Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 3x05 - "Imposters"

And he was publicly dressed down on his bridge by an admiral after the Hugh Borg incident; and although yes, technically Admiral Pressman was going to be prosecuted for his role in testing a phase cloak in the Pegasus incident; I don't think that made Picard a very popular officer among the upper brass either.

I mean, I have a feeling if Picard had showed up at Deep Space Nine during the Dominion War, he would have had Sisko brought up on charges because Sisko was using the Romulan cloaking device in the alpha quadrant, which technically violated the agreement the Federation made with the Romulans to allow the defiant to be equipped with a Romulan cloaking device.

That's why I call Picard the show oony Admiral for Starfleet. The only thing he was really good for in their eyes was Federation PR. He wasn't much of a tactician, and in most diplomatic situations he didn't put interests of the Federation first.

 

Have I come in at the end of this meme? Will I escape it unscathed?

 

I think Picard as admiral as little pull. He's just not as dynamic as Kirk was.

 

they had to cut a lot of the ending battle due to budget and bad luck, then they had to discard it completely and cobble something together because the effects sucked and they had no time and money to redo them. They also had to cut a lot of sequences due to budget too.

About the ending battle, Shat wanted angels that turned into demons, the studios said “no”, he asked for men of stones, the studio gave him only one, they tested it and it was impressive with all the smoke (done by he crew actually smoking cigarettes inside the costume!), but on the day of the shooting there was a lot of wind and it turned out looking really fake. At this point they asked the fx companies to do an orb or something to fight but it sucked a lot, so they cut it to have Kirk fighting “god”.

 

It could have worked with proper editing, decent post-fx and quick cuts showing the monsters as little as possible, Jaws style. Probably not.
But I think this belongs to the movie discussions.

 

I was reading about Yesterday's Enterprise earlier, turns out the (hastily written) script called for Wesley to be decapitated, but that was cut for budget. Today's writers seem no more "gory" than like Ira Behr and Ronald D Moore in the 1980s and 1990s -- lets not forget Rimmick's fate in Conspiracy, or 15 year old Wesley in Hide and Q.

 

Nothing on the prior canon says that she didn't/wasn't. The last Eddington story in DS9 only established that all of the Maquis he knew of were wiped out.

 

Considering the Maquis were made up of loose cells throughout the DMZ, it's certainly possible some made it out alive.

When Ro said 'a few years with the Maquis' it made me wonder if she left because Eddington started poisoning colonies. That might have been a bridge too far for her, so she decided to turn herself in.

Part of my reasoning is also the Dominion War. Starfleet was getting its ass beat at the start, and losses were mounting throughout. I can see Starfleet having Ro back due to these circumstances, the war ending, she serves time again, then gets recruited by Starfleet Intelligence.

 

There is a difference in gore levels, including in concept as well as execution, in modern genre TV (post GoT really) even though there were similar things present in older Trek/TV. One of the big differences is how and where they are viewed — big difference between scratchy SD picture on a little CRT, or even on a big TV with family around, and a 4K picture with much more emphasis on lingering shots and more advanced make-up.
There was greater horror/gore in Trek after Braga had some level on control, as that was his thing. He is Fangoria, and Moore was Starburst, to sum it up. (Though goodness knows it’s the late nineties where SF and Horror start getting lumped together along with Fantasy. Pain in the arse for those of us for whom part of the draw of SF is that it *is not horror*)
This season seems to know that, as we are back on ‘alien’ gore, and a more fantastical edge to it as a result. Sneed is in monster category, and therefore safer to do gory things with — and making it relatively bloodless.
For comparison, the first few episodes of DSC don’t just have gore, but also have bombs in corpses and cannibalism. The kind of thing that is *cool* to the Fangoria crowd, but really off putting to what I am offhandedly summing up as the Starburst crowd. (It’s not a perfect analogy, but should work) Not to mention they are war crimes in our less-evolved society, let alone Trek.
Picard is therefore, this season, a little closer to ‘family viewing’ though more at the level of First Contact (12) than TNG in its day (PG, and often edited by the laws of whichever land was transmitting it) A big part is how gratuitous (in various ways) the presentation is. Either way, it’s still amusing — by which I mean depressing — that you are more likely to see a character without their skin, than without their clothes. (The Klingon sex scene in DSC was way more carefully edited than any of the violence.)
There is a bleed-over of shock and awe in post 2K telly.

 

Well that's just American puritanicalism

 

Naturally. Field strip an M16, but never the underwear. That’s the rules.

 

I don't know. Seems to me that horror and SF have been joined at the hip since Day One, going all the way back to Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells at least. Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, etc. Remember the cannibalistic Morlocks eating the Eloi in The Time Machine, or the blood-sucking vampire squids in The War of the Worlds?

And as for movies, the SF-horror flicks of the nineties were just splashy new versions of classic 1950s sf-horror films like It -- The Terror From Beyond Space, The Thing from Another World, Invaders from Mars, Planet of the Vampires, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the original Vincent Price version of The Fly, and many, many more.

Heck, the very first STAR TREK episode ever aired was a horror story about a shape-changing Salt Vampire.

Point being, mixing horror and SF, even in STAR TREK, is hardly a new thing, let alone something invented in the nineties. The genres have overlapped since before any of us were born.

(Says the guy who edited two volumes of SF vampire and werewolf stories, some of them dating back to the 1920s.)

 

Oh, I think they overlap, and as you rightly say, to an extent always have done. Off and on. But the focus is often quite different… to the point where not only are they clearly different things, but that the audience and reaction is different.
It is the difference between the creature of Shelley’s work, and Frankensteins Monster.
The workings are different, the response intended to be invoked in many cases too.
The problem, for me, is in visual presentation and where the emphasis lies. Whether something is intended to engage with curiosity and wonder, even if also on occasion provoking revulsion along with its questions, or whether it appeals to baser desire for bread and circuses. Inwoild argue Trek used to stay more in the first area. The same is true of general SF — whether by dint of intent, genre, or the limitations on broadcast TV or print at the time it doesn’t really matter — whereas horror pushes more and more into the second from the 1970s onwards, until the two are crashing back together now in modern TV. And in terms of audience appeal… I do not know if that is great. From my perspective at least, it is not.

But then, I always quite liked TMP.

 

not bad for 1966!

 

A solid 7.

I'm ecstatic to see Ro, the one character I would have voted for to appear if I had that choice.

The Maquis question is a prickly one, both points of view can make sense, but ultimately this comes down to the results of a personal conflict in this episode, not politics.

This, and almost all of these episodes are bottle episodes. There's an apparent determination to keep the scale low and hide the details not created in darkness. It works better for this episode, and I feel the dramatic moments totally work. It's seems unnecessary for Ro to die, but I think Michelle Forbes (never a Trekkie) probably didn't want to ever come back.

The broader issues are still confusing: what exactly is going on with Starfleet, just how many of these engineered Changelings are there?

There's a bar in this episode.

There's a bar in every episode.

Team Ro

 

I was surprised to see Ro return and double surprised to see her in a Starfleet uniform. The resolution was fine and there was a nice attempt to give some suspense in the moment, Patrick Stewart is finally delivering some strong performances this season, something I wanted since S1. Michelle Forbes has taken really good care of herself, she looked decent and knows her character well. Both performances were tight and meaningful. I as well thought her demise wasn't necessary and I would've liked to have more episodes with her.

Seemed like Starfleet hasn't been like anything I remembered since S1, and maybe the forces who had taken siege of its command structure was the cause. Starfleet I would've thought has expanded, the enemies not in charge of Starfleet Command could be spread across their regions and could be harder to capture all of them. I guess I'll see what Picard can discover in the next chapter.

 

I stopped watching the first season and was lured into trying season 3 after hearing nothing but high praise. Definitely enjoying it so far, and I was delighted to see Michelle Forbes again, if ever so briefly. I didn't like their first interaction, but once they connected in the bar it was solid. Ro had a more plausible path back to Starfleet in the books, though (Bajoran militia > absorbed into Starfleet after Bajor joined Federation). The Vulcan crimelord was a solid character, but I wasn't surprised Worf bounced back. I figured they'd attribute it to redundant organs. I'm liking the little touches like the use of Goldsmith's Klingon Imperial Theme when Worf appears.

 

Very good episode. I didn't like it as much as the first 4 episodes but it was riveting. What a great season so far.

The Vulcan gangster idea was genius. Loved it.

 

You're gonna get a brain dump of a few episodes here, not just #5.

I gave up on Picard in season 2, but for some reason I decided to give season 3 a go. And the first episode was quite good, much like the first episode of season 2. Then it just gradually degraded into utter, mind-fuckingly stupid purile bullshit.

It's hard to know where to start. That all Changelings carry around Bajoran buckets because?

But it's the dialogue that is just overly offensive. "Congrats on that!" says a 24th century captain of a fucking flying metal machine. "Hot-dropped the saucer section of the Enterprise D on a planet..." what the fuck is hot dropped? I literally don't know. Hot dropped? Millions of lives were lost unless Picard fixed it, but... hot dropped Riker did for fun. Took the entire civilisation section into a planet because...

"Snog a villager on Ba'ku". SNOG? Are you a 1950s parent? And why does a random captain a) have a command in this state. b) know another captain in a fleet of thousands kissed a woman on a planet in one mission about 20 years?

Because the writers want you to know they watched Star Trek, innit? It makes zero sense on every level for this character, but the writers want you to know they know Star Trek.

Put this into context. You're a manager at Sainsbury's. You meet a fellow manager. You know he worked in one of the other 2000 branches. You heard he kissed the finance manager backer in 2003. And you're goanna comment on that. Fuck off.

"Pot are you on about Cannabis?" Just FUCCKKKK OFFFFFFFFFF.

This is the series that gave us The Inner Light, Darmok, The Visitor, The City on the Edge of Forever... and because someone in the 2400s mentioned the word "pot" the fucking Borg human hybrid thought he was on about cannabis?

Arggghhh...... it's just moronic bullshit.

And TOS moved on from TNG, I know life moves on and modernises. I am becoming the old man unkind to change. But it didn't treat its viewers like fucking clowns like the new shows do. That it can say "cannabis" and all its viewers go ho ho ho ho ho this shit is hot dropping on Veridian 3.

Edit: and Picard says where are you here Ro? I think he means Laren.

 

Shaw is written as a 21st century man, and this is considered a strength.