Sure did suck in TNG where, if you were genetically engineered, you were legally prohibited from any decent jobs. And the Bajorans were a race of refugees up until the Cardassians had bled them so dry there wasn't any point to staying (until a wormhole showed up).
Mindmelds are hackable with those cortical monitor thingies, so...it's not exactly out of left field.
I wouldn't put it past them, but this is uncomfortable to think about for me. As much as I like the character of Jean Luc Picard, if he were to die before ending the season or a character arc, I'd be uncomfortable watching a digital simulation finish his role. I'd rather see the role re-casted and then move on from that character. With the death of Chadwick Boseman, this has been on my mind a lot recently.
We're also just not there yet with digital replacements. Rogue One and The Mandalorian are great examples. For me, the digital replacements were jarring enough to pull me out (at least temporarily) from the story.
M Oh, come on. All that Borg shit laying around and they can't throw me some proper technobabble? And I hope they never mention the golem thing again. That was a terrible decision.
Golems have precedent in Trek history too. The green putty-man that gets turned into android-Kirk in "what are little girls made of?".
Just because you guys can come up with explanations for something doesn't mean that thing isn’t a stupid idea by the writers.
What if Patrick Stewart had agreed to it? And what if the CGI Picard was almost indistinguishable from the real Patrick Stewart?
Possibly. It would depend upon a number of factors. Lots of actors are supposedly having themselves scanned now to enable them to get future roles.
The show was not dystopian in any fashion. If anything TNG was too "perfect" due to Gene's supposed vision. But he was a fucknut anyway. I prefer the more realistic portrayal of the Federation in Picard. Everyone can identify with that sort of bureaucracy, no? Also, I liked that they killed Icheb in the most horrible way possible. Sue me.
Again, the only place in the Federation that was perfect was the Enterprise-D, and that's because it was Picard, and he hand-picked nice people, and weeded out the assholes. Every colony world they went to had horrible shit going on. Hell, Tasha grew up outrunning rape gangs. I know, because they loved making her say "rape gangs" at least once an episode. And the bad-mirals started off right quick. Right in season 1, Mark Jameson was a fucking monster.
And the Vulcans had an isolationist movement (with terror tactics) in late TNG years before ENT and later Disco and PIC went with "logic extremists".
Hell, even just on the Ent-D, people fell short of perfection quite a bit. Picard couldn't stand kids and picked on Wesley a bit. Barclay was a fuckup whose entire department shat on him. Geordi built himself a holoversion of an actual woman to bone (yeah, let's not pretend that he didn't hook up at least once with holo-Leah). Pulaski was a raging anti-AI racist.
And let's not forget Picard and Riker, whose solution to an alien incursion into Starfleet headquarters was to blow a fucking guy's head off, no questions asked.
O'Brien was a legit war hero who was also qualified to be chief engineer of a starbase, and they had him wasting years of his life hanging out in the transporter room.
It's not "dystopian" but the Federation is shown to have somewhat regressed in it's commitment to it's ideals. As per the interview Picard did with the Federation News Network, or whatever it was called.
Okay dystopian was a poor choice of words, but my point remains. If Q is indeed resuming the trial, he should show Picard how far the Federation has fallen. Of course none of it matters by the time we get to Discovery timeline, unless Q resets that or something.
That wasn't out of the ordinary for even the TNG Federation. Klingon Civil War? Let them fight, until it becomes obvious the Romulans were manipulating them to weaken the Fed/Klingon Alliance.
The terrible decision was providing a time-to-live value, my major beefs with the writing on Picard and Discovery is that they're far too conservative in what B is when they've got there from A. Looking back, Trek likes to re-write the classics, such as Frankenstein, but rarely dares to spin a positive on it. Both have been enjoyable, and with good stories but by and large they've been the old floating head Pocket Book adventures on screen, when they should have been knocking us off our seats. DISCO especially, 900 years in the future? Everything felt like it could've been a year after NEM comatosed the franchise.
I agree with most of that, especially your last comment. Season One of Discovery was uneven but really found its groove about halfway through. Season Two was awesome. Season Three, after about two episodes, went right off the rails and fell into a deep, deep gully filled with shite. Picard was decent and had more good episodes than bad, but it didn't knock my socks off like I was hoping it would.
I think Picard's problem was that it arrived with a set notion that everything had gone to shit. You had the existing world order upended with Brexit and Trump, and nobody was interested in whys and wherefores, just that a particular perception of the Road to Utopia now had a Road Ahead Closed sign on it and the writing reflected that mood. It was like Douglas Adams' "Mostly Harmless" in that respect. Had they held up a mirror to the shift away from globalisation, rather than have someone lend the Romulans a copy of the "I, Robot" DVD as to why the Federation was becoming more isolationist, with some pointed parallels and moral quandaries, that could've been some fine Trek. And it had some decidedly lore-expanding stuff in there - we had Blade Runner and Lovecraftian (Cyber Cthulu!) beats there which I'd love to see more of - but it was a muted series, and played fairly safe. And that's not a condemnation, just that it could have been very fresh Trek, but ended up being a nostalgia trip to a restaurant whose meals cannot meet the expectations of memory.
As for DISCO, if Picard was muted, DISCO is muzzled. S2 shines mostly down to the non-DISCO crew, which is a damned shame as they're good actors and characters. S3 was the real dropped clanger - 900 years in the future... Should have been like Walter Raleigh appearing in Kirk's time. Here's a pretty watery planet in a safe bit of the quadrant, we've made you a new ship that's pretty much unsinkable and has replicators, so no drinking your own piss, and you'll have people queuing up to be crew to meet you during their shore leave, cheerio and have fun exploring! The civilisations we knew from the TNG era should be Culture level, the Federation? Gone. More than half the population went post-physical, the resulting loss of trillions of people moving to a higher reality meant that as an entity it just faded, with some descendent versions from "younger" civilisations and some leftovers, like S31 (devils don't get invited to raptures) still hanging around. You get the same effect as The Burn, but without it being destructive. Have the crew try and find their place in this new setup. Have all the Kelpians have gone post-physical, leaving Saru to handle being the last one. Hell, use that to mirror the QAnon types, have him get paranoid it was all a plot to genocide them. Have ships be able to transport across the galaxy, have Stamets ego deal with that. So. Much. Potential.
