Picard > Discovery > Strange New Worlds
Come at me!
DSC and SNW are orders of magnitude better than PIC.
In fact I think PIC is the worst Trek series of all.
But yes, it’s all subjective and if you enjoy it, more power to you.
Spoilers Star Trek: Picard General Discussion Thread
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DSC and SNW are orders of magnitude better than PIC.
In fact I think PIC is the worst Trek series of all.
But yes, it’s all subjective and if you enjoy it, more power to you.
Indeed, that is my question. I am someone always interested in the "Why" of things.
Different perspectives are interesting, to say the least.
On my end, PIC was fantastic the entire time, with S3 being the single best season of any Star Trek show ever.
Meanwhile, Discovery isn't even bad for Star Trek, it's just... bad. Painfully terrible. To the point that i'm almost in awe that the show was shot, produced, and actually released and nobody along the line was like "we can't do this."
SNW is pretty good though, although I think the quality dipped in the second season. Not counting Discovery, which I don't even count in my series rank list, it's still almost dead last, over only TAS.
I try to pretend that Discovery just doesn't exist.
Kind of. Because it does and it's unavoidable, given my hobby of General Star Trek.
Ok, I'll bite. Why?
It's incredibly bad.
Hardly.
I avoid TMP and TNG all the time, as much as possible. Discovery, despite my love of it, hardly has an impact on my love of TOS, SNW, DS9, video games, RPGs, fan art, etc.
Dude was pretty clear that he feels its a poor production over all.
Picard Season 3 would have been much better if it were Season 1. I really, really didn't like how it went out of its way to actively crap on Seasons 1 and 2. Those seasons were flawed, but they still deserved to mean something in the greater scheme of things.
- Season 1 made the decision that Data's death in Nemesis needed a coda, and (despite other flaws) gave Data a proper send-off. Then it's undone by Season 3.
- Season 1 established a number of relationships Picard had developed over the years, including with Raffi (former protégé), Elnor (saw him as a father), and Soji (as some sort of adopted daughter). This stuff begins getting unwound in Season 3, but none of it makes any difference by the third season. We don't even see Elnor or Soji, and Raffi is barely onscreen with Picard.
- I'd argue that bringing back the Borg in both Seasons 2 and 3 undid to some degree what Season 1 was tying to do with the XBs.
- Season 2 - as flawed as it was - had a central character arc for Picard to confront his childhood demons in order to be open to have a relationship with Laris. Laris bids him goodbye in the first episode of Season 3, and we never see her again.
- Season 2 also introduced the death of Q, which was undone in a post-credits scene by Season 3.
I'm genuinely happy for you!
I'm hardly the biggest fan of Discovery, but is it really that bad?
I mean, I can at least appreciate that it tried to do something different, to varying degrees of success. At the very least it managed to introduce us to some genuinely interesting characters. I get not liking it. It's pretty far down on my own list. But to pretend it doesn't exist? Nah.
Yeah, but I'm home with a sick six year old so I got nothin' but time to kill. So I'm curious if he's willing to go a little more into why it's so bad.
Season 3 could have never been Season 1 without some serious negotiating power by production teams with Patrick Stewart.
Same for you with regards to Picard.
But, I have the perhaps unique experience in that Trek productions didn't work for me earlier on in my fan experience, than it seems for many here.
Yes. It's that bad.
I think i'm even more generally disdainful of it because there ARE good things hidden there, but they don't get to shine because of the focus on the garbage.
Burnham is perhaps one of the worst characters in Trek. It wouldn't be so bad if she was kind of there, and the show focused on others. Oh no... the show double and triples down on her. She's awful.
The overall look of the show is bland and generic. The stories are weak and poorly written, and the conclusions to the stories range from "eh, ok?" to just truly godawful.
Although when I say "I pretend it doesn't exist", I mostly mean in terms of thinking about Star Trek. I watched through once. That's enough for me. I'll never watch it again. It's not part of the Star Trek universe to me. It doesn't deserve that.
Again because internet is hard to understand... please understand i'm not like, some kind of anti-Discovery zealot who sits around all day thinking up conspiracy theories about how Discovery is killing our children or something. It's a TV show I don't like, in a series of TV shows that I very much do like, and this is a forum specifically about talking about those TV shows...
Yeah, I realize a straight-up TNG reunion wasn't in the cards when Season 1 was being filmed back in 2019, given Stewart's preferences.
I just find it funny that structurally speaking, despite the individual merits of both Picard and Discovery, both series have been failures when it comes to long-form storytelling. In both cases, either through changes in showrunners or due to studio interference, they couldn't just build organically on what began in Season 1, and just kept retooling until each individual season had about as little to do with the other as episodes of Voyager.
Deep Space Nine is still the high watermark when it comes to doing long-form character arcs in Trek, and that's really sad considering we're supposed to be in the age of "peak TV."
I don't think so, for a couple of reasons. The biggest one was the DS9 benefitted from anonymity. It was able to go in to that long form storytelling in a way that the suits wouldn't care about. None of these Treks, especially Picard and Discovery, would ever escape that scrutiny, especially when they are trying to build up a new streaming service. So, I can't find the sadness when DS9 succeeded because of near anonymity at the time,
ParaCBViacMounS has always been fairly terrible at doing things.
Making a long-form serialized Star Trek show shouldn't be difficult. They just don't let anyone do it, or if they try to, they pick the worst possible person (looking at you, Fuller).
In the case of PIC, I think it a bit more on the side of judging fan reaction/overestimating their initial idea. They definitely did not intend to make a TNG reunion. Even Riker wasn't supposed be in S1. Then fan reactions were... mixed, and it just so happened the whole TNG cast came out to say "Yeah, we'll do it"... and so.. they made it happen.
Discovery has done a reasonable job at maintaining the serialized format.
EDIT -
That's also true. DS9 was able to do it because nobody cared about DS9. In all fairness, it also did it for two seasons... REALLY half of one season.
ENT Season 3 did it pretty well.
Trek seems to want to do it in seasons... not one long story over multiple seasons. Smart, due to the volatility of modern streaming TV. Shows get cancelled on a whim.
At the time, Sir Patrick didn't want TNG S8 (He'd already done seven years and four feature films with them. He wanted to do something new.).
He wants a Picard movie, not a TNG movie (for the reasons I've already listed above).
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There were people angry that Matalas decided to talk to people instead of telling them to fuck off and coincidentally they seemed the same types a little bit dismissive of Picard S3 in any way they could. I think he helped produce the best year of Trek we've had for a very long time, it's a shame this year we have Section 31 and the final season of Discovery (the only saving grace being its the final).
I think the 3rd season of PIC might be the 11th or 12th best season of modern Trek, but I didn't use my toes to count.
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