Star Trek Picard – 3x04: No Win Scenario
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Star Trek Picard – 3x04: No Win Scenario
I kind of feel the same way about this episode as I have been, like it’s not bad but it needed another draft or two to polish it up before it’s all that good. I will say this one is probably closer to that distinction than the previous few have been. It benefits from being a single plotline instead of cutting away to a disconnected b-plot, and does manage to hang a lot of character work onto the basic plotline; it’s just a bit weakly written.
It appears I misread the final analysis last episode, and so have to walk back the praise I was considering giving that episode. We are supposed to see Picard as right about all these things, and I don’t like it. It’s not even that I want him to be wrong exactly, but he was acting like kind of an ass last episode being in such a rush to fight that it felt like he had to be wrong. If he was acting like the Picard of old, measured, reasoned, considering the thoughts and opinions of others, that would have framed him as actually being right and Riker as unreasonably cautious. There’s also not enough meat on this to have been a Riker character arc without it…being in the current along with Picard being on a related arc. Which was why I wanted them both to need to learn something from how badly last episode went; but it seems only Riker was supposed to be framed that way.
It turned out to be exactly what I was worried it was (but for some reason let myself think it wasn’t), main character syndrome. Picard has to be right, but he also has to have the bulk of the screen time which crowd out the people who aren’t always right.
At least it does seem willing to show Picard as less than always right on a personal level. Not exactly letting him be wrong, but…limited. He’s great with people on a detached level, which makes him a good commander, a good teacher, a good leader; but he got to be so good at that, partially at the cost of making close personal connections. Not even because he’s bad at it, but because he’s not infinitely skilled.
That said, I need to talk about this thing with Shaw. I was enjoying my read that he didn’t approve of the TNG crew being viewed as legends in the Federation, that they could and had made mistakes, and history is sort of pretending those didn’t happen. To make his bitterness about the Locutus incident, I don’t think works. At least not for that to be even the crux of his beef. It was one thing with Sisko only a couple years after the Borg invasion happened, and even then it wasn’t actually fair of him to judge Picard for what happened; this is 30 years later, people (at least in Starfleet) know what happened and that it wasn’t Picard’s fault.
I kind of wish Seven could somehow have been there for that discussion though. This obviously contributes to his treatment of her, and as she has been on the receiving end of a lot more of his Borg-PTSD than Picard has, she should have been given more insight into the cause. Also, I really think Starfleet HR would have a thing or two to say about using the wrong name for someone like this. You don’t even have to go to a trans place (although I suspect that’s what they’re going for, but I think suitably subtly), if a crewmember got married and changed their surname (however it is done in their culture) and the captain refused to acknowledge their married name, that would be disrespecting them on a few different levels that wouldn’t be okay. Hell, the Klingons were better at this with Alexander (who I don’t think Worf mentioned in his list of family connections); not great, and they maybe only got over it because of Martok and Worf being around, but they dealt with him using a human name rather than Klingon.
(Actually…we should really get something from Alexander, the rest of the old crew has kids running around (save Data…kind of). Also, I have to wonder if Wesley knows about his little brother and what he thinks about it. I don’t expect this show is going to embrace the P+C=W theory, I’ve never exactly bought into it myself, but I think it would be hysterical if it did.)
(Also hysterical: ‘forget that business on the Stargazer [last season], the Borg are still out there.’ The show is clearly pushing last season as far out of sight and out of mind as it can.)
(Also, also hysterical: further canonizing Voyager’s ridiculous explanation about separate power grids for the holodecks. Sir, we need a little more power; take it from life support, because we can’t interface with the holodeck powergrid.)
But I do actually like Picard’s reaction to Shaw’s attitude. It’s nothing he hasn’t heard in the last 30 years; he’s past apologizing for something that he knows but still struggles to believe wasn’t his fault; it pokes at an old wound, but doesn’t reopen it.
The only TNG space creature that this episode mentioned was Farpoint, so are we supposed to think these new space jellyfish are the same space jellyfish as were in Farpoint? If they wanted to raise the tension a bit more could bring up the Crystalline Entity; seems a lot less wonderous when thinking about that side of space creatures.
I’m just going to sigh and not talk about the lighting in this one. And I’m too lazy to do more than gesture toward the ‘cheap whiskey’ comment; it’s easy enough to say it’s a language artifact, but it would be easier to do if this show hadn’t been acting like money was a thing.
I do like that this ep found a way to use Crusher’s medical vantage point, but I wish it would give her a little more character work. I’m okay with her and Picard not being okay yet (although I can’t tell what they are at the end of the episode), but there’s got to be a lot going on in her head about this situation and I’d like to get more of it. And I am glad the show at least addressed the Jack name choice; I’m not quite sure I buy it, but at least it’s something.
As for the Changeling subplot…again, it’s almost there, but it needed some polishing and to not be competing against the other strands of the plot so much. It seems to have missed a few pieces of how Changelings work, like not using the fact that the Changelings can take the shape of objects not just people. And they do still have perception abilities when they’re in the form of objects. It’s also kind of weird that this Changling happens to use a bucket so much like Odo’s; Changelings don’t even have to be in a bucket of any kind, much less that same style. For that matter, with this redesign of the Changelings’ goo form, I’m not even sure it would fit in that bucket.
As this seems to be the end of Act 1 of the season, I’ll say that it’s working on a solid ‘okay’ rating. The further it goes the harder it gets to raise the score (except if it manages a really good way of pulling to overall plot off), and increases the risk of stumbling to a lower ranking. But I’m not writing it off yet at least. I suspect I would enjoy it a bit more if I wasn’t reviewing it, but I would also probably get less out of it, especially if it can pull off a quality rest of the arc, so I’ll stick do the reviews for now too.
Star Trek Picard – 3x04: No Win Scenario
I kind of feel the same way about this episode as I have been, like it’s not bad but it needed another draft or two to polish it up before it’s all that good. I will say this one is probably closer to that distinction than the previous few have been. It benefits from being a single plotline instead of cutting away to a disconnected b-plot, and does manage to hang a lot of character work onto the basic plotline; it’s just a bit weakly written.
It appears I misread the final analysis last episode, and so have to walk back the praise I was considering giving that episode. We are supposed to see Picard as right about all these things, and I don’t like it. It’s not even that I want him to be wrong exactly, but he was acting like kind of an ass last episode being in such a rush to fight that it felt like he had to be wrong. If he was acting like the Picard of old, measured, reasoned, considering the thoughts and opinions of others, that would have framed him as actually being right and Riker as unreasonably cautious. There’s also not enough meat on this to have been a Riker character arc without it…being in the current along with Picard being on a related arc. Which was why I wanted them both to need to learn something from how badly last episode went; but it seems only Riker was supposed to be framed that way.
It turned out to be exactly what I was worried it was (but for some reason let myself think it wasn’t), main character syndrome. Picard has to be right, but he also has to have the bulk of the screen time which crowd out the people who aren’t always right.
At least it does seem willing to show Picard as less than always right on a personal level. Not exactly letting him be wrong, but…limited. He’s great with people on a detached level, which makes him a good commander, a good teacher, a good leader; but he got to be so good at that, partially at the cost of making close personal connections. Not even because he’s bad at it, but because he’s not infinitely skilled.
That said, I need to talk about this thing with Shaw. I was enjoying my read that he didn’t approve of the TNG crew being viewed as legends in the Federation, that they could and had made mistakes, and history is sort of pretending those didn’t happen. To make his bitterness about the Locutus incident, I don’t think works. At least not for that to be even the crux of his beef. It was one thing with Sisko only a couple years after the Borg invasion happened, and even then it wasn’t actually fair of him to judge Picard for what happened; this is 30 years later, people (at least in Starfleet) know what happened and that it wasn’t Picard’s fault.
I kind of wish Seven could somehow have been there for that discussion though. This obviously contributes to his treatment of her, and as she has been on the receiving end of a lot more of his Borg-PTSD than Picard has, she should have been given more insight into the cause. Also, I really think Starfleet HR would have a thing or two to say about using the wrong name for someone like this. You don’t even have to go to a trans place (although I suspect that’s what they’re going for, but I think suitably subtly), if a crewmember got married and changed their surname (however it is done in their culture) and the captain refused to acknowledge their married name, that would be disrespecting them on a few different levels that wouldn’t be okay. Hell, the Klingons were better at this with Alexander (who I don’t think Worf mentioned in his list of family connections); not great, and they maybe only got over it because of Martok and Worf being around, but they dealt with him using a human name rather than Klingon.
(Actually…we should really get something from Alexander, the rest of the old crew has kids running around (save Data…kind of). Also, I have to wonder if Wesley knows about his little brother and what he thinks about it. I don’t expect this show is going to embrace the P+C=W theory, I’ve never exactly bought into it myself, but I think it would be hysterical if it did.)
(Also hysterical: ‘forget that business on the Stargazer [last season], the Borg are still out there.’ The show is clearly pushing last season as far out of sight and out of mind as it can.)
(Also, also hysterical: further canonizing Voyager’s ridiculous explanation about separate power grids for the holodecks. Sir, we need a little more power; take it from life support, because we can’t interface with the holodeck powergrid.)
But I do actually like Picard’s reaction to Shaw’s attitude. It’s nothing he hasn’t heard in the last 30 years; he’s past apologizing for something that he knows but still struggles to believe wasn’t his fault; it pokes at an old wound, but doesn’t reopen it.
The only TNG space creature that this episode mentioned was Farpoint, so are we supposed to think these new space jellyfish are the same space jellyfish as were in Farpoint? If they wanted to raise the tension a bit more could bring up the Crystalline Entity; seems a lot less wonderous when thinking about that side of space creatures.
I’m just going to sigh and not talk about the lighting in this one. And I’m too lazy to do more than gesture toward the ‘cheap whiskey’ comment; it’s easy enough to say it’s a language artifact, but it would be easier to do if this show hadn’t been acting like money was a thing.
I do like that this ep found a way to use Crusher’s medical vantage point, but I wish it would give her a little more character work. I’m okay with her and Picard not being okay yet (although I can’t tell what they are at the end of the episode), but there’s got to be a lot going on in her head about this situation and I’d like to get more of it. And I am glad the show at least addressed the Jack name choice; I’m not quite sure I buy it, but at least it’s something.
As for the Changeling subplot…again, it’s almost there, but it needed some polishing and to not be competing against the other strands of the plot so much. It seems to have missed a few pieces of how Changelings work, like not using the fact that the Changelings can take the shape of objects not just people. And they do still have perception abilities when they’re in the form of objects. It’s also kind of weird that this Changling happens to use a bucket so much like Odo’s; Changelings don’t even have to be in a bucket of any kind, much less that same style. For that matter, with this redesign of the Changelings’ goo form, I’m not even sure it would fit in that bucket.
As this seems to be the end of Act 1 of the season, I’ll say that it’s working on a solid ‘okay’ rating. The further it goes the harder it gets to raise the score (except if it manages a really good way of pulling to overall plot off), and increases the risk of stumbling to a lower ranking. But I’m not writing it off yet at least. I suspect I would enjoy it a bit more if I wasn’t reviewing it, but I would also probably get less out of it, especially if it can pull off a quality rest of the arc, so I’ll stick do the reviews for now too.
