How better writing could have saved the Picard season one finale...

kayajay

I know that it was marred with production problems and actors not being available etc, but I just can see how things could have been better in the Picard finale.

Instead of the silly Android macguffin device, why couldn't Seven have given The Vaper something from the cube...like an auto-regenerator we saw in Dark Frontier? It would have also given them a chance to talk, (because that incredibly random hand-holding just felt incredibly random).

In the fight with the Romulan...Seven should have hit her with assimilation tubules. "Welcome to being an abomination!" And then later, she could have had another conversation, remorseful at having assimilated someone, etc.

And when the cube emerged from transwarp...we clearly saw the sphere port. After killing the Romulan, I would have loved to have seen Seven and then all of the Ex-B's jump into alcoves and launch the sphere from the service, flying it on remote, to battle the Romulans...again, instead of the macguffin device.

In the end, the Ex-B's and the cube just felt...unnecessary and so very wasted.

phoenixc

It is the same kind of shallow writing that skates across threads that are sometimes potentially more interesting than the main thread. Kurtzman's team uses the classic action movie style of writing, which is (from a plot view) as sloppy and shallow as the old Flash Gordon serials or more recently Blake's Seven.

Like Blake's Seven they hold to a very linear plot progression and burn through plot threads that could go for several "episodes" (in a serial they are actually called segments), or even a season of their own, in a single episode or less and will soon exhaust the field of possible stories they could do (just like Blake's Seven did) and either end the series or do a major shark jump to get to a different story field (similar to what DSC did with their hop to the future).

I agree, if they went for a wider, deeper serial format where plot complications took them further afield and they actually followed up on some of the interesting but ignored threads, as well as kick the main thread up to multi-season instead of one-per-season it would be a lot better. As it is the show has a kind of over-produced gee-wiz feel to it that is not only unTreklike, it is a bit irritating.

kayajay

phoenixc#0738 wrote: »

It is the same kind of shallow writing that skates across threads that are sometimes potentially more interesting than the main thread. Kurtzman's team uses the classic action movie style of writing, which is (from a plot view) as sloppy and shallow as the old Flash Gordon serials or more recently Blake's Seven.

Like Blake's Seven they hold to a very linear plot progression and burn through plot threads that could go for several "episodes" (in a serial they are actually called segments), or even a season of their own, in a single episode or less and will soon exhaust the field of possible stories they could do (just like Blake's Seven did) and either end the series or do a major shark jump to get to a different story field (similar to what DSC did with their hop to the future).

I agree, if they went for a wider, deeper serial format where plot complications took them further afield and they actually followed up on some of the interesting but ignored threads, as well as kick the main thread up to multi-season instead of one-per-season it would be a lot better. As it is the show has a kind of over-produced gee-wiz feel to it that is not only unTreklike, it is a bit irritating.

Oh, poor Blake's...destroying the liberator, their smuggler relegated, Blake himself gone, for poor guy with the brain implant. The bones of that show are FANTASTIC, but it just didn't have a strong enough hand on the rudder.

foxman00

somtaawkhar wrote: »

kayajay wrote: »

Instead of the silly Android macguffin device, why couldn't Seven have given The Vaper something from the cube...like an auto-regenerator we saw in Dark Frontier? It would have also given them a chance to talk, (because that incredibly random hand-holding just felt incredibly random).

Because the auto-regenerator doesn't do what the android device did, so it wouldn't be useful in the situation they used the Andorid device in. And the hand holding thing was added because both Seven and Raffi's actors thought the characters had some obvious chemist during the "Stardust city Rag" episode when they interacted. So to them it was an obvious continuation on that.

In the fight with the Romulan...Seven should have hit her with assimilation tubules. "Welcome to being an abomination!" And then later, she could have had another conversation, remorseful at having assimilated someone, etc.

Seven wouldn't do this in the first place. She knows form first hand experience how inhuman that is. That's far more out of character then her just killing someone who is obviously evil.

And when the cube emerged from transwarp...we clearly saw the sphere port. After killing the Romulan, I would have loved to have seen Seven and then all of the Ex-B's jump into alcoves and launch the sphere from the service, flying it on remote, to battle the Romulans...again, instead of the macguffin device.

A single Borg Sphere isn't going to do jack to the Romulans, not after anti Borg measures have become more available following all the Borg run ins across the series, and the Romulans spending years studying Borg for years on the Artifact.

So, in short, because none of what you suggest really makes sense, or would have worked.

We also dont know if that Cube still had its sphere.

it could have not had one, it could have been disassembled by the Romulans for study for trying to backwards engineer the technology etc etc.

legendarylycan

Just because we saw one Cube launching a Sphere, it doesn't mean they ALL have them.​​

redeyedraven

shadowfang240 wrote: »

Just because we saw one Cube launching a Sphere, it doesn't mean they ALL have them.​​

I'm pretty sure that was literally done in FC because it'd "look cool" on the big screen, and also because they needed a McGuffin so the Borg could still be present after the Cube's destruction.

I call it reverse-escalation, because instead of building up to the cube-battle they just did that right in the beginning to "wow" the audience and went downhill from there.

kayajay

shadowfang240 wrote: »

Just because we saw one Cube launching a Sphere, it doesn't mean they ALL have them.​​

All I wonder is why they went to the effort of putting the hatch on the model...if they then didn't use it. Why bother? The second I saw it, I thought...ooh, there's a sphere on the way and then it was a letdown.

redeyedraven

reyan01 wrote: »

One could say the same of the Intrepid class and the Aeroshuttle they never actually used.

Or the Captain's Yacht of the Enterprise-D. Even the Nova-class has one, the 'Waverider'.

I mean on the Galaxy, that kinda made sense. To a degree. A bit. Here and there.
Luxurious ship with a fancy big shuttle for captain and possibly important guests; I'm sure there'd be a practical use for it on a delicate diplomatic mission that requires a bit more subtlety than a Galaxy-class ship knocking at your door.

On Intrepid and Nova... well... why. Intrepid-class-ships can land themselves and have pretty fast shuttles already.

Nova... well, on that one it may even be some sort of lifeboat? But why such a fancy one then.

And on the Sovereign......... "Jean-Luc, where's your car?" - "directly below my Macross-missile-massacre!"

legendarylycan

Or the Galaxy and the Captain's Yacht THEY never used.​​

angrytarg

ThevGalaxy's whole saucer was meant to land and take off planets. But time constraints caused them to never finish the hatches on the model (Eaglemoss' Starship Collection magazine), which lead to the whole thing being made a stupid oversized lifeboat. The 'Captain's Yacht' was also never made. Voyager wasn't a physical model any more (I think), but they still never made a Aeroshuttle. Instead we got the Delta Flyer. For whatever reason.

kayajay

angrytarg wrote: »

ThevGalaxy's whole saucer was meant to land and take off planets. But time constraints caused them to never finish the hatches on the model (Eaglemoss' Starship Collection magazine), which lead to the whole thing being made a stupid oversized lifeboat. The 'Captain's Yacht' was also never made. Voyager wasn't a physical model any more (I think), but they still never made a Aeroshuttle. Instead we got the Delta Flyer. For whatever reason.

It would have been terrific if instead of the Delta Flyer, they'd decided to complete the Aeroshuttle. They go down to...deck nine, I think would be the bottom of the saucer, where it hadn't been finished when they left drydock. It was something that a Starbase was going to complete later, so right then it was in shambles.

They could have pooled all of their new knowledge...Borg shields, Voyager's gel packs and made it better than it was ever going to be. On the Delta Flyer, they never followed through on the "Borg inspired weapon system" and it should have been, "Made with the same coming together of Starfleet and Borg technology that Harry and Seven used to create the astrometrics lab"...something cool like that.

The design was always gorgeous and far sexier than the DF. It was also always hilarious how in Threshold, the Cochrane barely made it out of the shuttlebay, but then the Delta Flyer started to!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZELcDMGdhJE

I know they didn't do the Aeroshuttle because of Voyager's model...but they went to CGI (which admittedly looked terrible) in season four, so that wasn't an excuse.

We also know that they reused the design as other alien ships...about half a dozen times! It was definitely in the Void, for one.

phoenixc

angrytarg wrote: »

ThevGalaxy's whole saucer was meant to land and take off planets. But time constraints caused them to never finish the hatches on the model (Eaglemoss' Starship Collection magazine), which lead to the whole thing being made a stupid oversized lifeboat. The 'Captain's Yacht' was also never made. Voyager wasn't a physical model any more (I think), but they still never made a Aeroshuttle. Instead we got the Delta Flyer. For whatever reason.

I haven't ever seen anything about a Galaxy class saucer doing that (it can land as a lifeboat though, and not just the crash it did when the Duras sisters blew the ship up), the only one that does that for sure is the Planet of Titans ship (it was never given a class name) that is seen in the background in TMP and TNG because there are storyboards showing it and it was in the PoT script (that ship was built the reverse of a normal Starfleet ship, the primary hull was the delta, the saucer was a specialized science section with landing and takeoff capabilities).

Of course, considering over 35% of the saucer is empty unfinished area (in case it has to do the ultra-long range trips it was designed to be able to survive) and there were apparently several different models it might be possible that at least one of them uses some of that unallocated space for landing gear and extra grav drive equipment to make landings like that.

qultuq

Andrew Probert’s early design plan’s did include landing pads, although he abandoned them before the final version:

“Probert always assumed that the original Enterprise had landing gear.
‘Popular opinion indicated that the two triangular points on the underside of the saucer are actually two landing legs; the third one would be in the dorsal cavity, so the saucer would have tricycle landing gear for planet landing. Carrying that into Star Trek: The Motion Picture Enterprise I designed four landing pads on the underside of the saucer.’”

But he said he was “distracted away from that” before his final design.

http://fsd.trekships.org/art/1701-d.html

And the idea of a ‘safe’ landing was clearly abandoned before the series aired. The Enterprise D Technical manual (pp 28-29) says that the saucer was not meant to be recovered. And in fact, because the saucer was so expensive, they never tested the saucer landing and only used computer projections to verify whether such a maneuver was possible.

https://xaeyr.typepad.com/files/franchise-star-trek-tng-technical-manual1.pdf

phoenixc

qultuq wrote: »

Andrew Probert’s early design plan’s did include landing pads, although he abandoned them before the final version:

“Probert always assumed that the original Enterprise had landing gear.
‘Popular opinion indicated that the two triangular points on the underside of the saucer are actually two landing legs; the third one would be in the dorsal cavity, so the saucer would have tricycle landing gear for planet landing. Carrying that into Star Trek: The Motion Picture Enterprise I designed four landing pads on the underside of the saucer.’”

But he said he was “distracted away from that” before his final design.

http://fsd.trekships.org/art/1701-d.html

And the idea of a ‘safe’ landing was clearly abandoned before the series aired. The Enterprise D Technical manual (pp 28-29) says that the saucer was not meant to be recovered. And in fact, because the saucer was so expensive, they never tested the saucer landing and only used computer projections to verify whether such a maneuver was possible.

https://xaeyr.typepad.com/files/franchise-star-trek-tng-technical-manual1.pdf

In the original TNG format where the sections would separate more often Probert's landing and takeoff idea would have been great, there would have been a lot of potential to examine "flying saucer" myths from the reverse of the usual viewpoint for instance (while they did it in smaller ways like Riker's hospital episode, there would have been even more potential with the actual saucer).

angrytarg

The landing/take-off for the TNG saucer is mentioned in Eaglemoss' starship magazine, I have a physical copy somewhere which I have to re-read, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't about the TMP one.

The concept was abandoned purely for RL reasons with the model if I remember correctly. In-universe it just makes sense as a Galaxy saucer can even serve as a colony center or mass-transport of material and personell or troops.

In-canon, at some point Galaxy saucers can be seen being assembled planetside/on the ground. That would make sense if they were capable of orbital/planetary operation

angrytarg

@qultuq @phoenixc

I looked around but I can't find my copy of it, however apparently someone added the bits to MA as well.

"For the refit Enterprise, Andrew Probert purposefully designed landing gear into the saucer, hidden behind the four square panels located on the saucer's concave underside. The panels were also carried over to many TMP-era designs, including the USS Reliant and USS Excelsior. Probert had intended to place landing gear on the Enterprise-D saucer as well, but became distracted by other elements and never returned to the landing gear concept. As he recalled several years later, the ship eventually paid the price for that oversight. (Star Trek: The Next Generation USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D Blueprints; Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 16)"​​

legendarylycan

I'm guessing that last bit was a reference to Generations...honestly, even if the saucer had landing gear, it wouldn't have made much of a difference in the end - the Daring D still would've been retired in favor of the Enterprising E.​​

phoenixc

shadowfang240 wrote: »

I'm guessing that last bit was a reference to Generations...honestly, even if the saucer had landing gear, it wouldn't have made much of a difference in the end - the Daring D still would've been retired in favor of the Enterprising E.​​

It would not have mattered for another reason too, the warp core breach was too close and EMPed (or whatever, subspace pulsed maybe?) their systems rather badly, including blowing out the impulse drive so Data had nothing but the thrusters and deflectors to attempt a crash landing with. The D's saucer was going to crash either way.

kayajay

It has to be said...it would have been cool to see the Saucer landing like a "Flying Saucer", Forbidden Planet-esque.