Spoilers PIC: No Man's Land by Kirsten Beyer & Mike Johnson Review Thread

Rate PIC: No Man's Land

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Blurb:
Discover what happens to Raffi and Seven of Nine following the stunning conclusion to season one of Star Trek: Picard with this audio exclusive, fully dramatized Star Trek adventure featuring the beloved stars of the hit TV series Michelle Hurd and Jeri Ryan.

Star Trek: No Man’s Land picks up right after the action-packed season one conclusion of Star Trek: Picard. While Raffi and Seven of Nine are enjoying some much-needed R&R in Raffi’s remote hideaway, their downtime is interrupted by an urgent cry for help: a distant, beleaguered planet has enlisted the Fenris Rangers to save an embattled evacuation effort. As Raffi and Seven team up to rescue a mysteriously ageless professor whose infinity-shaped talisman has placed him in the deadly sights of a vicious Romulan warlord, they take tentative steps to explore the attraction depicted in the final moments of Picard season one.

Star Trek: No Man’s Land is a rich, fully dramatized Star Trek: Picard adventure as Michelle Hurd and Jeri Ryan pick up their respective characters once more. Written for audio by Kirsten Beyer, a cocreator, writer, and producer on the hit Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard, and Mike Johnson, a veteran contributor to the Star Trek comic books publishing program, this audio original offers consummate Star Trek storytelling brilliantly reimagined for the audio medium.

In addition to riveting performances from Hurd and Ryan exploring new layers of Raffi and Seven’s relationship, Star Trek: No Man’s Land features a full cast of actors playing all-new characters in the Star Trek: Picard universe, including Fred Tatasciore, Jack Cutmore-Scott, John Kassir, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Lisa Flanagan, Gibson Frazier, Lameece Issaq, Natalie Naudus, Xe Sands, and Emily Woo Zeller, and is presented in a soundscape crackling with exclusive Star Trek sound effects. Drawing listeners into a dramatic, immersive narrative experience that is at once both instantly familiar and spectacularly new, Star Trek: No Man’s Land goes boldly where no audio has gone before as fans new and old clamor to discover what happens next.

About the Authors:

Kirsten Beyer

Kirsten Beyer was a cocreator of the acclaimed hit Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard, where she served as writer and supervising producer for season one and a coexecutive producer for season two. She has also written and produced Star Trek: Discovery and is currently a coexecutive producer on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the last ten Star Trek: Voyager novels, including 2020’s To Lose the Earth, for which she was the narrator of the audiobook edition. She contributed the short story “Isabo’s Shirt” to Star Trek: Voyager: Distant Shores Anthology. In 2006, Kirsten appeared at Hollywood’s Unknown Theater in their productions of Johnson Over Jordan, This Old Planet, and Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse, which the Los Angeles Times called “unmissable.” She lives in Los Angeles.

Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson is a New York Times bestselling writer of comics, games, and animation. Since 2015, he has worked as a writer and creative consultant for ViacomCBS on Star Trek games and interactive projects. His work on the Star Trek franchise began in 2009 with Star Trek: Countdown, the comics prequel to the blockbuster film Star Trek directed by J.J. Abrams. Since then, Johnson has written and cowritten the most Star Trek comics in the franchise’s history. His other credits include Superman/Batman, Supergirl, and Earth 2 for DC Comics, Transformers for IDW Publishing, and Ei8ht from Dark Horse Comics. He also wrote for the Emmy Award–winning animated show Transformers: Prime. Johnson previously worked in film and TV development for writers/producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/bo.../Kirsten-Beyer/Star-Trek-Picard/9781797124537

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This release marks Simon & Schuster's first foray into original Star Trek audio adventures since the three Captain Sulu releases in the mid-90s, and the two Spock vs. Q releases in 1999 and 2000.
 
Did anyone notice any references to other Trek novels or comics? I don’t think I heard one…

I really loved Hyroh though. If there’s a Seven spinoff in the future, I really want him to be in it.

There were references to things from Rogue Elements I heard, the idea of all the cultural artifacts in this area of space with the Romulan diaspora
 
Yeah, it's annoying. I went for Google Play because you can get a DRM-free download, but it's nowhere close to CD quality audio.
 
I'm a little shocked they'd release this kind of audio drama in anything less than full HD quality.
 
I'm a little shocked they'd release this kind of audio drama in anything less than full HD quality.

I'm not shocked since it has become standard for a lot of audio dramas to not bother but I find it really scummy and lazy. Hopefully it's something they can resolve for future releases, I don't really notice it when listening but I'd like the option and I know a lot of people find it more important than I do.
 
I'm not that familiar with audio dramas, so I didn't realize it was standard. It's gotta be one of the few forms of media that doesn't release everything in HD.
 
What they don't seem to have figured out is that an audiobook that's just someone reading doesn't need the highest quality audio to be listenable. However, if you have audio dramas with music, sound effects, dialogue from multiple characters, sometimes all at the same time, you need better quality audio. But the vast majority of the audio marketplace is aimed at audiobook listeners, not audio drama listeners. If Simon & Schuster wants to do more audio dramas they have to realize that they can't treat them the same as audiobooks.
 
I just wanted to report that I got very good audio quality from my Storytel app. It's very weird they'd downgrade it for, say, Google Audio...
 
For all I know, maybe the audio quality is better in the Google Play app, and it's just the download that's low quality. But I don't want to be locked into an app, I want a DRM-free download I can use on any device in the player of my choice.
 
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Really enjoyed that. It was very old fashioned Trek (the plot has echos of at least one TOS episode), but nicely done and all the characters, leads and guest stars, were fun. And liked that it (at a point it's too early to say how the show will handle their relationship), it treated the two leads as bisexual, with each fine about the other's "he" exes when talking about their pasts, rather than the more usual media thing of "We'll accept straight or gay, or crossing from one to the other (hello Willow) but not anything else".
 
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(And my phone has fucked up the formatting there and my attempts to edit have made it worse, must be a my software thing. If a mod could trim the big empty space...)
 
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