I liked it. And I didn’t like a lot of these seasons.
They put themselves into a preposterous situation in order to get the band back together. The plot was by necessity inane. But i thought they stuck the landing at the end and was very grateful for that.
I do wish in general that “fan service” was more about making good television/movies as opposed to writing endless nostalgic circle jerks…but I’m aware that I’m not exactly a fan of the non-circle jerk stuff either (Discovery).
In every episode? I chewed through all four last night - weird AF but right up my alley. Though I’m in for pretty much anything Lindelhof does. LOST and The Leftovers are two of my all-time favorites.
We knew they were going to win. Star Trek will not end a series on a low note. But it can end a series on a bittersweet note. The things on my mind after finishing the episode yesterday are:
In the first season of 24, the original ending of the season finale had Jack beating the terrorists and rescuing Teri, but it didn’t land well with test audiences. So instead they had Jack find Teri dead. Even though the good guy won, it wasn’t without a cost.
The ultimate victory in DS9 cost them two main characters (Sisko, who is neither alive nor dead; Odo, who sacrifices his friendships to save the Great Link) and a pretty important minor character (Damar, who eats it while fighting to liberate his homeworld).
In Wrath of Khan, victory costs them Spock. In Search for Spock, victory costs them perhaps the most important character in Star Trek: the Enterprise herself.
Battlestar Galactica. They lost almost everything.
Even Nemesis and Enterprise, both of which misfired in so many ways, made me feel a real sense of loss about Data and Tucker, respectively.
So what was the cost of the good guys’ victory in Picard S3? All of the TNG crew are fine. Jack and the LaForges are fine. Seven and Raffi are fine. The Titan is fine. Spacedock survives. The fleet is fine. The 40-year-old D doesn’t have one goddamn extra scratch on it despite all of the Star Wars shit it did. To tell me that all of that can happen and all it costs is (in order of significance) Shaw, Ro, Shelby, and the bald Vulcan chick is a little too neat for my taste. If you move just a couple of the pieces I listed to the other side of the equation then it starts to balance out a little. If you want to leave the TNG crew intact then Jack by himself would have been enough.
Furthermore, with the possible exception of Seven/Raffi and Picard/Jack, it felt like none of them were ever really in jeopardy. The D in its fighting days got its ass kicked twice by a single cube, but now the mothballed Franken-D can take on a mega-cube completely unscathed? Riker and Worf meet exactly two drones’ worth of resistance on the cube? Picard and Jack unplug from the collective and they’re… fine? It just feels kind of empty and unearned, and erodes the impact of Picard/Riker/Worf saying their goodbyes on the D.
All of that said, this was a great season with some fantastic character work, and it built up enough goodwill along the way that I can live with an ending that was simply okay. I’ll happily take that over Discovery’s S3/S4 approach of wagering literally everything on whether the finale lands for you. And I’ll sign whatever petition I need to sign to get Terry Matalas another 25th century Trek show.
I cannot disagree with you more about Nemesis. The whistling of B4 at the end made me believe that Data had successfully copied over to B4 and only his body was lost. It completely sold out his sacrifice.
I also strongly disagree on this point:
Spoiler
I completely believed that Riker and Worf were toast. Everything about Riker’s arc this season indicated to me he was the most likely to die.
I have a recording of my grandmother reciting a poem that I watch from time to time. The recording is of her, but it’s not her, and having it doesn’t make me miss her less.
B4 whistling at the end of Nemesis is not much different. The movie made clear, even before that scene, that Data copying himself into B4 was ultimately unsuccessful: the transfer succeeded, but it didn’t help B4 operate at a higher capacity. So when B4 started whistling it was just his defective brain randomly playing back one of Data’s memories. So while Data was in there, it wasn’t him.
Summary
When they left the D I completely believed it too. But the longer things played out on the Borg cube I realized they were going to make it.
Back to the important stuff; my predictions were pretty much spot on.
Spoiler
Swap the saucer section for the Titan (I completely overlooked there still being non-Borg crew on it), and the fact that they lied to us about someone definitely dying (a huge cop out, I agree), it basically went down as predicted.
I’ll leave that up to you if it is a good or a bad thing that we could see it coming.
I am not any part of this thread, and it might as well be written in Russian or in another impossible language.
Waldo’s quote above did speak to me, however. I have the last voice message my 8-years deceased best friend Dan left for me saying “DR here…thinking of an afternoon beer.” The recording is so Dan, and it certainly is of him but is not him. I miss him more when I listen to it.
By the way, Russian isn’t impossible, it’s just a pain in the zhopa. You want a language where you have to change the ending of every noun and modifying adjective(s) (by gender and number) depending on what they’re doing in the sentence? You got it. You want a language that has two different and sometimes totally unrelated verbs for each conceivable action that you use depending on how often that action is taking place? You got it. The good news is sentence structure goes right out the window like an enemy of Putin. You can arrange a sentence any way you damn well please. Put the subject at the end, live a little!
I’ve heard the Russian sentence structure is a free for all.
Korean has two number systems, one based on Chinese and one that is completely local and they’re used for different things. Telling time uses them both at the same fucking time. The Korean numbers for hours and Chinese for minutes. Luckily when I fuck it up (pretty much guaranteed) people get it but it’s still insane.
I’ve read that Korean is one of the most demanding languages for a non native speaker because unlike many other languages, you have to get extremely close for people to have any idea what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about Korean so I don’t know why that’s the case, but if you think about the horrible English people will hit you with from time to time, you can always figure out what people are trying to say. Apparently it’s not like that in Korean.
Before studying in Russia we were warned that if we fucked up the aforementioned cases people would literally have no idea what we were trying to say, they could not and would not sort of extrapolate. That wasn’t universally true, but true enough.
The shitty thing about Korean is how amazing the alphabet is and how easy it is to learn but the grammar is ridiculous. The shape of the vowels correspond to the shape of your tongue when you say them. How cool is that? But the Seoul dialect basically demands near perfect pronunciation. Some of the other dialects are rougher so I always do better in those areas. In Seoul I have to really concentrate on pronunciation which takes brainpower away from grammar.