Got caught up on Ashoka last night. It’s pretty good. Not Mandalorian or Andor good but pretty good nonetheless.
Ray Stevenson is excellent. And will be a great loss to the series. Ariana Greenblatt is very good as a young Ashoka. Natasha Liu and Rosario Dawson are competent if not unspectacular. Because I never watched any Clone Wars stuff, the story is a little laborious at the start but is picking up.
I finally finished Picard.
Some thoughts, by season.
Very well written/filmed/acted. Stewart was so good, often at times when Picard’s words failed him and he could only convey his message with an expression.
As for plot, the story was engaging. But like many, many stories setting up a good premise and bringing it home satisfactorily can be difficult. It all came to a thud in the last 1.5 episodes.
Spaceship eating petunias? A hippie colony of synthetics (complete with costumes straight out of TNG oe even TOS)? Picard has a fatal disease, makes a heroic sacrifice and dies just kidding here’s a synthetic body that looks just like his real one and will age and die so we’re not making him immortal because come on that’s just not realistic now is it?
The scenes with data were touching. As someone else noted not necessary to drive the plot but art for art’s sake is ok.
What the fuck was any of that about?
I found Jurati annoying in S1, very irritating in S2, and completely ludicrous in the big reveal after they return to the timeline.
They wrote Rios out to make room for the old crew in S3, which is too bad.
And Q? What a waste of a character and actor. His motivations were clear as mud. Time travel crap is tricky to pull off and it’s still not clear why any of it matters here. But they gave him a noble death. Or did they …
We’re getting the band back together. The call backs to Wrath early on were nice (shakedown cruise, inspection, reunited with former lover, long lost son, formidible enemy, countdown to a deadline, hide in a nebula).
Picard and Jack delivered the goods all season. Worf had great lines. Geordi was really thick headed but of course he got over it.
Similar to S1 bringing it all home wasn’t quite there. Big reveal, this is what we’re really up against, life in the galaxy is about to end Jack likes being plugged in oh here’s some dialog and now he doesn’t boom goes the borg all is well our youngsters are back to normal we’ll just transport that birg stuff out of their genomes.
They spent so much time with Vadic (a worthy villain) there was no time for the mastermind.
No matter since the season was really about sending off the Enterprise D crew. And they did that very nicely.
Loose ends:
Rafi: I found her not that great a character
Shaw: they killed another new, interesting character
Q: “don’t think so linearly” = we can make shit up as we see fit (WHAT THE FUCK WAS SEASON 2 ABOUT!?!?)
And the unintended take home message from all 3 seasons:
Star Fleet is a dysfunctional, dangerous mess. From the beginning there’s been the Ideal Star Fleet and the Actual Star Fleet, but this series has SF as a corrupt, inept, vulnerable institution that was infiltrated twice into the upper echelons in 3 seasons. So add it to the list of dead characters. I’m sure they’ll resurrect it though.
I liked it.
It’s best just to think that Season 2 didn’t happen, both in the Star Trek universe and in our own.
One of my favorite Star Trek headcanons (which I enjoy thinking about but don’t necessarily subscribe to) goes something like this:
Starfleet is a Mickey Mouse organization, and Jean-Luc Picard is the poster child for the kind of dysfunction Starfleet is capable of. Picard is an upwardly-failing officer who gains prestige with each hull loss on his watch, and his Enterprise-D crew is largely a band of misfits that keeps getting into outrageous situations due to either their sheer incompetence or their Galaxy-class ship being a liability clusterfuck of Ford Pinto proportions. Miles O’Brien was so desperate to get away from all of it that he took a posting on a broken-down, vole-infested Cardassian space station orbiting a backwater planet at the ass-end of the quadrant full of candyass religious nutcases.
Starfleet for the most part looked the other way when Picard and his crew would find themselves in some real Star Trek shit, which happened disturbingly often. But when an anonymous crew member filed an HR complaint about the cleavage-showing uniforms that Picard made Deanna Troi wear, even the feckless Starfleet knew that the situation on the Enterprise had become so toxic that they would have to intervene. So they sent Picard to his certain death on a covert mission and replaced him with Edward Jellico, who immediately brought order and discipline to Picard’s crew. But Jellico, being eminently and independently competent, rescued Picard, who pulled enough political levers to oust Jellico and regain command of the Enterprise-D, and immediately rolled back all of the technical and procedural improvements that were implemented under Jellico’s tenure.
All the story beats are right there in canon when you think about it. You just have to hold the rabbit ears a certain way to end up at this interpretation.
Have you tried sending this in to Lower Decks?
Do you want me to be drawn and quartered for blasphemy?
I caught an advance showing last night. Really, really, really liked it. Such an impressive visual spectacle. Really strong performance from JDW and the kid is phenomenal. One absolutely perfect moment about 3/4 of the way with Allison Janney that I won’t spoil. Perfect movie, no, it’s got a couple head scratchers and it’s a little rough around the edges. But man it’s good.
Saw it yesterday in theater (rare now) with youngest son (both of us hold Rogue one in high regard) and we agree that the creator is complete garbage. Great visuals. Terrible, nonesensical plot so bad it must have been made by a team of humans. Turn it off.
Considering its early box office returns it looks like more folks are in your camp than mine.
you are not wrong about great moments. The one you allude to with allison janey is a great moment–but the movie seemed to be hellbent on great moments without them emerging from the story.
Just saw wes anderson’s asteroid city. I think it’s his masterpiece. But i wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t like wes anderson movies already.
All the same i am even more grateful for rogue one–which did a lot to preserve my star wars fandom. I think the director has a lot of great movies in him yet and will likely watch everything he does in the theater opening week.
At a bit of a loss at the end of the Ahsoka finale. Cliffhangers are one thing; giant, dangling loose threads are another.
I wasn’t a fan of the Night Troopers living down to the old inept stormtrooper trope.
Why are we supposed to be scared of Thrawn again?
As great as Filoni has been, I’ve never thought that he really “got” Thrawn. He’s more generic Big Bad than tactical/strategic genius with a morally grey area.
I’m not upset at how the first season ended, but the number of question marks left out there is pretty gigantic.
I just hope isn’t 3 years before Season Two comes out.
For those of us not familiar with Rebels, he was introduced like he was Palpatine trying somehow to return. The man definitely did not live up to the hype.
Part of this is that, just like Ahsoka (the character) is Filoni’s baby, Thrawn is Timothy Zahn’s baby. He was a highlight of the Heir to the Empire books that basically reignited SW. I highly recommend the (canon) Thrawn Trilogy and Thrawn Ascendancy trilogies by Zahn.
That leads to the second problem - he’s a difficult character to translate to screen. He’s pretty much Sherlock Holmes, Space Admiral. He will notice every little detail and use them to make you look like a tactical and strategic idiot. But those are threads that take a long time to spool out.
Instead, it comes across as he is a dude trying to desperately maintain a fabricated prestige and use that as a springboard to actual, real power. This is not an invitation to bring politics into this thread, btw.
I have not seen the finale yet so no one spoil it for me.
Sadly, he ends up losing a bunch of court cases in the finale.
and goes to jail?
Thrawn, in Rebels, was the rare Imperial who knew what was up in just about every situation and could anticipate/plan multiple steps ahead of the action. Cold, blue-skinned red-eyed competence was his calling card.
Even more so than Tarkin, he was a genuine threat as a leader.
That’s why the remnant empire in these series want him back and why the fledgling (in-fighting) Republic is scared to death of him.