#she could have chosen a condenser coil or a recreation of hawkeye's still or anything

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

I built myself a new desktop PC, and I finally got around to setting it up and seeing what it could do. One of the reasons I wanted a new computer was because I watch a lot of DVDs using an external drive, but I've had a lot of trouble doing that, and I recently discovered that it's a power issue. My laptop can only operate the external drive properly when I unplug any other USB accessories.

So tonight I decided to see if my new rig could do better, and yeah, it works really well. No more VLC media crashing because the drive powered down while it was paused. To try it out, I put on Star Trek: Picard. After watching the first twenty minutes, I realized I was on Season 3, because CBS decided to make all their Star Trek DVDs with silver-on-grey labels, making them impossible to read. Then I put on Season 1 Episode 1, which sucks ass.

This show is so up its own ass that it's not even funny. I don't think it's going to get much better, because I saw part of Season 3 and I have some idea what I'm in for. But what really sticks in my craw is the scene where Picard goes to talk to a scientist about how to clone a robot, and she has all this dumb shit on her desk. Look at this.

I hate when TV shows do this. They need to make a lab look extra science-y, so they put some random glassware on the set and fill it with colored liquid. There's two beakers with green and purple, a Florence flask with orange, and a graduated cylinder with blue. Great. Also, on the far right are a couple of automatic pipetters. I think that blue box might be a case of pipette tips. I recognize all this stuff because I've seen it in various labs I've worked in my whole career. This show is supposed to be set three hundred seventy-five years in the future.

Now, let me pick apart any possible justifications for this. Maybe this is actually futuristic equipment for cybernetics research. Well, no, because in this show all of that has been banned. Picard openly laments that she's not allowed to make anything. Instead she can only run simulations. So this junk serves no practical purpose.

So maybe it's an aesthetic thing. She collects antique lab equipment to spruce up her workstation. No, I don't buy it. Picard keeps a bunch of old souvenirs, which is kept in a "quantum archive" that allows the producers to show off all the nifty special effects to make things appear and disappear. He can't just pull out an old painting from his attic, he has to teleport to San Francisco and have a hologram escort him to a secret vault where the painting emerges from a weird box or something. And it's a good painting, not "Dogs Playing Poker" or some cheap nonsense that would hold no meaning like a loose assortment of uninteresting glassware that tells you nothing about the character.

"Well, what do you expect? It's just a TV show--" No. I would let this slide, except everything in this episode is cluttered with special effects to remind you that we're in the world of the future. The reporter who interviews Picard has some floating holo-screen where the makeup artist can preview an exact hue of lipstick. When she interviews Picard there's floating robot cameras in the room. This laboratory is supposed to be a dilapidated shell of its former self, and yet it's still fancier than anything I'll ever work in, because in the future everything is just that fancy. Except the lab equipment, we'll just slap some random old glassware on a desk.

Here, let me offer this for comparison:

This is from TNG Season 1. For some reason, Sickbay always had these big glass jars of blue and red liquid. What were they? What was the liquid for? No one knows, because it's the future, and the equipment is supposed to be strange and unfamiliar to us. They didn't just leave a stethoscope lying around on a table. The sheets and pillows in this shot are pretty much like what you'd see in 1988, but they didn't tip their hand by using sheets with Snoopy prints on them. The prop master could have at least fabricated some unfamiliar looking glassware, but no.

This is what irritates me about this show. It's so determined to impress me with all this big budget prestige TV stuff, but they blow it little stuff like this. The dead boyfriend has cool alien eyes, and every smooth surface on this show is a secret computer, and Mars is on fire, but the story is about Picard having prophetic visions, and how you can clone robots with a single drop of robot blood, which... yeah, okay. That's what we're going with, huh? Neat.