Spoilers Differences between season 1 and 2

This has been my feeling about a lot of Discovery. Mind you, perhaps the same could be said for TOS and anybody not Kirk, Spock and McCoy.

 

If thought Picard and Discovery were ensemble shows I would feel the same.

 

I guess we know where you stand.

https://www.space.com/star-trek-picard-patrick-stewart-nycc.html

 

Well, I didn't get the impression. I'm also stubborn and thick headed.

 

I keep wanting to reply to this thread, then realize I'd have to write an essay, which I don't have the time for, plus I'm sure my essay writing skills are quite rusty...

So I'll just post short snippets instead and try to elaborate later, in small chunks.

Season 1, while very flawed structurally, made real efforts in world-building, in creating and developing new characters, and relationships between them.
Examples for wolrd-building were the whole Romulan, xB, and synth situation, the world outside of the Federation, and Starfleet being quite different from when we last saw it. Not evil by any means, but probably changed because of a long development starting even before the Mars attacks.

They gave us backgrounds and idiosyncrasies for all the new characters, some more, some less.

As for (budding) relationships, let's take Picard/ Elnor and Picard/ Soji as examples. (There was also a close Rios/ Raffi friendship, then that weird whatever-it-was between Rios and Agnes, and so on.), and the ending suggested the assembly of outsiders and broken things becoming somewhat of a crew/ family.

I would argue that season 2 had no interest to explore, or rather, disregarded all these aspects, which is a pity as they would have been far more interesting than what was presented to us on screen.

We learn nothing about the current politics of the Federation, the fate of the Romulans, xBs (no, off-screen comments don't count), or synths. As for Starfleet, apparently it's back to normal because the synth ban was lifted.

As for our characters back in SF, if they had any issues re-adapting, they happened in-between seasons.

As for relationships the Picard/ Elnor father/ son dynamic had already been abandoned in season 1. Picard/ Soji as a sort of (grand-) father/ daughter relationship? Nope. OK, I admit I was glad that the Rios/ Agnes thing had been resolved off-screen.

I'll talk about the characters later.

 

Season 2 wanted to tell a simplified story, I suspect because of the criticisms that Season 1 had.

Unfortunately, I suspect that all the people who loved Season 1 would be put off by this.

I know I was.

And I suspect the people who didn't like Season 1 were not inclined to give Season 2 a chance.

 

I don't see much evidence that people who liked season 1 were not inclined to give season 2 a chance. I know I did.

They definitely wanted a lighter tone overall, and I'm not opposed to that, if done well. (I'd argue that Picard's backstory didn't quite fit that possible goal, nor does a fascist MU but I digress.)

 

I meant that people who liked season 1 would be less inclined to like 2 because of the dramatic changes in style and treatment of season 1's cast.