Spoilers Is Picard season 2 a failure?
- Thread starter Ometiklan
- Start date
Not even close...
Like season 1, I think this can't be judged until the story is finished. They have a tendency to throw a lot of balls into the air, and keeping them there throughout the season. In S1 I felt that everything came together very nicely, especially on a second viewing it was a very impactful and moving story for me. S2 is less of that so far, although it feels more classically Star Trek.
They should in any event steer clear of the serialized form. All evidence to the contary from the past aside, it doesn't seem a good fit for Trek - at least not if "serialized" is understood as "mystery upon mystery" rather than an epic long-form adventure.
They should in any event steer clear of the serialized form. All evidence to the contary from the past aside, it doesn't seem a good fit for Trek - at least not if "serialized" is understood as "mystery upon mystery" rather than an epic long-form adventure.
I take it back. The actors have not been a failure. They've all been great.
Manny Coto seemed to crack the code on this with S4 of Enterprise. Two to three episode story arcs, tightly scripted, and then on to the next one. It worked very well.
Guinan summoning Q like a genie in a bottle.
Rios giving out 25th century medical tech to a doctor from 2024 and she automatically knows how to use it with ease.
Taking a trip inside the mind of another character because this is the 90s I guess? What a dumb and lazy story idea that is overplayed in Star Trek, and it was never a good idea.
Discovering a character from the distant past who looks EXACTLY like your friend from the far future. Exactly alike. To a tee. And for what reason? Because there was fan outcry for more Laris I guess, so they had to create this character to use the actress? So was there fan outcry for more Laris or for more Orla Brady?
Jean-Luc’s memories of Chateau Picard look like they belong in the distant past, by our present day standards. And these memories supposedly occur in the 24th century.
Why am I supposed to care about Renée? Because I don’t. She’s largely been forgotten except for the random mention here and there about how I should care about her.
They’ve taken forever to move this story along. The characters have been doing a whole lot of nothing since they arrived in 2024, and it makes me feel like this could’ve been wrapped up in a few episodes.
Q has even been largely forgotten about, again except for random mentions, and we still have no idea of his motives. And we’re 10 episodes in. No one can be blamed for losing interest after 10 episodes of the story never being explained. At least in season 1 we had an idea where things were headed well before the finale. This year we have no idea, and what we have instead isn’t even that compelling.
There are more things, definitely. But my point is that this year has been a massive output of lazy writing, with the exception of the first two stellar episodes. A lot of the “simple” mistakes could be ignored if the story itself was interesting.
It isn’t.
Rios giving out 25th century medical tech to a doctor from 2024 and she automatically knows how to use it with ease.
Taking a trip inside the mind of another character because this is the 90s I guess? What a dumb and lazy story idea that is overplayed in Star Trek, and it was never a good idea.
Discovering a character from the distant past who looks EXACTLY like your friend from the far future. Exactly alike. To a tee. And for what reason? Because there was fan outcry for more Laris I guess, so they had to create this character to use the actress? So was there fan outcry for more Laris or for more Orla Brady?
Jean-Luc’s memories of Chateau Picard look like they belong in the distant past, by our present day standards. And these memories supposedly occur in the 24th century.
Why am I supposed to care about Renée? Because I don’t. She’s largely been forgotten except for the random mention here and there about how I should care about her.
They’ve taken forever to move this story along. The characters have been doing a whole lot of nothing since they arrived in 2024, and it makes me feel like this could’ve been wrapped up in a few episodes.
Q has even been largely forgotten about, again except for random mentions, and we still have no idea of his motives. And we’re 10 episodes in. No one can be blamed for losing interest after 10 episodes of the story never being explained. At least in season 1 we had an idea where things were headed well before the finale. This year we have no idea, and what we have instead isn’t even that compelling.
There are more things, definitely. But my point is that this year has been a massive output of lazy writing, with the exception of the first two stellar episodes. A lot of the “simple” mistakes could be ignored if the story itself was interesting.
It isn’t.
Right. Also the two part episodes on tng worked well. These creators are trying to tell a 2 hour story in 10 hours. It's terrible and incredibly boring. I do like the self contained episodes like in tos tng, ds9, Voyager etc. Yeah the episodes weren't all winners but a lot were and we didn't get so much filler garbage. I hope snw us better but I am losing hope with the people making the new shows. Discovery is just as bad or worse then Picard. The whole last season of that show I stopped caring what was causing the planet destruction 4 episodes in. Dabe with the burn the season before. It was anti climactic. I suspect we will get the same with season 2 of Picard.
A 2 hour story in 10 hours.
Yes!
This is exactly it, and not just with season 2 of Picard but the last two seasons of Discovery as well. The story they’re telling in each of these isn’t BIG enough to warrant 10 hours or more.
Yup. I was watching doomsday machine last night. It was really similar to the last season of discovery in some ways. A alien construct destroying whole planets. It did the story way better than duscivery and it was contained in a 50 minute episode. Just getting tired of these 10 hour one storyline episodes. They are slow, meandering, overly melodramatic and frankly boring. Not nearly as fun and thought provoking as the old shows. The serialized story telling is in my mind probably being used because writers are having trouble coming up with more than one story per season. We'll see how SNW works out. I think serialized writing will be waning in coming years and other shows will go back into single ep stories with running character arcs like DS9 and non star trek shows like The Mandolorian have done quite well.
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I don’t mind serialized storytelling at all, if it’s smart and each episode has point. Current Trek, mostly, is doing a poor job with serial storytelling.
She didn't automatically know how to handle it with ease. She picked it up with great trepidation and fiddled nervously with it (while asking what to do) until it sprang open on a display because she'd inadvertently pressed the right button to open it. That's literally all we saw of her using it. Rios would have talked her through the rest. And who knows? Maybe medical tricorders are designed to be as intuitive as possible, so that laymen can use them in a pinch. The device Rios gave her to use in a previous episode literally had just one button to press, it couldn't have been simpler.
The Q have always been magical beings depicted with the superficial trappings of sci-fi. There was nothing wrong with how Guinan summoned him.
This is just a false characterization of the scene.
The trope was well-executed.
I'll agree that using that trope with three different characters is pushing it -- but it allowed them to bring back Brent Spiner, Isa Briones, and Orla Brady, so I'll suspend my disbelief and allow it.
It was TNG's "Family" that first established that the Picards tend to dress anachronistically.
Presumably, because you can relate to the idea of being an accomplished person who nonetheless struggles with mental illness and feelings of impostor syndrome.
Not plausibly.
No, we're 9 episodes in, and we've got the season finale coming up.
I cannot help but notice that several of these complaints boil down to disliking the entire structure of plot serialization: That storylines diverge and then come back together at the finale. Which is just silly. You might as well complain that every character isn't in every scene.
You know, you can dislike something without insulting the writers -- writers who, I might add, had to cope with the monumental task of re-writing the entire season on the fly, when budgets were already set and contracts already signed, in order to figure out how to shoot safely in the midst of the greatest pandemic anyone has seen since the Spanish Influenza.
Maybe you think it didn't work, but that's not laziness.
For some reason, the outright haters -- not valid critics; haters -- often seem to falsely describe the things they whine about.
Yes, it's a failure for me. Spending the entire season in the 21st century was a terrible idea. We watch Star Trek because it's set in a fictionalised, distant future. For all of Discovery's flaws, at least there is some element of fictional space exploration and scientific intrigue.
If I wanted to watch a series set in the present, there are a million crappy shows I could watch instead. I guess setting it in our present makes it easier for the writers to get their social commentary across more easily (and with zero subtlety), as opposed to being creative and trying to come up with actual science fiction stories to deal with the subject matter they want to highlight.
Not a great season. A shame too since the first two episodes were excellent but the quality has literally fallen off a cliff since the second episode.
If I wanted to watch a series set in the present, there are a million crappy shows I could watch instead. I guess setting it in our present makes it easier for the writers to get their social commentary across more easily (and with zero subtlety), as opposed to being creative and trying to come up with actual science fiction stories to deal with the subject matter they want to highlight.
Not a great season. A shame too since the first two episodes were excellent but the quality has literally fallen off a cliff since the second episode.
This is Star Trek.
If Star Trek fans who love Star Trek and watch lots of Star Trek keep saying that the social commentary has zero subtlety and hasn't been threaded into the story creatively, then they're probably judging it relative to Star Trek.
Star Trek: Picard is very explicitly a show that is not about institutional space exploration or scientific intrigue. It has always been advertised as a show about exploring the character of Jean-Luc Picard first and foremost. To hold the fact that Star Trek: Picard is not about institutional space exploration and scientific intrigue against it, is like holding the fact that The Godfather is not a romantic comedy against it, or holding the fact that The Wizard of Oz is not a political thriller against it.
At a certain point, you have to allow the premise.
They're upset because Star Trek used to be subtle, huh?
Probably as well as misremembering past Trek's supposed subtleties. Also, if it isn't Let that be your last Battlefield levels of subtlety it's doing fine.
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