Picard 2x05 - 'Fly me to the Moon' ~~ { ** Spoilers Within ** }

This season in particular it's very obvious how much Stewart needs to be kept out of the action.

Picard and Data was always a thing though as was Picard and his nephew and Wesley so he is all for kids when he has a connection.

@Liberty_Bear You do know there is only 3 Seasons of which all have been filmed?

I actually didnt! But now I know! I was going along the lines of Enterprise where Michael worked herself up to team captain. And Picard makes reference to the Enterprise and Kirk so knowing his past experience he relayed his experience on to the 'Supervisor'. But thanks for that link, I'll have a read!

Michael? Enterprise? You meant Discovery right?

Mea culpa yes..sorry! (is there an embarassment emoji!)

Hanging my head in shame as we speak!

A bit weaker this time, but still thankfully a good watch. Jurati was less annoying this week, which was welcome, but the Borg Queen herself is now taking her spot as the most annoying character on this show. She's gone past the Cartoon Villianess stage on Voyager to this campy shadow of that.

Her failure to assimilate that Police Officer didn't make any sense. She had the nanoprobes for it, and having a working drone would have made it much easier for her to also take Jurati. Jurati's "assimilation" is also pretty annoying. Having the Borg Queen secretly hijack Jurati smacks of the annoying Tumor Ghosts they liked to write into Greys Anatomy episodes. I keep coming back to that hospital drama, because I fear that this is the standard for most of the new crop of screen writers. I fully expect the Borg Queen to be chumming up with Jurati as this annoying "Imaginary Friend" who she will have to talk to.

Picard's reasoning for Jurati to be their person at the NASA Gala also gave me flashbacks of how they used to inject contrived reasons for Micheal to be main crew member to be involved in a given Discovery mission. It did not feel natural and even in-script they sort of question this. It could be partly bad writing, or even some kind of screen-time guarantee since Alison Pill has second billing in the credits. I hope they improve there.

Despite all those rants, still watchable, and still hopefully able to stick the landing when we can get to the season end cliffhanger. I have fears, because I sense their bad habits are starting to break though an otherwise very solid beginning.

It's more a gut-feeling than anything concrete, and of course could easily be based on nothing at all. When I noticed that her name came right after Steward's it just made me wonder why. Typically in a Trek show that would usually be where the actor playing the First Officer would go, or more to the point the show's second lead. Jurati seemed to be more of a secondary side-kick in Season 1, and yet also got second billing for some reason. Higher position in the billing can be sometimes quite important to hollywood actors, I'm guessing because people's attention starts to glaze over after the first 2 or 3 names in the intro. Getting the higher billing without a role that matches, suggests the possibility of some form of deal.

I'll sometimes cart out this little example of how silly things can get:

This interesting arrangement of text was the result of arguments / negotiations between McQueen and Newman about who got "first" position on the billing for "The Towering Inferno". Eventually they settled on McQueen being the first on the left (because some people read that way) and Newman getting the higher position, because some people read that way. You'll even notice that Newman's picture is slightly higher than McQueens. It's not the worst poster in the world, but it's kind of all over the place for the sake of ego.

That's why I start getting a bit concerned when I think I detect this behavior in a Trek show, where an actor's ego might get in the way of the quality of the production itself. Hopefully this is not the case with Alison Pill and that Picard continues to be a good watch.

Apologies for my segway into this kind of stuff. For some reason in the later years of TNG-era (Specifically in DS9 & Voyager) I had started to get interested in how the cast contracts actually worked in Trek shows. I had started to learn how head-lining actors would somehow be guaranteed a line in any given episode. You wouldn't notice this in TNG, but I had started to pick up on them making up reasons for Quark or Neelix to turn up when the plot didn't really need them. Felt like a case of the plot serving the cast instead of the other way around. I guess my interest in this sort of thing followed me forward into the current batch of shows :P

Snap @Rawr

Also weird thing I just noticed, the post time is UTC but the edit time is IST

I think the placement of Alison Pill would be about right. I would only put Jeri Ryan ahead of her due to her prior Trek work but if she wasn't in the main credits in season 1, bumping Alison down to slot Jeri in would probably be a bad idea. Of course the other compromise for bigger names who don't want to be seen as third or fourth billed is getting the final "And" or "With" credit.

Looking at the opening of season 1 on youtube we have Patrick Stewart, Alison Pill, Isa Briones And Harry Treadaway.

Season 2 has Patrick Stewart, Alison Pill, Jeri Ryan, Michelle Hurd, Evan Evagora, Orla Brady, isa Briones And Santiago Cabrera.

Isa got moved down likely to having a smaller role and Santiago got the "And" credit.

You mean to tell me that people actually see these credits and don't just skip over?