I had the same thought, but it's working out. The video keeps reminding me how grumpy ST:Picard made me, so I pause if for a bit, then go do day job stuff to calm down before unpausing it.
It's always nice to see personalities you kind of look up to, enjoy the same stuff/channel/person you do :). I'm glad I stopped watching "Picard" after just a few episodes. As TNG is one of my all time favorites, most rewatched series, that might have had the most influence as to the kind of person I am today. TNG always helps me give hope, helps me escape, but it also makes me sad when I look towards our own society.
As a pre-teen on the Autism spectrum in 1970, I wrote a letter to Jimmy Doohan. He took the time to write back and forth as pen pals for more than a year. He was instrumental in me improving my social and interpersonal skills. Years later, I had the pleasure of working on a very special project with his son Chris. Jimmy was the best.
I also have autism and it took me a good 35 years to improve on my social skills, even during the time that I did not have my diagnosis ( age:38 ) yet. So glad you had that chance.
I love that actual war hero James Doohan concluded that the best thing he ever did was give hope to a person who felt hopeless. That's the spirit of Star Trek.
You bring up a really interesting point War veterans were big part of fantasy and science fiction. Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, BSG... all had some past connection to military veterans either direct or not. and before that with little book series like... idk... LOTR, or Narnia? Both of those were REALLY shaped by WW1 War shapes people probably more consistently than anything else, and resulting stories are hopeful, yet are able to show realistic conflict. Current shows are made by people without that connection. They show conflict in unnatural way, problems discussed are very different, and too obviously inspired by current events. Fantasy/sci-fi changed, but not because people want something else, because the next generation of writers entered the scene.
@@cola98765 It's interesting. Take Lovecraft for instance. The guy heard voices in his head, got night terrors, and had a pretty terrible life but he managed to channel all of that into novellas so the narrators going insane could reflect the struggles in his own life. The story 'He' even reflected his phase as an urban explorer. And then there's Edgar Rice Burroughs who wrote Tarzan and John Carter lived in the twilight of the Wild West, was an air pilot, personally witnessed Pearl Harbour, and became a war correspondent. Compare that to Chuck Wendig and you see can see the difference.
The sad thing is that we have never needed a Rodenberry style Star Trek more than we do right now. People in real life are losing the belief that people can join together to make something good.
I strongly recommend looking up Strange New Worlds. The premise when they were first conceiving of the show was, "What if we just do Star Trek?" It checks all of the boxes she lists in the video, and as a lifelong Trekkie, I've found it to be a delight to watch.
SNWs is a lot better than Discovery and Picard but my god if Lower Decks isn’t the most faithful Trek show since Enterprise; yeah its a cartoon and its silly but it just ‘gets’ Trek.
Thanks for the therapy session. TNG was a massive influence for me and I miss hope and optimism about the future dearly in media today. It is a bit gruelling to see Star Treks potential being wasted with badly written action slob.
Doohan claims that single act was the greatest thing he had done in his lifetime and this is from a man who comported himself heroically in combat during WW2. Think about that. This man deserves to have his ashes in orbit around the Sun. I hope there are many more like him.
About a year ago, Alan Moore was interviewed by a small TH-camr from his hometown, and he said something which constantly comes back to me now, and which I deeply associate with why I like star trek so much, but dislike nutrek so much: "We have to be able to imagine a better world, or we're never going to have one." Trek has always represented this to me, and to many people. My favorite Trek quote, which I know by heart, is: "A lot has changed in the past 300 years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for posessions. We've grown out of our infancy." This is the world I dream of. (Yes, I know that line was reworded for one of the TNG movies, but this is better.)
@@johnprieto435 A lot of trekking stars was done in ds9. Sure it was mostly about a specific region of space but it was space and adventureous nontheless.
I have a little story to tell you: Between Star Trek The Next Generation, season 1 and season 2, they broadcast for the first time ever the original pilot of Star Trek The original series. For this pilot they had various TNG actors do Little bits and talk about various things. When they were filming that, I had just started working at the California museum of science and industry in Los Angeles. I think they call it something different now. Anyway, they asked for volunteers for somebody who was willing to come in at 3:00 in the morning and work in the aerospace wing while some Star Trek people did some filming in there. Naturally, I volunteered. I got to watch Patrick Stewart work, from 15 ft away for several hours. They would ask me if I could unplug the fans in certain machines and leave the lights and the rest of the machine running. Everybody was super nice and nobody was demanding at all. It was always, "Is this possible?" And never, "We need you to do this." So, I got to meet Patrick Stewart and shake his hand. And then, they put my name as the very last name on the credits for that broadcast. I used to have a VHS tape of that. And then somehow, in all of my moving, I lost that damn thing. So, if anybody can get me a copy of that particular broadcast that has the name "Grant S. Robertson" as the last name in the credits, I would really freaking appreciate it. Edit: I have now downloaded the video. Thank you to everyone.
I have a copy of it, but I have no idea how to contact you or send you a 1GB file. lol Update: I uploaded it to The Internet Archive. There was already a copy there that didn't have the end credits. The one I uploaded can be found at the URL path: details/the-star-trek-saga-from-one-generation-to-the-next I hope that's enough information for you guys to find it as TH-cam won't let me post a link.
Hell, Janeway finding out what happened to Icheb would've sent her on a warpath alone. It was very weird the writers just decided, "Lets ignore the extended character's personalities - that won't matter at all!" Janeway finding out the federation ignored HER CREW being murdered would be a short series on it's own.
The Janeway we see in _Prodigy_ (the one who got an augment into the Academy) would have resigned her commission before she let Seven get tossed to the wolves.
The people making these say they want to honor Star Trek, and I actually believe they do want that! They just _can't_ - they fundamentally don't believe in the principles of Star Trek the way that Roddenberry and the TNG writers did, and therefore their storytelling instincts lead them to tear it down in an attempt to make it more 'truthful' or whatever.
I'm not sure they are? There's always the "alternate universe" get out that shows *how* TNG and those universe stories worked in comparison to other situations For the in-universes stuff, Picard for example, pointing out that often Starfleet does go an impinge on other valid ways of life despite their prime directive 😅
Well thankfully none of the producers on this show ever watched more than an hour of TNG and decided Picard didn't like math and would want to live in the house where his entirely family died, that Worf would proclaim himself a pacifist AND a member of the space CIA, where Riker just lets things happen around him, and where we needed another Wesley Crusher except with a shitty accent.
Seven says Starfleet rejected her because she was a Borg in the same episode where they showed Icheb was in Starfleet. I don't think the writers even read their own scripts. Also, Seven was a super genius scientist. She built Voyager's astrometrics lab. She could integrate the Borg's transwarp core into Voyager. She literally knows how to bring the dead back with nanites. Every scientific organization in the Federation would be stepping over each other to recruit her. Even if Starfleet was dumb enough to reject her, the Daystrom Institute would want her. Even the Vulcan Science Academy would probably want to recruit her.
They did her character so dirty in those first two seasons of this show. Highly skilled and obscenely intelligent character turned into some kind of Rambo smh.
Wow, I totally missed that between all the _other_ horrible things about that arc. My headcanon, fwiw-especially with the line that "Janeway did all she could" or whatnot-was that Janeway _intentionally sabotaged_ her admission. 😂
Yeah they really dumbed her down into an action hero. I get that they wanted her to grow into her humanity but they really needed to keep some of that logical cold intellect.
The sad thing is, this is completely believable in the world we live in today. Stupid narcissists full of vain get to be in charge, while the ones with talent and good intentions are brushed aside only to turn into some bitter underdog warrior. It's neither the Star Trek we know nor want. Star Trek is essentially an escapist fantasy. But a fantasy grounded enough to give people some real hope that we may one day create a world where we can work together for the common good. And Picard (and Discovery, to some extent) negates all this. I'll give you an example. In DS9 Season 3, They go to San Francisco in 2024. It's a terrible world, and sadly not too far off from what we have today. But the point is, they are saying "hey look, maybe there's gonna be a WW3. Maybe there's gonna be Eugenics wars. Maybe 2024 San Francisco is gonna suck. But we'll eventually get past through all that stuff and build a true utopia. There is hope". And the contemporary Trek is like "nah bro, every single problem you face today, every deplorable human behavior that you see is gonna continue poisoning our society for hundreds of years. The institutions that you create, the relationships that you build with other civilizations, all that technological advancements that you achieve - they simply don't matter. Maybe there will be progress for a century or two. It's still gonna come crashing down and regress to the depressing society that you live in today". Well, we already know it, dumbass. That's not why we watch Star Trek. Give us some hope. Tell us that we can be good. And maybe you will inspire a generation to become physicists, or TH-camrs or whatever, just genuine humans, who are trying to do good and to spread the hope. And maybe that will nudge society towards being a little bit better, at some point in the future, even if not today. Just spread the hope! I dunno. Is that too much to ask for?
There are so many things I want to say to you about how much I love what you’re doing and how you’re doing it… I’m also watching your physics videos, by the way… and also how much I love your delivery and oration and brilliance… but I’ll save that for later. Here’s a month of Paramount’s NuTrek tax. Please continue to make content wherever you see fit. You are a necessary voice that I hope continues.
To the calculus point: there's an episode in TNG where elementary school kids are learning calculus in school because schooling has gotten way better hundreds of years into the future. Repeat: calculus is math for CHILDREN, adults have moved onto more advanced math.
I really disliked that Star Trek seemed like it was poking fun at itself. Like, Picard doesn’t like calculus and finds it boring, Jurati finds space travel boring and Picard doesn’t read Sci Fi and never got the appeal. Why do people who don’t like Star Trek work on Star Trek? And not in a cool fresh perspective way, but in an awful we want to turn it into every gory cynical drama way?
In one episode of TNG, Picard was having a go at solving some weird equation some mathematician (I want to say Bernoulli but that might just be because it's the only mathematician I can name) left behind but didn't explain when he died. Picard is totally a nerd.
The thing about Section 31 in DS9 is that they fit the role of the final villain for the show. Most of DS9 is about Federation ideals being challenged by more and more extreme situations. The delicate balance of Bajoran/Cardassian politics, A Ferengi bar plus crime on the station, interactions with the Dominion races, and the internal paranoia when changelings finally infiltrate every level. The moral challenges are there to show that Federation ideals can hold together even when tested time and again. Section 31 is the ultimate challenge in the show because it shows that the corruption of Federation ideals might come from within; it might be institutional. And all of our characters are anti-Section 31. Bashir fights with the one 31 agent we meet, and Sisko wants them exposed and stopped. When the virus is deployed -- even though it wins them the war -- it's not seen as a victory, but a giant moral dilemma in contrast to Federation ideals. The show ends with the Admiral character promising to "root out" the remnants of Section 31. They're clearly antagonists, and the only way they could possibly return is finishing them off in a one-off episode, and then be done. It shows how unintelligently Alex Kurtzman looks at Star Trek for him to see this -- all of this -- and just go, "so, they're the cool spy guys, huh?"
Yes, exactly. I LOVE Section 31 as a concept, but whether for or against the protagonists of Star Trek, their existence is meant to be a tragedy, and that they wouldn't exist at all except for the strain put on the Federation as it came towards the end of the "let the good times roll" era that Wolf 359 brought on
I’m glad I’m not the only one to notice NuTrek’s obsession with Section 31. They’re clearly the bad guys in DS9. If the Dominion were Magneto and the Brotherhood, then Section 31 was Bolivar Trask and the Sentinels. Both oppose each other, but both are still the bad guys that a 3rd party (X-Men/The Federation) has to stop.
Section 31 exists because people like Julian Bashir can not defend themselves against the more nefarious factions in the galaxy. His morals get in the way. They do the things Bashir can't do. That's why they're off books. Another way to protect people like Bashir. S31 are a deeply interesting concept. Nutrek turned them into cool assasins that go around telling everyone they're in Section 31. 😂
@@TheMightyFlea-0you might have missed the part where commiting genocide against the founders backed the dominion into a corner where diplomacy was no longer an option and fighting to the bitter end would leave any winning side decimated. Bashir saved his friend Odo who negotiated a lasting peace with the dominion.
@@TheMightyFlea-0 Section 31 was one of DS9's many, many criticisms of war and how war itself becomes a corrupting institute. the fact that people watch something like In the Pale Moonlight and walk away masturbating to conflict-born utilitarianism the episode is openly condemning says so much about how difficult it is to critique conflict - no matter how awful the depiction, some people will leave the experience licking their lips. I guess Kurtzman is one of those people nobody is supposed to look at Section 31 or Sisko's momentary descent into corruption or the razing of Cardassia and think, 'Wow! So fckn COOL!' but that's exactly the relationship NuTrek has with DS9
'Picard' should have been about Picard living in cosy retirement NOT on the farm where his whole family horribly burned to death. He reads and writes about spacefaring, exploration, history and politics, and mentors a bunch of younger people in various fields. Every episode, someone visits him with a Star Trek problem, like a mystery or a science puzzle or some tricky diplomacy, and they talk it out with flashback scenes, and Picard helps them resolve the problem right there in his nice Federation home. It's also a cooking show, because the whole time they talk through the story, Picard is showing his guest (and the audience) how to make some delicious meal, complete with accompanying wine.
I'd have loved to see a _Star Trek: Time Team_ where Picard and a handful of other xenoarchaeologists flit around from planet to planet doing digs that they have to conclude within 3 days, and maybe tangentially get involved in normal _Star Trek_ plots that are going on in the background.
This was amazing. I am reasonably sure you spent more time just editing this video than the entire writers team did breaking the stories for all 3 seasons. It didn't feel hopeful, so it simply wasn't Star Trek.
I gave up after the first season of "Picard" so I'm really glad you made this; it saves me wasting time watching the other two seasons.😬 I don't enjoy any of "New Trek" but the part of this that bothered me the most was the calculus comment that you mention at 2:03:53. Picard was famous for being a "renaissance man", someone who had many talents and skills across many disciplines. He was a musician, an actor, a leader, a scholar, an archeologist, a scientist, an engineer .. he was into everything. There is no way that he would be dismissive of calculus, of all things. It's just so gross that they took this enlightened master of all subjects and made him an anti-intellectual action hero, but it's par for the course for New Trek. 😞
I one hundred percent agree with you about "Picard" HOWEVER! i would recommend to watch the third season of picard, out of all of the picard seasons, season 3 was getting to be what you would want to see, i dont want to spoil anything about it by saying to much but there is a lot of stuff in that season you might like if you loved TNG
Oh of course NJB is an Old Trek fan…! So nice to see that your interest in a more utopian urban future extends all the way to the realm of Sci-Fi as well haha! Love your channel, I’ve learned so much from it! 🥰
There's literally an episode of TNG where a young kid (second, third grader? idk) complains about having to do calculus in school. In TNG the whole show was about how advanced society was.
Yeah man, it's the goddamn TNG universe, even a bartender knows calculus, and knowledge is always respected. What they've done here is just so bad. What's with this current trend of people who don't know/care about a franchise's lore just swoop in and are given the reins? It makes no sense
@@thomaskalinowski8851 Just like in generations when he threw the priceless artifact on the ground after Enterprise D crashed and they were going through his quarters...
What Star Trek: Picard should have been: Picard is retired to a small village in France. Every week someone (usually locals) come to him with a mystery to solve. Picard puts on his Dixon Hill hat and solves it. Sometimes Data helps. Sometimes there's space travel. It's basically Murder She Wrote. I'm gonna keep saying this every time ST:P comes up until I wake up in the parallel universe where it exists. Edit to add... I absolutely do watch RLM, but this was the fantasy show my wife and I came up with as soon as we heard the Picard show announced...before we ever had the chance to be disappointed by it. And then Mike and Rich had similar ideas as us because they are also true fans of both Trek and schlock, and because no fiction exists in a vacuum. Sadly this comment is probably the most successful thing of any kind I've ever put on the internet. Wish I had some other works I could parlay all this attention to... If you're ever in northern Delaware come and check me out where I'll be performing at Beck's Pond, quietly sobbing in my car in the furthest corner of the parking lot.
@@falken111 Near the end of the episode, Picard obliquely exonerates the antagonist, and starts to walk away. Suddenly, he turns around and says "just one more thing..."
Could be a decent vehicle to adapt some Isaac Asimov sci-fi mysteries. They already borrowed a lot with the planet of synthetic humans, might as well take that extra step 😅
Thank you for this. For a long time it seemed like every star trek discussion I came across, people were desperately trying to convince themselves that Discovery and Picard were an exciting and fresh return to thoughtful fables, when to me they seemed full of cheap cynical drama and confused characters who at times seemed to forget significant events that had just occurred in a previous scene. The entire first season of Picard in particular felt like the writers painstakingly researched every detail of "measure of a man" -except for the point. Hearing many of my own thoughts on the direction of "NuTrek" spoken aloud by someone else was cathartic.
I haven't seen much of Discovery and Picard - they don't really grip me - but I wonder what your thoughts are about Strange New Worlds (if you've seen it). To me it does a great job of balancing the optimism and hopefulness of the past with some interesting nuance, like with Federation laws about genetics being outdated and harmful to the Illyrians.
My parents held many national science positions, and more...we loved to laugh at Trek...but liked it as entertainment. The 60s show I saw Next G, annoyed half the time...Spiner, a great comedian, somewhat wasted.... my comment, " The STNG 2 episodes with the three fingered alien and his 'Thought and Reality, 2 sides same coin' drivel...pure comic book 'super power' adolescent fantasy...offended the hack out of moi. Happy to see him 'fade////phase' out. Manyway, you are worthy of being worth the while. Fun have, go to way, up it keep. I read in a mag, Star Trek writers left blank page for someone else to put in nonsensical scientism and jargon, to satisfy the 'miracle' fantasies. Tachyon fields...tacky feelies. Really STaNGs.
@@hbarz1066 It's hard to get into for me because Discovery and Picard put a pretty big damper on my enthusiasm, but I've seen a handful of episodes. SNW is definitely better but it occasionally overindulges in melodrama enough that it starts sharing that nu-trek flavor. I've also seen a bit of Lower decks, and while it's never gotten more than a sensible chuckle out of me, it does feel like it was written by people who watched AND enjoyed star trek, which is more than can be said for some of the other shows.
When I first saw Picard I had remind myself that Patrick Stewart is NOT Jean-Luc Picard, nor is he a writer, nor is he Gene Roddenberry, nor is this Star Trek.
The moment he said it was a passion project you knew we were in trouble. Star Trek was just a good steady job to him, he never watched the shows, had no investment in Picard and doesn't understand science fiction. All traits they look for when hiring writers for nutrek.
Picard wasn't just a captain, he was also an archeologist (we have seen him publish papers and preparing to speak at conferences as an archeologist). It Patrick Stewart specified that Picard can't be in Star Fleet anymore, shouldn't he be a professor? He could have his own research team (students of different species etc) and get involved in the plot by stumbling across something during an excavation.
I massively agree. At least one season of this show should have focused on Picard's love of archeology. He could be doing that, or at least teaching about it, rather than babysitting the family vineyard...which Jean-Luc was never into. I know people slow down when they age, but even at his age, Picard is too adventurous, ambitious, and studious, to just make wine and take naps. He should have been doing something else, even if only part-time.
@@umberhaven Yeah, and professors can be very old and never retire even today. It feels like a very obvious thing for him to do when he is not able to be in a command position anymore.
He was supposedly super depressed after they accepted his resignation, that's why he sat in his room all day doing nothing Still hate it, and think that he would have tried other methods to help the Romulans
There's a giant elephant in the room that A.C. is too kind to mention, but Patrick Stewart repeatedly demonstrates that he is not in physical condition to excavate anything. By the end of season 2, he can barely talk and rarely stands up for more than a minute in any scene. There's a reason that they wrote him as a retired guy who gets triumphant music when he is able to climb a flight of stairs.
20:00 - Alex Kurtzman has a history of plagiarism, settling multiple lawsuits. He's a hack writer. J. J. Abrams, while unimaginative, has not been the subject of multiple plagiarism lawsuits. So Paramount really had to pull some strings to get arguably the two worst writers in Hollywood to ruin a franchise. Abrams has the distinction of ruining the two most popular sci-fi franchises in history. Between the two of them, they have absolutely zero concept of the vastness of space. 31:30 - So when Kurtzman and his team wrote out the line, "A supernova destroys the _entire_ Romulan Empire!" ... yeah, no. I'm not being pedantic when I say a single supernova would not take out an _entire quadrant_ of the Galaxy. It would take out a single planetary system, sure, but not dozens if not hundreds of inhabited worlds. The whole of the Romulan Empire would have been fine. Yes, it would be devastating for Romulus & Remus to have been destroyed, but not population-ending.
Marketing and corporations can’t tell stories. They mine known properties for profit, clueless of what made them valuable in the first place. That’s it. That’s the problem.
I also feel some blame goes to "drama students". Star Trek used to be written by scifi-writers, about science, philosophy, society, history and politics stuff. Now it's just all "character drama". And emotions and grim-dark shock-value.
Yeah that pretty much sums up Disney to a T. They buy up franchises change them to market a wider general audience while screwing over the hard-core fans. Rinse and repeat
A lot of the hopelessness of this depiction of the future is just 2024 capitalist realism shrinking the writers' imaginations to the point where the Star Trek franchise exists but the writers can no longer imagine its positive post-capitalist future. All they can do is pollute the optimism of previous generations with the corporate doomerism of the present. The rest of it is just the same problems you have whenever you lazily mine a franchise for content. Lazy writing in, garbage content out. Also, letting Patrick Stewart write his celebrity love life with massive age gaps into the show as something inspiring is lol. Rich people all lose touch with reality eventually, which sucks because Patrick Stewart is supposedly one of the more left leaning ones.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. JJ Abrams was the worst thing to happen to Science Fiction media in the 2000's. Not only did he turn Star Trek into a low-brow action franchise, he polluted Star Wars with his bad mystery box plots.
I remember watching Lost along with everyone else - I didn't make it past the first season. The exact reason I gave up on it was some interview J J Abrams / the showrunners did where they talked about how they had a board with all the mysteries on it and they could only add new mysteries when they took other ones off. And then I realised they had no plan, they were creating mysteries and then figuring out the solutions later and there's no way that was ever going to lead to a satisfying or coherent conclusion. And now, almost all TV and movies have incoherent plots that are just an excuse for a bunch of action set pieces and throwaway jokes.
I don't know how you had the energy or patience to not only watch all three seasons twice, but also painstakingly go through and review/summarise each episode, but I'm glad you did. I only wish I saw your video before wasting so many hours watching the show myself.
@@amalekedomiteshalom aleikhem, just want to let you know I’ve let my buddy Shmuley in the Mossad know about your name and address, and you’ll have some nice friends over for dinner soon. Try not to resist, it makes the adrenochrome taste worse. Nice username by the way, rest assured I remember! See you soon
One of the things all of post-DS9 Trek seems to have ignored about Section 31 is that in DS9 they were antagonists. Like, they were doing awful things (usually to Bashir) and no matter how ~morally complex~ the situation was we weren't really supposed to root for 'em. They were still The Baddies. And then they weren't. Personally, I blame 9/11. You can see the shift begin when Section 31 comes up in Enterprise, the last oldTrek and the first post-9/11 show.
I feel like the Section 31 show was what Kurtzman really wanted to make. The guy loves spy shows and dark drama. Disco and Picard were just setups for that. But I get the feeling he just couldn't get it past the execs. Strange New Worlds feels like a compromise, like "ok I'll make the classic star trek show you want me to make, if you greenlight the sci fi spy show i want to make" "we'll let you have a tv movie" "fine"
@@KillahMate Episode one should literally come right out of TOS era. I'm talking about where the absorb that Genie of a technology that allows Federation ships to travel at super warp speeds without turning people into lizards or tearing the hull apart. Then we can really get into places where Humans have never gone, before.
Yeah but in Enterprise Section 31 wasn't really meant to be an actual organization. It was meant to be a thing in the peoples heads, just existing inside of Starfleet because people believed it existed. It was a mindset people could flee too/align with when everything was lost and they needed to justify a terrible decision to themselves, not a systematic way to undermine the good the Starfleet does.
RE: Picard knows calculus: it's not exactly calculus, but there is an episode of TNG (I forget which one) in which Riker comes into Picard's office, and Picard is at his computer trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, which he claims is still un-solved in the 24th century, even though it was actually solved in real life in 1994 (only a few years after this episode aired). He is doing this entirely FOR FUN, during his off-duty hours, because he thinks math problems are interesting riddles.
So so SO unnecessary. Did Icheb really HAVE to be sacrificed to give meaning to Seven's hate for Bjayzl? Isn't the simple fact of what she did to XBs, combined with Seven's strong sense of right and wrong, enough? And did we HAVE to see it in such vivid, revolting detail? Just... ???????????
I feel so vindicated watching this. The unaddressed plot holes, the cheapening of death, the whole deflecting thing where they think criticizing the terrible writing means you must hate diversity... all of that sat with me in ways that I didn't know how to express, so thanks for making a 4 hour video to address it for me!
And the showrunner & lead writer, Michael Chabon attacking ANYONE critical of the story choices on his IG page when the show was airing... That was some seriously unhinged stuff for a big award winning writer. But that's where that network sponsored narrative worked as their human shield... "you must hate women of color if you dislike Raffi or the girl playing the twin synths..." Right! Couldn't be the awful writing and characters... Naaaaaahhhh.
Well, a lot of the folks who were criticizing the writing were also trying to appeal to the right-leaning crowd who uses SJW like a pejorative. The problem I have is that the inclusion was done to virtue signal and felt forced.
The Icheb scene was egregious, but made even more so by a minor detail they definitely included on purpose. The Romulan who's operating on him at one point says "That cortical node's gotta be in there somewhere!" suggesting that she can't find it. Icheb donated his cortical node to Seven in an episode of Voyager. She's butchering him for fucking NOTHING.
theres a strong theory that the reason Icheb got such a brutal death scene is bc the original actor that played him in Voyager said some really callous and awful remarks about a pdf-phile victim. which were horrible...but why take it out on the character??? hes fictional. ya kno that picard writers??😅
@@X3nophiliac If true, that's a really immature way to respond to that. The Icheb guy's career was basically dead anyways, no point in getting so worked up about it that you take it out on your multi million dollar television show.
This is one of the most disgusting things about the show. They actually know so much about the canon and then go in the opposite way with it every time.
I’m a huge DS9 person and I understand why it’s not for everyone but god it bothers the hell out of me that the only thing nutrek thinks is worth pulling from that show is freaking section 31! it only works in DS9 because it was 1: the third series in the franchise. 2: late in the series when the characters, their personal philosophies and internal conflicts are well established - as well as the stakes of the war. And 3: it is portrayed as a BAD THING. The three (3) episodes Section 31 features in, are a terrible time for Dr. Bashir, and ruin his life and irrevocably disrupt his sense of self, and his faith in the Federation. When they mentioned Section 31 in the reboot I gasped, and not in a good way. I didn’t know I was capable of nerd rage up to that moment, but that one detail made me realize that Star Trek was in the hands of people who fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of Star Trek. Great video. You’re really funny.
I'm pretty sure that the writers of DS9 wanted Starfleet to try to genocide the Founders because of the way it would work really well for the plot, and then somebody objected to Starfleet doing that, so the writers came up with Section 31. I never liked them in DS9, but I was fine with them as a means to an end, the trope of the soldiers who protect paradise but are unworthy to be part of it is an old one. But every time they were brought back and given more validation, it was a mistake.
I'm so glad I found this video...because I have spent past couple years thinking I was crazy because of how much loathed Picard, while online channels (and friends as well) were consistently telling me, "It's a GREAT! Can't you see the 4-D chess the writers are playing??? What's wrong with you? Don't you like dark and gritty takes on legacy franchises? Don't you know what good writing looks like?" Yes, actually I do, which I have just watched "Cause & Effect" and "In the Pale Moonlight" for like the twentieth time each and never even finished Picard Season Two, I called it quits after episode 4, OMFG is was so bad. Like, three bizarre writing choices with the series (not mentioned in this amazing video) have been driving me nuts: 1) WHY does Rio, the moment Sojee boards the ship, run to his room and sulk and get drunk for a whole episode, without offering an explanation to the crew. If he really thought Sojee was a threat to the ship and crew, as the captain, shouldn't he have had her beamed off or confined immediately, or at least demand an explanation from Picard as too why he is bringing this dangerous synth onboard--and then immediately inform Picard of what the last synth--who LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE SOJEE did on his last ship? (And then the counseling session of him explaining his daddy issues and emo-man-boy-ness goes on for SO LONG.) 2) WHY are there so MANY f-king scenes of the main cast members drinking in bars, including Guinan's ugly-ass honky-tonk bar--and like why is that set so terribly lighted and uninviting (unlike the original Ten Forward, which was a place where you'd WANT to hang out? Picard himself spends collective hours in that loud, tasteless, bar---he goes there for LUNCH on the reg. Like, WHY Is Picard now a barfly? And why do so many of the main characters spend SO MUCH time drinking? WHY is everybody in this Star Trek future angry and drunk all the time? (Actually, I know the answer: it's lazy, dorky, hack writing to make the characters look "cool." Also, the writers hate you.) 3) In Season Three: WHY do they character-assassinate Janeway off-screen by making her sound like an out-of-touch bureaucrat? The explanation of why Janeway is unaware of the Changeling infiltration of Star Fleet, or has not moved to block Frontier Day, is literally that she is TOO BUSY and it's hard to SCHEDULE an appointment with her. And speaking of assassination... WHY did they bring back Shelby only to immediately have her murdered, in a scene that (I swear to God) was being played as comedy? Like, it's now considered fun, goofball fan service to have a powerful woman violently murdered--because 30 years ago she had the nerve to challenge Riker's complacency. And then had the gall to help rescue Picard from the Borg and , you know, save the galaxy. Do people forget that all of her crewmates, her friends, her mentor, her direct reports from her former ship in Best of Both Worlds were murdered by the Borg--and she remained unflappable in the face of that and proved herself a resilient and capable first officer? But yeah, anyway, let's murderize this shrew-- because isn't THIS what you WANT, you sexless, friendless, middle-aged incel? (I guarantee you that sentiment is exactly what was going through writers' minds as they slapped together the plot points this whole woeful series.) Anyway... this was great 4-hour video that helped me feel less gas-lit.
I paced myself and watched it in a few sittings. And now I need to go watch something else (maybe _Lower Decks_ "Crisis Point" or _Prodigy_ "A Moral Star" or even that _Voyager_ episode Angela used as her own palette cleanser), just to not feel so depressed.
re: Battlestar Galactica @14:00 you mention the Laura Roslin character going from SecEd to President/ranking governmental officer. The scene where they are escaping the Cylons and realize that only some of the ships in their "ragtag fleet" can warp (or "jump") and she has to make the call for all the ships that can, to jump and leave the rest behind. She is overwhelmed by the situation. Then the other ships realize what is about to happen and are screaming, pleading, betrayed and hysterical. A crew member moves to shut down comms and she stops him, saying "Leave it on." They will leave their fellow humans to die, but they will not turn away from what they have done. At that point she was internally broken and re-assembled into a leader. One of the most wrenching and well-acted scenes I've ever seen in a sci-fi movie or show. Hadn't thought of it in a while.
Doctor Collier dropping a nearly four hour takedown of a Star Trek series that I haven't seen yet? Send my calls to voicemail and cancel all my appointments and meetings for the morning. I love the uniform.
when i saw it was four hours i wasn't too happy, but then i set the video speed to 0.8 and now that it's five hours we're much closer to home with my expectations
Just stumbled across your video, love the analysis! I like to describe Star Trek as "competence porn" which is consistent with you initial analysis around why you (and many of us) love it. Being able to escape to a world where people have things figured out, are acting in good faith, cooperating, have low ego, and constantly seeking self improvement is frankly inspiring and healing, especially during times of uncertainty in real life. Relatedly to how Star Trek inspired you to be a scientist, it was similar for me but I studied the evolution of cooperation and altruism so that aspects holds a special place in my heart. I think saddest part about how modern Star Trek, including Picard, has let the franchise and the fanbase down is that now more than ever we need an optimistic view of the future that is low in conflict, but they have given us the opposite. I know that the trend toward more dark and mature media that started in the early 2000s was refreshing at the time, but it has overstayed it's welcome. With the current state of the world, I think people want media that is inspiring, optimistic, and provides us with hope.
Nemesis is like getting into a beautiful long-term romance and it's looking like a life thing and then right as you start thinking about popping the question they convert to scientology or crystals or something
Try being married for three years before they drop “I think mermaids might be real” on you. My first thought was “What the f*** did I get myself into?”
That's kind of my story around the release of this show. Just before it came out, I met someone I thought was my everything. The show came out and we got married. I watched 20 minutes of the show and it broke my heart, and she got obsessed with it. 6 months later she hid crystals around the house to fight ghosts and demons. One night I woke up and she was pouring some kind of holy water on me meant to fight the demon she thought was living inside me. And then we had a kid... I should have run when I realized she was just another idiot. If someone likes this show, they have to have something wrong with them.
A Shrike is a species of bird that is infamous for its especially brutal method of killing prey, by impaling them on sharp objects after snapping their neck. It's a fitting name for the ship.
I always understood it as less killing and more storing, but yes, the point is most shrikes earn the alternate name 'butcher birds' because of the hanging carcasses they produce.
Nu Trek has some bad writing for sure. But honestly the most depressing part about it is how they took the most recognizably positive and optimistic pop culture franchise and made it as depressing as everything else on the market.
It's like they said to themselves "Well the world is more depressing now than when TNG originally aired!"... completely forgetting Star Trek is still hundreds of years in the future
@@takeelingThe idea that the world is more depressing now than it was before is just objectively untrue. People only think that because they haven't bothered to look at recent history.
@@Buffaloguy1991i don't think they're chasing the success of ds9 because then they'd probably have way more dumb fan service moments for ds9. like rom would show up for no reason or something. they're just chasing current tv making trends but doing it really badly
Can we talk about how Starfleet apparently did end up creating an entire race of Soong-type androids, and the first thing they did was enslave them to do menial and dangerous labor, exactly as Picard predicted in Measure of a Man, and then... They never even mention this, never deal with it?
Not only predicted but they literally made a precedent judicial ruling specifically against that situation. So yeah, I'd also like to know how exactly that happened. But I doubt that there was someone in the writer's room who had watched that episode..
@@kyjo72682 But they balanced that by having a race of Soong-type androids who had free will and made their own society. Who, checks notes, almost destroyed the universe by inviting in vague mechanical doombots from another dimension. Though, come to think of it, that might be a commentary on the current state of Twitter.
@kyjo72682 Melinda Snodgrass, who wrote the original episode, has spoken out publically how Kurtzman's team contacted her about the use of Maddox, a character she created and owns, so they had to get her permission to legally use the character. She admitted when she eventually heard about what they did with him and how they butchered the very concept of her script with the synth plot, that it was probably clear none of them had seen the original episode and they were just trying to leverage points off of a popular installment of TNG.
This is infuriating to me. They went against the message of one of the greatest episodes of the franchiase.. for what? Why did they need Synths to be bad? to.. justify the Zhat Vash, which never existed before this show? To send a message about... slavery bad??? There was negative reasons to allow the Federation to have a Synth Slave Race. You had to built up a pile of bullshit before you can get to "no reason for this". Just have a different motivation for the bad guy! Or, IDK, there is the literal symbol of tachnology overload right there as the BORG!!! which you already included in the plot!!
I like how Angela is like "I don't know how films and shows work" and then proceeds to deeply analyze and diagnose how stories in media should work and provides excellent fixes
She's got some amazing writing ideas. I forgot which video it was but she just casually throws out there how "someone should write a sci-fi novel about xyz topic" because she's not a writer, and then proceeded to suggest a great plot 😅 And here she does it again.
I'm at the halfway point, and she's pointing out how Riker would have burned the galaxy down before he let his son die of a curable disease, and my jaw is on the floor, because goddamn, she's right. And my jaw is still on the floor because I'm just wondering how she's the first person I've seen articulate this.
Didn't Star Trek used to boast having scientists in the writer's rooms for these shows? Are they still in there? Are they alive? I'm worried about them.
@@FreddisredThey have science advisors, just as they always have, and just as always it's the writers' choice as to how much they want to listen to them.
@@Freddisred They do, and it shows on the shows that care. Dr. Erin MacDonald is the science consultant for the franchise, and as much as Angela has stated her dislike for time travel plot lines, I'd love to know whether that still holds when the stakes are real and the rules are well-explained, as in _Prodigy_ Season 2's "Temporal Mechanics 101."
Hi, I watched your video the other day and I wanted to come back today and say how much I liked it! I've been a fan of Star Trek ever since watching TNG as a little kid growing up, and I think your comments about the inherent optimism of it were spot-on. It's a sentiment that gets overlooked too often, but it's so important.
"Brought back Icheb just so he could be tortured to death", "this is like the 75th suicide in this show" yeah I'm out 💀. Never thought watching a 3 hour YT video about a TV show would _save_ me time and money, but here we are. Thanks 👍😸
I'm struggling to find another mention of the disturbing amount of suicide in Picard anywhere online. Seems like there was a hidden agenda in the show, a terrifying one, and perhaps one we ought to discuss? Anyone? Also, are there more mercy killings other than with Seven's scene? I'm just imagining the writers room. _'So that's where we are, any suggestions for how we resolve?'_ All appear in quiet contemplation for a couple of beats. Then cut to (the until now unseen) Anton LaVey. _' Another suicide?'_
One of the biggest plot holes was believing Riker and Troi would just let their son die when they knew B9 was in storage at Daystrom. The entire crew and others in Starfleet would have banded together to support them.
I would argue that Section 31 as originally portrayed worked in DS9. They were like an actual secret society. They had limited resources, and worked almost entirely outside the normal structures of the Federation. The power of an S-31 agent was not in their security level or rank, but in their ability to convince you, a rank-and-file, that you had been selected for an important mission by Starfleet intelligence, and that only you could prevent some catastrophe -- and their ability to disappear with a false trail when their plan backfired and they need to outrun the rest of SF Intelligence. NuTrek forgot all this, and gives S-31 an unlimited budget, unlimited clearance, and full authority within Starfleet like they're the bloody Obsidian Order or something. Entire fleets of highly advanced ships that are a majority of Starfleet tonnage, black badges that give a Commander the authorisation to depose and supplant an admiral, control of all the election officials in the 53 largest member-planets of the Federation...
Yeah, S-31 post DS9 was not handled well. In NuTrek they are basically a stand in for Starfleet Intelligence instead of a completely off the grid, non-Starfleet operation.
In DS9 you could leave it thinking the whole of Section 31 is an invention of Sloane, and with his death it ceased to exist any more. It was treated as anathema to the very idea of the federation, contemptible, disgusting. Then annoyingly ENT had to go and canonise S31 as existing from the very beginning of Starfleet, paving the way for what we have now. In some ways Section 31 kind of reminds me of Special Circumstances from the The Culture series of books, where even the most utopia of utopias has a shady secret alliance of Minds and agents doing anti-prime directive work.
For those who need to understand stand WOKE... All the men are playing women with mental illness.. also the women are playing as mean men.. This seems sick to me...If you go WOKE, You will end up BROKE..
Turning Seven of Nine from a brilliant and brave scientist enhanced with alien technology into a mysterious hard-drinkin', wise-crackin', gun-shootin' renegade was the dumbest fucking decision ever, _especially_ when Raffi existed and was already all of those things.
100%. That was actually one of my biggest gripes with Picard. Among many lol. But they butchered Seven imo, I was forced to re-watch Voyager afterwards to cleanse my brain.
I think of it as a missed opportunity. Sevens entire backstory is one of the most fascinating in all of Star Trek. She struggles to regain her humanity in Voyager and it's a major part of her character arc. I can imagine an entire series about her when she gets back to Earth just adjusting to a society she's never been in before; maybe even struggles for acceptance because some people blame her for borg atrocities. The idea that she'd run off to be a renegade isn't the most absurd idea but I feel we've been cheated of the interesting story of how she'd get there.
"She wasn't abused, she was just mentally ill" is probably the absolute worst way of handling a domestic abuse subplot short of outright victim blaming. I'm stunned.
I never watched season three. I am a person who has watched TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, all the way through, multiple times. After season two of this, my tolerance was so far gone, I simple never cared to attempt to see season three. In the first few episodes, I recognized that this character is not Picard. Continuing to watch, my repeated thought was - This is a man who's experienced more than possibly any human alive. He's literally lived another entire lifetime with children and grandchildren. He's witnessed beyond the limits of reality, dealt with gods, Been part of a collective conscious, actually lived even more in a place where time and space had no meaning along side Kirk, stopped galactic wars, found solutions to things as serious as government conspiracies, time traveled, relived his own younger life just to see how different choices would affect his life via Q, dealt with, and had to decide on, many philosophic thought experiments that manifested as real problems with real lives, ...... I could keep listing things. And he just acts like some old, know nothing, no wisdom, worthless old man.
His behaviour at the Romulan refugee camp was just so wildly inappropriate. I assumed the disease was destroying his brain. 'A sign saying "Romulans only", that is racist, I'll make an insulting futile gesture and annoy everyone into being tolerant of me, a Federation aristocrat!' says the career diplomat.
RLM were more hostile to S1 and 2 than anyone. There was a change of showrunner for S3, and they gave it their approval - but Mike & Rich have said that they're scared to ever watch any more Trek now, as it's unlikely to be better than that.
S1 was bad and unsatisfying. S2 was way, way worse - like, unbelievably bad. I almost didn't watch S3, but my curiosity got the better of me... Most of it is much better than S1 & S2 (this isn't saying much, but the improvement was surprising), but then it completely falls apart in the last few episodes and ends in eye-rolling embarrassment. I know that there are people that like this show, they just have very different expectations of the entertainment than I do. The writers/show-runners *KNEW* they had exactly 3 seasons, so they knew exactly the number of episodes they had to work with to create an overall arc with a satisfying conclusion. But, even the first season is very poorly paced and thought-out (as Agela rightly identifies), and then it just gets worse and more disconnected from there. They wanted a Star Trek show starring Stewart, but didn't know what meaningful thing to do with that starting point and never figured it out. Not only a waste of money and talent, but outright damaging to Star Trek overall.
Season 2 is worse than Season 3, but Season 3 is worse than Season 1. After season 1, they fired the showrunner and brought in a new guy who pitched the reunion show that Stewart hadn't let them do in the first place. But they did a breakdown and the reunion was too expensive for one season. So they made a counter-offer, they wanted two seasons. The only way they could pay for Season 3 was to write Season 2 so it took place in the present day (and mostly outside) so that they could shoot it as cheaply as possible and put the money into Season 3. But even though they knew this, Season 2 and 3 still have weird contradictions and gaps. One thing that Angela didn't mention -- Wesley has had a half-brother for 25 years who was fathered by his surrogate father and named after his actual father and they have never met. In fact, Wesley knowingly and deliberately abandoned his mother and has never visited her. AND BEVERLY NEVER MENTIONS HIM. There is literally no character that "Picard" can't assassinate.
In defence of Worf's parenting, I think he accurately assessed himself as a bad parent, and his parents as good parents. And he didn't know he had a son until a few days(?) before Alexanders mum died. And made the smart choice of sparing Alexander shitty parenting by himself, and made sure Alexander had good parents. Not great, but he accurately recognised himself as unqualified.
It's also a really long story arch that is only concluded in DS9. It's not at all perfect, but it's definitely a realistically complex portrait of many people's experiences.
I came to say this. It's what a good parent would do if they just woke up one day and magically knew that they would be a bad parent going forward. Sometimes good parenting is noticing what you can and can't do as a parent and doing what is best for the child in that situation. What he did for Alexander was, I think, an act of good parenting from someone who would have been a bad parent had he not acted as he did.
I have the impression that 90% of Hollywood scriptwriters are drug-addicted alcoholic deadbeat dads who have no idea why they are being kept away from their ex-wife and children. This one was written in a brief moment of hungover clarity and introspection. Also, Worf was afraid he could die at any moment by being hit with an errant table tennis ball or someone bumping into him in a queue in the dining area. So delicate for a half-Klingon.
"I don't even do media criticism. Like, what am I doing here?" Why don't you do more media criticism? This was absolutely stellar! I just watched you critically geek out for nearly FOUR hours in a single sitting, and I loved every minute of it. Seriously, your bitingly sarcastic, dead-pan delivery is hilarious and such a refreshing change from the typical "ANGRY NERD" persona that dominates the TH-cam media criticism sphere.
i was feeling the same way, i’ve watched a lot of her other videos but i’ve never felt such a comparison to jenny until this video. maybe they grew up in similar areas? they actually have very similar accents and cadences.
The moment she mentioned the avatar bracelet it clicked in my brain and I went, "OH. THAT'S why it felt familiar." Can't believe it took me over 30min to figure it out lmao.
Yeah it's just a similar humor style and speaking cadence. But for reason I won't go into Jenny gives me 50 different bad vibes, and I feel none of that here.
Fun fact: The Ferengi were originally meant to be the big villains of TNG, but they came across as goofy, much to Armin Shimerman’s dismay. So, when he was asked to play Quark in DS9, he took the character in a different direction, giving him more depth and dimension.
I didn't really like the logical-inconsistency of the Ferengi. They were supposed to be hypercapitialist and focused on profit. But then do stuff against that. Example - no refunds. That might maximize profit in the very short-run, but it would damage long term profits. Any human corporation would beat Ferengi at capitialization. Treat the customer like a king and that they can trust you, and they'll come back and spend more money with you. Instead, they hypercapitialist company would do stuff like not care about externalized costs - pollute the air and water, have slaves, terrible working conditions, push products to people that don't need them, like Nestle pushing baby formula to black women who didn't need it etc. Basically everything that Nestle does.
Yeah, ferengi capitalists were terrible to non-ferengi, because they were super racist and other cultures didn't have to follow their rules. However, ferengi followed their cultural rules, so they held each other to other standards.
After avoiding new-trek like the plague, someone mentioned to me, "watch Picard Season 3, it's much better than the other seasons". I sat down, put on the first episode, and in the first minute, Beverley Crusher walked up to a wounded alien, looked him in the eye, pointed a gun to his face, made sure he was looking at her, smiled and violently killed him in a shower of blood. In shock I turned it off in horror, and watched a dozen episodes of TNG, but I can never escape the profound sadness and dismay I had in that moment. What an awful awful show, and shame on the current day writers directors and producers. Good review Angela, you've earned a subscription from me.
@@shadowedmultiverse It's Gritty for sure, but I would argue not Realistic. As a real life person would never do that (unless they're a Nazi hell-bent on destruction of all life, or a psychotic psychopath, which Dr Beverley Crusher's character is most certainly not).
Klutzman Dreck does not show elevated better versions of humans / aliens. It shows the worst, the war driven, murder, splatter, guts all over the place in some weird form resembling an action movie and in the process destroys all the role models we have been looking up to because they were better versions of ourselves.
@@declandougan7243i think they were being derisive about the philosophy behind the show, not justifying it. unless you were merely adding on to their point.
I started watching this around midnight not looking at the run time. It’s now I’m just realizing it’s 4am. Your 4 hour video essay was more interesting than watching the entire 3 seasons of Picard 😂
Picard clapping after watching this woman burn the last bridge she had left looks and sounds like it's something out of a youtube poop, I can't believe someone got paid to write this
So the first season ends with Picard being put in a synthetic body that's identical to his own body except for the lack of a fatal brain disease. Couldn't they have just... cured his brain disease? Why introduce this insane development? Surely him being in a synthetic body will have some narrative significance in the next 2 seasons
Im a simple man. I see a 4 hour video talking about Star Trek, and i hit play. 13:00 - I fully understand. I wish I had a binder for life that just told me what i needed to do when i was lost and directionless. All of your points are as true as they are clearly obvious, which is so incredibly sad and confusing. Great video.
Relating to the professionalism and decor of Starfleet, I wish you showed the scene where Lt. Worf critiqued* Data when he was acting captain and Data politely but sternly reprimanded him in "Gambit, Part II" (Season 7, Episode 5) for undermining his authority, and Worf instead of being angry or throwing a tantrum APOLOGIZES for his behavior and for jeopardizing their friendship. It's just an encapsulation of everything that makes TNG great. Been a Trekkie since I first saw The Inner Light (Season 5, Episode 25), this video was great.
The whole "younger-than-25" thing is also stupid, because y'know the study that supposedly demonstrates that? It only studied people below the age of 25. So it's not that your prefrontal cortex stops developing after 25; it's that the study stopped at that point, and everyone has extrapolated from the void of data that development completely halts. XD
The pre frontal cortex is what stops developing at around 25 Not the whole brain. Also the use of the word development can be used for getting Alzheimer’s. So the word itself is kinda silly. But the overarching point that people try to make by saying this is correct. 25-30 is when your pfc which is the planning and emotional control part of your Brain matures and reaches its peak maturity.
I’m 100% in agreement on Section 31. It completely undermines the tenets of Star Trek and makes every speech Picard ever gave about the Federation, a hollow joke. In DS9 they made it sound like it could just be a few xenophobes pretending they’re more powerful than they are to gain complicity, but Kurtzman cant imagine a Federation that doesn’t have an official seedy black ops division, because he doesn’t actually believe in humanities possibilities like Roddenberry did.
If you want a deeper cut, it's exactly people like Section 31 persecuting the Founders that caused them to form the paranoid Dominion in the first place. One of the Federation's goals is to *stop* cycles of violence like that.
I think it's pretty clear in DS9 that the mere existence of Section 31 is supposed to be an evil, and that even if they defeat the Dominion, the fact that Section 31 could even exist, would mean that they had lost the war. The thing is, DS9 was written by smart people, who seem to believe in things. Nu-trek...
I actually appreciate that section 31 exists in the version it did in ds9. Its not all as bad as your making it out, its all the trek and fans SINCE ds9 who run away with section 31. But the idea is that the federation is right and good, but when diplomacy fails, section 31 would rather spike a senators drink or whatever than allow diplomacy to fail and war to begin. i guess im saying Section 31 in Ds9 was ok i understood what they were trying to say.
I'm studying math, doing my part in finding a treatment for my mom's brain disease, Cavernous Malformation. Part of how I ended up going down this path was because of Dr. Bashir from DS9. Season 4, The Quickening, he was against an "incurable" disease. It's given me a new purpose in life. Now that Star Trek and Star Wars are no longer fun, it's allowed me to break out of my comfort zone and explore an endless list of Sci-Fi classics like Dune and Stargate. I love your videos, hope you're doing well :-)
I am amazed that you are finding math useful in such a personal way. I finally earned my BA in Math just because when my other plans fizzled out, I would go back to math and eventually had enough credits for a major. I wish you much luck in your pursuit of using math to attain your goal.
2:39:23 "The Shrike" is an allusion to the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons where it's a spiked horror and one of the main antagonists. Shrikes are also a species of small birds that impale insects on thorns.
I've heard TNG described as "A show where an old man gives a boring speech to stop exciting things from happening" and it's accurate and it's why I love it.
I was so legitimately excited to see an overarching storyline about how even in the future, we all get old and we all still have to deal with what it's like losing something functional about ourselves but still proving the human spirit by showing that even if we're older now and have lost some things, it doesn't mean we're useless and that life and death have no meaning. "Picard" had a chance to be a deeply insightful meta-narrative about modern life. Nope.
@@jogymogy3691 or lock her up in his basement so he can record dozens upon dozens of re:Views episodes with him forcing her to constantly talk about star trek. It would be beautiful.
Me: "Instead of watching Star Trek Picard, I'd rather watch a 4 hour rant video about it." Angela: Hears my sarcastic prayer and makes it a delightful reality. ☺
I've never watched a minute of "Picard" and I never will, but I'm glad I can watch Angela and confirm my suspicions were correct, while also being entertained.
The problem with NuTrek is that it hates Star Trek, but wants to capitalize on a Space IP because Star Wars is cool. Also, I'm less mad about the killing of Icheb, the Wesley Crusher of Voyager, over everyone just forgiving PICARD because they built the bridge of the Enterprise-D
@@hbarz1066 I think Strange New Worlds is the closest to a real Star Trek show that we got. It does have the problem of one thing though. The whole cast forgets theres a command structure until the script remember there is one. I can't chalk that up to how Pike runs his ship, but everything require a discussion. Also everyone is just itching at the bit to do one-liners at every opportunity. I mean that's fine, we had people like Tom Paris afterall, but everyone can't sarcastic all the time. I consider this the Marvel syndrome of undercutting danger for a joke. Still all that is knit-picking. If we had a show like that during Enterprise era, I might have liked Strange New Worlds better. Spock acts morelike a vulcan than T'Pol ever did, even if I think he's way too emotional. Spock has an excuse though, given he's half-human and during the early days of TOS Nimoy was 100% emotionless there yet. So I can cut some slack there. Having said that, no episode really stands out like some of the greats in the past, while out-of-theme episodes like the musical one stands out in a bad way. It's a show I feel that has potential to be good, but is just kinda there. The acting is fine, the stories are fine, but it's not amazingly good or bad. I like some characters, forget others exist, and there isn't a stand out person like the original Spock or Worf or Data or Seven that makes the show feel special. The show looks good because it's standing next to Discovery and Picard. That's not really an achievement. Maybe Kurtzman just isn't that interested in the show so has completely destroyed it yet.
@@GleeChan Interesting, appreciate the response. I've personally really enjoyed it, but to each their own. One of my favorite parts is the Gorn storyline that bridges both seasons. Although I'm 1000% with you on the musical episode.
@@hbarz1066 I'd call it a fun, romantic space dramedy wearing Star Trek cosplay. The only Trek made in the past 20(...maybe 30?) years that I acknowledge as canon have been a select few fan-made productions. Those in control don't seem to have much love for its legacy.
I'm so glad the algorithm blessed me with this video. I usually mindlessly scroll while I have some TH-cam video droning on in the background. I actually watched this nearly 4 hour long analysis on a show I've never seen (and will never see). Why? Because you're great, Angela. You're great. Good job.
The thing I love about Worf is that while he is objectively not the best dad it’s explained by his own backstory and childhood. He is a Klingon raised by human parents. He learned earth culture, and his struggles between the human and Klingon parts of him are what made him into the strong lieutenant he is in the show. When he becomes a father he doesn’t know how to raise a child much less a Klingon child therefore he sends Alexander to the two people he knows can raise a Klingon. His parents. The show doesn’t justify his decision, but instead explains where he’s coming from through his backstory
It's called the control tower. Star Trek, when I was a kid in rural MI, made me feel like my geekiness and my pleasure with shortwave radio listening and experimenting with antennas wasn't me being somehow defective. Star Trek told me that there were a lot of people like me out there somewhere, people who pursued and advanced science and technology. I just needed to find those people. Now I live in Boulder, CO along with friends who are scientists, and mountain-bike riders, rock-climbers and white-water canoeists. Star Trek, even as a TV show told me that there was indeed more to life than mucking-out cow-barns. As an adult I don't watch much TV. I prefer to do things instead of watching others do things. But that one TV show 60 years ago kept this one kid going until he could get somewhere he finally fit it.
The reason many of us loved TNG was the unalloyed optimism of the future it presented. The Federation was hopeful and Starfleet was the ultimate meritocracy. So much has been done in the movies, Discovery and Picard to kill that hopefullness. That can only happen when the creators completely misunderstand, or simply don't bother to find out, what Star Trek is all about.
I love DS9, but the addition of Section 31 ruined a lot for me. Everything since is so dark, and has a seedy underhanded element that TOS and TNG didn't have.
STD is complete trash. Pretty much anything that has been called "star trek" since Enterprise, has been garbage. STD was a dumpster fire. PukeHard was pure shite! Even the last season of PukeHard, which occasionally seemed like Star Trek, quickly ruined it right after almost seeming like a Star Trek show. Star Trek died in 2005 with Enterprise. I guess it was still kind of alive until Jar Jar Abrams ruined it. And after that, STD drive nails into the coffin. There has not been a single actual Star Trek movie or show since 2005. Only garbage pretending to be Star Trek.
I'm glad to see someone who didn't buy into Picard. Did I enjoy seeing everyone back together and that they rebuilt the Enterprise D bridge? Absolutely. But that's about it. This reminds me of how Star Wars went. So many people keep consuming the garbage and say negative things if you don't consume. I don't get how anyone can love TNG, DS9, etc, and also enjoy NuTrek!
Section 31 was a fine idea for Deep Space 9 because as soon as our heroes learn about it they try to destroy it. Bashir goes along for a mission because he thinks it's genuinely important and his character has always been a little naïve, but after that it's just about exposing this cancer, not fetishizing it like Kurtzman does. Shit makes me so mad. It's anti-Trek.
Ever since the JJ Abrams trek came out I was like “I’m not a star trek guy, but I know this isn’t star trek”. It’s nice to see this video, from a trek fan, with full receipts, going point by point about how the people making trek nowadays do not understand what star trek is about.
I hardly remember the first JJ Movie. After we left the cinema we got sooo drunk. We were all really sad. Burnt a selfmade vulcan planet on the campus next week.
I identify so strongly with that desire for the comforting competence of “pomp”. I spent years of my life in my teens and early 20s obsessed with very LARPy video games because it’s just incredibly satisfying to play-act with other passionate nerds that you’re in a serious situation and everybody’s got a role to play, and in order to win you’re all communicating in very precise, official-sounding language. In brief, it was a massive self-esteem boost. 😂
This is a big reason I loved the "classic" era of World of Warcraft. Forty people coming together, doing their role, and feeling collective victory. It was such a rush and could work even without every single person being a finely tuned gaming machine.
I do like the "pomp" as well, but I also think it can deflate the dramatic tension in TNG for me in situations where the crew is facing something their training hasn't prepared them for because everyone seems a little too cool and efficient. I watched a little of Strange New Worlds and I actually enjoyed that those characters portrayed the professionalism and maturity expected of star fleet officers but also willing to show a little doubt and uncertainty under fire.
@@sswpp8908 I dunno... that's the _most_ essential time to be cool-headed. That's how one would expect serious professionals to act! When working in the oilfield, I was twice in situations that were real touch-or-go (like "we might actually all die if we don't correctly identify & execute the proper course of action here"-and we'd all seen, or at least known, people die in similar situations; I still remember the eerieness of seeing my buddy's cellphone video from a jobsite with a whole crew dropped from H2S... trucks running, music playing, nobody at all upright)... ...and I don't recall expressing any emotion whatsoever-it was probably evident in the tone of my voice, but there's no point in getting all WILD and DRAMATIC, y'know? It wastes time and takes bandwidth you really don't even have to spare. *edit:* oh, you mentioned SNW. My bad-I was thinking of Discovery, I think!
@@sswpp8908 I dunno... that's the _most_ essential time to be cool-headed. That's how one would expect serious professionals to act! When working in the oilfield, I was twice in situations that were real touch-or-go (like "we might actually all die if we don't correctly identify & execute the proper course of action here"-and we'd all seen, or at least known, people die in similar situations; I still remember the eerieness of seeing my buddy's cellphone video from a jobsite with a whole crew dropped from H2S... trucks running, music playing, nobody at all upright)... ...and I don't recall expressing any emotion whatsoever-it was probably evident in the tone of my voice, but there's no point in getting all WILD and DRAMATIC, y'know? It wastes time and takes bandwidth you really don't even have to spare. *Edit:* Oh, you mentioned SNW-my bad; I was thinking of STD, I think!
The idea that people could miss the Borg collective has actually been done over and over on Voyager, and even Hugh referenced it in both his tng appearances.
3:15 : "They go to cons and they talk to people who are like 'I am now this, because I saw you do that.' " My girlfriend is one of those people. When she was a kid, she saw Uhura on the bridge of the Enterprise. It was the first time she'd seen a female character on TV who was in an important position, and not just a secretary or housewife. It inspired her to become a scientist.
Picard was such a bizarre incineration of narrative (and literal) currency. It's actually kind of incredible, it's like a perfect inversion of good story-telling: there is so much a person could learn about how *not* to write a sequel.
It's like they did everything wrong absolutely right. Like, you start with a checklist of how not to do a show like this and you tell your staff, "Make this for me".
The incongruous triumphant music with the Raffi "calling in her last favor at Starfleet" scene in season 1 is a feature, not a bug. It's the writers trying to show how Picard doesn't know how his success is built on the suffering and sacrifice of other people: he walks away feeling accomplished, while she hits the bottle harder in despair. It's just like when Seven beams back to kill the gangster lady in that other episode and says how she doesn't want Picard to know she came back for revenge because she wants him to hold onto his idealism. They're trying to say that he's a quixotic old fool who needs to be protected from reality. All the messages about doing the right thing in TNG? Bullshit. As much as I love DS9, Sisko and Garak baiting the Romulans during the Dominion War opened the door to all this. It's all Section 31 pulling a fast one on Sarek, like you suggested at the end of the video. They're "deconstructing" Star Trek, i.e. shitting all over an optimistic vision of the future. And you're damned right Picard ruins Star Trek.
As a Picard S1-3 hater, Strange New Worlds S1 does feel like a nu-trek mea culpa of sorts. The writers are very clearly trying their hardest to "just make a Star Trek show", in their words, and there are some solid episodes (mostly in S1). But SNW also highlights why modern tv writers are unlikely to ever really do Star Trek justice. They simply can't imagine that working in a serious professional environment with a strict atmosphere could be anyone's dream job, let alone fantasy. So in SNW the ship feels more like a laidback tech company with beanbag chairs and a "cool boss" for captain.
Wow that last bit really summarizes it. I love watching the conflict resolution of TNG but imagining a modern audience getting into 45 minutes of that feels surreal and unlikely.
I’ve seen so many SNW dick riders and I thank you for realizing that, at least to me, it’s like if Star Trek was written by people who think being a stoner is a whole personality with one dude in there to handle the action
I think the writers on The Orville are more than capable. Though I admit it's not as strict or as serious as Star Trek it definitely still remembers that they are a military with a definite structure.
About the bad-guy ship named "Shrike"... I think that name is actually quite fitting. Shrikes are birds, and some shrikes are also called butcherbirds because they impale prey onto plant spines. Combine that with the design of the ship... well, I like the name.
This was supposed to be productive day...
Funny seeing you here, Captain
I had the same thought, but it's working out. The video keeps reminding me how grumpy ST:Picard made me, so I pause if for a bit, then go do day job stuff to calm down before unpausing it.
The captain is, of course, a hero of exceptional taste.
Just have your intern do the work, its not like you pay him anyway.
It's always nice to see personalities you kind of look up to, enjoy the same stuff/channel/person you do :).
I'm glad I stopped watching "Picard" after just a few episodes. As TNG is one of my all time favorites, most rewatched series, that might have had the most influence as to the kind of person I am today. TNG always helps me give hope, helps me escape, but it also makes me sad when I look towards our own society.
As a pre-teen on the Autism spectrum in 1970, I wrote a letter to Jimmy Doohan. He took the time to write back and forth as pen pals for more than a year. He was instrumental in me improving my social and interpersonal skills. Years later, I had the pleasure of working on a very special project with his son Chris. Jimmy was the best.
That's so cool!
What a class act.
I also have autism and it took me a good 35 years to improve on my social skills, even during the time that I did not have my diagnosis ( age:38 ) yet. So glad you had that chance.
The autism spectrum didn’t exist in 1970.
I love that actual war hero James Doohan concluded that the best thing he ever did was give hope to a person who felt hopeless. That's the spirit of Star Trek.
You bring up a really interesting point
War veterans were big part of fantasy and science fiction.
Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, BSG... all had some past connection to military veterans either direct or not.
and before that with little book series like... idk... LOTR, or Narnia? Both of those were REALLY shaped by WW1
War shapes people probably more consistently than anything else, and resulting stories are hopeful, yet are able to show realistic conflict.
Current shows are made by people without that connection. They show conflict in unnatural way, problems discussed are very different, and too obviously inspired by current events.
Fantasy/sci-fi changed, but not because people want something else, because the next generation of writers entered the scene.
@@cola98765 great comment! One detail: Tolkien was adamant that LOTR had nothing at all to do with WWI.
@@nonsensepoem yes... cause he was in WWI trenches
OK, but really... you can tell it did affect him even if he claimed otherwise.
@@cola98765 It's interesting. Take Lovecraft for instance. The guy heard voices in his head, got night terrors, and had a pretty terrible life but he managed to channel all of that into novellas so the narrators going insane could reflect the struggles in his own life. The story 'He' even reflected his phase as an urban explorer. And then there's Edgar Rice Burroughs who wrote Tarzan and John Carter lived in the twilight of the Wild West, was an air pilot, personally witnessed Pearl Harbour, and became a war correspondent. Compare that to Chuck Wendig and you see can see the difference.
@@romanfan250 Seems one has to be a little crazy to make a story that is actually out there and not too grounded in modern problems.
The sad thing is that we have never needed a Rodenberry style Star Trek more than we do right now. People in real life are losing the belief that people can join together to make something good.
The first two seasons of the Orville (not the third).
@@creativeprismstudio1003 Don't forget about Galaxy Quest, but indeed, that was a long time ago.
The Orville. Seth McFarlane is a HUGE Trek nerd (he was in an episode of enterprise) and proponent of space science education.
I strongly recommend looking up Strange New Worlds. The premise when they were first conceiving of the show was, "What if we just do Star Trek?" It checks all of the boxes she lists in the video, and as a lifelong Trekkie, I've found it to be a delight to watch.
SNWs is a lot better than Discovery and Picard but my god if Lower Decks isn’t the most faithful Trek show since Enterprise; yeah its a cartoon and its silly but it just ‘gets’ Trek.
Your critique of Picard is only 4 hours? Wow you must have cut a lot out.
Considering how thin the plot of all three seasons of Picard is, four hours is enough time to go into every little detail of its awfulness.
@@OscarFowlerwoosh
It all seems a bit silly to me.
I actually watched more of the critique than the TV series. (because it's more watchable)
I thought this was a joke until I looked at how long the video actually was lmaooo
Thanks for the therapy session. TNG was a massive influence for me and I miss hope and optimism about the future dearly in media today. It is a bit gruelling to see Star Treks potential being wasted with badly written action slob.
Amen.
cia op
Whos the admin😭😭
Really was a therapy session, I forgot how upset I was at this show. She’s thought way more about why I hated it than I did.
Thank goodness they have not encountered *strange matter.*
Jimmy doohan talking about him helping that fan will always make me smile. That man had a kind heart!
Doohan claims that single act was the greatest thing he had done in his lifetime and this is from a man who comported himself heroically in combat during WW2. Think about that. This man deserves to have his ashes in orbit around the Sun. I hope there are many more like him.
When a flipping _war hero_ describes "the best thing I've ever done in my life" and it's reaching out to a fan he's never met... that's character.
its really amazing and cool 🎉
@@anabasis3144 technically speaking, all our ashes will be in orbit around the sun 😅
you made a great point though, the man is a great role model 🫡
Made me cry. Now I'm thinking about it again and crying. What a beautiful soul.
About a year ago, Alan Moore was interviewed by a small TH-camr from his hometown, and he said something which constantly comes back to me now, and which I deeply associate with why I like star trek so much, but dislike nutrek so much:
"We have to be able to imagine a better world, or we're never going to have one."
Trek has always represented this to me, and to many people. My favorite Trek quote, which I know by heart, is: "A lot has changed in the past 300 years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for posessions. We've grown out of our infancy." This is the world I dream of.
(Yes, I know that line was reworded for one of the TNG movies, but this is better.)
Don't you will make me cry. A world with no hope, is not a world i want to be in.
Weird quote coming from Alan Moore. All of his work I'm familiar with is dour, cynical, and loathful of most of it's characters.
That kinda makes you a communist tbh, lol
@@swagatochatterjee7104 yes
"we're 3 hours into a show called star trek and we haven't trekked any stars" is the most compelling one-liner I've ever heard
A line I heard from another review said “Star Trek Picard is neither Star Trek nor Picard”.
You must have hated ds9
@@johnprieto435 A lot of trekking stars was done in ds9. Sure it was mostly about a specific region of space but it was space and adventureous nontheless.
@@johnprieto435 DS9 isn’t boring and has good writing and interesting characters.
@@johnprieto435 DS9 is actually a really interesting lens through which to view the Trek universe. It's anything but static or stagnant.
I have a little story to tell you:
Between Star Trek The Next Generation, season 1 and season 2, they broadcast for the first time ever the original pilot of Star Trek The original series. For this pilot they had various TNG actors do Little bits and talk about various things. When they were filming that, I had just started working at the California museum of science and industry in Los Angeles. I think they call it something different now. Anyway, they asked for volunteers for somebody who was willing to come in at 3:00 in the morning and work in the aerospace wing while some Star Trek people did some filming in there. Naturally, I volunteered. I got to watch Patrick Stewart work, from 15 ft away for several hours. They would ask me if I could unplug the fans in certain machines and leave the lights and the rest of the machine running. Everybody was super nice and nobody was demanding at all. It was always, "Is this possible?" And never, "We need you to do this."
So, I got to meet Patrick Stewart and shake his hand. And then, they put my name as the very last name on the credits for that broadcast.
I used to have a VHS tape of that. And then somehow, in all of my moving, I lost that damn thing.
So, if anybody can get me a copy of that particular broadcast that has the name "Grant S. Robertson" as the last name in the credits, I would really freaking appreciate it.
Edit: I have now downloaded the video. Thank you to everyone.
i don't have ur tape but I'd like to thank you thats this is a nice little story.
edit: sorry for the horrendous grammar. i dont care about it
I remember that show. It was quite a treat. Kudos to you for being part of it. Hopefully someone will help you out.
I have a copy of it, but I have no idea how to contact you or send you a 1GB file. lol
Update: I uploaded it to The Internet Archive. There was already a copy there that didn't have the end credits. The one I uploaded can be found at the URL path: details/the-star-trek-saga-from-one-generation-to-the-next
I hope that's enough information for you guys to find it as TH-cam won't let me post a link.
@@bonzobudydropbox, google drive
@@bonzobudyDropbox, Google drive
The idea of Janeway letting starfleet do seven dirty is absurd
And it doesn't even make sense. If "former Borg" can't be in starfleet then explain how Picard was
Hell, Janeway finding out what happened to Icheb would've sent her on a warpath alone. It was very weird the writers just decided, "Lets ignore the extended character's personalities - that won't matter at all!" Janeway finding out the federation ignored HER CREW being murdered would be a short series on it's own.
The Janeway we see in _Prodigy_ (the one who got an augment into the Academy) would have resigned her commission before she let Seven get tossed to the wolves.
I'm very happy Mulgrew wasn't in this, whatever the reason was.
This could be unfortunate bleed from the real world, because Kate Mulgrew was horrible to Jeri Ryan during Voyager. The whole situation sucks.
Star Trek made so many kids from the 1970s, 80s, 90s excited about technology, imagination, exploring, acceptance, so many things.
...and through the entire world.
I'm french. 😉
'raises hand' Me too!
It's so offensive how modern treks are implicitly saying the very essence of Star Trek was naive and boring and it's dated now.
The people making these say they want to honor Star Trek, and I actually believe they do want that! They just _can't_ - they fundamentally don't believe in the principles of Star Trek the way that Roddenberry and the TNG writers did, and therefore their storytelling instincts lead them to tear it down in an attempt to make it more 'truthful' or whatever.
I'm not sure they are? There's always the "alternate universe" get out that shows *how* TNG and those universe stories worked in comparison to other situations
For the in-universes stuff, Picard for example, pointing out that often Starfleet does go an impinge on other valid ways of life despite their prime directive 😅
Star Trek is about hope for a better future, but most of these modern writers are jaded nihilists who can’t possibly believe hope is a real thing.
@@ThePlayerOfGames They very much are though.
@@Linklex7 Or that there's much of a future to be had
Picard 100% likes math. He's trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem for fun in STTNG season 2
He also taught his children advanced mathematics and astronomy, from memory, in The Inner Light.
He has a line that about something being an unsolved problem, like Fermat's Last Theorem.
Six years after the episode aired it was actually proven.
@@RettMikhal God, that episode f'd me up hard. ;;
@@shevek2954 In fairness it wasn't solved in the Star Trek Universe because of the Bell riots, Eugenics wars and World War 3.
Well thankfully none of the producers on this show ever watched more than an hour of TNG and decided Picard didn't like math and would want to live in the house where his entirely family died, that Worf would proclaim himself a pacifist AND a member of the space CIA, where Riker just lets things happen around him, and where we needed another Wesley Crusher except with a shitty accent.
Seven says Starfleet rejected her because she was a Borg in the same episode where they showed Icheb was in Starfleet. I don't think the writers even read their own scripts.
Also, Seven was a super genius scientist. She built Voyager's astrometrics lab. She could integrate the Borg's transwarp core into Voyager. She literally knows how to bring the dead back with nanites. Every scientific organization in the Federation would be stepping over each other to recruit her. Even if Starfleet was dumb enough to reject her, the Daystrom Institute would want her. Even the Vulcan Science Academy would probably want to recruit her.
They did her character so dirty in those first two seasons of this show. Highly skilled and obscenely intelligent character turned into some kind of Rambo smh.
Wow, I totally missed that between all the _other_ horrible things about that arc. My headcanon, fwiw-especially with the line that "Janeway did all she could" or whatnot-was that Janeway _intentionally sabotaged_ her admission. 😂
Yeah they really dumbed her down into an action hero. I get that they wanted her to grow into her humanity but they really needed to keep some of that logical cold intellect.
I don't know what any of these words mean because I didn't watch Star Trek, but you sound like you're correct so I'll believe you. 😊
The sad thing is, this is completely believable in the world we live in today. Stupid narcissists full of vain get to be in charge, while the ones with talent and good intentions are brushed aside only to turn into some bitter underdog warrior. It's neither the Star Trek we know nor want. Star Trek is essentially an escapist fantasy. But a fantasy grounded enough to give people some real hope that we may one day create a world where we can work together for the common good. And Picard (and Discovery, to some extent) negates all this.
I'll give you an example. In DS9 Season 3, They go to San Francisco in 2024. It's a terrible world, and sadly not too far off from what we have today. But the point is, they are saying "hey look, maybe there's gonna be a WW3. Maybe there's gonna be Eugenics wars. Maybe 2024 San Francisco is gonna suck. But we'll eventually get past through all that stuff and build a true utopia. There is hope".
And the contemporary Trek is like "nah bro, every single problem you face today, every deplorable human behavior that you see is gonna continue poisoning our society for hundreds of years. The institutions that you create, the relationships that you build with other civilizations, all that technological advancements that you achieve - they simply don't matter. Maybe there will be progress for a century or two. It's still gonna come crashing down and regress to the depressing society that you live in today".
Well, we already know it, dumbass. That's not why we watch Star Trek. Give us some hope. Tell us that we can be good. And maybe you will inspire a generation to become physicists, or TH-camrs or whatever, just genuine humans, who are trying to do good and to spread the hope. And maybe that will nudge society towards being a little bit better, at some point in the future, even if not today. Just spread the hope!
I dunno. Is that too much to ask for?
There are so many things I want to say to you about how much I love what you’re doing and how you’re doing it… I’m also watching your physics videos, by the way… and also how much I love your delivery and oration and brilliance… but I’ll save that for later. Here’s a month of Paramount’s NuTrek tax. Please continue to make content wherever you see fit. You are a necessary voice that I hope continues.
Yeah, we want a Strange New Worlds review. For the sake of science! 😋
To the calculus point: there's an episode in TNG where elementary school kids are learning calculus in school because schooling has gotten way better hundreds of years into the future. Repeat: calculus is math for CHILDREN, adults have moved onto more advanced math.
A maths teacher in my uni was disappointed in his middle school aged kid not grasping multivariable integrals solution techniques.
well, calculus is mostly easy except for a couple of concepts that are weird to grok. tedious and easy.
I really disliked that Star Trek seemed like it was poking fun at itself. Like, Picard doesn’t like calculus and finds it boring, Jurati finds space travel boring and Picard doesn’t read Sci Fi and never got the appeal. Why do people who don’t like Star Trek work on Star Trek? And not in a cool fresh perspective way, but in an awful we want to turn it into every gory cynical drama way?
In one episode of TNG, Picard was having a go at solving some weird equation some mathematician (I want to say Bernoulli but that might just be because it's the only mathematician I can name) left behind but didn't explain when he died. Picard is totally a nerd.
@@SupremeFenix274 it was Fermat's Last Theorem, and Picard really liked puzzling over it. The idea that calculus would bore him is bananas.
The thing about Section 31 in DS9 is that they fit the role of the final villain for the show. Most of DS9 is about Federation ideals being challenged by more and more extreme situations. The delicate balance of Bajoran/Cardassian politics, A Ferengi bar plus crime on the station, interactions with the Dominion races, and the internal paranoia when changelings finally infiltrate every level. The moral challenges are there to show that Federation ideals can hold together even when tested time and again.
Section 31 is the ultimate challenge in the show because it shows that the corruption of Federation ideals might come from within; it might be institutional. And all of our characters are anti-Section 31. Bashir fights with the one 31 agent we meet, and Sisko wants them exposed and stopped. When the virus is deployed -- even though it wins them the war -- it's not seen as a victory, but a giant moral dilemma in contrast to Federation ideals. The show ends with the Admiral character promising to "root out" the remnants of Section 31.
They're clearly antagonists, and the only way they could possibly return is finishing them off in a one-off episode, and then be done. It shows how unintelligently Alex Kurtzman looks at Star Trek for him to see this -- all of this -- and just go, "so, they're the cool spy guys, huh?"
Yes, exactly. I LOVE Section 31 as a concept, but whether for or against the protagonists of Star Trek, their existence is meant to be a tragedy, and that they wouldn't exist at all except for the strain put on the Federation as it came towards the end of the "let the good times roll" era that Wolf 359 brought on
I’m glad I’m not the only one to notice NuTrek’s obsession with Section 31. They’re clearly the bad guys in DS9. If the Dominion were Magneto and the Brotherhood, then Section 31 was Bolivar Trask and the Sentinels. Both oppose each other, but both are still the bad guys that a 3rd party (X-Men/The Federation) has to stop.
Section 31 exists because people like Julian Bashir can not defend themselves against the more nefarious factions in the galaxy. His morals get in the way. They do the things Bashir can't do. That's why they're off books. Another way to protect people like Bashir. S31 are a deeply interesting concept. Nutrek turned them into cool assasins that go around telling everyone they're in Section 31. 😂
@@TheMightyFlea-0you might have missed the part where commiting genocide against the founders backed the dominion into a corner where diplomacy was no longer an option and fighting to the bitter end would leave any winning side decimated. Bashir saved his friend Odo who negotiated a lasting peace with the dominion.
@@TheMightyFlea-0 Section 31 was one of DS9's many, many criticisms of war and how war itself becomes a corrupting institute. the fact that people watch something like In the Pale Moonlight and walk away masturbating to conflict-born utilitarianism the episode is openly condemning says so much about how difficult it is to critique conflict - no matter how awful the depiction, some people will leave the experience licking their lips. I guess Kurtzman is one of those people
nobody is supposed to look at Section 31 or Sisko's momentary descent into corruption or the razing of Cardassia and think, 'Wow! So fckn COOL!'
but that's exactly the relationship NuTrek has with DS9
'Picard' should have been about Picard living in cosy retirement NOT on the farm where his whole family horribly burned to death. He reads and writes about spacefaring, exploration, history and politics, and mentors a bunch of younger people in various fields.
Every episode, someone visits him with a Star Trek problem, like a mystery or a science puzzle or some tricky diplomacy, and they talk it out with flashback scenes, and Picard helps them resolve the problem right there in his nice Federation home.
It's also a cooking show, because the whole time they talk through the story, Picard is showing his guest (and the audience) how to make some delicious meal, complete with accompanying wine.
Go home everyone, I solved television.
I'd have loved to see a _Star Trek: Time Team_ where Picard and a handful of other xenoarchaeologists flit around from planet to planet doing digs that they have to conclude within 3 days, and maybe tangentially get involved in normal _Star Trek_ plots that are going on in the background.
WHY COULDN’T WE HAVE ANY OF THESE??????
It's like ... they can't stop referencing canon, but also ignore canon. Make up your mind!
I would totally pirate the first two seasons of that before getting bored and moving on
This was amazing. I am reasonably sure you spent more time just editing this video than the entire writers team did breaking the stories for all 3 seasons. It didn't feel hopeful, so it simply wasn't Star Trek.
I gave up after the first season of "Picard" so I'm really glad you made this; it saves me wasting time watching the other two seasons.😬
I don't enjoy any of "New Trek" but the part of this that bothered me the most was the calculus comment that you mention at 2:03:53. Picard was famous for being a "renaissance man", someone who had many talents and skills across many disciplines. He was a musician, an actor, a leader, a scholar, an archeologist, a scientist, an engineer .. he was into everything. There is no way that he would be dismissive of calculus, of all things.
It's just so gross that they took this enlightened master of all subjects and made him an anti-intellectual action hero, but it's par for the course for New Trek. 😞
I read this comment in your voice. :D
I one hundred percent agree with you about "Picard" HOWEVER! i would recommend to watch the third season of picard, out of all of the picard seasons, season 3 was getting to be what you would want to see, i dont want to spoil anything about it by saying to much but there is a lot of stuff in that season you might like if you loved TNG
Far be it from me to try and convince anyone to watch that drivel but Season 3 wasn’t terrible. It was watchable. It’s a little better, almost TNG.
The 3rd season is actually decent. Best part is that you can ignore the other 2 season and just watch it.
Oh of course NJB is an Old Trek fan…! So nice to see that your interest in a more utopian urban future extends all the way to the realm of Sci-Fi as well haha! Love your channel, I’ve learned so much from it! 🥰
The breakdown you had around Picard not knowing calculus was such a perfect encapsulation of the whole show.
Not just not knowing calculus but being *too cool for calculus.*
There's literally an episode of TNG where a young kid (second, third grader? idk) complains about having to do calculus in school. In TNG the whole show was about how advanced society was.
Yeah man, it's the goddamn TNG universe, even a bartender knows calculus, and knowledge is always respected. What they've done here is just so bad. What's with this current trend of people who don't know/care about a franchise's lore just swoop in and are given the reins? It makes no sense
Can’t wait for that part of the video 😅
@@thomaskalinowski8851 Just like in generations when he threw the priceless artifact on the ground after Enterprise D crashed and they were going through his quarters...
What Star Trek: Picard should have been: Picard is retired to a small village in France. Every week someone (usually locals) come to him with a mystery to solve. Picard puts on his Dixon Hill hat and solves it. Sometimes Data helps. Sometimes there's space travel. It's basically Murder She Wrote. I'm gonna keep saying this every time ST:P comes up until I wake up in the parallel universe where it exists.
Edit to add... I absolutely do watch RLM, but this was the fantasy show my wife and I came up with as soon as we heard the Picard show announced...before we ever had the chance to be disappointed by it. And then Mike and Rich had similar ideas as us because they are also true fans of both Trek and schlock, and because no fiction exists in a vacuum.
Sadly this comment is probably the most successful thing of any kind I've ever put on the internet. Wish I had some other works I could parlay all this attention to... If you're ever in northern Delaware come and check me out where I'll be performing at Beck's Pond, quietly sobbing in my car in the furthest corner of the parking lot.
I hope I wake up in that same universe.
Keep dreamin', fellow 'Trekker!
Oh star trek cozy mysteries?! I would watch the heck out of that!
@@falken111 Near the end of the episode, Picard obliquely exonerates the antagonist, and starts to walk away. Suddenly, he turns around and says "just one more thing..."
Could be a decent vehicle to adapt some Isaac Asimov sci-fi mysteries. They already borrowed a lot with the planet of synthetic humans, might as well take that extra step 😅
found Rich Evans
Thank you for this. For a long time it seemed like every star trek discussion I came across, people were desperately trying to convince themselves that Discovery and Picard were an exciting and fresh return to thoughtful fables, when to me they seemed full of cheap cynical drama and confused characters who at times seemed to forget significant events that had just occurred in a previous scene. The entire first season of Picard in particular felt like the writers painstakingly researched every detail of "measure of a man" -except for the point. Hearing many of my own thoughts on the direction of "NuTrek" spoken aloud by someone else was cathartic.
I haven't seen much of Discovery and Picard - they don't really grip me - but I wonder what your thoughts are about Strange New Worlds (if you've seen it). To me it does a great job of balancing the optimism and hopefulness of the past with some interesting nuance, like with Federation laws about genetics being outdated and harmful to the Illyrians.
My parents held many national science positions, and more...we loved to laugh at Trek...but liked it as entertainment. The 60s show I saw Next G, annoyed half the time...Spiner, a great comedian, somewhat wasted.... my comment,
" The STNG 2 episodes with the three fingered alien and his 'Thought and Reality, 2 sides same coin' drivel...pure comic book 'super power' adolescent fantasy...offended the hack out of moi. Happy to see him 'fade////phase' out. Manyway, you are worthy of being worth the while. Fun have, go to way, up it keep. I read in a mag, Star Trek writers left blank page for someone else to put in nonsensical scientism and jargon, to satisfy the 'miracle' fantasies. Tachyon fields...tacky feelies. Really STaNGs.
@@JamesSimmons-d1t... what?
@@hbarz1066 It's hard to get into for me because Discovery and Picard put a pretty big damper on my enthusiasm, but I've seen a handful of episodes. SNW is definitely better but it occasionally overindulges in melodrama enough that it starts sharing that nu-trek flavor.
I've also seen a bit of Lower decks, and while it's never gotten more than a sensible chuckle out of me, it does feel like it was written by people who watched AND enjoyed star trek, which is more than can be said for some of the other shows.
When I first saw Picard I had remind myself that Patrick Stewart is NOT Jean-Luc Picard, nor is he a writer, nor is he Gene Roddenberry, nor is this Star Trek.
Damn, now that is a succinct way to summarize the Picard show.
Fat L if yall watched Picard 😂😂😂
Now I know why they call people sheeple
The moment he said it was a passion project you knew we were in trouble. Star Trek was just a good steady job to him, he never watched the shows, had no investment in Picard and doesn't understand science fiction. All traits they look for when hiring writers for nutrek.
@@CoercedJabPeople can have differing opinions after they experience something. Is this a novel concept to you?
@@juangalton999 It's probably not worth trying to have this argument with a child. just wait for him to grow out of it.
Remember, none of this happened. Picard is just chilling on his vineyard day drinking.
Yeah that's when I turned the show off.
Parallel dimensions are canon. I choose the happy universe. 😄
It's clearly a Nexus illusion.
He's having a stroke.
See you.. out there!
Picard wasn't just a captain, he was also an archeologist (we have seen him publish papers and preparing to speak at conferences as an archeologist). It Patrick Stewart specified that Picard can't be in Star Fleet anymore, shouldn't he be a professor? He could have his own research team (students of different species etc) and get involved in the plot by stumbling across something during an excavation.
He could go anywhere in the galaxy as an archaeologist trying to learn about the past. The possibilities are endless.
I massively agree. At least one season of this show should have focused on Picard's love of archeology. He could be doing that, or at least teaching about it, rather than babysitting the family vineyard...which Jean-Luc was never into. I know people slow down when they age, but even at his age, Picard is too adventurous, ambitious, and studious, to just make wine and take naps. He should have been doing something else, even if only part-time.
@@umberhaven Yeah, and professors can be very old and never retire even today. It feels like a very obvious thing for him to do when he is not able to be in a command position anymore.
He was supposedly super depressed after they accepted his resignation, that's why he sat in his room all day doing nothing
Still hate it, and think that he would have tried other methods to help the Romulans
There's a giant elephant in the room that A.C. is too kind to mention, but Patrick Stewart repeatedly demonstrates that he is not in physical condition to excavate anything. By the end of season 2, he can barely talk and rarely stands up for more than a minute in any scene. There's a reason that they wrote him as a retired guy who gets triumphant music when he is able to climb a flight of stairs.
20:00 - Alex Kurtzman has a history of plagiarism, settling multiple lawsuits. He's a hack writer. J. J. Abrams, while unimaginative, has not been the subject of multiple plagiarism lawsuits. So Paramount really had to pull some strings to get arguably the two worst writers in Hollywood to ruin a franchise. Abrams has the distinction of ruining the two most popular sci-fi franchises in history. Between the two of them, they have absolutely zero concept of the vastness of space. 31:30 - So when Kurtzman and his team wrote out the line, "A supernova destroys the _entire_ Romulan Empire!" ... yeah, no. I'm not being pedantic when I say a single supernova would not take out an _entire quadrant_ of the Galaxy. It would take out a single planetary system, sure, but not dozens if not hundreds of inhabited worlds. The whole of the Romulan Empire would have been fine. Yes, it would be devastating for Romulus & Remus to have been destroyed, but not population-ending.
Marketing and corporations can’t tell stories. They mine known properties for profit, clueless of what made them valuable in the first place. That’s it. That’s the problem.
It's almost as if optimizing everything for profit is bad for the "everything". Who could have seen this coming, except maybe everyone?
I also feel some blame goes to "drama students". Star Trek used to be written by scifi-writers, about science, philosophy, society, history and politics stuff. Now it's just all "character drama". And emotions and grim-dark shock-value.
If only there was a science fiction series that explored the failures of the profit motive a few decades ago@@Bennici
Yeah that pretty much sums up Disney to a T. They buy up franchises change them to market a wider general audience while screwing over the hard-core fans. Rinse and repeat
A lot of the hopelessness of this depiction of the future is just 2024 capitalist realism shrinking the writers' imaginations to the point where the Star Trek franchise exists but the writers can no longer imagine its positive post-capitalist future. All they can do is pollute the optimism of previous generations with the corporate doomerism of the present. The rest of it is just the same problems you have whenever you lazily mine a franchise for content. Lazy writing in, garbage content out. Also, letting Patrick Stewart write his celebrity love life with massive age gaps into the show as something inspiring is lol. Rich people all lose touch with reality eventually, which sucks because Patrick Stewart is supposedly one of the more left leaning ones.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. JJ Abrams was the worst thing to happen to Science Fiction media in the 2000's. Not only did he turn Star Trek into a low-brow action franchise, he polluted Star Wars with his bad mystery box plots.
They gave him two ships, and he crashed them together.
The Thomas Midgley Jr. of entertainment
I remember watching Lost along with everyone else - I didn't make it past the first season. The exact reason I gave up on it was some interview J J Abrams / the showrunners did where they talked about how they had a board with all the mysteries on it and they could only add new mysteries when they took other ones off. And then I realised they had no plan, they were creating mysteries and then figuring out the solutions later and there's no way that was ever going to lead to a satisfying or coherent conclusion. And now, almost all TV and movies have incoherent plots that are just an excuse for a bunch of action set pieces and throwaway jokes.
I mean Rick Berman wasn’t exactly knocking it out of the park before hand.
I disagree, he is a great director for it. He is a bad writer for it.
John De Lancie's line 'Eat any Good Books lately' is worth ten times every script, combined; in Picard.
Q: "What can I do to convince you people?"
Worf: "Die."
its soooooooooo good loooooooooooooool
I don't know how you had the energy or patience to not only watch all three seasons twice, but also painstakingly go through and review/summarise each episode, but I'm glad you did. I only wish I saw your video before wasting so many hours watching the show myself.
This video is therapy for a trekkie who deep down knew that Alex Kurtzman Trek sucks but was afraid to admit it. Thank you.
Red Letter Media did an analysis of Picard.
@@Jomi91 But they liked season 3
@@krishnajain4391 RLM like a lot of weimarian goyslop lately.
We all knew Kurtzman was CRRRRRRRRRRAP.
@@amalekedomiteshalom aleikhem, just want to let you know I’ve let my buddy Shmuley in the Mossad know about your name and address, and you’ll have some nice friends over for dinner soon. Try not to resist, it makes the adrenochrome taste worse. Nice username by the way, rest assured I remember! See you soon
One of the things all of post-DS9 Trek seems to have ignored about Section 31 is that in DS9 they were antagonists. Like, they were doing awful things (usually to Bashir) and no matter how ~morally complex~ the situation was we weren't really supposed to root for 'em. They were still The Baddies.
And then they weren't. Personally, I blame 9/11. You can see the shift begin when Section 31 comes up in Enterprise, the last oldTrek and the first post-9/11 show.
Star Fleet passed the Space Patriot Act giving section 31 legitimacy.
I feel like the Section 31 show was what Kurtzman really wanted to make. The guy loves spy shows and dark drama. Disco and Picard were just setups for that. But I get the feeling he just couldn't get it past the execs. Strange New Worlds feels like a compromise, like "ok I'll make the classic star trek show you want me to make, if you greenlight the sci fi spy show i want to make"
"we'll let you have a tv movie"
"fine"
@@smartalec2001 God, that Section 31 thing is going to be so incredibly crap.
@@KillahMate Episode one should literally come right out of TOS era. I'm talking about where the absorb that Genie of a technology that allows Federation ships to travel at super warp speeds without turning people into lizards or tearing the hull apart. Then we can really get into places where Humans have never gone, before.
Yeah but in Enterprise Section 31 wasn't really meant to be an actual organization. It was meant to be a thing in the peoples heads, just existing inside of Starfleet because people believed it existed. It was a mindset people could flee too/align with when everything was lost and they needed to justify a terrible decision to themselves, not a systematic way to undermine the good the Starfleet does.
RE: Picard knows calculus:
it's not exactly calculus, but there is an episode of TNG (I forget which one) in which Riker comes into Picard's office, and Picard is at his computer trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, which he claims is still un-solved in the 24th century, even though it was actually solved in real life in 1994 (only a few years after this episode aired). He is doing this entirely FOR FUN, during his off-duty hours, because he thinks math problems are interesting riddles.
The torture scene in season 1 with Icheb was so unnecessary. I remember sitting there watching that, thinking, this is Star Trek?
So so SO unnecessary. Did Icheb really HAVE to be sacrificed to give meaning to Seven's hate for Bjayzl? Isn't the simple fact of what she did to XBs, combined with Seven's strong sense of right and wrong, enough? And did we HAVE to see it in such vivid, revolting detail? Just... ???????????
I feel so vindicated watching this. The unaddressed plot holes, the cheapening of death, the whole deflecting thing where they think criticizing the terrible writing means you must hate diversity... all of that sat with me in ways that I didn't know how to express, so thanks for making a 4 hour video to address it for me!
And the showrunner & lead writer, Michael Chabon attacking ANYONE critical of the story choices on his IG page when the show was airing... That was some seriously unhinged stuff for a big award winning writer. But that's where that network sponsored narrative worked as their human shield... "you must hate women of color if you dislike Raffi or the girl playing the twin synths..." Right! Couldn't be the awful writing and characters... Naaaaaahhhh.
Well, a lot of the folks who were criticizing the writing were also trying to appeal to the right-leaning crowd who uses SJW like a pejorative. The problem I have is that the inclusion was done to virtue signal and felt forced.
The Icheb scene was egregious, but made even more so by a minor detail they definitely included on purpose. The Romulan who's operating on him at one point says "That cortical node's gotta be in there somewhere!" suggesting that she can't find it. Icheb donated his cortical node to Seven in an episode of Voyager. She's butchering him for fucking NOTHING.
Maybe the point is the careless approach to life and it's deeply aware of that?
I like a good tragedy.. In a better show that could have worked great.
theres a strong theory that the reason Icheb got such a brutal death scene is bc the original actor that played him in Voyager said some really callous and awful remarks about a pdf-phile victim.
which were horrible...but why take it out on the character??? hes fictional. ya kno that picard writers??😅
@@X3nophiliac
If true, that's a really immature way to respond to that. The Icheb guy's career was basically dead anyways, no point in getting so worked up about it that you take it out on your multi million dollar television show.
This is one of the most disgusting things about the show. They actually know so much about the canon and then go in the opposite way with it every time.
I’m a huge DS9 person and I understand why it’s not for everyone but god it bothers the hell out of me that the only thing nutrek thinks is worth pulling from that show is freaking section 31! it only works in DS9 because it was 1: the third series in the franchise. 2: late in the series when the characters, their personal philosophies and internal conflicts are well established - as well as the stakes of the war. And 3: it is portrayed as a BAD THING.
The three (3) episodes Section 31 features in, are a terrible time for Dr. Bashir, and ruin his life and irrevocably disrupt his sense of self, and his faith in the Federation.
When they mentioned Section 31 in the reboot I gasped, and not in a good way. I didn’t know I was capable of nerd rage up to that moment, but that one detail made me realize that Star Trek was in the hands of people who fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of Star Trek.
Great video. You’re really funny.
I'm pretty sure that the writers of DS9 wanted Starfleet to try to genocide the Founders because of the way it would work really well for the plot, and then somebody objected to Starfleet doing that, so the writers came up with Section 31. I never liked them in DS9, but I was fine with them as a means to an end, the trope of the soldiers who protect paradise but are unworthy to be part of it is an old one. But every time they were brought back and given more validation, it was a mistake.
It’s how I feel about the annoying Mirror Universe
Section 31 only worked in DS9 because it was personified by William Sadler.
DS9 became my fave series of the bunch once they fully embraced the Dominion War story
I honestly think Section 31 was utilized well in Enterprise too. They never actually name dropped it which was an impressive amount of restraint.
I'm so glad I found this video...because I have spent past couple years thinking I was crazy because of how much loathed Picard, while online channels (and friends as well) were consistently telling me, "It's a GREAT! Can't you see the 4-D chess the writers are playing??? What's wrong with you? Don't you like dark and gritty takes on legacy franchises? Don't you know what good writing looks like?" Yes, actually I do, which I have just watched "Cause & Effect" and "In the Pale Moonlight" for like the twentieth time each and never even finished Picard Season Two, I called it quits after episode 4, OMFG is was so bad.
Like, three bizarre writing choices with the series (not mentioned in this amazing video) have been driving me nuts:
1) WHY does Rio, the moment Sojee boards the ship, run to his room and sulk and get drunk for a whole episode, without offering an explanation to the crew. If he really thought Sojee was a threat to the ship and crew, as the captain, shouldn't he have had her beamed off or confined immediately, or at least demand an explanation from Picard as too why he is bringing this dangerous synth onboard--and then immediately inform Picard of what the last synth--who LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE SOJEE did on his last ship? (And then the counseling session of him explaining his daddy issues and emo-man-boy-ness goes on for SO LONG.)
2) WHY are there so MANY f-king scenes of the main cast members drinking in bars, including Guinan's ugly-ass honky-tonk bar--and like why is that set so terribly lighted and uninviting (unlike the original Ten Forward, which was a place where you'd WANT to hang out? Picard himself spends collective hours in that loud, tasteless, bar---he goes there for LUNCH on the reg. Like, WHY Is Picard now a barfly? And why do so many of the main characters spend SO MUCH time drinking? WHY is everybody in this Star Trek future angry and drunk all the time? (Actually, I know the answer: it's lazy, dorky, hack writing to make the characters look "cool." Also, the writers hate you.)
3) In Season Three: WHY do they character-assassinate Janeway off-screen by making her sound like an out-of-touch bureaucrat? The explanation of why Janeway is unaware of the Changeling infiltration of Star Fleet, or has not moved to block Frontier Day, is literally that she is TOO BUSY and it's hard to SCHEDULE an appointment with her.
And speaking of assassination...
WHY did they bring back Shelby only to immediately have her murdered, in a scene that (I swear to God) was being played as comedy?
Like, it's now considered fun, goofball fan service to have a powerful woman violently murdered--because 30 years ago she had the nerve to challenge Riker's complacency. And then had the gall to help rescue Picard from the Borg and , you know, save the galaxy. Do people forget that all of her crewmates, her friends, her mentor, her direct reports from her former ship in Best of Both Worlds were murdered by the Borg--and she remained unflappable in the face of that and proved herself a resilient and capable first officer? But yeah, anyway, let's murderize this shrew-- because isn't THIS what you WANT, you sexless, friendless, middle-aged incel? (I guarantee you that sentiment is exactly what was going through writers' minds as they slapped together the plot points this whole woeful series.)
Anyway... this was great 4-hour video that helped me feel less gas-lit.
"Is she insane? I'm not watching a 4 hr video, even for her!"
Immediately begins watching a 4 hr video, glued to screen.
Haha I'm opposite. I love long format videos. I can finally stop scrolling and just enjoy.
I have a feeling this will be me, and I've never even seen Star Trek...
I'm still waiting for her 7-hour anti-leaf-blower vid.
I paced myself and watched it in a few sittings. And now I need to go watch something else (maybe _Lower Decks_ "Crisis Point" or _Prodigy_ "A Moral Star" or even that _Voyager_ episode Angela used as her own palette cleanser), just to not feel so depressed.
I’m literally watching the first 45 mins before I have to leave.
When I come back, I’m restarting the video, and watching all the way through.
re: Battlestar Galactica @14:00 you mention the Laura Roslin character going from SecEd to President/ranking governmental officer. The scene where they are escaping the Cylons and realize that only some of the ships in their "ragtag fleet" can warp (or "jump") and she has to make the call for all the ships that can, to jump and leave the rest behind. She is overwhelmed by the situation.
Then the other ships realize what is about to happen and are screaming, pleading, betrayed and hysterical. A crew member moves to shut down comms and she stops him, saying "Leave it on." They will leave their fellow humans to die, but they will not turn away from what they have done.
At that point she was internally broken and re-assembled into a leader. One of the most wrenching and well-acted scenes I've ever seen in a sci-fi movie or show. Hadn't thought of it in a while.
Doctor Collier dropping a nearly four hour takedown of a Star Trek series that I haven't seen yet?
Send my calls to voicemail and cancel all my appointments and meetings for the morning.
I love the uniform.
Man, you're lucky you haven't seen it. After season 1 I just watched Redletter Reviews for seasons 2 & 3, because 1 was so terrible.
Multiple uniforms!
@@originalulix They only get worse.
when i saw it was four hours i wasn't too happy, but then i set the video speed to 0.8 and now that it's five hours we're much closer to home with my expectations
Her in the tng uniform is insanely cute. That uniform is very attractive actually...
Thank you so much for taking the time to make such a lovely and entertaining video :D
Just stumbled across your video, love the analysis!
I like to describe Star Trek as "competence porn" which is consistent with you initial analysis around why you (and many of us) love it. Being able to escape to a world where people have things figured out, are acting in good faith, cooperating, have low ego, and constantly seeking self improvement is frankly inspiring and healing, especially during times of uncertainty in real life. Relatedly to how Star Trek inspired you to be a scientist, it was similar for me but I studied the evolution of cooperation and altruism so that aspects holds a special place in my heart.
I think saddest part about how modern Star Trek, including Picard, has let the franchise and the fanbase down is that now more than ever we need an optimistic view of the future that is low in conflict, but they have given us the opposite. I know that the trend toward more dark and mature media that started in the early 2000s was refreshing at the time, but it has overstayed it's welcome. With the current state of the world, I think people want media that is inspiring, optimistic, and provides us with hope.
Damn, what a line- "Competence porn." Trek, The Expanse both have it in spades
Nemesis is like getting into a beautiful long-term romance and it's looking like a life thing and then right as you start thinking about popping the question they convert to scientology or crystals or something
Why is this so relatable! 😭 (it was moon worship and crystals)
Try being married for three years before they drop “I think mermaids might be real” on you.
My first thought was “What the f*** did I get myself into?”
For Christ's sake, they're minerals, Marie.
Tried that, don’t ask how it turned out.
That's kind of my story around the release of this show. Just before it came out, I met someone I thought was my everything. The show came out and we got married. I watched 20 minutes of the show and it broke my heart, and she got obsessed with it. 6 months later she hid crystals around the house to fight ghosts and demons. One night I woke up and she was pouring some kind of holy water on me meant to fight the demon she thought was living inside me. And then we had a kid... I should have run when I realized she was just another idiot. If someone likes this show, they have to have something wrong with them.
A Shrike is a species of bird that is infamous for its especially brutal method of killing prey, by impaling them on sharp objects after snapping their neck. It's a fitting name for the ship.
I always understood it as less killing and more storing, but yes, the point is most shrikes earn the alternate name 'butcher birds' because of the hanging carcasses they produce.
And also the scary robot in Hyperion named for said bird
I'm glad I checked the comments before saying this myself 😅
And she would name her ship after a bird from Earth?
@@hobosox nah, it’s a sci-fi reference from a book called Hyperion
“Whenever you hear mommy and daddy beating the shit out of each other just look at the stars.” Yeah that sums up season 2 Picard in a nutter shell.
Nu Trek has some bad writing for sure. But honestly the most depressing part about it is how they took the most recognizably positive and optimistic pop culture franchise and made it as depressing as everything else on the market.
It's like they said to themselves "Well the world is more depressing now than when TNG originally aired!"... completely forgetting Star Trek is still hundreds of years in the future
I blame them chasing the success of DS9. DS9 is the best Trek imo it gets dark. But what people forget is that optimism wins in the end on it.
@@takeelingThe idea that the world is more depressing now than it was before is just objectively untrue. People only think that because they haven't bothered to look at recent history.
No.
Global warming is by far the worst thing that ever happened to mankind. Nothing even comes close to that, including WW2.
@@Buffaloguy1991i don't think they're chasing the success of ds9 because then they'd probably have way more dumb fan service moments for ds9. like rom would show up for no reason or something. they're just chasing current tv making trends but doing it really badly
Can we talk about how Starfleet apparently did end up creating an entire race of Soong-type androids, and the first thing they did was enslave them to do menial and dangerous labor, exactly as Picard predicted in Measure of a Man, and then... They never even mention this, never deal with it?
Not only predicted but they literally made a precedent judicial ruling specifically against that situation. So yeah, I'd also like to know how exactly that happened.
But I doubt that there was someone in the writer's room who had watched that episode..
@@kyjo72682 But they balanced that by having a race of Soong-type androids who had free will and made their own society. Who, checks notes, almost destroyed the universe by inviting in vague mechanical doombots from another dimension. Though, come to think of it, that might be a commentary on the current state of Twitter.
didn't they have the mark 1 hologram of the dr doing mining
@kyjo72682 Melinda Snodgrass, who wrote the original episode, has spoken out publically how Kurtzman's team contacted her about the use of Maddox, a character she created and owns, so they had to get her permission to legally use the character. She admitted when she eventually heard about what they did with him and how they butchered the very concept of her script with the synth plot, that it was probably clear none of them had seen the original episode and they were just trying to leverage points off of a popular installment of TNG.
This is infuriating to me. They went against the message of one of the greatest episodes of the franchiase.. for what? Why did they need Synths to be bad? to.. justify the Zhat Vash, which never existed before this show? To send a message about... slavery bad??? There was negative reasons to allow the Federation to have a Synth Slave Race. You had to built up a pile of bullshit before you can get to "no reason for this". Just have a different motivation for the bad guy! Or, IDK, there is the literal symbol of tachnology overload right there as the BORG!!! which you already included in the plot!!
I like how Angela is like "I don't know how films and shows work" and then proceeds to deeply analyze and diagnose how stories in media should work and provides excellent fixes
She's got some amazing writing ideas. I forgot which video it was but she just casually throws out there how "someone should write a sci-fi novel about xyz topic" because she's not a writer, and then proceeded to suggest a great plot 😅
And here she does it again.
I'm at the halfway point, and she's pointing out how Riker would have burned the galaxy down before he let his son die of a curable disease, and my jaw is on the floor, because goddamn, she's right.
And my jaw is still on the floor because I'm just wondering how she's the first person I've seen articulate this.
Didn't Star Trek used to boast having scientists in the writer's rooms for these shows? Are they still in there? Are they alive? I'm worried about them.
@@FreddisredThey have science advisors, just as they always have, and just as always it's the writers' choice as to how much they want to listen to them.
@@Freddisred They do, and it shows on the shows that care. Dr. Erin MacDonald is the science consultant for the franchise, and as much as Angela has stated her dislike for time travel plot lines, I'd love to know whether that still holds when the stakes are real and the rules are well-explained, as in _Prodigy_ Season 2's "Temporal Mechanics 101."
Hi, I watched your video the other day and I wanted to come back today and say how much I liked it! I've been a fan of Star Trek ever since watching TNG as a little kid growing up, and I think your comments about the inherent optimism of it were spot-on. It's a sentiment that gets overlooked too often, but it's so important.
Bones. As in Ol’ Sawbones. It’s a reference to not only how doctors used to amputate infected limbs, but also Deforest Kelley’s career in westerns.
Not now because J.J. changed it. 😂
"Brought back Icheb just so he could be tortured to death", "this is like the 75th suicide in this show" yeah I'm out 💀. Never thought watching a 3 hour YT video about a TV show would _save_ me time and money, but here we are. Thanks 👍😸
I'm struggling to find another mention of the disturbing amount of suicide in Picard anywhere online.
Seems like there was a hidden agenda in the show, a terrifying one, and perhaps one we ought to discuss? Anyone?
Also, are there more mercy killings other than with Seven's scene?
I'm just imagining the writers room.
_'So that's where we are, any suggestions for how we resolve?'_
All appear in quiet contemplation for a couple of beats. Then cut to (the until now unseen) Anton LaVey.
_' Another suicide?'_
the whole "I wish there was an instruction manual for everything and no I do not wish to know what that means about me" is so incredibly relatable
It's the Autism /lighthearted
I stumbled across this channel and had to watch all 3hrs 47mins. Great critique, well balanced from someone who loves Star Trek. Awesome video 🖖😊
One of the biggest plot holes was believing Riker and Troi would just let their son die when they knew B9 was in storage at Daystrom. The entire crew and others in Starfleet would have banded together to support them.
I would argue that Section 31 as originally portrayed worked in DS9. They were like an actual secret society. They had limited resources, and worked almost entirely outside the normal structures of the Federation. The power of an S-31 agent was not in their security level or rank, but in their ability to convince you, a rank-and-file, that you had been selected for an important mission by Starfleet intelligence, and that only you could prevent some catastrophe -- and their ability to disappear with a false trail when their plan backfired and they need to outrun the rest of SF Intelligence.
NuTrek forgot all this, and gives S-31 an unlimited budget, unlimited clearance, and full authority within Starfleet like they're the bloody Obsidian Order or something. Entire fleets of highly advanced ships that are a majority of Starfleet tonnage, black badges that give a Commander the authorisation to depose and supplant an admiral, control of all the election officials in the 53 largest member-planets of the Federation...
Yeah, S-31 post DS9 was not handled well. In NuTrek they are basically a stand in for Starfleet Intelligence instead of a completely off the grid, non-Starfleet operation.
In DS9 you could leave it thinking the whole of Section 31 is an invention of Sloane, and with his death it ceased to exist any more. It was treated as anathema to the very idea of the federation, contemptible, disgusting. Then annoyingly ENT had to go and canonise S31 as existing from the very beginning of Starfleet, paving the way for what we have now.
In some ways Section 31 kind of reminds me of Special Circumstances from the The Culture series of books, where even the most utopia of utopias has a shady secret alliance of Minds and agents doing anti-prime directive work.
Secret societies becoming official government arms is a very common happening throughout history, especially if their focus is economic or marital
For those who need to understand stand WOKE... All the men are playing women with mental illness.. also the women are playing as mean men..
This seems sick to me...If you go WOKE,
You will end up BROKE..
Not that anyone writing Nutrek even knows what the Obsidian Order is…
Turning Seven of Nine from a brilliant and brave scientist enhanced with alien technology into a mysterious hard-drinkin', wise-crackin', gun-shootin' renegade was the dumbest fucking decision ever, _especially_ when Raffi existed and was already all of those things.
Not to mention all of sudden making her a lesbian
100%. That was actually one of my biggest gripes with Picard. Among many lol. But they butchered Seven imo, I was forced to re-watch Voyager afterwards to cleanse my brain.
@@Blox117 Seven in VOY was stronger and more independent than Seven in PIC
The sad part is Jeri Ryan loves it, because she thinks her character on Voyager was just boobs
I think of it as a missed opportunity. Sevens entire backstory is one of the most fascinating in all of Star Trek. She struggles to regain her humanity in Voyager and it's a major part of her character arc. I can imagine an entire series about her when she gets back to Earth just adjusting to a society she's never been in before; maybe even struggles for acceptance because some people blame her for borg atrocities. The idea that she'd run off to be a renegade isn't the most absurd idea but I feel we've been cheated of the interesting story of how she'd get there.
"She wasn't abused, she was just mentally ill" is probably the absolute worst way of handling a domestic abuse subplot short of outright victim blaming. I'm stunned.
I never watched season three. I am a person who has watched TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, all the way through, multiple times. After season two of this, my tolerance was so far gone, I simple never cared to attempt to see season three.
In the first few episodes, I recognized that this character is not Picard. Continuing to watch, my repeated thought was - This is a man who's experienced more than possibly any human alive. He's literally lived another entire lifetime with children and grandchildren. He's witnessed beyond the limits of reality, dealt with gods, Been part of a collective conscious, actually lived even more in a place where time and space had no meaning along side Kirk, stopped galactic wars, found solutions to things as serious as government conspiracies, time traveled, relived his own younger life just to see how different choices would affect his life via Q, dealt with, and had to decide on, many philosophic thought experiments that manifested as real problems with real lives, ...... I could keep listing things.
And he just acts like some old, know nothing, no wisdom, worthless old man.
His behaviour at the Romulan refugee camp was just so wildly inappropriate. I assumed the disease was destroying his brain. 'A sign saying "Romulans only", that is racist, I'll make an insulting futile gesture and annoy everyone into being tolerant of me, a Federation aristocrat!' says the career diplomat.
RLM were more hostile to S1 and 2 than anyone. There was a change of showrunner for S3, and they gave it their approval - but Mike & Rich have said that they're scared to ever watch any more Trek now, as it's unlikely to be better than that.
S1 was bad and unsatisfying. S2 was way, way worse - like, unbelievably bad. I almost didn't watch S3, but my curiosity got the better of me... Most of it is much better than S1 & S2 (this isn't saying much, but the improvement was surprising), but then it completely falls apart in the last few episodes and ends in eye-rolling embarrassment. I know that there are people that like this show, they just have very different expectations of the entertainment than I do.
The writers/show-runners *KNEW* they had exactly 3 seasons, so they knew exactly the number of episodes they had to work with to create an overall arc with a satisfying conclusion. But, even the first season is very poorly paced and thought-out (as Agela rightly identifies), and then it just gets worse and more disconnected from there.
They wanted a Star Trek show starring Stewart, but didn't know what meaningful thing to do with that starting point and never figured it out. Not only a waste of money and talent, but outright damaging to Star Trek overall.
Season 3 is the good one.
Season 2 is worse than Season 3, but Season 3 is worse than Season 1. After season 1, they fired the showrunner and brought in a new guy who pitched the reunion show that Stewart hadn't let them do in the first place. But they did a breakdown and the reunion was too expensive for one season. So they made a counter-offer, they wanted two seasons. The only way they could pay for Season 3 was to write Season 2 so it took place in the present day (and mostly outside) so that they could shoot it as cheaply as possible and put the money into Season 3. But even though they knew this, Season 2 and 3 still have weird contradictions and gaps. One thing that Angela didn't mention -- Wesley has had a half-brother for 25 years who was fathered by his surrogate father and named after his actual father and they have never met. In fact, Wesley knowingly and deliberately abandoned his mother and has never visited her. AND BEVERLY NEVER MENTIONS HIM. There is literally no character that "Picard" can't assassinate.
In defence of Worf's parenting, I think he accurately assessed himself as a bad parent, and his parents as good parents. And he didn't know he had a son until a few days(?) before Alexanders mum died.
And made the smart choice of sparing Alexander shitty parenting by himself, and made sure Alexander had good parents.
Not great, but he accurately recognised himself as unqualified.
It's also a really long story arch that is only concluded in DS9. It's not at all perfect, but it's definitely a realistically complex portrait of many people's experiences.
I came to say this. It's what a good parent would do if they just woke up one day and magically knew that they would be a bad parent going forward. Sometimes good parenting is noticing what you can and can't do as a parent and doing what is best for the child in that situation. What he did for Alexander was, I think, an act of good parenting from someone who would have been a bad parent had he not acted as he did.
Also as close as the enterprise came to blowing up having families on board was wild.
Worf is pretty bad at EVERYTHING in TNG, TBH.
I have the impression that 90% of Hollywood scriptwriters are drug-addicted alcoholic deadbeat dads who have no idea why they are being kept away from their ex-wife and children. This one was written in a brief moment of hungover clarity and introspection.
Also, Worf was afraid he could die at any moment by being hit with an errant table tennis ball or someone bumping into him in a queue in the dining area. So delicate for a half-Klingon.
Jack Crusher: "Star Fleet asked how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard."
Fantastic
Trek/New Vegas is the crossover I never knew I wanted
"I don't even do media criticism. Like, what am I doing here?"
Why don't you do more media criticism? This was absolutely stellar! I just watched you critically geek out for nearly FOUR hours in a single sitting, and I loved every minute of it. Seriously, your bitingly sarcastic, dead-pan delivery is hilarious and such a refreshing change from the typical "ANGRY NERD" persona that dominates the TH-cam media criticism sphere.
I feel like I stepped into an alternate world where Jenny Nicholson got really into Star Trek instead of Star Wars.
First time on this channel huh? As a fan of both I see the comparison. Hope you stick around! She also does cool science talks.
i was feeling the same way, i’ve watched a lot of her other videos but i’ve never felt such a comparison to jenny until this video. maybe they grew up in similar areas? they actually have very similar accents and cadences.
Glad it wasn't just me. Now I wonder what other excellent channels there are that I have never heard of?
The moment she mentioned the avatar bracelet it clicked in my brain and I went, "OH. THAT'S why it felt familiar." Can't believe it took me over 30min to figure it out lmao.
Yeah it's just a similar humor style and speaking cadence. But for reason I won't go into Jenny gives me 50 different bad vibes, and I feel none of that here.
Fun fact: The Ferengi were originally meant to be the big villains of TNG, but they came across as goofy, much to Armin Shimerman’s dismay. So, when he was asked to play Quark in DS9, he took the character in a different direction, giving him more depth and dimension.
Armin is an epic Shakespearian actor! Most of the actors are greats! I really love how Shimerman's modeling of Quark, he seemed very real
Quark is the 🐐
I didn't really like the logical-inconsistency of the Ferengi. They were supposed to be hypercapitialist and focused on profit. But then do stuff against that. Example - no refunds. That might maximize profit in the very short-run, but it would damage long term profits. Any human corporation would beat Ferengi at capitialization. Treat the customer like a king and that they can trust you, and they'll come back and spend more money with you.
Instead, they hypercapitialist company would do stuff like not care about externalized costs - pollute the air and water, have slaves, terrible working conditions, push products to people that don't need them, like Nestle pushing baby formula to black women who didn't need it etc. Basically everything that Nestle does.
They are still kinda goofy as a race, they aren't really fixable in that sense.
Yeah, ferengi capitalists were terrible to non-ferengi, because they were super racist and other cultures didn't have to follow their rules. However, ferengi followed their cultural rules, so they held each other to other standards.
After avoiding new-trek like the plague, someone mentioned to me, "watch Picard Season 3, it's much better than the other seasons". I sat down, put on the first episode, and in the first minute, Beverley Crusher walked up to a wounded alien, looked him in the eye, pointed a gun to his face, made sure he was looking at her, smiled and violently killed him in a shower of blood. In shock I turned it off in horror, and watched a dozen episodes of TNG, but I can never escape the profound sadness and dismay I had in that moment. What an awful awful show, and shame on the current day writers directors and producers. Good review Angela, you've earned a subscription from me.
It's Gritty And Realistic.
@@shadowedmultiverse It's Gritty for sure, but I would argue not Realistic. As a real life person would never do that (unless they're a Nazi hell-bent on destruction of all life, or a psychotic psychopath, which Dr Beverley Crusher's character is most certainly not).
Klutzman Dreck does not show elevated better versions of humans / aliens. It shows the worst, the war driven, murder, splatter, guts all over the place in some weird form resembling an action movie and in the process destroys all the role models we have been looking up to because they were better versions of ourselves.
@@shadowedmultiverseI guess all real doctors who’ve seen combat are psychopaths and we can’t have role models in a realistic version of the future.
@@declandougan7243i think they were being derisive about the philosophy behind the show, not justifying it. unless you were merely adding on to their point.
I started watching this around midnight not looking at the run time. It’s now I’m just realizing it’s 4am. Your 4 hour video essay was more interesting than watching the entire 3 seasons of Picard 😂
Picard clapping after watching this woman burn the last bridge she had left looks and sounds like it's something out of a youtube poop, I can't believe someone got paid to write this
So the first season ends with Picard being put in a synthetic body that's identical to his own body except for the lack of a fatal brain disease. Couldn't they have just... cured his brain disease? Why introduce this insane development? Surely him being in a synthetic body will have some narrative significance in the next 2 seasons
You love to see futuristic computer screens that are perfectly 100% transparent. Contrast? What's that?
I have to believe Sir Patrick Stewart could tell from the scene it was a mismatch.
It comes off so sarcastic and mean-spirited. Who the hell thought that was a fitting thing for Picard of all people to do??
Remember when youtube was the place where you made funny video clips and not the place where your career is destroyed if you say 'killed themselves' ?
Im a simple man. I see a 4 hour video talking about Star Trek, and i hit play.
13:00 - I fully understand. I wish I had a binder for life that just told me what i needed to do when i was lost and directionless.
All of your points are as true as they are clearly obvious, which is so incredibly sad and confusing. Great video.
Relating to the professionalism and decor of Starfleet, I wish you showed the scene where Lt. Worf critiqued* Data when he was acting captain and Data politely but sternly reprimanded him in "Gambit, Part II" (Season 7, Episode 5) for undermining his authority, and Worf instead of being angry or throwing a tantrum APOLOGIZES for his behavior and for jeopardizing their friendship. It's just an encapsulation of everything that makes TNG great. Been a Trekkie since I first saw The Inner Light (Season 5, Episode 25), this video was great.
decorum*
@@TheJacklikesvideos😂
Letting Patrick Stewart have creative control is how you get Picard driving a dune buggy in "Nemesis."
The whole "younger-than-25" thing is also stupid, because y'know the study that supposedly demonstrates that? It only studied people below the age of 25. So it's not that your prefrontal cortex stops developing after 25; it's that the study stopped at that point, and everyone has extrapolated from the void of data that development completely halts. XD
thank you!! I thought this too and it really irritated me
Yeah, it's basically the "3.6 Roentgen, not great not terrible" meme.
No it’s definitely a fact
@@thegreenbaron6439 Well don't leave us hanging...
The pre frontal cortex is what stops developing at around 25
Not the whole brain. Also the use of the word development can be used for getting Alzheimer’s. So the word itself is kinda silly.
But the overarching point that people try to make by saying this is correct. 25-30 is when your pfc which is the planning and emotional control part of your Brain matures and reaches its peak maturity.
I’m 100% in agreement on Section 31. It completely undermines the tenets of Star Trek and makes every speech Picard ever gave about the Federation, a hollow joke. In DS9 they made it sound like it could just be a few xenophobes pretending they’re more powerful than they are to gain complicity, but Kurtzman cant imagine a Federation that doesn’t have an official seedy black ops division, because he doesn’t actually believe in humanities possibilities like Roddenberry did.
Good points. But Section 31 in DS9 weren't xenophobes. They were pro-Federation, which includes many species.
If you want a deeper cut, it's exactly people like Section 31 persecuting the Founders that caused them to form the paranoid Dominion in the first place.
One of the Federation's goals is to *stop* cycles of violence like that.
I think it's pretty clear in DS9 that the mere existence of Section 31 is supposed to be an evil, and that even if they defeat the Dominion, the fact that Section 31 could even exist, would mean that they had lost the war.
The thing is, DS9 was written by smart people, who seem to believe in things. Nu-trek...
@@henryglennon3864a they believe in things! Those things just happen to be libertarianism and eugenics… you know, the antithesis of Roddenberry.
I actually appreciate that section 31 exists in the version it did in ds9. Its not all as bad as your making it out, its all the trek and fans SINCE ds9 who run away with section 31. But the idea is that the federation is right and good, but when diplomacy fails, section 31 would rather spike a senators drink or whatever than allow diplomacy to fail and war to begin. i guess im saying Section 31 in Ds9 was ok i understood what they were trying to say.
I'm studying math, doing my part in finding a treatment for my mom's brain disease, Cavernous Malformation. Part of how I ended up going down this path was because of Dr. Bashir from DS9. Season 4, The Quickening, he was against an "incurable" disease. It's given me a new purpose in life. Now that Star Trek and Star Wars are no longer fun, it's allowed me to break out of my comfort zone and explore an endless list of Sci-Fi classics like Dune and Stargate. I love your videos, hope you're doing well :-)
I am amazed that you are finding math useful in such a personal way. I finally earned my BA in Math just because when my other plans fizzled out, I would go back to math and eventually had enough credits for a major.
I wish you much luck in your pursuit of using math to attain your goal.
2:39:23 "The Shrike" is an allusion to the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons where it's a spiked horror and one of the main antagonists. Shrikes are also a species of small birds that impale insects on thorns.
I've heard TNG described as "A show where an old man gives a boring speech to stop exciting things from happening" and it's accurate and it's why I love it.
Boring, because they don't know what is happening.
It's a show that caters to the superego, not to the id. The characters are mature. It feels like they are adults, solving adult problems.
I was so legitimately excited to see an overarching storyline about how even in the future, we all get old and we all still have to deal with what it's like losing something functional about ourselves but still proving the human spirit by showing that even if we're older now and have lost some things, it doesn't mean we're useless and that life and death have no meaning. "Picard" had a chance to be a deeply insightful meta-narrative about modern life.
Nope.
Hoisted with their own Picard
le mot juste
Is it possible to laugh and groan at the same time? Because I think that's what I just did.
The world needs an Angela Collier/Redlettermedia collab.
Mike would marry her on the spot.
@@jogymogy3691 or lock her up in his basement so he can record dozens upon dozens of re:Views episodes with him forcing her to constantly talk about star trek. It would be beautiful.
Me: "Instead of watching Star Trek Picard, I'd rather watch a 4 hour rant video about it." Angela: Hears my sarcastic prayer and makes it a delightful reality. ☺
Watching this four hour video has saved us so much time
I've never watched a minute of "Picard" and I never will, but I'm glad I can watch Angela and confirm my suspicions were correct, while also being entertained.
@@TylerD288 I have watched all of picard, this is much better than picard lol
The problem with NuTrek is that it hates Star Trek, but wants to capitalize on a Space IP because Star Wars is cool.
Also, I'm less mad about the killing of Icheb, the Wesley Crusher of Voyager, over everyone just forgiving PICARD because they built the bridge of the Enterprise-D
Star Wars hasn’t been cool since Disney bought it. Both of these franchises have been utterly destroyed.
Curious if you've got any thoughts on Strange New Worlds
@@hbarz1066 I think Strange New Worlds is the closest to a real Star Trek show that we got. It does have the problem of one thing though. The whole cast forgets theres a command structure until the script remember there is one. I can't chalk that up to how Pike runs his ship, but everything require a discussion. Also everyone is just itching at the bit to do one-liners at every opportunity. I mean that's fine, we had people like Tom Paris afterall, but everyone can't sarcastic all the time. I consider this the Marvel syndrome of undercutting danger for a joke. Still all that is knit-picking. If we had a show like that during Enterprise era, I might have liked Strange New Worlds better. Spock acts morelike a vulcan than T'Pol ever did, even if I think he's way too emotional. Spock has an excuse though, given he's half-human and during the early days of TOS Nimoy was 100% emotionless there yet. So I can cut some slack there. Having said that, no episode really stands out like some of the greats in the past, while out-of-theme episodes like the musical one stands out in a bad way. It's a show I feel that has potential to be good, but is just kinda there. The acting is fine, the stories are fine, but it's not amazingly good or bad. I like some characters, forget others exist, and there isn't a stand out person like the original Spock or Worf or Data or Seven that makes the show feel special. The show looks good because it's standing next to Discovery and Picard. That's not really an achievement. Maybe Kurtzman just isn't that interested in the show so has completely destroyed it yet.
@@GleeChan Interesting, appreciate the response. I've personally really enjoyed it, but to each their own. One of my favorite parts is the Gorn storyline that bridges both seasons. Although I'm 1000% with you on the musical episode.
@@hbarz1066 I'd call it a fun, romantic space dramedy wearing Star Trek cosplay. The only Trek made in the past 20(...maybe 30?) years that I acknowledge as canon have been a select few fan-made productions. Those in control don't seem to have much love for its legacy.
"Shrike" is a bird that impales its pray alive on thorns and tears it apart.
Close
Oh yeah, THIS. "Shrike" is an actual thing, Angela, apologies. It's not a mashup. Meant to comment on that...
Thank you! When I heard that ship name I thought it sounded ominous as hell. Excellent, intimidating name imo
@ULTRAOutdoorsman LOL Nice
And because of this habit, shrikes are also known as 'butcher birds.'
I'm so glad the algorithm blessed me with this video. I usually mindlessly scroll while I have some TH-cam video droning on in the background. I actually watched this nearly 4 hour long analysis on a show I've never seen (and will never see). Why? Because you're great, Angela. You're great. Good job.
The thing I love about Worf is that while he is objectively not the best dad it’s explained by his own backstory and childhood. He is a Klingon raised by human parents. He learned earth culture, and his struggles between the human and Klingon parts of him are what made him into the strong lieutenant he is in the show. When he becomes a father he doesn’t know how to raise a child much less a Klingon child therefore he sends Alexander to the two people he knows can raise a Klingon. His parents. The show doesn’t justify his decision, but instead explains where he’s coming from through his backstory
General Martok even calls Worf out on being a terrible father lol
@ Martoks the man
It's called the control tower.
Star Trek, when I was a kid in rural MI, made me feel like my geekiness and my pleasure with shortwave radio listening and experimenting with antennas wasn't me being somehow defective. Star Trek told me that there were a lot of people like me out there somewhere, people who pursued and advanced science and technology. I just needed to find those people. Now I live in Boulder, CO along with friends who are scientists, and mountain-bike riders, rock-climbers and white-water canoeists. Star Trek, even as a TV show told me that there was indeed more to life than mucking-out cow-barns. As an adult I don't watch much TV. I prefer to do things instead of watching others do things. But that one TV show 60 years ago kept this one kid going until he could get somewhere he finally fit it.
But who mucks out the cow-barns? Synths? Immigrants?
Well, to be honest: Star trek Discovery ruined Star Trek before Picard happened.
The reason many of us loved TNG was the unalloyed optimism of the future it presented. The Federation was hopeful and Starfleet was the ultimate meritocracy. So much has been done in the movies, Discovery and Picard to kill that hopefullness. That can only happen when the creators completely misunderstand, or simply don't bother to find out, what Star Trek is all about.
I love DS9, but the addition of Section 31 ruined a lot for me. Everything since is so dark, and has a seedy underhanded element that TOS and TNG didn't have.
@@Celtic_Thylacine the wokeratti who make trek these days don't believe in meritocracy
Are you talking about Voyager? Discovery has been awesome and came after. Discovery is probably the best Star Trek since TNG.
STD is complete trash. Pretty much anything that has been called "star trek" since Enterprise, has been garbage. STD was a dumpster fire. PukeHard was pure shite! Even the last season of PukeHard, which occasionally seemed like Star Trek, quickly ruined it right after almost seeming like a Star Trek show. Star Trek died in 2005 with Enterprise. I guess it was still kind of alive until Jar Jar Abrams ruined it. And after that, STD drive nails into the coffin. There has not been a single actual Star Trek movie or show since 2005. Only garbage pretending to be Star Trek.
I'm glad to see someone who didn't buy into Picard. Did I enjoy seeing everyone back together and that they rebuilt the Enterprise D bridge? Absolutely. But that's about it. This reminds me of how Star Wars went. So many people keep consuming the garbage and say negative things if you don't consume. I don't get how anyone can love TNG, DS9, etc, and also enjoy NuTrek!
Section 31 was a fine idea for Deep Space 9 because as soon as our heroes learn about it they try to destroy it. Bashir goes along for a mission because he thinks it's genuinely important and his character has always been a little naïve, but after that it's just about exposing this cancer, not fetishizing it like Kurtzman does. Shit makes me so mad. It's anti-Trek.
Ever since the JJ Abrams trek came out I was like “I’m not a star trek guy, but I know this isn’t star trek”. It’s nice to see this video, from a trek fan, with full receipts, going point by point about how the people making trek nowadays do not understand what star trek is about.
I'll always be a Star Trek (and Star Wars) guy, but this isn't Star Trek.
I hardly remember the first JJ Movie. After we left the cinema we got sooo drunk. We were all really sad. Burnt a selfmade vulcan planet on the campus next week.
@@TylerD288why do the people at the helm seem to h8 our once beloved franchises? Both are as good as dead to me.
@@brandonnotsowise2640 great question, I have no idea.
@@TylerD288 There are answers. None of them pretty.
I identify so strongly with that desire for the comforting competence of “pomp”. I spent years of my life in my teens and early 20s obsessed with very LARPy video games because it’s just incredibly satisfying to play-act with other passionate nerds that you’re in a serious situation and everybody’s got a role to play, and in order to win you’re all communicating in very precise, official-sounding language. In brief, it was a massive self-esteem boost. 😂
This is a big reason I loved the "classic" era of World of Warcraft. Forty people coming together, doing their role, and feeling collective victory. It was such a rush and could work even without every single person being a finely tuned gaming machine.
I do like the "pomp" as well, but I also think it can deflate the dramatic tension in TNG for me in situations where the crew is facing something their training hasn't prepared them for because everyone seems a little too cool and efficient. I watched a little of Strange New Worlds and I actually enjoyed that those characters portrayed the professionalism and maturity expected of star fleet officers but also willing to show a little doubt and uncertainty under fire.
@@sswpp8908 I dunno... that's the _most_ essential time to be cool-headed. That's how one would expect serious professionals to act!
When working in the oilfield, I was twice in situations that were real touch-or-go (like "we might actually all die if we don't correctly identify & execute the proper course of action here"-and we'd all seen, or at least known, people die in similar situations; I still remember the eerieness of seeing my buddy's cellphone video from a jobsite with a whole crew dropped from H2S... trucks running, music playing, nobody at all upright)...
...and I don't recall expressing any emotion whatsoever-it was probably evident in the tone of my voice, but there's no point in getting all WILD and DRAMATIC, y'know? It wastes time and takes bandwidth you really don't even have to spare.
*edit:* oh, you mentioned SNW. My bad-I was thinking of Discovery, I think!
@@sswpp8908 I dunno... that's the _most_ essential time to be cool-headed. That's how one would expect serious professionals to act!
When working in the oilfield, I was twice in situations that were real touch-or-go (like "we might actually all die if we don't correctly identify & execute the proper course of action here"-and we'd all seen, or at least known, people die in similar situations; I still remember the eerieness of seeing my buddy's cellphone video from a jobsite with a whole crew dropped from H2S... trucks running, music playing, nobody at all upright)...
...and I don't recall expressing any emotion whatsoever-it was probably evident in the tone of my voice, but there's no point in getting all WILD and DRAMATIC, y'know? It wastes time and takes bandwidth you really don't even have to spare.
*Edit:* Oh, you mentioned SNW-my bad; I was thinking of STD, I think!
The idea that people could miss the Borg collective has actually been done over and over on Voyager, and even Hugh referenced it in both his tng appearances.
3:15 : "They go to cons and they talk to people who are like 'I am now this, because I saw you do that.' "
My girlfriend is one of those people. When she was a kid, she saw Uhura on the bridge of the Enterprise. It was the first time she'd seen a female character on TV who was in an important position, and not just a secretary or housewife. It inspired her to become a scientist.
This is why I think even flawed representation is worth it.
@@LimeyLassen There's a line in Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna's new book that's like "your feminism doesn't have to be perfect."
Picard was such a bizarre incineration of narrative (and literal) currency. It's actually kind of incredible, it's like a perfect inversion of good story-telling: there is so much a person could learn about how *not* to write a sequel.
It's like they did everything wrong absolutely right. Like, you start with a checklist of how not to do a show like this and you tell your staff, "Make this for me".
Indeed. Sometimes a persons role in life is to provide the cautionary tale, not the role model.
You know a remake is bad when you'd rather watch a lenghty autopsy of its reanimated corpse.
The incongruous triumphant music with the Raffi "calling in her last favor at Starfleet" scene in season 1 is a feature, not a bug. It's the writers trying to show how Picard doesn't know how his success is built on the suffering and sacrifice of other people: he walks away feeling accomplished, while she hits the bottle harder in despair. It's just like when Seven beams back to kill the gangster lady in that other episode and says how she doesn't want Picard to know she came back for revenge because she wants him to hold onto his idealism. They're trying to say that he's a quixotic old fool who needs to be protected from reality.
All the messages about doing the right thing in TNG? Bullshit. As much as I love DS9, Sisko and Garak baiting the Romulans during the Dominion War opened the door to all this. It's all Section 31 pulling a fast one on Sarek, like you suggested at the end of the video. They're "deconstructing" Star Trek, i.e. shitting all over an optimistic vision of the future.
And you're damned right Picard ruins Star Trek.
As a Picard S1-3 hater, Strange New Worlds S1 does feel like a nu-trek mea culpa of sorts. The writers are very clearly trying their hardest to "just make a Star Trek show", in their words, and there are some solid episodes (mostly in S1).
But SNW also highlights why modern tv writers are unlikely to ever really do Star Trek justice. They simply can't imagine that working in a serious professional environment with a strict atmosphere could be anyone's dream job, let alone fantasy. So in SNW the ship feels more like a laidback tech company with beanbag chairs and a "cool boss" for captain.
Wow that last bit really summarizes it. I love watching the conflict resolution of TNG but imagining a modern audience getting into 45 minutes of that feels surreal and unlikely.
I’ve seen so many SNW dick riders and I thank you for realizing that, at least to me, it’s like if Star Trek was written by people who think being a stoner is a whole personality with one dude in there to handle the action
I blame the economy
Strange New Worlds quickly devolved into some sick parody show.
I think the writers on The Orville are more than capable. Though I admit it's not as strict or as serious as Star Trek it definitely still remembers that they are a military with a definite structure.
science youtuber in a starfleet uniform, be still my heart
I think the hair nailed it!
A lieutenant no less!
This better not awaken anything in me...
bruh forreal
And the accurate division color!
Wait, you have MULTIPLE Star Trek uniforms?
You are somehow even cooler than I thought!
The real question is: Why don't I have multiple Star Trek uniforms?
@@rainbowkrampusThe official ones are, like $350, so that's the main reason for me...
@@GSBarlev Imagine commodifying cultural artifacts from a show about a communist utopia smh...
@@rainbowkrampus eh, you know what they say about capitalism! It subsumes all critiques of it (...or something like that).
About the bad-guy ship named "Shrike"... I think that name is actually quite fitting.
Shrikes are birds, and some shrikes are also called butcherbirds because they impale prey onto plant spines. Combine that with the design of the ship... well, I like the name.