The TV and Streaming Thread: Pilot Week

[uuuhhii]

the boys s03

so many character get their own story line are interesting to watch

but at episode 3 it become obviously time consuming

this season may rush to a unsatisfying ending like before

[Keyrock]

I keep hoping a blu-ray set of DS9 surfaces some day, but that's probably a pipe dream. I remember hearing that for some reason even a 1080p version of DS9 might not be possible. Is the original source gone?

Edited June 3, 2022 by Keyrock

[Gfted1]

We get Netflix included as standard with our T-Mobile cellular contract, Paramount+ is included with Prime and Pea**** is included with Xfinity. But I still pay extra for Disney+ and HBO Max. I cant remember how I have Hulu.

[Bartimaeus]

10 minutes ago, Keyrock said:

I keep hoping for blu-ray set of DS9 surfaces some day, but that's probably a pipe dream. I remember hearing that for some reason even a 1080p version of DS9 might not be possible. Is the original source gone?

IIRC, TNG was very expensive to get on BD because they had to re-do all of the special effects, since all of them were originally made only for SD. And apparently sales of the BDs were pretty poor relative to the expense, so they basically said "welp that's the last time we ever do that". Seems extremely unlikely they'll ever do it for the others.

Edited June 3, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[ShadySands]

I think there were some fan projects to upscale the whole show (and maybe Voyager too) but I don't know if that ever went anywhere and I'm not sure it can go anywhere since they'd be unable to distribute it. Would Paramount be willing to sell fan made content? Would they prefer your sub instead? I know absolutely nothing about this stuff.

a link to the past for reference

 

Edited June 3, 2022 by ShadySands

[Amentep]

43 minutes ago, Keyrock said:

I keep hoping a blu-ray set of DS9 surfaces some day, but that's probably a pipe dream. I remember hearing that for some reason even a 1080p version of DS9 might not be possible. Is the original source gone?

My understanding is that the elements don't exist because DS9 wasn't shot the old way TNG was.  So it's possible but would be more expensive than TNG, which as Bartimaeus points out was already expensive.

That said I suspect it will happen at some point, if nothing else so they can stream it in HD and make it a selling point for P+

[Bartimaeus]

46 minutes ago, ShadySands said:

I think there were some fan projects to upscale the whole show (and maybe Voyager too) but I don't know if that ever went anywhere and I'm not sure it can go anywhere since they'd be unable to distribute it. Would Paramount be willing to sell fan made content? Would they prefer your sub instead? I know absolutely nothing about this stuff.

With fan-done [film scans/games/other types of projects], usually the key is to keep quiet about until you're actually ready to distribute it online, and then just...do it. Then it's out there and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. The classic mistake a lot of such projects seem to make is announcing it before it's actually done, and then the project mysteriously disappear overnight halfway through it being done after the person(s) heading the project gets a cease and desist or some other type of legal correspondence that scares them into dropping the project immediately. There's, of course, loads of reasons to announce such projects - community excitement/anticipation, monetary support, community outreach for rare resources (e.g. obtaining specific film reels), getting into contact with those who have technical know-how in specialized areas needed to make the project the best it can be...and so on, but unless you're being very careful and making sure none of it can be traced back to you, you're really opening yourself up to a lot of legal scrutiny...on top of potentially wasting literal years of your hard sweat and tears for it to all come to naught.

There's also the possible technical hurdles involved as well, as Amentep mentioned. I don't think any of those Original!Trek shows were shot digitally (early to mid 90s, right?), so at least there's that - if they were, there's no hope of ever seeing them in HD.

Edited June 3, 2022 by Bartimaeus
momentary -> monetary

[majestic]

11 hours ago, Amentep said:

Seriously though, I was expecting a real train wreck, but it wasn't really that.

I think it was, and the base point is simply because it ties in to nuTrek. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, Picard lost me directly after the opening scene because it was a load of horse manure, and it only went downhill from there. The first episode wasn't over, and any goodwill I might have mustered because it has Patrick Stewart in it all but evaporated. Not only does it follow the nonsense established in Star Trek 2009, it tried to remake Star Trek's Federation into Trump's America because someone probably told them that Star Trek used to be brainy entertainment, not terribly acted and directed character drama with bad writing and stupid action scenes.

Ultimately, nothing good can follow from such a rotten basis, and in the end all I did was nitpick everything about the show, much like @Bartimaeus talked about in the earlier post here. I should have the good sense to just stop watching in any such cases, but I don't.

11 hours ago, Amentep said:

Definitely some of the same structural problems that Discovery has; I can only assume the writers rooms are struggling to come to terms with long form episodic television.  And it wasn't boring which is about the only problem I can't forgive in a movie or TV show.

Granted, that's a point I can give you. Star Trek Picard sure was never boring. I wish it would have been, then we'd just have a lower end episode of Star Trek: TNG or one of the lower end episodes of TOS. Alas, it was worse, it was infuriating from start to finish, poorly plotted, terribly paced, and - the worst offense - utterly stupid. I don't entirely know why, but it is what it is: If things don't make sense within an established universe, for me, at least, everything falls apart.

I've already said after the first few episodes that Discovery suffered from being tied to the brand name, and Picard does so as well, although of course you can't have Picard without Star Trek, so that's entirely moot. Back then I couldn't have known that the first season of Discovery would end up being its best, and that the show will continue on to be terrible in every which way.

11 hours ago, Amentep said:

I just got through watching all of TNG, the series that conveniently has Data relearn the exact same thing about humans a few times; that has Picard endanger himself and his ship just to communicate with an alien for the first time; who has experienced another lifetime and become more spiritual, who Q challenges to represent the best of humanity....and who also wants to let a planet die because of a whack interpretation of the Prime Directive; where Worf manages to be totally security minded and yet he also keeps his position as head of security despite being quite possibly the least effective member of the crew with just about everyone waltzing in and out of the Enterprise (and not all of them had superior tech); where the ship's counselor often blatantly disregards obvious signs of people in psychological trouble or gives specious (and perhaps dangerous) advice and also has to take bridge crew training despite being part of the bridge crew for a plot point that goes nowhere.  Out of character is kind of their brand.

You curiously forgot to mention an uppity kid saving the ship ten times over which is about a hundred times more annoying than Worf being bad at his job to demonstrate to the audience how dangerous a situation is, or the writers not really knowing what to do with Deanna other than putting her in revealing clothing. The fact that these points don't bother me speaks to a the strength of the series, even with it's less than stellar (nicely put) opening seasons.

Not that it's fair to compare a show that has 178 episodes to one that hopefully won't exceed 30, but who knows how long this will keep on going. Although Patrick Stewart sure looks like he's ready to call it quits. The thing is, even if you just take the first season of TNG, with it's Wesley focused offerings born out of the writing strike or the episodes with the laughably terrible racist subtones, it's still better than anything in Star Trek: Picard.

Troi undergoes command training for a promotion, by the way. Just to nitpick a little. That's why she needs to learn the important lesson of being able to send people to death if it saves others.

Still, even if we accept the point that TNG had lots of out of character moments, the characters, on average, where somewhat consistent. The Picard characters barely resemble their originals, and yes, while people change, if you want me to accept that change, then it needs to be shown, or at least properly explained. Picard having a sad because the Federation does something the Federation would never in a million years actually do, namely abandon people in need over political quibbling, well, I'm sorry, that might be an explanation, but it is a poor one, and you can't expect me not to be soured on the entire premise just because of it. In particular this one is even worse, because in itself it is based on Jar Jar Abram's utterly stupid idea that the Romulan Empire would be incapable of evacuating Romulus on their own or notice that their sun will go supernova, which just happens to be a stellar event millions of years in the making. It would be a stretch to accept that premise in the dumbest of sci-fi shlock, but there it would be at least appropriate.

If Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog can show the proper transformation of Billy from a goofy but entirely misunderstood 'villain' to Dr. Horrible, member of the Evil Leage of Evil in 45 minutes of runtime in a garage project because everyone invovled was bored out of their minds during another writers strike, then for crying out loud, at least do something to justify the god damned premise. Something that's not basically screaming 'WE WANT TO BE RELEVANT TO CURRENT EVENTS SEE HOW INTELLIGENT OUR ENTERTAINMENT IS' in the dumbest way possible.

Much like The Last Jedi wanted to yell WE DON'T CARE ABOUT STAR WARS as loudly as possible. Well, mission accomplished.

11 hours ago, Amentep said:

Moreover, I understand where they're coming from within the context of the show (whether they justify how they got there is another thing entirely).  The characters are all 'lost' in a way.  Each of the characters have trusted someone or something and had that trust violated (Picard and Starfleet, Rafi and Picard, Rios and his Captain/Starfleet, Soji and her first romance, Jurati and Oh, Elinor and Picard, Seven and that lady on the Star Wars planet).  So it makes sense that Picard at the start of the show isn't the Picard from "All Good Things..." or "Nemesis".  And it makes sense why this group is the one that gets together thematically (and why Laris and her husband don't make sense to join Picard).

So do I. The themes are there, they're just built on a foundation so rotten that I just don't care what they were trying to do. It's funny because this discussion is a reverse of what I sometimes do, most recently when talking about either Bubble with @Lexx or about In This Corner Of The World with @Bartimaeus.

Rafi should not even be a problem in the Star Trek setting, at least not when she's a Federation citizen. We've left that sort of stuff long behind us. That may or may not be a constraint in the setting for the writers, but it's not one that's hard to work around. There's a reason for all those forehead aliens in the Star Trek universe. None of these people should get any sort of command spot like they do in season two, by the way, minor spoiler, sorry. They should be locked away for being dangerous nutjobs, much like Janeway, but we're not complaining about Voyager here.

I don't even want to talk about Space Legolas.

11 hours ago, Amentep said:

As an aside, I don't think they were dumping the Borg to necessarily kill them (although it would, probably, kill most of the xBs) but to delay the return to operation of the Borg Cube.  Unless I missed a bit of dialogue where they specifically said they were terminating them (and of course, we don't know if the Romulans put in a fail safe that would ensure if the stasis pods were blown the Borg would be killed, so I guess even then, we just don't have enough information because they spent 100000% of the time on the borg cube with the sappy Soji/Romulan-dude romance).

Nothing about the Borg plot makes sense, so I don't really blame you there. It's an entirely superflous element in a series that already has an issue with tying plot points together in a timely and satisfying manner, and nobody on the writing team and nobody of the producers or editors or whatever else were on set checking what is going on had the good sense to tell them to streamline the storyline into something that's at least not resolved in a serioulsy dumb way in the last second, and what do you know, because it was so great, they get to do exactly that in season two as well.

11 hours ago, Amentep said:

Without these thematic elements satisfied, the team's 'return to adventure' scene doesn't feel earned, really. So don't get me wrong, I think the end is a mess.  I totally get why people would dislike it.  But I think at an entertainment level, its fine; but not everyone is going to be able to just ignore such problems.

Heh. In season two everyone is working again. They sure earned being back in Star Fleet. Hey, even Space Legolas gets to be in Starfleet because he joined the 1.5 year short course.

Oh, by the way, want to guess how relevant Rafi's open issue with her son is to anything? You're allowed one guess with no lifelines.

9 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I guess it's kind of like what Jay from RLM said: if you liked it, you liked it and the little stuff often doesn't really end up mattering too much (but also, the inverse is true as well if you didn't like it). There are some things that are wrong with a 90s animated show called Escaflowne that @majesticand I watched semi-recently that would bother me/us in a different series, that I would gladly nitpick to death almost anywhere else...but the thing is, I super enjoyed that show because of other stuff and so almost everything I could nitpick melted and washed away like so much sea foam.

That's putting it mildly, I thought I was going crazy after the first four episodes because I didn't just not hate it, I actually enjoyed watching The Vision of Escaflowne even though Van starts out as the worst sort of dork possible and it has cat girls.  

The example from Jay is funny because unless I remember wrong, he said that during their Skyfall review, a movie I hated so much I wanted to throw the Blu Ray into the trash. At least I stopped wasting money on theater tickets after A Quantum of Solace, a dumpster fire of a film that rivals Star Trek: Into Derpness.

But yeah, it is definitely easier to overlook the less well made parts if the rest is good enough. However, as is the case with pretty much all of nuTrek except for Strange New Worlds (caveat, I haven't watched the most recent episode yet, but it is called Spock Amok, which makes me hate the episode even before watching it, so that one's working from a whole lot of baggage just from the title alone), and Strange New World is only fine for now, and I'm sure if it keeps sticking to the formula of having to have at least 5 minutes of AWESOME COMBAT AKSHUN per episode, I'm eventually going to grow bored of it, and from that, the resentment I harbored for the first episode will creep back in.

Regarding nuTrek, it might seem completely silly, but back in 2009 directly after Spock's opening narration, I was sitting in the theater, and looked at the friend I was watching the film with and said: "I already hate this." That was just right after the first two or so minutes, and the rest of the film did nothing to change my mind. It didn't even try.

9 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

At least for me, there are a lot of things that really feel like they matter a lot but...other shows that I like or even love that do similar things kind of prove that they sometimes don't, not really*. A lot of such issues actually almost seem more like a misdirection of negative feelings - just a symptom of the larger overall problem of a show/movie straight up not working for a pile of different reasons that we, as non-film critics, may have trouble precisely identifying and putting into words. It's a heck of a lot easier to just focus on the things that are clearly and obviously wrong to me...but really, if a show or movie didn't grab my brain, it just didn't.

Pretty much. The easiest thing to point out is writing quality from a standpoint that is almost objectively measurable, when character motivations make no sense, plots are left open or resolved in poor, unsatisfying manners, then that's somewhat easy to point out. Even so, and this goes hand in hand with the above points made by @Amentep, TNG had its fair share of bad writing and episodes that did not truly make sense or repeated plot points that came before, or tried to ape the original series for no reason and ended up not working. These episode are, however, weighed against the average quality of the episodes, and that comes out positive for the show.

It doesn't for something like Picard, arguably of course also because once a bad TNG episode it is over, it is over. The rotten foundation Picard is built on doesn't go away after an episode. It permeates everything. The actual nitpicking then follows as an extention of being unsatisfied with the series. There's a rushed plot resolution for Allen in The Vision of Escaflowne as well, and the ending could have done with more of a setup, but the series was cut down a third of its runtime. Still, it ended up not mattering too much. Picard on the other hand had this abortive Borg plot, and here I am complaining about it.

Discovery worked in a similar way for me to a point where I started complaining every time the writers thought it was a good idea to give distances and they were hilariously inaccurate. Like putting a Klingon fleet at the Federation's doorstep and being close to winning the war, with coordinates somewhere in the Oort cloud. That's the Federation's back yard and the Soviets are storming Berlin. Steiner ain't going to stop that no matter what.

Guess someone told them to not always just use light years for some reason, and so they started using astronomical units and got that wrong too. Yay.

Forum almost killed my post. Yay!

Edited June 3, 2022 by majestic

[InsaneCommander]

16 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

The battle was end of S2 though, that much I do remember.

But the battle was not in the last episodes, right? I don't remember if there should have been time to deal with the consequences and how the crew felt about it. Maybe one or two episodes, at least. The last one not counting due to what was going on, of course.

[Bartimaeus]

40 minutes ago, majestic said:

told them that Star Trek used to be brainy entertainment, not terribly acted and directed character drama with bad writing and stupid action scenes

Something that I think that goes kind of unsaid for a lot of older shows is that...due to the usually not particularly good (relative to modern stuff) production values/filming techniques/action/acting/special effects and so on, that even when a show is bad, it's usually not terribly offensive to the senses. I've watched a bit of TNG, and while I'm by no means a fan, I can sit down and watch an episode and like...not want to blow my brains out while watching it, you know? There aren't special effects dominating every inch of the screen with a bazillion particle effects flying around the screen that make me just about have a seizure, there aren't a whole bunch of (fraudulently) EMOTIONAL scenes that make me want to curl up and die because they clearly don't work with these characters, no "high octane" action scenes with characters doing amazing (ridiculous) stunts and manuevers, no shaky camera or other annoying modern crap of that nature, no episode plots that you really have to care about for more than a single episode or two... I don't know, I feel like a lot of modern shows make a habit of asking too much of my brain and it can be really overwhelming when it's all combined together, especially if I'm not enjoying the show right off the bat - it gets to be intolerable so very quickly. Those original Trek shows aren't a constant assault on my senses like I feel so many other present day shows can be, and that makes them still at least watchable even when individual episodes are pretty bad in other areas.

Maybe that's just the ancient "they don't make them like they used to" part of my brain talking, even though I'm probably younger than most people who frequently post in OT here.

Edited June 3, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[InsaneCommander]

The Boys 3.1 to 3.3

Well, this was basically a sequence of WTF moments. Not that there is no story in it.

I couldn't watch it all in one go, so I may have lost track of the body count.

Their version of the Avengers, omg.

 

Spoiler

What a disaster in Nicaragua! Gunpowder shooting EVERYONE, including the American soldiers, their allies AND the CIA agent in charge. WTF man!? Swatto (!?) shooting into the sky for no reason... Good riddance! Black Noir never again considering not wearing a mask. Totally understandable.

Where the hell is Edgar now? So nice when he needed Starlight, but no sign of him later. Maybe he can only control Homelander because he doesn't show up when things are going well? So Homelander accepts the criticism and lack of respect when he feels like he is wrong?

Some people say Ryan is the safeguard against Homelander, but it must be head popper.

 

[Zoraptor]

2 hours ago, InsaneCommander said:

But the battle was not in the last episodes, right? I don't remember if there should have been time to deal with the consequences and how the crew felt about it. Maybe one or two episodes, at least. The last one not counting due to what was going on, of course.

Yeah, you're right. The actual finale was... something to do with time travel? or alternative universes? and had the old security officer back from Prodigal Son as a guest star.

After 3 years you'd think they could have at least had the other two seasons streaming for catch up/ reminder purposes.

[InsaneCommander]

5 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

Yeah, you're right. The actual finale was... something to do with time travel? or alternative universes? and had the old security officer back from Prodigal Son as a guest star.

After 3 years you'd think they could have at least had the other two seasons streaming for catch up/ reminder purposes.

Yes. The last episode was in the alternate timeline.

[ShadySands]

Just watched the Orville new season and I really enjoyed it. It took it's time without feeling indulgent and wasn't crammed with side plots.

Was also really surprised that there was no recap since it's been so long.

Edited June 4, 2022 by ShadySands

[kirottu]

6 hours ago, majestic said:

In particular this one is even worse, because in itself it is based on Jar Jar Abram's utterly stupid idea that the Romulan Empire would be incapable of evacuating Romulus on their own or notice that their sun will go supernova, which just happens to be a stellar event millions of years in the making. It would be a stretch to accept that premise in the dumbest of sci-fi shlock, but there it would be at least appropriate.

I don't know if Star Trek Online is canon or not, but according to STO Romulan sun going supernova wasn't a natural event. 

Spoiler

It was the Iconians getting revenge for something Empress Sela did, who only did it, because Iconians destroyed Romulus. Time travel shenanigans.

 

[ShadySands]

It's not canon, thankfully. It was just the game trying to make sense of the movie.

[Amentep]

Majestic, you make plenty of fine points about Picard, as I said I understand why people hated it.

Re: the Federation as Trumps America in Picard, all I can say is that nobody past Roddenberry has seemed to want to work in the better tomorrow he created. The Federation as Roddenberry envisioned it would have never had the Maquis exist within it,  much less be a major faction. So that bugbear is a something I've had to live with, but it grates (and should for ST fans). But I've begrudgingly accepted that fact that is where the series is so Picard didn't bother me in that respect as it just furthers this discontinuity with TOS.

7 hours ago, majestic said:

Troi undergoes command training for a promotion, by the way. Just to nitpick a little. That's why she needs to learn the important lesson of being able to send people to death if it saves others.

My problem with this episode is somewhat rooted in my feelings that Troi didn't work as a character as conceived because TOS had already established counseling as a part of Life Sciences, so there's no reason for her character to exist outside of the normal command structure. 

But for Troi to take bridge officer training in season 7 means that I have to believe that Starfleet knowingly gave her an equivalent rank in Starfleet that could put her in command of the ship (as happened in Season 5's episode 'Disaster') without offering her any training to be in command of the ship.

And since they'd established that she wasn't a part of the normal structure (hence the equivalent rank rather than a real rank) unlike TOS, it further makes no sense she'd be eligible to take bridge training for a promotion since she wasn't an actual member of the crew in a structural sense.

[majestic]

1 hour ago, kirottu said:

I don't know if Star Trek Online is canon or not, but according to STO Romulan sun going supernova wasn't a natural event. 

  Reveal hidden contents

It was the Iconians getting revenge for something Empress Sela did, who only did it, because Iconians destroyed Romulus. Time travel shenanigans.

 

Yeah, that doesn't really explain how Spock can try to save everyone with his red matter. If there's enough time for him to come and try save Romulus, then there's enough time to prepare exit strategies as well. Jar Jar just doesn't care about minutiae like that, so in addition to the premise not making a whole lot of sense, we also get a villain who has the hardest hitting, most advanced ship in the quadrant at the time, and he just patiently waits 20+ years for Spock to come through a time portal to take his vengeance, instead of heading back to his people and make sure they conquer the galaxy - or at the very least prevent the supernova in some fashion.

Then the film continues to have plasma blast drills that hang perfectly perpendicular to the surface in relative weightlessness even though they emit a stream capable of drilling a hole through the crust of a planet and creating stable tunnles down to the core. Never mind the red matter and how it even works, and yes, that's exactly the sort of nonsense that would not bother me if the film wasn't basically a stupid action film set in the 'Trek verse.

Inversely, I know people had similar problems with First Contact, however while First Contact began with the stupid idea that Picard would be of no use in a fight against the Borg and they send the presumably most powerful Federation starship off on patrol instead of temporarily relieving him of command, the rest of the film was fine enough, and in a way the events of the film justify him not being in command of the battle group facing the cube. 

And, eh, unlike Star Trek: Picard's second season, it references a clearly established traumatic event in Picard's life to justify some rather dark moments, like him killing half-assimilated crewmembers.

The film has some other problems, but overall, they don't matter as much for me as the issues of Generations, Insurrection and later Nemesis, all of which were much worse films. Insurrection in particular, what the hell Admiral Dougherty. Well, but the track record of Star Trek's film offerings is spotty at best.

40 minutes ago, Amentep said:

Re: the Federation as Trumps America in Picard, all I can say is that nobody past Roddenberry has seemed to want to work in the better tomorrow he created. The Federation as Roddenberry envisioned it would have never had the Maquis exist within it,  much less be a major faction. So that bugbear is a something I've had to live with, but it grates (and should for ST fans). But I've begrudgingly accepted that fact that is where the series is so Picard didn't bother me in that respect as it just furthers this discontinuity with TOS.

There's a big difference here, especially with the Maquis. The colonies forming the Maquis simply aren't a part of the Federation any more after the treaty with the Cardassians, as such it's much easier to justify, and the Starfleet personnel supporting or joining them are individuals, not the entire organisation. One also can't help but notice that you really did not follow DS9 much, because there's much worse than the Maquis going on in DS9.

Federation officers condoning an assassination, the Federation having a secret intelligence wing that's arguably on par with the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order in efficiency and ruthlessness (by the way, if you keep watching Enterprise, a part of that won't make sense without the frame of reference from DS9) and one of the crew members going off on a Klingon vengeance quest. However, all of that is presented in a way you can accept the drift from the ideals, in particular because the setting and story background of DS9 is kind of unprecedented.

The characters are strong, the acting and direction in generally is good, even if Avery Brooks is hilariously hammy at times and it is simply much easier to accept him taking a shortcut after watching the events unfold over several seasons. Rather than just saying "Hey Romulan refugees that aren't an issue in this kind of setting at all cause the Federation's ideals to collapse in on itself, just because we said so"!.

Granted, Section 31 is a tough cookie, but there we are again with the actual argument brought forth - DS9 is strong enough to be able to withstand such an element, and the episodes with Section 31 are tightly plotted and interesting, so it is much easier to forgive.

1 hour ago, Amentep said:

But for Troi to take bridge officer training in season 7 means that I have to believe that Starfleet knowingly gave her an equivalent rank in Starfleet that could put her in command of the ship (as happened in Season 5's episode 'Disaster') without offering her any training to be in command of the ship.

I've always assumed that Starfleet Academy gives cadets broad training in every branch and you simply pick a specialisation at some point, in the same way medical school shares a base course with veterinary medicine (well, it does so here, at least) and just branches off before further specialization. Troi was a staff officer who found herself to be the ranking officer during an emergency that saw a complete lack of line officer guidance, and proceeded to eventually take the education necessary to move to said occupation.

Well, and to be promoted to a higher rank.

Trek's always been a little unclear with how the command structure works, so there's... well... enough leeway. It's not the best setup, but Troi's promotion was a decent follow up to her inability to cut losses and leave during Disaster, which realistically was a nonsense decision and could have killed everyone if the plot hadn't decided to do otherwise.

1 hour ago, Amentep said:

And since they'd established that she wasn't a part of the normal structure (hence the equivalent rank rather than a real rank) unlike TOS, it further makes no sense she'd be eligible to take bridge training for a promotion since she wasn't an actual member of the crew in a structural sense.

I'm guessing there are way to change between branches and apparently it's possible to take courses like Troi did, however, you're right. It wasn't handled that well, much like a lot of things in season seven. She should have gone through a lot more training than that, really. It clearly detracts from the episode in question. But, again, given TNG's other strenghts, it's less problematic and therefore no real reason to nitpick it to death.

Which goes back to @Bartimaeus' post on the subject.

[Hiro Protagonist]

Raised by Wolves cancelled.

https://deadline.com/2022/06/raised-by-wolves-canceled-hbo-max-two-seasons-1235038081/

[Lexx]

Wait, there is a 2nd season? I didn't even know.

[Amentep]

1 hour ago, majestic said:

There's a big difference here, especially with the Maquis. The colonies forming the Maquis simply aren't a part of the Federation any more after the treaty with the Cardassians, as such it's much easier to justify, and the Starfleet personnel supporting or joining them are individuals, not the entire organisation

In TOS, the people of the Federation had eliminated the darker side of humanity (I can't remember the exact quote, but after the Eugenics war humanity had pulled together eliminated materialism etc)

TNG would have me believe that the people of the Federation would want to settle planets that were part of the Cardassian empire (why?) and that after doing so they wouldn't want to give them up. That doesn't sound like members of a better society that no longer is materialistic and driven by their baser wants.

The maquis stuff is very much using the Federation to talk about Earth in the 1990s, not about the future Roddenberry envisioned. 

[majestic]

1 hour ago, Amentep said:

TNG would have me believe that the people of the Federation would want to settle planets that were part of the Cardassian empire (why?) and that after doing so they wouldn't want to give them up. That doesn't sound like members of a better society that no longer is materialistic and driven by their baser wants.

Those were Federation colonies awarded to Cardassia. Territorial concessions to end the war. Hence them staying under Cardassian jurdisdiction, which even in TNG is implied to be a little on the arse side of things.

1 hour ago, Amentep said:

The maquis stuff is very much using the Federation to talk about Earth in the 1990s, not about the future Roddenberry envisioned. 

The Klingons were a Soviet stand-in TOS and The Undiscovered Country about the fall of the Soviet Union. Reflecting real life events or issues isn't wrong for Star Trek at all, it's a good thing, as long as it's not as badly handled as it is in Picard.

The difference is that in The Undiscovered Country, a group of people not capable of letting go of their grudges on both sides conspire to spark conflict, and our heroes are trying to prevent a devastating war. If the Undiscovered Country was set in Star Trek Picard's setting, there'd be a group of heros fighting against the Federation's idea of letting the Klingons die because they all suck and like 2% of their member nations threw a hissy fit about maybe helping them.

The difference with the Maquis being that the Federation would give up territory for peace because there's enough territory in space for everyone, just a stubborn group of people not wanting to leave and then being unhappy with how they're governed. The real meat of the story and ideas are then shifted to the Bajorans later in TNG and in DS9 anyway. Star Trek Picard's Federation would run supplies and weaponry to the Maquis to keep the Cardassians off-balance.

See the... difference? Yes, more modern Star Trek played with the edges of Gene Roddenberry's vision, poushed it to its limits and maybe even saw it break once or twice (Paradise Lost two parter in DS9) but it never fully crapped on it the way Alex Kurtzman did.

[Amentep]

The Klingons weren't in the Federation when they were a stand-in for Russia, though.  Non Federation worlds are fair game to have the failings of modern man.

And I still disagree that the Federation would colonize worlds in dispute enough to lose, and I dispute that Federation people who'd been freed from want would be so possessive of material things not to be willing to move even if the first part had happened.

[Hiro Protagonist]

On 6/3/2022 at 3:53 AM, majestic said:

Then there's also the little detail that the series tried hard not to be all about fanservice, but what fanservice does happen is even more ridiculous than the one in Rogue One. 

I'm not sure what you mean by tried hard not to be all about fanservice. I found it had tonnes of fan service in it as I read all the 80s stuff and a lot of the 90s books. I found it was too much fan service with tonnes of easter eggs from the original / expanded universe. It felt like they were trying to please the old fans from the backlash they had over the sequel trilogy, imo.

[uuuhhii]

finished the leftover season 1

ep2 make a lot more sense after the final episode

violence against cult are very cathartic and sad