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

[cooleddie74]

And the best part is Chef from the NX-01 was also on the Titan-A earlier in the series.

 

[Dar70]

Yes.

NOPE...

 

[FreezeC77]

Hey, remember that debate we were having about whether or not there would be cooks in Starfleet and they were just use civilians

Who knew that would be settled that fast

I want an animated comedy set at this alien deli on an alien planet.

 

[Racefuel]

And the best part is Chef from the NX-01 was also on the Titan-A earlier in the series.

Hopefully not forcing people to be cold soup again

 

[Commander Troi]

In 1994 I watched "All Good Things..." on my Parent's TV in a living room. I was 11 years old.
Now, 29 years later, I own that house. I'm 39 years old. And I got to watch "The Last Generation" in the same room.

Life is beautiful. And that is the crux of my review. I just got done with the episode. 10/10. Loved it. The perfect ending. But instead of going through all the (many) points I liked, there is one thing I want to bring up that this ending did right I've written about it before.

Death is horrifically overused in fiction nowadays. Particularly within the last 15 or 20 years. Maybe it reflects boomers coping with aging, or some long term dark place our society has moved into since 9/11, but death has creeped into comic books, TV shows, movies and books to to a degree that is both overwhelming and unhealthy.

Death in fiction is cheap, stupid and lazy. Writers do it to tug at emotional cords that everyone shares. We're all mortal. We all live. We all die. Maybe we're afraid of it, or maybe we've expressed loss. So they yank at that to engender an emotional reaction. But all it does is cynically turn a character into a prop. to advance other character's stories.

The Walking Dead became entirely about who was going to die "this season".
MCU movies have become since Infinity War a watch for character deaths.
Comics are killing more characters than ever before.
Even once really compelling written fiction have taken to stunt-murder to shock the audience.
Succession just killed their lead two weeks ago (albeit, this one kind of made sense given how the series started).

Need I go on?

Death represents the end of possibility of a character. But the temptation for writers is so high because its so easy. People go into these final episodes or conclusions of trilogy's expecting someone to die. Who is expecting someone to be offed in GotG3? *raises hand*. Five bucks says its Drax.

All season, wisely and to their immense credit and everlasting gratitude, Star Trek Picard's writers avoided this trap. And the last episode rightly reminded viewers that life matters more than death and life is full of possibilities worth exploring. That life is joy and that should be celebrated, for as long as it lasts.

I, like many people, walked into this Episode expecting Picard or Worf to die. But it didn't happen, and I know why now. Because Matalas and his team smartly realized that it would have been fundamentally stupid to repair the mistake of Nemesis after 20 years of breaking up the family in a tragedy (Data's death) by bringing it back together in an epic story, finally bringing and humanizing Data, bringing back the Enterprise D, only to snap all the action figures of these characters in half in our face an episode later. That would have been fucking with us. What purpose will it have surved? To make us sad about loss? How about tears of joy instead. And that's what Matalas and co. chose.

Every note with the ending, from the reveal of the Enterprise G, to Captain Seven, to the final poker game's slow and extended pan around the crew of the Enterprise D, to the after credits scene is just about a long road that started in 2365 ending in 2402 with everybody (mostly) living happily ever after, after a lifetime of trials.

I think Matalas and co knew this too. They dangled the "Picard dies", "Worf dies", "Riker dies", "let's make the audience feel loss" bait in our faces, and then threw it in the fire.

More fiction needs to do this, not just for the sake a franchise or future episodes, but for society. A society reflects how it sees itself through it's creative works. Star Trek Picard is really the first series in a long, long time that gives its audience PERMISSION to believe in the happy ending after a long struggle, rather than cry in their pillow at terrible loss.

I'm sad the Next Generation is finally over only in the sense of I could watch them forever. But like Michael Jordan's last game winning the NBA Finals (which I saw), I actually don't want anymore of these characters. This is the good ending for them. The best ending. All Good Things wasn't an ending because we knew Generations was on its way. Nemesis was a bad ending that was arguably in the opening years of Hollywood's obsession with killing characters for shock value.

This was Matalas' and co's line in the sand on that. This was them recognizing how much of a creative failure death like that truly is. I'm just so thrilled with it.

There will never be another crew like that of the Enterprise D, nor a cast like the TNG cast. They lived the noblest of lives and the cast gave some of the finest performances in American television history in a saga that may never be equaled in its scope and time.

To paraphrase Captain Picard in "Transfiguration", we are privileged to have witness it.

PIC S1, with its deep concern for how to find meaning, purpose, and love in the face of grief and the inevitability of death, literally helped me cope with my grandmother's death. It meant the world to me.

I'm only on page 27 of 90(!), but I wanted to shout out to @Scionz and @Sci for their thought-provoking and courteous discussion.

For the record, I loved it. More details later.

 

[NX_01]

Even if low impulse velocities were used, we're talking about potentially hundreds or 1000 km/s at minimum.

Fair enough. Big power gap between thrusters and impulse, maybe Utopia Planitia is working on something

 

[Rusty0918]

I like those discussions. We definitely need to move on. I would very much like to see this supposed "Star Trek: Legacy" series that has been talked about, although there hasn't been any official information about it and Matalas has warned us not to get too cocky about it - although I have to say it's pretty tempting. I'm for it, but one never knows. Strange New Worlds looks to be pretty good this year, I have to say.

 

[Photoman15]

It was an awkward line. And it did drag. I was almost expecting Sam Gamgee to show up and talk about how great strawberries and Rosie Cotton would be, Mr Baggins. The Q thing was odd. They couldn't afford Mulgrew for a cameo but De Lancie might be cheaper? Anyway, despite that. it was fine. I gave it an 8.

The "Q" scene was filmed while they were filming the 2nd season (near the end). I just don't know if Jack and Q were filmed separately, or Jack was already there getting ready to film Season 3.

_______________________________________________________________________
I'm currently on Page 63 in case someone else posts this. There are currently 90 pages
_______________________________________________________________________

 

[drt]

Did we? If we did then fair enough, episode four feels like a lifetime ago.

It's not entirely clear they're DOTs since all we see are tiny things fixing the ship, so it's understandable it folks didn't realize that's what they were supposed to be, but Blass or someone else from the production confirmed it via tweet.

 

[TRON JA307020]

The absolute truth is that the best line in this episode was: "Ma'am, I'm a cook."

Pretty cool.

 

[Photoman15]

Whatever happened to Jupiter station? Would Dr. Zimmerman or the EMH doctor have been there? Wouldn’t they have noticed a big ass cube sticking out of the planet?

The Borg ship just got there. It wasn't there the whole time.

It's interesting to compare and contrast Picard and Jack immediately post-Borg life.

Picard, haunted by all the deaths he caused after being taken against his will.
Jack, yukking it up with everyone despite all the death he caused after he willingly walked into it

Considering what typically happens to returning characters who aren't the TNG leads, I'm just fine with leaving all DS9 characters out of it.

Jake joking around is a year later, after some Academy fast-tracking and probably some therapy.


_______________________________________________________________________
I'm currently on Page 70 in case someone else posts this. There are currently 91 pages
_______________________________________________________________________

 

[Soong-type Android]

An alright but not great finale. It wrapped things up in a decent enough fashion I suppose. Q returning at the end was the cherry on top in course correcting from the previous 2 seasons. Can't say I'm too happy about the Titan-A being turned into the Enterprise-G though.

 

[Romulan_spy]

I don't think The Borg will be gone forever, but with the seemingly final death of the Queen it gives the writers some leeway.

I kind of hope that the Borg are gone for good because they were frankly overused. Plus, their story is complete. But if they wanted to bring back the Borg, they could say that there was a Borg cube somewhere that was disconnected from the Collective when Janeway infected the Queen, so they survived. And this Cube would be queenless so they could go back to the Borg like in Q Who who are a collective without a Queen.

 

[Photoman15]

But Raffi was more in need of closure to her own arc than Soji was. Soji was at least shown to be exploring, and pretty much done with at the beginning of season 2. Data and Soji could have done with their moment, but they at least both had separate, sort of, closures.

Soji was NOT in season 2. She's on the android planet with her sisters and brothers.
Kore is exploring with Wesley.

_______________________________________________________________________
I'm currently on Page 76 in case someone else posts this. There are currently 90 pages
_______________________________________________________________________

 

[Tosk]

Soji was NOT in season 2.

She was seen in 2x01, "The Star Gazer", hanging with Deltans.

 

[firehawk12]

We know from DS9's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" that the Klingons lost so many ships in the Dominion War that they're essentially a second-rate power now. That's also true of the Romulans post-Supernova. Sure, there are other fleets, but no other fleet is as powerful as the Federation Starfleet.

If every ship in the Federation Starfleet is under Borg control? Yeah, sorry, I don't think the rest of the Federation is likely to survive.

There are trillions of people in the galaxy, presumably with vast areas of space still unexplored. We already know the Federation falls apart in the far future, but the galaxy didn't implode on itself when it happened and people found ways to continue to live.

No, a real-life example would be the capture and co-option of the entire U.S. Armed Forces and the destruction of Washington, D.C.

Again not to drag the real life into this, but the US essentially destroyed the entire Taliban hierarchy, hunted its leadership, and occupied Afghanistan for two decades... only for them to regain power pretty easily. This "cut the head off the snake" idea is a nice fiction, but also creates a rather shallow world.

(For example, the very premise of Battlestar Galactica is that it's possible to survive after the annihilation of everything you may have known)

I interpreted her comment to include all the people on other Federation worlds that would die if Earth fell.

Yeah, I guess it depends if you believe the premise that Earth is the center of the universe... I guess I never got that sense. Vulcan is a founding world of the Federation and it didn't really impact the Kelvin-verse when it was destroyed and left the Vulcans homeless.

Again, the scenario being faced was the simultaneous decapitation of the entire Federation government and co-option of every ship in the Federation Starfleet -- the only post-Romulan Supernova hyperpower. That's a fleet capable of defeating every other power in local space.

We don't really know anything about the state of the galaxy... but also, I do want to point out that this particular point doesn't bother me in terms of my overall feelings of the series. It's just an odd way to try to raise the stakes when the scope of the Federation collapsing was done quite well in Discovery Season 3.

The gist was that Vadic and her faction defied the Great Link and went rogue. They are not agents of the Dominion government.

I mean, I never got that Vadic went back to the Great Link after the war and then came back from Gamma with others, but I may have missed that.

Yeah, and we should have gotten a scene of Geordi being reunited with his daughters. But beyond that, we didn't need to see anything. This is Star Trek: Picard, not Star Trek: Geordi's Daughters.

The theme of the season was about family. You have an arc where Riker has to retroactively deal with the death of his son to make up for the weirdness of season 1, but they couldn't find a way to work in his daughter other than a quick mention.

People like the poker scene, but I think there could have been a case for a scene where the TNG crew bring all their families together to have one big family/found family reunion to neatly tie up the family theme.

That happens a year later, and also Jack was no more responsible for the actions of Vox than Jean-Luc was for the actions of Locutus.

I mean, that's just inherent to a lot of storytelling -- you can't really go into the kind of trauma the story would realistically cause all of the tertiary characters. It's not so much that they want you to "forget" so as to get a swift ending, as that the trauma of those characters is part of a different story. Same way you don't incorporate Ben Sisko's pain over Jennifer's death or Liam Shaw's pain over his crewmates' deaths into the end of "The Best of Both Worlds." "The Best of Both Worlds" is not about Ben Sisko or Liam Shaw, and trying to encompass all of the trauma these other characters are going to distort the narrative into something too unweildy to function as a story.

I think narratively it's odd to make Shaw's backstory tied to his Borg trauma but then ignore it for everyone else at the end. Even Jack seems perfectly cool with what he did after a flash forward, when for this version of Picard, the Borg Queen has literally haunted him for the past 30 years of his life.

We clearly see that Sydney is traumatized by what she did when Seven comforts her, but then it's kind of waved away as an inconvenience. Am I supposed to think Shaw is weak for not being able to do the same thing? I'm only able to react to what they show on screen, not what ideas were cut or what the writers may mention on Twitter.

 

[Farscape One]

The absolute truth is that the best line in this episode was: "Ma'am, I'm a cook."

No, the best line was Worf and Riker.

"And I will make it a threesome."
"Do you ever hear yourself?"


And Worf again, with the two words every Klingon knows but refuses to say... defeat and farewell.


Okay, I want a Captain Worf series now!

 

[gvn2fly]

T

I mean, I never got that Vadic went back to the Great Link after the war and then came back from Gamma with others, but I may have missed that.

Odo knew some changelings left the link and were planning something against Starfleet. Either they left on their own and later found Vadic and her few changelings somehow or Vadic's group went to the link to recruit others?

 

[gvn2fly]

So what do people think about Vadic being scared of the borg queen earlier this season? It doesn't really fit with the pretty powerless borg queen we saw in the finale. And how was the borg queen remotely able to cause Vadic pain? We've never seen the borg use technology like that. It also appeared like Vadic was scared of what would happen if she didn't capture Jack, but why would she be scared of a powerless borg cube? This season has noticeable flaws like this that bug me. Another is that changeling earlier in the season that was involved with the attack. When he was being chased by Worf why did he not hide and then change into a small rock or dirt or rodent or fly away as an insect?

 

[Tosk]

When he was being chased by Worf why did he not hide and then change into a small rock or dirt or rodent or fly away as an insect?

Or (due to the theory that they are not able to turn into inanimate objects any more) turn to meat-jello and drop into a drain or something.

As for the rest, I'm sure there will be a tweet somewhere that makes excuses for them all.