Star Trek: Picard

I was worried about this, but I found myself very much enjoying it.

Looking forward to seeing where it goes, I absolutely hate Discovery, so it's been a long time since I've been able to enjoy Star Trek.
 
Not a bad start, did they use a stunt double for Picard when he was running with back to camera ? I don't blame them if they did because of Patrick's age, but it just looked odd
 
uvarvu said:
I really liked it too.
B4's drawer closing to the sound of a TNG era force field going up. At least recycle the sound effects properly!
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Might have been intentional given they're now outlawed so might be behind a force field for security.
 
james.miller said:
Well that was over very quickly. Pacing was a little off but I thought it was a great start.
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i read somewhere that episode 1 and 2 are a two part story,

tommybhoy said:
Anyone have a 4K link, its not in the Prime 4K list?
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as far as i know there isn't a 4k on prime yet but maybe at a later date and time. considering that when the expanse season 4 was released on the Thursday night at 23:00 all episode in HD were present, then some time on Friday the actual day listed for released 4k version was up. now star trek picard has seam to follow suit as it actual uk released is Friday 24th, but Thursday 23 at 23:00 episode 1 of picard was up to watch, so it seam it also possible that it following in what "the expanse" did so if there is a 4k version it might be on some time on the 24th, we can also expect to watch next episode of picards next Thursday at 23:00 instead of the Friday.
 
JRS said:
Right, I've got a couple of hours with naff all to do while I wait for a delivery. Thoughts on episode 1 "Remembrance". First spoiler tag is my running commentary, second tag is thoughts on the episode and series so far.

1) Space sure is purty
2) And here's the Enterprise-D. Hello old girl. Been a while!
3) Window zoom trope in full effect
4) Welp, this is a dream sequence then. Because Picard is in civvies, Data is in a post-First Contact uniform. Might be just me but I think Brent's makeup here looks better than in the trailers
5) He's also found that Data voice perfectly
6) Picard needling Data about tells while playing poker is giving me all the feels. I'm not gonna make it through the episode at this rate gang...
7) "Why are you stalling Captain?" "I don't want the game to end." Oh god :(
8) The dream is breaking down. We're now in Mars orbit, and everything is turning to ****
9) Even Starfleet legends get nightmares then. But puppies make everything better, so here's Number One to take care of his master :)
10) Some things will never go out of style. Rural French architecture and interiors for example
11) Neck-snapping contrast there, rural France to future Boston
12) Woah, talking of neck-snapping contrasts...quiet relationship scene goes south in an instant
13) Well, that's what you get for taking your time there lads. You killed her boyfriend, so now she's gonna wreck your ****
14) Even at the end of the 24th century you ain't coming back from a knife to the chest like that
15) Off you go to find Picard then, love. Because this is sci-fi - when three blokes burst in, kill your boyfriend and try to kidnap you, you don't go to the police. You go to a guy running a vineyard
16) Opening credits and theme then. I'd still prefer a Courage/Goldsmith type of score, but then this isn't that kind of Star Trek by all accounts. Cool shot of Picard though, and they sneak part of the TNG theme in right at the end :D
17) Back to rural France, and the gentleman farmer surveying his land. Speaking French to his doggo as well, nice touch
18) Picard has friends living with or near him. And either these two are exceptionally emotional Vulcans, or they're Romulans who survived the destruction of their homeworld. Guessing we'll find out shortly
19) "The dreams are lovely, it's the waking up that I'm beginning to resent." Where the hell was this kind of writing for the last two seasons of STD???
20) Gonna pause for an extended moment here and note the parallels between Picard now and Kirk in "The Wrath of Khan". At the start of TWoK, Kirk was feeling his age and utterly bored because he wasn't commanding a ship. More specifically, he wasn't commanding a starship. And more specifically than that, he wasn't commanding the starship Enterprise. The emergency at Regula happens, things all turn to ****, he rises to the occasion and defeats Khan. Yes, he (for a while) loses Spock. But he finds himself again, and at the end of "The Voyage Home" he's back where he belongs - centre seat of the Enterprise. Picard here is also clearly feeling his age, and is just as melancholy about it as Kirk was at home on his birthday with McCoy. McCoy's advice to Kirk was "[G]et back your command...before you really do grow old". Words that Picard would do well to hear from someone. Right, on with the show
21) Romulans
22) Ugh, decaf tea :(
23) Nice to see that news broadcasting style doesn't change in the coming centuries
24) "Be the captain that they remember"...good Lord, it's not even subtext any more. This is a full-on love letter to fans of TNG in general and Jean-Luc Picard in particular. No wonder Patrick Stewart was finally excited by the idea of bringing him back
25) He did retire as an Admiral then
26) Interesting line of questioning from the news lady there. Guess we know which way the Federation News Network slants on Romulans
27) "The Romulans asked for our help. And I believed we had a profound obligation to give it". And then she blathers on about how the Romulans were the oldest enemy of the Federation. Trek as social commentary is alive and well
28) Aha, now we hit the actual backstory of the series. Synthetic lifeforms attacked Mars and the orbiting shipyards, killing a huge amount of people and preventing the mass rescue of the Romulans. And then those lifeforms were banned. So...B4 will have been dismantled. But what about the EMHs? Holodeck characters? Could be a hell of a ban to enforce...
29) The series has it's first Picard Speech. And it's a good 'un :) News lady probably thought that her Pulitzer was in the bag until he utterly shredded her
30) On the plus side, the girl from earlier now knows where to find Picard
31) Ooh, futuristic irrigation equipment!
32) Sharing another quiet moment in retirement with his pupalup. But Number One has seen or heard something...and like any good guard dog, has gone to see if that something has brought treats :D Looks like she's found Picard pretty quickly in the end. I guess transporters help in that regard
33) A crying girl who needs help, a mystery to be solved. Order of business? Fix the cut on her head, get her a cup of tea. Jean-Luc Picard, ladies and gentlemen. Boy have I missed him.
34) Honestly, this is weird. Kurtzman and Beyer must have been to writing classes. Or maybe Michael Chabon was the killer hire. But it's not just that the writing is better than in STD (and it really, really is so far) but it's then been handed to people who can actually act. Obviously, there's Patrick Stewart. But there hasn't been a weak link so far. Isa Briones as mystery girl Dahj is sat the other side of a table from Patrick Stewart and is holding her own. Jamie McShane and Orla Brady are great as the Romulan pair of Zhaban and Laris. Merrin Dungey put in a believable performance as an interviewer out to get a strong reaction from Picard and not knowing what to do with it when she got it
35) "I believe that you believe you were supposed to be here. And if you were dangerous then...Number One would let me know". Number One by this point is looking all kinds of relaxed, flat on the floor :D
36) Dreaming again. Data, in a TNG series uniform, painting
37) Looks like Picard has figured out part of the mystery then. And he's off to San Fran, and the Starfleet Archives. Bit more of the TNG theme in the soundtrack
38) Dialogue between Picard and Maya Eshet's hologram character here is brilliant :D Answers my question from 28), even complex holograms that have AI and personalities are still allowed
39) Stargazer! And artefacts from his days on the Enterprise
40) Hoo boy. So there's the original painting that Data did. And that is definitely Dahj's face
41) The painting is called "Daughter". But you already knew that Jean-Luc. Even if you weren't sure, you knew it
42) Dahj has made it as far as Paris then
43) See, that's what the phone manufacturers should be working towards. Not folding phones. Holographic phones
44) Oops. That rather gave the game away there lady
45) Didn't take her long to find Picard again. It's a small Earth in the future, especially when you're almost certainly engineered to be even more than Human
46) Oh, that's fun. So she's the one thinking up 'believable' reasons why she knows things, thinking that maybe she's schizophrenic or similar. And Picard is the one insisting that nope, this is you, you're special
47) "Dahj, he painted you. Exactly as you are, in the here and now. But he painted it 30 years ago." And he's told her what the painting is called. Looks like Dahj's week is going to take another sideways turn
48) Can't help but feel that if SMG had been handed this kind of material she would have murdered it with that stupid wide-eyed panic look that seems to be her only way of getting emotion onto the screen
49) Right then Dahj. Jean-Luc Picard has asked you to trust in him. Time to rise to the occasion
50) Whoops, time to run. Patrick very believable here as an old, out-of-practice Picard
51) Dahj channeling ScarJo's Black Widow there
52) So, Romulans are involved. And looks like that's Dahj done. We barely knew ye :(
53) Picard explaining everything to Zhaban and Laris. And he isn't planning on letting this mystery drop. "I haven't been living. I've been waiting to die." Whoever the 'bad guy' in this series is, they just done goofed. Jean-Luc Picard is back, and he's out to get them
54) Off to Japan we go
55) Here's Alison Pill's character, Dr Agnes Jurati. And we get a little more backstory on the synthetic lifeforms
56) Hoorary for continuity! So Bruce Maddox was in an episode of TNG, "The Measure Of A Man". He wanted to shut down and disassemble Data to reverse-engineer more Soong-type androids. Originally he felt that Data was simply property of Starfleet and had to rights in law to refuse. He got better after the courtroom drama of that episode
57) "I really, really wish that you'd come here on my day off". And so the doctor explains what Maddox was up to
58) Twins then. That explains the necklace. Also explains how they get Isa Briones into more episodes
59) Back out to space, and whatever passes for Romulan territory in 2397
60) Harry Treadaway's Narek there looking a lot like Ethan Peck's Spock
61) And here's Dahj's sister Soji
62) Oh boy. Borg structure
63) And now a preview of the series to come. Dis gon' be good...

Well, that was more like it.

With Star Trek: Discovery, I was dismayed. Dismayed and angry. Trek had gone dark before, particularly with Deep Space Nine. But it always retained some optimism about the future. STD simply felt like a generic grimdark sci-fi series that someone had vaguely adapted to serve as Star Trek. With only a few exceptions, the acting was awful. With even fewer exceptions, the writing and dialogue were worse. Plot holes large enough to be seen from the Moon. Continuity both with the rest of Trek and with itself constantly violated. People who the story said were clever, doing dumb things for dumb reasons, and the story never telling us why. But it found an audience, and at a certain point you start thinking 'well, maybe it is just nostalgia, maybe this is Star Trek now'.

Then Star Trek: Picard was announced. And in spite of the bruising experience of STD a spark flickered in my brain saying "they'll get this one right". Lord knows I had precious little reason to think that, given how wretched STD had been. But if I had faith in nothing else I had faith in Patrick Stewart. And boy did he not disappoint.

The writing

The story and teleplay for this episode were by James Duff, with writing from Michael Chabon, Alex Kurtzman and Kirsten Beyer. Now, to say that I haven't been fond of Kurtzman and Beyer's work on STD would be understating things somewhat. So I can only conclude that either they've been to classes, or Chabon and Duff did good enough work that they couldn't hurt it.

I thought originally that with the episode being only a shade over 40 minutes long after the season preview is lopped off the end that it might end up feeling rushed. Not a bit of it. The story pacing was bang on - quiet, slower moments when it needed to be reflective, fast and noisy when things needed to be urgent. Contrast with the season 2 finale of STD, and the action grinding to a halt while two characters have an incredibly boring conversation that doesn't need to be had and at a time when speed was really of the essence.

I said in my commentary above that this is a Picard who has fallen into the same quicksand that Kirk did ahead of "The Wrath of Khan". Without starship command, life for him doesn't have a purpose. And, like Kirk, Picard decides after events giving him a nudge that 'bugger it, I am not done yet'. The episode started with Picard having retreated into a much smaller world. He had his vineyard, and his dog, and a couple of friends. And while this is a different Picard to when he was last seen, he's believably different. Then the news interview dredged up painful memories that he'd mostly turned his back on. Dahj rocks up needing his help. A mystery to be solved, one that involves his friend, a man who sacrificed his life for Picard. And we see that in other ways, he's exactly the same old Picard. Ready to investigate a puzzle, ready to dispense wisdom, ready to get righteous and stand up and say what needs to be said.

Continuity, visually and with TNG

I am a fiend for continuity in Trek. Mostly because, until recently, it had managed to show over 200 years of history without stumbling all that badly. And here was where things could have gone wrong. Because the STD approach had been...well, there's no way to put it kindly really is there?

So far it seems as though this series follows in the footsteps of the TNG movies with things like the LCARS graphics, the ship aesthetics, even the costuming - though they seem to have reverted to a similar uniform colour scheme to the TV series. And then the crowing moment for me, Picard goes to his storage room at the Starfleet archives. There's the model of the Stargazer, his first command. The model of the Enterprise-E's captains yacht. And the Captain Picard Day banner from "The Pegasus". The showrunners didn't feel the need to muck around with the look of any of it. Good for them. Let's see how they do for the rest of the series.

Acting

Of the cast that we've seen in the story so far I have no complaints. None. Isa Briones is great as Dahj, a scared young woman who doesn't understand what has happened to her but knows what she has to do. Jamie McShane and Orla Brady play Picard's Romulan friends Zhaban and Laris, and are very believable as an alien couple who clearly feel great affection for Picard, and that they owe a debt of gratitude to him for attempting to save their culture. I will say that Brady plays the most Irish Romulan seen on Trek yet, but we can simply say that she learned Federation Standard from an Irishman. Or the universal translator renders her native Romulan accent as Irish for some reason :p Dr Jurati is played by Alison Pill, and we haven't seen much of her yet. But she plays the part of a scientist relegated from practical work to the theoretical very well, getting the weary resignation to her fate across. It looks as though Jean-Luc Picard is about to shake her up out of that, though.

And what of Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner, the only returning character actors we've seen so far? As I noted in my commentary, Brent Spiner still has the Data voice nailed. Yes, he's aged since the last film. He'd aged a lot from "Encounter At Farpoint" to "Nemesis" anyway. But we're also only seeing him in Picard's dreams, so it's easy to imagine that he might look a little 'off'. Close your eyes, and you simply see Data from TNG. And Patrick Stewart...as I've said above, this is a Picard that is both quite different in some ways and exactly the same man in others as in TNG. And Stewart plays him so ******* well. It's ridiculous how good he is.

Visual effects and sets

Something that all Trek has done, even STD, has been to keep Earth locations looking fairly consistent. San Francisco has all the hallmarks you'd expect. Paris and Boston look like believable 24th century versions of those places. And the Picard family vineyard in La Barre looks quite a lot like it did in TNG's "Family". Top marks.

Space, or at least what we've seen of it so far, looks stunning. The CGI Enterprise-D is pretty good, though doesn't quite match up to the 4ft model created for TNG season 3 onwards in my eyes. What can I say, I like model shots for Trek starships rather than CGI :)

Concluding remarks

If anything I might be a bit more angry about STD now. Because Star Trek: Picard looks like it's going to show that you can indeed still make a good Star Trek show in this day and age. If they can keep the writing standard up, and the rest of the ensemble cast turns out as good as the people we've seen so far (and I've got no reason to assume that they won't) then this series will be a winner.

Can't wait for next week! :D

Regarding y'alls warp speed conversation...

Warp factor cubed x speed of light was the scale in TOS (so Warp 1 is the speed of light, 2 is 8 times C, 3 is 27C, 4 is 64C, 5 is 125C and so on). In TNG they made it a little more complicated :) Additionally, there seem to be areas of space where a given warp factor is quicker than in others (to take account of the occasional mistake/brainfade in the scripts).
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I laughed when I saw you had spent so much time writing thoughts as you watched the episode but the more I read the more I enjoyed it. Seriously hope you'll do this for the next episode.

Do you by any chance use a mechanical keyboard that feels glorious to type on, because you should if you don't.
 
Because many have the memory of goldfish in here. Thats how Data died 18 years ago...... Nothing physical left of him.

So the whole plot goes out of the window and anyone swallows this idiocy has no understanding of Star Trek.
Let alone this series goes against 3 TNG episodes and 2 DS9 who had similar "plot" and half the Federation directives.
 
@Panos

Yes, thanks for that. I actually had remembered that Data died at the end of "Nemesis" because I was paying attention. Were you?

So Picard goes to Okinawa to meet Dr Jurati. She relays to him what Bruce Maddox was working on after Picard shows her Dahj's necklace. But she never says when Maddox started working on the idea AFAIK. It could have been while Data was still alive (TNG established after "The Measure Of A Man" that Data maintained contact with Maddox to help him with his research into artificial life).

If Data and Maddox were doing research into this 'fractal neuronic cloning' before Data's death then they might have extracted something from the android's positronic net. Perhaps using a similar technique to the one Data used when constructing Lal in "The Offspring".

Anyway, just wild guessing until a few more episodes air to answer questions :)
 
Panos said:
Because many have the memory of goldfish in here. Thats how Data died 18 years ago...... Nothing physical left of him.

So the whole plot goes out of the window and anyone swallows this idiocy has no understanding of Star Trek.
Let alone this series goes against 3 TNG episodes and 2 DS9 who had similar "plot" and half the Federation directives.
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If you actually watch it you will realise that Data remained in contact with Maddox, how else do you think Dahj looks like the girl in the painting, do you think he was stalking data and broke into his quarters to take a photo of it? And as for the earlier comment about DNA, there is no mention of DNA. They talked about positronic signatures & code which were obtained well before he was vaporised.
 
I'll swallow the "idiocy" because its a really good program and i'm enjoying it. Seriously, just sit and enjoy it!
 
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