Now that I'm thinking about it, they should have brought back Vash or Ardra to be Catwoman to Picard's Batman. (Or a Black Cat to Picard's Spiderman, if you prefer.)
Vid not available in some locations, so here 'tis. https://intl.startrek.com/videos/watch-a-star-trek-picard-first-look-season-two
I just read that Captain’s Holiday story in a book I’m reading. It’s pretty true but it’s not Patrick Stewart’s fault. The irony is he hooks up with the actress that plays Vash, ending his 20 year marriage. They even got engaged by Q Pid. Stewart’s main beef wasn’t the Admiral storyline as much as it was he wanted to do more “fucking and fighting” like Kirk did. So RDM or ISB rewrote the story to Gene’s liking (who is a fucking psychopath) and it became the final episode.
Supposedly, the original concept for Picard's character (and it gradually got watered down during both development, as well as production) was that the bulk of Picard's career before TNG was as an instructor at the Academy. He got bored with this and decided that he wanted to command a starship. Of course, this wasn't a thing that Starfleet was really willing to allow. You don't put someone who hasn't served much, if any, time on a starship, in command. Picard, however, thanks to his years working at the Academy, has some dirt on influential people in Starfleet and explains to them that he'd hate to have to make that stuff public and that it'd be much harder for him to this if he was out there hopping galaxies. So, they give him command of the Enterprise.
I like Q. It definitely looks like time travel is involved, and it definitely looks like we're going to see some important part of the adventures of the Enterprise-D that we weren't shown previously. I wonder if Paradise Lost is also a pointer.
I'd love it if from Q's point of view, he just came from that cameo. Have him make some comment that Picard is more fun to play with than Freeman or something.
The implication from the teaser and the Stewart interview is that Q is gonna bounce Picard around in time and space. They might make a pit-stop at DS9.
Or could just be prop laziness, like in Generations when Picard carelessly tossed some artifact in his Ready Room, which was previously stated to be some super rare artifact that Picard nearly wet his pants over in a TNG episode.
After the dystopian future they showed in Picard, it would be smart to finish the trial by teaching Picard yet another lesson and by the end of the season, the optimistic world of Star Trek is restored, but I highly doubt they’re that smart.
The Federation was no more or less corrupt than it was in TNG. We just had the luxury of being on the Enterprise-D during TNG.
I don't understand how banning androids is "dystopian," especially in the context of that ban being the result of Romulan subterfuge. Romulan spies fucked with the Federation quite a bit throughout Trek. And the existence of alien refugees doesn't really make the show dystopian, we've seen that plenty of times before in Trek (various TNG episodes, the Maquis in TNG and DS9, a few Gamma Quadrant species in DS9, and El Aurians in Generations). We watch this through the lens of the Federation, not other species. If anything, Picard carried on some of the themes from DS9 (e.g., what are you willing to do to protect paradise). I admit, the show had a lot of problems, but I never viewed it as being set in a dystopia.
I hope there's a scene where Seven says "Q? The idiot that forced the Voyager crew to babysit his stupid kid? What an asshole. And he keeps convincing Picard that humanity is on trial? Hilarious."
In this video about making the Mandalorian, they talk about actors having themselves routinely scanned so that in the future if a role calls for a younger version of a character, there's a digital replacement ready to go. This got me to thinking: Suppose that Patrick Stewart and the others wanted to find a workaround in case Steward kacks it before they finish filming a season. By making him an android, they have a bit of an out. If they've got full-body scans of Stewart, along with audio of him reading off words and phrases that the folks who provide voices for things like Siri, then they can replace Stewart with his digital counterpart, and any differences between the real actor and his CGI counterpart can be explained away by some kind of problem developing with the android body.
