Having watched Picard twice through now I've come to the conclusion that Star Trek doesn't work as a ten-episode, ten-hour arc. DS9 worked because the serial continued from season to season and really took its time with both the plot and making sure all the different characters had a good share of screen time. In the 10-episode, 10-hour format nothing ever has to be resolved until the end and by then there is no way the payoff will be worth it because there is so much stuff that happened that makes no sense.
My problem with Picard is that it felt like less of a story and more just a series of barely-strung-together events. "First this happened, and then this, and then that, and this, and that," with no room for the story to just... breathe. It was too hurried, too rushed, and the payoff was very anticlimactic.
To your point DS9 worked because, as you said, it was allowed to take its time whereas Picard was not. Take, for example, Jurati (after murdering her lover, whom we spent half a season looking for in the first place and who anticlimactically dies within minutes of being rescued) and Rios hooking up within a few episodes of meeting each other. It just... happens. There's not much narrative reason for it, other than just checking off a box on a list of plot points they wanted to introduce. Nothing comes of it, there's no rhyme or reason, no consequences. In fact Jurati doesn't seem to suffer any consequences for her actions whatsoever, which is pretty $#@%ed up considering she murdered a man.
Contrast that with Dax and Worf in DS9. They meet at the beginning of season 4, and right from the jump she shows attraction to him, she flirts with him, but they don't start a romantic relationship and get physical until over a year later. It was gradual, it happened organically. It didn't just HAPPEN.
Same with Riker and Troi. They were former flames who were coincidentally assigned to the same ship at the beginning of TNG, and they show little flits of feelings for each other for YEARS on the show before anything further comes of it. Riker is demonstrably jealous when other men show/earn her affection, but is mature enough of a character to let it go.
One of the better dressings-down on the show was this little exchange from season 3:
There were feelings there that we the audience were made aware of through the plausible happenings in the narratives of other stories, so when they finally DO get together there's a PAYOFF! It wasn't just "some stuff happened, she killed her lover and felt sad about it, and Rios gave her some booze... AND THEN THEY &$@#ED!"
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They run DS9 on space every Thursday afternoon. I sat down and watched it, and though I loved the series and still think its the best Star Trek series thats been made, I had forgotten how good the cast was.
They had the episode where Quark and Rom and Nog ended up in Roswell and Quark basically wanted to mess with the time line and start a Ferengi finacial empire. They had the two parter where the admiral tried to launch a coup and it was an amazing watch. We can say a lot about how crazy Brooks is in real life, but by the mid point of the series he'd really nailed Sisko. but the best episode on Thursday was the one where Dukat was demoted to a freighter pilot and realized that the Cardassians were a beaten people not wanting to fight the Klingons. He delivered a argument to Kira about joining him to fight which was one of the best monologues that I've ever seen. Even the episode where Rom tries to form a union and strikes against Quark was so well performed.
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I really enjoyed Picard and, from the few comments I've seen here, a lot of that enjoyment came from not reading the Picard thread here.
I made a conscious effort to just watch week-to-week instead of binging at the end. I did not read any reviews and not read the posts on CP.
Every experience I've had on CP with the weekly TV shows like GoT or Westworld has sucked the life out of the show.
As much fun as it is to discuss every episode of a show like Game of Thrones, I'll never understand how picking apart minute details of a show is fun. Honest critique is fine but being an irrational, negative fanboy makes no sense to me. Hanging on to sci-fi cannon like Christians do the Bible makes even less sense.
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I really enjoyed Picard and, from the few comments I've seen here, a lot of that enjoyment came from not reading the Picard thread here.
I made a conscious effort to just watch week-to-week instead of binging at the end. I did not read any reviews and not read the posts on CP.
Every experience I've had on CP with the weekly TV shows like GoT or Westworld has sucked the life out of the show.
As much fun as it is to discuss every episode of a show like Game of Thrones, I'll never understand how picking apart minute details of a show is fun. Honest critique is fine but being an irrational, negative fanboy makes no sense to me. Hanging on to sci-fi cannon like Christians do the Bible makes even less sense.
I tend to agree, but Picard was probably the worst of the rebooted TV shows so far. I even enjoyed Discovery season 1 a lot more. Most of the arguments around Discovery are nit-picking canon. Picard was just fundamentally not very good, the writing was bad.
This might be old news for some but I notice that CBS has greenlighted Pike Trek:
Quote:
CBS All Access today announced a series order for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, based on the years Captain Christopher Pike manned the helm of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The series will feature fan favorites from season two of Star Trek: Discovery, Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One and Ethan Peck as Science Officer Spock. The series will follow Captain Pike, Science Officer Spock and Number One in the decade before Captain Kirk boarded the U.S.S. Enterprise, as they explore new worlds around the galaxy.
Some good news IMHO from the EP, Akiva Goldsman:
Quote:
We’re going to try to harken back to some classical ‘Trek’ values, to be optimistic, and to be more episodic. Obviously, we will take advantage of the serialized nature of character and story building. But I think our plots will be more closed-ended than you’ve seen in either ‘Discovery’ or ‘Picard.’ I imagine it to be closer to the original series than even ‘DS9. We can really tell closed-ended stories. We can find ourselves in episodes that are tonally of a piece.”
Quote:
I think what we would want to do is keep the characters having moved through and recognizing the experiences they’ve had in previous episodes, but to be able to tell contained, episodic stories.
I kind of figured this was going to happen when they built a set this nice for Discovery....
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The “Year of Hell” and the behind-the-scenes drama not only to craft episode, but that season, was fascinating because we wanted “Year of Hell” to last the entire season. We wanted to see Voyager get its ass kicked every episode and through that season was going to be marbled the story of Annorax and the time ship that was changing things. So, we would go back to it every once in a while to remind the audience that is the larger story. But [it was rejected] because Deep Space Nine made Rick Berman allergic to serialized storytelling, violently so.
Berman deserves credit for guiding the TNG era, but the slow decline of the franchise through the late 90's/early 2000's I attribute to him getting too comfortable and lazy.
Last edited by Inglewood Jack; 05-31-2020 at 04:05 PM.
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I posted it here a long time ago, but the things that bugged me in Voyager weren't around the characters (Though there were some terrible ones, they should have taken Neelix and Naomi and fired them out an airlock). They even had some really good story episodes and arcs, year in hell was a great piece of story telling. Voyager was such a lazy show
1) Near the end of every episode 7 or Janeway came up with this miracle solutions (Inverse Tachyon beams funneled through the main deflector). They managed to build these solutions in ten minutes, they never talked about testing them. Nobody ever said, hey man there's a reason why this miracle Whatchumacallit wasn't build into the ships specs, because it would burn out the power grid or kill half the crew through radiation. Nope instead they pulled a couple of chips and whammo, miracle weapon.
2) The bastardization of the Borg as a convenient plot device. The Borg as an original design were awesome, though the addition of a Queen that acted like a sexily clad self destruct button in Generations was a bad writing choice. A hive mind with the admirable goal of assimilating the galaxy through brutal means to perfect life and remove suffering and starvation was utterly cool. But Voyager not only removed this goal to make the Borg into a band of conquerors but added to the incompetence rules of the whole machine to the point of giving the queen an self destructive ego and very real personality flaws.
3) the crew never really suffered, they always had this brightly lit, warm starship with a pot in every chicken. Their biggest hardship was the rationing of Holodeck time. Because of this and they covered it well in one episode where another Starship was using lifeforms to power their propulsion and power systems. But Voyager never had that quandary. They always looked so comfortable. There was rarely if ever that hard choice of balancing your beliefs and laws against saving lives and getting home. Even at the start when the crew got together and half weren't starfleet, the struggle for power of decision was so soft and un interesting.
4) Going to the above point, Voyager should have been a battered hulk by the time it got home, with ugly welds of other tehnology and scorch marks and systems off line because even though Voyager was trading with other racings, and this drove me crazy, all of their technology, and food was always compatible. And the other thing that drove me crazy was the universal translator being able to translate every language. It should have worked well in their own quadrant, but it should have struggled when they were 70 light years from home or whatever it was.
With the exception of very few cases, they ignored the prime directive whenever it was convenient and there were no repercussions. Nobody important died,. they never ran into power troubles or food shortages, or had system failures or suffered to get home, instead this show was equivalent to the love boat as they explored a new segment in what was basically a luxury cruise ship with the bartender Neelix doling out advice like Ted Lange in the love boat.
At least in Enterprise which wasn't great had one great thing that I really liked. At the start and through the series they struggled with being overwhelmed by the technology of other hostile races. Oh and in a couple of episodes Archer made brutal choices to screw over other races to achieve his goals. (we're taking your hyperdrive, heres some food sorry about adding years to your journey home).
Voyager was the diet tab of Star Trek.
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You forgot to add in that Voyager directly led to the creation of the Kelvin timeline. By the time that Voyager made it home, the ship was so powerful, it could swat down galaxy killing enemies with ease. The Borg destroyed the bulk of the Federation fleet at Wolf 359, with just one ship, but Voyager dismantled their entire civilization. They were almost invincibly advanced. Where do you go from there?
Whomever was in charge of the Star Trek brand at that time, very nearly made a billion dollar mistake, and the method used to correct that mistake gave the world some pretty unspectacular Star Trek.
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never thought of that. But yeah, when Voyager was one shotting Borg Cubes, they might as well had Janeway giggling and doing booya dances on the bridge.
At least TNG had a generally interesting approach to the Borg by attacking their own code, twice, once when they inserted a sleep command, and the second time with Hugh, but the good part of that was there were severe consequences to it that came later.
One of the best things that I liked about First Contacts and there were elements that I strongly disliked about it. But the Defiant was built to deal with the Borg, and specifically designed to be a warship and the Borg Cube swatted it like a fly.
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