “all-knowing” intelligence to enlist Soong as an accomplice. The final story involves the Borg Queen who, rather than sulking in the dark like we were led to believe, devised a wounded gazelle routine to get a physical foothold into Agnes. Will Agnes play the sleeper agent again? Time will tell, but hopefully it plays out differently than last season as Agnes’ defiance of the Queen thus far has been a bright moment for the character.

    What I liked was that all three storylines were weaved together to flow seamlessly with the action on screen. I don’t know if it was camerawork, the writing, or a combination of the two, but it felt like the three story pieces were converging on a single cohesive narrative. We’re also never given extreme detail, but sort of a taste of each story to pique our curiosity. What is the Europa Mission; how exactly is it important? Why does Q need Soong specifically and what will be his part in all this? And perhaps most mysteriously, why is there a human Laris who has been enlisted a la Gary Seven from a relatively obscure episode of TOS? The answers don’t really matter; the questions are interesting enough that we can enjoy imagining the outcomes ourselves.

    Just an aside, Assignment Earth was originally a pilot for another show on NBC in the 60s that never panned out. That original Star Trek episode was mildly interesting and brought us less science but more supernatural elements like talking cats! I wonder if we’ll see one of those in Picard.  But at any rate, it’s surprising they’d borrow components from such an offbeat TOS episode.

    Yeah, this was a big improvement and I'm willing to say we're officially back on track. The pacing and plot threads are just so well paced and airtight, and I'm finally starting to understand the "gritty Voyage Home/modern drama" genre pastiche they're doing to do here.

    I thought this episode was great. Last week is the weakest of the lot, but we are back on track this week. Great pacing, raising stakes, answering some questions and introducing new ones, great character work - really good stuff.

    I had to remind myself that this is not our 2024. It's an alternate 2024 set in the prime timeline.

    It's also worth noting this episode was directed by "two takes Frakes." Not that Lea Thompson did awful work (I think her direction was one of the few good things about last week) but Frakes never does a bad job.

    “Yeah, his spleen’s in a box over there” is not excty a dialog line I expect from Star Trek. But it worked somehow for me.

    The entire episode was a lot better than last time: The story flow­ed bet­ter, we ap­proach more central pieces of the mys­tery, and Brent Spiner has a habit of im­prov­ing every­thing he’s in (even In­de­pen­dence Day). His scene with de Lancie sparkles.

    Casting Iso Briones as Soong’s daughter makes sense I guess — we know from ample evi­dence that the Soongs look the same in almost every ge­nera­tion, and they like to build an­droids in their own image. I was less pleased by round-eared “Laris”; they better give a reason for that other than “people liked Laris in S1, and that was the only way how we could squeeze the actress in.” The highly un­moti­vat­ed pres­ence of Elnor in the same episode makes fear grow inside me.

    On the the other side, I dislike the suspected reason be­hind the cast­ing of Kore Soong (the Soongs really like dis­tinct per­­so­­nal names, don’t they?). The cha­­rac­­ter of Soji is burnt by the events in the S1 series fi­na­le: Her de­ci­sion to blow up the entire uni­ver­se just to rid her­self and her two dozen an­droid friends from per­­secu­­tion is hardly de­­fens­­ible, in parti­cular as no­body saw a need to revise that deci­sion after Sutra had been ex­posed as a mur­der­ess. So in order to keep the actress, they had to give a new role to her. Better writing in S1 wold have been the better choice — just imagine Adam Soong being confronted with a time-travel­ing an­droid built by one of his own des­cen­dants. What a scene that will never be!

    The storyline between Jurati and the Borg Queen was well told. The “Jurati being controlled by a mind-altering agent”-stuff is not exactly new, but I really approve of the decision to let the audience know (at least) part of it from the beginning, unlike in S1, where the murderous twist came out of left field.

    The smoke effect at the end of “Watcher” had filled me with the hope that they would come up with a followup to Gary Seven, and when the Watcher and Picard appeared out of a smoking safe I cheered. Unlike many, I really love “Assignment Earth” — not as cerebral as the best TOS stuff, but still very enjoyable. It was not necessary for Picard to retell the story, though, and I want a black cat ASAP.

    But now I am confused on the plot: In the previous epis­odes, it seemed Q wanted the Fe­dera­tion time­line back and ab­hor­red the Con­feder­a­tion time­line. But now he sup­ports Adam Soong, the hero of the Con­feder­a­tion, over Renée Picard, who is some­how important for the Federation. What game is Q play­ing? With a better writing team, I should expect a mind-blow­ing twist and plans inside of plans and a clever Q-ism to save the day, but I re­mem­ber Dis­cov­ery S2 and re­main a skeptic.

    After last week’s dud, the show now looks a bit brighter again.

    A marked improvement upon last week's episode. The Jurati/Borg Queen story line remains compelling, and I quickly connected with and cared about Renee Picard.

    Did not expect any series would mine 'Assignment: Earth' for a story element. Glad the writers quickly dispensed with the Rios breakout and Raffi/Seven story, as the action elements were entirely needless. Found Picard overreacted a bit to discovering the identity of the therapist - Picard has long been tired of Q's antics, but his reactions this season have been more forceful than ever. And I'm all for a good heist-like story, but this is the second season in a row in which the plot has called upon the crew to drop in on a party unannounced. Also, it seemed odd to me that astronauts would be required to attend a party just before quarantining for a mission, needless exposing them to the potential of an airborne disease.

    Another set piece to the larger story line, but a better one than the last.

    @ Galadrial,

    Viewers have picked up on the fact that "Tallinn's" PDA has Romulan characters. She probably doesn't just look like Laris - she is Laris, albeit with cosmetic surgery to blend in on Earth so her mission is successful. She has no memory of Picard of course because that still exists in her "future."

    When it comes to Kore looking like Soji, I got nothing. But then again, they keep recasting Spiner as well. The tell will be if the other characters think she is Soji when (if?) they meet her. If they have no reaction, it's just a convenient way to keep Isa Briones involved, but if they do, there is likely some story reason, however cockamamie.

    I fell asleep twice during this one. Typical middle-of-the-arc tedium has set in. Jurati as the new Queen seems a given and I'm not sure why we needed the Gary Seven aliens from what was essentially a failed backdoor pilot. And why does Talinn need to look like Lariss? I like to see the actress work, but still.

    And if you insist on having Isa Briones as part of your show, why keep her away from the main cast again? Last season she was stuck playing As The Warpcore Turns on the Artifact and now she's Soong's immuno compromised daughter?

    Just get on with it...

    This not being the "Prime time line" makes all of this even more a waste of time.

    This isn't our Picard we're watching...it's just one perhaps from one of the other realities we briefly saw an Enterprise from in "Parallels". That's about how "real" this is.

    Jaxon,

    I'm not sure I get this. First, I don't think it's true, as if CBS says it's prime it's prime. We know that Picard (at least in mind) is from the Prime timeline, along with Rios/Jurati/Seven/Raffi. We don't get to deny this with headcanon.

    But more importantly, just because something is outside of continuity doesn't make it not worth telling. The Visitor is probably my single most favorite episode of Trek, but it's an alternate universe episode where nothing other than Ben Sisko's memory survive of what happened.

    Yes, just as in Parallels, Worf's mind was that of "prime" Worf in every other universe he moved into.

    Consider it a "pocket timeline" or a sort of slip knot that comes undone if you pull on the thread.

    The Visitor was an episode, not a season long arc. I wouldn't have wanted to spend an extended time in that universe either.

    Definitely a step up from the last two episodes. I enjoyed this one pretty much from start to finish, and the setups are starting to come together for the payoff.

    One exception. The Rios Rescue®. Why did they waste so much precious time on this subplot just for him to be easily rescued so the plot can continue? They didn't even make new, ground-breaking, or even good social commentary on that plot. If your peak TV show is doing a ten hour movie, every part matters. And if you need filler, why not skip the filler and have an 8 hour movie instead?

    Is Jurati becoming a Borg queen a red herring? In all possible timelines, Jurati is all alone... "look up" ... is that why it is her?
    Yes, Q is angry but he has always been "chaotic" and meddling with Picard and saving his life
    Remember Tapestry? Picard' own words - he was cocky. Did he not get an artificial heart? Why did Q "save" Picard?
    I am interested to know what Jurati and the Queen are up to.
    What will happen to Soong? What will happen?

    In Tapestry, Marta and Picard were "friends" and didn't Q try to insinuate he had regrets they could have been more than friends - Marta and Picard

    "I fell asleep twice during this one. Typical middle-of-the-arc tedium has set in."

    At this point I am just watching so I can read Jammer's review and comments. It's just homework for me. Booooooring.

    Picard is the only nuTrek I can stand to watch, and its mostly for the legacy characters.

    I'm not sure they are even those legacy character anymore.

    The Voyager two parter "Year Of Hell" ended with Janeway's corny "Times Up" and her ramming Voyager into the timeship, which totally reset button'd away what we spent two episodes watching.

    Now note that Brannon Braga originally wanted to make Year Of Hell a season long arc.

    "So in 2024 we will be flying manned missions to Io, where there is apparently unicellular life, so that will answer THAT question before the Vulcans show up, I guess. Oh and we also apparently will have forcefield-projecting antigravity drones capable of flying in perfectly synchronized formation. Neat."

    Wow I barely even noticed the absurdity of the mission to IO thing. I don't suppose the writers are aware that Jupiter is 7 years away from Earth and its radiation would turn any manned explorers into pulp within about 5 minutes. And we're apparently going there in 2 years lol. We'd be lucky to get there by 2124 maybe.

    Next to that the flying Stark Industries drones with forcefield projection aren't that big a deal.

    This was a huge step up from last week's disappointment. I was engaged for the entire thing.

    I'm going to watch it again before I comment.

    Call 323.634.5667!! haha

    Somewhere back there among the 14 or so years of comments I've contributed to Jammer's site is one that whines about how much I hate Q and why, and how I'd like to stomp the person who invented him. Someone said Gene did, so that's a bummer. I despise Q and every storyline involving him, ever. Yes, I like John deLancie very much and he does a great job at being a shithead, but an omnipotent being who likes to fuck around with the lives of beings so far below him that it would be like us tormenting termites is just . . . boring. Tedious. Pointless.

    Oh, I shall make John Luc be Robin Hood to prove to him that he loves Vash! Ugh.

    An omnipotent being that has nothing better to do than fuck with mortals--just ugh.

    ARGH!

    And this is the problem with the way shows are made today. In old Trek, if you didn't like an episode, next week's would be something different. Now with these "ten-hour movie" things, you are stuck if you don't care for the "arc."

    And I sure don't. I don't like Q, I don't like the Borg (been there, done that). I was SO hoping that Agnes hadn't been secretly assimilated when I saw the dead Borg Queen, but not really. I was just hoping that stupid plotline would be over already. But no, now Agnes is the Borg queen.

    Sheesh. I hate that they keep getting my hopes up and then throwing them out the window.

    I'm not sure if everyone is aware, but the Europa Clipper is a real thing:

    https://europa.nasa.gov/

    It will launch in 2024 (with a projected landing date of 2030) in search of life on Jupiter's moon of Europa. I agree that the show's timetable is a bit fantastic, but I thought it was cool they based it on real space exploration.

    @Jaxon

    "Now note that Brannon Braga originally wanted to make Year Of Hell a season long arc."

    That would have been incredible -- IF the reset button had not been permitted.

    I have only watched that two-parter once because I was SO angry when it ended. We saw these characters experience incredible obstacles, growth--it had real consequences (unlike so much of the show). I was so invested I literally threw something at the wall when it was over. What a fucking waste.

    Sigh. What might have been.

    "It will launch in 2024 (with a projected landing date of 2030) in search of life on Jupiter's moon of Europa. I agree that the show's timetable is a bit fantastic, but I thought it was cool they based it on real space exploration."

    I don't even have to open the link to know it's not a manned mission.

    A manned mission to Jupiter is barely more plausible with today's technology than a trip to Alpha Centauri. Even a manned mission to Mars is basically science fiction and that's a 7 month journey versus a 7 *year* trip to Jupiter. And I hope this Mary Sue Picard plot doesn't involve her reproducing because by the time she gets back from Io she'll be in her 50s and so pumped full of radiation she'll be glowing green.

    Also, that a mission that is specifically taylored to investigate Europa up close would instead just stumble onto life on Io, which is a quarter of a million kilometers away at its closest...

    Definitely an improvement over last week. At least the plotlines are moving forward and we have a better sense of what's driving this overall story arc. I love that Picard's ancestor, who is part of NASA, has something to do with all this. And I'm definitely curious as to what's going on with Q... Agree with some of the comments here about the whole ICE / Rios Rescue plotline, took way too long and wasted valuable time. I was also a little disappointed that this episode was only 41 minutes long. The beauty about streaming is that you are not confined to the 40-minute restriction of network television, so why squander the opportunity to tease out the storylines a bit more (e.g. we learned very little about Soong, could have devoted more time to that new thread)... Anyway, I'm back to being intrigued, and will continue watching the season... Oh, BTW, did you notice the nod to the Apollo 16 landing with the "1202 Alarm" at the beginning of the episode? That was the alarm that indicated the computer was in executive overflow, so it was dropping low priority tasks, something the controllers at mission control didn't understand and nearly caused an abort of the mission.

    By the way did anyone else catch Raffi's line about how if they don't rescue Rios he will "disappear forever"? I think the writers really think that the bus to Mexico is like a train to Auschwitz. Hey Raffi - it's Mexico, not the dark dimension. Just beam him up. Idiot.

    At least with this episode there are some interesting developments brewing and what what seems like a decent story is unfolding but there's an awful lot of moving parts introduced with the first half being quite discombobulated. I don't think just "name-dropping" makes things better necessarily though I would appreciate trying to make use of the vast Trek canon/history in sensible ways.

    So I presume part of the mystery is how Q lost his powers (or some of them) and how can enlisting Dr. Soong help, how stopping Renee Picard's flight (and again, presumably stopping her from finding something on Io) change the timeline to get Q his powers back? So he wants to change the timeline, as does Picard for different purposes? It's not clear, nor should it be at this stage necessarily, but hopefully it makes some reasonable sense eventually. Picard and his team have to stop Q and Q is trying to stop Picard -- what else is new?

    Again, the 7/Raffi/Rios scenes were the weakest part -- bus rescue was forgettable, but that aspect needed closure so that they all rendez-vous on the ship. It's padding.

    Jurati and the Borg Queen is one of these parasitic "relationships". The BQ tells Jurati she'll always be lonely -- she's moaning about her own loneliness earlier in the episode. I guess they meld somehow after Jurati shoots the BQ? Interesting possibilities, though the whole subplot was a bit grisly/dark/sinister for Trek.

    I liked the use of Laris (or whatever her watcher name is - "Talum"?) being like Gary 7 -- this seems like making good use of what TOS started. But why does it have to be Laris -- is that to work the romance angle with Picard somehow? Hope not. And what of Picard's mother / abuse / childhood? Has that been shelved? It looks like just a loose end potentially.

    I think what is also potentially very interesting is if this PIC S2 story fills in details of the century leading up to 1st contact (in roughly 40 years time). Renee Picard's ultimate role could prove interesting from a Trek history perspective.

    Also it's great to have more John de Lancie acting and now we get Spiner as well. Seeing these two in scenes together was fun to watch.

    2 stars for "Fly Me to the Moon" -- some good, some bad, still a lot of setup going on to introduce the elements of the story coming in the 5th episode - so that much is frustrating. I think this episode needed to be streamlined -- cut out a subplot or 2 and let things breathe a bit. Perhaps they could have focused a lot more on Renee Picard and her program. But I think a reasonable foundation was starting to get established, but this episode was still all over the place.

    @Jason R, Rios' communicator was left behind at the clinic during the raid, so not beamable without firm coordinates. Trying to find someone who's dumped at the border and no longer in your tracking system is a bit of a needle in a haystack situation. Raffi was exaggerating but it would have made a crap situation much more untenable given the looming deadline.

    I agree with Rahul that this episode could've been seriously streamlined--its biggest weakness was that there were too many storylines and too many tropes being juggled. A heist episode would've been great if it were allowed to play out, a jailbreak and the voyage back home would've been a great episode. A suspense/horror episode would've been intriguing. However, these were all the victims of trying to reset the table and move the plot forward. If not streamlined, perhaps the story beats could've been redistributed between eps 4, 5, and 6.

    That said, I think Frakes did a pretty good job given the material he had to work with. I was really awestruck by the color composition, especially during the scene where the crew was back at Chateau Picard discussing the gala plan by firelight. It's something about NuTrek I do really like. Berman-era Trek never allowed the directors the time to play with color, camera work and lighting. It was always very bland and muted.

    All right, calling the 323 number was good for a laugh. Sneakers pulled something similar, IIRC, almost 30 years ago.

    Any Outlander viewers here? Did Jurati's red dress seem like the same sort of va va va voom effect that Claire's red dress in season 2 of Outlander had?

    Not that there's anything wrong with that.

    The overall story and episodes this season are oddly structured. What was this episode about, other than moving the plot forward incrementally? Why spend so much time on Rios getting captured only for him to be rescued five minutes into this episode? What growth did Rios experience from that incident? Since when is Jurati a desperate lonely woman? What character arcs are happening in this show aside from characters moving from one mission to the next? There’s stuff happening on screen, but none of it ever coheres into anything thematically interesting.

    Jeffrey's Tube - let me give you some advice: When you’ve got an ass like the North Star, wise men are going to follow it.

    Your ass hasn't approached the North Star in a very long time

    'Kay, well, I don't really know what to do with that, soooooo . . .

    @ Victor1982

    If you say he mentioned her in the season premiere in his Academy speech, I don't recall that, but I believe you. I took my cues from this episode, in which every line of his dialogue suggests he's never heard of her before.

    @ Daniel

    Good points about Jurati and medical training and about ancient computer programming. I'm not convinced on either point, but they certainly bear talking about some more.

    Jurati wasn't necessarily interested in building android bodies "indistinguishable" from human bodies. That was Arik Soong. I think Jurati was just interested in building android bodies. She would have been happy to build another Data, I'd imagine. I don't think she would need medical training vs. engineering training for that. However, it is certainly true that medical training wouldn't hurt. But, even if she's received medical or anatomy training on how the human body works . . . that's a long way from being able to practice medicine. The human body is an extremely complex system and a holistic approach is needed. Medicine is not anatomy. On the other hand, she has advanced 25th century medical technology, so how much did she really have to do on her own? And she DID fail to save his spleen, after all. A proper doctor might've. So . . . we can let this one pass. I'll agree.

    As for the ancient coding . . . you know, I guess it depends on if I believe future coding systems are iterative from what they are now, or if they've started over from a completely brand new conception and approach to computing. If the former . . . sure. It'd be like me speaking Old English (like Saxon, i.e. Beowulf) because I have a degree in modern English lit. But Jurati is an academic, and a brilliant one, and this is her field, so . . . sure. There are academics who do, in fact, speak Saxon. I learned under one. I accept that Jurati, with her background, might be one. But if it's the latter . . . if future computing has started over from a brand new conception and approach to computing . . . well, my modern English degree isn't going to help me read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Maybe I'm an enthusiast. Enthusiasts who read Egyptian hieroglyphs without it being their profession do exist. But we're stretching credulity here a little, aren't we?

    Look, all I'm saying is, Jurati could give Wesley Crusher a run for his money at this point. And he evolved to travel the universe using only the power of his mind or something, so.

    I find it a bit hard to believe anybody could be seduced by the prospect of assimilation, although I suppose Seven in Voyager initially was desperate to return to the collective.

    You know, for as unsatisfying as I find NuTrek to be, the one thing NuTrek cannot do is take away from the fact that I will always have the old shows I love to watch (TNG, DS9). I re-watched an episode of TNG yesterday called “Who Watches the Watchers?”, and although it isn’t an amazing episode, it is solid, and thought provoking. You know, something that NuTrek cannot do with their thousand camera cuts, pointless car chase scenes, and Picard being a robot or something. Seriously, what exactly was the point of making Picard a robot?

    @ Frank A. Booze:

    Agree 100% on the difference between classic and Nu Trek.

    Am I the only one who thinks 7 of 9 s character is being totally wasted here? She would be the logical choice to communicate and manage the Borg Queen. And BTW, how did the Confederation manage to wipe out the Borg in the alt timeline if they were so invincible and nearly assimilated the Prime Federation and always gave us a run for our money?

    But I digress. Seven on Picard bears no relation to Seven from Voyager. No mention has been made ever I’d her long history with the Borg or sheer connection to Janeway, the Doctor or the events of Voyager. The way the whole series has gone that could be any random character, and they could have got any actress other than Jeri Ryan to play that character that looks like Seven of Nine but sure doesn’t act like or resemble the Seven of Nine character in any way.

    More lackluster writing.

    I called it last episode in my review... Jurati becomes the Queen that we saw in episode 1.

    My other prediction is that the Q continuum will be replaced by humanity someday, and Q has come back to stop it a the pivotal moment the whole evolution starts. I don't know how this will be explained in a way that makes sense though... like why wasn't this an issue before?

    So, Raffi is a Starfleet Commander but she shows zero regard for the timeline.

    There are so many other things that just aren't intellectually satisfying about this episode.

    I am tired of Singh showing up in every single series. He was already in Enterprise. Can we give it a rest already? No more retrograde Trek, ok? Just. Stop.

    Sorry, I meant Soong*

    I agree with Kyle. Seven bears no resemblance to the Seven we know. And why isn't she the one managing the Queen? They left Jurati there to try and figure out a way back to the Federation time line using the Queen but how is she qualified to do that?

    Jeri Ryan is wasted in this season.

    I'm sorry to be so nitpicky but it's just not good writing. This episode is better than the previous, but only slightly. I attribute that to Brent Spiner's acting. The f-bomb in his conversation with Q was low brow.

    This is getting dumber by the episode, guys. I dunno if it's even that much better than last time. Perhaps some people are confusing relief for quality. Kinda like some battered wives might confuse a break from the abuse for love.

    - LOL @ Renee throwing a tantrum in the simulator THREE DAYS before launch. They do realize that people like this usually get weeded out in the selection process, right?

    - The added context about her chronic anxiety and depression doesn't really justify this for me. Not to knock people who are going through that -- I know what it's like -- but psych evaluations for astronauts are rigorous fairly early on. NASA doesn't take chances like that. I doubt she would have even gotten this far.

    - Oh noes, a therapist is talking her out of her high stakes interplanetary mission while she's raising psychological red flags like "nothing matters anymore" -- something definitely seems off here...WITH THE THERAPIST!

    - If this were TNG, the "That's not a therapist!" would have totally been played for laughs, with none of the sinister undertones and eerie background music...yeesh, way to suck all the fun out of Q, Nu-Trek.

    - LOL @ how quickly Picard leaps from "Q is robbing her of her agency and destiny as a fully empowered woman!" to "I don't suppose you have any sedatives?" ...are we sure that a woman wrote this episode and not Bill Cosby?

    - "If we beam Rios out in front of everyone, who knows what effect it will have on Time!" Um.. wasn't it only last episode that Seven and Raffi beamed themselves out in front of those cops?

    - Do they suppose that releasing all the illegal immigrants is not going to have an impact on the timeline either, or is spontaneous social justice the highest priority here?

    - If you're gonna bring a borg queen with you to the past, it's probably best to have more robust security on your ship than just voice biometrics

    - LOL, even this gala in 2024 has better security than Rio's ship

    - Speaking of the gala, are we watching Oceans 11 or Star Trek?

    - So I guess this whole time, the Borg Queen could have murdered or assimilated anyone she wanted to really easily since was never properly restrained to begin with, what with the range and lethality of those tentacles and all...

    - I'm really puzzled over how Jurati gets a really bad headache or starts dying or whatever so she needs to merge with the BQ. It all happens so fast that it feels like the writers really don't want us to think too hard about it. I had also hoped that Jurati had learned her lesson about melding or merging with aliens because she seems to do some pretty crazy murderous shit whenever that happens.

    - Well there goes the neighborhood.. now that the BQ has probably assimilated that cop from the past and they just let him walk free rather than shoot him in the head like Picard would have done in First Contact.... Does anyone really continue to believe that Renee Picard's lack of self-confidence is the straw that broke the timeline's back, rather than all this other shit that's hit the fan as a direct result of the stupidity of Picard & co.?

    Enjoyed it a lot more than last week's episode, but that was never going to be hard. We haven't quite regained the momentum we started the season with, but seem to be picking up steam again, which is promising. And I'm loving the TOS callback to Gary Seven - a fascinating idea that none of the later shows wanted to follow up on.

    I don't have a whole lot else to say until I see more of the plot play out, but they've got my interest back. I *still* don't think a time-travel alternate-history story was the best use of this premise or this cast, however. Prove me wrong, show!

    I actually think, on balance, Seven is written better this season and has more connections to her Voyager character than what we saw in Season 1. The issue is all of the good character work was in the first two episodes of the season for her, and all she's done for the last three episodes is bicker with Raffi.

    Ok, the Queen hacking the security system by talking like Rios made me laugh out loud. Hahaha. I guess the ship is less pw protected than my email account. :D
    Not a good start.

    Nurse, please double the dosage for patient Raffi.

    Renee learned Cantonese with 11? Who learns Cantonese before Mandarin???

    Nasa used a French national to fly the first mission to a Jupiter moon???

    Is NuTrek finally saying that it is actually a completely separate universe. There is no womaned mission to Europa or Io.

    Did anybody not immediately notice that the voice of the therapist was Q's? and if he wants to stop Renee then why not just tell the authorities that she is unbalanced (which she is)???

    Are all the Soong's clones and super genius scientists? Are all Picard's explorers?

    "You experimented on soldiers!" "EX-SOLDIERS!" Hahaha. This line probably takes the cake for dumbest line in the episode.

    Agnes, forever invisible??? She was the leading scientist at the most prestigious institute in the Federation!! She also has several friends.

    His spleen is in a box. another lol moment

    Sorry but there is just so much dumb stuff in here that the episode wants you to ignore. Nice to see that an astronaut who is supposed to go an yearlong mission can attend a huge gala three days before launch. I guess Corona is not a problem anymore. Good to know. Wow those Nasa galas have top notch security.

    Is the Borg Queen crying?

    I said last time that I'm out of the season. This did not bring me back. It feels like the writer have given up and just do whatever. Very little makes any sense anymore. On a positive note I can say that I laughed a lot. :)

    One technical issue that has been bugging me is with the Borg Queen herself. In previous episodes of Voyager, not to mention ST First Contact, the Queen would have been able to just assimilate anyone she wanted with nanoprobes. I kind of assumed that the Confederation had somehow defanged her since otherwise, she'd by all rights have assimilated Rios, Jurati and half of 2024 Earth by this point.

    But then she lures that cop into the ship and suddenly she has tentacles again like she's Doctor Octopus. But she doesn't assimilate him? Or does she? I am so confused. What kind of threat does the Queen pose? Given how much history there is here you'd think someone like Seven for example, could give us a line of dialogue to clear up the confusion.

    Speaking of Seven, I think it's safe to say that her Borg name notwithstanding, the writers have decided to forget about the fact that she used to be a Borg, and by all rights should have *a lot* more to say to or about the Queen than Picard, who was a Borg for what? 3 days?

    //Renee learned Cantonese with 11? Who learns Cantonese before Mandarin???//

    WHAT? Who cares who learns what language first

    In comparison to last week's episode, this week's "Fly Me To The Moon" had much more redeeming and rather interesting qualities that actually made me happy, yet I had to literally dig into the recesses of my 51 year old mind to get the "Gary Seven" references from the original series. Yet like all here, Rafi and Seven of Nine are seemingly in the storyline to save face.

    Pretty good episode, cleared up a few loose ends from the prior episode and looking forward to next week's episode.

    I’m confused on the timeline as well.

    Was the bus that 7 and Raffi pulsed, the same bus they saved Rios from? Coz the pulse bus stopped on the left side of the road and the Rios bus was clearly on the right side of the road and oh my… Did they save an alternate Rios??? Aye caramba!!

    French gendarmerie used his radio in the shittoe but couldn’t use it when he stumbled upon a large unknown semi transparent object???? Sacre bleu!!!

    The BQs tentacle??? Where’s that been? In the wine cellar?

    The pool scene??? Open your eyes woman! Perhaps the chlorine that irritated your eyeballs was what seeped into your bloodstream and the cure was fine??

    Seven.is.wasted.

    I'd also note that there seems to be a danger that this season will suffer from the same issue that Discovery Season 4 had.

    Basically the showrunner has come up with a potentially good serialized plot structure. However, it involves the introduction of a ton of new characters (in this case Q, Guinan, Adam Soong, Kora, Tallinn) - even though in some cases they are played by actors from last season or old Trek standards.

    This is great, if this was a narrowly Picard-focused show. But there doesn't appear to be any story need for the core crew of La Sirena other than Picard himself and Jurati. So Elnor has already been killed off, and Raffi, Rios, and Seven are (thus far) useless to the plot and have busy work constructed for their characters as an excuse for the actors cashing a paycheck.

    I mean, imagine if Picard was the only one who woke up in the Confederation timeline at the end of Episode 1. He still likely could have found individuals who (even if part of the Confederation timeline) would be willing to work with him to spring the Borg Queen (maybe Garak or Worf are imprisoned somewhere on Earth? Maybe someone from the Enterprise-D crew ends up a washed-up loser in this timeline and would be eager to make things right?) . The core narrative of the following episodes would still work just fine, aside from needing someone to replace Jurati.

    Well, lots of interesting comments here.

    I enjoyed it. Maybe I'm numb to the head scratching details, but this one kept me interested throughout.

    I think a lot of the issues brought up above will, or will not, be answered/resolved by the end of the season so I'm not going to nit-pic all of them (yet). It's kind of what we get with the season long mystery box serialized format.

    The worst part is of course the 7/Raffi/Rios stuff. They still haven't picked up his communicator and Michelle Hurd is really rounding out to be a horrible actress. Good lord, I know these aren't the greatest lines but damn... Jennifer Lein did better. On the other hand, Santiago Cabrera kills it with everything he's given. IMO they are wasting Jeri Ryan so far... you'd think she would have more input to the Borg Queen stuff.

    John Delancie is knocking it out of the park here. I'm intrigued with his "dilemma" and how this is all going to pan out.

    No problem with a "Picard" being a talented kid that ends up flying the Europa mission. This also intrigues me.

    I'm also OK with Soong back again and even more OK with his daughter resembling Soji. This answers why Soji looks like she does and why data painted the picture that resembles her. I'm also glad we get some Isa Briones. I thought we weren't going to see her the rest of this season. Is this Soong responsible for the Eugenics Wars to come in the near future? We'll see I guess. Is Q's issue biological?

    Still, THE most interesting pairing we have is Jurati and the BQ. Should 7 be dealing with her? Maybe. But maybe we need 7 to fix/repair things at the end. Annie is absolutely killin it as the BQ. Right out of the park. I don't know that I'm too enthused with the "Baltar/6" angle, but I'm sure Annie will make it watchable. I was surprised Jurati pulled the trigger.

    The Watcher angle and trek reference to Gary 7 is pretty cool. Picard sure remembers a lot about Kirk's time on the Enterprise. So the watcher isn't Laris, but will it be revealed that her job all along has been to watch Picard and that Laris in the 24th century is really a watcher? She did seem attracted to him.

    Really nice to see Jurati filling out that red dress... lol who knew? Not me.

    4 star episode? No, but I'll go 3 stars because I actually enjoyed this one and was drawn to it the entire 41 minutes and have already watched it twice and dialed Q's number at least 5 times. lol

    @Eric Jensen
    "WHAT? Who cares who learns what language first "
    A french women of today learning Cantonese/Yue instead of Mandarin would be like a Chinese learning Basque instead of Spanish. Cantonese is spoken by 80 million people in southern China, Mandarin is spoken by 1.1 billion people. Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong, I wonder if that factored into it considering that there at least two other Chinese languages that are spoken by around 80 million people (Wu, Min).

    I speak Cantonese and you forgot Guangzhou and Macau. That is beside the point and who cares which language you want to learn. If you learn Swahili, good for you. You want to learn German, go for it. Stop mocking those who want to learn another language. I do not care if you want to learn WHATEVER language you want. It is good that they CAN speak another language

    I'm baffled by Seven of Nine's character in this series. I mean, she is absolutely nothing like the Seven from Voyager. I don't even know why she's in this series. Just put literally anybody else there and it would not make an ounce of difference to the story. Th Borg Queen doesn't even care about her, she's more obsessed with Jurati. Jeri Ryan is a fine actress and I enjoy her performance but I'm struggling to see the point of her character in this series.

    "Agnes, forever invisible??? She was the leading scientist at the most prestigious institute in the Federation!! She also has several friends."

    She also was romantically involved with Maddox before, you know, murdering him. But I'm intrigued: is the Sassy Borg Queen trying to say that in the entire multiverse, poor Agnus never finds love? So Picard can be a genocidal Nazi and Seven President of the world but poor old Agnus can't get a date in any reality? OUCH. The Sassy Borg Queen sure plays dirty.

    @Jason
    You are right. She was involved with Maddox and she had that creepy bald guy hitting on her. Let's call it what it is. The writers have just decided that it is so. She is and was always alone for no reason.

    @Eric Jensen
    Sure, an 11 year old girl in France learns a minor Chinese language just for fun. Why not.

    A great review of this episode, sans delay and toxic comment-sniping: https://gizmodo.com/star-trek-picard-season-2-episode-5-recap-fly-me-to-the-1848732286

    1) Who leaves the Borg Queen unattended. Yeah I'll just go into the empty castle for a nap and just leave her hanging there.

    2) Seriously, imitate the voice and the computer complies????? WTF.

    3) 80 year old gun on the wall works with no problems.

    4) Everybody returns to the ship and nobody gives 2 cents about the Borg Queen being shot. Even worse, they more or less shrug it off as nothing.

    5) Borg Queen has suddenly has tentacle arms - where have they been the entire time.

    6) I studied antique coding???? What??? Why? I guess I should go learn to use a abacus or knots on a rope.

    After watching the episode this week - I'm seriously considering that this is the end. I wanted to like this show but wow......

    If Jurti suddenly has tentacle arms in the next episode, I am done.

    Maybe there will be plot reasons., but for the moment having Orla and Isa back playing totally different characters strikes me as akin to having Denise Cosby periodically come back to play various guest characters like Nuria, Ardra, Kamala, etc.

    Maybe Renee Picard had a Cantonese nanny? Maybe her parents spent some time living in Hong Kong? There are a lot of possibilities.

    Not a huge issue with Isa coming back. I suppose you could easily say that the android made in Picard S1 was a replica of an the daughter of a Soong ancestor who overcame some great odds to survive or whatever her story ends up being.

    As for our watcher; I wonder if they are going to end up saying that Picard's housekeeper is the actual same being and was sent to watch him. I hope not because that is a massive stretch but it's hard for them to not address the identical actor.


    Having all Soong's look the same is a bit funny but the more Spiner the better so I am good with it.

    @Karl Zimmernan
    It's a minor nitpick. I found it odd how it was presented in the episode.
    From the episode
    - "She taught herself to be an expert sailor. ... . And that was by the age of 10. By age 11 it was chess, fluid dynamics and Cantonese. University at 16." I was kind of waiting for the sentence "Nobel Prize in chemistry at 19"
    How Picard never heard of an ancestor super genius that found the first alien life in the solar system, certainly one the most important discoveries in Human history, is another one of those things.

    Another minor nitpick. She taught herself sailing at 10 in southern France even though the Picards lived in GB at the time? Are the Picards super rich? They have a huge estate in eastern France which they don't use and apparently a summer house in southern France (very expensive) with sea access and a sailing boat? By the way, who doesn't use a huge estate in eastern France and rather stay in Britain. Utter Madness! In Germany there is a saying "Leben wie Gott in Frankreich (Living like God in France)" which means that there is no better place to live than France.

    Ok ok I'll stop nitpicking but damn. France!

    This show is getting dumber and dumber with each episode. So many implausible things happening it's almost an unstoppable eye roll.

    - Picard knows everything bout his ancestors... then why it seems that he completely forgot about the existence of this "Renee"? If she is a very important explorer and she is so gifted (why can't we see normal people? Why everyone need to be the best in everything and have multiple profound knowledge about so many things? This is so artificial!) and this mission was so important... then everything here doesn't make any sense.

    - As already mentioned by some, NASA wouldn't be so lame to ignore red flags of depression on someone that will fly to the space in just 3 days. Psychological evaluation is very rigorous, but it seems that the security of some dumb dinner party is more important, right? Those security protocols were exaggerated as fuck. SO DUMB!

    - The Rios, Seven and the other woman (forgot her name) plot I just eye rolled in fast forward because it's just some plot that comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere, adding nothing relevant to the characters or to the story... it's just a pure waste of time.

    - Brent Spider replaying another Dr. Soong ancestor and the plot with his daughter were the only thing in this episode that made some sense. That might explain why all Songs are clones and gifted crazy inventors...

    - It was nice to see Q... John de Lancie seems to be the only actor that still remembers how to portrait his old character.

    Sincerely I don't know why I am still watching this show...

    Picard did know about Renee. In the first episode when he's giving a speech to Starfleet Academy he says. "A great-great cousin Renee Picard was instrumental in early exploration of this solar system."

    Now, he might not have known the details, but the episode seems to intimate that a lot of the electronic records of the late 20th/early 21st century were lost after World War III.

    And TBH, I don't know anything about my own family before the mid 1800s myself. There's just too many lineages to track, since the number of generations keeps doubling. once you get past 32 g-g-g grandparents what's the point?

    Surprised to still see comments about him not knowing about Renee. He mentioned her in the opening episode as an early explorer of the solar system. Also its been noted a lot of records from this time frame are gone (I would assume due to Trek's WW3 that is coming soon).

    I am not saying it's great writing, but this is not a particularly terrible plot hole.

    Also, there are kids out there who do these kinds of things at 10 and into their teens. They are rare, but they exist. A kid may want to learn another language and parents get them a tutor for it. She may have been sent to france for a boarding school or something even while the family is in the Uk.

    Also, he does mention she is some cousin in his speech; she may not be in the exact lineage of JL Picard and may not even have lived in the UK much if at all. I have cousins now , as we all do, that live all over the place but 400 years from now my direct descendants would look at them as part of the family ancestry. Just some possiblities, this isn't as horrible as people are making it out to be. It is plausible.

    @Karl Zimmerman
    Oh thanks. I had forgotten that. I guess I can accept this retcon.

    "And TBH, I don't know anything about my own family before the mid 1800s myself."
    If one of them had been the first person to walk on the moon, sail around the world or discover the first alien life ever, I think you would.

    The "not knowing about Renee" is about before this series.

    You can't CYA by saying he mentioned her a few episodes ago.

    Booming said: "discover the first alien life ever, I think you would. "

    Especially when the surname is the same as yours.

    @dave
    I could accept it if Renee was just some astronaut but she made one of the greatest discoveries of Human history. That would be like forgetting the moon landing.

    This show is like making love to Bruce Lee. Lightning quick movements and before you know it you are in a satin robe smoking a cigarette. Picard reminds me of the time I stripped naked in Madagascar and shot flare guns at a coral reef. It's just a very personal experience

    "@dave
    I could accept it if Renee was just some astronaut but she made one of the greatest discoveries of Human history. That would be like forgetting the moon landing."

    Maybe her legacy of space exploration was overshadowed by slaughtering all those Indians.

    Yeah. I didn't make this nitpick myself because I don't really care, but I think that when others say "Picard didn't know about Renee" they're not necessarily forgetting about that foreshadowing tidbit in episode 1... Rather, their beef might be that Picard has been boasting that he comes from a family of explorers for quite some time all the back to TNG. You'd think whenever he gave examples of this, the first item on the list would be the first woman to discover extraterrestrial life and not just his great grandfather who sailed around in a wooden ship. It's essentially same complaint as "Spock never mentioned he had a sister".

    In Tapestry TNG: //Q: Au contraire, he's the person you wanted to be. One who was less arrogant, and undisciplined as a youth. One who was less like me. The Jean-Luc Picard you wanted to be, the one who did not fight the Nausicaan, had quite a different career from the one you remember. That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realised how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. So his life never came into focus. He drifted for much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never lead the away team on Milika Three to save the ambassador, or take charge of the Stargazer's Bridge when its Captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe. And he never, ever got noticed by anyone.
    PICARD: You're right, Q. You gave me the chance to change and I took the opportunity. But I admit now, it was a mistake.//

    I am wondering... does Q want to be like Picard?? This still resonate with the self-destruction of the StarGazer, after the Borg queen asked to join the Federation...

    I don't see how not mentioning Renee existing is any different than no one after ENT discussing the Xindi War during an episode. Or Spock not mentioning Sybok until STV. Or Worf never mentioning his stepbrother. The list goes on and on.

    This is just how shows without a master plan (not based upon a pre-written series of novels or something) are written. It makes zero sense to attack Picard for this when all of the earlier shows did the same thing. Things are simply not mentioned onscreen until they are dramatically relevant.

    I always thought Tapestry was a bit overwrought, placing the entirety of Picard's being on one incident.

    He'd already become the first freshman to win the Academy marathon by that point, so it isn't like he was some slacker with no drive before the stabby stabby.

    Having Picard be a first officer commander on a run of the mill ship instead of being the captain of the flagship and a living legend would have sufficed. Having him be a sexagenarian junior lieutenant in some astrowhatever (a field we've never seen any evidence of Picard favoring) department was eyerolling overkill. The stabby stabby at the least shouldn't have affected his archeology background.

    The alternate reality could have been Picard having that career alongside Galen from The Chase, but that would have been appealing and dignified enough for Picard to actually live with it, so we couldn't have that. Instead we had to have something ridiculous.

    @Karl Zimmerman
    It's one thing not to talk about a sibling but quite something else than somebody never mentioning being an ancestor of Magellan or Neil Armstrong, especially if that somebody is an explorer as well.

    and to mention it again, what really sunk the episode for me is that this is all happening in 2024 and as we all know, there is no mission to send a Human to a Jupiter moon in 2024. Even 2054 would be extremely ambitious. I'm one of those people who looks at picture from the Mars Rover and who reads a lot about the next new thing, like that Webb space telescope recently, so to me this is really insulting. If there isn't some explanation why this is actually not our 2024 but another reality entirely, then it's just nonsense.

    I'm not one of those people who insists upon reading all of Star Trek like One Text but just to play devil's advocate, you could argue that Picard boasting about the great exploits of his ancestors in previous instances is "dramatically relevant" in a way that Sybok isn't.

    Also, I'm curious why people even care. Is it really because Star Trek needs to be considered one cohesive text, or are they bothered by it like they're bothered by Ghostbusters 2016 with its Feminist-Revisionist "can i be the hero too?" cosplaying that never pretends to be canon in the first place?

    I am looking for clues... Looking at Tapestry sees why Q is doing what he is doing
    The Borg has changed tactics - 1. asking to join Starfleet. 2. stunning people and not killing or assimilating them 3. not sending drones
    Why did Q send the Enterprise to see the Borg?
    Q sees the human race as arrogant, never asking for help.
    Picard asks for help when they were flung into Borg space... Humans were not ready
    ...NOW
    Why would Q change the past? The end goal? The Borg wants to join Starfleet - if the Europa mission has to go ahead because of "hope" and "not being alone" in the universe, then that is cause for exploration.
    Of course, wanting "power" is not a good step in negotiating and I think the Borg does want to help...

    I would like to point out that in GEN, Picard listed "the Picards who settled the first Martian colonies". Now, that perhaps should've been the way the writers went especially since we're closer to Mars in current events then we are to Io. But, the Picard history of space exploration has bee mentioned before.

    Star Trek doesn't take place in our future, but an alternative history. This was sealed when TOS decided to have in-universe events take place at times eventually lapped by reality.

    I'm pretty sure that Roddenberry thought of Star Trek as representation of how our future could or should be. Not some parallel universe were anything can happen. Sure, they depicted events that didn't happen but that is because nobody thought in the 1960s that this would go on for another 60+ years.

    o/~ “If you're wondering how he eats & breathes, And other science facts...(la! la! la!) Then repeat to yourself its just a show, I should really just relax.” o/~

    Will this be the first time there are a hundred comments before the review is posted?

    This whole discussion is evidence for the problems with this show. All we're talking about is continuity and whether or not Star Trek canon is in our timeline. Who cares? The best episodes of Star Trek inspired us to talk about ethics and philosophy and politics.

    The problem with Picard is he's bald. Add a prime-70s bouffant and a thick stache and you have something. 2370s that is.

    If more of you got out - a little swag in your day - who knows how you would feel about nu-Trek.

    It's interesting that much canon is still quaintly fixed in the naive past of 1960's Hollywood...

    TOS tended to create freakish Earth parallel development scenarios and projected them onto different planets...examples: Miri...The Omega Glory. I think that those developed under the influence of The Twilight Zone.

    In TOS, time travel was largely confined to Earth...City on the Edge of Forever/Edith Keeler...being the biggie.

    The time travel exception was All Our Yesterdays (Atavachron) which took place in some distant locale, but even then the historical periods on that planet were manifested like Earthly ones.

    Mirror Mirror is still the ultimate parallel universe episode...as much as I like watching the Intendant's twisted nature in DS9 ...from time to time.

    Assignment Earth, as others have noted, was a weak episode with a ditzy 007 "Our Man Flint" knock-off flavor to which an alien abduction backstory was attached. It seems a strange candidate for producing canonical strength. Pity the Picard.

    The absurdity of the Miri planet being identical to Earth was very Twilight Zone-ish.

    Hopefully the seasons got all of its preaching out of the way in the previous episode which I found tedious in places because I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

    Raffi is still acting like rather an idiot but perhaps her grief is the cause?

    Nice to see DeLancie and Spiner acting on screen together again too.

    It wasn't a 4 star episode at all but it moved things along nicely and did kind of show how ultimately all Raffi and 7 did was cause some havoc (which would surely effect the timeline but whatever) and rescue Rios.

    Picard was the only one who did anything useful at all.

    If a certain person going on the mission is enough to catastrophically change the timeline (since the mission would surely go ahead with someone roughly equally qualified) then the impact of Picards team has already changed things already (The cop, the clinic doctor, the prison bus etc etc). Anyway - time travel stories are probably best not to think about too deeply.

    Q's whole trial about humans being a savage race etc... right now he seems to be making certain that comes true by meddling in history? Although humans were already a fairly savage race a in our not so distance past (and of course still are today in some ways).

    Looking forward to next week anyway. I don't get the little trailer thingies for the next episodes here and I'm kind of glad I don't. That was a part of old school broadcast TV that is best left in the past.

    @I don't know.

    "I studied antique coding???? What??? Why? I guess I should go learn to use a abacus or knots on a rope."

    I don't find that so far-fetched. People still write NEW games for machines from the mid 1980s (like the Commodore 64) which have a ridiculously small fraction of the power of you average cell phone. In another 100 years or maybe 200 maybe people still will enjoy writing ancient code for ancient machines?

    Being a coder myself there's something strangely enjoyable about actually working with the deep low-level code rather than endless layers, engines, abstraction, intellisense, ai suggestions etc etc etc.

    I just need to point out that it's absolutely impossible to lose so many records of this moment in history that we wouldn't be able to piece back together everything that happened, especially with 24th century technology. There are just So. Many. Records. EVERYWHERE. You could NEVER get them all. Even if WWIII was apocalyptically catastrophic, and humanity itself was wiped out entirely . . . short of the planet itself being turned into asteroids or falling into the sun, those records would survive to be found.

    And how bad could WWIII really be, if every single Earth landmark that exists now still exists in the 25th century? Okay, we don't actually know that. But it seems like it, doesn't it? The Golden Gate bridge is still there. London and Paris are still there. New Orleans is still there. So maybe Manhattan is just a blast crater . . . but you know, something tells me we'll see the Empire State building standing in the 23rd or 25th century someday. So, I ask you: how, exactly, are we supposed to accept this ridiculous idea of records being so completely wiped out that we wouldn't know basic things about the time period?

    @Booming: There are two Jovian Moon missions for the next two years: “Jupiter Icy Moons Ex­plo­rer” (ESA, 2023) and “Europa Clip­per” (NASA, 2024). Of course both are un­man­ned, but I guess Kurt­mann did not read the Wiki­pedia pages be­yond the first sentence.

    @Jeffrey’s Tube: In the case of a planet-wide EMP event that puts all elec­tro­nic de­vi­ces on the fritz, I could well imag­ine that a lot of cur­rent history gets lost. Off-power devices and optical media would survive, but those do age and need main­te­nance, so if they ad­di­tion­ally could not manu­fac­ture any com­pu­ters for a few decades (or lose the DRM spec), a lot would go down­hill. Yet we still have printed books which should be safe against that type of cala­mity, and as seen in “First Con­tact”, com­pu­ters were still around after WWIII.

    I cannot come up with a excuse why Picard would not think about Renée when he travels back to 2024.

    I watched “Space Seed” in the early eighties, and wondered what Khan was doing now, in my time, be­cause he surely must be al­ready born to be­come a war­lord ≈15 years later.

    I'm ok with the Borg Queen essentially hacking La Sirena. It's the alt-future La Sirena, not the prime universe one. Before everything went kerbluey in episode 1, Rios was commanding Stargazer, and Seven was on La Sirena. There was at least one scene in which Rios himself wasn't familiar with how the alt-La Sirena operated. Considering that Picard and company don't have much time to stop the divergence from happening, I think it's ok that they didn't spend time trying to find out how the alt-La Sirena operated.

    Guess I'm talking myself into liking the episode more than I originally thought.

    My biggest problem is that we are stuck in 2024 and it is getting boring cause the sci-fi elements are weak, except the Borg Queen.

    I keep hoping that each episode will be the last on 2024 earth cause I am really not interesting to pass that amount of time and story in our present, alternative or not.

    The plot is dragging way to much, I think the last 3 episodes could easily fit in one.
    Q doesn't seem interesting now, just annoying, like a little red devil who creates upsets coming from some vintage cartoon.

    And yes, Seven is wasted! As Rios is so far.

    Ok so Assignment: Earth - Redux.

    This episode was the Season 2 Finale of The Original Series, for the uninitiated (if any). It was pulling double duty as TOS’ S2 ender and as a pilot for a new Science Fiction Series.

    It not only wasn’t picked up, but got Star Trek cancelled for the first time. The Studio heads responded by cancelling the show, and famously, a letter writing campaign spearheaded by a very devoted fan managed to revive Star Trek for another Season.

    Season 3 of TOS was not to be the glorious return fans hoped for, however, as Star Trek was moved to Friday Nights at 10pm (basically a death sentence) and Gene Roddenberry walked from the show in protest, leaving it in the show under what Q would call the “inept ministrations” of one Fred Frieberger.

    This does not bode well. Star Trek has basically devolved slowly since oh, about the time Voyager’s first season aired, and what better way to symbolize it being right back where it started than by it thinking it can put us on deck for Spock’s Brain (Harve Bennett: “Ugh.”)?

    The episode is basically a Mission Impossible plot setup with the twist that Agnes (the insider) is now under the control of a malevolent alien force (which happened last season…come on guys).

    2 stars, and whatever hopes I had of this being a good season of Trek are now dashed.

    It all started with somebody not having watched Time’s Arrow…how ironic. Guinan has met Picard before…and now this plasma exhaust of a season ender.

    I’m afraid I’m going to have to request a transfer to another form of entertainment.

    @MidshipmanNorris
    "The episode is basically a Mission Impossible plot setup with the twist that Agnes (the insider) is now under the control of a malevolent alien force (which happened last season…come on guys)."

    Thanks for the historical details! I live for those.
    I have discovered a short while ago that there was a connection between TOS and Mission Impossible in the original 60's Hollywood context. So it seems we've returned to the mothership. :)

    Tune in to a *very special episode* of Star Trek Picard: Matrix Resurrections sponsored by Microsoft Surface with special guest director Jonathan Frakes!

    A year ago I wrote about TOS’ “Assignment: Earth”

    https://www.jammersreviews.com/st-tos/s2/assignment.php#comment-81477

    In my post, I highlighted this key dialogue,

    ROBERTA: Mister Seven, I want to believe you. I do. I know this world needs help. That's why some of my generation are kind of crazy and rebels, you know. We wonder if we're going to be alive when we're thirty.


    What were they so worried about?


    SPOCK: Current Earth crises would fill a tape bank, Captain.


    I wrote, "Assignment: Earth is the culmination of the central theme of Season 2, the exploration of late-1960’s society.”

    It is fitting then, that Star Trek: Picard is the culmination of all of 2020’s American pathological neuroses. And speaking of neurosis, lo, the all seeing, all knowing Q is a shrink. Paging Doogie Houser, M.D.

    @Booming asked, "Did anybody not immediately notice that the voice of the therapist was Q's? and if he wants to stop Renee then why not just tell the authorities that she is unbalanced (which she is)???”

    The point is not to stop the mission. The point is not even to stop Renee from going on this (ridiculous for 2024!) mission.

    That would be so very TNG (or First Contact). It would imply that somehow a mission has the power to change everything. No. nuTrek isn’t about the mission at all. nuTrek is all about the people. About their feelings.

    This is Trek for the generation that came of age when TIME magazine named “You” the man of the year.

    It is about destroying the Picard family legacy - to destroy Picard.

    Because, of course, legacy is just another word for privilege.

    And so, instead of a lot of techno-babble, we are subjected to a avalanche of psycho-babble.

    Yes, Jonathan Frakes did an awesome job directing this mess. Yes, it was much better than last week. No, that’s not saying much.

    I enjoyed this episode.

    The pacing is great and keeps me interested in what is happening.

    Only thing annoying me was Raffi's dialogue. Her character arc is just not working for me this season.

    Spiner and DeLancie's scenes together were great. Can't wait to see what Q has up his sleeve.

    "Only thing annoying me was Raffi's dialogue. Her character arc is just not working for me this season."

    Her character is so bad that I wish for Elrond in her place.

    Seven is great in this series. People holding up Voyager as good when dumping on new Trek because they can't accept new things is the biggest bad faith criticism there is.

    Voyager isn't a good show. Holding it up as something to criticize something trivial in new Trek just shows your criticisms to be disingenuous and is very LOLworthy.

    Same with pedantic shit like "they'd weed out people like Renee earlier in the selection process." Based on what? Do you work at NASA? We don't know enough about her, or if her depression is new. It also shows a lack of your understanding of depression and lack of empathy for mental health concerns.

    "She learned Mandarin before Cantonese". Lmao. Who gives a fuck? Your "evidence" for this stupid gripe is entirely anecdotal.

    William Shatner's "GET A LIFE!" SNL bit really applies to a lot of ya'll fake Star Trek fans.

    I wouldn't say Voyager wasn't a good show. It wasn't a great show, but episodes/scenes like the one where Seven facetimed with her aunt were more emotionally nuanced than most of what these new CBS shows do.

    I hate how Picard used to be so eloquent in basically every scene, and now the best he can do is "Depression, in a human, can be debilitating."

    @Kyle A

    "Only thing annoying me was Raffi's dialogue. Her character arc is just not working for me this season."

    Yeah I'm wondering if they're trying to make her seem like she's so grief-stricken because of the romalan kid's death (perhaps because he's replaced the son she "lost") that it has made her irrational and unstable. Unfortunately to me it's just turned her into a bit of a hot-headed idiot. Not really working for me either.

    She was a commander or some such rank at Star Fleet so you'd imagine she's seen people die before and not completely fallen apart.

    "Voyager isn't a good show."

    Some people have done some robust "objective" analyses, looking at all the imbd scores for all the episodes and seeing how they stack up per series. Voyager scored a lot better among audiences at the time than many of us think. I believe Voyager's bad reputation has to do with it coming immediately after TNG and DS9 and many fans dunked on it for not consistently living up to those high expectations. More sober reappraisals show that this reputation is largely undeserved.

    "'they'd weed out people like Renee earlier in the selection process.' Based on what? Do you work at NASA?"

    "Failing the psych test" is so prevalent in both science fiction and in biopics seemingly based in reality that it may as well be it's own TV trope, so this judgement isn't coming out of nowhere, nor it is completely unsubstantiated.

    "We don't know enough about her, or if her depression is new."

    Not-Laris gaves us the impression that Renee has been struggling with mental health issues for awhile. This is the sense that other reviewers got as well. She's not, only just now, three days before the launch, "depressed". And if she were, that wouldn't meet the diagnostic criteria for clinical depression. I'm not trying to be pedantic here -- I find it more bizarre that they're doing the psych evaluation only three days before the launch than that NASA would want people with a history of mental illness to be represented among their active astronauts.

    "It also shows a lack of your understanding of depression and lack of empathy for mental health concerns."

    I don't think I'm being uncharitable or callous either seeing how it would be in the best interests of all involved if your mission leader didn't figuratively and literally self-destruct half a billion kilometers from earth. We live in a time when star athletes are being celebrated for taking a needed mental health break in the midst of the Olympics, putting their dreams on hold, so the only people being callous here are the showrunners and audience members insisting that The Show Must Go On at all costs, even if it's the most stressfully high-stakes situation imaginable.

    @Bryan
    Thanks for speaking up for Voyager.

    Voyager is derided for so-called missed opportunities, a surfeit of monotonously obstinate species and an over-active re-set button. Then there are those who never accepted Neelix, Kes, and even Janeway.

    The Kazon really didn't make sense and mis-fired on all thrusters, but many episodes from season 3 onward held my interest. I really like much that the show offered.

    It retains the optimism and grit of early Trek (TOS-TNG) and so episode by episode is actually still worth watching.

    I found this episode to be far more enjoyable than last week. My hope is they don't spend too much time in 2024. As a mom who has lost a son, Raffi's grief made sense at first but now it's over the top and not believable. It's a criticism but also a blessing for the writers as they haven't lost a child. It's good to see Brent Spiner again. He must so enjoy being freed of Data's makeup. Agnes will be the future Borg Queen, that's obvious but it will be interesting to see how it manifests. Frakes did a great job of directing, faster pace, more loose ends tied up. Looking forward to next week.

    Unlike the syndicated TNG and DS9, Voyager was carrying a new network, so it was endlessly meddled with by suits. Note the promos that each had. TNG/DS9 had promos that were mostly stragithforward episode descriptions, while VOY/ENT often had promos that strayed ridiculously from what episodes were about.

    If you only went by ENT's promo for Cogenitor, you'd expect some R rated sex romp.

    After a strong start this season is really going downhill. The plot feels like that of a video game. The characters are just being given a set of different quests to complete each episode. It's a very task oriented plot, the latest task being "break into the gala" which makes no sense. Why would anyone go through the trouble of setting up that kind of security to protect a party? What risk are they trying to mitigate?

    On the bright side, all the scenes with Spiner and Q were great.

    Anyways, all these quests would make a great video game:

    Disable the transporter blockers and get the Queen
    Neutralize the Magistrate and security officers who beamed on Rio's ship
    Repair the Queen
    Find the Watcher
    Hack the Police to find Rio's Location
    Rescue Rios
    Stop the Borg Queen from killing the policeman
    Infiltrate the Gala

    Yeah. I mean that was an improvement. I just want to find out what is Q's game and why he is being excessively knobbish.

    So the writer, Cindy Appel, once worked in a Chinese fishing village.. where she learnt how to speak Cantonese? Grew up in Washington DC around the intelligence/ foreign service community and has written for shows such as.. MacGyver. We’ll if anyone knows about infiltrating high security gala events, it’s Cindy. We’ll need to MacGyver our way out of this seasons shamozzle.

    To note: did anyone else first see the Borg ship in Ep 1 and say ‘wow, will that be coming out as a Lego kit?’ Would explain the sell out season so far.

    I think this is the first time I've enjoyed a Brent Spiner performance, outside of Data. I found the scenes with Soong, Q, and Kore to be the most interesting parts of the episode, along with The Borg Queen.

    Overall a step up from last week but with one caveat, I think the characters on the fringes are more interesting than the main cast, for the moment. I hope that begins to balance itself out in the coming episodes.

    2.5 stars

    The only thing that makes this show mildly watchable is Red Letter Media's reviews on youtube. Those guys are hardcore OG trekkies taking one for the team and they're pretty frelling funny.

    Bryan
    Fri, Apr 1, 2022, 3:49am (UTC -5)

    "- LOL @ Renee throwing a tantrum in the simulator THREE DAYS before launch. They do realize that people like this usually get weeded out in the selection process, right?"



    You do realize this vaunted "selection process" sure as hell didn't weed out Lisa Nowak, right?

    Red Letter Media is funny, but they are way too cynical about these shows. Now, I think this season is going downhill, but they thought that episode 2 was bad when it was definitely "pretty alright" at the very worst.

    @Quincy

    "You do realize this vaunted "selection process" sure as hell didn't weed out Lisa Nowak, right? "

    Are you suggesting that she slipped through the cracks? Because I don't think she did. Lisa Nowak had a long and distinguished career before she went bonkers. Anyone can have a spontaneous psychotic break that is impossible to predict, but this in no way obviates the utility of screening for inherent psychological vulnerabilities that, with the cumulative or acute stressors that one can expect to encounter in space, can send a person teetering into the mental red zone.

    It was quite Entertaining. There was a surprise with Reene Picard. Agnes mergin wihth the borg quen was not surprising . Making a Occeans 6 ... hmmm.

    The script and plot is definetly more consideered (and understandable) than Discoveery. Acting and or characters generally better.

    As i like Brady as an actress I don't mind seeing her again but very strange as she is not Laris.

    The character Raffi never convinced me in the first Season. I am not sure it is only becaues of Michelle Hurd's acting.

    The character Elnor was also strange and not succesful but using point ears and green blod coud be usable for some funny sceenes. Making Oceans 7 instead would reqire no major change.

    Even if i understand a nostalgic reason for brining in Spinner again .... hmm.
    But in itself a well plaed side story.

    Briones could have got in normally. Making Oceeans 8 instead would require no major change.

    Using cliff hangers instead of stand alone is still not my preferencee.

    The "problem" is the long season arc... the long season arc feels like a very very long movie.
    This is the long season arc - why did Picard get into Starfleet and not find love? Q is enacting penance on Picard and they need to figure why...
    But each episode feels like a sprinter handing the baton to the next sprinter... like in old trek, each episode is "self contained" but feels unfinished, but at least there was some hope, or some sense of achievement...
    Not with Discovery or Picard.
    For VOY, they want to get home because they were stuck in the Delta Quadrant but that was given. However, it was to explore the Delta Quadrant. DS9 was about the prophets and Sisko. But it was not just about that. It was about the Dominion War and the wormhole... yet there were many unknowns
    Picard feels like there should be answers specifically for the Picard problem and there is no room for exploration, apart from looking at Picard himself... hence the title of the show.
    I have no idea what I am talking about

    It's why my favorite "Trek" is The Orville.

    It's episodic, adventure based, and as expected of its creator, liberal without being politically correct or "woke".

    Are there any ethical quandaries or moral issues?

    So far we had Agnes deciding between "working on your loneliness" vs "joining the space nazis". Data 3.0 deciding between "horrifying experiments on EX-soldiers for a private company" vs. "taking stuff from a super shady guy" to cure your daughter which really doesn't sound that different.

    My prediction is Agnes becomes the new Borg Queen and the big twist will be that she then makes the Borg super nice. A collective of fun. Then they join the Federation.

    Saw my dad today. We chatted about "Watcher" a bit and I outlined my previous comment to him.

    His reply was, "Well, at least it gives Lower Decks something to shred."

    Point to Dad. :D

    This episode was a defnite improvement over the last two, and although not quite reaching the standard set by the first two episodes, it nonetheless puts the season firmly back on track. I'd rate it *** out of 4 stars.

    The pacing and weaving of the subplots were done well, no doubt due to Frakes' deft direction. I was pleased to see that the not-Laris Supervisor was a callback to Gary Seven (and it makes sense that Picard, a student of history and captain of an Enterprise, would be familiar with the exploits of prior captions of prior Enterprises). The Borg Queen and Jurati scenes were, once again, creepily effective (I can only think that their prior joining afforded the BQ unique insight into how to manipulate Jurati psychologically). I'm curious to see where this thread goes.

    The Renee Picard storyline also worked for me. Not-Laris tells us that she will be on a mission to Io, but that isn't necessarily the mission launching in three days; it could be a later one. The description of depression was effective--those criticizing it seem not to have experienced depression nor known someone who has. I'm also curious to see how Q's apparently timeline-harming actions play out. The divergence seems to have injuried the Continuum and that alone is a fascinating concept I want to see explored.

    The scenes between Spiner and DeLancie were a delight, as well. Did anyone else notice that the board that pulled Soong's funding included a Vasiliy Rozhenko? I'm also pretty sure Lea Thompson was one of the other board members. Cool.

    I'm looking forward to next week!

    Oh, and I just called the number on Q's 3D-printed biz card (323-634-5667). Hilarious!

    Voyager had a lot of bad or mediocre episodes. It also had a lot of good episodes, and several great ones.

    When ever people use the rhetoric of "because you said this, which is broadly related to x, you must not have any experience of x" they're practically just begging to have the tables turned on them. It also leaps from mere disagreement to dismissing other people's lived experience out of hand. It may not be intentional, but that's what they're essentially doing. Generally, I don't think people realize what a weak and shady tactic that is because they wouldn't use it if they did.

    To those complaining that it's unrealistic having europa missions etc in 2024 - it's not "our" 2024, and i don't mean that in the "season 2 is a divergent timeline" way. Star Trek is not "our" future - in Star Trek, Khan and his cronies headed off into deep space on a cryo ship launched in i think 1996. The guy from the 1960's episode, tomorrow is yesterday i think, had a grandson commanding the first manned jupiter mission in 2020 i believe. The timelines don't match up already, and if we want to keep TOS etc as canon then we need to accept that and just watch it for what it is, the future of the future as imagined in 1966.
    As for the reference to setting Soong up to work with Khan in the supposedly-to-be-retconned 21st century Eugenics wars, i don't think that's what they're going for. They referenced working with soldiers and doing genetic experiments - i think they're setting him up to be involved with the Encounter at Farpoint Q's courtoom drug-addicted soldiers of WW3.

    Nice, so stuff like ICE that was created because of 9/11 exists for no reason in Star Trek world. I guess Star Trek never was a hopeful portrayal of the future, just some fantasy world that has less and less to do with our own reality. Great. Nothing matters.

    "To those complaining that it's unrealistic having europa missions etc in 2024 - it's not "our" 2024, and i don't mean that in the "season 2 is a divergent timeline" way. Star Trek is not "our" future - in Star Trek, Khan and his cronies headed off into deep space on a cryo ship launched in i think 1996. The guy from the 1960's episode, tomorrow is yesterday i think, had a grandson commanding the first manned jupiter mission in 2020 i believe. The timelines don't match up already, and if we want to keep TOS etc as canon then we need to accept that and just watch it for what it is, the future of the future as imagined in 1966."

    Interesting. I think that most people would presume that any divergences are simply retconned by default as a necessity of keeping present Trek in rough continuity with our own world.

    But you are taking it a step further and claiming that Trek was never intended to take place in our reality - so what we get isn't a hopeful vision of our future, but a hopeful vision of somebody else's future.

    I mean ok, sure, why not? So it's not intended to be our 2024? So all the stuff about ICE immigration raids and climate change and racism are in the context of an alternate parallel universe?

    Whooooo now I feel less guilty.

    I'm honestly really shocked a few people here are taking the attitude that they should just retcon a good deal of TOS to make it so that the stuff which doesn't align with the real world is forgotten/non-canon/ignored. Most die-hard Trek fans tend to argue that "canon" (by which they really mean continuity) should be honored, sometimes to such an absurd extent that they place it ahead of good storytelling.

    I'd actually be all for a more "hard-SF" reboot of Trek as a sort of standalone thing, which gets rid of the the more nonsensical portions of the setting (alien hybrids, the universal translator, etc.) But if you're going to "honor canon" you do have to accept on some level the stuff they talked about in TOS from the late 20th/early 21st centuries really happened within the universe, even if "Gene's vision" was originally for it to be our future. After all, most fan seem to engage with Trek from a Watsonian rather than Doylist perspective anyway, trying to figure out within-universe reasons things happen rather than authorial intent.

    You are "honestly really shocked" that MANY people here see Star Trek more like a vehicle to tell stories about how enlightened our future could be and not like some kind of fixed lord of the rings? That seems like an overreaction. :)

    @Jason R.
    "I think that most people would presume that any divergences are simply retconned by default as a necessity of keeping present Trek in rough continuity with our own world."

    It's not just "most people" but the way the Star Trek writers themselves always dealt with this problem.

    Three small examples:

    1. When Voyager returned to 1996, it was clearly our own 1996.
    2. 9-11 was shown as part of the Trek timeline on ST:Enterprise.
    3. Voyager once described a Mars mission from 2032 which is was obviously intended as a reasonable projection.

    On the other hand, ST:Picard has clearly chosen to abandon this route. I am fully aware of the fact that this makes no narrative sense what-so-ever, but it is clearly the choice they've made.

    PIC is not the first time this has happened though. ENT's third season was pretty explicit about the Eugenics Wars taking place in the late 20th century for example. Although outside of the main continuity, Star Trek: Into Darkness also explicitly referenced the Eugenics Wars as being 20th century conflicts. The other Treks ignored the issue of squaring TOS to the real world, but they never really attempted to retcon it (there was a production error during DS9 which referred to the Eugenics Wars as being two centuries prior, but it's been admitted to have been an error.

    I strongly disagree with the statement that Star Trek is primarily about our own future being an enlightened place. That may be the background setting of the Trekverse, but utopian fiction always suffers from a lack of conflict, which is why Trek wisely tended to focus on allegorical storytelling about our own present instead through aliens and other means (including time travel). So (as an example) when DS9 did Past Tense, they were making a point about how 1990s California treated the homeless and other poor individuals - they were not making a statement about what 2024 would actually be like. The use of Sisko and Bashir - from more "enlightened" times - allowed them to call bullshit on the stuff we freely ignore from day to day.

    The truth is, the writers want to have it both ways, and so it's up to us to reconcile it. My response is to think of it along the lines of Marvel's "sliding timeline." Like, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm originally fought in WWII until it became absolutely impossible for them to have done that, and then they never fought in the war anymore. So in Star Trek's case, things that clearly cannot be reconciled with the actual present get slid off their original projected "future" date into a further future date. Things like the Millennium Gate from the abominable Voyager episode (I love Voyager by the way, and not to contribute to the off-topic tangent of that discussion, but when I rewatched the series last year, I counted 43 episodes that didn't meet the quality threshold--haha, Threshold!--to have been made, and the rest were at least good enough to have been made, so yes, that's a good show on balance even aside from my irrational love for it) don't have to "slide forward," because they're minor inconsequential things. But the Eugenics Wars . . . it just feels natural to make it part of WWIII. It may not be "correct," but you could squint a bit and let it slide. We squint a bit with a lot of TOS stuff already. What's the United Earth Space Probe Agency, eh? It sure isn't Starfleet/The Federation.

    Although maybe we're at the point where we're out of runway to slide things to already, eh? 2063 is certainly the hard end of it, and WWIII/The Eugenics Wars needs to happen before then. I think WWIII is supposed to happen in 2042? That's only 20 years away. There will certainly be more Star Trek being made in 20 years . . .

    @Bryan
    Sat, Apr 2, 2022, 9:37pm (UTC -5)

    "Are you suggesting that she slipped through the cracks? Because I don't think she did. Lisa Nowak had a long and distinguished career before she went bonkers. Anyone can have a spontaneous psychotic break that is impossible to predict, but this in no way obviates the utility of screening for inherent psychological vulnerabilities that, with the cumulative or acute stressors that one can expect to encounter in space, can send a person teetering into the mental red zone."


    Are you suggesting that any argument you've made to handwave away the real life example of an astronut that clearly "slipped through the cracks" wouldn't also apply to a fictional astronaut manipulated by a cosmic being in regards to a far less extreme fictional incident?

    I don't care about timelines and all that nonsense. I care about a positive vision of the future and interesting ethical problems. NuTrek isn't interested in either.

    Can't it be a little bit of both? What's REALLY at stake if NASA isn't quite ready to fly a manned mission to Io, or if we can't seem to find Khan in the real world? Have the Messages of Star Trek truly been rendered moot? There are so many movies where they need to change a few details about the real world in order to get the story to fit into it. Does that make it a "parallel world"? Technically, but I don't the creators would put too fine a point on that. I think Star Trek is like that too. It only just so happens that Star Trek's past has an annoying tendency to catch up with our present, so it needs to make a few more tweaks than usual. I don't really care whether people insist on calling it a parallel world or not because I think the main point of Star Trek is that these are humans like us who found a better way forward than they did in the past, and therefore so can we.

    Though to be fair, it's kind of annoying when people try to undermine any argument with the facile assertion of "well it's just a parallel world anyway so your real-world logic doesn't t really apply!"

    Like, I could flesh out the most iron-clad argument about NASA's rigorous screening process that attempts to select for pristine mental health, quoting from Scientific American and Mary Roach's well-researched book, "Packing for Mars" and so on, which would honor the challenge implicit in some of the criticism I've received, but once I've done that, there's always gonna be someone out there who falls back on the claim that "it's not OUR 2024, but THEIR 2024 where NASA would be way more progressive than that and would NEVER discriminate based on mental health, ensuring that there is fair MAD representative among their active astronauts!"

    @Karl Zimmerman
    "Most die-hard Trek fans tend to argue that "canon" (by which they really mean continuity) should be honored, sometimes to such an absurd extent that they place it ahead of good storytelling."

    I've yet to meet the kind of Trek fan you've just describe.

    Yes, continuity should be honored, but there's also such a thing called common sense. Like any other good principle, respecting continuity can become absurd if taken to an extreme while ignoring every other consideration.

    Most die-hard Trek fans would agree with you 100% on this.

    By the way, I hope you're not calling the massive and arbitrary changes that NuTrek has applied to OldTrek's continuity "good storytelling". :-)

    "But if you're going to "honor canon" you do have to accept on some level the stuff they talked about in TOS from the late 20th/early 21st centuries really happened within the universe"

    Yes, *on some level*. But as you've aptly said yourself, "taking it to an extreme would be absurd".

    Besides, taking this to an extreme with TOS, would mean a total disregard to everything that came later. So a person who does this is not "honoring canon to an absurd degree". He is simply inconsistent.

    "ENT's third season was pretty explicit about the Eugenics Wars taking place in the late 20th century for example."

    Source? I always thought it was remarkable how ENT did an entire arc about Genetic Supermen without mentioning either the date or the circumstances of the war.

    "The other Treks ignored the issue of squaring TOS to the real world, but they never really attempted to retcon it"

    Such a retcon does not require a conscious attempt.

    The other Treks constantly referenced real world history. They are *rooted* in real world history. They've also ignored the more blatant disparencies between TOS and reality. In effect, that's a retcon, whether they meant it as such or not.

    "So (as an example) when DS9 did Past Tense, they were making a point about how 1990s California treated the homeless and other poor individuals - they were not making a statement about what 2024 would actually be like."

    It's both.

    They were making the statement of what 2024 *could be like*, given the reality of the 1990s. There is a direct connecting casual link between the real 1990s and DS9's 2024.

    "Are you suggesting that any argument you've made to handwave away the real life example of an astronaut that clearly "slipped through the cracks" wouldn't also apply to a fictional astronaut manipulated by a cosmic being in regards to a far less extreme fictional incident? "

    I didn't even see this before I posted the above, so it looks like I called it.
    Also, I don't see how you can have it both ways. You can't try to whittle down the argument with real-world examples that aren't even relevant to the case in question, but then be like "well this case happens to be fictional which should be obvious since there's a cosmic being involved, so it's misguided to defer to real-world examples in the first place!"

    But to be a little more charitable to those claims, yes, I'm saying that spontaneous and brief psychotic breaks are in a totally different category than chronic mood disorders, and Renee hasn't displayed any symptoms of the former. I still think NASA would be a little more discriminating if they had any knowledge of either.

    Also, if Q were manipulating her all along with his cosmic powers then all bets are off regarding her psychological profile, but instead it seems like he only just now started when he doesn't have any powers to speak of. Instead, all he's done is play therapist and gently discourage her from doing the mission if her mental health in as much jeopardy as she implies, which, actually seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do. It certainly wouldn't be unheard of to say that if it were a real therapist saying what Q said.

    But like I tried to emphasize earlier, my main point isn't even about the specifics of what Renee could or couldn't be diagnosed with, but about NASA's 'discriminatory' practices, and the writing is already on the wall regarding her symptoms for all to see. Her Watcher seems to know all about it even before the revealing therapy session. In contrast, real-world astronauts actually have a tendency to conceal their symptoms if they don't conform to NASA's high standards for fear of being grounded. It's just a facet of NASA culture and it would be very interesting if the showrunners shined a spot light on that, or criticizes those questionable attitudes regarding mental health. Instead, it looks like they're going with this attitude of "The Show Must Go On" regarding mental illness, which I don't think it particularly helpful either.

    "Can't it be a little bit of both? What's REALLY at stake if NASA isn't quite ready to fly a manned mission to Io,"

    There are no plans to fly a manned mission to Io because doing so is *impossible* with today's technology. This isn't even equivalent to a manned mission to Mars, which itself would be a generational achievement to put the Apollo program to shame. A manned mission to Io is orders of magnitude harder than going to Mars and is a ridiculous notion in any kind of 2024 timeline based remotely on the real world. NASA says such a mission might be carried out in *80 years*. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the space program would know this.

    Of course they could have just as easily made it about a mission to the moon, or even Mars and nothing would have changed with the plot. So we have to assume that the writers didn't bother doing a Google search and just don't give a shit.

    Omicron is entirely correct - trek was a science fiction program about a possible future of our world. Even when timelines and dates for key events had to be retconned by necessity there was never any doubt that it was intended to take place in our world, not in some fictional alternative reality.

    And the suggestion that nuTrek's departures from canon are for the purpose of better storytelling makes my brain hurt.

    "Nasa aims for crewed mission to Jupiter or Saturn's moons within 80 years"

    https://www.bbc.com/newsround/58916959

    Yeah, maybe the writers don't give a shit about any of this, but my point is that maybe we shouldn't give so much of a shit about it either.

    "Yeah, maybe the writers don't give a shit about any of this, but my point is that maybe we shouldn't give so much of a shit about it either."

    Apparently most people don't. Today's viewer doesn't want to hear much about a mission to Io anyway- that doesn't matter anyway. It could be a mission to Mt. Olympus or maybe to the Land of the Lost or to the Dark Dimension. That's all just nerdy science nonsense anyway.

    It's more important that we dwell on Mary Sue astronaut's depression and anxiety, because as we know, today's audience views mental illness as the hallmark of how awesome someone is. No hero is complete without a DSM diagnosis.

    I'm not kidding by the way. This generation really sees mental illness as heroic.

    Yes, it's like Marvel's sliding timeline. I do understand how unsatisfying that can be, which is why whenever possible I prefer my sci-fi to avoid mentioning any events before the 22nd century. Like, it was actually fairly shortsighted to give "Space: 1999" and "2001: a Space Odyssey" those titles, when there was nothing about them that would not have fit with 2199 or 2201. At least Roddenberry was smart enough not to set TOS itself in such a near future.

    @Bryan

    The problem here is chiefly a story-telling one:

    The writers have chosen to tell a story in which Picard and company return to (more-or-less) the present day. They are also trying to make a statement regarding the present situation in the world.

    So if the 2024 they depict varies wildly from the real world (and it's not just the Io mission) it simply undermines their story. Especially when there's going to be a major timeline change soon, which is supposed to trigger the dystopian Confederation.

    What's even the point of all of this, if it all happens in some kind of alternate reality anyway?

    @Jason
    Star Trek Picard gets it's worst ratings from the youngest and the highest rating from the 45+ and older
    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8806524/ratings

    Maybe rethink your young people bashing.

    Funny thing I've just noticed when researching on memory alpha:

    Apparently, in "Watcher", Q is holding a 2024 newspaper which has the headline "Will 2024 revive space exploration?" and a sub-headline regarding the Europa mission.

    In the real world, 2024 may be the year we return to the moon. So they had the perfect opportunity to combine a real-world development with the theme they wanted to develop, right there.

    Shame, really.

    "So if the 2024 they depict varies wildly from the real world (and it's not just the Io mission) it simply undermines their story."

    Far be it for me to defend the sloppy writing of Nu-Trek, but I don't see how that's necessarily the case. Why can't they pick and choose which facets of present reality to maintain and which to overwrite with the narrative necessities of the plot? When ever they criticize ICE, however ineptly, I don't think anyone in the audience is distracted by thoughts of how surprisingly far technology has advanced for 2024, at the Gala, at Soong's lab, in space travel, etc...

    We bring our real-world preconceptions with us when we watch this show, but we shouldn't have a problem selectively dispensing with them as long as the deviations from reality are established within the text of the show. This doesn't mean that "nothing matters" and it also doesn't give people license to hand-wave anything they like just because some other specific things have been hand-waved by the show-runners.

    "@Jason
    Star Trek Picard gets it's worst ratings from the youngest and the highest rating from the 45+ and older
    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8806524/ratings

    Maybe rethink your young people bashing."

    I don't really see ratings as conclusive of anything since there are about 1,001 reasons why an older demographic might like the show more than younger having nothing to do with something as minor as how generations see mental illness. The fact that it is based on Picard, a character beloved by people 45 years old and older (who grew up with TNG) is probably determinative.

    I am not even certain this is an issue with the younger generation. But it's definitely a running theme in many movies and shows geared to younger people.

    ""within 80 years"
    2024 is within 80 years."

    Haha take it from a lawyer, "within 80 years" means maybe 150 years. It's like if your contract entitles you to "at least 5%". Translation: 5%.

    Another mistake. But to be fair to writers back then, we had gone from Sputnik to Apollo 11 in barely over a decade (incredible, really). For that matter at the time of Apollo 11 anyone our current president's age would remember the Wright brothers flight at Kitty Hawk happening when they were a teenager. Since then computer technology has continued to advance by leaps and bounds, but space exploration has slowed way down, more than anyone could have imagined.

    The speed that computer tech advanced is why TNG era Star Trek had to resort to "iso-" to measure it.

    RLM has a new episode of "I absolutely fucking hate myself" up on their channel.

    @Bryan
    Mon, Apr 4, 2022, 3:54pm (UTC -5)

    "I didn't even see this before I posted the above, so it looks like I called it.
    Also, I don't see how you can have it both ways. You can't try to whittle down the argument with real-world examples that aren't even relevant to the case in question, but then be like "well this case happens to be fictional which should be obvious since there's a cosmic being involved, so it's misguided to defer to real-world examples in the first place!" But to be a little more charitable to those claims, yes, I'm saying that spontaneous and brief psychotic breaks are in a totally different category than chronic mood disorders, and Renee hasn't displayed any symptoms of the former. I still think NASA would be a little more discriminating if they had any knowledge of either. Also, if Q were manipulating her all along with his cosmic powers then all bets are off regarding her psychological profile, but instead it seems like he only just now started when he doesn't have any powers to speak of. Instead, all he's done is play therapist and gently discourage her from doing the mission if her mental health in as much jeopardy as she implies, which, actually seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do. It certainly wouldn't be unheard of to say that if it were a real therapist saying what Q said."



    You called it? I was very clear in my very first post what I was talking about. It shouldn't have taken you that long to understand in the first place.

    I'm not having anything both ways. You scoffed at the notion that a fictional character under supernatural circumstances could escape the notice of NASA. You failed to acknowledge that an ordinary person in real life had already done so under ordinary circumstances. Nowak and 2 doctors also stated she had chronic mental and neurological disorders, more than one. You might try to claim both she and her doctors were lying, but where's the evidence? It doesn't exist. Since you have zero evidence for anything that you're claiming about Nowak's supposed sudden psychotic break, your assertion is automatically wrongheaded. The real life precedent has already been set for the fictional circumstance.

    We don't know what Q's current power level is. We do know he was able to remotely hack Soon's equipment to communicate with him and quickly produce a temporary cure for a genetic disease that didn't exist before he got there. That means he's not powerless, just limited to an unknown degree. We also know that his omniscience, for lack of a better term, give him insight into human psychology. We see this demonstrated in that scene where you claim he's powerless. We also saw it demonstrated in his manipulation of Picard in Tapestry and All Good Things. We know he's been passing as Renee's therapist. It literally doesn't matter if he's using his abilities or if he's using his supernaturally gained knowledge alone. He's already shown the ability to manipulate everyone on the show using one, the other, or both.

    “We don't know what Q's current power level is.”

    What’s the scouter say about his power level?

    @SlackerInc

    Nothing is comparable to Marvel's (or any mainstream comic's ) sliding timeline. DC actually lampshaded this in one of its many recent overarching storylines. Marvel just tends to ignore that something is odd about Magneto being in Auschwitz or one of the other camps 77 years ago, but is still out and about like he was a spry 40 year old, instead of pushing 100 on a walker. It's more mitigated in the movies (Magneto is clearly older) but it's legendarily absurd in the comics. No franchise of Star Trek can currently come close to that. However, I could see them catching up some day.

    Okay, a lot to reply to...

    @OmicronThetaDeltaPhi,

    Trek fandom is full of continuity nerds. Look at how many people simply couldn't swallow the Klingon redesign from TMP onward as due to higher budgets/better production, and demanded some within-canon explanation (until Manny Coto finally gave them one, even though it more-or-less contradicted DS9). We've had people on this forum - in this very thread - argue that if a season isn't within the general continuity of Trek, it's "worthless."

    As for ENT's third season, in Borderland, when Phlox is talking with Arik Soong in sickbay, he's viewing the DNA of the augments, and remarks to Soong that it's "extremely sophisticated work for 20th century Earth." Earlier dialog between Reed and Archer establishes that the Augment embryos had been frozen since the Eugenics Wars - which dates the Eugenics Wars to the 20th century.

    I actually agree with your follow-up post that some of the themes they meant to explore are kinda rendered irrelevant by the use of an alternate timeline. Like, the whole ICE thing is pointless, because now people can just say "well, it's an alternate universe, maybe ICE isn't that bad" and it misses the desired impact entirely. They would have been better off not calling it ICE and doing the story a bit more allegorically.

    @ Jason R.,

    Trek's space program is more advanced than the real world though. For example, Nomad was launched as an interstellar probe in 2002. A model of Nomad is apparently going to be seen in this week's episode, so they are again reinforcing that this advanced space exploration is part of Trek's timeline.

    I personally think the idea that Trek took place in "our world" ended with TOS at the latest. All later iterations of Trek have been more interested in being self-referential to the Trekverse than they have to integrating plausible aspects of our own future. Which is why Trek had such weak use of AI and posthumanism - that stuff really wasn't part of SF in the mid 1960s when it crystalized. In contrast, psi still had mainstream respect then, so psi is part of Trek even though it's a bunch of bullshit.

    @SlackerInc,

    There were no dates at all in TOS (witness the use of "Stardates") on purpose. It wasn't until TWOK that it was canonically set in the 23rd century.

    @Quincy

    "You called it? I was very clear in my very first post what I was talking about. It shouldn't have taken you that long to understand in the first place."

    No, I understood what you meant in your first post. I was alluding to where I said that someone is probably going to make reference to this episode taking place in a purely fictional universe, as if that detracts from my point. I said this minutes before I noticed your second reply to me. It was meant tongue in cheek in any case.

    "You failed to acknowledge that an ordinary person in real life had already done so under ordinary circumstances."

    I didn't fail to acknowledge it. I said that it's more understandable that she escaped early detection. Whether one wants to argue that this happened because she didn't have serious mental illnesses until later, or they argue instead that she did but that her symptoms weren't severe enough to raise any red flags for NASA, I don't really care because I think that distinction is beside the point. It's likely a bit of both, but let's not be obtuse here: mood disorders like anxiety and depression and neurological conditions like Asperger's Syndrome are not sufficient to explain the top tier psycho shit that Nowak pulled. Since the incident was an embarrassment for NASA, you can be pretty damn sure that their filters regarding mental health only became all the more stringent afterward. Here's an interesting article on the topic:

    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/mental-health-in-outer-space/

    So why exactly do I think it's possible NASA could be forgiven for overlooking Nowak but not Renee? Because everything about Renee screams "look at me, I have a mental illness!" Even before we know who she is, her establishing scene is about her crashing in the sim THREE DAYS before launch, and then losing her cool and banging on the equipment in frustration even though there's probably cameras on her. And NASA like just like "Don't worry, you still have three days to get it right!" We also see her make no attempt to conceal her symptoms, but openly reveals them to someone who she believes is a NASA's psychiatrist, who -could- conceivably pull her off the mission merely for uttering those words. Like I said, normally there's a culture of silence regarding mental illness and it wouldn't surprise me if Nowak tried very hard to pass herself off as completely mentally and emotionally fit. Meanwhile, Renee wears her illness on her sleeve for all to see.

    "We don't know what Q's current power level is."

    It seems Q has retained his high intelligence but it also seems necessary to greatly curtail the more supernatural aspects to his powers in this episode in order for the story to work, in order for Picard and co. to have any hope of standing in his way. That said, it certainly wouldn't require any special powers for Q to simply tell the NASA's top brass, in the guise of a psychiatrist, that Renee has raised some psychological red flags and that she should be grounded. It's truly bizarre to me that the writers seem to be suggesting that it's ultimately Renee's decision whether she goes to space or not depending on whether she's feeling up to it on the day of the launch.

    This is not good.

    I think I've developed a Stockholm type syndrome where I watch the show hoping that it has something to say. The smallest thing that they do well (The Borg Queen) makes me suddenly hope that they're onto something. But when I step back - and look at the writing, the plot, the dialogue, the atmosphere - I realize what a mess this is. Good shows take thoughtful writing, a sense of wonder, and loyalty to the show's characters. Picard does not of that. It's like a bunch of random people cobbled together a show out of disparate parts. I don't want to compare it to Marvel - because as much as I hate Marvel - at least Marvel cares a little bit about the writing. This show is an insult to the great Deep Space Nine and TNG; it makes Enterprise shine; it even elevates Voyager.

    Sad.

    @ Karl Zimmerman,

    "I personally think the idea that Trek took place in "our world" ended with TOS at the latest."

    I don't want to wade into a discussion about a season I haven't seen, but I just wanted to throw in 2c about this suggestion. I think TNG and DS9, even VOY, are pretty blatant about being in our actual universe as our (hopeful) future. I mean, they literally met Amelia Earhart on VOY. So what, I'm supposed to assume this was a parallel universe version of her? Similarly for Distant Origin, where the fun of the premise was "what if this was what happened to the dinosaurs." It's only a fun premise if it's a what-if about Earth's past. Our Earth, not another one.

    Granted these one-offs are more frolicky than they are serious statements about our planet, but either way it shows the mindset in the showrunners was that it was clearly our actual future. The fact of past predictions being off, vis a vis Nomad and the rest, is not a sign it's a parallel universe; it just means their guesses were wrong. If they put my head in a jar for a few hundred years I'm sure I'd hear a fan in the 24th century saying that things are nothing like what we see on TNG and DS9, therefore they are clearly not about our universe!! No one makes such claims about Back to the Future and other 'futuristic' films precisely because we know the dates were just guesswork that didn't pan out. They aren't actual prognostic promises that, if in error, must be true in some other universe. Trek was always the future of our world, as Gene clearly intended it.

    I don't know anything about PIC S2, but I'll watch it once the season is done, probably. If they're retconning Trek to being a pure fantasy, then although it's their right it does take away that element of Trek which was suppose to give us hope to create that actual future for ourselves. If it's just some parallel universe's future then it's more like a daydream than an ambition for us. DISC already pretty much opened up the barn door on discarding any relation to reality anyhow, so if PIC is the horse then so be it.

    In Bryan's comment, he mentioned that Renee Picard was alone in the simulator. This would not have happened. This is not Mercury; this is a multi-crewed mission. She would have been training with the other members of the crew.

    The writers of present Trek, especially Discovery and Picard, are having a difficult time in pacing their stories. This is evident when compared to other serialized shows. When I saw the preview for the next episode, I could not believe it. Are they suggesting that we are going to spend an entire hour at the gala? Are you kidding me? Already, I am seeing where they could have pared this story down.

    At this point, I am more interested in Los Angeles than I am in the story. I am having fun in identifying the buildings seen in the establishing shots and working out where the car chase was filmed. (It was filmed in a small section of downtown Los Angeles clustered around the Los Angeles Convention Center.) I did not like the 25th century version of Los Angeles - it lacked imagination. It was taking an establishing shot and adding new buildings by removing existing buildings.

    Regardless of what the continuity snarls generated by this show's plot are, regardless of whose politics are having what said about this or that or them, or lo and behold, regardless of any other issue...

    It's that Star Trek is becoming as vapid and "actions/emotions"-centered as the rest of TV, and that's the *draw* of the show, or it always has been, that it's "ideas"-centered. It doesn't pander, doesn't just tick boxes, doesn't just phone it in; It's supposed to explore strange new story ideas and seek out new plots and new moralizations. It's supposed to boldly say what nobody's said before.

    This (and much of Trek for some time now) does not do that. And it's N o t A c c e p t a b l e .

    Thus, the modern era Trek, has basically cut off Trek's storytelling "lobes."

    It's obvious that "Trek History" can't have happened in our world. Not anymore anyway. It's been that way for a while know. So many things that were far in the future when Trek was conceived are in the past or near future now. If you want to keep that fictional history, you need to pull away from the actual present. I'm ok with that, though until this episode, I hadn't really thought about it.

    It's pretty revealing that so far we had very little (or no?) discussions about ethical or moral problems. It's all "continuity this" "actor choice that" and it's not that they didn't have a million topics.

    So far we had these topics which the show only mentions and then kind of forgets about. Here are some of the topics and how the show dealt with them

    - childhood trauma, bad
    - spousal abuse, bad
    - ICE, bad
    - climate change, bad
    - shady genetic experiments, bad
    - totalitarianism, bad
    - depression, sad
    - loneliness, sad

    No wonder that we have no debates about anything actually interesting.

    And about the whole parallel universe vs our world debate. To me Star Trek was always a portrayal of our far future with interesting issues sprinkled in. I accept that Star Trek is now the product of many writers who often came up with stuff because they had to. Star Trek "canon" is not a holy text. For me it is not a problem to realize that 2024 DS9 is not like our 2024 is going to be and still think of Star Trek as a positive vision of our future.

    @Karl Zimmerman
    "There were no dates at all in TOS (witness the use of "Stardates") on purpose. It wasn't until TWOK that it was canonically set in the 23rd century."

    In a way....But there were relative indicators of the time period when TOS was set. From Tomorrow is Yesterday for example:
    BASE SECURITY OFFICER: "I am going to lock you up for 200 years."
    KIRK: "That ought to be just about right." (Paraphrase)

    But those references lack consistency. Khan is described as having spent roughly 200 years in space after the 1990s. But in "Squire of Gothos," Kirk tells Trelane "Then you've been looking in on the doings nine hundred years past" and these includes specific references to the 19th century, like the death of Alexander Hamilton, and knows a Strauss waltz. So there, TOS would have to take place in the 28th century.

    @Booming "For me it is not a problem to realize that 2024 DS9 is not like our 2024 is going to be and still think of Star Trek as a positive vision of our future.

    DS9's 2024 (a future imagined in 1995) was bound to be inaccurate in some way, but not in all ways. For a lot of people, life in the here and now, is probably very much like DS9's 2024. We all know that the problems shown in DS9 Past Tense were, and are, real ones.

    Dystopic SciFi is cautionary, as if to tell each of us that it is "imperative" (as Kirk would say) to really work on making things in the future better. We need to make a different future ... Or the future different.

    @TopHat
    quite correct but we all somehow knew that the scrpit got it wrong from the get-go
    Squire of Gothos is indeed a problem historically. It always really bugged me. To deal with it, I have to conjure in my mind that the sensors were off in measuring how far Gothos was from Earth (though more likely a 900 should have been a 600 in the script or something like that).Trelane plays the harpsicord, but that was already antique in Napoleon's time and he should have a hammerklavier (fortepiano) in his drawing room instead, and be talking about Beethoven incessantly.

    @Peter G.,

    My point is - broadly - only TOS was concerned with making good TV science fiction. Every Trek product after that was concerned mainly with making good Star Trek. This started as early as TAS, where we got Spock's childhood, more tribbles, more of Harry Mudd, etc. The focus had already shifted away from using the format to explore the human condition through original sci-fi concepts to fleshing out Star Trek lore. This is something that only increased over time, because it's clearly what the fans want. For example, TWOK is typically considered the best of the TOS movies, and it's a direct sequel to a TOS episode. First Contact is considered the best TNG movie, and it's incredibly fanwanky (focusing on both the Borg and Zephram Cochrane). The majority of fans seem to want Star Trek to be LoTR, even if many of you don't - they want deep dives into lore, well-known characters to return, and small universe syndrome.

    I'd also say - as someone who has been reading alternate history novels since I was in high school (which is like 25 or so years ago now), I simply don't understand the distinction between a scenario that could be "our future" versus a different timeline. I've read great utopian fiction with points of departure in the 19th century which have resulted in a "present" similar to Star Trek in tone, and I find it just as optimistic as Trek. I think such scenarios are as "real" as an imagined future - in some ways more so, as they depict what could already have happened with only minor points of departure. In both cases, I leave with a desire to do better, and a better understanding of what is actually within the realm of possibility.

    Trek fans excel at picking at nits, no doubt.

    I have never been one to treat canon as gospel, nor is this even possible in many cases.

    Continuity can and should be ignored where *necessary* and conducive to *good storytelling*.

    I don't give a crap about Trelane's harpsichord.

    What matters here is the show's writing, which routinely throws logic, continuity and canon in the trash for no discernible reason.

    Take the mission to Io. Anybody who read past the first sentence on the Wikipedia entry for Europa Clipper knows that it's unmanned. Anybody with even the slightest passing interest in space exploration knows that it's impossible for us to send a manned mission to Jupiter, full stop.

    There is no conceivable storytelling necessity for this to be a manned mission to Io. They could have picked the moon or even just an orbital mission to the ISS and they could have still told whatever cockamamie butterfly effect time travel story they wanted.

    It is not the error itself that is the issue - in the context of a whole season this is trivial. It is what this error represents a and how it is symptomatic of a whole attitude to the writing that is the problem.

    There's just no thought to any of the science fiction elements here, none. Zero interest in space exploration. Does anyone notice that no one has actually talked about the *mission*? They're sending people to Jupiter, holy shit that's cool!

    Remember the movie the Martian, how cool it was to see the logistics of sending men to Mars, Matt Damon figuring out how to grow food, make water, find fertilizer? Finding the old rovers and communicating through them? Was all of it scientifically accurate? No. But it made me as a viewer want to go out and research what a real Mars mission would be like. That's what Star Trek used to be. People became scientists because of Star Trek. Star Trek inspired real life astronauts!

    Renee Picard is going to be exploring a new world! What are her thoughts on that? What made her want to explore the stars and why is this mission important to her? Anyone? It appears being an astronaut is as relevant to her story as knowledge of Cantonese or her skill at chess. It's a footnote in her oh so awesome cv.

    I can't tell you how spending a whole episode dwelling on an astronaut's depression and anxiety while completely ignoring her imminent mission to explore a new world is not Trek or even science fiction. It sucks. And no, in no real world would someone with such obvious psychological red flags ever be permitted to lead a space mission, let alone the biggest space mission in human history, no way mo how end of story. It doesn't matter what an awesome mega Mary Sue genius she is. If it weren't for the time travel butterfly effect nonsense Q therapist would be the hero of the episode for saving NASA from sending a loose cannon to lead its biggest mission since Apollo 11.

    Anyone seen this TNG parody song:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwDUVMgYjH8&t=246s

    I thought it was quite funny.

    I read Brint Spiner was turning up in this episode, so haven't watched it. Nothing against Spiner, but having him play Data, Lore, Noonian, B1, B2, B3, B4, Arik etc etc...as well as another role in this episode, is a bit too much for me. The return of the Mirror Universe in season 3 of Discovery made me bail on that show, and I think I'm bailing on Picard unless Jammer drops a three star or more.

    Again, I completely disagree that a lot of thought hasn't gone into the setting. I think Matalas & Co put considerable thought into it. They referenced Jackson Roykirk, and we know the next episode will show a model of Nomad in a museum. The TNG Season 1 Episode the Neutral Zone has 3 20th century humans who were in cryostasis, found far from the solar system. As was, of course, Khan's ship. TOS also established a manned mission to Saturn in 2018, meaning - within the established Trekverse - a manned mission to Jupiter in 2024 makes perfect sense within canon and continuity. It doesn't make *common sense* of course, but very little within Trek makes common sense (how the hell do aliens interbreed with humans?!?).

    I do think you're putting too much emphasis on the Renee Picard thing though, because it will ultimately be a red herring - not what the season is actually about at all. I presume the POD is actually something that echoes back from the decisions that Picard made at the end of the last episode when choosing to destroy Borg Jurati who came forward in time rather than trusting her enough to see what happened once she had enough power from the Stargazer.

    "I do think you're putting too much emphasis on the Renee Picard thing though, because it will ultimately be a red herring - not what the season is actually about at all."

    You are not wrong- no doubt the whole season will be a red herring.

    My hunch is the Picard astronaut is the proverbial "butterfly" that determines whether or not the future goes good or bad.

    If she doesn't do the flight then humanity stays down a dark, xenophobic path blah blah blah.

    If she does, she discovers life on another world or something and brings hope that triggers humanity changing to something more like Gene's utopia.

    The problem is Star Trek already has a history of how we bettered ourselves and it was first contact with Vulcans, not a microbe on Europa or whatever

    So who knows

    "no doubt the whole season will be a red herring."



    This show is so woke even their fish are communists.

    That seems to indicate that a whole lot of trust has been put in the showrunners for them all to sign on like that. Could they be missing something, or are we? I would assume that they've been watching the same show as the rest of us...

    So far a lot of the appeal for many seems to be the cameos and references. How expensive can the TNG crew be. They are not in high demand. One big paycheck for them. Many will certainly talk about how great it was to see the old crew again. I could not care less but it works.

    The press also says the adventure will be "starship bound." So listen, maybe they're finally giving us what we want?

    @Sigh2000
    "DS9's 2024 (a future imagined in 1995) was bound to be inaccurate in some way, but not in all ways. For a lot of people, life in the here and now, is probably very much like DS9's 2024. We all know that the problems shown in DS9 Past Tense were, and are, real ones. "

    The scary thing is that DS9's 2024 is hauntingly similar to present day reality. The details may be off, but the general sentiment was almost prophetic.

    I've watched "Past Tense" not long ago, as part of a DS9 rewatch. It was a very uncomfortable viewing. You get the feeling that this episode *is* dealing with present day reality, even though the details are wrong. It was quite unnerving.

    @Nacho Picard
    "The problem is Star Trek already has a history of how we bettered ourselves and it was first contact with Vulcans, not a microbe on Europa or whatever"

    Okay, now I'm imagining a very stern microbe giving a classic "get your sh*t together" Picard speech to the visitors from earth.

    @Bryan
    "That seems to indicate that a whole lot of trust has been put in the showrunners for them all to sign on like that. Could they be missing something, or are we? I would assume that they've been watching the same show as the rest of us..."

    Why wouldn't they sign on? They are actors and they've just been offered a job (which I assume to be very well-paying).

    Besides, have you seen any interviews with these people in the past few years? If not, you should. Nearly all of them were severely effected by the madness that swept through Hollywood in 2020. I don't know how many of the TNG cast (if at all) cared about real Star Trek 20 years ago, but I guarantee you that none of them care about it today.

    So them giving an "okay" to the next season means absolutely nothing.

    The word of the moment with Trek, for me is

    “Vapid.”

    It doesn’t have anything to say about us as a race, or the way the world is, anymore. It just loves to rake in the ad revenue/merch revenue, and it puts up a bunch of decorative “events” that are supposed to seem like “they care about the history of the show,” or whatever, and amount to little more than “huh, that happened, wow,” for me.

    There aren’t any ideas in this story, and what few they try to explore get sidelined quickly, giving the feeling that ideas and thinking are just another mostly cosmetic “trapping” of Star Trek that I’m meant to respond to.

    I’m responding to it by saying “this doesn’t excite me guys/gals.” There. That’s my response.

    @Bryan
    Mon, Apr 4, 2022, 8:34pm (UTC -5)



    That's because it does detract from your point. Once something happens in real life it by definition is plausible in fiction.

    Nowak claimed to have obsessive compulsive disorder. I have a relative that has that. It's toxic as hell and disruptive beyond belief. An astronaut with obsessive compulsive disorder who freaks out because of a trigger for his/her disorder can absolutely kill everyone aboard in the wrong circumstances. If NASA isn't screening for it they're retarded.

    Psychotic break doesn't explain it, especially since you have no evidence for it. Some of the experts on the other side at the time argued that she didn't have any mental disorder other than an antisocial personality disorder, which is completely different than a mood disorder or a psychotic break. One thing is clear. NASA dropped the ball. Something was always wrong with Nowak and NASA should've been screening for it if they weren't.

    You're claiming that the organization which has screwed up in so many arenas, like two space shuttles, numerous unmanned probes/landers, a multimillion dollar telescope, is magically infallible in this one arena which they've already failed in. It's absurd. There's no doubt NASA screwed up and will continue to do so. They recently had a astronaut aboard the space station tracking her estranged wife through online accounts. She only got off because she still had a legal right to access the accounts that she was spying with. They could've easily caught a black eye from that incident, but skated by.

    Not that I'm completely crapping on NASA. They're one of the better governmental organizations. But infallible they ain't.

    Q could simply kill her. He's killed people in the present while supposedly teaching Picard a lesson. Why couldn't he kill someone in the past? But this is always the case. Q could use his powers to do 90% of the things he's done more easily than he's done them. He could use his knowledge to do 90% of the things that he's done better than he's done them. Q does what he does because he likes doing things that way going back to the beginning of TNG. "The Trial" is some sort of game or test, so it's possible he's simply restricted to certain actions by the Q Continuum's rules for that test, but this is also always a possibility. His true purpose on the show is to be comic relief and Diabolus ex Machina.

    This whole season has been bizarre. What's bizarre to me is that apparently the Queen has been hanging there like frozen meat on a hook in the cargo area or wherever all this time with active Borg nanoprobes in her system and magically there hasn't been the Borg version of a grey goo event in whatever city they're in. I had been hoping that they were deactivated due to her being in captivity, but nope. That doesn't make any sense.

    The bizarreness goes back to the first episode (which almost everyone was cheering on) where Starfleet in general and Picard in particular magically forgot how to respond when a Borg vessel randomly appears in your neighborhood.

    You're supposed to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEjuYAvBeEM

    And then you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Io0OQ2zPS4

    And then hopefully: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaC2nSMH1H4

    "Why wouldn't they sign on? They are actors and they've just been offered a job...I don't know how many of the TNG cast (if at all) cared about real Star Trek 20 years ago, but I guarantee you that none of them care about it today. "

    It's easy to be cynical about how a job's a job and all they care about is money. That may be true for some but I don't think it has to be true for everyone. Surely a few of them must still maintain some shred of integrity about their career and about the legacy of these iconic characters. For instance, maybe this was part of the reason that Brent Spiner insisted that Data needed to be killed off in Nemesis and even had a hand in writing the character out, so as not to do a complete disservice to such a beloved character. So we may have a hundred Soongs but at least we're not getting too far into Geriatric Data territory...

    @Quincy
    The scenes with the Borg queen are a lot dumber when you really think about it. Why did she have to call the police? Agnes during episode 4 was standing close to her several times and was completely alone. She could have just grabbed her at anytime but didn't for no reason.

    @OmicronThetaDeltaPhi
    Re: DS9 Past Tense
    "You get the feeling that this episode *is* dealing with present day reality, even though the details are wrong. It was quite unnerving."

    I had the same basic reaction. "Unnerving" is a good description of the net effect. :)

    "@Nacho Picard
    "The problem is Star Trek already has a history of how we bettered ourselves and it was first contact with Vulcans, not a microbe on Europa or whatever""

    Not to mention ww3 and post atomic horror etc... Also keep in mind that they're not saying this mission to Europa affects our scientific advancement- quite the contrary, the alternate Confederation hell reality is every bit as advanced as the Federation we know. Rather, somehow we are expected to believe that an astronaut finding a microbe on Europa somehow destroys mankind's moral centre and triggers a xenophobic fascist future.

    It is almost impossible to imagine how they are going to square this circle. Which raises the distinct possibility that the astronaut side plot is a total red herring and has nothing to do with the timeline change.

    I seriously wouldn't put it past this show.

    @Quincy

    "That's because it does detract from your point. Once something happens in real life it by definition is plausible in fiction."

    Nearly anything is "plausible", but rampant speculation about what could have happened behind the scenes doesn't really carry much weight compared to the actual text of the episode, so I don't find it to be as useful in discussions about said episode. In it, we see that NASA is indeed concerned with doing psych evaluations, so we would also need to see something of substance behind the mere possibility of what you're suggesting in order to have a point that is supposed to trump mine.

    "Psychotic break doesn't explain it, especially since you have no evidence for it."

    I really don't understand why you keep saying that. It's a matter of public record and it's in the article I linked. It's even in the basic wikipedia page about her. Everywhere I look regarding Lisa Nowak, I see "brief psychotic break" so I don't know if you're engaging in willful obfuscation here or if its just dumb luck that you've only read sources that confirm your story.


    "One thing is clear. NASA dropped the ball."
    "You're claiming that the organization which has screwed up in so many arenas..is magically infallible in this one arena which they've already failed in."

    Oh, that's the jist of your argument? That NASA isn't perfect? OK, and..? Where did I say that NASA is completely infallible in all things? Nowhere am I defending NASA's record in general. I only said that the particulars of the Nowak incident may shed some light on why they didn't catch her sooner, but that Renee's case seems different for reasons that I already covered. And listen, I'd be totally fine with this "NASA screwed up" narrative of yours within ST:Picard if that were actually part of the episode. So I'm not some shill for NASA. I just went into the episode with some real-world conceptions about psychological screening that the show itself seemed to bolster rather than challenge, and you're acting like I'm not supposed to have those conceptions just because you viewed the episode through the real-world conception that NASA occasionally screws up..? I frankly find that attitude baffling.

    @Quincy

    Here is the main difference between Novak and Renee:

    Novak's OCD was only discovered after she "went crazy" and committed her crime. Before that time, nobody - including Novak herself - had known about this diagnosis. Nor did anybody care. And to be blunt: If you have OCD and you manage a TEN YEAR career as an NASA ASTRONAUT without raising any kind of red flag, then you're OCD isn't much of a problem.

    Renee, on the other hand, had a multitude of known life-long issues that she is actively struggling with. If NASA accepted such a person as an astronaut, that's not "slipping through the cracks" but sheer madness.

    What's worse:

    The episode shows us Renee breaking down during a crucial simulation THREE DAYS BEFORE THE ACTUAL MISSION.

    Unless I am mistaken, the simulation in question occurred *before* Q meddled with history. So apparently, in the original timeline, NASA actually greenlighted Renee for this mission immediately after she botched the simulation.

    Does this make any kind of sense to you?

    @Jason
    "Rather, somehow we are expected to believe that an astronaut finding a microbe on Europa somehow destroys mankind's moral centre and triggers a xenophobic fascist future.

    It is almost impossible to imagine how they are going to square this circle. "

    One obvious route:

    The buzz from the discovery of extraterrestrial life effects public opinion on certain issues. Now, you see, there's an Presidential election coming in a few month in 2024, so... ;-)

    Hopefully this won't be it, though.

    I gave up on Discovery after last season, and saw nothing in the reviews that made me really want to watch season 4. I thought the new season of Picard might still draw me into renewing a paramount subscription, but I thought I’d give it a few weeks and read the reviews first.

    Glad I waited. Don’t think I’ll give paramount/cbs any of my money for this stuff. There will always be haters and bad reviews, those don’t dissuade me in general. But the complaints I see are similar to the ones I had about last season, and it doesn’t seem like the ethos of the show has changed any. I love TNG, but I’ll pass on Picard. It’s really disappointing as someone who has been waiting on new trek for years to finally get a bunch of new shows, but then find out it is all just mindless drek. I even liked a lot of Enterprise for what it was. Disco and Picard both rate worse in my book.

    Regarding what's been said about Q, it would be NICE if the showrunners continued to use him merely for comic relief and "Diabolus ex Machina" or whatever, but it feels like they've taken things in a completely different direction, which I think is to their own detriment and that of the audience.

    Normally Q would set the initial continues and then sit back, relax and laugh haughtily as everyone scrambles around like rats in a maze trying to figure out whats going on and try to fix things. But now even Q himself seems to emphasize to Picard that he's not there to teach lessons for shits and giggles but for "penance", whatever that means, striking Picard hard enough to draw blood in order to make this distinction clear.

    Whatever Q's aim is, he's a meddler actively trying to achieve a particular result and the protagonists are trying to achieve the opposite, putting the two in direct conflict. So it's a good thing that Q can't magically force things to go his way this time because he would obviously win and there wouldn't be much of a story to tell. But because John de Lancie is accustomed to playing Q in a particular way, we sometimes see him hamming it up in scenes in which the writers/directors are going for a more sinister tone and two energies clash and cancel each other, which is a real shame to see. The showrunners are really squandering his talent and trying to force him down a path in which he can't shine, doing the things that he does best.

    I just doubt it's entirely correct to say that Q is just holding back purely "for sport" in these episodes just because that's probably what he did in TNG.

    Mental gymnastics will be required to see how her not finding the microbe leads to a global warming polluted and dying planet facist humanity;; but finding it led to WW3 and 600 million dead and that lovely future we know.

    Humanity was supposed to go through all that WW3 and then have this change in view at first contact. Not before!

    I don't see how they are going to work themselves out of this one without angering everyone.

    This series started off looking cool; I thought wow we get this alternate timeline and how they try to get out of it. Sending it back to 2024 to do social commentary on mental health and climate change was a disappointing route to take.

    I keep coming back to the choice of name for our troubled Astronaut, Renee. Is this supposed to link us with JL’s nephew? I understand they are different genders but is there going to be some link, or no link at all and if the later, does this also point to lazy writing having character names too similar? Might just be me.

    Also, would NASA be content to allow their flight personnel to consume alcohol so close to a flight? Would they also expect them to be in some sort of pre-launch quarantine to ensure they remain fit, healthy and focussed? I only briefly researched but noted a 2 week pre-launch quarantine period.

    I had thought about those things but I don't think they really matter all that much compared to the more egregious omissions and trespasses this episode commits.

    I'd be surprised if the connection between Renee and Rene is anything more than pure allusion, meaning that it's meant to evoke the sentiments associated with Rene. It's kind of a shortcut to making us subconsciously care a little more about this brand new character that we've never heard of before, because we know how much Picard cared about Rene. If that's the intent, it's actually kind of clever. It may not be very original, but it isn't necessarily lazy.

    Three days is probably enough time to metabolize alcohol before the mission, but it's not quite enough time to have a truly effective quarantine. I believe the main reason for quarantines before space flights like this is to make sure that the crew doesn't become infected with serious pathogens that could compromise the mission. Since the incubation period for a lot of common microbe-born illnesses is 2 to 5 days, they should really be quarantining for a week at the very least.

    Hey, they are already letting an astronaut who botched a critical simulation to fly the actual mission. I don't see how adding alcohol to the mix could make the situation any worse...

    Well I hope she has 3 more shots of something called… tequila because we don’t have time to talk about time.

    Didn’t the Apollo 13 crew botch a simulation before their mission? They weren’t grounded either.

    "Didn’t the Apollo 13 crew botch a simulation before their mission? They weren’t grounded either."

    Did one of them lose his cool and throw a tantrum in the simulation?

    While the movie Apollo 13 is fairly accurate...

    " the scenes where he gives Jack Swigert a dirty look in the Simulator, blames Swigert for the Accident, and nearly screws up the course correction maneuver are not supported by any historical account available to this contributor."

    "Jack Swigert is depicted as an inexperienced pilot. Several characters express doubts about his ability to dock the command module with the LM. During the docking, the probe contacts the drogue off-center and scrapes along the walls of the drogue. In reality, Swigert flew a perfect docking and hit the drogue on dead center"

    As a committed space exploration enthusiast, I can tell you flat out:

    If an astronaut botched a simulation a few days before launch, they would not go on the mission. Either a backup crewman will fill their place, or the whole mission will be postponed.

    Note that this doesn't necessarily mean the person will be kicked out of the program. If the failure was merely due to being technically ill-prepared, he might get his chance later (after additional training, of-course). But if the cause is a freaking nervous breakdown, then this person's career as an astronaut is over.

    TL;DR
    Neither the Apollo 13 crew nor any other crew botched a critical simulation so close to launch.

    Yeah, what's the point of having a replacement pilot, if that pilot cannot take over at any time.

    Still concerning the whole Renee thing. People, six seasons of NuTrek. They were all really dumb. Shallow Left wing Transformers or woke Marvel if you will and that is it. I'm done pointing out the dumb. I will just enjoy this as the trashfire schlock that it is. Let's all have a nice cocktail and stop hoping that any of this will ever be actually good.

    Booming said: "Let's all have a nice cocktail and stop hoping that any of this will ever be actually good. "

    The impression I get is that most people think this stuff is good. "Picard's" getting good reviews everywhere. Even "Discovery" reviews by major review sites are pretty good. I think this stuff is literal bottom-of-the-barrel garbage, but the impression I get is that most people think it's good. People love this stuff.

    Mal01 said: "People holding up Voyager as good when dumping on new Trek because they can't accept new things is the biggest bad faith criticism there is."

    Off the top of my head, the first 4 seasons of Voyager gave:

    "Eye of the Needle", "Prime Factors", "Projections", "Remember", "Scorpion 1 and 2", "Nemesis", "Year of Hell 1 and 2", "Mortal Coil", "Living Witness", "Counterpoint", "Distant Origin", "Latent Image".

    I would say these range from masterpieces to excellent. We've had 6 seasons of nu-Trek. Has any nu-Trek episode been better than any of these?

    75% of Voyager was crap. But because of its episodic nature you could come back to a handful of great episodes and still enjoy it in retrospect.

    @Booming. I never cared for the way the movie portrayed Swigert. It was very irritating. These astronauts were/are consummate professionals as they know one mistake can kill you. I always felt that as Swigert died fairly young of cancer and never married, the producers could use an editorial licence for drama without worrying about the family suing.

    Good and bad. "Could be better." Basically "Could be better" sums up Star Trek post Enterprise now. These new series just don't feel like the inspirational Star Trek story of a better humanity.

    On a quick side note, I am guessing that Professor Okun managed to secure significant funding for his Research given his contributions decades back as shown in Independence Day.

    Firstly, Brent Spiner was good in this episode and he and Q were stand out. I didn't like that they had Soji as his daughter. Would have been much much much better in my view to use a completely different actress altogether. Maybe Kaley Cuoco, or Chloe Bennet.

    I thought the story with Soong and Q was interesting. Though it seems to have added yet another angle in this enigma of mystery boxes. I feel like they could have introduced this last week to at least link everything together more especially since nothing much happened in the previous episode. You can feel Soong's pain at his daughter's suffering. Though how this ties into the time deviation, who is to say. Is this the deviation with Genetics and the supposed Eugenics Wars/Third World War?

    Or is it the Space flight involving Picard's ancestor?

    Like many comments above, it seems very SILLY to say the least, to suggest there will be a MANNED SPACEFLIGHT to Io by 2024. For goodness sake. At least they could have made it Mars which would fit in better with our current times AND relate to previous cited Earth history in series like TNG, DS9 and Voyager regarding human space exploration of the solar system.

    Worse still is Picard not supposedly remembering he had a famous ancestor of this time period to do something so important. And Worse that this supposedly discovers sentient life which destroys the entire premise of Star Trek: First Contact!

    HOW THE HELL IS 21ST CENTURY EARTH SECURITY BETTER THAN A 25TH CENTURY SHIP? The Borg Queen didn't have to get through Face ID, didn't have to get through having to be one of the installed security profiles, nor had to scan a chip. And despite what... 3 failed attempts to "Log in", the computer didn't request her to confirm it's really her with two factor authentication and a text message. Added to that Jurati not being present (another huge flaw in the entire team's plan to not guard the Borg Queen who they have no reason to suspect can be 100% trusted).

    Then not only that, the "Cloaked ship" is seen by the French police officer who is able to ENTER said ship. So is the door open? How is that even possible? In "The Voyage Home", the ship was invisible and that was a damaged ship with limited power. And even if you might bump into it, you could not enter it without either transporting in, or walking up the ramp when it was open.

    I could "hear" it was Q as the therapist the whole time. But was surprised at Picard and the Watcher taking so long to talk. The Watcher should have been a different actress frankly. Not the same as Laris. Unless you're telling us that Laris in the 24th/25th century is the same watcher. Would have also been better if this Watcher was a Q I reckon. Or predecessor to a Q.

    The entire Rios caught storyline seems so pointless now. Unless they're going to include the Hot Doctor lady. Was his rescue in that manner really necessary off the bus? They could have just tracked him, and when he was free, just made contact and beamed him back to the ship/city with them.

    Now those 3 characters - Rios, Seven, Raffi appear to have achieved nothing and spent 2 whole episodes not helping them solve their initial problem. And at least 1 of them probably should have been on the SHIP to help guard the Borg Queen in the first place. I did find the scene of Picard seeing the others dragging away the Frenchman quite funny though.

    The notion that Picard's ancestor would be depressed seems a little off though. There are usually all sorts of checks before an astronaut would take off. And would they really be drinking and mixing with so many people just before the isolation period? Still think that this entire mission should be to Mars, rather than Io. What exactly is going to happen here? Is Q seeking to have Picard's ancestor killed/compromised by some genetic manipulation/weapon?

    The Heist did seem a bit un Star Trek, or at least not done subtly enough. They could have brought a lot of this episode's plot into the previous one to improve pacing. Frankly though this all doesn't feel very Star Trek like.

    People saying some of these new shows get good reviews doesn't mean much when a lot of "professional critics" in the media don't seem to even grasp what a lot of these show's were about. And pretty sure "critics" lambasted The Sound of Music which turned out to be a box office sensation when viewed by real audiences. Similarly a lot of studio types didn't "get" or back Star Wars in the 1970s yet audiences loved it. And so called critics lambasted the Star Wars prequels for certain "flaws" whilst blindly praising the Disney Sequels without mentioning the same so called "flaws" that were blatantly present in those abominations (and not the original saga author's intent either).

    I would have said personally that "The Voyager Home" is a much nicer, enjoyable, logical and beautiful story set in "our times" with subtle messaging in the context of a STORY unlike this series. Same with First Contact for different reasons (inspiring us of the time when humanity is about to change for the better).

    Voyager had some great moments. And any bad episodes in the various series could be isolated episodes. Here the gist seems to be an entire story arc over a series. So if the arc is extremely poor, or just mystery boxes, or just poorly told, it means the entire series is poor as a result.

    There are ways to cover moral themes within a STORY and whilst telling a STORY. Instead there seem to be certain things these so called writers want to say and they are threading a jumbled mess around it and stamping "Star Trek" (or indeed Star Wars) on it.

    This far into the Season of goodness knows how many episodes (but probably not many episodes in total versus the past Trek series), and it isn't clear at all just what the deviation that leads to that messy future is. Nor why Q grabbed them from the Stargazer in the real future. It feels like it is going to be incredibly anticlimactic though. They also don't appear to really be using new cast at all. Just reusing cast from Season 1 in new character roles which makes no sense.

    I feel like I'd rather have had a series set in the 24th/25th century telling how the Federation is dealing with the aftermath of the Dominion War, show us the Enterprise E and maybe Enterprise F. Show us Admiral Picard and company being told by Q that Data is alive and go and save him. Show us Admiral Janeway, Admiral Sisko, Captain (or Ensign) Kim maybe married to Seven of Nine, Icheb alive, Troi and Riker happy with a happy family without losing anyone etc. And Holo Doctor in a prominent position as well. Have Picard training a competent young crew of the new Enterprise or something. Or a new ship with a new name, but 25th century with nice designs like the TNG era, not the JJ flashy gimmicky nonsense. Maybe a Twilek female First officer, or aliens on the Starfleet vessel. Encounter new civilisations and explore new worlds.

    Picard doesn't quite feel like Monsieur Capitaine. Unless Picard is actually still going through torture in that Cardassian episode from TNG. At any moment, in the next episode, he will suddenly awaken and be asked "How many Lights do you see?"

    @TheRealTrent
    "The impression I get is that most people think this stuff is good."

    Take a look at the audience score for these shows on rotten tomatoes. "Most people" do *not* think these shows are good.

    As for official reviews: they mean absolutely nothing these days. There's enormous pressure on reviewers to positively view any show that panders to the "correct" agenda. Whether it's Star Trek, Dr. Who, Star Wars, or any of a gazillion others shows who fell victim to these recent trends.

    (I'm not doubting that the "Nu" iteration of these shows have genuine fans. I'm just saying that the extremely one-sided picture you get from the official reviews is far from reliable)

    In all of Nu Trek I can name only two episodes that are on the level of the average episode from 90s Trek.

    New Eden
    If Memory Serves

    Both from Discovery's second season. The rest (Disco s1, s3-whatever, Picard s1-2) is either forgettable schlock or abject disasters.

    A lot of you guys remind me of the stories I've heard regarding double blind taste tests - where people who are told ahead of time that wine is cheap (even if it isn't) will say it tastes bad, regardless of the taste. Or that people who are told they are eating veggie sausage will say it tastes bad, even if it's actually real sausage.

    If you're primed to think something is shit - if you already believe it's crap - all you will see is the worst elements of it. And that's not even to say that those elements don't exist in something like this episode of Picard. But great Trek has these kinds of plot holes and logical oversights as well. TWOK made in 1983, when it was pretty clear that the Eugenics Wars couldn't happen by 1994...and Chekov explicitly calls him a "product of 20th century genetic engineering." Khan acts like an idiot as well considering he's supposed to be a superior intellect - his plan is never clear to the viewer at all. But so much else is done right, like the use of themes (around aging, friendship, death, and sacrifice) and allusions to Moby Dick, that we tend to let the flaws slide.

    "If you're primed to think something is shit - if you already believe it's crap - all you will see is the worst elements of it."

    Let me respond to this by quoting my initial comment on the "Remembrance" thread from season 1:

    "But seeing the Enterprise D and Captain Picard Day drawing pretty much sealed the deal. And yeah, it's Picard.... I feel like I've come home and found my long lost friend. They've got my money for as long as they want to put Patrick Stewart in front of the camera."

    The trouble was it didn't take long to discover that it was not Picard I was watching. I can watch any shitty 1 star episode of TNG from Qpid to Matter of Time and it is still Picard. This washed up bland old codger played by Patrick Stewart isn't Jean Luc Picard. Even the alien doppelganger from Allegiance was more Picard.

    That is pretty much the show's chief sin, setting aside everything else that is wrong here. To quote JLP:

    "Except for his features, there is nothing about him that I find familiar!"

    This show's chief sin is that it's called Picard and yet there is no Picard.

    Looks like now we'll see the wreckage of what nuTrek's writers do to the entire TNG cast...

    @Karl
    "If you're primed to think something is shit - if you already believe it's crap - all you will see is the worst elements of it."

    Primed by what, exactly?

    Many of us have been fans of Star Trek for decades, and had no problem keeping up with all the changes from TOS to ENT.

    So why would we be "primed" to think that the newer series are crap? If anything, we would be primed to think the opposite. NuTrek managed to alienate us *despite* our decades-long loyalty to the brand. It's the exact opposite of priming.

    @Karl Zimmerman
    I would like to see the study you are referencing. I wrote my thesis about framing and priming. If people here think the show is bad and you speculate that this makes them perceive everything afterwards equally bad then that is not Priming. That could be a bias but it could also be true that this show is just not very good. One could even make the argument that having low expectations would lead to a more favorable opinion.

    Yeah, having low expectations means as that as much as we condemn them for the Big Things, we can also praise them for the Little Things, like enjoying the staging and lighting around the Borg Queen, or being impressed that the writers might be using Rene/Renee like a literary allusion when we would ordinarily overlook these small details in favor of praising the Big Things like Character, Plot, and Story if they actually were actually good such as in TNG or DS9.

    One of the most spectacularly stupid things about nuTrek is its penchant for planet destroying.

    The Kelvin universe arbitrarily destroyed Vulcan, and then, not to be outdone, the Discovery universe destroys Romulus. I have little to no interest in such bonkers timelines.

    Whatever...it's all stupid.

    Main sequence K and G type stars don't die in supernovae...certainly not suddenly.

    @Jaxon: I know we have to be ready for that letdown lol, though I was excited to see all the TNG cast names in the S3 announcement.

    I'm in total alignment with Jammer's review for last week's episode, and this episode was just as bad for me:

    - Picard talking about how good his crew was before they dragged the cop into frame was so clunky it hurt. I was like "Here's the set-up.... and.... the payoff..." *ennui*
    - not-Data and not-Soji's not-story, though I agree with comments that this may develop into the more important part of the timeline blip, as opposed to Wrennay Picarrrrrr....d.
    - The Secret Service security for the world's glitziest astronaut gala.
    - The Keystone Kops location of Agnes' holding room.
    - Agnes' transformation into a (now-malevolent) Cathy cartoon.
    - Raffi, who really needs a session with Sybok.

    The Voyage Home continues to be one of the most bonkers high-concept movie ideas ever - not just in Star Trek, EVER - and yet the pure joy of its execution is light years beyond what we're seeing almost 40 years later. I'm hoping S3: The Search for Tasha will recapture that warmth, or at least give us a serviceable holodeck malfunction lol.

    ***

    Finding Jammer only recently has been refreshing and frustrating. I usually stay away from comments because they can be so toxic; maybe I've been poisoned myself, but I feel the commenters spend way more time thinking through these shows and their potential than the actual writers do. I get more out of what I read here than when I'm watching the shows themselves, though I'm still not sure that's healthy lol.

    I recognize that there are people who have positive reactions to these shows, including this episode, but has anyone come across a strong overall case or casemaker for NuTrek (not the pandering "reviews"), even if you don't agree with them? Thank you!

    @Species Ten Forward - The NASA gala had better security than the 25th century ship! (Both for access to the computer and entering the ship itself)

    I too agree with above that we've yet to see Jean Luc Picard in this Picard show.

    The writers are asking us how many lights do we see when there are no lights.

    @Booming
    Tue, Apr 5, 2022, 4:34pm (UTC -5)
    "The scenes with the Borg queen are a lot dumber when you really think about it. Why did she have to call the police? Agnes during episode 4 was standing close to her several times and was completely alone. She could have just grabbed her at anytime but didn't for no reason."


    You ain't never lied. I was flinching at my computer screen every time she got too close. That's when I started thinking, well, maybe I missed something and her nanoprobes have been deactivated. Nope. Both the ship and everyone on it should've been assimilated. At that point, you either assimilate earth or contact the Borg. Game over either way. Ridiculous.

    @Quincy

    Exactly. There is no logic in keeping the Birh Queen around after you're back. Phaser her.

    Frankly it is a threat to history and the survival of Earth (and thus no Federation) as to allow a Borg to exist in this time frame as clearly demonstrated by First Contact.

    She's literally going to try and do what the Borg tried to do before. Prevent First Contact and assimilate Earth in the past to prevent the future.

    There is zero reason to let her live, let alone the totally abysmal security regarding her on the 25th century spaceship.

    @Jaxon
    "One of the most spectacularly stupid things about nuTrek is its penchant for planet destroying."

    Wanton destruction of planets was seized upon by nuTrek creators to make things seem meaningful and momentous....but no matter what gets destroyed none of it comes cross as very important.

    Hypothesis: there has just been too much use of alternate timelines... leaving one feeling a bit like TOS characters in "Day of the Dove."

    KIRK: ".... In the heart. In the head. I won't stay dead. Next time I'll do the same to you. I'll kill you. And it goes on, the good old game of war, pawn against pawn! Stopping the bad guys. While somewhere, something sits back and laughs and starts it all over again."

    The showrunners of nuTrek are essentially the entity 'starting it all over again' using simple inversions of established characters and offering wanton regurgitation of older elements --e.g. Nero was basically the Kelvin timeline equivalent of Khan- another sad soul bent on revenge against someone...using slugs to extract information- doing unfair stuff all over the place.

    When Vulcan's core is drilled into for destructive purposes in nuTrek it's just a thinly veiled inversion of the Genesis planet being drilled into for generative purposes in TWOK.

    Some of it is said to be done as an homage, like the slugs, or the punk dude on the bus still smarting from a StarTrek IV neck pinch, as if it's offered to the viewers for some holy reason. However,
    an argument can be made that we're all being slowly homaged to death!

    @Jammer
    "Hopefully this heist will prove more entertaining than the one in "Stardust City Rag.""
    How could anything be more entertaining than eye-patch Picard. I start giggling uncontrollably every time I think of that scene. I'm giggling right now!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4towujqjBQ

    A couple of things come to my mind overall with this series…

    First I can’t imagine in a million years that the man who “broke his little ships” in First Contact would be so lax about the borg now especially the Queen that he wouldn’t have killed this alternate version on sight or allowed that execution to go forward.

    Secondly our legacy characters seem so… well… out of character. Picard isn’t behaving like Picard at all. He’s some sort of feeble old man that makes mistakes left and right and Patrick Stewart is all in on playing him that way so it seems deliberate on the part of the writers.

    Lastly can we just not deal with the Borg after this season? I’m kind of Borged out at this point. Last season we had the artifact we spent much time on and now we have Agnes probably attempting to hijack the entire fleet or something. It’s kind of boring to be honest. I’m up for some sort of other imminent threat or political intrigue or something meaty and substantive. But please no more Borg.

    Love the Lucsly and Dulmur mention in the review. Maybe this is a predestination paradox.

    @NS8401 I'll make a wager with you right now that Season 3 is all about the borg.

    I truly, deeply despise this series. It is so cynical, stupid, manipulative and devoid of any originality. Every time I watch it it makes me appreciate Discovery.

    Briones has the most performances in PIC alone, at least, with four (so far!)

    @NS4801

    Exactly. There is no way the Picard (or even Federation citizens/Starfleet) seen in First Contact would be so LAX regarding the Borg. And for good reason. She/the Borg are literally hell bent on preventing Humanity from ever becoming the Federation.

    "Don't hesitate to fire." - Captain Jean Luc Picard.

    Seven would also be hell bent on phasering the Borg Queen or at the very least having the Queen held captive behind a maze of intricate security.

    HOW THE HELL IS 21ST CENTURY EARTH SECURITY AT THE NASA GALA BETTER THAN A 25TH CENTURY SHIP? The Borg Queen wasn't asked by the Computer to go through Facial recognition, didn't have to get through having to be one of the installed security profiles, nor had to scan a chip. Just mimicked a voice. And despite what... 3 failed attempts to "Log in", the computer didn't block additional attempts?

    The cloaked ship also was ludicrously easy for a 21st century human to just walk into.

    @KDalton_69

    Exactly. It is beyond silly having the same actors/actresses from Season 1 playing Different characters.

    Soong's daughter should have been someone else. Same goes for the Watcher. Cast someone else for the role.

    If the whole Rios communicator at the Hospital thing was seemingly an irrelevant filler, then why not have cast the Doctor Lady as Soong's daughter instead! Why not have cast Whoopi Goldberg as herself as Guinan?

    @Bryan

    Some of the articles mention brief psychotic disorder, some don't. The ones I read didn't mention it. My point still stands. The same doctors that said she had a a brief psychotic disorder say she had chronic OCD. NASA didn't discover her OCD. NASA dropped the ball.



    @OmicronThetaDeltaPhi

    So now you're talking to me again? According to you, I distort your arguments even when I give exact quotes of them in the exact same post, as if people couldn't look at what you said and what I say you said and decide for themselves what you said. When did you decide that wasn't a problem? I assumed you were serious after your refusal to answer my post that time. I've said hardly anything to you since. I dislike wishy washy people. If you want to have a discussion lets have a discussion. If you don't, don't do drive by's on discussions I'm having with other people, while refusing to answer posts directed at you.

    I have a relative with OCD. Nobody who knew him for YEARS knew he had OCD. We knew only that his house smelled like strong disinfectant and his hands were raw. When asked why his hands were raw, he always replied that they just needed some lotion. He went through 4 years of college and 2 of grad school just fine, until we got a call at 3 in the morning one night and he's throwing everything out of the house because a mouse got inside and now everything that might have been touched by the mouse is magically automatically contaminated. We're talking sofas chairs TVs being literally thrown out of the front door at 3 in the morning. Police were there when we got there.

    If someone has OCD, depending on what the subject of it is, they can be an extreme danger to those around them if some type of trigger occurs. There is no such thing as oh, if he went 10 years and nobody knew it's a-okay. That's bull$# and you don't know what you're talking about.

    And you're exaggerating that she had a nervous breakdown. She crashed the simulator an expressed frustration. If you really think that was a nervous breakdown you haven't seen a nervous breakdown. In any case, there are a lot of stupid things to complain about this season. (There was in fact a whole host of stupid $#!% on the very first episode that left me in disbelief while everyone else was cheering.) This is the least of them.

    Also, are you even watching the show? If not, why the hell are you here? Go somewhere and wait till the Orville comes out, since that's your comfort carcass now.

    Don't worry. I'll be over there too, pointing out all the dumb crap that we already know is going to be on there that we also already know you're going to ignore, excuse, and pretend is so wonderful.

    @Quincy

    Yeah, I'm not saying that it's an EITHER/OR between psychotic break and OCD, though it doesn't surprise me that we're seeing a wide assortment of mental disorders ascribed to her since her lawyers would have tried to throw all that they conceivably could at the judge in hopes of a lighter sentence. No one is arguing that an insanity defense isn't appropriate to what she did, though.

    OCD can be as severe and debilitating as you describe but for most people it can be fairly mild, unproblematic and easily fly under the radar especially if they're trying to hide it. Also, it's not like it's somehow predestined to get out of control later if it's always been mild. My dad said he had a touch of OCD. As a kid, I thought he was goofing around when he would occasionally straighten and align random things, but no, he said he just couldn't help it. From what I could tell, it never caused any real problems for him so if he had been an astronaut, it could have gone undetected without anyone necessarily dropping the ball.

    Interestingly, the more I read about OCD, the more I'm convinced that I probably have it myself. I've been through various psychological testing but it never came up as far as I can tell, and unlike with astronauts, there was never any incentive for me to try to conceal my symptoms. I don't know whether just the diagnosis of OCD itself without severe symptoms would be enough for NASA to weed out potential candidates, but I don't think it should.

    So did NASA drop the ball regarding Lisa Nowak? There is evidence to say that they did and evidence to say that they didn't, so take your pick, I guess.

    WOAH JAMMER MAJOR SPOILER I DO NOT think it's obvious that Agnes is the abrogated Queen from the opener. Does anyone else think so..I don't see as obvious at all and you havee spoiled it

    >He's got to hold the record for the most (sorta different) characters played by one actor on Trek, right?

    Jeffrey Combs? He played eight characters

    I believe Vaughn Armstrong has played even more Trek roles than Jeffrey Combs did...

    hmmm let's see Brent Spiner played
    - Data
    - Lore
    - B4
    - and Arik, Noonien, Altan and Adam Soong

    BUT he also played the two unnamed prototype androids! 9!

    Vaughn Armstrong has played 12 characters. Combs has played 8, unless you kind of cheat by including the multiple Weyouns and/or Mirror Universe Brunt.

    Can we at least have Jessica Alba play the various characters:
    Soong's daughter
    Raffi
    Watcher
    Borg Queen
    LAPD officer
    Starfleet Admiral
    Confederation Security
    La Sirena Hologram Assistant

    “Retrofitting Agnes' character as a lonely wallflower who uses awkwardness and humor as a defense mechanism — and who is bizarrely and codependently drawn toward the Borg Queen until the moment she is joined with her — is one of the more promising things happening on this show right now.”
    I disagree. I find the whole thing clichéd and boring. Agnes is a far more interesting character when she fully embraces her nerdiness. Also, the Borg were way scarier when they just came at you with brute force rather than trying to manipulate your feelings like almost all other villains do. Yawn.
    Watching this episode, I was reminded of a portion of your review of VOY’s “Repression”: “the only possible reason for us to care about this story is if the motivation of the character pulling the strings from afar has any sort of impact.”
    That’s really the only thing that’s keeping me watching at this point: curiosity about Q’s motivations. Why is he doing this? Why has he (partially) lost his powers? I’m not expecting a great reveal on this front (I’ve been burned before), but I am at least mildly curious.

    2 stars.

    1.5 stars from me… this season becomes more and more of a chore as it wears on. I honestly do not know how you can take such a promising concept and completely crap the bed. Everything so far has been done vastly better in “The Voyage Home” and “Best of Both Worlds.”

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