Sodium Lamp

44, he/him | Back off man, I'm a scientist.

[sodiumlamp]

Panel from Spider-Woman #16 (July 1978). Written by Mark Gruenwald, art by Carmine Infantino and Al Gordon.

[beardedmrbean]

[garmbreak1]

interactable object

[fluxion-fluent]

Visit Original Link

[swordy-da-goat]

An amorphous black blob thingy that shape-shifts into any hazard related thing.

[swordy-da-goat]

The Hazard Monster also has the ability to change the reaction of their body. Examples include:

There are other examples of reactivity, but I don’t wanna draw them

[sodiumlamp]

Is it safe to melt antimony with borax without first smelting it with iron?

I don't think that's safe at all.

Antimony melts at 631 degrees Celsius, which is very, very hot. I've used a muffle furnace at different labs I've worked at, and we usually kept them at 500C just because there was no need to go any hotter for what we were doing with them. As a point of reference, 500C is about how hot the oven in your kitchen gets when it's in the cleaning cycle, and the only way to perform the cleaning cycle is to lock the oven door. This is because the oven is so hot that the manufacturer doesn't want you opening it until it's had time to safely cool down.

Antimony is also toxic, so that's another risk to deal with.

Mostly, though, I don't think this is safe because I have no idea what you're talking about. Why would you want to melt antimony with anything, and what does "smelting it with iron" even mean?

[sodiumlamp]

All I'm saying is "How does a walrus knock on a door?"

At best, he'd slap his flippers on the door, and you'd hear a noise, but it wouldn't be knocking.

[sodiumlamp]

Lower Decks

I'm not gonna liveblog Lower Decks because I only liveblogged Picard to maintain my sanity as I endured it. It was more of a defense mechanism than a plan. The only reason I bring up LD is because I wanted to end the Picard thing on a more positive note. Lower Decks is a much better show, and I dare say watching Picard first made me enjoy the experience even more.

It's a comedic take on Star Trek, and the show could be forgiven for playing fast and loose with the premise, but it doesn't. Lower Decks feels like a very authentic Star Trek expereince, but it just has a comedic flavor to it.

It also does a whole lot of callbacks to old Star Trek lore. The difference is that LD isn't depending on the viewer to get all the callbacks. If you don't notice or recognize Spock Two's skeleton hanging in that display room on the collector's ship, it doesn't matter, because the plot doesn't hinge on it. LD also doesn't pull the Picard trick of making callbacks as an end unto itself, like Adam Soong holding a folder entitled "PROJECT KHAN" and nothing happens. Lower Decks has some running subplots, but it's very clear to its audience about which moments are clues and which moments are fun easter eggs.

Most critically, Lower Decks maintains the optimism of the classic 20th Century Star Trek shows. You watch an episode, and things usually work out by the end of it. More importantly, when people lose faith in the world they live in, there's some moment where that faith is restored. Starfleet stands for something and it's not just empty slogans or cynical public relations. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel and the characters generally find it. Except for Peanut Hamper. Fuck you, Peanut Hamper.

The fundamental conflict in the show is that these are all good people who strive to be better, to do better, and they tend to get in each other's way as they try to improve. Mariner defies her superiors because they doesn't always know best, but sometimes her superiors do know best. Boimler (and other characters) crave promotion and recognition, but he sometimes has to take a step back and consider why he wants those things. There's an episode where he joins a group of ambitious ensigns and they practice making inspiring leadership speeches, but he eventually realizes that it's a skill he can't use in the here and now. "We have to inspire the crew!" "We are the crew!"

The show demonstrates just how badly Picard fumbled the ball with its "everything sucks now" philosophy. In theory, you can do a utopia-gone-wrong story with Star Trek, but there needs to be a clear understanding of what went wrong and how it gets fixed. You can't just make a Star Trek story that flat out repudiates the optimistic future. You can just have the characters say "Whoops, that never worked!" That'd be like Batman deciding that crime is actually pretty cool. Shows like Picard try to convince the audience that the only way to tell a story is to break everything and make it miserable. Lower Decks proves that's a lie told by lazy showrunners who only know how to pull one lever.

Part of the problem, I think, is that these studios keep trying to do big events, relying on spectacle over storytelling. That's why Picard Season 2 had to climax with Picard's mother hanging herself. It has to be this big provocative moment, regardless of whether it makes sense or fits the characters. Picard has prophetic dreams of Data, the exploding girl looks just like the one from the old painting, it was the Borg the whole time, and by golly there sure are a lot of decapitations in this show.

By contrast, one of the most powerful moments on Lower Decks is when Captain Freeman finally gets fed up with Mariner and has her transferred to Starbase 80. It's not a big, apocalyptic moment that will Change The Marvel Universe Forever™, but it's effective, because the show took the time to establish that Starbase 80 is the worst assignment in Starfleet, and it's the one punishment Mariner takes seriously, and Freeman must be really upset if she's decided to take it that far. And then later, she regrets her decision, and when things work out in the end, their reconciliation is that much more satisfying. It just works. Not everything has to be a swordfight in a Borg Cube, for crying out loud.

I haven't watched Season 4 yet, but I'm really looking forward to seeing the new Vulcan character, T'Lyn on the show. Now we have two blueshirts in the cast. And they're not doctors or nurses! Nothing against doctors or nurses, but there's a severe lack of science division characters in Star Trek, and that screenshot of two of them doing something involving hydrogen samples is more exciting than a hundred Jack Crushers. I hope they do a whole episode about hydrogen samples. That would kick ass.

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

Maybe they should have named it "Star Trek: Suckhard". Get it? Get it? Because it sucks.

All right, this is season three finale, and the very last episode. So the Borg Queen (not the Jurati one, the original) has this whole bullshit plan that depends on assimilating Jack Crusher and using him to complete the assimilation of a bunch of twenty-something Starfleet officers assembled over Earth. The only ones who can stop her are Seven and Raffi on board the Titan, and the TNG gang aboard the reconstructed Enterprise-D. All Titan can do is distract the Borged-up fleet from attacking Earth. This buys time for Enterprise to track the Borg Queen to what is apparently the last functioning Borg Cube, hidden in the Jovian atmosphere.

As far as I can tell, stopping the Borg Queen's plan is actually pretty simple. There's a "beacon" they have to blow up, and that will destroy the whole cube in the process. Once they're out of the picture, the affected Starfleet crews will return to normal. The only problem is getting Jack Crusher out of the cube alive. Picard can't get through to him, so he connects himself to the Borg collective, something he vowed would never happen again. He can't convince Jack to leave, though, so he offers to stay with him to the end, and that seems to get Jack thinking straight. He yanks out all the cables and they leave together.

And this is why the Borg suck, because the writers keep trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, we're led to believe that Picard's assimilation was so thorough that there were still traces of it left behind that remained undetected. Those traces were passed on to Jack, which turned him into some sort of super-powered jerk, able to defeat four Changelings at once, and mind control people with his creepy red eyes. And yet, the moment he chooses to resist, all he has to do is pull out a few cables and he's free. Which is it?

In theory, the Borg Queen was all that was left of the Borg, unless you count xB's like Seven and Jack, or the Jurati Collective from Season 2. This whole caper involving Jack Crusher is presented like the last, desperate gasp of the Borg after they were nearly eradicated by Janeway at the end of Voyager. I would like to think that this means CBS/Paramount/whoever will use this as a clean break and future projects will be required to stop using the damn Borg so much. But Q appears in the post-credits scene, so if he's not dead then there's no reason to believe they won't bring the Borg back whenever it pleases them.

Seven gets promoted to Captain of the Titan, which is then rechristened Enterprise-G. Jack Crusher is assigned to serve as some sort of special counselor. Like, not a psychologist like Troi, but I think like an advisor in general? It seems appropriate, but I don't know what it means. The La Forge sisters are there, and I guess anyone else from the Titan who didn't get killed this season.

Her first officer is Raffi, who is now celebrated as a hero, thanks to Worf leaking information about her role in foiling the conspiracy. That's nice and all, and it's objectively good that Raffi's family is speaking to her again and everything. But it kind of bugs me that Raffi literally has to save the universe just to get that kind of approval. I don't like the message that sends, where the only way to get people to like you is to make some big achievement happen to distract from your flaws.

Anyway, the idea of an Enterprise-G kind of bothered me, but it's been about 30 years between D and G, so that's a fair amount of time for E and F to have their runs. And F was reportedly scheduled for decommission around the time of its first-and-only appearance, so it's basically in the same status as the Enterprises B and C.

Much of the episode is just a reinforcement of the problem introduced in the previous episode. There's a part at the beginning where Picard's group is basically just describing the situation in different soundbytes, as if they're taking turns reading lines that will be used in a trailer, or a "previously on..." segment for an 11th episode that doesn't exist. Despite its antiquated systems and lack of a proper crew compliment, the Enterprise-D never seems to be in any real peril. So everything just sort of hinges on Jack choosing to break free of the Borg, and I guess the idea was that he needed his dad to tell him how much he loves him for that to happen? I don't know.

There's a lot of ending sequences of the gang celebrating their win. They all hug on the Enterprise bridge, Worf falls asleep, Data gets counseling sessions from Troi, Beverly becomes an admiral and her son joins Starfleet. Finally we see them all drinking toasts in Guinan's bar, and Picard whips out a deck of cards and they play poker through the credits. It's supposed to tug at my sentimentality, but it doesn't.

I already watched these folks play cards like this 30 years ago. It was how the series finale ended.

I've already seen them defeat the Borg Queen.

I've already seen Data get emotions. I've already seen Picard wrestle with fatherhood. Remember that guy Daimon Bok turned into a fake son of Picard?

The whole thing just doesn't work for me. The idea is to bring back all these characters and continue their story, but they can't come up with new ideas for the story. It all boils down to repeating ideas we've seen before. I missed TNG when "All Good Things" ended, but at no point was I thinking "I need to see them play poker again." That was never the point.

I think this is where the hype for "Star Trek: Legacy" has come from. As far as I can tell, no such production actually exists, but people who worked on Picard have spoken positively about it in the abstract. Sure, do a show with Captain Seven on the Enterprise-G. No one's saying no, but I don't think anyone's actually making the show right now. Fans take that as a guarantee, though, so all the promotional stuff I see for it is just fanart. Ultimately, the fans are less concerned with seeing the familiar old faces and more interested in seeing new stories that build off the old ones. If Geordi or Tuvok shows up, great, but that's not the real meat of it.

But I don't think the Star Trek franchise is inclined to make a show like that. They want to do these big movies-disguised-as-TV-shows, or whatever this Picard thing has been. And they'll want to push all the big buttons and tell big sprawling tales, and the only way to pay for all of that spectacle, they think, is to rely on old, established IP like Q and the Borg.

I haven't given up hope on a good Star Trek show happening. I still need to watch Lower Decks and I think that'll be promising, but I once thought Picard would be adequately mediocre and it's thoroughly disappointed me at every turn. I can't un-recommend this show enough. Avoid Star Trek: Picard if at all possible.

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck this show.

I already knew it would be the damn Borg again. That's part of why I wanted to watch this show all the way through, because everytime I looked something up on Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki, there would be all these references to Picard continuity, and I was getting tired of trying to dodge spoilers. You'd look up something like "tribble poop" and there'd be a whole section about how Booter Soong ate some while he reprogrammed the Emergency Dork Hologram on La Sirena.

Another reason I wanted to watch this show was because I had heard about all of this nonsense where the Borg put secret DNA in Picard's body, which was then added to the transporter system in order to covertly add it to every Starfleet officer in the service. But the whole thing sounded so nonsensical that I had to see it for myself. And I guess I went through episodes 1-8 hoping against hope that maybe I'd misunderstood somehow, and it would turn out to be something else. After all, this show already used the damn Borg in Seasons 1 and 2.

But here we are! The big twist this season is: more Borg. Again.

The only difference this time is that it's the "classic" Borg. Season 1 featured a derelict cube full of offline Borg who were either in stasis or being de-assimilated by Hugh's "Reclamation Project". Season 2 featured a Borg Queen who merged with Jurati and went back in time to start a kinder, gentler collective. This version of the Borg returned in Season 2 to assist Starfleet in sealing up a space anomaly and as far as I know, they're still monitoring it. I'm curious to see if the Jurati-Borg are mentioned at all in the Season 3 finale.

So this time it's the main version of the Borg, who I suppose are still reeling from the events of the Voyager finale, and their big idea is to activate all this "stealth assimilation DNA" that's been passed through everybody via the transporters. I think Jack Crusher's role in all of this is to function as the "transmitter" that activates the affected victims and links them all together in a new collective. That's why the Borg's allies, the rogue Changelings, we're so determined to capture him alive.

What I don't understand is why Vadic and her group were so cooperative with the Borg. In several scenes, Vadic would cut off her left hand and it would morph into this weird face and speak with its own voice. Clearly this was how Vadic received communications from the Borg Queen, but how did they even set that up? Was Vadic assimilated? Was she even remotely worried about the Borg turning against the Dominion after they finished taking over the Federation?

I also don't understand how the Borg altered Picard's DNA and no one noticed all this secret stuff until now. Did they not have records of Picard's genome before his assimilation? Could they not compare the two and eliminate any differences? Did the altered DNA have a cloaking device? That's stupid. That's really stupid.

This whole show is stupid. Picard's a damn robot. Androids can be made out of flesh and blood, but also have super powers. The Romulan Empire is either dead or stronger than ever. The Federation is a dystopia except when it's not, and Rios is just going to stay in 2024 because it's only slightly worse than 2410 and it's easier to find cigars. Picard's father locked her mother in her room to keep her from killing herself, but he didn't use a computer lock, it's just a 500 year old skeleton key behind a loose stone in the wall where a child could get at it. The Borg Queen exists in multiple timelines simultaneously unless Jurati combines with her in which case there are just two versions of the Borg Queen now. I guess.

So the only way to stop the Borg now is to take all the old people on the show who haven't been affected by the Borg-Changeling plot, and put them on an older ship that pre-dates all of the tech that connects all the modern ships together. And that's why the TNG seven are on a rebuilt Enterprise-D. Geordi recovered the saucer section, repaired it, then connected it to the drive section of the Syracuse, another Galaxy Class ship.

This is probably supposed to be a feel-good moment. They finally got the whole gang back on the original ship, or a reasonable facsimile, and they're going to go on one last ride to save everyone from their signature enemy. It sucks. That's all I can say about it.

I don't like how we got here. Years ago, I was excited to see the TNG movies, because the show was a success and they could just jump straight to the movies instead of how it went for the original series, where it took ten years for Star Trek to get that kind of support. I was expecting the Enterprise-D to get destroyed, because that would pave the way for a new movie ship, which was one of the things I looked forward to in First Contact.

The problem was that it never quite measured up to my own imagination. The Enterprise-E never got to do anything cool, at least not cool enough to justify introducing a new ship. I always liked the design, but it never had a big hero moment, where it did something that only a Sovereign-class could do. And Insurection and Nemesis sucked, so maybe it never had a chance. This episode of Picard treats E with some contempt. Worf apparently liked it, but everyone else thought it sucked, and apparently they all blame him for whatever happened to it.

This whole series has been about looking backwards. There's an Enterprise-F now, and I'm not sure how long it's been in service, but it's part of the Borg now so it's up to the old guys in the old ship to take care of things. This feels wrong. I think I understand why fans are so excited about that "Star Trek Legacy" show, because it promises to do what TNG did decades ago, which is to carry the concept forward. TNG was never about this navel-gazing callback festival. Picard is all about that, but it's a hollow pursuit. I guess I was hoping for a look at what happens next, with an elderly Picard there to experience it with me, but instead it's just Soong, Romulans, Q, 21st Century, Changelings, Borg, Borg, Borg.

Oh, Shaw dies and he finally addresses Seven of Nine by "Seven of Nine" and bequeaths her the Titan. It took nine episodes to get here, and most of that was spent with Shaw just reminding us that he doesn't respect her. No real change was made until the very end, because this is his last chance to wrap up that subplot. It's dumb. They went out of their way to crowbar this guy into the show, and this is all he does. It's a shame there were no other Chicagoans around when he died. They would have howled into the sky as a warning to the dead: Beware, there is a dipshit among you.

I keep saying it, but I want to be as clear as possible. So there's no misunderstanding: This show is terrible. Watching it is a miserable experience. It's Sunday and I'm actually looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. That's how un-entertaining this has been.

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

Picard Season 3 is ten episodes long, and as advertised, it reunites the cast of TNG .......... .................................... ........................................................................................................... .............................................................................................................. ................................................................... ........................................................... ..................................................................................................................................ei.........................ght.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ep...............................................................................i............................................................s..............................................................................................................o.................................................................des..............................................in.

As I expected, this episode sees the good guys retake the ship from Vadic. Jack Crusher creates a diversion, Worf and Raffi rescue Riker and Troi from the Shrike, and Geordi reconnects Data to the ship so he can lock out Vadic's control of the ship's systems.

The good: Data's final showdown with Lore was satisfying, in that there was literally no way for anyone else to interfere or get in the way. Data had to defeat him on his own, and he did it by being the man he is, which sort of revealed the empty life Lore lived. In essence, Data and Lore have combined together, but in the final analysis, Lore doesn't contribute very much at all.

The good: Riker and Troi had a nice conversation in their holding cell on the Shrike. I was confused about how their Season 3 dynamic aligned with their appearance in Season 1, and this filled in the gaps. Riker was just as miserable in S1 as he was at the start of S3, but Troi was using her powers to alleviate his grief, which is why he was so chipper. He saw this as a crutch and wanted to sort things out on his own, and he did. They argue over whether Troi should have done what she did, but in the end she acknowledges that you can't skip to the end when it comes to healing. It works. It's the sort of conflict and resolution you'd expect to see from a couple that's been married for this long. As well as they get on, they still have things to work out sometimes.

The good: Vadic's dead and the Shrike is destroyed. This is satisfying, because it's long overdue. Better late than never. Vadic gets sucked out into space, where she freezes solid and shatters against the hull of the Shrike. I'm not 100% sure that would be enough to kill a Changeling, but the Shrike explosion would probably finish the job. Vadic freezing in space is a nice Jojo Reference, however unintentional. It might have been nice to have her float in space forever, give her the full Kars treatment, but that would never stick in Star Trek. Someone would thaw her out for another run in Star Trek: Discovery Season 47.

The bad: This episode took forever. At least half of this turkey must have been taken up with Vadic reveling in her victory from the Titan's bridge. The point is self-evident. "I won, you lost, and now that I control your ship, I'll start killing you one by one until Jack Crusher surrenders himself." This point is repeated at least three times, and none of them are quick. It's the same dilemma from Episode 2, with Titan in an even weaker position. And Vadic gave rambling speeches then, too.

She talked about why her ship is named Shrike, and how she likes to torment and chip away at her prey, just like the bird the ship is named for. That's just standard supervillain rhetoric. DC Comics has spent decades explaining why "The Penguin" is supposed to be a badass name. But it feels like Vadic's entire raison d'être is to drag out the story. I found out last night that the actress who plays Vadic, Amanda Plummer, is the daughter of Christopher Plummer, who played General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. That probably explains why she spins in her chair and talks so irreverently to her enemies. Except Chang's scenes were mercifully brief. He'd quote Shakespeare at you, do a couple of spins, make some nonverbal commands to his crew, then die to one torpedo. Nobody needed 35 minutes of Chang's routine. A little went a long way.

The bad: Throughout this episode, the Shrike just.... sits there? It made sense in Episode 7, because Vadic led a boarding party onto the Titan. Shrike couldn't do anything without risking their commander or the man they came to get. But somehow Worf was able to sneak on board without anyone noticing, and then he shuttles back to the Titan with no trouble at all. Then, when things really start to go badly for Vadic, the Shrike continues to just sit there. It sits there while Vadic shatters against its hull, it sits there while Titan opens fire on it.

It's like there was no one left on board to man the ship's controls? Except Worf's group left in a hurry because the guards were coming, so there would have been a few people left to run things. You'd think at least one guy would be on duty to raise the shields, or teleport Vadic back aboard, or at least pick off Worf's shuttle.

And if there was anyone on the bridge, it's weird how Titan took out the Shrike so easily, considering how powerful the ship was reported to be in Episode 2. Maybe that asteroid Riker threw at it did more damage than we realized? I don't know, it just seems very anticlimactic. Who built the Shrike, and how did Vadic get it? Why is she commanding it, when her allies have so much of Starfleet at their disposal?

The bad: This season is 80% done before we get all seven TNG characters in the same room together. I didn't expect that moment to happen early. They had to bring Data back from the dead for one thing. But throughout this season, I've found it strange how little we've seen Deanna Troi. That appears to be for plot-related reasons, because the second she's on board the Titan she can sense something eerie about Jack Crusher. If they met too soon, that might short-circuit the story (Don't threaten me with a good time.). It's the same way they had to hold off on Data so he could be the one to reveal that the Changelings stole Picard's corpse.

To be fair, maybe this is the right call, because withholding Troi makes you want to see her that much more, so they held her back until it was most effective. Once she's on the scene, she starts to get to the bottom of things, much like Worf did when he finally showed up.

Still, there's only six TNG characters to be re-introduced here. Picard's the title character, so he's already there. Even if we bring the others in one episode at a time and save Troi for last, that should still bring her in by Episode 6, not 8. Seven's had a bigger presence in this show and she's a Voyager guy. Shaw's had a bigger presence in this show and he's just some dipshit from Chicago.

It's also possible that some of this was done at the actors' request. Maybe Marina Sirtis was like "Hey, I want to be a part of this, but I've got other things going on, so I'd like a smaller role." And that's why she had those isolated cameos because they were easier to film.

But I feel like this could have been handled differently. Just do a shorter season. Six episodes instead of ten. Or write more story for criminy's sake! I feel like a supercut of Vadic's ramblings would fill a whole episode all by itself. No one needed that!

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

This one started out promising but went downhill fast. They should have called this one "The Icarus Factor II: So Very Tired".

I'll try to keep it short this time. Geordi's still trying to figure out how to get Data separated from Lore, since they're now both stuck in the same body. Euthaizing Data (again) might be an option here, but they need his help to stop the attack on Frontier Day. That's a good way to explain why they don't just dump Data's new body in the sun. He's clearly suffering, but there's too much at stake.

Beverly suspects there might be a way to track or even kill this new-and-improved breed of Changeling Revanchists, but she's worried about the moral implications of using a species' own biology against them. Meanwhile Jack is loaded with survivors guilt, and wants to trade himself to Vadic in exchange for Riker. Also Troi, I would imagine, since Vadic has her too, but Jack doesn't know that. Picard won't allow this, but it does give him an idea to set a trap.

So the Shrike finally tracks down Titan and it looks like it just got disabled in a battle with a "Vulcan warship", also disabled. Was there actually a battle or did they stage the whole thing? Anyway, Vadic is desperate because she can't get any information out of Riker and Troi, so she leads a boarding party and Jack lures them into a bunch of force fields. Hooray!

And then things start to go bad. Somehow Lore takes over all of the ship's systems. I'm not sure what the rest of the good guys' plan was supposed to be, but Lore causes it all to backfire. Jack and Sydney La Forge are trapped with a pair of Changelings, and Jack has to do some sort of telepathic thing to guide her body into defeating one of the Changelings the same way he did.

Meanwhile, Picard and Beverly interrogate Vadic, who reveals her dark origins. She and her comrades were Changeling prisoners held captive during the Dominion War. They were experimented upon by a Federation scientist at the Daystrom Institute, and apparently the goal of the experiments was to make them even better at infiltration? Was the plan to use them as Federation agents? How was that ever going to work? Anyway, Vadic escaped, and she could pass her enhanced powers to other like-minded Changelings. So I guess she was always part of the Changeling plot going on in this season, but why is she posing as a bounty hunter? If her comrades have so much influence in Starfleet, what do they need with the Shrike? Why did she kill those security guys who had captured Riker? She just re-captured him for the same cause.

Anyway, thanks to Lore's treachery, Vadic escapes and takes control of the Titan. Data reasserts control, so may he has a chance to turn the tide, but the episode ends before that can happen.

And that's the problem with this thing. It's a pretty good half-episode, but it's been padded to full-length. Vadic's origin story was compelling, Picard and Beverly's moral dilemma was compelling, Geordi's plea to Data was nice, but what I really wanted was for the good guys to get a win, and they decided to defer that for the next episode.

There's no good reason for this. A lot of time was spent on dramatic pauses and ominous posturing. When Vadic takes the bridge she gives a(nother) long, rambling speech. Then she stops talking, and this really grim, suspenseful music plays, and she.... sits down in the captain's chair. Is that supposed to matter? She already won, what difference does it make that she decided to sit?

The next episode will probably feature the big comeback I was hoping for, but that's the problem. I wanted a mid-story comeback, kind of like what we had when they escaped the nebula a few episodes ago. But now, if the good guys get out of this jam, it'll have to happen in Episode 8 of the season. So then they'll have to immediately move on to the part where they win the whole thing. It's not paced well, is what I'm saying.

Oh, wait, we never saw Worf in this one. In the previous episode he said he would bring back Riker, so maybe he snuck aboard the Shrike or something. Well, this might be worth it after all... but I doubt it.

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

When you're Captain Shaw's XO and Raffi's former(?) girlfriend, "very annoying" is a not term used lightly.

This is Season 3 Episode 6, and the first one to feature all seven of the TNG main cast. If you want a machete cut of Star Trek: Picard I would recommend watching a gifset of Picard hugging Q, then start with this episode. I think you'll be a bit confused about who Alton Soong is, but Season 1 didn't try very hard to introduce him either. Besides, if you're a big enough TNG fan to want to check this turkey out, you're probably already used to them tossing out hidden Soongs and secret androids.

Let's see if I can sum this up quickly: Picard (1) gets a distress call from Beverly Crusher (2) so he contacts Will Riker (3) for help. They try to sneak to her location using the USS Titan, but end up in a long, drawn out battle with a bounty hunter ship called the Shrike. After escaping, Ro Laren sacrifices herself to warn Picard of a Changeling plot that involves his and Bev's son, Jack Crusher. She leaves him records of her investigation, which leads them to her field agents, Raffi and Worf (4).

In this episode, Titan attempts to seek answers at the Daystrom Institute, but the security is tighter than they expected so they can't retrieve the away team that they send to the station. So Picard goes to the fleet museum to get help from Geordi LaForge (5). Together they rig up a cloaking device on the Titan, which enables them to beam out most of the away team, including the Daystrom manifest, which is stored inside Data (6) in a new body. We'll come back to that. Riker gets captured by Starfleet security, but then he gets double-captured by the Shrike's Captain Vadic, who reveals she's a Changeling, and also she's holding Deanna Troi (7) captive.

See, this is why I'm writing all this down, because the show is so unbearably tedious that I need to record my understanding of the plot. I learned some time ago that a sure sign of bad storytelling is when you write down what happened in a given episode or chapter and you realize the answer is "not much". I've watched about two or three movies' worth of content from Season 3, but very little has actually happened. Let's put that into perspective. You could watch Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, and the first leg of The Voyage Home in the time it takes you to watch the first six episodes of Season 3. A lot of stuff happens in those three movies. Hell, even that first chunk of Voyage Home has a lot going on in it.

The storyline in this season isn't bad on a conceptual level. It's a bit derivative, since we've seen Changeling infiltration stories before, and crew reunions are a regular thing in this franchise, but it's solid. The problem is how they keep dragging things out with all this stuff that doesn't matter: Captain Shaw, Worf mentoring Raffi, Picard asking Laris if he should go help Beverly or not, 90 percent of the battle with the Shrike, Raffi arguing with her handler, Worf and Raffi arguing with Worf's handler, the scene with Sneed, the scene with Krinn, Jack Crusher's hallucinations, all of the pointless flashbacks. None of it matters, but they threw it in to make this take longer. They threw it in to fool you into thinking these diversions were clues instead of filler.

This is how they kill time in this episode. The gang does to the Daystrom Station to burgle the place, but their magic space key doesn't work. The away team gets in the station and they can move freely, but Titan can't get close enough to extract them when they're done, so they have to leave and come back. That's a waste. If this story were better paced, they would have gotten all their ducks in a row ahead of time. It would still be a suspenseful touch-and-go heist, but it would have taken half the time to tell it.

Instead, they get split up and have to go ask Geordi for help. But he's worried about the bad guys coming after his family, so Picard has to talk him into this. Then his daughters have to talk him into it, and it becomes this weird thing where Geordi was a pilot and an engineer in his youth, and one daughter's an engineer, and the other's a pilot, and for some reason he feels slighted by that? "How could you follow in my footsteps like that? Why couldn't you be like your sister, who followed in my footsteps?"

He comes around in the end, but it takes forever. I see now that this is why all the characters in this show are always mad at Picard all the time. Before I thought the writers were just too lazy to think of a second character dynamic, but now I see it's a stalling tactic. Each character they bring in who has a beef with Picard is another insta-conflict they can introduce and resolve to pad out the piece. It doesn't even have to be rational. Captain Shaw's the one guy who still blames Picard for what Locutus did. Beverly ghosted Picard for the unspeakable crime of being a responsible public servant. Geordi's mad at Picard for getting his daughter into this crisis even though it was Beverly who called him, and I'm pretty sure the bad guys were the ones who started it. Ro was mad at Picard for not being supportive enough of her whole "traitor" phase.

Most of these characters come around, but it's so dumb. The whole reason this show got made was because Picard is such a popular character, but the entire formula of the show is "What if everyone hated Jean-Luc Picard?" Starfleet brass tell him to shut the fuck up. Old friends point guns at him. His son blames him for the genetic brain disorder that killed him. His friends hate him for being too dedicated to his work. The people he helps hate him for not helping them more. His adoring fans won't even let him eat his lunch!

Let's move on, since I'm sure we'll have a chance to come back to "Everyone hates Picard" later. Apparently Jack's whole berserker rage thing comes from him having the same genetic abnormality that gave Picard prophetic visions of Data. Also it killed Picard, so Jack is kind of bitter that he may not live past the age of... [checks notes] ah yes, ninety-four. Jack Crusher sucks. Still he manages to look past his bitterness long enough to get the big idea to steal the cloaking device from the "HMS Bounty" the Klingon ship from Star Trek IV. He and Geordi's kids think they can use it to get the Titan close enough to save the away team.

Geordi has kittens over this, because hooking up a cloaking device to a Federation starship is a treaty violation, but if that were true then why does the Federation still have the Bounty in the first place? Also, it's a 115-year-old cloaking device. How effective can it still be? You'd think 2401 tech would be able to detect that sort of thing. Besides, they have to uncloak anyway to teleport the away team back on board.

Wait, no they don't? That's not how it worked in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The Bounty was cloaked for most of the movie but they used the transporters multiple times. You know what other ship could operate the transporters while under cloak? The alternate timeline version of La Sirena, from this obscure show from a few years ago. What was it called? Oh right! It was Star Trek: Picard!

I mean, it's a silly thing to nitpick, but the point is they spent most of the episode on a fetch quest for the cloaking device, and then it barely helps at all. They could have just warped away from the Daystrom Institute and then doubled back an hour later and swooped into get their pals in the nick of time. That's basically what they did anyway, but with more hand-wringing from Geordi.

Back to Data. So the big idea here is that the bad guys swiped a portal gun from the Daystrom Institute and used it to destroy a Starfleet building somewhere, but this was only a distraction from the other thing they stole, which must be part of an even bigger plan. So Picard sends Riker, Worf, and Raffi into the station to steal the station's manifest, which will show what that other missing item is. As it turns out, the manifest is contained inside the "AI security system" that protects it, and both of those things are contained inside an android body wired into the station. A hologram of Alton Soong explains that he was planning to transfer his mind into an android body, but decided against it after meeting Picard, so instead he rigged it up to contain the minds of Lore, Lal, B-4, and mostly Data. Then he died before he could finish, and.... Starfleet took it? This doesn't make much sense.

The gang try to turn this new android on, and it gives Brent Spiner a chance to switch personalities like he used to do all the time back in the day. Data's in there, but so are the others, and he can't think straight. Then he projects a hologram from his eyes, which is... weird. I mean, could Data do that before? And I thought Alton said this android was biological like Picard's synth body. Can Picard display holograms with his eyes?

Anyway, Data finally shows the gang what else was stolen from the Daystrom Institute, and it's Picard's corpse. I guess that was also confiscated by Starfleet when Alton Soong died? So Picard's original body is some sort of deadly weapon now. I bet the next episode has a scene where people are mad at Picard for this. "How dare you! That dead body of yours is going to kill all our loved ones, and it's all your fault!"

Fuck this show.

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

More like "Pic(king a better show to watch would not be h)ard"! Ha ha!

This is Season 3, Episode 5, "Imposters". I think this is a rare bird in the season, where the episode title is not some cutesy reference to classic Trek. Most of them have names like "Make It So" or "Four Lights". Sometimes they'll add a little twist like "Tea, Earl Grey Cold".

Oh... this is ass. Let's talk about continuity for a minute, because I'm still pissed off at how neither Guinan nor Picard remembered their meeting in 1893. I looked this up on Memory Alpha to see if there was some acknowledgement of the error, and apparently the people who made the show provided an explanation: Due to the changes in the timeline, General Picard never experienced the events of "Times Arrow", so this version of 2024 Guinan had never met Picard before. Which is kind of what I assumed, except Admiral Picard (the good one) still remembers 1893, but he never mentions any of it. He walks into her bar expecting her to recognize him, and he's surprised when she doesn't, but he never explains why she should. You'd think he would just assume she forgot, since it was so long ago. You'd think he would say "Don't you remember that 19th Century mine in San Francisco?" and she'd tell him she has no idea what he's talking about, and he'd go "Oh, right, because the timeline changed. Crap." But that never happens, which took me out of the show.

I say all of this because Picard usually operates that way. In the previous episode, Seven kills a Changeling, but it retains its human disguise even as a corpse. That's now how it worked in DS9, but they explain that here. Dr. Crusher makes note of how unusual this is, and she studies the body to understand why. She doesn't have a complete explanation, but she confirms that these Changelings are Built Different, and chalks it up to evolution. The upshot is that the Changelings in Picard are harder to catch than the ones in Deep Space Nine. I assume this also explains why they look more like liquid meat than the orange syrup we saw in the 90's. They wanted to beef up the Changelings and they did, but they also took care to inform the audience of it.

I say usually because Picard screws up in a number of places. For instance, Season 2 heavily implies that the Ten Forward bar on the Eneterprise-D was named after a bar Guinan ran in Los Angeles. It's not; "Ten Forward" is a designation for the most front-facing section of Deck Ten. Season 1 makes it seem like extracting Borg implants is a laborious, sometimes gruesome process, but Picard and Seven were de-assimilated pretty quickly and easily decades earlier.

Sometimes Picard struggles to get its own continuity straight. Last episode had a flashback to "five years ago", when Picard told old stories of his adventures to a bunch of excited Starfleet officers, and he unwittingly told his son that Starfleet was the only family he ever needed. The thing is, five years ago, Picard was in the middle of a fourteen-year resignation from Starfleet. He was bitter and disgusted with the whole organization, so it seems odd that he would be so eager to call it "family". His crewmates, sure, but not Starfleet. I'm not talking out my ass here, because this was all established in Season 1, set two years before Season 3, and three years after this flashback scene.

My point here is that the show is a confusing mess. Lots of TV shows play fast and loose with continuity. Hell, TNG was a repeat offender, using, distorting, or discarding TOS lore as it saw fit. But TNG could get away with it, becuase it was (a) good, and (b) it wasn't depending so heavily on the callbacks to TOS. Picard, however, is pretty much marketed as a continuation of TNG. Season 3 in particular is marketed as a damn reunion show. It desperately needs to get the continuity right, or at least mostly right. But it makes some big blunders, which means the callbacks that actually make sense are less effective.

For example, this episode sees Commander Ro Laren from Starfleet Intelligence show up to question Picard and Riker about their shenanigans in the previous four episodes. But the last time we saw Ro, she betrayed Starfleet to the Maquis. The idea here is to make the audience wonder if this is really Ro at all, or a Changeling infiltrator disguised as Ro. That's a good angle, except that the show has made too many mistakes in the past, so I couldn't ignore a third possibility: It's a plot hole.

So we get this rather well-acted scene with Ro and Picard talking out their beef, each gauging the other to see if they're really who they claim to be. But the whole time I'm trying to gauge the writers, trying to figure out if they actually watched the Ro episodes of TNG and paid attention. And it turns out they got it right! This time. It's frustrating because a lot of this episode is about trust, and I can't trust this show because it's let me down so many time.

For example, I assumed Captain Shaw would be killed off by now since they introduced him like the kind of jerk who dies in hilarious fashion in a horror movie. He's like the guy who dies in the restroom in Jurassic Park, or Peck from Ghostbusters. Yet Shaw remains improbably alive and with zero marshmallow goo on his body. Ro had most of the crew sent to a different ship and warns Picard to make a run for it, but she doesn't tell any of this to Shaw, who is the captain of the damn ship. So Picard has to convince him that Ro's news of a Changeling conspiracy is legit and they need to run, except Shaw's been burned by Picard before. He finally comes around, but it's becoming more and more clear that Shaw's sole purpose in this show is to pump the brakes on the plot. I'm sure Chicagoans love seeing one of their fellow dipshits on the show, but as far as I'm concerned Captain Shaw is like a bad Peter David Star Trek novel come to life. I trusted the show to avoid stooping this low, and they keep digging deeper.

Will the Federation Horns appear in Star Trek: Picard? Is that where we're headed? Maybe they already did, since there was a live band at that pre-launch party for the Europa mission in Season 2. They were simply biding their time, scouting the centuries before making their big move in Season 3. Their plan: pointless filler bullshit. The cybrid bitch is mine.

What else happened? Oh, Jack Crusher got cornered by a bunch of Changelings posing as security officers, and he suddenly "activated" just like Dahj and Soji in Season 1. I mean... literally exactly like what the synths did in Season 1. You'd think that the writers would get to this scene and someone would point out that this is too similar to a moment from a previous episode, but no.

Could this be an important clooooooooooooooooo as to what Jack Crusher really is? Maybe he's a robot like Dahj and Soji, by which I mean not a robot at all, but somehow a robot anyway, because the writers don't understand what words mean?

I'm gonna say no, because Worf pulls the same trick in this episode. A bad guy captures him and Raffi and makes them fight to the death for his amusement, and Worf fakes his death in order to get the drop on them. How did he fake his death so thoroughly? He used the "Kahless Technique."

...

You know what? I'm in the wrong blog, but I can roll with this. I thought Worf was acting a little too much like a Jedi in this show, but no. No, he's become a Dragon Ball Super guy. That's why his hair is white. He's not going grey, he just had to be in Ultra Instinct (mastered) so that he could properly align his ki to survive the knife wound. Also he needed the heightened reflexes and speed to ensure Raffi would actually stab him in the right place, since Raffi's such a fuck-up she couldn't win a fight even if it was fixed. At least now I know how Goku survived all those stab wounds he got in the Zamasu arc. He learned the Kahless Technique. Or he's a synth. I hate everything.

Or... they could have just caught the guy they wanted without all this nonsense and had the information they needed without all this rigamorale, but Captain Shaw can't slow down the show all by himself. We have to drag this out to ten episodes together! Come on everybody!

Back to Jack Crusher, so he beats up and kills four Changelings all by himself. Bev asks him how he knew they were Changelings and he admits that he had no idea. He's just been having these nightmarish visions of murdering every crewman on the ship, so when they tried to capture him it just sent him over the edge. He sees all this red shit when he's in this mode, so either he's a vampire and this is all a Hellsing reference, or he's like a Borg sleeper agent and the red color scheme is meant to throw me off the scent. "Ha ha," the writers said when they came up with this. "We always use green lighting for the Borg, so this time we'll use red and they'll never see it coming." No, I'm on to you, Alex Kurtzman. You ain't slick.

Oh, right, I forgot to talk about the show's opening. They didn't do a flashback this time, instead it was a dream Jack had of himself shooting up everyone on the bridge. Apparently the writers got bored trying to make a space 9/11 on Star Trek so they started doing space mass shootings instead. This show is hacky and crappy and boring and stupid and not even the Kahless Technique can save it.

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

I just did the math, and Star Trek: Picard is approximately 22.5 fucking grueling hours, so that made me kind of sad.

This episode tries. It doesn't quite succeed, but I see the effort and I appreciate it. I'd like to believe that this marks a turning of the corner, and the rest of this season will get better, but it's too late to redeem this series, which currently stands as one of the all-time worst shows I've ever seen.

With a lot of bad media, I will often see apologists offering up defenses like "It had some good ideas, but they were poorly executed." And I have watched TV shows where that simply isn't true. The ideas were bad and the execution was bad, so it was bad all around. Picard, on the other hand, actually does have some pretty great ideas. There's a lot of stuff that would totally work if only it were being done anywhere else but here. And that's actually more tragic, because Star Trek Picard is like this graveyard where good ideas go to die. And of course, they're buried alongside a ton of bad ideas, which the show also has.

All right, so in this episode, they're stuck in the gravity well of a nebula that isn't actually a nebula, and they've only got four hours left to live. The gang have hit rock bottom, but they slowly start to dig their way out, which is kind of uplifting to see. Riker admits to Picard that he was right about not wanting to fight the Shrike. Picard spends some QT with his new son Jack Crusher. Seven and Captain Shaw have to work together to flush out the Changeling saboteur. Beverly figures out that the nebula is actually some sort of alien womb, because it's sending out energy pulses at regular intervals, comparable to a human experiencing contractions during childbirth.

I mean, that last part is pretty ridiculous, but I'll allow it, because it's on-brand for Star Trek. Still... I'm beginning to wonder if anyone in Starfleet has ever seen an actual nebula before. It just seems like this thing turned out to be very different from a nebula, which makes me wonder why anyone thought it was a nebula in the first place.

Anyway, they finally come up with a plan to use the energy pulses from the space-womb to carry the ship back out before they all die. It mostly relies on this weird premise that's also on-brand for Star Trek: that all starships can magically be drained of their power, or absorb power like a sponge. In this case, Bev can predict the next wave, so once they're prepared they can just time it right and use the power of the wave to re-energize the ship. When they escape, they're treated to a swarm of alien squid creatures born from the "nebula".

So what's the problem? Well, two main issues here. First, even though there's a happy ending to this crisis, this episode gets really fucking dark. The crew morale is in the toilet. Riker confesses that he's in a profound depression from the death of his son, so he left his family to get back into space just to try and feel something. He tries recording a message for his family when he thinks they're all going to die, and when the others come to him with their escape plan, he's so despondent that he thinks it would be better to wait for a rescue, because at least that way the ship might still be intact and they could leave something behind. I don't know what the hell happened between Season 1 and this, but that's a pretty dark mindset he's in.

We also learn that Jack approached Picard years ago, without telling him who he was, and asked Picard if he ever considered having a family, and Picard replies that Starfleet was the only family he ever needed, which would have been an innocuous comment except he was saying it to his son without even realizing it, so that's really grim. Also, Jack has some spooky hallucinations near the end of the episode. I guess he really is his father's son, since Picard had the prophetic dreams in Season 1 and the Silent Hill jumpscare flashbacks in Season 2.

Oh, and there's a lot of body bags in this thing. It's kind of tough to appreciate the Titan surviving this mess when you see so many crewmen who definitely did not survive it.

Oh, and Captain Shaw is high on painkillers and he finally opens up about why he's such a giant douche: Turns out he was at Wolf 359, and he and 50 of his closest friends had to figure out which ten of them got to use the only functioning escape pod. Did anyone actually die at Wolf 359? The way I remember it, there were a lot of broken hulls and the Enterprise scanned for life signs and found none. But Sikso got out and Shaw got out. Shaw describes himself as a "dipshit from Chicago," and I gotta admit, ripping off Ben Sisko's origin story is a pretty dipshit move. I'm voluntarily subjecting myself to Star Trek: Picard, so I can't judge.

Oh, right, there were two issues with this episode, but there was so much dark stuff in this one that I got sidetracked.

The other issue is that they just sort of blew off the original problem that got them in trouble in the first place: The Shrike. On their way out of the "nebula" they almost run right into it, but Riker uses the tractor beam to snag an asteroid and fling it into the Shrike before it can attack. It's kind of cool that he got his groove back and managed to one-shot this enemy that had seemed unstoppable a few hours earlier, but it also undermines all the buildup we had with the Shrike in the previous two episodes.

The Shrike's captain looks like she's auditioning for the role of Oswald Cobblepot. She acts like a maniac, and her ship is supposed to be loaded with incredibly powerful weapons. When Titan falls into the gravity well of the "nebula" she cuts off her own hand, which then turns into a floating head and it orders her to pursue the Titan and recover Jack Crusher at all costs, and she reluctantly obeys. The Shrike sucks and she sucks as a villain, and Episodes 2 and 3 sucked, but I assumed they were going somewhere with all of this. Instead, Riker throws a rock at them and that seems to solve everything.

I mean, they didn't destroy the Shrike, so maybe it comes back to menace Picard later, but we spent three episodes on it and I'm not impressed at all. I'm certainly not looking forward to a rematch.

Worf isn't in this one, which is pretty disappointing, but it allowed the episode to focus on the A-plot, which was a good thing. Also we get a day off from Raffi's nonsense. Wait, that means we'll probably have to get double the Raffi in the next episode. Where the fuck is Geordi, anyway? They promised us the whole TNG crew would reunite for Season 3, and we can barely get more than three of them in a single place. At least Worf and Troi are in the show, though. Data's not around, but he's dead, so what's Geordi's excuse?

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

This might be my favorite shot of the whole series. "[no audible dialogue]" sums up so much of Star Trek: Picard.

The runner up for this episode of Seven of Nine saying "mass spectrometer".

So this is Season 3, Episode 3, and it should have been a lot of fun, because the previous episode set up this battle in a nebula. Titan is outgunned and can't escape, so they flee into the nebula to hide. But the Shrike follows and seems to catch up to them anyway. The only advantage the Titan seems to have is that Shrike can't destroy Titan without killing Jack Crusher, the man they came her to get. It's a nice premise for a battle. A real cat-and-mouse game, where it seems like the Shrike is content to chase the mouse and whittle away at it until it finally succumbs to exhaustion.

The problem is that the breakdown of leadership on the Titan. Captain Shaw's kind of an asshole, but his bigger problem is that he keeps letting people push him around on his own ship. Seven defied his orders, which got them into this mess, then Picard overrode his authority by refusing to allow Jack to be surrendered. He confined Seven to quarters, but it took him forever to do it, and then he leaves Riker and Picard on the bridge to continue to get in his way.

Then he gets wounded during the battle and transfers his command authorization to Riker. You might think this would turn the tide, since the story clearly wants us to think that the main characters are the only ones who are good at their jobs. But no. Riker insists on a defensive strategy, buying time until they can get their warp engines on line and make a run for it. Picard insists that they should go on the offensive. When Jack Crusher figures out how the Shrike is tracking them, Picard sees this as an opportunity. He wants to lure Shrike into a trap, while Riker wants to use this chance to put more distance between them. And they argue about this. A lot.

You might think Picard has the right idea, since it's his show, but eventually Riker plays it his way, mostly because they've run out of options, and it only makes things worse. They get pulled into the center of the nebula... which is apparently very dangerous because it's not actually a nebula at all... and Riker bitterly informs Picard that he's killed them all.

It sucks all the fun out of this battle. There's three damn captains on the bridge, and they each take turns having no idea how to win this thing. In the long run, it probably doesn't matter much, since they'll probably be okay and there's seven more episodes for them to fix things, but this is just a real downer of a way to end the episode. I shouldn't be surprised that Star Trek: Picard would pick this.

Let me complain about the mass spectrometer line for a moment. While treating Captain Shaw's injuries, Jack sees a trail of blood on the sickbay floor. Also, Beverly Crusher was making the point that Shaw's internal bleeding had to be diagnosed indirectly. Imaging scanners don't always pick that sort of thing up, but she caught it by paying attention to his labored breathing and poking him in the belly. So Jack tries to tell the bridge, but they won't let him up there, so he tells Seven instead, and they reason that a gas leak from their engines would leave a trail for the Shrike to follow. But the sensors are useless in the nebula-that's-not-a-nebula, so Jack's logic is that it must be something you can detect without sensors.

The thing is, wouldn't a mass spectrometer be a type of sensor? I might be splitting hairs here. We tend to think of Star Trek sensors as being this scanner type thing that detects energy being emitted from a source, or maybe they emit energy and bounce it off an object to detect it. A mass-spec works a little differently, because you have to draw a stream of matter vapor into the thing, then ionize the vapor and direct it through a magnetic field. The ions then strike a detector, and the paths of those ions are influenced by their respective masses. The lightest ion fragments shoot mostly straight through the magnetic field, while the heavier ones get tugged "off course" a little more. This allows you to measure the mass of the fragments, and you can use all the data to get an idea of what the original matter was made of.

In this case, it's "verterium", a thing they made up for the show, but it sounded like they were saying "deuterium", which is a real thing. I had to turn on the subtitles to find that out. I guess verterium would be complex or unique enough to stand out in a mass-spectrum, but the nebula is packed with its own gases, which you would think would interfere, since they seem to interfere with everything else. No, wait, they could use a sniffer kind of deal to draw sample into the Shrike, and most of the gas is just hydrogen, and you could set the MS to ignore mass-to-charge ratios of 1. Dammit, Picard got the science right, I guess.

Anyway, there's pleny of "verterium" leaking, because there's a saboteur on board who purposely caused the leak. Jack finds the culprit, and takes an asswhoopin' with a side of verterium poisoning, because the saboteur is a Changeling. There's a whole scene where Beverly and Picard anxiously worry about him as he seems to die in sickbay, but then Beverly's medical stuff finally works and he lives. It's like this counterpoint to their argument at the top of the episode, where she told him she didn't want him to find out she was pregnant with Jack because his life was always in danger, and he's upset that she never let him have the chance to decide to be a father. Well for a brief moment they're a family, just like Riker felt when there was some crisis during his son's birth.

And I guess that has a lot to do with Picard and Riker's friction on the bridge, where Picard thinks Riker's afraid to attack because he lost his son years ago, and that was probably the wrong thing to say. See, it just doesn't work. I can see what they were going for with all of this, but it's too overwrought. Throughout the episode, people keep saying that their survival is all that matters now, but they keep letting their little personal dramas get in the way of that.

This is probably why Worf's scenes are the best part of the show. First, he's a Klingon, so when he does all the zany fighting moves that this show loves so much, it actually rings true. They turned Seven into a badass vigilante, and made Elnor a badass warrior monk, but Worf was a badass from Day One, so it's easier to believe. Second, he doesn't put up with Raffi's bullshit. He lets her rant and rave and be self-righteous, and then he calmly informs her that he's in charge and she's too unstable to handle this on her own. The show seems to be introducing this more contemplative side of Worf's character, like he's trying to be more mindful and patient, and that's fine, but much of what he's doing is just being the same cool, professional dude he's always been. It's too bad he's not on the Titan, because they could use a firm, steady hand at the wheel right about now.

Anyway, Worf and Raffi catch a bad guy involved in the attack she failed to stop in S3E1, but the bad guy melts during the interrogation, because he's a Changeling and they can't stay solid for more than 16 hours. Worf's exact role in this is unclear, but he claims to be working alongside Starfleet in this matter, and he got a hot tip from Odo that there's a faction of rogue Changelings who are still mad about losing the Dominion War. Since there's a Changeling saboteur aboard the Titan as well, I guess we finally have something to tie these plots together.

Overall, it's the same complaint I have about every episode. A lot of time passes, but very little actually gets done. The battle in the nebula didn't need to go on as long as it did, and Raffi seems to just slow Worf down.

Oh, I keep forgetting to bring this up, but: It's bizarre how every episode does a cold open, but then they run an opening credits sequence at the end of the episode, followed immediately by a closing credits sequence. What were they going for? It's like they couldn't pick a format so they just went with "all of the above". Just like the writers, unfortunately.

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

Oh, fuck they're gonna have Section 31 in this show on top of everything else, aren't they?

All right, let's recap the plot of this one. Picard and Riker rescue Dr. Crusher, and her son, Jack Crusher. But before the Titan can return to Federation space, they're cornered by the Shrike, a powerful, unknown ship run by a bounty hunter. Shrike's commander demands that Jack Crusher, and gives Titan one hour to decide. Captain Shaw wants to do it, but Picard finally pulls rank and flees into the nebula they just got done escaping.

That whole business takes like 30 minutes of screentime. It's mostly characters bickering and Captain Shaw trying to preserve his pride after Picard, Riker, and Seven made him look like a dope. I guess the idea here is that Picard could have acted more decisively from the start, but he needed to hear from Beverly that he's Jack's father, which suddenly galvanizes him into action.

It's dumb as fuck, because Picard already cared about Beverly, so he should have just pulled rank in the first place to rescue her, before he even knew Jack existed.

This whole episode treats the chain of command like a joke. Shaw's the captain of the Titan, and he feels secure enough in his authority to tell Picard and Riker "no"... until the plot calls for it and then he has to back down. Seven defies Shaw's orders and barely tries to hide it, but it takes him forever and a day to relieve her of duty. Not that it matters, because she keeps giving orders anyway and finds Jack before he can teleport himself over to the Shrike to save his mom.

It's the same contradiction we had with the Romulans in Season 1, where they were simultaneously presented as a displaced, weakened people, and a fearsome galactic power. Captain Shaw is simultaneously too strong and too weak. He's strong enough to maintain command in spite of his shitty attitude, but he's weak enough that he's powerless to stop Seven and Picard from undermining his authority. It just depends on which one the plot calls for in a given moment.

In the end, the viewer loses all interest in Shaw as a character. He's neither an antagonist to obstruct the heroes' mission, nor is he an ally with a contrarian perspective. He's just there to slow down the story. He's mud in the road for Star Trek: Picard to spin its tires in.

The rest of the episode sees Raffi convince herself that she knows better than Starfleet Security when it comes to solving the mystery behind a recent terrorist attack on a Starfleet Recruitment building. Her anonymous handler tells her not to pursue the investigation, but she does it anyway, even asking her estranged husband to help her get in touch with a gangster who can give her a lead. He's upset that she's more interested in the gangster than trying to reconnect with their son, so he offers her a choice, and she goes for the gangster with both hands.

What's really sad about all this is that Raffi is really, really bad at her job. Like, she's clearly talented. She knows computer stuff and she's really good at swiping right on all those holographic screens. She can hold her own in a fight, and she bedded Seven of Nine, which is pretty impressive. The problem is that she keeps risking everything on some flimsy chance of a lead, and then her only plan is to bluff until everything sort of works out.

Raffi's ex-husband and son got fed up with her bullshit a long time ago, because she absolutely can not and will not walk away from the paranoid intelligence agent game. The game she constantly loses because she's terrible at it. I mean, if she were frighteningly effective at her job, then it would be kind of a neat conflict. She loves her work too much to give it up, or maybe she sees herself as the indispensable woman keeping the galaxy safe. But she's not. She hates her job because everyone tells her what to do, and she's really bad at it, partly because she won't let anyone tell her what to do.

She survives this episode because her handler shows up to rescue her, and it turns out to be Worf. So I guess this brings Raffi closer to the main plot, but I can tell it's gonna be a while before they get everyone in the same room.

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

So this is actually where I came in, because I put the wrong disc in my DVD player, and it took me 10-15 minutes to figure out that it was Season 3 instead of Season 1.

My initial impression was that it looked kind of ridiculous for Dr. Crusher, now 70 years old if I'm not mistaken, to get in a crazy laser gun shootout. I mean, I don't know who's chasing her, but presumably they sent two of their better henchmen to get her, and she smokes both their asses. I could live with that, because the good guys always do a little better than they ought to in these kinds of situations, but there's a couple of moments where she just darts across the room to get to a better position, and the bad guys just sort of shoot at everything else in the scene while she's out in the open less than twenty feet away.

But now that I've seen Seasons 1 and 2, I realize this is just how the show rolls. Ridiculous gymkata battles, ridiculous BFG shootouts, it's all good on Star Trek: Picard. I guess I should be grateful Beverly didn't spin kick an alien, but there's still nine more episodes for that to happen.

Wait: Fantasy booking. Crusher and Troi have to stop a bad guy, and they lure him into a hallway with a mirror in it, and he's like "What the hell is going on here?" Then they come out wearing their backwards aerobics gear from TNG Season 3, and karate the shit out of him. I mean flips and kicks and elbows all over the place. Then the bad guy tries to open a door to escape, but Geordi rolls under the bottom of it and he's all "Going somewhere?" and bam! He kicks him in the nuts! Take that, alien bad guy! Then Geordi shoots heat vision from his cyborg eyes and he says "Take a look, it's in a book!" Then he says "fuck", because this is Picard and everyone swears.

Crusher sends a coded distress call to Picard and he takes like... a week to respond. First he gets the message, and Crusher explicitly warns Picard to "trust no one". He immediately tells his housekeeper to get her advice. Crusher also warns Picard not to go through Starfleet, so the next person he tells is Will Riker, his old buddy from Starfleet. Riker's idea is to get on a Starfleet ship and pull rank to get it to take them where they want to go. The ship's captain, a man named Shaw, tells them no, because he's not an idiot.

Okay, so the show goes out of its way to make Captain Shaw look like the biggest horse's ass in the universe. When they board the ship, they're greeted by his XO, Seven of Nine, who's now a real Starfleet Officer. But he makes her go by Annika Hansen. I thought Seven preferred Annika for a hot minute, but maybe I missed something. It's still weird that Captain Shaw can just order you to change your name and there's no Starfleet HR you can take that up with.

Shaw invites them to dinner in the captain's mess, but he's already eating when they get there, and he makes some weird joke about it to explain his behavior. Then he makes fun of Riker's musical tastes, and says a bunch of shit to Picard, who's a friggin' admiral for pity's sake. They really, really want you to hate this guy, but they overdid it. It just made me wonder how he got a command in the first place.

The idea is that you're supposed to think Captain Shaw's a jerk when he refuses to take Picard and Riker where they want to go, but no. He's a jerk for unrelated reasons. He's kind of within his rights to refuse their order for a course change, since he has orders from higher up to go where they're already going. So Seven does it behind his back while he's asleep, because she's the cool Starfleet officer who helps out the main characters when they're in a jam. Pretty sure she'll get court martialed for this, but no one seems to care. I think Shaw dies in a few episodes anyway, so it won't matter, but this is still incredibly dumb.

I mean... Picard had the exact same problem in Season 1. He needed to search for Bruce Maddox, but he couldn't involve Starfleet because he didn't work there anymore, so he made a few calls and hired Rios to take him where he needed to go. Why couldn't he just hire another private ship to do the same thing? Instead, they hijacked Captain Shaw's ship, and got caught the second Captain Shaw looked out the damn window. Then they stole a shuttlecraft to get the rest of the way. What were they going to do when they got back? Bring an injured Dr. Crusher onto the ship and pretend like they just happened to find her? She told Picard "no Starfleet" and now Shaw's going to file an official report to Starfleet about it.

All right, so they make it to Crusher's ship and they take their sweet-ass time searching for her, even though their sensors confirmed she's wounded. Fortunately, they find her in a healing tank. That's sad, because it'll take like fifteen episodes for her to get back to full strength, and Picard and Riker will have to fight Frieza by themselves in the meantime... wait.

The other guy on the ship claims to be her son? Everyone mumbles their lines on this show, especially whenever they state important exposition. It's not Wesley, since we just saw him in the last episode. It looks more like that guy who played Adult Wesley when Riker got Q powers and turned him into a grown man. I don't know if that's what they were going for, but it's the first thing I thought of.

The bad guy ship closes in on them, and Picard's like "Who's after you?" and the guy's like "See for yourself", and we see the ship, but I don't recognize it. Usually when they do that on a TV show, it's so the audience can see it's someone they recognize. Like you'd see a Cardassian ship and go "Oh, so the Cardassians are after her... but why?" But it's some new ship design which tells us nothing. Dr. Crusher's other son is a jerk.

While all of this is going on, Raffi is off doing her own separate TV show where she's trying to prevent a terrorist attack and fails miserably. She's all weepy and bitchy and annoying and it's impossible to tell what's going on with her. I remember being frustrated that we never got closure on her estranged son, but now I get why he was fed up with her bullshit. Cripes, imagine being her son. Man, nobody's got time for that.

Speaking of bitchy, I'm getting really sick of how everyone in this show has a beef or points a gun as soon as they show up. It usually happens to Picard, but that's only because he's the main character. Other characters will talk to people, and it immediately turns hostile. Picard goes to meet Raffi and she pulls a gun on him. Raffi goes to reconcile with her son and he tells her to get lost. Picard goes to find Guinan in the past and she pulls a gun on him. Guinan takes Picard to the Watcher lady and she pulls a gun on him.

Picard meets Captain Shaw and Shaw treats him like shit for no good reason at all. Like, you'd think Picard killed his wife or something. That's not even a hypothetical scenario, because Picard killed Sisko's wife and he still treated him more professionally than Shaw does here. Maybe Shaw had two wives and Picard killed them both? No, wait, he had seven wives, and Picard killed four and Riker killed three, and that's why he makes Seven of Nine use her birthname.

Sorry, I got off track there. Picard and Riker go to save the Crushers and Beverly's son... you guessed it... pulls a gun on them. It's a cool trick when used sparingly, but watching this show you'd think it's just a standard greeting in the 25th Century.

And it just keeps happening. Raffi and Seven were dating in Season 2, and all they did was bicker constantly. Rios and Jurati bickered a lot, but they were no longer dating. The key thing is to bicker, regardless of your romantic status. This might explain why Elnor hardly ever did anything on the show. His whole deal was "absolute candor", speaking honestly and without reservation. So it's hard to have him get in an argument with a friend or comrade, because if he was really hot at someone he would just say "I'm very mad at you" and leave. The writers didn't know how to write for him.

The biggest annoyance I have is when Picard first approaches Riker, and apologizes for taking him away from his family, and instead Riker notes that Deanna and Kestra would enjoy some time away from him. The fuck? We're doing a separation subplot with Riker now? We already did estranged Riker and Troi, and it was all seven seasons of TNG, plus two of the movies!

She'll be joining him before this show is over, so maybe they're just setting up some drama for later. It's not a terrible idea, but I don't trust this show to get it right, because they just have everyone mad at everyone else all the time. Worf and Geordi will probably show up later and they'll pull guns on each other and bicker about their failed marriage to each other. Then they'll see Picard and put aside their mutual loathing to point their guns at him, their common enemy.

This show is a tire fire. I don't like it.

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

The one thing, the only thing that I really cared about with Picard Season 2 was this moment where he hugs Q. I don't know if I just figured out he was dying all on my own, or I read spoilers at some point. But I'm pretty sure I saw this and decided there was really only one reason for this. I mean, I guess Q could just be "going away for a really long time." Like he got a job screwing with some other characters in a different dimension, and he won't be back before Picard dies of old age. But it simplifies things if he's just dying, or whatever the Q version of death is.

And I guess the basic idea is sound. Q knows he's only got so much time left, and he wants to spend it on one last romp with Picard, and this one is extra special because it forces Picard to confront his feelings about his mother's suicide.

I don't like Yvette's suicide in a vacuum. It's pretty fucking dark, and the gravitas it would have had in another show is wasted in Star Trek: Picard, which does constantly hotshots dark moments in a vain effort to be profound. By the time we get to Yvette's noose we've already seen Icheb's eye get plucked out, several other character deaths, Evil General Picard's skull collection, and all the spooky hallucinations and flashbacks that foreshadowed the Yvette reveal. The actual reveal gets lost in the shuffle.

Still, for what they were trying to do with Q, the gesture he was trying to make to Picard, it almost has to be something that big and character redefining. It's just that it's a good idea that was cast in the purgatory of this tedious bullshit show. Q's powers giving out was completely unnecessary, except as a way to drag out the story. Now he has to walk everywhere and use proxies like Adam Soong, which just ruins the pacing. All the other Q stories are settled in two hours or less, and that's because he can appear whenever and wherever to gas up the plot, or vanish to allow the story to simmer. But Picard isn't built that way.

The thing I realized today is that this show, and others like it, relies more on the audience speculation than the actual writing. What I mean by that is: You get one story over several episodes, and you're supposed to watch them over a span of time, and between episodes you're supposed to wonder about what's going to happen next. You're expected to rewatch the episodes you have access to and search for clues, formulate fan theories, and then tune in for the next one and see if you were right. And there's fun to be had there, but with Picard, it feels like the show is constructed more to tickle the viewer's curiosity more than actually telling a compelling story. For example:

Most of this episode is about the good guys trying to protect Renee and the Europa launch so Adam Soong doesn't spoil it. Q's nearly powerless, and the Borg Queen left in the previous episode, so there's no one left to be the villain except Soong, and he's... not a strong enough character to carry that off. He tries to poison Renee with a fast-acting neurotoxin, but Gary Eight fakes him out with a decoy. Soong's backup plan is to destroy the spacecraft itself with drones, but Raffi hacks their guidance system and Rios manages to use one drone to take out the other three. Then Kore reappears to reveal she erased all his research files, just to twist the knife. Utterly defeated, Soong reaches into his desk and pulls out a file entitled "PROJECT KHAN". You know, like the Star Trek villain. Khan? You know who that is? Do you?

It's... a dumb moment. This story is over, so there's nowhere for it to go. The good guys return to 2401 at the end of this episode, so they don't have to deal with the Eugenics Wars. And we already know how Khan ended up. This show isn't gonna pay any of this off.

But earlier in this viewing, I considered that maybe Adam Soong had something to do with the Eugenics Wars, since he seemed to be a hawk for genetic engineering, and then it turned out he cloned dozens of daughters in some sort of weird experiment. So during the long, dull minutes of this season, I wondered if maybe he was going to turn out to be involved with Khan and the Eugenics Wars somehow. That was kind of fun. And I was right! Good for me!

Except... I had to make my own fun. The text of Star Trek: Picard doesn't actually do much with any of this. Adam Soong's arc in this season is:

Whoa, what's Brent Spiner doing here?

Oh, he's a scientist with a sick daughter, and he's desperate enough to help Q.

Oh, he's turning into a huge dick. It's like Q corrupted his love for his daughter. Very tragic.

Oh, he's some sort of shady war criminal? So he's always been like this, and he always will be.

It's not much of a character arc at all, is my point. The real fun of Adam Soong depends on the audience to try to figure out his whole deal. Maybe he's Alton Soong from the 25th Century, or Data in disguise! Maybe he's Lore! Maybe he has an army of Kore clones in his basement! But the dirty little secret is that he really isn't that interesting at all. And by the time you find out what he really is, it's the end of the season, and they got away with wasting your time with a dud character.

The "PROJECT KHAN" folder is this cheap prize they give you at the end to reward you for sticking around this long. "Hey, you were right, he really is important because he invents Khan later." But it doesn't actually matter because this is his last appearance. It's just Brent Spiner holding a folder.

The same thing applies to Wesley Crusher showing up to recruit Kore into the Watcher/Traveler organization. I guess the idea here is that the Gary Seven people and the Travelers were in the same group? And now that Renee's Watcher is dead, they have a vacancy. But what makes Kore special? Like, Wesley had all these special talents and gifts. Kore spent her whole life indoors waiting for a cure for her genetic ailments. I mean, maybe she's a super-genius, but they never showed that. It just feels like they worked this in to cover for the fact that they never did much with Kore. "No, no, we meant to overlook Kore! That way you'd never see it coming when we... uh... uh... have her team up with Wesley Crusher! Wow!"

I mean, it's nice to see Wesley. I wasn't sure if he was in this series or not, so I can check off that box. I'm glad he's doing well. But it just doesn't matter. I guess they might still turn up in Season 3, but I doubt it.

So, once Q takes everyone back to their own time, we get back to the Borg crisis from the beginning of the season, and it turns out it's Jurati, and she set all this up to coordinate some big joint mission to save the galaxy from another space anomaly. It really doesn't mean anything, but they had to do some big feel-good thing to pay off the Borg. Jurati's Borg are good guy Borgs, I guess, and they request provisional Federation membership. I guess.

I think that's about all I wanted to go over. There's some interesting ideas in this, but the show is so plodding and slow that it never manages to land any of its best shots. Again, all I cared about was Q and Picard hugging. They could have done anything else to set up that moment, and it probably would have been better. Maye Q uses Picard's house as his own hospice, and Picard's stuck with him as a roommate for a while. Maybe he tries to take Picard on some goofy fantasy adventure but his heart just isn't into it, so Picard takes him out for drinks instead. Maybe they just give in to 30+ years of sexual tension and have dirty, nasty, old man sex for three episodes straight.

Oh, and Elnor's alive again. For all the difference it makes.