space taxi...I didn't mean to watch this.
Well, I did - just as I meant to watch a few of the other new(-ish) trek shows - but I just never got around to it, stuck in my cdrama haze as I was. Weirdly, this year I've slowly started resurfacing from that, without losing my Zhu Yilong addiction, even, and have watched a few shows in English again. No subtitles, what a treat!
What finally made me watch it was
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colls' fanvid
It gets dark (so I can see the stars) (spoilers!), which made it look like a kind of mad dream in space, where all the characters are women.
What can I say? It did not disappoint!
Almost all the important characters are women. Those who are not women are only there in a supporting capacity - except Picard. He really does hold the story together.
more opinions under the ... details thingy (Spoilers for all of season 1)
soji
I'll start with the things I liked:
+ My favorite scene of the whole show was when Agnes propositioned Rios. She gets to initiate, and she gets to doubt herself in the same moment. And when she says she's never "slept with a captain of anything" before, he doesn't pounce or sneer or do anything in the form of a power display, no, he just says "I recommend it", and then assumes she changed her mind, and asks her how she feels, and listens, and only then does she kiss him again, and takes his hands and leads him away.
It has everything I love and could never get from Asian dramas (portrayal of women is not their strength). I know there are a lot of other factors in play between Agnes and Rios, but looking at it purely from the characters' knowledge at that point in time, it's not that problematic. I just love it.
+ My second favorite scene is Doctor Soong saying "you're just like us".
- Of course then he goes and immediately ruins it by playing both judge and executioner and ... I have no idea what exactly he does to her, I hope he just puts her on pause or something.
+ Another thing I really enjoyed was how much of a bumbling old man Picard is in this. He's gotten really old, and everyone fawns over him, but he hasn't quite realized it yet. He's 94, and Patrick Steward is 80, and it shows.
* I also loved how much hubris Picard has, and how it backfires on him *every single time*. He keeps saying "the Federation will listen", but they never do. Basically the only one who does, and who then comes to help, is Riker.
+ I liked how Seven regrets killing the Romulan spy. It was such a common scene for Trek - and it's not like all of them didn't kill a lot of Romulans in the course of the season - to have it put as something morally questionable was a good thing.
that's a lot of ships...
Then there are things I really didn't like:
- pretending that the androids had a choice up until the last minute. They were forced with a hostile fleet and two seconds away from having their whole planet sterilized, but, sure, they had a choice.
- Whenever Soji asked whether the others considered her human, way too few people said yes. They don't, and it's not a good reflection on racism. Or maybe it's not supposed to be, but they weren't accepted as their own species, either.
- the fact that Deanna told Picard that they can't lose their daughter, implying that he put her in danger, but then Will Riker goes and heads a fleet against the Romulans. They should/would/could all have died.
* In general, the whimsy of Star Trek shines through all of it. Things I never liked, and like less the older I get: military titles, military posturing, pretending war is a game.
- the higher synthetic life forms looked very Lovecraftian. All of that talk about fear not being a good teacher, and then making them look like a nightmare. I thought that was sloppy storytelling.
i love hugh!
Then there are a lot of things in between:
* I loved seeing all the old characters again. Especially Hugh. Sadly, there were no Vulcans.
* I'm not sure about what they're saying about death. Agnes killed her mentor and lover and she's obviously mentally unstable through a lot of the season, and everyone's like "oh sure, you were temporarily insane, it's fine". Data asked Picard to kill him and it was accepted without question. Deanna and Will grieving for their dead son was well done. Death definitely is a major topic on the show, and maybe just showing a lot of it (and not in the shoot-em-dead way) is all they wanted to do? Maybe I'm also just too ill/headachey to analyze it properly.
* They resurrected Picard without asking him. That is something you Do Not Do. He died of natural causes, come on.
* But: they invented immortality. Of the kind Peter F. Hamilton has in his novels - people keep growing new bodies and then have their consciousness transferred when the old one dies. Effectively immortal. I'm sure the're going to ignore that going forward.
* The Romulans weren't uniformly shown as killers. I found it especially powerful that Picard was trying to save them but was betrayed by the Federation. That was a relatively nuanced portrayal, I thought.
* I had to laugh at the most extreme example of hubris Picard showed in the whole season: when he pulled down the "Romulans only" sign from the tavern and sat down at a table, expecting to be served. And then proceeds to almost get himself killed. What did he expect was going to happen? O_O Is that how old white men think racism should be countered?
* I still want the (male) Romulan spy to be a good guy. It's not realistic, and I'm not proud of it. I'm just a sucker for fictional romance.
* I loved the space orchids. Not that Picard would have managed to pilot a ship through that mayhem, but the flowers were still very cool.
pastoral borg cube
All in all, I enjoyed it. It had a lot of good female characters, and the mystery was well done, and Picard himself was less overbearing and more tongue-in-cheek than I expected. 4 out of 5 stars.
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