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Friday, January 31, 2020

Star Trek: Picard

1. Out of curiosity, I saw the pilot episode of Star Trek: Picard. I did it in part because the pilot episode can be viewed for free. If I cared enough, I could view the second episode for free by taking out the temporary subscription, then canceling it, but I don't care that much. It's not really fair to judge a series by the pilot episode, but I'll do it anyway. I was never planning to watch the entire series. 

2. I've been viewing Star Trek on and off since 1966. TNG was arguably the most successful of the spinoffs (some Trekkies prefer DS9), so if you're going to exhume one of the spinoffs, that's the obvious candidate. 

3. The newest iteration of the franchise is a star vehicle for Stewart. It will succeed or fail based on his ability to center it. Pushing 80, he looks and sounds his age. In his prime he was a larger-than-life stage actor squeezing into the role of a TV actor. You could often see the frustration as he had to hold so much in reserve. Occasionally he had a scene where he was free to cut loose and perform on a theatrical scale, but that was rare.

Now his situation is the opposite. At his age the reserves are gone. That sets a low ceiling in his ability to rise above a certain dynamic range. 

The Picard character was never all that sympathetic. Aloof and rulebound. For someone who made his career exploring alien civilizations, he was quite narrow, chauvinistic, and intolerant. He treated the Starfleet code of conduct as a universal norm. In one episode, Worf's wife is murdered. Worf exacts revenge by slaying her assailant. That's the Klingon honor code, but Picard disapproves.

However, Stewart's aging process has mellowed Picard. It lends poignancy to the character. 

In that regard, it's striking to compare Stewart, in his prime, playing an old man in "All Good Things…" to Stewart as an old man. Despite his formidable acting chops, Stewart's attempt to play his older self wasn't very prescient or convincing when you compare it to the real elderly Stewart. 

There is a certain irony in the fact that Chris Pine has been bypassed to go back Stewart and TNG. Especially for atheists, there's sentimental appeal to watching beloved actors over the years reprise old roles. Since they deny the afterlife, it gives them a sense of rootedness in their past.  

4. There's a silly fight scene at Stardleet Archives where a female android singlehandedly protects Picard from Romulan terrorists. Doesn't the Starfleet complex have surveillance and security? Can't they scramble/beam armed guards to the fight scene?

5. Picard is having paranormal/precognitive dreams. How does he have that ability? Will the source of his dreams be explained? Is this like hive mind telepathy, where his dreams are subconsciously tapping into other (alien?) minds? Even if that's the case, it wouldn't explain paranormal/precognitive dreams about androids, since their "minds" operate on a different basis, a different wavelength. 

6. The series will have guest stars like Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine. That betrays a certain lack of confidence on the part of the TV producers. She was the actress/character who rescued Voyager from ratings oblivion, so it's understandable that the producers wish to include her, but her character doesn't belong in the TNG timeline. 

7. The episode suffers from tired plot ideas. Data gave his "life" to save Picard. One goal is to revive Data. But was his positronic mind/memories destroyed? Is he gone forever? 

That recycles The Search of Spock, where Spock gave his life to save the crew. Can he be restored? They have a new body, but what about his mind? Vulcans have a soul or katra. But did he transfer his consciousness to someone else (McCoy) before he died? And can the T'Pau reunite the soul to the body? 

8. Another tired plot idea is the destruction of homeworlds. In Generations, a probe collapses the Veridian sun, wiping out inhabited planets in its solar system. In The Undiscovered Country, an explosion on Praxis dissolves the ozone layer of Kronos. In Star Trek (2009), Vulcan is destroyed by an artificial black hole inside planet. Now, in Star Trek: Picard, Romulus is destroyed when its sun goes supernova. This is lazy screenwriting. 

9. In addition, the destruction of homeworlds suffers from a tension in SF metaphysics: time-travel. In a genre where time-travel is feasible, the obvious, easy solution to the destruction of your homeworld is to go back in time and change a key variable, thereby averting the cataclysm and restoring the status quo ante.

10. Admittedly, it might not be possible to prevent a supernova, but that goes to another scientific absurdity. A sun doesn't go supernova overnight. Surely Romulus would become uninhabitable long before its sun went supernova, at that late stage in its lifecyle. So the Romulans had plenty of lead-time to evacuate and colonize another M-class planet.

11. Time-travel poses a dilemma for the SF genre. On the one hand it's one of the most appealing conventions of the genre, because it's such a nifty way to illustrate and explore hypothetical or counterfactual scenarios. On the other hand, the principle is too powerful, too flexible. If feasible, it would be overused and have a radically destabilizing effect. It would obliterate historical continuity as plenary or cosmic history keeps resetting to create alternate timelines that replace the last timeline. So SF writers are arbitrarily selective about the convention. 

12 comments:

  1. The idea that there are time policers in the Star Trek universe has been mentioned or alluded to a number of times. For example, in the TNG episodeCaptain's Holiday where Picard and Vash are looking for the Tox Uthat. There the "time cops" are actually criminals. In the TNG episode A Matter of Time, the thief played by Matt Frewer claimed that there are future temporal observers and visitors who travel to the past and who are careful not to change the timeline.

    More specifically, Voyager's two-part episode Future's End as well as episode Relativity explicitly refers to these time policers/patrolers. In the former Captain Braxton is captain of the Federation Timeship Aeon. In the other the Timeship Relativity.

    Here's a link to a review of the Picard pilot from The Dave Cullen Show that I have substantial agreement with:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7c551s_Cd4

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    1. Problem with the time cop solution is that if time-travel was realistic, it would be too tempting to too many groups and individuals for a ban to be enforceable. That would only work by positing an alien species so intellectually and technologically superior to all the other species that it could monitor all the advanced alien races and individuals to prevent/destroy the development of time-machines.

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    2. The final minutes of the Cullen review make some interesting observations about how nihilism is infiltrating Hollywood fare. That's the logical outcome of a post-Christian society.

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    3. //Problem with the time cop solution is that if time-travel was realistic, it would be too tempting to too many groups and individuals for a ban to be enforceable.//

      Yeah, I've often thought about that too. Even the time patrollers might need to be patrolled, and them patrolled...ad infinitum.

      //The final minutes of the Cullen review make some interesting observations about how nihilism is infiltrating Hollywood fare. That's the logical outcome of a post-Christian society. //

      I suspect that Cullen isn't a Christian. But even he's aware of how much progressivism and wokeness has infiltrated modern Sci Fi. Many of his comments in his other videos could be spoken by a Christian.

      The Vandalization of Star Trek
      https://youtu.be/Qo_A3vXHmVM

      The Wokeness of Modern Star Trek
      https://youtu.be/WRyyxxYdqcc

      The Vandalization of Star Wars
      https://youtu.be/K-GxIoQPXPg

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  2. Just tidbits to add to Steve's fine review of the pilot:

    1. I've seen the first two episodes. I think there have only been two. One per week. However, it seems to me they've really filmed the episodes to be binged. In any case, in a binge watching age, they should seriously consider just dropping all the episodes at one time. Like Netflix routinely does.

    2. I presume the showrunners are trying, on the one hand, to satisfy old Trekkies, while, on the other hand, reaching out to a new generation. (Well, that's probably true of almost any similar tv series.) Hence why they went with the Romulan supernova since (at least as far as I know) the supernova wasn't part of canon, per se, but only came in with JJ Abrams' reboot. If so, I guess they're going with the rebooted timeline. Not to mention I assume that's why they've recycled various past Trek plot elements. Maybe studio execs think it's a tried and true formula? Or maybe I'm just making excuses for their lazy writing.

    3. Good points about time travel! Time travel especially in Star Trek is highly "illogical". There are ways to creatively limit the use of time travel, but the writers don't seem very creative!

    4. Old man Picard. He certainly looked and acted his age. I guess there's no way around it. Presumably Stewart knows this since his last few memorable characters have been reflective old men contemplating the meaning of life, dying, etc. Stewart did a fine job as an old Professor X in the movie Logan. (For that matter, so did Hugh Jackman as an old and dying Wolverine.) So I presume old man Picard is intentional since it's not as if there's any other choice for him. Problem is that means Picard as a show might be good as a one-off kind of a show. A single season showing an aging, dying Picard. But it looks like it's been renewed for a second season!

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  3. Time travel in TOS and TOS Movies seemed to not change anything but fill some causal role necessary for things to turn out as they do in the 23rd century.Also, they time travel many times: the time gate, going around the sun at warp.

    Also there are like several replica earths in TOS. One Christianity is emerging in 23rd century (20th century tech on that planet). One was wiped by plague. One with the tribal post nuclear war Comms and Yangs. Good thing Kirk knows his American history. Never hear about those earths again.

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  4. (some Trekkies prefer DS9)

    I can't believe this.

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    1. For what it's worth, if anything, here's one data point: I had a roommate who was a huge Star Trek fan. He had watched and read virtually the whole of Star Trek. He always maintained DS9 was the best of all the shows and certainly his favorite. He made the following distinction: people who like scifi in general like TNG best but people who like Star Trek like DS9 best.

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    2. (Speaking for myself, I prefer TNG.)

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    3. I liked TNG a lot, and I thought Voyager was a good pick-up of that world. DS9 seemed like another world. I even liked Enterprise a lot, but I thought that they ran into trouble trying to create different species by rearranging the bumps on the faces.

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    4. I heard the final two seasons of Enterprise were good. That's when the series finally came into its own. But many Trekkies had dropped out by then.

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    5. Steve, yeah, it did take a while to get the series started. You had mentioned time travel. There was one episode where the crew of the Enterprise traveled forward in time to Enterprise "C". It was pretty funny, because they used the set from the original series, and yet, the crew was marveling over the advanced technology. It was pretty funny, and I'd imagine they had a pretty good laugh on the set!

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