No matter how long this post may seem, I promise its a Readers Digest version. I edited out most of my rants. Hold on tight, grab a drink, and settle down for my guide to the third season of Star Trek Picard….
Episode One “The Next Generation” Picard’s new sweetheart from season two, the Romulan Laris (who so conveniently lost her husband so that she could fall for Picard in the finale), is instantly dumped/forgotten with the rest of season one and two continuity when Picard receives a plea for help from Dr Beverly Crusher. Crusher is out dallying around the cosmos with her son Jack (see the clue they dropped in the episode title?) doing some kind of missionary work but is being chased down by evil aliens for Reasons Unknown. Crusher warns Picard not to trust Starfleet for more Reasons Unknown, so Picard puts on his Incognito Cap (no, literally, he puts a cap on, maybe its his idea of working undercover) and goes to his old first officer William Riker for help. They attempt to hijack the starship Titan-A under the ingenious pretence of a surprise inspection by two old fossils.
Meanwhile on M’talas Prime, Starfleet Intelligence (oh the irony) officer Raffi totally fumbles an investigation into some stolen tech and watches lots of people die. Finally the Titan-A arrives at Beverly Crusher’s ship to find a wounded Crusher in a stasis pod and her son Jack speaking with a suspiciously British accent. A big alien starship arrives menacingly.
Episode Two “Disengage” Did I mention that Seven of Nine is now an officer aboard the Titan-A? Anyway, the big alien starship, The Shrek, sorry Shrike, attempts to capture Jack for more Reasons Unknown but is thwarted by Seven who justifies her convenient recruitment to the Titan-A by convincing its Captain Shaw to beam Jack and his mum aboard, even though Shaw is too pissed off at Picard and Riker to think about Doing The Right Thing. The Shrek‘s captain is Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction, and she gives chase threatening Very Bad Things. Picard rumbles that Jack is his son (maybe its the inherited British accent). Mind you, didn’t Captain Kirk have a similar situation with his former lover Carol Marcus and their son David? Maybe this kind of thing goes with the territory of being a Captain of an Enterprise. Anyway, more Wrath of Khan references next episode.
But first- back on M’talas Prime the useless idiot that is Raffi totally fumbles an interrogation of a Ferengi suspect but is saved at the last moment by a homicidal Klingon (hey its Worf, hurrah!) who unfortunately beheads the suspect who may have had important information (oh, boo).
Episode Three “Seventeen Seconds” The Shrek has chased the Titan-A into a nebula to reprise the best bits from that second Star Trek movie. Unfortunately the Shrek is somehow managing to stay on the Titan-A’s tail, and Jack and Seven deduce that Honey Bunny is tracking them through a leak in the ship’s plumbing. Its not just bad maintenance at fault either, but sabotage- a member of the crew is a Changeling imposter! Shaw is injured and hands command over to Riker, but unfortunately Riker has suddenly developed a Cowardly streak because he wants to cut and run rather than turn the tables on Honey Bunny.
Meanwhile Worf and Raffi capture another criminal in cahoots with the bad guys and it turns out he’s a Changeling too! Gosh. Shape-shifters. You don’t see any for several seasons of Trek and SUDDENLY THEY ARE EVERYWHERE (I need a Tee-shirt emblazoned with “I’m with Odo” and see how many ‘get’ it). Anyhow, Picard convinces Riker to grow some balls and they fire on the Shrek but the crafty aliens use the stolen portal tech on them to fire it back on the Titan-A, crippling the ship and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Riker blames Picard’s shit tactics and throws him off the bridge while the stricken Titan-A falls into a Deadly Space Anomaly lurking in the heart of the nebula.
Episode Four “No Win Scenario” Riker goes all Bill Paxton (“Game Over, man, its Game Over!”) and sulks some more before grimly advising Picard to get some quality father/son time with Jack before they all die, then the crew works out some technobabble bullshit (an old staple of ST:TNG, so a weirdly authentic plot device) to use energy from the Space Anomaly to recharge the Titan-A’s engines and escape the Anomaly before dropping in a big dose of Fan Service when the Anomaly gives birth to more of those space jelly fish critters from Encounter at Farpoint, the very first TNG episode (bless ’em, these writers are so clever). The crew even manage to damage the Shrek and escape from Honey Bunny. Oh, and Seven tracks down and kills the Changeling saboteur. Hurrah for the good guys.
Episode Five “Imposters” Shaw is feeling much better now so Riker gives him his command back, and Shaw promptly decides to hand Picard and Riker over to Starfleet. Oh you should see their faces. The USS Intrepid arrives and sends a shuttle to pick up Picard and Riker – there’s some bullshit reason I can’t recall as regards why they aren’t transported over but anyway, the writers decide we’ve waited long enough for another TNG cameo so the shuttle’s pilot is none other than Ro, an old member of TNG crew, who drags Picard off to the Holodeck and over a drink and a Bajoran earring informs him Starfleet has gone all to shit and is full of Changeling imposters. Her shuttle is sabotaged on the way back to the Intrepid for no other reason than that she can sacrifice herself to give the Titan-A a chance to escape. The crafty Changelings, perhaps finally realising they can use the teleporter, teleport over to abduct Jack (why couldn’t they, er, just teleport HIM over to THEM?) but Jack develops more Superpowers and kills them all by himself like a one-man killing machine. Meanwhile Worf and Raffi use some hologram bullshit to outwit more conspiracy dudes and we find out from Ro’s Bajoran earring that Raffi was working for Worf, but Worf was working for Ro, and now they are all working for Picard, so hurrah.
Episode Six “The Bounty” Remember the Klingon ship in that movie with the space whales? Well, that’s why this episode has the title it has. And isn’t it a wonder that Star Fleet never thought to use captured Klingon tech to cloak their starships until now? The sound you can hear is all those Star Fleet boffins smacking their heads wailing “why didn’t I think of that!!?”
This episode has so much Fan Service it must put even the dumbest of Trekkies in a tailspin. We get a museum of fan-favourite CGI starships, a graphic of the Genesis Device, a manic Tribble, we got Geordi La Forge, Professor Moriarty, and Brent Spiner in a breathless masterclass of ripping the scenery apart playing Data AND Lore AND Dr Soong, and we’ve even got the lovely Deanna Troi. Dear me, its like we’re at a Star Trek convention. They even throw in an aside that the Institute has Captain Kirk’s body in cold storage (what?). This so-called Research Institute is more like that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I see no indication that its actually a Research Institute at all, to be honest, I mean, there’s no researchers or scientists etc anywhere but hey-ho.
Because dear idiot Raffi still hasn’t figured it out yet, the crew decides they have to break into the research institute to discover what weapon was actually stolen from it. I’m not sure I can get my head around the logic of that but hey, I’m no Spock, so they break in stumble past endless Fan Service and eventually they discover the stolen tech was Picard’s corpse from season one. No, I can’t get my head around that either. Picard donated his original body to science? And what do these boffins want with Kirks body? Mind you, if I get it right, if Starfleet is so infiltrated by Changelings, surely they could have just walked in posing as some major chief of Starfleet and taken it out of the Institute rather than employ a bunch of criminals to break into the unbreakable base to steal it from er, Starfleet? Anyway, seems like this unbreakable base has been broken into twice, now that our good guys have done it so its patently redundant. The plan does go a little awry when Riker is captured by Honey Bunny but its not all bad, he finds out Honey Bunny has Deanna waiting for him in the Shrek‘s brig so they can sort out their marital problems by episode eight.
Episode Seven “Dominion” I can’t believe I’m still watching this, but we’re six episodes in, the end is in sight. So while in the Research Institute the crew stole Data Mark Two (or is it Mark Three, hasn’t Data already died (twice?)) because this Data has all the data (sic) regards the Institute because of course he has, and Geordi does his best to stop Brent Spiner playing two Datas simultaneously but we all know its surely to no avail, Spiner turbo-charges all his acting regardless.
The crew set up a ploy for the Titan-A to pose as a stricken vessel to lure in Honey Bunny and capture her. Hang on, they spend six episodes escaping from her and then… nevermind. Maybe Honey Bunny should have let them capture her in the first place instead of wasting several episodes trying to capture THEM, but hey, they have to stretch the story across ten episodes so hey-ho. Honey Bunny reveals she too is a Changeling, making a desperate plea for audience sympathy by revealing that she was part of a group of captured Changelings who were experimented on and tortured by Nazi Starfleet scientists (that sound you hear is Gene Roddenberry spinning in his grave), before cleverly evolving and killing the scientists and hatching some scheme to take over the known universe, or something (which still involves abducting Jack for Reasons Still Unknown), but Geordi screws up and Spiner launches into Manic Lore Mode, and that little devil Lore decides to free Honey Bunny and she takes the ship over sooner than a guy can ask where the f–k are the security guys. Or the keys to the goddam bridge.
Episode Eight “Surrender” Honey Bunny threatens to kill all the captured crew unless Jack, who she still wants for Reasons Unknown, gives himself up, which he eventually does. But meanwhile Brett Spiner continues to over-act at frankly dangerous levels as Data outwits Lore by giving him his memories or some such bullshit (no it doesn’t make any sense at all) and Geordi then plugs him into the Titan-A and Data ejects Honey Bunny and her cohorts off the ship via a hatch conveniently hidden behind the Bridge viewscreen, killing her, maybe (who knows, with this writing). Poor Honey Bunny.
Anyway, the REALLY important thing is that Riker and Deanna have kissed and made up in time for Worf to save them. Bless him, Worf LITERALLY appears out of nowhere behind an unsuspecting bad guy at just the moment the bad guys seems about to kill Riker and Deanna. This guy always appears as if from nowhere, they must start filming a scene, pause, Michael Dorn step onto the set, then resume filming and Presto! The other actors probably jump out of their our own skins if they’re not privy to it.
Meanwhile true to form idiot Raffi brings knives to a gun fight but the villains conveniently use their swords rather than shooting the shit out of her with the guns they’ve been toting all season, damn it all to hell. So now all the old TNG crew are back together again having a cosy chat in the board room summarising the plot once more for those unable to keep up. Great stuff. But Jack is haunted by Space Madness/ visions of a Red Door and we’ve still got two episodes to go to reveal who Honey Bunny’s evil mastermind boss was and just what is going on with Jack’s increasing superpowers.
Episode Nine “Vox” Its the Borg! Well, it had to be, its like Dr Who and them damned Daleks. Troi goes into Jack’s head and opens the Red Door and discovers nasty Borg on the other side. Everyone tells Jack not to heed the call so of course he does exactly that, dashing off in a shuttle to get captured by the Borg Queen (oh Christ another cameo- they’ve brought Alice Krige back). Turns out this entire season is a sequel to First Contact. Funny thing is, everyone seems to have forgotten the Changelings in just the same way as Picard has completely forgotten his Romulan lover. I miss Honey Bunny already.
The Titan-A races to Earth and the impending Starfleet anniversary party (fireworks in space?) but with Raffi wasting eight episodes of investigations, its too late and the Borg plans reach fruition- every crew member under the age of 25 on every ship of the fleet is suddenly Borgified and kills anybody older than they are in the most egregious display of ageism I’ve ever seen in popular culture this side of Logan’s Run. Instantly the Star Fleet Job Vacancies sheet for ranks higher than Ensign goes through the roof. I kid ye not, the entire fleet is Borgified, and the Titan-A discovers she’s playing gooseberry at a Borg Convention. All the hundreds ships of the fleet adopt a pretty formation and turn on the still-partying Space Dock (why exactly nobody under the age of 25 in the Space Dock is Borgified is a mystery, but hey-ho). Seven and Raffi stay on the Titan-A to fight the good fight and try get control of the ship back, while everyone else flees to Geordi’s Space Museum.
But wait, its time for Fan Service Overload and the one moment that really pissed me off with a whole new level of Star Trek Jumping The (Space) Shark. How many people does it take to build a Galaxy-class starship? Turns out the answer is one, if your name is Geordi La Forge (eat yer heart out, Mr Scott). Yes Geordi takes his Next Generation buddies back to his museum where he unveils… the Enterprise-D! You know, that one blown to pieces and whose saucer section was crashed into a planet in Generations. My jaw was hanging on the floor for a day or two, let me tell you. These writers are really taking the piss giving us a Fan Service masterclass.
The sheer hubris of explaining this away by Geordi casually telling us he assembled the nacelles and engineering hull from some other Galaxy-class ship and rebuilt the saucer from the wreckage that crashed in Generations. Can anybody guess the structural integrity of that saucer section after that crash landing? My first car, a rusty old Mini that was pretty much a shiny blue death-trap, was a much safer bet to pass its MOT than what was left of that saucer. And not only did Geordi pull this off single-handedly, he apparently did this in total secrecy. Let me tell you, in all my years of geekdom my intelligence has never been so brazenly insulted. Of course all the Trekkies the world over give this a pass, but please, wait just a minute, let me go back and watch the Grand Reveal again, so I can quote the sheer gall of the writing: Geordi calmly states “Thank the Prime Directive! The saucer was retrieved from Verdian III, so as not to influence the system. I’ve been restoring it bit by bit over the last 20 years. Engines and nacelles come from the USS Syracuse” and that’s it. That’s all yer gonna get. A galaxy-class starship rebuilt in total secrecy in a space museum that presumably no-one visits, by one dude over twenty years and it doesn’t affect his day job. They enter the bridge and its as good as new, even the damn carpet. It looks gorgeous, admittedly reminding us that every bridge design since TNG looks pretty dire in comparison, but that’s beside the point. Its ridiculous. Its too good to be true. Its space magic.
Well, the Enterprise is back. She launches from the space museum, a galaxy-class starship piloted by the Magnificent Seven who dare to save the Federation from the Borg one more time. Its the Mother of Insane Treks. Those singing hippies in TOS seem rather dull and ordinary in comparison.
Episode Ten “The Last Generation” Hang on, wasn’t the Enterprise crewed by hundreds of people back in the day? There’s nobody in engineering or anywhere else, there’s just the Magnificent Seven piloting this ship now. There’s lights on all over the ship in exterior shots but nobody’s home. Do these huge starships even need people at all anymore? Picard and the Enterprise crew track the Bat Borg Signal that’s Borgifying all the young ‘uns in Starfleet and trace it to Jupiter, and a Borg Cube hiding in the Red Spot of the Jovial Giant. The other Magnificent Seven (the one back on the Titan-A) liberates that ship from the Borgified crew using nifty transporter guns (which I guess will never be seen again), then engages the fleet with the Titan-A’s cloaking device for cover in an attempt to buy Picard more time. Speaking of which, over at Jupiter, Worf, Riker and Picard transport over to the Cube on a mission to find the source of the Borg transmission, during which Picard finds the Borgified Jack and plugs himself into the hive mind to tell Jack he loves him and that Jack should reject that ugly-ass bitch Borg Queen in the corner.
To raise the stakes, the Space Dock falls and with it Earth’s planetary shields, and the Borgified fleet proceeds to target major cities, killing thousands, if not millions. Everyone’s going to have a hard time cheering after this one (you’d think…).
Thanks to Worf and Riker’s heroics the Enterprise locates the beacon controlling the Borgified starfleet, and its one more time down the Death Star trench as Data (“my gut tells me I can do this!”) goes all Luke Skywalker, piloting the Enterprise into the Borg cube like its some kind of X-Wing and NOT a gigantic galaxy-class starship being piloted by (four at this point) brave crew members. Faster than a Millennium Falcon can bomb a Death Star II, the Enterprise races into the core of the Borg Cube, and blasts the transmitter. Picard frees a tearful Jack from the Borg Queen (“you are not his mother!” Picard sagely informs her). On its way out of the Death Star trench, the Enterprise beams up Worf, Riker, Picard and Jack, escaping the Cube before it explodes. With the Borg destroyed once and for all for at least the remainder of this season , the Borgified Starfleet personnel return to normal and stop bombing the shit out of Earth’s cities. Arrest the bastards for treason, forgiveness is too good for ’em.
Proving no lesson can be unheeded and that twenty years work amounts to nothing, the Enterprise is returned to the Fleet Museum and replaced by a renamed Titan-A (well, thats what it looks like), the Enterprise-G, captained by Seven, alongside her idiot lover Raffi (well that proves the depths of the Stafleet vacancy sheet) and Jack, who has raced through his Starfleet exams in a twelve-month crash course. They depart for fresh adventures and a new Star Trek spin-off .
So the Next Generation crew reminisce over drinks (always boozing, these old turks) and after Picard almost sends them to sleep with some Shakespeare they have a game of poker while they wait for the next crisis to hit the Federation of Planets. Finally, in another blatant middle finger to Picard Season One and Two continuity, Jack receives a visit from Q, who was supposed to be dead (remember that big tearful hug with Picard at the end of the last season?), Q, cryptic as ever, says Jack’s trial has just begun… TO BE CONTINUED!
Its also little strange how much The Sleeping City feels like a film hampered by a bad title, because to my mind it doesn’t really fit anything about the film or its story. For all I know, its actually the original title by the writer Jo Eisinger (who also wrote 
I took a quick snap of the disc purchases from the last month or so. Looking at them it looked a little curious, the spread of them- six Blu-rays, six 4K UHD so an even split on formats, there’s a few noir, a few westerns, a television show that I couldn’t (well ok, wouldn’t, paywall and all that) watch on streaming, and a few releases of old films I like/ have watched before. The 4K steelbook of The Green Knight was triggered by a sale on Amazon. I surprised myself by buying the deluxe edition of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, its not a film I’m particularly fond of. I bought a copy on R1 DVD back in that formats early days when I used to import loads of stuff, but it frankly disturbed me so much I only watched it once, maybe twice. But there you go- trust Second Sight to pull me back in. Its a nice set but the book is not as definitive as the one that came with their Dawn of the Dead release, I’d have preferred more variation in the choice of essays/writing, some focus on merchandising maybe or video releases over the years. But certainly as far as the film is concerned, this set is the final word. Five commentaries though: what’s the chance I’ll even manage to get through even one?
I’m enjoying Station Eleven, one of two post-Apocalypse series that I’m currently watching. As suspected, Station Eleven seems very much like The Leftovers, which was itself a wonderful, nuanced show full of fascinating characters. Weird, somewhat obtuse storytelling that demands work from the viewer (I can imagine many switching off in confused droves). I am, however, sadly dubious that a bunch of Americans would reach for Shakespeare as the choice of entertainment for weary survivors. Indulge me for a few moments to have a little fun with this- I mean, sure, that’s what intellectuals would like us to believe, lets aim high with the best of our Culture but surely everyone knows it would more likely be the works of George Lucas and his cohorts, or perhaps even more likely the mythology of DC or Marvel superheroes. That’s the literary zeitgeist most Americans would be more familiar with. Hamlet? Macbeth? Give me a break. It’d be Luke Skywalker or Captain America.
Describing The Last of Us as the best screen adaptation of a videogame seems rather disingenuous and a little on the other side of hyperbole. Certainly the show seems very good, and competently made, and I’m enjoying it (always great to see Anna Torv again) but what I’m getting at is The Last of Us was hardly really a videogame, at least the way videogames are traditionally considered when people claim plaudits like “the best film/tv show based upon a videogame.” This isn’t Pacman or Super Mario. There has been a trend in videogame design over the past decade and longer, that’s been more akin to engineering entertainment narratives, videogame designers pretending to be Hollywood directors and producers. These are games that are really curated sequences of ‘events’ with limited player inputs linked by scripted beats. Player agency is not what one would possibly expect it to be: its actually cleverly curtailed, the player partly participant, partly viewer, in stuff like this. If the game designers want you to go through THAT door, you’re going through that door.
Once a geek, always a geek, it seems… No wonder my wife attests that I never grew up.
All Quiet on the Western Front, 2022, 145 mins, Netflix
Finch, 2021, 115 mins, Apple TV+
Finch doesn’t follow any Nuclear War that those books and films may have envisioned- this apocalypse is partly the result of climate change, a gigantic solar flare and mankind’s hubris in the face of Nature, but the result is much the same. Deserted cities, and most of the animal and plant life dead or dying: its the end of the world.
As a synopsis it maybe seems saccharine, indulgent nonsense and maybe it is, but as both a dog lover and a fan of those 1970s flicks that this film nods to, I appreciated the film immensely. It felt like a breath of fresh air. Mind, I have curiously been watching too many post-apocalyptic shows lately- this week alone I’ve seen the world decimated by a fungus in The Last of Us and a flu pandemic in Station Eleven. Is all this post-apocalyptic stuff some reaction to the Covid pandemic, or just curiously coincidental? Probably the latter (Hollywood has been occupied by this stuff for years, for instance another 1970s classic, The Omega Man and its later reimagining I Am Legend, the Mad Max films etc), but it can’t be denied that this stuff resonates more now than it used to. We’ve sort-of ‘lived it’ now, so we can project our own experiences onto those characters in the fictional narratives.
I bought a few discs last week that I will hopefully also get around to writing about in proper posts. One was the Imprint edition of Jacob’s Ladder; this is one of my favourite films and advance reviews indicated that the HD transfer was an improvement on previous Blu-ray editions, and the extras clearly were, so it seemed a safe purchase. I dipped into the opening sections of the film and it certainly looks pretty good, and the extras really are very good indeed. Its a great release and I look forward to spending some time with it and rewatching the film but I was a bit raw regards its subject matter for obvious reasons (it even arrived on Wednesday, of all days) so its gone on the shelf for a bit.
No doubt that sound you can hear is Studio Canal gearing up to announce a 4K UHD edition in a few weeks… actually, Studio Canal did make a welcome announcement (well for me at least) with news of a 4K UHD edition of Christophe Gans’ Brotherhood of the Wolf. I have no idea what I’ll make of the film watching it again, its been so many years since I last saw it, but this was such a big favourite of mine when I imported it back in the R1 DVD days (so long ago now that I really don’t want to know). Its been as troubled for a decent UK edition over the years as Jacob’s Ladder has been so its rather strange how both of these films suddenly now get new disc releases so close to one another.
Here’s what I watched in week 13 of 2023:
the ghost of 82 