Well, at least we don't drink tea, unless we're sick. I can count the times I was invited to drink tea on the fingers of one hand...
That reminds me of one episode of Cheers where Woody was asked by Rebecca to make finger sandwiches and he made them look like fingers...
because it's several hundred years in the future and the characters don't have to be total stereotypes. And really i imagine by then Earth society might be a lot more homogenized than they even show. putain, they already gave Picard a chateau in La Barre. What more did he need? He could have worn a uniform kepi and went on strike twice a month. Anyway. I think coffee is fairly universal now. It certainly might be by then. If Picard likes tea, well fine. He was always the odd one in his family. He probably smuggled packets of Earl Grey and Irish Breakfast home from the village replicator on the way back from school.
Pity you nose-dived at the end there - I was kinda enjoying your "drunk man bursts into a bar to rant and rave about his day" take. You can have a good story with gender-neutral pronouns. Also, you can have a bad story with gender-neutral pronouns! They have little bearing on the quality of the story. By implying the use of said pronouns is indicative of "not good", well ... you've seen it now, haven't you?
They haven’t come back to the thread, this feels like a drive by posting. Though they haven’t been online since the day this was posted, so who knows.
I always thought that was a perfectly valid way to interpret the fact that he so rarely visited the vineyard and didn’t get along with his brother.
To be fair, I'm British, and along with most people I know irl, I'm more of a coffee drinker. Tea, only for when ill in the same way (mostly because coffee tastes bad with a cold). Oh, and when I do drink tea, it does tend to be Earl Grey, but that has nothing to do with Picard, or just happens to be what my partner buys. And strangely enough, being from Yorkshire, I don't know anyone who buys Yorkshire tea. My main point here is that tea drinking is only really prevalent with certain kinds of brits. Mostly, your stereotypical royalist fuddy duddy. I don't roll in those circles.
I had a fair few Yorkshire and Northern friend who were very proud of their tea but big mugs none of that dainty pinkie crap. They were far more "Royle Family" than royal family
It may have been a function of trying to do too much in a 13 episode season. Some of the earlier episodes in the season (Forget Me Not, Die Trying, and Unification III) were quite good. But towards the end it did feel very rushed. It didn't help that they had to take a 2 episode detour to setup the Section 31 show. The Emerald Chain stuff in particular went really fast at the end and devolved into a lot of pointless action. The quality of the story suffered because of it. I didn't have a problem with the gender neutral pronoun thing or trying to be politically correct, but it did feel like virtue box checking where you just drop a few lines about it and then move on. Certainly better than nothing but I would have really appreciated an entire episode dedicated to describing the struggles of a non-binary person or maybe it could have been addressed in more depth through discussions between Adira and Sammets. Felt like a missed opportunity to me.
I think they could have done something within the context of Adira being a trill and struggling with gender identity because of it.
I don't really think it's a cop out. To me it's a central premise in Trek, providing commentary on current affairs by setting up a similar issue within the context of the fictional future environment. Instead, they took an issue that's trending in society today and basically repeated it verbatim on the show, implying that society has these exact same problems 900 years in the future. It kind of comes back to lazy writing like, "yay, we had a couple of sentences on the pronoun thing, box checked, time to move on". Now, if you are a non-binary person, you were probably happy to see that issue acknowledged on screen, and from that prospective it was good. But if you are not a non-binary person (sorry about the double negative), the scene doesn't carry as much weight because it doesn't give much insight into the life of a non-binary person and associated struggles, etc. To me, that's the missed opportunity, giving a binary person like me greater insight into non-binary people by telling a story about it within the context of Star Trek.