Spoilers So, what do we think of Season 2 now that it's done?

No. The final episode was a mess. The writers didn't know where they were going or what they were doing, and it was awful.

Oh...Q's dying? Boo-fucking-hoo.

 

I'm sorry that ship captain dude left (but I thought they ended his arc nicely), sorry to see Q go, even though I always disliked them (so that's says something about that bit of writing), think the Sapho thing is a bit forced - it just comes out of left field but whatever, and Pikard finally being able to get his freak on with alien babes just makes him like Kirk, but it was all his depressed mommy's fault and I thought that was all well-done. I liked the bits with the Pikard girl going to Europa, that was nice. Don't care at all about pretty Romulan-boy - I think it would have worked better story-wise if they just kept him dead. Going back - I like the overall concept of the synths and some of the stuff they did there, but it was too 'Soongy', and don't care for the term 'synth' in Trek. Liked seeing Ryker, disliked seeing Troi (what was that?) Don't understand how we were supposed to care about son-we-never-met (we got two of those, but we met the one for five whole minutes), and 'wild girl of the woods' was just like, WTF? What was the actual point of that character? Was that just someone's kid and they promised her she could be on Star Trek? I don't get it. The bad thing about the serialized format is now you can waste precious on-screen time with innate mindless drivel, meeting family members no-one cares about, oh... and song solos. Star Trek: The Musical. UGH!!!

How many 'normal humans' had their heads messed with across all the Trek shows, and were killed because they became dangerous? Too many to count? The Borg? They are victims of a machine intelligence, just like Agnes, yet are killed on sight. But not only does cold-blooded murder get over-looked, she even gets a song-solo... on STAR TREK! Oh, and now there finally IS a borg we don't kill on sight, and guess who it is? Our same favorite murderess. At least that Romulan girl was a decent Thanos-style villain (hateful, but 'killing for the greater good', so not truly evil, more like a zealot). Agnes kills the dude who dumped her and then she's over her 'mind control'? Yeah.... RIGHT. How convenient.

And lets not forget about all her amazing talents - the show went full-on Professor from Gilligan's Island with her. This is why I fear a season 3, since they wrapped the show around the one character that's so poorly written and contrived I almost shut the show off mid-watch. But we'll see...

 

Geordi wasn't killed. He kept having a career.

Data tortured Geordi. Maybe that counts?

 

Not main cast members. Geordi, Scotty, Miles and Chakotay immediately come to mind as having been mind-controlled and not killed. (and Keiko as a non-main example)

Um...pretty sure they didn't kill Picard, Seven or Hugh, for starters.

Not sure why you're so bothered by singing either - Seven, Kira, the EMH, Data and plenty of others have sung on Trek.

 

I wonder how long the ENT-era prejudice against mind melds had been commonplace among Vulcans. Was that guy on 20th century Earth some kind of outcast or something?

Kor

 

I thought the implication in Enterprise's fourth season was that it was something relatively recent, (say within the past fifty years) instigated by the Romulan infiltrators in the Vulcan government so that Vulcans would have no way of detecting who among them was in fact a Romulan.

 

Looks like they kept it right with the smooth Klingon foreheads ENT established

 

You will understand Season 2 when you get older.

 

I doubt that. I give the season a 4 out of 20. Those points are for finally seeing a proper interior of a late 24th early 25th century ship with the ICARS and a bridge that wasnt reused from discovery. Also for John Delancie. Other than that the story was terrible. The middle was all filler, too many outside characters and the story didn't flow well at all. Picard and a trauma we or he didn't know about and it took up a tom of episodes. No thanks. Maybe eseason 3 they get back to basics with the TNG crew. Not getting my hopes up though.

 

What is the bloody difference between one long post and multiple short ones?

None. It is just formatting.

You need to relax.

 

Hrm. Just finished binge-watching this over the last few days, and have some overarching thoughts to share. And this thread would seem to be the place for 'em!...

On the whole, I liked the season. Not great, but solid. Didn't hang together completely, but hung together better than season 1. I particularly liked the use of the Supervisors (the moment I saw that misty teleportation vault, I thought "Gary Seven"!), and was intrigued by the reveal that they're linked to the Travelers. I liked having a time-loop story that managed to avoid any flagrant logical contradictions, so far as I could tell. I liked the chemistry between Rios and Dr. Teresa. I liked the chemistry between Picard and Q, Picard and Tallinn, Picard and Guinan, Picard and his father... heck, pretty much Picard and anyone: Patrick Stewart really elevates all those scenes, and brings out the best in whoever's opposite him. I liked most of the Easter eggs. I liked lots of things.

But...

Thematically, it seemed like it wasted lots of opportunities. Here's a story visiting 2024—with obvious relevance both to established Trek history, and to present-day reality... but the first of those was neglected but for a couple of the Easter eggs ("sanctuary districts," "Brynner"), and the latter... well. C'mon. The show spends a few story beats to establish that ICE is evolving into an unaccountable gestapo, that systemic racism is still a thing, that we're destroying our own ecosystem, and that economic inequality prevents us from solving lots of festering problems. IOW, trivially obvious stuff that everyone in the audience already knows (except for those stuck in right-wing denial). But it doesn't do anything with any of these elements, beyond note their existence. No insightful social commentary, no clever allegories, not even any stakes for the plot or the characters (beyond Rios' brief detention).

Granted, any Trek story touching on the "present day" has always perched on a balance beam (all the more precariously as that present day overtakes what was once "the future"), trying on the one hand to make those sequences relatable and relevant to audiences, while on the other incorporating fictional elements that distinguish it from our actual reality and lead to Trek's future. We have all the social problems just mentioned above, but we certainly don't have any Jackson Roykirk Plaza (nor the Nomad probe that made him famous), much less a manned international mission to explore a moon of Jupiter. We don't have automated radiation-blocking force fields, nor successful human cloning. Personally, unlike some fans, I'm perfectly fine with the fact that Trek's future is not an extrapolation from our present, and I kinda liked how this show underscored that. Unfortunately, however, that same balancing undermined the theme (and the plot) about working to preserve a better future.

The conceit here is that either the space mission goes forward and discovers life on Europa (which would be world-shaking news even if it didn't somehow help resolve the climate crisis, even though it's barely mentioned as an afterthought), leading to the Federation's utopian future... or it doesn't, we use technology from a brilliant geneticist (?) to protect ourselves, and that somehow leads to a fascist hellscape. Okay, the causal logic isn't super-clear on either side, but let's roll with it.

Problem is... Picard and everyone with him knows that even if Renée and the Europa mission succeed, the next forty years will still involve major fascist movements (Col. Green), eventually leading to World War III and the deaths of millions. (Exactly how many seems to keep growing... Spock in "Space Seed" originally told us 37 million, then in First Contact that was bumped up to 600 million, but most recently in SNW s1 Pike says it was actually 30% of the human population(!) and adds an imminent Second Civil War to the mix.) If not for the invention of warp drive and the intervention of Vulcans (neither of which we in the real world can rely on, unfortunately), that sounds like a pretty dark path indeed, and one that could easily lead to a fascist future (with or without the galactic empire angle). Meanwhile, it's not at all clear whether the alternate fascist future of the Confederation glimpsed in ep2 of this show actually includes any or all of that history. Perhaps what's bad for Earth is a necessary part of what's good for the galaxy... but if so, that'd be an interesting moral dilemma for the show to confront, especially as Rios ultimately stays behind in that era. Instead, it goes completely unmentioned.

Theme aside, on basic matters of plot the show took the easy, trope-y path way more often than necessary. There's the infiltrate-the-event bit, because for some never-explained reason the reception for a space launch has world-class high-tech security (that is, somehow, also instantly defeatable with the contents of a thumb drive)... even though that's never actually relevant to the story, which is really just about Picard having a chance to give a pep talk to his ancestor. (And why couldn't any of her fellow astronauts discover the Europan life, BTW? That's never explained either.) There's the shoot-out/fight-scene episode against the anonymous rent-a-goons, because somehow the Queen thought they'd be useful and somehow Soong had instant access to them through some unspecified source. There's the very presence of Soong himself, who started off seeming interesting and morally conflicted, but quickly degenerated into a silly ego-driven gimmick-laden Bond villain. (And I like Brent Spiner, but seriously, how many iconoclastic genius scientist lookalike Soongs do we need spread across the centuries? What is this, four now?) And there's the achingly generic Threatening Space Anomaly that pops up in the final fifteen minutes to rationalize the motivation for the whole time loop in the first place. These elements didn't really add anything to the story; they just helped drag it out longer than necessary.

And much as I love the Q/Picard dynamic, his behavior over the course of the season didn't really make a lick of sense.

So: enjoyable. But flawed, in lots of ways. Mostly due to the writing. That's more or less the track record for modern-day Trek, I guess.

 

I think Soong winning implied that his company would get so powerful during and America's Civil War/2nd Eugenics War/WW3, it would have a major effect on humanity's socio-political fabric for the worst, becoming more Nazi-esque and warlike, forming the Confederation.

I think the editing rather than writing was what nearly tanked Season 2 (and Season 1 had its issues, but was better than DSCO's S1 & PIC's S2, and felt less drawn out in comparison).

 

I binged season 2 last week, as I do not have Paramount Plus, and likely never will. Anywho, I loved the action and suspense of S2 just as I did in S1. I continue to be surprised at the bashing of the series, I have found it very enjoyable. I used to be a canon-psycho, but stopped many years ago. Even my old self would have been okay with it. I loved the return of Whoopi, Johnny D., and of course yet another menacing Spiner/Soong performance. I really have little to honestly nitpick although lamented the lack of presence of Evan Evagora and Isa Briones. The series gets applause from me, and I am looking forward to the third season.

Moreover, I actually LOVED the Khan Project thing at the end for Adam Soong, because I think it's very clear that the "history of the future" proposed in Space Seed or Bread and Circuses are obviously as eye-rolling as the Great Barrier in Star Trek V. It's a plot point that might work generally, but pinning it down to a year, or using it at all, is questionable. There's been so much "meddling" in the time line, would they still occur? Obviously our scientific society is probably a thousand years behind the fictional one. But again, it's "just a TV show."

PS: Love the involvement of Terry Matalas, as his 12 Monkeys series was a fav of mine.

 

I think the season would work better as a binge. I plan to rewatch it again in the fall/winter.

 

Yeah, I liked S1 and found S2 worthwile at the end, and looking forward to S3, so let the more entrenched Trekkie fandom make themselves look silly and dogmatic (the more Rightwing Trekkies are a peculiar breed).

 

My only complaint is time travel. Time travel is something that requires a balanced approach to make it enjoyable and Trek has a huge mixed bag on that. I don't mind the rest, and the adventures in the past were suitably interesting enough to try and garner my attention. But, overall, it's not something I found gripping the same way I liked S1.

I mean, Trekkies themselves are peculiar. Are we peculiar of peculiar now?

 

Much like the first; brilliant start, then quickly fizzled out.

 

I couldn't have said It better

 

If we can accept Picard just lightened up with age surely we can accept the same with Wesley.