Vee

I knew something was off with the theme song this week and I knew I knew that voice. I guessed it before the theme ended but sure enough, it's Alanis fuckin' Morissette!

My 79 yo mother has it bad for Jack Crusher, lol.

I know the Troi militants or the Seven/Raffi fangirls exist if I dig a lot but I almost never see them on Twitter in the trending #StarTrekPicard hashtag, so that's small mercies for me. I had no idea anyone could possibly have anything to complain about for Beverly. I do see the real crazies I mentioned on random Trek forums, and of course there's the hardcore who will never like anything produced for Trek after 2002. But for the most part with this season it's been a very positive mass response and I'm glad for it.

It's no big deal. I think those Troi stans online get pretty militant though lol. If Marina was truly pissed I think we'd know it, but she also speaks off the cuff a lot. But yes, why CBS won't give them another 5-10 mins more often outside of finales is beyond me. This is streaming, it's not an episode of Blue Bloods on the main basic network. I do think it will be a mistake if they don't show Janeway next week (especially since is going to be back). There is too much background with her, Seven and the Borg as well as her admiral's role in Frontier Day which has been heavily mentioned. If she doesn't show up I will have to blame either runtime, budget/scheduling or worst of all, Nickelodeon though I seriously doubt Nick could insist on them not using Janeway at present. She has to be at least mentioned. For the most part I am happy with all the time given to other character beats. All the Crusher stuff in the last few weeks, and the lovely little scene with LaForge and the new Data discussing his new self last week. I would've liked to see a little more of Marina before if it was possible (though that seems to be a matter of opinion BTS) but so far for me this is shaping up like Star Trek VI - would I have liked a little more here or there, sure, but it is a damn good finale for this group. It is heavily patterned after VI in fact, which may be my favorite Star Trek movie of all time. (Except unlike Picard with Crusher, they didn't get to do the romantic beat with Kirk and Carol Marcus they'd scripted originally in TUC.) The people I can't tolerate are the super weird, small but very vocal fringe subset of fans who ride or die for the first two seasons on some Trek forums and claim it's conservative right-wing erasure of progressive characters that this show is not using Soji, Rios, Agnes Jurati, Elnor, etc. lol. I enjoy some things about the first season and I love Allison Pill and Michelle Hurd, but I think that first season is largely a mess and I don't think anyone can sanely claim those characters or stories were generally well-received or popular. I wouldn't mind seeing poor Elnor (apparently stationed on the Excelsior last season, so hopefully he uh, transferred off before today's episode?) once more in the background or something. But with the exception of Raffi I don't care about most of those people.

Chase is like an overgrown little boy and I have little interest in him, but all the material for that set is juvenile or neutered because the show is generally risk-averse to actual adult romantic content that does not involve babies, evil twins or serial killers. As I've said before, on paper the silly story with the Dr. Luke-esque music producer is a fun soapy time. But it's executed in a truly Scooby-Doo way and has gone nowhere for months. AS can do better and I would absolutely put BLQ with old neighborhood pal Dante romantically for awhile in saucier, sexier screwball comedy stuff and various murder mystery capers, etc. (a la Anna Kendrick in A Simple Favor, or some of Kevin and Lucy's older stories) until something more substantive can be figured out for both characters. I wouldn't mind seeing Rena again if she was actually willing to appear for more than a couple days. While Ron Carlivati touched on it briefly early on when he paired up Olivia and Ned, the Lois/Olivia issue is a huge one and has been avoided for years. I've always liked Olivia despite her many flaws and I'll always love LLC over many shows, but unless you can differentiate Olivia and Lois more clearly she'll always be in the first wife's shadow. And it would be good for Brook Lynn, as mentioned. Victor's random master plan has many plotholes. But not as many holes as Anna must have taken from bullets over the long years! Why they have her weeping and feeble at death's door now while Valentin hams it up is beyond me. Anna has been a superspy since at least the Ford administration if not longer. She has "died" at least once before, lest we forget that she spent the bulk of the '90s locked in a tower with brain damage after getting blown to bits. She has been about that life but, and I have said this time and again, they have made her too soft in recent years. I get crying and being emotional throughout the Robin saga in the years when Finola first returned, but Finola has had Anna crying about a little too much about a few too many things since then. Valentin's the worst of it though. Anna will drown in his mucus before she gets a chance to recover. I'd have a lot more respect for the show if they had Anna jam a bunch of painkiller syringes into her body, crudely staple herself together like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween Kills and start shambling around with a saline bag and a piece looking to go after Victor herself. That's how Anna rolled back in the Cold War!

I get what you'e saying, but I think they're just juggling everyone in the runtime they have. There's only so much for the entire OG cast to all do week to week and they gave Deanna a lot in the opening act, and they had a lot to force into their 45-50 mins or whatever. I do hope she gets a little more before the end too. They've also mentioned Kestra at least 3-4 times this season. That was enough for me. I don't think they're retconning her out or ignoring it. That said, why they can't get an extra 5-10 mins on these eps from Paramount in order to be able to do things like squeeze in a line about Kestra when the whole Borg assimilation wave happened, I don't know. Discovery regularly runs over an hour in big finales when it wants to. I really hope the finale here is at least 60 mins and I am annoyed that P+ seems to heavily enforce keeping normal episodes to 45-50 mins tops. This is a CBS mentality.

True, though in-story I think that had to do with the computer records on that non-networked ship not being updated since the original run.

A wonderful penultimate episode that has me gagging for next week. I forgot to mention: How wonderful to hear as the computer one last time.

Big spoilers for tonight's Star Trek: Picard:

I just thought they were very sweet and romantic as a kid and was a bit sad when they didn't reunite. I was not used to that happening as a kid lol. Watching the Sonny/Lily stuff as a married couple more recently I think it is layered and interesting, how she quietly understood her father and husband's business and life (and manipulated it). Like many soap characters unnecessarily resurrected, Lily is much more powerful in death than life. I am glad Ron never got to act on what I suspect were very real rumored plans to bring a scarred Lily back as Sonny's uber-enemy - Lilly Melgar was too tight with the production at certain points in the early 2010s, and there were too many direct connections to Lily springing up among various new characters. I didn't mind Brenda the global celebrity and icon because it was an outgrowth of offscreen stuff and part of the texture they played in her life as an evolved person, vs. her simply swanning around PC with everyone being obsessed with her BITD. Of course when she came back everyone obsessed over her too. I don't think it's impossible with the show ongoing. Victor Kiriakis and Victor Newman were both toned down over the years (and then ramped back up again) vs. the supervillains or the guy who put his ex's boyfriend in a dog cage. I think the way we've outlined it together in the past makes it doable, if Sonny goes largely white-collar and applies his criminal mind to more straight business or a scheming patriarch role in a reduced capacity while Brenda takes the bulk of A-story (we have discussed this twenty times but I am saying this for the benefit of onlookers lol). I also think it's the only way to preserve MB staying on a revamped or streaming version of the show with his current energy level. But you would have to play it out as a long, long story with Scorpio and co. getting to finally take Sonny down, having his choices as a kingpin humble him and take real losses like another of his many unnecessary kids, etc. Then when he's at bottom, he can receive Brenda in the way a better man could. But this is all abstract and academic.

It's still the main hook for them in the future for me. I just thought Brenda was too pushed as the pretty princess in those years (and I always held a bit of a grudge for her covering up Ned's bigamy to Lois, lol) so I was contrarian about it and preferred Robin, Lois, Luke and Laura, later Carly, etc. I even liked Lily and Miguel! I didn't come around to Brenda more til Jax. Today I appreciate Sonny and Brenda a lot more - they had great stuff.

Well, I was only watching fitfully during that period at best. It was the stuff where they actually had Sonny and Brenda evolving and trying to work out a functional marriage for a brief period that caught my interest most of all, when I had never been a fan of theirs in their heyday (I preferred Ned and Lois and later Jax/Brenda and Sonny/Carly). Rewatching during the pandemic I appreciate the OG Sonny/Brenda romance a lot more now than I did as a kid, when I was more focused on other couples and stories.

I didn't remember that either. Of course Guza had Luke burn it down. They burned all the old homes down!

IIRC Helena took off with hostages on the Star in 2013 too. I am personally still recovering from the revelation that Luke's Club burned down (like so many other landmarks) offscreen and that apparently, in-universe Ava's gallery now sits on its former site.

Young Picard was also a rash daredevil. That's how he ended up with an artificial heart at a young age, stabbed in a barfight. There's a couple TNG episodes devoted to his exploits. That's why they draw that parallel.

Kelli Giddish (Di Henry, AMC) is returning to her long-running role on not one but two L&O shows.

Chavez has been working out!

And they're asking people to pay $20 for 4K. Good luck, Zaslav.

Exactly like her father's character in Star Trek VI.

Extremely dumb.

Spoiler pix appear to have begun leaking from the final two eps. So far it's nothing many of us have not speculated about, but I'm very excited. Although: If I'm right about who I just saw in one of those pix I peeked at, there's one surprise I did not expect. I won't say who/what I am pretty sure it is except to say

For once, she's right.