Star Trek Archives – Benjamin T. Milnes

Somehow both boring and chaotic at the same time, 3/10 – Doctor Who – Wild Blue Yonder – Review

Well that was all over the place.

Let’s start with the first scene – a truly bizarre scene that becomes even more bizarre when you realise it had nothing to do with the rest of the story.

It’s 1666, and we see a man exiting an old house. He chats to a woman briefly, in a cheery English fashion, and then goes and sits under an apple tree, scrawling something in a notebook. One of the apples falls on his head, and he has an idea.

It’s Sir Isaac Newton. But for reasons entirely baffling, Sir Isaac Newton is played by half-Indian actor Nathaniel Curtis.

*Sigh*

Now, these episodes of Doctor Who cannot escape the context in which they are being released. As I said in my last review, Doctor Who has had three disastrous series’ led by Chris Chibnall. It needs to show, now, that it is going to change course. It needs to show, now, that it is not going to make the same mistakes. If it doesn’t, it will be well and truly dead.

One of the major errors of the show during the Chibnall Era (which I think henceforth I will refer to simply as ‘The Mistake’), was its relentless pandering to Twitter misosophy. Every bad idea that received applause from the seals of Twitter was rammed into the show. It is a virus that infected Star Wars, Star Trek, Amazon’s “Wrongs of Prime”, as well as Doctor Who. Doctor Who needed to show that the fever had passed – that it was not going to pander to these anti-sci-fi, anti-logic idiots anymore.

One of the symptoms of this virus is the idea of changing the ethnicity of established characters or (worse) historical figures – always from “white” (a word that is only valid in a North American context), or native British or native European, to black (another word that is only really valid in a North American context), south Asian, or arabic. (For some reason, none of the other ethnic groups in the world get a share.)

I say again here that these episodes cannot escape the wider context. The ethnicity of the actor not matching the ethnicity of the character is not always a bad thing. The show Merlin – on the BBC about 15 years ago now – a fantastic show – had Lady Guinevere played by Angel Coulby. No-one cared. But that was for two reasons. Firstly, the show established very early on that it was a ‘modernised’ telling of Arthurian Legend. There were loads of changes to modernise it – including making all of the characters young. And it remained consistent with this modernisation throughout. But secondly, that show was not being made in a time when rabid ideologues online were trying to make every historical figure black and ‘decolonise’ every book and fact in sight. Viewers trusted that there was no vicious ideology behind the change – it was just creative licence.

Nowadays, though, all of the great science fiction and fantasy film and television series’ have fallen into the hands of a horde of Hollywood lobotomites intent on destroying them (and succeeding). When characters and historical figures have their ethnicities changed nowadays, it is ALWAYS because of that ideology. So you must avoid it if you want to demonstrate that you are no longer deferent to that ideology.

This episode has not avoided it. In fact it’s put it front and centre, right at the start of the episode. This therefore shows complete adherence to this stupid, stupid, stupid ideology. It shows an orgasmic obsession with promoting The Message. This does not bode well for Doctor Who.

Any whole-brained person already knows why this case of ethnicity-swapping is bad, but for the slow people at the back, I’ll explain in more detail. Russell here is showing that he is completely on-board with this distinctly American ideology. It is an ideology that asserts that all Americans of European descent, as well as all native Britons and Europeans (who it erroneously labels ‘white’) are intrinsically bad, and that all culture and history must be edited to reduce their presence or remove them entirely. It’s an epitomisingly racist ideology. These ideologues go giddy when they see ‘white’ characters and historical figures changed to be ‘non-white’, but they would be apoplectic if it happened the other way round. (If we saw Martin Luther King played by Benedict Cumberbatch, or Nelson Mandela played by Eddie Redmayne, or Srinivasa Ramanujan (the great Indian mathematician) played by Daniel Day-Lewis, these ideologues would make it their life’s mission to exact revenge on everyone involved.)

Russell is showing that he doesn’t care about immersion. (Seeing a figure like Sir Isaac Newton played by someone who doesn’t look like Sir Isaac Newton pulls you out of the story (unless there’s an in-universe reason for it).) Any show about time travel has a great opportunity to explore history – Russell here is showing that he doesn’t care about any of that. History exists simply to support The Message. That is all that matters – The Message.

So instead of this being a fun opening to the episode, it just becomes two minutes of Russell desperately trying to appease American sociology professors.

The TARDIS crashes into the very tree that not-Newton was sitting under – how that weedy little tree was holding up the TARDIS I don’t know. The Doctor and Donna emerge, work out who the man isn’t, and make a joke about gravity. This, apparently, is the first time this random man has heard the word ‘gravity’. (Entirely ludicrous – the word ‘gravity’ was known about for centuries before this – but fine, it’s Doctor Who, whatever.) This random man is unable to recall the word just said to him, however, and accidentally remembers it as ‘mavity’.

And that’s it – the scene ends. That was the first two minutes, and there was already that much wrong with it.

What’s worse, nothing in the rest of the episode had anything to do with it – well, with the exception of ‘mavity’. Later in the episode the Doctor and Donna sometimes say ‘mavity’ instead of ‘gravity’, suggesting that their short excursion to the past has altered history, and now everyone says ‘mavity’ (except the Doctor, sometimes). This is probably all setup for something later – which if it is, great. It does still make for a rather disjointed episode.

Now let’s get on to the actual story of this episode.

A lot of this episode was very slow. The first half of it after that opening scene was very slow. The characters talked much more than normal – with lines that added nothing. There were a lot of lingering CGI shots. Very few events happened, and the story did not set up a mystery or suspense well. In fact, the first part of the episode was so slow that by about half or two-thirds of the way through I started looking to see how long was left – that’s never a good sign.

This kind of problem is quite common in a lot of the Marvel and Star Wars shows on Disney Plus. Lingering shots – shots that are just too long or superfluous – and characters not getting anywhere – just kind of wandering around talking about irrelevant things. It’s very odd – and completely opposite to Davies’ normal style. Davies is normally excellent at using montages and music to increase the pacing, but here he has abandoned that.

The pace of the episode does increase later. This episode did not need to be as long as it was – a lot could have been cut out – ten to twenty minutes of it, I think. It seemed like the script had been rushed – like it should have gone through several more rounds of edits to trim the fat.

At one point they refer to a thing called ‘the flux’ – I don’t know what that is and I don’t care to look it up – is that something they did during The Mistake? Don’t reference things from The Mistake, Russell, the returning fans neither know nor care about them. Treat The Mistake as though it didn’t happen.

The basic idea of the story was okay: go somewhere where there supposedly aren’t any life forms, but actually there are. It’s been done many times. The whole which one of you is the real one has been done many times too – it was even parodied in Family Guy years ago. They’re not bad ideas – they’ve just been done a lot.

The story did have a key flaw though. The Doctor suggests that the TARDIS brought them there deliberately to solve a problem (as it often does throughout the show – it takes them where they need to be). But had the TARDIS not appeared there at all, the problem would have solved itself. The ship would have blown up even if the Doctor and Donna hadn’t been there, killing the two aliens. The TARDIS didn’t need to appear there – and would have known this, given what we know about how the sentient TARDIS perceives time. This really is a script error – they just shouldn’t have had the Doctor suggest the TARDIS brought them there deliberately.

And then the episode ended with a glorious appearance from Bernard Cribbins. His character on the show remains incredibly popular – entirely because of Cribbins’ performance. It was a bizarre and sudden reversal of the tedium and nonsense of the rest of the episode. This episode would have been better if it had just been an hour of Cribbins and the Doctor chatting.

Unfortunately this moment was interrupted by explosions and stuff. We were also given the nightmare fuel of a plane falling from the sky and crashing nearby.

This episode was a mess. Before I started writing this review, I had a higher opinion of it. But this episode had ideological nonsense, slow pacing, lingering shots, boring dialogue, an overused core story idea, uninteresting set design and CGI, no memorable music, still a lacking vitality from the Doctor and Donna. The only properly good thing was Bernard Cribbins, and he wasn’t in it long enough.

3/10

Almost good; marred by nonsense; 5/10 – Doctor Who – The Star Beast – Review

Doctor Who is dead. That was very much the status of the show by series 13. The show had been declining in quality for years, but the disastrous writing of Chibnall and child-in-oversized-wellington-boots portrayal of the Doctor by Whittaker made it unwatchable. Like Star Wars and Star Trek before it, Doctor Who had been killed, and Chibnall et alii were the Salisbury assassins who did it.

I tried watching series 11, but found it so bad that there was no point watching the last few episodes. I gave the first episode of series 12 a chance, but it was dreadful, and didn’t watch any more. Series 13 – not even a full series – apparently even those commissioning it knew something was wrong – hardly even registered as a thing. I had completely abandoned the show, with no intention of ever watching any more.

But then something utterly bizarre. It was announced that Russell T. Davies was coming back to Doctor Who. I couldn’t have predicted that. It’s so rare for writers and showrunners to return to things they’ve given up. But this made me optimistic for the show – Davies got New Who going, and all of the works of his I’ve seen over the years – Queer As Folk, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, It’s A Sin – were all very enjoyable to watch. He seems to be a very reliable showrunner.

Doctor Who needed to show that it was going to turn away from the Twitter misosophy that has dominated both it and Hollywood for years. Maybe the return of Davies was that. Maybe he was returning to undo all of the nonsense that has happened in the last few years? So this series (I’m counting these 2023 specials as series 14) gets a chance. I’ll give the show a chance of one whole series (unless it’s REALLY awful, in which case it’ll only get a few episodes). Maybe, like an actual Time Lord, the show will cheat death and regenerate.

(I.S.: In the unlikely event that Davies himself is reading this, if you really want to win fans like me back over, decanonise all of that Timeless Child bullshit. All it takes is a tweet.)

Everything in this post so far I have written before seeing this first of the 2023 specials – titled The Star Beast. I am now going to go and watch the episode.

Well, that was … almost good. To be more precise, that was a mostly enjoyable episode – fun, compelling, humorous (and not with that special new ‘Hollywood comedy’ that gets put into everything nowadays). But it was marred by these short fits of current-day nonsense. They were very, very distracting – I kept getting pulled out of the immersion.

The designs of the aliens were excellent – very contrasting with each other and very different to anything else we’ve seen in New Who. Using the appearance and sounds of the aliens to make the audience make assumptions about their benevolence or malevolence was excellent. I was unsure about Miriam Margolyes as the voice of The Meep at first, but she did the contrast between the good and evil Meep voices very well. The CGI of The Meep was also some of the best CGI we’ve ever seen in New Who.

The plot was compelling – crucial for Doctor Who. Dull plots was one of the main failings towards the end of the Moffat Era. The idea of a species turned mad by a sentient star is stupid – and that would have been so easy to change, given that it was just a line of dialogue – but it’s far from the stupidest thing that’s been in New Who. (I’m thinking of that star with an angry face – so fucking stupid.)

I VERY much enjoyed Davies bringing back some of his world-building elements: invoking the Shadow Proclamation, UNIT being made into something not-silly. The CGI for the time vortex is fun, but I wish they’d stick to one idea about what it actually looks like. The new TARDIS interior looks fantastic.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate jump right back into their roles almost as though no time has passed at all. (Almost. There is something slightly off about them – a missing vitality, or something – but it’s so slight you can ignore it.) Jacqueline King makes a flawless return as Sylvia Noble – her character is perfectly consistent.

Yasmin Finney, who plays the new character of Rose Noble, is a weak link. Finney was not the strongest actor in the cast of Heartstopper, and gives a similar performance here. Finney’s delivery lacks personality – compare it to Billie Piper as Rose Tyler and I think it’ll be obvious.

The thing that let this episode down was the gender-woo. I had assumed that they were only going to reference this in passing – if at all – but they made it the core of the story. Now, in fairness, they did put it with an interesting idea: the ‘Doctor-Donna’ metacrisis was a metacrisis between a male and female organism; part of the energy of the crisis was shared when the containing organism reproduced – i.e., Donna had a child – meaning that the energy was now not too much to overwhelm them, allowing both to escape its catastrophic effects; but because the metacrisis was between a male and female organism, the offspring carried some combination of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’. That’s an interesting idea.

But the gender-woo interrupted the story every few minutes or so, and it breaks the immersion every time. One of the most egregious examples is Finney’s line of ‘You’re assuming “he” as a pronoun?!’, referring to the furry, gremlin-like alien known as The Meep.

It would take several long blog posts to fully explain why this line is stupid. Every assumption that goes into it is incorrect, and there are A LOT of assumptions that go into it. I don’t have the time to go through it all – either you already know why it’s stupid or you don’t. It stops the show dead for a few moments in order to show deference to a very recently-created ideology from Tumblr. It rips the story out of its setting and places it firmly on 2023 TikTok.

Towards the end, when Donna and Rose are about to release their extra metacrisis energy, we’re given the lines ‘It’s a shame you’re not a woman anymore, ‘cause she’d’ve understood.’ and ‘Something a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand.’. I am disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to see such rabid sexism in Doctor Who. If the sexes had been reversed for this scene and these lines, every media outlet in the western world would be screaming bloody murder.

Every time there’s a moment like that, it just pulls you out of the show, and you are agonisingly aware that you are watching actors read lines. The audience seeing an actor as an actor and not as the character they’re playing should be an actor’s worst nightmare.

If it hadn’t had all that nonsense in it, this episode would have been a solid 8/10. As it is, it drags it down to a 5/10. As long as they don’t keep doing this stuff, the series may well be worth watching.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace – Review

One of the things that I like to do over Yule is watch films. I find it’s essential for making it seem like Yule. And I don’t watch films in the way that I usually do either – usually I do something else at the same time while watching a film, but over Yule I like to sit and watch films, and focus on them completely. That’s a much more relaxing way to watch a film, and relaxation is an essential part of Yule.

This year I decided that I would rewatch the six Star Wars films over Yule. I’ve been rewatching one a day – I’m now half-way through. This is actually the first time that I’ve gone back and rewatched the Star Wars films since the Disney films came out.

The three Disney films that were meant to follow on from Return of the Jedi – The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker – were shit. The Last Jedi is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, and The Rise of Skywalker was about as bad. Before watching The Last Jedi, I didn’t realise that it was even possible for one film to destroy an entire series of films, but that’s what it did. (Incidentally, since that film came out, we’ve seen this sort of thing happen (at least) two more times with other sci. fi. and fantasy titans – Game of Thrones was completely annihilated by its final series (no-one talks about Game of Thrones anymore – that’s the extent to which that franchise was destroyed), and the most recent series of Doctor Who tried to retcon its entire history.) After seeing The Last Jedi, my interest in Star Wars completely dissipated. I only went to see The Rise of Skywalker out of a sense of morbid fascination – I wanted to watch the franchise completely collapse as a result of the stupid decisions that had been made. I did not see the Han Solo film; I have not watched any of The Mandalorian. The only thing that could bring my back to the franchise is if Disney were to officially announce that their sequel films are not canon, and will have no bearing on things they make in future.

However, now that there is some distance between the Disney films and the six Star Wars films, I find I can go back and watch them, and still enjoy them.

This time, I have started with Episode I. There is much debate as to the best order to watch the films in – I tend to vary it, sometimes starting with I, sometimes starting with IV. This time I have started with the prequels.

Now, there are some people who absolutely despise the prequel trilogy. I myself have always liked them. I am aware of their many flaws, of course – I do not pretend that they are perfect – but they do have many good aspects to them. For the entire time that I’ve heard people complain about the prequel films, however, I have found their complaints to be disproportionate. They seem to focus on aspects of the film that are highly inconsequential, and take up only a few seconds of screen-time – like the odd bad line. And this focus seems to be at the expense of the many excellent aspects of these films.

Coming back to these films after having now seen the Disney films, I am now struck even more how out-of-proportion some of the complaints about the prequel films are. Many of the people who abhor the prequels adore the Disney films – the number of people who I see claiming that The Last Jedi is a perfect film – not just good, but perfect – is astonishing.

So, I’ve decided that as I rewatch each of the Star Wars films, I’m going to write reviews of them. I don’t intend for these reviews to be exhaustive – I’m not going to go through every aspect of each film and analyse it. The aim is just to point out the main flaws in each film, and just how many good things each film has in it.

So, Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way.

One of the problems with this film is that many of the scenes are ‘incomplete’. Actually a better way of describing this is that in many parts of the film (many, but not all), there simply are no ‘scenes’. Many times the film cuts to one set of characters, in one location, who will say only one or two lines, and then it cuts to a different set of characters, in a different location, who will again only say one or two lines, and then it will cut again. There is no ‘scene’ – it’s just clips. It’s enough to understand the events of the story, but no more. This makes the film seem more like a synopsis than a story – just a list of things that happen and in what order. This is a problem that all three prequels have, and is probably a result of George Lucas focusing a little too much on the overall plan for the prequels. (That focus has paid off in other aspects of the films, however – the overall structure of the prequels (as a set of three films) is excellent.)

A related problem to this is that there are many missing reaction shots. It is often said that all good acting is reacting. One reaction we don’t get is Anakin’s reaction to learning that Qui-gon Jinn has died. This, I would think, is quite an important reaction. Qui-gon is the first Jedi that Anakin met, and the person who got him freed from slavery. Anakin expected Qui-gon to be his teacher, and Qui-gon would probably have been a better teacher for Anakin than Obi-wan. Anakin found Obi-wan frustrating – he thought he was overly critical and didn’t listen to his ideas. Qui-gon’s more laid-back style of instruction would probably have complemented Anakin’s over-confidence well. (Indeed, one could argue that Qui-gon was meant to find and teach Anakin, and if he had, Anakin might not have fallen to the dark side – making Qui-gon’s death a crucial moment in the series.) However, as an author, I have the luxury of being able to put whatever I want in my stories. Qui-gon’s death is quite late in the film, putting Anakin’s reaction in there might have made the pacing of the ending of the film a bit odd, which is why we only get Obi-wan’s reaction, which does not require a separate scene.

Another problem that Episode I has is that it doesn’t really have a main character. Many people might say that Anakin is the main character, but Anakin doesn’t appear for quite a while in the film – not until they go to Tatooine. Also, Anakin is only tangentially involved in the ending of the film. He does blow up the droid command ship, but he does this by accident – it’s not something he intends to do, and it is not a particularly important moment for Anakin. Qui-gon and Obi-wan are main characters, but neither is the main character. The same is true for Padmé. This is unlike the original trilogy, where even though Leia, Han, Obi-wan, Yoda, et alii, are all main characters, Luke is the main character.

Related to this is that we don’t really get a strong sense of what the characters personally want. We know that Qui-gon and Obi-wan are trying to fight back against the Trade Federation, but they are doing this because they have been told to by the Jedi Council, not because they personally want to. (That’s not to say that they don’t want to do it – it’s just that their main reason for doing it is shown to be because they are told to by the Council, rather than personal motivation.) This is one of the difficulties in writing about Jedi – especially ones that are part of a Jedi Order at its height. Jedi are supposed to be detached. They are not supposed to fiercely want to fight – they are not supposed to fear losing the fight. Their personal motivation isn’t supposed to come into it.

However, this problem of not having a clear sense of what characters want extends beyond Qui-gon and Obi-wan. It’s true of Padmé too. We know that she does want to fight back against the Trade Federation, but this comes across in the film as not much more than the duty of the monarch. We needed a stronger sense earlier on in the film that the Trade Federation is a great threat to Naboo, and that Padmé knows this, and resolves to fight back against it. (A lot of this stuff is just covered by throw-away dialogue in the film – it needs to be more than that.)

And it’s also true of Anakin. Anakin almost has the opposite problem, in that he wants too many things. He wants to do pod-racing, and he wants to win in the pod-race that Qui-gon enters him for in particular. He wants to travel the galaxy; he wants to become a Jedi; he wants to free the slaves. The focus for this film should have been on getting off Tatooine, and becoming a Jedi so that he can free his mother. That needed to be established earlier and more strongly, and then we would have understood why Anakin was doing anything he was doing.

So there are flaws with the film. The ones I’ve mentioned are not structural in the sense of the events that happen, but they are structural in the sense of what we know of the characters, when we know it, and whether it affects the subsequent events of the story.

One of the things that people often complain about with this film is the dialogue. A lot of people complain that the dialogue is wooden. They often focus on Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin, and complain that many of his lines weren’t delivered well. Personally, when it comes to very young actors, I always give them a pass. Jake Lloyd was about 9 or 10 years old when he played Anakin – it’s extremely unusual to find people of that age who are great at acting. (I’ve only ever seen one, and that’s Iain Armitage, who plays Sheldon Cooper in Young Sheldon – and he is such a good actor at such a young age that it’s actually quite unnerving.) As a society we should generally expect that if we put nine-year-olds in films, that there is a limit to what they’re going to be able to do, and that’s fine.

I will also say, though, that many of the odd lines that Anakin says in this film are due, I think, to the writing and the direction. For some of Anakin’s odd lines, it’s very obvious that what was written in the script was odd, and that Jake Lloyd was just doing it as written (which is what we should expect from a nine-year-old – I don’t think we expect them to improvise). Twice in the film Anakin says ‘Yipeee!’ – now, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone ever actually say that in real life – people don’t say that in real life. That’s why it comes across as an odd line – it’s very unrealistic. But I suspect that was just what was written in the script, and Jake Lloyd just read it out.

For Anakin’s lines, George Lucas seems to veer between lines that are clichés of what children say, and lines that only older people would say. This is a problem that a lot of writers have – they forget how children talk. So I think some of these odd lines are due to George Lucas not having a strong sense of how people of different ages talk (which is a problem, I think, that film directors tend to have more often than novelists, because film directors tend to think more about camera shots and the composition of scenes, rather than words and styles of language).

Many of Padmé’s lines are often called wooden too. I think this is primarily a direction problem. It’s apparent that, when Padmé is speaking as a queen, Lucas wanted her to come across as forceful and somewhat remote. This works well in some scenes, but not others. I think in some of the scenes, Natalie Portman should have been directed to do the performance more casually. (Indeed, she may have done some takes like this, but these were not the ones that were chosen in the edit.)

More importantly, though, the bad lines in the film are few in number, and take up a very small amount of screen-time – the complaints about them are very disproportionate. Furthermore, while Jake Lloyd does do some lines not so well, he does do plenty of lines very well, and I think this is often overlooked.

Oh – I might as well get the Jar Jar stuff out of the way. A lot of people complain about Jar Jar – I have never understood this. I find Jar Jar a completely ignorable character – my focus is never on Jar Jar when I watch this film.

Something else people complain about is the pod-racing. A lot of people seem to just wish it weren’t in the film. The existence of pod-racing is, I think, very good world-building. We were introduced to speeders in the originals – speeders, of course, have some kind of anti-gravity mechanism in them, as they float off the ground. (Anti-gravity technology must be very cheap in the Star Wars universe.) Pod-racing is just what you get in answer to the question ‘What if we add some jet engines to a speeder?’. You would end up with something that could move extremely fast, because only air resistance is slowing it down, and that would naturally become a sport. This is good world-building – figuring out what the consequences of different kinds of technology are. If both anti-gravity speeders and jet engines exist in a universe, then pod-racing exists in that universe. And besides, is pod-racing really worse than all that stuff on Canto Bight in The Last Jedi? Absolutely not.

That’s some of the bad stuff; now for some of the good stuff. On the subject of world-building, this film is a masterpiece of world-building. There is more great world-building in the first ten minutes of this film than in everything produced by Disney since they bought the franchise.

We get several new species: the Neimoidians (the species that seem to run the Trade Federation), the Gungans, the Dug (Sebulba’s species), the Toydarians (Watto’s species), the Cereans (Ki-Adi-Mundi’s species), the Zabrak (Darth Maul’s species), and what seems like hundreds more. And what’s more, characters of these species aren’t just standing in the background, as is often the case in the Disney films – the characters of these species in the prequel films actually have lines.

The Gungans get even more world-building. The Gungan cities are completely unlike anything we’ve seen in Star Wars before, with a unique and distinctive style of architecture. The Gungans also have a distinctive military, and technology which is unlike what other species and factions in Star Wars use.

The planet of Naboo gets a lot of world-building overall. The fact that the planet has no solid core, and is just water all the way down, is something we’ve not seen before in this series. The Nabooians also have a distinctive culture and their cities have a distinctive architecture.

In fact many planets get a lot of world-building in this film. Tatooine becomes more than just a moisture farm and Mos Eisley, with Mos Espa and its grand pod-racing arena. We get the entire planet of Coruscant – a planet that’s one giant city – Coruscant alone is more than we got from all of the Disney films. Coruscant has the senate building and the Jedi Temple, both of which have unique designs. In the Disney films, the most we see of anything like Coruscant is a few seconds of Hosnian Prime before it’s blown up.

We get new, and distinctive, ship designs, with the Nubian starships and Trade Federation’s control ships – both unlike anything we’ve seen so far in Star Wars. We even got new droid aesthetics – most of the droids in this film, and all of the adjacent technology that they use, are completely different to what we saw in the originals. The battle droids have a design that shows they were intended for mass production – they appear to be made of something like plastic – something that is cheap – because all these droids have to do is carry a weapon. They don’t have to last; they don’t have to endure; they just have to fight, and then be disposed of.

And the Jedi themselves have had a lot of development. We get a Jedi Order at its height, with Yoda as grandmaster of the Jedi Council. We get Mace Windu – a fan favourite. We get the very concept of padawans. We get the Jedi clothing and customs.

Some people don’t think that world-building is important, but it’s incredibly important. A rich, highly-developed, convincing world is essential for something to be immersive. When I watch a film, I want to be transported to another world, and I want to be convinced that it could be real. World-building is essential for that. The real world is complex and detailed. For a fictional world to be believable, it must be complex and detailed too.

But if you wanted a more simplistic argument for the importance of world-building, notice that it is the stories and franchises with the best world-building that have the strongest fanbases. Notice how there are entire YouTube channels dedicated to the worlds of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Star Trek. These channels don’t just focus on the characters – they are able to make entire videos about seemingly minor aspects of these worlds, and people are interested in them. World-building matters.

We get some fantastic music in this film – most notably Duel of the Fates. Duel of the Fates alone makes the prequels far better than the Disney films. We also get some great actors in this film, and some excellent performances. Liam Neeson is outstanding as Qui-gon Jinn; Ewan McGregor is fantastic as Obi-wan Kenobi (though he doesn’t get too much to do); Samuel L. Jackson is outstanding as Mace Windu (although he didn’t get much to do either); Ray Park was brilliant as Darth Maul; and of course, Ian McDiarmid was sublime as Palpatine. There are even some minor characters who I think were done very well. Brian Blessed is perfect as Boss Nass, and I think Pernilla August plays Shmi Skywalker very well.

This film also sets up the trilogy, and the hexalogy, very well. Anakin is shown to be headstrong, and over-confident. He believes he can win the pod-race, despite never completing a race before. He deliberately stays in the Naboo starfighter, knowing that he can join in the fight while also technically following Qui-gon’s instructions. He also has a determination to change the world around him – he talks about dreaming of freeing the slaves – he wants to change the way the world works. And he also has a strong attachment to his mother. These traits all lead to his downfall.

This film also sets up Anakin’s interaction with the Jedi Order. When he first meets the Council to be tested, he finds them hostile, and he finds their questions to be irrelevant. Later, he is told by the Council that he will not be trained as a Jedi. This immediately sets up the Council as being an obstacle to Anakin – something that connects to Episode III, where he believes that the Council does not trust him, and wants to hold him back. He sees the Council as something that will prevent him from doing what he wants to do.

As I’ve said, this episode also shows how it might have been better if Qui-gon had been Anakin’s mentor. Obi-wan only just becomes a Jedi Knight at the end of the film, and as Qui-gon says, Obi-wan still has much to learn of the living force, and it’s Qui-gon’s understanding of the living force that gives him his laid-back way of doing things, which is probably what Anakin needed in a mentor. So this film sets up very well this idea of how even though Anakin was the chosen one, who would destroy the Sith, if the Jedi didn’t do it right – if they didn’t have the right person training him – then Anakin might not destroy the Sith in the way they expected. This is why Yoda says that Anakin’s future is clouded – it’s clouded partly because it’s dependent on whether Qui-gon lives or dies.

So those are some thoughts on this film. It has its problems, but it has an extraordinary number of great aspects to it – far more than all of the Disney films combined. As I said, this review isn’t exhaustive – there are many things that I’ve left out (which I might return to later). I think that all of the prequels might actually have been better as a television series, rather than films. There are many reactions and scenes that it would have been good to see in the films, and if all of them had been put it, they would probably have been too long as films. I’m not keen on the big time jump between episodes I and II, but that was necessary to fit everything into three films. But on the other hand, the idea of long-form television series’ with film-quality effects is something that didn’t really exist in the late 1990s and early 2000s – that’s a trend that’s appeared later as special effects have become easier and cheaper to do. It’s only nowadays that the boundary between film and television has ceased to exist. So I think these stories would only ever have been films.

Star Trek Picard – Series 1, Episode 10 – It’s just shit

It’s taken me a while to get around to writing this review – I’ve been putting it off, because quite frankly I’m just glad that this series is over and I don’t want to spend any more time on it.

This final episode ultimately epitomised everything that was wrong with this series. I think all of the main things that have been bad about the previous episodes were in this one too. Because of that, there was no one main thing that was wrong with this episode, and so nothing that I can focus this review on – I’m just going to have to go through everything in order. So here we go.

At the start of the episode, Seven and Elnor are talking, and Seven says that the ex-Borg have no homes. This is odd, because the convention up until now is that de-assimilated Borg go back to the civilisation and planet that they were originally from. Sure that might not be an option for some people, as the Borg might have destroyed their home planet and the entire civilisation on it, but then there must be other ex-Borg from the same species, with whom they could start a colony – something which happens all the time in the Star Trek universe. Or they could even just join the Federation – there must be loads of Federation worlds that would have them. I get that the point of this series is that the Federation became closed off, but that was to Romulans, not just everyone.

Similarly, Seven says that she has no home. Err … Earth?

Narek makes his way into the Borg cube, where his sister greets him with a knife to the throat. Why? I get that these two are adversarial, but she knows it’s him doesn’t she? These two characters are weird – most of their conversations are quite incest-y. I can’t tell if they hate each other or want to fuck each other.

Shortly after that we hear a bit more of Narek’s backstory, from Narek himself. He’s rather pleased that he’s the one who found all the robots, and describes himself as ‘The Zhat Vash wash-out.’ … err … Can you leave the Zhat Vash? Surely they’d kill you – they seem like the sort of people who would kill you if you left. Also, has he left? The entire series he’s been doing stuff for the Zhat Vash? This show not only contradicts canon established by previous shows, but also things from earlier episodes!

We get a bit of chat between Picard and Soji at this point in the episode. They try to talk philosophy, but the writers aren’t capable of it, so a lot of what they say is just gibberish, but at one point Picard says ‘To say you have no choice is a failure of imagination.’ – no, this show is a failure of imagination.

Speaking of imagination, we get a weird scene between Rios and Raffi where they try to fix their ship. All of the dialogue in this scene is weird. Santiago Cabrera once again sounds like he’s reading his lines for the first time, Raffi is just insufferably patronising as she tries to get Rios to use the imagination tool thing to fix the ship. In this situation, Raffi obviously would have no more of an idea of how to use this tool than Rios would, but somehow she still tells him what to do with it.

This whole scene is completely unnecessary. What does it add to the episode or the series? Nothing. The imagination tool is just a deus ex machina tool. It can apparently do anything at any time with no constraints on materials or power. You don’t even have to learn how to use it. How does it work? We don’t know. Did the robots know? How did they make it? Did they make it? Where did they get it from? Seems like it would be good to have a lot of these things about. Are any of these questions going to be answered? No? Okay then.

Also, the imagination tool sends out these Borg-like tubes to fix things – is that a deliberate reference? If so, to what? How did these robots get a Borg device like that?

Throughout this episode we get a lot of very unsubtle foreshadowing that Picard is going to die and get put into this artificial body that they’ve been building. But … why are they even making that body in the first place? Apparently Soong and the other robots have been making this body, but … why? Who was it for? Was it for Soong? He was the only human there when they started building it, so it must be – does that mean he has to give up a new body so that Picard can have it?

Narek goes to the ship where Raffi and Rios are. He tries to get their attention, and when they ask what he wants, he says he’s ‘Trying to save the universe.’. No, just no. Fuck off with that. This is a problem that’s endemic to science fiction nowadays – people aren’t just trying to save a person, or a group of people, or a civilisation, or a planet, or a star system, or a galaxy – no, they’re trying to save the whole fucking universe. Stop. Putting. This. Line. In. Stuff. The story isn’t made more grand and epic by adding this line – you don’t raise the stakes, because no-one can really imagine this. This doesn’t increase the tension, it just makes the characters needlessly melodramatic. You know what actually raises the tension? Putting characters who we actually give a shit about in danger. Make us give a shit about the characters, and then put them in danger. Just having a character exposit the end of the universe does nothing.

It’s also completely inconsistent with what we’ve found out so far in this series. If this super-advanced AI does arrive, then they threaten, at most, all of our galaxy – there has been no mention of them going to other galaxies at all. So no, Narek, you are not saving the fucking universe.

I also noted down at this point in the episode that it’s very hard to believe that both Narek and Elnor are Romulans. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it can just show the variety that there is to Romulan culture.

Narek’s telling of Ganmadan is fun, but the fact that the imagery here isn’t better shows that these aren’t very good writers. Also, this series would have had more tension as a whole if we’d heard this story far earlier in the series.

Narek says ‘And the fascinating thing about history is … it always repeats itself.’ No, Narek. No it doesn’t – it sometimes repeats itself. This is the kind of bullshit profound I expect on Twitter, not in Star Trek.

Jurati’s plan to help Picard escape seems to consist of just unlocking the door. They walk the six miles back to the ship pretty quickly.

By this point in the episode, I think most of the main characters know that genocide is imminent, but considering this they are not panicking nearly enough. Apparently they are all going to die in a few minutes, along with the people on a lot of other planets (it would seem), but no-one’s panicking – why is no-one panicking? This is partly why this episode has no tension, despite it being a ‘save the universe’ plot. The characters are about the same level of bothered by this as not being able to get a clue on a crossword.

We have some more bullshit profundity from Picard. He says ‘To be alive is a responsibility as well as a right.’ … Jesus fucking Christ. That might sound like the sort of thing that would go on a cheap inspirational poster that someone shares on Instagram, but this is actually quite a dark statement. The implication of this statement is that unless you, as a life form, do not carry out your “responsibilities”, then you don’t get to be alive. (This also shows why the word “responsibility” is vague, meaningless, and only really used as a way to get other people to do things regardless of how right or wrong that thing is, but that’s a rant for another blog post.)

Jurati says ‘Make it so.’ to Picard. How the hell does she know that he says that? This line is one of many that just serve as a shallow attempt at fan service by going ‘LOOK! SHE SAID THE THING! SHE SAID THE THING THAT HE NORMALLY SAYS! REMEMBER THAT? HE NORMALLY SAYS THAT! REMEMBER THAT! REMEMBER THAT BETTER SHOW THAT YOU COULD BE WATCHING!’ … You know what’s actually fan service? MaKiNg A gOoD fUcKiNg ShOw!

Down on the planet, Soong and the others are trying to stop all of the androids from doing whatever it is they’re doing. He goes up to Sutra and uses some device on her that knocks her out. He only uses this device ONCE. They then try and fight the other robots off by hand.

Back on the ship, Jurati says to Picard ‘Are you not answering to build suspense?’ – I suppose this is an attempt at a funny meta-line, but it doesn’t work. In order to break the fourth wall (or in this case, dent it), you first have to establish that there is a fourth wall by making your show immersive, which this show is not. Too often in this show the thoughts of the characters blur with the thoughts of the writers, which makes a meta-line like this just look like bad writing.

On the Borg cube, Seven has a gun pointing at Rizzo, and for some reason she doesn’t kill her straight away. There is no reason for this. Rizzo then somehow just pushes Seven’s gun aside, and they fight.

Throughout this entire episode, Commodore Sunglasses is the only Romulan we see on the Romulan ships – I guess they just didn’t have the money for more.

Picard and Jurati just fly around in front of the Romulans for a bit, not really doing anything.

Jurati also knows about the Picard manoeuvre. How? I get that it’s famous, but is it so famous that people outside of Starfleet know it? The only military manoeuvre that I know is the pincer manoeuvre, and that’s been around for millennia. This is just more desperate fan service.

Picard gives Soji a call on Zoom. Soji is not surprised to learn that Picard has left the village.

Up in space, Commodore Sunglasses says ‘Ready planetary sterilisation pattern number five.’ … apparently planetary sterilisation patterns one to four are not suitable in this case.

Back on the FaceTime call, why does Soji give a shit about Picard dying? When she first met him, she didn’t trust him. Have we ever actually been given a reason why she changed her mind? When did she change her mind? It all just happens because the plot requires it.

They activate the beacon, and it turns out it’s not just a beacon that sends a message, it opens the portal from Avengers Assemble. Jesus fucking Christ – check your fucking script! Make. Sure. You. Know. Whether. It’s. A. Portal. Or. A. Beacon. They. Are. Not. The. Same. Thing.

Also, the portal is now red when last time it was green.

The Starfleet ships arrive, and they look like they’ve just been copy-and-pasted in Blender.

We get about a minute of back-and-forth between Riker and Commodore Sunglasses, and for a few brief moments, the show actually feels like Star Trek. Jonathan Frakes is still great. If we had a whole series with him as a captain of a star ship, it could be amazing (though, without any of this Discovery / Picard style writing – I don’t want another classic character to be ruined).

Picard’s brain problem spontaneously flares up again, and honestly it has better dramatic timing than most of the actors.

Very slowly, the super-beings are making their way through the portal, and apparently they’re just tentacles – not what I was expecting.

They manage to close the portal again, and the super-beings just decide to go back into it. Apparently even though they’ve been summoned, ostensibly to rescue the androids down on the planet, they decide that since the portal has closed they must not need rescuing.

Picard dies, and the rest of the characters just mope around for a bit. Seven of Nine says that she intended to never again ‘kill somebody just because it’s what they deserve’. What a weird thing to aim for.

Okay, this next one’s harsh – maybe too harsh, even for me – but Evan Evagora is not an experienced enough actor to pull off that short scene with him and Raffi. Now, I like Evan Evagora – he’s got some great pictures on Instagram – but he doesn’t have a lot of acting credits – only two before Star Trek Picard. Now this alone isn’t a bad thing – in fact I quite like that the show was willing to give out some parts to less-experienced actors – it helps them to get going in the acting world. This short scene is very cringe-worthy, and I actually blame the directors for this, because if you as a director get an actor to do something, and it’s obvious that they can’t really perform that way yet, do the scene differently.

Anyway, we then learn that Data has actually been alive all this time, inside a simulation, for about twenty years. Why did they leave him there? They’ve been building all of these other android bodies, why not make one for Data?

Also, considering how good Brent Spiner is at playing Data, they should have had a lot more of him in this series.

Data says he wants to die again, and he says ‘Mortality gives meaning to human life.’ No, no it doesn’t. This line kind of highlights what’s wrong with this show – Picard is supposed to be a philosophical character, and Star Trek is supposed to be a philosophical show, but you can’t have that unless the people writing it are very intelligent.

Anyway, they transfer Picard’s memories into a new body – I’m not sure what kind of body this is – the show doesn’t seem to understand that a biological android is just a fucking human, but it seems to want to think that somehow they’re still robots – I don’t know – it doesn’t make sense. But something that other critics have said is that this new Picard isn’t Picard – the real Picard died when his body died. And this is an important point: is a copy a continuation? If this were classic Star Trek, this idea would have been explored, but since it’s not classic Star Trek, it isn’t.

The characters are fine with it anyway – they all seem to consider this new body with Picard’s memories to be Picard. I did wonder though – what did they do with the old body? Did they just dump it in the trash? We don’t see the other body at any point – itself an odd choice for the show to make. Perhaps they just wanted to ignore the philosophical implications of all of this.

In the end, Picard has no brain problem, and Data is still dead, so basically nothing has changed since the start of the series. (Because this series chose to make Picard’s brain problem into a thing – they could have just ignored it any no-one would have noticed.)

For about half a second just before the final shot of the series, there’s a brief lesbian moment between Seven and Raffi. This really pissed me off. It’s so fucking weak. You don’t get representation points for lesbians holding hands – it’s not 19-fucking-95 – it’s 2020. Two decades ago you got points for that, but not now. If you want credit for having lesbians in your show, put them front and centre – make the main two characters lesbians, THEN you get credit for it. Either put them front and centre or don’t bother at all. Ambiguous sentences and people in the background holding hands is just fucking weak.

And then at the end, the ‘gang’ is about to go off on some other adventure. It’s not obvious why they decide to do this. But more importantly, what’s actually going to happen to all of those androids down on the planet? They can’t just be left there – the Romulans would just come back. In the end, we have no idea what happens to the androids, which was the entire point of this story.

It’s just astonishing how much of this episode made no sense – not just in terms of the wider context of the Star Trek canon, but in terms of things this show said earlier in the series. There is no consistency; there is no coherence.

I was optimistic about this series – I was optimistic that it wouldn’t have the same problems that Discovery had. But while it’s not quite as bad as Discovery, it’s obvious from this series that the showrunners have a critical error in their understanding of what Star Trek is supposed to be, and a complete inability to do world-building, separate their thoughts from the thoughts of the characters they are writing, understand character motivations, write natural dialogue, build suspense, or have any philosophical ideas that are distinguishable from what Inspirobot chucks out.

The acting in this show is sometimes good, sometimes repulsive. The CGI is mostly alright, with the occasional copy-and-paste. The music is forgettable, but inoffensive. But the writing is an absolute clusterfuck. This show is a complete failure of writing, and the only value it has is as an example of what not to do.

I gave Star Trek Discovery a second chance, and watched the second season. Star Trek Picard is getting no second chance – that’s it, this show is dead. In fact, after three awful series’ of television, I’m tuning out of modern Trek. There is just no point watching it, and until there is a complete change of writing philosophy I’m not going to watch any more modern Trek. Other shows deserve more of a chance; modern Trek goes to the back of the line.

Star Trek Picard – Series 1 Episode 9 – What the fuck is going on?

That episode was a complete mess. The pacing was dizzying. New things were brought in so fast that by the end of the episode I had no idea what was going on, what any character wanted, or what anything meant. I just had an endless stream of questions as I was watching the episode – none of which were answered, so for this review, I’m just going to list them all:

How are they able to travel through a Borg transwarp conduit without a transwarp coil? Or do they have a transwarp coil? Do all Federation ships have them now? Did they get them from the Artefact? If they do have a transwarp coil then, why is their ship shaking so much as it goes through the conduit?
Why does Picard decide to bring Narek onto their ship immediately when it’s so obviously a trick and Soji even says she thinks it’s a trick? Since when would Picard fall for such an obvious ploy?
No-one ever explains these flower things. What are they? How do they make them? Are they living things? How do they survive in space? Are the flowers meant to crash ships into the ground, or was that an accident? Can the flowers only do this by dying? How do they control the flowers? Do the flowers control themselves? Do the flowers have free will? How do you even ‘make’ a flower anyway – don’t they mean ‘grow’?
Apparently crashing through an atmosphere is a viable way of getting down to the ground.
Picard is apparently going to die, and I don’t know what the point of this is.
Soji remembers things whenever it’s convenient to the plot. Is she going to get all her memories back at some point, or will she just have hazy memories forever? How are these memories even being blocked? Why does no-one question it? Why does no-one ever ask her to just tell them everything she knows?
Somehow a large part of the cube survived the landing.
Apparently Seven enjoyed being a Borg again for a bit. This massively, massively undermines the Borg as a threat.
The gang leaves the Borg cube within minutes of arriving, making the whole thing seem pointless.
Why does Elnor stay with the Borg when he clearly wants to go with Picard?
Five strangers walk into the android’s village and no-one asks them who they are for several minutes.
All of the androids in the village look more like Data than either Soji or Dahj. Why? Why did they make Soji and Dahj differently? And how?
Why are the androids fascinated by how old Picard is? Soong is there and he’s just as old.
How does Altan Soong look identical to Noonian Soong? (Some have speculated that it’s actually Lore.)
Why didn’t the androids make more flowers? Why did they think fifteen was enough? What else are they doing all day?
Why is Picard not there when Soji explains everything?
Why did they block Soji’s memories in the first place if it was possible that she might accidentally reveal the location of the planet? Why was it necessary to block her memories at all? How were they expecting Soji to return to the planet if all of this hadn’t have happened?
Why doesn’t Soji just remember everything now that she’s back in the village? Is anyone going to help her get her memories back at all?
It turns out it was stupid for the Romulans to grab onto that glowing handrail.
Why did the robots only have one ship? And why didn’t they make another one after the first one was destroyed?
How the hell is Sutra able to do the Mind Meld? She looks like a Soong-type mechanical android – I thought they couldn’t interact psychically with anything? Thinking about it, Troi couldn’t empathically sense Soji, so even Soji shouldn’t be able to do it.
Why does Sutra decide to do a Mind Meld even though it might drive her mad too? At this point it’s only a hypothesis that this information was intended for androids. And a psychopathic synthetic is far more dangerous than a homicidal human.
Sutra claims that ‘organics’ hate robots because they don’t age, which is not something that has ever been suggested by anyone so far in this series.
If the super-beings are always watching, why do they need a special signal to know when to come?
Everyone condemns Jurati as being a bad person for killing Maddox, even though they all agree that she had been driven mad by the Romulans.
Also, everyone seems to be over the fact that Jurati killed Maddox – they can’t seem to decide whether they like her or not from one scene to the next.
The robots have a tool that can repair your ship with imagination, but apparently can’t build a fucking ship.
Picard says he has a ‘first contact situation’, but is it really first contact when Maddox and Soong have been there for a while?
Why do Picard and Soji discuss the moral implications of Jurati killing Maddox when she was brainwashed?
Why does Narek run to the Borg cube? Don’t they all hate him there too?
Did Saga just lose an eye? How did she die from that – she’s a robot?
Is Sutra in charge? Why is Sutra the one that’s in charge?
Jurati is apparently over her brainwashing now. And the psychic block that didn’t last more than a few minutes. How? Why?
And probably the most annoying thing in this episode: the Romulans were right. They tried to understand some information intended for synthetic minds; it drove them mad, and apparently they got it wrong; but they actually got it right – if the galaxy keeps making androids, eventually the super-beings will come and destroy them all. It’s extreme dramatic dissonance, where the audience can see that the Romulans got it right, but the show is telling us the opposite.

Star Trek Picard – Series 1 Episode 8 – I don’t think I liked any of it

This episode had more moronic moments in it, and thinking back on it, I don’t think there was anything that I actually liked about it, though there were a few things I was indifferent to. I’m going to go through the problems with this episode in the order that they happened.

At the start of the episode, we saw some CGI of this octonary star system. Later on we’re told that the orbits of these stars would have to be very complex in order for such a system to exist. That’s actually not entirely true. This is an extension of the three-body problem in physics. Solutions to the three-body problem, for the most part, cannot be determined analytically, and must be determined computationally – i.e., using a simulation. But for any number of masses, there is always one trivial solution if the masses are all the same – the masses can all orbit a central point with the same speed and direction. This is a very simple solution to the problem, and, if you were creating this star system, as is postulated in this episode, possibly the solution you would go for. It would also be the most conspicuous solution, given its symmetry, and so good for sending a message. (The main problem with this solution however is getting eight stars with the same mass.)

But that’s not what we see at the start of the episode. In fact we see all of the stars close together – REALLY close together, and by the looks of it the stars all have different masses. In fact the stars are so close together that they must be having tidal effects on each other, possibly pulling mass off each other – they look like they’re in each other’s Roche limit. It certainly doesn’t look like a stable system.

Also, one of the stars has a distinct magenta hue – that’s not possible in real life – there are no magenta stars.

Raffi says later on that the planet is at the centre of the star system, but in the CGI we see clearly that it is not. I give the show a pass on this, however, because how would Raffi have any idea where the planet is? She’s only just found out that this star system exists – she’s just guessing. But also, if it were at the centre of all of those very close stars, it would be in perpetual daylight, and completely roasted – it probably wouldn’t survive very long, let alone have plant-life on it.

Much like with all that stuff in Star Trek Discovery, this shows why Star Trek needs scientific advisers (I don’t know if this show has one – certainly there’s less nonsense in it than in Discovery). But not only that, it shows why your scientific advisers should be involved in the CGI process as well – artists draw what looks good, not what could be real.

Then we go down to some stuff on the planet’s surface. Apparently, in the entire history of the Zhat Vash, no-one has questioned whether they should keep touching the alien artefact that instantly radicalises people. I suppose no-one would, since everyone who survives it has then been radicalised. But still, we have no idea if what that weird barrier thing shows you is even true.

Similarly, even though the knowledge you gain via Admonition is apparently very important – important enough to set up a super-secret organisation to act on it – it’s apparently not so important that anyone tells any major governments about it.

Rizzo says to Ramdha ‘I’d’ve made a much better Borg than you.’ … err … what? … who? … wh- … Who on earth relishes being assimilated? Who the fuck thinks the idea of that is fun?! I don’t know what they were going for with this line.

Picard and Asha come onto the ship. Picard then doesn’t know what the nearest starbase is – … how? Even if Picard is a bit out-of-the-loop, surely he’d know where Deep Space 12 is? I mean, there’s apparently only been 11 other deep space starbases before that one. The line is so unnecessary as well, so this must have been a deliberate choice by the writers.

Then Raffi is once again very irrational, but the show does not acknowledge it – dramatic dissonance.

There are many times throughout this episode where Santiago Cabrera sounds like he’s reading the line for the first time. I don’t know how chaotic things are on set, but if they are very chaotic, this could well be the case.

Also, why do the holograms’ eyes light up when they try to search for something – that shouldn’t be necessary.

Then we have a scene between Picard and Asha where Picard is asked to describe Data. He does it very badly. He misses out all of the actually interesting stuff about Data, and there’s no way that Asha could build a picture of him with the information she’s given.

Now, this should have been a very long scene. This is the scene where the main character of the series (which, let’s face it, is Asha, not Picard) learns about Data, the person she is essentially cloned from. This should be a big scene. But it’s not – it’s actually very short. In this scene, we definitely should have heard about the trial that established Data’s legal status, because that’s the event that ties all of this together – Picard, Data, Maddox, Asha (and because it’s probably good for Asha to know the result of that trial). But we didn’t. This is a massive failing of this show – it can’t even get its core story right.

Shortly after that we have a scene between Asha and Jurati too. Asha asks Jurati ‘Am I a person?’, and we don’t get to hear Jurati’s answer (because that wouldn’t have been interesting or anything (!)). Why the fuck does the show keep doing this? Why does it keep not letting us see characters’ reactions and responses to things?

But these two scenes also reveal something that is missing from this series that we should have seen a few episodes ago. We never really had any scene where Asha tries to process the fact that she’s a robot. (In fact we’ve not even really had confirmation that she is a robot – everyone just seems to believe that she is. Is no-one going to do some kind of scan? It might answer a lot of Asha’s questions.) But even just a scene where we see Asha ponder the implications of being a robot is missing from the series. The show went straight from Narek trying to kill her to her being on Nepenthe being told by some kid that she’s a robot. At no point was there disbelief or scepticism. At no point did she think ‘But how is it even possible? No-one’s been able to recreate a robot like Data.’

And I think this points to something that the current writers of Star Trek need to realise, which is that you sometimes need slow scenes where characters contemplate things, or discuss things in a non-adversarial way. Every scene in Picard is either a fight scene or just characters being maximally emotive.

Around this point in the episode, we hear more about these eight stars from Raffi: ‘You’d have to capture eight suns, move them across light-years in space, and set them in motion.’. Okay, so, this is science fiction, and maybe in this universe there’s a way to do this. But this show completely lacks a sense of scale. Just throwing this in there lacks any awareness of just how big stars are, and just how big a light-year is. You can only do this if you have some way of simply counteracting or nullifying the effect of gravity around a star. Manipulating gravity is possible in the Star Trek universe – that’s presumably how they all have gravity on their spaceships – but it’s usually done on a much smaller scale. Even the warp bubble around a ship is nanoscopic compared to a star. To move a star, you would have to create an enormous, artificial gravity well (one basically as big as the star itself), near to the star, and then drag that well and the star in the direction that you want the star to move. You’d probably be limited to sub-light speeds, so it would take you many decades to move the star from one star system to another. You’d also probably disturb the gravitational interactions of the local cluster at the same time, potentially destabilising other star systems or planets, or grabbing yourself a rogue planet as you went.

And sure, the whole point of this idea is to show that this ancient civilisation was very powerful, but doing this requires years of planning and building infrastructure to do it, and then decades or centuries to actually implement. And apparently, this civilisation only did this once they realised that androids were getting too powerful, which is probably too late. This is all a bit ridiculous. The only people who could have done this are the Q.

We also have, at this point in the episode, a cutesy scene with Raffi and all of the holograms. Maybe this scene seemed good on paper; on screen it’s just annoying, as the different holograms are paper-thin characters.

Then we get to the part of the episode that I think I disliked the most. When Elnor and Seven of Nine are trying to take control of the Borg cube, Seven decides to reintegrate herself into the Borg, and become, presumably, a Borg Queen.

I absolutely hate this. This completely minimises what assimilation is. Assimilation by the Borg is the complete and utter eradication of the self. Your body is hijacked and transformed – there are Borg nanites in your blood that interrupt the normal function of your cells – your very cells are slaves to microscopic machines. Organs and body parts are changed to machinery – in some cases your entire spine is replaced. Your thoughts are invaded and overwritten with the popular will. Uniqueness, individuality, identity, and dissention are not permitted. Your personality is gone. You are gone. You cease to exist. It is a fate worse than death precisely because you disappear while part of the biological form that allowed you to exist goes on as a cog – a dispensable, replaceable component – in a biotechnological machine that actively resents the concept of the basis of your existence. It’s the great irony of the Borg that even though they seek the cultural distinctiveness of other species, they destroy it when they try to merge it in with their own.

This is emphasised by the irreversibility of assimilation. It is far easier for someone to be assimilated than for someone to be de-assimilated. You cannot easily get back what was lost through this process. Now, Star Trek itself has been somewhat inconsistent about this – Picard himself was able to recover from assimilation almost fully and relatively quickly. Seven of Nine, however, took years to recover, and never had all of the implants removed. Star Trek has generally suggested that the longer you’ve been assimilated for, the harder it is to return. They’ve also been somewhat ambiguous about whether the Borg eradicate your personality or just suppress it – personally I don’t see the difference when the method of suppression is one that involves direct physical access to your brain.

But regardless of the reversibility of this process – even if the effects are only temporary – this is not something that should ever be portrayed lightly. The subjugation of thought is pretty fucking serious. Seven even protests at the idea when Elnor mentions it, so it’s bizarre that she then goes and does it. The show continues to portray this process as not serious when Seven very easily de-assimilates herself about a minute later.

I do not believe that Seven of Nine would ever have chosen to do any of this, and I find it repulsive that this show portrays one of the most conceivably horrific things as easy and 100% reversible.

Anyway, there were two more annoying things after that in the episode. Firstly, Soji suddenly remembers things whenever it is convenient to the plot, and there is no explanation for it. Secondly, Picard doesn’t know how to fly the ship when he tries – it would have been such a boss moment if he had known how to fly it, and even though it’s been over a decade since he was in Starfleet, I can’t believe that the technology and the interfaces have moved on that much in that time.

This was an absolute disaster of an episode, in just about every way.

Star Trek Picard – Series 1 Episode 7 – A Mix of the Magical and the Moronic

Okay, this episode was annoying, because this episode contained some magical moments, but also some unbelievably crap writing.

I’m going to start with the good stuff – a lot of other people have pointed out this stuff.

Firstly, seeing Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi again and Jonathan Frakes as Will Riker again was a genuinely magical part of the episode. They completely brought the characters back to life. While they were each given a few out-of-character lines to say, for the most part the characters we saw on screen really seemed like Deanna Troi and Will Riker.

Furthermore, a lot of the scenes between those two and Picard were incredibly reminiscent of TNG at times. Somehow, when those actors are put together, they just seem to talk in the right way. As has been the case throughout this entire series, the new characters have nothing on the old. (And as much as it seems as though Jonathan Frakes doesn’t want to do any acting anymore (preferring to direct), he is still very good at it.)

Secondly, this episode genuinely had a lot of tension. A lot of this show so far has had no tension – the episodes have dragged on and a lot of what’s happened has seemed pointless. But this episode genuinely had suspense. And it did this in a very simple way – one half of the gang was being pursued by a member of the Zhat Vash. We cut between the slower scenes on Nepenthe and the more tense scenes on the ship – it was very simple.

(Oh, and as a minor third point, Tamlyn Tomita continues to perform Commodore Oh well.)

Now for the bad. There was one aspect of this episode that I found particularly annoying. Several episodes ago, we were told that the Zhat Vash hate all artificial life, and we were told that the reason why they hated artificial life and AIs was because of something so horrific that if you knew it, it would, essentially, drive you insane. That was a big promise. What could it possibly be? we wondered. What was it about AIs that was so Lovecraftian?

In this episode, we found out. Commodore Sunglasses shows Tilly 2.0 via Mind Meld. And it turns out that the reason why the Romulans hate AI so much is because some robots are going to do a Star Wars on a planet and blow it up.

How … … … dull. What an uninteresting answer to that question. We were promised something so shocking that it would make someone go insane. We were promised something Lovecraftian. Instead, we got the whole blowing-up-a-planet thing, which has been done ad nauseam not only in Star Wars but also in Star Trek itself.

Now sure, Jurati does go kind of mad after learning this – she kills Maddox and then tries to kill herself. But here we arrive at a point of dramatic dissonance, because while the characters in the story may find the idea of a planet blowing up more shocking than us the audience, destruction of that scale is not unknown so far in the Star Trek universe (the Romulans, after all, are in their current predicament because their home planet was destroyed, albeit by less malevolent means), and it’s difficult to believe that anyone in the Star Trek universe would be as shocked by the idea of such destruction as Jurati appears to be. I think if she’d just been told this information, rather than given it via Mind Meld, her response would have been very different.

And all of this actually opens up something much darker than I think the writers were intending. Normally, Mind Melds are only done if both people consent. Here, Commodore Sunglasses just does it, without permission. This is very, very rapey. I’m actually surprised that this was allowed into the show because of that – I think it’s because the writers didn’t think about the implications.

So what we have seen is a member of the Zhat Vash Mind Meld with someone without their consent, and then impress images into their mind of some horrific event. The imagery is so visceral that it immediately wins over that person to the Zhat Vash. There is no proof that androids will do what the Zhat Vash say they will do – how do they really know that the robots will do that? They don’t. So is this all that the Zhat Vash is? It’s just a series of people forcibly Mind Melding with other people and impressing images to them?

The implication of all of this is that there’s actually nothing wrong with the robots at all – the Zhat Vash just represents a problem with Mind Melds. Mind Melds can apparently be used to instantly radicalise people. If Star Trek Picard goes with this idea, it would actually be very interesting, but I suspect that they won’t.

Furthermore, after this very rapey Mind Meld, Commodore Sunglasses insists that Jurati swallow a tracking device. Jurati is clearly in no state to consent to this either – this is coercion – and I am again very surprised that they decided to add this into the episode.

That stuff was what really stuck out, and that was right at the beginning. There were many other annoying moments, but they’re not really worth several paragraphs of explanation each, so here they are as a big list:

There’s lots of dialogue at the start of the episode that’s just exposition. Its purpose is clearly to inform the viewer what happened in the last episode, but I don’t know why they need to do that in the dialogue, since they have a ‘Previously, on Star Trek Picard …’ bit at the beginning.
At one point, Chris Rios says to Raffi ‘Can’t you hack the traffic control system?!’ and Raffi says ‘The underlying code’s all freaky Borg machine language!’ while looking and sounding as though she is indeed attempting to hack it. If it’s in a completely different language that she doesn’t understand, how does she have even the slightest chance?
Rizzo continues to be insufferably over-the-top.
Chris Rios and Raffi immediately forget about Elnor, and when they are reminded about him, they don’t really care, and are fine with letting him stay (probably to die). They don’t give a shit about him, and it just makes them look like the terrible people they are. The decision about whether to stay and rescue Elnor or leave and get to Picard should have been far harder for them.
Picard just tells Soji ‘Your sister is dead.’ and it’s unintentionally hilarious. Why must the plot of this show depend on characters making faux pas? Surely Picard would know not to say this so bluntly?
Will Riker accuses Picard of ‘classic Picard arrogance’. Err … when in TNG was Picard arrogant? Wasn’t humility one of Picard’s defining traits?
Soji doesn’t trust Picard and there is no reason for this. It seems to be simply so that the other characters can give Picard a ‘dressing down’.
Will Riker says to Deanna Troi ‘Easy there imzadi!’. I’m pretty sure ‘imzadi’ isn’t supposed to be used this way. I never got the sense that it was supposed to be used angrily, or when there were other people around.
Deanna Troi says to Picard ‘Pretend that our dinner table is the ready room of the Enterprise.’. This is weird, desperate, and patronising. Also, they proceed not to actually do it.
Hugh is killed off – seems like they kind of wasted the character – they could have done loads more with him.
Why are the medical and hospitality holograms so inconsistent at appearing?
Also, the medical and hospitality holograms have no personality. Remember when a holographic doctor had so much personality that he was a fan favourite character?
Soji ‘gives Picard purpose again’ and it makes no fucking sense.
Alison Pill continues to be an outstanding actor. She is by far the best of all the new cast and is orders of magnitude ahead of the rest of them. Put. Her. In. Series. Two. And. Don’t. Give. Her. Shit. Lines.
At least Picard is aware of the ridiculousness of all the drama.
Picard says to Riker ‘They seem to be carrying more baggage than all of you ever did.’. This is a meta-line from the writers and it pisses me off. This line is a criticism of TNG – it’s saying that TNG did not have enough in-fighting between the characters and that the characters didn’t have enough tragic backstories. The writers could not be more wrong, and this is why Star Trek Discovery was shit.

Dramatic Dissonance

In my reviews of Star Trek Picard, I’ve started using the term ‘dramatic dissonance’ to describe something that we’re seeing on-screen. This particular phenomenon or quality may already have a term to describe it – if it does, I don’t know what it is, so for now I’m going to use ‘dramatic dissonance’ (to mimic the phrase ‘dramatic irony’). And while I’ve started using this term in my Star Trek Picard reviews, it’s something I’ve seen in lots of other shows too – like Star Trek Discovery and recent Doctor Who – so I thought I’d write a blog post about it in order to define it more clearly.

Dramatic dissonance is when the reactions of the characters to each other, or to the events of the story, are different to the audience’s reaction to the characters or to the events of the story.

Here’s an example of this: one character says something, and several other characters around them consider it a very awkward thing to say, or a faux pas, but the audience doesn’t think that it’s an awkward thing to say.

Here’s another: one character does something (it could be anything), and all of the characters around them think that this character is a genius for doing it, but the audience isn’t impressed by it at all.

This second example is one we’ve seen a lot in both Star Trek Picard and Star Trek Discovery – in fact this second example is often a way of determining whether a character is a Mary Sue. (Other characters will just think that they’re brilliant no matter what they do.)

Dramatic dissonance is a bad quality for a show to have. It is, by its very definition, unrealistic, and if a show has it, the audience will sense something is amiss, even if they can’t quite put it into words. The audience can sense it because things in the show don’t seem to make sense.

I’m not sure I could exactly say what the origins of dramatic dissonance in a show actually are, but I don’t think it’s an acting problem – I think it comes from the writing. It may come from writers thinking too much about ‘How do I want this character to react?’ rather than ‘How would they react?’.

Star Trek Picard – Series 1 Episode 6 – Nothing happens

Well there’s not much to say about this episode, because nothing really happens. The mystery hasn’t progressed at all – we still don’t know why the Zhat Vash don’t like androids; we don’t know why Jurati killed Maddox or why she’s here at all; we don’t know why Maddox created the twins; and we’re so far away from any connection to Data that I’d almost forgotten he was in this series. In this episode, they go to a place and say some things. That’s it.

There were a few odd moments in this episode – moments that were either unintentionally funny or just nonsensical. They’re all quite disconnected, so I’m just going to do what I’ve done a few times before in reviews, and chuck them all at you in a big list:

Elnor says ‘out-butt’ at one point when he means ‘butt-out’. Not sure what’s going on there, but a few moments later he says ‘Was I in-butting?’ instead of ‘Was I butting-in?’. No Elnor, you weren’t ‘in-butting’ … that’s … that’s something very different.
Also, Elnor is apparently psychic now – he seems to know what both Picard and Jurati are thinking – but he still has no fucking personality.
So far Rizzo has existed just so that Narek has someone he can exposit to. (She also says the occasional incest-y line to him.) Rizzo is played ridiculously melodramatically – it’s like her character sheet just said ‘Disney villain’.
When Picard suggests doing things the Qowat Milat way, Elnor confirms that ‘That is the Qowat Milat way.’ … Well thank goodness you’re here to tell us that Elnor … I don’t know what we would have done without you there.
The show continues not to acknowledge how much of a twat Raffi is. Raffi’s character seems to be what one might call the ‘traumatised saint’ archetype. I’ve never known that archetype actually work. At one point in this episode she says ‘You know Picard! Every part of that guy that’s not ego is rampaging id.’, and I was surprised that she didn’t explode with the irony.
Also, I don’t understand why Emmy (that’s that Starfleet person that Raffi talks to), agrees to give them envoy credentials. Starfleet is dead against Picard doing any of this stuff – wouldn’t someone higher up intervene? And how could the Romulans start a war if Picard didn’t have permission to be there anyway? I thought the Romulan civilisation was now spread across a huge area of the galaxy? I thought their military empire had collapsed? (Was that not what the previous episodes were suggesting?)
Soji scans all of her stuff, and the scanner says that it’s all 37 months old. I would have thought that her first reaction would just be confusion – after all, perhaps the scanner is broken – but no, her first reaction is blind craze.
I actually quite liked the way they brought Hugh back. He seems to be a lot more similar to his TNG / VOY character than Picard and Seven are. And the ways in which he is different seem to be in line with what we would expect based on his TNG character.
We have some fun with words in this episode, in a moment reminiscent of STD. Rios says to Raffi at one point ‘Because you’re a terminal pessimist.’ … um … ‘terminal’? Did you mean ‘eternal’? A ‘terminal pessimist’ is someone who’s going to die from being so pessimistic.
They also invented the word ‘protometric’ for this episode. It’s not complete nonsense – it could either mean ‘the first measurements performed as part of a process’ or ‘measurements of proton flux or density’ – so I’ll let it slide, but I do wonder if the writers knew what they wanted it to mean.
And then there’s a funny moment when Narek tries to kill Soji: the guard just sees Soji banging on the glass, and looks from Soji to Narek as he has no-idea what’s going on.

Six episodes gone; four left. I am starting to wonder whether we’re going to get any kind of satisfying conclusion to many of the things that have been set-up in this series.

Star Trek Picard – Series 1 Episode 5 – Picard is not Picard and Seven is not Seven

Hmm. I wrote five pages of notes for the last episode; for this episode I wrote six – this is not a good sign.

This was not a good episode – for many reasons. Over the course of the series so far we’ve seen various problems: a lot of the dialogue is very unnatural; many of the characters are played over-the-top; the characters just exposit their backstories to each other or to holograms; alien races have lost all of their distinctive qualities and are now just space thugs. Many of these problems have been somewhat ignorable, because they’re only very apparent in one part of the episode, and this is the start of a new series anyway, and new shows tend to take a while to get going.

But in this episode we saw many of these same problems again, suggesting that these are going to be problems throughout the whole series, and this episode revealed some very big character problems. This episode also shows that the mystery of the Mars incident is not progressing well – I was amazed to find out that this series is only going to have ten episodes in it – this episode marks the half-way point, but the mystery has really only just been set up – nothing else has happened with it. By this point we should have found out something important about the mystery, but we haven’t. The ‘gang’ is still just wandering around the galaxy, looking for some sort of starting point. (Also, consider that it was only in episode four that the ‘gang’ first all assembled, with Elnor ‘binding his sword’ to Picard’s ‘quest’.)

I’ll get to the main problem with the episode in a few paragraphs, but first let’s get the simpler stuff out of the way.

Firstly, this episode was very gory. I personally am not a fan of gore – many people like it (and indeed, horror as a genre is often thought of as being part of a set of related genres with sci. fi. and fantasy), but I don’t. I detest the gory and the grotesque. (Anyone who’s read my books will have seen that while I don’t mind the gross (all of the trolls in OTSOT are described as being disgusting), I never describe gore, even when quite violent things happen in my stories.) This is just my preference, and I don’t hold it against the quality of the episode, because I know some people do like that stuff. However, I will say that this is yet another departure from the style of classic Star Trek. Classic Star Trek was not gory (or rather, there was an upper limit on how gory it was willing to be – a limit that was a lot lower than in this show). Other episodes in this show have had moments of gore too – like when we see doctors taking the implants out of Borg on the Artefact – it’s clearly a deliberate decision by showrunners to make the show more gory.

The show continues to have character problems – so, so many in this episode. The character of Raffi (whose full name is apparently Rafaela Musiker – interesting choice) continues to be an obnoxious mess. Firstly, Raffi has just become every single expert who’s normally on a Federation starship. Throughout the course of this episode we see that she is an expert hacker, an expert spy, a cultural expert, a chief medical officer, and a chief engineer. Throughout the ‘mission’ that they go on in this episode, she is the only one who knows anything about anything – all of the other characters are clueless and just listen to her tell them what to do. She has a detailed knowledge of the culture and technology on Freecloud, and how to infiltrate them. She knows enough about medical science and human physiology to create a substance that can block the special abilities of the Beta Annari. And she is apparently the only person who knows enough about transporter technology to give instructions on what to do to everyone else. This is unrealistic – it is not possible for one person to know that much about that many things. One of the good things about classic Star Trek is that the different skills of the different characters meant that no single character could solve every problem, and they had to work together. At one point Picard even says to Raffi ‘This is going to be very much harder without you.’ – Yes! Because she literally does fucking everything!

As a side note I really don’t care about this new thing with Raffi’s son. It just seems like some desperate attempt to tag on a ‘personal storyline’ to Raffi’s character, but it doesn’t seem to have any relation to anything else that’s going on in the show or anything to do with Raffi’s personality. It’s just a cliché of writing – you’ve accidentally created an overpowered character so now you have to tag on some ‘tragic backstory’ bollocks. A character’s own story arc should be interwoven and relevant to the main fucking story arc of the show – this is basic fucking shit.

That’s Raffi; now Elnor. Elnor so far has been completely fucking useless and has no personality. I mean really, what do we even know of Elnor at this point? What does he want? Why is he there? What does he really think of Picard? He chose this ‘quest’ because he thought it was hopeless – does that mean he thinks he’s going to die? How is he preparing for that? Or is he thinking of ways that he can make this ‘quest’ succeed against all odds? The show has not even begun to answer any of these questions.

At this point, the only personality trait that Elnor has is that he’s awkward. That’s it. But even that is not as concrete as it might superficially seem, because while we see lots of scenes where the other characters around him think that something he’s said is awkward, it’s actually not. Because of the very unnatural dialogue of the show, many of the things that other characters say are actually far more awkward than the few things that Elnor says. This results in what one might call ‘dramatic dissonance’, where what we are being told by the dialogue or the script or the writers is different to what we are being shown and what the audience thinks. All of the characters act as though Elnor is really awkward, but this is madness when every other character is actually more awkward.

Next: Agnes Jurati. This character is all over the place, but I will say that this character is much better in the serious moments than in the ones that try to be funny or matey. Alison Pill is actually an extremely good actor – her performance as Jurati kills Maddox is extraordinary. But she keeps being given crap lines to perform in the less serious moments.

As a side note: Maddox. Firstly, why is Bruce Maddox being played by a different actor? This character was a minor one-story character in TNG, and completely obnoxious. Why bring back a character like that if you’re not going to at least maintain the consistency and get the same actor? More importantly though, shortly before Maddox is killed, he says to Picard ‘Dahj is dead, isn’t she?’. The show deprives us of seeing his reaction when he learns this by having the character already know it. This is a thing that seems to happen a lot in modern television (and film) – where we just don’t see the reactions of characters to new information – and it’s bad. Stop it. If all good acting is reacting, how can we get good performances if we never see the bloody reactions! (And this was particularly annoying on this occasion because it’s so bloody unnecessary!)

But okay, let’s get to the big ones – the problems that really condemn this whole episode and this whole show: Seven of Nine is not the same character that we saw in Voyager, and Jean-luc Picard is not the same character that we saw in The Next Generation.

Seven of Nine is completely different. There are almost no similarities between this character in this show, and the real Seven of Nine from Voyager. They are two separate characters with the same name played by the same actress.

Now, some people may argue that characters change over time, and it has been, what, 20-ish years in-universe since Voyager? That’s a long time – people can change a lot over that time. Firstly, I disagree with this premise – I actually don’t think people change as much as some like to think – this idea that people change radically over the course of their life is a cliché – some people do, but most don’t. But even if people did change a lot over 20 years, I don’t think this is a good thing to do in fiction. This does not make for a good narrative – in fact it’s quite nihilistic. In most narratives, characters have some obstacle to overcome – some challenge to succeed at. Changing a character off-screen essentially involves giving them a new obstacle or challenge (or, as is the case in a lot of contemporary television and film, giving them no obstacle or challenge at all), which most of the time is not related or connected to their previous challenge. This means that essentially their previous challenge and success is meaningless and irrelevant – it didn’t matter whether they overcame the obstacle or not, because now they’ve just been given a new, different one. If characters are defined by the obstacles they overcome, then giving them a different obstacle makes them a different character.

So it is bad to outright change a character from a previous series. Even just from a pure entertainment point of view it makes no sense – people liked the old character, so why are you just replacing it with a new one that the audience may not like?

And the character of Seven of Nine has changed – quite drastically. Just look at any clips of Seven from Voyager, and you can quickly see that these are not the same character. Seven of Nine from Voyager is meticulous and diligent. She is no longer part of the Borg, but she does not outright hate them – she sees the advantages to some of the things they do, and thinks some of the things that humans do are strange. She gradually learns how to be more human, and enjoy human things, but it is not tragic. Seven of Nine from STP is a vigilante. She’s abrasive, and ‘doesn’t play by anyone’s rules’. She’s a space cowboy who’s tragically haunted by her Borg past. These are completely different characters. (Seven of Nine in STP is also selectively moronic – why, WHY, even though she is completely prepared to kill Bjayzl, does she allow Bjayzl to stand there monologuing for several minutes?! It’s Austin Powers levels of unrealistic incompetence!)

And now the big one: Picard. The character of Jean-luc Picard in this show is not the same character as Jean-luc Picard in The Next Generation. Considering that he’s the main character of the show, that’s pretty bad.

So far in this series I’ve been somewhat tolerant of the disparities between the two Picards – I’ve put it down to badly-written dialogue and the show getting started. But no – this episode shows that the two Picards are different characters.

Let’s look at the examples. Firstly, when Picard is talking to Seven, he says ‘You are taking the law into your own hands.’, referring to her being a vigilante. This line is ridiculous because Picard knows that no law is being enforced in this part of the galaxy, and he would know that in such a situation you have to follow your own principles and be strategic. Picard never just considered ‘The Law’ to be outright correct, and thus any violation of it to be automatically incorrect – many times he disagreed with what the law was, and deliberately went against it. He would not be an advocate for just following non-existent law for the sake of being lawful. He would have known that lawful and good aren’t always the same thing.

The Picard from TNG was the ‘philosopher king’ archetype – a character who is both an authoritative leader and a moral teacher – a difficult archetype to do right and one that’s not done often nowadays. The reason it’s not often done nowadays is because lots of film and television writers nowadays lack the profundity to have the character say anything with any real moral value. In this episode, the writers of this show tried to mimic this philosophical Picard from TNG, but lack the capacity. The result is that Picard is no longer a moral teacher, and is just as stupid as the rest of the characters.

Not only is the ‘philosopher’ part of Picard’s character missing, so is the ‘king’. This is connected to Raffi’s all-powerfulness. In all of these episodes, Picard is just standing around, asking other people to do things for him. He does not lead anyone at any point. You’d hardly even know he was an admiral at all.

Let’s look at another odd line. When Seven is about to kill Bjayzl, Picard says to her ‘This is not saving the galaxy – this is settling an old score!’. So, Picard knows that Bjayzl tortured Seven’s friend. The Picard of TNG would never refer to the torturing of someone’s friend as an ‘old score’ – he would take it far more seriously than that. Similarly, Picard would never talk about ‘saving the galaxy’ in this way. This isn’t fucking Star Wars. What Seven does isn’t saving the fucking galaxy – she is limited to one very small part of the fucking galaxy, and there are many parts of the galaxy that no-one’s even been to yet. It’s ridiculously melodramatic and Picard in TNG was anything but melodramatic.

As an aside, consider the scenes where Picard is down on Freecloud. It’s clear that Patrick Stewart had far more fun playing that character than he does playing Picard’s Picard. There’s also a bizarre moment where he says the words ‘appropriately sinister’ in a French accent, which is odd, because Picard can speak French – would he not just say the words in French?

The Jean-luc Picard in this show is not reminiscent of the character from TNG. The character actually reminds me far more of Professor Xavier from the X-Men. But in this series he has nothing interesting or meaningful to say, and does not actually take any actions in the story. In five episodes he doesn’t seem to have actually done anything to try to solve this mystery himself – he’s just been nearby to other people when they tell him things about the mystery. He has not solved or figured out anything himself, nor has he made any of the decisions for what to do next – Raffi does all of that. He’s just some guy, standing there, watching the other characters do things.

There are only five episodes left. I don’t think this show is going to turn around in that time. So far, what have we seen? A mystery that is moderately compelling, but which has hardly moved forward since the first episode, and which the main character has only had peripheral involvement in solving. We’ve seen no other interesting or new ideas – if this had been TNG, we’d’ve gotten five new, interesting, sci. fi. ideas by now. We’ve heard a bunch of annoying, over-performed characters say some very unnatural lines. And we’ve seen some other characters who have the same names as characters from TNG, some of whom are also played by the same actors, but who are completely different characters. So far, this series has mostly been a massive waste of time.