Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 3x09 - "Võx"

[cooleddie74]

To be honest the portal weapon attack on the Starfleet Recruiting Center on M'talas Prime was a lot more shocking and interesting than stealing Picard's organic corpse.

 

[Gepard]

100% agreed. Like I said -- the text is now literally, "Young people are all brainwashed by evil foreigners using scary new computer networks and it's up to the Boomers to fight young people to save the day." It's a very regressive idea, even if it's not intentionally so.

I don't care at all about the erstwhile subtext, but the last-second logic they injected to get all of - and only -- the original TNG cast onto the Ent-D bridge is my one major issue with this episode. Prior episodes had Ro and the Changelings both avoiding use of the transporters, and then it turns out it wouldn't have affected them anyway because of the technobabble that allows Riker, Worf, et al to escape the consequences of the premise.

Have the courage of your convictions, writers; if you set up that "transporter do bad thing" actually have it do bad thing to the people who used the transporter.

 

[BBC 2 6pm]

To be honest the portal weapon attack on the Starfleet Recruiting Center on M'talas Prime was a lot more shocking and interesting than stealing Picard's organic corpse.

That's why it's such a perfect distraction! /s

 

[Bad Thoughts]

I believe Starfleet has a policy of Suspension of Disbelief when it comes to preserving heritage. Every museum ship is kept up to date, equipped to fire the newest munitions and are loaded for bear.

 

[BBC 2 6pm]

I don't care at all about the erstwhile subtext, but the last-second logic they injected to get all of - and only -- the original TNG cast onto the Ent-D bridge is my one major issue with this episode. Prior episodes had Ro and the Changelings both avoiding use of the transporters, and then it turns out it wouldn't have affected them anyway because technobabble to allow Riker, Worf, et al to escape the consequences of the premise.

Ehhh Ro knew there was something funny with the transporters, but not exactly what.

 

[Scionz]

This is great to hear, especially if/when DS9/VGR finally get HD remasters.

So here's the thing about what I said: it's not clear if CBS/Paramount has any of the DS9/Voyager/Enterprise era CG at all. Eaglemoss (or rather, it's artists) having it, sourced from 90s CG artists from their lost-and-found personal drives, doesn't mean CBS/Paramount took possession of it. Samuel Cockings has much of it too. But when I asked David Blass and another Picard CG guy about this on Twitter, I got a generic ownership non-answer.

When the Sacrifice of Angels scenes were upscaled for the DS9 documentary, while it was done with Paramount approval and crowdfunded money, the CGI was sourced from drives from the VFX studio that an artist took from the office when they went out of business. Paramount did not give them the CGI.

There is an urgency to this. To put it simply, the 90s shows were a long time ago. A 50 year old VFX producer in DS9 Season 7 would be 76 today. Furthermore technology is changing all the time making compatibility with 90s software ever dicier. When some of these artists and producers pass, the location and how to use the tools to upscale that 90s/early 2000s CG will be gone with them. One of Eaglemoss' principle CGI artists, who acted as the pointman for collecting the 90s ship models and upscaling them, actually died a year or two ago of Covid.

After Episode 10 airs, I hope to ask again about what Galaxy class model was used and if it was archived. But the organized archiving of 90s/early 2000s CGI by the rights owner, even if it is for archival purposes so AI can upscale the Berman shows to 8k for cheap in 20 years, is something that should be asked loudly and often by Trek fans.

 

[cooleddie74]

When the distraction is more interesting than the caper then that says something about the caper. But whatever, I'm having goofy fun with the wrapup of this season so I say let it ride!

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I do find it funny that with all the budget concerns, I wonder how much money they spent on those naval costumes used in the holodeck scene in Generations.

Too much. They spent too much money on that sequence. It was pointless and didn't add anything. It was all because Jeri Taylor said they (Moore and Braga) needed a fun introduction to the crew in her script notes.

 

[DaveyNY]

Putting the Borg aside, allowing all your ships to be remotely controlled with no way to override it just seems like a terrible idea with little upside.

I think perhaps folks are missing the fact that the Changelings who had apparently replaced many Star Fleet Command Officers quite awhile ago, were the ones who initiated the Remote Controlled Fleet idea.
I'm sure Geordi wasn't the only one who complained about that being a bad idea.
But anyone in authority who could have stopped it was probably either replaced (killed) or ignored.

 

[SJGardner]

I don't care at all about the erstwhile subtext, but the last-second logic they injected to get all of - and only -- the original TNG cast onto the Ent-D bridge is my one major issue with this episode. Prior episodes had Ro and the Changelings both avoiding use of the transporters, and then it turns out it wouldn't have affected them anyway because of the technobabble that allows Riker, Worf, et al to escape the consequences of the premise.

Have the courage of your convictions, writers; if you set up that "transporter do bad thing" actually have to do bad thing to the people who used the transporter.

I would counter that Ro did say there were several transporter accidents recently. She avoided them because she knew the Changelings were doing something to them, but didn't know what. It was an effective way to establish their plans were somehow connected without revealing anything specific too early.

 

[JoeZhang]

Right but the ship has functional launchers? The phaser arrays have been repaired/replaced? The shields? And not just 'they work to do a demo to impress visitors', but combat-ready?

Remember Starfleet is not a military and that's why they have high capacity weapons all over the place to demonstrate that - a real miltary would take better care of them.

 

[BBC 2 6pm]

I think perhaps folks are missing the fact that the Changelings who had apparently replaced many Star Fleet Command Officers quite awhile ago, were the ones who initiated the Remote Controlled Fleet idea.
I'm sure Geordi wasn't the only one who complained about that being a bad idea.
But anyone in authority who could have stopped it was probably either replaced (killed) or ignored.

True that's why I said upthread that I hope Shelby was a Changeling. Because she was in charge of the ceremony it seems, and very senior, so if she wasn't a Changeling then she was an idiot.

 

[Tuskin38]

So here's the thing about what I said: it's not clear if CBS/Paramount has any of the DS9/Voyager/Enterprise era CG at all. Eaglemoss (or rather, it's artists) having it, sourced from 90s CG artists from their lost-and-found personal drives, doesn't mean CBS/Paramount took possession of it. Samuel Cockings has much of it too.

One of the VFX artists on Picard said they have access to a lot of the 90s CG assets, but it's just a pain in the ass to upconvert to their modern rendering software formats, which is why they were using STO and Eaglemoss models.

 

[David cgc]

When the Sacrifice of Angels scenes were upscaled for the DS9 documentary, while it was done with Paramount approval and crowdfunded money, the CGI was sourced from drives from the VFX studio that an artist took from the office when they went out of business. Paramount did not give them the CGI.

I’m pretty sure those shots actually predated the documentary, at least some of them. I’d seen a couple of them posted years earlier online.

 

[CrockAlley]

Plot, character, and emotion. I can overlook weakness in some of those categories if the others are strong. But this show has never really hit any of those for me. Nostalgia is not a substitute for good storytelling. I grew up with TNG and I love it, but this episode left me cold.

 

[nic3636]

The narrative problem for me was how unceremoniously Shaw was killed off after barely having done anything for the past few episodes, quickly followed by Seven refusing to leaving his side, then Raffi deciding to stay at hers, and that's the last we see of them. It almost felt like the story just wanted to shove these three aside as quickly as possible because their presence on the Enterprise-D bridge would've ruined the nostalgia.

Shaw's death was my biggest problem of the episode. I can't quite articulate why, but it threw the pacing of that scene out of whack. It also wasn't necessary, as captain of the Titan he was never going to leave. It also leaves a bad taste in my mouth to spend so much time building up an interesting character only to kill him off so suddenly.

 

[eschaton]

Again the "under 25" thing is just ridiculous on so many levels.

I mean, I know they picked it because it's based on real science - that's the age human brains do reach final maturity.

That said:

• The bridge crew actors are all in their 30s...and look it, much like Ed Speelers.
• In the real life military, it is true like half of enlisted are under 25. But very few officers are, and those who went to Starfleet Academy are officers. The bridge crew should be older, established folks, not n00bs on a ship like the Titan.
• The show seems to intimate that the under-25 folks somehow took over every bridge but one in the entire fleet quickly...how? Like, really, are the officer corps entirely Gen Z now?
• Other species presumably reach brain maturity at different ages.
• Presumably due to advanced medical tech (and the job not being very physically taxing, like being in the military) Starfleet tends to lean older than the military.
• If the kids successfully decapitated all of the over-25 people, that means that Starfleet's entire officer corps has been decapitated, which will lead to pretty ridiculous outcomes for Star Trek: Legacy (or any other hypothetical post Picard show).

 

[DaveyNY]

True that's why I said upthread that I hope Shelby was a Changeling.

To me anyway, it seemed that Admiral Shelby was there as the "Guest Admiral" to make things seem normal.
She's probably retired like Picard and was called back for the ceremony.
(just like Picard was supposed to do)
Therefore, she wouldn't have a clue about what was really going on, hence why the Borg had no compunction about phasering her.

 

[jaime]

The first bit is possible but as for the latter, it's pretty clear the changeling was trying to kill him with the toxic gas etc. Jack barely survived as it was and Seven was lucky to get back in time for him.

It’s entirely possible that Changeling was very pissed off and had decided the hell with its orders. It’s also possible that it did it to achieve exactly what we saw — Jack experiencing the red door delusion.

 

[Sci]

It’s established that the Transporter Borging has to be done manually by a replaced Changeling transporter chief.

Yeah. But I gotta say, if I'm either the Borg Queen or Vadic or whoever was in charge of figuring out how to implement this plan, I would definitely have a Changeling infiltrate the transporter networks used at the Federation Council and Federation President's offices. I would absolutely want to have as many assimilated interns and staff assistants and legislative correspondents and junior assistants to deputy chiefs of staff as possible in the Federation Capitol and Federation White House* to decapitate Federation civilian leadership simultaneous with capturing the fleet.

* In the novels, the Federation Council and President are both housed in a large building in Paris called the Palais de la Concorde, built over the real-life Place de la Concorde. Council Chambers and offices take up the lower floors, the middle floor has a large state dining room, and the President's offices take up the upper floors, with the Presidential Office itself as the top floor.

The question is, how quickly could the Changelings get from place to place, and when did they start? They’d gotten Picard’s body sometime before the premiere, Raffi seemed to have been investigating the theft for a while. And we know there were Changelings on Earth.

I would assume that they had not begun their plot at least as of 2399, since presumably the Changelings would have had an easy time abducting Picard in his first body from his residence in LaBarre. Other than that? It's an open question. I would assume that it was going on at least as far back as the start of 2401, since it's only been about three months since the launch of the Stargazer and presumably the Changelings would need more than three months to infiltrate so high into Starfleet that they're able to put every damn ship in orbit of one planet for Frontier Day.

It feels like it’d be a safe bet that everyone on the planet young enough to be affected who’d been through a transporter in the last month would’ve been. Maybe just a Starfleet transporter, attacking ones outside for the fleet would’ve made it more likely their tampering would be discovered, but, still, that’s a lot of people.

On the other hand, if you can hack into a few civilian networks while you're at it? I'd say that would be worth the time and effort to suddenly have hundreds of thousands, or possibly even millions, of drones at large all across the surface.

I'm literally picturing a nightclub full of drunk/high 18-to-25 year olds all simultaneously going Borg in the middle of a rave now. Every teenager and young adult at a wilderness camp. Kids in schools, people at movie theaters, singers onstage at concerts, actors onstage in touring theatre productions...

Remember, a lot of lower-deckers don’t go on away missions. Though, I guess, with the holiday, the Changelings could contrive mass assemblies or shore leave that would ensure everyone in Starfleet was beamed somewhere at some point.

Exactly.

It's not intentionally so. Nor is the show a commentary on something like "9/11 was an inside job!" just because changelings infiltrated starfleet. It's not an allegory.
It's a show that has an older cast that they wanted to bring together without younger characters because they were aiming for that last scene with the original Next Gen cast on the bridge of the Enterprise-D.

To be clear, I am not at all claiming it's intentional. I agree it's not an intentional allegory. But subtext can happen unintentionally.

It was an old wrong to destroy the Enterprise D like that. Again, I'm conflicted because the Enterprise-E is my favorite trek ship and you have to destroy the D to get to the E, but to have it shot a few times by a goddamn Bird of Prey after the punishment it got in TNG was a lousy way to go.

It might not have been the best way to destroy her, but I think the Enterprise-D needed to be destroyed in Star Trek: Generations. That film was about mortality, and I think thematically the Enterprise-D needed to "die" to provide thematic closure to Picard grieving the loss of his brother and nephew.

Better than I expected. This was taut and had a sense of purpose.

Mostly, this episode confirmed theories I've had for at least part of the season though was extremely well done.

The Borg seem like a perfect through-line for the overarching story of Picard the series itself, I'm not sure why it's such a problem for some people.

I agree that Star Trek: Picard needed to revisit the Borg at some point, since that was one of the central traumas of Jean-Luc's life. But I feel like we got all the closure we needed on that in S1 and S2. I suppose we might get final closure with one last confrontation between Jean-Luc and the Krige Queen (as compared to the Annie Wersching [may her memory be a blessing] Queen).

Matalas can get a lot right but then there are those glaring moments of innacurate information that somehow no one caught. In this case, I nearly wanted to half-throttle the writers for saying the Enterprise-D was...omg...analog. Nothing could be further from the truth!

LaForge was speaking metaphorically, not literally.

The first bit is possible but as for the latter, it's pretty clear the changeling was trying to kill him with the toxic gas etc. Jack barely survived as it was and Seven was lucky to get back in time for him.

Maybe that Changeling was just very stupid? Or misunderstood the plan?

Fuck, the entire Federation might have been saved if Seven hadn't saved Jack!