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Spoilers Star Trek: Picard General Discussion Thread

Eh, I think you CAN do it, I just don't think they're pulling it off at the moment. Even things like ENT S3 did a better job of it, and felt like at least the through-line made sense and they used the time ok. The recent stuff is just feeling like they had an idea for a fun episode, or 2-parter, and then were told they weren't getting any more sets, so make it last the whole season.

Look at the most recent DIS season, was that really more than a single episode, 2-parter at best if you were going to put it into any other series? Weird anomaly shows up, it's destroying things so the hero ship has to track down the origin point and ask them to turn it off. That's 45 minutes worth of TOS most episodes, leaving time for Kirk to flirt with the lead alien female for 5-7 more minutes. DIS made it an entire season, 10 hours. Yes, fleshed it out more and had lots of side moments and quests tossed in, but that's the whole plot and you can easily see TOS knocking it out in 1-2 episodes max without really missing much. Picard feels slightly better but we just spent 2 episodes with the plot of 'keep an eye on a girl at a party, give her a pep talk so she doesn't quit her job'. We're most of the way through this season, and probably only a couple episodes' worth of material. Entire first episode could have happened before the title card played, and that was one of the better paced episodes. Again, it's not terrible/don't hate it, just feels slow and bloated, like someone wrote a fan script that didn't get cut down to episode length by the editors. A little disappointing, as one of the show runners was previously writing epic-feeling VOY novels, and just can't capture that same feeling in tv format.
 
I think lots of shows do a great job telling a serialized story - I'm thinking about The Expanse, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, so many streaming shows out there that are high quality serialized stories. The problem is that the current Trek writers/producers seem to be failing at it. I think a part of it is that they are stuck to this formula of having a mystery/plot that needs to be wrapped up by the end of the season. I think some of the best serialized shows aren't like that..they have a plot that just connects and continues and may lead to new plots. Look at the serialized episodes of DS9 - it had plots that continued and connected - there wasn't a different mystery that had to be resolved every season.
 
Look at the most recent DIS season, was that really more than a single episode, 2-parter at best if you were going to put it into any other series? Weird anomaly shows up, it's destroying things so the hero ship has to track down the origin point and ask them to turn it off.
It was a 20 minute Animated Series episode once
I think a part of it is that they are stuck to this formula of having a mystery/plot that needs to be wrapped up by the end of the season.
I think you're absolutely right there. Basing a whole season around a mystery means that the characters are stumbling around without knowing what to do for most of it, and it means that the eventual reveal can't possibly live up to all the expectations put onto it.

I reckon there's room for a completely serialised Star Trek series, but they haven't quite figure out how to make that work yet.
 
Regarding the “novel writer in the writers’ room, why isn’t this show better” thing: Writing a novel and writing a TV show are two entirely different beasts. I think Michael Chabon had to realize that as well in the first season. He explained so much background info on Instagram and whatnot and it was VERY clear that he had things well thought-out and they all made sense to him - and if he had written season 1 as a novel he could have included ALL the info he wanted and things would have been a lot more coherent. You can’t do that on a television show tho - stuff gets dropped, scenes get cut out, scripts are MUCH more streamlined than a novel, you can’t write down half a page that explains a character’s inner thoughts, you have to somehow SHOW these thoughts, etc etc… I guess what I’m saying is having a novel writer as a writer on a show is not an automatic guarantee that the show will be as nice as the novels they have written. I mean I sure know I’d fail at writing a TV show even though my fan fic is halfway decent. It’s just all so different. What looks great on paper as a written draft can turn out to be incoherent and weird when turned into an actual script. And when you then also have a pandemic to deal with, which means limited sets and actor availability etc etc, it all gets even more difficult.

But I do agree with the general statement that serializing Trek so completely just doesn’t seem to be it for the franchise. They’re basically making ten hour Trek movies now, which is why things get a little… strange at times.
 
It was a 20 minute Animated Series episode once

I think you're absolutely right there. Basing a whole season around a mystery means that the characters are stumbling around without knowing what to do for most of it, and it means that the eventual reveal can't possibly live up to all the expectations put onto it.

I reckon there's room for a completely serialised Star Trek series, but they haven't quite figure out how to make that work yet.


They could have wrapped up the Q / time travel stuff in 5 episodes and then had the last 5 focus on Picard's trauma or the other way around. Each season doesn't have to stand alone and be about one specific thing.
 
But thats the way they’ve chosen to do it. It is messy at times. The prime example of this is Disco season 2 where the focus shifted so heavily because the showrunners were fired. Even if I am fairly entertained week to week, I really wish they would do a better job breaking a story better, whether that’s agreeing to do the number of episodes per season the story needs or writing the story to the number of episodes ordered. Sometimes that involves doing other things. As much as I hate them, standalones aren’t always a bad thing.
 
I think it's more disappointing since they had more time prior to the beginning of filming season 2 due to the pandemic. I guess the first warning sign with Akiva saying he didn't know if they learned their lesson from the mistakes of season 1 (I think I enjoy season 1 more at this point - I would have said the opposite a few weeks ago).

I'm fine with standalone episodes if they are done well, but these last few don't feel like standalone to me. They feel like wheel spinning..and the episodes don't really stand on their own. I'm also having issues with the character behavior. The show has just begun to feel "off" - from Rios being locked up and shocked to loving the time period in the next episode, to not caring about Jurati missing, to Raffi/Seven always arguing, to a 35 minute episode that all took place in a gala, to 30 minutes in Picard's mind this week, Not-Laris is a human, no wait she's a Romulan like Laris! The show just feels really disjointed to me.
 
To be fair the hints that NotLaris is a Romulan were there from the start, what with her “surveillance” equipment having Romulan letters and all.

Fair point. I had seen that discussed (and her speaking in Romulan from the closed caption), but hadn't noticed any of those things while watching.
 
I think a lot of that disjointed nature might be lessened if one were to watch it in two or three sittings. As opposed to ten. I mean all of the episodes really are leading one into the next.

Maybe. I'm sure I'll binge the season at some point like I did with season 1. But just from my mind, I'm not seeing it (Soong last week, his daughter finding out the truth about herself followed by them not being in the next episode & exciting cliffhanger with Borg Queen walking away followed by her smashing a window for 30 seconds in the next episode & the Rios example I mentioned above. I'm happy you're still enjoying it though - trust me I wish I was also and I really hope I love the next 3 episodes. For me, I think it's the contrast of how much I loved the earlier episodes (and even episodes 5-6 to a lesser extent) and how much I disliked this one that I'm having a hard time with. The difference for me between my enjoyment of this and other episodes is huge and I wish it wasn't.
 
I have to say, I'm enjoying this season overall. Each episode this season has advanced both plot and character. I know quite a few people have felt like there's a lot of wheel-spinning, but to me it's only wheel-spinning if we assume the main goal is to solve a big sci-fi mystery.

And that's just not the goal. Sure, it's the excuse for the season to exist. But it seems clear that the real goal is to caper through a wide range of disparate genres, one per episode, and exploit the chosen setting for social commentary, fun, and suspense while solving the much more complex riddle of these people and their myriad troubles. The people are the story.

And the throughlines are there when some recent Trek seasons haven't done as well with them: the Soong storyline was seeded in episode 2, the fantasy world shared by Picard and his mother was seeded in episode 1, etc. The character beats of Rios's character evolution have been there episode by episode. The fact that Tallinn is Romulan was seeded in her second appearance. I imagine this stuff will be more transparent on future viewings.

The price of such frequent genre shifting is probably a certain degree of disjointedness, but I suspect that the season will (a) play well when binged in the future and (b) make for fun standalone viewing as a result. I'll look back and want to watch the Rios-in-the-hospital episode, or the car-chase episode, or the party-crashing episode. Thank God it isn't a season set on a starship. We've got a billion episodes of that and we're get a billion more soon enough. In other words, I'm mostly quite pleased with how this season is shaping up.
 
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I present to you one Jackson Roykirk (Marc Daniels in cosplay gear), whose Institute helped secure the success of the Europa Mission. And which inadvertently exterminated the Malurian race several centuries later...
 
I feel this season has been ordinary and average but not bad except for one episode. It feels like Trek has done this story before and better many times before but they are doing a okay version this time as well. I think I actually prefer season 1 though except for how it ended. I miss the space stuff.
 
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