Star Trek: Picard.

Tso I would have gone with the Bengali curry I had in Kolkata to hold that changeling together...

Bruh

I wouldn't presume to address any of these points, some of which I wouldn't have a counter for anyway - but I can't watch a show like that. If I found that many irritants, I wouldn't be enjoying it enough to watch it all the way through. I'm much easier to amuse I suppose.

My Thursday schedule is pretty light, so I've started watching new episodes once through to just to experience, then again to nitpick.

There's definitely stuff to like, I really enjoy Shaw as a new type of relatable asshole captain that Lorca was originally sold as, and they're opening up a lot of new interesting story hooks for the 25th century even if they're not exploring them here. But overall, I'm not really sold. All three seasons of Picard so far have this "first draft" feeling to them.

regarding the retro/refit...


this:



is also this:


and is still essentially the same motorcycle as this:



with about 25 years between them.

I would rather like, I think, a Shaw centered 25th century Star Trek crew when this often regrettable TNG lovefest is past - IF they can bring to it a DS9 storytelling sensibility and not make it a warmed over "Voyager: The Next Generation"

IOW, all boils down to the quality of the writing.

Except in this case that last one was made using the literal 25 year old used parts from the first one.

Gotcha covered. This is a 1953 Studebaker (I'll skip the exact model because it has a kajillion different names for that year).



Fucking gorgeous, ain't it? I'd never heard of one until the mid-90s when I saw a customized one on the cover of a magazine. I bought it, saw the name "Studebaker" and assumed it was a foreign make I'd never heard of and that there was no way in hell a car that lovely could have been built back in 1953. Boy, was I wrong!

Anyway, Studebaker was an independent US automaker (and the oldest one in the US at the time of its death) that got screwed over for various reasons too complicated to go into here and was running short of cash. And in 1964, about two years before they finally died, this was the version of that car that they were turning out.



The only cars I can think of that had so few body style changes in over a decade are the Model T, the VW Beetle, and the Citroen 2CV. There are probably others, but you get the idea. Oh, and that 1964 model? Studebaker hopped it up with a supercharged engine and other performance features so that they could charge (and get) a premium for the model. Fun fact: A shitload of the parts under the hood were decades old designs, so even if the skin was a new design, many of the mechanicals weren't. That's why they put the supercharger on the engine. The Big Three were putting out new V-8 designs that had more horsepower than the stock Studebaker engine did. Studebaker didn't have the money to design a new V-8 that would be more powerful, so they slapped a supercharger on it to put it ahead of those normally aspirated Big 3 V-8s.

Star Trek: Picard Almost Brought Back a Different Classic Villain
It was the bugs from "Conspiracy." There. I just saved you two long boobless hours.

Trying to justify the refit/retrofit bullshit is just silly.

Season 1 of PIC showed us a massive copy-paste fleet of Inquiry class ships, which Riker claimed was the "toughest, fastest, most powerful ship Starfleet ever put into service," and he said it to Commodore Oh, who'd have known if he was bluffing.

Season 2 showed us a brand new Sagan class ship that incorporated Borg technology.

Season 3 shows us the USS Titan-A, a "Constitution III class" built around a refitted and retrofitted Luna class USS Titan, with nacelles at least a quarter of a century old.

It's. Just. Stupid.

Conspiracy bugs would have made sooooo much more sense, since so far the "changelings" can only shapeshift into people, and the good guys are using the same old "see if they remember stuff" trick to out them. The conspiracy bugs would even have a legitimate reason to hate Picard and Riker, since it was them that phasered the queen bug to death back in the day.

fine, but the second one is built using the same engine, wheels, and brakes as the first.

not seeing why? the first bike is a 1973, the second is pre 1974 (judging by the spark plug angle) but built years later. Odds are it's engine has been rebuilt and had the pistons replaced/rebored, and the frame has been significantly altered, but they're still the same bike.

I feel like Trek has just gone overboard with all these different Starfleet ship classes.

There is really no need for so many designs when all these ships basically do the same thing.

I guess it started with the movies, from II onward. And it got kind of ridiculous by First Contact.

In TOS we had the Constitution class and in TMP the Constitution Refit.

TWOK introduced the Miranda class which was just a flipped over Constitution class but I guess for dramatic purposes they wanted the enemy ship to look visually distinct even though it basically did the same thing.

TSFS introduced the Excelsior class which was meant to replace the Constitution and which we saw again in ST6 and Generations. That is fine.

But we also got the Oberth class which was a science vessel with apparent limited defense and weapons. Why? The other existing classes could do the same job. I can only guess they wanted another visually distinct starship so people wouldn’t get confused?

Once Trek started going full CG we saw all sorts of odd and seemingly pointless starship classes.

I guess Defiant made sense as a pure warship with less crew complement, less extraneous equipment and faster to manufacture even though we didn’t see a whole bunch during the Dominion War.

They should have been cranking those out like they were Klingon Birds Of Prey.

The Intrepid class again made no sense, it functioned exactly like the Galaxy class but I guess they wanted their own ship design to make VOY visually distinct from TNG.

But in universe there was really no reason to have so many IMO.

The reason the Reliant was upside down is that Nicolas Meyer didn’t know what ships looked like and he was in Israel filming a biopic of Golda Meir when they sent him the proposed Reliant drawings. He signed them upside down, so that’s how it came to be.

I can see this... he already broods as well as Sisko, and the sarcastic streak is a benefit.

The crew already has potential to be interesting...

Actually, the Intrepid was one of the new classes that did make sense to me - if you can build and crew three Intrepids for the cost of one Galaxy (assuming Voyager's complement of 150 was a bit lower than "usual" since she was only expecting to be on a week-or-so mission) then you've sped up your exploration programme a lot.

There's also the unspoken bit about Voyager's variable geometry nacelles being a success at overcoming the subspace damage that led to the warp 5 limit in TNG - can't retrofit that onto a Galaxy easily.

This x 1,000.

They've introduced an interesting captain and crew and, if they don't kill them off by the end of season 3, Paramount's next best move would be to have a series around them.

Yabut we all know the real reason is so guys like @Forbin will waste money on models.

That's too bad. One of the very big unresolved threads of TNG. Would have been nice to a see a few more heads explode from phaser fire.

TBH, they've never had a problem since Disco with introducing interesting characters, it's giving them plots worthy of them that is the issue.

What struck me about that red straw is the continued use of plastic for straws in the 25th century... Both India and Europe use paper straws now.

Yabut, their disposal systems are de-replicators, to forever-trash isn't a worry anymore.

And they also have the ability to make shit like straws out of basically anything. So why plastic? Why not some material that doesn't exist in the 21st Century? Or, if it is something we use now, why not make it out of something that straws aren't normally made of in our time? You know, say an indestructible glass or transparent aluminum. Or, if you want to get really creepy: A genetically living organism that derives pleasure from you using it as a straw and begs you to use it?

Oh for fuck sakes, I finally clicked through and read Matalas reasoning for using changelings instead. The guy doesn't remember what actually happened in Conspiracy, and he clearly doesn't remember how changeling physiology is supposed to work.

I still prefer a rolled up $10...