Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 2x10 - "Farewell"

As much as I absolutely adored this final episode, and had me teary eyed through out the last half of it......

The final scene was complete rubbish, both in terms of how there's almost no believable connection between the two characters to the horrible cgi. Both completely drew me out of the moment.

As for season 2 as a whole..... This felt like the producers and writers had a great idea on where they wanted Picard to end up in this season, letting go of a lot of emotional baggage, and knew how to both start and finish that journey. Then totally got lost in the middle.
"We need, like exciting shit to happen to other people while Picard struggles with trauma and emotionally connecting to those he loves."
"Well, we've got that Borg Queen thing around and Jurati doing nothing. Let's have her become the new Queen and run amok in the early 21st century, only for to become a more compasionate Queen at the end with a more evolved sense of being that will turn the Borg in good guys.....even though we're going to make it look like they're still bad in the first episode."
"Yeah, that works. Also, remember how we teased a thing between Seven and Raffi? Let's break that up before we ever saw it happen, make them act both absolutely normal together sometimes and hella awkward at other times. Also, Seven, who became very normal and adapted in her social behavior towards others should act like she was just out of the Collective towards some security guy. Then we'll forget about that."
"Makes total fucking sense!"
"And kill Elnor."
"Why?"
*insert Uncle Roger emotional damage meme*
"Eh, ok. We don't really know what to do with him anyway, it's cool".

I could go on and on. Soong was there to just have Brent Spiner there, same for Kore and Isa Briones. Why cast the guy who played an friggin' Time Cop in Voyager in a friggin Star Trek time travel story and NOT use that in the story except for a little 'haha see what we did there moment'? And even though it didn't bug me that much at first.....
I don't need Star Trek to believable. It's SciFi. It's all make believe. But it's also a show that wants to pretend our present setting is their past. So a Europa mission in 2024? It just bugged me a little, that's all. Canon and stuff is something I care nothing about. There hasn't been true canon since the third episode of TOS where things already didn't make sense with what was established in a the other two episodes. But it just felt weird to me.

In any case.....
Season 2 is the least rewatchable Star Trek for me to this day. For the simple reason, that to have a single episode make any sense, you need to rewatch all of it. And I don't want to suffer through episodes 4-9 just to get to the pretty good ending. I still love basically all of the characters. I just wish they had given them better stories to work with.

 

Deep Space 9 season 1?
The season with 4 amazing Kira episodes?




One of which is one of the greatest Star Trek episodes of all time.



(Look at what Star Trek did with a prison episode, versus what NuTrek did in a STD prison episode. "The Examples"
Two actors, one room.
No mindless pew-pew action, no distracting B-plot. Everything was about one narrative. The only B-plot, if you can call it that, was Odo doing some investigations and he talked to Dukat. But that "B-plot" was directly linked and interwoven with the A-plot.
Everything was better than in NuTrek. The writing, the dialogue, the acting, the structure.)



In the first episode after the pilot episode, we got a Kira episode in which we got more insight into her character and more character development for her than some STD characters got after four seasons (or PIC characters after two seasons. Elnor who?).



DS9 season 1 had bad episodes. "Move Along Home", "The Storyteller", "If Wishes Were Horses".

But DS9 season 1 had a great season final:

I know I'm a bit off-topic, but people need to rethink what a bad season looks like, how great some early TNG and DS9 S1 episodes are, and how far Star Trek has fallen.

I take season 1 of DS9 or TNG or VOY over Picard season two (or season one).

 

I took away the images so people don't have to scroll through them twice, makes everything less cluttered that way.

But I fully agree. Yes, season 1 of DS9, ENT, VOY, TNG all had some pretty bad episodes, but also a lot of good and even amazing ones. The best thing was, they were all seperate episodes. I love serialized tv. A whole season spanning story is awesome. But make it good, please. I loved season 2 of DIsco (not everyone does) and even despite some bad moments in episodes, I can rewatch it as a whole and be happy.
For me, season 2 of Picard had so many bad episodes that as a whole, it just doesn't work. Traveling is about getting from A to B. A story is about getting from A to Z with all the other letters being as fascinating as both A and Z. The writers here seemed to have an A and a B and realized half way through that fascinating stuff need to happen in between. Most of it felt like that Jeremy Clarkson meme when he reacts to some unimportant car related news.... "Oh no.....Anyway"
THAT is what season 2 felt like to me. "Oh no, Jurati is being assimilated.....Anyway" "Oh no, Picard get hit by a Tesla....Anyway"

It was all stuff that they wanted us to feel engaged by, just so they could get to where we find out the Borg Queen was Jurati and Picard has come to terms with childhood trauma and being able to finally love. And yes, again, the scenes with Picard and Q had me teary eyed and I completely felt for and with both characters. That really was amazingly done. The journey to get to that though.... Rubbish and badly written.

 

wow, I guess I own a piece of Star Trek then! Been using a nanokontrol for a dozen of years now.

 

Yes, but I doubt Borgati would have been cruel to not allow them to acclimate first (or use Borg technology to speed up the transition to individuality - remove the longing to return to the collective, inform them that there's been a change, and have them decide whether to join this new collective or not).
This could all easily be accomplished in a few minutes to hours really. And I doubt Borgati wouldn't be willing to wait a few days for the drones to get to their senses and make a decision.

The Artifact could have been roaming the quadrant in a disconnected state, trying to find other Borg. With the Queen gone and the Collective in tatters, its possible the cube was set to auto pilot and the Borg onboard trying to maintain their own collective of sorts and being in sleep mode for the most part.
Bystander assimilation was more or less to be expected... until eventually, the Cube stumbled upon that AI signal and forced the cube and its occupants into hybernation or forced shutdown (though to be fair, the 'excuse' the Borg couldn't handle such a signal was ridiculous to begin with - the Borg are cybernetics... they should have been able to handle the signal/message easily enough).

 

it took seven years to admit she preferred remaining an individual though. Icheb and the others weren’t borg for long, Hugh had developed a strong personal connection with Geordi that helped develop his individuality (and in the end still went back to the collective, even if for noble reasons).

 

Wow I would have never put "Duet" in season 1. I thought that was deep into the show.
Move Along Home is amazing. Now all together "count to 4, then 3 more"

 

Seven took 1 year before she realized that she no longer looks forward to going back to the collective ('Hope and Fear'), and she was a drone for 18 years (mind you, she was also assimilated at a very young age - she was 6 years old to be precise - so that's likely the reason which contributed to her taking longer - she was raised by Borg) - whereas it took her longer to embrace her individuality.

I would surmise that individuals who had similar experiences as Seven would be provided the needed support from this new collective to transition gradually and then once they have better grasp of their own decision making, to decide whether they wish to be re-assimilated into this new collective, and give them a higher purpose if you will... along with biological immortality (or at least exceptionally long lifespan).

Also, the way Jurati suggested things to the Queen in episode 9 was that these new drones would essentially be fighting that much harder for a better cause... suggesting that the collective consciousness would not be usurping people's individuality necessarily... and this could also mean that these new Borg might not have the same limitation as the old Borg (aka, what they don't assimilate they can't understand).

I'm obviously not privy to all the details because we ultimately have no idea how the practical implementation worked in the end, so I can only speculate.

EDIT: There's also something else to consider. VOY 'Endgame' took place in 2378. Between then and until 2401, there's 23 year gap here to take into account (that is of course if events of PIC S2 take place in 2401).

If Seven took 3 to 4 years to embrace her individuality and she was raised by Borg... imagine how fast majority of the ex drones could change if they were mostly assimilated sometime in their adulthood.

23 years is a long time... and even if majority of the ex drones don't want to become part of this new Collective, a certain % of them might (which would still give these new Borg a massive amount of 'manpower' and raw material to work with).

 

No it isn't. You're just afraid of being wrong, you're moving goal posts.

And? None of these images are related to the eyes. You can even see red around Tuvok's.

 

Different day, same non-argument.

 

DS9 season 1 is inarguably the best first season of Berman Trek.

Which admittedly isn't that difficult to do.

 

Wow, EAS gave this episode an 8/10, even with like 10 nitpicks.

 

That is... Shocking.

 

Mind blown.

 

Just for comparison, here is his ratings for all 10 episodes
E1: 6
E2: 3
E3: 7
E4: 5
E5: 5
E6: 5
E7: 4
E8: 4
E9: 3
E10: 8

Also the review page
https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/episodes/pic2.htm

I believe his ratings are in comparison to other episodes of the series, not the entire franchise, but I could be mistaken.

 

"In all of the universe, you're the closest thing I have to a friend, Jean-Luc."

Alright, I cried. Seriously, I'm starting to feel something in my eye just at hearing that above line in John de Lancie's voice, even though everything was different back then when he said it. It was a beautiful swan song for Q. And I want a Picard/Laris endgame, dammit. I never really cared for the whole Picard/Crusher pairing, and throwing out the stellar chemistry Stewart and Brady have consistently had for two years just because the idea of Picard/Crusher is an established part of the Fandom's groupthink seems to be a total waste for me. But I have no illusions, because I've learned in the last five years that fanwank always wins out in the end.

That being said, now that I've managed to get through the last two episodes in one afternoon, I'm not as mad about the TNG reunion we're getting next season and I think I can make peace with the endings Jurati and Rios got, and quite frankly, while I like Elnor, they didn't flesh him out enough to make his absence carry much weight for me. Keeping Raffi for the next season because of her connections to the two legacy characters staying in the main cast makes perfect sense.

I enjoyed the handful of posts in this thread describing how all the seemingly random events could all be tied together into a coherent plot by Q: he needed a group of Borg tempered by Jurati's compassion to cooperate with the Federation to stop the anomaly, and because he was dying, he also wanted to help Picard let go of his repressed pain as a parting gift. He brought the crew to the Confederation timeline specifically because he needed a Borg Queen that was disconnected from the Collective so that she would merge with Jurati instead of just assimilating her. However, because he was dying, he expended most of his power bringing the crew into the alternate timeline, and he was forced to go through with his plan in a roundabout way, manipulating Soong and Renée to create a chain of events that would force Tallinn into action, leading to Picard's injury and subsequent epiphany. Tallinn being given the chance to meet Renée and the liberation of Kore were just small moments of compassion for him, deciding to do some good things with the limited time he had left, culminating in him resurrecting Elnor with the small bit of energy originally intended to bring Rios back to the future. He truly shined as a bona fide Trickster Mentor for me throughout this last lesson of his. The only thing that would've made me like it better would've been Picard recapping this as he's putting the puzzle together like he did in the eighth episode of the last season.

"Must it always have galactic import? Universal stakes? Celestial upheaval? Isn't one life enough?" - I chuckled at that line, it was definitely intended for (a certain part of) the viewers.

 

Another nitpick.

We're supposed to assume Kore knew Q's name from her father? We never saw him mention it to her. And Q used metaphor to describe himself in the simulation.

Why would she think Q was playing games? He was the one who gave her "freedom"? This comment is just there to set up The Traveler.

 

It's like the Gorgan in TOS being called "Gorgan" by Kirk when there's not a single scene of any of the surviving children mentioning the name of the entity. Kirk just says it on the bridge near the end of the episode. Just a nitpick where we can probably assume both Kirk and Kore were made aware of their antagonist's name without us seeing either moment.

 

Guess I'm a slightly jaded fan, but that stuck out like a sore thumb when I watched the episode recently. Hadn't seen it in something like 30 years either. And sadly, it wasn't quite as chilling as I remembered it being.

 

Great chant. Creepy effects. Bad episode.