Akiva Goldsman On How Long Picard Will Last
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I'd agree with that. The Federation Council's follow-through was a given from that point onward.
I can see that point of view.In some ways, I almost think Star Trek: Picard should have ended after Season One. I just feel like in some ways, it's the perfect ending for Jean-Luc -- he's gotten himself out of his funk, he's redeemed himself for his failures, he's saved the Coppelians, he's led the Federation out of bigotry and xenophobia, and he's gotten a metaphorical resurrection. Let him warp off into the stars and have that be his happy ending.
But hey, S2 could totally prove me wrong.
But I think the first season of Picard was more about getting things out of the state that Previous Trek left them in. So now that PIC has cleaned up Nemesis' mess and done something with the backstory from the 2009 film, it can chart its own course.
And they now have a Picard who's defined by the terms this series has set up itself rather than anything from Nemesis or the 2009 film, or "All Good Things". "What is Picard?" is taking the character places never shown in TNG. "Who is Picard without Starfleet?" is also something that TNG never delved too deeply in and only ever teased it.
Actually, it was only ruled out for the viewing audience, who saw that F8 was being manipulated before destroying Utopia Planitia. We don't actually know what the Federation thought, since there were no survivors. The news reports from "Children of Mars" seemed to indicate that the Federation thought the synths had gone 'rogue' (i.e. attacked Mars of their own free will), rather than that they had simply malfunctioned or were being controlled by someone else. Either way, it still ended up giving the Zhat Vash what they wanted: no more synths.
It is pretty convoluted. My beef with much of this serialized stuff.
The fact that we here are still trying to make sense of the plot is not good. I gave up. Couldn't even remember why the hell PIC was off in space? find the other synth? Why? Uncover a plot? And the Romulans still seem right to me. I mean the synths did call down the tentacle AI robots who would DESTROY ALL LIFE, didn't they?
Man, I hate this stuff. DSC2 Angel/AI plot was ridiculous.
So now what is PIC about? He did what he set out to do. Now ya go home. Does he get a starship back? Be an admiral? What is the sirena for? I'd rather a Seven show, at least she has a guiding purpose.
The fact that we here are still trying to make sense of the plot is not good. I gave up. Couldn't even remember why the hell PIC was off in space? find the other synth? Why? Uncover a plot? And the Romulans still seem right to me. I mean the synths did call down the tentacle AI robots who would DESTROY ALL LIFE, didn't they?
Man, I hate this stuff. DSC2 Angel/AI plot was ridiculous.
So now what is PIC about? He did what he set out to do. Now ya go home. Does he get a starship back? Be an admiral? What is the sirena for? I'd rather a Seven show, at least she has a guiding purpose.
I mean I followed it just find. But, as I've learned not everyone experiences things the same way.
The only thing that irritated me was the Borg and Seven.
The only thing that irritated me was the Borg and Seven.
This and Discovery both have about 12 executive producers each, and it shows. The plots are so convoluted because everyone has to have their own input. The Borg were such a dumb inclusion and Narek completely ran out of things to do half way through the season, to the point where he was literally ditched with no explanation.
I enjoyed Picard a bit, mostly because of Rios, Raffi and of course Picard, but the storyteling was just as juvenile and nonsensical as Discovery and the more I think about it the more I dislike it. The fact that fans are still confused and having to fabricate so many in-universe explanations for things really isn't a good thing.
If it keeps the conversation going, I think CBS will take that.
For me, Picard set things up for something nice and big, but ran out of time to finish and tie things up well. There's enough in it to rate it as "good". And of course now, JL has a ship, a crew and no Starfleet to tell him what to do. That's exciting!
For me, Picard set things up for something nice and big, but ran out of time to finish and tie things up well. There's enough in it to rate it as "good". And of course now, JL has a ship, a crew and no Starfleet to tell him what to do. That's exciting!
Kpnuts said:
Huh? He was totally involved in the story. He chased Soji to the planet with intent to kill and in the last episode came up with the plan to blow her up. It's easy to assume he was arrested or went back with the other Romulans at the end.
I cant really imagine the story playing out without him
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Narek was basically entirely superfluous after The Impossible Box, which was the one time they used the character correctly. Sure, he got some scenes in the final two episodes, but they really weren't necessary in the narrative.
I suppose it's better than Elnor, who was entirely superfluous in every episode following his introduction.
I agree that they're not just gonna shrug. But that's not the same thing as meaning they must go to war. (Indeed, a really important thing to remember about the Federation is that, unlike the United States in real life, its leaders aren't looking for excuses to go to war all the time to reinforce imperial hegemony.)
Well, as far as we canonically know, the Mars Attack death toll is actually 92,143. This does seem unusually low given the scale of the attack, but I would hypothesize it's not higher because the Martian surface is still inhospitable to humanoid life and most Martian citizens live in domes or underground. Mars may also have a much lower planetary population than M-class planets in general.
Interesting side note: According to Google right now, the current United States death toll from COVID-19 is 92,333. So our real-life COVID-19 death toll is 190 people higher than the fictional Mars Attack death toll. Just something to think about.
Of course not! But there are any number of options the Federation might pursue that avoid full-scale war. Indeed, if the Federation were to pursue war with the Romulan Free State, an important question would be: To what end? What's the end goal of such a conflict, what's the objective?
Maybe, maybe not. Star Trek: Picard is not about Federation/Romulan relations per se -- it's about the emotional journey of Jean-Luc Picard through the final years of his life. To the extent that developments between the UFP and RFS are relevant to Picard's personal journey, they should be on PIC. But to the extent that they're not, they shouldn't be.
Right, but the Federation figured out what had happened on Mars in the course of PIC. Raffi and Rios pieced together that Oh was a Zhat Vash infiltrator and that she had caused the Mars Attack to manipulate the UFP into banning Synths so as to advance the Zhat Vash anti-Sythetic agenda, Picard informed Starfleet Command, and Oh essentially confirmed it all by abandoning her cover and revealing herself to Riker as the leader of the Tal Shiar fleet in orbit above Coppelius.
I'm at a loss as to how you could say it was so convoluted you couldn't follow it. The early episodes set it up as a mystery, and then the later episodes featured the main characters solving the mystery. It was no worse than, say, an Agatha Christie mystery novel.
... Because he met Dahj, realized she was an android with a connection to Data, witnessed a Tal Shiar death squad operating on Earth itself, and pieced together that Dahj had a sister who was almost certainly in danger. It was all laid out very clearly in the first two episodes.
I mean, part of the point of PIC is that no one faction was evil and they were all operating from a place of misguided fear.
The Coppelians who called down the Admonition Makers only did so because they were facing genocide, and that clouded their judgment into feeling as though all organics were threats. But the Zhat Vash were only going to try to commit genocide because the Admonition had damaged their minds and led them to assume all synthetics are inherently a threat -- a vicious circle. Everyone is somewhat sympathetic here, because everyone is both in the right and in the wrong.
One of the things that made Star Trek: Picard's finale so perfectly Trekkian is that Picard interrupts this vicious circle of fear and violence, and forces the Coppelians to realize how wrong they have been through his act of self-sacrifice rather than through violence.
Looks to me like S2 is gonna be about found family, about Picard taking up the mantle of father figure/grandfather figure to the crew of La Sirena. Picard has never had children, and yet now he has become a father to a whole group of people who are, to varying degrees, kind of messed up and in need of that kind of love. I'm really looking forward to it.
Why would he go back to Starfleet? Jean-Luc Picard has a life outside of his old job now. And I can easily imagine plot lines for him and La Sirena's crew to get involved in. For start, Vashti certainly looks like it's got problems La Sirena's crew could help with, and Vashti is only one Romulan refugee world out of what are no doubt dozens.
I think there's a strong chance Seven's guiding purpose is going to intersect with the future adventures of La Sirena's crew.
The plot is complex -- not convoluted -- because modern prestige television is structured like a novel, and the producers expect the audiences to pay attention and keep up instead of having simplistic Planet-of-the-Week plots spoon-fed to them.
There were no Borg on PIC. I think you mean the ex-Borg and the Artifact. I think the presence of the XBs and the Artifact was a very good choice -- you can't do a story about the final years of Jean-Luc Picard without following up in some manner upon the central trauma of his life, his assimilation into Locutus. And that obliges you to find ways to tie that in with the story of the Federation's rejection of Synthetics.
Now, I do think that the Artifact's and Seven's presence at Coppelius ended too abruptly. Chabon should have tried to find a way to fit the Artifact in with that final space confrontation, or found some way to establish that the XBs would play a role in how the Federation would relate to the Coppelians; having the Artifact just crash shortly after arrival and never return to flight, and having the XBs play no role in how the Federation would relate to the Coppelians, is dramatically unsatisfying. But that doesn't mean the XBs shouldn't have been there in the first place.
I think it's just evidence that some people weren't paying attention to what they were watching.
I think that's a fair critique. To my mind, PIC would have been served well if CBS-AA had given them one or two more episodes.
Yes!
I have no idea how the Zhat Vash would have found the Coppelians without Narek, nor do I find it plausible that Narek would not have done everything in his power to follow Soji to Coppelius. That was literally his mission the entire series.
I agree Elnor was underutilized. I hope PIC S2 visits Vashti again, because I think that's the key to getting Elnor to a place where he develops more as a person, and to finding a source of tension and drama in his grandpaternal relationship with Jean-Luc.
I think its more a matter of reading in to it what they want. Every complain I've read thus far (here and other places) simply smacks of a brief watch and concluding that all Picard must be that minute long segment they viewed.
Some stuff I've seen:
"Picard is nothing but killing and swearing!" Except when Picard is doing as Sci described of sacrificing himself to break the cycle of violence.
"The Plot makes no sense!" Except that each moment was building towards the conclusion, with Picard recognizing the danger while others did not, and what would motivate Starfleet to action.
It's OK to not like Picard but, like the Abrams Trek films, I feel like there is this knee-jerk reactionism against the perception of what they are rather than what they actually are.
Star Trek is truly blessed to have an insipid creep like Goldsman. Would've been such a loss if he were off making bad Dark Tower or DaVinci Code sequels instead.
Is that a thing?
Are you seriously trying to compare the death toll of a pandemic in a single country over three months and Romulan secret service orchestrating the murder of that same number of Federation citizens on Earth's doorstep?
The Mandalorian season 1 plot could be written on a napkin but people adore it anyway, because it's so compelling, well made and paced perfectly. Plot doesn't need to be complex to be good, and given the number of plot holes, you can't say that the complex story-telling was worth it.
If they didn't have or execute a compelling reason to be there, then they shouldn't have been there. It made the plot even more convoluted and ultimately went nowhere, so yes either make it good or get rid of it. They didn't make it good so it shouldn't have been there.
I thought it was an interesting coincidence that the numbers are so similar.
The Zhat Vash are not the Romulan secret service. That's the Tal Shiar. The Zhat Vash are a centuries-old conspiracy within the Romulan state but not actually a legitimate part of it. They're Hydra to the Tal Shiar's SHIELD. In point of fact, the Mars Attack proves that the Zhat Vash was willing to act against the Romulan Star Empire's wishes.
Of course not! But being complex doesn't make it bad.
I really can't think of any plot holes, just questions people had because they weren't paying attention to what they were watching.
They had a compelling reason to be there and things were executed well up until the very end, where they didn't quite stick the landing on that subplot.
You can't "get rid of it." PIC went into production as the final episodes were being written; the train was already moving and it would have been impossible to re-write every single episode just because the XB subplot's ending wasn't quite perfect. A subplot can be a B or a B+ and still be artistically valid, and not quite finding dramatic satisfaction in that subplot's end does not mean the entire subplot suddenly deserves an F.
*shrugs* Closest thing I can think of to a plot hole is that we don't find out the story of how Hugh went from leading the Free Borg faction in "Descent" to becoming a Federation citizen and executive director of the Borg Reclamation Project.
But even that's not really a plot hole, any more than how the Federation went from being enemies of the Klingons in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home to allies of the Klingons at the start of The Next Generation was a plot hole in 1987. It was just a story that hadn't been told yet.
You were trying to downplay the Romulans destroying Mars because the death count is similar to a 2 month pandemic. "Just something to think about" as you said?
"The Zhat Vash was an ancient and secret Romulan cabal of Tal Shiar operatives. According to Laris, it was thousands upon thousands of years old, and it supposedly predated the Tal Shiar, which she said functioned merely as a mask for the Zhat Vash."
No, being bad made it bad. But I call it convoluted, you call it complex.
Don't be so condescending. You've no idea if people were paying attention or not and maybe if the show were more compelling more people would be paying attention.
by "they didn't quite stick the landing" do you mean... they didn't provide any landing and just abandoned the storyline?
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