'Star Trek: Picard' finale: It's both amazing and awful, yet ultimately disappointing

[Kachunga]

i was looking forward to this series all it did was disappoint, Picard a dying old man weak one moment then all fiery the next. then the emotional train wreck who kills here romantic couterpart, even Picard when he finds out wants her off the ship and the hands of the law for good reason then turns around now and is happy as punch all of them in fact as a member of the new crew and her new boyfriend conveniently the captain of the ship. c'mon she is still a murderer, cold blooded in fact, the psychotic thereafter. you have a downed borg ship on the planet unresolved what happens there and the survivors on that with the synthetics maybe the toy they gave suzie psychotic can help all the semi borg crew become totally human again? who know, totally left without a second thought, its like hey were only making 10 episodes and we need to wrap it up real fast here so make up something quick we have 10 minutes left of airtime. we have hundreds of new star-fleet ships show up like the Calvary when the federation had more or less gone into isolationism but now have this bad ass fleet of ship capable of kicking the romulans butts. OK, now were off on a new adventure, a sphycho suzie murderer (who the writers all make out as it is somehow ok now saving Picard all is forgiven like it never happened, really bad example but how wollyweird is these days and teaching the young and then the other end of the coin the Picard view of things which on the surface is good and also not so good but how we want to mold kids today it seems) the two girlires holding hands new love interest there for all the lbgt writers and crowd who now all seem to be the writers of all sci fi and horror anything when you are a single digit crowd in society. all in all very disappointing series. only good part was data and they ruined that making him so incredibly old before dissolving. oh and the butterfly going ot person to person to "feel" and share their greif, a few of them were poinient and real bu t it got to be hey c'mon stop already with that it was dragging it out. i could go on but that enough lousy show.

Oh man, I hope English is your second language and you were typing on a glitchy phone that had spell check disabled. I think I agree with most of what you said, at least whatever I could sort of decode and understand.

Except, poor form on dissing the LGBT bit. Look, I feel you that there are definitely a lot of shows that beat the audience over the head with it. Pendulum swinging and all that. But at least Picard just had a 2 second glimpse of it, in the last episode, in the last 60 seconds. So relax on that. Gay people have it hard, seriously hard, no matter what anyone who's not gay wants to think. Western culture seems to be maturing about it, but it's still outright dangerous to be gay in many parts of the world. Have a little empathy and compassion, bro. People's choices as to who they love and choose to be intimate with in no way threatens you. In. No. Way.

 

[Kachunga]

With all due respect, you are most certainly wrong in your assessment of the word "apologist". It is almost strictly used in modern western vernacular as a term of derision. This is easily verified, if you in fact need that.

I too was gravely disappointed in Picard, having been a Trekkie for my entire rather long life. The assessment that the writing, and more importantly, the direction, was childish, is accurate. A truly lost art seems to be the ability to convey the passage of time. There are many episodes of the Generation era that take place over weeks or months. A good director is able to convey that from one scene to another. Picard felt as if it took place over a few days, or maybe a week. The tired modern trope of an existential threat to the entire galaxy is also rather lazy and reeks of a childish mind. Discovery suffered from this as well. And must I point out the literal "magic wand"? The author of this piece calls it a MacGuffin. It is, quite literally, a magic wand that one makes wishes come true with. At least in prior Trek incarnations they would come up with some sort of technobabble solution that Geordi or O'Brian then had to actually break a sweat over, and were not guaranteed to work. I felt intellectual insulted by this, after already feeling mildly offended at many other childish aspects of this series.

Ha! That clown disappeared now. Likely redacting this bit from his memory rather than admit he was a total clown. His kind would rather die by fire than experience the embarrassment of their own idiocy. Being stupid is supposed to hurt, that's the feedback mechanism for a healthy individual to learn and grow. His kind are stunted incorrigibles, that likely cause all manor of collateral damage as they blunder through their awful lives.

 

[Ringo1]

Oh man, I hope English is your second language and you were typing on a glitchy phone that had spell check disabled. I think I agree with most of what you said, at least whatever I could sort of decode and understand.

Except, poor form on dissing the LGBT bit. Look, I feel you that there are definitely a lot of shows that beat the audience over the head with it. Pendulum swinging and all that. But at least Picard just had a 2 second glimpse of it, in the last episode, in the last 60 seconds. So relax on that. Gay people have it hard, seriously hard, no matter what anyone who's not gay wants to think. Western culture seems to be maturing about it, but it's still outright dangerous to be gay in many parts of the world. Have a little empathy and compassion, bro. People's choices as to who they love and choose to be intimate with in no way threatens you. In. No. Way.

yup got a crap keyboard and i dont look over things much after i hurriedly type and send off stuff. no diss intended, simple statement you saw and agreed upon, my point was just that, "being beat over the head", nothing else, i dont understand the poor form issue. had i said i dislike seeing gays/lesbians in my programming, then i certanly would need some compassion. i see these writers pandering for an audience which no person should like or accept.

 

[dwan]

One problem with some Trek fans, also a problem with a lot of Star Wars fans, is that they forget how cheesy the originals were. Star Trek was never, in any of its forms, an artistic masterpiece. The writing has always been corny and the acting hamfisted. My wife and I loved Picard, while we spent a lot of time making fun of the silliness of the plotting, but that's what you get with Star Trek. I grew up on TNG, and I love to revisit those every few years, and I enjoy them as much as I roll my eyes at them. New material in the Trek world will never meet the standards of a large portion of fandom because they put the originals (or what they were first exposed to of the ST universe) on a pedestal and pretend that they were a lot better than they actually were. One clear path to not being sorely disappointed with whatever new Star Trek series comes out is to remember that it's cheesy, formulaic, pulp television. The other biggest problem with fans and the new stuff, an insurmountable one in reality, is that people want more of ____x___ (fill in the blank with your favorite series or movie in the ST canon). Unfortunately for them, that won't happen because it is no longer the year in which that movie or series was big. Nobody will ever make a new TNG style Star Trek series, for instance, because the cultural sensibilities that made that series popular are no longer part of our culture. They're outdated, and so such a series would absolutely fail. The second clear path to not being disappointed with the new shows is to let go of the completely unrealistic fantasy that a network will give you more of ____x___, rather than creating something that will sell ads or tickets to enough of a current audience to make the production profitable. If you don't want something other than ____x___, just go rewatch those.

 

[dvnobles]

The writing has always been corny

just.....wow. Do you think it was the amazing FX and the stellar acting that endeared ST throughout generations? Maybe it's easy to look back now and see things as, I don't know...'ho hum'? But back in the day TOS and TNG told many cutting edge stories, many penned by highly respected authors.

 

[Kachunga]

One problem with some Trek fans, also a problem with a lot of Star Wars fans, is that they forget how cheesy the originals were. Star Trek was never, in any of its forms, an artistic masterpiece. The writing has always been corny and the acting hamfisted. My wife and I loved Picard, while we spent a lot of time making fun of the silliness of the plotting, but that's what you get with Star Trek. I grew up on TNG, and I love to revisit those every few years, and I enjoy them as much as I roll my eyes at them. New material in the Trek world will never meet the standards of a large portion of fandom because they put the originals (or what they were first exposed to of the ST universe) on a pedestal and pretend that they were a lot better than they actually were. One clear path to not being sorely disappointed with whatever new Star Trek series comes out is to remember that it's cheesy, formulaic, pulp television. The other biggest problem with fans and the new stuff, an insurmountable one in reality, is that people want more of ____x___ (fill in the blank with your favorite series or movie in the ST canon). Unfortunately for them, that won't happen because it is no longer the year in which that movie or series was big. Nobody will ever make a new TNG style Star Trek series, for instance, because the cultural sensibilities that made that series popular are no longer part of our culture. They're outdated, and so such a series would absolutely fail. The second clear path to not being disappointed with the new shows is to let go of the completely unrealistic fantasy that a network will give you more of ____x___, rather than creating something that will sell ads or tickets to enough of a current audience to make the production profitable. If you don't want something other than ____x___, just go rewatch those.

Bro, you’re just not listening. Nobody is expecting a replication of TNG era content. But we are demanding a full stop to the incoherent childish nonsense that they do give us. Here, how’s this for an example of one time they actually got it. BSG. Original, talk about cheese! It was glorious as a kid, absolutely terrible now. But the reboot? Massive success with a very broad audience. For ST they don’t even need to reboot, just mature it a bit, have some internal consistency, and assume your audience is smart rather than dumber than a box of rocks. Stargate Universe was pretty good at taking fun cheese in a more mature direction too. And I think that Romulan is still preparing to fire to this day.

 

[dvnobles]

Bro, you’re just not listening. Nobody is expecting a replication of TNG era content. But we are demanding a full stop to the incoherent childish nonsense that they do give us. Here, how’s this for an example of one time they actually got it. BSG. Original, talk about cheese! It was glorious as a kid, absolutely terrible now. But the reboot? Massive success with a very broad audience. For ST they don’t even need to reboot, just mature it a bit, have some internal consistency, and assume your audience is smart rather than dumber than a box of rocks. Stargate Universe was pretty good at taking fun cheese in a more mature direction too. And I think that Romulan is still preparing to fire to this day.

I like what you said here. Imagine ST taken to the seriousness level of the later BSG. I like that idea. The Expanse is a good example, too. They don't spend time explaining the universe and technology, the characters live in it and we are along for the ride. I'm not a big fan of political sci-fi, but in The Expanse it didn't bother me at all because the main plot and sub-plots were/are great.

 

[Kachunga]

I like what you said here. Imagine ST taken to the seriousness level of the later BSG. I like that idea. The Expanse is a good example, too. They don't spend time explaining the universe and technology, the characters live in it and we are along for the ride. I'm not a big fan of political sci-fi, but in The Expanse it didn't bother me at all because the main plot and sub-plots were/are great.

Oh hell yea, Expanse is brilliant! That's a great example of how new material should be. But ST doesn't have to be quite as harsh and dark as either that or BSG. It can still maintain it's utopian outlook. DS9, especially the Dominion War arc, was pretty close, IMHO. But here's my real fantasy: reboot of B5, with JMS at the helm. Imagine that given the BSG treatment. Zero cheese, light vs dark, all the politics that 1990's B5 totally saw coming, and modern production values. Oh, and a continuation of the Farscape universe, which I think was perfect even by modern standards. Baby Yoda was not the first successful puppet by a long shot!

 

[Apollo316]

Are you kidding me?? It was AMAZING!! This episode reminded me of what an astounding and powerful person Picard really is! It actually made me cry. Maybe there are a few technical faults, like the point about the Borg cube, but that is really not the point that defines this episode. Picard aside, there are many other aspects that were really touching, deep, and beautiful, including the scenes about Data's request.

Could not agree more. This was incredible!! Also, anyone who's going to gripe about the BORG cube not creating an extinction level event (which is valid) must also gripe about space ships doing the five D's in space (Dodge, dip, dive, duck and...dodge). Or, when exiting warp they're always upright facing enemy ships. I mean..it's sci fi, some suspension of disbelief is required. Things are done to be exciting at the cost of realism. But the acting, story, everything..incredible!! My heart stopped, my heart raced, I laughed, I cried. This delivered the Star Trek I knew and loved, and grew even more incredible to me!!