With over 20 votes, there's evidently much more of a debate regarding whether S3 is the best seasons of PIC among folks who grew up with TNG than there is among people who did not grow up with TNG. Looks like my theory may have a fair amount of validity, though this isn't a spectacular sample size (yet).
Poll Season Three: The Search For Causation
- Thread starter DonIago
- Start date
I was born in '75 and TNG was the first Trek series I watched in full (although I'd seen some repeats of TOS episodes, as well as TWOK on the telly - the TOS movies were what made me a fan). Rather like @Tosk, I can't bring myself to like any season of PIC, but S3 is definitely not my least disliked. One day, I might rewatch the first half/three quarters of S1. Maybe.
(DS9 was my favourite Trek series for the longest time, but LDS has just snuck ahead).
(DS9 was my favourite Trek series for the longest time, but LDS has just snuck ahead).
I feel like there is too much emphasis on liking a whole season. I like a lot more of the episodes in Season 1 than Season 3, and I guess that adds up to make me like the whole season more.
Season 2 involves Q and already starts at a disadvantage.
Season 2 involves Q and already starts at a disadvantage.
^Ironically I feel S2 starts out pretty great and if the show had stayed with either of the two premises it seemed to be moving toward in those first couple of episodes it could have ended up being my favorite season. But alas, time travel and our heroes wandering around LA took precedence. :|
Ok, I'll grant that. I did like Rios and being on the Stargazer. Once Q arrives it does become less compelling.
I wouldn't have minded a whole season of TNG Mirror Mirror... agreed on the time travel bit. It wasn't coherent or done well at all, and I love a good time travel episode. Even SNW S02 did it better.
I've said this in other threads, but I'll reiterate it here: When Our Heroes jumped back in time, I really thought it was going to be essentially two or three or four episodes (so, 20-40% of the season), and then they'd return to the 'present' for the remainder of the season. I never guessed they'd stay there for essentially the entirety of the season, and the longer they stayed in the past beyond those initial episodes, the more bored of it I became, especially when it started to feel as though they were just about to return and then they'd have one more setback.
I also...while it was somewhat interesting to get the psychological insight into Picard (assuming you don't feel it contradicts previous history), the idea that his mother was treated in the way she was in the distant future beggars belief and really makes Picard's father look irredeemably horrible. Wanting to live in the past is one thing, but making someone else suffer because of it is unconscionable.
I also...while it was somewhat interesting to get the psychological insight into Picard (assuming you don't feel it contradicts previous history), the idea that his mother was treated in the way she was in the distant future beggars belief and really makes Picard's father look irredeemably horrible. Wanting to live in the past is one thing, but making someone else suffer because of it is unconscionable.
He wasn't trying to make anyone suffer.
He may not have been intentionally trying to make anyone suffer, but in the 23rd or 24th century, the idea that the best option available for his mentally troubled wife was to lock her in a room is inexplicable to me. Was there really no better option available? It's the sort of thing that would have been right at home in Janeway's Victorian holonovel.
As has been reiterated time and again, the point was for a brief respite and then take her to care.
And with due to respect to Star Trek, mental health treatment has not been its strong suite. In TOS, most of the treatments were wiping the mind, or others altering the personality to a shell of their former self. Asylums and penal colonies were still used, and people kept isolated due to their illness.
So, while it's inexplicable to you, it is in keeping with the mental health treatment in Trek, and wasn't even meant as a long term solution.
My apologies if I brought up something that had been "reiterated time and again", but it hadn't been reiterated time and again in any threads that I've read here, nor have I come across this claim anywhere else. If I somehow missed it in dialogue then mea culpa, however...
From Jammer's Review of "Monster": "Picard's mother being locked away, and indeed everything inside Chateau Picard, feels excessively 18th century. Wouldn't they have a better 24th-century treatment for mental illness than "lock her in a room"?"
From KRAD's S2 overview: "Unfortunately, while the notion has its heart in the right place, none of it really works. For starters, we have no idea what Yvette Picard’s mental illness is exactly. And while it’s true that the Picard family was established as being Luddites who eschew modern technology and conveniences in TNG’s “Family” (a legacy Picard rejected when he went off to Starfleet Academy), we’re still talking about a future in which mental illness is very rare (viz., the original series’ “Dagger of the Mind” and “Whom Gods Destroy,” which take place many decades prior to Picard’s childhood). More to the point, locking someone mentally ill in a bedroom is behavior that would be prosecuted as abuse now, much less three hundred years from now. The whole thing feels like a nineteenth-century treatise on how hysterical women were dealt with: lock them away for their own good, lest they hang themselves. It’s a story out of 1810 or 1910, not 2310, or even 2022."
So evidently I wasn't the only one who found this dubious.
From Jammer's Review of "Monster": "Picard's mother being locked away, and indeed everything inside Chateau Picard, feels excessively 18th century. Wouldn't they have a better 24th-century treatment for mental illness than "lock her in a room"?"
From KRAD's S2 overview: "Unfortunately, while the notion has its heart in the right place, none of it really works. For starters, we have no idea what Yvette Picard’s mental illness is exactly. And while it’s true that the Picard family was established as being Luddites who eschew modern technology and conveniences in TNG’s “Family” (a legacy Picard rejected when he went off to Starfleet Academy), we’re still talking about a future in which mental illness is very rare (viz., the original series’ “Dagger of the Mind” and “Whom Gods Destroy,” which take place many decades prior to Picard’s childhood). More to the point, locking someone mentally ill in a bedroom is behavior that would be prosecuted as abuse now, much less three hundred years from now. The whole thing feels like a nineteenth-century treatise on how hysterical women were dealt with: lock them away for their own good, lest they hang themselves. It’s a story out of 1810 or 1910, not 2310, or even 2022."
So evidently I wasn't the only one who found this dubious.
I'm not saying it's not dubious. Just that the text presents both as Picard's memories, as well as the idea that this was not a permanent solution.
So, while I questioned it initially, I think it is, unfortunately, in line with what Trek has presented with regards to mental illness. It's not been great. At all. So, while I do see the dubious side, I do think it is in line with past Trek, as well as not as bad as assumed, since the presentation in the episode was that this was temporary, and not permanent. A poor choice, and one that impacts Picard clearly, but one I think that can be understood when taking the whole context, and not penalizing it as "19th century thinking."
I don't think that was the intent at all.
My point is that at least if the series pitches this as a temporary solution, apparently at least two reviewers either didn't catch that, or didn't feel it was a significantly mitigating factor.
I'm also not sure it's kosher to compare Trek's portrayal of the treatment of mental illness in the '60s with how it should be portrayed in a contemporary series.
I'm also not sure it's kosher to compare Trek's portrayal of the treatment of mental illness in the '60s with how it should be portrayed in a contemporary series.
Mental health treatment is not portrayed well in later series.
And new series get compared to old ones all the time.
Picard said in one of the episodes that his father tried to get her professional help, but she kept refusing it.
That doesn't excuse locking her in the bedroom, but it wasn't the only thing he tried.
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Could have been a TOS fan as a child but discovered it through TAS and then TMP. TNG is dear to me at heart because I followed it from the breaking news (after ST IV) and throughout its seven seasons and four movies. Loved all three seasons of "Picard" and really appreciated that each season had a different flavour.
S3 is probably my least favourite. I liked the first half, but it got ever more grating as the season went on. Grew up with TNG. It was my favourite series for a while, but I've found that a lot of it doesn't hold up well on rewatches.
Just off the top of my head Barclay, Suder, B'Elanna, Janeway, O'Brien and Neelix all had significant mental illnesses at times which were inadequately treated until they reached the point of causing serious issues, to the brink of suicide for several of them.
I don't think it's that surprising that someone would slip through, or that a person would make bad decisions about the care of a loved one. Happens all the time, and no doubt will continue long into the future.
Just off the top of my head Barclay, Suder, B'Elanna, Janeway, O'Brien and Neelix all had significant mental illnesses at times which were inadequately treated until they reached the point of causing serious issues, to the brink of suicide for several of them.
I don't think it's that surprising that someone would slip through, or that a person would make bad decisions about the care of a loved one. Happens all the time, and no doubt will continue long into the future.
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