Picards story started in Encounter at Farpoint, Which is why this analogy doesn’t work. Burnham is Tom Paris.
Third rewatch, not counting the dozens of times I’ve rewatched some of the key scenes today. Still incredible.
The difference is, DSC is trying to shoehorn a PIC-like main character into a traditional ship-based setting. It just doesn't work.
I'm talking about the Burnham ep 3 of Discovery vs. Picard ep 1 of Picard. Michael Burnham has little in common as a person with Tom Paris.
???? I only bought the first one (digital) and it was $4.99 !! How'd you get such a good deal?? oh never mind... I see that Amazon has discounted the first two already. I backed off from getting the 2nd one due to the price... shouldda followed my own advice and waited. Picked up the 2nd one now. ($1.99)
All the immediate rewatching seems odd to me. I gotta let it marinate for a few days before dipping back in for another taste.
I think -- I think -- after Data died, Maddox was trying to see if he could create another android like Data or even improve upon him. I think he made it pretty far along when the Federation banned any further development of "synths", so Maddox went into hiding to continue his research. I think out of that came Dahj and Soji.
If they do the whole "ashamed and regretful of his own unchecked hubris" thing with Maddox, I'll be really disappointed.
I feel like those are very, very broad similarities that you could apply to countless main characters. Star Trek heroes are seldom wrong, especially Picard. But even when Picard is the smartest guy in the room (which is most of the time), he's humble. Burnham comes across as smug. But that's just my read on it and I really hope it's due to hidden bias.
That seems very plausible. I’ve been trying to see where the “positronic neuron” from Data would come from, that Maddox would need to create Dahj’s brain. On the one hand, it seems obvious that Daystrom would have one already. Data was cooperating with Maddox, and would have likely volunteered bits of himself for study. On the other hand, maybe positronic neurons aren’t detachable, so he couldn’t get one. Could the Romulans, in sweeping up the Scimitar after its destruction and the E’s departure, have come across one by luck? A microscopic piece of the exploded Data in the debris, detectable by its positronic signature? Seems that could be how the Romulans initially reached out to Maddox.
After losing Lal, I could see him trying again and contacting Maddox because he had done more research on positronic brains than anyone else. It’s possible that the twins were only completed after Data’s death. So I figure they only got so much done before he died and Maddox was finally able to complete them afterwards. Or it wasn’t really going anywhere and Data has moved on, then his death stirred on Maddox to finish them in order for some part of Data to live on.
But it still doesn’t work. Because Picard as a character doesn’t start in Picard, and Burnham does not start in episode 3. Both characters only work by contrasting, and Burnham has so little to contrast with (which is part of what makes it hard for some viewers to empathise with her, especially when she is so tightly focused on and is generally presented as something of a Mary Poppins.) and makes her arc very truncated. As I said...she is Tom Paris. Imagine the first season of Voyager focused so tightly on him that we don’t even know more than a few other characters have names (let’s say...Janeway, Tuvok, maybe B’Ellana, and definitely Harry Kim, as he’s a ginger wig away from being Tilly.) would it have worked? One of the things DSC has improved is by remembering the Trek milieu has always to some degree worked on ensemble, certainly it’s most successful iterations did (the films and TNG).
Martian and Lunar settlement may be largely underground for all we know. The terraforming could be to make it easier to grow crops, allow for better thermal insulation, etc., but that may be it.
The evidence from the first episode suggests the "rogue synths" weren't really self-aware themselves, doesn't it?
It is. I found Picard to be insufferably arrogant many a time. And the episode where he is forced to face the face that he is often insufferably arrogant shows us that. I don't see that arrogance in Burnham.
I could see Data physically putting one inside Lal to grow. That could be what he was doing at the beginning of The Offspring. Dahj/Soji May have Lal in them. The twins thing also springs to mind, as Data/Lore may have been closer together than we thought. B4 throws a spanner in that, but always did.