When I talked about Paramount+'s Picard series, I mentioned how it was one of those where the final act had a lot of the cast just standing around with their thumbs up their asses--metaphorically. And so it got me thinking why this was the case. My conclusion is mostly that they made the problem so big that it was pretty much unsolvable for our heroes.
The final two episodes take place on a mysterious planet in an 8-star solar system, which is something I'm sure would give Neil deGraase Tyson fits. Picard and the misfit crew of the small ship La Sirena crash down on the planet after being attacked by weird flying orchid things. 7-of-9 in a Borg cube also crashes down. Meanwhile a Romulan fleet of 218 warbirds is on the way to destroy them all.
And there's the problem right there: 218 warbirds?! That's really stacking the odds so far in favor of the bad guys that it's impossible for the good guys to do much. Picard is able to stall them with a holoprojection trick for about thirty seconds and then a Federation fleet arrives to stall the Romulans further.
Because there are so many bad guy ships, there really is nothing our heroes can do, hence no real reason to write them anything to do except stand around and wait. Now if you made the odds a little less stacked by only having say 12 warbirds, then maybe our heroes could find some way to stop them. Because the space orchid things could take out a chunk of the warbirds, it would leave just a few against the La Sirena. Picard could still make his heroic sacrifice and still talk Soji down and you wouldn't need such an unbelievable number of Starfleet ships to show up. (I mean, did they even have 200 ships at Wolf 359 or the battle in First Contact or any of those in the Dominon War on DS9?) And a dozen warbirds would still be more than enough to blow up one settlement on a planet. Just one warbird would be enough. Like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica all they need to do is drop some nukes and irradiate the whole place; one ship could easily do that.
The obvious parallel to writing: don't make the odds so great the hero has no chance at all! Sure you want the odds against them, but you don't want it so impossible that the only way out is to have some deus ex machina resolve everything.
1 comment:
218 warbirds is just insane. It was all about making the situation look like it was certain doom for the synths, leaving Soji with two choices. Trust humans or do something drastic and dangerous to save her kind. She proves that her kind are not dangerous. So yes, this meant several characters with nothing to do. It would've been better if they were also involved in saving the day. The series didn't seem to be for people like a lot of action.
I've also noticed that these new Star Trek shows have big stakes. Failure means either the collapse of the universe, or the total destruction of humanoids. It wouldn't hurt for them to tone it down a tad.
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