Ugh, I knew someone would be pedantic and step on my joke. I thought about amending it to add "(No, I don't mean the Lego one)," but I hoped I wouldn't need to.
The episode is amazing, no question. My issue is that it shows the most massively impactful events happening to O'Brien, and it isn't followed up at all. It's like if season 7 didn't show the Dominion War for the first few episodes and then someone mentions in passing that there was a big off-screen battle between seasons and the Dominion surrendered, except on a character level.
That’s the problem with episodic tv. At the end of the episode the reset button is pushed. Some years ago I read the Voyager trilogy String Theory. One regular character is offered a life changing, er, change. But as the trilogy was set during the series run you knew what his choice would be. If that had been during the relaunch era the outcome wouldn’t have been so certain.
It would be interesting if we had received the version of TNG where William Riker died on a mission for Frakes to play Thomas Riker as a main character for the remainder of the series.
Not necessarily. There have been plenty of shows that have been episodic on a plot level yet still allowed ongoing character development over time, like with TNG's development of Worf's family life and Klingon politics. DS9 did this with a lot of character arcs, of course, but they did occasionally drop the ball, as with "Hard Time." The mistake people make is to treat episodic vs. serial as a binary. It's not. They're both ingredients in the mix, and different shows have different ratios of the two. The best approach is a balance somewhere in the middle. Going too far in either direction is unhealthy. Yes, too far to the episodic side and you fail in terms of character development, but going too far to the serial side is bad too. With excess serialization, characters become narcissistic and selfish, because everything in the story revolves around them dealing with their own personal problems rather than helping others. Also, serialized arcs too frequently revolve around conspiracy plots, because that's the only way to have repeated episodic twists and revelations when you're only telling one long story.
As others have pointed out, I didn't find Picard that dark. Perhaps mature is the right word. It was a ten episode story about a man reclaiming his place in the galaxy. At the start he had given up but by the end he was back on a starship, with a crew, doing what he can to help people. It was almost a ten hour version of Night. Yes the Rikers lost a child, but they didn't turn Picard away and Will rejoined the fleet temporarily to help his old captain. In fact nearly everyone in the story went on a journey of going from giving up to helping people, and achieving more as a crew working together than individually. And Deanna was not the first Troi to lose a child, so her family does have a history of this sort of trauma. The cause of death was different but it is not like TNG never covered this topic.
If anything, my issue with the season arcs on both Discovery and Picard is that they start out setting up fairly dark situations, but then give them upbeat, happy endings that are maybe a bit too pat and optimistic. Like the way PIC set up the synth ban as this big overarching controversy, then swept it away with a line or two in the finale as if it had been no big deal. At this point, I think we can pretty much conclude that however superficially dark a story element in modern Trek may appear, it will turn out happily at the end of the season, sometimes more easily than it should. And that's why it's not really dark on the whole.
Picard was hardly pathetic. As for tragic family backstories: - Worf was orphaned as a child - Tasha was orphaned as a child, and had to scavenge for food and evade rape gangs - Wesley's father/Beverley's husband was tragically killed - Beverley's parents died when she was young - Troi's sister died as a child - Riker's mother died when he was an infant, and he was estranged from his father Which one is the "darkest timeline" again? I swear people have a complete memory block about past series when it comes to judging the current ones.
You just hit on something I wasn't aware was bothering me. Yes, I adore both Discovery and Picard. Amazing shows if you ask me. But yes, the resolutions are a bit too fast and easy. For Picard, I would have prefered a line or two where it was said that the Council is now looking into the ban again, and how these new developments should be taken into consideration.
With Picard, we were led to believe it was a different kind of show, more an introspective character drama, but then in the latter half it shifted to being this big epic action story with the fate of the galaxy at stake, and I feel a number of the early ideas got short shrift as a result.
I'd have been perfectly happy with a series where retired Picard solves crimes on earth with his Romulan housekeepers.
I was hoping for Picard’s archeology adventures, where he led a group of freelance scientists exploring various ruins as framing stories to an anthology taking place across the history of the Trek universe. Short Treks crossed with Jack McDevitt, basically.