Picard show confirmed

Whoop, there it is!

Wait seriously? Those mind controlling slug things from Conspiracy? Holy crap, that’s all I need to know, I’m in!

Did I miss something? When did they show up?

It’s Jack’s visions combined with the return of the shape shifters. Those worm dudes were infiltrating the Federation to set up an invasion. Jack keeps seeing visions of worms and shit, so he’s connected somehow. And bringing in the Shapeshifters seems like a natural alliance for the extra-galactic worm people, since they like being spies.

This is just my theory. I think this season is going massive fan service, like remember these guys from season 1 that we never did anything with?

Gosh, if you’re right I’ll eat my hat.

I would love for you to be right. It always bothered me, that those worm things never came back. Biggest open unresolved plot line in TNG.

Maybe Jack’s just got a bad case of tapeworms

I love this theory because I always wanted closure on that Season 1 arc, but even if those are worms we’re seeing in that scene (and it’s not clear that it is), that’s not what those parasites looked like:

Ok maybe I’m wrong, or this is a feint. But they did consider this idea!

Ah, yes, I came here on my lunch break to mention Matalas had called out that he’d looked at the Conspiracy bugs, but decided against them because they kill their hosts. That means you can’t have any primary characters taken over. (I mean, you could, but can you imagine the response if they had to phaser-kill Geordi or Deanna because they’d been parasite-infected?)

If you’re wondering why aspects of this season’s Picard are so good, there are some fun people to follow on Twitter.

Terry Matalas, showrunner. Lots of fun behind-the-scenes posts and links

(I’ll add to this that Picard said “shit!” in French a number of times in TV TNG.)

Dave Blass, production designer. Awesome posts about ships, art, etc. Here’s his tweet of a video explaining that the holodeck having its own power source is established Trek canon:

Jorg Hillebrand: A hardcore Trek geek so knowledgeable he was hired as a research assistant to provide insanely deep-cut references for Picard S3:

Bill Krause, starship designer:

Some OG TNG production folks with interesting streams:

Mike Okuda (the inventor of LCARS and literal writer with his TNG vet wife Denise of the Trek encyclopedia) who had graphic design contributions on Picard S3:

Doug Drexler, a TNG designer also brought back for Picard S3, has been posting on Facebook:

I do really like the updated LCARS look. One of the reasons I always watch the end credits this season.

Jorg is a great follow – that guy catches the most minute details. He’s also going back through the original TNG run and is about at the same point where y’all are in the TNG revisited thread.

Cripes, even the computer screens on this show have become nearly monochromatic.

Why do these people hate color?

To be fair, when you work all day in the equivalent of a dark cave, a colorful high-contrast screen is going to be murder on the eyes. No wonder they went dark mode.

Yeah, I honesty prefer dark mode here.

LCARS was already dark mode. This is “my CGA cable’s green pin went out” mode.

Like any rational TNG fan who values his nostalgia I only watched about an ep and a half of the first two seasons of this and only caught S2 of Discovery in full along with parts of 3 and 4. So far this season has been pretty fun, even if they should have setup Riker’s weird uber-safe mode at least a bit before the character assassination in ep3. They could really have pulled back on the asshole side of Shaw and just made him a very competent captain that happens to do stuff more by the book and be less grandfatherly that Picard can be. They get him right about 80% of the time but then turn him up past even 11 into the 14-15 range the other 20% and as that captain he should have had dozens of mutinies along the way. They did eventually give him a reason and it’s one they’ve used before obviously, but still one I don’t think a captain would/should be holding onto for all these years after it is known how the Borg work.

But really my only main gripe across all the new series is that the maneuver these capital ships like fighters. SNW did it the worst (of what I’ve seen) but even here they’re spinning and ‘dodging’ torpedos and shit. I guess they think they need that ‘action’ but it’s laaaaame to this old man.

Okay, Episode 5 was also good, with another great return of a classic character that gives them some meaningful closure. It’s not a perfect episode–all of the crime planet stuff still kind of sucks–but the core cast stuff is very, very good.

I’m ready to call it: I’m no longer a skeptic. This is a worthy season, and they’ve turned this shitshow around. It’s enough to make you sad this is the final season. I’m actually looking forward to the rest of these episodes.

Yeah, I’m mad they brought that character back just to kill them off, but it didn’t feel as useless as Hugh’s death in season one, at least.

I don’t think this is fully the end. I feel like they’re setting up a Titan spin-off, which I’d totally watch.

It was a heroic death, though, not a waste like Hugh’s. I liked the fill-in on what the character had been doing in the meantime. But yeah, would have liked to have had the potential to see them again.

I have a fun story about the actor that I need to write up. Me, that actor, two Klingons, and a Q walk into a hotel with a laptop…