>Picard Season 1 and 2 were absolute garbage

Hard disagree. So many people hated it just for the fact that it actually tried something a little bit new, without having any kind of cogent criticism other than "Its just bad! BAAD BAAAD!"

> SNW was finally good but the only Star Trek show that actually tried to be Star Trek.

SNW was okay, but let's not pretend that six good episodes out of ten is setting any kind of records.

> Picard Season 1/2 were downright awful.

Both those seasons were way better than season 2+ of Discovery.

> I can imagine believing this if you watch a ton of bad boilerplate TV

So ChatGPT can probably take over for 911 Lone Star?

DS9 had the benefit of a separate showrunner and writers IIRC, but yes, the TNG crew were essentially trying to double-up handling both TNG and Generations at the same time.

That said though, the writers have also talked about how after seven seasons they were basically running out of plotlines, finding it increasingly difficult to come up with something that they either hadn't already done, or it had been decided previously that they weren't going to do.

I'd say the two best I know are Star Trek Discovery's "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" and Agents of SHIELD's "As I Have Always Been."

Unlike so many other shows doing this trope, neither of them wastes the viewer's time walking you through the same events slowly getting you into the idea. They know the viewer isn't stupid, and they trust that you're going to follow along, allowing them to dive right into the plot. They also take great advantage of NOT showing every single loop, allowing them to move the plot forward faster and make the most out of the episode's length.

IIRC he's mentioned that he didn't even really unpack his bags for six months.

"Chaos on the Bridge" is a great documentary on the disaster zone that was the creation of Star Trek TNG, and the first couple seasons of its production before it found its footing.

Yeah, most of the rest of us feel that way too.

It's the desperate need by the GOT haters to oppose everything about the show.

He's a man in his 60s who hasn't seen real combat in more than a decade, and he took down 11 men before he was killed.

People still whining about this are just desperate to find something to complain about in the show.

It's Dean Devlin, what do you expect? The guy has made a career out of mostly bad movies that ignore logic and science.

And it's not like he hasn't been the lead actor in one of the biggest shows out there since 2019.

I do that with most shows that I want to see. I like not being stuck to anyone else's schedule and taking things at my pace. Sometimes that means 3 episodes in a night, sometimes it means I don't touch something for months. It's my choice.

Pre-streaming days sucked until DVRs were available.

I stopped after episode two, honestly. With no second season, the girl getting her dad back seems like as good a place to leave it as any.

For being a small player in streaming and needing to curry favor, AMC+ certainly seems intent on telling its viewers to go fuck themselves.

When Stellan Skarsgaard's character shows up, things are about to get serious.

It's more convenient right up until it isn't. When you were looking at two to four streaming services--say Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and HBO--it was convenient.

When you're looking down the barrel of eight to ten streaming services to get the same amount of content, there's going to be a sharp rise. Especially with services like HBO and the like now farming out a bunch of their content to smaller streamers.

Let's rephrase it: one in ten adults ADMITTED to pirating content.

> Check out a god walks into a bar from watchmen.

Technically it's "A God Walks Into Abar". It's a pun.

> Right and TNG both the series and movies never showed a relationship with the two of them beyond captain/crewman.

I wouldn't agree with that. Data routinely went to Picard for a lot of things. Picard's the man who was teaching him humanity through acting. The man who stood between Data and Starfleet first when they wanted to experiment on Data, then when they wanted to experiment on his daughter. Data was more than anyone else responsible for saving Picard from the Borg. And Data sacrificed himself to save Picard's life.

> It doesn't line up at all with his explanation in the Firefly pilot.

It also doesn't line up with his downplaying of River's mental talents, when he's been expressly told by the project head that she was a psychic. But it makes perfect sense if you consider he's trying to cover that fact up, along with the lengths that he went to to break her out.

There's a one-hour documentary called "Chaos on the Bridge" which is all about the inception and first few years of Star Trek The Next Generation. It's a really fascinating look inside what was very nearly a trainwreck. Between Roddenberry being more than a little off the rails, and the sheer anarchy that ensued when nobody knew what to do, it's insane. One part talks about how the show had hired and fired over thirty writers just in the first two seasons.

> Honor is a Mary Sue, clearly. Just because a character is such doesn't have to mean they're not fun or interesting to follow along with

I would agree with both those statements. That said, the big problem I had with the series (besides Weber's very obvious tendencies toward inserting his personal politics) and the reason I gave up on it was that everything goes right for her.

You can have a character who's overpowered, better than others, and even just out and out perfect, but when you then feel the need to make all their enemies stupid, and everyone else fawn over them, and everything just happen to work out in their favor, it kills any real dramatic tension. Having a character overcome superior odds through cleverness and skill is great; having them overcome superior odds because their enemies are idiots who just happen to do everything exactly wrong is boring.

Because then you'll be paying them $21 per month, of course.

What, you're shocked that Amazon is greedy?

I'm glad that Google is at least trying. The problem with Google though is that they entrust making choices about content to an algorithm, and eventually people find ways to beat it. Like when they started measuring the time people spent on a site as an indicator of content quality, and sites started throwing a ton of fluff at you before they got to the actual information to prolong your visit. (If you've ever wondered why some sites/articles have a recap of the entire history of Samsung before some bit of news about the newest phone, or a long rambling personal story before a recipe for biscuit dough... that's a big reason why.) If there's a way to exploit the rules, people will find it. So I guess you could say I'm on the skeptical side to any kind of automated solution; machine learning only goes so far against human cleverness.

> Curious: what career did you segue too after tech journalism?

To be perfectly honest, I started taking entry level factory jobs to make ends meet. I'm currently looking for another of those, because I don't expect any of the copywriting jobs I've applied for to come through for me, nor any of the remote customer service stuff. So that, and hoping that my next novel meets some success.

In principle, it sounds good. The problem is that laws are made generally by people who have no idea about how technology works. And even when they do, they don't want to. We're still struggling with laws for something as basic as network neutrality.

There's also a lot of wiggle room that would make it difficult for a one-size-fits-all law to cover and, more importantly, enforce. You'd be looking at needing some kind of agency that actually made sure the rules were followed and settled disputes.

Maybe it could be done on a good faith basis, the way that groups like the Writers Guild of America arbitrate cases among members. If you could get Google and a few other big players on board, you might have a groundswell. But there's a lot of incentive for big tech companies not to want to stop the free circulation of content when the only people they're really hurting are writers and readers, not themselves.