#picard series spoilers

[spiderh0rse]

I have just watched the final episode of Picard. I find myself incredibly underwhelmed. The most excited I was the entire episode was at Picard plugging himself into what remained of the Collective. The comment about Jack having to choose to leave is a bit silly, but the portrayal of the Collective was at least somewhat similar to how Discovery plays it? Jack's description of the Collective was a bit lackluster. Sure, he's happy, but is that all? He's not lonely- but he's still just Jack? If there's individuality within the Colelctive it's hardly a collective at all?

I'm. Saddened by the destruction of the cube. I'm glad Janeway had an impact, she deserved for her virus to be successful to a point, but this feels a bit ridiculous. All of the Borg? All of them but this Cube, Jurati, and whatever that Discovery Cube was? (and that drone in Lower Decks, distant future. there's hope.)

jack is. such a dull chatracter. he feels generic and too headstrong, not a good foil or bridge officer to go with Seven in whatever they eventually make off of that situation, it doesn't make sense for him to have to chose to leave the collective at all? "he'll go into shock" my ass, other drones get foribly removed and function. what's so special about him, huh? director's favour?

I'm not thinking too clearly on this. I'm just mad.

[ireallyamabear]

The choice to put Una Chin-Reily on a Starfleet recruitment poster in the late 2370s seems a nod to the extraordinary person she is and her exemplary service, but Boimler’s enthusiasm for her as a personal hero cannot mask the fact of what Starfleet execs are really doing here: while it is Starfleet tradition to honour esteemed personnel from its centuries of history, we have to look at the poster as a product of its time: it seems clear that, shortly after the devastating death toll and the rapid militarisation of the Dominion War, putting a prominent figure of the Great Exploration Age - and notedly someone who had not served in the Klingon War - as the poster person for Starfleet is an indictment that contemporary young people of the Federation are not drawn to the service as it is in their time anymore.

Critically, Starfleet has to use somebody from a 120 years ago, a timeframe that would lap generations of even especially long lived member species like Vulcans or Denobulans, to attract new recruits. Boimler says himself that seeing Una as a representative and her motto - “Ad astra per aspera” was: “Uh, it was a really big reason why I joined.” Clearly there is a wealth of recognisable Starfleet officers from 2370 and onwards, but their entanglement in the Dominion War, or at least in the Borg threat makes them unsuitable as role models for people like Boimler who cannot help but associate these contemporaries with the horrors of war and intergalactic conflict. Thus, the retreat to a “safe” historical narrative, with Starfleet still being about peaceful exploration reflects the growing divide between the realities of a colonised galaxy, the ongoing need of new bodies to fill the posts on all those ships and space stations and the aspirations and values of young people today. In this essay I will question whether Starfleet can keep its promise of scientific integrity in the face of growing political unrest in the UFP and ask what “Number One” herself would have thought about-

[captaincrusher]

Star Trek: The Voyage home (1986)

Star Trek: Picard (2022)

[andrewckeeper]

LIDMF AI + PHOTOSHOP "Stab Trek"

[biblioflyer]

Evolving beyond your core conceits: risks and rewards.

Allowing a setting to grow while remaining recognizable and accessible to the audience is difficult. Too much of the wrong kind of changes can make a setting unusable for the themes and storytelling devices it started off with. It is, however, possible to grow without cheating the heroes of earned victories and without wholly divesting from core themes.

This is part 4 in a series of discussions about the pessimism of the X-Men setting, its origins, its consequences, and whether that’s even a fair assessment.

Part 1 laid out some of the core conceits of the setting.

Part 2 discusses theories of historical change.

Part 3 is about the messiness of allegories.

It's difficult to evolve beyond a setting’s original conceit without having to become something radically different, even unrecognizable.

I’m one of the people who started to lose interest when Stargate SG-1 moved beyond Earth as scrappy underdogs and essentially became a superpower, while still somehow being able to hide the entire program. Also it turns out that SG-1, regardless of the roster, always seemed to be exactly the right people in exactly the right place.

Committing to the bit has risks too.

The X-Files solved and then had to unsolve its core mystery multiple times, becoming ever more convoluted in an effort to ensure its gnostic pursuit of ever deeper mysteries did indeed have even more arcane conspiracies hiding behind the busted ones.

Core characters evolved in Supernatural, but after a few repetitions of the Winchester brothers gaining and then losing access to resources and networks of allies, it almost became a bit of a joke that everything always led back to the two living out of motels. Yet while the situation of the Winchesters wasn’t allowed to change much, the threat of each season had to be ever more cosmic. This ultimately resulted in a direct and extremely meta confrontation with the very force that ensured their lives always defaulted back to misery and watching any progress they made fall through their fingers.

The conceit of Star Trek’s Federation is that our contemporary flaws can be resolved, but to model solving its allegories for contemporary societal issues it has to periodically discover new -isms that have emerged within it that the Federation has rationalized away. 

Augment proscriptions are rationalized as protecting the egalitarian nature of the Federation and preventing the rise of superior beings with superior ambition, fully sentient artificial intelligence had a rocky road to recognition, people struggle with fully recognizing XBs as fellow victims of the Borg Collective rather than conflating them with the destruction and horror the Borg have perpetuated. 

There have been enough repetitions of the storyline that there is something rotten in the Federation that needs to be confronted and opposed that many (not I) feel like the Federation has undergone a very cynical deconstruction in the streaming era (although it would probably be more correct to say it started with DS9.) Which is part of why the “Magneto was right” discourse began to alarm me, because I associate it with the increased sense in the Trek fandom that the Federation is both rotten at its core and too naive to survive without the rot.

Kudos to Star Trek Discovery though for reliably shifting away from the “edgier” darker tone it began with and embracing the idealism of the TNG era. I realize there are those who look at a dark and fearful world full of war and revanchism and find it childish for fiction to be aggressively sunny, but I enjoy having a few things to watch here and there that stimulate my mind but don’t leave me drained and morose when the credits roll. I don’t mind good pessimism, but I never felt like Discovery was doing more than gesturing at more mature, emotionally and ethically complex themes in its early seasons. It's still not doing more than gesturing, but in my opinion it's no longer pretending to be more than thoughtful camp.

The Expanse novel-verse is one of the rare examples I can think of a setting that resolved one of its core conflicts, but still managed to be an effective vehicle for storytelling about many of the same themes. By the end of the original six book series, Earth and Mars are on the path to reconciliation and the Belters have won statehood and the means to prosperity. 

The sequel trilogy introduces a new nemesis that partly resets the setting, but critically the reset doesn’t put the Belters back under the boot of the Inners or restart the original cycle of violence. In many ways, Earth and Mars get a dose of what it’s like on the receiving end of imperialism.

In this way, the writers could still speak about war, cycles of violence, paranoia, various forms of oppression, and the difficult moral dilemmas of gray zone conflict but without victims becoming oppressors or having all of their gains rolled back.

Did you forget this was an article about X-Men, bub?

Which brings us back to X-Men.

Because X-Men is a setting dedicated to storytelling about oppression, a critical thing to remember is that things are not going to get better in any lasting way. 

Not because the message you are supposed to take away is that nothing can ever be better and trying to disrupt violence and humanize oppressed people is self defeating, but because showcasing oppression and the fight against it without it ever actually being resolved is its raison d’etre. 

Unlike the Expanse novels, the X-Men is not a closed storyline with a limited number of authors tightly controlling it. While specific iterations of X-Men could, in theory, make progress against the core human vs mutant conflict without rolling it back in a devastating way, there is an expectation that X-Men more broadly is a bit like Coke or Pepsi: consistency and recognition across all “products” is a baked in assumption. X-Men without the mutant vs human conflict could drift away from the otherwise very low barrier to entry for the audience.

The last installment will discuss how X-Men '97 does leave the door open to some things getting better even though the general state of affairs seems poised to get pretty bad.

[teaospin]

TREKKIES WE EATING GOOD THIS WEEK HUH?

THEY GAVE ME EVERYTHING AND MORE IN THIS EPISODE I CANT EVEN PUT IT INTO WORDS 🥹

[iamthecutestofborg]

I loved this ending

[ignisgalaxia]

Quick question

Why the fuck did Starfleet keep Picard’s corpse

[thesevenwondersofawitch]

I watched the Picard series finale

Going into this, I have chills 👀

Holy shit Seven looks hot as hell

AHHHHHHHH

She's so bad ass

Raffi my beloved 😍

Seven and Raffi looked at each other👀

Seven looks so done while the poor cook dude is explaining how his mom got sick and his brother got a hernia

"You got this." Just gonna think of her saying this whenever I feel like I'm struggling

AHHHH SHE'S ALL CAPTAINY AND I HAVE NO IDEA HOW RAFFI HASN'T JUMPED HER😂

Oh shit

Jack is consumed by the collective 👀

The little smile Beverly exchanged with Jean-Luc

Worf: "And I will make it a threesome."

Will Riker: "Do you even hear yourself?" Oh my god😂😂 I'm dead

That look between Deanna and Will😭

If anything happens to either of them I'm gonna cry

Aw, Beverly is gripping that computer so hard

"I can no longer be your captain. I have to be a father"

Oh no

Does that mean he's gonna take Jack's place and die😭

Picard: "Beverly. Lead me to our son."

I'm crying "You did everything right." Oh damn 😭

OH SHIT VOX

Jack looks kinda awesome as Vox

OH SHIT

BORG QUEEN

I got chills

I am so creeped out rn

AHHHHHHHH

Raffi is Seven's number one

I'm so happy

The looks they keep sharing

I'm screaming with how they're finishing each other's train of thought

That poor Cook 😭😂

OOOOOOO SEVEN IS GIVING A SPEECH

I will fight under her

Raffi called Seven captain

Picard to Borg Queen: "You are not his mother!" AWWWWWWWWWWWW HE WON'T LET BEVERLY BE FORGOTTEN

Damn, this queen is bitter

HOLY SHIT

Oh no

Worf. He got zapped

Hope he still lives

"I had no idea it was that heavy." 😂

"We can't do this forever." Feels like she could be talking about more than their ship fighting

But I could be reaching

The way that Beverly fought so well and ruthlessly, and everyone turned slowly to look at her 😂

Beverly: "A lots happened in the last 20 years"😂

"Swords are fun." They really are

"no computer not even my daughter could navigate us through this." Love how proud he(Geordi) is of his kid

YEAH DATA!

Data: *tells them to trust him*

Also Data, seconds later: "Here goes nothing."

Deanna: "Wait what do you mean here goes nothing." Oh I'd hold on if I were you Deanna

The way Deanna is confused about why she senses enjoyment, meanwhile Data is living the dream 😂

OH SHIT

The earth is undefended 👀

Oh. Shit.

THE TITAN IS EXPOSED 👀

Sisters that assimilate together stick together (the La Forge sisters moving around the ship)

Seven's look of defeat 😭

Aw, the look between Saffi

Oh hell😭

"destroy the cube we kill everyone on there." Shit, Deanna is gonna need so much therapy

Beverly looks so freaking heartbroken I want to hug her 😭

"Will, the moment we fire, you'll have a minute at most." The emotion in her voice 😭

OH MY GOD

Oh MY GOD

OH MY GOD

OH. MY. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD

Damn, it hurts even more watching this knowing that if Will, Picard, Jack and Worf die, Deanna will feel it

Picard to his son: "If you won't leave, I'll stay with you till the end. You have changed my life. Forever." Oh damn😭

HOLY SHIT THE way Jack starts ripping out everything to save his dad

Will to Deanna: "I love you Imazati. We'll be waiting, me and our boy."😭

I'm sobbing

"I know where they are." oh thank God

I'm loving how Deanna goes to the console

Me at Jack: You're not alone, together we stand, I'll be by your side, and I'll take your hand. KEEEP HOOOOLDING OONNNNNNNN

OH MY GOD

Awwwww, Seven giving Sydney a hug😭

Pretty awesome looking armor jack is wearing 😂

Deanna and Will are adorable

Awww, three bros, chilling in spinny chairs

TO SAY I'M SCREAMING AT THE CLIP OF RAFFI, SEVEN, AND THE LA FORGE GIRLS IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT

I love how Worf is just snoozing away 😂

There's still like 22 minutes left, so plenty of time for something to go wrong, but I'm gonna bask in this brief moment of happiness

Oh my god

BEVERLY IS AN ADMIRAL

TUVOK MY BOY

AHHHHHHHH

Seven and Tuvok are talking

Acting Captain Seven of Nine: "I'm resigning from Starfleet." Aw😭

Aw, Shaw was a lil bit, kinda nice😭

Seven's crying 😭

My girl

AHHHHHHHH

Chills

Tuvok: "Resignation denied, Captain"

Raffi got to video chat with her grandbaby🥺

"Strangest thing. My son Gabe, wants me to meet my granddaughter." I'm sobbing😭

Worf leaked the info for her😭

Hell, I'm sobbing

So hard

AWWWWWWWWWWWW he's hugging her😭

Deanna is counseling Data😭

Wonder if he'll meet Daj

Deanna: "We've gone by our time over an hour. Again."😂😂😂

I love how Deanna is searching for beach vacation spots while Data is going on and on 😭😂

"Same time tomorrow?"

"Yes, yes. Can't wait." Oh she's dreading it a bit

"Still batshit?"

"Stop it." I love them 😂

I wonder if Picard is gonna join Laris wherever she is

"I miss that voice." So do I 😭

"Admiral Picard, Admiral Crusher" AHHHHHHHHH

Ah, Jack is joining Starfleet, I'm sure that'll be a wise and interesting decision

"This is all you son, I'm very proud." AHHHHH

I just slapped my leg so hard

"We know your aversion to fanfare."😂

OH MY GOD

She's beautiful (the ship)

"Out." 😂

"Thank you Number One."

"You're so very welcome, Captain." I. Am. So HAPPY

I AM SO HAPPY

SO HAPPY

Jack's the special counselor to the Captain 😂 this is great

Raffi: "Your first official act of command."

Jack: "Writing the opening line to your legacy, so then, what will it be?"

ARE YOU KIDDING ME

I WANT TO KNOW MORE

Beverly is so drunk😂

Worf has an adorable voice 😂

A different planet vs Orlando?😂 How random

Oh my god I'm screaming

They're gonna play poker!!!

*slams down on table* I fold OK?

So ... Is Laris just chilling in a restaurant, waiting on Picard? 🤔

Feels like they forgot about her

HOLY SHIT

HoLy ShIt

The way it's an old pic of Gates and Patrick 😂

I love that Q is still alive 👀

Oh, I'm screaming. Like so much

This was so good and idk what I'm gonna do with myself now.

[nevertrulyset]

Can't believe (actually can) they brought Patrick Stewart back as Professor Xavier in that Doctor Strange movie only to have him quote himself from X-Men: Days of Future Past and then die violently like he did in Logan.

[cannibalspicnic]

So, I'm caught up on Picard.

[porgthespacepenguin]

barking mad (a North Star story)

Fandom: Star Trek: TNG Pairing: Jean-Luc Picard/Q Summary:

All Jean-Luc wants for Halloween is a quiet night trick-or-treating with his husband, his grandchildren, and his dog.

The universe has other plans.

Link to Ao3

[captaincrusher]

I haven't started watching Picard s3 yet but it bugs me that Seven was just swept up into Starfleet and Rios was suddenly a Starfleet Captain again.

The stories of both those characters were headed away from Starfleet. Starfleet was a big part of their lives, yes - but it was behind them. They had other things to do, other people to save. Not everything in the Star Trek universe is always about Starfleet and being in this quasi-military organization is not for everyone.

I assume Seven's Starfleet career is created for the sole purpose of telling a story within Starfleet with all these old characters in season 3 and it's not a choice based on where it would make sense for her to end up. Now they don't have to focus on the wider universe.

I want to use the expression "pseudo character development" here, where the writers make choices that seem like progress but are actually replacements for real character development. Like a promotion or a wedding or other things that are easily wrapped up without any need to flesh it out.

[stoplookingup]

Having always been extremely meh about TNG, my BAH HUMBUG reaction to the Picard finale is no surprise. I'm especially pissed off there wasn't even a hint of a nod to the characters and events of the first two seasons, which were deeply flawed but still far more interesting than the better plotted, but ultimately banal and workmanlike third-season nostalgia-fest. This was 100% a TNG finale and 0% a Picard finale. So disappointing. I'm way more interested in the teased spinoff than I was in this. I'm glad TNG fans got their fix; can we please move on now?

[mycenaae]

oh star trek picard really is just straight up taking away sisko's revolutionary arc and hard-won victories in the dominion war so that jean-luc can solve the ~changeling issue~ once and for all, huh