Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 3x01 - "The Next Generation"

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Hey, needs of the many as some Vulcan once said! Who cares about a ship when you save billions? lol


Here's my thing though... Shaw's a fictional character completely controlled by the writing staff. Presumably they want us to hate him, because they're making it so obvious that they might as well show us that he spends his off-time in the holodeck dressed up as a Nazi, but I just don't get why. lol

Like if it's because Shaw's like Sisko and he hates Picard, then fine. At least with Brooks and how Sisko was written at that point, I totally get why he disrespects Picard the one time they meet each other. But the characterization of Shaw and his actual actions in this episode are just confusing to me.

He's either smart because he suspects them for having ulterior motives, or he's an idiot who somehow failed upwards into command of a C-tier ship that even Mariner wouldn't want to serve on... or is he both?

The question is, though, is how much of the events of Generations through Nemesis are common knowledge in the Fleet? We (the audience) know Picard saved the galaxy multiple times and destroyed his ship every outing, but how much is classified or considered heresay amongst the Fleet captains? I suppose since the events of First Contact would've been nearly 30 years ago, most of the events surrounding the Battle of Sector 001 were probably classified and swept under the rug by the Department of Temporal Investigations.

Shaw would've been probably a teenager hearing about Picard's exploits. Also, since the TNG movies were more action-oriented, in-universe Picard would have probably developed a cowboy reputation for going in guns blazing, which would have had an affect on Shaw's impression of Picard. Going through the Academy, moving up through the ranks, it's also possible Shaw despises what older Picard and co. stood for and wants to run his ship more on rules and diplomacy.

I have no excuse for Shaw's ex-Borgiphobia :lol:
 
And the point is missed.

She is a victim and not the victimizer?

20 years later and she still uses a Borg Designation.

Except ... only in the sense of being subsumed into a collective mind against one's will.

It's been pretty explicit for decades that an individual assimilated into the Borg is the equivalent of a rape victim.

The cycle of childhood sexual abuse.

The abused grow up to be abusers.

Seven returned, or tried to return to the collective four times, after being liberated.

In Collective (s06e16) she assimilated three other freed Drones and created her own miniature Collective, until they could be rescued by the regular Borg Collective.

In a couple episodes after Scorpion, she tried to run and tried to send distress signals and pleaded her desire to return to the Borg as soon as Janeway was cool with it, that she chose to be Borg over Human, because she is Borg.

In Regeneration it was a sacrifice, she returned to the Borg, to save her friends from assimilation, even though it would mean that her body and soul would be further implicit in the assimilation of billions of individuals she did not know personally.

In Unimatrix Zero it was a heist, and she was sure that she could get in and out, before she was forced to assimilate anyone, and therefor become guilty about the abuse, rape and slavery of the next billion, billion drones.
 
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Yeah, I'm still not the biggest fan of Starfleet's hand phasers and rifles firing blaster-style bolts and now we've got Beverly Sarah Connorin' her rifle before she disintegrates her attackers. I liked the boarding sequence at the episode's beginning but she pumped that thing like it was a candle holder.
 
That was pretty good.

The boarding of the Titan sequence was very nicely done. Really felt like Star Trek.

Minus one point for Beverly using a pump-action phaser rifle. That’s pretty dumb.

:lol:

9
Trekyards speculated that maybe it's the 24th century equivalent between civilian and military spec weapons in the United States, where civilians might be able to obtain a phaser rifle, but it's not "automatic" and might be semi-auto with the pump action and limited power packs.

Although, if you were going to limit it that way, I doubt they'd let civilians have a phaser capable of vaporizing people.
 
Then why they heck would they write him going to sleep right after?

Because as far as he's concerned, the situation is handled. Picard and Riker have no authority to issue orders to him, and he's issued a direct order to his executive officer.

If he really cared, he'd presumably keep an eye on them, especially since he hates Seven and presumably doesn't trust her either.

Who said he hates or distrusts her? He's an asshole to her, but that doesn't mean he suspects she would disobey a direct order from her commanding officer and willingly get herself court-martialed.

I'm only a quarter of the way in but isn't there a bit of a contradiction in saying "I am not a man who needs a legacy" mere minutes after talking about writing your memoirs?

Jean-Luc Picard is vast and contains multitudes.

Some interesting discussion here about Seven of Nine's name. I've always disdained that name, and do see it as an imposed designation. However, I do understand that is Seven's preferred identifier, so if I knew her in real life, I would respect her choice. I'd say, as opposed to a trans dead name allegory, she is shown to not consider it dead per se, or at least she didn't. I got the impression that she let B'Jayzl (or whatever her name was) call her "Annika" so her birth name was more an intimate name than a dead name. It may have "died" when she found out the one person she let in to her heart in that way ended up murdering her beloved child.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think this is a one-to-one allegory. We've seen other contexts where she allows people to call her Annika without objection, and I don't think she considers it a "deadname" in the sense of "Annika Hanson" being an identity she has rejected in the way a transgender person rejects the false identity that was originally given to them before they realized they were trans. But she clearly thinks of herself as Seven of Nine and would prefer to be addressed as such except for certain trusted people.

Here's what I want to know: If she were to have her name and style of address changed, does that mean she would be addressed as "Commander Nine?"

My issue is if he presumably dislikes Seven on a personal level and doesn't trust her on a professional level, having to remind her to remember where her loyalties lie...

Why? I mean, she's a fellow Starfleet officer. When he was reminding her about "loyalty," I don't think he meant that he thought she would actively conspire to issue illegal orders to her subordinates.

Never said that.

If you did not mean to imply that Picard's unresolved trauma somehow made him unfit for service, then what is your point? Because I can't follow what you're trying to say at all, other than that you don't like the idea that Picard's mom killed herself when he was a kid. You keep saying "they would have picked that up" -- what makes you think they didn't?

These notions that the current team behind trek, are some how evil, machivellian schemers out to do harm and rip people off is bizarre and unhealthy.

It's really weird.

Chabon would probably still get residuals given that he was one of the creators of the series. Also the series is still using Raffi and Laris so he'd get residuals from those characters regardless of much or little they are used.

Again, as I understand it, royalties for character use only kick in if the character was created by a freelancer rather than a staff writer. Chabon was literally the show's co-creator and co-producer, so he would, as I understand things, not get royalties merely through the usage of Jurati/Laris/Rios/Elnor/Raffi/Soji/Neris/Nedar/Nerak.

However, as co-creator of Star Trek: Picard, Chabon (along with Kurtzman, Beyer, and Goldsman) already gets residuals for every episode just on that basis. I think he gets another set of residuals for his separate producer credit, too.

The simple truth is that Matalas wanted all of the TNG crew cast back. Bringing on board Todd Stashwick and Ed Speelers would not have been cheap either. There was no room in the budget or in the story matalas envisioned for any of the original Picard characters other than Raffi and Laris.

Which is where ultimately he and I have a fundamental creative disagreement. If I couldn't afford to get the entire TNG crew back together, then I wouldn't drop the Picard characters to afford it. The Next Generation already had its series finale, and Picard shouldn't lose its identity and its characters to accommodate an entirely different show's characters. Hell, Next Generation characters already took over and thereby ruined another show's series finale in Star Trek: Enterprise; why should they get to take over yet another show's finale?

To me, Shaw forcing Seven of Nine to answer to a name she never really had for most of her life and has trouble identifying with would be the equivalent of Picard having forced Worf to answer to "Lt. Rozhenko" aboard the Enterprise (since, arguably, Rozhenko is Worf's adopted last name given that Alexander carries it).

I don't think we ever saw evidence of Worf adopting the surname of Rozhenko. He just always answered to "[Rank] Worf." The only time we ever saw him giving his full name, it was, "Worf, Son of Mogh."

It's a level of personal insensitivity that you would expect a progressive society like the Federation to not allow among their officials and organizations.

Also, the Borg (or at least a segment of the Borg), are members of the Federation now, guarding the portal in space that opened at the end of season 2. So the idea that Borg designations aren't real names doesn't fly, since if the Borg are Federation members their "culture" and the norms of that culture would be just as valid as any others.

I mean, Picard was willing to start the bureaucratic process on the Jurati Borg spin-off (let's call them the Borg Commonwealth just so we have something to call them separate from the Collective) applying for Membership. That doesn't mean that they're Members yet, or that their application has been accepted or rejected.

And I could plausibly imagine the Federation pushing back on using Borg names during the period between 2378 and 2399, and that those bureaucratic barriers to XBs using their Bog names not yet being fully dismantled as of whenever this season is set. It would be inconsistent with Federation values, but clearly the Federation has its biases and blind spots even when it represents real and meaningful progress over real-life issues.

Shaw strikes me as a very solid, reliable captain (They wouldn't have given him a ship with a legacy if Stafleet didn't find him competent). Its also hinted in the 5 years since he took command of his ship he's kept them safe, likely without much in the way of casualties or issues. Unlike Picard, Riker or Seven he obviously follows orders and enjoys the structure of ship/starfleet life.

To Shaw, Riker and Picard are rogue elements, to him Picard likely is his own version of a Badmiral, especially when he tries to take his ship to god knows where, using the Titan's old captain to try and do so.

I mean, Shaw quite literally lists half of the things Picard and Riker got up to during the TNG days and it's an utter disaster when listed. Between them they destroyed the Enterprise D, embarked in numerous escapades that were against orders, disobeyed orders on multiple occassions and nearly sparked several border conflicts and wars through their actions.

Anywhere else, they'd have been drummed out even if "their heart was in the right place". Instead, one was promoted to Admiral and gets hero-worshipped and the other got command of his own ship and also enjoys hero worship, even if he never made the Admiralty.

Yeah, I'm with ya on that.

It's way better done on screen and in character/in universe than Admiral Clancy spitting out "Sheer fucking hubris" at him in a scene which lasts under 3 minutes in which she doesn't do any real dialogue rather than "OMG WE SWEAR IN TREK NOW!" like in Season 1.

No. Sorry, but that scene was perfect. We already know exactly why she turns him down: He literally was on interstellar television not five days earlier condemning Starfleet as having fundamentally betrayed its values. And then he waltzes in and expects to get an entire starship on the basis of an outrageous, unsubstantiated claim about a Tal Shiar death squad operating on Earth? Of course he's going to be told not to let the door hit him in the ass on the way out.

The question is, though, is how much of the events of Generations through Nemesis are common knowledge in the Fleet? We (the audience) know Picard saved the galaxy multiple times and destroyed his ship every outing, but how much is classified or considered heresay amongst the Fleet captains? I suppose since the events of First Contact would've been nearly 30 years ago, most of the events surrounding the Battle of Sector 001 were probably classified and swept under the rug by the Department of Temporal Investigations.

Why? Hell, Jurati appears to know all about time travel incidents in S2E2, and she's a civilian with no training or professional need to know about time travel. There's no real reason for DTI to classify the fact that the Borg temporal incursion.

Shaw would've been probably a teenager hearing about Picard's exploits. Also, since the TNG movies were more action-oriented, in-universe Picard would have probably developed a cowboy reputation for going in guns blazing, which would have had an affect on Shaw's impression of Picard. Going through the Academy, moving up through the ranks, it's also possible Shaw despises what older Picard and co. stood for and wants to run his ship more on rules and diplomacy.

Yeah, he describes Picard and Riker in much the same terms by which Picard described Kirk and Spock in "Unification II" (TNG).
 
Trekyards speculated that maybe it's the 24th century equivalent between civilian and military spec weapons in the United States, where civilians might be able to obtain a phaser rifle, but it's not "automatic" and might be semi-auto with the pump action and limited power packs.
My personal justification for the stupid pump-action phaser is that it was old and faulty. In my mind, normally you have to pump it once to activate it and that's all but because it no longer works properly Beverly has to prime it before every shot, and the power cell is almost completely run down. :bolian:
 
The flashlight he held reminded me of the time he investigated the Amargosa Observatory in GEN. More than three decades later Will's still got the touch.

Whatever my creative disagreements with the decision to ditch the Picard cast to afford the Next Generation cast, I must say it was still really great to see Frakes, Stewart, and McFadden back together again. :bolian:
 
Interesting note: Crusher's ship, the S.S. Eleos, is named after the Greek god of mercy. I wonder if that's foreshadowing anything?
 
I mean, Picard was willing to start the bureaucratic process on the Jurati Borg spin-off (let's call them the Borg Commonwealth just so we have something to call them separate from the Collective) applying for Membership. That doesn't mean that they're Members yet, or that their application has been accepted or rejected.

And I could plausibly imagine the Federation pushing back on using Borg names during the period between 2378 and 2399, and that those bureaucratic barriers to XBs using their Bog names not yet being fully dismantled as of whenever this season is set. It would be inconsistent with Federation values, but clearly the Federation has its biases and blind spots even when it represents real and meaningful progress over real-life issues.
Even if the "Borg Commonwealth" was not fully a member, or just provisionally in the process, their position would arguably be the equivalent of Bajor during the events of Deep Space Nine.

Would it ever be conceivable that a Starfleet captain would tell a Bajoran that their preferred name wasn't valid? Ensign Ro has that specific conversation with Picard when coming onto the Enterprise about how to address her and that family/surname comes first in Bajoran culture.
 
I wish Picard wouldn't act so bewildered all the time.

Him and Riker were being "cutesy" in the first episode. Not sure I love that.
 
Even if the "Borg Commonwealth" was not fully a member, or just provisionally in the process, their position would arguably be the equivalent of Bajor during the events of Deep Space Nine.

Would it ever be conceivable that a Starfleet captain would tell a Bajoran that their preferred name wasn't valid? Ensign Ro has that specific conversation with Picard when coming onto the Enterprise about how to address her and that family/surname comes first in Bajoran culture.

True, but she explicitly says in that episode that some Bajoran officers in Starfleet chose not to correct those who mistakenly address them by their given names instead of their surnames, or reverse their name order. (Which is itself weird, because there are plenty of Human cultures in real life that go Surname-Given Name, so it's not like the idea should be some weird alien concept for Starfleet.) Hell, we even saw Riker yell at Ro for wearing a Bajoran earring as a violation of the uniform requirements even though he lets Worf wear his Klingon baldric all the damn time.

Anyway, yeah, it would be inappropriate, but TNG itself established that Starfleet officers do that kind of stuff sometimes.
 
It's way better done on screen and in character/in universe than Admiral Clancy spitting out "Sheer fucking hubris" at him in a scene which lasts under 3 minutes in which she doesn't do any real dialogue rather than "OMG WE SWEAR IN TREK NOW!" like in Season 1.

Not remotely. Clancy's position is explicitly tied to storyline events and differing perspectives on the role of the Federation, and her frustration with Picard and rejection of his request is entirely understandable in that context.

Shaw, on the other hand, just comes off as an unprofessional jerk completely lacking self-control, especially his crude reference to ex-Borg. Even if he dislikes the methods and reputation of Riker, Picard and Seven, outright rudeness is entirely improper for someone in his role. It's a clumsy and jarring introduction to the character, even if his motivations are revealed later on.
 
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