Star Trek: Picard - Season One - CBS All Access - starring Patrick Stewart (1 Viewer)

[joshEH]

I don't remember. How Picard knows

Spoiler

Seven of Nine?

Where did they meet?

Spoiler: Absolute Candor

As mentioned above, when Voyager returned from the Delta Quadrant in 2377 with a couple of Borg aboard, that of course would've been huge news across several sectors, and it's reasonable to assume that Picard -- who alone among all other captains except maybe Janeway herself has the most direct, firsthand experience with the Borg Collective -- would've made it a point to learn as much as he could about Seven (and Icheb). Perhaps even at some point personally crossing paths with her directly, especially considering there were 22 years in between "Endgame" and Star Trek: Picard.

At the very least, it's guaranteed he'd have read whatever intel was available on them, and would've been able to recognize Seven on sight (as we saw on VOY, she was instantly identified as a former Borg due to her cybernetic implants, even by newly-encountered alien races).

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Where did they meet?

They frequented the same "assimilated by the Borg" support group.

 

[TJPC]

I have seen the Pilot show for Picard and now have to decide if I break down and pay for CBS Online or not.

There is one more obvious solution you haven’t considered.
— move to Canada.

(Here comes the Canadian characteristic! I hope everyone knew I was totally joking here, and I didn’t come across as arrogant!)

 

[Sam Favate]

I have seen the Pilot show for Picard and now have to decide if I break down and pay for CBS Online or not.

If you're concerned about the cost, wait until mid-March or so, subscribe to CBS AA's $5.99 service for a month and watch all 10 episodes. At 60 cents an episode, that's a bargain.

 

[Clinton McClure]

I don't remember. How Picard knows

Spoiler

Seven of Nine?

Where did they meet?

I’m guessing they know each other by reputation.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Author Una McCormack discusses her "Star Trek: Picard" tie-in novel, The Last Best Hope

 

[Francois Caron]

I don't remember. How Picard knows

Spoiler

Seven of Nine?

Where did they meet?

I suspect that will be part of the next episode's cold opening.

The way the Romulan senator's attitude was portrayed really pissed me off. Didn't anyone pay attention to what happened to Picard over the years? He was betrayed by the Federation just like the Romulans were, and still managed to evacuate a whole lot of people from the supernova. Why did the writers maintain the narrative set by the lousy J.J. Abrams movie franchise where Romulans will just continue to hate on you in spite of your valiant attempts to help them out?

The "surprise" in the episode also pissed me off (which wasn't a surprise to me since I follow a certain individual on Twitter). What was it? Six words and 15 seconds of screen time?

 

[Nelson Au]

Maybe on Vashti they don’t have internet access because the Federation didn’t get the internet connected after the Synth attack on Mars. So the Romulan Senator wasn’t able to keep up with current events.

Though I could see why the Romulan’s in that cafe would be unhappy to see Picard show up after all this time. After his promise to return with more help and support. Though I also found it interesting that the Senator spoke of the Romulan ability and ingenuity to have found a solution to escape Romulus without the help of the Federation.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

That seems to be a legitimate issue from the Romulan point of view. They had some notice the supernova was on its way. Picard shows up, the great man who helped rid them of Shinzon and helped to bring some stability to their empire. He promises that the galaxy’s citizens backed by the Federation will rescue them. Then, at the last moment, the Federation says “nope!” By that time, it was too late for the Romulans to have saved themselves as they might have been able to if they had worked on their own from the start instead of partnering with the Federation.

It seems reasonable to me that Romulans could believe that the Federation acted in bad faith, offering a rescue plan they never intended to follow through with. The deaths of thousands of people in the Mars attack doesn’t justify allowing billions or trillions of Romulan lives that could have been saved to be lost.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I think it's a combination of the Romulans having a legitimate grievance that Picard pulled a bait and switch by making a lot of promises that he wasn't ultimately able to deliver upon, and the Romulans overestimating their own ability to have gone it alone out of pride and arrogance.

 

[joshEH]

Author Una McCormack discusses her "Star Trek: Picard" tie-in novel, The Last Best Hope

Am reading this one right now as I type this (well, not literally as I type this, but you get what I mean), and wow, it's a real barn-burner all right. Some huge events which fill in the gaps of the Romulan-supernova, as well as the attempted evacuation. Fits right in with not only the TV show itself, but also with the recent Picard: Countdown comic-series and Short Treks. McCormack's Discovery Tilly-novel last year (The Way to the Stars) was a great character-study in its own right.

The way the Romulan senator's attitude was portrayed really pissed me off. Didn't anyone pay attention to what happened to Picard over the years? He was betrayed by the Federation just like the Romulans were, and still managed to evacuate a whole lot of people from the supernova. Why did the writers maintain the narrative set by the lousy J.J. Abrams movie franchise where Romulans will just continue to hate on you in spite of your valiant attempts to help them out?

Er...that particular narrative predates the 2009 J.J. Abrams film by a couple of decades in fact, since it was a recurring theme on TNG and DS9 to one extent or another (although it should be clear to anyone watching that movie that Nero was very much insane at that point, and not responding to reason, which amplified his responses accordingly). Abrams and his screenwriters were simply picking up those worldbuilding threads from the TV shows in the movie, and Picard is developing them even further.

 

[Jason_V]

Why did the writers maintain the narrative set by the lousy J.J. Abrams movie franchise where Romulans will just continue to hate on you in spite of your valiant attempts to help them out?

Was there really any other choice? No. Everything that happened in the Prime Universe in Star Trek (2009) is canon. Everything that happened in the Countdown comics prior to the movie is canon. It would be like ignoring the entirety of Voyager because it was "lousy."

Sure, Picard tried to help but he says it himself in the episode: he let perfection (ie. saving everyone) be the enemy of the good (ie. saving some). And when he didn't get his way, he took his toys and left instead of working with what he had in the best way he could. That kind of introspection comes with age and time...both things STP is playing with as much as it can.

 

[The Obsolete Man]

Was there really any other choice? No. Everything that happened in the Prime Universe in Star Trek (2009) is canon. Everything that happened in the Countdown comics prior to the movie is canon. It would be like ignoring the entirety of Voyager because it was "lousy."

No, as usual, comics don't mean shit. If it's not onscreen, it doesn't count. I mean, those comics feature Data as Captain of the Enterprise, which obviously didn't happen according to what we've now seen onscreen.

I guess they're locked into the crap JJ set in the real universe onscreen, though.

 

[Jason_V]

No, as usual, comics don't mean shit. If it's not onscreen, it doesn't count. I mean, those comics feature Data as Captain of the Enterprise, which obviously didn't happen according to what we've now seen onscreen.

I guess they're locked into the crap JJ set in the real universe onscreen, though.

Some parts are canon, some aren't. It is the prequel to the movie, from a story by the same people who wrote the movie. It's canon, unless contradicted in the future per Robert Orci. Some, as you pointed out, have been contradicted.

On screen, we have seen Nero (Ding ding ding! Canon!). On screen, we've now seen what happens to Prime universe Romulus (Ding ding ding! Canon!). So those pieces which tie into the "crap JJ" universe are canon. Sorry, that won't ever change no matter how much people don't like it.

 

[joshEH]

I guess they're locked into the crap JJ set in the real universe onscreen, though.

I wouldn't agree with that. The Abrams movies captured the TOS characters quite well, and the plots were always written to serve the characters. The first film is about Kirk finding direction in life, and he and Spock going from adversaries to tentative friends. Nero and the plot he sets in motion are secondary, because they aren't as important to the writers as the relationships and emotions.

(Which is quite common in Abrams's work. The plotting in Alias was often ridiculous, and mainly served as a backdrop for the ongoing character-drama. Mission: Impossible III was the first movie in the series that gave Ethan Hunt an actual personality of any kind, but its plot was largely a means to the end of advancing Ethan's character-arc, and the script had so little interest in the Macguffin driving the plot that it didn't even bother to explain what it was. Star Trek Into Darkness is about Kirk learning humility and earning the captaincy that he somewhat-lucked-into during the previous film.)

And yes, there's plenty of action, but it's handled in a deeply character-focused way. When the Kelvin is blowing up, we're focused on George and Winona and their tearful goodbye. When we see Romulus destroyed by the supernova, it's a moment of significant grief and regret for Spock Prime. When the Narada is blowing up, we're focused on Nero's quiet moment of grief and surrender, with the direction deliberately parallelling his end to George Kirk's end and creating sympathy, rather than going the usual action-movie route of treating the villain's death as something cool and celebratory. No matter how big the action gets, Abrams is always focused on the people at the center of it.

So I'm amazed that some people elsewhere on the Internet often think that Abrams makes character secondary. Character is the thing he does best by a huge margin, and it's always been the clear priority of his work overall, frequently to the detriment of plot and logic. It's the success of his character-work that makes me willing to forgive the absurdities of his plotting and the excesses of his action.

Some parts are canon, some aren't. It is the prequel to the movie, from a story by the same people who wrote the movie. It's canon, unless contradicted in the future per Robert Orci. Some, as you pointed out, have been contradicted

No, nothing offscreen is canon, period. Only if something gets referenced in a filmed or animated TV episode or movie (or, now, in a webisode) does it get canonized, which has actually happened quite a few times across the franchise's history, most recently several times during the past two seasons of DSC (stuff like Number One's real name, Tilly's childhood-backstory, bridge-crew character details from the novel Desperate Hours, material from the 1984 TOS novel The Final Reflection, etc.). But not even offscreen material written by the show's creators is considered to be canon unless referenced onscreen -- this includes Gene Roddenberry's own ST:TMP novelization, Jeri Taylor's three TNG and VOY novels, and all of Roberto Orci's comics.

When Kurtzman and Orci were working on the movies, their assumption at the time was that the 2009 Countdown comics would be major secondary continuity for at least the foreseeable future (since it was considered highly unlikely at the time that any late-24th Century onscreen continuation would even happen after the box-office failure of Nemesis), but Orci, for his part, isn't working on the franchise anymore. New creators aren't bound by the assumptions of their predecessors. Jeri Taylor considered her Voyager novels to be binding, but once she left the show, her successors ignored her novels. Bryan Fuller never intended to bring Pike, Spock, and the Enterprise onto DSC, but Berg and Harberts had very different ideas when they took over that show. Gene Roddenberry insisted there could be no three-nacelled starships, but after he was gone, we got a three-nacelled future Enterprise in "All Good Things..." (And so on.)

However, even when people like me say that the Star Trek canon is the onscreen material, that doesn't mean every individual word and image, since a lot of those contradict each other. It just means that Star Trek is a franchise whose original, primary incarnation is as a TV and movie series, so its canonical works -- the shows and movies -- are onscreen, while its secondary works like novels and comics are not (although computer games and fan-films exist too, and those aren't part of the canon either, of course).

By contrast, for example, the canon of Sherlock Holmes is in print, and the various films and TV shows based on it are non-canonical. But that doesn't mean every single printed word about Sherlock Holmes is inviolable "fact," because there are a lot of words in the canonical stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself that frequently contradict each other, like the ones about where Watson's war-wound is located, and what his first name is.

Canon is not the granular details, it's just the overall set of stories that pretends to be a consistent whole even when individual details within it are contradictory. I always tell people to think about it like this: "Canon is climate, not weather."

 

[joshEH]

...But just want to say, as an addendum to my previous post, re: "canon" --

Go out right now and buy the new Star Trek: Picard novel (The Last Best Hope), like, IMMEDIATELY, if you haven't yet done so. It was written (as was the Picard: Countdown comic-series) with the full cooperation and input of the TV producers, and is simply a huge, vital piece of this whole story we're experiencing right now, regardless of difference between "canon" or "official." And it's a helluva great read, to boot. A rich feast for fans of the television show.

 

[Philip Verdieck]

[QUOTE="joshEH, post: 4834371, member: 328199"

Gene Roddenberry insisted there could be no three-nacelled starships, but after he was gone, we got a three-nacelled future Enterprise in "All Good Things..." (And so on.)

I remember that.
I also remember a 3 nacelled Dreadnought ship in the Starfleet Technical Manual.

 

[Philip Verdieck]

...But just want to say, as an addendum to my previous post, re: "canon" --

Go out right now and buy the new Star Trek: Picard novel (The Last Best Hope), like, IMMEDIATELY, if you haven't yet done so. It was written (as was the Picard: Countdown comic-series) with the full cooperation and input of the TV producers, and is simply a huge, vital piece of this whole story we're experiencing right now, regardless of difference between "canon" or "official." And it's a helluva great read, to boot. A rich feast for fans of the television show.

Done.

 

[Sam Favate]

Another winner for the show. Lots of good character development for Seven and Raffi, and plenty of action too.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Will write when I have the chance but I thought it was another fantastic episode and I hope the Kelvin and Mirror mes like it as much as I did