Star Trek: Picard - re:View

I posted some premature optimism on YouTube for the pilot’s potential and for that I am forever sorry. Humanity should completely leave space jams alone until we can at least write as well as Elon Musk invents.

Fancy McShane

Just lazy writing, they should just start handing out fake evil Spock goatees to the cast and go full on with this farce.

Kostas P

I saw the first few minutes of the review, and was like 'eh it sounds acceptable, i'll give it a shot', paused and watched it (I did the same with Beyond), only to be amazed at how bad it was. I haven't seen Discovery, but given that they didn't think this was just complete trash by comparison, I can only imagine how bad that show really is.

Andrew Cassar

This show is so bad, it's already available for free on Pluto.tv.

Steve

Could a new viewer even relate to the optimistic views of TNG?

Kostas P

Didn't he also put the dune buggy in Nemesis?

Daniel

Yeah. The existence of racism in the US is today is more nuanced and complicated than Hollywood tends to portray it. A great film that captures accurately modern racism (also is outside mainstream Hollywood) is the film "Last Black Man in San Francisco". The show "the Wire" is great too. Just saying to y'all cinephiles who are curious.

I am so sick of the narrative that Hollywood tries to shiver into the public's faces that America is racist and evil because the president says stupid things. They destroyed Gene Roddenberrys vision of a unified and enlightened future of humanity for their political narrative that is based on false assumptions. Americans are not evil for voting for a certain president. They didn't vote for him because he's racist or an isolationist. The majority of Americans want peace, security and stability. Star Trek was better than this. It was inspiring. Now it's just political propaganda and trash. I will never watch this garbage again and I will mourn for true Star Trek.

Philip Gumpl

The podcast Making It So does interviews with writers who have work on a variety of Star Trek properties. The guests give an insight into how malleable a character is and how the production decides how to set the guardrails.

Robert Daniel Pickard

this was such a fun (and emotional!) video guys! great to see you care so deeply about something.

Peter Varga

they made a point about noone entering the museum room, so probably noone could actually see the painting to use it. however, the face on the painting is probably stored among every other information in Data's "positron", so whoever was looking through that data (khm) could very likely recreate it for a real life model. in any case, it does not seem such a mystery as the guys seemed to think.

Peter Varga

Ah, Star Trek. The dead horse that keeps getting fucked.

Daniel E. Passaro

From what I've heard (granted, I didn't pay much attention, 'cause I really don't care about "Star Trek")... isn't Patrick Stewart heavily involved in the writing of "Picard"...? So... isn't all the stupid shit... kinda... coming from him... ...? :/

Manuel Johnen

Oh no! That thumbnail is not promising. Looks like Rich was right. Alex Kurtzman got his shitty fingers all over a beloved Star Trek character.

Steve

Rich helping Mike pronounce words is the nearest thing to Roddenberry's utopia we will ever get.

Lelio Mulas

The original Star Trek often gets accused of the usual isms and lack of representional "obligations" of today, but I think it's more apt to look at Star Trek the way the children in that one South Park episode look at the town flag. Everybody sees racism and oppression in that flag, but the children don't even consider that angle, because for them black and white are just different skin colors and nothing else.

Marvin Falz

The point of Mudd's Women is to make men respect women and women respect themselves. Mudd made a profit from women who adapted to the wishes of men who only seek outer beauty and a housekeeper and see no value in the woman as a being with feelings and thoughts. I, Mudd is the episode with the androids. The point of that episode was more like that humans can't thrive, get demoralized and corrupted, when they're kept in a gilded cage (a technocracy?) with instant wish fulfillment and protection from themselves.

Marvin Falz

I agree for the most part... but... Data and Picard were friends - how many episodes involve Data and Picard on the holodeck wrestling with some classic text and its relation to Data's personal growth. When they find Data's head under San Francisco they are all shaken because they assume Data will outlive them all. In broader terms Data was where the crew placed their hopes for the future - by encouraging Data's emulation of what they saw to be the best parts of themselves they grew along with him. I think Picard by season 7 would be deeply shaken by the loss of Data. That being said after the abortion of Discovery I don't expect the writers of Picard to know or understand that relationship, they probably will end up being in love and it'll take starfleet's 20,000 ships to hunt down the rouge Picard!

This reminded me of the one time Levar Burton came into the chinese restaurant I used to work at and got upset because hardly anyone recognized him. I remembered him from "Reading Rainbow" though.

Steve Can Still Believe

Thank you for your service, Gents. My plan was to wait to hear from Mike & Rich on Picard before subjecting myself to it, and the review was well justified. I'd read summaries of the episode and was already fuming...such a disappointment.

I'd say the bare minimum content I expect from RLM is thumbnails of Mike and Rich having migraines underneath various logos.

Dusty Staccato

Rich's point about the Uhura/Abe Lincoln scene and the optimism that Roddenberry tried to convey about the future through Star Trek might be one of the best points I've ever heard made about Star Trek. It legit blew my mind, never thought about Star Trek that way.

The bag on head scene was some of the dumbest shit I've ever seen. They just put a bag on her head and did nothing else.

SteeScribbles

You guys also ruined Solo! Thanks!! KK watched your little critique, fired Lord and Miller because it differed from your predictions. Nice going. Otherwise, I didn’t hate Picard. Looked really nice. But somethings aren’t sitting well. Can’t tell if it’s deliberate or incompetence. Ah well.

Sean Wickett

Mudd's women weren't androids, were they...? As I recall, they were real women, but Mudd was pulling some tomfoolery to make them seem more beautiful than they really were-- a sort of semi-hypnotic bait-and-switch.

punctuator

You guys missed this stupid idea connection: the Borg want to clone Locutus. Guess who has the ability to clone Picard and have already done so (i.e. SHINZON)?? The ROMULANS!!

I had / have a pretty good idea that this is going to be a shit show when you have 19 producers in the opening credits.

Kellic

I enjoyed the review even though I disagree with some of the points you made. Hum... I mean, I UNSUBSCRIBED FROM THESE HACK FRAUDS! I see two reasons why Picard dreamt about Data a lot. First, we see them playing poker, which would implied that Picard playing poker at the end of All Good Things wasn't a one-time thing. The whole point of the series finale is that Picard finally get to know his crew. Probably that, as he aged, he became more amicable (just like he started to tolerate children over the course of the series), so he spent a lot of time with them, Data included. The second reason is that Picard is depressed and that the 10-year anniversary of his worst failure of his career (even though it is not his fault, you feel that he feels as such) was just around the corner. Bad anniversaries tend to make these kind of dreams more recurrent. He even said himself that he was just waiting to die. Also, Agnes (the Daystrom Institute scientist) and Picard came to the conclusion that Maddox probably modeled Dahj and Soji Asha from Data's painting (that, in turn, looks like Lal). Data's brain is not made of positron (anti-matter electrons), is it made of positronic neurons, which are probably tiny bits of hardware that contains Data's code (not unlike DNA). Maddox emitted the hypothesis that probably all of Data's memory could be retrieved from the compressed code contained in any one neuron, hence the term fractal neuronic cloning. It is not actual cloning, but more decompressing and copying computer code, but so his copying DNA when you think about it. Nothing indicates that the Borg cube is being constructed. In fact, it could be an original Borg cube and some of it could have been scrapped by the Romulans to rebuild their fleet. Soji is actually "fixing broken people". So maybe her job is actually to help rescue Borg drones found in the cube and help them disconnect from the consciousness. Now, time for some hypothesis of my own. Maddox probably created Dahj and Soji not from Data (because they couldn't retrieve any part of him in the wreckage of Shinzon's ship) but from Lal, making them Data's "granddaughters". Even though she had a cascade failure and died, Data had the time to copy his entire code in her. She also developed emotions. This emulation of emotions could have helped Maddox creating a "perfect" android. At the same time, the Romulans/Tal Shiar could have developed a similar program but went nowhere. Then, they kidnapped Maddox and was forced to create Androids for them. He could have taken this time positronic neurons from Lore to create androids in Rolumans form. After all, the Romulan vilain lost a "brother" recently, so he could very well be one in a pair of androids. Also, I find it strange that two ex-Tal Shiar (Picard's carers) could lost track of Dahj and simply believed the police report that somehow Picard was simply knocked out as he was chilling in San Francisco. I know it been explained in the episode, and I believe they are good people, but they may know more that they're letting on. Anyway, I hope you do a re:View every week so I CAN KEEP ON UNSUBSCRIBING, YOU FUCKERS!

Vincent

Clonecutus of Borg. Mike's calling it now.

Adam Lash

Stolen credit cards

James Murphy

You hit an important point: why does all sci-fi these days *have* to be dystopian. And I'm not saying just the absence of utopian sci-fi (Star Trek), but what about more ambiguous sci-fi (something like Babylon 5 or Farscape).

Jesse Johnson

Excellent! Accessing...

Mike St Louis

Who pays for CBS all access?

Adam K.

I'm typically not one to comment, but this is a fantastic episode of re:View fellas. Especially considering it was put together in four days. Great work.

Watching as we speak.

Matt Naylor

Looking forward to Mike's cameo as a Romulan film critic.

QB

First!

Michael Matzat