#Cris has only been in 3 episodes of Picard so far

[thegeminisage]

ok we watched the tng pilot. let's get into it

data is my best friend on this show and i love him

i liked riker but jonathan frakes looks like a baby without facial hair. he's gotta grow that in. also, at one point he asked someone a question and i got really excited. he should ask more people more questions i think thats what jonathan frakes was born to do. that and sit in chairs with style

also liked geordi even though we only saw him for 3 seconds and worf even though same.

the sections with q draaaaaaagged. ik people like q and whatever he has going on with picard but i'm just not there yet. this "humans are NOT savages anymore" plotline has been played out in tos many times to better effect

actually shocked picard was such a dick. idk why i was expecting him to be more kind maybe i was projecting professor x onto him?? but he kinda sucked lol like what was EVEN going on w his little pissing contest with riker

love and light, there should not be children on a starship. space is fucking dangerous. they're literally boldly going where no one has gone before. these kids could get hurt

the ship??? splits?????????? IS THAT LEGAL????

ok, furthermore, sorry, speaking of kids, not to be a misogynist but out of the 3 ladies (troi, crusher, and yar) i dislike 2 of them. love and light to deanna troi but i really hope she gets something to do besides emote and go OH THE PAIN...her look was slay. i understand completely how she turned women gay. give her something to do. give her a chance. i know she could be good.

i didn't mind dr crusher until she let her kid on the bridge even though you're not supposed to do that and they told him to touch nothing and he proceeded to touch everything and then she got mad when picard got mad. picard spent 70% of this episode being a dick and the one time he was justified she was like :/ wow you're such a dick. lmao. girl come on he literally said don't touch anything he was already being nicer than he had to be. the child was in the wrong children shouldn't even be on this ship

also they talk about wesley like he's their affair baby. idw if its true but nobody tell me. let me believe it. wesley crusher destined to suffer through male pattern baldness

also, i can see now why you're not supposed to date your ship mates. dating them is fine but being exes with them is excruciating and we had TWO PAIRS this pilot

anyway. tasha yar was rad i DID love her.

it's weird though how many of them use first names...in tos sometimes they didn't even use last names, only titles. spock called bones "doctor" almost exclusively. so riker calling geordi geordi after like 5 minutes of knowing him was a little weird

i cried when bones showed up. sue me. his prosthetics were terrible and i already miss him so much.

SPACE JELLYFISH. that part was good

overall both the adventure and the interpersonal stuff was a little ????? which is like. you can flop on one or the other. i DO have faith it will get better but i feel kind of lukewarm on it so far

there's a lot of direct counterpoints to tos, but it's shuffled JUUUST enough so it feels like it isn't copying tos's homework word for word but rewording it to trick the teacher. for example, data is like spock in that he doesn't understand emotions or whatever, but it's actually the inverse because spock understands and pretends not to, while data truly doesn't understand but wants to. then you have deanna troi who's sort of filling in for the other thing spock used to do, which is give us general impressions about unknown alien life, but she SPECIFICALLY does it through emotions so she doesn't resemble spock too much. the captain and first officer have a lot of scenes together but they're tense so it doesn't look too tempting to the slash fans. the doctor is still a bit grumpy but she's a woman this time. they don't use tricorders but geordi's special prosthetic helps them see all that shit anyway. it's tos but shuffled. lmao that it took 2 people to replace spock <3

anyway my favorite part, aside from the part bones was in, was when riker and data talked in the holodeck. and riker was like actually yeah the fact that you're a machine DOES make me uncomfortable. and data is like well i am superior but i'd like to be human actually! and you could see the little gears in riker's head turning and later he called data friend. i liked that and i love data. i love data he's very important even though the pilot wasn't good i think i would keep watching no matter what for data. and i knew it would be like that.

[procrastinatorproject]

I think the really important part is, as @llywela13​ said:

They could have spent that time planning and coordinating, to ensure that everything tied together [...]. They just...chose not to. 

It was a conscious choice the writers made. Matalas might not have been in the writers room for the entirety of the season 2 writing, but he was the show runner. They would have developed an overall concept for season 2 and season 3 before they sat down to work on the individual episodes, so he would have been aware of what was going to happen in season 2, at least in broad strokes, and he would have seen the season 2 scripts at the very least after they had been finalized.

So, major plot points like Agnes giving herself to the Borg Queen and petitioning to join the Federation 400 years later, Rios staying in the past, the return of Guinan, Q being the driving power behind the plot, ditching Soji and killing Elnor - all of that would have been established in advance. Hell, some of it even happens on the first few episodes that Matallas was still head writer for.

He might have expected Goldsman to write a better wrap-up for the season (like... an explanation for what the hell the cosmic force was that the new!Borg were trying to protect the Federation from. Or, you know, anyone in the present acknowledging that Rios and Agnes have suddenly disapeared???) But the existence of the galactic threat, for example, was established when Matalas was still working on season 2. So the decision not to tie it into season 3 in any way was his, in part if not in full. And it was a decision they made in advance. (He has said as much, iirc.)

Also: even though the writing happened concurrently, and the production on season 3 sets, costumes etc. would have happened while season 2 was still being filmed, the actual filming of season 3 started after season 2 was over. If, after seeing the scripts for the episodes that Goldsman et al. ended up with, Matalas had wanted to, say, put half a scene in episode 1 where he has someone say “We just received a hail from the USS Exposition near the Borg-protected rift and they’re saying everything is fine and the mystery will be resolved soon”, he could have added that into even an already existing script. Might have interrupted the flow a bit, but there could have been ways to do it without too much trouble.

Not making any reference to that was a conscious choice. AndI think you can say the same about most of the things left unresolved from season 2 (though I don’t feel like there were nearly as many plot points left in the air as there were after season 1, since most of season 2 was contained in the past with characters we never see again).

So while the concurrent writing certainly would have made an interconnected story over two season more difficult (or even two relatively self-contained stories that more thoroughly built on each other), it wasn’t remotely impossible. If they had wanted to, they could have done it, but they chose not to.

They have picked up little things here and there, like suddenly remembering Raffi’s familiy and history for more than a throwaway line about losing her sons and a longing glance at a glass of alcohol. But they’re not really building on Raffi’s character development from either season 1 or two. At least not so far (though, let’s be fair: we’ve only seen 2 episodes). So far, Raffi is in... exactly the same place she was in season 1? Pretty much? Making the exact same mistakes? Except now she no longer has Cris to hold her hand and help her through it, and apparently also no longer has Seven.

There is a reference to Picard’s synthetic body, but no indication why in season 1 he was adamant not to involve anyone from his old crew in the dangerous mission, and then in season 3 he immediately runs to Riker. Is it because he learned something in season 1? In season 2? Or is it just because we need to bring in the TNG alumns somehow?

Season 2 gave us the holos for a brief, terrible moment, season 3 isn��t even attempting to explain why Raffi is apparently all alone on La Sirena.

So, yeah, I don’t think the decision to ignore season 1 and 2 beyond superficial callbacks (so far) has much to do with tight schedules or concurrent writing. It was a choice, from the start, and a very deliberate one at that.

(All of this with the caveat that I only know what I have heard Matalas and Goldsman say in interviews and have gleaned about the Picard production process on twitter and through publicity. I might be mistaken about the timeline, or their concept of season 2 might have been more vague before Matalas moved on and he would have tied it in more if he’d had the chance. So grain of salt. But from everything I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like this was an external problem.)

So I was wondering why there was such little continuity between the second and third seasons of Picard, and initially I thought that Terry Matalas just wanted a clean slate to bring in new (old) fans; but then I noticed that there were a bunch of callbacks to the first season, like Raffi's family and substance use issues and reference to Picard's "synthetic flesh". And then it hit me: Terry Matalas had no idea how season 2 ended before he started writing season 3. He had to drop out of the writing midway through season 2 and leave the rest to Akiva Goldsman because CBS didn't give them enough turnaround time; the two seasons were written simultaneously. And so the reason why he didn't even make reference to any of the rather large plot hooks left over from the second season finale...is because he had no idea that they were there.

[cristobalrios]

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[calliecat93]

ST: The Next Generation S3 Watchthrough Episodes 14-17

A Matter of Perspective: So we have Riker being accused of murder and Picard and the others having to piece together the events to find the true story. We have a bit of a unique way of accomplishing this as they use the Holodeck to recreate the various accounts… which causes a problem. Not everyone’s accounts line up. They may feel like they’re telling the truth, but may be remembering things wrong, going off second-hand information, misunderstanding wich affects the testimony, and all that fun stuff. Now we know that while Riker can kill if he has to, he likely didn’t commit murder (or do anything like force himself on a woman like the one recreation protrayed), or if he did there would be a reason for it. It sucks to see Riker int his situaiton and Picard wanting to believe his First Officer but having to follow his duty as Captain and with the evidence mounting against Riker… yeah.. So it was fine. Nothing to really complasin about, but nothing to really praise eiher. I guess it shows how messy it can be to get to the truth with so many people believing different things which causes so many muddled up accounts. We never get the true story (though Riker’s is probably the closest to the truth), but we get enough to prove Riker innocent so yay~! Just a solid episode all in all. 3/5.

Yesterday’s Enterprise: YAR! OH MY GOD!!! So in this episode, we end up in an alternate timeline where I guess the Bad Ending of The Undiscovered Country occurred and Starfleet is at war with the Klingons. Only Guinan can tell that something’s out of place. Yar is alive, Troi and Worf are gone, Wesley’s an actual officer, and they have found the believed to be destroyed Enterprise-C. They even bring back the movie-era red uniforms for the Enterprise-C crew. Yar pretty much gets far, far more material to work with than she did in her one season which I guess is how they convinced Denise Crosby to come back for it since I think that’s why she quit in the first place. I still feel very conflicted about her death in Skin of Evil. The senselessness cetianly added to the cruel reality, but left me upset to see her character thrown away like that. Here she will die again no matter what, but this time she decides to let it be on her terms and do something that will at least matter. The whole episode is darker than usual due to the war, allowing them to get away with killing characters and the Enterprise-C’s lose-lose situation is just… it’s just depressing. All while Guinan is trying to convince Picard that this whole reality is wrong, and he’s understandably struggling with being told that what he knows is his reality and life is fake. Guinan watching Yar, knowing that her being alive is wrong, also added ott he unease and lets Yar piece together that she didn’t survive in the true timeline. Seriosuly, Whoppi Goldberg is always awesome, but she was amazing in this episode. The only real downside is because this is an alternate timeline that essentially gets wiped out of existence, the impact is minimal and while Yar got a much better sendoff … it doens’t change that the real Yar is dead and her death was empty (though Guinan asking Geordi about Yar to know more about her was an excellent end note). It holds me back from giving this a perfect score, but this was still an excellent episode and at least shows that even in death, even in another reality, Yar was very much a part of the Enterprise and that she mattered. Clearly the writers realized that they made a mistake and did what they could to make some form of ammends, and I can respect that. 4.5/5.

The Offspring: Data’s a daddy! I thought this sounded kind of silly when I read the description… but Dear Lord this broke my heart. I just wanted to hug Lal through this entire episode. She was just created and experiencing life and already has her own feelings and thoughts, like not liking the other children treating her as different. Data is trying his best and overall I think that he was as good of a parent as he could be. He genuinely wanted to raise Lal, he educated her and even enrolled her in school, went to Crusher for parenting advice, and I think that he truly loved her as any good parent would for their child. It makes the ending just utterly heartbreaking and how the admiral who comes to check things out being just feels so God awful. Hell the fact that they consider taking what is essentially a young child away from her parent without taking her feelings into account just because she’s an android already exceeding Data’s funcitons essentially because of prejudice and claiming to know better than the parent/father who is clealry not abusive or anything like that… yeah, the allegory hits hard. Data having to say goodbye to Lal as she died… yeah that hit me hard. I cried. That was just… God I don’t even know how to describe it, but it hurt. The episode has it’s issues. Like while I do like that Lal was allowed to choose her own gender, it’s a painful reminder that no one could even consider non-binary an option. I also felt like Picard was off in the first half since while he does ultimately defend Data against the admiral and I understand his concerns about Data not telling anyone and how Starfleet will react, him acting like Data even able to fathom wanting a child or if Lal even counts as a child just feels… horribly dickish. At least Troi was on Data’s side, and liek I said Picard did ultimateley defend Data and his and Lal’s rights so that’s good. And while I get that Data views himself as unable to feel… he clearly did love Lal and I need to keep reminding myself that we didn’t have the understanding of neurodivergence or the like back then, but I legit cannot tell what the show is triyng to say concerning Data’s ability to feel. Can he? Or can he not? They only allow one or the other. Still, the episode was sweet in a lot of ways and just brutal/sad in others and just a painful reminder of the prejudice against Data/androids that The Measure of a Man illustrated. Hopefully, happier things for Data are on the horizon. 4/5.

Sins of the Father: So after that heartbreaker, lets do more father-related stuff but time with the Klingons! This time we have a Klingon, Kurn, working on the Enterprise as an acting FIrst Officer and not only does it turn out that he’s Worf’s unknown brother… but that Worf’s father was accused of treason and thus he and his family are facing dishonor, hence why Kurn is there. Until that revelation it looked like we were getting the reverse of A Matter of Honor, but when that twist comes in? Ho boy… As the oldest son, Worf has to face the challenge that will either clear his family or end in his execution and of course Worf feels bound to do so. This certainly was something. We get to see the Klingon homeworld, we plunge straight into Klingon politics, and damn is it intense from the moment we warp to the planet to the very end. While we sort out that Worf's father wasn’t a traitor… unfortunately the one whose family was is in a high position of power who tries everything possible to keep the truth from coming out. It’s a whole conspiracy and Worf is forced to accept the dishonor just to prevent the planet from plunging into Civil War. It’s clear that no one, not even the other Klingons like this and knows that it’s wrong… but they turn their backs on him anyways. Worf even forces Kurn to do so so that he won’t have to suffer the same fate when the truth about his identity becomes known. It reflects on Worf’s character, his honor and devotion to his family despite them being either dead or only just finding out that he had a brother at all. Not to mention to the Klingon Empire since he’s also allowing it to save them from war. But it’s also just so cruel that he and his family got scapegoated all because of one asshole to cover his own family’s dishonor, especially since we’d watched Worf trying so hard to uphold the Klingon ideals and beliefs despite having grown up among humans. Now he’s been shamed by his people and viewed as a non-entity, which may be even worst than mere dishonor. IDK if this plot will continue in TNG or when he joins DS9, but I hope it does because Worf didn’t at all deserve this. It makes me respect his character so much more though and Picard was freakin’ badass as well. At least in the meantime, he has the Enterprise crew standing by him. 4/5.

[july-19th-club]

about to just start inventing picard episodes

star trek picard episode whatever “Electric Sheep”: Cris, Raffi, and the gang beam down to pick up supplies for malfunctioning holograms. Soji and Geordi conduct an experiment on lucid dreaming. (geordi’s here because i love him and the experiment they’re doing is ‘if soji puts enough parts of her brain in sleep mode can she or geordi talk to a remnant of her dad in there’ and the result is ‘yes and there are seventeen individual lines of dialogue that will have you bawling like a baby’. then they have to pilot la sirena out of a contested patch of space together because they accidentally let her drift while they were doing weird science and everybody else is planetside having wacky market haggling shenanigans and emmett & enoch are still not online. do they sit in The Correct Spots On The Bridge? brother, it’s the only reason the scene exists)

star trek picard episode whatever 2 electric boogaloo “Dinner and a Holonovel”: Raffi and Seven go on their first official date. Meanwhile, La Sirena receives a coded message from one of Raffi’s mysterious contacts. (in this one Raf and Sev get dressed up but they’re both sort of uncomfortable doing so and they try to have a date but neither of them are enjoying themselves trying to be normal, because Raf’s an old reprobate who’s definitely forgotten how to Have Fun With Others and Sev never learned because it wasn’t relevant to her interests. but then they wind up in some trouble(maybe they deliberately seek it out sort of unconsciously bc they’re bored) and it becomes a fun bar fight date that they really enjoy. everybody else is playing twenty questions trying to figure out this weirdly-encoded message for her bc she’s busy. they come back all bruised and grinning and the whole gang looks up at them with this half-decoded message and is like what kind of life do you lead).

star trek picard episode whatever 2 the sequel “Dr. and Mr. Smith”: Raffi’s contact has asked the crew for their help in a...discreet political matter. (it’s a reverse heist episode starring everyone’s two favorite sort-of-semi-retired-?-spies (if we are spies no we are not. yes we are. no <3). julian and raffi have a very good rapport and sev and garak don’t understand each other AT ALL. yes they are together in this one. no i dont think we need much backstory on when or how it happened i will leave that to the experts and their fucking youtube plays. keep up the good work. what are they reverse-stealing? idk yet it’s just a vehicle for character dynamics anyway).

star trek picard episode we cry a lot “The Daughters”: Soji confronts her legacy when an old friend of her fathers hails La Sirena, eager to repay a debt. (although to be honest, when is our sweet girl NOT confronting her legacy? that bitch is all legacy; she’s got legacy frankly oozing out of her positronic pores. this is partly a story about soji, but it takes a while to get there. first it’s the story of Sarge, who had an imaginary friend when she was six...

she can’t pinpoint exactly when she came up with him, and she doesn’t even remember what she named him - but she knows it happened sometime around the evacuations, and when they all moved back home and the world started growing again - lush and fast from the rich volcanic soil - she used to spend hours playing around with her birthday-gift radio set, ‘talking’ to her imaginary friend. of course, she never got actual replies, but as she aged out of the phase she retained an interest in radio and communications, and her parents indulged it and bought her more and better equipment, enrolled her in science programs, fed her curiosity. until one day as a young adult doing a school project on theoretical outer space transmissions, she arrived at a theory which (she later describes it as a CLICK, like something is settling into place in her brain) could account for the existence of extraterrestrial life, just out of reach. and perhaps, she posits in her presentation, the reason no aliens had yet contacted her world had little to do with them not being there and much to do with them choosing not to respond. the goal, she concluded, was to continue reaching out - to close the gap. she wrapped up the presentation with a nod to nostalgia. “And maybe someday, those friends will be imaginary no more.”

she wins an award for the project, and begins work in her chosen field that’s extremely rewarding, but it is still years before she reaches her second conclusion: the logical leap that if future alien contact was not only possible but likely, her imaginary friend might have been a real person after all. she brings this idea up with her mother one night over dinner, and her mother is somewhat alarmed - what do you mean you think you were talking to aliens, you couldn’t do that on a child’s transmitter kit, adults??? adult aliens? what are you saying they said to you? - but she can’t answer. she doesn’t have clear memories of that time, only an unshakeable conviction that the life she may have contacted is closer than anyone could possibly imagine. and so she starts a new project. she digs out the old childhood kit, fiddles with the dials, finds the frequency she used to tune it to. in her mind’s eye there’s the impression of a clear, frank voice, but no words. she tunes her own, more modern and complex instruments, to the same frequency, and keeps listening.

one day, she hears something. this time, she doesn’t talk first. the next few months are a whirlwind of information-gathering. there are people out there. whole societies. she pieces together the basics of what she’ll eventually learn is the prime directive; enough ships pass by the atmosphere of her world that she’s able to form a working conclusion as to why the come close but never hail. they know we’re down here, she thinks, they just think we’re not ready.

and maybe they don’t have the kind of boats that could get you that far into the sky. but she’s always been resourceful. she picks up a new frequency, and starts listening to starfleet. and after a few months of listening and planning, she starts packing. she takes the kiddie transmitter kit, she takes clothing designed for all-weather wilderness exposure, she takes the kind of emergency preserved food that people used to keep by the pallet in case of earthquake, and she takes a few other trinkets she can’t live without. and when the time is right, she hails. it might be a combination of luck or goodwill, but she manages to convince a passing freighter that she is the stranded comms officer of a downed private ship, the only survivor of the wreck hiding out on a pre-warp world. they beam her up and the first few weeks are very touch-and-go, but she manages to convince them she belongs up here, that the people who look like her are very far away and not just under their feet, darting around her green little world like a hill of bugs under the eyes of giant birds. she gets off at the nearest starbase, and she starts exploring.

she takes numerous vessels to numerous worlds, gathering information all the time. she starts calling herself Sarge, instead of Sarjenka, and it makes people think she’s a military type and nobody bothers her. she stops at a library planet for a month and researches everything she can about the major governing systems in the galaxy. without much to go on - no name, only a vague physical description (tall? pale? humanoid?) - it’s hard to determine exactly what kind of vessel the Friend would have been on, if indeed he existed. the yellow clothes, one of her few clear recollections, lead her to guess starfleet, but starfleet is a massive organization and so many of its vessels have come near her homeworld that it seems unlikely she’ll be able to narrow it down like that. so she tries a different tack, searching for the other two vague faces that she can bring to mind. one is a middle-aged woman, humanoid, but the search turns up nothing; the woman is a doctor who has retired from the organization and now works at a teaching hospital near vulcan. the other is a bald man with a deep voice, humanoid, and his record turns up an absolute deluge of information. she skips past most of it; she’s inpatient now, if anyone knows about the Friend he will, and so she checks his last known location. on board the private supply-class ship La Sirena, captained by ex-starfleet officer Cristobal Rios. Rios is tall, dark-haired, and humanoid, but absolutely nothing about him rings that little mental bell. she checks his last docking location. the ship visited a reclamation site briefly, and then disappears from the record.

but Sarge is nothing if not a searcher, so she adjusts her frequencies and tries again. it’s months before they’re in proximity to one another, months in which she’s taken the opportunity to secure her own vessel, a little rented, dented passenger bucket that’s probably worth more in repairs than the price she got it for. but she trades radio repairs for ship repairs at the port where she buys it, looks up its name (Avis) and finds it acceptable, and then she’s in the sky. she tools around exploring new bases and stations, and keeps the hail open. and one day, it’s answered. a human voice answers. “Avis, we read you. What can we do for you?” they go on-screen with each other, and she sees first the captain - the bearded guy - and then...him. the old man. he is an old man, the bald guy, and his eyebrows raise when he sees her come on the viewer.

“Permission to come on board?” she asks. “I have something which might belong to one of you.”

the old man looks wary for a moment, but then he turns to someone behind him, they exchange some quiet words, and he nods. “Permission granted.”

there’s a young woman waiting for her at the transport platform. shorter than her by a good half meter, humanoid. pale. “Dr. Soji Asha,” she says, “You look...”

and Sarge could swear she’s about to say ‘familiar.’

“Sarge,” she says, and the woman’s small hand grasps her long one in a firm shake, and then waits patiently while Sarge performs greeting, letting her fingers just-not-rest on the woman’s shoulders and arms. “I’m actually looking for an old friend of mine, and I thought you might have his whereabouts. Tall, pale, starfleet officer? Ops gold. I know that’s not much to go on, but if it helps, he would have once contacted and established a rapport with pre-warp Drema IV? Humanoid, but not human. He...” It’s weird. standing here, explaining herself to this quietly-held young woman, Sarge is able to articulate better than ever before her half-formed memories. “He told me once he was a machine.” and then, like another CLICK is settling, she has a name. At last. “Data.” I knew he’d had a name.

the woman’s face lights up and falls in such swift motion it is hard to tell which comes first - the recognition or the sorrow. but they’re both there, clear and present. “Dad died almost twenty years ago,” she says. “But if it helps, I have a positronic clone of his brain.”

Sarge starts laughing; she doesn’t mean to, but the way the woman - Soji - says it, so matter-of-fact, so frank...she stops herself before it’s rude, but Soji’s laughing too. “Sorry, I -”

“No, don’t - how do you - how did you know Dad? Come on, come with me -”

“What happened? I didn’t know him for long, I barely remembered him, but I knew he existed -”

“That’s a long story. Do you want to meet the crew?”

Soji reaches for her hand, and with a feeling of mechanisms interlocking as they properly should, she takes it. they start walking. “Oh.” She’s almost forgotten. “If...if he’s not around to take it back, then this might belong to you.” She reaches in her pocket and holds it out: a small, ceramic singing bird.)