Picard season 2 (spoilers maybe unmarked)

[Morrus]

So the really odd thing, within universe, is that Rios and Raffi both have their own crews who have possibly been transported to this timeline and neither of them bother to check up on any of them at all.

Who says they didn't?

I sometimes feel like the sheer volume of things fans demand be explicitly explained to them would utterly ruin a show and its pacing. Do we really need to know the details of these things, given that they don't push the narrative forward at all? Can't we just accept the story as they chose to tell it without being spoon-fed every background detail?

 

[Mezuka]

Who says they didn't?

I sometimes feel like the sheer volume of things fans demand be explicitly explained to them would utterly ruin a show and its pacing. Do we really need to know the details of these things, given that they don't push the narrative forward at all? Can't we just accept the story as they chose to tell it without being spoon-fed every background detail?

I call it the Harry Potter Syndrome, in which each book became thicker because fans demanded to know more about minor characters who had served their purpose and were not needed to go forward.

 

[Morrus]

I call it the Harry Potter Syndrome, in which each book became thicker because fans demanded to know more about minor characters who had served their purpose and were not needed to go forward.

The end result is Solo: A Star Wars Story, where everything down to Han Solo's underpants gets explicitly explained.

 

[Mezuka]

The show is boring and predictable. Nothing new, move along, this is not the sci-fi show you are looking for.

 

[Mezuka]

The end result is Solo: A Star Wars Story, where everything down to Han Solo's underpants gets explicitly explained.

And Lando's wardrobe of capes!

 

[MarkB]

Anyone else find it really odd that Soji isn't even mentioned after the crew finds themselves in the changed timeline?

Everyone else is tracked down even though some are nowhere near each other. But the person with the positronic brain that can, almost certainly, perform the calculations needed for the time jump, without any of the borg queen drama, isn't even brought up?

Seems like a glaring omission by the writers to not even bring her up (even if it's to exclude her being able to help or to state that she wasn't created in this timeline or something)!

The only people who retained their memories of the original timeline were those who were on one of the ships adjacent to the Borg space-rip when things went wibbly. That doesn't include Soji, who stayed behind at her Deltan diplomatic event when Dr Jurati was picked up.

So, even if she exists in the alternate timeline and they do find her, they're strangers to her, and she has no reason to help them break her timeline.

 

[Hades#2]

I enjoyed the 1st season more than this season. I don't mind time travel stories if they are done well. This one is not. It reminds me of the Voyager episode when the crew were in the past. One moment Janeway couldn't type on a keyboard and the next she was typing like a pro. The crew should not be able to easily figure out and use our current level of tech.

 

[Ryujin]

The only people who retained their memories of the original timeline were those who were on one of the ships adjacent to the Borg space-rip when things went wibbly. That doesn't include Soji, who stayed behind at her Deltan diplomatic event when Dr Jurati was picked up.

So, even if she exists in the alternate timeline and they do find her, they're strangers to her, and she has no reason to help them break her timeline.

And the odds that a secret culture of synthetics somehow survived the purges of an ultra paranoid totalitarian regime would seem to be vanishingly small.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Who says they didn't?

I sometimes feel like the sheer volume of things fans demand be explicitly explained to them would utterly ruin a show and its pacing. Do we really need to know the details of these things, given that they don't push the narrative forward at all? Can't we just accept the story as they chose to tell it without being spoon-fed every background detail?

I was just saying that within universe what happened to those crews is the bigger question than "where's Soji?"

But I guess now that you bring it up, I disagree, and this has nothing to do with me needing to be "spoon-fed every background detail". I think characters should be written with consistent believable behavior. It's one thing to have inconsistent character motivations when you are trying to corral the characters together to tell a particular story in the context of an episode in a series where episodes are expected to each tell mostly self-contained stories in a rigid time frame (ie: pre-streaming Trek). I've done enough writing to know that it's hard to make characters do what you want them to, and I'll forgive some inconsistencies when writers are working within tight constraints.

It is quite another thing to be inconsistent in the context of a show in this era, where they have a whole season to tell a story (in episodes that themselves it seems can vary by about 10 minutes in length), to needlessly make two of the characters somewhat implausibly reinstated as starship captains (Starfleet is full of great officers, I don't think they need to reactivate retired ones with checkered pasts) and then have them drop their responsibilities to their crews (which Trek has trained us to know that starship captains put the highest priority on) as soon as that element of their characters was inconvenient to the story they wanted to tell. They had a timeskip in part to give them lot of leeway to put the characters wherever they wanted to set up the season, so I'm going to hold them to a standard of positioning them for the story they want to tell.

I can maybe buy that Rios would just quietly decide to himself that the best thing he could do for his crew was get with the time travel plan, or make whatever attempts he made to contact them without ever mentioning it to anyone else. That seems reasonably consistent with his character. But I really don't don't buy that Raffi would have a lost crew and constrain her efforts to help them to going along with the plan, which she is otherwise pretty vocal about not liking, or that she would otherwise stay mum about the issue. Not that I need more complaining from Raffi, which is what I suspect acknowleging that the crew of her ship is lost in fascist future would consist of. But the solution, if they didn't want to explore this aspect of the character, was to not needlessly put her in a command position when they could have easily worked her into the story in myriad other ways.

 

[MarkB]

I can maybe buy that Rios would just quietly decide to himself that the best thing he could do for his crew was get with the time travel plan, or make whatever attempts he made to contact them without ever mentioning it to anyone else. That seems reasonably consistent with his character. But I really don't don't buy that Raffi would have a lost crew and constrain her efforts to help them to going along with the plan, which she is otherwise pretty vocal about not liking, or that she would otherwise stay mum about the issue. Not that I need more complaining from Raffi, which is what I suspect acknowleging that the crew of her ship is lost in fascist future would consist of. But the solution, if they didn't want to explore this aspect of the character, was to not needlessly put her in a command position when they could have easily worked her into the story in myriad other ways.

Of everyone in the team, Raffi has the strongest motivation to get out of their current situation as fast as possible. She may have other friendships aboard the Excelsior, but one of her deepest friendships, and certainly her strongest sense of responsibility, is her mentoring relationship with Elnor. And in the alternate timeline he's a member of a dissident group for whom standing orders are "execute on sight".

From literally the first moment she catches up with him he's living on borrowed time, and absolutely everything she does is dedicated to keeping him alive for just a few minutes longer. She doesn't have time to go checking in with other members of her crew, and in her position of police officer she'd have no excuse to do so anyway. Picard's plan may not seem the most rational to her, but it's the plan with the best chance of getting Elnor out of harm's way quickly, so she goes along with it.