Seven/Raffi for the win!I’m mrs_javert over on ao3 and part of the online ‘Voyager rewatch gang’ with fellow ao3-ers Troodster1972 & PetitePhilomath :)
rewatching picard s3 (ep 2 rn) and i have thoughts
i actually sympathise with shaw a lot more this time around. just playing by the rules and getting through the day with the lives of 500 in your hands. like, he's not a hero and that is okay!!! god knows it takes so much energy to go all out and rebel and live with the consequences aand bro does not have that. and that is FINE. he's doing his best.
deadnaming aside ofc
not to diagnose him with Like Me but i'm thinking thoughts about shaw having me/cfs. just thoughts.
conversely i hate jack crusher even more this time round lmao. like wow he really is a cringe mary sue oc and we just allowed that.
i'm ambivalent about holo engineer shaw in legacy but can we boot jack crusher out the airlock at earliest convenience
like the picard's son plotline is so uncreative and cringey. there's nothing his character brings that cannot be filled by soji and elnor combined. elnor could have been working with beverly as Qowat Milat!! or even soji!
or beverly could have gone solo i literally dgaf
and if you're going to be uncreative and fuck around with the borg again, SOJI HAS LITERALLY BEEN WORKING WITH THEM IN S1. like if anyone is set up for a dormant borg virus it's her.
and lord knows you aren't going to pay either of them equal to what you pay a cis white man so there literally was no reason to boot the two of them to introduce jack
i just??? he is so useless???
sorry gang i am feeling feelings and the feeling is salt
There’s a lot of things that annoy me about Picard Season 3, and one that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere is the decision to ‘reveal’ that Picard’s Irumodic Syndrome wasn’t real and was actually faked as part of the big conspiracy.
I always felt the decision to give Picard a terminal neurological disease in the All Good Things future was tragic but felt somehow appropriate - that despite all the adventures and heroic things he did, in the end, he is just a man, and suffers the same frailties as any of the rest of us. Star Trek’s always been a fundamentally humanist story, and so having its heroes die and fall ill from something so mundane felt right. Sarek falls victim to Vulcan Alzheimer’s, Yar dies so abruptly while carrying out her duties, Kirk is shot saving a civilization he’ll never meet and will probably never know his name. Star Trek isn’t about being an immortal hero, it’s about being the best human while still keeping our humanity - and that does mean that the character’s stories don’t form perfect narratives, they have the messiness and seemingly ignoble failures of real people.
So taking that aspect of the character away from Jean-Luc Picard and making it a plot point that he never really had that frailty feels like the wrong direction, and just another aspect of Picard gradually moving away from presenting the TNG characters as flawed humans and more and more as perfect heroes. I think it was the wrong choice.
I think that the reason why Picard season 3 ended up being so popular in spite of the fact that 2023 really seems to be the year when the film-going public turned on the Nostalgia Industrial Complex was because TNG-era Trekkies had never really been pandered to like that before. The trailer for the first season of Picard kind of teased at it ("Look, it's the "Captain Picard Day" banner from "The Pegasus"! Look, it's Seven of Nine! Look, it's Riker! Look, it's a Borg Cube! Oh Holy Crap, It's Data!!"), but the actual series initially tried very hard to be its own thing (which I actually think accounts for a lot of the hyperbolic hatred for that season in spite of it being actually pretty good on its own merits); but season 3 promised nothing but TNG nostalgia and delivered very little else and that made it...good, if you belong to a certain very vocal subset of the Star Trek fandom.
I do, however, think that this will wear very thin very quickly if Legacy offers nothing but nostalgia.
"Picard season one was the best series of the show. It actually had something to say. No disrespect for the folks who liked s3 but I think their nostalgia glasses were on. Some of the inane mistakes our crew made just for the sake of half-baked plot drama drove me up a wall and honestly felt disrespectful to TNG and Trek overall. Where was the ingenuity? The philosophy? The heart? Season one had all those things, and was a keen allegory for political issues facing many of us today. I don’t believe it’s irreconcilable to have interesting action and the exploration of serious ethical/philosophical quandary but Picard sure made it seem like it was either one or the other! And I just think it sucks that so many people seem to be reinforcing that."
A recent Seven/Raffi commission for @theofficeghey <3 thanks again!
[Image ID: a digital painting of Raffi Musiker and Seven of Nine from Star Trek Picard. They are shown from the waist up. Raffi is slightly behind Seven with her arms wrapped around Seven's arm. Her chin is resting on Seven's shoulder and they are smiling at each other. Seven's implant covered hand is resting on Raffi's in a gentle caress. The background is slight purple and blue. End ID]