Star Trek: Picard

Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
I think it is very likely that the Troi in the cell is a Changeling. I won't bet $100. But Vladic asking for information about anyone close to Picard is just as much an indication that a Changeling will impersonate them as it is an indication they they will capture them and impersonating is much easier and faster when you are on a time budget. If I were writing, I would draw it out for a very long time and then reveal that Will could see it almost immediately. But I guess they only have 4 episodes and it would be nice to have some real Troi along the way.
 

Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
Good points, good points, retracted.
I actually haven't seen "These Are the Voyages" since it originally aired. It didn't offend me very much what they did, but I just haven't ever gone back. It would make a lot of sense not to have exteriors in the episode since it was from Riker's perspective in the holodeck and he wouldn't have seen any of that. But I feel like there was a space battle and they did show it.
 

Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
Does everyone remember how worried we were that Season 1 wasn't even going to matter this season?
 

Dake

Well-known member
Citizen
Isn’t the New Jersey wholly new?

Random observation but this is a weird name for a starship - it doesn't follow the regular naming conventions for ships of the line at the time which weren't named after states. The closest we have were cities: the Lexington and Yorktown. I know it's far-removed from canon at this point but the old Starfleet Technical Manual from the seventies puts the highest registration number as the USS Wenzen NCC-1842, so NCC-1975 is a loong way down the list to boot.
 

Cybersnark

Well-known member
Citizen
Regarding Voyager, note that Voyager's return would've been before Jack was born; regardless of timeline weirdness (this show can't possibly be in 2401 as claimed) Jack was canonically only conceived after Nemesis, which included this scene:


The selection of the ships in the museum as we see it in Picard is suspect. They're the same ships that Boimler gushes about in Lower Decks, which happen to be the hero ships of the various series. I think we need a little bit of that "according to great minds like Plato, Zoroaster, and M'Keptak of the planet Frall" business in there to mix in some colorful nonsense with the familiar names so we don't assume we've seen everything there is to see.

The Stargazer is there too (right side of the image), which has significance to the entire Picard/Crusher family.

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There's also a Saber-class ship in one of the lower berths, which I will be assuming is the da Vinci until contradicted.
 

Kup

Active member
Citizen
Along with the Hathaway. Yes I believe it’s the Stargazer, though I thought there was an idea that the Stargazer-A was an upgraded original. So it could go either way if we’re being fair about it.
 

Tuxedo Prime

Well-known member
Citizen
Isn’t the New Jersey wholly new?

Random observation but this is a weird name for a starship - it doesn't follow the regular naming conventions for ships of the line at the time which weren't named after states. The closest we have were cities: the Lexington and Yorktown. I know it's far-removed from canon at this point but the old Starfleet Technical Manual from the seventies puts the highest registration number as the USS Wenzen NCC-1842, so NCC-1975 is a loong way down the list to boot.
Given the likely late construction (after 2270, probably), one would expect so see a "Phase II" type (as seen in production art for the scrapped 1970s series of the same name) rather than the Bonhomme Richard or Achernar subclass (the type seen after "The Cage", of which casual fandom would be the most familiar).
 

TheSupernova

How did we get so dark?
Citizen
What's crazy is that
the building blocks they are now playing with could make for one hell of a FRANCHISE finale.

  • In the Star Trek subreddit, they are positing that somehow Jack (or his blood) will be the key to reviving Picard's body as Locutus, who will be controlled by the Changelings as a hive mind that commands the entire networked Federation fleet.

  • Janeway could easily appear. We could feasibly see DS9 cast members appear (besides Worf). Hell, if you read the blurb about Kirk's body, it mentions that his body was retrieved for Project Phoenix..... meaning that since William Shatner is still alive.... KIRK COULD APPEAR!

  • If the bad guys from the final battle are a fleet of Federation ships controlled by a hive mind, who are the good guys? The museum ships! Enterprise A, Defiant, Voyager for sure, and very likely NX-01, Excelsior, Enterprise E and the mystery in hangar bay 12.. a fully-restored Enterprise D (with a new stardrive section salvaged from a different decommissioned Galaxy class ship)!

Essentially you could in theory have an iconic big bad as the face of the enemy, fighting a team of pretty much every iconic hero ship in franchise history (aside from the Discovery which is in the future, and the TOS Enterprise and original Defiant which were completely destroyed), with core cast members appearing from most of the series.

If Star Trek were to end (which it won't), this is setting up a hell of a way to do it. Do I think any of this will happen? I'd say we could easily see most of it. I don't expect to see any more DS9 cast members or Kirk. I don't even think we will see the Enterprise E. I do think we are going to see Locutus and the Enterprise D though, and that our hero ships are going to fight the networked fleet. I think Shaw's line about hot dropping the D's saucer section on a planet was to remind us that it crashed so that when it returns, we are even more surprised.
Back in the mid-2000's, there was a PS2 game called Star Trek: Encounters, in which the player took on various missions in the different Star Trek eras up to that point (From NX-01 to Ent-E). The final mission basically had you jump between the ships to fight off the various enemies of the Federation. Even then, it came across like the worst fan fiction (well, a lot of that game came across like the worst fan fiction), so to see that basic idea actually show up on Star Trek proper would not be overly satisfying...
 

G.B.Blackrock

Well-known member
Citizen
Re: the look of the NX-01 in "These are the Voyages," here's a quote from Memory Alpha:
The only exterior shot of the NX-01 Enterprise in this episode appears in the closing montage. This is consistent with the narrative method established in TNG, that the viewers can't see the "exterior" shots when a starship is recreated on the holodeck.
Leaving aside the Beta canon retcon of that episode (whereby many of its events didn't play out in reality the way Riker's holodrama depicted them), that leaves plenty of room for the NX-01 to have added a secondary hull by the time of those events.
 

Kalidor

Supreme System Overlord
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
The New Jersey is named as such because that's where Terry Matalis is from and was born in 1975


And please put this man in charge of ALL modern Trek going forward. Holy shit. Picard 3 is the best season of Star Trek by FAR of all the new stuff.
 

TheSupernova

How did we get so dark?
Citizen
I feel like that sentiment takes away from Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy (the latter of which I haven't watched most of, but it seems to be well received). All three of those have done well enough and really don't need someone new at the helm.

Matalas has done a fine job of running this season, which is indeed leagues better than the previous seasons, but I mean, it isn't perfect (feels a tad fan-servicey, yet another galactic threat to be stopped, the plot dragging a bit more than it should, etc).

I would agree that the franchise has been doing better than it was when Discovery started out, though.
 

Kup

Active member
Citizen
Wonder what a Matalas-driven Discovery would have looked like? I think, as the flagship series, that’s what puts “live action Trek needs work”-type thoughts in people’s minds. That and the lackluster reaction to Picard’s first two seasons, which I liked if it matters.

Disco? Besides season 2, and that mostly driven by Anson Mount, has been largely forgettable for my household.
 

Kalidor

Supreme System Overlord
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
I feel like that sentiment takes away from Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy (the latter of which I haven't watched most of, but it seems to be well received). All three of those have done well enough and really don't need someone new at the helm.

Matalas has done a fine job of running this season, which is indeed leagues better than the previous seasons, but I mean, it isn't perfect (feels a tad fan-servicey, yet another galactic threat to be stopped, the plot dragging a bit more than it should, etc).

I would agree that the franchise has been doing better than it was when Discovery started out, though.

Those 3 series are fine on their own. Prodigy is the best of the bunch. SNW is good but is rather shallow in the grand scheme of things. There isn't and won't ever be any real stakes to the overall scope, though Hemmer was definitely a shocker.

Lower Decks isn't bad either. It's come a long way from where it started but I still mostly regard it as in canon fan fiction. It's more like a show people in the Star Trek universe watch

The first two seasons of Picard were trash so the fact S3 has done such a 180 was an incredible feat. It's the first time since Nemesis that it truly feels like the official Star Trek universe has progressed in a meaningful way.

Discovery is a show that has the Star Trek name as part of the title. It started out flawed and continually got worse with each season.
 

Copper Bezel

Revenge against God for the crime of Being.
Citizen
Discovery is a show that has the Star Trek name as part of the title. It started out flawed and continually got worse with each season.
I'm surprised that's even a take. The third season had a weak mystery box plot and resolution, and the fourth still wasn't what most people really want out of a Trek show, but the dire meanspirited imitation prestige drama of the first season and the incoherent reverse-engineered plot of the second are on a whole other level.

There's way too much leaning on fanservice for Picard S3 to be in my top anything as a season of Trek. And it's inherited a cluster of stupid from the first two seasons around Raffi, with way too many scenes on Planet Crime for me to begin to actually take it seriously as a piece of writing. (It's a pity, too, I was starting to like Raffi's character in spite of the rest of the show last season, but this season's got nothing good for her.) The best of S3 is beginning to feel like the ideal modern second attempt at Generations or something. By the end it might be the best TNG movie. (There are people with opinions about First Contact, but they're wrong - it's an entirely competent and coherent film that breaks some things but is fun to watch and does right by the characters in broad strokes. So I'm waiting to see if Picard S3 can do something special to rise to that level in spite of its flaws. And it can't get worse than Nemesis.) It's also only so indicative how well a series works when it's sending off a cast of characters aged beyond their roles with several very long seasons of material behind them. Shaw, Vadic, and Jack are all very good and they're new, but still, not really indicative, this season is something you can only do once.

I think describing Lower Decks as a comedy that people within the Star Trek universe would watch is a perfect description. It's very good at what it is, but comparing what it is to what other Trek shows are doesn't produce anything meaningful.

I should take Prodigy more seriously but I really can't. There's too much of the Star Wars cartoons in it and as much as I appreciate the less humanoid aliens and the like, it just feels very targeted at its age group in a way that makes it hard for me to watch. Once they revealed that the Protostar was named that because it has a ... compressed protostar inside it? ... I just couldn't.

SNW is the flagship show now, it's the least fundamentally flawed, and IMO it has largely the most likeable characters. Thanks to the anomaly-of-the-week format, it's also the most undeniably Trek Trek that's been made in the modern era, and it's the most optimistic and the best looking series to boot. If they can drop the xenomorph thing and focus on the lavender scare transhumanism, I think we're finally cooking with gas.
 


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