I'm hoping it will play better on a binge watch. Watching from week to week making the glacial pacing very obvious.
I wouldn't call it a failure. It took me longer to figure out where they were going with it than the other seasons of DSC and PIC, but now that I can see where it's going -- Jurati is the Borg Queen the Stargazer encountered -- it's all up to how the last two episodes play out. But even if the next two episodes were flat-out horrible, that doesn't negate the first half of the season. The penultimate and ultimate episodes of season would have to seriously betray everything else in order for it to be a failure.
I've enjoyed it so far. Modern Trek has missed the landing more often than hit it, so check back in a couple weeks.
Yeah, sure....it's a failure. I personally haven't enjoyed it as much as S1, but it is far from "a failure" or THe WurSt StAr tRack EVAR!!1!! I'm not a huge fan of "time travel to the past" stories in Star Trek. My least-favorite TOS movie is TVH. I also am not a big fan of The Borg Queen in Star Trek....I think having a smarmy, scenery-chewing dominatrix as the leader of billions of bionic drones is campy and ridiculous. So, right there, PIC S2 has some massive "bias strikes" against it for me. But, even though this is how I feel, I've still been engaged and I've tuned in every week to watch. It's a well-acted, well-cast, gorgeous looking show. It's had a couple of really bad episodes mid-season. "Watcher" was an irredeemable pile of shit, easily the worst Star Trek episode of the new era. But, the first 2 episodes were brilliant (and the 3rd was not far behind). The last couple of episodes have been damn good as well. The inclusion of Q is welcome. Although I hate the concept of the Borg Queen, Alison Pill has been amazing, and every time she's on screen she's electric. Santiago Cabrera is also awesome, and I love his character this season. Isa Briones is probably my least-favorite PIC performer, so it's irritating that they found a way to bring her back. Anyway, I think that if I wasn't biased against "time travel to modern times" stories and the over-use of the Borg Queen, I'd probably think this season was brilliant. I'm a huge DSC fan, and so far, I still like S2 PIC better than S3 or S4 of DSC...so that's saying something.
Season 2 is not over yet. So until we see the season finale, we cannot say that the season was a failure or a success. Let's wait and see. If they stick the landing, I will call the season a success. It all depends on the finale and how they bring all the different arcs together. That does not take away from the fact that some of the middle episode have been disappointing to many. But a season can have a few bad episodes and still not be a total failure.
Too early to tell, IMHO. Let's see how the final episodes roll out. I am not as negative on the season so far as some. Episodes 1-2 were good, episode 3 was fine, episode 4 was pretty awful. I liked Fly Me To the Moon. Two of One was kinda bad again, but I thought Monsters was a step up (don't know why people hated it so) and Mercy finally saw some glimmers of the endgame (and was a step up in terms of plotting). I think the flaws of this season have more to do with the seasonal arc as a whole rather than the individual episodes however. There are several episodes where basically nothing happens. Indeed, entire subplots seem to take place simply to give cast members something to do (Rios is captured by ICE, and Seven/Raffi try to break him out, for example), and don't really serve the core themes of the season or provide any character development. Based upon comments Chabon made back in 2020 he had written two scripts for this season, but so far he had a partial story credit on the second episode, and that's it. This seems to suggest to me that - as has happened several times on Discovery - the original plans for the season were partially pulped to deal with COVID. We also know that it was intentional how everyone was hived off in subplots (Seven/Raffi, Rios/Teresa, Jurati/Borg Queen, Picard/whoever) for the middle period of the season. This cut down the risk of a COVID outbreak on set, but meant that the number of character interactions were quite limited. What I find less forgivable overall is that a lot of the middle of the season was turned over to two writers (Cindy Appel and Jane Maggs) who...don't seem to have a very impressive set of writing credits (either from anything good, or anything much genre related). I'm not saying that superfans need to write Trek, but I think it's notable that the quality of the season dipped when the core team wasn't involved in the scripting (and it jumped up a bit last week when Beyer had co-credit on the script). The dialogue this season has often been pretty bad, and characters tend to just get "hunches" about something that moves the plot forward. You can just tell that someone who isn't very accomplished at scriptwriting is penning these episodes, and for whatever reason Matalas (or anyone else more accomplished) isn't doing a rigorous enough final edit of their work.
I work with the guy who wrote that article on TheGamer. Told him I disagree and that the show's pretty good IMO. I do think there's a soggy middle here (although I don't outright dislike any episode).
As far as I'm concerned, the worst season of Trek outside the first two Enterprise seasons. For all the season's problems, at least there are no dogs peeing on trees, declining to prevent extinction on made up principle, or mind melds as AIDS analogies.
My Prediction: Picard Season 3 will be considered "even worse" than Season 2. The Reason for My Prediction: It'll be called a Super-Long TNG Movie. You heard it here first. Feel free to quote this post of mine in 2023.
“Success” or “failure” doesn’t really mean anything other than “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it”. Or, if it is considered in terms of ratings, which we’ll probably never be privy to. Even then, some of DS9’s absolute peak seasons didn’t get great ratings, so that metric probably doesn’t mean much either. Trek fans are often perpetually fretting like OCD mother hens. I saw a link to an old usenet group from the early 1990’s a while back…and realised that’s always been the way of it. I have a touch of OCD too, but I’m not as emotionally invested in Star Trek. I either like it or I don’t. I loved TOS, DS9 and TNG and they all had a heap of mediocre and downright awful episodes. Frankly, nothing about PIC has been terrible, but it has been mediocre at times, including the middle part of this season. But I’m still enjoying it for what it is. It’s flawed, but it’s fine. It’s a pleasant diversion in these challenging times. I’m kinda more looking forward to SNW actually.
I'll get the ball rolling with the first thread. How's this sound? "Can we all agree season 2 was better than this TNG movie cash-in trash?"
That's how I feel. Like, I'm used to my Trek fan friends telling me I'm wrong so if people don't like an episode/season or consider it a "failure" and I like it then that's pretty much my Trek experience. I've never been apart of the mainstream Trek opinion and probably never will.
I've really liked Picard season 2 and the time travel plot and the characters story arcs have been really good. Alison Pill's character got to do more with her character and her scenes with the Borg Queen were really interesting.I'm looking forward to seeing the last 3 shows to see how they fix the time line to stop Adam Soong and the new Borg Queen.
Failure is such an extreme word. It basically means there are not redeemable qualities and it should just be brushed aside. While I have not enjoyed this season at all, I will still say there have been some redeemable qualities, such as episode 1 and the Q/Picard scenes of episode 2. I think the better word I would use for Season 2 might be disappointment. I'm disappointed that the promise of the first 2 episodes might not be realized. Of course there are 2 episodes to go so I might have a change of mind in a few weeks. Still, I'm not going to bash something others enjoy (And I really haven't posted much on this forum the last few weeks) because of my own personal disappointment with the series.