A Half-Cocked Defence of Phillip Schofield

I confess, he got me. Phillip Schofield was a man whose company I enjoyed in childhood. Every Saturday morning, on BBC1 from 9am to midday, Going Live set me up for the weekend. There was no kinder presence, no greater friend to children throughout the land, than the reassuring, nurturing, Phil, who affected to take an interest in the things you were interested in, and delighted with his easy charm and promise of great things to come. Double Dare. Growing Pains. It was all innocent fun as our parents dozed in the other room.   

I see now that I was being groomed for Phil’s future forays into live television – This Morning being a sort of middle-aged sequel to Going Live. Despite this, I was shocked to learn that Phil had to resign because of the new civil offence of implicit nympholepsy. Schofield, we’re told, covetously plucked a teenage boy who dreamed of working in TV and fattened him to industrial maturity with the man milk of human kindness.

There’s nought wrong with mentoring an innocent lad, whose virginal purity must have marked him as unsullied in the icky world of television, moulding him to become a new Phil – a clean-cut media professional untrammelled by sexual complications. Yet Schofield, the older friend of every ’80s child, has been vilified for just this. Couldn’t Phil have just seen himself in the boy? Might he not have taken pleasure in giving him a helping hand?

Phil’s a unique pariah. In addition to the aforementioned implicit nympholepsy, he’s coined a second new offence – namely familial predisposition to minors. His brother, Timothy, was recently convicted of child rape and grooming, and the sanitised world of daytime TV shifted uneasily, wondering if Phil’s rumoured liaison with a boy on the periphery of manhood’s outer rim, sat within the same wheelhouse.

Did Timothy Schofield simply go further than his brother, a public figure, dared, or is this thematic coupling a heinous category error? Are we cynical to disbelieve Phil’s protestations that his forbidden fruit relationship with a hairless intern only took on a sexual character when the boy was old enough to drive? If the law reflects our morality, we’ve already decided that a man is not guilty of having a malfunctioning libido if he waits until his ward is old enough to be strongarmed into consenting. Sure, you say, what about the power dynamic, the cynical exploitation of the boy’s burgeoning sexuality and ambition, the squalor of the middle-aged man’s lasciviousness? It’s grubby, certainly, but relationships are complicated. Is Phil better or worse than a violent coercive controller, or a partner who’s selfishly laid waste to their betrothed hopes and dreams? I don’t know, but maybe you do.

At the time of writing, there’s no real scandal for us to salivate over. Phillip Schofield’s flesh was weak but he’s no serial rapist or necrophile. He can’t claim the mantle of ITV’s Jimmy Savile. The evidence we have suggests Phil’s crimes are of the heart. Power, it seems, went to his glans. If it remains that way, he’ll be a minnow in light entertainment’s hall of shame – an also-ran, a pretender. Rolf Harris, who thankfully died recently, molested more before breakfast. Now the nation holds its breath, waiting for Going Live’s audience members to either give up their secrets or confirm all was good when the cameras were off, and the nation ogled The Racoons.

Finally, the question of Phil’s enemies. If, by them, we shall know him, there’s a prima facie case he may not be the monster mooted. GB News’s vile, toothy, odious bitch, Dan Wootton, bloviating bore Eamonn Holmes, little Englander parody Christine Hamilton, quite possibly should have been nicked nicked a long time ago, Jim Davidson, Kim Woodburn (so why don’t we have a go?), insufferable cokehead Julie Burchill. If these are Phil’s detractors, the majority motivated to twist the knife because Schofield, in his pomp, treated them with disdain or indifference, then we can say that whatever his sexual proclivities, he’s a reasonable judge of character.

The more the reactionary mob gleefully round on Gordon the Gopher’s former assistant, the more we’re left to wonder, is the empty vessel that leant Holly Willoughby gravitas, so threadbare was she, just a dirty lying sod? How seriously can we take his guilty erections when his real offence, as far as his former TV associates are concerned, is that he found them odious?

I’m sorry, I must end there. Some breaking news just flashed up on my phone.

Published in: on May 27, 2023 at 16:02  Leave a Comment  
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What hope for the socially unjust county of Cornwall now Ash Sarkar has forsaken it?

Don’t you just hate it when in the middle of rebutting an off-the-wrist statement, someone inadvertently duplicates the same logic fart? On Twitter, home of measured debate, Ash Sarkar, Novara Media’s strange mix of intellectual muscle and self-obsessed juvenile, was busy socking it to some half-wit who suggested London – Sarkar’s manor, was replete with “no go” areas (a euphemism for minority hotspots), when she made a wild swing to knock out her opponent – a swing so clumsy it missed the mark and landed in Cornwall’s groin.

Cornwall, the Jewel of the South West and tolerant neighbour to Devon, was, she said, a no go area for her because once, while on a tour of St Just, a chocolate box village where change is measured in artistic movements not years, some imbecile drove past her and shouted, “P***, go home”. Rightly affronted, Sarkar, based on this damning piece of anecdotal evidence, instantly badged the county as a racist backwater; a boorish white monoculture she wouldn’t be revisiting any time soon.

That’s not the kind of blanket judgement she’d apply to London of course, home to psychotic acts of racial violence, self-segregated communities, and the occasional terrorist outrage, but then Cornwall is neat shorthand for everything the metropolitan Sarkar pities – an outcrop of England that’s seemingly impervious to the right kind of social change.

As a Londoner who’s sandwiched his long city life between two slices of Cornish residency, formative years and middle age, I instinctively felt aggrieved by Sarkar’s use of the county as an example of an inferior community, a degenerate place. This, in contrast to her perception of London – a metropolis she regards as relatively enlightened, cosmopolitan and welcoming of those from diverse backgrounds. The people of St Just, unlike the good folks of say, Tottenham, Stoke Newington, or Greenwich – were, in Sarkar’s eyes, Morlocks, who reacted to sightings of non-white people the way pets greet fireworks. Some uncultured, impertinent arsehole subjected Sarkar to an ugly piece of xenophobic racism, which is just what you’d expect in a place like Cornwall, a community of troglodytes.

I could understand this knee-jerk reaction in the moment, but the thought appeared to have settled in Sarkar’s usually analytical brain unchallenged. This surprised me, because I regard the self-styled luxury communist (and champion fucker, but let’s not get into that) as a thoughtful commentator who’s usually highly alert to issues like intersectional disadvantage, poverty, deindustrialisation, history, post-war social policy and demography. This, after all, is what Novara Media was constituted to talk about; it’s the lens through which they analyse the world and seek to expose intellectual vacuity and hypocrisy in political discourse. Why then, had Sarkar not considered these factors when pronouncing final judgement on Cornwall?

Perhaps she couldn’t see past the racial slur. Sure, she had no way of knowing where the people in the car that abused her were from (racism is mobile when on four wheels and can be imported from anywhere), but why not assume they were local residents who got off on abusing tourists? Isn’t that what you’d expect from a bunch of inbred fish folk?

But wait – what if the culprits were a family from Eltham, South East London on their summer holiday – a suburb of the great metropolis, that unlike Cornwall, has clocked up one infamous hate-based murder (Stephen Lawrence) and about a thousand and one incidents of race-based violence and tension? What if they were visiting family members before returning to Dartford? I’ve lived in Cornwall for a total of 6 years, and I’ve never seen a person of colour or an immigrant (we have both in Cornwall, you know) chased down the street by thugs, or mugged 20 yards from the local police station. But I’ve seen exactly that on the streets of the cutting-edge South East.

I’ve always found the Cornish to be a friendly, welcoming people, who are about as successful as any community in integrating enterprising families from abroad and other parts of the UK. I don’t live far from St Just. The surrounding area, though only populous in the nearby towns, is home to Lithuanians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Ukrainian people. No go areas for locals are defined by poor bus services not the demographic makeup of villages.  

Cornwall doesn’t boast many families of colour (the total population is only 565,000 – about the same as Croydon and Camden combined), but those I’ve known, and I’ve known a few, have settled here and continue to live here, without fear or tension. The paradox, for those who imagine rural outposts of England to be backward places, in contrast to their own bustling, diverse population centres, is that a place like Cornwall integrates new arrivals without fuss or incident. London, for all its cultural magnificence, cannot say the same.

Ash Sarkar will know that Cornwall is the most impoverished part of the UK. She will also be aware that it is a neglected county – deindustrialised and reliant on tourism to survive, thanks to the indifference of successive governments.

She will know that it suits Westminster to keep Cornwall as it is – an unspoilt theme park for those looking to temporarily escape City life, because the world’s largest holiday village is a wonderful place for the cosmopolitan family and rich second homeowner. She will know, as a vocal commentator on the housing crisis, that it’s said second home ownership, coupled with depressed wages and service-driven seasonal work only available in lockstep with the tourist influx, that subjects a significant proportion of Cornish people to the exploitation of the rental market, and borderline penury.

This, one would imagine, would make Ash Sarkar a friend of Cornwall – it’s a victim of all the social injustices and metropolitan condescension that she professes to despise. As long as places like Cornwall exist, Sarkar and her colleagues at Novara will have something to talk about (though curiously, when it comes to the South West, they never do). But Ash was racially abused in Cornwall, so she won’t be going there again. She wouldn’t dignify the place with her presence. She wouldn’t touch it with yours.

People of St Just, you simple, primitive degenerates – on the assumption you harbour that racist you’ve alienated your opposite – a protean, educated, enlightened advocate for change, who otherwise might have been your champion. Now you’ll have to claw your way back to prosperity and social justice without the help of her YouTube channel.

Cornwall, though it has a small immigrant population, retains a traditional sense of identity. This does not quite equate to a monoculture; like any place insulated from change, it represents a prevailing attitude and turn of phrase, rather than a generic resident. Its social problems are not those of the city. The problem is poverty. The problem is neglect. The problem is the contempt of a commentariat that equates the place with parochial wank.

Cornwall needs modern infrastructure, investment, industry, and a new economy tailored to its unique geography, not judgement and generalisation. Of course, such changes would impact on demography. It would make Cornwall, for so long a paradise for children and retirement home for grandparents (those in-between tend to move elsewhere) an attractive location for enterprising families of colour – a place much more to Ash Sarkar’s liking.

Her approval is all a neglected people crave, after all. Well, that and good all-year-round jobs, affordable housing, integrated transport, world-class local services, 5G reception, entertainment venues, a decent Italian restaurant, a parliament, a new airport, the deportation of Rick Stein, a return to wrecking…

Published in: on April 27, 2023 at 18:48  Comments Off on What hope for the socially unjust county of Cornwall now Ash Sarkar has forsaken it?  
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Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.10 (Final Reflections)

Now it’s all over, we can finally ask the question: was Picard the legacy sequel TNG-era Star Trek deserved? More importantly, what has it all been for? If wiser heads had prevailed, would the project have survived the moment Patrick Stewart, with his franchise tin ear, decreed it was only viable if it didn’t sequelise the parent series? For modern TV and movie writers, no nostalgia – no heavy-handed references to the past, is as radical and difficult an edict to follow as Gene Roddenberry’s no conflict directive. Picard only came alive when the writers finally managed to charm Stewart into a fully-fledged reunion. Only then were they enabled to fan fic the fuck out of this thing.

In the first two seasons, a creative necropolis as far as new ideas were concerned, the hacks tried to work around Stewart’s sabotaging imperative and make a show that recycled characters and concepts in other ways. Seven was imported from Voyager, minor characters were revisited and ruined, plot threads from the broad and braindead TNG movies that Stewart was known to favour over the less bombastic, more cerebral TV series, were pulled and broken. New supporting characters whom we never got to know; underwritten and locked into non-sensical, meandering plots; were a poor substitute for the conspicuously absent TNG cast. Stewart had little agency in the first two seasons – a headliner standing in the slips, looking lost.

Season 3 has been a very different experience – coherently plotted and character-centred, though not the complete break with the first two years many had hoped for. You can free the hacks of Alex Kurtzman’s dead hand, but you can’t fully exorcise the Great Satan from the minds of those he employs. Terry Matalas et al, returning from S2, may have written off the sophomore season as a sunk cost, as they secretly cajoled and negotiated behind the scenes to realise their vision of a repurposed third season becoming the final TNG movie, but the instinct to asset strip, to pastiche, to write a post-modern script that looked backwards, to add the illusion of grit with uncanonical swearing and sadistic violence, was still abundant.

This impulse, to remix and remake, to reference and retool, put a ceiling on how good S3 could be. It added constraints and limited options. Often the show felt a season of Star Trek written by a franchise literate Chat GTP. “Legacy” was the term used to excuse this bricolage approach, whereas once the word had been employed to simply mean giving the characters a victory worthy of the status and affection they had earned from the audience.

Kirk and crew didn’t need to revisit old plots and memorabilia from the previous 25 years to be given a successful send-off – they were too busy trying to end the space cold war. It was fresh and meaningful – it had weight. Picard S3 opted to sequelise a classic story that had been given a successful coda in the very next episode, plus a far less successful movie sequel. In doing so it blew the opportunity to fully unite the classic cast, despite Denise Crosby’s Sela being the embodiment of a legacy character whose story constituted a familial tie to the Enterprise-D crew.

As we contemplate whether Picard’s been a folly or a gift to fans of ‘80’s and ‘90’s Trek, let’s pause here to consider the episodes of Trek which have arguably been overwritten or ruined by the streaming sequel.

  • All Good Things… (overwritten)
  • The Measure of a Man (ruined)
  • The Offspring (ruined until S3, then coyly referenced)
  • I, Borg (ruined)
  • Time’s Arrow (overwritten)
  • Journey’s End (ruined by that Wesley cameo)
  • What You Leave Behind – DS9 (ruined)
  • The Best of Both Worlds/Family (ruined)

Woah, you say, “Best of Both Worlds” ruined? Well, here’s the thing. You can only tack on so much plot and complication to a classic story before it’s retrospectively weakened.

“Best of Both Worlds” is not the very best TNG story but it’s close, and no two-parter is more fondly remembered. Why has it endured? Perhaps because of the dispassionate cruelty of the set up. Picard is kidnapped by the Borg, not because their Queen has decided one human amongst billions sampled would make the perfect consort – but because, in a time before the Borg’s USP was tarnished by introducing an individual leader, they reasoned, with logic cold and calculating, that the decorated Captain of the Federation flagship – the only Starship they’d sampled up to that time, would be both a mine of useful strategic information and a morale-sapping blow to the enemy. Imagine an army confronted by the brainwashed shell of their best general. Locutus was strategically expedient as well as a great piece of walking enemy propaganda. The Borg’s interest in him ended when the Earth orbiting cube exploded. Our interest in the Borg ended with the same act.

“Family” picked up the story with compassion and subtlety. Here was a shell-shocked Picard, a proud man violated and victimised, struggling with the enormity of the experience and the menacing truth that he’d been chosen because of his status and experience. ‘They took everything I was,’ he told brother Robèrt, ‘They used me to kill and to destroy and I couldn’t stop them.’ And it was that simple, indeed that profound, until the entire incident was retconned as a barmy scheme by a newly invented Borg Queen to unite humanity and the Borg – a thread Picard S3 pulled with undue relish.

To appreciate how silly this is, how self-indulgent, you have to imagine a sequel to “Chain of Command” in which Picard’s torture at the hands of the Cardassians took on galaxy-wide significance. Be thankful there was no Picard S3 featuring the head of the new Cardassia who turned out to be the daughter of the woman Jean-Luc was forced to violate in a missing scene from the original two-parter. She’d be thirsty for revenge of course, having been told the human prisoner had been savage (like all Terrans), and she’d have hatched a plan to re-annex Bajor, go into the Gamma Quadrant, do a deal with dissident Changelings who didn’t like the Dominion’s surrender, and launch a full-scale invasion of the Federation. Ask yourself, and be honest now, would such a story improve “Chain of Command” by association, or diminish its power as a gut-wrenching ordeal for the Enterprise-D Captain?

You see kids, we live in an age of TV and movies where the writers can’t tell the difference between the significance of an event in-universe and that story’s hold on audiences. Using Sela as an antagonist for Picard S3 was probably dismissed on the grounds the character and her link to the TNG crew, didn’t have the requisite cultural cachet – it wasn’t big enough for the show’s grand finale. Needless to say, it could have been with thoughtful writing and a great story, providing the unprecedented opportunity for an original cast reunion that effortlessly fulfilled the legacy brief, but it was safer to regurgitate the Borg – dip back into “Best of Both Worlds”, remix the old hits.

“The Last Generation” was hopelessly constrained by its predecessor, because once you establish that Jack is the new Locutus and the Borg, as ever, are vulnerable to a severed connection, there’s very little to think about and nothing to do, except watch the climatic rescue, admonishment of the Queen, and destruction of the cube play out. It was all done with movie-like grandeur (and accompanying clichés), but for all those swooping shots of the Enterprise-D (euphoria fades fast without additional cerebral input) it felt like empty spectacle. This was well-charted territory and the way out was signposted a lifetime ago.

We were left to wonder – was this a story that needed to be told? It was all so maddingly derivative – from the speech the Federation President gave (Anton Chekov, indeed), half-cribbed from The Voyage Home, to the Queen’s grandstanding, to the matching overhead shot of the gang playing poker, patterned on “All Good Things…”, that closed the episode. The hope, at the beginning, was that Terry Matalas was reaching for all this off-the-shelf iconography to steady fan nerves and flout his franchise credentials before warping into original territory. But ultimately, we came to realise that a polished remix, sampled dialogue, score and sound effects included, was all there is – that there was nothing more.

It was a more enjoyable time that we ever had with this crew at the movies, but in some ways the closing poker game signified the redundancy of it all. Thirty years separate the poker game in “All Good Things…” from the one that closed “The Last Generation”. Everything of significance that happened in that time – Picard losing his family, the Enterprise-D’s destruction, the death of Kirk, the death of Data, Picard’s death – all had been reversed. So what had been the point of it all? Even Q, who dared to show up in a mid-credits scene, lambasting the Picard family for thinking in a linear fashion when he’d moved on to the next generation, was determined to pick up from the TNG finale and continue his trial of humanity. Still, au revoir Jean-Luc, with a new Enterprise crew out there and your son now the focus of the galaxy’s antagonists, at least you can retire and enjoy some new experiences. If only we could join you.

Anomalous Readings

  • Alright, we’ve established that Picard S3, tonal issues aside, was the only run of episodes that resembled the franchise of old since 2005, and that’s not nothing. The characters were on point, our old pals uniformly excellent, the newbies weren’t bad, and Seven’s promotion to Captain of the Enterprise-G (though it’s still the weird, kitbash Titan-A rechristened, not a new ship of awe-inspiring scale and complexity, to match the newly restored Enterprise-D’s beauty) was just reward for all the nonsense and shit she’s had to put up with over three seasons. But given the DNA links to the old crew, and indeed old shows, perhaps the G should also have been reclassified as Progeny Class.
  • ‘I joined Starfleet to find the family I didn’t have,’ Picard told his son. RIP Robért, Marie and René – you deserved a relative who remembered you.
  • Jack was fast-tracked through the Academy on account of – er, the family name? Never mind if he’s psychologically stable, or a dubious choice for an officer given his recent problems with the enemy – he’s a Picard. Good to know nepotism still opens doors in the 25th century.
  • Starfleet was in a giving mood, considering Enterprise-G first officer, Raffi’s former relationship with Enterprise-G Captain, Seven of Nine. Might that not compromise the command structure somewhat? I suppose if you save Earth, the rule book becomes a set of guidelines.
  • We never learned how the Borg Queen, frail and reliant on the corpses of drones for sustenance, found Vadic and the rogue Changelings, and made a deal to infiltrate Starfleet, and I guess we never will.
  • Denise Crosby’s contribution to the season? Zero. She featured in a few seconds of stock footage. She deserved better.
  • Wesley Crusher did not return. He got what he deserved.
  • Another phone they forgot to ring – Diana Muldaur’s. Dr Pulaski, we’ll never forget you, even if the producers of Star Trek have. I mean, Majel Barrett got a cameo and she’s dead.
  • Jack said the quiet part out loud when he wondered what Starfleet was doing outfitting the Enterprise-G with officers famed for insubordination and, in his case, coordinating an attack on Earth. Captain Shaw must be spinning in his grave.
  • “They’ve moved into the deadzone,” said Data, inadvertently describing the plight of fans who from now must return to Alex Kurtzman’s suite of fan unfriendly shit. Starfleet Academy with Silly Tilly, a Section 31 movie with Empress Georgiou, Strange New Worlds II with Young Kirk. Yes, I hope you enjoyed this above average sequel to the Trek of yore because it looks like the last relative of the genuine article.
  • Will Star Trek: Legacy be made now its constituent parts are in place? I’m not convinced flying around with Seven and the TNG kids will be as much fun as people imagine, but if it’s the only show set in a recognisable Star Trek universe, with an ethos to match, then I’m game. But please, Terry Matalas, I beg of you, if you get the call, have some fresh ideas ready to go. The nostalgia well is dry. There are nails embedded in the walls. At the bottom a girl is crying. It’s time to make it new.

That’s all for now Space Folks. Thanks once again for joining me on another viewing adventure. Star Trek will return of course, and so therefore, must we. May Q have mercy on our souls.  

The Wistful Musings of a Mandroid

Picard Portents

The Backdated Adventures of Logicman and Bleep

A horrifying vision of the future

Michael Burnham in the 32nd Century

Mick’s Calamitous 23rd Century

Station Keeping

Teen Fan Fic

Published in: on April 20, 2023 at 19:09  Comments Off on Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.10 (Final Reflections)  
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Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.9

Okay Terry Matalas, you thin-skinned, Twitter blocking bag of shit – you win this round. By sheer force of nostalgia alone, by reversing one of Star Trek’s most egregious errors – the destruction of the Enterprise-D, by earning a moment of pure, unadulterated wish fulfillment, which shamelessly riffed on two of the most memorable moments from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, you’ve won me over.

Though it was never in doubt from the moment the Frontier Day fleet, assimilated by stealth, by a Borg offshoot who’d learned to play the long game, linked every modern Federation Starship and every crewmember under 25 – in a scheme of such diabolical complexity and improbability that it almost collapsed under its own weight, it was nevertheless a joy to see the Enterprise-D, the missing cast member (if you didn’t dwell on Denise Crosby) lovingly restored (that is to say part-restored by Geordi, part-kitbashed using the Stardrive section of the Syracuse) and space worthy.

“Hello Chair,” said Data, assuming his station, “I’ve missed this carpet,” cooed the wizened Mandroid, Picard. And by God, in the name of all that fucks, so had we. It had been so long since this set of characters stood on that bridge – a bridge that was, as they said, beautiful, brightly lit, clean, comfortable, our home away from home and a stark contrast with all the murk and misery in the universe, that you needed a heart of stone, a Worf-like preference for might over eloquence, not to be moved.

The Titan was fine, but dark and militaristic in that way that every Federation ship, including the Enterprise-E (brilliantly dismissed here in a throwaway line, without sentiment), has been. But it was the D – the big D, that thing of beauty, infused with Roddenberry goodness, that signified the best years of this franchise and arguably her most beloved ensemble. And here we were, back on the bridge, warping to Earth to once again save it from Borg invasion – the only ship that could. The only ship that has.

It was, in televisual terms, a pastiche of two Star Trek movies, a moment of conspicuous, unabashed manipulation. It was also tremendous, joyful, maybe – if you thought about it, ridiculous. But wonderful all the same.

This is what the end of The Voyage Home did for Kirk’s clan – it reunited them with their ship, the dutiful pretender having performed diligently, and restored everything to its correct setting. Now if Picard et al can just survive the final episode, commandeer this bitch on the grounds that she’s a decommissioned vessel and that as Earth’s saviours they’ve earned the right to retire on board and fly her where they will – well, that’d be a fucking great place to leave things, don’t you think?

But before that, there’s the minor matter of this season’s story to conclude – its full design now laid bare. “Vox” had no out-of-left field rug pull, it paid off on the revelation it had seeded from the first episode’s then curious shot of a computer playing Picard’s “Best of Both Worlds” log entry. Jack Crusher is a hereditary Borg – a man whose transceivers and connection to the collective consciousness are organic.

Did the twist stack up? Well, it felt unlikely but the writers set it up and paid it off with enough conviction to suspend disbelief. By the same token, there’s something about the way that Geordi and Data do technobabble when delivering exposition that can make you accept just about anything. On TNG one got the sense the writers had spent time making the ‘tech’, the shit you dropped into the script to add a scientific sheen to plot contrivances and sci-fi conceits, plausible. One just about got the same sense here.

What’s that, the Borg have used Changeling infiltrators to upload the synthesised DNA from the part of dead Picard’s brain that was re-engineered by the Borg 35 years ago to enable him to communicate with the drone network into each Starship’s transporter system, so that said genetic coding can be surreptitiously integrated into every Starfleet officer under the age of 25 whose brains are still developing, so that in time said officers will be activated as organically assimilated drones, take over their vessels, and link them together, using a highly-vulnerable and insecure transponder network, allowing the Borg to invade Earth with the Federation’s own fleet? Well, Data and Geordi explained it succinctly, so it makes sense. But wait a min- oh, who cares, look it’s the Enterprise-D! It’s back!

Perhaps this is as good a moment as any to pause and reflect on the astonishing longevity and legacy of “Best of Both Worlds”. Who knew we’d get a movie sequel and two full seasons of Picard out of it (the first story adjacent, the second a pseudo-remake of that movie). Now here we are again.

Could Matalas et al have resisted another trip to the well? Could they have explored hereditary connections to the crew another way, say by having Sela be the season’s villain instead of the Borg for the forty-eighth time? Sure. But that two-part story, that for many signalled the moment TNG fully emerged from its predecessor’s long shadow, has taken on such significance that it now means as much in-universe as it does to those fans in ours.

Is that a mistake – Star Trek’s equivalent of Darth Vader becoming the central pillar of the Star Wars universe? Maybe. But at least Picard S3 has delivered a muscular Borg story that felt congruous with the classic episodes that informed it. But wait a minute, how can the Borg Queen be alive again – didn’t she first die, then die again in Voyager, then die and become Jurati, then- fuck, it’s Shelby, and she’s in command of the Enterprise-F!

Star Trek scholars will, in time, decide if “Vox” was a well-crafted clusterfuck that worked because it revived the tone and feel of ‘90’s Star Trek for 47 memorable minutes, or the culmination of some dense plotting, that retrospectively improved some of the season’s episodes. The important thing is that the show did not fall off a cliff, it soared ahead to its final episode, and for the first and last time, we’re heading into a Picard finale where we’re invested in the outcome and will lament the season’s passing. As Jean-Luc Picard, the great orator once said – “fuck”.

Anomalous Readings

  • The Enterprise-D’s reveal was perfectly timed. Consider, she could have been shown as early as our first trip to the Fleet Museum, and it’s fucking weird Geordi never told his friends he was rebuilding the former flagship that meant so much to them, but by aping the Voyage Home, it hit harder and meant more.
  • The D’s saucer was apparently removed from Veridian III so as not to hinder its development. But, er, wasn’t it uninhabited? Were Starfleet afraid the local bird population would steal the tech?
  • Worf’s implicit destruction of the Enterprise-E makes him a hero in my eyes. I love that we don’t know what happened to it, and I love that the crew are as indifferent as we are.  
  • Poor Admiral Shelby – the Borg finally got her. “How can she endorse something that’s so Borg-like?” wondered Picard aloud, as she proudly announced the fleet’s new interdependency. It just goes to show that for all her ambition, the one-time usurper and would-be Riker replacement never got what it meant to be an Enterprise bridge officer, namely an aversion to sameness.
  • If Liam Shaw is indeed deceased, let’s give Todd Stashwick his due for creating a memorable character whose orderly existence was spectacularly upended by Picard and friends. There was no place for Mr Misery, a.k.a. Captain Caution, on the bridge of the Enterprise-D, but his acknowledgment of Seven as her true self, and the passing of the Titan to the Voyager’s one-time celebration of the female form, was a moment that hit because we’ve grown fond of the character. So long, Liam – I hope they take your body to Daystrom Station and use the Genesis II device to bring you back to life – you’ve earned it.
  • Credit to Ed Speleers, whose performance in this episode was excellent. His portrayal of a man trying to reconcile his hereditary compassion with his genetic propensity for fascism, was well-weighted. “He inherited the best of you and the worst of me,” was Picard’s analysis, and with Jack now ensconced with the Borg Queen’s umpteenth version, let’s hope it’s Beverly’s DNA that wins out.
  • With no real swearing and no sadistic violence, this was the episode where the nostalgic imperative gripped the writers by the throat and they regressed, somewhat beautifully, into the Star Trek writers of old. There’s no room for cynicism when you’re doing it properly.
  • Well, now we know why Vadic was expendable and the Shrike did not merit further investigation. But that looks suspiciously like the characters having the same information as the writers. Can we now assume that Vadic’s hand was a sort of goo-like rendering of the Borg Queen’s face?
  • “There’s been no activity from the Borg for ten years” apparently. Wait, did Season 1 and 2 not count, then? Not in our hearts, I know, but… Perhaps they meant the real Borg – the old Borg, not a faction or the benign Jurati variant that was inducted into the Federation at the close of last year. Hold on, couldn’t they help? Or are they busy protecting the galaxy from that fissure? We know this set of writers remembers that story, they wrote it. Er…, are they going to mention it next week?
  • Wait, how did the Borg make contact with a group of rogue, radicalised Changelings? And how the fuck did they find them? Oh, never mind – look, it’s Alice Krige!
  • So, apart from wanting Jack by her side when she finally assumed her throne on Earth, why did the Borg Queen not wait until the plot to take over Starfleet had been successful to pursue the son of Locutus? She didn’t need him to execute her plan and if she had left him on the edge of the final frontier with his mother, there would be nothing to alert her old nemesis Picard, or indeed anyone else to the plot. By insisting Vadic go after him, the Queen, historically not the galaxy’s greatest strategist, only succeeded in alerting the one man most incentivised to destroy her, and reuniting the only Starfleet crew to frustrate her Earthly ambitions. Had she done nothing at all the plan would have gone off without a hitch and she’d have all the time in the world, not to mention the resources of the entire Federation fleet, to hunt for her organic offshoot and return him to the fold.
  • The trouble with a Borg story is that inevitably the solution has to hinge on either breaking links or uploading humanity, a la the aborted “I, Borg” virus. Can Terry Matalas et al find a more novel cure for the Borg’s ambitions? Will Jack be the key that unlocks the peace? Will Wesley return with Yar from a parallel universe and save the day? Who knows, but YOU will return next week to find out and for us to decide once and for all if Picard is redeemed and the door to Trek’s future opened, or if we’re like the patients in Awakenings – revived for a short time, but destined to once again become drooling vegetables when the Mandroid retires and Alex Kurtzman’s Trek returns.

The Wistful Musings of a Mandroid

Picard Portents

The Backdated Adventures of Logicman and Bleep

A horrifying vision of the future

Michael Burnham in the 32nd Century

Mick’s Calamitous 23rd Century

Station Keeping

Teen Fan Fic

Published in: on April 13, 2023 at 21:06  Comments Off on Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.9  
Tags: , , , ,

What’s Graham Linehan’s Endgame?

I’m convinced books will be written about Graham Linehan. Possibly with black covers. His fate should be the preoccupation of every psychologist in the country. It’s a fascinating story – how opprobrium from the once beloved comedy writer’s natural constituency of middle-class, left-leaning fans, radicalised a man who’d styled himself as a benevolent Uncle and friend to the Twittersphere – a man whose online activism suggested a fragile ego that relied on praise for displays of righteous indignation to stay healthy.

When “Glinner”, to use the neologism he invented to describe himself – an attempt to reconcile two sides of his identity into a seamless whole, was aligned with progressivism – that is, those who self-identify as such, he was validated by the marginalised groups that formed the once liberal state now annexed by Elon Musk (which I’m afraid makes Glinner a member of the Vichy regime).

But then the great and the good, who loved Linehan and his sitcoms, turned on him when, in the wake of gender-critical pronouncements, they thought an episode of the I.T Crowd, that appeared to ridicule trans people, betrayed a barely-concealed (but at time of transmission, socially acceptable) prejudice. Suddenly, the man who’d gone to court to defend the right of one Twitter user not be taken literally, was looking at the business end of a censorious attempt to prosecute him using the biographical fallacy.

Linehan had done this himself of course, famously when suggesting that “Count Dankula” – an online pub bore, might just be alluding to right-wing sympathies when training his dog to sieg hail. He even produced literature that documented the use of humour as a well-worn device to hide social attitudes that would be actionable in any other context – a nod and a wink to sympathisers on the right.

Graham subsequently apologised to the Cunt – sorry, the Count, when this unfortunate case of intuiting a political bent threatened to make him a hypocrite. By the time he felt the need to achieve consistency and retrospectively annul the kind of scrutiny he was now being subjected to, he was deep into a battle to protect his own reputation – a fight that he was keen to stress, was not about him, but women’s rights.

Graham, the backs of fellow writers, comedians and equal rights activists turned, doubled down. The more the internet told him he was an oddball bigot, palsied by hate, and obsessed with trans people to the exclusion of all other life, the former pied-piper, now been gnawed by millions of rats, was compelled to rationalise his plunging popularity by reinventing himself as a campaigning, unreconstructed second-wave feminist. Germaine Greer with a penis.   

It must have been a shock to Linehan that a man once so deeply immersed in comedy’s establishment – hitherto a safe space that guaranteed a lifetime’s media profile, could so easily be rejected by the community, once his liberal credentials were questioned. I’ve never been part of a media clique, I couldn’t even get into my primary school’s playground football team, but I can imagine the affection and self-importance that comes with being part of a group admired by the IT crowd – the cool kids, must be very potent.

Linehan reacted to the loss of this natural high with tangible contempt and incomprehension. Was his career really over just because he found the idea of trans people being accepted as the opposite sex, inherently ridiculous? Were the comedy establishment, who’d championed the plight of other marginalised groups since the 1980s, really that consistent?

A man more concerned for his reputation might have walked back his comments, or reframed them in more liberal terms, or tried to marry the science of the issue with the philosophy, but Graham’s pride could not countenance such a climb down. Instead, he sought to reinvent himself as a social justice warrior – a great man of history.

“Glinner”, so hated by his former fans, that an artist who designed his Twitter profile picture, withdrew his consent for its use, has made a bid for martyrdom. The war on women, as he styles it – because 51% of the population have an existential fight on their hands from the 0.10% who identify as trans women – is one of those epoch defining struggles, in which the people who’ve condemned Graham for his alleged hatred of a marginalised group, will ultimately be shown to be apologists for child mutilation and the infiltration and dilution of the sisterhood from male sexual deviants.

Linehan, one assumes, felt that nothing but total commitment to his cause would do. The Twitterati – Graham’s nemesis, would never accept nuance, or equivocation – they would read that as weakness, as doubt. Graham has therefore taken a series of absolutist positions – brought into focus by absolute moral certainty, from which they can be no retreat, no surrender. I know what you’re thinking – how very un-Irish.

Graham believes that male to female transition is a kink, a fetish – malfunctioning male libido and a tale as old as time. If you agree that trans women should be integrated into the female population, you’re a misogynist, because you’re allowing men to define what a woman is (a circular and philosophically intractable argument that must dismiss the claim of trans women that they’re characteristically female and are looking for self-actualisation).

If you’re indifferent to the cause, or believe that Graham may be fixated on it to an unhealthy degree, you’re “invested”, to use Linehan’s attack line, in attempts to brainwash children into believing that gender dysphoria necessitates life-changing surgery. Clearly, you’re not invested – you’re just one of 99% of the population whose lives remain untouched by this debate, but Graham can no more understand that lack of indignation than a dog could process indifference to squirrels.

For Graham, trans ideology, in its purest form – the idea that gender is innate and therefore subject to invocation at the moment of realisation, is the greatest threat to womankind since Jack the Ripper. Argue there are gradations, or that acceptance is a practical and empathetic workaround for an identity crisis afflicting a miniscule percentage of the population, and you may as well be helping Jack toss intestines over a dead woman’s shoulder.

Graham’s detractors will say that he’s projecting – that he’s a man who’s hijacked a woman’s cause, whether ill-conceived or existential, to validate his own gendered fantasy – the chivalrous knight, protecting our delicate maidens from unregulated cocks. Others – like me for example – might wonder if he’s betrayed himself, by frequently conflating the struggle for female emancipation with the cancellation of his Father Ted musical – an act of “cultural vandalism”, he tells us, because there’s not quite enough musical theatre based on TV. Said musical was the cash cow Graham hoped would help him beat his critics and set up his dotage in the style to which he was accustomed. Its inability to self-actualise potentially condemns Graham to a terrible fate – a life on par with his internet critics.

Seldom in the history of women’s rights has a man’s pension being the focal issue in the female struggle, but for Graham the production’s nixing is a victory for the flamboyant set that, in different times, would have lined up to see it. Perhaps it was rights holder and production company Hat Trick’s uncontroversial identification of musical theatre goers as the very people most aggrieved by Graham’s politics, that led them to withdraw support unless he took a fee and fecked off.

All of which is a lengthy preamble to the question that brought us here – what is Graham Linehan’s endgame? Has the one-time comedy scribe written himself into a corner? When you’ve defined victory as nothing less than a binding, presumably perpetual recognition that sex is immutable and society’s organisation around this principle can never change, what odds would you place on the other side’s unconditional surrender?

When vindication means any attempt to understand the condition of trans people and the psychology underpinning the social and material conditions of their existence is understood to lend legitimacy to sexual deviance, and that anyone interested in gaining a nuanced and workable understanding of the social facts that govern this small but significant group is an apologist for rape, child molestation and infantile fantasy, what hope victory?

And on the assumption victory is possible – that the characterisation of trans women as deviants and their supporters as misogynists, is likely to lead to the wholesale capitulation of the LGBTQ+ movement, is it truly desirable?

I don’t know about you (because I don’t know you) but on my death bed I’d struggle to feel comfortable knowing I was lying in the shit and piss of hard-hearted assumptions, which thanks to my diligent life-long efforts, were no longer being tested. The part of my brain that wasn’t necrotic, would struggle with the knowledge that I had established a consensus that trans people were freaks and perverts who should either be cured by intense life-long psychiatric interventions, or separated from the general population to protect the normies. Still, the Father Ted musical, huh? Wasn’t it great?

But this is easy to say. After all, it’s not my need to get back at the peers who turned on me, maintain a media presence, and regain a sense of lost prestige that’s at stake – it’s Graham’s.

Published in: on April 9, 2023 at 20:12  Comments Off on What’s Graham Linehan’s Endgame?  
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Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.8

Last week on Critic’s Log, we observed that this final season of Star Trek: Picard, though more coherent and powered by weapons grade nostalgia, in a bid to overwhelm its detractors, had reached a point of critical mass – that is, the stage where a mass of critics would either realise it was more Nu-Trek imbecility, or a TV classic in the making – the epilogue to Star Trek: The Next Generation both show and cast – yes, even Patrick Stewart, deserved.

After a disappointing seventh episode, which degenerated into cliché and was suffused with a problematic backstory, we realised that either this was a symptom of the show’s own Irumodic Syndrome, or the writers trading on our low expectations for these Alex Kurtzman produced serials, in order to dazzle us with a development of uncharacteristic intelligence and guile. Sure, it’s odd that you’d bait the audience with the impression you’d fucked things up by reaching for off-the-shelf storytelling complications, but maybe Terry Matalas and team have a dry sense of humour. Maybe Episode 7 was a deadpan joke.

“Surrender”, then, had a crucial role to play in restabilising the show’s cerebral credentials; the final instalment before what one assumes is the all-action climax. Did it settle nerves? Well, it was a better episode than the one before, but only because, one realised, this season of Picard is insubstantial without the Next Generation cast at the fore, embracing the past and planning for the future. That’s the season’s emotional warp core. Without it, as we found out last week, the creaky conspiracy plot and Amanda Plummer’s one-note villainy, can’t quite bear the load of fan expectation.

Episode 8 concluded the Titan siege and reunited the crew in full, but for all that – when it came to settling the question of whether this season of Picard is just nostalgia clad to TNG-movie style nonsense, the space can was kicked down the trans warp conduit. We’re two hours away from the end of TNG and we don’t yet know if it will be a climax that successfully balances action with pathos, a la The Undiscovered Country, or derivative schlock.

If I were a betting man, based on “Surrender”, I’d have to say, on the preponderance of evidence, that the team who brought us Picard Season 2, haven’t shaken off enough of their old handler’s idiocy to safely guide the Titan through those space dock doors. After all, this was an episode when a lot of dumb shit happened.

Vadic, who knew Jack Crusher could take over minds and see through their eyes, channelled her inner Kruge from The Search for Spock and entered into a meaningless hostage taking, execution threatening stand-off with a walking super-weapon, which arguably exposed her to danger, because if she got her way, and he did come to the bridge (which he did), he’d be highly incentivised to kill her (which he did).

Vadic, who had control over the ship’s systems, could simply have flooded the whole starship with anaesthetising gas, or locked on to Jack’s signal and beamed him to the Shrike. But instead, because she was channelling a villain in a TNG movie, opted for grandstanding and skirting around her motives. Alas, we never learned what her true objective was, because of the Titan’s odd feature that allowed for the bridge to be exposed to space. Vadic, who tried to gain our sympathy last week by arguing the Federation was evil for trying to engineer a defence against the most aggressive foe it had ever faced, was duly blown into the void. She froze and shattered against the Shrike’s hull. So much for redemption and mutual understanding. But as her parting words were, “fuck solids” – ah, the poetry of Nu-Trek, perhaps it’s just as well we won’t see her in the grand finale.

Ultimately, following a strange scene set in Data’s mind, in which he triumphed over Lore, by using his memories as a trojan horse to transfer his consciousness to, er, himself, the crew finally got around the table, curiously without other key characters like Shaw and Seven, and workshopped the problem, old school conference room style.

Their conclusion? Jack Crusher, though a lovely guy in his own right, was channelling “an ancient evil” – something nasty that hid behind a symbolic red door. What the fuck is it? We will know next week. As this is the key to the entire story, it better be an exceptional reveal. A few logs ago I joked that Jack had Borg DNA, and this was the source of the Changelings’ interest. Sadly, following some innuendo by Vadic that Seven and Jack had something in common, and his ability being something like a naturally occurring collective consciousness, I fear I was right. The idea could be handled with intelligence of course, but this is the same writing team that gave a Changeling scars and a smoking habit.

Anomalous Readings  

  • Why did the victorious Titan torpedo the Shrike? Almost all of her crew were dead, her Captain was floating in space in fragments, and she was a mine of useful intelligence. Yes, I know they downloaded her data – though it’s not clear when, as a gung-ho Seven, fresh from delivering a movie dispatch line, “get off of my bridge!” (it’s not strictly your bridge, Commander) didn’t wait, or even call a staff conference, before launching a volley of photons at the empty ship’s hull. Imagine what the Shrike could have told the Titan about the people who’d made it, or those involved in the plot, but fuck it – it was cooler to destroy it. This was indicative of how, despite the possibilities afforded by long-form TV, the writers wanted their dumb movie moments.
  • I laughed out loud when the Titan’s LCARS display flashed “removing partition” as Data and Lore duelled inside their positronic brain. And there was I thinking the partition was figurative – just a metaphor used by Geordi, not an actual thing the computer would recognise as a barrier.
  • When did the Titan crew have the opportunity to put the cloak on a shuttle and dispatch Worf and Raffi to rescue Riker and Troi? When they were setting up the trap to lure Vadic that got that poor Vulcan bridge officer killed? How did they know Vadic had Riker on the Shrike at all? She might have left him at Daystrom Station. Or he might have been on his way through the Wormhole. Did they read the script?  
  • Someone who did read it was the engineer who designed the Titan to have a bridge blow out feature in the event of a takeover. A bit fucking dangerous for the crew, however.
  • So, we finally got a cameo from Denise Crosby and it was, er, Tasha’s pocket hologram as remembered by Data. If this is a prelude to a flesh and blood appearance from Crosby in the final episodes, great. If that’s all we get, when Sela could have been the villain and one with an organic connection to the Enterprise-D cast, not just a scene chewer pursuing a human maguffin, then you can file that under M, for the mother of missed opportunities.
  • All Data’s memories were from his days on the Enterprise-D. Clearly nothing of note happened before or after.
  • The Data/Lore scene wasn’t so much a battle of wills as a nostalgia off – but only Data had stuff to produce. Lore, it seems, was unable or unwilling to summon the Crystalline Entity or the Borg – which is weird because they surely would have trumped Spot the Cat and a deck of cards.
  • So, as we warp to the finish, the big question is still what the fuck do the Changelings want with the diseased part of dead Picard’s brain and Jack? If Irumodic Syndrome is a red herring, then we can probably infer it’s something to do with whatever the Borg put in Jean-Luc’s head when they transformed him – perhaps the part of his mind that connected with his fellow drones, and whatever he inadvertently passed on to Jack. But are the Borg “an ancient evil”, “an all-consuming darkness”? It doesn’t sound like them does it? After all, the Borg, though villains, were, as originally conceived, the ultimate user – a cold intelligence indifferent to human concerns. No, this is Pah Wraith territory, and the closest Picard came to them was when he eyed Ro with not strictly professional eyes. The answer will make or break the show and that’s why you’ll return next week when we’ll unpick the choice together.

The Wistful Musings of a Mandroid

Picard Portents

The Backdated Adventures of Logicman and Bleep

A horrifying vision of the future

Michael Burnham in the 32nd Century

Mick’s Calamitous 23rd Century

Station Keeping

Teen Fan Fic

Published in: on April 6, 2023 at 21:52  Comments (1)  
Tags: , , , ,

Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.7

“Dominion” is the weakest episode thus far in this improved season of Star Trek: Picard. Why? Because it amounted to a pause, in which our legacy characters, the show’s meat, took a backseat to the serial’s new mystery box elements – Vadic and Jack Crusher. Sure, we were curious as to who Vadic was and what Jack is – because there’s clearly more to him than French mayo and anglicised vowels. But were we curious enough to spend precious time pondering their identities while Mr Fucking Data stood in an engineering bay, waiting to be fully excavated, and Troi was imprisoned on the Shrike? The writers gambled on ‘yes’.

The problem is, Vadic simply isn’t that interesting a villain. You can cast nostalgically and you have Amanda Plummer give the Changeling Captain plenty of kook, but when it came to explaining why she and her band of fluid co-conspirators were hellbent on the Federation’s destruction, the best the writers’ room could come up with was she had been experimented on by Starfleet’s scientists during the Dominion War, in what amounted to prolonged torture.

The Federation, those bastards engaged in an existential fight for their lives, facing a belligerent species that had infiltrated their society, and those of the other great Alpha Quadrant powers; who’d been forced into a defensive war against an invading army of goops and drug dependent super-soldiers, decided to weaponise a small sample of the enemy to gain a tactical advantage against those who’d shown themselves to be duplicitous and nakedly imperialist during one of the galaxy’s most savage conflicts. This, it should be noted, being an idea stolen from the enemy who’d used the tactic to destabilise governments, dissolve alliances and weaken the Alpha Quadrant’s defences.

If the aim was to make us sympathetic to Vadic’s cause, and give her a self-serving pretext for colluding to wipe out the Federation, I’m afraid this backstory didn’t cut it for me.

Picard could and should have pointed out that the Founders, having killed billions in their paranoid war against an imaginary threat (that obviously became a self-fulfilling prophesy once war was declared) were lucky that a compassionate Federation had allowed Odo to upload a cure to the virus engineered to kill the invaders, at all.

If Vadic objected to the unethical treatment of her and her comrades in the lab at Daystrom Station, she might have answered the charge that a desperate people, subjected to the horror of total war – a war they objectively did not provoke or desire, might want to get on the front foot when it came to morphogenic infiltration.

As we discussed in this log, way back when the Changelings were revealed to be the season’s villains, the Federation’s notable lack of interest in subjecting their former foes to servitude or punishment in the years since they tried to annihilate us on fascist principles, proved what we said and the Great Link came to know thanks to Odo’s empathy upgrade, was true – that we could peacefully coexist if they stayed in their pool. Vadic and friends, who presumably could have gone home to the Link and enjoyed the victor’s gift of life, liberty and mutual understanding, decided against because – well, one Federation scientist subjected her and her test tube buddies to experiments? And her proportionate reaction to this is attempted genocide?

It was telling that she referred to her fellow goops as “family” – a strange concept for a Changeling. But if you use that word, you can join the long list of Star Trek villains that hates the Federation, or its proxies – peace loving humanoids, and wants to see them/is indifferent to seeing them destroyed because they’ve lost a few loved ones. Think Soran, Nero, Khan, Shinzon – all damaged characters with tortured histories who lost everything and sought to punish the universe for it.

Jesus Christ, isn’t there a more original motive on the shelf for revenge? And why the hell does it always have to be about revenge anyway? These cliches are so well worn they’d fall off your feet. But this, apparently, was the reveal designed to add shade and dimensionality to Vadic. Instead, it flattened her out. We must hope there’s a more interesting foe, yet to be revealed, behind her. My hopes for Sela are fading but if fucking Tuvok from Voyager can cameo – or his likeness at least, I’m not giving up.

I almost forgot Jack, which is easy to do when, likeable though Ed Speelers is, he’s little more than an attitude. In this episode his importance to the Changelings’ plot was restated and we learned he can pair with other humans – like biological Bluetooth, and share his apparent enhancements – an ability to default to a psychotic bent and fight like an elite soldier, when required.

As Vadic knows more about his condition than we do, are we to infer he’s also an experiment? I must confess this conspiracy story, with the Federation’s implicit role in its own predicament, made me nostalgic for earlier in the season when I thought this might be a reunited TNG crew fighting a legitimate rear guard action against a misguided and wholly illegitimate bad actor. That’s right, I’m never going to stop pining for those bugs.

Anomalous Readings

  • We’re back into schlock territory now we know that the Changelings want to combine Jack Crusher’s DNA with Picard’s human DNA to create a perfect replica of, er, Picard. Because there’s some kind of imperfection in Jean-Luc’s human form? Er, huh? How can the real man be an imperfect version of himself? What are the Changelings talking about here, microcellular damage from his time with the Borg? Well, that might explain why you need undamaged DNA to make a perfect Picard, except that a) Picard exploded inside his former Chief Medical Officer after he was assimilated, so Jack’s DNA is equally corrupted and b) the Picard Starfleet are expecting at Frontier Day – the naval parade and fleet gathering at which the Admiral is due to appear, would be his golem – the distinctly non-human version with what one assumes is an entirely different physiological profile. So what’s the value in producing a fake human Picard? Let’s hope the next episode makes it crystal fucking clear.
  • Was the Changelings’ plan dead in the water from the moment Picard boarded the Titan, and is this is the truth that everyone in the show, including Picard, is slow to realise? Surely, once Jean-Luc went rogue and became a fugitive, his security clearance would be revoked and he’d be the last person on Earth, or any other Federation world, to be invited to Frontier Day. We know the Admiralty are aware he’s on the run because of Ro. Changelings can only infiltrate starships, they don’t control the comms going in and out, and besides, didn’t the writers establish the fleet was linked now – its activities monitored in the space cloud? So I suppose the plan to copy Picard and do something unspeakable to the fleet is off, right? In which case, er, why is Vadic still interested in Jack? If I’ve missed something, I trust you’ll tell me.
  • Of course if Picard has guessed wrong about the Changeling plot, then the above is moot. Pray that he, not the writers, have slipped up and they’re not already wishing the copied guest of honour was someone else – someone we haven’t seen yet.
  • So much of “Dominion” occurred on dark sets with minimal lighting, that one was reminded of why old Trek – with its bright interiors, worked better. When there was an incongruous element on say, the Enterprise-D, or the Voyager, the contrast was highlighted by the difference between that person or element, and the warm, inviting Federation décor. Think Locutus on a biobed or the dimension shifting terrorists from “The High Ground” on the Enterprise bridge. And don’t say, “Ed, the lights were off on purpose – the Titan was playing dead”. The ship’s always dark and you know it.
  • A casualty of the emphasises in this episode was the absence of Riker and Troi. I can understand why the production would want to push back the moment Marina Sirtis has to speak on screen, but nevertheless…
  • It looks increasingly likely that Janeway will appear at Frontier Day. What hope that at least one DS9 character also features?
  • Shaw got cut and blooded for the second time in a few days. We love to see it.
  • The Schizoid Android’s conceptual origins were revealed when Geordi cribbed a line from The Search for Spock – not being able to stand losing Data again. It’s now fair to assume this is Terry Matalas and crew’s version of McCoy stuck with Spock’s katra.
  • Today was the day that Alex Kurtzman reminded the world he hasn’t gone away, announcing a Starfleet Academy series that just might feature Discovery’s Silly Tilly as an instructor. It’s good to know that after a few episodes of something like real Star Trek, normal service will soon resume. What a difference a spike in critical acclaim and a renewed production deal makes!

The Wistful Musings of a Mandroid

Picard Portents

The Backdated Adventures of Logicman and Bleep

A horrifying vision of the future

Michael Burnham in the 32nd Century

Mick’s Calamitous 23rd Century

Station Keeping

Teen Fan Fic

Published in: on March 30, 2023 at 21:51  Comments Off on Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.7  
Tags: , , , ,

Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.6

The problem, if you’re Terry Matalas – sensitivity to criticism notwithstanding, is how you reconcile the various iterations of modern Trek – the transgressions and the tangents, the errors and experiments, into a coherent universe, while adding something of your own DNA. Yes, the Picard season 3 writing team are custodians, doctors (working to off-set the impact of metastasising cells introduced into the franchise body from previous showrunner ejaculations) and would-be parents, hoping their voluminous injection of seed embeds and grows into something that lasts. You know, something like a legacy.

“The Bounty” gave us the perfect metaphor for this attempt at housing all Trek’s mishaps, contradictions and memories in a novelty package, namely the introduction of a hybrid Soong android – a Schizoid Man, housing Data, Lore, B4 and Noonian Soong’s oddly superfluous biological son (the androids were supposed to be surrogates), Altan – the lunatic who put Jean-Luc in a golem while binning what remained of Data. 

This new synth, which for budget purposes, gave Brent Spiner’s personalities an aged form – white hair and sunken flesh, with an android colour scheme, was the show personified – something more troubled and continuity aware than the original, who reminded you of something you used to love. When the Schizoid Man spoke, the past came alive, but as this episode frequently reminded us, it’s the future we need to worry about.

With one eye on the serial’s advancing plot – the identity of the item stolen from Daystrom Station by the Changelings, and the show’s overarching theme, namely TNG’s beneficence to the world, the characters’ various offspring picking up the slippery baton – the real aim of “The Bounty” was to lock into place the constituent elements of a spin-off – a show Matalas et al are already presumptuously calling Star Trek: Legacy.

Legacy, one assumes, would be the Cobra Kai of Star Trek – nostalgia fuelled but finely balanced between the heroes of yesteryear and their progeny, for optimal fan satisfaction and canon-friendly continuation. One could see how the show might work in this episode’s series of engagingly written exchanges between the stalwarts and their successors.

We choked up as Jeri Ryan eyeballed the Voyager at the Fleet Museum and reminisced about being lost in the Delta Quadrant. We sat poised as Sydney La Forge gave her father, facility curator Commodore Geordi La Forge, one of those generational lessons in remembering your true self and the values you’ve passed on. We took a nervous swig of whisky as Jack Crusher discussed his double-edged inheritance with Picard – Irumodic Syndrome on one hand (hence those disturbing hallucinations, apparently), bravery on the other. I know which I’d prefer. 

This is a safe formula for continuing the franchise, but would I be a curmudgeon, even – gasp, a toxic fan, for suggesting that said formula is also a sort of thunderingly crude literalisation of what Trek used to do figuratively, namely passing the baton to a new set of characters that embodied the spirit and ideology of old? Would a show like Legacy constitute the franchise eating itself – shrinking its own universe? Remember how universe expanding “Encounter at Farpoint” felt? No, and neither do any writers working in TV today.

Still, within the self-imposed confines of its legacy TV sequel template, “The Bounty” successfully balanced deftly written character moments with balls-out nostalgia and story advancement. It was calibrated to delight fans and it will.

Yet below the surface, behind the relics from past adventures, was the troubled, schizoid universe of Nu-Trek; a place where the HMS Bounty from Voyage Home – a movie that provided an in-canon explanation for why contemporary profanity no longer has a grip on the language, can sit alongside Riker talking about “goo shit”. It’s a place that appears to acknowledge the aesthetic of The Original Series in the form of the USS New Jersey, in a show that ostensibly exists in the same continuity as Discovery and Strange New Worlds. It’s a place where Picard is both dead and alive – the desiccated corpse of the flesh and blood man he once was, now an intergalactic collectible. The miracle of Picard season 3 is that it plays as a coherent voyage that respects the past while laying pipe for the future, while simultaneously being a show that showcases the tension between Star Trek in the Alex Kurtzman era, and the Roddenberry utopia it replaced. Can both truly co-exist, or will a future showrunner have to pick one? Place your bets.

Anomalous Readings

  • Did you ever, in your Trek lovin’ life, believe you’d watch an episode featuring the dead bodies of our two most cherished characters, namely Picard and James T. Kirk? That’s right, amongst the oddities at Daystrom Station was the corpse of the man last seen under a pile of rocks on Veridian III. A less dignified resting place then, but one more deserving of Kirk’s special status. Is the actual body of an iconic character going to remain a throwaway Easter Egg, or will Matalas et al actually tell us what Section 31 want with the good Captain’s remains? What’s next, Yar’s brain in a jar?
  • What else might have been recovered from Veridian III – perhaps the Enterprise-D saucer?
  • Given the foreboding, are we really content that Jack’s visions are just a symptom of Irumodic Syndrome? I’m going to call this one as a red herring, as the hallucinations seem a little specific to be just textbook side effects. It would be disappointing if the diagnosis wasn’t masking something more significant.
  • Picard’s desiccated corpse is a neat metaphor for the first two seasons.
  • Given how casual the swearing remains in this show, can we really believe the writers when they tell us each easily excisable example has been carefully considered?
  • The appearance of the USS New Jersey is arguably a shot across of the bows of those who’ve boldly fucked up before, but it also suggests that Picard, a sequel to a show inextricably tied to old continuity, exists in its own (legitimate) universe. Dare we dream?
  • The Schizoid Android was as close as we’re going to get to someone undoing the disastrous conclusion to Picard Season 1, which euthanised Data and robo-ed Picard. One of the surprises of this season has been the extent to which the writers have embraced this calamitous fuck up, and made it work for them. Picard’s body in Changeling hands is a disturbing, intriguing setup. What do they want with it? They certainly don’t need it to copy him, as no flesh and blood Picard would now past muster. The return of Data in the form promised by Season 1, but as a sort of culmination of Soong’s work, develops a once hard-to-advance character. It adds dimensions. Again, we don’t know where this is going but like the treatment of all the TNG characters in Picard season 3, it feels like evolution not destruction, and that is the right course.  
  • Was Seven thinking about nights with Chakotay when lost in a Voyager reverie? Let’s hope so. Let’s also hope she’s forgotten Neelix.
  • Moriarty as the embodiment of a Data memory remnant worked, as it didn’t require an addendum to “Ship in a Bottle”.
  • We await to hear more about how Geordi La Forge, the man who couldn’t land a date to save the universe, and who once had a relationship with a holodeck character, managed to conceive two kids. Forget the rest – this alone stretched my suspension of disbelief to breaking point.
  • Vadic (confirmed for Changeling) has Riker and Troi and is using the latter to get information from the great beard. 30 years ago, I’d have killed every last Starfleet officer to save her. But today?

The Wistful Musings of a Mandroid

Picard Portents

The Backdated Adventures of Logicman and Bleep

A horrifying vision of the future

Michael Burnham in the 32nd Century

Mick’s Calamitous 23rd Century

Station Keeping

Teen Fan Fic

Published in: on March 24, 2023 at 16:34  Comments Off on Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.6  
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Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.5

A couple of log entries ago, I lamented the missed opportunity to reprise and conclude the TNG season 1 story, “Conspiracy” – the teased but never explored threat from the parasitic coercive controllers, who liked the Federation so much they wanted to nest there. “Imposters”, the mid-way point in this nostalgia-fuelled season of Picard, regurgitated the plot of that classic episode, with the Changelings swapped out for the bugs as the enemy that can pass for human, except on close inspection; a villain who’d already penetrated the highest echelons of command.

I won’t hammer at this space door too much, but I invite you to consider that this repeat adventure, right down to one of Picard’s old contacts returning to warn him of the threat, only to be assassinated for their trouble (is Tracy Tormé getting residuals on this one?) could have been an organic extension of an old story – not to mention Wrath of Khan-like (the hallowed template) in its tendency to sequelise a story of yesteryear, rather than plagiarism, had the writer’s room thought-planets aligned. But I almost certainly won’t mention this again, except when reflecting on the scene in the final episode in which Picard and Riker phaser the Changeling leader to death, external layers of mimetic flesh burning away to the soft goo beneath.

Despite the parallels with the near identikit scenario of old, everyone’s favourite Mandroid didn’t refer to the events of “Conspiracy”, or any lessons learned, just as the Titan’s predicament in the space-womb didn’t invoke “Booby Trap” for him last week. But we know a lot of memories probably got lost in the transfer to that synthetic body. It’s a just a pity they were the precise analogues that would have given Jean-Luc and the gang pertinent experience at a time of life when everything they do appears to be a riff on something they’ve done before.

The big reveal of the episode was the re-emergence of Ro Laren, the recidivist Bajoran we last saw thirty years ago, who betrayed Picard’s trust to join the Marquis (the turgid freedom fighter arc designed to set up Voyager’s backstory). We wondered aloud how this character could now be a Commander in Starfleet, only for Picard to demand the same answers, and the result was a just-about-plausible story of self-capture, court martial and recruitment to Starfleet intelligence. The latter mattered because, we learned, Ro was Worf’s handler in this conspiracy investigation business, and as luck would have it, was dispatched on the Intrepid to intercept the Titan and acquire Jack Crusher, providing the opportunity for her to assess Picard’s human credentials (no controversy there) and, once satisfied, hand over her intelligence dossier to her one-time mentor and substitute Dad.

Perhaps given the historic animus between Ro and Picard, the Changelings didn’t fully appreciate the danger of allowing the former comrades to interact privately, hence deciding against sending another ship, say the USS Champagne Breakfast, or the USS Cole Porter, whose crew had conspicuously no ties to the Enterprise-D, to bring Picard and Riker in. But if you could accept that Ro, using her intelligence savvy, had engineered the scenario, perhaps by talking up her Picard hating credentials (she’d seen the first two seasons), then her role as Deep Throat was good, solid, conspiracy movie fluff – a meeting in a dark alley (or dark holodeck in this case), the trading of information (using her Bajoran earring no less), the “you don’t know how deep this goes” revelation. It moved the plot on nicely, while setting up a satisfying conclusion for Ro’s story – her sacrifice to facilitate the Titan’s escape. Yes, Ro Laren, last seen giving a “fuck you” to the Federation, died to save it. Picard was a proud father at last.

While Picard tussled with his surrogate daughter, his biological son (what a week the Mandroid’s had!) wrestled with a series of violent hallucinations involving red weed and group execution. What’s eating Jack is one of the season’s big questions. As the issue rose to prominence in an episode entitled “Imposters”, we were invited to reflect on whether Mr Crusher was his authentic self or corrupted by an as-yet-unseen malevolent force. I think we can rule out PTSD from finding out his late father lives again in a synthetic body.

In any event, the fantasies became reality when Jack mercilessly killed four Changeling infiltrators. The sting was that he didn’t know they weren’t human until he’d shot them. This critic had a terrible flashback to First Contact and Jean-Luc’s glaze-eyed execution of a nano-probe infected crew member. Let’s hope the nano-probes in Picard’s ejaculate haven’t conditioned a similar psychopathy in his first born.

Anomalous Readings

  • Spare a thought for Captain Liam Shaw. A week ago, he was master of a safe, if boring ship, dutifully going about its business. Now, after a visit from Picard and Riker, he’s been in battle, had a near-death experience, being forced to confront his PTSD, and is now on the run as a Search for Spock-style fugitive on what is now technically, and actually, a stolen Starship (with the significant caveat that as Starfleet has been captured by an alien power, the Titan is legit). No wonder he’s so (incongruously) foul-mouthed.
  • The arrival of the Intrepid maintains a tendency in Nu-Trek to revisit a series of established ship names, as it’s considered a cheap sop to older Trekkies. Critic’s Log suggests it makes the Trek universe smaller, and that what older Trekkies would really like are new elements that add scope and texture to Roddenberry’s universe. Just a fuckin’ obvious thought.
  • The idea of a Vulcan crime boss would have seemed like a highly illogical Nu-Trek indulgence, if mooted pre-season, but Kirk Acevedo’s performance as Krinn, and his logical embrace of gangsterism as the essential pre-condition for utopian thought (the optimists need something to kick against) made it work.
  • Ro suggested the bigwig conspirators were planning something for Frontier Day – Starfleet’s annual celebration of its military might in which, security be damned, the fleet assembles for what Picard described as “pomp and pageantry”. There seemed something vaguely autocratic about this idea – like a missile parade, but one assumes the point, from a storytelling point of view, is to have a fuck-load of Starships on display (perhaps including some old favourites) for an all-navy climax.
  • Was Ro a left-field choice for character reprisal? She wouldn’t have been on my list, but the writers found a place for her in their story that worked. Given the season’s themes, Picard’s significant others, treason, betrayal, infiltration, redemption – one can see how her name came up, despite the contortion required to bring her back to the fore after so long, but it was good to see the one-time outsider and original Bajoran get some closure with her old Captain. “I’ve been rehearsing this conversation for thirty years,” said Picard, and given his wordless reaction to news of her defection in “Pre-emptive Strike”, one could believe it. Aesthetic and dialogue issues, notwithstanding, the one thing Picard season 3 has got right is the dynamic between the characters. Ro was rounded off here, whereas had she appeared in the preceding two seasons she almost certainly would have been ruined. What a shame it’s too late for Hugh Borg, Guinan, Q…
  • The Titan becoming a renegade vessel with a skeleton crew, echoed Search for Spock, and gave pause. Is this season going to be a Star Wars sequel trilogy-style spin on old story elements, using an old movie trilogy as the founding myth? It would be a shame if there were no original elements to this legacy story. Not everything has to be a variation on a theme, does it? It may work in the context of a crew’s final outing (though it didn’t have to be all nostalgia) but Trek going forward will need new stories if it’s to once again become a vitalising, forward-looking vehicle for intelligent, speculative fiction.
  • Alas, this was the week your favourite Trek scribe (me) was blocked on Twitter by Mandroid minder, Terry Matalas. Perhaps I paid the penalty for not joining the chorus of adulation that’s accompanied this season – questioning some of the style choices and the pastiche-heavy, postmodern storytelling approach. But you don’t come here for hype, Space Pals, just Trek-literate reflections on the condition of our oft-misunderstood celestial odyssey. That and the jokes, obviously.
  • Next week: Shaw and the gang head to the heavily guarded Daystrom Station to uncover a wrong darker than death or night. Or Brent Spiner, as he’s sometimes known.

The Wistful Musings of a Mandroid

Picard Portents

The Backdated Adventures of Logicman and Bleep

A horrifying vision of the future

Michael Burnham in the 32nd Century

Mick’s Calamitous 23rd Century

Station Keeping

Teen Fan Fic

Published in: on March 17, 2023 at 16:51  Comments Off on Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.5  
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Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.4

Earlier in our trawl through the gallic mandroid’s third geriatric outing, we noted that Picard, in its final incarnation, is like a soiled version of The Next Generation. It’s an organic continuation, akin to the difference between TOS and the sequel movies, but it’s a little more jaded, a shade cruder. “No Win Scenario” – the end of this ten-hour movie’s first act, showcased the tension between the bright and optimistic Roddenberry odyssey of yore and the foul-mouthed, shit-caked, embittered show that replaced it. In the end there was indeed hope, but we endured some despairing moments along the way.

Todd Stashwick’s Captain Shaw embodied this tension very well. The Titan-A’s commander is a likable curmudgeon and has been established, with great economy, as a person of interest; an addition to the cast who brings conflict and a dose of revisionism to the Captain’s table. In episode 4 we learned this wasn’t just schtick. Shaw was an engineer when the Borg passed through Wolf 359 and prolonged PTSD and survivor’s guilt from the infamous battle explained both his initial caution and antipathy to Picard’s legend. “No Win Scenario” added layers to Shaw’s character and gave him a hero moment – the chance to fall back on those old grease monkey skills and help save the day, as the Titan-ic employed some old TNG-style problem solving to ride the energy from some space contractions to exit the celestial womb that had ensnared the ship.

Great, you say. But Shaw is also a foul-mouthed and curiously flippant creation, who seems designed to use up the season’s swear quotient singlehandedly. Throughout seasons 1 and 2 of Picard we lamented that too many characters seemed to have idioms and cultural reference points imported from our own ugly present. They didn’t talk like Star Trek characters used to talk or indeed occupy the universe of Kirk where more colourful metaphors had become archaic. The language wasn’t lofty and technical anymore, it had devolved – it was dirty – and that was neat shorthand for Picard’s repudiation of TNG’s sunny-side optimism and utopian leanings.

Shaw described himself as a “dipshit from Chicago”, “an asshole”, and maybe he is, but this left us in the strange position of both looking forward to the character’s appearances and dreading him speaking. Why, we wondered aloud, did Shaw have to talk this way? Why did he have to personify a certain pot-smoking ineloquence? Because, Terry Matalas, for all his Trek-affirming credentials and conspicuous love of the source material, appears to have been persuaded, presumably by his show-running predecessors, that this kind of cynicism grounds the material – it added world-weary grit, commensurate with the show’s abiding theme of looking back and reflecting on past glories. In reality, it only adds an incongruous and franchise-unfriendly element to what would, with minor edits, and a little more 25th century finesse in the dialogue, be a very fine Star Trek story indeed.

The show’s instinct this season – to tap nostalgia while adding a contemporary sting, was manifest in the episode’s framing device – a scene, set five years previously, in which Picard’s Haddock dinner in Guinan’s Ten Forward bar was interrupted by star-struck lower deckers, looking for celebrity anecdotes.

Picard reluctantly gave the kids what they wanted, only for us to learn, in the final flashback, that a young(er) Jack Crusher, who actually looked in his ‘20s this time thanks to digital smoothing, was a barfly, observing Dad from afar. Seeing an opportunity, he asked him a question about the lack of family in Jean-Luc’s illustrious career, only to get the crushing reply that Starfleet was the only family Picard had ever wanted or needed.

Had we not known Jack was Picard’s son, we would have accepted this a reaffirming of the character’s dedication to service – the lonely at the top stoicism that marked the difference between Picard and Kirk. But here is was re-cast as inadvertently tragic – a bittersweet sting. Bittersweet sting is Picard’s approach to sequelised storytelling. We suspect it will all work out in the end – that the show will conclude with something like the tear-inducing spectacle of a sea of space babies, but we privately wonder how many of our cherished memories will be intact when the moment comes.

Anomalous Readings

  • If “No Win Scenerio” had a selling point, it was the emphasis on conversations between characters and how this deepened the ship-in-peril scenario. Riker and Picard’s dark night of the soul – with Will staring into the godless abyss, reminded me of “Booby Trap” and the moment that Picard’s space-faring wonder and admiration for ancient forms of propulsion snagged against the Enterprise’s doom-laden predicament. Terry Matalas seemed to have that episode in mind too, as the way out of the anomaly required a similar gambit – running on fumes, utilising the environment to escape, manually navigating around asteroids as power depleted to nothing. Curiously though, despite the similarities, it was an unseen incident with Picard and the late Jack Crusher on a shuttle that inspired the escape, not the near-identical example from the former Captain’s log.
  • The aforementioned incident on the shuttle prompted Picard to say that he’d drifted in space for “ten fucking gruelling hours”. No surprise that this un-Picardian turn of phrase was a Patrick Stewart ad-lib. Depressing that no one on the production could find a Trek-like substitution. How about cutting the word “fucking”? Just an obvious thought.
  • Shaw’s Changelings for beginners summary aside, apparently written for ten year-olds – we learned no more about their beef in this episode. However, it transpired they all have buckets like Odo did – something we imagined to be specific to him; a practical workaround in his world of solids; and they have a sense of humour. Vadic, we learned, was a hired hand of the Changelings, and to make this point clear, her actual hand has been substituted for a kind of sentient communicator that detaches, issues instructions, then reattaches to the stump. If a Changeling agent has two hands, one imagines they’re either forced to give one up, or another appendage is chosen. That’s right, there could be Changeling agents out there with talking dicks.
  • “Don’t come. Don’t come!” – Shaw sounds more and more like my ex-girlfriend every week.
  • So, Act One is over and as Picard neatly summed up, the questions are – what do the Changelings want and how is Jack Crusher, prone to disturbing hallucinatory episodes featuring red weed and apocalyptic destruction, involved? It’s a credit to how much the series has improved that we want to know the answers to these questions, but as ever, the jury will remain out until the full facts are known.

The Wistful Musings of a Mandroid

Picard Portents

The Backdated Adventures of Logicman and Bleep

A horrifying vision of the future

Michael Burnham in the 32nd Century

Mick’s Calamitous 23rd Century

Station Keeping

Teen Fan Fic

Published in: on March 11, 2023 at 13:26  Comments Off on Critic’s Log – Star Trek: Picard 3.4  
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