Picard 1x03 - "The End is the Beginning" [** SPOILERS WITHIN **]

Spear

A new thread since the episode and spoilers are out and about.

I'm getting a little concerned that there's going to be some major and daft retcon regarding the entire Romulan species.

Slydice

Ohhhhhh! So they made a bunch of the Emergency Medical Holograms have Irish accents
.. and I assume they all looked after loads of the Romulans who evactuated their planet.

Looks like it's not species 8472 spitting stuff.. it's like a Romulan death capsule for the event of being captured.

Vaping!? Really?! .. hrmmm

It occurred to me during the episode that the Romulans here look similar to Banas Romulans from the 2009 film which.. kinda makes sense.

I like the idea of a Starfleet Officer keeping to Starfleet reg after he left.

Starting to think it's inevitable there'll be some Borg reconnection and assimilation episode.
Also a time travel element.

Wow I really wanted to see more at the end there!

ilovesmybrick

Slydice wrote: »

Ohhhhhh! So they made a bunch of the Emergency Medical Holograms have Irish accents
.. and I assume they all looked after loads of the Romulans who evactuated their planet.

Looks like it's not species 8472 spitting stuff.. it's like a Romulan death capsule for the event of being captured.

Vaping!? Really?! .. hrmmm

It occurred to me during the episode that the Romulans here look similar to Banas Romulans from the 2009 film which.. kinda makes sense.

I like the idea of a Starfleet Officer keeping to Starfleet reg after he left.

Starting to think it's inevitable there'll be some Borg reconnection and assimilation episode.
Also a time travel element.

Wow I really wanted to see more at the end there!

I know, the quick shot of the old school bird of prey on the preview has me really impatient for next week!

I liked the idea that he's made his EMH look like himself. It's a weird narcissism.

In terms of the borg I don't think it's time travel. I think that possibly the Romulans captured Dahj, Soji, and Maddox (or something along those lines) prior to attempting to their assimilation. Maybe the information regarding positronic neural networks fried them once it was assimilated? We know that knowledge or viruses can be assimilated into the collective to devastating effect.

Also I'm guessing that those Romulans rescued from the Borg were 'broken' because they were Zhat Vash.

Yester

Engage!

_Kaiser_

I really don't like this Zhat Vash thing.. It's basically a rehash of Discovery-style Section 31.

The trailers really gave away far too much including "engage!" We're 3 episodes in and that and the Mars attack is about all we've learned. Bearing in mind that this is a 10 episode season, I'm getting a bit worried about the pacing - but that said, each episode seems to fly by!

I'm still enjoying it, but a bit of the sheen has come off for me.

Charlie-Bravo

What time does this episode become viewable on Prime?

Burty330

Worst episode so far.

lol@ at a former SF officer living in a trailer house on a patch of scrubland. How current year Rafi to then belittle Picard for enjoying his white male privileged life on a vineyard.

The whole notion that this Rafi character would have a 15 year long grudge against Picard because she got fired is utterly laughable.

Why didn't quit anyway just like Jay-Ell did??

Their plan could only go forward if Luc went Rouge , a plan which she expected and fully encouraged.

Her egging Luc on and the utterance of the "hell with them" moments before the SF communique came in , implied she would have quit anyway and joined ol Luc on his renegade mission to uncover whatever it is thats going on.

Rafi doing a 180 and storming off in a huff when learning about her firing was such embarrassing stupidly , but it was hardly surprising coming from elementary school writers.

Surely they could have came up with a better plot device for Rafi to have a grudge against Picard so to justify the belittling and demeaning of his character.
How about having the character being positive rather than negative?

She certainly would be if this was real Trek as classes in society do not exist. There's not supposed to be any currency so how is she worse off than anybody else?
She shouldn't be , but cannon must be violated and shatted upon so a current year political agenda can be slotted in.

But but Burty , Star Trek was always political..

NO. This is This..This isn't something else..This is This!!!! This is today , not 30 year ago.

A buffoon like Trumps odds of winning the presidency are getting more likely every day cos modern far lefties are bitter , intolerant and hateful people. Every reasonable person can see it.

Piers Morgan - a life long liberal - argues with these far left loons every week.

Kurtzman is one of them and he's wipping his ass with your fandom

pah

I find the whole experience of watching this unsettling.

_Kaiser_

pah wrote: »

I find the whole experience of watching this unsettling.

Having thought about it some more, there's things that just don't make sense..

- why would Starfleet outright fire Raffi as well when Picard resigned?

- why is she living like Riggs in Lethal Weapon? You could put it down to choice except she calls Picard out for his vineyard lifestyle. What happened to poverty being eradicated on Earth at least?

jim-jam

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

- why is she living like Riggs in Lethal Weapon?

I fully expect Jean Luc to say he's too old for this **** in the next episode now.

Not sure what to make of the episode but what I do know is that this 'JL' nonsense needs to stop.

Goodshape

Pretty good.

Acting not the best though, nor the editing. Yer one playing Dahj / her sister (can't remember her name!) is pretty good though.

All that stuff on the Borgulan cube is decent actually! Bit drawn out, so far, but I'm enjoying the drawing.

FutureGuy

I’m hoping now that the series really starts. We have a ship and a partial crew.

As with last week, I enjoyed it but you can clearly see they have done some huge reshoots and some of it is so poorly done.

Also, there are moments that really take me out of the experience.

- Raffi suddenly getting angry with Picard because she thought she was getting fired. Made zero sense. How it made past post-editing. Her acting was awful there too.

- Hugh said that the people in the room were the ”only Romulans ever assimilated, as far as I know”. What an utter crock of sh!t. How did that line get past anyone with half an idea of the franchise is beyond me. That makes me angry.

-O’s sunglasses. 2399 not 1999.

I’m giving the series a huge pass on the initial writing as I know there were changes from ep 4 onwards. That needs to get way better because it’s pretty poor right now.

Evade

Finally made it into space but not for long because trailers. I don't know how much of a story there is here, what's been shown so far could easily have fit into two episodes.

Episode musings

• How does a planet burn for 10+ years?
• RIP Doc
• Not a fan of using modern programming terms in Star Trek
• Section 31 was in control of the Tal Shiar for a while
• The flashback uniforms are nicer than the current ones
• How does he know Soji wasn't killed first?
• VAPING!? WHY!?
• Where did the Chateaux come from?
• It seems the economics of the future aren't all that different after all
• I wonder if this is a cube redesign or because it's being reclaimed
• Is that Hugh?
• I wish they'd stop using Federation/Starfleet interchangeably
• Hmm, sunglasses on an alleged Vulcan
• Is the bad disassimilation intentional?
• We've seen ex-Borg Romulans before
• The ship is... different
• And now smoking
• Medical tools are primitive
• Really leaning heavily on the Starfleet = bad, just erasing a ship from the record should be hard to do
• Another bad accent
• Robert used to say that about one eye on the stars
• Romulan tarot...
• The disruptor rifle knock back is silly and they should be green
• Why arm yourself with a knife and a wine bottle if there's a phaser/disruptor under the table?
• Fortune telling
• Was that a Terry Farrell Trill reference?
• Why exposit before melting yourself?
• They're siblings aren't they?
• So there is money now?

Yester

jim-jam wrote: »

I fully expect Jean Luc to say he's too old for this **** in the next episode now.

Not sure what to make of the episode but what I do know is that this 'JL' nonsense needs to stop.

At least it's not J-Luc.

jim-jam

Yester wrote: »

At least it's not J-Luc.

He's still Jean-Luc from the block!

FutureGuy

Going back to that first scene. It’s one of the worst pieces of Trek created in many years. Bad acting, dreadful writing, poor editing.

But someone thought it was good enough to go with so what do I know.

Venom

This was my least favourite episode thus fair due to a major drop in story quality.


I hated the "JL" guff from Raffi which just feels totally out of place. Why is she a space hobo when it's long been established the federation is a paradise? She also seemed to flip from being 100% behind anything Picard was going to do to help the Romulans, to being pissed at Picard the second she's gets summoned to see the C&C!


The clumsy Zhat Vash attack was just awful and felt written by someone who has never watched a single movie or tv show dealing with military personnel or combat. Why didn't Picard or the ex-Tal Shair caretakers remove the acid tooth they know these dudes tend to use before waking the dude up!



Borg cube bits were the most interesting but way more needed.

Evade

Venom wrote: »

The clumsy Zhat Vash attack was just awful and felt written by someone who has never watched a single movie or tv show dealing with military personnel or combat.

It is pretty silly but Star Trek has never been great at that kind of thing, a two handed hammer blow to the back used to knock everyone out. But since they brought up the Romulans can cover up a decent sized explosion in a city why not fire a Star Trek equivalent RPG at the house?

velo.2010

Last week was disappointing... this week was bad!

Bad acting, bad writing and bad editing. That opening scene between 'JL' and Raffi had the hallmarks of a hastily written scene late on in the filming schedule. The episode just went all over the place from there.

The only interesting thing was the Jane Badler (Diana from V) vibe I got from Narek's sister. Can we say she's hot?

Anyway, I can't be arsed writing a longer review like last week. The episodes are short enough so I'll stick with it if only to look out for the upcoming cameos.

Optimus Prime

Still enjoying it , but this weeks was the worst so far for me. I didn’t have a problem with the Romulan Irish accent at all , in fact I liked it , but the holograms accent here was shocking. It was back to the Irish village from voyager or the time the Irish lads where all on the enterprise in TNG. Really bad.

Was I the only one that thought the Deystrom doctor is now replaced with a romulan ? And that the whole attack on the house was just to get her in with them so they would take her on the mission ? Seemed that way to me. One minute on the bench and the admiral in the stupid sunglasses says we need to talk , next minute she is killing a romulan.

Optimus Prime

Still enjoying it , but this weeks was the worst so far for me. I didn’t have a problem with the Romulan Irish accent at all , in fact I liked it , but the holograms accent here was shocking. It was back to the Irish village from voyager or the time the Irish lads where all on the enterprise in TNG. Really bad.

Was I the only one that thought the Deystrom doctor is now replaced with a romulan ? And that the whole attack on the house was just to get her in with them so they would take her on the mission ? Seemed that way to me. One minute on the bench and the admiral in the stupid sunglasses says we need to talk , next minute she is killing a romulan.

With the sunglasses , could the idea there be that maybe her eyes where damaged if she was near the super nova?

Didn’t like the JL thing either , seemed really forced, like the writers wanted a way to show us how close they where really quickly , but it didn’t work, especially then when she stormed off without knowing she was sacked??

Optimus Prime

Optimus Prime wrote: »

Still enjoying it , but this weeks was the worst so far for me. I didn’t have a problem with the Romulan Irish accent at all , in fact I liked it , but the holograms accent here was shocking. It was back to the Irish village from voyager or the time the Irish lads where all on the enterprise in TNG. Really bad.

You can say that again!

:pac:

is_that_so

Yeah, not the best of episodes at all with the Fair Haven hologram a real low although Peyton List is a close second! But finally underway and a chance to see where it can take us. As an aside, so nice to see Hugh again!

seamus

I think "unsettling" is a good description given above. And IMO, I think it's because we've been shown that the Federation is a paradise. That conflict, crime, disease and poverty have been eradicated. That everyone is the greatest human they can be and they have conquered their baser instincts.

Their only flaws come from their personal relationships and ethical conflicts.

This series (and DIS to a certain extent) have introduced more "normal" humans. People vaping, smoking, committing crimes, being sexist, racist, etc.

This is a more realistic portrayal; the idea that no human would replicate cigars or take drugs is a complete fantasy. The sterile, puritanical Starfleet/Federation was the unrealistic one. Nevertheless it does feel like the established universe is being "tainted" somewhat to see it.

I do feel overall that it was quite a weak episode, though it did do a good job of setting up more of the storyline, introducing more questions and mysteries. The final scene in particular makes it feel like this is the "real" start of the series, that the first 3 episodes were just setting the stage.

I do have to wonder WTAF they are doing with the ENH with the bad Oirish accent? Maybe it's supposed to be a joke and we'll find out that he was programmed that way for entertainment.

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

why would Starfleet outright fire Raffi as well when Picard resigned?

We might find out more about that, but it is probably to do with her loyalty to Picard as well as her insistence on a Romulan conspiracy in Starfleet.

why is she living like Riggs in Lethal Weapon? You could put it down to choice except she calls Picard out for his vineyard lifestyle. What happened to poverty being eradicated on Earth at least?

We already know that while humanity doesn't use money, there is still a meritocracy in place, and what people get to do very much depends on who you are, what you've done and who you know.
I don't think Raffi is living in poverty, but she's living outside of society. They don't imply that she's struggling to eat or otherwise fend for herself, but she's isolated and has no reputation on which to trade. Which she alludes to by the fact that she's a pilot without an "official" job or an official ship.
Picard by comparison is still a celebrated hero and gets to live on and run a massive vineyard by virtue of who he is.

jim-jam wrote: »

Not sure what to make of the episode but what I do know is that this 'JL' nonsense needs to stop.

I don't mind it at all. It's a reminder that Picard had a whole other crew, other adventures and other ships afters the Enterprise-E.
Hearing her say "JL" is a little bit like hearing someone else use a pet name for your ex-partner.

TheIrishGrover

I thought that was pretty good. I mean, initially I thought the Bareshaven Hologram was just godawful but then I just assumed he was played more for laughs so I wasn't too put out. As long as they don't overuse it.
There better be more to the captain than the heavy-handed exposition that they laid on this episode: So, basically I'm Malcolm Reynolds with a tragic back story (tm).
The "JL" thing did grate alright. I mean I can't remember the name of the Admiral that used to popup in TNG occasionally but she always called him Jean-Luc.
And the Romulan sister is so OTT sinister I'm sure it was her eating the scenery that caused that huge gap in the cube She reminded me of "Diana" in the original version of "V" back in the 80's.

So I know that all sounds quite negative but I did find the episode interesting. Was good to see Hugh back (As we all knew he was coming back). So interesting to see what the story is with the sister. Is she also part Borg as was the initial rumour? She can speak languages of assimilated species and knows the history of the cube. Is she the "Destroyer" of the Borg collective?
It sounds like it was the the Romulans' particular psyche that caused some some cascade reaction in the Borg cube that caused it to basically cause the collective in that cube to lose cohesion and thus get cut-off from the collective as a whole (Like what they planned to do with Hugh initially).

Evade

TheIrishGrover wrote: »

tragic back story (tm).
The "JL" thing did grate alright. I mean I can't remember the name of the Admiral that used to popup in TNG occasionally but she always called him Jean-Luc.

There's a difference between calling a subordinate by their first name and a lieutenant commander calling a full admiral by a nickname.

FutureGuy

Evade wrote: »

There's a difference between calling a subordinate by their first name and a lieutenant commander calling a full admiral by a nickname.

Based on teh countdown comics

she was his XO on the USS Verity and they had that type of relationship.

Evade

FutureGuy wrote: »

Based on teh countdown comics

she was his XO on the USS Verity and they had that type of relationship.

Stuff like this might have been better if it was on screen and not in a tie in comic a lot of people won't read.

TheIrishGrover

Evade wrote: »

There's a difference between calling a subordinate by their first name and a lieutenant commander calling a full admiral by a nickname.

Yeah, that's what I meant.

Plus, and it's not specific to Star Trek Picard, but haw many times do they change their uniform? I mean EVERY time a new timeline is mentioned there is a new insignia design or rank design or uniform design. They must go through uniforms like a Man United Away Strip (And that's the limit of my knowledge of football )

I didn't have a problem with the difference between Picard's mansion and his friend's shack. I don't think the whole post-money type system really bears up to any scrutiny at all. I mean if it was the utopia why would anyone work menial jobs if they didn't have to? I mean, even in this episode it's mentioned that the captain is expensive. How? So he can be rich offworld?

It's not a conversation for this thread really but I certainly have no problems believing that Picard would be very well off and others not so. Coming from old money: Vinyard in his family for generations, Military school, all the best and most expensive education to become captain of the Federation flagship. That sh*t ain't cheap

TheIrishGrover

TheIrishGrover wrote: »

Yeah, that's what I meant.

Plus, and it's not specific to Star Trek Picard, but haw many times do they change their uniform? I mean EVERY time a new timeline is mentioned there is a new insignia design or rank design or uniform design. They must go through uniforms like a Man United Away Strip (And that's the limit of my knowledge of football )

I didn't have a problem with the difference between Picard's mansion and his friend's shack. I don't think the whole post-money type system really bears up to any scrutiny at all. I mean if it was the utopia why would anyone work menial jobs if they didn't have to? I mean, even in this episode it's mentioned that the captain is expensive. How? So he can be rich offworld?

It's not a conversation for this thread really but I certainly have no problems believing that Picard would be very well off and others not so. Coming from old money: Vinyard in his family for generations, Military school, all the best and most expensive education to become captain of the Federation flagship. That sh*t ain't cheap

Plus its mentioned he's written a couple of books. Presumably he got some royalties from those.

Evade

TheIrishGrover wrote: »

Plus, and it's not specific to Star Trek Picard, but haw many times do they change their uniform? I mean EVERY time a new timeline is mentioned there is a new insignia design or rank design or uniform design. They must go through uniforms like a Man United Away Strip (And that's the limit of my knowledge of football )

If they're taking cues from the US military each branch changes uniform design every 10 to 15 years too. The Wrath of Khan reds seem to be one of the longest lasting uniform variants in Star Trek if you count the version without the polo neck, as seen in Yesterday's Enterprise, as the same uniform.