The lorca stuff absolutely felt like a last minute change! Anyway, sorry to derail a Picard thread into Discovery territory!
It’s easy to see it was done for ‘look Klingon boobies! We’s an adult show)’ reasons to be fair. It wasn’t even like it was a character undressing or something similar. The scene may as well have had a fanfare.
Oh, look!!! I don't agree, since that wasn't the reaction, and given some responses of "Don't even remember it" it feels a lot less of "Klingon boobies" and actually trying to do something with the story. To me, it's simply unimpressive to think it was done for "shock factor" when I've seen the same thing in PG-13 films when I was 14.
Giger inspired my Arse. Species at a push. And some of Giger’s stuff does lean to the puerile side. It was a freeze-frame wank shot for the kind of teens that used to do the same in horror films....no nudity without guilt! That’s your Joss Whedon influence, going to slasher films for your style cues. And they went so ‘full Lewis Carroll’ that the whole series was telegraphing it’s plot twists ( I think I knew Lorca was mirror universe within a few episodes because of it.) Picard doesn’t hover anywhere in your teenage ninja whedon wheelhouse (Though I can see a level of a Buffy sense in there.) but instead moves slightly more in the Cameron / Terminator area. Which isn’t a surprise, David Mack went there in the novels. (And since DSC lifted a concept wholesale from David Mack novels, it’s not much of a surprise.) Incidentally, as I mentioned above, going to noir detective fiction for Picard, subtly, makes sense... Dixon Hill was a thing with the character. But it is far from overt.
It’s Hollywood produced content. It was a gratuitous boob shot, (and expensive to boot) same as all the gratuitous violence visuals that abounded that season. It was all about ‘not your fathers Trek’ and the ‘see, we can do stuffs now not normal TV’ thing. Trek on TV was never in the PG 13 zone (well maybe some later Treks, a little, but TNG almost never as a matter of course...the exceptions are well documented.) and didn’t really add anything to story at all. To give it it’s positives, it did provide the first nude alien in Trek (well...humanoid) Which is interesting, and did work far better than Tilly’s fuck. A lot of effort went into it (including the old nineties erotic thriller shtick of getting the right amount of shadow to obscure otherwise obvious genital shot.) even if ultimately they kept to a minimum to still get its shock value in. I don’t think we will see the same in Picard, but it’s not impossible. They do seem proud of it being relatively family friendly though.
Yeah, you and I are never going to see eye to eye on this one. So, I'm moving on. I'm sure there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth if Picard has nudity.
Hate to have to break it to you, but Giger designed Species himself, and have you seen any teen slasher flicks? That's not how slasher flicks work re: Sex. They are about punishment not guilt. Dajh is totally in Whedon's wheelhouse. Buffy...Dollhouse...River Tam. Cameron did that trope exactly once, sort of in round about way, in his career with Dark Angel but his Terminator stuff is very different. And if I can see the noir cliches in Picard, then yeah, they are overt and intentional just like the geysers of sentimental nostalgia this ep offered up. On the other hand, props to the show for demonstrating how toxic Picards self righteousness turned out to be when the universe didn't let him get his way. I'd been wondering about how that would happen since around 1987.
Giger designed Eve. He had nothing to do with the rest of the design in Species, and the scene bears a passing resemblance to it. Tbh, I am being generous with that analogy, since it’s just ‘alien sex scene with human Male’. It really is nothing like Giger. At all. I wasn’t referring to the ‘bad girl gets killed’ aspect of horror films, just the tendency towards boobs shots to titillate the audience, after all, they have the high end certificate already, might as well use it. Dahj is not a teenager..she’s off to the Daystrom Institute, the overall impression is of a character in early twenties. She has more in common with Jason Bourne than anything Whedon. It reminds me of Cameron/Terminator tropes because of the inverted ‘come with me if you want to live’ where you she goes to Picard for help, and the way in which she later protects Picard himself. It’s not heavy, and it’s not like faceless biker assassins are out to kill her for reasons she doesn’t understand but are related to a biological vs AÍ conflict or anything like...oh. There are of course little sprinklings of Blade Runner too...but again, that makes sense for bunches of reasons. One of which is that it was a stated influence during the research for TNG way back when, but the other is...it’s an SF detective story dealing with the same (admittedly well trod) things we deal with here...the sentience of constructed beings. You also don’t seem to understand what a cliche is, vs basic narrative tools/traditions, let alone why they might thematically go there for this specific character. (Of course it’s quasi noir...Dixon Hill.) If anything, it’s not Noir anyway...Dahj is not a femme fatale, Picard is no gumshoe. This is more ‘retired military hero’ pretty much outright, ‘daughter of the buddy I lost in the war needs help’ etc. Put it this way, it’s more A-Team than Chandler, but we tend towards the noir comparison because of Dahj’s story and the cinematography. In terms of pacing, I would say it lands more in the Lê Carre tradition, Picard as something of a George Smiley, Starfleet as the Circus. Your posts however suggest you are swiping out because of the comparisons to previous DSC. Picard is better. So far. But that’s not a surprise, DSC had a messed up production, different pressures and indecisiveness. Picard had to be more considered or it just plain wouldn’t have happened.
I am noting that as Picard goes along, there's going to be more things it does that people freaked out when Discovery did similar thing, but the reaction is going to be a collective shrug instead of cries that "This is not Star Trek!!". So far we've got an otherwise collective shrug.
I’ll let you know when I see the next episode. This is the board for episode one. I also don’t trust you to lack bias.
Yeah, let's be mindful of which thread we're in. No uncoded discussion of episode 2 in here yet, please.
Episode 2 spoilers: Spoiler Wesley crusher goes to Picard for help, and the dog barks at him to shut up
Sorry ... But I thought I was being just about a vague as I could and since "Nakedness" had already been brought up in this thread, I was just adding to that conversation. The Spoiler 'SEX' Scene was already shown in a couple of the trailers and I used "they" to describe the participants.