Star Trek: Picard

I don’t like that there are no Starfleet ships. I read years ago that the ships were just as much characters of the shows as the crew, I always thought that was true. Seems to have been lost over the years.
 
Spit said:
I don’t like that there are no Starfleet ships. I read years ago that the ships were just as much characters of the shows as the crew, I always thought that was true. Seems to have been lost over the years.
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Many things have been lost over the years sadly :(
 
Spit said:
I don’t like that there are no Starfleet ships. I read years ago that the ships were just as much characters of the shows as the crew, I always thought that was true. Seems to have been lost over the years.
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All we got was a half assed copy\paste of the same ship over and over. Since when has the federation ever had that many identical ships deployed at once? It's usually a smattering of different designs. i think everyone was expecting the Enterprise to show up as well, but nope.
 
Gerard said:
All we got was a half assed copy\paste of the same ship over and over. Since when has the federation ever had that many identical ships deployed at once? It's usually a smattering of different designs. i think everyone was expecting the Enterprise to show up as well, but nope.
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Trig said:
Yeah that was a bit naff tbh
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Like I said though, you're never going to get the variety that we used to see because modern high definition television isn't going to hide the mold lines, rough castings and marker pen nacelles.

And to try and do six or seven different designs in CGI that will hold up to 4K TV, for a single scene in a single episode...not a runner :)

***edit***

I read this guy's reviews and have done for a while. And I have to say, for those here who were wondering what this season was about - Jamahl has nailed it, IMO.

So, now that I see the full picture, I realize what season one of Star Trek: Picard is actually about.

It's not about the Romulan refugee crisis. It's not about the reclamation project going on in the derelict Borg cube. It's not about the Zhat Vash or the Tal Shiar or undercover Romulan commodores, or the attack on Mars or the synth ban. It's not about catching up with Hugh or Riker or Troi or Seven, or about Soji learning her true identity, or Raffi drinking and vaping all the time, or Rios and his holograms, or everyone trying to track down Bruce Maddox only so that Agnes could kill him, or about the robot apocalypse.

Oh, sure, it was sometimes very much about all those things. But, ultimately, it wasn't about them. Thematically, emotionally, spiritually — nah. I see now that all those things were basically very elaborate and prolonged MacGuffins. The means to an end. They don't matter, except to fill 10 episodes of screen time, to distract us, to misdirect us, and hopefully entertain us along the way (with variable degrees of success).

No, what this season of Star Trek: Picard is actually about is Picard saying goodbye to Data.

I've gotta say, the fact we came all this way to learn this is what it's actually about is, to me, nothing short of a total writer's coup. This is audacious. It's heartfelt and sincere. It turns the plot on its head and makes everything about this one personal moment. It reveals something about this show's writers that my cynicism just last week would not have thought was possible, given how mechanical everything was shaping up to be. Credit where credit is due. I did not see this coming in quite this way.

There is plot, and then there is story. I think Roger Ebert once said something along the lines of: Plots are about things that happen; stories are about people who behave. This season had a lot of plot. The story essentially provides the bookends, where Picard gets, and provides, closure for Data.
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JRS said:
I read this guy's reviews and have done for a while. And I have to say, for those here who were wondering what this season was about - Jamahl has nailed it, IMO.
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It's a shame so many people probably gave up and never got to see it. It's not surprising if there's only 30-60 good minutes out of nine hours of TV. It's a shame the showrunners resorted to padding to fill the time, instead of having a good story. It disrespects the audience and the characters. It ceases to become about the art of telling a story, and all it's about selling the show, the merchandising, and making money.

The journey needs to be worth taking, not just the arrival at the destination. Otherwise you lose people along the way.
 
Steampunk said:
It's a shame so many people probably gave up and never got to see it. It's not surprising if there's only 30-60 good minutes out of nine hours of TV. It's a shame the writers resorted to padding to fill the time, instead of having a good story.

The journey needs to be worth taking, not just the arrival at the destination. Otherwise you lose people along the way.
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Agreed.
 
I enjpyed picard enough I guess but it was pretty meh imo.

the whole series storyline should have been done over 2-3 episodes not a whole season
 
Steampunk said:
It's a shame so many people probably gave up and never got to see it. It's not surprising if there's only 30-60 good minutes out of nine hours of TV. It's a shame the showrunners resorted to padding to fill the time, instead of having a good story. It disrespects the audience and the characters. It ceases to become about the art of telling a story, and all it's about selling the show, the merchandising, and making money.

The journey needs to be worth taking, not just the arrival at the destination. Otherwise you lose people along the way.
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I think my feelings for this season are like (if you play golf) that one shot you hit that will make you come back for more. You've had a pretty up and down game, started very well, but have been 6s and 7s after. But you've just holed out from 90 yards after a slightly wayward tee shot on the last. The Data send off was that for me. I'll be back for next season.

I would like to see more new Starfleet designs up close though! And enough of the mega fleets. Don't fall down the Star Wars rabbit hole. Diminishes from individual Starships which should be rare and extremely powerful things, that as someone said are characters in their own right. A loss of one should be like a character death. If anything that needs doing it seems to require 50+ of them to rock up. You lose a lot of story telling potential straight away. So what if a ship was just lost? There's 80 more of them.
Wolf 359 was meant to be devastating for the federation and that was, what? 30 ships down? DS9 got away with it because they'd show a hundered or so ships in huge fleets, but you had the impression that there was only a few of those and that was pretty much it.
 
Washout said:
I think my feelings for this season are like (if you play golf) that one shot you hit that will make you come back for more. You've had a pretty up and down game, started very well, but have been 6s and 7s after. But you've just holed out from 90 yards after a slightly wayward tee shot on the last. The Data send off was that for me. I'll be back for next season.
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I think I need more than that. It's not just the short attention span generation, it's the fact that you see good movies and TV shows, that you read great sci-fi books with fantastic stories, so it's easy to see where you are being short changed and palmed off with substandard story, characters and writing, but being distracted by shiny-shiny VFX. The investment is not worth the payback when there are so many other alternative uses for the precious minutes available for entertainment.

Washout said:
I would like to see more new Starfleet designs up close though! And enough of the mega fleets. Don't fall down the Star Wars rabbit hole. Diminishes from individual Starships which should be rare and extremely powerful things, that as someone said are characters in their own right. A loss of one should be like a character death. If anything that needs doing it seems to require 50+ of them to rock up. You lose a lot of story telling potential straight away. So what if a ship was just lost? There's 80 more of them.
Wolf 359 was meant to be devastating for the federation and that was, what? 30 ships down? DS9 got away with it because they'd show a hundered or so ships in huge fleets, but you had the impression that there was only a few of those and that was pretty much it.
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Big battles are spectacular, but need to be used wisely and sparingly. Kurtzman/Abrams Trek just throws a lot of stuff at the screen to dazzle the audience and distract them. "MOAR!! BIGGER!!" so it must be better. The writers have forgotten scenes (if they ever saw them) like the Enterprise refit reveal from "Star Trek The Motion Picture", or when Kirk self-destructs the Enterprise in "The Search For Spock". I don't think there has been a Trek show that hasn't had a special ship as not just the background, but as an ever present character. It's not just the set, it's the characters' home, it's the thing that fights with them to keep the crew alive, and ensures their continuing adventures. Tales of great journeys always include a ship or the like. The Enterprise is a direct descendent of the likes of the Argo.

Kurtzman Trek half-heartedly tried to do this with Discovery, but that had enough problems of it's own, and not really much time to get to know the ship, though we saw a guest appearance from the Enterprise. Picard didn't even bother at all, which I think is just another example of how Kurtzman Trek very much misunderstands what Trek is about.

I suppose we could sit down and figure out what the core of Trek is, things like the special ship, a semi-episodic structure, an ensemble cast, a hopefulness and exploration of the future, etc, and I wonder how we'd judge Picard beyond it's use of characters we know from TNG?
 
Gerard said:
The ds9 "nobody has shields but the defiant" battles. :p
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Particularly egregious in the otherwise-excellent "The Way of the Warrior" two-parter - single phaser blasts blowing up Bird of Prey type ships, photon torpedoes going straight through K't'ingas/D7s...:p
 
Steampunk said:
I think I need more than that. It's not just the short attention span generation, it's the fact that you see good movies and TV shows, that you read great sci-fi books with fantastic stories, so it's easy to see where you are being short changed and palmed off with substandard story, characters and writing, but being distracted by shiny-shiny VFX. The investment is not worth the payback when there are so many other alternative uses for the precious minutes available for entertainment.



Big battles are spectacular, but need to be used wisely and sparingly. Kurtzman/Abrams Trek just throws a lot of stuff at the screen to dazzle the audience and distract them. "MOAR!! BIGGER!!" so it must be better. The writers have forgotten scenes (if they ever saw them) like the Enterprise refit reveal from "Star Trek The Motion Picture", or when Kirk self-destructs the Enterprise in "The Search For Spock". I don't think there has been a Trek show that hasn't had a special ship as not just the background, but as an ever present character. It's not just the set, it's the characters' home, it's the thing that fights with them to keep the crew alive, and ensures their continuing adventures. Tales of great journeys always include a ship or the like. The Enterprise is a direct descendent of the likes of the Argo.

Kurtzman Trek half-heartedly tried to do this with Discovery, but that had enough problems of it's own, and not really much time to get to know the ship, though we saw a guest appearance from the Enterprise. Picard didn't even bother at all, which I think is just another example of how Kurtzman Trek very much misunderstands what Trek is about.

I suppose we could sit down and figure out what the core of Trek is, things like the special ship, a semi-episodic structure, an ensemble cast, a hopefulness and exploration of the future, etc, and I wonder how we'd judge Picard beyond it's use of characters we know from TNG?
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I agree. Look at the Wrath of Khan, such a fantastic and beautiful battle scene that even nearly 40 years later I can still watch over and over. At the end when the Enterprise is crippled and trying to get away still provokes real emotion, when the mains comes back online and she goes to warp you get a real sense of the speed she is capable of, a gorgeous scene of her powering away from danger through the vastness of space. The original films really treated the Enterprise as a character and a rare and awe-inspiring star ship.
 
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