Picard Season 3 (SPOILERS)

jonsills

Okay, just watched the premiere episode. No spoilers here, but Capt. Shaw is a bit of a jackhole, isn't he?

foxman00

jonsills wrote: »

Okay, just watched the premiere episode. No spoilers here, but Capt. Shaw is a bit of a jackhole, isn't he?

Yep, in his first minute on screen, I had to pause the episode to do a tiny bit of housework. I verbally said "I hate this guy already".

A testiment to the actor for straight away hitting the ground running and being in character from the first microsecond.

evilmark444

Overall it was a great episode, and I loved it! One of the few things I didn't like is a bit nit picky, but details like this really bother me: Dr Crusher's rifle.

I was VERY excited to see the First Contact era rifle in the photos they released leading up to the premiere, but now all of a sudden it's a pump-action weapon of some kind!? That doesn't even make sense since it's an energy weapon, and the phaser blasts from it do not look or sound anything like they did in the TNG movies.

jonsills

The pump-action one wasn't a Starfleet phaser, apparently - both Picard and Riker seemed taken aback by the fact that it left ashes. Her Starfleet phaser rifle had a low battery, and ran dry after a few shots.

legendarylycan

That still doesn't explain the pumping - pump stocks on rifles are used for ejecting spent physical rounds and/or chambering fresh ones...such a thing is not needed on an energy weapon. Unless they're trying to justify it as a charge-up function of some kind, similar to how winding the handle on certain brands of rechargeable flashlights recharges the internal battery.​ Or that annoying-to-use laser musket from FO4.​​​

questerius

legendarylycan#5411 wrote: »

That still doesn't explain the pumping - pump stocks on rifles are used for ejecting spent physical rounds and/or chambering fresh ones...such a thing is not needed on an energy weapon. Unless they're trying to justify it as a charge-up function of some kind, similar to how winding the handle on certain brands of rechargeable flashlights recharges the internal battery.​ Or that annoying-to-use laser musket from FO4.​​​

Not necessarily.
Remember the burned out phaser coils stacked against the wall on the Defiant in DS9.
Similarly disposable cartridges could be used on high powered hand held weapons during the 25th century.

neowolfen

Did noone else notice the Elachi Qulash Friagtes chasing down Crushers vessel at the start?

Here is an in game shot for contrast
Seems STO got another vessel Canon. I wonbder if this means the Elachi are now canon??

legendarylycan

The Elachi always were - they just weren't called Elachi. They appeared in the Enterprise episode Silent Enemy.​​

jonsills

I gather from some things the showrunner has said that the crew aren't supposed to be Elachi. Maybe they picked the ships up on sale somewhere?

neowolfen

jonsills wrote: »

I gather from some things the showrunner has said that the crew aren't supposed to be Elachi. Maybe they picked the ships up on sale somewhere?

Yeah the crew in the episode definitely weren't Elachi, but I was actually meaning if the Elachi ships are now canon then by extension the Elachi themselves could be canon now that thier ships DO exist in canon.

inferiority

jonsills wrote: »

I gather from some things the showrunner has said that the crew aren't supposed to be Elachi. Maybe they picked the ships up on sale somewhere?

The Lobi Crystal Consortium perhaps?

.

neowolfen wrote: »

...but I was actually meaning if the Elachi ships are now canon then by extension the Elachi themselves could be canon now that thier ships DO exist in canon.

As previously mentioned, since the Elachi have already been in an episode of Enterprise (S1E12 Silent Enemy), they are already canon and do not need canonisation. Alkthough, they are unnamed in the episode.
See these screengrabs:

neowolfen

inferiority wrote: »

As previously mentioned, since the Elachi have already been in an episode of Enterprise (S1E12 Silent Enemy), they are already canon and do not need canonisation. Alkthough, they are unnamed in the episode.
See these screengrabs:

STO using thier image doesn't make them Elachi, nor does it make Elachi canon. Having thier ships canon could however mean that the species is also now canno which would officially and canonically attach a name to that species once and for all. Which is a whole different ball game and would be another "canonical" addition for the STO team if the case, which would be cool.

inferiority

neowolfen wrote: »

STO using thier image doesn't make them Elachi...

The aliens that appeared in Enterprise were what STO named as the Elachi.
By the same logic, the aliens that appeared in Voyager were what STO named as the Undine.

jonsills

inferiority wrote: »

neowolfen wrote: »

STO using thier image doesn't make them Elachi...

The aliens that appeared in Enterprise were what STO named as the Elachi.
By the same logic, the aliens that appeared in Voyager were what STO named as the Undine.

Yes, Species 8472 are indeed known as the Undine in STO, though unnamed in VOY. Same species. The Borg don't give them names, just numbers.

However, the ships haven't been canonized as Elachi ships yet. We do know that they used the Qulash-class frigate as the model for these ships, with different hull paint but the exact same glowy bits, and they don't seem to be crewed by Elachi as far as we can tell. This could mean they were acquired from the Elachi, either by trade or capture, or it could mean that there aren't going to be Elachi in here but they really liked the ship. Only time (and possibly Terry Matalas, if he's in a chatty mood) will tell.

jake477

Captain Shaw I believe fits the "renegade" or "jack-hole" as you put it Starfleet officer narrative TNG was infamous for over the years. Admiral Necheyev. Captain Jellico, Admiral Pressman, etc. Unlike TOS where Kirk could just simply give Admiral McCormack a call at Starfleet HQ and its business as usual, the Starfleet of the 24th Century and now 25th Century seems to lack shall we say "humanity" they once had. Even the officer presiding of Spock's "Court-Martial" in during the Talos IV incident was more agreeable than Captain Shaw was. Commodore Matt Decker and Commander Ben Finney were the only two I'd consider worthy of being "TNG" caliber officers.

Something tells me he won't last much longer. Knowing its TNG he will have change of heart and sacrifice himself, or be exposed by Picard/Riker for some unknown violation or Starfleet will just give Picard command of the Titan because the new "genesis level" threat Raffi found out about. Just like Starfleet gave Admiral Kirk the refit Enterprise in Wrath of Khan to investigate Regula 1. Afterall this whole ordeal did start off with an "inspection tour" like Kirk did with the 1701. Either way, Shaw does not have long.

jonsills

I don't mind his sticking around - he was absolutely right to refuse Picard's request to throw their deployment orders out the airlock, and a ship captain should stick to his guns like that - but the "guest quarters" were strictly an unnecessary power move, and officially deadnaming Seven is just beyond the pale. He needs a severe redemption arc if he's not going to be shuffled offscreen soon.

legendarylycan

I really don't think calling someone by their birth name when they prefer going by the shortform of their Borg designation constitutes deadnaming - the fact that term is specific to transgender and non-binary people notwithstanding, if that DID constitute deadnaming, calling a Sith by their original name would also be deadnaming them and that's just silly.​​

jonsills

"Seven of Nine" isn't a nickname, or a title, it's her name. Seven indicated during VOY that the name "Annika Hansen" is dead to her - Seven of Nine is the only name she's ever known, and "Seven" is a barely-acceptable shortening of her name.

(VOY:Day of Honor)
JANEWAY: Your designation, Seven of Nine, it's a little cumbersome. Wouldn't you prefer to be called by your given name, Annika?

SEVEN: I have been Seven of Nine for as long as I can remember.

JANEWAY: All right. But maybe we could streamline it a little. How would you feel about Seven?

SEVEN: Imprecise, but acceptable.

---

And I'm having difficulty recalling it with precision, but there was a moment in a later season when a message came in addressed to "Annika Hansen"; Seven replied, "There is no one aboard this ship by that name."

qultuq

The episode was pretty good I guess. But there is no way they could have gotten from ESD to the Federation border in one night. That is like a years-long journey at maximum warp. I get warp travel is more dependent on plot points then any consistent hard science fiction. But looking at the Bergman era starcharts Sol is pretty center in Federation space and Federation space takes up a majority of the Beta quadrant. Unless the warp scale completely changed since TNG. If Picard could reach Beverly in a day—Voyager would have been able to get back to Federation space in the course of a three day weekend.

I liked that Shaw received them in his dining room. It was like a Hornblower novel to meet the upper class officer in private and to pull rank without just calling up Starfleet command.

What was going on with the Raffi subplot though? What is this egnimatic security group. Why are they using bulky flip communicators? I don’t think I cared for any of those scenes.

evilmark444

I am curious how Seven will be addressed once her name issue is resolved, will they treat Nine as a last name and call her Commander Nine, or will they just stick with Commander Seven?

phoenixc

qultuq wrote: »

The episode was pretty good I guess. But there is no way they could have gotten from ESD to the Federation border in one night. That is like a years-long journey at maximum warp. I get warp travel is more dependent on plot points then any consistent hard science fiction. But looking at the Bergman era starcharts Sol is pretty center in Federation space and Federation space takes up a majority of the Beta quadrant. Unless the warp scale completely changed since TNG. If Picard could reach Beverly in a day—Voyager would have been able to get back to Federation space in the course of a three day weekend.

I liked that Shaw received them in his dining room. It was like a Hornblower novel to meet the upper class officer in private and to pull rank without just calling up Starfleet command.

What was going on with the Raffi subplot though? What is this egnimatic security group. Why are they using bulky flip communicators? I don’t think I cared for any of those scenes.

I think the flip communicator was so they could bypass the planetary network and contact the nearest relay directly (with the speed and bandwidth of the comms in PIC I suspect they have a relay in each star system or something close to that density) while just looking like it was an old model communicator. It could also be because of really beefed-up encryption and possible alternative uses for the device or something along those lines, like the movie-era Klingon communicators having a rudimentary sensor secondary function.

legendarylycan

Klingon tech is bulky and rugged more because it needs to be able to withstand Klingon tempers than having added features.​​

jonsills

qultuq wrote: »

The episode was pretty good I guess. But there is no way they could have gotten from ESD to the Federation border in one night. That is like a years-long journey at maximum warp.

In "Where No Man Has Gone Before", they went to the edge of the galactic disc. Time needed was unspecified, but given speeds discussed later, it should have taken years - and despite the title, someone else had been there before.

In STV, they went to the galactic core in less than a day.

In "Broken Bow", Qo'noS was less than five days from Earth at warp 5, but somehow that was the first time a Klingon had found our world.

Warp drive operates at the speed of plot.

legendarylycan

Someone once speculated long ago that there were 'currents' of a sort running through space that significantly amplified warp speeds during Enterprise and TOS, but had vanished for whatever reason by the time of TNG onward to explain the sudden massive decrease in speed. If the producers were smart, they would've used that to explain away inconsistencies in speed back when TNG aired.

Frankly, they should've just done what Star Wars did regarding that as well - from the edge of the Galaxy to just outside the boundary of the core in roughly a day (about the amount of time it took to get from Tatooine to what was left of Alderaan - and that was WITH having to plot courses around major astronomical bodies).​​

phoenixc

jonsills wrote: »

qultuq wrote: »

The episode was pretty good I guess. But there is no way they could have gotten from ESD to the Federation border in one night. That is like a years-long journey at maximum warp.

In "Where No Man Has Gone Before", they went to the edge of the galactic disc. Time needed was unspecified, but given speeds discussed later, it should have taken years - and despite the title, someone else had been there before.

In STV, they went to the galactic core in less than a day.

In "Broken Bow", Qo'noS was less than five days from Earth at warp 5, but somehow that was the first time a Klingon had found our world.

Warp drive operates at the speed of plot.

While there is a lot of speed-of-plot in Trek (especially in the newer stuff), often because the writers have a hard time imagining the distances, the situation in Where No Man Has Gone Before is not quite as bad as many think it was. They did not travel out to the rim of the galactic disk (which is about 250,000ly away), they went to the closest face of the disk which is a lot closer at about 500ly.

It is still a long trip, even at the faster speed Roddenberry initially used for travel in Star Trek (".73 of one light year per hour"), but it would be a trip time of approximately 28 days or so which isn't too unreasonable.

After the second pilot was filmed, someone (the head writer maybe? I forget offhand and don't have time to look it up again) talked Roddenberry into using that "speed of light squared" formula in the first series bible (or cubed in the second series bible) to supposedly make it easier on writers to calculate times instead of guessing some speed lower than Roddenberry's original maximum speed (which ironically is about warp 9.98 or so in TNG scale).

How that squaring or cubing would be somehow simpler than just rounding up to one lightyear per hour as a maximum cruising speed would actually be simpler I haven't a clue, but they adopted the formula (and made an even more complicated one for TNG and later).

Using the cubed version of the formula the same trip would have taken about a year and a half at warp 7, which would have probably been a dealbreaker in the second pilot episode. The fact that they had three different speed scales in use depending on whether a particular writer used the one in the first bible, the second bible, or Roddenberry's top cruising speed figure (which evidence points him still using as a rule of thumb even after approving the formulas) probably didn't help with consistency even when using "official" speed charts either.

legendarylycan#5411 wrote: »

Someone once speculated long ago that there were 'currents' of a sort running through space that significantly amplified warp speeds during Enterprise and TOS, but had vanished for whatever reason by the time of TNG onward to explain the sudden massive decrease in speed. If the producers were smart, they would've used that to explain away inconsistencies in speed back when TNG aired.

Frankly, they should've just done what Star Wars did regarding that as well - from the edge of the Galaxy to just outside the boundary of the core in roughly a day (about the amount of time it took to get from Tatooine to what was left of Alderaan - and that was WITH having to plot courses around major astronomical bodies).​​

That effect is known as the "Cochrane factor", which was a fan theory originally that eventually made its way into Star Trek Maps and a few other things that Trek shows used behind the scenes. Roddenberry started talking about it at conventions by the late '70s more or less, and some of the TNG technobabble hinted at it though I don't think they ever came right out and babbled about it directly. It would be nice if SNW got around to making it official, since it would help a lot, especially if they used the dynamic version of it where the flows can drift and change a bit.

jonsills

Phoenix, I know you want to believe Gene R had everything planned out (when even he said he didn't), but the dialog did not say they went to "exit the galaxy" - it said they went to the edge of the galaxy. You don't refer to the underside of a dinner plate as its "edge", do you?

Warp speeds aren't consistent. They have never been consistent. And frankly, I think trying to tie them down to specific numbers weakens the story, in much the same way it would weaken the story if they always used real stars (this proved to be a poor choice in "The Apple", for instance, as Gamma Trianguli is a blue-white giant star with no planets, just a protoplanetary disc that probably won't even have a chance to form planets because of the star's incredible speed of rotation. Astronomers knew at the time that Gamma Tri was an A-type star, far too hot to host Earthlike planets; the part about the disc was discovered about a decade after the show aired).

eazzie

Ep. 2 Disengage. WHOA GREAT ACTING. GREAT DIRECTING. GREAT STORYTELLING. TRULY BRILLIANT.

phoenixc

Edge can be any edge, not just the RIM of the galaxy. And yes, they did travel vertically to one of the flat edges since there was an anecdote about it being pointed out by the science advisor as the only "edge" they could possibly get to in a reasonable timeframe at the .73ly/hour speed they were using for the ship's top cruising speed at the time and Roddenberry saying if that was so then that is where they were going.

And no, I don't think Roddenberry had Trek all figured out from the start, a lot of things had to be decided on the fly for various reasons (including NBC insisting they get rid of various things, like the drugged needlers they were originally going to use as weapons). You only have to see the differences between The Cage and the second pilot to see some of them.

Another example is that he wasn't the one who came up with the Federation, all Roddenberry called it to begin with was "the interstellar community" and he described the friendly part of that community as having an organization like the United Nations. It was Gene L Coon who came up with the name "United Federation of Planets" and tightened the organization into a more federal model that was better suited for the cold war allegory they were bringing into the series.

Also, writers were supposed to actually use the speed calculations, but apparently few (especially the outside ones) really did use them (or just didn't know what the distance actually was if they did, which is not surprising since fiction-writer friendly star catalogs didn't start getting published until the early 1980s). And familiar names often counted for more than accuracy did, the same way it does in a lot of TV sci-fi (and novels for that matter). Those discrepancies were the reason the concept of what later became known as the "Cochrane factor" of space was invented and became such a fixture in fanfic and whatnot.

jonsills

A surface is not an edge, Phoenix. You're scrambling to justify something that's more easily justified by saying that warp speed is as fast as it needs to be for a particular plot. The point is to tell the stories, not to be "scientifically accurate" in a fictional science. And if that means the Titan needs to reach the edge of Federation space in a single night, then it can be done.

As for Ep 2 - Shaw's working on redemption. That's certainly one way to interrupt a tractor beam! Not sure he should have stuck around to talk after getting everyone off the Eleos, but that's Starfleet for you, always more curious than is good for them. (I'm also wondering about that psych profile that was hinted at...)

phoenixc

Technically, an edge is anywhere there is change from one thing to another, and it doesn't even have to be something physical either, for example there is an edge of night (the name of that old soap was not just random word salad), waveforms have edges, there are edges to maps, etc. In this case it is the upper or lower (depending on how you look at it) edge of the dense galactic disk.

Speaking of soaps, I am glad to see PIC s3e2 confirm that s3e1 was not a fluke and the season-by-season trend the series has shown of dialing down the suds compared to DSC seems to be progressing well.

So far s3 has the most TOS-like feel of the NuTreks drama-wise (SNW is close but gives the impression they are trying a little too hard so far, hopefully SNW S2 will relax a little and let the stories happen naturally) and has been using drama instead of the melodrama that JJ Abrams and his disciples like Kurtzman are known for (of all the Treks, DSC is the melodrama poster child). It also has hints of actual philosophical allegory instead of just a knee-jerk checking off of the cookie-cutter points Hollywood uses when they want to make something seem like it actually addresses social and philosophical issues (but doesn't want to take the time to actually explore them) which plagues so much of TV nowadays.

I was not favorably impressed by first season, and second had its moments in a generally a bumpy ride, but this season so far has been great.

radionic

I'm enjoying the show. The acting is great, writing is hit or miss. I had a hard time getting past a couple of things in E3.

First -

Beverly doesn't tell Picard about Jack because she wants to protect him, then they go full on med-merc and spend 20 years flying around bad neighborhoods in a puny glorified shuttle by themselves. It's non-sensical.

Second -

To use Riker's line, what the hell were those exchanges on the bridge? Picard seems to go out of his way to undermine the crews confidence in Riker, by disregarding chain of command and openly challenging every move in front of everyone. Both of them knew those conversations should have happened in the ready room. I know they want to be all modern now with ST, but that's not how Starfleet officers behave on the bridge in a crisis situation

Aside from that, Enjoying one last season of TNG. The acting is really good. The exchange between Beverly and Picard is sincere, complex, and well done. Writers did a good job there. Worf's entry was fantastic. He's been fun to watch. Raffi's arc was getting less interesting until Worf shows up, but now I am quite interested to see where that goes.