"Star Trek Picard Is Not a Sequel to The Next Generation Says Producer"

I have never had a problem with this scene/sequence. Not once. It's a fun scene.

Maybe it's because I've always been under the belief, even as a kid, if you can't beam directly to a location and have to take a shuttle down you're going to want to make sure it's safe. So you park it a distance from where you need to go if you're going into an unknown area. Then you either walk or you take a vehicle of some kind if the terrain permits it. If you know where your'e going and the place is safe then you fly right to it. It makes sense to me. Lets them carry equipment is needed or get away quicker if there is danger.

Starfleet being a military org or a sudo one they would use stuff like this to make the job easier, more efficient, etc. Especially if you have the budget to show more then what the show could and expand what options the ship has instead of rigidly sticking to only what the show could do as an example of what Star Trek is..

I want to see more stuff like this in Star Trek. It's why I was happy to see the DOT droids in Discovery. The budgets are there. Make use of them and show tech and items that would make sense for characters doing these jobs would use.

 

But (given Trek anti-grav tech that was shown as foolproof and routinely used in the 23rd century, would they be using a dune buggy with TIRES in the 24th century?

 

Maybe a Prime Directive consideration based on the technology of the planet? Who the fuck knows the thinking behind it? I still think it was a cool scene.

 

Let me be clear-the buggy itself is not the problem. Its the rather casual violation of the Prime Directive for the sake of giving Patrick Stewart a driving scene that bothers me.

 

yep. I don't buy this whole "This isn't a sequel to TNG" nonsense. All rubbish.

 

What is the bigger violation? Using a dune buggy or leaving the android parts around for the Kolarans to find?

 

Well, I doubt an 80 year old Patrick Stewart will have that in mind for this show.

 

On the contrary, they were following the Prime Directive there. Think about it -- if they hadn't fled the Kolarans, they would've been captured, and the Kolarans would have had definitive proof of alien life. As it was, they only had a few uncorroborated eyewitness claims of a close encounter with aliens.

 

I think the wholesale slaughter of the Kolarans was a pretty big violation.

I don't.

 

Huh? I don’t remember that. I remember them hitting on or two.

 

Yeah, slaughter was the wrong word. Still, killing them seems like kind of teensy-weensy Prime Directive violation.

 

Go rewatch the scene embedded above. There's no evidence that any Kolarans are killed. Worf and Data are mostly just laying down suppression fire, hitting the ground in front of the Kolaran buggies. Only two buggies are flipped over, and it appears they hold only two Kolarans each. We see no indication of the fate of the Kolarans inside. Okay, the gunner on the first buggy appeared to have the vehicle roll over on him, but it looked like that was a live stuntman there, so presumably it was survivable. Dune buggies aren't very heavy, and sand is a soft surface. From what I can find online, only a very small percentage of ATV or dune buggy injuries are fatal.

So most likely, nobody was killed and at most four Kolarans had to be hospitalized. If anything, Worf showed considerable restraint given that the Kolarans were firing machine guns at him and his senior officers.

And again, the Prime Directive violation would've been far greater if they hadn't resisted. Plus they would've been dead. It's a little-known fact that the early TNG writers' bible said that the Prime Directive allowed an exception for the protection of one's crew (which retroactively helps clarify Kirk's actions in episodes like "The Return of the Archons," "A Taste of Armageddon," and "The Apple" where a threat to the Enterprise forces Kirk to intervene in the local culture).

For that matter, doesn't the Prime Directive potentially answer the question of why they were using a dune buggy comparable to the Kolarans' vehicle tech instead of an antigrav skimmer? Maybe it was a precaution in case they were spotted from a distance, although presumably they didn't expect to be confronted with such a large attack force before they could reach the shuttle.

 

I did. At least one was fully impacted.

Which is all well and good in TOS and would be appreciated in TNG. But, TNG was rather black and white in the PD's application and times, so the above scene sits oddly with me, at best.

More irritatingly, it was introduced to just have a driving scene. It doesn't feel organic, it feels very out of place with TNG, and is just an odd scene over all. I find it unnecessary.

 

Nope, I just watched the whole chase straight through a second time, and unless you're referring to the aforementioned gunner's impact with the ground in the first rollover, no Kolarans were hit. Data's phaser shot doesn't hit anyone (freeze frame reveals that it goes just to the side of the buggy he fires toward), and all of Worf's shots hit the dirt. The two buggies that flip are not directly hit, but are flipped by the eruption of the ground just ahead of or beneath them.

I don't dispute any of that. If we were talking about the quality of the scene, I'd be the first to say it was stupid and pointless. My ideal fan edit of Nemesis would cut back to the Enterprise immediately after B-4's head is discovered (and would restore the plot-crucial earlier scene of Picard and Data's toast in the ready room).

I merely dispute the oft-trotted-out claim that fleeing from the Kolarans was a Prime Directive violation. Again, we're talking about a choice between two scenarios:

1. A bunch of Kolaran troops come back in from the desert with some crazy tale about finding spacemen that ran away from them and shot at them with ray guns and flew off in a flying saucer. They have no physical evidence beyond a few mysterious scorch marks on the desert floor, so at best it just gets filed away somewhere with a hundred other unverifiable UFO reports, and the soldiers who saw the aliens probably learn not to talk about it if they don't want to get laughed at.
   
2. A bunch of Kolaran troops come back in from the desert with a tale about finding spacemen that sat there passively and allowed themselves to be gunned down, and they proceed to prove that tale by displaying the shot-up corpses of a human, a Klingon, and an android (and extra head), along with a captured spacecraft and ground vehicle built by a technology centuries ahead of their own. The bodies and vehicles are taken to the nearest government research base, the tech is reverse-engineered, and in a few decades you've got a warlike state using Starfleet-derived tech to conquer its enemies, then expand into space seeking new conquests.

Now, you tell me: If your objective is to minimize cultural disruption, which of those two options would you choose?

Sure, arguably going down to the planet without Kolaran disguises was itself a reckless move in PD terms; but they were going to a desert area for just a brief time, and they didn't expect to be spotted by anyone. Once they were spotted, though -- more to the point, once they were spotted and immediately fired on with machine guns -- their only options were to fight back and create a slight disruption, or to not fight back and create a massive, massive disruption. So fighting back was the only available way to honor the Prime Directive in that context.

 

I'll concede that point, upon closer inspection.

I really don't feel like that's the only two options. But, I appreciate your analysis.

 

The only other option I can think of is to call for beam-out, but that would expose the Kolarans to knowledge of transporter technology, which is a much bigger leap beyond their existing tech knowledge than phasers or shuttlecraft (plus they'd already found the shuttlecraft anyway).

 

Why not just use a shield of some kind to protect the buggy? I mean, it could probably deflect the flying rocks since there is no windshield either.

 

Again, presumably they did not expect to encounter Kolarans. If they had been able to predict such a confrontation, then it wouldn't have happened in the first place, since they would've taken more steps to remain inconspicuous (like using the camouflage suits seen in the opening of Insurrection, maybe). As it was, they were taken by surprise and had to make do with what they had.

 

Which is why it is so off putting of a scene. Picard is normally far more cautious, more prepared and more careful, especially as far as matters of the Prime Directive.

 

I didn't think they could beam down? Which was why they took the shuttle in the first place.