Spoilers Star Trek - Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack Review Thread

Is there something destructive resulting from the explosion which would propagate at a speed lower than the speed of light and could be legitimately sucked in by the Thingamajig?

 

Ok. I thought it was noted somewhere in the film that the supernova was a threat to the galaxy at large, but maybe I'm thinking of the Countdown comics.

Duh. That's what the Red Matter is for. To suck the radiation back in.

 

I offered one possibility already in comment #502, but it would have a limited effect at best.

No, it does say it threatens the whole galaxy, but that's not what I was referring to there. I meant that it did not explain the benefit of setting off the Red Matter after the supernova happened -- which is tantamount to trying to defuse a bomb after it's exploded. That doesn't make any sense no matter how wide an area the explosion endangers.

In fact, the way it's presented in the movie is completely nonsensical from the start, because it portrays the supernova happening first and then the Vulcans coming up with the Red Matter plan, which means there's even more time for the radiation to spread out from the point of origin, so that it's even more incoherent to suggest that a black hole at the point of origin would have any effect at all. It also adds the further absurdity that the expanding wavefront somehow got faster while Spock was en route and thus swallowed up Romulus too soon.

At least in the Picard formulation, the supernova hasn't happened yet, but there's advance warning that it's coming. So we can suppose that Spock told the story a bit out of order, that he was planning to set off the Red Matter before the supernova actually happened, yet it happened earlier than predicted so he was too late. Up to that point, the revised version makes relative sense. It's a clever fix for most of the illogic of the movie's version. But it still fails to explain why Spock still set the RM off anyway, if it was already too late.

 

Maybe the Red Matter is faster than the supernova wave front and catches up to it ---ok, I'm reaching here. It almost looked like from the way the scene was set up that he set the Red Matter into the wave front itself to stop it from going any further. Though that does sound ridiculous even to myself who can be a bit more forgiving of writers taking liberties.

Perhaps there's a way to work around that. It sounds like this Supernova is not natural so maybe someone miscalculated. Maybe Spock set off the Red Matter at what he thought was the proper time but the Supernova started a split second before the Red Matter could do its stuff--or maybe the Red Matter simply failed--maybe they deployed it as planned and it just plain didn't work, the Supernova started and the Red Matter caused a reaction that pulled Spock into a singularity and back in time with Nero.

There are probably ways to work around but the only way I see that they can reconcile it with Star Trek (2009) is some of what you noted that the mild meld with Kirk didn't impart all the details correctly and that for whatever reason the Red Matter failed to do it's job--either it started in the time between when it was deployed and when it could work--or it just failed to do the job (which might give more credence to Nero being mad with vengeance--he thought it would do the trick and when it didn't and his home was destroyed he went to catch his whale).

 

I never posted about this book, but I read it when it first came out. I think that overall it added so much to my enjoyment of the show, by giving more depth and background that I wish the show would have taken the time to go in to. I felt bad for the people that hadn't read this, some of them missed so much or were left confused by certain things that were well explained.

That said this is the only time I can recall reading a trek novel where I felt sad and bleak when I finished it. I totally get that why it was that way, and it was the perfect set up for the show, but it's just so odd to not feel at least somewhat hopeful after reading treklit, or at the very least feel happy.

Is there any other trek novel, outside of ones in the middle of a multi part series, that ended on a depressing note? Even Destiny, with so much death and destruction felt hopeful at the end.

 

A couple of the New Frontier ones I felt actually were pretty dark and depressing, especially as the cast started getting knocked off like the victims in Clue.

And honestly, I wish they'd adapted this novel to two episodes and made them the opening of Picard. The series would have been stronger (and I loved the series) if we'd begun with Picard triumphant before his fall.

 

Believe I admitted as much (in as much as a "sun" is also a "star").

Wasn't what was said in the movie (but I will concede it's been years since I saw it).

Okay.

And yet Klingon Augment virus, TOS warp scale, only some Vulcans mind-melding being propaganda, clarification that Treaty of Algeron was not signed at the end of the Romlulan War.

As you've pointed out before, we don't get to decide what's ignored and what's not. Maybe Horbus destroying the whole Galaxy is "stupid" and should be ignored, but the fact remains that that is as much a fact about the Star Trek universe as is tribbles and whatnot.

Might've worked better if it wasn't for Spock Prime narrating the whole thing. (On the other hand, the Powers That Be did suggest that they thought Spock watching Vulcan be destroyed from the surface of Delta Vega not being a literal depiction, so eh).

 

A few months after finishing both the book and the 1st season of the series, I have to say the series feels like a companion piece to the book. I really hope we get more Picard-related books, and I'm eagerly awaiting news about Ms. McCormack being contracted for another ST novel...

 

Not at all. It was a single throwaway line. Many other throwaway references in Trek have been ignored or contradicted. Even much larger things have been ignored, like the treatment of antimatter in "The Alternative Factor" or of transwarp in "Threshold."

It's irrational to talk about "facts" in this context. It's fiction. Every last word of it is made up. We're all just pretending. And the advantage of pretending is that you can change your mind if nobody likes what you pretended the first time.

 

It's kind of questionable if they'd really qualify as novels, but she does have the Janeway autobiography coming out on October 6 of this year, and the Spock autobiography coming out September 7 of next year.

 

I will concede that I've found trying to stop worrying about the broken canon has made enjoying stuff easier.

 

I admit I justify every change in the Star Trek timeline or broken canon with time travel. The Temporal Cold War could have been awesome to explain away any discrepancy but the writers hated it and never wanted to use it in the first place.

 

Do you know why they gave Janeway first a autobiography instead of Sisko?

 

Hard to write a book when you're dead.

 

Jake Sisko could posthumously publish his father's memoirs.

 

By what metric is Sisko dead? He's living in the wormhole. And he said he would definitely come back (and did so long ago in the novels).

 

I admit, I kind of hope its an Arthurian, "In Bajor's hour of greatest need."

The documentary showed the kind of Sisko return I enjoy, for a brief moment and not to rejoin Starfleet.

 

They did do stuff like that for characters who's deaths were established. Kirk's biography ended shortly before he was presumed dead on the Enterprise-B, with others adding an epilogue to fill in the gaps.

 

Well Kirk and Spock are also dead so?
And Sisko is living in the wormhole so he is not dead

 

I guess he could have returned as in the novels and written it years later. But I doubt he'd have had any time to write his memoirs during the Dominion War.