Original premise for Pic S.3 - Terry Matalas.....

[Admiral_Young]

The hosts reaction is hilarious. At first he's like wait what...then he just accepts it and is like oh that would be have been cool.

The Borg reanimating Picard's body into Locutus and having him "face/off" (lol) against him would be a wild live action general audience kind of deal. Almost quirky enough that it reminds me of Shatner and the Reeves-Stevens using Borg tech to reanimate Kirk's body in "The Return".

"First Contact" was enough closure for me with Picard and Locutus---and it kind of ties in to what they did with the whole 2 in 1 thing in Picard----I forget the specifics of the quote---The Queen wanting an equal with Locutus and a partner, etc.

This is why a lot of this stuff remains on the writing room floor though or gets rejected lol.

 

[CampBOO!]

Once we knew Picard's body was stolen, that was what I was expecting.

But really, is his son becoming Locutus any less fanwanky?

You mean Vox?

And it’s all fanwanky because that’s how Matalas writes. I’ll admit I’m curious about Vision Quest despite his involvement. I hope he’s actually learned a lesson or two from some of the negative commentary on Picard. But I doubt it. There was enough positivity around it to not listen to the negativity.

So much of S3 is fanwanky right from the very moment it opens with “in the 25th century” with the same TWOK typeface.

What’s even more remarkable is how many went along with the TWOK callbacks despite being vocal of how Trek has cribbed from TWOK. That “Project Khan” bit in S2 was rightfully mocked, and yet somehow all those criticisms were completely dropped for S3. Especially by the folks who griped about it the most like Robert Meyer Burnett.

Yeah, I never did understand the difference there.

 

[Admiral_Young]

"Vision Quest" by the all presence of all the characters in it sounds incredibly fan wanky. I admit to be mildly curious about it---and already know that James Spader is going to scene steal all of his scenes because that's what the man does! He's impossible not to be great.

 

[CampBOO!]

He already does in the trailers.

 

[Sketcher]

Meh, this just sounds like a lot of writers whose first idea for how to do a story are complete garbage and don't happen. Your mileage may vary on if Matalas ideas that did happen are complete garbage or not.

 

[DonIago]

Man...as disappointing as I found S3, I think perhaps I find Picard vs. Locutus to be a less fanwanky lever to pull than the Borg and a bunch of rogue Changelings forming an inexplicable alliance. And Bev not telling Jean-Luc about his son really wasn't a great look for her, nor was it a great look for him when she asked him not to trust anyone and the first thing he did was go running to Starfleet (even under false pretenses).

 

[Tosk]

I honestly don't care that PIC S3 was 'fanwanky'. I'm all for fanwank as long as the story and motivations actually make sense. And much of S3 did not.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

Many of the things that annoy people in PIC S03 were actually delightful for me.

I thought a cast reunion was a logical endpoint for the final season. An inevitability almost and I would have been disappointed to *not* see it happen.

I don’t think the E-D was strictly necessary, but at the same time I didn’t object.

Changelings seemed like an interesting route to follow.

But…

Changelings forming an alliance with the Borg is just bullshit. Doesn’t make a scrap of sense and as soon as it turned out it was the Borg… again… for the third season in a row, like they are somehow the only antagonist worth digging up from TNG, then I was done.

PIC S01 had a really interesting take on the Borg, much like how TNG moved the concept of the Klingons forwards. PIC S02
ended with them in a similarly interesting spot. Then Matalas just fucked it all back where it was and reset the Borg to the evil because… who knows why?

What a confused show PIC was overall and what a missed opportunity in general.

 

[Starflight]

I never get what's going on in his head, he seems to read Star Trek as basically Marvel - a relatively small toybox of heroes and baddies to rearrange and smash into each other to make epic action setpieces.

Which is fine, but I always wonder how he feels sitting there watching a typical episode like "Loud as a Whisper" or w/e. It's amazing how much influence BoBW, Descent, and DS9's war stuff seems to have over the franchise as a whole, totally eclipsing what most of the shows are usually like. I've always found all those aspects pretty dull, which I suppose is the punchline.

The part that still stuns me is that Worf becomes a "pacifist" and is introduced by letally beheading several people with a big sword. He kills more people in his first eight seconds as a "pacifist" than he did in seven years of being a "warrior" in TNG. Matalas seems to just experience the franchise in a completely different way than I do.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I never get what's going on in his head, he seems to read Star Trek as basically Marvel - a relatively small toybox of heroes and baddies to rearrange and smash into each other to make epic action setpieces.

My read on season 3 is almost exactly this.

I have called it something like "the Star Trek equivalent of a mid-90s post-Claremont X-Men comic." People getting their hands on the toys they grew up reading, with big, epic melodrama, getting to do the big moments their own way.

Or, in South Park terms, it's memberberries.

 

[somebuddyX]

I always hated the term fanservice. I just think does it make sense and work emotionally. Patrick Stewart facing evil Patrick Stewart sounds pretty cool and a great way to play with Picard's emotional turmoil about being mind raped and forced to lead an attack on his home planet and kill thousands of his friends and colleagues when that component of himself is out there running amok.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Stewart would have eaten up the dual role of Picard and Locutus. It's very Shakespearean. I can see him being in favor of such a pitch.

 

[DonIago]

S3 might have gotten away with doing the Borg if S1 and S2 hadn't already done them, and in more interesting ways.

 

[Admiral_Young]

Many of the things that annoy people in PIC S03 were actually delightful for me.

I thought a cast reunion was a logical endpoint for the final season. An inevitability almost and I would have been disappointed to *not* see it happen.

I don’t think the E-D was strictly necessary, but at the same time I didn’t object.

Changelings seemed like an interesting route to follow.

But…

Changelings forming an alliance with the Borg is just bullshit. Doesn’t make a scrap of sense and as soon as it turned out it was the Borg… again… for the third season in a row, like they are somehow the only antagonist worth digging up from TNG, then I was done.

PIC S01 had a really interesting take on the Borg, much like how TNG moved the concept of the Klingons forwards. PIC S02
ended with them in a similarly interesting spot. Then Matalas just fucked it all back where it was and reset the Borg to the evil because… who knows why?

What a confused show PIC was overall and what a missed opportunity in general.

The Changeling/Borg alliance is what gets me still. It doesn't make sense at all. The Changelings should have been just themselves and we leave the Borg alone having already dealt with them in the previous two seasons. They milked them to death in the revival and I get why, they're an important part of Picard's past---this specifically didn't make sense and ruined the main villain character. I thought Amanda Plummer was fucking fantastic until that connection was made and it almost undermined her completely as a character.

 

[DonIago]

What irked me was that they made any sort of big deal about the Changelings returning...but then it's a rogue faction who don't represent the Dominion in any meaningful fashion and who basically could have been any race of shapeshifters, especially given that the Changelings we see are altered from the ones we're used to so that they'll better serve the plot.

 

[Fire(BOO!)]

Making Plummer and her group Changelings literally did nothing for the plot, either. It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about them. It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already about how awful Section 31 could be.

It might have made more sense to make them a rogue band of ex-Borg who never got readjusted to life outside the collective and held the Federation accountable. Emphasis on the might.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

If they wanted to use that idea that they could take on any form, make them holograms instead.

 

[Fire(BOO!)]

If they wanted to use that idea that they could take on any form, make them holograms instead.

Holograms wouldn’t have any relevance to Picard. Janeway and the Doctor, sure, but they weren’t the focus of this show.

 

[DonIago]

Changelings, especially rogue Changelings, didn't have any relevance to Picard either. Nor did S31 for that matter. But I may be saying things you already agree with.

If they were going to revisit things from DS9, I wish they would have done so more thoughtfully rather than apparently just reading the Wikipedia synopsis of the series.

 

[Smear-Gel]

What’s even more remarkable is how many went along with the TWOK callbacks despite being vocal of how Trek has cribbed from TWOK. That “Project Khan” bit in S2 was rightfully mocked, and yet somehow all those criticisms were completely dropped for S3. Especially by the folks who griped about it the most like Robert Meyer Burnett.

PIC 3 and the reaction really did change how I viewed a lot of nutrek critisism. Because while watching it all I could think was that this has every single issue that a subset of the base has with Discovery and Picard, and a bunch of new problems on top of it, and it felt like apparently none of that mattered, all that mattered was if that was happening while the characters from the old shows are there flying the classic ship we like.

The mystery boxes, the weird character moments, the "grimdark" feel, the serialized story that takes up the whole season, a "bad guy" Federation, the overdone references to the past, yet another giant tragic event that everyone has to recover from, it's literally all there. And Im not saying you have to agree with all of those critisisms, or conversely that you cant think those are all issues. I even think that sometimes something can do the same thing as another show but have a better execution.

But it was so odd seeing people who spend a lot of time talking about these things, just get completely sold on this season. I get people who are like "I enjoyed the story, it was a nice victory lap, it had problems but things were well done." Especially if they are more open to liking other modern Trek shows. But people who hated everything else since Enterprise saying this season needs to be the Trek template going forward really makes me go hmmm.