Picard 2x09 - 'Hide and Seek' ~~ { ** Spoilers Within ** }

Her tech is the same as Gary 7s who was from the 20th century but gifted the tech by powerful aliens. Any tech not Laris has would be theirs and not an indication of Romulan tech.

Well, that was just not very good. And the Emergency Combat Hologram, sigh.

Episode 10 ends with Picard stepping out of a sonic shower.

I enjoyed the Picard mother back story parts.

The bits with the Borg guards and green gun sights was just really poor stuff.

The lonely Borg stuff makes no sense since they are all about perfection like the Omega Particle. Literally nerfed the Borg threat. Borg were about the collective and endless assimilating in the quest for perfection. Ah sure we'll see how it turns out.

Needs more Q. Presuming we get a lot of him next week.

It feels like this season has committed multiple sins of introducing potentially excellent plot threads, and then just dropping them in favor of doing the next thing:

Earth Confederation: An excellent antagonist who could have been a good continious threat thoughout the season if they had a Conferderation team also turn up in 2024, trying to prevent Picard & Co from destroying their future. Mostly dropped entirely when they got to 2024.

The Borg Queen: Potential return to form for the Borg Queen, with her loose in a densely populated American city. Turns into little more then Jurati wandering the town eating batteries and breaking the odd window. Whole Borg dropped after they get a good talking to, and promise to be nice.

Guinan: Potential exploration of Guinan's past. The El-Arian is instead used for social commentary and mostly dropped.

Q: Potentially great villain of the show as an unhinged and dying member of the Q-Continuum. A call-back to his menacing introduction in TNG. He barely turns up in half of the show, and I almost get the feeling that they forgot about him.

Soogn & The Eugentics Wars: Potential setup for the Eugentics Wars which could have a good link to the Earth Confederation (if Khan etc..had won). They instead use him as an excuse to include Soji's actress in this season and becomes a cartoon villain with his "Borg" sidekicks. They should have leaned into a Khan origin there.

Picard himself: When we started the flashbacks, I was imagining a much better character development arc than what we got. I had hoped that this would serve as a book-end to Picard's story, the source of his desire to join Starfleet as well as a reason why he stayed away from romantic partners. Yvette Picard's fate could have been used as a driving force for this, but instead introduced a tragic end for her that didn't really feed into Picard's character arc I feel. The fact that this plot has been crammed into 1 season, instead of 2 seasons as I had expected originally means that it's now too late. What's worse is that they had used a lot of screen time teasing the same reveals again & again, when they didn't have that much time to waste.

Red Letter Media didn't hate the first few episodes in their earlier reviews of Season 2, but pointed out a concern that many of the long list of producers in the credits were the same as Season 1. While still hoping for the best I was afraid of this myself. These writers are frustratingly inept at their jobs, and I fear that this week's finale might add Season 2 to an unfortunately growling list of Trek seasons I will not bother re-watching.

As of this week we will have more shows for this era then Bermantrek although at least this era varies the shows more. LD and PRO can't really be classed as a group with live action like Bermantrek.

I definitely felt the last break was good for the show.

I've come to realize I actually don't like or care about way more Trek than I love. TNG, DS9 and most of the movies are about all I care about from the before time. Voyager had the odd episode and ENT was crap. TOS I appreciate as a show of it's time but don't really watch it. LD is the only current show I will remember exists in a year.

A big thing for me with people like RLM is when they say "they are done with it" will they stop reviewing or just hate watch. For the life of me I do not understand hate watching.

In fairness to RLM, they do stop watching shows when they get sick of them. They hadn't watched / reviewed Season 3 or 4 of Discovery, despite that probably being an easy draw for viewers. (I loved their hilarious roasting of Discovery Season 2). They don't seem to be like the Nerdrotics / Midnights Edges / Doomcocks of the world where their entire MO is to bemoan stuff and conflate bad production work as some kind of Culture War exercise. That kind of hate-watching is just exhausting. At least with RLM there appears to be an attempt at a light-heart yet cyincal banter about all of the silly choices made in the writing, mostly done for a bit of a laugh by the feel of things. I guess if they feel like they can't do that, they don't bother.

Picard's experience in best of Both Worlds basically lasted a few hours, but had numerous episodes and even a movie calling back to it.

He was supposed to have lived an entire lifetime in the Inner Light, and he just went back to normal for the next episode? I know it's a TV show and we shouldn't hyper analyse this stuff but it always annoyed the hell out of me

It's like never seeing them go to the toilet, it's so mundane we we don't need to see it. I think First Contact was the first time those bodily functioned were even referenced.

More like 50 surely? It was 30 years ago, so Patrick Stewart would've been around 50 then, and I don't think they consciously made Picard a different age that i can remember.

I was the same as JayRoc after I first saw it alright, where the weight of what had just happened to him felt absolutely massive to me, so it was a bit weird to just not come up again. Like, he raised children, and grandchildren, and spent however many remaining decades with his wife, and that was all suddenly just gone. Even just the fact that he'd have to go back through ~30 years of this other life's memories to get back to the Picard memories from before. At the time as a young fella I was thinking, "christ, he'll need to be retrained and everything - he's been out of command for decades!"

But yeah, with all the incredible trauma we know he's already been through between one thing and another, it's hard to see this repressed childhood memory they're now exploring as being a worthwhile story creation. If they had to do a backstory, using one more focused on some past relationship would've felt more fitting I think.

Part of me wonders if they just decided they wanted to end up with this big action set piece off in this big old house in the middle of nowhere, and then worked backwards to justify it and try to give it some weight with the memory stuff.