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.
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