It seems like mystery box-writing to me, because the show presents us first with Picard blowing up during an interview, then some flashbacks. It’s colouring around the contours of Picard’s grief, giving us bits and pieces in a way that doesn’t directly confront the impact it had on Picard.

Yes, he does. Funny how they’ve now both worked on big scifi franchises, Chabon has Star Trek, and Mitchell The Matrix.
Question now is when is Star Wars getting a novelist?

Oh absolutely, The Orville looks and sounds like a TNG knock off.
It reminds me a lot of Babylon 5 in the way that like that show you can so clearly see the things from Star Trek it’s riffing on; they both have their own versions of Klingons for example.
I wonder if the leap to Hulu is going to be used as a chance to…

Was it a holodeck? On a ship with a complete backup holocrew there are probably emitters in every cabin and deck. You could make each cabin look whatever way you want.
My question is, how big is that ship? We’ve gotten no sense of scale for it yet. It looks like a runabout with added bits, but it’s clearly a lot bigger…

TNG definitely had a somewhat heightened/stylised tone, in which the language and behaviour of the characters seemed entirely natural. Part of that came from Roddenberry’s influence, and part of it was the restrictions of broadcast tv.
That’s why the TNG-movies already felt different from the show.
Replicating that…

Yeah, I can see that. Chabon is a fascinating writer because he so clearly loves the genre-entertainment of his youth, and it has influenced him deeply. I don’t know a lot of authors who can switch back and forth between the modes of serious literary fiction and genre entertainment without trivialising either of them.

I can’t help but feel that they should have saved up whatever story they’re telling with Soji, and then held off the reveal of her existence until later in the season. Right now a lot of this feels like filler, because they’re waiting until later in the season for stuff to actually happen.

This episode definitely felt the most Chabony, of the episodes so far. The old Romulan warbird, and the name of the Romulan warlord sounded very Edgar Rice Burroughs, it had a kind of the old-fashioned pulpy feel to it that he seems to love.

I also wonder how used Picard is to failure (on that level), this is a man who in his prime saved whole worlds from certain doom, who changed the course of history with the force of his convictions.
It’s no surprise he retreated after experiencing such a profound failure.
Where the flaw is, I think, is in the writing.…

I wonder if part of that is that Whitaker probably wasn’t much of a Doctor Who fan the way Capaldi and Tennant were, so her approach to the role is a little less personal. She’s coming at this as a job, and seems to have based her performance to some degree on Tennant’s take.
So coupled with the lack of consistency in…

I mean The Orville looks pretty terrible most of the time (sets are too brightly and flatly lit, awful uniforms, etc), but they have at least created a cohesive bunch of starships.

The Disney Star Wars movies are a good example of how to expand and update an older property (although Star Wars benefited from being made…

From an interface-design point of view Minority Report really has a lot to answer for. It’s also silly that they decided they needed to alter the perfectly usable concept of the Okudagram this much. With current technology they could have made those come alive in a way that would seem fresh and futuristic in a way…

I mean that stuff would be at least 40 years old by now, and the costs of storing it probably outweighed other concerns. What’s a shame though is that nobody on the current design teams seems to have really considered the aesthetics of Star Trek. Discovery and Picard do a lot to pay homage to their legacy, but it’s…

I really like Michael Chabon as a writer, but I have my doubts about how his skills translate to the screen. Especially combined with notorious hacks like Kurtzman and Goldman.

I don’t have an issue with a ‘ten hour movie’, the problem is that the show needs to pick what it wants to be, a slow portrait of Picard in…

Okuda is one of those people who was crucial to Star Trek’s success without most people even noticing. The design team on TNG and DS9 were fantastic within the confines of what they had. And what they had was mostly a warehouse filled with props, costumes and sets left over from the movies.
It’s to their credit that…

It looks like any show these days, no worse no better. Things look overdesigned because you can do anything in cgi these days. Concept artists all use the same computer programs to model everything in 3d, so everything is overly complicated. Limitations like budget and technology can be very helpful, without them you…

Not to mention her fortuitously timed arrival.

The advantage of this being the Peak tv-era is that we have a lot of points of comparison for serialised storytelling. There are shows that succeed at telling a story across a season, Orphan Black did a pretty good job of it for the most part, and the key is, unsurprisingly, telling decent stories in each episode.
Picar…

We never really saw a lot of life on earth though, and nothing so far really conflicts with that vision of society.
Really though what’s happened is that Star Trek’s future was shaped by the blithely optimistic consumer society of America in the nineties, and the current landscape is too bleak to not be reflected in…

No, but you should know better.