Star Trek

Yeah, the problem I have with both Discovery and Picard's first season were that Trek overall presented itself as both aspirational and inspirational, something I found lacking. Pike brought some of that back for Season 2 of Discovery (which is why I have hopes for Strange New World) but it kind of fell apart again in Season 3 due to the "Andromeda Redux" issues. Haven't seen Season 4. Picard side-stepped the issue entirely in Season 2 with alternate timeline shenanigans but was let down by pacing issues.

Raffi's back story does baffle me, I have to agree with you there.

Seven's backstory, I think I would have preferred it if Seven just plain didn't get along with Starfleet and left of her own accord. Most of the latter half of Voyager is Seven accepting Starfleet on her terms. And Starfleet hasn't been afraid to accept people who pose potential risks due to no fault of their own so I think Starfleet would at least consider offering a position.

But I also accept that a great big fear of the Borg is a nessicary part of the setting's world building.

It feels both resonable and hypocritical, because on the one hand there's lots of voyager plots where Seven's nano probes act unpredictably and that puts the ship in danger, but there's also lots of episodes about how the biology of other star fleet regulars can act unpredictably and put everyone in danger.

Like, you can make an argument that Seven is dangerous, but that same argument can be made of Luxana Troi.

I might be willing to buy bias against ex-Borg, but (putting aside Picard, who was only assimilated for a little while and in Starfleet beforehand) they let in Icheb, whose backstory is basically Seven's, except he was rescued a little younger and proved himself less frequently.

Personally, I'd have just gone with 'I spent the first half of my life as a literal cog in a machine, I didn't want to be part of another machine, even a nice one. The Rangers let me do my own thing, but helped when they could, more family than army.'

Edited by ECD on May 19th 2022 at 3:16:01 AM

That's exactly the mind set I would expect from Seven. I had assumed in series 1 that Star Fleet was just too rigid for Seven.

Edit: Utter change in topic, I've been speculating what kind of continuity could appear in ST:SNW, I doubt the show will spend much time on continuity and guest appearences as it seems the show has it's own character arcs to focus on,

But I can't help but think that we've never seen first contact with the Cardassians depicted.

Also we know Emmony Dax interacted with a young Lenard Mc Coy, so I would love to see Dax, even if she's a gymnast at this point (though I think the one after Emmony is a politician?)

Mostly I'd really like to see T'pol. Being the first vulcan to serve on a human ship she surely has something to say to Spock. Not to mention because the writers of Enterprise never got around to revealing she was half Romulan I would love to see that depicted.

Edited by Whowho on May 19th 2022 at 11:22:23 AM

I think there's a fairly straightforward line for Seven's story that actually works quite well. Starfleet's Admirals were against Seven joining because she was a Borg, Janeway threatened to resign, Seven refused to let her, Janeway becomes an Admiral instead, and janeway lets Icheb in Starfleet Academy. Which fits all the characters involved and is actually a moment of heartwarming.

Icheb was killed, yes, and that's presumably why Seven's ex is on Freecloud and not in the Federation.

That one is not even speculative. Raffi looked into the disaster at Mars and came up with the insane (but correct) theory the Romulans did it.

And presumably Admiral Oh fired her for it.

Hence why she was court martialed and is now living in a trailer at Vasquez Rocks.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 19th 2022 at 3:49:04 AM

One thing Picard absolutely does well is move away from some of the worst fanservice elements of Seven's presentation and I'd be interested in their version of T'pol. The world building elements of Picard, I generally quite dislike, but I mostly enjoyed the character work.

Well, minor nitpick, Oh was a commodore at the end of her Starfleet career, never an admiral. And it seems unlikely she had the pull 14 years earlier to have Raffi court martialed for...what? Speculating about potential Romulan involvement in an attack on the Federation?

But more critically, I recommend rewatching the scene. Seriously, the sequence is, he goes in, says 'accept my plan, or I resign.' They reject it, he resigns, he goes out and tells Raffi, she tries to get him to come up with another solution, he doesn't, she gets a call and says: "That's great. You tender your resignation and my ass gets fired." There was no time for her to raise a stink about anything. Now, maybe she was wrong and wasn't getting fired at that time (also, side note, there's no indication anywhere else that Starfleet officers can just be fired at a whim), but we certainly don't see any evidence that she was wrong.

This radically overstated what happens in the latest episode.

Edited by ECD on May 19th 2022 at 4:59:11 AM

STRANGE NEW WORLDS III will be controversial because it dives headlong into the idea that the Federation finds augmented humans to be disgusting and they are subject to violence as well as prejudice.

Una is the augmented one, not La'an.

The Federation forbids Augmented species members.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 19th 2022 at 3:53:15 AM

Regardless of spoilers, augments being a big problem for the federation has a long precidant. In Deep Space 9 it's shown that the only method the Federation has to stop people from practicing eugenics is to threaten the people with prison and exclusion.

Though it always seems to be needlessly cruel on the augmented rather than focusing on the people who did the augmenting.

In TOS and original moves, it made a bit more sense that they'd react like that (the Eugenics Wars were apparently really bad), but the newer stuff has been stuck with making what the Eugenics Wars actually were vaguer and vaguer.

As much as I liked Red Letter Media I’m the first to see that their criticism towards Picard is in many cases excessive or based on cherry picking and they’re clearle alreay pre-disposed to hate the show. In some cases they even take it against the shows for things that they got wrong.

But they do have some legit criticism and I think it does acknowledges a lot of what was said here.

-Helping the Romulans being controversial among the Federation because they “its oldest enemies” make no sense as the relationships between the two were already normalizing and they were recently allies during the Dominion War. Is more like the producers didn’t knew other recurrent villains. Cardassians or Founders would have been a better option. Maybe they wanted to save on make-up. -Raffi’s backstory indeed doesn’t work because the Federation is supposed to not have poverty or need for money. How does she “lost” her pension? What pension? Of course you can handwave that as is often done in the Headscratchers but is still pretty contradictory.

Despite being indeed a copy of Mass Effect’s plot I still enjoyed Picard S1 more than S2 which felt pretty sloppy. Giving Picard childhoods traumas at 90 felt forced and the episodes felt disconnected but not in the good way, more like if the writers were throwing everything to the wall and see what sticks.

I have my problems with Lower Decks specially for the fantasy elements that is introducing to canon, but is indeed much more Trek-like than two of the three live action shows.

You can blame the Romulus stuff on JJ Abrams. If he hadn't used that as backstory in the 2009 movie, they likely would have gone with something else.

The Cardassians and the Founders would be non-starters though. Something that threatened Cardassia like that would also threaten Bajor (where the Federation would focus) and the Founders would do anything to avoid asking for help from the Federation, especially in that timeframe.

Also, the Romulans are kind of the only major established culture secretive enough that something like the Zhat Vash makes sense.

The Founders point could be, but I disagree with the Cardassians. They are also secretive and the catastrophe doesn't have to be sun going nova. Besides in the case of Romulus there's still the issue that they are a vast interstellar empire and sounds unlikely they didn't had the resources themselves to transport their people to other areas specially considering that they already have hundreds of colonies and a fleet, while Cardassia was crippled after the Dominion War.

The backstory set out in the 2009 movie doesn't make any sense to begin with, to be honest. Like...Hobus exploded and threatened a whole quadrant? How? Also, what the fuck is Red Matter? How does the Federation have it? And, also, why does Spock's ship look like that? It looks like absolutely nothing the Federation has ever made and it definitely looks nothing like Vulcan designs.

It's a huge continuity snarl and, I want to note, Picard has completely ignored everything but the supernova itself. Spock isn't mentioned, the Red Matter is certainly not mentioned, it's pretty obvious that CBS just kind of...wrote off literally everything else because it was too much of a pain to deal with.

But that's JJ Abrams for you. The guy has this...fundamental lack of curiosity and his approach to stuff is just rearranging existing stuff with the occasional inexplicable and unexplained thing to paper over the cracks.

Edited by Zendervai on May 19th 2022 at 12:52:06 PM

I wouldn't call the star exploding and Spock having a peculiar ship and red matter a continuity snarl, as that stuff takes place in the 24th century, not the 23rd. That's stuff that takes place after the events of DS 9 and Voyager. There's just some off screen adventures leading up to that event that I'm happy to have left up to the imagination.

Also, dang, Spock being the one trusted to do the mission is really poetic considering how much effort he put into bringing peace between Vulcans and Romulans in his later career.

Romulus exploding collapsing the Romulan Empire isn't a continuity error either. In virtually every single series, Earth is depicted as a place that the destruction of will end the Federation despite it supposedly being a vast interstellar civilization. Also, that there's only one ship to defend it many times.

And "vast interstellar Empire" in Trek is more like 30 worlds not thousands ala Star Wars.

So Romulus exploding is like Athens being destroyed in the Hellenstic League. It's not like Romulans are extinct either, they just have lost any cohesion and it's the same thing they did in STAR TREK ONLINE.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 19th 2022 at 10:40:33 AM

Agree.

I don't remember that has ever being established that Earth's destruction would bring the end of the Federation. It will make a big blow but never had the impression that the whole Federation would collapse afterwards. The closest example I remember is the Praxis moon explotion crippling the Klingons but their empire did not just vanished they just had a major energy crisis forcing them to end their arms race for economic reasons.

Anyway, even if the Romulan nova disaster is correct in causing their collapse there's still loose ends as, for example why would be so controversial to help one the Federation's recent allies and who have an entire movement of re-unification between them and Vulcans. It just feels like whoever choose the Romulans never saw beyond TOS. If they wanted to give the message that Federation citizens would be, at least in large numbers, oppose to help and recieve refugees of an enemy there were other much more potable enemy races, like, you know, the actual genocidal fascists that conquest their Bajoran allies and massacred their own Federation citizens aka Maguis. Not the ones that help them defeat the Dominion and have their cousins living in Federation space.

I mean the controversy is that they would build ANOTHER fleet after having the one they already built destroyed and an entire planet destroyed. I don't see why it's even immoral to focus on rebuilding yourself and not devote any more resources after something like that. People keep forgetting the Federation DID attempt to help and then had a cataclysmic tragedy happen.

Mind you, I find the Romulans much-much more threatening than the Cardassians and imagine feelings in the Federation would be more against them than the Cardassians. After all, the Federation was formed in response to the Romulan threat as seen with ENT.

The Cardassians were just the minions of the Dominion.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 19th 2022 at 12:05:42 PM

Even if the Romulan empire still exists, there's no way their colonies are going to be built to accommodate the population of both their homeworlds, which are going to have populations in a tens of billions.

If all 8 million inhabitants of London got evacuated, the rest of the 52 million aren't going to be able to accommodate their population suddenly increase by a sixth.

This is why refugees always end up reaching quite a distance from even regional crisis.

That part of the rebuilding fleet sure, is totally true.

About the other thing, well the issue is not so much that they are a menace, caused the same logic applied to the Klingon when the went through something similar. There has been increasingly friendly relations with the Romulans since the TNG era, thus the idea of such backlash for helping the Romulans felt, for me at least, weird. Almost like if whoever choose it only has a very light knowledge of Star Trek and has only seen or TOS or some scattered episodes of all shows and the movies.

With the Cardassians would have been more natural, as many Federation citizens are Bajoran -assuming Bajor is not already a Federation member- and ex Maguis. Thus it would have made for much easier tensions than a former war ally with strong ethnic links inside. But if the Carsassians do not work there's plenty of other vilain races.

I think the choosing of the Romulans apart from the aforementioned that they were the main antagonists in the Abrams' reboot and probably they wanted to keep track of the fans of those movies, for me probably comes from two possible reasons; saving in make-up or having a very slim knowledge of Trek lore and only knowing the more famous villains -them and the Borg which they couldn't use in that way-.

Edited by Dgon on May 19th 2022 at 12:23:31 PM

I mean, when last we left the Romulans in Star Trek, the Romulans had attempted to build a dreadnought to exterminate every man, woman, and child on Earth under Shinzon.

Yes, Picard predicts a softening of relations.

But the whole point is Picard is wrong.

The Romulans were also the primary villain on TNG despite the Borg being more famous.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 19th 2022 at 12:36:21 PM

The events of Nemesis logically would sour the increasing relations given that the are preceded by a fake peace offering.

It's not Picard or Abrams which spat in the face of progress towards peace with the Romulans, it was Nemesis. And unless you want to back track, you kind of have to hold onto that. Putting the Romulans into a refugee crisis seems like an interesting progression to me.

Hmmm not sure yet. The attack on Nemesis was done by a rogue faction lead by a human with a crew of Remans after a coup.

Edited by Dgon on May 19th 2022 at 2:16:58 AM

I mean it's a "rogue faction" that was composed of the rulers of the Romulan Empire of the time and supported by the military in their coup.

That's about as rogue as Dukat when he was ruler of Cardassia.

SNW episode 3: So I guess Scotty got the idea to stick himself in a transporter as a form of stasis in Relic from M'Benga

I was mostly okay with this episode, but did we ever get an explanation for why he needed to do that secretly? It's basically medical stasis for a sick child, why would it need to be a secret? Is it just no children onboard? If so, that...honestly makes sense and wouldn't they be better off and just as able to read up on new medical developments on a planet or starbase?

Worried me a bit as it felt like secrecy for the sake of misdirecting the audience, not something that arose out of character motivations I understood.