A new news article has been published at TrekToday: A new Star Trek: Picard post-Season One novel will be arriving next year. The novel, titled Second Self, will be written by... Continue reading...
I still want to know how she got "fired" after Picard's resignation and became "poor and homeless" in a society that doesn't use money.
I figure she "dropped out" partly by choice, and partly just by alienating everyone who would otherwise have helped her. Even without money, there can be an economy of reputation and connections. Besides, she's explicitly, textually living on Vasquez Rocks, which is not some remote part of the desert, but a public park routinely visited by tourists, bikers, hikers, rock climbers, etc. If anything, she'd have to have quite a lot of influence to be allowed to stay there. That's not homelessness, that's eccentric luxury.
I don't believe, in universe, that it was supposed to be Vasquez Rocks. They likely just filmed it there as a nod to all the other times it has appeared in the franchise.
Yes, that's the problem. They were going for an in-joke by filming at Vasquez Rocks and explicitly captioning it as such, but that created a conceptual problem because it's a freaking public park and someone shouldn't be able to squat there. But then, the Presidio and the Marin Headlands are parks, and Starfleet built its headquarters and academy all over them. So I guess the Federation doesn't have a lot of respect for 20th-century parkland designations.
I think we can assume World War III and the collapse of nation-states may have changed some rules along the way....
Meanwhile, I'm still wondering how it happened that both of Picard's onscreen first officers have names that begin with "R" and end with "iker."
Except we've seen time and again that the Federation does have a currency and that Starfleet officers do get some type of Salary. Sisko bought land on Bajor to build a house. Beverley Crusher used credits to buy stuff at Farpoint Station. Nog and Jake have a discussion in 'In the Cards' that would indicate that money is definitely a thing in the Federation. Federation citizens can clearly get their basic needs met, but the fact that not everyone is living in a mansion like Picard means that there is still some type monetary class based system in the Federation.
Except that all your examples are for commerce outside the Federation. Deneb V (Farpoint), Bajor, and Ferenginar are not Federation member worlds. Other civilizations still use currency and capitalism, so Starfleet personnel on the frontier would naturally need a monetary stipend for doing business with non-Federation cultures. That doesn't tell us anything about everyday civilian life within the Federation. The very fact that Jake, a civilian, explicitly says in "In the Cards" that he doesn't have any money suggests that it's not typical for Federation civilians to have money (although it makes no sense that Sisko doesn't give Jake an allowance for doing business with the shops on the Promenade or the like). That's jumping to a conclusion. Just because differences in living conditions are based on money in our society doesn't mean that's the only possible basis for the difference in any society. That's a failure of imagination. In a society like the Federation, it would probably be assigned by need or by interest. Without the incentive to compete for wealth or show it off, a lot of people might simply choose to live more modestly, because they don't need anything more. And Picard doesn't live in a "mansion." He lives in the main house of his family's vineyard. Presumably that needs to be a fair-sized building to accommodate the staff, the wine cellar, whatever else is needed.
I think it was interesting a Romulan spy contacted Raffi in the synopsis and maybe exploring her background as a intelligence officer.I've been curious what the Romulans have been up to since the season one finale and the events that happened on Capellious.
Interesting thought, but a park caretaker would be unlikely to live smack in the middle of the most frequented public area of the park (or the one most frequently used as a filming location). Normally the only things there (when they're not filming) are picnic tables. I just wish they'd had the restraint to use the visual in-joke of Vasquez Rocks without actually putting up a caption identifying it as such. Textually, the implication is that she lived somewhere very remote and off the grid, so they shouldn't have admitted it was actually a public park that's a major tourist attraction.