Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 2x04 - "Watcher"

What does lifespan have to do with it? People can burn out at any age.

 

The only time we saw her get really upset was in I Borg and since they destroyed her planet I am guessing that is something that hits home maybe even more than any other issue. I will say though I kind of Guinan gained a new outlook on life after her experience with The Nexus. I doubt they would bring that up though in the show.

 

So what? Does that make her incapable of wearing out? Being fatigued by all the pain and suffering she witnesses?

What is this standard of fictional characters to endure hardship at a constant rate with no sign of fatigue?

 

That's assuming Guinan is already old and wise in 2024 where nothing indicates that. We literally don't know anything about her before she decided to hide from her father on Earth. Chances are it's the first alien society she ever spent a considerable time in. Guinan in the 24th century has the benefit of having already seen humanity get through and learning from its worst mistakes, but even if she has seen something similar once, nothing guarantees that the historical tendencies she's witnessed over the late 20th and early 21st centuries couldn't possibly end up in human extinction or at the very least a global environmental catastrophe and a large scale societal collapse. We can very well poison our own planet to the point of uninhabitability yet and there's no way she doesn't count that possibility.

For her to just shrug and passively witness it all because other civilizations were able to overcome this before, therefore Humans surely will too would be akin to that joke with the physicist, the engineer and the mathematician in the burning house, where the mathematician sees the fire extinguisher on the wall and contentedly goes back to sleep because a possible solution exists.

 

You're missing the context of her being black in a country that largely isn't kind to black people, for 130 years. Her skin color makes her "black" in the context of society.

 

The Star Trek franchise already crossed that bridge when they decided to canonize the events of Star Trek First Contact (specifically the debris of the destroyed Borg Sphere impacting in the Antarctic), in ENT S2 - "Regeneration". Given the events in that ENT episode, you'd have to assume that in the 'temporally updated' version of TNG S2 "Q-Who" (which we the audience never saw), Data DID find Starfleet records that had pictures of, and info on a cybernetic species...etc.

 

I have an easy time with the idea that Earth Starfleet buried those records. Nothing could hamper your fledgling space program like stories of zombies assimilating humans that go into space.

 

Makes sense, actually.

 

This is a ship that has first contact with a new aliens species and seemingly didn't ask about their species (Ferengi) so it isn't unlikely.

 

But remember Picard knew about the Ferengi in the pilot episodes of TNG. He just didn't have very accurate information.

 

I've ducked out this thread for just a little bit and there's like 50 more pages!

I was thinking about the timeline deviation. The more I think about, the more I like the idea of a twist where the timeline change wasn't something that Q did to it to bring about the Confederation. Instead, it was the lack of interference (i.e., history running its natural course) that brings about the Confederation.

They're showing our present in all its "glory." We've got the authoritarianism and environmental degradation on full display. These conditions are all logical precursors to the Confederation that we saw earlier.

Perhaps, there was some interference by Q or another entity (a Supervisor?) that made a change that diverted us from the Confederation timeline to the Federation timeline. We wouldn't have achieved the Federation without that outside interference. However, for some reason, that alteration was undone. Maybe it relates to Q losing his powers as we saw? Picard said there was something wrong with Q earlier.

It's a powerful message. We're not on track to achieving the Federation. Instead, we're on course for bringing the Confederation into existence without some outside miracle. We need to do more.

I like that more than the typical story of our heroes fixing history.

 

Generally speaking, that's not something I'd be interested in. Shoot, the Mirror Universe got old for me in Discovery.

However, I do want to see the comedy that would be the alternate TVH were the fascist, polluting versions of our crew are forced to go back and save the whales. Comedy gold!

 

This needs hundreds of "likes" (and needs to be stickied...pretty much all over the interwebz).

 

Oh, they asked

 

While I don't disagree with the idea that the Confederation is the "proper" timeline and someone interfered, isn't that quite a slap in the face of the optimism that Star Trek is supposedly about? That humanity grew up, settled our differences and reached for the stars.

 

It would definitely upend the "original intent" of TOS. On a purely entertainment level, I think such a twist would be great--though primarily because it would be different from the 1,847 times Trek "fixed" the timeline back to the "good one". If this was the first attempt at an alternate timeline story, such a (hypothetical) twist might not be well received at all.

At this point, having seen every minute of official Trek ever produced (except for Prodigy episode 2 and on--just didn't feel it), I would welcome such a twist just for its relative novelty. But it does, in many ways, pose a greater challenge to the point of Trek (to the extent it has one) than almost anything else in the franchise.

 

That's my personal favorite!

 

If they've thought of that angle, I'm sure they'll have Picard paper over it with a long-winded speech about how we still had to make the right choices after the interference.

 

That was definitely what TOS was all about. But it seems like we might have lost our way. We need a wakeup call that we're of course!