Not a stereotype in my case; a fact ! I don't hate SW because, as a trekker, I'm supposed to; I just do. Wished I could enjoy both, but no.
Anyway, I just like the original trilogy and Rogue One. I've just ordered the UHD BD's (from Australia, they're dirty cheap) for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi and Rogue One. The rest can get heavily discounted in some time or a Black Friday that I won't bother buying them, I just have no interest. And the same with Star Trek. From the Original Crew movies I only like The Motion Picture, well, I don't like it, I love it, and its soundtrack too (the 2012 La La Land Records 3 CD release is OUSTANDING), the rest are just entertaining to say the least. I like Star Trek The Next Generation very much, I grew with them, I was 15 or 16 the first time I watch it. From The Next Generations movies I think the only good one is Generations, the plot is good, seeing the two captains together working side by side was a great idea and Malcolm McDowell makes a great villain, it couldn't be any other way as he's an outstanding actor. But by far my favourite Star Trek is Discovery.
I actually like the original three, Rogue One and the second of the recent films. Abrams is a hack as far as I’m concerned. A talented hack mind you but he takes everything digests it and just remakes it flashier. As to the shows, I enjoy Discovery and Picard both. Curiously (Or not) the conclusion of Picard and Discovery are tied into each other.
Endless. Also the only real tie to Discovery is the fact that both are in the "prime universe", as opposed to 2009's "Kelvinverse". I knew that definitively canonizing the Romulan supernova would be deliciously upsetting to said complainers, though.
while a bit tough to follow at times, it all made sense (mostly) in the end and we look forward to season 2 at my house. long live JL.
I think me feelings after watching it all a few weeks ago are..."Was it all worth it?" My changes to the show would be get some writers in that understand the nuances a bit more and tell Patrick "why don't you sit this creative meeting out?"
Exactly. Wasn't it Stewart's fault that TNG and the movies derailed a bit because he got more power behind the scenes?
TNG didn't really 'unravel' until it's (largely) awful seventh and final season... and that had more to do with writer burn-out (according to Brannon Braga) than Stewart's creative contributions, which he didn't really have any official capacity in at that point. After Stewart's initial two-film contract was up after First Contact, he renegotiated for another two movies, including an Associate Producer credit and a direct say in the creative process. That creative process became a total clusterfudge of varying vested interests - Stewart, the studio, producer Rick Berman, etc - and the resulting film, Insurrection, was but a pale and milquetoast shadow of what writer Michael Piller (R.I.P.) had intended, and the latter wrote a book about it but Paramount refused to approve it's publication, so Piller self-published it online prior to his death; https://pineapples101.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/fade-in-mid-res.pdf A very illuminating read and a case study in how a great story idea can get chewed up in the system...
That was for Nemesis, written by his good friend John Logan... interestingly, Nicholas (The Wrath of Khan) Meyer was supposed to direct that movie but he felt the script still needed work and Logan had script veto powers and was being too precious about it, so Meyer walked... so they hired Stuart Baird to direct who, whilst unarguably being one of the very best editors in the business, had absolutely no clue whatsoever about 'Trek... and it showed; the film stank, subsequently flopped, and killed the franchise stone dead until Jar Jar Abrams very successfully rebooted it in 2009... Both Marina Sirtis and LeVar Burton have publicly stated that, in their opinion, Insurrection and Nemesis weren't very good... they weren't wrong. Truthfully, TNG was not really suited to big-screen ventures... at least not in the way corporate, formulaic, focus group-obsessed studios wanted them to be...
For my money, Insurrection not only killed the TNG franchise...it killed any film that wants to call itself "Insurrection" (with the one obvious exception: Insurrection 2: Electric Bugaloo )
I don't like what they did to Picard in those movies. He was never much for away missions, that was not his roll as a captainin the series. But in the movies, all of a sudden he was turned into a action hero.
Well, maybe. These golems though appear to be exact replicas of humans. If that's the case, they're no more immortal than we are, although they might live longer. But people in the Star Trek future already live much longer. It's also possible the human brain doesn't continue to function correctly past a certain age. You might be able to transfer the consciousness into some other electronic brain or something, but then you wouldn't quite be human anymore. You'd be something more like the Borg. Did she really commit murder, though? Seems to me she was traumatized into it by Commodore Oh. I don't know if I'd expect any human to withstand literal (and traumatic) brainwashing at the hands of a Romulan double agent. I thought Ryan was on fire and the most interesting part of Picard outside of the moments with Data. Definitely wanted to see more of her and less of some of the other characters. You mean the Federation and the Romulans? They're both vast star empires and have thousands of warships each. Or at least had - the Romulans might be somewhat diminished in the wake of the destruction of their core systems. I'd imagine both of them overhauled their fleets in the wake of the Dominion war, which would have been what, a quarter century before the events of Picard? It's not really clear where Coppelius was, but it could have been fairly deep in Federation space. That would have made it a much shorter journey for a Federation taskforce than a Romulan one. I thought it was bizarre - and unnecessary - but when they showed the incomplete golem in the previous episode I thought they might be setting something like that up. Personally, I think it would have been better if they'd just discovered some more effective treatment for his condition - not a cure, but something that would push it off until the end of the series.
Overall I liked Picard, but it was a bit of a mess. When it worked it worked really well (Jeri Ryan, the stuff with Data). His ragtag crew felt like a bit of a cliche, apart from Agnes who developed into something perhaps more than that. When the show surprised - which it did from time to time - it was pretty good. But much of what happened near the conclusion was just too on-the-nose. For example, I probably wouldn't have had the androids summon the big bad AI monster to come to their rescue - I'd have had them come to the conclusion on their own that it wasn't a desirable outcome, that they weren't going to burn the galaxy to a stump just to save themselves. I wouldn't have given them the ability to be as conniving as Sutra was. And if the androids had summoned the beast, I wouldn't have had the big bad AI monster turn out to actually be villainous, after all.
And remind me once again? Why make a Star Trek show with a villain as the main character in Section 31? She is not just a crook turned good, she was the Hitler of the mirror universe. Gene Roddenberry would have never agree to this and no one else should either. Is it because she is a female Hitler and she is redeemed now? Would a male Hitler character have gotten that chance? It is not Star Trek. Some things can't be fixed. If you have murdered and tortured millions of people and is a military dictator... Someone should end your reign. Captain Kirk would, because he is rightous
Actually, doesn't Star Trek have a long history of "redeeming", uh, problematic characters (like Garak)? Not that the Section 31 series will necessarily redeem the mirror universe Georgiou.
All valid,points.,I also didn’t buy the romance between Alice and the Captain of Picard’s ship. That was so undercooked it was a problem. I think that they should have summoned the big bad and then during the battle realized it was a mistake. They could then take out some of the Federation ships andRomulans, etc. the -athwart is severed allowing the two shops to destroy what came through. It was too )n the nose at the end. I think that Picard should just have died but they want a seas0n two.
I suspect it was originally written where Picard dies, and then they changed their minds when they realized there could be a second season.
Wasn't much of a "romance" though - more of a hookup. I could see that happening - they were both lonely and wrecked and haunted, but also opposites. Opposites attract. Emotionally the show certainly had its moments. The scenes between Picard and the Troi-Rikers certainly tugged at the heartstrings. The work with Seven, with Hugh, was just fantastic. The stuff with Data. They had issues though with the new characters. I loved his Romulan housekeepers, Laris and Zhaban - that felt genuine and the actors were fantastic. Not sure why we didn't hear more from them as the series progressed. Orla Brady was fantastic as Laris, and easily my favorite of the new characters. I thought Agnes was probably the most realistic of the characters beyond that, and the one whose motivations and limitations didn't seem quite so manufactured. Alison Pill did a great job with her. Raffi and Rios are more problematic. They do feel a bit manufactured. Santiago Cabrera never really manages to overcome that with Rios, although he does a great job with his holographic alter egos. By the end of the series though, I feel like Michelle Hurd did actually manage to inhabit the Raffi character well enough that I felt the connection between her and "JL". The turning point might have come on Freecloud, where we got a little more of her backstory, one that made a big difference. Elnor was the only character who remained something of a cipher - they tried, but he still feels more like an archetype than a flesh and blood person. I'm also not sure he was really needed - it feels like 7 of 9 could have largely fulfilled that role. I also thought that lead Romulan warrior nun was much more interesting, and kept thinking they'd have been better off taking her along (or her and Elnor). For the bad guys, Oh was well handled until the final episode, where she got way too much clunky dialog. Tomita did what she could. Harry Treadaway handled the Narek role reasonably well - he was appropriately despicable. Peyton List chews lots of scenery as Narissa. She's not bad at it, but the role feels underwritten, like Elnor, and borders on being a cipher. I do think it's interesting people were complaining about the space battles or whatever, since the series finale turned out to be as talky as "Encounter At Farpoint" was 30+ years ago. The whole thing managed to feel very TNG and very Roddenberry at the end, in spite of the modern cinematography and occasional f bomb. If I had to rank this as a TNG episode (or multi-part episode, really), it would rank as one of their better adventures, and better than any of the TNG films apart from maybe First Contact.
I just thought of a much better ending for Picard, by the way. The synthetics summon their AI helper...only to discover its actual purpose is to absorb and destroy any other form of AI life in order to retain its supremacy. It isn't interested in biological life at all, which it considers less advanced and not a threat. The Admonition was intended to either get biological lifeforms to do the work of sterilizing other synthetic life forms for them, or to encourage synthetic life to summon them directly to do the job. Oh is incensed when she realizes that the Zhat Vash has been used for centuries to carry out this entity's work, and joins forces with the Starfleet ships to ward off the attack by the summoned AI. The combined forces take heavy losses before Seven manages to get the Borg cube back online and joins the battle, pushing the entities back into the spacetime gateway they were summoned from and finally sealing the breach by ramming the cube into it, destroying it.
