Spoilers Star Trek: Picard General Discussion Thread

He's seen more than scripts apparently.

 

It's an "Only Nixon can go to China" move. Terry Matalas wants to make a Proper Trek Movie with the TNG Cast, something that feels like it could fit in with the TNG Movies while one-upping them, and reached out to someone who's as Anti-New Trek as you can get to say "This feels like Old Trek! I felt like I was back in 1998!"

I think Terry Matalas is making a huge mistake, if that's what he's going for. I've posted on bulletin boards since I was 16 and I know for a fact that once a fan ends up stuck at a certain point, they usually stay there. For them to get out of where they're stuck is pretty rare. He's not going to win most of these people over. They're very good at coming up with ways not to like something.

 

RMB is already alienating his usual base QUITE a lot - they want to loathe “Klutzman Trek”, it doesn’t matter to them if Matalas has made the best season of anything ever. They still want for the Trek franchise to crash completely so that a mysterious gatekeeping savior of their choosing can make it great again.

The only explanation I can come up with is that RMB is so friendly because a lot of old school Trek people he knows are/were working on PIC s3, and he wants in just in case there’s a spin-off and someone might have a seat for him somewhere then. I doubt he’s this kind towards this one season just because he really thinks it’s good. He’s the type who tends to have an ulterior motive for either liking or disliking something. It’s there, and it WILL reveal itself in time. It always does with things like this.

Like I said before tho, the fact that he likes it so much is more like a red flag because it means they’re following Matalas’ TNG fanboy demands instead of making a unique show. The fact that they ditched most of the original PIC cast for this final season indicates this sort of direction, too. It’s all Matalas’ TNG fanboy dream season, and RMB shares that dream (for some reason).

Also, I’m sure I’m not the only one who cringes when he hears the words “love letter to the fans” being used in this context. Gives me some very unpleasant “These Are The Voyages” vibes. Some broad parallels are there, too. Final season, showrunners want to go out with a “love fest for the fans” and drum up hype, TNG characters replace the show’s actual characters in importance/appearance… etc, etc.

Bottom line is… this is either going to be the super wonderful thing Matalas promises or it’s nothing more than a tired old TNG movie plot with a few “shocking moments” (meaning name drops, Easter eggs and fanboyish retcons) stretched out into ten episodes. There isn’t much room in-between.

 

Gene Roddenberry was born in 1921, Rick Berman in 1946, and Alex Kurtzman in 1973. If this pattern holds, the next regime of Star Trek on TV will be headed by someone born in 2002....

.... thinking about when this person would've been growing up...

Wow. Of the ones who'll still be around, can you imagine how much these people who are currently hoping for Alex Kurtzman to fail would end up hating Fourth Generation Star Trek?

 

There are some things that are not meant for ensigns.

Kurtzman is younger than ME!

 

Having seen "These Are The Voyages..." not super long ago on Netflix, I think that episode was heavily marred by Berman and Braga burned out on Trek in comparison to Cotto, and it felt rushed with a sense of spite (because Enterprise was cancelled relatively prematurely next to its Berman era peers).

Picard was compromised in that it likely only intended to be one season in its planning stages under Chabon with Rios, et al, given short-ish support roles, but writing room shuffle, and Picard was spared being fully killed off (and we had a muddled "buffer" season with the more divisive S2 where most of the S1 character baggage got resolved).

I'm hoping we'll get a TNG version of Star Trek Beyond where it's not perfect, but it is solid and got enough oddity to hold up to repeat viewing and got 10 episodes to breath (while Season 2 felt like it went on for 4 or 5 episodes too long).

 

Most of them also worked on Season 2.

According to Patrick it was always the plan to have 2 seasons with a new cast to earn the right to bring back the TNG cast or something. Now how they execute that, the story they tell is all Matalas and his team.

Why can't he just simply like it?
Look I don't like the guy, I have him blocked on twitter he's a real piece of work, but I can't see why he can't just simply like what is happening.

 

Yeah, I know. This wasn’t something they did spontaneously or because of some “the execs hated season 2” conspiracy theory nonsense. But somehow I doubt all of it was the plan from the start because back in the early days Sir Patrick said his idea was that by the time PIC ended we got to see all the TNG characters and what they were up to. It sounded more like extended guest appearances over the course of the whole show than an entire season that ditches the previous cast and dedicates itself fully to the TNG crew. And he did make that remark about how they “tore the family apart”. I think it was mostly Matalas who really pushed for this. He makes absolutely no secret about the fact that he really, really wanted to make that whole “farewell to the TNG crew” thing. And he has also basically said that they ditched the original PIC cast because they ultimately had to decide between the two casts because there was no way they could have paid all of them. And Matalas chose the TNG cast. For better or worse. That is yet to be determined.

 

He hates things - we have a huge discussion.
He loves things - we have a huge discussion.
What would happen if he were neutral about something?

 

He can like it all day long and I don't believe him.

Boy who cried wolf etc.

 

Besides, it’s Hollywood. One of the most dishonest places in the entire world. Everything is glitz and glamor but also usually very fake. It’s wise to take ANYONE who drums up hype for a show with a grain of salt and to always wonder why they’re doing it. Usually the (boring) answer is “because their contract tells them to promote their show and has them say everything about it is spectacular and awesome”, but sometimes it’s a little more complicated. But like I said, it’s always wise to wonder why someone who is working in Hollywood and/or has connections to the industry there says they like something and yells about it the way RMB is. Especially when it’s such a sudden change from “I hate this show and I yell about it all the time for attention” to “I love the new season and I yell about it all the time for attention”. It arises… questions and suspicions as to why the desired attention seems to suddenly have shifted.

 

Usually, these “love letters to the fans” work out in Star Trek. TUC, AGT, & WYLB were all great sendoffs for TOS, TNG & DS9, respectively. It was only when VOY had its finale that series finale as a love letter faltered, and even then, that finale’s flaw is that it’s an average or below average sendoff compared to what came before it. But its still watchable. Then came the second TNG sendoff, NEM, which wasn’t going to top the sendoff of AGT whatsoever.

“Terra Prime” was a return to form and a good sendoff for ENT. But was undermined by TATV airing the very same night as “Terra Prime”, and was written as being the franchise finale with ENT being used for that backdrop.

At present time, I have very little reason to be concerned about the finale, even though this is the third TNG sendoff. If this is to be believed as to who is writing what episodes for S3, then there is no reason to fear the actual finale being bad. Of course, we’ve never seen Terry Matalas write a finale before. But we do know that based off of the first couple of episodes of S2 that his work is very, very good.

I'll give it a chance.

 

This is a tweet from March, but I hadn't seen it before. Looks like we're going to see the holodeck in S3:

https://twitter.com/KITST7LEN/status/1507410650640764929

 

I'm trying to wonder why the crew of La Sirena would stay together other than they were the show's cast for the first two seasons? Picard wouldn't have had a reason to stay on La Sirena after finding and rescuing Soji. What would Soji do on La Sirena? Same question applies to Jurati, who worked at the Daystrom Institute. I can see Raffi staying on La Sirena with Rios and Seven staying since she didn't have a ship anymore and would want to stay with Raffi. And Elnor would have no place to go. He could've stayed on La Sirena with Raffi, as she would've formed a new surrogate family with her makeshift "spouse" and makeshift "son", but the Academy is the best place for him.

So, in fact, the seven members of the original PIC cast didn't have much reason to stay together. The story of Season 1 organically brought them together. For the story of Season 2, it was more just something they tried to make work.

I think had PIC not returned for a second and third season, they were thinking of having Picard's death at the end of the first season be permanent, so they could end the story if they needed to. Speculation only, but that's why I think they went through with shooting Picard's death and the reactions to it afterwards. They wrote it in before they knew if there would be a second season, and then left it in just in case they wanted to have a storyline about Picard's new body, which they ultimately didn't really do.

When they say they had plans for PIC to be a one-season show, a three-season show, or a five-season show, I can see the case for all three. A one-season show for what I described above, a three-season show in the case of what we're actually getting, and a five-season show, where there would've been a season of story slotted between the actual Season 1 and Season 2 and another season of story slotted between Season 2 and Season 3.

 

I would say that only Picard and Jurati had no reason to stay onboard. And Jurati was in a relationship with Rios by the end of S1 and had a reason to at least visit La Sirena.

That left:

- Rios, captain and owner of La Sirena, plus all of his emergency holograms

- Seven, a Fenris Ranger without a ship; its not clear if she could afford a new ship, or if Rios was opposed to becoming a Fenris Ranger himself

- Raffi, who was no longer employed by Starfleet and had started a relationship with Seven

- Soji, who had no direction or purpose for her life at the end of S1, but could probably be mentored by Seven. Similar to Janeway mentoring Seven on VOY.

- Elnor, who had no reason to return to Vashti and could take up someone else’s lost cause. And Picard had already let over a decade pass without speaking to Elnor, so history is bound to repeat there.


Unless a contrived reason brings them back together, like with S2, or they agreed to be the anti-Starfleet to counter the direction Starfleet was going in, Picard would just move on to different people. While the La Sirena crew would have their adventures without him.

 

Just commenting on the cast changes. It's pretty clear now that the intention always was to bring back the TNG cast in some capacity for the final season. Gates McFadden basically admitted at a convention in the last week or two, she was approached by Terry Matalas in early 2020 right when lockdowns were just starting. So the TNG cast basically already had contracts in place while the first season was still airing.

I get that it's disappointing that everyone but Raffi is been written out, but in reality that's the nature of acting. You don't become an actor because you crave job security. Alison Pill has also said she pretty much knew from day one that she'd only be on the show for two seasons. It's also how television is done now. Unlike back in the previous eras of Trek, it's customary in most TV shows to have major changes in the ensemble over the course of a show's run. Don't get me wrong, I really liked some of the new characters. But I suspect that if there is a 25th spin-off, we'd likely see some of the Picard cast (like Elnor and Soji) return.

 

It's far more realistic too. Staying together over multiple years is just not how many people run their lives. I am a person who loves my job but even I consider leaving after a certain length of time, and have faced multiple changes in staff members. Changing positions makes more sense than the TNG style static process.

 

She can always come back as Queen Borgati (if they're doing a Borg civil war arc along with a highly-likely Seven spinoff, she probably WILL come back at some point).

How many times has NCIS turned over ITS cast over the course of nineteen seasons?

 

for the first 13 seasons, I think there was only one change in the main cast. But over the last few years they’ve had quite a bit more turnover.

something like the original Law & Order changed out either one or two cast members every 2-3 seasons.