I think you might have to. At no point did I get the impression it was about getting Data back.
Spoilers Star Trek: Picard General Discussion Thread
- Thread starter Tuskin38
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I thought it was about Picard.
No one had seen the painting aside from Picard.
Now, if AI copy Data had created the sisters on the planet, acting as their ‘mother’ AI, in order to get Picard help for them vs the Romulans and himself, trapped in his box, then it all would have made sense. Instead, much import from literally episode one, was based on ‘you can grow him back from a neuron’.
I need to rewatch to work out the precise details of planet of the golden skinned droids, the narrative was always leaning into Data’s resurrection till it wasn’t. Chekhov’s positron.
It was. Then they hired Brent and filled the trailer with him and watched fandom go into squee meltdown.
I still found the story about Picard. Don't care about squeeing or fandom.
I found the suggestions that Vulcans were actually advanced AI life terribly interesting. But they were mostly in my imagination rather than the writers, unless they changed my mind.
I enjoyed Picard. I did not enjoy its ending. But you could have told the exact same story with literally any member of the TNG crew. In fact, given how little anything in the later episodes actually hinges on a personal connection, you could do the story with almost any member of the Voyager crew with very few tweaks.
The personal connection was only needed for the seeds of the mystery, but the seeds didn’t grow into the ending, and there are many Star Trek characters who would simply motivated to protect Dahj for it simply being the right thing to do.
I think a lot of this obvious from the recent comments about ‘knowing the ending before you start’ because the disconnect between where Picard started, where it went, then where it finished is obvious. It’s that which made the ending a little... hollow. It also made the cameos we didn’t get more obvious. Not as fan service, but logical things that make sense. (Not to mention the Will Riker warping out being incongruous)
Stargazer Doctor? Why? Crusher was the doctor who knew about the potential irrumodic syndrome, and clearly had a bigger connection with Picard.
You find Data’s apparent daughter, and Maddox is missing... at no point do you contact the man who knows Soong type androids better than anyone, with a personal connection to Data to boot: Geordi. You go and pick up space elf ninja, because presumably your go to melee fighter buddy of about twenty years was having his hair done.
Now, those criticisms aren’t about wanting more fan service, just noticing that they accidentally wrote TNG character shaped holes in for some reason. It’s even kinda funny that Rios seems to be carved from the DNA of Will Riker. (beard, something of a ladies man, hotshot pilot, anachronistic music tastes, XO)
It just makes the overal experience a little bumpy, and the ending just... doesn’t quite work.
Also... is 25 light years in 15 mins really fast by TNG standards?
Edit: just had a bonus funny thought: what if Rios was Riker, and Raffi was Deanna. The same story with added ‘the trois split but have to work together again for this’ would still be apparent.
I think not going the full TNG reunion was wise, but I am not sure they fully let go of that somewhere in the writing process.
It's been a while since I've watched, but IIRC, it was about figuring out where Dahj/Soji came from, their connection to Data and protecting them from the Romulans nefarious plan. Maddox was the guy with answers. That there is a planet of the androids is discovered later, though that's what the Romulans were after. Going there is a spur of the moment act. Resurrecting Data doesn't seem to be anyone's goal.
The main reason Crusher or Worf or any of the other’s didn’t show up in the series is pretty empathetically stated by Picard early on in the show, and then reinforced by his actions throughout the series. He doesn’t want them in danger and he doesn’t want to them to worry. He doesn’t even tell the crew of the La Sirena about his syndrome until he’s forced to, and once it’s actually revealed he basically tells them all to treat it as if it never happened. Why on Earth would he bring Beverly into it? Given how close they are, of course she’d do the one thing that he doesn’t want her to do, which is ground him and stop his mission before it even started. No doubt, he believed the rest of his old crew would do the same. He even thanks Riker in Nepenthe “for not talking him out of it.”
As far as Rios and Riker being similar, I’m not sure I really see it, beyond the superficial level. When Riker was disillusioned and betrayed by his superior officer on the Pegasus, he used that experience to shape his career in Starfleet. When Rios had a similar thing happen, he basically did the opposite and retreated into himself for a good few years. They share base characteristics, but seem almost polar opposites in terms of personalities.
What suggestion?
Some rando on the internet more than likely.
So the big issue with the show is that they didn't film the script in your head.
Since it was put into storage, no. But Data was in regular contact with Maddox at the time it was painted, and sharing his work was part of that correspondence. That's how Maddox knew about the painting and why he chose to design some of the new synthetics in its image, in homage to Data. The show never hinted for a moment that it was building toward Data's return. The story was always, always about Picard letting go of the past and learning about Data's legacy, looking to the future.
Nope. Not at all. (Hence me jokingly referring to the bits being in my imagination but not the writers imaginations... I.e I was looking at what they were putting on screen and seeing where they could go with it each week.)
(a) I overall liked the show but:
(b) there are obvious moments where something was set up, then the direction changed. The most obvious being about how much of the early shows are setting up a sort of ‘search for data’ and then it kind of doesn’t really follow through on that (and makes some of the links suddenly extremely tenuous, once we do have the sort of return of data in his box at the end) after we get about half way through.
Similarly, we get a lot of set up with The Artifact, and as late as the two part finale we are still getting Picard referred to as ‘Locutus” without really going anywhere with it. It’s something that was being strongly set up as an important thing, that ultimately contributes fairly little to the ending or overall arc. At most it’s a ‘look, evil romulans don’t even like AI a little bit: they’re being nasty to ex borg’ but there isn’t much in the way of a satisfying conclusion as to why any of this is relevant, in this story.
(Possibly they planned for Picard as an XB to actually have his health condition tied to his assimilation, way back when, but then changed their mind on it as they headed to the finale. Possibly that’s where his ‘cure’ was, which is hinted at by the Troi’s vignette, before another direction is taken.)
Basically, it’s a little bit of a mish mash, and you can sort of see the parts not quite meshing.
Romulans are against AI life, with a secret organisation dating back to when they split off more or less. They use a sort of broken mind meld technique to initiate this group. Soji and Dahj are AI that present almost totally as organic (as is Picard later) and we see a mind-meld performed by an Android.
Basically, up until space tentacle monster, I felt there was a very real possibility the Vulcans were going to be outed as being descended from organic AI, which is the reason the Romulans split off. It was an interesting idea, nothing more.
Meh. I wrote it as short as possible, but early in the season, when as an audience we are all looking for ‘where is this going’ it seemed an intriguing possibility, and would have been very interesting. (It would have retroactively moved things like Katra into a more loosely ‘science’ based concept over ‘mysticism’ which would have had interesting effects on Trek too.)
Given the late appearance of mind melding androids, I do wonder if it’s something that trickled from an earlier draft, like much seems to.
(I don’t buy Maddox making four — two pairs — of androids look exactly like Data’s painting. I am still trying to work out if the entire Android population of the planet and it’s society were built by Maddox and Retcon Soong. Or if it’s a hangover going right back to Data originally being constructed by ‘aliens’ before they settled into the Soong story with Datalore.)
I think you're overthinking things.
Yes, the entire synthetic population of the planet was built by Maddox and Soong. They initially only created one pair of synths to look like Data's painting - Jana and Sutra. Maddox later decided to create another set of synths, this time not intended simply to add to the population, but programmed with a very specific purpose for deployment as undercover agents to investigate the cause of the Mars atrocity. To expedite the process, he re-used an existing design, which is why a second pair were created with the same face. Plus, since he went to the trouble of programming Dahj, the Earth-based synth, to seek out Picard in a pinch, he probably chose that particular face again because he knew it would be familiar to Picard.
Honestly, the story holds together a lot better than you seem to think, and the pieces do tie together, if you accept them at face value and make the connections, instead of looking to holes to poke at.
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