cinderella is just this season’s annabelle cheddar
annabelle cheddar is forever the most iconic NPC
my new favorite genre of picture is Players Succeeding Making Brennan Feel Actual Genuine Fear. it’s absolutely brilliant and i am going to start a collection
LOU WILSON?????? AND CHRIS PINE????? AND AMETHAR’S SWORD??????
the difference between theobald announcing amethar and colin announcing delissandro for your viewing pleasure
They are the same and no one can convince me otherwise
I am fascinated by how, in the Bridgerton Extanded Universe, everyone is in a period drama EXCEPT the Bridgerton family, who is in a romantic comedy.
me, when watching bridgerton: oh lady danbury, she's cool
me, after watching queen charlotte: sorry, lady danbury fucked WHO-
One of the problems of Picard S3 is whose nostalgia gets a chance to shine.
This was a TNG show. But we robbed DS9 and Voy of their importance to make it happen. We pretended that S1 and S2 just did not happen.
We brought back the changelings from DS9. Worf is somewhat involved in that but ultimately the changelings aren’t really even that important. We don’t really find out how they met the Borg or why they’re even scared of the Borg or how the Borg seem to control Vadic. They’re just a vehicle to introduce the Borg…
Who have been decimated by Janeway! This is actually about the fallout from Voyager and Janeway’s actions. You know, she who will not appear in this series. And Seven? Sidelined. Over and over and over again. Mostly so that Jack can be the special chosen white boy, Picard’s son.
(He’s also Beverly’s son, but you will mostly forget that because it’s important he’s Picard’s son.)
It is so frustrating that this was both a DS9 and Voy story given to Picard to solve in 40 mins after 9 straight hours of build up. Seven and Raffi were both left to linger at the fringes so we could stuff in Jack.
Did Elnor live? Who knows. Did Data meet Soji? Dunno. What happened to the entire race of new Borg we developed? Who knows. What happened to Laris? Great question. Why are Seven and Raffi working together with Raffi in a subordinate role? What is the nature of their relationship? Shrug.
You know…
I grew up with TNG; it’s always been my Star Trek; I spent much of my childhood obsessed with it. And there I was, watching what promised to be the Last! Appearance! by the TNG Crew! Ever!,
and I felt nothing at all.
Nothing had any weight. The Borg Collective got blowed up real good, but they’d already got blowed up real good 20 years ago, and last season set up another, vastly more interesting version of the Borg anyways if only anyone had bothered to mention them or anything else from the first two seasons, so it means nothing. Nothing had any weight. No one even died. No one even got meaningfully assimilated. Apparently you can just peel Borg implants right off your face without, you know, bleeding to death or ripping out a chunk of your brain. Someone should probably tell Seven of Nine about that.
And now I’ve had a few hours to reflect upon it and what occurs to me is: I think I hate it. Yes, that sounds right. I hate it.
I mean, Nemesis gets a lot of sh*t, much of it deserved, but like…I actually cried during Nemesis. Nemesis also had a fascinating nature-versus-nurture theme, which admittedly, was a come-down from “All Good Things’…” promise of human transcendence, but at least it was something! This just felt like empty nostalgia calories, wrapped it a blanket with bathetic MCU quips. No thought-provoking science fiction. No exploration of the human condition. Just…bloodless violence for an hour.
And then I thought back to how this series started, my beautiful, flawed, Star Trek: Picard; and here I must admit that I’m one of those sad, lonely freaks who actually really liked the first two seasons. I liked the weighty themes of living in the cognizance of death, and the serious engagement with transhumanism. Above all, I liked the characters. Elnor, Soji, Rios, and especially Agnes. And then I thought: what an absolute Insult this season is! You dump all of the characters and you can’t even be arsed to namedrop them. I mean, shit, there’s a reference to Chekov in the first five minutes, but you can’t be arsed to reference any of the characters whose series you hijacked? You have Raffi sparring with Worf and she can’t even mention that her adopted son is a Romulan swordsmaster? You have the Borg invading, and “no one’s seen them in over ten years!” and you can’t be arsed to clarify why that Borg Queen that we all saw Jurati turn into last season doesn’t count? Literally the only allusion, anywhere, to any of the characters from the first two seasons other than Raffi is Shaw telling everyone to “Forget that weird shit on the Stargazer.” That weird shit. Yeah. One of the only characters in all fiction that I’ve ever meaningfully identified with. Thanks, Terry!
But, at the same time…what a gross insult to TNG! TNG, with its humanist utopia and moral conundra and scientific grounding. TNG, which, at its best, showed us what humanity could be; which challenged us to see the world in new ways. Reduced to this. This hollow, plastic pile of rubbish.
But, hey; the reviews are positive! The series is in the top ten for streaming! And a billion YouTube comments have already informed me that, finally, REAL Star Trek is back! Forget “all that weird bullshit,” this is what we, the fandom, wanted all along!
Anyways, can’t wait to see the next exciting installment of Star Trek: Funko Pop
Star Trek wildly flip flops between "command positions take years of training and experience and people work incredibly hard to attain them" and "lol this person has barely even set foot in a starfleet institute but they disobey the rules in a fun way so they get to be in charge of a flagship and the lives of a crew of hundreds"
Not to bash on Voyager once again (I swear i DO like the show lmao i wouldn’t be rewatching otherwise) but the fact that the crew is not as close as I would like drives me up the wall, like
what i mean is that Voyager is completely isolated, unlike any other crew. All the other crews are allowed shore leaves, time off the ship/station, visits and calls to family and friends, even in hard times, and Voyager doesn’t have this luxury - they only have each other, quite literally, which means to me that they should have been a little bit closer than they are. this is something i find more realistic about the Equinox crew, for example - like, heck, I can understand Janeway’s policy of keeping command structure and discipline to not go down on madness but tbh the bonds between the people of the crew should be more obvious. they should be better friends.
and i mean sure we are /told/ that they are but I think I can see this closeness in every other crew and find it believable. TOS crew sacrificing their careers so they could honor their (un)deceased fellow friend Vulcan traditions? I buy that. TNG’s crew does seem like close family too, in great part because they got along so well behind the scenes, but every time those bonds are tested, I bought it too.
DS9 is the most misfit crew and the one who started with the possibility of being the most distant, but the events of the show did a lot to make it believable that when they went separated ways in the end, they were as good as family. Even the Enterprise crew has this close sense of union, be it on the friendships (like Malcolm and Trip), T'Pol’s loyalty towards Archer or even her romance with Trip, like, I can buy it! Discovery crew is also tight as heck, Saru and Michael are as good as family, it’s too soon to tell with the new Picard crew and Lower Decks also has that same sense of union but like…
I always find it missing on Voyager. Always. Not that there isn’t friendships and good relationships in the show - Tuvok and Janeway’s friendship is great, I think Seven and Neelix build a really good relationship with Naomi, but overall the crew lack a greater sense of union to show the depth of their relationships.
I mean, during the sixth season - in a seven seasons show - we have Janeway and Chakotay turning on each other and doubting each other viciously, and all it took was Seven of Nine’s mad theories of conspiracy for them to reach this point. In one episode we have the EMH encouraging Janeway to date a hologram, and two episodes later he’s practically shouting on her face You don’t think I am an equal to you, and you never did with gravity enough for us to see he’s not joking, and the show doesn’t have a good enough record with Janeway for us to think the EMH was exaggerating.
and I think there’s two main reasons for this a) Voyager’s lack of continuity (a whole other can of worms) AND the constant tension behind the scenes (it’s miracle the characters can be civil enough all things considered tbh)
tl:dr Voyager’s distant and at times overly formal crew when by all rights they should’ve been the closest one drives me up the wall
i think the writers really missed an opportunity to drive home the moral grayness of voyager and janeway in particular during equinox pt. 1 and 2. don’t get me wrong they were a good set of episodes but i wish they’d taken it as an opportunity to confront all the fucked up shit voyager has done while trying to get back to the alpha quadrant. like obviously they’re not harnessing extradimensional creatures to power their engines but they did make an alliance with the borg, started wars, threatened to commit genocide, and broke the prime directive multiple times. it would’ve been really cool to see janeway getting angry at ransom and his crew for the evil stuff they’ve done then coming to the realization that she’s done a lot of terrible things as well and questioning if she’s even in a place to judge their actions because of that
man i just got past equinox and apparently one of the writers was PISSED and i can see why. like janeway takes a flying fucking leap off the deep end for NO apparent reason, endangering her crew and ignoring every other option of how to resolve the situation, fucking? essentially torturing a dude for information? and then she just… turns on a dime when captain sexual harassment is like pwease ms janeway i’m weawwy sowwy 🥺👉👈, like girl WHAT? and then NOTHING HAPPENS, she isn’t confronted w the consequences of her actions, she doesn’t even have to decide if she’s gonna keep her word and turn the equinox over bc he essentially does it for her. she gets everything she wants and afterward she’s just like well let’s just move on and put all that past us, chakotay, and they have the most on the fucking nose metaphor for picking up voyager’s plaque and putting it back where it belonged - but that would require admitting that her actions were unacceptable and lessened her as a person, and the show just. didn’t.
i was also upset w how they treated the doctor. like he’s had a full six seasons of developing beyond his original programming, then they flip ONE switch and suddenly he’s ready to lobotomize seven?? what sense does that even make?? that felt like it would have been the perfect time for him to prove he didn’t even need ethical subroutines to be a good person but i guess they couldn’t resist the allure of strapping a woman down on a table and menacing her. BLECH.
also if i had a nickel for each time i’ve seen an evil doppelgänger replace a starfleet medical officer and no one noticed, i’d have two nickels. which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it’s happened twice.
Also like...is anyone else getting kind of transphobic vibes from this plot? Like, they spend the first half of the season setting Seven of Nine up as a transgender analogue because of her Borgishness, and then the whole twist is literally that the Borg are using the transporter to groom young people, *directly repeating* the pseudoscientific myth that the brain doesn't fully develop until 25 in doing so. Like, they *literally* have the only nonbinary character on the entire series, post-assimilation, sit down in the captain's chair and announce that the Titan belonged to the Borg.
I'm going to *hope* it's unintentional, but like...between this and the complete lack of Saffi, I understand why every alt-right fucknugget on YouTube was giving this season good reviews.
on a funny note
after watching the cast on the Titan for 9 episodes and you being like
then the old crew goes back to their Enterprise and you're like
and Picard said he missed the carpet, dude, I missed the light lol
