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Rewatching Picard...

I wasn't expecting this but, despite rating "The Last Generation" higher, I agree with almost everything you said about it.

AntonyF said:
Season three felt solid when viewed piece by piece but by the end it felt a bit of a slog with very little variety tonally or in story.
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In general, I think there's something to be said about two-hour movies versus eight-hour movies. Picard Season 3 was meant to be TNG's Star Trek VI, except Star Trek VI wasn't eight hours!

I wish they'd also have a shorter version. Being in my 40s, all my friends who liked Star Trek only really liked TNG. They liked the movies as well, but Star Trek to them was TNG. Some of them watched Picard (especially Season 3) but I think more of them would be willing to watch two hours of a TNG Reunion than eight. That would've been a great Movie Night. Inviting my old college friends over to watch the "fifth TNG Movie".

EDITED TO ADD: Overall, I put Picard Season 3 under the even-numbered TOS Movies and First Contact but above the odd-numbered TOS Movies and the other TNG Movies.
 
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I would also say its been quite fun taking part in this. I'm not quite ready for another rewatch, but its interesting to see the perspective of a fresher pair of eyes.

I've got far too many opinions regarding the current era of Trek, but despite Picard almost making me pull my hair out on several occasions, it is a series that I will return to many more times.

So many "what if's" and "if only's" to this show, it's quite unique in that respect.
 
I've only watched the series one time. To me it felt very uneven and had some rather off-the-wall stuff.

Kor
 
Kor said:
I've only watched the series one time. To me it felt very uneven and had some rather off-the-wall stuff.

Kor
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Same. There are parts of it I'd likely consider rewatchable, but I can't imagine rewatching the whole series.
 
I've thought in rewatching Picard that the show could be ripe for a fan edit. Two episodes trimmed from season one would make it tighter. More likely half of season two, and probably again a couple of episodes from three.

I see someone did a fan edit of three:
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They re-edited it as three 'movies'. I'd be curious to how it turned out.

What I also find intersting is that they seem to have the same sensibilities as me when i'm reviewing. The removed the decapitation for being too gruesome. removed an unnecessary use of fuck. And even "Removed the pot/cannabis joke... totally took me out of it the first time I watched. It seems way too contemporary and anachronistic for them to not only still familiarly refer to cannabis as the slang 'pot' 400 years from now, but for Shaw to apparently have an affinity for it. "

As a more conscious creative choice they excised references to previous seasons, in order to make it more standalone.
 
AntonyF said:
I've thought in rewatching Picard that the show could be ripe for a fan edit. Two episodes trimmed from season one would make it tighter. More likely half of season two, and probably again a couple of episodes from three.

I see someone did a fan edit of three:
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For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

They re-edited it as three 'movies'. I'd be curious to how it turned out.

What I also find intersting is that they seem to have the same sensibilities as me when i'm reviewing. The removed the decapitation for being too gruesome. removed an unnecessary use of fuck. And even "Removed the pot/cannabis joke... totally took me out of it the first time I watched. It seems way too contemporary and anachronistic for them to not only still familiarly refer to cannabis as the slang 'pot' 400 years from now, but for Shaw to apparently have an affinity for it. "

As a more conscious creative choice they excised references to previous seasons, in order to make it more standalone.
Click to expand...
I'm slowly (as I have time) working on a fan-edit of my own where I'm mashing up "Space Seed" and TWOK into one story favoring Khan's point-of-view. It's my way of celebrating Star Trek's 60th Anniversary.

My next fan project after that was going to be turning Picard Season 3 into two TNG Movies (to match TOS's six) to celebrate TNG's 40th Anniversary...

... but what this person is doing with their fan-edit sounds like everything I would've done. And I have to admit that dividing it up into three would be far easier. So, I'm glad they're tackling it. It's something I'd like to see as well.
 
Argh they and you @Lord Garth have inspired me. I couldn't resist meddling with one scene. I only started with this software for the first time an hour ago, so I'm reasonably pleased with the results.

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Removed the image of his English mother, and replaced it with the elegant and lovely Yvette.

Removed the phrase "and she also struggled" (I'm not 100% against this line, and it may then lead into the fear conversation... but I think it also works without it).

Then removed a scene where her saying his mother must be proud triggered a negative flashback. On this you hear a slight music shift, I don't think that's really solvable (at least not without some sound editing skills) but I don't think it's too objectionable.
 
AntonyF said:
Argh they and you @Lord Garth have inspired me. I couldn't resist meddling with one scene. I only started with this software for the first time an hour ago, so I'm reasonably pleased with the results.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Removed the image of his English mother, and replaced it with the elegant and lovely Yvette.

Removed the phrase "and she also struggled" (I'm not 100% against this line, and it may then lead into the fear conversation... but I think it also works without it).

Then removed a scene where her saying his mother must be proud triggered a negative flashback. On this you hear a slight music shift, I don't think that's really solvable (at least not without some sound editing skills) but I don't think it's too objectionable.
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That's pretty good! I think I'd like to see a 2 to 3hr movie version of Picard Season 2, with a lot of the misery edited out.

I've been complaining ad nauseum about movie plots stretched out into a 10hr series, with the greatest offender being the Obi-Wan series. There's a good film in there, in my opinion, once the meandering is ripped out.
 
Hellbird said:
That's pretty good! I think I'd like to see a 2 to 3hr movie version of Picard Season 2, with a lot of the misery edited out.
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I'm so tempted to try it and pick away at it. I have so many things I should be doing instead, but I can see how it could play out. This little edit has give me a taste...
 
I find it ironic that we're now into shorter seasons of 8 or 10 episodes, sometimes fewer... yet the feeling is here and with that Obi-Wan link above people are still feeling things are stretched out.

I guess that's because if it were episodic, it would just feel like a short season. But when you do an arc and don't necessarily have the material or variety to fill that out.. it comes out feeling like a long movie rather than a tight series.
 
One of the reasons stretches out seasons don't bother me is because Marvel did it with Daredevil. It had a slump that felt very difficult to overcome. So I just started to anticipate that much in a way I simply didn't have to watch every Star Trek episode.
 
AntonyF said:
I find it ironic that we're now into shorter seasons of 8 or 10 episodes, sometimes fewer... yet the feeling is here and with that Obi-Wan link above people are still feeling things are stretched out.

I guess that's because if it were episodic, it would just feel like a short season. But when you do an arc and don't necessarily have the material or variety to fill that out.. it comes out feeling like a long movie rather than a tight series.
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It's because there's not enough interesting "filler" to justfiy it...and if there was, then because the seasons were leaning into Crisis of the Season format, the question would be how come Our Heroes have time to be fapping around rather than trying to defeat the Big Bad.

I kind of blame shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer for this, though give me a minute to explain before you crucify me (see what I did there?). BtVS had a seasonal Big Bad, and generally it was defeated in or close to the season finale, and when the next season started it was basically a new chapter.

But the key difference is that the Big Bad wasn't presented as a crisis-level event from the beginning of the season...in fact, Our Heroes often didn't even know the Big Bad was a threat to them for multiple episodes, and even then, there wasn't necessarily much they could directly do about it. So even though the seasons were longer, Our Heroes had time for character development and less severe crises along the path leading up to the confrontation with the Big Bad (sometimes involving minions thereof).

Take S4 of DISCO. For most of the first episode of the season, there is no "Big Bad"...but it surfaces catastrophically at the end of the episode, and it's an omnipresent threat for the rest of the season. Our Heroes get no significant time for more episodic adventures or downtime because there's this crisis hanging over them the whole time. It's probably the best overall season of the series, and yet it feels bloated because parts of the tackling of the main story seem to take more time than they should, and yet, ironically, there's little time devoted to giving most of the characters much time to breathe.

What they could have done was have some lower-level problems to solve, perhaps even caused (unknowingly) by the "Big Bad", and save the catastrophic event until the third or fourth episode. It would trim some of the bloat from later episodes and make things feel a bit more urgent, but give the characters some time to be not in crisis-mode at the beginning of the season.
 
I don't think there are any crucifixions in Buffy. 😉You have raised the stakes here though. (Yes you can slap me.)

I think your analysis is really good, and makes a lot of sense. You say you blame Buffy but surely what you're saying is Buffy did it right?

But I think also more broadly Buffy and shows like DS9 had arc elements with episodic format. So it wasn't all consuming. Whereas Picard (like you described with season four or Discovery, which I never watched) it's THE story. Nothing else can really exist in its orbit.
 
I certainly think Season 2 (above S1 & S3, which don't need one, despite their faults) is the arch contender for a truncated feature length fan edit. Its middle episodes were mediocrity that nearly killed the season (though the stuff with ICE aged painfully well).
 
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TedShatner10 said:
I certainly think Season 2 (above S1 & S3, which don't need one, despite their faults) is the arch contender for a truncated feature length fan edit. It's middle episodes were mediocrity that nearly killed the season (though the stuff with ICE aged painfully well).
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I thought this when I last rewatched it.

Nuts.
 
AntonyF said:
I don't think there are any crucifixions in Buffy. 😉You have raised the stakes here though. (Yes you can slap me.)

I think your analysis is really good, and makes a lot of sense. You say you blame Buffy but surely what you're saying is Buffy did it right?

But I think also more broadly Buffy and shows like DS9 had arc elements with episodic format. So it wasn't all consuming. Whereas Picard (like you described with season four or Discovery, which I never watched) it's THE story. Nothing else can really exist in its orbit.
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Yeah, my wording was a bit bad on that. I generally think Buffy did it well, though objectively speaking, life doesn't really tend to work in "chapters" as Buffy showed, and it might have been better if different seasons had taken up different amounts of time in-universe.

I think the "Big Bad" format may have somewhat inspired later shows to try to do the same thing, though, and I don't think Star Trek has particularly benefitted from this.
 
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