Which makes me think it doesn't mean what we think it means.
The title might just refer to the word not the political entity.
Spoilers Star Trek: Picard General Discussion Thread
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The title might just refer to the word not the political entity.
While I'm okay with DSC ending after five seasons, I'm starting to really wish PIC wouldn't be ending after three. I understand "it was planned!", but they really seem to be in a groove, firing on all cylinders. Ending it now is starting to feel like a mistake.
"But the other series!" I don't care about the other series. The only way to say it is to say it. I think this one is better. PIC doesn't feel like a series that's winding down.
"But the other series!" I don't care about the other series. The only way to say it is to say it. I think this one is better. PIC doesn't feel like a series that's winding down.
That's the situation with DSC. They can't really top reaching out to Species 10-C and having key worlds rejoin the Federation. The Discovery has grown to be a pivotal part of Starfleet in the 32nd Century. Narratively speaking, it feels like the show has more or less run its course. While I would've liked for it go past its fifth season, I feel like it's lived its life. That's why my attitude towards DSC ending is "that's too bad" instead of "No! I want more!"
I'm not so sure now if PIC has run its natural course, unless its only purpose was to tie up loose ends with after NEM and give TNG a better send-off. I feel like they can do more with it than just that.
I kinda feel the same way about Discovery, but I also feel that way about the 25th century in general.
The narrative outlines of the trek universe are set more or less until the 32nd century.
everything that occurs in the 25th century, including S3 Picard borders on fan fic: "look at your faves having cool adventures" "oooh Dominion is back and they mean business"
I hope TPTB are developing something new in Disco land that explores all the sci fi weirdness that disco got into over the last two seasons.
I want Star Trek: Calypso.
"The V'Draysh" sounds more mysterious than "The Federation". It would be interesting if the Federation became so large that there was a split after The Burn. According to DSC, there were almost 400 worlds in the Federation before The Burn. As of the end of DSC Season 4, they're only up to about 60. So there are a ton of ex-Federation worlds that could go to the V'Draysh and have them both exist.
Then there's Craft. What's his story all about?
As far as the Discovery being in "Calypso", not the Discovery-A, and having a fully developed Zora? Reprogrammable matter makes it easy to solve that mystery.
I'm normally not a prequel fan. Better Call Saul and early-Disco are the only prequels I'm a fan of (Prometheus as well, if you want to throw in films). I liked DSC enough that I was willing to look past its prequel-ness during the first two seasons.
"The V'Draysh" sounds more mysterious than "The Federation". It would be interesting if the Federation became so large that there was a split after The Burn. According to DSC, there were almost 400 worlds in the Federation before The Burn. As of the end of DSC Season 4, they're only up to about 60. So there are a ton of ex-Federation worlds that could go to the V'Draysh and have them both exist.
Then there's Craft. What's his story all about?
As far as the Discovery being in "Calypso", not the Discovery-A, and having a fully developed Zora? Reprogrammable matter makes it easy to solve that mystery.
If Star Trek hadn't wasted its time doing nothing but prequels and reboots for almost 20 years (file this under Controversial Opinion), we'd have seen the Dominion in other series after DS9. EDIT: Okay, that came off too harsh. A reboot was necessary to restart the films, which eventually led to having new series. But still, if they had anything that took place in the 24th Century during the '00s and '10s (besides Nemesis and the tail-end of Voyager), we'd have seen the Dominion again for sure before now.
I'm normally not a prequel fan. Better Call Saul and early-Disco are the only prequels I'm a fan of (Prometheus as well, if you want to throw in films). I liked DSC enough that I was willing to look past its prequel-ness during the first two seasons.
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I disagree to an extent. I view Discovery in different terms. Season 1 was restarting Trek after 15 years. It was a product of a tortured pre-production and terrible season 1 behind the scenes drama. Season 2 was a great course correction, but it was still trapped by the pre-production decisions of Season 1 and people who largely didn't work on Trek anymore. WIth Season 3, the show arrived. Discovery in the 32nd century is the show it always should have been. Everything about it makes more sense, free of the nonsense like inserting the Spore Drive in the mid 23rd century and Spock having an adopted sister we never heard about before. Spore Drive as a post-Warp very long-distance means of travel (given the evident problems with Quantum Slipstream, Transwarp Conduits or whatever else), even though the technobabble behind it is utter crap, works too.
We need more 32nd century content. I hope we get it. It's an interesting, fresh era and a new dynamic. It's a shame we'll get only 3 seasons of it, when its when Discovery got really good. Season 4 especially, was excellent.
Picard though is different.I wish we could just get back to having 24th/25th century shows. One Trek producer - might have been Matalas - put it perfectly. The 23rd century / SNW is "the past", the 24th/25th century is "the present" and the 32nd century is "the future". I would love to have more shows in the "the present". But the limitation of Picard is Sir Patrick Stewart. Both in what he wanted for the show, and secondly is health.
In terms of what he wanted, he was very clear from the outset: not a TNG reunion show. He was adamant about that for Season 1 and Season 2. He wore the uniform only for flashbacks and exactly one scene in Season 2. He doesn't regret Picard anymore or his career one bit, but he clearly has issues with being the captain in that uniform, with a combadge and won't even do it in Season 3 when Riker is donning the unform right next to him. Even now, he is insisting Season 3 isn't a reunion show, when you have Matalas and Okuda all going on social media "yeah btw, we think of this as TNG Season 8" as evidenced by literally every aspect of our revamped production style, right down the font of the credits". I doubt SPS would ever go for 2 more seasons of in the mold of the "real TNG Star Trek" style of Season 3. More likely, he'd want to do something entirely different for a theoretical Season 4. Probably closer to Season 1. If Season 3 is about Starfleet, Season 4 would very much be not about Starfleet. That is how SPS works.
As far as his health, I'll put it bluntly, his semi-emergency heart surgery a a few years back brought an end to 20 years of eternal youth jokes. He's lost his vigor since. He's frankly, finally getting old and it shows. This is not surprising. Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney are both other high profile public figures who had cardiac surgeries and the surgery and their post-surgery self-care both made them frailer in motion and demeanor. The Patrick Stewart of X-Men Days of Future's Past, which wasn't that long, is simply a more vital man than the Stewart of "Picard", and it wasn't long ago.
The 3 season plan for Picard, especially with Season 2 and Season 3 shot back to back (which was broached as early as Season 1) was clearly made with SPS's limitations in mind. In Season 1, you could see, that he had limited presence on sets and on location, which is why they ludicrously made his room on the ship his office in France (so they could shoot half his scenes in the show in one location, in a short period of time). In season 2, he had almost no physical mobility. His ability to move his body or bend his back and knees during the scenes in the catacombs was clearly very limited.In Season 3, we'll be 4 episodes in on basically two sets - parts of his Vineyard (but notably, clearly not the same places as Season 1 and 2), and the Titan/Starfleet sets, which they keep reusing and redecoing. It's also more of an ensemble show, so he has fewer lines and fewer scenes.
This is not meant to be a critique of an aging man and a hero to many of us. All of us age, and none of us ever want cardiac issues. But "Star Trek: Picard", in a sense, was made almost 10 years late for there to be a long run with SPS doing more than what he is. It pains me to say, but unless we're very lucky, we're going to lose him in a few years. DS9 has already lost three cast members. (Odo, Nog, Wynn),and Avery Brooks has been retired for nearly 20 years. We've been lucky that the TNG cast has remained involved, and aged so gracefully for so long and also hasn't devolved into the dysfunction that the TOS crew did, or the cynicism of parts of the Voyager crew (or disinterest of the ENT crew). But this show, specifically this season, comes along at basically the last possible moment to do a TNG show.
So better to end it now, in a controlled fashioned, in a way that brings the closure that a Nemesis and indeed no 2 hour movie could. And if out of this, we get a 25th century show that features "Admiral Riker" doing guest spots so much the better. We're getting a true gift with Season 3... the love letter that Berman and Braga cynically said we'd get with "These Are the Voyages....", delayed by 18 years. Let's enjoy it, and pray Star Trek alumni in Matalas gets another show and isn't regarded by TPTB as too low level to be given another production, or as a rival by"the big names" that have cycled through Picard like Chabon (who cares), Avika Goldsman or Alex Kurtzman.
Regardless if we got the terrible Kelvinverse movies or not, we weren't going to get new Trek because of one man: Les Moonves. Star Trek was protected under CBS/Viacom/Paramount (i forget what the name was at the time) for years by Les Moonves' predecessors. He had been at the head of CBS Television since 1998, but when he became CEO of CBS in 2003, he immediately, personally, went about trying to kill Star Trek. Trek came under the authority of CBS Television (his old haunt) and not Paramount Pictures. He tried after Season 3, and the show got a stay of execution (and a massive cut in budget) for Season 4, when he succeeded in killing it.
Killing Trek was personal for him. He hated all things sci-fi, and Trek was king of sci-fi. He kept Sci-fi off of CBS at a time the other networks were doing sci-fi, like the X-Files and BSG (which aired sometimes on NBC). I believe once I read he used a homophobic slur with reference to sci-fi. Why have such strong opinions about something he may have personally not enjoyed? Who knows, but anyone who has interacted with CEOs knows they are often borderline personalities and kept in check by their subordinates. In CBS's case, his subordinates were his servants. That's how he got to stay at that post, despite mergers and demergers of Viacom/CBS/Paramount, until 2018.
Trek was dead so long as he was there. Sci-fi in general was. CBS leaned hard into police / first responder shows, reality shows and tough-guy shows. The things he liked.
So why did Trek come back. Because CBS All Access was gearing up and needed tent polls, and Star Trek was a latent license, that by his own mouth, would attract millions of "Trekkies"... and even in promoting it, he managed to take a crap on the Berman era shows, comparing his plans for Discovery favorably to them. He also probably knew he would be on his way out the door after All Access launched, so it would be someone elses problem before long. And no surprise, after he came back, CBS's all new management decided to keep piling on Trek shows, despite the fact that Discovery Season 1 apparently did decent, but not spectacular ratings wise.
To qualify it like Star Trek was "choosing" to do nothing simply isn't fair. Star Trek was impounded by one Type-A asshole who had power for the entire time. The only reason the Kelvinverse happened was because it was under Paramount's authority (a separate company at that point), and JJ Abrams brought in external financing to pay for it through Bad Robot, so Paramount's risks were low. It's also why, in the reunified company, I expect Star Trek 4 to never get made.
There certainly is wisdom in retelling the iconic TOS story. The Kelvinverse does deserve credit for breaking that one difficult-to-imagine barrier and disassociating (to some degree) character from specific performances by their original actors. The Kelvinverse cast very consciously decided to not ape the TOS cast performances besides some callbacks. That opened the door to a new generation of Trek fans, a return to the 23r century (for better or worse) and the far superior SNW show. Will the same thing be possible to recast TNG one day? I doubt it. But who knows. So the Kelvinverse era wasn't all for naught in the end.
But I do believe that if CBS/Viacom/Paramount hadn't undergone its business drama and Les Moonves had never been in that position, Enterprise probably would have run a further 3 seasons, and we probably would have gotten new Trek shows earlier (though Berman and Braga were clearly on their way out by Season 3 of Enterprise... understandably so).
But we really can blame TV-Trek's 12 years in the wilderness on exactly one asshole who, in the end, turned out to be another executive-level sexual predator. Because of course he was.
I want to congratulate Michael Crow for skillfully hiding a spoiler in plain sight.
This makes me wonder. The Female Changeling once said that the Founders were not always able to shapeshift and that they had evolved from a humanoid species. I wonder if Vadic and her crew are changelings who are genetic throwbacks to an early transitional form. Hence why they look different in their fluidic state and why Vadic has to cut parts of herself off instead of detaching it by sheer will.
Don't really have anything to add, but this was a great, thoughtful post.
I'll put it this way: If Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard were replaced with (for instance) Star Trek: Calypso and Star Trek: Legacy, just as examples, I'd be able to get behind that.
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It was ten years ago and he’s in his eighties. There’s a huge difference for almost anyone at that age.
I’d love more adventures in the 25th century but people need to realise it’s a miracle we got Patrick Stewart back as Picard at all. Any new series is going to have to more forward without him, and I think this season is proving that Star Trek can move past Jean-Luc Picard.
Does anyone feel that the trailer reveal of Lore and Moriarty were unnecessary spoilers? We re 40% into the season and haven't seen them yet and I certainly would not be expecting them had it not been spoiled in the trailer. Now I am just anxious to see how they fit in. I don't think that anticipation is better for fans than the surprise would have been.
Daniel Davis said that filming his scenes as Moriarty took less then a day, so he's going to be in one episode for a few scenes at most. He was chucked in the trailer just to generate buzz and to intrigue the haters. We all knew Spiner would be back as well so seeing him as Lore wasn't that huge of a surprise for me.
Trailers are to hook interest.
I think that also says something about the direction the show took in the 4th season. It might have been too inside baseball for the masses. Perhaps they didn’t care about the augments, Klingon ridges and the Mirror Universe.
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