Spoilers Is Picard season 2 a failure?

[Starbreaker]

I'm hoping it will play better on a binge watch. Watching from week to week making the glacial pacing very obvious.

 

[Lord Garth]

I wouldn't call it a failure. It took me longer to figure out where they were going with it than the other seasons of DSC and PIC, but now that I can see where it's going -- Jurati is the Borg Queen the Stargazer encountered -- it's all up to how the last two episodes play out.

But even if the next two episodes were flat-out horrible, that doesn't negate the first half of the season. The penultimate and ultimate episodes of season would have to seriously betray everything else in order for it to be a failure.

 

[Spike730]

It had a promising start but I'm not impressed by the 2024 setting.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I've enjoyed it so far. Modern Trek has missed the landing more often than hit it, so check back in a couple weeks.

 

[EnderAKH]

Is Picard Season 2 a failure? Or: How I am disappointed by Picard Season 2

So, first off, pardon the longish rant, but I wanted to discuss the season overall and see if other people feel the same way I do about Season 2. I read a couple of reviews recently that crystalized some of my opinions about the show that I was really trying to hide from acknowledging.

· Some good points about Picard being more like some subpar “edgy” sci-fi drama than anything Star Trek: https://www.thegamer.com/star-trek-picard-is-garbage/

· Picard’s pacing, among other things, are major issues: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-trek-picard-season-2-episode-8-review-mercy/

I thought episode 1 was great and what Picard should have been all along. Episode 2 was pretty great, with great performances and a less silly “mirror universe”. So I was really digging this season at the start. Since then, for me, it has devolved into barely watchable, boring, and meandering Discovery-level Trek.

Positive points:

· Jeri Ryan acting more like Seven, and less like the too-human version of her in season 1

· John De Lancie playing up a great, darker version of Q, even though the actual part is small/less than impactful

· Ito Aghayere’s portrayal of young Guinan

· Stewart getting a couple of Picard speeches (even if the justification for them was very slight)

Negative points (just about everything else, where to start?):

· Pointless fetch quests for our crew in the 21st century (Rios, Seven, and Raffi) where they achieve nothing but wasting time (why was the music so dramatic when Seven was driving, when absolutely no one was chasing them?)

· Waffling back and forth about whether Renee is ok or not; once Picard gives her his little speech she is fine, but only really noted in offhand dialog an episode or two later, but then suddenly they worry about it again and desperately need Picard back up and functioning again to address absolutely no problem with Renee

· Meandering storylines in every episode that just go on and on: Jurati/Borg Queen, Rios and the doctor, Soong and his daughter

· Our heroic crew seems very uncaring regarding security of the Borg Queen, the likely greatest threat to the survival of the entire planet:

o just hook her immediately in to the ship; don’t worry about a security field; don’t worry about implementing any security on the computer systems; leave her alone in the ship while you traipse off to the Chateau (for no reason); leave her Borg tentacles and nanoprobes intact and functional; leave her in the care of the not-at-all-unreliable and already compromised Jurati; once she and Jurati combine, don’t pull out all the stops to find her, just send 2 of your crew to kind of look for her 8 hours later and hope they don’t get their butts kicked

· Non-stop plot holes/lack of justification in practically every episode

o Q’s plan for Adam at the party was to alert security, then Adam walks off assuming everything was fine; security does zip; and then Adam repeats his failure with the out-of-the-blue attempted car homicide thing; and why were all 5 of the crew there again? Only Jurati and Picard did anything at all.

o Everything with Picard’s injury; he’s fine until he is not, then the doc just walks out, then non-Laris has magic mind-meld tech, then it’s crucial that the doctor holds the stabilizer instrument over Picard’s head when neither of them knows what they are doing and it requires no medical skill at all; and apparently all along non-Laris is an ancestor of Laris’s (at least there is some explanation)?

o Q, Adam, the Borg Queen; they all seem to go about their plots (whatever they actually turn out to be) in needlessly circuitous ways (almost like they are trying to pad out the running time of a 10-episode serialized show). Why does Q become a fake psychiatrist? Why does he try to get her to quit? Why doesn’t he just report that she is psychologically unfit for service? Why doesn’t he just kill her? Why does he recruit Adam to do nothing at all (other than to get Spiner and Stewart in a scene together)? If he can impersonate a doctor as part of the Europa mission or a FBI agent, why does he need Adam for anything? If Adam has access to advanced cloning technology, and money, and mercenaries, what does he need permission from some stupid medical board for? If he’s willing to do illegal genetics experiments and clone people, run down heroic astronauts or random nonagenarians with his car, and hire mercs to do whatever, what does he care if some board gives the stamp of approval for his work?

World building issues

· No references to the apparently very impactful (given Soong’s storyline) eugenics war storyline (other than a reference, maybe, to some treaty or agreement). I get that the writers seem to not want to touch that rail, but then why have a genetics/eugenics storyline if you are afraid to address it?

· They seem to be going out of their way to make the 2024 setting to be exactly like current reality, so it feels weird that the only differences are elements specifically needed for the plot lines, with no outside impacts or changes.

o ICE is just like in our reality, re: immigration and poor treatment of prisoners/suspects; but no sci-fi trappings like different uniforms, technology, or organizational title

o There are background references to sanctuary districts and 1 reference to homelessness among wealth, but no other impacts

o There are advanced space missions (Europa) and advanced genetics (cloning?) but no impacts on any day-to-day life: no clothing differences, dialog differences, nothing

· It just all feels very small; maybe this is all impacts from covid restrictions, but every scene (minus the party scene which had more people) feels like the scenes were all designed to take place in closets where we don’t have to see any historical, social, or technological differences; where our characters have stilted dialog talking all around the actual topic at hand until they have ultra-direct pointed discussions resulting in insightful and life-changing revelations over the course of 10 minutes. Rios on a whim shows the doc and her kid all the future tech; Picard reveals the entire plot re: being from the future, to some random FBI guy.

o [Noted that Voyager’s visit to the “present” in “Future’s End” was similarly underwhelming with some of the same issues re: eugenics, and sci-fi differences, but it felt like it was trying harder. DS9’s visit to the 21st century in “Past Tense” actually felt like science fiction.]

[And yes, I realize that we can all bend over backward to come up with some tortured justifications to paper over the holes in logic and motivation, but that doesn’t mean the show isn’t bad.]

I guess I have to face it: Picard season 2 is no real improvement over season 1 in any of the ways that really matter. It still has bad pacing. The mystery box approach to the individual plotlines is still boring/unengaging. And in some ways it is worse: the plotting (logic, character intentions and decisions) is even less justified than in season 1, with episodes lurching from point to point with little support other than that is what the episodes call for at any given minute. Raffi is seriously underserved both in storyline and in giving the actress not much real to contribute. And none of our crew members feel like the heroic best-of-the-best Starfleet types that we were led to believe they were back in season 2 episode 1 (after they had supposedly gotten their mojo back as a result of their work/success in season 1).

So, I will still be looking forward to the reunion of the TNG cast in season 3, but I don’t have any real hope for this season to be good and will likely just complete it to see how the plot ends (like I did season 4 of Discovery). Such a let down from the promise the start of this season.


So rant over. Anyone else feeling similar?

No.

 

[Jack Wolfe]

So rant over. Anyone else feeling similar?

No.

 

[KennyB]

So rant over. Anyone else feeling similar?

Yawn......nope. I'll finish the season before judging it.

 

[Vger23]

Yeah, sure....it's a failure.



I personally haven't enjoyed it as much as S1, but it is far from "a failure" or THe WurSt StAr tRack EVAR!!1!!

I'm not a huge fan of "time travel to the past" stories in Star Trek. My least-favorite TOS movie is TVH. I also am not a big fan of The Borg Queen in Star Trek....I think having a smarmy, scenery-chewing dominatrix as the leader of billions of bionic drones is campy and ridiculous. So, right there, PIC S2 has some massive "bias strikes" against it for me. But, even though this is how I feel, I've still been engaged and I've tuned in every week to watch.

It's a well-acted, well-cast, gorgeous looking show. It's had a couple of really bad episodes mid-season. "Watcher" was an irredeemable pile of shit, easily the worst Star Trek episode of the new era. But, the first 2 episodes were brilliant (and the 3rd was not far behind). The last couple of episodes have been damn good as well. The inclusion of Q is welcome. Although I hate the concept of the Borg Queen, Alison Pill has been amazing, and every time she's on screen she's electric. Santiago Cabrera is also awesome, and I love his character this season. Isa Briones is probably my least-favorite PIC performer, so it's irritating that they found a way to bring her back.

Anyway, I think that if I wasn't biased against "time travel to modern times" stories and the over-use of the Borg Queen, I'd probably think this season was brilliant. I'm a huge DSC fan, and so far, I still like S2 PIC better than S3 or S4 of DSC...so that's saying something.

 

[Romulan_spy]

Season 2 is not over yet. So until we see the season finale, we cannot say that the season was a failure or a success. Let's wait and see. If they stick the landing, I will call the season a success. It all depends on the finale and how they bring all the different arcs together. That does not take away from the fact that some of the middle episode have been disappointing to many. But a season can have a few bad episodes and still not be a total failure.

 

[eschaton]

Too early to tell, IMHO. Let's see how the final episodes roll out.

I am not as negative on the season so far as some. Episodes 1-2 were good, episode 3 was fine, episode 4 was pretty awful. I liked Fly Me To the Moon. Two of One was kinda bad again, but I thought Monsters was a step up (don't know why people hated it so) and Mercy finally saw some glimmers of the endgame (and was a step up in terms of plotting).

I think the flaws of this season have more to do with the seasonal arc as a whole rather than the individual episodes however. There are several episodes where basically nothing happens. Indeed, entire subplots seem to take place simply to give cast members something to do (Rios is captured by ICE, and Seven/Raffi try to break him out, for example), and don't really serve the core themes of the season or provide any character development.

Based upon comments Chabon made back in 2020 he had written two scripts for this season, but so far he had a partial story credit on the second episode, and that's it. This seems to suggest to me that - as has happened several times on Discovery - the original plans for the season were partially pulped to deal with COVID. We also know that it was intentional how everyone was hived off in subplots (Seven/Raffi, Rios/Teresa, Jurati/Borg Queen, Picard/whoever) for the middle period of the season. This cut down the risk of a COVID outbreak on set, but meant that the number of character interactions were quite limited.

What I find less forgivable overall is that a lot of the middle of the season was turned over to two writers (Cindy Appel and Jane Maggs) who...don't seem to have a very impressive set of writing credits (either from anything good, or anything much genre related). I'm not saying that superfans need to write Trek, but I think it's notable that the quality of the season dipped when the core team wasn't involved in the scripting (and it jumped up a bit last week when Beyer had co-credit on the script). The dialogue this season has often been pretty bad, and characters tend to just get "hunches" about something that moves the plot forward. You can just tell that someone who isn't very accomplished at scriptwriting is penning these episodes, and for whatever reason Matalas (or anyone else more accomplished) isn't doing a rigorous enough final edit of their work.

 

[Quinton]

I work with the guy who wrote that article on TheGamer. Told him I disagree and that the show's pretty good IMO.

I do think there's a soggy middle here (although I don't outright dislike any episode).

 

[Vger23]

Too early to tell, IMHO. Let's see how the final episodes roll out.

I am not as negative on the season so far as some. Episodes 1-2 were good, episode 3 was fine, episode 4 was pretty awful. I liked Fly Me To the Moon. Two of One was kinda bad again, but I thought Monsters was a step up (don't know why people hated it so) and Mercy finally saw some glimmers of the endgame (and was a step up in terms of plotting).

I think the flaws of this season have more to do with the seasonal arc as a whole rather than the individual episodes however. There are several episodes where basically nothing happens. Indeed, entire subplots seem to take place simply to give cast members something to do (Rios is captured by ICE, and Seven/Raffi try to break him out, for example), and don't really serve the core themes of the season or provide any character development.

Based upon comments Chabon made back in 2020 he had written two scripts for this season, but so far he had a partial story credit on the second episode, and that's it. This seems to suggest to me that - as has happened several times on Discovery - the original plans for the season were partially pulped to deal with COVID. We also know that it was intentional how everyone was hived off in subplots (Seven/Raffi, Rios/Teresa, Jurati/Borg Queen, Picard/whoever) for the middle period of the season. This cut down the risk of a COVID outbreak on set, but meant that the number of character interactions were quite limited.

What I find less forgivable overall is that a lot of the middle of the season was turned over to two writers (Cindy Appel and Jane Maggs) who...don't seem to have a very impressive set of writing credits (either from anything good, or anything much genre related). I'm not saying that superfans need to write Trek, but I think it's notable that the quality of the season dipped when the core team wasn't involved in the scripting (and it jumped up a bit last week when Beyer had co-credit on the script). The dialogue this season has often been pretty bad, and characters tend to just get "hunches" about something that moves the plot forward. You can just tell that someone who isn't very accomplished at scriptwriting is penning these episodes, and for whatever reason Matalas (or anyone else more accomplished) isn't doing a rigorous enough final edit of their work.

Very good analysis............

 

[JirinPanthosa]

As far as I'm concerned, the worst season of Trek outside the first two Enterprise seasons.

For all the season's problems, at least there are no dogs peeing on trees, declining to prevent extinction on made up principle, or mind melds as AIDS analogies.

 

[Lord Garth]

My Prediction: Picard Season 3 will be considered "even worse" than Season 2.
The Reason for My Prediction: It'll be called a Super-Long TNG Movie.

You heard it here first. Feel free to quote this post of mine in 2023.

 

[ananta]

“Success” or “failure” doesn’t really mean anything other than “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it”. Or, if it is considered in terms of ratings, which we’ll probably never be privy to. Even then, some of DS9’s absolute peak seasons didn’t get great ratings, so that metric probably doesn’t mean much either.

Trek fans are often perpetually fretting like OCD mother hens. I saw a link to an old usenet group from the early 1990’s a while back…and realised that’s always been the way of it. I have a touch of OCD too, but I’m not as emotionally invested in Star Trek. I either like it or I don’t. I loved TOS, DS9 and TNG and they all had a heap of mediocre and downright awful episodes. Frankly, nothing about PIC has been terrible, but it has been mediocre at times, including the middle part of this season. But I’m still enjoying it for what it is. It’s flawed, but it’s fine. It’s a pleasant diversion in these challenging times. I’m kinda more looking forward to SNW actually.

 

[Quinton]

My Prediction: Picard Season 3 will be considered "even worse" than Season 2.
The Reason for My Prediction: It'll be called a Super-Long TNG Movie.

You heard it here first. Feel free to quote this post of mine in 2023.

I'll get the ball rolling with the first thread. How's this sound?

"Can we all agree season 2 was better than this TNG movie cash-in trash?"

 

[fireproof78]

Trek fans are often perpetually fretting like OCD mother hens. I saw a link to an old usenet group from the early 1990’s a while back…and realised that’s always been the way of it. I have a touch of OCD too, but I’m not as emotionally invested in Star Trek. I either like it or I don’t. I loved TOS, DS9 and TNG and they all had a heap of mediocre and downright awful episodes. Frankly, nothing about PIC has been terrible, but it has been mediocre at times, including the middle part of this season. But I’m still enjoying it for what it is. It’s flawed, but it’s fine. It’s a pleasant diversion in these challenging times. I’m kinda more looking forward to SNW actually.

That's how I feel. Like, I'm used to my Trek fan friends telling me I'm wrong so if people don't like an episode/season or consider it a "failure" and I like it then that's pretty much my Trek experience. I've never been apart of the mainstream Trek opinion and probably never will.

 

[Reanok]

I've really liked Picard season 2 and the time travel plot and the characters story arcs have been really good. Alison Pill's character got to do more with her character and her scenes with the Borg Queen were really interesting.I'm looking forward to seeing the last 3 shows to see how they fix the time line to stop Adam Soong and the new Borg Queen.

 

[tomalak301]

Failure is such an extreme word. It basically means there are not redeemable qualities and it should just be brushed aside. While I have not enjoyed this season at all, I will still say there have been some redeemable qualities, such as episode 1 and the Q/Picard scenes of episode 2. I think the better word I would use for Season 2 might be disappointment. I'm disappointed that the promise of the first 2 episodes might not be realized. Of course there are 2 episodes to go so I might have a change of mind in a few weeks. Still, I'm not going to bash something others enjoy (And I really haven't posted much on this forum the last few weeks) because of my own personal disappointment with the series.

 

[Jack Wolfe]

I will agree that Picard has turned in the worst season of Seinfeld ever.