Very much so. Lot of folks seem to kind assume that since most of his famous/well-regarded roles involve playing some variation of "Intellectual and Cultured British Gentleman" that Stewart himself is that sort of person.

 

Spoiler

These fuckers killed Hugh. What the fuck.

That was a much better episode than the last couple though.

 

Spoiler: Rura Penthe

Ugh.

A mind meld in the flashback, so we know that Oh is a Vulcan because Romulans don’t mind meld (unless they retcon that in), which means there’s less motivation for an irrational hatred of androids on her part. Also, I don’t understand (and it will most likely never be explained) why this theoretical tracking device needed to be ingested orally, AND chewed, AND it only works if the person being tracked is conscious, seeing as android doctor is in a coma at the end but the tracker's not working? What the fuck.

I don’t care at all about the Firefly. Rios is the only main character other than Picard that I’m even sort of vaguely invested in, and I’d have to say that it’s because of the charisma of the actor over any character motivation (because he doesn’t seem to have any, other than fucking the android doctor).

The child actor was painfully child actorish, that can’t be helped. Her intro scene felt like a cheap knockoff of Rene’s intro scene in Family, right down to the raising of the hands, and the walking through the forest. That’s one of the things I outright hate about this show, the fact that it shamelessly rips stuff off from older episodes, and the things were done better the first time (apparently Kurtzman has a lot of coincidences about stealing ideas or scenes?). Also, fuck off with all the stupid fake language shit, this is set in a universe where there are real aliens with real weird languages.

It was kind of hard not to notice the Data-head tilt. If it was subtle, it would have been a nice touch. The Picard/Riker/Troi interactions were the best part of the episode - for the most part. Picard getting bitched out by women is surely a meme by now; thankfully it was by a counselor about psychology, instead of some random character.

But why did he get bitched out? He was a dickhead for no real reason. Imagine that, you met this guy five fucking minutes ago and you don't know who he is and you're suspicious. Fuck’s sake, why is this happening.

Not-Spock looks like a junkie, playing with a fidget spinner the whole time. And the whole idea of “gee, we’ll drop out of warp and let him go by” is ridiculous. I guess this tiny Romulan shuttle has a billion weapons but no sensors. It's like WWII movies who insist that an inside loop will allow you to get behind the enemy that was chasing you.

Hugh died a pointless death. And I still don’t understand why he was so willing to bend over backwards for Picard: Hugh was in like two episodes iirc, and in neither of them did Picard really do anything to engender that sort of loyalty. And Legolas running over to his dying body in the middle of a fight really made sense tactically, well done. Fortunately for the actor’s paycheque, evil incest sister is too busy creaming herself over the kill to actually get on with it in a timely manner. How wonderfully convenient.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t possibly kill off the android doctor or space Legolas, so I’m sure little subplots will emerge about how they’re not completely useless even when they're completely fucking useless.

All I want is a good show... Why is this so difficult?

 

I mean, I've seen the TNG outtakes, I know and kind of love that he's silly. Thing is, that ridiculous outfit wasn't an outtake it was in the actual show.

 

And then giant space flowers happened.

 

How can an Android perform a mindmeld? I'm really confused.

 

Dear Picard episode 7+ writers,

Can we please not turn Data's legacy into the tired and cliche "oh no androids are going to kill us all because (insert handwaved reasoning about incompatibility of humans and AI)".

Thanks and fuck you very much.

 

I feel like they're going full Mass Effect and I don't like it.

 

Except Mass Effect 3 had a more satisfying ending than this.

 

Well.

The best word I can come up with for Picard, overall, is "muddled."

Individual scenes and moments were good, great even sometimes. That beat Picard had on the ship before they took off, where he talked about the androids being children, if you just kind of.... take it in isolation, it felt good. It felt like a speech Picard would make and it felt impactful. That conversation with Data at the end, like of fucking course it tugged on the heartstrings. It almost couldn't not, given the history. But that nostalgia was a line of credit and I just question what they chose to spend it on.

Basically, the whole 10 episodes didn't have a coherent spine, it didn't feel like it had a rock-solid vision behind it, it felt like a bunch of people throwing ideas at the wall and then filming them and then putting them together in some kind of order and hoping the audience would feel like it was a story. The audience really was being asked to do quite a bit of work - you really had to kind of triage your sense of "wait, how would that even work? How did that happen in that amount of time?" and just roll with it.

Idk man. I'm not sorry I watched it, per se, and I respect the hell out of the original actors for coming back and putting what looks on paper to be a very earnest effort forth at some kind of meaningful continuation, but. I can't say I ever really felt like I was in good hands, watching it.

Real shame.

 

Have to agree, the lack of a strong overall structure to the entire season really hurts the story. It left us with lots of dangling plot threads or poorly resolved issues. Not to mention the massive thematic dissonance of them seeming to build up the whole idea that we shouldn't hate and fear androids, only to reveal that the androids were totally all plotting to exterminate all organic life (but we should still trust them).

 

The theme of the show seems to be waste.

They wasted where the characters had left off. Nemesis was admittedly bad, but Picard's character was left as someone stoically bereaving a very good friend, Data's death scene had meaning, and Riker and Troi were off to star in their own, untelevised series. Cut to Picard, and the titular character is a depressed old man, browbeaten at every corner, the withered husk of his former self. Even in All Good Things he was shown as a senile old man with his Whatever Syndrome, but still forceful, passionate, and commanding. That wasn't the Picard we were given. Data's revival was meaningless, which was one of the reasons Spiner wanted to be killed off in Nemesis in the first place; his death rewritten from 'saving a beloved friend' to 'idk bored now pls kill me lol'. Riker and Troi living planetside somewhere, broken because their firstborn had to die in order for them to have a stake in the android persecution.

They wasted every old character and cameo they had. With all the effort they made to get Jeri Ryan (traumatized) and Jonathan del Arco back (killed off), how much more effort would it have been to get the original actors for Icheb (killed off) and Bruce Maddox (killed off)? But then all of the characters themselves were wasted anyway; I can't think of any effect on the story that necessitated bringing back these characters over having new characters written in. So either go whole hog on bringing people back, or don't even bother, know what I mean?

They wasted time following plot threads that ultimately went nowhere. Raffi's drug abuse, her kid and his family? Yeah, fuck it. Seven and the Fenris Rangers? Whatever. The Romulans seeming to have a massive fleet despite being the Syrian refugees of the galaxy? The seeming infiltration of foreign organizations within Starfleet? Hey, Jurati (I had to look up her name) killed Maddox in the sickbay... any consequences for that? Legolas' character period? These synth defenders with tentacle dicks know where our galaxy is now... is that going to mean anything?

And ultimately, does anyone care, or did they watch this because it said Star Trek on the tin?

 

Apparently Icheb's actor said some un-PC things on the internet, which is why they didn't want him back (and is suspected to be why his character got graphically murdered torture-porn style).

 

If that's truly the reason why it was done (which I don't believe, I just think it was a hackneyed cheap and easy way for some rushed character "development" because they can't seem to be able to write), then all the whining manbabies would then have been proven right, would they not?

EDIT: added to the parentheses

 

Hard to say for sure on why they killed off Icheb, since all we really have to go on right now is that the actor said some stuff on Twitter and that's why they didn't want him on the show. Maybe the plan was always to have him return just to be killed off, or maybe they changed those plans once they decided to recast the role.

 

...so recast the role, why torture him to death?

 

*Shrugs* Maybe once the NDAs expire we'll eventually hear what was going on the writer's room.

Maybe the plan was always to torture the character because they wanted to be grimdark and edgy, and the controversy with the original actor had nothing to do with it. I mean, it's not like "let's torture a fan favorite character to death" would be that out of line with a lot of the other decisions made by the showrunners. That said, it's far from unusual for characters to die in nasty ways if there's bad blood between the showrunners and the actor who played them.