And, he put milk in his TEA!!!
I enjoy RLM, but found this video super nit-picky. I did also wonder if there was a Pat Stew stunt double for the running up stairs scene, though.
I wonder if Dahj is alive, having been beamed out before the explosion.
Cripes, Brent Spiner’s put on a few hasn’t he? Even since his appearance on The Big Bang Theory.
Just happened to finish watching this myself, and while they obviously nitpick a couple of times (the Captain Picard Day banner was just a fun easter egg, don’t think about it too hard Mike), the gist of this is one thousand percent correct. I can’t stand what hacks like Kurtzmann have done to the core of Star Trek.
You can’t “Trump’s America” the Federation, because the entire idea of the Federation is that it’s a UNITED FEDERATION of planets. It’s not just human beings. Without those planets, you don’t have a Federation - you have Earth. But people like Kurtzmann don’t care about Star Trek - they just know Star Trek talks about the Federation a lot, and that it’s basically the Space Government.
The idea that you’d go from racism basically being eliminated as a concept, to America circa 2020, in the span of Picard’s lifetime, is ABSURD. As is the idea that an android attack on a shipyard (…?) would cause it. The Federation has been attacked dozens of times across the history of the show, by countless different species.
Rich sums up Roddenberry’s vision nicely. Star Trek was about a vision of a future humanity that “made it” - that came together, got over our petty squabbles, and went out into the stars. You could still explore all sorts of relevant, tense subjects - but that was often done via interactions with other factions, who generally represented different, broad aspects aspects of humanity. Xenophobic races existed (like the Romulans), but the show would use them as a sounding board to try and show humanity’s best self.
I said it weeks ago, but TNG episodes like “The Drumhead” are a far more thoughtful, nuanced, timeless dismantling of what people like Trump represent, than “Star Trek Picard” will ever be with it’s hamfisted “it’s like current American politics, get it? That lady works for Space Fox News!” analogy.
Between this, Discovery, and the movies (starting all the way back with the TNG movies), Star Trek isn’t Star Trek any more. It’s just generic science fantasy action schlock, that relies on cultural member berries like “tea, Earl Grey, hot”, transporters, and Borg cubes.
I’ll watch the next couple of episodes to see if it gets any better, but I don’t see how it can based on this.
I think the point is that the “eliminated all poverty and racism” of 24th century is not the reality.
If the person from FNN interviewing Picard had been non-human maybe it would have been more poignant?
FNN stands for Fox News right?
I don’t see this as “Trump’s America” commentary. I see it as the Federation, shocked by the destruction on Mars (it’s not just an attack on a shipyard, the whole planet is apparently on fire) and disillusioned by their failure/inability to help the Romulans retreating into a more isolationist stance.
The Federation has been in a space cold war against the Romulans for like 150 years. They’ve been the boogeyman, the threat that any day could decloak and destroy the comfortable quasi-utopia the Federation has created. I’m fine with some racism against Romulans existing in the setting, especially given the destruction Mars may be seen as a result of trying to help them.
We see racism against humans from the Vulcans in the very early movies! A fellow Federation race!
Anyway, we will see what Picard does with this. I don’t get the impression that 2020 US political commentary is going to be a major part of the themes of the show. I hope.
Except it was the reality through 4 (5?) entire TV show runs, haha. The shows reference it multiple times. You can’t just throw all of that in the trash - especially in a show that literally features arguably the single most iconic Enterprise captain from those years. And to do it in service of a hamfisted, thin allusion to current American politics? Ugh.
In a world where replicators are common devices, the concept of scarcity loses all meaning.
And Picard makes it clear that the Federation used to be that way - but that it wasn’t any more. Meaning everything changed because of those darn androids.
Xenophobia still existed in Star Trek, of course. But it was pretty much always fearing other species from other planets. As I recall ST Enterprise had a short arc about this in it’s awful 4th season, featuring Robocop.
Ultimately the joke is on me here. I knew who Alex Kurtzman was. I knew his resume. I knew he and Orci were arguably two of the worst screenwriters of the last 15 years. And yet I saw Patrick Stewart, and I chose to get excited anyway.
Oh I’m fine with illustrating some growing distrust of the Romulans or whatever. What I strenuously object to, is this idea that the entire Federation essentially became isolationist and xenophobic (with the latter almost being an inherent contradiction, due to the “Federation” actually being dozens of different species in the first place) - and especially having it happen due to some androids attacking… Mars?
EDIT: And beyond that, “cold war” or not, the reality is that there hadn’t been an active conflict with the Romulans in decades during the period this show takes place in. In fact, the Romulans allied with the Federation/Klingons in the Dominion War, and a senior member of their leadership came to Picard’s (and Earth’s) aid during the events of Nemesis - literally helping to save the planet!
I don’t know where these ideas about Trump’s America et al are coming from (interviews, maybe?) but it’s not what’s been presented in the show so far.
The Federation (despite initial misgivings) agreed to help the Romulans. Then androids attacked the shipyards on Mars that were building the rescue armada, and the Federation changed its mind. We don’t know why yet, but it’s easy to imagine them reevaluating the cost/feasibility of the rescue misison after losing that fleet.
If there was anything in the show about the Federation becoming racist or xenophobic I certainly missed it.
Probably.
Good point about the Dominion War, I lost track of canon around early DS9 so I’d forgotten about that.
Do we see any evidence the Federation has become xenophobic?
Wrt isolationism, all we have actual evidence for is Starfleet pulling back. And remember, this is an organisation that canonically often leaves billions to die in maintenance of a non-interventionist ideology - it’s hardly surprising that there are some that think the prime directive does not go far enough! And the destruction of the main shipyards might well have brought that faction into the ascendency.
At the end of the day I’m assuming it’s all a convoluted plot mechanism to get Picard in a Captian’s chair, which cannot really happen within Starfleet.
On reflection I think the news reporters wording (“Romulan lives”) was bad - you’re right that it’s not the kind of thing a Federation citizen would say - chalk that up to bad scriptwriting. Unless it’s foreshadowing more reveals about whats been happening in the last 10 years. The Romulan diaspora certainly seem to have some snacky warships and advanced personal cloaking tech, who knows what they’ve been up to :)
Do we see any evidence of scarcity? It really feels like you watched a very different show.
EDIT: oops, I misunderstood. Yes, agreed that the Federation is post-scarcity on the level of basic human needs (including medical care), and almost all transport and luxuries. Genuinely scarce (in the economic sense) resources (advanced replicators, dilithium crystals, starships, etc.) are allocated using a mechanism other than money.
[Probably some kind of dreary technocracy with (possibly tenuous) democratic oversight, although I would enjoy a genuinely syndicalist Federation :)]
I was responding to Rei’s thesis that poverty never actually went away. Poverty is caused by resource scarcity, which wouldn’t exist in a society with ample access to devices that can create anything you want by resequencing atoms.
I’m on the side you’re stating - there is no scarcity. It’s a post-scarcity society. There’s no money, no hunger, no disease, and no poverty. Picard says as much in (I believe) season 1 of TNG.
Starfleet is just the Federation’s space military/exploration organization. It acts (or doesn’t act), at the direction of the Federation, which is basically the government. Picard makes several very unsubtle world-building allusions to the idea that Starfleet isn’t Starfleet any more, hammered home all the more bluntly by the interviewer’s questions and attitude.
The Prime Directive isn’t about isolationism or indifference to non-human lives - it’s about not interfering with, and forever altering, less advanced cultures that aren’t ready for starships to descend from the heavens and so on. Picard actually gives a good monologue about the Prime Directive on an episode of TNG, when Doctor Pulaski is arguing for interfering on a world that is going to become uninhabitable due to… something (can’t remember). Picard points out that if they didn’t have the Prime Directive, the Federation would be intimately involved for decades on virtually any inhabited planet. Intervening in destructive local wars. Intervening in cases of plague and sickness. The PD was about protecting them from their innate desire to try and save everyone, all the time.
Now, there are some inherent issues logically with the PD, but that’s the principle of i
I thought Enterprise also had an interesting exchange, where Archer proposes giving a less advanced society warp technology, which he admits they aren’t ready for, but says maybe they could stay to help them.
T’Pol asks how long they would propose staying. Months? Years? Decades? Then mentions that the Vulcans came to Earth (at the end of First Contact) to help them, and that they were still there almost a century later. Archer then says he’s starting to understand how the Vulcans must’ve felt when they made first contact.
Sorry for rambling. I love the weighty issues Star Trek used to dive into. I miss it. :)
I always got the impression that the Federation government is pretty bureacratic, with a certain amount of tunnel vision and siloing. I don’t think the entire federation has to be full of xenophobes for Starfleet to be in the middle of an cautious, non-interventionist phase, and that might have been enough to cause Picard to resign, especially after his failure to save the Romulans (which he clearly takes super personally).
I agree with you about the PD (Adn thanks for the canon references!) but the same logic applies - after rescuing the Romulans how long are the Federation stuck helping them? Remember the Romulans certainly are both xenophobic and brutally factional. All I’m saying is that I can see how an honest non-interventionist might not want to get involved, especially after the destruction on Mars, without there being some collapse in the morality of Starfleet.
Now if this is all foreshadowing a “something is rotten in the heart of Starfleet” plot then I agree, that would be pretty disappointing.
We’ll see I suppose. I plan to watch at least the next couple of episodes and see if it grows on me, but I’m not very hopeful on that front. I just miss Roddenberry’s vision of what Star Trek was really about, and see this change to the Federation’s attitude as fundamentally illogical and antithetical to the universe they had created from TOS up through Voyager, and even Enterprise to some extent - and humanity’s place in it.
I watched the RLM video last night, those guys are always fun but those criticisms are seriously overblown.
First, kind of ridiculous that they spend several minutes griping about the unlikelihood of the Romulan supernova and how long that would take. Sure, under normal circumstances I’d expect that to develop over a much longer timeframe but do we know if these are normal circumstances? Might the supernova have been induced somehow? I don’t know the answer to that but let’s say it wasn’t - are they trying to argue that Trek has always been a bastion of good science, and never cut corners for narrative sake? Because I’ve got a derisive snort all primed for that argument.
Second, they’re cherry picking their old TOS precedent for racism. It’s not terribly meaningful to say racism has been abolished in the future because Uhura doesn’t recognize an epithet. A much better example would be one of my favorites, “Balance of Terror” where several Enterprise crew members turn on Spock just because of his physical resemblance to Romulans. Oh yeah, xenophobia? Problem solved.
And I’m not even clear why they’re blaming the Federation deciding not to assist the Romulan exodus with xenophobia or racism to begin with. The Federation commits 10,000 ships to the effort and then backs out when they, and the construction yard used to create them, is destroyed. Sounded like the argument made was why help a non-Federation civilization when those resources could be used here? Definitely not a pleasant conclusion, you’d think their better angels would prevail in a time of need, but you see this argument all the time when foreign aid is brought up. Some may argue due to racism, that’s undeniable, but that’s not necessarily at the heart of the argument.
And they’re really going to claim that it’s never explained why Data’s painting looks like Dahj? When they say explicitly that Maddox based her looks on the painting? Seriously, there are valid nit picky arguments to be made about the episode. Why were the Utopia Planitia shipyards shown on the surface of Mars when previously we’ve seen them in orbit around Mars? Why did Picard and Dahj escape up to that roof, boxing themselves in? There were some strange calls made but it was hardly a disaster of an episode.
I’ll at least give them credit for pointing out the inherent ridiculousness of reviewing just the first episode of the series. I don’t know if I can sit through nine more sessions of old man belly aching.