Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 3x05 - "Imposters"

[Tuskin38]

Well Terry Matallis isn't the TNG Cannon Guru he thinks he is. Shaw also brings up the temporal anomaly in the devron system from TNG S7 All Good Things, but at the end of the episode itself, John-Luc makes a log entry stating that nothing in the reality he experienced happened in the 'real world'. He said he was the only one with any memory of what happened in any of the three Q created timelines..

Doesn't stop him from making a report to Starfleet.

So yeah changelings being able to fool Federation scanners is nothing new

One presumes Starfleet managed to improve their scanners to detect changelings.
Seven said it was routine to scan since the Dominion War.

 

[Noname Given]

Doesn't stop him from making a report to Starfleet.

Uh huh - and EVERY report to Starfleet gets disseminated publicly to all levels of Starfleet; NOTHING is secret. Not to mention Picard reported that NOTHING happened in the 'real world' - so Shaw's line is BS to begin with. Yes, it happened for/to Picard and Q; NO ONE ELSE. (Capitalized because that is an important point that seems to be missed.) Like TNG S6 Tapestry, it was all a dream that only Picard himself experienced.

 

[Tuskin38]

Uh huh - and EVERY report to Starfleet gets disseminated publicly to all levels of Starfleet

Sure why not.

 

[fireproof78]

Uh huh - and EVERY report to Starfleet gets disseminated publicly to all levels of Starfleet; NOTHING is secret.

No, not really. Starfleet and the Federation is built on trust so logs are probably distributed to command level officers based upon assignments and personal interest. Dissertations, or explorations of missions could be standard practice at Command School at the Academy.

 

[The Master of Tarquin Hill]

No, it was not gratuitous. I am so tired of hearing this. No offense but people who think this do not seem to understand what they are watching. Look deeper. If go back to TNG, Ro Laren was a protegee of Picard. He even saw her like a daughter. He tried to mentor her and guide her out of her rebellious ways. But she betrayed him by rejecting Starfleet and joining the Maquis. It deeply wounded Picard. So the whole point of bringing Ro back in Picard S3 was to being some closure to that really important thread that TNG left dangling. And her death was not gratuitous because she was able to get that closure with Picard and more importantly, sacrificed herself to allow Picard and co. a fighting chance to continue her investigation which was her passion and hopefully save the entire freakin' Federation! Her death is the ultimate act of redemption: a prodigal daugher who came back and gives her life so her mentor can finish her work. It was anything but gratuitous. If she had been commander "red Mcshirt", you would have missed the entire point of bringing closure to a TNG character who meant a lot to Picard and have a meaningful sacrifice that redeems the character and motivates Picard to finish his protegee's work. So no, she could not have been commander "red McShirt".

And if that wasn't enough for you - she committed her transgression in a shuttle("Pre-Emptive Strike"), and redeemed herself in a shuttle.

 

[Sci]

That’s because so far, every one of the ‘huh’ things has been addressed in story, usually pretty swiftly.

Don't agree. Jean-Luc irrationally believing that the Titan had any tactical chance against the Shrike (when he has used the exact same run-and-hide tactic plenty of times before against tactically superior vessels) was a pretty big "huh" moment with no real explanation. Neither did we get much of an explanation for why Will would blow up at Jean-Luc on the bridge, refuse to accept responsibility for his own orders, and then undermine crew morale and discipline by proclaiming that they were all gonna die.

I still don’t know why Seven broke up with Chakotay,

We still don't know why she started dating Chakotay. It's not like they had any chemistry.

But more seriously, do we really need an explanation for why she's not dating someone she went on a grand total of two dates with twenty-three years ago? I mean, I went on a couple of dates with someone six years ago and I can't remember her last name. Does that need an explanation?

left Starfleet,

Seven never joined Starfleet until PIC S3. There were multiple scenes in S1 and S2 about this. Please do pay attention.

and joined the Fenris rangers,

This was explained in S1 and S2. Starfleet rejected her application in spite of Admiral Janeway's attempts to help her. Seven saw how the collapse of both the Romulan government and the Federation's decision to turn their backs on the outside galaxy meant that regions of former Romulan space were collapsing into anarchy. She joined the Fenris Rangers because they were acting to try to restore some semblance of order to those areas.

let alone who Vajayjay was to her and why Seven shooting her was such a big deal for her

"Stardust City Rag" was very clear about this.

The few things in DSC s1 that I was curious ‘how are they going to resolve that’ never were, and I drifted off in s2 because so many spoilers showed what was coming, and I really hate the concept of Control, having sat through it once already in the books. Besides which, I barely knew more than a handful of characters, most of whom were written out.
I really wanted to see how the Tyler/Burnham thing would be resolved, and found the Klingon woman intriguing — but a couple of years on, having seen that be fumbled, I can’t even remember her name.
I can still remember TNG guest star character names thirty years later, despite sometimes only seeing an episode once. (Sure, trading cards helped…)

This has nothing to do with Star Trek: Picard.

She was a field commission in Voyager,

Nope. She was never given a field commission. She was a civilian who was given a job, same as Neelix and Kes, but she was never a Starfleet officer.

no different to all the Maquis crew and Neelix, or even Kes.

Neelix and Kes never received field commissions. They were civilians with jobs -- like Mr. Mott the barber on the Enterprise-D.

Yes, we hear her application was rejected

You are upset at PIC because you fundamentally misunderstood VOY.

Yes, we can tell there’s a history there, with Bjayzl, but we aren’t told that much about it — compared to say Boothby,

We're told no more about Boothby than we are about Bjayzl. All we know about Boothby is that he was a groundskeeper at Starfleet Academy from at least circa 2320 to at least circa 2374, and that he apparently gave good "life lesson" advice to cadets like Jean-Luc and Chakotay that they later remembered with respect and fondness.

By contrast, with Bjayzl, we know that she was a Fenris Ranger who was emotionally quite close to Seven, that they may have been lovers, that she betrayed Seven and the Rangers, that she killed Icheb in order to sell his Borg implants on the black market, and that she became a powerful organized crime leaders on the corrupt world of Freecloud.

Really, we know more about Bjayzl than we do about Boothby.

or Phillips Louvois in the olden days of Trek.

The details we have on Bjayzl are comparable to the details we have about Louvois. She was a former lover of Jean-Luc's who was assigned to prosecute him in his court-martial for the destruction of the Stargazer and emotionally betrayed him rather than recuse herself for a conflict of interest.

Her shooting her is this big thing, but we aren’t shown *why* particularly.

... if you don't get why killing the woman who killed her ersatz son was a big thing, then I don't even know what to say. It's all there in the episode. Nothing about this is unclear.

Worf quitting his role as an Ambassador is indeed a question, but, hadn’t that already happened in Nemesis?

Star Trek: Nemesis never bothers to establish why Worf is back in Starfleet, only that he is. It never addresses the question of if he is still Ambassador of the United Federation of Planets to the Klingon Empire, whether he has taken a sabbatical to attend Will's and Deanna's wedding, whether he has resigned his post and rejoined Starfleet permanently, or whatever is going on. He's just back in uniform with no explanation. Star Trek: Picard has not yet explained the situation.

Regardless, a former Starfleet Command and Tactical/Security Officer, then an Ambassador… there’s not a more obvious candidate for Intelligence Officer. Even if he wasn’t one, most people would assume he was. Which would probably be really annoying for Worf in the Klingon Empire, as he’s far too honourable to spy on the Klingons. Embassies are where the spooks live, everyone knows that.

Yes, but the spies are not the literal head of the diplomatic mission. Typically intelligence agents are placed under cover as lower-ranking diplomatic officials. The heads of mission are under too much scrutiny to be viable intelligence agents.

Also, most importantly, is it a functional part of the story that he is no longer an ambassador?

Is it a functional part of the story that Seven is no longer dating a dude she went on two dates with a quarter-century ago?

The changes in Sevens character set-up would have benefit from proper exposition, precisely because they did not seem organic.

Seven not being with a guy she went on two dates with a quarter-century ago and with whom she had no chemistry seems plenty organic to me. Seven not being part of Starfleet at a time when Starfleet has clearly become reactionary seems plenty organic to me.

Look at the difference between Ro this week and Icheb in s1 — both single episode cameos tied to a lead character, but one achieves much more and is much better handled.

Nope. "Stardust City Rag" handled Icheb just as well as "Imposters" handled Ro.

Nope. I caught that. But outside of inferring from performance and minimal dialogue, I do not know why this was such a betrayal for seven.

... you mean, outside of the elements that make up a story? It's a work of art, not a Wikipedia entry.

The Fenris Rangers too are little more than a “cool” name, evocative more of Babylon 5 than Trek, and we still don’t know who or why they are.

Yes, we do. They are a private militia that arose out of the chaos of the collapse of the Romulan Star Empire and act to provide some level of law and order in the regions of space where there is no large government present.

(Easy fix ‘they grew out of what was left of the Maquis, once the Dominion war was over” slap that in dialogue.

That's not a fix. That's just pointless continuity porn. Things can develop without being direct descendants of things we've seen before.

It’s nebulous how she even knows Picard, other than both being XB.

No, it is not. She met him for the first time in "Stardust City Rag."

Albeit in radically different ways, as long time viewers will know, but new viewers may not notice the difference. Mostly I am put in mind of the comic series Hive. Which reminds me — a little exposition on how we went from Guinans speech in Measure of a Man to a Federation embracing slavery with Synths would have been nice.

There's no explanation needed. "The Measure of a Man" did not depict the Federation as an institution that embraced Jean-Luc's defense of Data as a standard for all artificial lifeforms; it was one court case, but there was nothing to indicate it was used as a precedent. Indeed, later TNG episodes strongly implied that it wasn't used as a precedent, since "The Offspring" literally featured Starfleet trying to abduct Lal from Data's custody. Meanwhile, VOY established that sapient EMHes were being used for compulsory, uncompensated labor and were consider Starfleet property very early on, and then VOY's "Author, Author" established that older EMH models were being used for literal slave labor.

Data's case in "Measure" simply never became a legal precedent.

Ro's death was way more gratuitous than Hugh's. High was in the whole season and had a very good reason to be there.

I don't think Ro's death was more gratuitous than Hugh's. I think both died for very clear plot and thematic reasons.

Ro could have been Commander Red McShirt and it would have made no difference to the plot. Complete and utter memberberries but of course Matalas is a god because it helps with the bashing.

I don't agree. While it could have been a number of characters besides Ro, it could not have been a random person because it had to be someone who could convince Jean-Luc to trust them enough to go on the run from Starfleet entirely and to believe that Changelings had infiltrated at the highest levels. And then the informing character needed to die to turn up the sense of the threat -- just like Hugh had to die narratively in order to turn up the sense of the threat from the Zhat Vash.

Crusher literally had a pump action phaser

I absolutely do not care about this. This is something that took exactly 2.3 seconds and meant nothing whatsoever to the plot, characters, or themes.

I’ll be honest, given she doesn’t have a rank pip except when she’s in uniform for time travel shenanigans, I suppose it could go either way

No. It couldn't. Seven of Nine was never part of Starfleet until 2401.

— she’s referred to as part of Janeway crew, functions as a de facto officer,

De facto is not de jure, especially on an isolated starship trapped on the other side of the galaxy trying to get home. Seven was never given a field commission.

I don’t think civilian specialist is a thing that matches up in Trek much of the time, but that’s something that devolves into ‘is Starfleet a military’ and that things on its ninth Soong golem body.

Civilian specialists are things we have seen multiple times in Starfleet. Seven was clearly a civilian.

I mean no wonder she’s pissed off — wears the uniform, follows the chain of command, takes classes on behalf of Starfleet, saves the universe or somesuch here and there, all with that Delta smacked on the Starfleet Designed Warp Bosoms, and doesn’t even get a metaphorical Paycheck?

Seven of Nine rather famously did not wear a Starfleet uniform aboard Voyager. But yes, you have accurately summarized part of why Seven is so furious at Starfleet in PIC S1. This was pretty clear in the text.

I still stand by that it was clumsily done, and could/should have been handled better, and that so far this season most things that have looked similarly clumsy initially have had further exposition that makes them either less so or not.

It wasn't clumsily done. You just weren't paying attention and appear to want characters' personalities, desires, and stats written out for you like a Dungeons and Dragons game.

Even Raffi is getting more development,

Raffi is acting like a newbie who's never done undercover work before. She's a middle-aged who was already a seasoned intelligence professional before PIC S1.

Other than ‘oh Noe’s, they killed Hugh, those bastards’ what did it bring to furthering the plot or story?

The same thing Ro's death brought to the story: It elevated the level of threat the protagonists were under from the villains and neutralized a character who might otherwise have been in a position to provide them with greater resources to fight the villains.

No, it was not gratuitous. I am so tired of hearing this. No offense but people who think this do not seem to understand what they are watching. Look deeper. If go back to TNG, Ro Laren was a protegee of Picard. He even saw her like a daughter. He tried to mentor her and guide her out of her rebellious ways. But she betrayed him by rejecting Starfleet and joining the Maquis. It deeply wounded Picard. So the whole point of bringing Ro back in Picard S3 was to being some closure to that really important thread that TNG left dangling. And her death was not gratuitous because she was able to get that closure with Picard and more importantly, sacrificed herself to allow Picard and co. a fighting chance to continue her investigation which was her passion and hopefully save the entire freakin' Federation! Her death is the ultimate act of redemption: a prodigal daugher who came back and gives her life so her mentor can finish her work. It was anything but gratuitous. If she had been commander "red Mcshirt", you would have missed the entire point of bringing closure to a TNG character who meant a lot to Picard and have a meaningful sacrifice that redeems the character and motivates Picard to finish his protegee's work. So no, she could not have been commander "red McShirt".

I agree. And I think the same argument applies to Icheb and Hugh: neither one's appearances or deaths were gratuitous.

I'll go one further and say that I wasn't overly pleased to see Worf decapitating Ferengi henchman. But I can accept it because he is a Klingon - maybe that one does makes me a hypocrite though - because I hated the decapitation scene in Picard Season 1.

I mean, it's fine to just find decapitation an unpleasant thing to see depicted. But yeah, I don't see where Worf decapitating Sneed was objectively any better or worse than Elnor decapitating Tenqem Adrev. They both come from cultures were violence, up to and including lethal violence, is normalized; they were both employing that violence on a planet where the rule of law was weak or nonexistent; and they were both acting to defend the lives of other people.

Okay, I am sorry if this has been brought up before. Now that P+ has put up the Shaw turbolift scene from this episode on YT, I feel compelled to say that he got the facts about “Insurrection” wrong - It was not a Prime Directive violation! The Baku was not indigenous to the planet as Admiral Dougherty pointed out to Capt. Picard in his ready room!

Nope, it's still a Prime Directive thing. Forcibly relocating an entire foreign culture from their territory is still interfering in their evolution.

Later, the Entire Federation, who do not have to respect General Order 1 of the Star Fleet Charter because they are not in Star Fleet, mostly the diplomatic corps and the Ambassadors, sometimes the actual Federation Council, defines the relationship that the Federation is going to have with that new Species who is cool with the Federation being obnoxiously friendly, droning on painstakingly about values and goals.

Bear in mind though that DS9's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" explicitly establishes that the Federation Charter bans the UFP from interfering in the internal affairs of foreign cultures, so there's still a non-interference law at play even at the Federation government level.[/quote]

 

[IRW Bloodwing]

Okay, I am sorry if this has been brought up before. Now that P+ has put up the Shaw turbolift scene from this episode on YT, I feel compelled to say that he got the facts about “Insurrection” wrong - It was not a Prime Directive violation! The Baku was not indigenous to the planet as Admiral Dougherty pointed out to Capt. Picard in his ready room! It was more a disobeying a direct order from a superior officer thing

I got the impression he was going off of after-action reports. Let's not forget that some officers are stodgier than others. Janeway had a rather jaundiced view of Kirk and co. And the DTI loathed him with a fiery passion (for DTI, that is...)

 

[The Master of Tarquin Hill]

Uh huh - and EVERY report to Starfleet gets disseminated publicly to all levels of Starfleet; NOTHING is secret. Not to mention Picard reported that NOTHING happened in the 'real world' - so Shaw's line is BS to begin with. Yes, it happened for/to Picard and Q; NO ONE ELSE. (Capitalized because that is an important point that seems to be missed.) Like TNG S6 Tapestry, it was all a dream that only Picard himself experienced.

I'm sure Captains and Admirals gossip too.

 

[IRW Bloodwing]

Picard: How can there be an order to abandon the Prime Directive?

Dougherty: The Prime Directive doesn't apply. These people are not indigenous to this planet. They were never meant to be immortal. We'll simply be restoring them to their natural evolution.

Seems like Shaw was dozing off while watching most of the Ba'ku documentary and apparently only paid attention to the juicy parts with Anij.

Admittedly, Daugherty was playing very fast and loose with the rules there. If the Ba'ku weren't protected by the PD, they shurely would have been covered as the original (and rightful) colonizers of their world.

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

No, it was not gratuitous. I am so tired of hearing this

I don't believe it was either. But I also don't believe Hugh's was. Deaths are just deaths.

Now it makes more sense why you were asking me why I liked PIC Season 3 so much. I thought it was an odd question, at first, because I wasn't sure where it was coming from.

Was mostly surprised you ranked it so much higher than other recent shows which I know you also like.

As for my post I'll just say I like season 3 of Picard but there is very little between it and season 1 which I also like. I was just pointing out the hypocrisy in much of the posts that feel the need to couple every praise for the season with a dig at recent Trek.
I gave up on the SNW threads because people couldn't just say "it's very good" it was always "way better than STD"
People get what they want but still can't put the hate watching aside.

 

[Sci]

Here's a question: Jean-Luc was an admiral from at least 2381 to 2385, and then again from 2399 to 2401. Why was he unaware that Ro had returned to Starfleet and been assigned to Starfleet Intelligence?

 

[IRW Bloodwing]

I'm sure Captains and Admirals gossip too.

I know it got brought up in the (non-canon, admittedly) New Frontiers (?) novels where an admiral tells Capt. Calhoun about how there used to be peals of laughter in the halls at Starfleet HQ every time Kirk turned in one of his more "colorful" after-action reports.

 

[The Master of Tarquin Hill]

Here's a question: Jean-Luc was an admiral from at least 2381 to 2385, and then again from 2399 to 2401. Why was he unaware that Ro had returned to Starfleet and been assigned to Starfleet Intelligence?

Maybe it wasn't just him. Maybe only a few people in SF Intelligence knew she was back in the fold.

 

[Yistaan]

Here's a question: Jean-Luc was an admiral from at least 2381 to 2385, and then again from 2399 to 2401. Why was he unaware that Ro had returned to Starfleet and been assigned to Starfleet Intelligence?

Maybe he did know that she re-entered, but not the details, and then forgot about it in the 2380s? He has no right to go out of his way to interfere in her Starfleet rehabilitation if people outside his chain of command brought her back in. "How the hell is Ro Laren back in Starfleet" is vague enough that maybe he did know in the past, forgot about it, and only remembered it now when he was faced with it.

In Prodigy

Spoiler

Janeway apparently is unaware one of her own Dauntless crew is a refugee she saved on Voyager, despite the likelihood being very high that Janeway would've had to sponsor said crewwoman's entry into Starfleet to begin with!

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ About that last bit in your spoiler: If an Academy applicant is from a non-Federation world, they need a recommendation from a command level officer, true. But it can be ANY command level officer, regardless of posting.

So...

Spoiler: Prodigy

Just because that officer on the Dauntless was saved by Janeway all those years ago, doesn't mean she needed Janeway to sponsor her application. It could have been anyone with command rank.

As for Picard and Ro: Just because Picard is an admiral doesn't mean he knows everything about everyone. Ro's return could have been just a minor background detail that he missed. And/or, her superiors in Starfleet Intelligence decided to keep her return a secret...

 

[The Master of Tarquin Hill]

Maybe he did know that she re-entered, but not the details, and then forgot about it in the 2380s? He has no right to go out of his way to interfere in her Starfleet rehabilitation if people outside his chain of command brought her back in. "How the hell is Ro Laren back in Starfleet" is vague enough that maybe he did know in the past, forgot about it, and only remembered it now when he was faced with it.

In Prodigy

Spoiler

Janeway apparently is unaware one of her own Dauntless crew is a refugee she saved on Voyager, despite the likelihood being very high that Janeway would've had to sponsor said crewwoman's entry into Starfleet to begin with!

As someone who takes care of an elderly patient who is alert and engaged, and recalls most things...but not everything, even things you would totally expect her to remember, I can see this.

 

[TV's Frank]

Nope.

Golum Picard's soul was shifted into alt universe General Picard's evil robot body in season 2, that probably has a kill mode that can fell an elephant.

Hmmm, well that certainly gives me pause to think and consider... but then this season the characters still refer to Picard as being a "robot" or "positronic" and Picard himself doesn't correct them and say "no".

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I guess now that Ro has died, we'll never know what exactly the hell happened that got her kicked out of Starfleet in the first place!

I mean, we know she disobeyed orders which somehow led to eight of her crewmates being killed, but we never find out WHAT orders or WHY....

I don't suppose the novelverse ever dealt with that issue?

 

[fireproof78]

I don't believe it was either. But I also don't believe Hugh's was. Deaths are just deaths.

Same here.

I was just pointing out the hypocrisy in much of the posts that feel the need to couple every praise for the season with a dig at recent Trek.
I gave up on the SNW threads because people couldn't just say "it's very good" it was always "way better than STD"
People get what they want but still can't put the hate watching aside.

Indeed and it's quite frustrating. I get it not all shows are for everyone. I get that this Season is the one that many want. So leave the others alone. The comparison game is unseemly.

Here's a question: Jean-Luc was an admiral from at least 2381 to 2385, and then again from 2399 to 2401. Why was he unaware that Ro had returned to Starfleet and been assigned to Starfleet Intelligence?

Why would he? Need to know as many intelligence operatives usually are.

Maybe it wasn't just him. Maybe only a few people in SF Intelligence knew she was back in the fold.

Exactly.

 

[jaime]

Don't agree. Jean-Luc irrationally believing that the Titan had any tactical chance against the Shrike (when he has used the exact same run-and-hide tactic plenty of times before against tactically superior vessels) was a pretty big "huh" moment with no real explanation. Neither did we get much of an explanation for why Will would blow up at Jean-Luc on the bridge, refuse to accept responsibility for his own orders, and then undermine crew morale and discipline by proclaiming that they were all gonna die.



We still don't know why she started dating Chakotay. It's not like they had any chemistry.

But more seriously, do we really need an explanation for why she's not dating someone she went on a grand total of two dates with twenty-three years ago? I mean, I went on a couple of dates with someone six years ago and I can't remember her last name. Does that need an explanation?



Seven never joined Starfleet until PIC S3. There were multiple scenes in S1 and S2 about this. Please do pay attention.



This was explained in S1 and S2. Starfleet rejected her application in spite of Admiral Janeway's attempts to help her. Seven saw how the collapse of both the Romulan government and the Federation's decision to turn their backs on the outside galaxy meant that regions of former Romulan space were collapsing into anarchy. She joined the Fenris Rangers because they were acting to try to restore some semblance of order to those areas.



"Stardust City Rag" was very clear about this.



This has nothing to do with Star Trek: Picard.



Nope. She was never given a field commission. She was a civilian who was given a job, same as Neelix and Kes, but she was never a Starfleet officer.



Neelix and Kes never received field commissions. They were civilians with jobs -- like Mr. Mott the barber on the Enterprise-D.



You are upset at PIC because you fundamentally misunderstood VOY.



We're told no more about Boothby than we are about Bjayzl. All we know about Boothby is that he was a groundskeeper at Starfleet Academy from at least circa 2320 to at least circa 2374, and that he apparently gave good "life lesson" advice to cadets like Jean-Luc and Chakotay that they later remembered with respect and fondness.

By contrast, with Bjayzl, we know that she was a Fenris Ranger who was emotionally quite close to Seven, that they may have been lovers, that she betrayed Seven and the Rangers, that she killed Icheb in order to sell his Borg implants on the black market, and that she became a powerful organized crime leaders on the corrupt world of Freecloud.

Really, we know more about Bjayzl than we do about Boothby.



The details we have on Bjayzl are comparable to the details we have about Louvois. She was a former lover of Jean-Luc's who was assigned to prosecute him in his court-martial for the destruction of the Stargazer and emotionally betrayed him rather than recuse herself for a conflict of interest.



... if you don't get why killing the woman who killed her ersatz son was a big thing, then I don't even know what to say. It's all there in the episode. Nothing about this is unclear.



Star Trek: Nemesis never bothers to establish why Worf is back in Starfleet, only that he is. It never addresses the question of if he is still Ambassador of the United Federation of Planets to the Klingon Empire, whether he has taken a sabbatical to attend Will's and Deanna's wedding, whether he has resigned his post and rejoined Starfleet permanently, or whatever is going on. He's just back in uniform with no explanation. Star Trek: Picard has not yet explained the situation.



Yes, but the spies are not the literal head of the diplomatic mission. Typically intelligence agents are placed under cover as lower-ranking diplomatic officials. The heads of mission are under too much scrutiny to be viable intelligence agents.



Is it a functional part of the story that Seven is no longer dating a dude she went on two dates with a quarter-century ago?



Seven not being with a guy she went on two dates with a quarter-century ago and with whom she had no chemistry seems plenty organic to me. Seven not being part of Starfleet at a time when Starfleet has clearly become reactionary seems plenty organic to me.



Nope. "Stardust City Rag" handled Icheb just as well as "Imposters" handled Ro.



... you mean, outside of the elements that make up a story? It's a work of art, not a Wikipedia entry.



Yes, we do. They are a private militia that arose out of the chaos of the collapse of the Romulan Star Empire and act to provide some level of law and order in the regions of space where there is no large government present.



That's not a fix. That's just pointless continuity porn. Things can develop without being direct descendants of things we've seen before.



No, it is not. She met him for the first time in "Stardust City Rag."



There's no explanation needed. "The Measure of a Man" did not depict the Federation as an institution that embraced Jean-Luc's defense of Data as a standard for all artificial lifeforms; it was one court case, but there was nothing to indicate it was used as a precedent. Indeed, later TNG episodes strongly implied that it wasn't used as a precedent, since "The Offspring" literally featured Starfleet trying to abduct Lal from Data's custody. Meanwhile, VOY established that sapient EMHes were being used for compulsory, uncompensated labor and were consider Starfleet property very early on, and then VOY's "Author, Author" established that older EMH models were being used for literal slave labor.

Data's case in "Measure" simply never became a legal precedent.



I don't think Ro's death was more gratuitous than Hugh's. I think both died for very clear plot and thematic reasons.



I don't agree. While it could have been a number of characters besides Ro, it could not have been a random person because it had to be someone who could convince Jean-Luc to trust them enough to go on the run from Starfleet entirely and to believe that Changelings had infiltrated at the highest levels. And then the informing character needed to die to turn up the sense of the threat -- just like Hugh had to die narratively in order to turn up the sense of the threat from the Zhat Vash.



I absolutely do not care about this. This is something that took exactly 2.3 seconds and meant nothing whatsoever to the plot, characters, or themes.



No. It couldn't. Seven of Nine was never part of Starfleet until 2401.



De facto is not de jure, especially on an isolated starship trapped on the other side of the galaxy trying to get home. Seven was never given a field commission.



Civilian specialists are things we have seen multiple times in Starfleet. Seven was clearly a civilian.



Seven of Nine rather famously did not wear a Starfleet uniform aboard Voyager. But yes, you have accurately summarized part of why Seven is so furious at Starfleet in PIC S1. This was pretty clear in the text.



It wasn't clumsily done. You just weren't paying attention and appear to want characters' personalities, desires, and stats written out for you like a Dungeons and Dragons game.



Raffi is acting like a newbie who's never done undercover work before. She's a middle-aged who was already a seasoned intelligence professional before PIC S1.



The same thing Ro's death brought to the story: It elevated the level of threat the protagonists were under from the villains and neutralized a character who might otherwise have been in a position to provide them with greater resources to fight the villains.



I agree. And I think the same argument applies to Icheb and Hugh: neither one's appearances or deaths were gratuitous.



I mean, it's fine to just find decapitation an unpleasant thing to see depicted. But yeah, I don't see where Worf decapitating Sneed was objectively any better or worse than Elnor decapitating Tenqem Adrev. They both come from cultures were violence, up to and including lethal violence, is normalized; they were both employing that violence on a planet where the rule of law was weak or nonexistent; and they were both acting to defend the lives of other people.



Nope, it's still a Prime Directive thing. Forcibly relocating an entire foreign culture from their territory is still interfering in their evolution.



Bear in mind though that DS9's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" explicitly establishes that the Federation Charter bans the UFP from interfering in the internal affairs of foreign cultures, so there's still a non-interference law at play even at the Federation government level.

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You know I like Picard, even the early series right?
And cos there’s no time to back and forth individual points, Seven did wear a uniform, briefly, when doing time travel shenanigans, to which I was referring — and technically her Borg catsuits were Starfleet issue. Medical prostheses technically. ;p

For some of the other stuff, I guess I will eventually give series one a rewatch (I thought she only met Picard when beaming onto La Sirena as you say, but she has followed Picard so much since and was there for his almost-death with the big feels, that I was starting to assume a prior relationship was implied, and that therefore I must have been mistaken.) but do feel Hugh and most of the XB stuff was almost irrelevant to the plot when all was said and done that year.

As to Chakotay — this is Trek. Whenever two main characters are involved, they either stick together, or we get chapter and verse on why they didn’t. See: Bev and Jean-Luc, this very season. Real world reasoning doesn’t apply, and small universes are nothing to worry about — otherwise, why is Seven randomly in Picards life? (And the real world can be just as small at times.)