What I’d like to see from the Wit Studios anime The One Piece

A few years ago, shortly after the success of the One Piece live action, Netflix announced they were funding a new adaptation of the One Piece manga with Wit Studios called The One Piece. I had just finished catching up on the existing One Piece anime, and my opinion at the time was, “Why?” Watching all of the original One Piece anime was one of the best experiences I had had with a piece of media, and it’s not even done, why would you remake it? Seeing most people’s reactions to it left it clear to me that my opinion was not typical. People who had never watched or read One Piece before were saying things like, “Maybe I can actually watch it now,” while people who had read or watched it before were saying things like, “I hope they improve the pacing!”

Recently, we got our first actual information and trailer for it, including the information that the first season will be seven episodes with an approximate total runtime of 300 minutes, or roughly 44 minutes an episode, and that it will cover material up through the end of the Baratie Arc. The original One Piece anime covers the same material in 30 episodes that are roughly 25 minutes each, or 750 minutes, two and a half times longer. The live action, for comparison, is 8 episodes totalling approximately 7 hours or 420 minutes of run time to cover material which the original anime covers in 44 episodes or 1100 minutes of run time, approximately 2.6 times longer, meaning it has a slightly less favorable ratio, but not loads less. While the live action was widely praised as a good adaptation, it was criticized for significant changes to the story which were forced by a combination of insufficient budget to cover some of the more fantastical action sequences and creatures of the anime, and insufficient runtime to fit in all the events. The biggest of these changes was the elimination of an entire villain, Don Krieg, which makes it questionable why Sanji even joined up, as well as doing short shrift to Usopp’s introduction and early heroism in his arc, which makes it questionable why anyone trusts him to be able to contribute to the crew, and the compression to Zoro’s introduction which made him come across as a psychotic badass rather than a psychotic badass with a heart of gold - a major issue when it is clear in the original that the big reason Luffy chose him to join his crew is not his badassery but his kindness. I’d hate for the new anime to be so compromised.

So the question is, what is the goal of this adaptation? Is it to produce an accessible abridged version of the story to introduce people to the story, which they can then get the full version of by reading the manga or watching the original anime? Or is it to produce the definitive version of the anime, without the filler and pacing issues that were forced onto the original anime due to the constraints of it airing weekly on Japanese TV with barely any breaks for nearly the past thirty years? I mean, honestly, the answer is neither - it’s to make money. But I do wonder, is this One Piece for Newbies or One Piece The Best Experience?

If it is One Piece for newbies, well, it’s not for me. I’ve watched the whole original anime and loved it, pacing issues and all. I don’t need a new version, and especially not a new, shorter, compromised version that sacrifices any of the story in favor of accessibility or runtime. One Piece is notorious for “padding” for time - it has a lot of sequences of long reaction shots, panning panoramic landscape shots, and extensive dramatic speeches before and after every major event, and surely many of the people welcoming this new anime are hoping these will be shortened or eliminated. I can understand that, as there are definitely times, particularly in Dressrosa and Wano, where they clearly are running out the clock in some episodes to avoid moving too fast and catching up with the manga, which would force them to either write filler episodes or go on hiatus. But East Blue does not really suffer from those issues - while it still has a lot of those, there they are used judiciously to build tension, and while I don’t doubt it can be cut down in runtime without sacrificing narrative somewhat, doing it too drastically - and in particular if it results in actual cut scenes or events deemed nonessential - could completely change the story and feel. The live action, although good, suffers from this - by the end of Arlong Park in the anime, you feel like the Straw-hats are friends for life, not just with each other, but with you, the viewer, who has spent a thousand minutes watching them struggle for their lives and freedom. At the end of the live action, I honestly questioned why these people who had just met were committing to spend the rest of their lives together in the most dangerous seas of the world. One Piece uses the time it spends to build these relationships and intimacy and connection, and while I’d never propose that its perfect, there is definitely a limit to how much you can cut it down without killing that very important element of the show.

So what do I want from the remake? What are my hopes? I want the definitive version. I want a version that includes absolutely everything from the manga, with enough time and slow enough pacing that we can really get to know the Straw Hats as we did in the original, but that isn’t pressured to pad for time beyond that like the original was. Is that possible with the runtime Wit Studios has allotted for this remake? I honestly cannot say for sure without watching it. I doubt it, but I hope so. While I can understand why some want a more accessible version than the original anime, that already exists. It’s called the live action. Watch that, and if you like it, then watch the anime or read the manga. People say the anime is just too long, but honestly I think thats bullshit. East Blue is amazing and does not suffer from pacing issues, and any version of the story that does justice to it isn’t going to be any more accessible than the classic, charming, retro feel of the original.

I also want one that incorporates all the cover stories. Oda draws covers that are often just fun scenes of the Straw Hats in random scenarios, but other times are actual important plot relevant events happening to background characters while our main story happens in the foreground. The very first filler arc of the original manga adapts one of these stories, following Buggy in his chibi form after Luffy defeats him, and one of the biggest travesties of the original anime in my opinion is they did not keep adapting the cover stories into filler arcs. While I don’t think they need to do full filler arcs in this new anime for these, incorporating them as transitional panels or in openings or ending sequences would be a great way to tell these stories without burning runtime on them.

Will I get what I want? I strongly doubt it. I honestly was more optimistic before writing this post, as doing the math really underscored how difficult it would be to do justice to this material in the runtime allotted. But I’ll keep my mind open. And at the end of the day, if the new anime is basically One Piece for newbies, at least it will get more people into the fandom. I just hope the original anime doesn’t go the way of the original FMA anime if people decide the new anime is better despite being compromised simply because they can binge watch it in an afternoon.

Another Low Effort Blog Post About Picard

 I call these posts low effort because I can kinda just go from memory, I don’t need to think too hard about what I am doing, but inevitably they end up super long, so saying its low effort seems a little silly, but if I was actually doing something thesis driven or writing a story, that would be a lot more effort even if it ended up shorter. But anyway, so more random reactions to Picard, this time for S3E7.

At the start of the episode they are talking to Data and then Lore takes over so they shut him off, and then they discuss, hey, what should we do about Data? His brain is partitioned and Geordi can remove the partition to let them integrate but Lore might end up destroying Data, or he can keep it and Lore still might end up taking over, blah blah blah, what should we do. My question is, why not ask Data? If they really think he is a person deserving human rights - something we had a whole episode of TNG about and that Picard the show so far mostly seems to indicate is still the intended interpretation and how Picard the person is supposed to see him - than surely he should decide the best course of action, not Picard and Geordi while he is turned off. Also kinda feels rude that Picard just tells Geordi to switch him off once Lore takes over - you cannot do that to a person. Lore says later in the episode he wants the same things as the changelings, to survive, and like, thats pretty reasonable? It really feels like Geordi and Picard are failing to live up to their ideals here. This is not necessarily a problem - like I think the show is at least somewhat aware and thats the point and hopefully this problem will somehow resolve in a way to make peace with Lore, not destroy him - but I do wonder exactly how much of this is intentional to further that theme and how much is the writers not thinking about how violating it would be for someone to turn your consciousness off mid sentence or whether Data (and perhaps Lore, although an argument could be made he gave up those rights when he became a murderbot) should have the right to self determination with regards to whether to integrate with Lore or delete him or suppress him or whatever.

This is honestly almost completely an aside and maybe should be its own thesis driven blog post but I feel like modern Trek is written in such a way to make the universe feel tiny. I remember in Strange New Worlds constantly being mind boggled they were so close to all these Star bases and planets and they just kept meeting up with Captain Love Interests ship and its like, are they even going anywhere? I felt the same at times in Discovery, although somewhat less so, and during these last few episodes of Picard, and I think I know what the difference is. Older Trek episodes were almost entirely episodic, and as such would mostly only occur in one place. Usually episodes would start with them journeying to that place, there would be some slice of life stuff on the ship that would often but not always set up the plot somehow, they’d arrive, stuff would happen, then they’d be back on the ship and discuss what happened. Sometimes instead the episode would open with noting that they were en route somewhere, but the first half or more of the episode would occur while they were en route and only the climax would actually occur once they arrived. Other times they’d be en route but the entire plot would take place on the ship during that journey - sometimes it would be about the place, other times it would be interpersonal conflict or random holodeck shenanigans or maybe a space anomaly is discovered whole they are en route. The point being, there was always a sense of journeying and distance being conveyed in how the plot was structured. It was very rare for a scene to occur, we find out we need to be in Y place, and then the next scene we are there - even if an episode was written such that we would need to be in two places and journey between them (rare) there would usually be at least one scene during the journey establishing the passing of time.

Modern Trek is different, though. Events usually happen at the places, and we skip the journey. We go to Warp 9.9 and then next scene we are there. Part of this is I think also influenced by how modern Trek is more serialized (or completely so in the case of early seasons of Discovery and all of Picard) which means there is always a lot of pressure to solve whatever the season long crisis happens to be, which is always some big fucking deal, so it feels unnatural to watch them calmly discuss Dom Jot over tea or whatever. I also think a bigger focus on action influences this - they want to keep the episode exciting so they are rushing to get from set piece to set piece. In general I think this is a deliberate artistic choice that is accomplishing creative goals the writers and directors and what not have, but I think the cost is it makes the Universe feel tiny because we never see the time it takes to get anywhere. Personally I greatly prefer the style of older Trek, and also value that sense of distance, so I think this is a bad trade off, trading a good sense of distance for a negative payoff, but for people who like the more serialized plots and high action set pieces, they may see it as a necessary evil, or even a good thing.

I am legitimately unsure if I just missed something, but Picard is having a conversation with Jack and then suddenly is like, “Maybe we do have the advantage.” and then the next scene Vadic is boarding the ship and they end up trapping her in some force fields (I think this is actually what made me think the previous thought about the universe feeling small). And like… what? I really expected them to have some amazing plan and it would eventually be clear how they had the advantage, but like, their plan ends up failing and if his whole idea was, “If we let them board us we control the ship so can trap them.” That was a dumb plan. Thats just Picard forgetting that letting the enemy board you is stupid, especially enemies who can become liquid and squeeze through tiny gaps and then look like normal crew members. I actually kept expecting Picard to be like, “Ah ha!” and reveal his secret plan and advantage they had all along which would make that line make sense and it never happened. So this feels like dumb and bad writing, Picard being stupid on purpose to move the plot forward, but I kind of suspect I missed something.

I’ve mentioned before that I hate Starfleet officers using disintegration weapons, and my opinion on that has not changed but I find it interesting that I mentioned before that it was discordant for Beverly in particular, a doctor who has vowed to do no harm, is using one, and then she herself brought it up in this episode, but in the context of, “Well, maybe I will do some harm anyways,” She then also later has a conversation with Picard that she thinks she may be losing her moral compass. On the one hand I am glad the show is addressing this, albeit belatedly, but I’m not convinced they are doing a good job, especially because Picard is like, “Well, maybe we should develop a genocidal tool just in case and decide once we have it whether to use it,” all the while Vadic is making it clear just how far Starfleet has fallen. Things will probably turn around at some point, but its hard to be invested in these guys as heroes even with decades of history when they are saying to the camera “Are we the baddies?” then shrugging and continuing to do bad stuff while your villains are like, “Please stop torturing our people.” Like honestly after this episode I’m Team Vadic. Down with Starfleet. I think Vadic is suppose to be sympathetic, but not the person you side with, and its got a lot of work to do to convince I should be on Picard’s side for anything other than “I am personally invested in his character,” reasons, because morally he is a shit storm this season. This does definitely feel like an issue I am going to later have to be like, “Okay, fine once the plot landed I get it,” but I still think they are leaning too hard on the grimdark side for the changelings to be like, “You used a bioweapon to genocide us and and then experimented on us while we were alive to turn us into weapons,” and for Picard to be like, “Yeah, well, it was war, and maybe we’ll do it again, how do you like that?” There is also a lot of casual racism against changelings being tossed out too which feels jarring coming from Starfleet mouths with no pushback. Keiko needs to be here to say, “Raffaella, that was very ugly,” and then plopping down some potato stew.

Speaking of turning the changelings into weapons, it was just yesterday I was complaining about how Picard was tweaking changeling lore in ways that made DS9 era Starfleet look like idiots, but it payed off this episode… kinda. I get what they were going for and why they thought they needed to do this. But like… did they? Given that no accurate way to detecting changelings was ever demonstrated in DS9, they could have just had these changelings be prisoners of war who were tortured so Starfleet could brainwash them, or try to clone them or hybridize them with humans to make their own spies, or to interrogate them - any number if reasons, without actually tweaking the lore in this way which results in DS9 retroactively making less sense. At the end of the day, they wanted to tell this story and they probably were not thinking super hard about how these lore tweaks would affect interpretation of DS9, and its not a huge deal, but I would definitely have preferred a more careful approach, and it is entirely possible to have written this same plot with slightly different details that would be wholly consistent with how DS9 portrayed them instead of off just enough that you wonder why changelings were ever hard to detect before.

Finally, Jack using telepathy to instruct Sidney how to fight was stupid as fuck and I hated it. She is Starfleet. She knows how to fight. I honestly hate how fights in modern Trek feel like anime fights where everyone is either a god tier fighter who uses a flashy martial art or a complete pushover, and in the context of that it makes sense Jack is conveying his anime protagonist powers telepathically to her, but like, fuck that. She is a Starfleet Officer, she was trained as a soldier. Jack was not, and like, I’m sure we will find out why he is having borg themed seizures which make him an anime protagonist and why he can transfer those skills to her, but I don’t like it and it feels like it hugely undermines her character that she needed him to do that. Bad vibes all around, I disapprove.

One last thing, I hope we find out why these clicky aliens are so clicky before our heroes disintegrate them all with their auto kill weapons. Are they changelings? Are they a new kind of Jem Hadar? Why do they communicate in clicks? I actually am pretty sure they are also supposed to be changelings based on what has been said but I do not understand why they look and speak the way they do and I hope the show addresses it. Oh, that actually reminds me of a thought I had - its weird to me that old Trek just hand waived all alien languages with a universal translator, except in particular instances where it was malfunctioning, while modern Trek tends to leave them untranslated and subtitle. Is this supposed to represent diversity - as it might if these were real languages, showing other cultures more accurately - or is it actually a way to make them seem more alien and thus its okay for our heroes to disintegrate them with impunity? I feel like it was probably intended to be the first, but it definitely seems to have the second effect in my opinion, especially because the aliens the shows choose to do it for - Klingons and these clicky guys off the top of my head - are enemies while like Vulcans are shown just speaking English usually. I dunno, food for thought. I don’t have a huge preference either way but I do think the shows should be careful not to use it to dehumanize aliens.

In Which I Probably Make A Fool Of Myself Bitching About Changeling Lore

 So I actually find myself with less to say about Season 3 of Picard so far, as it seems to have somewhat hit its stride, and I’m curious exactly where it is going. I would not necessarily say I like it so far - its tone is still far darker than I would prefer for Star Trek, and while I do like seeing all my favorites from TNG come back, it definitely feels more like fanservice than organic. I would greatly have preferred TNG Season 8 and 9 to Picard Season 1 and 2, but having gotten those seasons, having Season 3 suddenly become TNG Season 8 kinda feels like they just gave up and said, “Fine, we’ll shoe horn in all the classic dudes, are you happy?” And sure, they are great, but they do feel like they are being forced into the story being told rather than the story being the one that makes sense to tell with these characters. But, I’m not hating it, and I’m not finding myself constantly pulled out and needing to note down things, which is a good sign. Ultimately my opinion on the season is going to entirely depend on how it ends, I think, because what has come so far has been intriguing but not “good”, so it needs to pay off or else it will just end up another disappointing season.

But I do still have some thoughts I want to share. I love Vadic, they are really chewing the scenery and steal the show in every scene they are in. Honestly the acting is pretty stellar in this show generally - everyone is playing their roles to the hilt, and any problems I have are entirely with the writing and decision making process of the show, not the actors. The way the changelings are being portrayed though raises some confusing questions lore wise for me, questions that -might- get answered, but if the previous seasons of Picard are any indicator, probably not all of them, possibly not any of them.

I’ve already talked about the pot, and how that was a bizarre over generalization of Odo’s habits before he became fully comfortable with his form to the race as a whole, and I stand by that assessment, but its not the only example. They also talk about “the classic blood test”, and how these new, evolved changelings can now pass it. The problem with that, is, to my memory - and I’ll grant that without rewatching a bunch of episodes of DS9 I cannot be 100% sure - but to my memory this “classic blood test” never once worked in DS9. The episode where it was introduced, The Adversary, which was clearly inspired by the Thing, in fact, has the changeling use the test to frame someone else, by taking over as Bashir and faking a positive on Eddington. I also remember in some episode - maybe that same one, maybe a later one - where someone says that hey, if I was a shapeshifter, why would I just kill a bunch of people, store their blood inside of me, and produce it on demand? I think that was actually Eddington after he was fingered in the Adversary, but regardless, this is not a test that is shown the work and the show points out its a shitty and unreliable test, and thats the point - its supposed to be tense and impossible to know who is the shapeshifter, Now, just because the so-called “classic blood test”  was never shown to work on screen doesn’t mean that it has never worked off screen in the history of Star Trek, of course, so them saying it is now useless against these shapeshifters is in no way directly contradictory to the prior established lore on its own.

They also show that these shapeshifters do not revert to goo on death, only when their flesh is dissected, and its noted that the standard procedure to prevent changeling infiltration is to scan then for internal organs, since Changelings do not normally have these, but that these changelings do, and so are not detectable by scans. Now, I am pretty sure in DS9 nothing is ever established with regards to whether or not changelings can mimic internal organs, but I am also pretty sure that they never in the course of the show develop a reliable way to scan for them, aside from the extremely limited devices that Garak used to torture Odo and attempt to force Gowron to reveal himself as a shapeshifter (which also did not work). What this means is that if 1) scanning for internal organs works and 2) they never developed a way for them to scan for them throughout DS9 they either 1) lacked the technology to scan for internal organs in DS9, which seems preposterous, we can do that now and could do it with current technology when DS9 aired or 2) it never occurred to them to do so during the run of DS9. Moreover, at one point Odo notes that he CAN eat, and tried to once, but the aftermath was messy so he never did it again. Before watching Picard, my personal headcanon was 1) shapeshifters mimic enough of the internal anatomy that they were undetectable to conventional scans, and possibly well enough even to mimic eating and drinking 2) Odo perhaps was enough worse at shapeshifting than his kin that perhaps he could not do so as well as they could. Picard is saying that no, they cannot do that, which does not directly contradict anything stated in DS9, merely my headcanon, but if that is true, why couldn’t they just have scanned for them in DS9?

Now, of course, does this matter? You might say, okay, fine, these lore tweaks may seem a little odd when you take DS9 into account, but they aren’t directly contradictory, just funky, and Picard is telling a new story here, and these are necessary changes for that story. And you know, maybe they are - I do not know where this story is going. So far these changes though all seem to point to the writers thinking that 1) detecting shapeshifters is a solved problem and 2) thus the shapeshifters would need to adapt and find a way to become undetectable again thus the changes. But the thing is, 1 was never shown to be true in DS9, it’s just being asserted as true now in Picard. They simply could have said, hey, we still don’t have any way to detect shapeshifters and nothing else about the plot would have needed to change, and they wouldn’t have retroactively made everyone in DS9 look like idiots for not thinking to scan for internal organs. Ultimately, depending on where this plot goes, maybe this really was all necessary, although I suspect even if so there was probably a way to do it that didn’t make DS9 look dumb, but for now, this feels like them way overthinking things to little end but lore navelgazing. The big advantage of technobabble is you don’t really need to fully explain why something works, and DS9 carefully mixed technobabble and lack of information to keep the shapeshifters a threat. Picard could have done the same, and if this doesn’t pay off, I’m really going to wonder why they decided to defang them this way.

Persona 3 Reload Thoughts

 So I finished Persona 3 Reload last week, and figured I’d do a quick write up of my thoughts. For context, my first Persona game was Persona 5, followed by 5R, then 4 Golden, and now 3R. I also played SMT3, 5, 4, and Apocalypse, in that order, between Persona 5 and 5R, and a little bit of Vengeance after 4 Golden. So I started playing them relatively recently in the history of the series, but I’ve played at least one version of every “modern” one since the two series defining entries, SMT3 and Persona 3, now.

The first thing which struck me was how the game in general feels like it has a much creepier tone than later Persona games, closer to SMT, especially early on but throughout. The dungeons vibes are generally weirder, as are the enemies at least than Persona 5 since P5 decided to use the SMT system of Personas and Shadows being one in the same design wise, the setting and tone feel creepier than 4 which was loads creepier than 5, and adding to it is in general, especially early on, character seemed far more likely to simply no sell bizarre occurrences or respond to them cryptically, whereas I feel in 4 and especially 5 reactions are more naturalistic. Although I think that makes 5 a bit more accessible and easier to digest and understand than 3, I think I actually prefer 3’s vibe, much like I prefer SMT’s far more cryptic, creepy, and inaccessible vibe than Persona. I’m a big fan of weird stuff, and SMT is just weirder than Persona, and Persona 3 is weirder than Persona 5, and I like that. Hell, you get a dog, a kid, and a robot in P3, P5 all you get is a talking cat. Talk about a downgrade.

Another thing I noticed which I have to admit, I am not entirely sure I’m right about, but I felt in Persona 5, most supports followed a pattern of you get to know them, become trusted, you discover some problem they have which can only be solved by beating some dude in Mementos, you do that, and then you finish the support, whereas Persona 3’s all seem to follow a different pattern, namely, you get to know them, they have some problem, you either egg them on to make that problem worse (which consistently gives the most relationship points) or you advice against it (and thus have to make up those points otherwise) and then eventually there is a reversal, where they discover they’ve been fucking up and change their ways, and then they thank you for supporting them the whole time. I find this interesting because it really made me feel like I was actively making these peoples lives worse, even if they ultimately got happy endings. Part of this might just be a consequence of me using a guide to choose my responses and thus maximize points - people who choose dialogue options without a guide might read it as you simply connecting with troubled people, but since I was optimizing my time (so I could see as many of the supports in one playthrough as possible, my priority) I was consistently encouraging these people to ruin their lives. Yes, ask your teacher out. Yes, run away from your parents, child. Yes, keep running on that knee until it snaps. Yes, keep gorging yourself to the point of vomiting, its fine. There are a couple exceptions, but it definitely felt like a very high percentage of supports followed this same pattern, and it honestly made me feel really evil, and in turn made it less surprising to find I had been the host to the avatar of death the whole time. I don’t really know if that was the intent - I feel like probably not? But it was interesting. I didn’t hate it.

Another thing I noticed was just how much Persona 4 and 5 cribbed straight from 3. Elements from Fuuka were brought down and became Futaba and Haru, who also borrowed some of Mitsuru’s plotlines. Most of the rest of Mitsuru’s traits and personalities went to Makoto. Junpei become Yosuke became Ryuji, becoming dumber but mildly less pervy each time, but also getting less of a redemption arc each time - low key I love Ryuji but he never really learns anything, whereas Junpei starts off awful but I legit liked him by the end due to his changes over the course of the game. Ryuji also has a lot of Kanji in him, although I don’t know if there is a good parallel for him in P3. Akechi is a mash up of Naoto and Akaya. And so on and so forth. It kinda feels like they have a list of necessary elements for a Persona game, and they just kinda mix and match who gets what traits and roles in the plot each time. This did not at all ruin the experience of Persona 3 for me, but it definitely did make Persona 5 seem shittier in retrospect, seeing just how derivative it really is. Its still probably the best of them simply because it is the same formula refined, but it does make me hope that Persona 6 will take some risks to make it not just Persona 3 for the fourth time.

Overall, though, I enjoyed Persona 3 a lot, and its problematic portions were so much less problematic than those in 4 that I don’t even feel I need to qualify it like I would with 4. It did kinda creep me out that Chihiro’s final platonic support had her get mad about a poster declaring Teacher/Student love as bad, though, even moreso than the Hermit support or the Magician support, which more directly dealt with that, since how dare they put those words in her poor naive mouth. I’m not sure if I’ll play the Answer - I’ve heard its bad and I have kinda lost motivation, but since its a separate thing I can really play it anytime, so maybe I’ll get around to it. I honestly hated the post ending content in both 4 and 5 though which AREN’T widely thought of as trash, so I’d hate to see how bad one that people actually dislike is.

Picard Season 3 Random Reactions

 I really don’t feel like thinking too hard at the moment so I am gonna fall on my old standby, expanding notes I took while watching episodes of Picard into a blog post. First things first, I have a comment from Season 2 I never actually managed to include that I’m gonna dump here, and that is the special forces Borg were so silly and non threatening. Honestly the normal, “I am Borg I am just going to stand here and absorb punishment then use some godawful mechanical device to eviscerate or assimilate you” is way more threatening than these slightly gray dudes doing krav maga or whatever. I understand that from a lore perspective she probably didn’t have the time and resources for a full assimilation and that the visual style of Star Trek fights in the modern shows are much more dynamic and thus this kind of fighting fits the normal style, but it just felt really silly to me and not at all scary. I forget if I mentioned it or not, but in general the fight scenes throughout but especially in the penultimate episode of Season 2, were incredibly tedious and boring. I don’t watch Star Trek for the fights, but I do enjoy fights in other shows, and to be honest I am not entirely sure if its merely because I don’t -want- extensive choreographed fights in Star Trek or if the fights are legitimately bad or boring, but I was falling asleep.

Okay, now on to Season 3. I’ve heard this is “the good” season, although if so, I feel like I haven’t hit the good parts yet. Beverly’s initial depiction felt super out of character for her, but this is apparently intentional, since when Picard sees the footage of her shooting at people, he mentions it too. But I also want to call attention to something I have repeatedly complained about in modern Trek - how often Starfleet officers use weapons which disintegrate their enemies. I honestly feel like those would be banned as inhumane in the Federation. Why would a non-military organization who wants to use nonlethal force if at all possible who has repeatedly been shown to do things like provide medical care to enemies after subduing them or beaming enemies from stranded ships onto their own to save their lives use disintegration weapons? In this instance its actually Beverly who presumably is no longer in Starfleet since she disappeared for twenty years, but given she is a fucking Doctor who has sworn to do no harm, even moreso strikes me as discordant. Thumbs down.

Picard saying he doesn’t want a legacy, he wants a new adventure struck me as funny just because the first two seasons, but especially the first, felt like Picard struggling with his legacy and the fact he had sort of fucked it up in his final years and trying to reclaim it, mirroring perhaps the fact that Star Trek tried to paint a picture of a hopeful future but our actual present kept getting worse, meaning the show itself failed to create a legacy. Again this in some ways feels like a metacomment by the writers bitching at the fact the executives? the audience? rejected their attempts at legacy building in favor of wanting an adventure. But maybe its just suppose to set him up as still not being mature enough to shoulder the coming responsibility of a child, cuz he is still in adventure mode? Unclear.

I find it amusing that Picard and Riker can apparently just fuck around and board a ship with a phony inspection claim and get away with it. Yeah they are high ranking but you’d really think Starfleet would be more regimented than this. Of course Shaw does kinda figure out what is going on but the fact it got as far as it did is honestly wild, and I’m not sure if its indicative of Starfleet being a mess, the show being poorly written, or some third thing. I don’t really think it’s suppose to be that first one but I’m not convinced there isn’t something I’m missing here, and regardless, not a big deal. It would be perfectly believable for Picard to just ask for a command like he did in Season 1 and get it this time since he has redeemed his name, so the fact they want it to be a bit more shenaniganny is not a big deal even if it feels unrealistic.

I wrote down “Are the Picards just genetically British?” given that Renee, Jean Luc, and Jack all have British accents despite Renee and Jean Luc being presumably raised in France and Jack having no contact with his father, but then the show made the same joke. Still a super weird detail though.

I wrote down “Shaw refusing to help rescue Picard and Riker in the shuttle makes no sense,” because guaranteed, if he came back to Starfleet and said Picard and Riker fooled him into thinking there was a fake inspection, then hijacked his ship, stole a shuttle, and died, there is about a zero percent chance that wouldn’t ruin his career. Even if he somehow managed to avoid any official blame - which is unlikely - I feel like it would still read as such an enormous blunder of incompetence all around as to ruin him. The show is in fact one step ahead of me though, and Seven points this out, eventually, and then eventually we find out that Shaw is salty about Wolf 359. I still don’t super like Picard’s tendency (and modern Trek generally, Discovery did this a lot) of hiding character motivations for multiple episodes so they just seem like dipshits until you find out why, but in this case the fact I watched these episodes over the weekend meant I got to the explanation before I had a chance to whine how it was dumb. I do still wonder how his guy got promoted though, he honestly seems like a huge asshole and coward.

Raffi feels like every season she gets reset back to being a conspiracy and drug junky who has ruined her life and it’s getting tiresome. Is it realistic a junky might keep regressing? Sure. But since the regression keeps happening off screen, it just feels dumb. Also, I find it wild her husband is judging her when she is actively working with Starfleet intelligence when he is apparently in some line of work where he thinks the kind if connection she might need is a drug hook up. I don’t necessarily think this is bad writing, mind you - he clearly has an image in his head of her based on her past actions and it doesn’t matter to him what she says about her life, he still sees her as a junky (and, as noted, she does seem to have regressed somewhat where she is at least thinking about drugs a lot and acting manic as fuck) and unreliable, but does he really have a leg to stand on? Basically, this isn’t bad writing, but I kinda want to sock him one.

I find it super weird that the way the decision of whether to turn over Jack went down the way it did. First, is he not a Federation citizen? Shaw claims that protocol here is clear and you always prioritize the life of the crew outside Federation space, and far be it from me to contradict made up regulations, but in real life America goes to ridiculous lengths to preserve the lives of its citizens in foreign nations, and Starfleet has repeatedly been shown to the do the same in prior shows. I think a more Starfleet way of writing this is it simply being a principle that they cannot turn him over to a bounty hunter because he is a citizen - which is even mentioned as also being a regulation, merely one which is superseded by the fact they aren’t in Federation space (but like, would they even encounter a bounty hunter in Federation space? That feels like something that would not be legal in the Federation). But anyway, Picard keeps himming and hawing and refusing to take Riker’s hints that hey, Jack is your son, so eventually Riker wakes up Beverly in the sick bay, who is clearly very injured and over the objection of her doctor, walks her to the bridge, where she stares nauseated at Picard and then he is like, “We refuse to hand him over, he is my son.” Even if the point was that Picard was only going to believe it from her mouth - which feels silly - why couldn’t Picard have come to sick bay? If you say he would have refused, okay, then why did they choose to have her just stare at him? He didn’t even hear it from her mouth, he inferred? it from her nauseated look, I guess? I know they were trying to maximize the drama but to me if just feels like everyone is being ridiculous. Maximizing drama at the cost of good character and plot is not good writing.

Deanna appears exclusively in nagging phone calls in these episodes, even in flashbacks, and I feel bad for her. She was always so short changed in The Next Generation and now she is just Riker’s bitch of a wife. I say that not as a reflection of my opinion of her, but how the show is portraying her. I honestly don’t think the show intended to besmirch her, but rather unintentionally echoed common depictions of love interests of heroic older men, trying to tie them down and ruin their fun. The fact that it is likely unintentional makes it mildly better, but I would definitely have preferred if they’d put in effort to give her something to do other than nag Riker.

Geordie’s daughter claiming she could empathize with Seven because she too has faced discrimination as a nepobaby because everyone expected her to be an engineer like her dad but she is a pilot is so incredibly silly and tone deaf, but I think the show thinks otherwise. I don’t really have anything else to say about that, other than maybe just a general note of Seven standing in as a mild metaphor for trans people with Shaw not respecting her name by Geordie’s daughter doing so is nice, I liked it. They didn’t stretch the metaphor too far or too hard (at least not yet) but made their point.

The scene where Riker keeps trying to escape and Vadic keeps portalling them back is so incredibly silly. It really feels like they should have been able to figure out a way to get away after the first time it happened, but it was comedic gold they kept falling for it, culminating of course with them getting absolutely dunked on when they fire the missiles. Is this a problem? Only because I don’t think they were trying to make it funny.

Jack like nearly dying and them saving him really read as a birth scene. I don’t have anything to add, thats just how it read to me symbolically. I think the idea is Picard really -gets- that he has a son now, and the parallel is intentional, but also, kinda funny.

The whole Raffi trying to torture the guy scene was uncomfortable. Is it in character for her? Honestly, sure, its believable based on how unhinged she has been in the past and in the start of this season. Worf trying to rein her in also was amusing. But as a member of Starfleet, it does kinda feel like it was not depicted with sufficient weight to the truly evil choice she was making. Everytime there has been a similar scene in previous Treks I can think of, it was either an example of that person at their lowest and they come to regret it, or that character was just evil and yet to be revealed as such, like Captain Fake Trump from Discovery Season 1. Maybe that is where this will go, but because Picard is serialized, we just won’t find out for five episodes. Sigh.

Picard, Beverly, and Riker all felt wildly out of character throughout these episodes to me, which is not necessarily a problem if the point is to establish that these characters have been changed in the years since we have seen them last, but what is a problem is that they did not feel internally consistent to this show itself. Like Picard is constantly pushing for aggressive, dangerous action here and saying we cannot be afraid of loss - this being a man who spent the last two decades doing nothing because he fucked up saving the Romulans once, and then went on a huge adventure to save a single life. Picard typically is a more peace and diplomacy guy, not a shoot first guy, and at no point did he become an action guy in the last two seasons - although he was an action guy in the movies, making this season almost feel like it could be set before the other two seasons.

Riker, however, is normally an action guy, and when we see him in Season 1, although he is retired and although it is post the death of his son, he is not afraid at all of the danger Picard brings to his doorstep and insists on helping - and gave the vibe he would have jumped straight into action at the drop of a hat if Picard asks - which he then does at the start of this season! Yet as soon as the shit hits the fan, he is cringing at danger while Picard yells at him to man up, flips out at Picard for pushing him and claims that Picard doomed them all, even though he was the one who ordered the launching of the torpedos which backfired - which again, feels like something Riker would never do - and then has to apologize when it turns out Picard was right. The point that is is all a reaction to his son’s death makes sense, the issue is the fact that its not consistent, which drains the weight of the change.

Beverly, on the other hand, has been going on space adventures her whole adult life. She was definitely one of the most safety conscious members of the crew of TNG, but the idea that she would get pregnant and then immediately cut Picard off because he lives too dangerous of a life feels out of character and like something an eighteen year old girl who got pregnant might do after her boyfriend ships off to war before she can tell him, not like a fifty year old grown woman whose baby daddy is in his mid seventies and who ends up retiring anyway in just a few years. On top of that, she then starts living the life of a pirate doctor outside of Federation lands, stealing medical supplies and giving them to the poor, an incredibly risky lifestyle that guaranteed puts her and her son in far more danger than chilling with Picard on a galaxy class starship or in his vineyard would expose them to. However, she then ends up siding with Picard for endorsing the risky maneuver to escape without undergoing -any- character growth between the scene where she tells off Picard for being a danger junky. Like Deanna, she feels like she is (unintentionally?) echoing misogynistic tropes here and is clearly in the wrong for depriving her son a relationship with his father, but they can’t even keep how she has changed straight or consistent.

I’m gonna end on two minor, silly complaints. First of all, they say that all changelings need pots to dissolve into to rest, as part of a plan where Seven will find the pot, analyze the residue, and then scan for the shapeshifter. The pot that Odo had, however, was given to him by his Bajoran father, and he later stops using it in favor of just flopping in a puddle in his room to rest, and its noted as character growth, him feeling comfortable enough to just be himself, establishing that no pot is necessary. But okay, maybe if they leave residue behind, it makes sense that ones who are hiding might want a pot to contain said residue and limit the chance of them being discovered. But even if thats the case, why would the pot these undercover shapeshifters use look identical to the Bajoran designed one Odo used? I mean, the real reason for that is so we as viewers can recognize it, so, okay, fine, I’ll let it pass. But then, after Seven finds the pot, she just fucking bumps into the shapeshifter?!? Like, why did we even need this whole pot plot point then? Its them tossing in a reference solely for the sake of a reference, but it makes no sense on its face, less sense if you are a lore nitpicker, and then ultimately isn’t even narratively necessary. This should have been cut. Normally I’m forgiving about things like this, saying, well it doesn’t really matter they made a minor lore mistake, but because it doesn’t even make sense in context and was narratively unnecessary, I actually feel this rises to a level of something that outright needed to have been cut or rewritten. Okay, maybe that is an overstatement, I feel silly just saying that, but still.

The other thing I wanted to say was just when they were surfing the energy wave, each and every actor looked like they were orgasming. Was that the stage direction they were given? Because it sure seems like it.

Picard Season 2 Final Thoughts

 So I finished Season 2 of Picard, so I might as well get out all my thoughts on it while they are fresh.

Something I meant to mention last time and forgot, the ninth episode of the season really felt interminable due to all the action scenes. I don’t know why they keep doing this on all the new shows. Do they really think Star Trek fans won’t watch a show without action set pieces? Honestly they may be right about newer fans, or demographics more generally, but I honestly found these action scenes shooting and punching Borg incredibly repetitive and boring. Between that and the dumb metaphorical labyrinth scenes, it made the episode a slog to get through, E9 of S2 of Picard might actually be my least favorite episode of Star Trek, ever, and I’ve watched Code of Honor as well as that one where Deanna gets space pregnant against her will because an alien got bored and wondered what it would be like to be a baby.

So I wrote a big long thing about how the takeaway from Picard’s trauma was nonsense, that he blamed himself when his father was truly to blame, and that he should have aided his father in locking his mother up instead of freeing her, and turns out, the show seems to mostly agree. It doesn’t go so far as to actually blame Picard’s dad, but Tallinn does absolve Picard in episode 10, but like… why did they wait an episode to do so? Tallinn actually seems to agree with Picard last episode, now she flips the script. Maybe this is just a me issue, but I don’t think serialized shows should necessarily stretch every plotline they have to start and end on the first and last episodes of the season. It would have been okay to have Tallinn say it isn’t his fault at the time. Let me also be clear, I still hate this plotline and flashback and implied message that bitches be crazy and need to be locked up, but having the show push back on it being Picard’s fault is nice, I just don’t understand why it was put where it was. Picard chooses to tell its story is such weird ways, I do not like how they do it, but I will admit this may be a personal thing rather than an objective flaw.

Tallinn’s speech to convince Renee to trust her is just incredibly sketchy sounding and its wild it worked. Honestly I dunno if I really have anything more to say about that, again, the whole “some people are vital to the timeline” plot point is one I dislike, but honestly what I am complaining about here isn’t even the plotline, just how silly it is that their plan hinges on Tallinn being like, “Hi, I’m your stalker, but don’t worry, I’m an alien.”

I also find it wild that when Soong finds out Renee is alive after he literally murdered her with his own hand is just a scoff. No confusion, no anger, just a disdainful huff. Could he not have at least been surprised?

One thing which I’ve alluded to before but I want to reiterate now is I think this season would have been much better as a standalone show set during the Eugenics Wars. Just have this be the first season, and then play it out for there leading into the rise of Khan and what not. No time travel necessary, cut out Picard and his nonsense, and just follow Renee, Guinan, maybe Tallinn if they want to keep the Monitor plotline, and instead of anyone repairing the timeline, just have it showing what was actually happening in that time period in more detail. Definitely keep all the ICE stuff, you’d probably need to lose the Borg shit but that should be its own separate show anyways. I strongly suspect these scripts started as a pitch for that show and got turned into this with Picard shoved in, and it’s very obvious it would have been more interesting without him.

The Travelers showing up and inviting Kore is bizarre. I don’t think it was very apparent exactly what the Travelers were or did in TNG, and I kinda think it should have stayed that way. Honestly they felt like just a way to get Wesley off the show before, and now making them the preservers of history, I mean, well, at least it gives me more reason to hate Wesley I guess. But also, they invited Wesley because he was a genius child prodigy with a sixth sense for space time shenanigans or whatever, but why are they inviting Kore? She’s just a clone, and a shitty imperfect one at that, who has spent her whole life sheltered from the outside world. Its nice she gets a happy ending but I do not understand why the Travelers would want her. Honestly just feels like Whil Wheaton wanted to cameo and they didn’t know what to do for Kore’s ending.

I don’t really understand what the point of taking away Seven’s Borg gear and then giving it back to her. Like, its kinds funny, but they barely did anything with it. We got like one scene of her touching her face missing them and like one scene where she expressed mild ambivalence about their absence and like one scene where their absence made tracking Jurati down harder and then she got them back. Is it just to save on costuming? It should have mattered more if they were gonna bother to do it.

So Q whines about how he is dying and lonely and Picard should consider getting a girlfriend so he doesn’t die alone… but Q got married and had a kid on Voyager. Like, I think his wife disowned the child and forced him to raise it (and perhaps left him in the process) but like… do they not count? Its weird to have Q act as if he led a life lacking connection and doesn’t want Picard to do the same when part of his character arc was in fact learning to connect to others and build relationships. This isn’t exactly a plothole - maybe he too disowned his son later, its not hard to justify why Q would end up alone, but it does definitely feel like the writers were simply unaware of these facts rather than aware and accounting for them, and whenever it feels like a writer couldn’t even check the wiki for a character before writing an episode about them, it feels super lazy to me. Just show the bare minimum of care about a series if you are gonna get paid to write for it, okay? I can forgive continuity errors but in the age of fan Wikis there isn’t actually a good excuse for ignoring a characters prior appearances.

I also thought it was really funny how Picard made a speech about how the small stories and personal stakes matter when this is a universe that literally has a transdimensional space and time police who ensure important people stay alive no matter what the cost, and the show runners couldn’t just write a personal story about Picard needing to overcome his childhood trauma but expanded it into saving the whole goddamn timeline. Learn your own damn lesson, show! Alternatively, maybe this is the writers screaming at meddling executives again, I’m going to just assume that as it makes me happy.

I like Rios’s ending from a personal character arc perspective, but he is such a good actor I do wonder if it was wise to write him off the show. On a similar note, I like Jurati’s ending as a conclusion of her character arc and her and the Borg queen’s flirtations and conflict, but I have so many fucking questions from an in universe perspective. But also, like Rios, she was a great actress and the best part of this season by far, so writing her off seems like a bad idea? But unlike Rios, I could see her coming back - I am assuming Rios will never show up again, though.

But yeah, like, its super wild to end the season with a new apocalyptic threat showing up and Jurati being like, “I am here to watch it and make sure it’s fine.” If this isn’t the plot of Season 3, then that is even wilder, and based on what I have seen so far of Season 3 (I started episode 1) it doesn’t seem to be? But also, is this timeline the same as the old timeline? Is this a closed time loop situation that was always destined to happen, or did they change the past? Or neither and Q just patched things up as so they ended up the same with his poeers despite the differences? This is important because the Federation genocided the Borg in Voyager, but yet Jurati is here. Did she never join the main Borg collective? Did she join it but survive somehow when they all died? Did she join it and Janeway and her had a friendly relationship and in this resulting timeline the Borg never got genocided? Again, if some of these questions get addressed in Season 3, dope, I’m excited, but right now, I’m mostly confused, and also impressed by the balls to make such an audacious change, assuming they put anywhere near the amount of thought into the implications as I have, which, to be honest, I am skeptical of.

I think its super weird Picard went to see Guinan and ask how Rios died, like, at all, but especially so soon after getting back, and I also think its weird we got to see him do it. It reminded me a lot of Phillippa Georgiou’s funeral on Discovery. Like, sure, technically they are dead now, but like, not really? Not in a sad way? Like realistically sure, you’d feel a loss if you knew you’d never see your friend again because they were stuck four hundred years in the past and are now dead, but narratively, his choice to stay there was about finding a life, not choosing a death, so immediately memorializing him like he died feels way too much of a bummer to me. With Phillippa it was even worse because she was Space Hitler and they were all mourning Space Hitler whereas Rios is more Kmart Che Guevara but still, I think we didn’t need to know he died in a knife fight leaving his wife widowed in her final years.

Anyway, I think Season 2 of Picard is definitely one of the worst seasons of Star Trek I’ve ever watched. I think its definitely either S1 of Discovery or S2 of Picard that is the worst, S1 of Discovery had me real mad at the time but I have had time to sit with it and it later grew into a show I legitimately liked by the end, whereas Jurati and the Borg Queen is the only part of S2 I really loved and everything else feels so meh - not even anger inspiring, just meh. So much more milquetoast than any part of Discovery. Yeah I think its the worst, I’m giving Picard the prize. S1 wasn’t far behind though, so unless I really love S3 of Picard it may go down as my least favorite Star Trek of all time, and possibly also the only one I’m net negative on, wishing it actually didn’t exist. Well, I dunno. That Jurati song scene is really good, maybe just that redeems it.

Continuing My Picard Rants

 You know what time it is. I’m almost done with S2 of Picard, I have one episode left, but before I finish it, let me dump some more thoughts here. I will once again just be taking my thoughts as they are written down in my notes, but I think they may end up more scrambled even than usual as I merged a couple documents and thus they may not be chronological, and some are more overarching comments.

To make this extra confusing, lets start with a general thematic thing. I commented how weird it was that S1 of Picard ended with such a strong, “Things need to die or they have no point.” message in Data’s final plea to Picard to let him die. Thats a message which has literally never once resonated with me, but that is not why I object to it. I question the idea we can only value things which are ephemeral - although technically speaking the Earth and the Sun and the Universe are ephemeral according to our current understandings of science (or, at least, always decaying, per entropy - I don’t think the Universe is actually predicted to end, merely reach a point of maximum disorder commonly called the “heat death” of the universe, I don’t feel like I need to get into the science here), for the vast majority of human history these things have seemed eternal, and in practical terms they are - none will die even in our lifespan, even if the worst global warming predictions are true - yet we still value those, surely? But anyway, thats all a distraction, I don’t object to that message, even if it is one I don’t quite understand - what I found funny about it is having that be the message of a sci fi show no one asked for reviving a character in his nineties as nostalgia bait. A show which then proceeds to pretend he has a fatal illness only to immediately erase it and give him a robot body in the exact same episode you sold this message. Its some bizarre cognitive dissonance, and requires the show to specify this new robot body will continue to age in order to even begin to reconcile the stated message to the camera and the actual plot of the show. It feels like absolutely atrocious writing, where you could not even manage to write the theme you want so instead of trying, just have a character say it to the screen.

Honestly I am still getting sidetracked, this isn’t supposed to be a dig at Picard and certainly not at S1 of Picard. Rather I just thought it was interesting that this theme persists into the second season. Q too now is facing his death, causing this theme to resurface, the idea that things can only have meaning if they end, and that even if that is scary, it is necessary. It makes me wonder exactly how right I am about the executive meddling in Picard and the show being a Frankenstein’s monster of different shows, disparate plotlines, and executive insistence on nostalgia bait, and whether these duplicate end season pleas to let franchises die is their revenge. I honestly kind of hope so, as that would make the theme resonate with me more, as in this specific case, I agree, even if I don’t think its that profound as a general philosophical theme - as a general theme it feels like copium from people afraid to die, telling themselves death conveys meaning, but in terms of a TV show, yeah, maybe we should stop bringing back zombified forms of old good shows and try making something fresh and new. Even if that means Star Trek as a franchise dies, and especially if it means it doesn’t but we can stop shoving in legacy characters where they don’t need to be. I know Starfleet Academy did it too, but it was really refreshing that none of the legacy characters were main characters at any point, unlike Discovery (Spock, Pike, and Sarek), Strange New Worlds (half the cast), Picard (Picard, Data/all the Soongs, Seven, and tons of more throughout). Weirdly enough I think Lower Decks is the only show with zero recurring legacy characters, despite how much shit people give it for just being entirely referential in its humor (a criticism I disagree with but understand).

This is a dumb complaint but when Kore is confronting Soong about her clone sisters she lists off all their names, which are all different names for the same mythological figure, Persephone, who was locked in the underworld by her husband after he raped in the middle of a flower field. Honestly I feel like the use of the name doesn’t quite fit the character - Soong is her father figure, not her husband - and its especially bizarre that Soong would have chosen it for her - what in the world was he trying to convey, and to whom? Does he just have a fetish for controlling women? But none of that is a real problem - I do think the show is probably trying to be clever with her name but I don’t really care whether or not they succeeded. What I do care about is when listing all the names of her clone sisters, she says “Prosperina” for one, which is notably not an alternate name for Persephone. Its Proserpina. They misplaced the P. “Prosperina” sounds like the love interest in the anime “Oh No! I Woke Up in A Fantasy World and Fell In Love with A Rich Merchants Daughter!” This is a dumb nitpick but it made me laugh so you have to read about it. I will admit though I searched for a bit to confirm I wasn’t in the wrong here, because I thought, hey, maybe that is a legitimate version of her name, but I could find no reference to that name anywhere, not even, weirdly enough, in Star Trek Picard documentation online, meaning this might just even be the actress fumbling a name and no one noticing but me.

The scenes between Seven and Raffi talking about their relationship and the flashback to Raffi’s conversation to Elnor was all good stuff, in my opinion, but it did raise a big question for me, which is why is it here? Why did it take until Episode 9 of a ten episode season for us to know why Raffi was suddenly so attached to Elnor and so upset at his death? Why are we only getting this window into Seven and Raffi’s relationship and Raffi and Elnor’s relationship so late in the season? What was the point of keeping these things a mystery? There are times I think it can make sense from a writing perspective to hide a character’s motivations, but I don’t understand it here. It just made me wonder why the fuck she was acting this way for nine episodes. It made me think the writing was worse than it was. I brought up before, “Why is Picard so nonlinear?” and basically said it felt like the show just inherently thinks nonlinear storytelling is simply better than linear storytelling regardless of what effect you are going for, and you know, it is not. If the show was a show with a close perspective on a single character - like, focusing on Picard, for instance - having him slowly discover why Raffi was so devastated could make sense. But this is not that show. We jump perspectives every scene, and the show fundamentally is one where the viewers have limited omniscience - we are told everything that is happening from everyone’s perspective and the timing of those reveals creates dramatic tension, but we are not living in anyone’s perspective. Delaying Raffi’s motivations for her actions just makes her actions seem out of character until the reveal, and after the reveal I was just wondering why they bothered to delay it. It really made me wish we had actually seen all the events of the timeskip in an episode or two before the first one of this season so we could understand Seven and Raffi and Raffi and Elnor’s relationship dynamics, rather than the bizarre reveal that they’d gotten closer and she saw him as a replacement son just as the season ends and he has been dead for seven episodes.

Speaking of, I spoiled myself to knowing that Elnor ends up coming back when he first died, which makes me beg the question, why did he even die? Yes it provided a lot of drama with Raffi this season, but he is not going to stay dead. Moreover, he kept reoccurring, in flashbacks, hallucinations, and now a hologram, so they did not save money on the actor. Having him come back completely undercuts the emotional impact of his death. They could have just written him to have not gotten shot and then showed Raffi and him growing closer over the course of this mission instead. Of course that would require real character writing rather than using a cheap gimmick to manipulate viewer emotions, but that should be a welcome writing challenge, an opportunity, not a cost. Honestly I think the answer is, “Modern Trek wants to be edgy and kill characters for emotional stakes, but simultaneously doesn’t really have the balls to go through with it, not to mention significant character death is difficult to square with a hopeful outlook that is mandatory for Star Trek properties.” My impression is Elnor does not appear in the third season, so even moreso, they should have picked one, either killed him off or not, killing him off only to bring him back and immediately write him off is just nonsense, but it is what I’ve come to expect from this show which seems to have no idea what it wants to do with any of its characters.

This is another minor nitpick, but on multiple occasions various people have said that the Borg Queen wants to get a 400 year head-start on conquering the Universe. This rang false to me, so I looked it up. Canonically, there is a reference in a single Voyager episode to the Borg having controlled several systems in the Delta Quadrant in the 15th century BCE, but otherwise we do not actually know when the Borg came to be. If I was being an ultra Star Trek nerd, I could simply stop here and say, Ha! This conflicts with established canon! But honestly I don’t think contradicting a passing reference in a Voyager episode is that big a deal - I forget if the Borg Queen herself ever says it, I am positive Seven says it at least once, and in theory Seven should know how long the Borg have existed since she was a member of the collective, but at the end of the day, people in universe getting the exact number of years that her stealing a future ship would give them an advantage is a minor issue. Also I guess maybe the idea is not that they don’t exist then and haven’t started assimilating, but that she would get technology from the future early? Okay, I think I may have actually talked myself into thinking this line is perfectly fine. I was going to say, “My real problem with it is its ridiculous to think the Borg sprang into existence in Picard’s time, they must have been around for longer, probably quite a long tine given how much of the Delta Quadrant they control…” and all of that is true, but I think I was just interpreting this line too narrowly. I have some questions over whether that really is what the writers meant, but at the end of the day even if it was wrong it’d be a minor nitpick, and I can easily explain it to myself having thought about it, so its not even worth nitpicking. I will leave this here though since it may be useful for others who have the same nitpick.

Speaking of me being wrong, I wrote a literal whole blogpost about how the Confederation shouldn’t have been written as successfully genociding the Borg because it rides too close to handing it to Nazis, but I only just realized something I had forgotten: Janeway also genocided the Borg for the Federation. Thus this not an example of, “Maybe being a Nazi has its advantages,” but rather I had just blocked out the fact that canonically the Federation is down with genocide. Honestly, thats fucked up, but I can hardly blame Picard for Voyager’s fucked up writing.

On the contrary, I have not finished the season yet, but it kind of seems like this might be an attempt to fix that. The Federation has gone astray, and we are currently in the past fixing the timeline. We also have now witnessed Jurati and the Borg Queen merging into a new entity which seems more reasonable than the Borg Collective used to be. Given the season started with the Borg Queen asking to join the Federation, it feels like this is an attempt to find a way to square a circle and make peace with the Borg by reforming them into less of a totalitarian forced conformity force of nature and more an enemy who is still fundamentally human and who can be reasoned with. And honestly, I am down with that, even if I strongly suspect most Star Trek fans are not. Let me explain.

The Borg were super cool and super threatening when they were first introduced. However, as they evolved over time, as we saw them get beaten over and over, as we saw more and more ex Borgs be saved, and as they got human faces first as Locutus, then as the Borg Queen, and also in Seven, they became a lot less threatening and, in most peoples opinions, a lot less interesting. By the end of Voyager, most fans were sick of the Borg, and thought Voyager had ruined them. I honestly mostly agree with that assessment. But, much like we cannot blame Picard for Voyager genociding the Borg, we also cannot blame Picard for Voyager ruining the Borg. Its already done. So what Picard is doing here, is recontextualizing the Borg to tell a new story. Is it better than the one that TNG told with the Borg? Probably not. But it is new, and I think deserves credit for finding a way to rework them in an interesting way. They were already ruined, why not try something new with them and see if you can make anything compelling out of them?

Honestly even the idea of throwing a Borg Queen into the past was kind of a brilliant as a way of making them feel threatening again. Maybe Janeway could curbstomp them and blow up all the Cubes in one fell swoop, but can a ragtag group of individuals from the future stop a single Borg Queen from assimilating downtown LA? That is a legitimately amusing and fresh way to make them a threat again. And then finding a way to make it a story about loneliness and humanity, thats real Star Trek shit there. Even if this makes the Borg even stupider and lamer going forward, even if people think it shits on their legacy, I think it is downright the most interesting thing Picard has done so far and I give them credit for it. And Alison Pill is amazing, and she and the Borg Queen have great chemistry. The show should have been about them.

Okay, so, now we get to the meat of what I want to say. Yes, only now. This is the big one. What the fuck is up with Picard’s backstory? So basically, it has finally been fully explained in plain English… wait, wait, I have to rant about something else for a second. Picard has an English accent, but is suppose to be French. Thats just because his actor is British. But why is Renee Picard also English? Are the Picards just a family of English aristocrats who bought a French villa?

Okay, okay, back to the real meat. So yes, it is explained that Picard’s mom has some kind of unspecified mental illness, she takes Picard with her into their unsafe dungeon basement that they have for unclear reasons, he gets stuck on some debris, she disappears, eventually his father finds first him and then her, his father locks her up in her room, she pleads with Picard to free her, he does, then he shortly discovers she hung herself. He then says, in the present, that he should not have freed her, and blames himself for her death. Its also notable that this is supposed to be a repressed memory - Picard has not -always- blamed himself for his mom’s death, he is only now remembering and blames himself NOW for her death, as a rational adult thinking back on his actions as a literal child, not as the child in the moment faced with his mom's dead body. He says this to Talinn, and she does not push back at all. The show gives us no indication that this is anything other than the intended takeaway, Picard is to blame for his mother’s death.

Except, no he isn’t. His mother had been having problems her whole life. Also, why does his family keep an unsafe, unlocked dungeon? In a house with a child and a mentally unstable person? Why did Picard’s dad lock her in her bedroom instead of seeking medical help? Why didn’t he explain anything to his son? None of this is Picard’s fault. It’s also frankly a bizarre trauma to choose give him, and I don’t understand the point. But if one were to read this as having a “message”, that message would be “crazy bitches need to be locked up for their own good.” Is that the intended message of Season 2 of Picard? I mean, honestly, it could apply to Jurati and the Borg Queen too.

I don’t seriously think it was. I think the writers wanted Picard to have a sad backstory to explain why he is cold and distant, they wrote one, and the intended message is we have to process and deal with trauma and move on. Which is all well and good. But why did the trauma need to be written in such a misogynistic way? Men locking up their “crazy” wives is a long and tired trope and writing a story that seems to validate that as necessary, even temporarily, is simply a bizarre choice. There was no reason it needed to be this way. I’ve already covered why I don’t think it even makes sense to write him as a traumatized person to begin with, but even if they were committed to that, why does his trauma need to be the plot of Jane Eyre mixed with Pan’s Labyrinth? Derivative and sexist are labels that certainly can be applied to a lot of Star Trek, but there is no reason new shows should be aiming for that as a goal.

Okay, now I’m done. Can the last episode of the season save it? Almost certainly not, but we’ll see.

Nostalgia versus Taste

 It might not come as a surprise to hear this, but I greatly prefer older Star Trek shows to the newer ones, with the exception of Lower Decks. I also often watch movies from the 80s and 90s now and think, man, they just don’t make movies like this anymore. Likewise, I love classic JRPGs, especially Final Fantasy, and about ten years ago I often pined against the fact that it was so rare to find a new, good JRPG in that style, especially as Final Fantasy has continued to experiment and become more of an action RPG series. But often if you express opinions like these, people will say things like, “Oh, you’re just blinded by nostalgia. Those things weren’t actually better, you just grew up on them and cannot evaluate how good they are rationally because of your nostalgia.”

Now, is this true? Perhaps. Like, for instance, I’ve enjoyed every mainline Pokemon game thats been released. Until recently, I’d have said that Ruby and Sapphire were my favorite, but when Sword and Shield came out, I liked it so much I changed my mind and declared that actually, that was my favorite, and then when Scarlet and Violet came out, despite their extreme bugginess on release, I changed my opinion once more and decided that was my favorite. When people tell me that they only like older Pokemon games, and that newer ones are in some way different and worse, I usually consider them to be blinded by nostalgia. From my perspective, every generation of Pokemon has been so similar to every other, that if you like one, you’d like any of them, with the possible exception of the fact that older ones have fewer quality of life features. Thus, there is no reason to dislike the newer ones but like the older ones except nostalgia, but the opposite is not true - I can understand why a modern gamer who goes back to Pokemon Blue might not enjoy it.

So I definitely do think nostalgia is a real thing that can blind some people making accurate assessments of things they like, at least some of the time. But also I clearly am not blinded by it with regards to Pokemon, since I like newer ones equally or better to older ones, because they have largely kept their formula the same and either made minor tweaks or increased quality of life in each iteration, which I’m on board with. But just because I am not blinded with it regards to Pokemon, does not mean I am not falling prey to it for other things, especially because I’d be the first to admit that Star Trek and Final Fantasy are much closer to my heart and more important to me than Pokemon, a game which I’ve always enjoyed but has never been a major obsession of mine.

When I mentioned JRPGs, tho, you’ll note I said “until ten years ago.” That number is approximate, so hopefully nobody is gonna quote the release date of Bravely Default at me and make fun of me for how old and wrong I am, but there was a window of time where classic style turn based JRPGs were widely unpopular and much fewer of them were being made, and I felt their loss keenly. But that began to change when Bravely Default was released, and its only accelerated since then, especially with games like Persona 5 and Dragon Quest 11 being mainstream hits, and now new JRPGs are hot items and are everywhere, both modern 3D ones, retro inspired 2D ones, and indie ones directly cribbing the style of older games, and I’m glutted with choices of games I’d love if I had time to play them all. Am I blinded by nostalgia here?

I don’t think so. I think that one can draw a line between taste and nostalgia. I like a particular style of JRPG, a style which was popular in the nineties through the early 2000s, which indeed was when I was a child in middle school and high school playing tons of Final Fantasy. I don’t really think it makes sense though to say that when I play Persona 5, the first game in that series I played, that I liked it because I was blinded by my nostalgia for old JRPGs. I don’t even think it makes sense to say that for Octopath Traveler or Bravely Default, games which certainly purposefully ape the style of those old games. I just like games like that, whether they are new or old, whether I played them first as a kid or as an adult. Perhaps the reason I like games like that is because thats what games were like when I was a kid, but thats no different than literally any other taste someone might have.

If being blinded by nostalgia means anything, it needs to mean preferring something purely due to your association with past positive experiences with it, and not because of its objective traits. But liking a particular style of thing, even a style that was only produced in a particular time period of the past, is not being blinded by nostalgia as long as you are open to new experiences similar to those ones and still enjoy those new experiences. I’ve seen a lot of people accuse One Piece fans who prefer pre-timeskip as being blinded by nostalgia, but older One Piece does have a notably different animation style than newer One Piece, and as someone who only started watching it a few years ago, I can understand why someone might prefer it (even if I do not specifically) and I think it’s silly to argue that I’m blinded by nostalgia for something I binge watched all thousand episodes of in six months two years ago. With Star Trek, the older shows are just very different than the modern ones. They’re more episodic, they have way, way, way more episodes, they have much less or no CGI and thus had to rely on dialogue to drive the plot instead of action set pieces, they just have a massively different feel. Its an opinion whether that older style is better or worse than the modern style, but preferring the older style does not mean one is blinded by nostalgia - and the fact I prefer Strange New Worlds to Picard and Discovery, and Lower Decks to all of them, is because those shows have more in common with that style, not because I am nostalgic for SNW or Lower Decks, nor is it because those shows constantly reference the older shows and try to play off nostalgia (although they do). Honestly the times they play off nostalgia annoy me, particularly SNW, Picard, and Discovery’s attempts at doing so, which always come off as nauseatingly reverential. I want an episodic space opera featuring intense moral debates in conference rooms, not for Spock and Kirk to chat at a table with moony lighting while everyone points and says “Look! they’re making friends!” The fact SNW does both does not mean I like it for the nostalgia, it means I like it despite its attempts to win me over with weak nostalgia bait.

Now, are there things I am definitely nostalgic for, that legitimately aren’t very good and I only like them because I enjoyed them as a kid? Well, probably. Honestly I think the best example I can give is Muppet Babies. I loved that as a kid, but when I tried sitting through an episode a few years back, I couldn’t even get through one. Now, of course, thats a show for literal babies, and also I recognize it’s bad now so I’m not really blinded, am I? I think those are fair points, but as a counter 1) I have watched both Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street more recently and easily watched whole episodes of both and enjoyed the crap out of them and 2) I still sometimes think, it can’t be that bad, right? Maybe I should give it another chance. It must be good if I liked it as a kid. So I do feel there’s nostalgia at play there, even if its not strong enough to stand up to actually sitting through an episode. But Fraggle Rock? No, that’s just a good show, and so is classic Star Trek, and its not nostalgia that makes me say that.

More Picard Nonsense

 I had some aspirations for a more thesis driven post today, but I’m tired and just feel like ranting, so I’m going to do that instead. These are just gonna be expansions of the notes I wrote down about Picard as I was watching it, so they in theory should be roughly chronological but they are from multiple episodes and kind of scattered, so apologies if they come across as incoherent.

Last season I tentatively identified the intended interpretation of the synthetics plotline to be about immigration - the Federation was using synthetics as a cheap source of labor much like the United States uses migrant laborers from Mexico and other places as cheap labor, then a terrorist attack by the synthetics leads to a ban on them, much like increased xenophobia following 9/11 led to a crackdown on immigration and eventually Trump’s Muslim ban. The Romulans traditionally are stand ins for the Russians, and I’m honestly not really sure whether the Romulan role in orchestrating the terror attack is really suppose to map to anything or say anything of interest regarding real politics, but I do think this was roughly the intended thematic thrust of Season 1. I definitely do not mind when a work has political messaging, and in Star Trek, I consider it mandatory, but I think the closer you come to allegory without actually just plainly stating your meaning, the easier it is to accidentally say something you did not intend to, which I think was a big problem with Season 1 of Picard where they were trying really hard to create a readable allegory about immigration but they missed the mark by just enough to instead be kind of incoherent as to what their intended point was.

Honestly I think the way to go is to pull back and tell more general stories - for instance, while I think you could easily read the situation with the Bajorans and the Cardassians as parallel to Nazi Germany and the Jews, you can also read it as parallel to colonizers and Native Americans (or any colonized group) or Israel and Palestine - similarly the Maquis can be read as parallel to the actual Maquis in Vichy France during the Nazi occupation, but also parallel to any other colonial project or Israel and Palestine or what have you. It’s general enough to be generally readable to any number of situations, and thats a strength, and writing it that way requires clarity of meaning that intentional close allegory does not always reflect. I say all this, because Picard Season 2 does the opposite. They just put their heroes in the present day and had them fight ICE. And… I don’t hate it. Its not general at all, it feels a little silly and super on the nose, but there is no mistaking the message, and that is a good thing. Star Trek V does the same thing with saving the whales, so you can hardly even say its not Star Trek to do it this way, although I do think it is slightly lazier and less creative, but its also bolder and less likely to be misinterpreted, so I’m fine with it. If new Trek cannot writer coherent political stories in a Scifi setting for some reason - and they do seem to be struggling to do so, as Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds all struggled with it at different points - then taking away the scifi setting and just stating what they mean is honestly not a terrible option.

I also really like Jurati and the Borg Queen’s flirtatious disaster lesbian dynamic. I’m not really sure if its “saying” anything - there are some obvious parallels to abusive relationships and gaslighting but I haven’t really put the analytical thought into whether the show really is saying anything coherent about them - but their chemistry is entrancing and I can’t help but hope these two crazy kids can work things out somehow. I mean not really the Borg Queen seems obviously evil and like she’s just going to destroy Jurati but I dunno, it really just tickled me seeing them interact, and I’m not always a hardass about Star Trek needing deep messages its okay to have fun too and the show is definitely having fun here with their dynamic.

On the other hand, I am increasingly disliking basically anything going on in the show that actually relates to Picard. Why is there so much focus in modern Trek on important individuals who must be preserved to maintain the timeline? Why does Star Trek want to be a chosen one story so badly? Why is there a Romulan on Earth doing nothing but stalking Renee Picard? I just really hate this plotline, it feels so anti-progressive and so Big Man theory of history (even if Renee is a woman). Really all timeline preservation nonsense tends to be annoying, but especially of this variety implying that there are some greater beings working to preserve a set history. Its one thing for the heroes to fuck things up and scramble to fix it, as is common in older Treks, but the pattern in newer Treks invariably is something gets fucked up (often for reasons unrelated to the actions of our heroes, like didn’t La’an just wake up to her ship being different despite not doing a damn thing? Here its just Q being a dipshit, Picard did not do nothing. and on Discovery, Spock is just a magic boy who needs to be preserved at all costs with no deeper explanation than he is a main character on the show during important events.) and then we find out there are Greater Powers like the temporal police or the Watchers or the Red Angel trying to preserve the timeline for the greater good. Honestly smacks of “Just Trust the System” politics to me, from a message perspective. I don’t even know that these are intentional messages so much as just a consequence of writers liking time travel and needing a justification for the shows conflict, but I really think it needs to be done more carefully and with less of a focus on “This guy is vitally important.” Like its preposterous to think that if Renee Picard doesn’t fly to Europa Earth will become fascist, even if the mission still happens without her, I don’t care how awesome you tell me she is.

Also, why is our introduction to her like Laris telling Picard how awesome she is? Why can’t we actually spend time getting to know her if she is that important? It was incredibly boring and vapid just watching Laris talk her up and then even weirder having Picard say some insightful things about this woman he has literally never met. I am guessing the reason is they just did not have time to get us invested in her, but that is the case, then don’t write the plot that way. The plot of this season could have been anything, no one forced you to center it around Renee Picard when you didn’t have the time to properly introduce who she is, why she is important, and why we should care in an organic manner instead of having Laris just list off her accomplishments like we are a college acceptance committee instead of an audience.

In my notes I said, “Why is the Supervisor Laris?” but then shortly after we saw another Soong and then Kore and I immediately changed my mind about it. It might be nice if the show offers some explanation - and honestly the amount they point out the similarity I am expecting one - but just from a show writing and casting perspective, reusing actors in new roles in time travel makes a lot of sense, and lets us see the actors in new and fun ways, like in a Mirror Universe episode, so I’m fine with it. If they don’t provide a good explanation for Laris in particular though, I do think thats an issue with how much they harped on the similarity, but they probably could have just had Picard get confused once and never mentioned it again and I’d have been okay with it given Soong and Kore. I do find it super weird though they recast Whoopi for “young” Guinan when she literally could have looked like anything and we know that Guinan looked like Whoopi from the nineties in the 1800s from TNG. Was it just too expensive to have her play the role in all the scenes? To be honest if so I’d have just recast her entirely then, have Guinan explain in the future that she can adjust her appearance up and done as needed, and leave it at that, rather than having her explain she can adjust her aging, then go back and recast her in the past as younger. I’m guessing the writers literally forgot about that TNG episode - I saw an explanation online for why it is not a plot hole because the events of TNG never happened in this timeline, which, like, sure, fine, whatever, but its still kinda weird and I definitely think thats an ex post facto justification.

This is a random aside but I found the idea very funny that Kore cannot go outside because UV causes her DNA to degrade more than normal. Thats just called albinism. Picard reinvented albinism with extra steps. Yeah I know she is eventually revealed to be a clone or something (its not entirely clear to me where I am at, but she discovered she was created) so its presumably her clone DNA being extra weak but it still made me laugh. Also, why does he live in California then? He could live somewhere cloudier. Also, normal window glass filters UV. Why doesn’t he just have normal window glass so she doesn’t need to live in a cave? Honestly this is why technobabble can be useful. You kinda need your science to either be 1) accurate enough to pass a sniff test (this doesn’t) or 2) fantastical enough that no one is going to scrutinize it. Star Trek really struggles to ever hit 1 and usually goes with 2, and at least in my opinion, it succeeds much better with 2 than 1. Its not just Picard of course - the episode where Spot devolves into an Iguana comes to mind, or where Janeway and Paris evolve into salamanders, and honestly countless other examples. But at the end of the day, its science fiction, Star Trek has never been hard scifi and never will, its fine, I just prefer it when the science is fake enough I can’t tell how dumb it is, from an immersion standpoint.

I also have written down, “Why did she remove his spleen?” which honestly I think is about Picard after he passes out and is brought to the clinic? But I kind of forget, and it might have been a joke I just did not get. I think they implied that spleens are pointless but they aren’t, its just possible to live without one, but they do perform a function.

Raffi and Seven have chemistry and I like the pairing, but I feel like its happened entirely off screen, and thats weird. Like they held hands randomly at the end of season 1, there was a year and a half time skip, and now it kinda seems like they might be in a relationship, but the show is never fully clear about it, and I just don’t understand why. It makes me wonder if I missed an episode where they started dating. Why is it written like this? Do they think we don’t care about the details? We just want to know they are an item but don’t care how it happened? Its a wild way to write a romance.

I said before I kind of dislike anything in the show relating to Picard, and this whole trauma plot is a great example. What I took from the weird flashback therapy session story hallucination was 1) Picard seemed to think his mom was great and loved him and his dad was abusive 2) but after confronting and and dissecting it in the most boring, drawn out, and obscure way possible, he is told by the therapist who is almost certainly Q in disguise but looks weirdly similar to Julian Bashir but is apparently suppose to be Picard’s dad that his mom was actually crazy and his dad was just doing his best to shield Picard from her because bitches be crazy but also 3) maybe there is more to it, because Laris literally says, “there is more to this story.” And like, I’ve already said I don’t understand why Picard needs hidden trauma forty years into his character development that we have never seen a hint of before, but even if he does, why is his trauma being inflicted by his mentally ill mother that he mistook for an abusive father? What is the point of this, narratively, thematically, or otherwise? It honestly kinda just feels misogynistic. “If your emotionally unavailable dad felt abusive to you, have you ever considered he might have had to deal with your crazy bitch of a mother and thats why he was so emotionally unavailable?” I honestly just do not understand why this is what they went with, but perhaps I am judging it too early and it will become more clear - certainly my initial reaction to the whole story/hallucination was “this is a dumb waste of time” before the therapist finally just told us what it meant, so maybe in an episode of two Laris or Picard or Q will just tell us the take away and I’ll get it, although on principle I think if you need to do that with your hidden meaning, then you should not have tried hiding it in the first place.

I’ve said similar things before, but Picard really feels like three different shows in a trenchcoat, and that trenchcoat is Picard himself. The writers want to make any other show than this, and the executives said, “No, you have to make a Picard show.” so they shoved all their ideas into a Picard shaped show with him as the main character but because he is literally tacked on. Everything about his plotlines comes off as a stupid, poorly thought out afterthought while the actual interesting meat of the show struggles with not having enough time because it needs to share screen-time with two other shows AND the trench coat. I really wish they had just made one of these shows instead of all three of them plus shoved Picard in there. We really did not need him to come back. Yet my impression is Season 2 dumps all these plotlines in favor of being TNG Season 8, so I know it’s the trench coat that wins. I hope its a nice coat.

Does Data Feel Emotions? The Intersection of Media Literacy and Science Fiction

 In the TNG Episode Schisms, Data recites a poem to his pet cat, Spot, reproduced here for the sake of ease of reference:

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,

An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;

Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses

Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,

A singular development of cat communications

That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection

For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.

A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;

You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.

And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,

It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion

O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display

Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.

And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,

I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

Throughout the Next Generation, Data and everyone around him seem convinced that Data does not feel emotions, aside from perhaps when he has the emotion chip installed. Yet in this poem, Data expressed several emotions. He says he is intrigued by Spot’s meows - is curiosity not an emotion? It’s by far the one Data expresses the most often - he finds things interesting, intriguing , and fascinating pretty much every episode. He also notes that he pets Spot to demonstrate affection - isn’t the feeling of affection an emotion? He also says he considers Spot a “true and valued” friend. Being able to understand and recognize friendship of this sort seems like, perhaps not an emotion itself, but demonstrating an understanding of emotions deep enough to guarantee Data must have some. Yet he and everyone around him insists he does not.

We also see other instances of Data displaying emotions. At various times he expresses a sense of loss over Tasha Yar’s death. When Data is captured by a collector in The Most Toys, he chooses to shoot the collector after the collector says its a shame Data has no emotions and thus cannot feel rage driving him to kill over the collector having shot another person - although one could argue Data chose to shoot the collector for non-emotional reasons, he is beamed out at the last minute and his disruptor fails to hit the collector, and then when Riker asks about the discharge, he lies and says it must have been a transporter malfunction, which definitely seems to indicate Data feels shame about his actions - another emotion. Data also displays anxiety and confusion when he cannot defeat Kolrami at Strategema, and must be consoled by Counselor Troi. Honestly there is hardly an episode where Data appears that he does not appear to display some emotion, even if it is usually muted or perhaps a different emotion than one might expect.

Now, this could all be dismissed as just, “the writers do not know how to write someone truly emotionless.” Indeed, doing so would probably be quite hard, especially someone like Data who is so very human and who aspires to become moreso. Oh wait, thats another emotion - desire to become human. But I don’t think “the writers made a mistake and meant to write him emotionless and failed” is a terribly interesting take on Data for the same reason I think ignoring all of Data’s clear evidence of emotions throughout the show does not make much sense.

So, does Data actually feel emotions, pre-emotion chip? If we take statements said in the show to be infallible and canon, the answer seems like it can only be no - the show repeatedly tells us he does not. Steve Shives comes to this conclusion in his video on this subject for basically this reason. I, however, come to the opposite conclusion, and the reason why is pretty simple: media literacy. Television shows and fiction more generally are not textbooks: they do not plainly assert facts we are supposed to accept and absorb as true. Rather, they tell stories that we are supposed to interpret, to read between the lines. Thus just because various people on the show say Data cannot feel emotions, does not mean he actually cannot, especially if other things on the show - such as Data’s aforementioned actions and reactions indicate he does feel emotions.

I even think Doctor Soong more or less tells us this when the emotion chip is first introduced. I have not seen the episode in a while, but if I remember correctly he clarifies to Data that Lore was not more perfect as he claimed, but rather that his emotions were too powerful and Lore was unable to manage them, so Data was his attempt to rectify that, to allow him to adjust to the world before he installed the emotion chip to enhance Data’s emotions. I do not actually remember the exact terminology, but the implication to me was the chip would not allow Data to -have- emotions but merely to feel them better, to boost his capacity for feeling and understanding them. This distinction might not make a lot of sense to your average person, but it does to me.

I am not diagnosed autistic, but I am fairly positive that I am - I’ve never been evaluated, but my mom said when I asked her about it that they strongly suspected I was as a kid but refused to get me evaluated to avoid the stigma of a diagnosis. I also experience what is called alexithymia, an inability or difficulty to understand and interpret my own emotions. I still -have- these emotions, and can easily get overwhelmed by them when they are quite powerful, but I cannot easily identify them and often do not notice them until they get to the overwhelming point. I also do not generally express them visibly until that point, and generally the only way I express any and all emotions is crying. I cry when I am sad, I cry when I am angry, I cry when I am happy. Thus, to me, Data reads as essentially processing his emotions the same way - he has them, they affect his behavior, but he is unable to identify them or understand them in the way most people can, until his emotion chip is installed.

Now, do I think the writers were thinking about people with alexithymia when they wrote Data? I mean, probably not, its not a well known condition and was certainly less well known in the 80s, although its possible a writer was writing from personal experience. Do I think they were thinking of autistic people when they wrote Data? That, on the other hand, seems very possible, as there are numerous episodes where he essentially acts as a metaphor for neurodivergence. As Steve Shives often says, its important when interpreting Star Trek (and all media) to remember that it is not about the future, it is about the present. Any and all conclusions we draw about Data should be informed by that - although Data is a robot, we are not supposed to be learning about what robots will be like in the future when Data appears - his stories are meant to tell us something about ourselves. Things like, just because you have a friend who seems cold and emotionless, does not mean they do not feel emotions. Just because someone thinks differently than you, or is more or less bothered by things, or is more naive, or doesn’t understand humor, does not mean they aren’t still fundamentally a person who deserves respect.

I think Data experiences emotions because although the text tells us he does not, it shows us he does, and I also think he experience emotions because the text is more meaningful if he does, if he is read as a metaphor for real life neurodivergent people. The opposite conclusion, that he does not, is simply not an interesting read of the text. The only thing we can draw from that would be “If someday someone invents a robot that seems human in all capacities, ignore any signs it may be developing emotions cuz clearly they are fake.” I just don’t think there is a point in that interpretation? Even if the writers did mean it that way, it is entirely possible, even common, for writers to inject more meaning than they intended into something - many writers are just writing stories, and the themes which arise come about organically, and we should not ignore them just because we doubt the writers had ever heard of alexithymia or were thinking about autistic people. Also I kinda buried the lede, because Star Trek Picard establishes Data loves Picard *mic drop* (although thats post emotion chip but whatever)