Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 3x10 - "The Last Generation"

And I will reiterate: it's not that it is unbelievable; it's that it is distracting. It reminds me of Star Wars. And that takes me out of the moment and detracts from my personal enjoyment of the story.

Mileage will vary, and clearly does, but continuously explaining why it's completely possible misses the whole point of why I personally don't like it.

 

You got it, man.

I'm a pretty honest guy. I find honesty is simply easier because it's less I have to keep track of.

 

Because for many fans, the Enterprise (all of them, not just the D) are as much characters in the story as anyone else, since the characters usually feel they're more than a "conveyance" as much as the fans. When the original Enterprise is destroyed in The Search For Spock, there's a weight to it. When Kirk and the crew are watching the Enterprise burn up in the atmosphere, it's treated as a death.

 

Yes. @KamenRiderBlade and @El Maestro have explained this (and I know KRB has done so for me multiple times). As I stated to them, I head understand it (knowledge) but I don't heart understand it (feeling). I lack the sentimentality gene for vehicles. It's a character flaw, yes I know.

 

Compare to the equivalent scene in Beyond, which lacks weight ( possibly due in part to the fact that what's being destroyed is a bunch of ones and zeroes ).

 

All the weight comes from the characters for me. Kirk's look in Beyond is all I need to feel that "oof" feeling deep in my gut and the tears well up.

 

I absolutely HATED the look of the Kelvin Enterprise. Just horrible.

But BEYOND did something totally unexpected... it made me feel a bit of a gut punch at the destruction of the Enterprise. Maybe because of the manner it was destroyed, piece by piece.

The characters' reaction to it is another thing that sold me on it. It was the first time I felt loss at the destruction of a ship that I actively disliked.

It's yet another reason why BEYOND was leagues ahead in terms of quality vs. the other 2 films, and the only Kelvin movie I rate above NEMESIS.

 

I am admittedly pretty tired of the "blow up the ship" occurrences in the movies...but the Beyond stuff was very well done to me. Very visceral and the way the characters played it was very good. Man, I really like that movie!

 

I mean, I think this speaks to a fundamental conflict between what different people wanted out of Star Trek: Picard.

Simply put: The USS Enterprise and Starfleet protagonists may be the ur-essence of Star Trek, but it was not the ur-essence of Picard as it was originally conceived. As originally conceived, Star Trek: Picard was about a celebrated Starfleet officer long after his career has ended, as he is approaching the end of his life, wrestling with his mortality, taking responsibility for his failures, finding meaning in spite of death and failure, and creating a new found family outside of Starfleet.

Whereas PIC S3 was about... well, it was about Getting The Band Back Together. Which is fine.

But yeah, when the first half of the series builds up La Sirena as the new hero ship outside of Starfleet and the it just gets ditched with no explanation halfway through S3, that's... well, it undermines the sense of dramatic unity Picard originally sought to establish.

I mean, even if that were true, that still doesn't mean it's good writing to just ignore it. It would have been better to have La Sirena assisting the Titan in Earth orbit while the Enterprise dealt with the cube at Jupiter.

Sure, but "Scorpion, Parts I & II" weren't all that thoughtful.

 

But that did raise the moral dilemma of 'do we turn around and find another way or ally ourselves with the worst possible kind to get home a little faster'. While it wasn't a full on thought exercise like other episodes, at least it posed the question and brought some conflict between Janeway and Chakotay.

 

This is a good point, and makes me even MORE convinced that in a perfect world S3 would've been first...then S1 and S2 after it, in order to solve this problem.

 

...and in an even MORE perfect world NEM would not have been a failure of a send off so that none of this would even matter that much and PIC as a show wouldn't have this baggage....

 

I still think that Season 1 to 3 actually work very well when taking in all the tragedies the Federation, Starfleet and the Alpha quadrant had endured that would lead to Picard's resignation and then rediscovering new purpose in Starfleet that Season 1 sets a different stage. I think Season 2 is the weakest but I do think Season 3 draws people back together in a positive way.

 

And now I lament for the missed opportunity here; this would've been interesting and fun to watch!

 

I think it's there but you really have to go in to Season 1 with that mindset. Going from Nemesis straight to Season 1 is more disjointed, at least tonally. End of DS9, end of Voyager, First Contact, Nemesis to Children of Mars to Season 1 all paints a much broader picture, and really highlight not just the crisis of Picard feeling that Starfleet had lost a measure of it's integrity and what that meant for him, leading to possible despair, to borrow Erik Erikson's terminology. Taken from a psychosocial and sociological point of view makes the whole chapter far more dynamic, in my opinion.

But, I'm often one to find bridges and connections that may be unintentionally present.

 

Speak for yourself on that one.

While the JJprise was not my favourite design, her death was gut-wrenching to me.

Watching the crew do everything they could to save her, and being countered with every effort, was hard to watch. The look on Kirk’s face as he's the last to evacuate says it all.

We didn't just watch the Enterprise blow up. We watched her die a slow and painful death.

While the destruction of the Enterprise in Search for Spock might have been a more emotional gut punch, seeing the JJprise being ripped apart, hurt. Probably even more then the original.

 

It's not a character flaw. It's just who you are.

There is no Good/Bad there. It's just how you're built.

 

Also my dry sense of humor since that part was intended as a joke. Can't think of what comedian I was thinking of who would say such dry lines.

 

That's also the first time I've seen a enemy counter the USS Enterprise or any StarFleet ship through conventional means w/o trickery. It was quite brilliant and well planned IMO. Alot of enemies, through-out the multi-verse can learn the lesson of using giant swarms of ships to take out a lone Federation StarShip.

There's 3x major ways to defeat StarFleet.

The Borg way (Single Hulking Mass, raw UnStoppable Force like ship)

The Zerg way (Massive swarms of enemy fighter craft, individually, they're not much of a threat, but in the quantities of thousands to hundreds of thousands, no lone StarShip has enough fire power to stop that many ships)

The Deceptive way (Trick the protagonists to lower their shields or have a cheat to steal vital information to bypass their shields, Kirk suffered from this in Wrath of Khan, Riker suffered this in Generations when La Forge returned after being kidnapped, had his VISOR modified by Soran to leak visual information to the Duras sisters)

 

I'll have to admit the JJprise was the one time I didn't care. The movies never really stuck with me or gave me that feeling that it was true trek. The ship in that movie we never really got to know through shaky cameras and lens flares.