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Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 1x08 - "Broken Pieces"

Rate Episode 1x08 "Broken Pieces"

  • 10 - Fenris Rangers

    Votes: 57 24.1%
  • 9

    Votes: 94 39.7%
  • 8

    Votes: 48 20.3%
  • 7

    Votes: 19 8.0%
  • 6

    Votes: 8 3.4%
  • 5

    Votes: 6 2.5%
  • 4

    Votes: 1 0.4%
  • 3

    Votes: 1 0.4%
  • 2

    Votes: 1 0.4%
  • 1 - Power Rangers

    Votes: 2 0.8%

  • Total voters
    237
Nor in my experience.

And, honestly, there's the entertainment factor here. Given a choice between a show where all the characters talk very earnestly and "professionally" all the time, and shows where the dialogue is witty and clever and characters can be wry and sarcastic and ironic sometimes, I'll take the latter most any day.

I like dialogue with a touch of flair and style. "I'm done killing people" is way more fun, and in character for Jurati, than some dreadfully sincere plea for forgiveness. Much less on-the-nose as far as dialogue goes.
 
I thought it was Rios in the drawing and perhaps Beautiful Flower drew it.
That's what Rios told us, yes: that Beautiful Flower sketched a picture of him and Jana while they were all having dinner. It is clearly a younger Rios in the sketch, to my eyes.

How Oh knew the visitors aboard the ibn Majid were synths is unclear - maybe the Zhat Vash were already onto them before they made contact with the ibn Majid? Maybe Beautiful Flower told the captain, seeing no reason to keep it secret, and the captain included it in his report...but if that were the case, there'd have been no reason not to also tell his first officer, who clearly didn't know, so that seems unlikely. 'Tis a mystery.
 
Just had another thought:

Why didn't the Zhat Vash try to kill Data, Lore and Dr. Soong while they were alive? And why didn't they go after Maddox earlier?
 
I'll bet you he looks exactly like Data/Lore. (Maybe that's what tipped off commodore oh to the fact the two ambassadors must be Synths).
I also had that thought. But Data was pretty famous. Odds are, if Beautiful Flower looked like him, someone on the ibn Majid would have clocked the resemblance and commented on it, and Rios as first officer would have heard about it. But, stranger things have happened, I guess.

Just had another thought:

Why didn't the Zhat Vash try to kill Data, Lore and Dr. Soong while they were alive? And why didn't they go after Maddox earlier?
I think this was covered by what Agnes told us. Data wasn't seen by the Zhat Vash as the tipping point in himself, he was seen by them as a warning. Destroying Data wasn't really an objective for them, although I daresay they've have done it if they ever got close enough. But their objective was to prevent even more sophisticated synthetic lifeforms being developed. So rather than focusing on Data - who would have been pretty hard for them to get at, given his posting on the Enterprise and the political situation at the time, not to mention that destroying one android would not have solved the root problem of continued technological advance - they instead focused their efforts on infiltrating Starfleet. It took time to get Oh in place and for her to rise through the ranks to a position of influence, but as soon as she was in a position to take decisive action, she did so, comprehensively. And in one fell swoop achieved her ultimate objective: the prohibition of all research and development of synthetic life.

Maddox then went into hiding, which is why they hadn't taken him out before now - the deal they were making with Bjayzl proves that he was still on their hit list. He just wasn't a top priority, and they seem to be a fairly small cabal, they can't be everywhere.

Soong they'd have struggled to get at for similar reasons: he was in hiding for years, plus he was on the wrong side of the Neutral Zone, from a Romulan perspective.
 
I've got a thought:

How come life-altering super technology that would change the narrative forever in Star Trek never gets brought up again? :p
 
And, honestly, there's the entertainment factor here. Given a choice between a show where all the characters talk very earnestly and "professionally" all the time, and shows where the dialogue is witty and clever and characters can be wry and sarcastic and ironic sometimes, I'll take the latter most any day.

I like dialogue with a touch of flair and style. "I'm done killing people" is way more fun, and in character for Jurati, than some dreadfully sincere plea for forgiveness. Much less on-the-nose as far as dialogue goes.

That's why I'll take TOS dialogue over most TNG dialogue anyday. It may have been sparse at times and light on the science but at least Kirk and Spock didn't spend five minutes arguing over how to best realign the main deflector to emit chronitons at a singularity to reverse the flow of time and reroute emergency warp plasma conduits to the Heisenberg compensator.
 
A matter of taste, perhaps. I don't find this kinda dialogue sit-com-ish, just naturalistic. People swear, make flippant remarks, indulge in gallows humor, even during serious situations. Doesn't undermine the seriousness of the drama, just makes it more real. People snark and swear and make wisecracks, even on the battlefield or in emergency rooms.

This kind of dialogue doesn't not come across as naturalistic to me:

Jurassic Part: The Lost World: [Eddie finds Ian, Sarah, and Nick trapped in a trailer hanging over a cliff]

Eddie Carr : What do you need?

Dr. Ian Malcolm : Rope!

Eddie Carr : OK, rope! Anything else?

Dr. Ian Malcolm : Yeah, three double cheeseburgers with everything!

Nick Van Owen : No onions on mine!

Sarah Harding : And an apple turnover!

Or Arnold Schwarzenegger killing people via stabbing and making time to say "Stick around!"

It's closer to cliched Hollywood writing than naturalistic. I'm sure that in emergency rooms or with police officers they encounter serious or life-or-death situations on a daily basis so they may have a tendency to treat it as just another day at the office and make snarky, wise-cracks or otherwise inappropriate comments. Are 9/11 events that common for Clancy?
And when those kind of comments are caught on video and broadcast somehow via YouTube or the news usually it's met with criticism. For sure I don't find it humorous whatsoever. And yet in PIC it's intended to be humorous for the viewer.

(How many corona-virus jokes have you heard already?)
I've heard plenty from people who haven't been affected by it in anyway and/or are not too concerned about it. The people that are scared and stockpiling water and disinfectants? I haven't heard them cracking jokes about the virus. People that have lost someone they knew to the virus? I'd guess they're not cracking jokes or making light of it.

Heck, Kirk and Spock and McCoy were always drolly bantering, even when under fire on Cestus III or whatever.
Just because the original series did something, that's not a strong argument to justify it. If I was complaining that current episodes of PIC weren't passing the Bechdel Test would it make sense to counter that the original series also did poorly when it came to the test?

The idea that people must always talk seriously and formally during serious difficulties doesn't gibe with human nature, at least in my experience.
I never said always.
 
I also had that thought. But Data was pretty famous. Odds are, if Beautiful Flower looked like him, someone on the ibn Majid would have clocked the resemblance and commented on it, and Rios as first officer would have heard about it. But, stranger things have happened, I guess.

But remember at that point in time Data had been dead for 20 plus years. Also unless the Captain or Rios had a photographic memory and in the intravening years, had a reason to look up Data's record; I don't see why they would immediately recognize that an ambassador from a new world looks like Data.

Hell in the second episode, Picard walks into Star Fleet Command HQ; and the ensign at the check-in desk doesn't even recognize him until he spells his name and his record appears on screen. And that's the celebrated John Luc Picard. So yeah the captain not recognizing the ambassador's resemblance to Data; but Commodore Oh immediately recognizing such a look alike and putting two and two together so that she issues her black flag order would make sense in that situation.
 
So Rios's captain got the call to kill those two synths from Oh, but how did Oh know they were synths?

They probably knew Dahj and Soji were synths because of Jana, but that just loops around to, how did they know Jana and Beautiful Flower were synths?
Not just that they knew in advance, that they knew 10 years ago which is long before Dahj or Soji were created.

Its likely that Dahj and Soji were more advanced versions, perhaps the previous ones didn't have the ability or skill to fight and defend themselves.

It does explain how the Commodore found them though, they look like one that was killed 10 years earlier.
 
The character has been awkward/cringey/whatever the whole time though. It's not like it's an out-of-character moment for this character to now have an awkward moment. And to me, Allison Pill's performance has not been ignoring what's been going on, she's looked pretty rough these last episodes. She hasn't been thrown in the brig but I'm not so sure she's considered absolved of what's she's done.

That's an argument against it being naturalistic dialogue. If she's awkward/cringey the whole time then it's more like making the character conform to a specific TV archetype/role than being a more nuanced human being.
In real life people might be awkward/geeky, or they might be confident, wise-crackers. But when they happen to have a sobering moment, something extremely serious, in my experience they tend to act differently.
And it's not just the fact that she continues to make awkward geeky comments like that. That could easily be explained as a coping mechanism for her. But how would she be confident enough to even say that? Considering that she herself says her mind has been poisoned by Oh, and that she's already murdered one person, how could she be so certain that she wouldn't kill again? If you had some vision implanted into you head that drives people insane and made you commit murder, I'm pretty sure you'd have doubts about whether you might do it again, or something equally heinous. But here, it's an easy way to let the viewers know, hey, Jurati did a bad thing, but she's on the good guys' side again.
That might change in the remaining episodes and do something like attempting to blow up La Sirena with Soji on board but I doubt it.
 
Yes, she cannot be sure; more importantly, her companions cannot be sure. It's all fine that they are compassionate; although I had to laugh when Jurati and Soji joined the others, and Rios asked: You alright? Meaning not Soji, the one Jurati would have merrily killed a couple of days ago and whose world has been turned upside down and who kindly and patiently helped Jurati understand she's a person, but of course, Jurati...

No, what really irritates me is that they cannot know she won't change her mind again/ relapse, whatever. Raffi threatened Picard and Soji with a phaser because she was pissed at him for not doing a backround check on Jurati. And now not even she has the brains to get Jurati behind a forcefield? Come on. They can visit her and empathize with her all day long, in turns. Oh well.
 
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