Star Trek: Picard Season 2

[Zargon]

S2E3

Well bit of lazy writing after the not really a cliffhanger where Seven does not know her evil husbands name. But she has read at least a couple "offical confederation documents" and would not such things have peoples full names? But sure they just needed to get the "you don't know" question out of the way....but they could have picked something more personal...and "evil", like "who did we kill on our wedding day and drink their blood?"

Then it's time travel to 21st century Earth...where luckily all telescopes, radar and such were destroied in the Eugenic Wars (except that famous one in LA that we see in the establishing shot..wink, wink).

So maybe I missed a bit....but the ship zooms out of the time portal at warp 9...on a heading to directly crash on Earth? Wonder why they did not even try to enter orbit? And...Rios...aims the ship at LA? So...his plan was to kill a couple hundred people? But then Picard knows a place and he crashes there and says it's home? So....um, did they crash in the Picard family estate in France? And no one noticed? No one saw the huge skid mark, burning trees and, oh yea, the spaceship? We do oddly see a shot of the crashed ship not too far from....a city? Villa Picard? If it was LA, I wonder where the "deserted spot for spaceship crash landings" is?

Then once crashed most of the non crew goes crazy and wants to kill the queen? So....if they did, how would they get back to the future?

And, oh no ninja "Star Trek has cool space swords too" guy dies. Never liked him anyway.

So Raffi, with her crazy unhealthy Romulan obsession takes it out on Picard that he is always "playing games with Q" . And sure she is upset her favorite Romulan guy died and she is a horrible person and has a lot of mental problems......but her complaint makes no sense. Picard was never given a choice or had any control over anything. He even refused to play the game......but that does not matter to Q.

And...guess they are in France, as they transport to LA...with a broken transporter. Er, maybe they could have just took a flight?

And as everyone is a broken non Starfleet character, Allison Pill has to do the "don't take any tech with you speech".....well, except your com badges and a tricorder....but no phasers. It would be "too easy" to stun noisy 21st century humans after all.

And Raffi ends up in the LA sanctuary district....that was a nice touch.

And a Rios subplot with a pretty doctor? Makes me wish Picard had more episodes...I could have watched a whole episode of Rios in LA. But then ICE comes in to ruin the day...but is not LA a sanctuary city(the other kind, not the Star Trek kind)? Or is this an evil Confederation like ICE?

And the "assimilation" stuff was ok. But...um...why does Allison connect to the queen by her neck? The brain in most people is up in the head. And if they were connecting to the brain stem...that is in the back of the body.

It was nice that each actor go to act out a human moment or two. I like the Seven face one the best.

So who thinks "The Watcher" will be Uatu....lol, just kidding. Who thinks it will be Guinan? Well....maybe...you would need to do the CGI deaged Guinan...and that might be weird. Though...maybe it is one of Guinan's kids? She has at least two. Maybe it's Gary Seven 2.0?

And hey....anyone else see this epsiode was directed by Lea Thompson? She is one of them life long Trekkies claims to be an expert on Time Travel

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

So Raffi, with her crazy unhealthy Romulan obsession takes it out on Picard that he is always "playing games with Q" . And sure she is upset her favorite Romulan guy died and she is a horrible person and has a lot of mental problems......but her complaint makes no sense. Picard was never given a choice or had any control over anything. He even refused to play the game......but that does not matter to Q.

She doesn't understand the nature of Q; the fact that whatever choice you make tends to elicit his involvement one way or the other. Maybe I got that backwards, but the point still stands.

[Frustration]

Pro Tip: the 5000-IQ alien with the godlike powers always gets things his way. If you think you've outsmarted him, you never understood his goals in the first place.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Whenever it starts with a Q it virtually always ends with a Q.

[Frustration]

Augh! I should have called that a "Q-Tip".

Too late now.

[Mabus]

S2E3
So Raffi, with her crazy unhealthy Romulan obsession takes it out on Picard that he is always "playing games with Q" . And sure she is upset her favorite Romulan guy died and she is a horrible person and has a lot of mental problems......but her complaint makes no sense. Picard was never given a choice or had any control over anything. He even refused to play the game......but that does not matter to Q.

One would think that despite the show telling us how well Picard got along Raffi (off screen of course), he would have told her about Q in some way, and she, being a Starfleet officer, would be intelligent enough to understand that a God-like being is not something you can just ignore. But nothing in the show tells me that Raffi was ever a Starfleet officer, let alone intelligent. I suppose the only reason Raffi calls Picard "JL" is because her brain will fry if she tries to speak like a normal person.

It's even more jarring when you consider that Q's relationship with Picard is pretty much abusive (regardless of Q's "benign intentions"), and given Stewart's insistence of including his own past abusive childhood experiences, you end up with Raffi blaming Picard (the victim) for being somewhat responsible for Q's (the abuser) antics. Yeah, blaming the victim for the abuser. This is something I'd expect from the villain and not the hero.

On a happier note, RLM:

youtu.be/aQ2TQ_GRO4g
Kurtzman doesn't just seem to not understand Star Trek, but also sci-fi in general.
"Sci-fi is about now" Nope, sci-fi is the use of imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life, either set in the future or in an alternate world (but not fantasy world, since at that point it's just fantasy) to explore the human condition or how human behavior and society react to those hypothetical concepts. Reducing the whole concept of sci-fi to just "now" is ridiculous, TOS aired in the 60s and most of the "now" from then is no longer relevant. Same with the other shows. And funny enough, the only stories that aren't dated from the old Trek shows and still hold up to this day, are the ones written to be timeless, without a clear resemblance to a topic that was relevant at the time it was written, rather than some bullshit heavy-handed message that didn't age well (cough The Omega Glory).

Also, I do find it funny that the show has to kill Elnor to give Raffi a motivation, it's not like they have a bigger one, like say... save the whole galaxy... and time... again...?

[CharlesPhipps]

I think Picard let Raffi rant because she just lost someone and he's aware she's freaking out. Frankly, it's a more mature response than most people would have under the circumstances.

[CMWaters]

Without getting too much into the episode...

I like the cameo from a Star Trek IV character in this episode.

[Mabus]

Episode 4 can best be described in one word: cringe.

There's the unfunny cameo of the Boomer Punk, who for some reason still listens for the same song he listened to 40 years ago (Shouldn't he be like 60 by now?), though now he's in LA because SA has too many hobos I guess. I don't find it funny, if anything, it's kind of sad to see the guy doing the exact same thing he did almost half a century ago.

ICE IS EVIL! YOU ALL GOT THAT? THEY'RE EVIL! THE "E" IN "ICE" STANDS FOR "EVIL"! AND THE PEOPLE THAT DEPORT IMMIGRANTS ARE EVIL! ICE = I CAUSE EVIL!

However, nothing beats Millennial Guinan... Christ, where do I even begin... So Guinan, who is like 900 years old, had like 23 marriages (though maybe by 2024 she only had like 20), lots of children (implication being LOTS), lived on dozens of planets, met dozens of civilizations and different cultures, seen countless atrocities, probably experienced the Borg before they came for her homeworld, then came to Earth during or around the time of the American Civil meaning she must have experienced the slavery-era racism, which was far far far far far worse than anything she would have seen in later years, lived through WWI, The Spanish flu, WWII, the Cold War, saw the Iron Curtain fall, and even if she left Earth during the 20th century, she would have still experienced other conflicts and horrors on other planets. But no, because I guess on some pre-warp civilization some Orange Bad Man was elected and illegal immigrants are grabbed from the streets and sent back to wherever they came from and Californian forest fires and pollution, and racism, that's what made Guinan quit. Because that's what makes nigh-immortal time travelling aliens ragequit living on Earth, not centuries of heinous crimes, but a decade of FoxNews racism. When Millennial Guinan showed Picard the hobos from LA like it's supposed to be some gotcha moment, I was like: Ukraine be serious? That's the worst humanity can become? Really?

There are also smaller annoying stuff, like Picard getting nostalgic after touching the items from the 21st century Chateau Picard, even though there's no way they're the same objects 300 years later since they would have rotted away by the time the Picard family returned, pointless Hannibal Borg Queen (because clearly the Borg Queen will totally assimilate Earth), transporters again being unable to lock onto slowly moving targets (Earth spins at around 460 m/s and because it's not a perfect sphere, the linear velocity of its rotation in France will be slightly smaller than the linear velocity in LA, because they're are at different latitudes and altitudes, and that speed difference will certainly be grater than a police car doing circles at 30 km/h, so if the transporter can compensate for that it can fucking compensate for tiny car speeds!), Q stalking women, etc., but those are just tiny annoyances compared to the El-Aurian in the room.

[Frustration]

It's things like those, that violate basic common sense as well as established lore, that have convinced me that the show is written by idiots, for idiots. And in a sense they're right to not bother writing any better, because the audience they're aiming for doesn't care.

The often excellent writing on TNG was a large part of what made the show wildly successful, but the core demographic was still nerds. It seems to be believed now that aiming at nerds won't lead to success... but there's plenty of idiots!