OneMario

It's no secret that the time travel mechanics as portrayed in Picard Season 2 were a little hard to fathom. My goal here isn't to answer every question, I'm not sure that's possible, but to propose a framework for the minimum amount of temporal manipulation you would need to explain the overlapping paradoxes, without resorting to the cheap "Q did it"-style answers (Q actually being responsible for most of this notwithstanding). If this looks familiar, it's because it's basically the same thing I posted on r/Picard last week, with some elaboration.

**tl;dr I think this season is best understood as an orphaned timeloop originally created and abandoned by the Borg that Q attempted to splice

I wanted to try to make some sense out of the timeline shenanigans as presented in Picard Season Two, particularly Q's seemingly random interference in Renée Picard's life. If Q's goal was simply to get Picard to deal with his mother's death, none of the rest of the events seem strictly necessary. And the story we have as presented is Q creating the Confederation future out of whole cloth, which is inconsistent with his attitude and the opposite of what he claims, where he puts the blame on Picard. The alternative is an autonomous predestination paradox, which is fine, but also a little cheap. I think I have come up with a working solution, though despite my grandiose title there are

KASIDY: Let's go home.

SISKO: I can't. Not now.

KASIDY: Why not? Oh, God. This is it, isn't it? The sorrow that the Prophets warned us about.

SISKO: It's difficult to explain. It's not linear.

KASIDY: What isn't?

SISKO: My life, my destiny. The Prophets saved me, Kasidy. I'm their Emissary and they still have a great deal for me to do. But first, there is much to learn. Things only the Prophets can teach me.

KASIDY: When will you be back?

SISKO: It's hard to say. Maybe a year, maybe yesterday. But I will be back.

There are still some lingering questions regarding Sisko's promised return and his apparent abandonment of his family. I would love it if B

I just watched a scene from The Price where Geordi referred to the Barzan Wormhole as a "dry well" and "worthless" when they found out that the far aperture was unstable, but this is absolutely not the case. We know that the Federation sends out long-range probes all the time, the Barzan wormhole would allow them to do that in a way that their probes start 60-80,000 light years away and chart their way back rather than going the other way. The traditional approach likely leaves the Federation with cone-shaped blindspots, where the probes are not allowed or able to travel to the far side of hazards or hostile powers like the Jarada, casting a long shadow of ignorance along that trajectory

Contains Picard s1 spoilers

!I left the title vague to avoid spoilers, but for Picard season 2, could we be dealing with Human-Picard again? If Seven doesn't have her Borg implants, presumably because she was never assimilated, why would this season follow Robo-Picard, as opposed to human Picard who lived a different life? Just a thought. This could be a decent way of dealing with the massive change in his life that was kind of glossed over at the end of the last season, both justifying and grappling with what it means, but at the same time it is Picard himself who is dealing with that reality, not an android duplicate. I think it means more if we see Human-Picard consider the a

In the ridiculously unnamed Star Trek movie from 2009 and its associated materials, there was a lot of backstory concerning the supernova that set the whole thing off. Most of it was a little messy and made no sense, and even less of it made it into the actual film. Now it looks like Picard might be going back and cleaning up the tale somewhat, so I thought it was important to think through exactly why the original supernova explanation was so convoluted in the first place.

In the original tale, the supernova started with the Hobus star, apparently 500 light-years from Romulus, and the destruction propagated through subspace and eventually claimed the twin planets of the Star Empire. T

I was watching the episode Interface, where Geordi's mother disappears, and, naturally, I started to speculate on what happened to her ship, which was lost without a trace.

The two ships weren't lost too far apart. Voyager was lost before stardate 48315.6, while the Hera was lost sometime before 47215.5, not much more than a year earlier. We know Voyager was the last ship taken by the Caretaker, who, according to Neelix, had been taking ships "for months."

We know that the Caretaker took at least two ships out of the Badlands, and likely two more, the Cardassian ship from The Voyager Conspiracy and the Cardassian drone from Dreadnought. So we can identify the Badlands as one of th

One thing that has always bothered me in Trek is the notion of the huge empires on the borders of the Federation that seem to only consist of a single race. This is a big problem with the Klingons and the Romulans, and maybe even the Cardassians, depending on what they meant by "Union." Yes, the Romulans were eventually given the Remans, but that is still a planet in the same system (and might be a related species). Not quite a "Star Empire," unless star was meant in the singular.

Now the obvious reason for this was budgetary constraints, and I can't quarrel with that. But still, I'd like to make an effort on solving the problem of who, exactly, the Romulans have conquered.

First, it's

It occurred to me that, as closely as the show mirrors The Next Generation in tone and style, the bridge crew might have their own version of poker night. I also think, though, that playing poker is a little too on-the-nose, so I tried to find a more Orville-style alternative.

Now poker isn't just a game, it also has dramatic potential with its use of bluffing and tense stand-offs. We know the ship has board games, so you could just replace poker with Monopoly, but you would lose the essence of what makes poker an interesting part of the story for little more than a visual joke. So what we need is a game that can handle a medium-to-large group, involves bluffing and negotiation, but is