Otherwise, I liked the show about Jake Picard. Just like I liked the Star War sequels about Jake Skywalker.
The centrepiece of the first episode is a big angry Picard speech. The centrepiece of the last episode is a big inspiring Picard speech to Soji, along with Picard heroically putting himself in front of the Zhat Vash fleet. Everything else in the middle is basically "How Picard got his groove back."
but... he built consensus and the women often acted autonomously without his permission!!! they made a 90 year old character impotent!!!
Honestly, Star Trek has historically been so shitty to it's female and minority characters that no amount of "female empowerment" or "sjw agenda" is going to be worth complaining about for the foreseeable future.
Okay, so at the beginning of episode 6 they do the “Previously on Picard” clip thing and they show Elrond/Elsinore/Elf dude asking, “But why do you need me?” To which Picard replies, “Because you’re a young man and I’m an old man” and I cannot believe that no one’s made a “We’re going to need an old priest and a young priest” joke. WTF is wrong with you people?
Okay, I'm part-way through the penultimate episode, and I have to say that all of you are some dumb motherfuckers, because you failed to pick up on the underlying theme that's been running through the series and is now, absolutely screaming at people. Let me say that until about episode six or so, the series suffers through the same problems that most of TNG had, in that the scripts needed at least another draft before they were ready. And a lot of them were far better in concept, rather than execution. Think of the Darmok episode where the idea that aliens think far differently than we do was the theme, but the way it was executed wasn't great. Now, as I watched the series unfold, I kept thinking that Patrick Stewart had pushed for the story arc to go the way it did because he was pissed that he never got to be in any of the LOTR/Hobbit films. So he, and the writers, figured out a way to work those kinds of elements into the series. Explains Elrond/Elsinore/Whatever Romulan dude's name is. One thing kind of nagged at me, however. It was the whole "there are always two" business. Didn't really make a lot of sense. Oh, sure, you had Data and Lore, in TNG, but you also had B4 and Lal, who didn't have any twinned companions. (And fuck any of you who thought about the whole "There are always two" from the prequel trilogy, because fuck Lucas and his little Gungan.) Then, while I was watching the penultimate episode and I looked up the title of it Et in Arcadia Ego, the whole thing hit me. @Asyncritus is the only one here I can think of who might also know this, but whoever is responsible for the overall arc of the season did a hugely deep cut into Christianity and Gnosticism. When you poke around, deeply, into history, you find out that there's something rather interesting about the name of the disciple Thomas. His full-name works out to be something along the lines of Thomas, the twin. (It's a little more complicated than that, and I'm not about to dig up the full details, but when you go back to the original languages, you find out that his name could be translated as "testicle." If you want to be deliciously sacrilegious about it, you could argue that with the way it works out, Jesus is one testicle and Thomas is the other. I'll leave it to you to decide which one is the left or right nut.) Et in Arcadia Ego is the name of a rather famous painting by Poussin. Doesn't matter if you've heard of it or not, you've certainly heard of (if not actually have seen) a rather shitty series of books and movies that it inspired. I'm talking about the movies based on Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code books, which were inspired by the "non-fiction" Holy Blood, Holy Grail series of books that claimed the painting "Et in Arcadia Ego" was the key to a secret society of people who were the descendants of Jesus and/or his twin brother, Thomas. So, you've got some rather hugely layered elements to the story, going all the way back to the dawn of Christianity, carefully coded so that it's not quite as bad as someone driving up in a semi and punching you in the dick with a chainsaw, but it's close. And my hat is off to the folks behind Picard, because not only did they manage to work all of that in, but they did it in a way that those who like nothing better than to bitch about Trek would never notice. Bravo. My hat is off to you. You successfully managed to troll the fuck out of those idiots, who focused on the things they thought meant the series was praising SJWs, but, in fact, was going for something far different in the realm of conspiracy theories. They slipped one by you, and you never even noticed. God, I love it!
Also, I need to point out that when Alison Pill has the replicator make the neurotoxin the device is quite clearly a 3D printer. This means that it's product placement and nobody here complaining about the purity of Trek even bothered to mention it.
Oh, and can someone explain to me how I can tell the difference between young nuSpock and Romulan boyfriend? Because I'd swear they were the same actor if I didn't know better. Seems to me that this might be a clue to shit, but nobody else has made the same connection, so I dunno.
Something else I feel compelled to mention is that I was in college when TNG premiered and it didn't take me long to figure out the tropes they were cribbing from for the series. I mean, "Encounter at Farpoint" where they had Q judging humanity was clearly a cliche'd storyline intending to tell folks that the new cast was worthy of the mantle of the previous one. (Not that you'd know it from any of the first two season episodes, but whatever.) In later seasons, I and my friends would gather to watch new episodes as they premiered and I had the plot patterns all figured out. So, naturally, I had to annoy my friends with this. A thing would happen as the show was heading to a commercial break and I'd turn to my friends and go: Because I knew it was all bullshit and that they were ramping up the drama simply because they were headed into a commercial break. I mean, they weren't going to kill off a major character or anything. A buddy of mine tried to say after one of the later episodes where the Enterprise got blown up in the opening sequence that no matter how many times he'd seen such a thing, it still got to him. To which I replied, "Not really. They've blown the thing up so many times already that I know it isn't really going to happen." That bothered him since I was so obviously right.
I know next to nothing about "Picard", having never seen one single episode, so I am not at all qualified to comment on the series. I can comment on the "Thomas - twin - testicles" bit, though, since linguistics is a subject I know fairly well, and the languages involved are also rather familiar to me. First of all, saying that "Thomas full name works out to something along the lines of Thomas, the twin" is pretty much a tautology, but poorly expressed. "Thomas", in Aramaic, means "twin". Saying that works out to something like "Thomas, the twin" is like saying someone's surname of Smith "works out to something like Smith, the smith". It is vaguely possible, if one attributes any shred of credibility to the so-called "Gnostic Gospel of Thomas" (I personally do not), that he may have been "Thomas Judas", but that would not mean "Thomas, the twin". It would mean "Judas, the twin". But since that document is almost certainly up spurious, late origin, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the disciple of Jesus, even that has almost zero probability of being true. Thomas is also referred to as Didymus, but that is merely the translation into Greek. Didymus, in Greek, means "twin" just as Thomas in Hebrew means "twin". In both languages, the etymology is clearly in the concept of doubling. Didymus, for example, is a translitteration into English of didumos. Greek also has the words tridumos, tetradumos, etc. They literally mean "twofold", "threefold", "fourfold", and so on. So there is no doubt that the root meaning of "Didymus" is "the twin" and not "the testicle". The fact that in slang terms the testicles may sometimes be referred to as "twins" has nothing to do with the meaning of the word. It would be like saying "the true meaning of the word 'nut' is testicle, because guys refer to their testicles as 'nuts'." That is very poor semantics. And the name "Thomas" in Hebrew is also clearly rooted in the idea of doubling. The root "toam" in those languages is beyond any possible doubt related to the idea of doubling. So forget any idea of "Thomas" meaning "testicle". That' just wrong. At best, it is slang usage, not meaning. As for that disciple being named Thomas because he was supposed to be somehow a "twin" of Jesus, that is just as erroneous. He is called "twin" because he is the twin of someone else. (It is a safe guess that he was the second of a pair of twins; it is unlikely that the parents would name the first one "twin".) There is no more justification for thinking it was a mere nickname, and somehow "paired" him with Jesus, than in thinking it made him a twin of Peter, or Matthew, or anyone else. So gnostic speculations notwithstanding (Gnosticism was, by its very nature, not a rational philosophy -- the "gnose" was not rational understanding, but mystical "insight" without basis in rational thought), Thomas was not a twin of Jesus, be it literally or metaphysically, and "twin" in his name had nothing whatsoever to do with testicles. As to what the Gnostics came up with, there are so many and wildly varied forms of Gnosticism that almost anything can be found in "gnostic" philosophy. About the only constant that is found throughout Gnosticism is the dualistic idea that the "spiritual" world is irrational and the physically ordered world we see around us is a different, unrelated, and less important reality that is part of a totally different continuum Whether or not any of that has anything to do with "Star Trek Picard", I have no idea whatsoever...
I knew I was oversimplifying things a bit with Thomas, but the whole thing of Gnosticism and hidden knowledge tracks quite well with Picard. It was clearly in the minds of the people who created the series.
I have a hard time seeing this connection. (I loved Picard, and I have read a bit on Gnosticism.) The Thomas connection I wasn't sure about, but @Asyncritus to the rescue (thanks!). As for Poussin, while one 'Et in Arcadia Ego' painting has the Dan Brown connection, the phrase is the title of many paintings by many different artists ever since Virgil's poetry immortalized the previously Greek slogan. It denotes a motif connected with enjoying an idyllic life, especially in the face of death, and is often repeated on tombs ("I too once enjoyed Arcadia --"). All of this suits the themes of the episode very well; I don't see why we should read it as a connection to the very specific Gnostic interpretation of the same tradition instead.
Are you forgetting the whole run of the series was about seeking out hidden knowledge? And that the truth was in Soji the whole time? Or that Soji spent a large portion of at least one episode questioning the reality of everything? All Gnostic concepts.
Interesting. It goes to show how differently two people can read a piece of media. Not disagreeing with you, but that wasn't at all what I took from it. I would say that the main themes of the show were coming to grasp with past mistakes; racism; colonialism; arrogance; and the connections between idealism and privilege. Some of it deals with a quest for identity, and I would read Soji's quest that way, not as a questioning of all of reality. And while there is a central mystery to be solved, I wouldn't have tied that to the concept of 'revealing hidden knowledge' any more than in any procedural drama.
But Soji very clearly says, “How do I know if any of this is real?” Several times. Not saying that the elements you talked about weren’t there, just that they didn’t stick out to me the way the ones I mentioned did.
She certainly does; only the 'this' she's talking about is all about very personal experiences: mementos, memories, dreams, relationships, family members. I don't remember her questioning the nature of all reality. Having said that, I can now sort of see a gnostic tradition alive with regards to the Admonition, including its irrationality as well as the eventual reveal of other-worldly forces.
When they’re on Riker’s planet she questions the reality of the world around her. She doesn’t know if it’s all part of some elaborate plot against her or not. Yeah, I hadn’t planned on rewatching the series, but after everything dropped into place near the end, I want to go back and see what other things I missed. (Oh, and Picard is now space Jebus since he was turned into an android.)
I saw that video months ago and didn’t post it because the usual suspects would just hand wave it away and say how brilliant it is so I didn’t bother with it because I’m tired of arguing about it. You guys clearly don’t care if the show is poorly written and the production team is lazy in areas.
Using a 3-D printer as a replicator is a master stroke of ultimate genius. It's the cherry on top of the greatest masterpiece the human species has ever unleashed on the world. Everyone who watches that scene, and loves it as much as I do will live forever, and ever, and ever, and never know sadness, or pain, or grief, or illness ever again. Everyone who hated it has no soul, no essence, no true beating heart, and is doomed to a life of torment, and misery, and anguish, and failure, and screams of pain and terror all alone in the cold frosty moonlight. ()
That’s because all you do is drop videos with little to no explanation as to what they’re about, other than saying, “These guys prove it sucks!” And WTF is “lazy” about product placement? Especially here, when it was a clever bit of marketing. It’s not at all comparable to the dune buggy sequence in Nemesis or the hours long pod racing sequence in Phantom Menace. Those really had no other purpose than to pimp products. Replicators are expected in TNG+ era Trek settings and they weren’t really overused in the series from what I noticed. Hell, it wasn’t until chick had it produce the syringe that put her in a coma that noticed that’s what they were. Prior to that, I just assumed that they were a prop built for the series. And you might have noticed that I’m a fan of 3D printing, so I should have picked up on it sooner.
Lazy and s the fleet at the end which is copy and paste of the same ship as opposed to the various ship designs we saw in the fleet on DS9.
A Naval officer thinks it's brilliant. My argument from authority beats your argument from authority. https://trekmovie.com/2020/07/05/us...seen-in-star-trek-picard-battle-of-coppelius/
Unlike a certain ex-poster, I care more about the story than the window dressing or how many times shots were fired in a season. The composition of the fleets wasn't really important, in terms of storyline. They were just there so that when the Romulans showed up, the fans could say, "Oh, shit! They're fucked!" Followed by, "Fuck, yeah! You pointy-eared bastards are gonna get your asses kicked now!" when Riker showed up. That's it. They probably had less than a total minute of screen time between the two of them. Why worry about coming up with a bunch of different designs for such a short sequence. It's not like they lingered on the ships with the camera, or had some kind of massive pitched battle between them. It was just "Look at my dick!" and "Oh, yeah? Well my dick's bigger!" Now, I don't know about you, but I don't need to spend any time finding out about the veining on either of the dicks, or just precisely how big they are.
Oh, and in looking over the wiki page for the showrunner of the series, I think that there might be some elements of Kabbalahism mixed in as well. I'm not very familiar with that at all, so I don't know how much of an overlap there might be.
Somewhere upthread there was a discussion of how it would make practical sense for Starfleet to use the same starship design.
I think you're both overthinking the whole thing. After all, Patrick Stewart was the guy who was largely responsible for Star Trek: Nemesis.
Season 1 comes to blu-ray in October. https://trekmovie.com/2020/07/22/star-trek-picard-season-one-arrives-on-blu-ray-and-dvd-in-octoer/
