Star Trek: Picard - S1E2 - 1/30/2020 - "Maps and Legends" - (Spoilers)

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She's new & she's not from a previous show. In the preview comics for the show (very light spoiler):

Spoiler

She was Picard's first officer on the USS Verity, the ship he was commanding the rescue fleet from

She's obviously mad at him for something, but we don't know what yet.

 

I think it worked here. The Admiral's use of profanity was intended to be shocking to both Picard and the audience. It is far from the first time we've seen swearing in Star Trek, but only the second F Bomb I'm aware of.

Bye

 

Too much time wasted on explaining...

"Oh, everyone heard of the secret Romulan police, Tal Shiar. But there's a secret secret Romulan police."

Anybody know if the Federation's own Section 31 is still alive at this time?

 

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It's a little clunky, but I understandy why. They have to fit in the exposition dumps now to get the audience up to speed on what's been going on, so we get a lot of little sequences where all the characters might know what's up, but somebody has to explain everything out loud for the audience's benefit. They could do better at making it more organic, but they're doing a better job of it than . . . say, early TNG did.

Last we heard of them (chronologically) was in DS9, 25 years before the events of this show and they were still firmly entrenched in the Federation and Starfleet. They're probably still around, but maybe Bashir's been busy trying to take them down from the inside. Considering there are Romulan agents running Starfleet security and the CinC is totally oblivious, S31 is as incompetent as ever assuming they even still exist.

As tropey as double-secret-police are, this might be more interesting than it seems on the surface. If the Zhat Vash has been around "thousands upon thousands" of years, then they pre-date the great schism between Romulans and Vulcans and that might have some interesting implications for the Romulan-Vulcan relationship. Did they have an AI uprising in their distant past? We're talking about flesh-and-blood androids, so might the Vulcans or Romulans be descended from artificial life? I'm really interested to see where they take this.

 

Hmmmm.... Narek is only one letter off of Sarek...

 

Especially one that caught Jean-Luc completely flat footed.
(But I don't think we were told exactly where the Romulan refugees were going to be relocated to.)
I'm not sure it was just the humans though as Admiral Clancy said that three member worlds(?) were threatening to pull out before the Mars attack.

However, considering that Earth had it's first terrorist attack in generations shown in Deep Space Nine (Homefront) and then had the Mars Attack about 15 years later, a skilled orator (or maybe even a not so skilled huckster) could bend public opinion to be more "speciest" against Romulans and "Synthetics".

 

I was glancing thru some of the reviews of the show in the IMDB app and ouch, many are really harsh. Some are haters of Kurtzman or just that the show's different or that the Federation's different/changed so much. There are numerous other reasons.

Some accuse CBS's marketing dept of astroturfing and writing fake/shill reviews.

 

Sometimes the biggest fans of a series are the series' worst enemies.

 

Or S31 agrees with their agenda and is happy to mislead the above-board portions of Starfleet.

 

This was a big drop in quality from episode one. Way too much unnecessary dialog. Some was necessary but a lot of it could have been much shorter to much better effect. I think 2 minutes of silence as Picard thought about his physical ailment and what it means to him, leading to him deciding he had to get back in space, would have been significantly more powerful than random stuff like an overblown explanation about room scanning technology that added almost nothing to the story.

 

I read that the media got the first 3 episodes to review and this week may be more set up again. But character development is what makes good entertainment so... I am eager to get in space as well.

 

Also...I'd anyone else having closed captioning issues? Mine are a good two seconds behind the dialogue. I can't use them they are so out of sync. I am using CBS all access.

 

"Request denied Jean-Luc". Even with the f-bomb that was a guy wrenching scene. " The delusions of a once great man" " this is no longer your house". BOO!

 

And the guy being wrenched was Jean-Luc!

 

Not sure what the media got, but that's probably true. The first 3 episodes were shown spliced into one movie at the premiere & one of the executive producers said they consider the first 3 to really be one episode.

Surely CBS wouldn't have split up one long episode into three so they could stretch the whole season out over 10 weeks to try and push subscribers into staying for three whole bill cycles..

 

As another data point, I did NOT have any CC lag issues streaming from my AppleTV.

 

Nor I using a Roku Ultra

 

Data: AppleTV, no lag.