Spoilers Star Trek - Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack Review Thread

Wouldn't that actually consist of his captain's logs? Mind you, no way to talk about "In the Pale Moonlight."

 

That was one of my biggest issues with the Kirk biography. Would Starfleet let it be known there was a planet with a magic time portal on it that could rewrite the timeline in a flash? Imagine the chaos that would cause. I was hoping for a more hardcore read, where Kirk would speak vaguely of classified missions and you'd be able to decipher some stuff from reading between the lines.

 

Depends on if it still works or came out some other way. Presumably they'd blockade the planet Talos IV style.

You don't want that thing unguarded.

 

I just had a new idea for how the Red Matter was supposed to help save Romulus. A supernova happens when a stellar core burns hot and fast enough that it uses up all its fusion fuel and cools down, causing the star to collapse in on itself and rebound explosively. And the more mass is pressing down on the core, the hotter and faster it burns. So maybe the idea was for the RM black hole to suck up enough of the star’s atmosphere to relieve the pressure on the core and prevent, or at least delay, the supernova.

I also had a new idea for why Spock went ahead and activated the Red Matter anyway. Maybe he started the release process mere moments before the supernova, but then it happened while the process was underway but before it was completed. You’d have to assume that what we were shown in the mind meld sequence was presented in nonlinear order, but that’s reasonable enough given how memory works.

 

There are always ways for a creative mind to come up with an explanation.

I seemed to infer from the film that the Supernova was some sort of runaway threat to the galaxy, or at least to their part of the galaxy and the whole Red Matter thing was to prevent that from happening once the effort to save Romulus failed.

But there are probably other ways to explain the events that are still mostly consistent but offer up an alternative explanations.

I noted previously another option is maybe it just failed. He set it off and it just didn't work, though it still created a singularity that sent Spock and Nero back in time.

But your option, that it just started and the red matter didn't work in time works as well. And still allows for the creation of the singularity.

I haven't seen Picard yet, but did the show ever address Spock and Nero at all?

 

And I've explained time and time again why that makes no sense at all. You can't prevent a supernova that already happened. You can't magically suck back in the radiation that's already expanding out at the speed of light. So that part has to be ignored.

No, not at all. They made sense of the parts they did address, but they didn't address that, which is why it's still an open question.

 

Well, yeah. I just don't think the writers of Star Trek (2009) were thinking about the reality of it all. But it's probably ambiguous enough that alternate explanations can be provided that are still consistent with what was shown, at least to a large extent.

I'm just making an inference from what was shown in the film, not what was actually possible.

I wonder if that will come up. Though from what I have heard about the show we're years past the nova at this point and what happened to Spock and Nero isn't really part of the story so it may never come up.

But it does leave the door open possibly for an author to cover that part of the story in a future novel at some point. Perhaps if the show goes into more detail about the nova itself (i.e. was it some sort of attack, were there minds in the Federation working on trying to contain it, etc.) maybe that will give some background to work off of for someone in the future.

Or maybe they won't do that at all, and a novel writer can fill in those details at a later date.

 

I think even Chabon and the Picard writers realized it's a giant can of worms which is why they haven't gone into detail.

 

A failure on Spock's part but still a game effort. Bravo for your latest continuity patch!

 

Sisko's pre-DS9 life would offer a lot of material: his experiences with Curzon; his engineering days on the Livingston and the Okinawa; the Tzenkethi War with Leyton (Leyton was in the Picard autobiography) and his time on the Saratoga.

 

Wrong thread?

 

I would assume somebody probably thought a Janeway book would sell better than a Sisko.

 

That's because Janeway at the end of the day wasn t with her butt seated in a desk on some space station.. She was a ship captain.
Ahahah

 

As I recall, Voyager was significantly more popular and watched than DS9.

DS9 is greatly beloved but by a smaller number of people.

 

This book was actually my first Trek audiobook. Having listened to a number of Doctor Who audio plays I decided to use my Audible credit on this to see how it compares. I knew going in that it would be different as it had one narrator instead of a full cast, and that it was written as a book first and not a play, but overall I enjoyed it. I found the narrator very good, with the characters feeling distinct and recognisable (his Picard was very good I thought). The story was good but not great. I felt it suffered a lot of the problems prequels suffer from - parts of the story would only be resolved in the TV show, so it couldn't really tell its own distinct story. As was pointed out elsewhere, the story strand with Dr Jurati was probably the weakest. The age difference between her and Maddox, along with their professional status did not sit comfortably with me., but not enough to put me off the book.

 

I just wanted to say I'm glad I read this novel. I got Picard on Blu-Ray for Christmas and am about halfway through now. I found reading this novel before seeing the show helped with some of the background.

For instance, the novel gives a clearer picture about Picard's ultimatum to Starfleet...and how he became so singularly focused on his mission. And when Raffi meets her son in the show I already knew she had a family and how that broke down for her. Also it gives more background on what happened to Maddox and how he was involved.

It's not necessary to read the book to grasp the show by any means. But I found it helpful in that I already had some foundation to the story and why some things are in Picard.

So I'd recommend it for any fan of the show (even if you haven't read it yet but seen the show it probably still could be helpful).