The episode I watched tonight was the one with Tasha’s sister and Picard was all “she fooled all of us” and the camera flashed to Deanna and she looked a little annoyed and quite right too as Deanna had said all along “I sense ambiguity, I sense deception” etc. so no not everyone was fooled Captain.
Someone on discord is semi-live blogging watching Star Trek Beyond. I am not sure if it’s their first viewing of that particular movie or not but it made me nostalgic.
Kelvin movies have a bad rep mostly I think? The whole “not real Trek” thing but I grew up pretty sheltered from sci-fi. I could read whatever I wanted but we only had the one TV and so I watched what my mum watched. To be honest it didn’t really occur to me to try anything until I had moved out and a whole new world (well galaxies haha 😛) opened up.
So I was 19. Definitely old enough I could have watched at least Enterprise when it was on for real, if not Voyager, but the first Kelvin movie was the first Star Trek I ever saw. Eventually it gave me the itch and I had Netflix by then and tried TOS (intending to go chronologically). I think I made it 2 episodes before I looked up what was the most recent (Enterprise) and skipped to that. Enterprise kinda killed Trek for me for a while until another Kelvin movie came out and I was like “Trek is cool, I want more Trek!” and then there was Discovery and suddenly I was starving. Voyager, DS9, TNG, all the TV movies – everything. I am a total obsessed fan now. I love it. I mean I’m critical sometimes but that’s just because I love it.
And it all started with those Kelvin movies that people bash for not really being Trek. Idk just makes me think.
It’s a bit like how people draw a line between old and new Trek, and you aren’t a real fan if you only watch Discovery or something. Like I get it because vibes/storytelling methods. I mean it’s episodic vs arc etc. and we can definitely debate the pros and cons of approaches. I do think modern Trek has lost some things and /cough less said about the most recent Picard the better
But I rec Prodigy very much. The finale was just… that is what Frontier Day wished it could have been. The speech Gwen gave about the meaning of the Federation was as close to the essence of Trek I think I have ever heard on screen.
And it has holo Janeway and Admiral Janeway for all your Janeway needs.
I found Prodigy very slow to get into. I was iffy about it until nearer the end of season 1 when it just sort of came together.
Lower Decks unfortunately I can’t click with. I think it’s that I have a weird sense of humour. So I don’t find it funny.
I just googled about the Illyrians as SNW is set pretty early in Treks active timeline. So I wondered how things were for them Picard+ era but there’s nothing?
All the Memory Alpha page has is that Archer and co ran into an Illyrian ship, and stole their warp core when they said no because the Enterprise had the greater need, and then what little SNW added to the lore in season 1.
So do you think that Illyrian’s are still outcasts in the 25th century? Inquiring minds want to know.
Ok so last night I watched DS9 – Through the Looking Glass, in which Sisko barely put up a token protest to sleeping with alternate!Dax. Then also kissed alternate!Kira. I was like 👀
Then I watched Voyager’s Timeless and Voyager was under the ice and I was like “whaaaaat?” and then Harry and Chakotay were walking around and I was like “they look older, do they look older? Are they older?” and I was just thinking “what happened? What happened?” and then the bodies started appearing, and then Chakotay was on the bridge. I went “is that Tom?” And then I said out loud “if you show me Janeway I am going to lose it” and then WHAT DID THEY DO!?!? And then compounded that with Seven, and then we are back on the Delta Flyer and my heart is ripped out of my chest, and all I can think about is Chakotay must have some real charm for that girlfriend to go all in like that. Like yes we’ll either die, go to prison for forever, or we’ll never have met. So totally unselfish of that woman. I want to know more about her. And as for Harry… 😢
Oh man, oh man. The feels I get from it. So good that I only listen alone because I do the autistic flapping, and the ahhhhh whisper screams, and the punching the air and the grinning like a lunatic.
It is healing. It is a tonic. It is, hard to freaking breathe because OMG it exists. Like I listened to that with my own two ears.
Not gonna lie I want to illustrate the hell out of it. I don’t have the spoons but maybe one day it will make for some good comics practice. The hard part will be not doing the whole thing 😍
Just perfection.
purlturtle said: Sounds like i need to seek that out!
galactic-pirates said: @purlturtle it is so shippy! The first time I listened to it my eyes were on stalks. Hell they kinda are now because how can something canon be that shippy? But beyond that. The background it gives the Fenris Rangers is amazing. The Ranger mission providing the plot is cool. I really would watch 10 seasons and a movie about the Rangers saving the galaxy one lost soul at a time. There is just so much heart, and the musing on life and loss. Immortality and love. It all intertwines beautifully.
purlturtle said: @galactic-pirates Wow! Now I *will* seek it out!
Idk if it will be any good. But it’s Trek as a game. My obsession likes that. Immersing myself in the verse.
I have been playing some of Legacy on Apple Arcade but my free trial month is up on Thursday and it’s not worth paying for. Only Voyager Seven and no Raffi. There is Elnor which was a surprise and Soji but no Rios or Agnes etc. There is Pike and Una and SNW Spock but no Ortegas or SNW Uhura or La’an or well any other SNW. So hit and miss.
Apparently they got all the cast (not sure if Janeway as well?) to voice this game. So that will be fun if nothing else.
I am so deep in my feels today. Are they cliche choices? Probably. Do I have epic feels anyway? Yes, yes I do.
The oneshot for Seven is now first in a connected series 🙄 calling the series “scars of acceptance, finally enough” ratherthan just the fic.
Current title for the oneshot is “somewhere to belong” but that could change by dinner time which is when I was thinking of posting. It’s changed 3x already this morning.
My thinking at the moment is calling Raffi’s oneshot “another second chance” but it was called something else this morning so who knows 🤷♂️
Say what you will about the first season, but it’s meaningful. In fact, Rios says explicitly what it’s about in the fourth episode: “the existential pain of living with the consciousness of death and how it defines us as human beings.” Pretty much all of the character arcs are about different reactions to this, and the supposed “grimdarkness” of the setting reinforces this point; the Federation has become reactionary and xenophobic because it was a utopia that experienced mass death right on its doorstep for the first time in living memory. The conflict with the Synths is ultimately rooted in the fact that we die; they don’t. The fact that the finale was called “Et in Arcadia ego” really just telegraphs this; “Even in Arcadia [utopia], I [Death] am.”
And the second season, for all its many flaws, carries this theme forward, proposing that love, togetherness, and companionship are the only meaningful candles in the dark. Q is dying; he awaits meaning, and he doesn’t find it. And so he opts instead to do one last favour for Jean-Luc so at least he can spare his favourite mortal from his own fate of dying alone. Jurati is able to connect with the Borg Queen because she recognises that her own motivation is something similar: the Queen can feel herself dying across infinite realities and she doesn’t want to be alone. Seven and Raffi find each other; Rios gives up his entire life for a shot at love. It’s an infernal mess, a budget-saving exercise in want of a plot, but I’m going to be honest: I kind of adore it. I think it’s beautiful for all its flaws.
Throughout the first two seasons, we have serious contemplations of transhumanism and identity in the face of death. Picard escapes death using technology, even as his friend, a living machine, embraces his end as a necessary part of being human. Soji loses her identity even as she gains knowledge of herself as an immortal android. Jurati too embraces transhumanism and, to some extent, loses her identity by so doing, but–in an interesting twist for Star Trek–this is not stigmatized; this is framed as what’s best for her. All of this is philosophically rich, high-octane fuel for thought, as speculative fiction should be.
The third season, meanwhile–for all that I have loved (some of) the nostalgia hits injected directly into my veins–bugs me because of how absolutely lightweight it feels. Death is gone. Not just as a theme, but gone from the narrative. Sure we kill off Ro, and T’Veen, and Vadic, and Shelby, and Shaw, but it feels like nothing. Death holds no dominion; Data is back; so’s the Enterprise-D; so’s Q (or maybe he’s come in from an earlier point in his timeline; it’s not clear). Kirk apparently is alive again, resurrected offscreen sometime after Generations and kept in a covert warehouse awaiting new adventures. Apparently Terry Matalas has already formulated plans for bringing Todd Stashwick back if when he gets his “Legacy” spinoff. I’m half-surprised that they didn’t reveal that Romulus magically popped back into existence in a background Okudagram somewhere. The Federation is as “grimdark” as it has ever been depicted, but unlike the first season (or Deep Space Nine, or even the first season of Discovery), this is never seriously interrogated or problematised. We go through the motions, cargo-cult-like, of moral debate in episode 7, but it’s not connected to anything. We hear that Vadic was the product of Section 31 war crimes; Picard looks shaken up by this, but then he and Beverly immediately decide to commit some war crimes of their own by executing her. This is never mentioned again. The whole exercise feels perfunctory, as I have said above: like ten-year-olds playing with action figures. It doesn’t feel like Picard, and frankly, for all of the surface detail it gets right, it feels even less like TNG.
So no; I’m not pleased that the first two seasons were ignored.
#I don’t know enough about behind the scenes to say but did someone else do most of the work on season one?#this has flavours of ouat and how the early seasons setup was rumoured to be someone else’s#and then when Adam and Eddie had to continue on their own that’s when it lost the plot#that and their favourite self-insert history does love to repeat#I just can’t fathom how anybody looked at season 3 scripts and didn’t just burst out laughing and go you are kidding right?#it’s a fever dream well more of a nightmare#what were they thinking??#i am salty
