We finally get the end of the story that was started in “Monsters” when Tallinn ENTERED PICARD’S BRAIN! Indeed, we get more revelations and things happening in this, the nineteenth overall episode of Star Trek: Picard than in the previous eighteen combined. The biggest is what we learn about Jean-Luc Picard, but there’s also some other big deals—and all without Q even showing up.
Let’s start with the biggest revelation: Yvette Picard committed suicide when her younger son was a little boy. Specifically, she did so in the solarium, and only was in there because little Jean-Luc let her out of her bedroom after her husband Maurice Picard had locked her in that room for her own safety.
From a character point of view, this brings a lot of who Jean-Luc Picard is into focus. Why he had such a contentious relationship with his father, why he was so eager to go into space and avoid the family business, and why his relationship history is checkered to say the least. Sir Patrick Stewart also beautifully plays the elderly Picard finally dragging these memories out of the darkness, and I’m so glad they had Tallinn hug him, because that performance called for a big hug, and Tallinn fills in for the audience there.
Kudos to James Callis, Madeline Wise, and Dylan Von Halle for how they play the Picard family in the flashbacks. All three do superlative work, from Callis’ concerned crankiness as Maurice to Von Halle’s blithe innocence as little Jean-Luc to Wise’s tragic fragility as Yvette. But they also feel like a real family, with the banter and conversations and such. (It helps that the dialogue all rings quite true; the script is credited to executive story editor Matt Okumura and staff writer Chris Derrick.)
Unfortunately, from a Star Trek point of view, from a worldbuilding point of view, this entire storyline is just complete and utter nonsense.
These flashbacks take place in the early days of the twenty-fourth century, some fifty years or so after the original series episodes “Dagger of the Mind” and “Whom Gods Destroy” made it clear that the Federation had done tremendous work in eliminating most forms of mental illness. Now, it has been stated that Yvette refused to get help for what appears to be either schizophrenia or clinical depression (or both), and that’s in keeping with the anti-technology bent of the Picard family as seen in TNG’s “Family,” but still, it strains belief that if she was suicidal that she got no help.
And just in general, this whole thing feels like it’s out of a nineteenth-century drawing-room drama instead of three hundred years in the future: Yvette hanging herself with a rope while wearing a white dress in a solarium, after her son lets her out of the bedroom with a skeleton key, where she’d been locked away, because of course that’s what you do with a woman who’s hysterical. The scenario feels dated now, much less for the era being portrayed.
On top of that, Picard’s had his mind ripped open any number of times, most notably when he was assimilated by the Borg, when he was tortured by Gul Madred, and when he mind-melded with Sarek. Plus, he’s been through tons of therapy and trauma, and this never came out before now? For most characters, I’d accept it, but given what all else Jean-Luc Picard has been through, it strains credulity a bit.
Plus, there’s a major missing element to all these flashbacks: Yvette and Maurice’s older son Robert, also introduced in “Family.” It’s such a blown opportunity, too, as the dichotomy is there for the asking. In “Family,” Robert was very much taking after their father: disdaining technology, taking over the winery from the old man. This entire season of Picard has been dedicated to showing that Jean-Luc was very much his mother’s son—she was the star gazer, she was the one who encouraged his love of space. Here was a wonderful opportunity to show the origin of the sibling dynamic we saw in “Family.”
(One discontinuity is spackled over, at least: Picard mentions that he often imagined his mother as an old woman offering him tea, which explains the one sighting we’d had of Picard’s maman prior to “The Star Gazer,” to wit, the illusion of her, played by Herta Ware in TNG’s “Where No One Has Gone Before.” Picard’s sad “no” in response to Riker’s query if there’s anything he can do has a lot more pathos in light of the revelations of this episode…)
All this happens in the middle of an action movie, because of course it does. The Borg Queen is taking over Jurati’s body, and is trying to take over La Sirena, aided by Soong and the mercenaries he hired, who have all been sorta-kinda assimilated.
I say sorta-kinda because after that nasty-ass cliffhanger last week, after Seven saying these mercenaries aren’t human anymore, they’re Borg, what we see are—um, a bunch of mercenaries shooting guns. There’s absolutely nothing Borg about them except that they’re working for the new Borg Queen, but given Soong’s monetary resources, they’re probably being paid enough that that wasn’t even necessary. And being Borg drones doesn’t give them a single solitary advantage, especially since Seven, Musiker, Tallinn, Picard, and the Emergency Combat Hologram all are able to take care of them without too terribly much effort.
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Yes, there’s an Emergency Combat Hologram! And it’s patterned after Elnor, so we can get Evan Evagora back! And it’s programmed with Elnor’s memories up to the moment he died, er, somehow, so he and Musiker can Have A Moment. Sigh.
Mind you, this makes sense in general. Holograms can’t be physically harmed, so they’re a great resource to have in a fight. I mean, the mercs’ bullets wouldn’t have any effect on him, and indeed the ECH is only stopped when the Jurati Queen in essence turns him off.
Jurati fighting against the Queen for control of their now-shared brain meats is a running theme throughout the episode, with Jurati keeping the Queen from taking over La Sirena by using a complex lockout code, and creating the ECH, and also storing the code to the hologram, Jurati herself not having memorized it.
The Queen is able to reassert dominance for a time, long enough to erase the ECH and mortally wound Seven, but then Jurati reasserts herself.
Probably the biggest recurring theme this season has been characters making a speech that changes someone’s life and outlook—and those speeches also not convincing me in the slightest. First we had Picard unconvincingly getting Renee not to back out of the Europa mission. Then we had Picard even less convincingly getting Agent Wells to stop being suspicious of aliens invading Earth by telling him that the aliens he encountered as a youth tried to erase his memories without his consent. And now we have Jurati convincing the Borg Queen to be a kinder, gentler assimilator, to only absorb cultures that need help. To be a true collective, one that is cooperative.
One that might even go through a rift in space and ask to join the Federation…
Mind you, I love this result. It’s a very Star Trek solution to the Borg, one that opens up all kinds of possibilities. But I just didn’t entirely buy how we got there.
At this point, the timelines are completely muddled. The episode ends with the Queen taking La Sirena off into space to be this spiffy new Collective, and wasn’t the whole point of this exercise to not change history? I have no idea. There’s only one episode left, and our heroes’ only method of getting back to the twenty-fifth century just buggered off into space to completely change what the Borg are. (And how’s she supposed to do that, anyhow, especially with the Borg themselves actually around in this century. What happens when the Jurati Queen interacts with this timeframe’s Queen?)
However, even with the Queen gone, we still have a bad guy to deal with. Soong is still determined to stop the Europa mission, since he has been told by the Queen that his future legacy depends on it.
Which is too bad, because while it was fun to watch Brent Spiner as the egomaniacal mad scientist, he’s now morphed into a Bond villain, and that’s way less interesting. His verbal confrontations with Picard are pretty nowhere, and his escape at the end is less than convincing. The finale is being set up to be a confrontation against Soong, though there’s also Q—who doesn’t even appear in this episode—to deal with, and I have no idea how they’re going to do this. I mean, the obvious answer is Q, but he’s depowered…
There are two other plots in this episode, one kinda meh, the other fabulous. The former is the continued Rios-Ramirez relationship which is perfectly fine, but not very gripping. I adore Sol Rodriguez’s Teresa Ramirez, mind you, and she and Santiago Cabrera have superb chemistry, but the storyline isn’t really doing anything for me.
However, we also get some great stuff with Seven. We start with her finally telling us why Seven didn’t join Starfleet after Voyager got home in “Endgame“: they wouldn’t let her. According to Seven, Janeway went to bat for her and threatened to resign, but Starfleet refused to allow her into the club. They did allow Icheb, as we saw in “Stardust City Rag” last season, but Icheb was barely even a Borg, really—he’d only just been assimilated and was just out of the incubator when Voyager found him in “Collective.” Seven, by comparison, had been a Borg for twenty-four years, assimilated at the age of six.
This is prompted by Musiker telling her that she’d make a great starship captain. After hearing her tale of woe, Musiker starts to say that when they get out of this, but Seven cuts her off, saying they won’t get out of this, as Seven is unaware that she’s an opening-credits regular in a TV show and therefore almost definitely will get out of this. But at this point, Seven’s been human for about as long as she was a Borg. Would Starfleet be just as cranky about letting her in, especially given how much more they know about the Borg now?
That’s a question for next week—or next season. Or perhaps for the Seven/Fenris Rangers spinoff that people have been clamoring for pretty much since she appeared at the end of “Absolute Candor.” For now, though, we do get one more important scene both with and about Seven, because the biggest part of Jurati’s argument to the Queen—and pretty much the only convincing part—is the example of Seven. She’s spent the last twenty-three years combining the best of her Borg background and her humanity, and what Jurati poses to the Queen is to make up an entire collective of Sevens. Which is a nice thought.
When the Queen is convinced to be not such a horrible person, the first thing she does is heal Seven from the wound she herself inflicted, but in order to do so, she has to restore Seven’s exact Borg implants from the mainline timeline for reasons the script doesn’t even bother to provide.
So now Seven’s back to her normal, Jurati’s a Borg Queen, and Soong is still trying to change history to make himself the hero of fascists. That’s a lot to deal with in a finale…
Keith R.A. DeCandido is looking forward to next week when he gets to talk about both the Picard finale and the Strange New Worlds premiere, all at the same time!!!!!!!
Whew boy, I thought this year got off to a shaky start with The Brochure of Boba Fett (nothing that thin and flimsy can be considered a “book”), but then Picard stepped up and said “Hold my Earl Grey.”
You know how sometimes you get that feeling behind your eyes like two people are shoving a knife into your skull? Yeah.
This was bad. And not even a fun kind of bad. Just your below average melodramatic fantasy series strutting around and pretending to be thoughtful sci-fi kind of bad. But… at least Alison Pill made it somewhat bearable to watch, I’ll give it that. She’s a talent. I just wish it wasn’t wasted here.
Alison Pill is horrible, the writing is laughable, Raffi is insufferable, Stewart is completely lost and the false sense of camaraderie is just plain silly. Once again, I have to give Keith kudos for doing his best to make sense out of the nonsensical. But, not even the most generous reviewer could cover up the endless scenes cutting to other scenes before being finished, mystery boxes and unbelievable cheapness of this show. Nor could they hide the fact that not one writer seems to have watched any Star Trek episode involving the borg.
Good Lord.
Yeah, I can’t really add much more to what’s already been said.
But again, if the TNG cast wasn’t returning for Season Three, I’d be exiting the show. Season One had its flaws, but it’s got nothing on Season Two. This Season has been everything I was afraid it was going to be.
#2
Well, I’m not saying Alison Pill is worthy of awards for her performance here, but I do find it somewhat engaging on a pulpy Flash Gordon level. Or maybe I’m still smitten over her from “Midnight in Paris.” Now there she was wonderful.
Um….KRAD …. I think you meant to say that Jean-Luc was Yvette’s son, not daughter in the second graf after the second picture
I won’t judge the event too harshly until I see for myself how it was handled when I watch it tonight, but given that “teaching the Borg Queen empathy” was used as a joke in an episode of Lower Decks precisely because it is so ludicrous of a concept, I have concerns.
The main thing that I’m finding with this season is that even though the show is nominally about Picard, one of Star Trek’s most compelling characters, and played by one of Britain’s greatest living actors, I’m mostly tuning in each week for Alison Pill and Annie Wersching. I agree that Jurati’s speech about how the Borg are always defeated was not particularly convincing, but I suppose it might go down better with a Queen who has just witnessed the extermination of her entire race, and I think that it was the perfect culmination to Agnes’s entire arc.
As for the big reveal about Picard’s mom, I don’t think that the implication was supposed to be that he was only just now remembering what happened to her, I think that he was accepting that trauma as being a part of him. That said: *ugh*
Leaving aside what has become almost a cliché in the Secret Hideout era of characters needing to have a traumatic backstory, leaving aside the bizarre insistence, on both this series and Discovery, of characters interupt tense climactic scenes to work through their personal issues, there’s the fact that this particular trauma has never been mentioned or even hinted at before, seems like it belongs in a mediocre Victorian melodrama, and actively makes one of my favourite episodes of TNG (namely “Family”) worse. Even worse is how glamorous they make it look! The shot if Yvette hanging there is clearly framed to be artistically beautiful, the beautiful mother figure in her pure white shift and it’s just…that’s not what suicide is! You don’t look *beautiful* at the end of it! You look like a corpse. And more than that, you generally look like the corpse of a person who had just lived the worst day of their life. That part just really pissed me off.
@5: Updated, thanks!
#4
Fair enough. And, it isn’t like she has been given even mediocre dialogue or plot or character development to work with. Frankly, the cast should probably be given credit for even having to work with this rubbish.
I mean, she’s playing a character who hand waves away murder and apparently has every band at every party she attends (even though she isn’t supposed to be there) ready to play Pat Benatar on queue.
#4 on the other hand, Oscar Isaac is basically doing the same role and absolutely crushing it. Of course, he has decent dialogue but he elevates it even further. Watching the latest episode of both back to back really highlights the differences.
Mixed feelings here. I didn’t like the action-movie stuff at all, so the first half didn’t do much for me. But there was some effective stuff later on. I do have a hard time believing that it was so easy to convince the Borg Queen to change her ways, but it is very Trekkish to have the heroes change the villain’s mind and inspire her to try something better instead of just killing her.
The Seven/Raffi resolution was pretty good too, though I also have a hard time believing Starfleet wouldn’t admit an ex-drone. Well… they did sideline Picard in First Contact for fear that his residual link to the Borg might compromise him, and Seven retained considerably more implants than he did. So maybe I can buy that.
It’s very contrived that the Queen healed Seven by restoring the exact same implants she had before. Not only that, but her eyepiece appliance looked much more rubbery than it should have. It even flexed when she touched it.
As for the timeline thing, I suspect this is a “Yesteryear” time-loop scenario where the characters had to experience an alternate timeline in order to bring about the events of their own timeline, i.e. the Borg coming through the rift to make peace. Queen Agnes comes through the rift, it catalyzes the events that send the gang back in time, and those events lead to the creation of Queen Agnes. That’s what Q meant when he said what matters isn’t the trap but the escape.
Still, I was kind of hoping this episode would wrap up the 21st-century portion so that the finale would be entirely back in the 25th. Season 1 rushed through its denouement, giving short shrift to matters that deserved more attention, like the revocation of the synth ban. I don’t want this season to make the same mistake, but it looks like it will.
@7/Iacomina: “there’s the fact that this particular trauma has never been mentioned or even hinted at before”
I’d say that the deep sadness Picard showed in seeing the image of his mother in “Where No One Has Gone Before” was very much a hint of a tragedy, though I always took it to be simply that his mother had died of old age some years before that point. Still, they did a nice subtle job of tying into that vision and his reaction to it, when he told Tallinn that it was a daydream he often had. Amazing that such a subtle detail would end up being so important to this storyline.
A really epic iteration of Trek, as long as you don’t expect airtight plot logic (and since when did Trek ever have airtight plot logic?). If you approach it with the expectation that this is essentially a story about trauma and codependency (and… exploitation, and consent?) rather than one about space exploration in the literal sense, this is a very satisfying and well-acted drama (although pacing remains an issue).
In a sense it reminds me of DS9’s 4th season, when Worf was brought in to the cast and everything we thought we knew about the Klingons was gleefully discarded, ultimately resulting in a resonant reexamination of Klingon culture. It has certainly taken a while to get there but this is culminating in meaningful character insight into Seven and an exploration of the Borg that challenges their previous portrayal as two-dimensional villains. Very optimistic and true to the spirit of TNG in that sense.
Jurati’s character arc was satisfying: last season her mind was taken over by Commodore Oh, this season she musters the willpower to essentially assimilate the Borg Queen. Great stuff. The tear running down her cheek as she is about to be used to kill Seven has plot significance but it also closes the circle with the depiction of Picard’s assimilation in “Best of Both Worlds”, and his own desperate resistance in the denouement of that episode.
It isn’t mentioned here in dialogue, but one early TNG Picard’s distinguishing characteristics — extreme discomfort around children — could also be explained by the fact that his own inner child is alone in a dungeon somewhere waiting for a mother-figure to unstick him.
#7
I agree. The therapy storyline this season might have been interesting had it not been so dreadfully handled. I also dislike it now because it retroactively makes Troi out to be a lackluster shrink. Really, as Krad pointed out, this mother issue should’ve been resolved many moons ago; it is pretty much the first area any therapist worth their degree explores — parents? Childhood trauma? Yes? Besides that, Picard seemed perfectly willing to talk to her about his traumatic experiences, be they Borg, Cardassian, or the loss of his brother and nephew.
And that whole slapdash way they covered the image of Picard’s mother from “Where No One Has Gone Before,” gimme a break. It’s like Patrick Stewart was reading from the Memory Alpha episode summary. Yeesh.
In every other instance of assimilation that we’ve seen, it’s been one individual mind absorbed by billions. In Agnes’s case, it’s basically a binary merger between her and the Borg Queen, so I actually like the fact that Agnes can influence how their little “collective” operates. That said, they probably shouldn’t have done it in the same year that they had a joke about Boimler teaching the Borg Queen empathy.
This whole series of “Picard” has been…bad.
Boimler’s feat is still more impressive; he taught her empathy without being partially assimilated first. Besides, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that’s what happened. The Queen is nothing if not pragmatic; she has absolutely nothing to lose by trying it Agnes’s way for a bit. If she were to decide that it was not effective enough, she’d have a ship and be much stronger. It wouldn’t be hard to go back to assimilating. The goal is always the same: perfection.
Boimler also defeated her at chess first, as I recall…
I feel like most complaints — ones about changing history and resolving timelines, for sure —that I might have about this episode carry big asterisks until at least the next episode airs, but I also have the unfortunate suspicion that they will hold.
given what all else Jean-Luc Picard has been through, it strains credulity a bit
Yeah.
And it’s programmed with Elnor’s memories up to the moment he died, er, somehow
Yeah. That opens up all sorts of questions about how massive amounts of folks circa the 24th-25th centuries aren’t stone-cold addicted to keeping holograms of their departed loved ones around. Never mind that you could actually learn new, previously unspoken things from the scanned minds of dead people.
Why volunteer the fact that the lockout code is hidden in Elnor the ECH, by the way? Given their mental battle it may not have been a trivial thing for the Queen to pry that knowledge from Jurati.
she has to restore Seven’s exact Borg implants from the mainline timeline for reasons the script doesn’t even bother to provide
Yeah. Plus, Seven getting re-emBorged is a shock and trauma for her in the moment but she’d be restored to her old self in the known timeline anyway if they’re all successful at restoring it.
That’s a lot to deal with in a finale
Yeah. Of course that was the case to an extent with the first season as well and it was resolved far too cleanly and quickly.
Now I’m really hoping that whatever going on with Q is the main thrust for next season, because if they kill off one of Trek’s best supporting characters in a subplot, with an explanation that’s at best going to get a little dialogue next week, that will make me very annoyed.
@20 I’m not at all convinced that Q is going to die. I think it’s more likely that the new Borg cooperative or whatever it’s called will eventually become the Q, and as soon as Picard makes the decision to trust Queen Agnes instead of destroying the Stargazer, he’ll be fully restored and fix the broken timeline with a snap.
Oh boy. that’s all I’ll say about this episode. Everyone has said what I’m thinking. T
Well, now that they have no ship. Q must send them back. Either as a last act or together. Anyway, time to end this. Onward to SNWs.
@21/Chase – It’s a bit hard to reconcile with the existing continuity, but I do like the idea of the Q as being a sort of “emergent” lifeform arising from the unified consciousness of every mind the universe in the distant future. It would even help to justify a line of dialogue from “Q2” on Voyager, where Q upbraids his son for provoking the Borg. Though, again, it seems like a weighty idea to throw in in the final episode of a ten-episode season.
So, did this episode just officially screen-canonize Doug Drexler’s Enterprise NX-01 refit design that we’ve seen on the covers of Christopher L. Bennett’s Rise of the Federation novels, the Ships of the Line calendars, etc.? Sure looked like it to me:
@krad:
I mean, they basically told us that they need to keep pumping us with adrenaline in order to assimilate us.
I really don’t think the Q are related at all to the Borg. That wouldn’t make sense to me.
To me, the whole queen thing is to setup the Queen we saw in the first episode. A borg looking to join the federation. That’s it.
I guess Q will snap them back into that moment. Picard will realize it’s not assimilation. And they won’t blow themselves up.
a
@26 Not strictly to the Borg, but from the voluntary union between the Federation and the Borg. Over millennia, the line between technology and biology could blur to the point when nobody remembers a time when they were separate.
@21/Chase: “I think it’s more likely that the new Borg cooperative or whatever it’s called will eventually become the Q”
Gods, I hope not. It’s way too small-universe if the origin of these vast, ancient, cosmic entities happens to be something that humans are familiar with, let alone something directly connected to Jean-Luc Picard. There is immeasurably more of the universe that we aren’t aware of than that we are, so probabilistically speaking, the odds that the origin of the Q has any connection to anything we’re aware of, or that it would occur during the tiny sliver of the universe’s history that humanity occupies, is infinitesimal. It would just be way too huge and contrived a coincidence.
Two things out of this please
1 A starfleet captain who is a Borg on Discovery
2 The masked Borg Queen reveal to be Sir Ian McKellen.
Perfection arrived.
@2/Kurt: “Alison Pill is horrible”
Also, LOLWTF? She’s totally fine; in fact I’d suggest that she’s very nicely underplayed her performance as the Borg Queen here, when she might have totally swung for the fences, so to speak, with a super-broad portrayal.
What I kind of suspect is that the horrific future in episode 2 was how history was “supposed” to turn out but for Aegis’s interference. It still doesn’t explain Q’s angle though.
@31 I thought Q wanted to teach Picard something. But there has been a criminal lack of JDL
So, when we return to the Stargazer, Picard won’t blow up the ship. When that happens, we will have Elnor alive. There’s also a non Borg Jurati on the bridge.
I suppose the two Renee comment means we need both timelines in play, but how does that get realized?
Those flashbacks were so dumb and pointless
There is one thing about this I did accurately predict. When the “semblance of a point” line was uttered, I pointed to my screen and said, “I bet that’s going to be the title of Krad’s review!”
:)
Sketchy: That’s pretty much what I said to my wife when that line came up…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The idea of Picard’s family not getting treatment for mental illness and attempting “natural” cures is not far fetched even in the future. Recent events of anti vax and people even frothing at masks and vaccines make it plausible.
I went back to the first episode of the season because I could have sworn that Robert was mentioned in a flashback. I remembered correctly; he was described as being “at boarding school” when Yvette died. I understand from a production standpoint why they didn’t want to deal with another character who didn’t really have a role in the story. Story-wise, it makes a ton of sense for Robert to resent Jean-Luc if he was gone when the tragedy happened.
On the subject of Robert Picard’s absence, TrekCore mentioned on Twitter that Robert was established earlier in the season to have been away at boarding school during these events.
@37/Pc: You’re right. Indeed, maybe this explains why Jean-Luc rejected his family’s traditionalism and embraced Federation modernity.
@37: I’d like to think that people would be smarter than that in the Utopian Space Future, but on the other hand, I’m kind of amused by the idea of people insisting on “traditional remedies” such as kidney dialysis, hypodermic needles, and chemotherapy.
I’ve finally made peace with why Yvette would reject treatment. For some reason, it makes more sense in the current day than in the future, But I think I understand it now without villainizing Yvette. My thinking is she didn’t trust doctors and didn’t believe anything was wrong with her anyway. She probably thought of herself as a free spirit and everyone else was small-minded.
But then there’s Maurice and I don’t want to villainize him either. So, I think he did want his wife to see a doctor to get treatment, but just like now you can’t force someone. He may have threatened to leave her and take the children if she refused treatment but relented when she begged him. I think he was an enabler.
Mary: except Yvette acknowledges her own illness in this episode…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@42/Keith
She did?? I totally missed that. When was that? I thought the whole defense for people not getting help for mental illness is that they don’t realize they’re ill? The only other reasonable answer is fear/distrust of doctors.
I just don’t want to say she’s a selfish/negligent woman who knowingly put her child in danger because she refused treatment. I was trying to avoid that.
Some thoughts about the penultimate episode:
1. The Federation had just come out of the Dominion War and was a lot less accepting as well as cordial than it was before the Voyager was lost. They weren’t ready to accept the Doctor as a sentient being and were iffy about accepting the Maquis as crew members.
I can easily imagine them attempting to impose a lot of conditions on Seven, only for Janeway to make it a fight and Seven to say “no thank you” because she didn’t want to make it a fight. Seven’s pride has always been huge and she wouldn’t want to be a place she wasn’t wanted. Also, Seven identifies as a Borg while Picard didn’t. By contrast, I’m inclined to think Icheb would react to any hoops he had to jump through by going, “How high?”
2. Picard’s mother committing suicide after being locked up by her husband in the attic and freed by her son isn’t so much LIKE a Victorian novel as it is made of several Victorian plots put together. Particularly Jane Eyre. Certainly, it makes no sense as a thing on Earth in the 21st century let alone 24th but I’m willing to give a pass for the sake of melodrama.
My headcanon is Picard is the child of one of the two suicides on Earth that year versus our 800,000 per year. And yes, I say this as someone who has lost loved ones to it.I also do love the “Where No Man Has Gone Before” comeback because it turns an innocuous scene into something that would clearly FREAK Picard the hell out.
3. Speaking as someone with a family that has a history of mental illness, I can easily buy it as a perfect storm of Papa Picard hating modern technology (including medicine) and the mother believing she’s not mentally ill. Destygmatizing it is hopefully something that happened in the 23rd and 24th century but I can easily buy she doesn’t consider herself “sick” if she was just severely bipolar. The two’s out of odds views combined with their relative isolation resulted in an event that should never have happened.
It doesn’t need to be spelled out that Maurice screwed up since locking his wife up triggered her suicide.
4. The Borg being driven by a relentless sense of loneliness and fear of rejection is something that I think works on that “everyone bad is secretly reasonable and good except for Dukat” that is part of Star Trek’s heart. I also buy it because Jurati is only dealing on a one to one basis for the Collective.
5. I am going to be sad if this is the end of Doctor Jurati even if this was a pretty good send off for her. Having Captain Picard inspire the woman who potentially “heals” the Borg or at least causes a good chunk of them to break off is a pretty good resolution to a lot of Picard’s plots. I do hope Rios stays in the future, though, because I want to see him in Season 3. As much as I love the old gang, I don’t want the current group discarded.
6. I don’t think Picard forgot his mother committed suicide or anything, though he may have forgotten letting her out.
7. I actually like how Adam Soong essentially just brushes off Picard’s attempt to reach out to him, which I don’t think we see enough of in Star Trek. I truly believe he’d look at the Confederation and go, “Hey, the Borg had it coming. What’s a little genocide if they’re EVIL?”
Okay, I think I found where Yvette said she was sick. From Memory Alpha:
The brilliance you see in the night sky, Jean-Luc, that exquisite light, it’s just an echo, really, of a star that has long since faded. Like me.“
i think I did consider that an acknowledgment that she knew she was sick but was so subtle that I forgot about it. The way she’s speaking–of echos and stars having faded–it sounded like a mentally ill person talking. It sounded more melancholy than self-aware.
“On top of that, Picard’s had his mind ripped open any number of times, most notably when he was assimilated by the Borg, when he was tortured by Gul Madred, and when he mind-melded with Sarek. Plus, he’s been through tons of therapy and trauma, and this never came out before now?”
I agree with you for the most part but if you think like that, then you can essentially never introduce new aspects to a familiar character.
Also, the idea that the Yvette suicide story is something out of a Victorian novel reminds me yet again that Picard is British in all but name. British accent, he loves Shakespeare, he drinks tea, etc. He just happens to be born in France and lives in a winery.
Otherwise, it was an okay episode to go along with this okay season. I just don’t think that the high stakes, serialized method of story telling works well for Star Trek. I’m hoping Strange New Worlds, with its return to episodic stories, will be better.
@43/Mary: “I thought the whole defense for people not getting help for mental illness is that they don’t realize they’re ill?”
“Defense?” It’s not a crime, it’s an illness. It doesn’t need a “defense.” It needs understanding.
Yvette was portrayed as apparently being bipolar, with depression coming and going. Depression alters your mental state, your perception of yourself, your willingness to take care of yourself. In an up phase, you can be concerned for your own well-being and take care of yourself normally and fulfill your responsibilities, and then in a down phase you just don’t see the point, or you neglect yourself and others without realizing it. It’s not the depressed person’s fault, because it’s a chemical alteration in the way their brain works, something they can’t control.
Long time lurker, first time poster. After years of rewatchs of TNG, DS9 and VOY I am finally up to date with Keith’s reviews on at least one series. Thank you for being a great guide!
@47/Christopher
Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend by “defense” I meant it as “In their defense, it’s not their fault.” I was thinking of “understanding”
I posted something but didn’t get approved. I don’t see where she acknowledged she had a problem, specifically. I do remember her likening herself to a dimmed star but I saw that as more melancholy than self awareness that she had a problem.
And I am trying to sincerely understand this because i don’t want to think of her as his horrible mother who could’ve put her son in danger because she refused help. I’ve defended people in current events who’ve gotten sick and hurt their children–saying that we can’t expect someone with a mental illness to act rationally. I’d like t give the same benefit of the doubt for this story.
I have to agree with someone on Twitter now. If a show is going to shine a light on someone with Yvette’s problems, then it should do a better job. The point should be raising awareness and creating understanding. But just presenting Yvette’s problems the way they did–with no explanation of how this could’ve happened–it muddies the waters, in my opinion.
You know… “Whom Gods Destroy” claimed that mental illness had been nearly eradicated in the 23rd century. That was implausibly rosy and simplistic, but what if 24th-century Federation society just has so little serious mental illness anymore that they’ve forgotten how to cope with it when it does crop up? Like how so many people today are against vaccination, because they’ve grown up in a world where vaccination is so routine that once-pervasive deadly diseases like polio have been all but wiped out, so they take the absence of the threat for granted and assume they don’t need to protect themselves from it, and in their complacency they’ve allowed the threat to resurge.
@51/Christopher
That’s a good point.
Plus, I do think she might not have totally trusted doctors. It could’ve been “Doctors couldn’t help Great Grandmere with her Irumodic Syndrome. They couldn’t save Uncle Claude after that shuttle accident. They still haven’t cured Darnay’s Disease Why does everyone think they they know everything?”
Tim Kaiser: You left out the next sentence in the bit you quoted: “For most characters, I’d accept it, but given what all else Jean-Luc Picard has been through, it strains credulity a bit.” In general, I agree with you, but given how much trauma Picard has gone though, and in particular given that he was sitting next to a telepathic therapist for years and years, this should’ve come out sooner.
PabloZ: Thanks!
Christopher: That’s a good rationalization, at least…..
Mary: I agree with that person on Twitter, also. If you’re going to portray mental illness, don’t show it in a way that reads like a treatise on hysterical women from 1902.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One of my Facebook friends pointed out over there that Maurice locking his mentally ill wife in a room would be prosecuted as spousal abuse now, much less in the 2310s……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@Mary
I think the thing to understand is that Yvette was a fantastic mother as far as Picard knew. He loved her and she would never voluntarily put him in danger. Her suicide might have been prompted by sudden and overwhelming guilt that she couldn’t process. Which is the nature of the disorder in that you have no control over your emotions. Yes, she could have gone to a doctor and been treated but that would require either of the Picards to trust doctors.
And yes, in RL, there’s many people who don’t and yes they do horribly suffer from disease and yes it’s dumb of them but I don’t see that as a moral failing. I see that as a tragedy of ignorance.
Picard does Skyfall but without Adele singing the theme song … And not nearly as interesting.
And considering what a huge issue suicide still is in our timeline, I felt it was poorly played out. Perhaps some help line info at the end? It was too graphic.
Seven not being allowed to join Starfleet makes no sense except that the writers and producers don’t understand Star Trek. I’m sure Robert wasn’t included because they don’t know he exists. This show is an absolute train wreck.
@44 “I actually like how Adam Soong essentially just brushes off Picard’s attempt to reach out to him, which I don’t think we see enough of in Star Trek.”
Yeah. I did thing the whole conversation was weird, though. Like we the audience have spent a fair amount of time with each of these characters, but they haven’t spent much time with each other. Like, Soong hit Picard with a car, but at this point in their relationship they don’t feel like they know each other as well as I’d imagine two people having that conversation know each other.
Why does everybody (everybody being the few comments I’ve seen on-line) make it seem as if Maurice was locking Yvette in a room permanently to deal with her problem? Maybe he intended it to just be for the the rest of the day? Maybe was going to take her the hospital the following day but she committed suicide before he had a chance.
Now, granted, I could be grasping at straws but I didn’t see the locked room as a solution to the Yvette problem. For me, it was “I’ll keep her safe for now.”
My late aunt suffered from dementia and her bedroom door had to be locked at night so she wouldn’t hart herself or wander out of hte house.
The funny thing about the comments about Federation civilians keeping holographic versions of dead ancestors around and the claim that the Borg or intensely lonely is that I always thought the Borg would have a unique offer of an afterlife. Imagine everyone pulled into the Collective always existing somewhere always backed up somewhere, even if their physical body dies. The Borg should have assimilated a better pitchman somewhere along the way.
@59, Mary. It sounded like what she has there is no cure in the future. That they tried what they could, and the only way he can help is to lock her up so she can’t harm herself or anyone when the episodes hit. That night it had been a while since the last one. Why she isn’t in some place to get help or can be helped through her episodes? It’s weird. Help is literally a beam away.
Now change it up. She’s locked into a room, so she can’t get out till someone on the other end of a call clears her or something. Still not great, but if they showed some more effort it wouldn’t come off as…
It finally hit me (better late than never and I overlooked people mentioning it. Picard isn’t an only child. Talk about a missing piece of the story and a chance for him to see his whole family in a new light.
For all the talk in the first few 2024 episodes about polluting the timeline and whatnot, they sure ended up killing a lot of mercenary mooks in this one who could have ended up having important descendants.
So Starfleet and The Federation decide to not allow Seven to join despite roughly 3 years of reports, crew member logs, the fact that the guy they let run the FLAGSHIP was fully assimilated – leading to the destruction of 40 vessels and the deaths of thousands and fly in the face of (as one Klingon ambassador stated) “everything they claim to cherish.”
Nope. Bad writing. Period.
@61
I agree. Locking someone in a room with no way out isn’t the best idea but if their safety depends on it, then not locking the door is just as bad. The only perfect solution (which isn’t perfect at all) is sending said person away to a facility
I just didn’t get the “That’s horrible!” vibe from her being in a locked room. Probably, because I didn’t see it as her being locked in that room long term.
As for Robert–it’s been mentioned that he was away at boarding school. It was mentioned on the show but, to be honest, I I missed it at first too. I heard “away at school” and thought he was just at school at that time of day. I didn’t realize until yesterday it must’ve been a boarding school.
From a friend: I can imagine the showrunners looking for hooks to this season, watching some Netflix, and suddenly texting one another “The Haunting of Château Picard!”
@60/jeffronicus: “I always thought the Borg would have a unique offer of an afterlife. Imagine everyone pulled into the Collective always existing somewhere always backed up somewhere, even if their physical body dies.”
Except that would have been a lie on the Borg’s part, because they couldn’t care less about individuals’ personalities or memories, just the collective knowledge and capabilities of their species and civilizations. That’s why drones’ personalities are completely suppressed, so their own thoughts don’t interfere with the Collective’s mind puppeteering their bodies. So I doubt the Collective bothers to retain drones’ personal memories or psyches in any coherent way; it would just save whatever data it found useful and delete the rest.
What you’re describing sounds like Unimatrix Zero, a mental realm where dormant drones remember their identities and can live out the semblance of normal lives. But that was an aberration, a rare mutation that only a tiny fraction of drones were capable of and that the Queen/Collective was determined to eliminate. It was a part of their own brains that retained the ability to think in a sort of lucid dream state, rather than their personalities being stored in the Collective. Drones’ brains are the Collective’s data storage devices, after all, so it wouldn’t make sense to think that all drones’ minds would be routinely preserved after their physical death. That just wouldn’t add up in terms of storage space.
Oh. @Mary, thanks. I didn’t hear that. Wasted opportunity though.
#63
Yup, and it doubles down on the Federation are now openly racist paranoid jerks theme from season 1 of Picard, which I also loathed. Granted, they didn’t trust Picard in First Contact, but after he and his crew saved Earth and the Federation (again), this trusting former drones thing should no longer have been an issue.
It’s also a kick in the gut to Voyager fans. How many years did we watch Seven struggle to regain her humanity? How many times did Janeway have to talk her down from the proverbial ledge, giving her inspirational speeches about trust and redemption? And how many times did Seven help save the ship? So, in the eyes of Starfleet all that counted for nothing? Screw that.
What’s next, are we going to find out that Chakotay and the other Maquis were lined up against a wall and given a last cigarette?
All I’m going to say is this: If the season doesn’t end with a cameo from Kate Mulgrew, as Admirals Picard and Janeway succeed at getting Seven into Starfleet, I’m going to be annoyed. This season has been botched from start to finish; the least they could give us is a little fanservice.
It is so tiresome to keep reading “these writers don’t know Trek” or are “lazy” or whatever synonym is used in the moment. It just isn’t true. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. It’s not your thing. You don’t need to justify your feelings by attacking. One of the show runners was on Twitter conversing with a fan about the merits of Horner’s Search for Spock score vs Khan and Goldsmiths Klingon theme vs Horners. That’s not the behavior of a non Trek fan.
Being outraged at a situation doesn’t mean that said situation “can’t happen.”
All it takes is one bad admiral who lost a loved one at Wolf 359 to veto Seven.
#70
Then that admiral should be relieved of command, or at least be removed from the decision making. This is one reason why the appeals process exists, to expose such biases. Of course, that’s assuming the Federation is still a just society to which we would want to aspire to be.
Come to think of it, this scenario with Janeway making an argument in a courtroom ala “The Measure of a Man,” sounds like far better Star Trek than anything we’ve seen this season. That’s a shame.
@71/Sketchy: The impression I got is that Seven walked away rather than pursue that kind of appeal. If she’d stuck around and fought as Janeway wanted, she might have prevailed. But she chose not to try.
#72
Fair enough. Well, not really fair. Just kind of sad to watch this… new future.
@73
I agree. It’s different. We’re using to seeing this bright, utopian future in Star Trek. Now that future is more cynical. I guess that’s a product of the times we’re living in now.
@43, 45 – Regarding the acknowledgement of the illness, I would actually point to an earlier scene where Yvette and Maurice are talking quietly, and he notes that she has been doing really well for an extended period. That scene makes it clear that they are both aware of whatever it is she is suffering from, and probably that it had been getting worse for some time. It reminded me of how some people talk when someone with terminal cancer suddenly has a short period of increased energy and the like before the end, and people get sort of hopeful that maybe they are going into remission until things return to their inevitable conclusion.
Beyond that, this season is just such a mess. As someone above noted, were it not for the return of the TNG cast next season, there is almost no chance I would even consider watching it when it came out. The plotlines have been all over the place. This whole Renee Picard storyline was picked up, then dropped, and now suddenly picked up again? And now rather than just missing out on the mission, she needs to die on it (at least in one timeline)? Q is doing what? What was the point of the ICE arrest and rescue? The whole FBI agent thing was for what purpose exactly? And given he wasn’t even the guy who spotted Picard transport into the middle of the street, how is this even really resolved? Was there any point in having Kore in the story? Was young Guinan really needed? Does killing a couple dozen borg mercenaries have any repercussions to the timeline? Will anybody even pretend to care?
And because it was brought up last week, the differences in how they treat the hetero- versus homosexual couples in this episode was probably even more glaring. Rios going back into potential danger gets him a big, passionate goodbye smooch session. Raffi and Seven contemplating a suicidal run doesn’t even merit a meaningful hand squeeze.
This is just one of those things where you have to wonder how so many talented people can come together and produce something so utterly disjointed and disappointing. What the heck happened
I had much the same thoughts as Keith after watching this episode. There were a lot of things to like, and after reading some of the comments here, it does feel like there are reasonable ways to reconcile some of the apparent plot holes. But I also feel like a lot is riding on the finale to stick the landing.
#74
Sure, but I can’t help but think… the 60s, anyone? That was a pretty turbulent time and cause for cynicism, too, and yet for some odd reason they tried to go at it from a different, futurist angle on television then. But whatever.
I mean, if they’re going to continue on this track, they might as well stop calling it Star Trek and instead call it All Your Same Exact Problems and Dire Outcomes… But With Lasers!
@71
“Then that admiral should be relieved of command, or at least be removed from the decision making.”
Are we going to pretend we’ve never had short sided admirals in Star Trek before? Really????
”Come to think of it, this scenario with Janeway making an argument in a courtroom ala “The Measure of a Man,” sounds like far better Star Trek than anything we’ve seen this season. That’s a shame.”
Starfleet was a split second from getting their way and dismantling Data yet you can’t imagine a scenario where they deny Seven, at least a for a bit? Come on. For all we know, she did give such a speech and that is what got Icheb into the academy, but Seven moved on.
Frankly, I’m shocked at this selective memory everyone is having about the Federation in TNG. The Federation does not have racism or sexism or homophobia. It does have much have xenophobia and bias against artificial beings as well as transhumans. This has been established in dozens of episodes and the fact that people are acting like Picard made this up is something that is a shocking case of selective amnesia.
Just off the top of my head:
* The attempt to seize Lal from her father.
* The trial over Data’s personhood.
* Pulaski’s casual racism toward Data
* The Doctor only being given “author’s rights.”
* The attempted genocide of the Borg via Hugh.
* The rejection of the quarter Romulan
* Sisko’s racism toward Nog (which he himself is ashamed of)
.* Miles O’Brian’s hatred of the Cardassians.
* The planned genocide of the Founders.
* The treatment of Doctor Bashir as a genetically engineered being.
* Torres having severe issues growing up due to being a half-Klingon.
* Torres herself having difficulty at Starfleet academy.
* For a nonhuman example, Vulcans constant racism to humans even in the “Take me out to the Holosuit” episode.
Now I’ve seen plenty of these things attacked by fans as out of character for the Federation. However, how many examples have to exist before it is a canonical status that the Federation has issues with xenophobia and transhuman bias? One or two is an oddity, dozens is a pattern.
We know they accepted Icheb and it was something about Seven they had issues with. Maybe it was her pride at identifying at Borg or her confrontational manner. That doesn’t make it her fault, it means that she was unlikely to jump through whatever hoops Icheb did. It’s not remotely bad writing as we see Seven constantly bristle under JANEWAY’s direction let alone a stranger.
It’s very good writing because I can think of a dozen, hundred ways Seven would end up screwed over. Heck, at the end of Voyager, the Federation is iffy about having the MAQUIS crewmembers as members. Let alone a liberated Borg drone with authority issues.
@75 re: the couples. One is a well established couple past the first bloom who have seen each other walking into danger constantly. The other is a couple so in the first bloom of love they have not even consummated said love. There is enough misuse of same sex couples to protest but this was not one. This was established versus maybe never.
“Does killing a couple dozen borg mercenaries have any repercussions to the timeline? Will anybody even pretend to care?”
Yeah, it was rich when Seven of all people said something to the effect of “they’re not people, they’re Borg.” They’ve been Borg for 12 seconds. What are the chances they couldn’t be xBorged at this point? If you need to kill them in defense, justify it by saying “it’s us or them,” not that they’re irretrievably gone.
I think that there are plenty of ways in which they could have expanded upon Seven being denied entry into Starfleet. Honestly, the continuing fallout from it could have been a great arc for the season (Maybe have it be something that impacted her relationship with Raffi, what with Raffi returning to Starfleet in between seasons and all). Ideas like Starfleet thinking that she is still ‘too Borg’ compared to other former drones, or maybe her assuming it was because she was Borg and it actually being because of her well-established willingness to ignore orders could have been very interesting and would have been worth exploring. There are dozens of potentially fascinating ways that this concept and the characters it relates to could have been explored or expanded on.
The problem is that we didn’t get any of that. We can fill in the blanks in our heads as much as we want, but all the show gave us was “Starfleet said no Borg allowed” and that was that. It was basically a throwaway line introducing this concept in the penultimate episode. This should have been introduced earlier and should have been fleshed out far more than it was.
Also, a couple more stray observations: I found it tremendously jarring that this “you would make a good captain” scene came in the direct aftermath of Raffi and Seven teaming up to brutally kill someone. Relating to that, it is also frustrating to me how the whole “those who are assimilated aren’t human anymore” thing only seems to apply to those who aren’t in the opening credits. I’d honestly assumed that the reason why they hadn’t gone full drone with the mercenaries was because they were going to technobabble a way to de-assimilate them (seeing as how two of the people present had been assimilated in the past) in order to preserve some semblance of the timeline.
@74/Mary: “We’re using to seeing this bright, utopian future in Star Trek. Now that future is more cynical. I guess that’s a product of the times we’re living in now.”
You think this show is cynical?? It literally just showed the Borg Queen being talked into changing the Collective’s ways to be kinder and more positive. That’s so optimistic and rosy that even I have a hard time believing it could work.
ST’s future wasn’t originally meant to be utopian, just improved. TOS showed that while things had gotten better in terms of war and racism among humans being eliminated, there were still criminals, rogue captains, interspecies bigots, evil scientists, and the like. TNG was more utopian, but DS9 countered that by bringing back the ambiguity. I’m sure many people at the time found DS9 too cynical and blamed it on the tenor of their times, three decades ago.
This season has been so silly. I keep wanting Picard to be a respected golden age of TV type drama because the acting pedigree of Patrick Stewart demands that, but the writing is constantly disappointing.
I found all the flashbacks to “Victoria-era” Picard family life on the chateau and the slow reveal of Yvette’s tragedy to be tedious. I’m like, just get on with it! I know Robert Picard was “written off” as being away at boarding school, but that seemed lazy and a way to save on not hiring another actor.
It strains credibility that Picard/Musiker/Seven/Tallinn fend off the Borg super soldiers and no one gets killed.
Rios should have just let the weapon in Soong’s hand blow up rather than warn him about it. It could have been problem solved.
I think with all the deaths that have occurred due to the Borg involvement in 2024 that surely this timeline is already diverging from what Picard and team had intended. So much for not stepping on butterflies. But it could be that Q gets his powers back and resets/restores everything to how things should be. Speaking of Q, for all the hype about his return to Star Trek and his importance to this season’s arc, I’m pretty amazed and disappointed that he’s been used so sparingly.
Can’t wait for SNW to serve as a palette cleanser for all of this disappointment!
Independent of everything surrounding how Yvette Picard’s personal tragedy is written, framed, and presented to us, for me the deepest error is who the conversation is with.
This and ENTERING PICARD’S BRAIN! shouldn’t have been Picard & Tallinn scenes, they should be Picard & Guinan scenes.
I’d argue that Elder Picard reconciling himself to his mother’s suicide and the root of his estrangement from his father alongside a younger Guinan is a powerful way to pay off her quote from Best of Both Worlds.
“Our relationship is beyond friends, beyond family” is the sort of thing that comes about when you walk through the deepest layers of someone’s trauma with them.
Knowing what to leave unsaid is a huge part of writing quality material. Dialogue feels hammy and unnatural when characters start giving voice to inner thoughts and concepts that should be subtextual. This episode got that wrong at almost every turn. It’s often a sign of underestimating the intelligence of your audience – “will they get it if we don’t spell it out through painfully awkward exposition?”
It’s quite baffling how they could do such a good job with pacing and dialogue towards the beginning of the season, and that it has fallen apart so utterly by the end despite that foundation. I wonder if it’s a case of too many cooks in the kitchen.
Finally seen the episode – sorry UK here so have to wait for it to appear on Fridays!
Few thoughts….
Locked door – along with Mary, the impression I got from the flashbacks vs. memories vs. overlaid memories was that Yvette was in a frenzied state, established that treatments were often rejected, what do you do to keep her safe – if there’s no drugs in the house, no transport inhibitor, no brig forcefields – I think I’d lock the door overnight as well until I could get help in the morning.
Plotlines/Pacing – I think the biggest issue with this series, as with season 1, is that it’s a story plotted and planned for bingeing, released weekly to build… audience numbers? As fans, our predisposition is to the episodic storytelling of the first 5 series of Trek, so we expect and judge a 10 hour TV movie as a season of episodes, when actually it’s one movie in 10 acts (or 30 I suppose) – and that if we watch it back in a binge, we might find all the issues with ‘this plot thread was dropped now picked up again’ diminishes as we watch Plots A,B,C,D & E intertwine and come to resolution.
Nature of the Time Loop – as Chris suggested, Yesteryear would seem to be the model – perhaps the UFP future is actually the aberration, and the confederation is the right one!
The Borg are Lonely – I’m not adverse to them trying to humanise the Borg – it’s no different to David Mack postulating that they were a lone Caeliar on a delta quadrant world that was exceptionally hungry for resources – only this time instead of raw materials, its affection they want. Certainly I can see the links back to Borg portrayals in the past – not least the episode I’ve mentioned before when Seven recreated the collective with the crashed drones – if you see the Borg as a lonely child, rather than a rampaging menace of a rapist, it does but a different spin onto things.
Last Episode – I have to say, I am looking forward to next week… but then I’ve enjoyed the whole season – sorry!
@87/ Transceiver – That’s one thing that I’ve noticed with both of the live-action series is that the scripts at the top of the season seem better polished than those at the end. It’s been true of both seasons of Picard and at least 2 out of 4 seasons of Discovery. To me it suggests that the writers aren’t getting enough development time, and it’s a shame, because in a tightly serialized format, failing to stick the ending can sour even the things that were done well at the beginning.
Frankly, though, I think that a single sticky note in the writers’ room reading “Tense battle scenes are a lousy time to have characters exposit about their personal issues” would go a long way.
@85/garreth: “Rios should have just let the weapon in Soong’s hand blow up rather than warn him about it. It could have been problem solved.”
I liked it that he didn’t do that. He took the high road like a Starfleet captain should.
Besides, Soong isn’t the ultimate problem; Q is. Get rid of Soong and Q might try another option, one the characters know nothing about and have no way to prevent. Better the devil you know, etc.
“Speaking of Q, for all the hype about his return to Star Trek and his importance to this season’s arc, I’m pretty amazed and disappointed that he’s been used so sparingly.”
I’d imagine that’s due to budget, or to DeLancie’s availability, or to his age and health.
Anyone that is sincerely attempting to canonize what the writers have done in this season….. Please.
I was waiting for something to fix everything until episode 9 broke my soul.
These writers don’t know Star Trek and definitely do not know anything about TNG.
I re-watched all of TNG twice during lock-down, once alone and once with my (ex girlfriend… still dating at that time)
Are you telling me nobody in the writing room could just binge watch?
Or perhaps like the TECH people for TNG’s scripts; the writers would write TECH and then people that knew how to make situations make sense over-looked the script and wrote in things that worked and made sense.
Why didn’t they have a small panel of people using Memory Alpha even… just to make sure ideas they introduce didn’t break 300 other ones that already exist.
Or ignore When Picard and Guinan met making it just weird now. They even wrote Q in to say “That’s right you hadn’t met yet” Which is just a slap to the face;
How many things can they break before as a fan you just hurt inside?
I feel this is something that would have been an excellent story arc for Season Eight of Voyager but it is something Seven is well over since it happened decades earlier. She’s happily assimilated (hehe) into being a Fenris Ranger, if not being their actual leader from all we’ve seen. It’s just filling in some backstory on how she got from Point A (Voyager) to Point Z (Ranger).
#78, 79
Yes, I would like to imagine that the Federation, after a devastating war that strained its own morality, and after numerous corrupt admirals we saw throughout TNG, might reform and come out on the other side a better society. But that’s not what we have here. It’s basically the same, if not worse. And more’s the pity.
I also don’t like how this again puts Seven in the role of victim. Icheb also for that matter. They went through hell in the Delta Quadrant, only to find more hell awaiting them in the Alpha. It’s depressing, again on a grim Victorian level, and I don’t watch Star Trek for that.
Instead, they could’ve simply had written it to where she didn’t want to join Starfleet. She’d already served for several years on a Starfleet ship. Why not, there are other things to do. Not everyone wants to wear the uniform and make a career of it.
I don’t know how this opinion lines up with most others but on a episode-by-episode basis, I am enjoying this season a lot better than the last. That said, last season had a stronger and more coherent arc.
So, it’s hard to say which I like better. I’m enjoying this season more, but last season was definitely written better.
On another note–one more week until SNW premieres!! I’m so excited!! I already decided to watch Picard first. Because I have a feeling I’ll be disappointed and I’d like to go out on a high note since I’m anticipating that I’ll really like SNW.
Seven was rejected.
Icheb was not.
I think it’s important to note that.
I figured that Seven was not in Starfleet because she’d never shown the slightest interest in it (Icheb was shown studying for the Academy; Seven always appeared indifferent). But I suppose that it makes sense that a former Borg Drone, having lost her found family on Voyager after their return to the Alpha Quadrant, might at least entertain the idea of signing up with a quasi-military organisation just to feel that she had some place to belong. Even so, I would guess that her interest was tepid, and it would be perfectly in character for her to walk away out of spite the moment some puffed up Admiral raised objections.
Personally, I don’t like the apparent expectation of this season that everyone should just want to be in Starfleet. One of the only Jake Sisko moments that I truly appreciated was when he told his dad that he just wasn’t interested.
#96
Ah, so you’re suggesting that Starfleet did eventually learn their lesson? I can go along with that.
If only Icheb hadn’t been fridged. Alas, back to grimness.
Depends on the level of “up” in the bipolar. It’s less a case feel good / feel bad and more a case of energy levels. A lot of suicides take place on more of an upswing even with “regular” Depression, because it seems clear to the Depressed person that they’re a problem or an impossible situation, but now have the wherewithal to do something. In Bipolar, the up phase can leave you more determined to commit suicide (you don’t necessarily feel good, but have a mind that can work at overcoming barriers), or it can bring on its own delusions. They can be scary, or just dangerous: I went to school with someone who jumped off a bridge not because he was trying to kill himself, but his brain convinced him that he was perfectly safe and could fly.
What if they also aren’t in to treating people without their consent? What if previous treatments have tried and failed? People act like drugs/medication are a miracle intervention that if people just took them, they’d be fine. Even now, getting closer to a century past the writing of “we’ve cured that” a lot of people don’t realize that just like there can be antibiotic-resistant infections and chemo-resistant cancer, there can be treatment-resistant MI, and it has nothing to do with patient willingness to get better.
Someone on Twitter pointed out that as shown onscreen (I don’t know if novelizations do better), the Federation is a hell-place to be neurodivergent. The messages it sends on that topic during the TNG/DS9 era border on the “cure-at-any-cost” or “institutionalized” as the only two options. It might be that all mental difference, whether neurodivergence or sserious MI get treated that way to the point that people will do anything to hide it from an ignorant general public. Maybe that’s one facet of humanity that doesn’t fundamentally change: it doesn’t matter what you have to go through (side-effects, personality changes, health risks) so long as you conform enough that no one else has to spend the least bit of mental effort to accommodate you (no matter how much you must for “normal” them). Looked at with a critical eye, IDIC is more “IDIC (within these acceptable parameters, of course).” Who determines those parameters? Aye, that’s always been the rub.
Uh huh. If you can’t lock away the implements of destruction (seriously, suicide hotlines will recommend locking knives, drugs and chemicals away, at least during the crisis, especially if you live alone), sometimes locking the person away temporarily will prevent the inevitable. If someone had locked the door on the guy I mentioned above, he wouldn’t have been at yhe bridge that night, thinking he could fly. There would have been more opportunities to get help. Barriers/obstacles work.
As for the romantic imagery, if this is being pulled from Picard’s memory, it’s likely because that’s how he coped. Memory isn’t like a photograph. Our brains aren’t hard drives. We know he prefers the Romantic (think Byron, not Harlequin Inc.) to the grimdark. Even Dixon Hill was sanitized Noir. Should have they done a better job of making clear the distinction between a retrieved memory and ugly reality? Probably. But it doesn’t mean that if you could download Picard’s brain you’d find a version that contradicts what was shown. If people can recall in detail a day when they were lost at Disneyland as a child despite never having been to Disneyland, then it’s not hard to belive that a child steeped in Romanticism and fairytales would come up with that kind of framing for what is obviously the worst thing to ever happen in their life.
@99 – Based on what we can gather of Picard’s household, and in particular of his mother’s preferences, they chose to live a private life in which they addressed their issues with minimal if any outside involvement. Picard was most certainly old enough to be enrolled in a proper school, for example, and likewise, his mother could have been seeking professional help. I would assume she was simply resistant to seeking treatment, which is a common enough view of mental illness. I see more sense in exploring the relatively simple reasons she would be resistant than I do in trying to infer statements on future perspectives on mental illness.
I’d also argue that his mother clearly WANTED a romantic suicide straight from a Victorian novel but the show does a decent job of showing what a completely awful thing it was that utterly traumatized Picard.
I tend to not take things so literally, so black-and-white. E.g., Picard says he recalls Maurice locking Yvette in her room, and young Jean Luc let her out that fateful night. This does not mean to me, as I interpret it, that these things happened exactly this way. Picard’s memory is perhaps fuzzy. Also, in a literary sense, it could all be symbolic. Locking Yvette up may be a metaphor for the family’s sense of helplessness, or maybe a family’s avoidance of the issue. Jean Luc unlocking the door could symbolize a child’s unfounded but profound sense of guilt when a parent dies. I usually take a lot of grief when I posit such things. People seems to feel bound by events as portrayed. I think this is one of the beauties of literature and movies – it is open to interpretation. How boring it would be if everyone agreed on a uniform interpretation.
Once I posited that the world did not end in the 1998 Canadian film “Last Night.” I suggested it was actually the end of the protagonist’s self imprisonment, the end of the solitary emotionless world he had created for himself. People in the forum I was on generally reacted with ridicule and disdain. Oh well, I like art the way I see it. Even sometimes, if it was not as the artist himself/herself intended.
It hasn’t been perfect, but I’ve enjoyed this season immensely. Jurati has been a definite high point, and I’m loving the Raffi/Seven dynamic. Obviously Q has to be a big part of the finale but I hope we get one last scene with Guinan – Ito Aghayere was so much more fascinating than Whoopi ever was.
@79: I think there’s a certain amount of viewers assuming that the episodes featuring those events “resolved” the problem, and that bringing it back up is the setting backsliding.
Interesting that we’ve never actually seen those tunnels in the 25th-century winery. I imagine Picard had them filled with concrete as soon as he took over.
Yvette was making the same astronomical mistake described in this cartoon:
@101/ C.T. Phipps: Okay, admittedly you can rationalize it as Yvette having an overly romantic notion of her own status as a tormentented artist or whatever, but the director didn’t need to go along with this framing. The whole thing is filmed from the perspective of young Jean-Luc; seeing his mother like that should not be a beauty shot.
Anyways, this is probably one of the most frustrating episodes of Star Trek that I’ve ever seen because I absolutely loved the resolution to Jurati’s arc but just despised the suicide plot with the heat of a thousand suns. Like, I just hope that the single most interesting thing that they’ve done with the Borg in 30 years doesn’t get buried underneath the cruft of the rest of this season.
I don’t so much have a problem with them revealing new things about Picard’s past (certainly Star Trek: Picard is the place to do it), but in this case it probably would’ve been better to do this without the flashbacks. One of the rare occasions that telling instead of showing would’ve been more appropriate. Because when you’re in the middle of an action story, a “ticking clock” as it were, revelatory flashbacks tend to slow things down. Dialogue, instead, can do the job while keeping things in the moment, without breaking the suspense.
Case in point: Return of the Jedi. That’s a movie with a third act containing a lot of cutting between battle scenes and the more intimate struggle of a son trying to save his father’s soul. But one thing it doesn’t include are any flashbacks to Anakin’s childhood and to the time when he turned evil. It’s all dialogue between characters.
The story with Yvette was badly handled. Which is a shame since it’s a prevalent issue today. But instead of shining light on the issue, they just created more confusion.
The flux of the story should have been the suicide but all everyone is talking about is the fact she was locked in a room. For me, it overshadows the main issue–why did she refuse treatment. Why did she kill herself? But now all I see (on Twitter) is how locking her up was abusing and the show dodged what should’ve been a domestic violence story.
The thing that unsettled me–to the point that I tried to deny that it happened the way we saw it–was Picard found his mother’s body?? That’s traumatic for anyone but a young boy? I think we could’ve done without that (come to mention it, we could’ve done without the locked room)
Did they just completely drop the Kore/genetic engineering plot line? Why spend so much effort on showing a scientist create endless versions of an imperfect clone (and name them all after the same mythological figure), only to totally ignore all that plot building?
I hope this season ends on a cliff-hanger a la “Best of Both Worlds” and the storyline continues next season, because otherwise there’s no way this gets resolved anywhere close to neatly.
@105/Gareth: “Yvette was making the same astronomical mistake described in this cartoon:”
Yes, thank you. That annoyed me too. Most naked-eye stars are within a few hundred light years.
Along the same lines, I hate it when movies/shows/stories have characters on a planet thousands of light years away do the thing where they point to a star in the sky and say “My home, Earth, is around that star.” Sol would only be visible to the naked human eye within about 80 light years, give or take.
Two theories for end of the season, both trying to explain Q’s sudden possible mortality:
(Both hinge on the fact that the Stargazer Queen from Ep 1 is the 400 year evolution of Jurati and the Confederation Borg Queen)
A) Picard blowing up the Stargazer created a time paradox. This caused damage to the fabric of the universe, effecting the Q continuum. Qs loss of power is the result of that harm. He goes back to normal when Picard returns to the Stargazer and doesn’t self destruct.
B) Q has stuck his neck out for humanity/vouched for them enough times in the past, despite the rest of the continuum not agreeing. After the continuum saw how the Federation lost their way by attempting genocide against the Founders, abandoned the Romulans, and synth ban, the continuum has soured completely on humanity. When Picard tried to kill the new, evolved Borg with talking, the continuum had enough. Our Q intervened to give Picard another chance. In the meantime, the rest of the Q punished our own Q by making him mortal. Once again, this gets righted when Picard makes a welcome first contact with the nu-Borg in the finale.
I feel this is one of those divisive episodes for a lot of people because quite a lot of the audience (myself for example) have relatives who deal with mental illness, often refusing to seek treatment or take their medication, and also have relatives or loved ones who have either attempted or actually carried out suicide. It hits a VERY raw and underrepresented subject and either is something that resonates with you (as it did me) or is something that infuriates you (as it’s done others).
For a lot of people, Yvette’s Victorian novel framing aside, the issue is a reality for people in the 21st century.
But should it be for the 24th? Probably not. That still doesn’t mean it didn’t hit VERY close to home and VERY powerfully.
The thing about a serialized show like Picard is that there aren’t really any bad episodes. Certainly nothing as atrocious as Spock’s Brain, Fair Haven or Threshold or anything mediocre and forgettable like The Vengeance Factor, Melora or Unnatural Selection. All nine episodes this season have been filled with memorable character moments and have been otherwise perfectly watchable and even entertaining.
And yet, what a mess of a season. Plot-wise, it’s been anything but smooth.
Story threads that should have been pivotal are tossed aside and brought back with no rhyme or reason (Renee Picard being the worst offender; you could barely call her a character). The 10 hour movie approach had similar effects in the first season (the artificial invader being that season’s misfire). It just doesn’t work.
It also affects what should have been a natural dramatic arc. Usually, the penultimate episode is where the season’s themes and emotional climax come to a head, before wrapping everything up in the finale. Watching this episode, I get no sense whatsoever of rising stakes and what should be an emotional rollercoaster.
If this were your average 120 minute movie, this would be the point where Picard activates the ship’s self-destruct and surrenders to the Borg Queen on First Contact. Here, we’re getting a pretty tame firefight involving a Borgified militia controlled by Soong.
Yeah, Picard finally facing what really happened as a 12 year old works well (and as I’ve said before, it really puts the tea scene with his aging mother on Where no One has Gone Before into perspective).
But it still feels completely disconnected from the rest of the plot. Picard’s issues have little to nothing to do with what’s going on. He’s been barely present on at least two prior episodes. I’m guessing part of this had to do with COVID and a desire to minimize Stewart’s presence on the soundstages. But the writing and plotting really hasn’t juggled the loose pieces remotely well.
And I still can’t see an endgame. Is it even possible to wrap everything up with Renee, defeat the Borg, deal with Soong, restore Q’s powers, restore the timeline and travel back to the 25th century? Because I don’t think it’s possible to do all that and still do it well. Either they cliffhanger the finale (which would be interesting), or it’s likely to be a messy resolution.
It’s just frustrating, because there are plenty of good scenes throughout. The image of Yvette Picard hanging limp from the ceiling alone is a landmark moment for Trek. We finally get some pathos with Seven as she regains her Borg implants. Hell, they manage to reach a potential understanding with Borg, which might actually grow to a relationhip in the future (something Guinan herself implied it might one day happen at the end of Q Who). And unlike Janeway’s one-time bargain on Scorpion, this shows promise.
@111: It’s a quite common mistake in pop culture – Felicity Smoak makes it in “Arrow”, which is why her daughter’s fighting alias is “Blackstar”.
@112/M – The impression that I got was that whatever’s happening to Q must be happening to the whole continuum; otherwise, why didn’t someone else show up when Guinan opened the bottle? At this point, I suspect that whatever it is will have to be the main plot for season 3, because it seems an awfully big thing to just drop in the final episode.
I’m also not entirely convinced that the masked Queen is Jurati, even though it seems logical. Why did she say “Look up?” I can’t recall Agnes having heard Jean-Luc relate that story. I think that she might be Renée.
@115/Gareth Wilson: “It’s a quite common mistake in pop culture”
That’s exactly what’s so frustrating — how widespread astronomical illiteracy is, when it’s so very easy to do a little reading and find these things out. I see so many astronomy mistakes in fiction that could be avoided with two minutes or less on Wikipedia.
If a writer of a story set on Earth said that, say, the Eiffel Tower was right across the Ganges River from Antarctica, that would be caught right away and would never be allowed to reach the public. But comparably extreme errors of elementary fact are made about outer space all the time, even though the correct information is not at all difficult to find. Space is a real place, as real as anyplace on Earth and well-understood by astronomers, yet fiction far too often treats it as a magical fairyland with arbitrary geography and physics. It’s frustratingly lazy.
@113/CT Phipps
That’s a shame too. Yvette’s story is so touching and so prevalent today, it shouldn’t be so controversial.
That said, it probably would’ve been controversial no matter how it was presented.
To be honest, I find it perfectly plausible that Seven of Nine – a (technically-ex) Borg who still took outspoken pride in being Borg even after her deprogramming and tended to regard Federation mores with a certain disrespect (if not outright disdain) during her career on the USS Voyager (A starship a long, long way from the Federation whose captain regarded her as something of an adoptive sister/daughter and therefore tended to cut her a LOT of slack) – would have serious trouble getting into Starfleet, especially if she refused to undergo qualification at Starfleet Academy (which, especially after the Dominion War, would almost certainly have experience of inducting & retraining older recruits, as well as training brand new cadets).
Given that Seven of Nine has a long history of high-handedness, I can imagine her casually dismissing this compromise between immediately commissioning a somewhat maverick personality and simply dismissing her application outright (with the training being regarded more as a probationary period that would let Starfleet know how Seven of Nine handled subordination to senior officers NOT part of the Voyager crew, as well as social interactions with individuals outside that social circle).
In all honesty I’m not even certain Starfleet made a mistake, in this case: Seven of Nine/Ms. Hansen would undoubtedly be happier in a more rough-and-ready environment than a (peacetime) Starfleet crew.
I’ve been rolling with this season, enjoying the good and largely ignoring the bad, but this last episode was just not for me. Like last season’s finale, it has actually lessoned my opinion of the rest of the season so far. It will take one heck of a finale come Thursday to turn this thing back around.
One would also like to note that I’m equal parts horrified by the fate of Madam Picard and entirely surprised – the Picards seem to be Good People, but emotional intelligence does not seem to be their forte.
I am somewhat ashamed to admit that part of my response to her self-destruction as a certain relief that she had not been somehow murdered or driven to suicide by her husband; while Maurice Picard bears a great deal of culpability, he seems to have made his mistakes without malice and in all sincerity.
I know that the topic has been discussed a good deal already, but has it yet been suggested that Yvette Picard was receiving treatment for her mental illness, but that the treatment (as is the case with a number of medical treatments in real life) had reached the point of diminishing returns?
It’s possible that Madam Picard had received the standard therapies, but that she had begun to build up a resistance to those treatments to the point where they weren’t very effective: were this to come at a time when Next Generation treatments were still in development, the Picard family may well have been reluctant to countenance more untested or esoteric treatments.
Were those treatments very close to a breakthrough, Federation medical authorities might well allow that she would remain in the custody of her family, rather than close supervision – which might actually exacerbate her mental illness, since the expression of same seems to have paranoia tendencies – in a home environment which would reduce the risk of her suffering an incident.
Something of a gamble, but probably not an immense risk by Federation standards – given the existence of transporter technology, which could bring a crisis team to Chateau Picard ASAP (and it’s far from impossible that Robert Picard was sent to boarding school in part because – being somewhat older than Jean Luc, but still a boy – he knew of his mother’s condition, had difficulty coping with it and therefore made it more difficult for her to cope with).
All of which would, of course, set up a classic ‘Perfect Storm’ scenario where a number of variables had to fall out just so to result in what I hope would be a very rare event in the 24th century (At least outside the ranks of a defeated Klingon Great House) – in this case Yvette Picard’s mental illness finally coming to a crisis at a time when only her husband and innocent son were present (and given the nature of the Star Trek galaxy, it’s perfectly possible that poor Maurice was offscreen calling for help, only to find that there was some wider crisis sucking up all available medical personnel, turning his desperation move into a Classic Tragedy).
This is, it must be admitted, the rough sketch of a scenario, but it does suggest that there are other possibilities than that Yvette Picard was refused or personally refused treatment.
Also that Robert Picard is going to have a profoundly unhappy homecoming (and for the record, I think the production was wise to keep the cast list down for this particular three part tragedy – since this keeps the focus on Picard’s relationship with his mother, heightens the sense of an idyllic childhood that makes the eventual tragedy so much more awful and helps make that tragedy possible without showing the parties concerned as horrifically careless or stupid.
@119/ED: “Given that Seven of Nine has a long history of high-handedness, I can imagine her casually dismissing this compromise between immediately commissioning a somewhat maverick personality and simply dismissing her application outright”
I think that interpretation makes a lot of sense.
@122. ChristoperLBennett: Sir, such flattery will get you everywhere, but most particularly into someone’s good books. (-;
Sorry for the edits on this, dear moderator.
@105/Gareth, 111 CLB – Yvette was unwell and waxing poetic, and even though she was talking about stars visible to the naked eye, she isn’t wrong, or at least her poetic liberty with distance and time, and the sort of blanket statement she made about all stars is at the very least based in science, albeit mixed with a very heavy helping of romanticization.
The majority of stars visible to the naked eye are in the nearer range, several in single digits of light years, but the furthest naked eye visible star is a large magnitude star in the neighborhood of 4000 light years away.
Take Romulus, for example, which was destroyed by a supernova over 1000 light years away from Earth – that event would not be visible from Earth via telescope or naked eye for over 1000 years. Even changes in our nearest neighboring stars can’t be seen for over 4 years after their occurrence! In a reality in which we’ve seen dozens of stars die over the span of thousands of hours, most of them within Federation space, at least the concept of Yvette’s statement is undoubtedly true, if not the figures themselves.
Instead of removing me from the episode, Yvette’s commentary caused me to ponder the existence of two types of star charts in a space faring society – one of the visible galactic neighborhood as seen from Earth at present time, and another for astrogation purposes which depicts the same region as it actually is – there would be a large amount of overlap between the two, obviously, but the earthbound map would be increasingly less useful as the distance from Earth expands.
What took me out of the episode, is the idea that an emergency combat hologram would be programmed to feel pain, pause in battle when struck, or really be impacted by incoming strikes/inertia in any way – surely selective density could be implemented so it could deal physical damage while not receiving any – it should just be an unflinching killing machine.
For all those freaked out that a 19th Century acting, seemingly bi-polar, Mama Picard doesn’t know her astronomy…Science was not her thing. Imagination, fun, playing, art etc were.
not everyone is in Fleet of Stars and not everyone is a scientist. (Yeah Jake Sisco! artist)
@124/Transceiver: “Take Romulus, for example, which was destroyed by a supernova over 1000 light years away from Earth – that event would not be visible from Earth via telescope or naked eye for over 1000 years.”
Where are you getting that figure from? The star was Romulus’s own, as we now know, and Star Trek Star Charts (which is the template modern shows’ graphic artists use for their onscreen maps) doesn’t put Romulus nearly that far away, since it has to be close enough for 2150s Earth to have had a war with them.
Besides, statistically speaking, the odds that any given star would happen to have gone supernova with as tiny a sliver of time as a few thousand years before the present are infinitesimal. (Although it does tend to happen an awful lot in Trek — Fabrina, Minara, Beta Niobe. Maybe the Q were having some internal strife that millennium?)
As for the Elnor Combat Hologram, yes, I had a moment where I thought, “Why are you dodging fire? Just go intangible.”
@126/CLB – Oh? I thought I recalled Romulus being more on the distant side. I guess I’m out of date on that info or just mistaken. Agreed – should be an infinitesimally rare occurrence.
On the hologram, come to think of it – in the first episode of this season, didn’t we see a Rios based combat hologram, and didn’t it actually go intangible for tactical purposes in that fight?
Having it be the Romulan sun that went supernova, rather than Hobus, is narratively tidy, though it does raise the question of why the early Romulans would choose to settle around around a star that, presumably, was at the end of its lifetime and had a high chance of exploding within the next few thousand years.
@128/Iacomina: As I mentioned, Trek has had multiple supernovae of stars with inhabited planets, which shouldn’t happen in real life. Presumably, in the Trekverse, there’s a kind of supernova that happens to main-sequence stars.
Alternatively, sometimes supernovae in Trek are artificially induced. The first two Picard tie-in novels both contain vague implications that the supernova might have been artificial, which has led some to wonder if that was what the producers intended.
Anyway, the question applies whether it’s Romulus’s own star or one in the vicinity. Supernova effects can be devastating for dozens of light-years around, and we know the supernova was close enough to destroy Romulus. So either way, if it were a conventional supernova-ready supergiant, the Romulans would’ve had good reason not to settle in the vicinity.
@124/Transceiver & @126/CLB:
Re the behavior of the Elnor combat hologram: there was dialogue in the first season — in the episode where the many holograms of Rios are convened by Raffi to reconstruct the secret from his Ibn Majid days — about the system being programmed by reproducing mental characteristics of a live subject. I think that is what was being referenced here. The hologram would be designed to carry out its function by emulating some version of the behavior and thought process of of the original subject.
i haven’t read all the comments, and just finished catching up prior to the finale, but what i’ve been wondering is whether Q’s comment that sending Picard back was for a penance is actually his (Q’s), not Picards. I
@128 Unless it was artificially induced to explode. One of the tie-in novels, The Last Best Hope, explores this a bit.
Handwavium is a thing in Star Trek. There’s no such thing as subspace, as far as we know, or 90% of the anomalies that afflict warp drive. So the Romulan sun about to explode due to, I dunno, Singularity emissions from he Romulan black hole drives is as believable as anything else.
I just re-watched this episode… I found it much more powerful the second time, watching it with a clear understanding of the narrative structure.
I suspect this whole season is like that: better on re-watch.
To those wondering if the Kore thread was just dropped by the writers, I’m guessing we’ll see Adam Soongh die in the finale, perhaps sacrificing himself in order to preserve his creation/legacy (Kore), and Kore will become the progenitor of the future more virtuous generations of Soongs. That might actually turn out to be the fulcrum on which the dark/light futures pivot, not Renee Picard.
@129 I’d be willing to bet a very large sum of money that JJ Abrams did not stop to think whether the supernova made sense scientifically.
@130 I think it’s also worth remembering that this is the Confederation La Sirena. I had the nasty thought that maybe they have this kind of holographic capture technology as essentially a torture device. They execute somebody, and then can re-create that person who would be forever trapped in that moment of terror.
@136/Chase: “I’d be willing to bet a very large sum of money that JJ Abrams did not stop to think whether the supernova made sense scientifically.”
No, but neither did Rik Vollaerts (“For the World is Hollow…”), Joyce Muskat (“The Empath”), or Jean Lissette Aroeste (“All Our Yesterdays”) when they had stars with inhabited planets go supernova.
Or Krypton.
:)
@138/C.T. Phipps: Most continuities show the planet Krypton itself exploding, not its primary star.
@126. ChristopherLBennett: Could the ECH have been dodging, rather than turning insubstantial, as a way of keeping enemy attention on HIM rather than focussing on those members of Team Picard who can be shot?
I cut Raffi and Seven some slack because they kissing at the end is meant to show them getting back together.
Woo, I can comment on this one :D I actually missed the entire first season (which we watched last year a little while after it came out), and most of this one because we had waited until now to binge the season (well, we’ve more or less been watching one a day) so I’ve enjoyed the articles and commentary but haven’t discussed.
Anyway, I also agree with the general sense that this season has just been very eye-rolly. Is this whole thing really just because Q is upset that Picard doesn’t want to date Laris (which is the whole framing device this seems to be pointing to)? Does Picard NEED this weird Victorian traumatic backstory to explain why he is driven and perhaps not particularly emotionally available (can’t he just be…not that into that?). Sad thing is I actually LOVE Q so I was excited for this season but it just doesn’t seem to be working for me, nor does any of the Soong/Kore stuff.
It doesn’t help that I’m not super into time loops and all that so I’ve completely lost the thread of what is impacting the timeline and what isn’t, and while I’m banking on Jurati being the Queen from our future, then of course that puts is in one of those scenarios where they were required to go back in time to cause it. And honestly I was hoping for more time in the future, not the 21st century I already know.
I DO really like the idea of the Borg evolving because I’d had a similar thought as the show progressed – there probably are plenty of people who would WANT to be part of a collective, especially if instead of drab uniformity it’s more about embracing differences and the sum being greater than the parts, etc. Sadly I guess I’m just a bit skeptical that speeches would actually work when the other party is so bent on domination…but I always love a good redemption arc.
Agreed that Elnor is just so utterly wasted in this season.