Star Trek: Picard

[Kalidor]

I just don't see it as fan service. The museum ships, sure. But the overall evolution of the characters existing and still having stories to be told? No way.

These are people that have grown and developed over time. They aren't the same people they were all those years ago.

That's something I can feel and relate to on a lot of levels just in how things are different here than 20 years.

This is probably the best version of Raffi yet and she has great chemistry with Worf. He sees a lot of how he used to be in her and it's great how he's mentoring her.

We have several breakout characters like Shaw and Sydney LaForge and even Jack. Those characters are all connected to the original cast but certainly in very organic ways.

Comparing it to the "Hey look at all these Easter eggs we found on the wiki" fanservice done by Lower Decks is a disservice to what we're getting on screen.

So far we've gotten a pretty good arc that is paced leaps and bounds above the other seasons.

I don't know why calling it fanservice irritates me but I guess it does. I just see it as respecting the fans and the source material, while still bring great new material to the table. It's adding to the universe rather than trying to strip mine it, which these days is a rarity.

\\//,

 

[Copper Bezel]

I feel like each TNG character was individually introduced by turning to the camera to reveal their face, cutting to a low angle, and grinning while they repeat their old catchphrase, possibly with a pause to let the live studio audience applaud. That didn't actually happen, though, it's only Worf who did that. And when a character is coming back to television for the first time in twenty odd years, it's almost the only way to handle things; there is a degree of special guest star treatment that's warranted. But it's inherently trading a lot on nostalgia, too. I don't think you can really separate those things. Making this show without that attitude, without accommodating the audience's desire to see where all their old favorites ended up and see how they're all going to get dragged along into this new adventure, would probably make for a show that felt uncanny and foreign and as if twenty years of change really had happened while we weren't looking, and Picard already tried that in the first season. S3 is what everyone wanted all along, after all.

But, you know, the mystery starts with Picard's TNG uniform box for a reason. And as uh, brilliantly delivered as the Moriarty fakeout was, it would be properly incoherent without the nostalgia decoder glasses. Again, it's the things that are funny in Lower Decks because of how on the nose they are that make this show feel so deceptively cozy to me. Discovery S3 gave us that one big "I am the Guardian of Forever", Picard tries to give us at least one per episode. Maybe Picard S1 really is what you get when you overcompensate to avoid that feeling, and there is no middle ground, I don't know. And Lower Decks is just the other model that's handy for comparison, I don't think this is a domain that comedy is exclusively equipped to navigate. But I do know that how Picard S3 negotiates nostalgia is inseparable from everything else that it's doing. It's all extremely subjective stuff, but there's a lot of it around.

As for Raffi ... it's less her character and more the fact that the universe will not let her catch a break. Her situation when she's reintroduced is that everyone she knows is gaslighting her into thinking she's a paranoid basket case again while she follows the threads of another equally real Federation-threatening conspiracy. She feigns being more or less drunk in a gutter before revealing that she's Starfleet Intelligence, and then we gradually find out that everything else she said about herself like her breakup, family problems, and desperate need to show Starfleet they should take her seriously are all true; she isn't really strung out on drugs, but the plot is going to require her to shoot up later on for no reason just to clear the bingo card. And this isn't anything new, as every season has singled her out to suffer special in some way, but she got some good time in S2 just being capable and cool and a mutual foil with Seven, and I miss it here.

The Worf mentorship thing is fine I guess? I would feel a lot better about it if they'd dropped it on us in her first appearance in media res. The whole conceit of Starfleet and Worf communicating to her through anonymous text messages and her having to use her own hand-me-down starship instead of getting a company car, just really pushing for us to understand how isolated she is in all of this, it was completely unnecessary. Extract all the nonsense with Starfleet seeming to construct a mission precisely to drive her insane and what you have left is pretty good. Worf's feel-good reveal to save the day and Raffi insisting she totally had that guy (she totally didn't) should have been in the first scene we had with her, a scene that they could have held off to the second or third episode if necessary. She could already be the slightly annoyed mentee quoting Worf's anger management techniques back to him like a sarcastic teenager from go. And then we'd get to skip all that exposition about how Worf got wiser in his old age, too. (Because, you know, I can't imagine if the show had left us to work out for ourselves that tea-sipping samurai Worf with anger management mantras had to do with offscreen character development, how would we ever figure that out without suspiciously pertinent exposition covering exactly the last twenty years we didn't know about.)

 

[Axaday]

It is hard for me to ever disagree with Copper Bezel. It's all true. I can see it isn't great stuff. But just like Copper, I like it anyway.

-=-=-

Am I too out of touch with the related trappings? I seems to me that by the 25th Century there might be substances that you can carry around and take whenever you need it that will make you feel really good for a while that aren't dangerous. Maybe that's silly. Maybe that is what a chocolate bar is.

 

[Dekafox]

Synthahol is an obvious example, in that it's just about that counterpart to liquor, but it seems no one's really considered running that across the board for all other psychoactives. ANd I guess, to be fair there have been a lot of people on screen who still prefer the latter to the former, despite everything.

 

[Axaday]

My understanding of synthahol may be weak. I am sure I learned that you don't get drunk. Do you get a buzz and then that is it?

It really may be that the normal mature thing is that we don't NEED to get high and anyone who thinks they do need to get high is wrong.

 

[Dake]

Fanservice can be done well or poorly. It has grown to be a pejorative but it doesn't have to be. Lower Decks takes fanservice to the extreme for comedy purposes, I think Picard S3 is using it and doing it (mostly) well compared to the first couple seasons where it tended to stumble. I agree that this season would not have the same impact without being TNG Season 8 but even in saying that, they're doing a good job with it. The flip-side of this argument is they've been able to fast-forward some of the character building to get to the story which has been part of what held the previous seasons back (because they also didn't do a great job with earlier character building).

Am I too out of touch with the related trappings? I seems to me that by the 25th Century there might be substances that you can carry around and take whenever you need it that will make you feel really good for a while that aren't dangerous. Maybe that's silly. Maybe that is what a chocolate bar is.

That stuff exists, but we're spending much more time outside of the Federation's influence. Just like today people will gripe about light beer not being the "real stuff", or you're not "doing it right" if you don't get hung over. It's reasonable that the seedier parts of any given local still cater to the "old ways" of getting wasted.

 

[Cybersnark]

It occurs to me that the thing I love about Picard this season is that it's making me imagine a USS Titan series featuring Shaw, Seven, Sydney, and Jack (and the rest of the Titan crew), with the TNG cast relegated to occasional guest appearances for the "big" episodes.

 

[Dekafox]

My understanding of synthahol may be weak. I am sure I learned that you don't get drunk. Do you get a buzz and then that is it?

It really may be that the normal mature thing is that we don't NEED to get high and anyone who thinks they do need to get high is wrong.

That's what I would assume - get the good without the bad, but some people want to get the full drunk experience. I always got the impression it wasn't for the flavor, which is the only other reason you would have such a thing, like how sugar free stuff is supposed to replicate the flavor(but seldom does). Can't pull up Memory Alpha to check currently.

 

[Thefakelink]

I thought it was more “get drunk but without a hangover.”

 

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, and specifically a drunk you could just "turn off" when it's time for duty.

Edit: Now I'm picturing something that's definitely not what synthahol is, but the curse-of-eternal-life-without-eternal-youth version, where you can shut it off instantly but get an instant hangover

 

[The Predaking]

So if you remove the fan service, you still have some amazing characters that were added this season.

Captain Shaw - a great new complex character. Another former engineer turned captain after Wolf 359, but he still does the right thing, and is an annoying pain in the butt for our pre-exisitng characters.

Jack Crusher - a great new addition to the cast. He is that rogue/Smuggler with the heart of gold type of character His condition hasn't been fully explained yet, but I am sure that it will soon.

Sidney LaForge - A great pilot and a bit of a risk taker. Love that she and Jack have some great chemistry.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Just like today people will gripe about light beer not being the "real stuff",

Missed this, but light beer isn't for your health, it's just something some people inexplicably prefer the taste of. It's the same alcohol.

 

[PrimalxConvoy]

Missed this, but light beer isn't for your health, it's just something some people inexplicably prefer the taste of. It's the same alcohol.

In Japan, we have fully non-alcoholic beer, with absolutely no alcohol in it whatsoever. I sometimes drink it at work (although some Japanese colleagues think it's taboo for customers to see us with such drinks).

As for synthhol:

And if you'll excuse the casual racism and "old Disney film acting circa Mary Poppins":

 

[Copper Bezel]

In Japan, we have fully non-alcoholic beer, with absolutely no alcohol in it whatsoever.

That exists everywhere. Only Americans would invent light beer though.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

And if you'll excuse the casual racism and "old Disney film acting circa Mary Poppins":

Yeah, while there have been a few attempts to chart various post-faster warp engine 22nd century cultural diaspora from Earth, people often try to forget the "Stage Irish" Neo-transcendentalists....

They could have been Travellers (the Irish ones, not the grayish ones from Tau Alpha C who may or may not also be the Aegis), but they'd be a lot less comprehensible to American ears if they were, I suspect. Maybe that was the best the UT could do with an isolated variant of Gaeilge?

Either way, Colm Meaney was largely absent from this episode, for which we and he are no doubt all grateful.

 

[PrimalxConvoy]

That exists everywhere. Only Americans would invent light beer though.

As far as I can tell, it was invented in Japan in 2010:

- https://tokyoesque.medium.com/mindf...e-alternative-beverages-in-japan-e6131a37e2bf

The most famous, "All Free", is basically carbonated, beer-flavoured water, as opposed to "low" or so-called "non" alcoholic beers from other countries (which can claim to be so, even with a 0.005% of alcohol). All Free, by comparison is completely devoid of all alcohol and calories, so it's good for dieting too.

 

[G.B.Blackrock]

As far as I can tell, it was invented in Japan in 2010:

- https://tokyoesque.medium.com/mindf...e-alternative-beverages-in-japan-e6131a37e2bf

The most famous, "All Free" is basically carbonated, beer-flavoured water, as opposed to "low" or so-called "non" alcoholic beers from other countries (which can claim to be so, even with a 0.005% of alcohol). All Free, by comparison is completely devoid of all alcohol and calories, so it's good for dieting too.

Why are we talking about alcohol free beer? I thought "light" beer was supposed to be (essentially) diet beer. Same alcohol content, but fewer calories.

I'm not a drinker, so I could be mistaken.

 

[Copper Bezel]

You are correct. Light beer has nothing to do with alcohol content.

so-called "non" alcoholic beers from other countries (which can claim to be so, even with a 0.005% of alcohol).

That's eighteen milligrams in a can, or about one third of a drop.

Edit: That is, if you tried to intake enough to get a buzz, the water would kill you first.

 

[PrimalxConvoy]

Why are we talking about alcohol free beer?

Because it was related to a discussion on synthahol, a faux-alcoholic drink that could possibly be drunk while "on duty" in the Star Trek universe.

 

[Copper Bezel]

I can see how you got there, but we know synthahol has effects, so it's not really related.

I mean O'Douls could qualify as a homeopathic hangover cure, but I'd like to think the Federation has moved on from such barbarism as homeopathy.