Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 1x06 - "The Impossible Box"

It occurred to me now that these plot holes have become more frequent in our era of serialized storytelling. That's because we have multiple writers involved in multiple episodes and then they all get confused and fans point out the glaring plotholes. See also the current dilemma on how Spock was going to save Romulus by destroying its sun (due to multiple writers disagreeing on where said supernova was).

TOS and TNG didn't have these problems because they weren't serialized. The writer only had to worry about his/her episode alone and that was it. And if one episode had an error, it didn't affect all the rest like a chain of dominoes because the stories were standalone.

 

Emergency Hook up Hologram

With all the continuity porn in this episode you want this? You might have a problem,. Maybe Raffi can hook you up with a program.

Drunken Master

Impossible, these people have never seen Star Trek.

 

The image on the screen was wrong so that the image in "real life" would be correctly aligned.

 

Maybe Hugh's in (frequent) contact with Geordi, so it wasn't really a concern.

 

Or, maybe Hugh has yet to even have his first...contact in a while with Geordi!!!!

(I'll show myself out...)

 

And it was more than implied that Starfleet did not entirely trust Picard anymore, where the Borg were concerned, leaving one of their best ships of the line deliberately out of the battle of Sector 001.

So Starfleet may have also known/suspected he still had implants.

 

It reminds me of a coworker telling me about his first job out of high school, assisting on some kind of delivery route. The driver would take big swigs of vodka between stops, and drive that truck like a maniac all day long. My coworker was terrified for dear life the whole time. Not cool.

Kor

 

Most people would just leave it to the professionals. Unless they're conspiracy nutters. Picard and Agnes are the only ones who actually knew Maddox. The rest have no reason to think anything criminal happened.

 

As someone who watched my coworker die last year of a heart attack (even after we tried CPR and it failed), we all asked questions about his health state in the office etc. leading up to it. What he ate, what he said, what he was working on, etc. Even after the ambulance came. It's natural. It doesn't make you a conspiracy theorist.

In Trek, asking why the EMH didn't activate would be our equivalent of, hypothetically, why wasn't the auto-defibrillator working? Anyone would ask that.

 

Again, these people knew Maddox for a few minutes. The most qualified person on board explained how he died . Not sure what would make them look deeper.

 

As I clarified in my edit: In Trek, asking why the EMH didn't activate would be our equivalent of, hypothetically, why wasn't the auto-defibrillator working? Anyone would ask that.

If Agnes said the EMH glitched, Rios would check it the way even if a doctor told me the AED glitched, we'd be checking to see how that could happen.

 

Its just one of those times you have to chalk it down to the needs of the plot outweighing the needs of the situation.

 

Anyone else notice all discussion of the Zhat Vash has basically vanished? Even when the La Sirena crew discuss it among themselves, they just talk about the Tal Shiar.

Did Picard just decide to not tell them Laris's hypothesis? Or is this a subtle mid-season retcon of a silly idea from Episode 2?

 

I sure wouldn't want Rios as our office emergency manager that's for sure. We'd have a lot of auto defribrillators out of power and/or in a state of disrepair.

 

I did wonder about that.

Perhaps its to keep it on the low down for longer, it may be important in future seasons.

The Commodore may not be Zhat Vash and its not like Narek or his sister are going to have a talk about it.

This Cabal will no doubt come up again.

 

All-in-all, this was a really good episode. Best of the season, so far. I have a few complaints, but they are very minor and didn't really take anything away from the overall plot.

The first is the tidbit of information Nerak and Rizzo coaxed out of Soji. A planet with two moons and electrical storms. Maybe there's more than two moons and the others Soji couldn't see. How do you know it was an actual planet; Maybe it was a large moon. Maybe the electrical storms are rare occurrences, happening once every two hundred years or so. Furthermore even if it was a planet with two moons and frequent electrical storms; The galaxy's a pretty big place; I can imagine something like this:

Rizzo: "Computer, find all planets with two moons and electrical storms."
Computer: "There are 8,947 planets that match search parameters."
Rizzo: "Crap!!! Nerak, don't kill her yet!"
Nerak <sniffling>: "Too late..."

The second is Legolas... err Elnor. This dude running around with a sword against opponents with particle beam weapons or disruptors. Yeah... without the plot conveniences setup by the writers, he should have been vaporized by now. I know swords are cool and all, but there's a reason why we stopped using these weapons in the battlefield hundreds of years ago.

Finally... I still don't understand why Picard and Soji simply couldn't beam back to La Sirena. Elnor seemed to be able to beam to the Borg cube without any problem. A little exposition about security fields preventing beam out or something would have been nice.

The Picard/Hugh scenes were great. Raffi was good this episode. She and Rios have good chemistry. Dr. Jurati still hasn't done much, other than murder her lover/mentor and banging Rios. Elnor, at least in my opinion, really is just a 3rd wheel... unnecessary to the crew. A much better pick would have been Laris, or even Zhaban, but I guess the show's creators felt it best for them to be tending the vineyard rather than using their years of experience and expertise as Tal Shiar agents.

 

Te first thing I would say if I ended up in the 24th or 25th century is that I want a light saber.

I wouldn't use it as I am more likely to chop my own arm off than an opponents.

For the look of the thing.

 

Yeah, if you need some bullshit then Voyager is practically an inextinguishable source.

 

I was thinking about Narek's cool little puzzle/murder box, and how well it relates to the Nemesis Thalaron delivery/gift box. And then I remembered McCoy's "Beware Romulans bearing gifts".
Intentional or not, that's a damn fine connection.