‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 1, Episode 2
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Join the full complement of the Shuttle Pod crew as they discuss the second episode of Star Trek: Picard, titled “Maps and Legends.” The episode definitely felt like the “middle child” of the first third, setting up more plot threads and introducing new villains, who seemed a bit over the top. But it was still a generally satisfying episode overall. Also, the podcasters give special kudos to Orla Brady as Laris, who was “fecking” great this week!
Wow. Y’all tore into that s**t.
They always do.
And practically no one else can (will) speak honestly about these franchises anymore thanks to Youtube.
For transparency sake I haven’t listened to the podcast but I’m a little confused when you say no one speaks honestly about these shows or movies? PLENTY of people (me included) have criticized Discovery and part of the reasons that show is making so many changes now. Picard is only in episode 2 and even then people who had problems with the second episode had no problem saying so. And besides a few trolls the debates have been very civil as well. Now I will admit Picard will probably get more of a pass with some because its Picard. Many are just happy to have him back at all. But if the season is deemed bad like others deemed Discovery first two seasons then you’re going to hear about it…a lot lol.
I’m speaking very specifically of those who claim to review these programs professionally. There aren’t a lot of Trek (or other mainstream genre-related) podcast/commentary shows that aren’t just completely polarized.
OK I see. But I thought a lot of the professional reviewers were pretty critical of Discovery as well, but I admit I never read a lot of them, just a few here and there. I just stick to message boards mostly.
Podcasters, commentators, fan-oriented bodies. Mostly Youtubers. Not people who “actually” do it professionally.
Well OK, but I guess I’m confused again lol. A lot of those people had a lot of issues with Discovery, did they not? I guess I don’t really understand what you’re suggesting? DIS seemed very mixed out of the gate with that crowd. Yes some really liking it, but many still loathed it at the same time.
Picard so far certainly has more really liking it, but its only been 2 episodes. And frankly because it at least managed to avoid the bigger mistakes Discovery had at the very beginning and that was just having the show look and feel like the universe it took place in. But it still doesn’t mean everyone will like the show as a whole. We’ll see where everyone is at by episode 5 though lol. Maybe a lot of people will have second thoughts. So far I can say I’m really enjoying it but it is early.
There’s not more than a small handful of channels/streams willing to discuss these current franchises reliably.
It’s almost next episode and this is probably the first ep2 podcast to speak honestly about some of the problems with Kurtzman Trek without being “meh, Alex Kurtzman, talentless hack, 25 percent difference, guilty until proven innocent, mary sue mary sue mary sue mary sue mary sue.” (Oh hey, Picard himself is a mary sue now. At least the term is becoming more gender neutral).
Feminist Frequency and Red Letter Media are out there, but they’re not going to weigh in every week (we’ll hear from Mike and Rich after the season wraps assuming they’re still watching). Rob Burnett doesn’t like modern Trek, but I’ve decided he’s at least fair.
And “frankly” the “bigger mistakes” of STD didn’t start to really become apparent until about 3/4 through S1 when the captain’s motives no longer made any sense. In just the last quarter of S1 episodes the show lost its theme, its premise, and any semblance of resolving its story arc in any believable fashion without violating some of its characters.
I’m not really talking about the story itself, I mean just the look and feel of the show in the beginning, coughKlingonscough and all the things people like me moaned about lol. Now it doesn’t mean everyone felt that way but since so many are still taking about it and to their credit they did change a lot in second season, they knew it was an issue.
But as for me, I was enjoying the story through the MU episodes if I’m being honest. But then looking back at most of the early episodes, they frankly just felt like a waste for me and it was too many twists. It’s basically my worst first season out of all the shows, yes even when compared to TNG fist season. Its why I have not rewatched season 1 outside of a few episodes.
But oddly enough its second season is one of my favorite out of all the shows (but yes still lots of problems), beating all the others for me except VOY and TOS. I guess maybe its a tie with DS9 second season.
And unfortunately, I think that’s where a lot of people lose me the most.
Like I find the narrative crucifixion of Bryan Fuller particularly frustrating. We never even got to see his ST. The staff were already picking up the pieces from his absence with the 1st episode.
So here comes this guy, I dismissed him more than I should have because I’d never been very fond of VOY, but he puts all this work into pre-production -and of course a lot of the fans hate it- but at least conceptually and visually he’s got the most expressive vision for ST since Nick Meyer came in and militarized/nauticalized the ST world with both his movies. And they spent all this money on it and we never got to see it. I’m all about handing the keys to the independent-minded writer/director. Whereas fans just seem to reflexively fear and dread [him]. So as I see it this was extremely tragic.
And S2… I know we said it would be the “real” test for STD, and then we said that about S3 because 2 was already known to have more production issues. But STD’s production problems just stopped being an acceptable explanation in the last third of episodes (as well as a few in the middle third). Did these people even outline their story -at all- before apparently deciding to get themselves fired? And how did they really “fix” S1 except in ways that were excessively fan-servicy, while handwaving those “fixes” within the story in ways that further undermined narrative credibility much more than helped it? Their priorities were back@$$wards; they had time to apply these realignments and they still couldn’t even step back and examine whether they really had a story. And I’ll hear fans insist this is somehow an improvement, but it’s like their voices are echoing because the rational side of my head may be having a stroke.
And I still don’t see how they’re really supposed to start over with S3. Not when a serialized format demands that these characters have backgrounds which inform WHO they are. There’s not going to be a clean entry point where you can say “You know what, just ignore everything before this.”
It’s a mess, and I’ve had to just let go. Right now they (Kurtzman Trek) just need one solid season. Not three shows, not five, just show us you can bring us a single good season.
And if this one (STP) can’t be it, Kurtzman Trek will continue to get a lot more complicated.
I hear you but I think for most people who hated DIS out of the gate (and as I said I didn’t hate it but had a lot of issues with it) the changes were just too vast and not very good. And they fixed some of it in season 2 by just feeling a bit more consistent. Sure plenty of fan service lol, that’s obvious but it just felt closer to Trek canon.
Perfect example was the Enterprise. It didn’t look 100% like the original ship but it actually felt like an updated version of it which is what I think people felt Discovery as a show was going to do but didn’t. But if you take what they did with the Enterprise on the show versus what they did with it in the Kelvin Timeline movies, which ship do you think is going to win out for fans, especially hardcore TOS fans? It’s not even a question. Is it ‘fan service’ because one just look like the actual ship? I think that’s just universe consistency. And again Kurtzman learned his lesson on that and went a different way than Abrams did and got a better reception for it.
But ironically this article says exactly what I was thinking with my OP and why Picard is at least a success for fans who wants to be back in the 24th century that they know and what many fans felt they DIDN’T get with Discovery in it’s first season:
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-picard-discovery-mistakes-correct/
But I don’t disagree with you second season of the show ended up being a convoluted mess lol. And yes the same thing could happen to Picard too. But I just enjoyed the episodes overall much more. The stories were a LOT lighter for one, they did ACTUAL exploring (they did literally zip in season one), and a few crazy anomaly stories (some of my favorite stuff in Star Trek) and had better characters. But yes it had many problems too but for me the positives outweighed the negatives unlike season one did. It just felt more like…Star Trek.
And it got us into an advanced future which I’m most excited about! And it won’t erase anything they did in the first two seasons (ALTHOUGH it sounds like from Starfleets POV in the 23rd season they are erasing Discovery in a way), but they can just tell any story they want now without having to deal with so many issues as before and why it was a mistake to have a prequel so close to TOS timeline. But we still may get one with Pike anyway and hopefully done better out the gate.
Season 1 of Discovery wasn’t going along swimmingly but while there were some characters that were pretty weak I was still kind of OK with where they were going and Lorca kept me fascinated. Once they went tot he MU was where the show went off the rails. But that doesn’t let the first part of the season off the hook. Afterall, the show is a season long arc. That path was leading to the MU the entire time. Which causes me to look back on those episodes VERY differently than when I did not know they were ultimately headed over the cliff. Which is the risk you take with season long arcs. If where your shows are going is lame, or silly or just plain bad, it will ruin everything that game before it in that story arc.
Oddly enough, season 2 started heading off the rails earlier than season 1 did even though season two got off to a better start.
These guys are excellent I agree, please keep up the good work Trekmovie!
If I may… I believe what @Sam is alluding to, and which is confusing @Tiger2, is that many SF-media “reviews” have migrated to YouTube (or been *invented* for YouTube), where there is a monetary incentive to take an extremist position, i.e., clickbait, i.e., angry viewers are engaged viewers — the same dynamic as AM talk radio in the U.S. Conversely, privately-hosted podcasts don’t have that incentive, so they can take an even-handed stance.
That’s probably what it is, now that you mention it. Youtube is just the wrong place for a lot of this stuff.
I could have sworn the Roddenberry podcasters had reviews up on all the Kurtzman Treks (on the side of still working their way through the classic shows, which of course is their main feature), but last I checked all I could find were the classics.
The two styles of reviews (and ecosystems that *encourage* the styles) are the difference between “Violating visual canon is the worst heresy EVER! Join us in our smug self-congratulatory vitriol and ‘true-fan’ gate-keeping, because dog-piling is addictive!” and “The show has its own visual style, which works adequately in isolation, but it’s inarguably a departure from precedent and that will bother some returning fans; it’s happened before”.
Anybody who’s a *fan* first and a *reviewer* second might lack practice in maintaining dispassion; anybody who’s trying to earn a slice of YouTube advertising revenue will be *tempted* to abandon dispassion altogether. (And now I’m pondering the absurdity of Vulcans who are “social media influencers”.)
Well, it would help if Scott actually paid attention when watching the episode sometimes ;)
I wouldn’t really expect the Klingons to help rescue the Romulans. They might have arranged a party to celebrate the supernova that killed their blood enemies though.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a story about a Starfleet captain delivering a great speech convincing the Klingons to help their old enemy. Sounds like Star Trek to me.
Except that Picard already had that talk with Worf -one of very few Klingons who even knows how to listen- in 3rd season TNG and Worf remained unmovable.
I think you’re forgetting all the other times Picard and other captains debated the Klingons. Just because you fail once with one person doesn’t mean you give up on an entire race.
If the Klingons weren’t capable of listening then they would’ve never become allies with the Federation.
They’re capable of listening and compromising on some issues, but they remain intractable on other issues. Unless the Romulans made some kind of grand gesture proving their honor, like the Federation did at Narendra III, I don’t think that the Klingons would be willing to help them.
Didn’t Martok become Chancellor at the end of DS9? Doubtful he would easily forget Romulans dying alongside Klingons in the Dominion War.
So obviously they are capable of seeing eye-to-eye on some things, though I wouldn’t use that phrase around Martok. ;-)
Hmm! I hadn’t thought about him.
He could be pretty intractable too though. But one could certainly hope he wouldn’t forget their help.
I can only remember Martok being intractable about Kor, but even he came to respect him in the end. Worf was a big help.
I would recommend you to watch the 1931 G.W. Pabst film “Kameradschaft” to get an other perspective on how archenemies think about each other.
I’ve not forgotten anything. Klingon flexibility ends where any discussion of Romulans begins. Worf’s comment that they behaved “honorably” in NEM being so far the only exception.
Plus Federation would be in the weakened position of having already decided they themselves have a good enough excuse not to send help. They’ll never convince the Klingons that way. Anyone who’s ever had to manage people will know how that works.
It’s good to finally hear someone acknowledge the molecular/holographic forensics tech in this episode was just complete BS. As I’ve suspected since the fractal neuronic cloning in the first ep, they really are just using STD-style magic on this show.
Though I’d hate to go back to hearing VOY levels of meaningless technobabble in almost every episode, Kurtzman Trek really does need that science consultant.
It worked in the Batman Arkham games. >;>} They did throw in how dubious it was. It sounds like submolecular ray tracing on steroids. The flooding with antileptons almost sounded like it made sense.
And it made more sense than Data’s essence being in a single positronic neuron.
What would make sense is if they are gathering data from all the devices that are probably scanning every inch of the planet. We have CCTV now and all our devices are being logged, imagine 24th century scanning technology.
If they have Romulans at the highest levels of Starfleet, why wouldn’t the Romulans have a backdoor into all the sensors on Earth?
The hard scientists in our household aren’t really put out by this.
It’s tricky to balance ‘future science’ and realism. Late 24th century cutting-edge tech or science ought to look magical to us to some extent.
A good deal of what we do now, especially in the biosciences, would have violated the established consensus of ‘science facts’ of the early 19th century let alone the 17th. Science is all about running a theory to its limits and then coming up with new and better theories as experimental and empirical evidence demonstrates that the current understanding is untenable.
So, as long as ‘out there’ magical science is not overused, we can deal with it.
What’s more important to us is that the scientific and engineering process feels authentic. This has definitely been a problem in Discovery. We’ll take technobabble over cringy ‘I like science’ outbursts any day.
I agree and disagree. Yes, the science needs to FEEL authentic. Technobabble, for all its faults, does lead a bit of authenticity to the science. Especially if they use words that feel appropriate for what is happening. But that did not happen in the CSI scene. It felt more like magic than science to this viewer.
Next, I get that science advances to the point where today’s tech is yesterday’s magic. But using that argument means you could literally get away with ANYTHING. Therefore it needs to be more grounded for audiences to buy it. And I did not buy that they could recreate a scene as if there was a security camera in the room. Also it seems to me that their mere presence would potentially ruin anything they might get. One would think that tremendous precautions would be taking when dealing with getting accurate forensics in a crime scene.
Especially if the Romulans “scrubbed” the room from something like 22:47:31:54 onward (right? We’ll assume Dahj and her boyfriend were up late), they shouldn’t have been able to recover what happened *before* that time only to catch up and lose it again as if one were shuttling back and forth through an analogue videotape. There would just be nothing. The room itself is what got degaussed. And that’s if one even buys the premise of going backward in time to construct an image (let alone a moving one, let alone one with sound) from just the current movement of gas particles in the first place.
That kind of nonsense belongs on Farscape (which I love more than a lot of Trek). My favorite version of Trek has whole planets being composed instantly and subatomically from who-knows-what, as well as whale songs traveling thousands of light years across space. So I can buy suspension of disbelief. But you can’t ask people to ignore things that are just demonstrably untrue about the more immediate world around them according to “fairly common” sense.
That’s how I felt. Complete magic. She could have waved around a Harry Potter magic wand while saying “Ridicularous!” and it would have had the same impact as the magical molecular DVR she was using.
They need to cool it with the fantasy stuff and remember that Star Trek is supposed to be sci-fi and not pure fantasy like Star Wars.
Yeah, that bugged me.
I’m almost happy for the forensics stuff to be a plot device, in practical terms we don’t know what forensics will look like in 350 years, and the audiences won’t understand it, so yeah, give them license on that, but it’s a warning sign,
The cloning stuff was a a huge McGuffin. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they’re not talking about Lore. Lore was captured, dismantled, and presumably sent to Maddox years ago, yet so far the only two soong type androids anyone will talk about are B4 and Data, they won’t even mention Lal.
The series will find its feet, I only hope that when it does, it runs in the opposite direction to DIS.
(Man, I miss having these discussions on usenet!)
If you miss Usenet, there’s TrekBBS.com, which is organized into subforums for each series, lit, games, etc. I.e., you needn’t wait for a newsworthy blog post to initiate discussion.
I consider the concept of cloning an entire android from one positronic node or whatever it was to be complete hogwash. I know, I know. It’s science FICTION. But it still strains suspension of disbelief for a number of reasons.
Great commentary about disposable people being used as slaves. Whether it is from a Measure of a Man with Guinan, Voyager with the EMH Mk1s being used as miners or the synths being used as laborers on Mars. That was my take exactly when I watched last week’s episode 2. The disrespect Picard receives at Starfleet IMO continues the theme of highlighting “disposable” people. In this case, it’s not EMHs or Synths but people of advanced age. Just some food for thought.
Except the concept of “disposable people” is misplaced when it comes to automatons like tools used on Mars. They were obviously not designed to evolve or grow. They were exactly what they were created to be. On top of that, someone else decided they were amazingly disposable when they were programed to kill and self destruct when the special order came through. So that commentary I felt to be WILDLY inappropriate.
Orla Brady is hot
Very much so.
Never really thought about it but all those Starfleet crews including Picard and Crusher on the Enterprise-E in keeping their EMH hologram lifeforms turned off were engaged in slavery and forcing captivity according to ST: Picard. Just think the whole TNG starfleet is engaged in keeping lifeforms in captivity!!!! That’s almost as sadistic as Picard and the TNG Starfleet purposely programming synths to be life only to force them to work on his rescue fleet.
Well except the EMHs get more frustrated when you leave them on. Their programming won’t instruct them what to do in those circumstances.
What programming? These are fully evolved life forms like Data according to ST: Picard that deserve the right not to be held in captivity. Hopefully they get justice for the criminal acts against them.
That’s like asking about all the Holodeck characters that haven’t been run in a while, in particular Moriarty.
In universe, the EMH is just a holo-character front end to a collection of medical databases. (In some beta canon, it’s implied that the acerbity is because the doctors interviewed for the personality model didn’t have much patience for the project.)
The doctor’s development beyond that basic programming was a recurring theme in Voyager, including discussion said of whether he wasn’t crew or equipment,
That went to hell in a later episode of voyager when for some reason they were used corn dilithium mining,
Star Trek Picard takes the position that he is crew and that to have any concerns on that equals discrimination, no? (The irony of course being that Picard had no qualms on creating the EHM to be a slave in captivity).
Then how sentient can they be? They don’t know what to do when there is no medical emergency.
Sentient enough to express comical impatience and frustration, fortunately.
And you know that is because these automatons developed such feelings on their own (which does not seem to be what they were designed for to begin with, unlike Data who absolutely was designed to be a learning computer) and NOT because said expressions weren’t programmed into them, right?
I didn’t see Zimmerman “develop” anything on VOY. He came with his sentience and personality right out of the box, and then better applied himself over time because he decided his original programming was no longer sufficient.
Here is the thing… He couldn’t decide his programming wasn’t enough unless he was programmed to do so. Such things do not spontaneously happen. Siri does not suddenly decide she wants to be more than a disembodied voice.
According to ST: Picard it is only because they are trapped by their captives (i.e. Captain Picard and Beverly Crusher on the ENT-E) now that you can electronically engineer fully sentient life. Anyone seeing ethical issues with this electronically engineered life – if so you are with the evil Starfleet where according to Picard having ethical concerns equals discrimination though ironically at the same time he was a-ok with having an EMH and synthetics with feelings work on his rescue armada fleet!!!!!
I don’t think anybody really understood that the EMHs were life forms until the Doctor developed his own individuality. After Photons Be Free was released, I would hope that Starfleet would reexamine how they used holograms.
Next Drinking game – Take a shot when he says ‘fa sure’ :)
I have a bad feeling that they will have the Romulans create the Borg. Perhaps that’s the reason the Zhat Vash (sp?) loathe AIs, since they accidentally created the Borg 1000 years ago, perhaps similar to Skynet from Terminator.
And that would be the worse sci-fi retcon of all time.
But I agree with podcasters about Laris. She’s the MVP of this episode!
I’ve listened to the “spoilers” for the season (relayed by Youtubers who want STP to fail) and that one’s not among them. It’s a favorite speculation of theirs though.
(And hey, at least it would discourage any future ST from wanting to resurrect the bloody Borg)
“And that would be the worse sci-fi retcon of all time.”
Yeah! Besides, everybody knows Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler created the Borg.
Well, the Cybermen did cyber-convert the Borg in that one comic.
It’s 2019 all over again:
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-discovery-control-borg-origin-theory/
I’m old enough to remember when so many had a bad feeling CONTROL created the Borg lol. Look, I understand not everyone trusts the people in charge of Star Trek now and that they can go too far at times. But I think they know how ridiculous these ideas are.
And as I always bring up (and oddly gets ignored) is that the history of the Borg would make no sense because it took hundred thousand years for them to even revolve into the Borg. And how did the Romulans manage to create them but yet there is no Borg influence in the alpha quadrant??? Why do they all exist in the delta quadrant, literally on the other side of the universe? So I wouldn’t worry about that, you can’t square it away I don’t care how much retconning they do.
I know that it is not canon, but isn’t there a series of Trek novels that shows the origin of the Borg and it has something to do with time-traveling humans from the Enterprise era?
That would be the “Destiny Trilogy” by David Mack. It involves humans (the crew of the NX-02 Columbia, during the Romulan War), and aliens (an isolationist super-tech race called the Caeliar), and a third planet of humanoids on the far side of the galaxy. The time travel is accidental (when the humans try to sabotage their way out of Caeliar bondage), as is the fusion of tech and organic (when energy-starved and not-thinking-straight Caeliar nanotech bonds with a humanoid substrate).
Thanks for the information, Phillip.
There could be Borg connections that wouldn’t be quite so contrived. Perhaps the Zhat Vash were not Romulan to begin with. Perhaps they were a faction of the species that first gave rise to the Borg, and they founded chapters embedded in the subversive elements of other species before they became extinct. The Tal Shiar version of the Zhat Vash might be a third or fourth generation copy of the originals.
I would rather they didn’t drag Section 31 into the story yet again, but I have to admit, they’d certainly have every reason to be sympathetic toward an anti-AI sect.
Unless I badly misremember the movie, Whoopi Goldberg did not play a slave in “The Color Purple.”
Yes, it was set after the period of slavery, but her character was treated so badly by others it’s easy to misremember that.
Yeah. That seemed like an odd mistake for them to make.
You remember correctly. The Color Purple is set in the early 1900s. The movie also did not win any Oscars, but was nominated for several.
I really can’t understand the praise for Orla Brady. A thick Irish accent on a Romulan and using Irish slang makes absolutely no sense.
It really stuck out this week.
Well, it is hard to explain why a person has charisma, but if someone has it most persons will recognize it. Orla Brady definitely has outstanding strong charisma.
For me the unsung heroes of modern Trek are the people who are responsible for the casting, they did amazingly great for Picard as well as Discovery.
She learned English from someone with an Irish accent. There you go. Sense.
“A thick Irish accent on a Romulan and using Irish slang makes absolutely no sense.”
Well, she had to learn English somewhere.
Maybe she was taught to speak English by Irish people. There. See how hard that was?
Andrew, those of us who aren’t American have been finding it really hard to believe in a future where everyone speaks with a standard American accent.
That’s what really makes no sense to me, and it’s an error that TOS avoided even if it’s ‘accents’ weren’t very authentic.
The Federation is supposed to be huge, with colonies that have been settled by different ethnic populations.
Why should all the aliens who learn standard English speak in an American dialect? Certainly, many people learning English today learn the accent and dialect where they first immerse themselves in the language. Or. If they are learning formally, they are just as likely to learn Oxford/British English as American.
More, as someone who has found the lack of national diversity of actors in post-TOS Trek an issue and have said it here, I have to give TPTB credit for casting actors who aren’t American.
From my perspective, it’s great to see that they’ve stopped the practice of ‘washing’ the ethnicity of the actors playing aliens. As others have noted, one can always come up with as good a reason why the characters have non-American English as why they would.
I have particularly found it objectionable that Shazad Latif has been obliged to speak in a US accent when his delivery in his own British accent is so much clearer and is reflect his South Asian heritage. It wasn’t really necessary to have the original ‘Ash Tyler’ come from near Seattle.
Trek is a global show, attempting to show a human population that has reached out beyond Earth. It’s time to reflect that.
Maybe it’s a sterotype among non Americans but the fact is there are quite a few regional accents here in the States. My ear can discern someone from New England, New York, Kentucky, Chicago, North Central area, Southern CA, etc.
Absolutely ML31, regional American accents remain strong, but are infrequently shown on television.
I was very surprised when I came to the US for grad school that the accents and dialects of my American peers were so much stronger than what I had heard in entertainment.
I can also say that I took a lot of flack for my Canadian accent until one of my American colleagues spent 6 weeks in Canada for a research project. When they returned, I was told that they had always thought my accent was affected, but after being in Canada, they realized there was an entire country that talked like me. (Not exactly true, as Canadians have regional accents too.)
And it’s not just the accents I can hear. There are words and phrases that are uniquely regional. I do catch that in TV and movies. I think, someone from that part of the country wouldn’t say that unless they spent a lot of time in SoCal or something to that effect.
“Feck” is VERY regional. Haha!
it means Disc does not have a brit on board as many ‘trek’ tv shows have done save for Voy and Ent.
Good point about the crappy replicators.
But I did not see those androids as any kind of AI. They obviously were not nor were they ever meant to be. I think it wrong to say this was the creation of “slaves”. That would mean that probes are something you don’t need to be concerned their well being. They didn’t make “disposable people”. They made tools. They could only be considered “disposable” if they were sentient in a Data kind of way. These clearly were not nor were they made with that capability. In a way, that scene might end up being what is problematic with the show. They set those workers up to be “mean” to the androids. Clearly to make the audience feel a bit of resent towards them so when they all get killed the audience isn’t supposed to feel as bad for them. I sure didn’t. I sympathized with them and felt anger at whoever programmed the machines to go off like they did.
Hey, I was using the “double secret” moniker for the uber tal shiar before you guys did!
And I too am REALLY hoping a lot of this is indeed a misdirect. If not it doesn’t bode well for the show.
I too was taken aback by the C in C. She could be unhappy with Picard and NOT undress the man like she did. That was uncalled for and as was said, was unprofessional at best.
And I had a hard time buying the UFP did not have enough ships to assist an evacuation. The only thing that I DID buy was the political ramification of continuing the relief effort. I can totally buy that.
I still don’t think anything about Picard’s two Romulan caregivers. I don’t like or dislike them at this point. They are kinda just there. But I also agree that the CSI stuff was absurd. In addition to anyone just beaming into a crime scene.
I’m a long time fan and I never made the All Good Things brain disease connection. Mainly because I only saw AGT the one time and found it to be a very forgettable episode and thus did not recall that particular aspect of it. I tend to recall the good ones and the bad ones. So that is a nice thing for fans that know it and and does not require that viewers even be aware of it. That is the best way to do fan service.
I also think the current day slang and language appearing in Trek takes me out of it a bit as well.
I want to say once again that cannot express deeply enough how lame I think the concept of “data’s daughter” is.
Thanks for the enjoyable 50 minutes!
The Androids obviously have AI. They wouldn’t be able to function without it. The real question is whether or not they are sentient. We do see F8 attempting to mimic human behavior, and he is able to carry on a conversation with his co-workers so it seems likely that he could have evolved like Data did had he been given the opportunity.
Why would they need to be AI without it? My robot sweeper serves it’s purpose. It moves around objects. It recalls what obstacle was where. Yet it has no intelligence. Or does it and I’m just being bigoted against robots?
F8 is merely doing things it is programmed to do. There is no evidence this was learned behavior nor does it make any sense that such androids with that capacity be there to begin with. SIRI is able to carry on a conversation on about the same level as F8. Maybe we should let siri decide if she wants out of her box?
Siri and your Roomba have AI. Nothing near as advanced as what Data has, and they aren’t self aware, but they’ve got basic AI.
I don’t think everyone would be making such a big deal about these Synths if they were just glorified Alexas. A team of scientists developed them at the Daystrom Institute, and they certainly look and act a lot like early TNG Data. The implication seems to be that they are based on the same technology as Data. I’m sure we will learn more about what they are capable of later in the season.
I think it’s a stretch to call Siri and Roomba AI’s. It’s an early step in that direction is about as far as I would go.
No one on screen seems to be making a big deal about the robots on Mars that were programmed to turn on the organics. The only ones who seem to be seeing them as anything more than tools are some viewers. Those robots looked like Data only in that they were humanoid. They certainly didn’t act like data. Those things seemed to be only perhaps 2 steps ahead of Roombas.
Raise your hand if a Laris spinoff sounds more interesting than an Empress Georgiou Section 31 show
Right now a Laris spinoff has the potential to be more interesting than STP.
Cool and smart Laris has eclipsed 2 seasons’ worth of grimacing, emotionally unstable St. Michael in just 2 episodes. This is how attractive female characters are done!
Orla Brady deserves high praise. She is a very effective (deep chops) actor, she has buckets of charisma and easily holds every scene with Picard, maybe even a tad ahead of him. Watching true acting talent like this, and then watching the two Romulan Stooges at work, I almost lost my lunch. The Brits really know how to crank out proper talent, having years of practical learning in school. The country treats acting as a legitimate profession and molds the talented ones to pursue it as a career.
Harry, I thought you did not like the British actors playing the Romulan Stooges based on an earlier post.
Could you please clarify?
Orla Brady’s Irish, not British. An important distinction.
To clarify….I HATED the two female actors playing the Romulan Commander and her over-the-top aide (with rounded ears). I forget their character names, but their acting was GAWDAWFUL!!!
I LIKE the two Romulans living with Picard, especially the woman. Great actor!
It’s funny there are some things almost all fans, no matter which faction of fandom they belong to, can agree on. Like “More Pike/Spock/Number One” and “More of those two Romulans”.
I guess the smartest thing Kurtzman ever said/did is that he’s gonna wait for the fan reactions to Picard season 1 before getting on with plotting season 2 (hint hint: put some synths in charge of Chateau Picard and get Laris and Zhaban into space pronto!)
Just pointing out… I have no problem with those two. But I’m not sitting here wanting more of them either. If they keep showing up, that would be OK. If this was their last episode of the season, that’s fine too. I wouldn’t miss them.