Just so glad this awful series is over. The truly sad thing is that very occasionally, as in the episode when Picard ended up on Commander Riker & Deanna Troy's planet it could feel almost like the old Next Generation. This episode - spoiler alert - has something similar in a some later scenes with a former stalwart of that show. Yet, the moment the nostalgic throwbacks end you discover your back in the presence of this abomination of bad story-telling muddied even further by agenda driven politics.
The denouement of this tale actually seems for a while as though it's going anywhere, but while we do get a final showdown & something in the way of a - very messy - hint in the direction of a final battle, the ending turns out to be the usual schmaltzy cop-out: the higher life-form synthethics are barely seen & never met with & then suddenly the action is over, everything - pretty much - is resolved & we have 20 minutes of final wrapping up.
Now, Captain Picard from both STNG the series & the film was one of my all time great heroes but when he died in this series I felt nothing, except perhaps relief...a life well lived, then ruined at the end. Except, the truly awful twist is he comes back, I kid you not, and in that moment of resurrection I knew with absolute certainty I would never be visiting this series again.
As for the crew. This has to be the worst, most uninteresting, most annoying and artificially welded together band of non-entities that has every been birthed by a committee of activists. There is a single one that should ever occupy a single second of your thoughts or oimagination.
The spanish captian is a good actor, but that's it. Even he can't make for a good player in this mess. There is a point where Raffi jokes about him not having a soul. Ironically that could be said about all of them, but in the moment it is simply the typically lazy writing characteristic of this show - as it relates to nothing at all to the character being portrayed.
At the end said captain suddenly for no reason gets off with the flaky scientist woman, presumably on account of her annoyingly smiling all the time in-between killing people & apologetically gouging eyes out (albeit only of a dead synth). The point of this though is to pan over to Seven & Raffi suddenly holding hands. I guess this is what the show writers consider character development in the 21st century. At this point Seven has literally nothing that connects her to her character in the original show. Not her sexual orientation, not her personality, not her weird becoming autism....nothing at all. Seven & Raffi are two strong women, both lesbian, and in the final scene they sit at the front of the ship symbolically navigating the ship together. We see Ninja boy walking around playing with himself in the shadows, having presumably recovered from having wept like a baby in strong Raffi's lap in the previous scene.
If I dwell on this, it is because throughout the series it has been made quite clear that this is the real point of the show. Picard, the return of a few favourite characters, are simply what are there to lure us inside. The point of the show is the inversion of roles, the neutering of those characters that once had the power to command our imaginations & their replacement with simulants designed to break our resistance to thinking different thoughts & ideas, literally the thoughts & ideas that the writers are trying, with barely any subtlety to program us with.
In psychiatry there is a condition, a delusion, called Capgras Syndrome where the patient comes to believe that those they care about have been substituted with imposters of some kind. Except here, this really is the case. It is not a delusion. At best the characters in the show are neutered of their original energy & character, and at worst as in the case of Seven they bear no more than a physical resemblance, a familiar name & background.
As for Picard, although in a few scenes towards the end, he gets to pilot a ship, he never actually gets to command one. His crew, are never his crew in any meaningful way. Even his most famous line 'make it so' is butchered in forced referentiality, by someone with absolutely no connection to that line: this, in an episode which actually features Commander Riker at the bridge of a star ship!
Such incompetence matched only by the prodigious vandalism of the writers
The denouement of this tale actually seems for a while as though it's going anywhere, but while we do get a final showdown & something in the way of a - very messy - hint in the direction of a final battle, the ending turns out to be the usual schmaltzy cop-out: the higher life-form synthethics are barely seen & never met with & then suddenly the action is over, everything - pretty much - is resolved & we have 20 minutes of final wrapping up.
Now, Captain Picard from both STNG the series & the film was one of my all time great heroes but when he died in this series I felt nothing, except perhaps relief...a life well lived, then ruined at the end. Except, the truly awful twist is he comes back, I kid you not, and in that moment of resurrection I knew with absolute certainty I would never be visiting this series again.
As for the crew. This has to be the worst, most uninteresting, most annoying and artificially welded together band of non-entities that has every been birthed by a committee of activists. There is a single one that should ever occupy a single second of your thoughts or oimagination.
The spanish captian is a good actor, but that's it. Even he can't make for a good player in this mess. There is a point where Raffi jokes about him not having a soul. Ironically that could be said about all of them, but in the moment it is simply the typically lazy writing characteristic of this show - as it relates to nothing at all to the character being portrayed.
At the end said captain suddenly for no reason gets off with the flaky scientist woman, presumably on account of her annoyingly smiling all the time in-between killing people & apologetically gouging eyes out (albeit only of a dead synth). The point of this though is to pan over to Seven & Raffi suddenly holding hands. I guess this is what the show writers consider character development in the 21st century. At this point Seven has literally nothing that connects her to her character in the original show. Not her sexual orientation, not her personality, not her weird becoming autism....nothing at all. Seven & Raffi are two strong women, both lesbian, and in the final scene they sit at the front of the ship symbolically navigating the ship together. We see Ninja boy walking around playing with himself in the shadows, having presumably recovered from having wept like a baby in strong Raffi's lap in the previous scene.
If I dwell on this, it is because throughout the series it has been made quite clear that this is the real point of the show. Picard, the return of a few favourite characters, are simply what are there to lure us inside. The point of the show is the inversion of roles, the neutering of those characters that once had the power to command our imaginations & their replacement with simulants designed to break our resistance to thinking different thoughts & ideas, literally the thoughts & ideas that the writers are trying, with barely any subtlety to program us with.
In psychiatry there is a condition, a delusion, called Capgras Syndrome where the patient comes to believe that those they care about have been substituted with imposters of some kind. Except here, this really is the case. It is not a delusion. At best the characters in the show are neutered of their original energy & character, and at worst as in the case of Seven they bear no more than a physical resemblance, a familiar name & background.
As for Picard, although in a few scenes towards the end, he gets to pilot a ship, he never actually gets to command one. His crew, are never his crew in any meaningful way. Even his most famous line 'make it so' is butchered in forced referentiality, by someone with absolutely no connection to that line: this, in an episode which actually features Commander Riker at the bridge of a star ship!
Such incompetence matched only by the prodigious vandalism of the writers