#the end is the beginning

[hannahstanwald]

4 years ago today :(

#dark netflix #dark 2017 #mikkel nielsen #michael kahnwald #daan lennard liebrenz #baran bo odar #jantje friese #dark #tv series #tv shows #the end is the beginning #mikkel my beloved

[demclocks]

#Youtube #rebirth #death is the only ending for the villainess #The end is the beginning #Letting go

[nugothrhythms]

"Upside Down in the Air" by Oslo, Norway-based cold electro post-punk band Mirror of Haze off of their 2021 album The End is the Beginning

#post punk #electro post punk #coldwave #alternative #Mirror of Haze #Upside Down in the Air #The End is the Beginning #music #2021 #Norwegian goth #Oslo Norway #darkly inclined #Bandcamp

[biblioflyer]

Classism? In MY Star Trek? The Raffi Controversy, Picard Rewatch s1e3

Raffi's digs at Chateau Picard strike the ear as rather meta and ill fitted to the setting, but is there validity there? If so, how? If not, then what are we to make of these digs?

This is part of a series of essays reevaluating Star Trek Picard and interrogating the widely held fandom criticism that Picard made the Federation into a Dystopia.

Raffi will make snide remarks about Chateau Picard twice in this episode, once in the flashback and again in the present, fourteen years later comparing it to her “hovel.” Many a fan has bristled at these remarks. 

Isn’t the Federation, or least Earth, post scarcity? Isn’t acquisition and greed supposed to be beyond the average human? Shouldn’t Raffi be satisfied with her actually quite pleasant home in a remote area? I myself am rather envious, the view is magnificent and having that much space for just yourself seems incredible.

If you’re a longtime fan like I am, these comments don’t have the best brain feel. At face value they imply that materialism still exists in Federation society. They hint at the ongoing existence of social status drawn from possessions rather than affinity or merit. There are other references that also imply money may be a thing: Riker’s comment about Guinan “hawking” Enterprise models, Shaw’s reference to pay grades.

If you’re inclined to dislike the series for other reasons, the obvious explanation is that the writers are lazy and have accidentally or on purpose retconned a market economy back into the Federation because they can’t imagine an alternative that would be legible to the audience. It is looked upon as an unwelcome and immersion breaking intrusion of modern class politics into a setting that is supposed to be depicting a classless society.

I will accept that I may be wrong and am engaging in head canon, but I choose to interpret these references as largely symbolic or turns of phrase that are still in use out of linguistic habit rather than their literal meanings. Such as how “take a crap” is derived from the John Crapper toilet. Star Trek’s “warp speed” gave its name to a fast paced effort to develop a vaccine. Weird experiences are still compared to the Twilight Zone. 

I take Raffi’s comments as reflecting a much deeper wound relating to her sense of self worth and Chateau Picard is just a convenient symbol she can gesture at. It’s a convenient handle she can attach to the hyperobject that is her pain. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but people when they are angry often don’t lash out at the exact thing they’re angry about, they lash out at a symbol of it or something that was their breaking point.

Raffi may also just genuinely think it's unfair that an entire vineyard can be a family heirloom. She wouldn’t be the first person to scoff at this. Many a fan has asked uncomfortable questions about how this is fair in a supposedly classless society and through what social and legal structures is the Picard family afforded the privilege to pass the Chateau down generation to generation? 

Raffi is definitely a believer in the Federation’s values, in season two she will be harshly critical of 21st century LA and its inequality.

Perhaps she’s actually a bit of a radical even by Federation standards and does have a simmering issue with what she sees as a contradiction in the Federation that comes raging to the surface when she gets mad. Whereas I think there are arguments you can make that would answer some of the challenges presented by Chateau Picard in a decent enough way without having to reinvent class.

Finally, it bears repeating: hurt people hurt people. The way they lash out doesn’t always make sense because the point isn’t to make a coherent argument about the secret classes hiding within a supposedly classless society, it's to ensure everyone else knows that they’ve hurt you.

#star trek picard #star trek picard rewatch #picard s1e3 #the end is the beginning #star trek ethics #raffi musiker #star trek economics

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

Stream of Passion ► The End is the Beginning (official video)

#marcela bovio #stream of passion #The End is the Beginning #Youtube

[enigma-the-mysterious]

In Season 1, Picard calls Cris "Starfleet to the core" despite having no connections to the organization for 10 years

No way is he going to abandon his crew during a moment of crisis over a woman. That's not a Starfleet man, that's a fuckboy

#cristobal rios #santiago cabrera #picard #star trek #star trek picard #original post #not incorrect quotes #stp #jean luc picard #sir patrick stewart #patrick stewart #teresa ramirez #sol rodriguez #season 1 episode 3 #the end is the beginning

[incarnateirony]

Let me help a few people chugging into the station late here.

The corporate god unplugged the old show.

The story isn't over.

Now the rebels have the airwaves. No bloated machine telling it anymore, just dean's own pen, a shuffled tape deck, and the old radio stations.

Thanks for catching up.

And i oop.

Please, do not be alarmed, remain calm Do not attempt to leave the dancefloor The DJ booth is conducting a tro-tro-troubleshoot test of the entire system

We just reaching out to the solar System, we flying over Bullshit, we flying over Supernatural love up in the air I just talk my shit Casanova Superstar, supernova, power pull 'em in closer If that's your man, then why he over here?

#tbs born 1976 #died piece by piece to time warner #and wb #then the cw merger #now what bastards #who are schwartz and dennis friends of #the end is the beginning #on peachtree #eat our shit #Youtube #rockin roxy #is tired

[lostinaflashforward]

STAR TREK: PICARD - Recensione 1x03 “The End is the Beginning”

RECENSIONE 1x03

#star trek picard #1x03 #the end is the beginning #star trek #drama #sci-fi #patrick stewart #michelle hurd #santiago cabrera #allison pill #isa briones #recensione #LIAFF: COUNTDOWN

[raurquiz]

#otd #startrekpicard #theendisthebeginning #picard #agnesjurati #soji #laris #zhaban #narek #raffimusiker #cristobalrios #hugh #narissa #commodoreoh #ramdha #startrek57 @TrekMovie @TrekCore @StarTrek @StarTrekOnPPlus @SirPatStew

#otd #star trek picard #the end is the beginning

[earlgreydarkchocolate]

Celebrating tonight. The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning.

#the end is the beginning #is the end #бг тъмблр

[1introvertedsage]

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end. ~Seneca~

#Seneca #Seneca quotes #new beginning #quotes #new #beginning #end #beginning is the end #the end is the beginning #cycles #lha #learning #1introvertedsage #oroboros #cyclical #patterns #ending #connected #restart

[wildflowercryptid]

underappreciated marcille bit : her being a gay lil hater and glaring at toshiro whenever he gets flustered over falin

#i finally finished dunmeshi and i'm irreversibly changed as a person #kinda surprised that i warmed up to toshiro by the end of the manga #still not my biggest fave but the way he greets laios at the beginning of chap. 93 lives in my head forever now #dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon #dunmeshi #marcille donato #toshiro nakamoto #falin touden #mj.txt

[kazraza]

lmao doesn’t even mean “laughing my ass off” anymore it’s just “lmao”. she is like a brother to me

#begins and ends all my sentences with lmao

[nugothrhythms]

“Forgotten Places, Forgotten People” by Oslo, Norway-based cold electro post-punk band Mirror of Haze off of their 2021 album The End is the Beginning

#electronic post punk #coldwave #synthwave #electro post punk #Mirror of Haze #Forgotten Places Forgotten People #The End is the Beginning #music #2021 #2020s #Oslo Norway #Norwegian goth #2020s goth #Norwegian post punk

[biblioflyer]

How to squickly mangle a theme, Picard Rewatch s1e3

This is a crankier essay than some. I'm still enjoying myself but the stuff I thought was messy and uncomfortable is starting to reemerge. Three episodes in, the metaplot and dominant themes are taking shape and there is so much there that has such incredible potential, its frustrating how quickly its already kind of dissonant.

This is part of a series of essays reevaluating Star Trek Picard and interrogating the widely held fandom criticism that Picard made the Federation into a Dystopia.

All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again….wait, wrong show….

Something I am struggling with in this rewatch is what was the point of sending Dahj and Soji into the Federation with false personas and no memories of the Synth colony? OpSec? Did the Synth Colony somehow figure out that someone was trying to capture Synths and extract intel after their emissaries went missing? 

I don’t clearly remember what the rationale was at this point and I’m struggling with the seeming pointless cruelty of Dahj and Soji having to experience a profound identity crisis in order to reclaim their true selves. 

If they’re the next evolution of Soong-type Androids shouldn’t they be perfect mimics? Or did they lose the ability to be perfect mimics when they made the leap from circuits and tritanium to synthetic flesh and blood?

The Artifact and Romulan Intrigue

The Romulan metaplot is kind of troubling. The first two episodes set things up so that we are supposed to feel bad for the Romulans. The heart was torn out of their civilization by a supernova, the Federation had pledged to save almost a billion people and then it didn’t. 

This is presented as a very serious moral lapse on the part of the Federation that spirals into a prolonged retrenchment from being an outward looking people into a self interested and paranoia fueled decline. I have all along been debating whether this is fair but a lot of the meta commentary around the show certainly seems to take this as an article of faith: the Federation was wrong, the Federation became a meaner, darker place. Picard himself even laments bitterly that half of Starfleet Command didn’t even want to help the Romulans in the first place.

So if the Romulans are supposed to be stand ins for refugees and a condemnation of the global community’s persistent racism and abdication of mercy and responsibility, why is every Romulan we’ve met after Laris and Zhabon a high level infiltrator plotting assassinations, nameless death squad goons, a gaslighting Romeo, a textbook example of the Dark Triad personality profile, or merely unpleasant, authoritarian, and callous like basically all of the unnamed Romulans on the Artifact?

This would not be the first time Star Trek stepped all over its own messaging, but this is seriously yikes. I’m pretty sure that episode where Troi was undercover as a Tal’Shiar operative managed to have more than two sympathetic Romulans. I’m extremely confident “Unification” (Spock’s two parter) had a lot more than two.

To be fair, later episodes will complicate the picture further by presenting us with a fresh batch of sympathetic Romulans, but the presentation of Romulans on the Artifact is seriously lacking in nuance.

The storyline on the derelict Borg Cube is definitely a bleak one. You have the Romulans, now a scattered and shattered people, exploiting an even more unloved and unmourned people: the Reclaimed or, as they refer to themselves, XB. The XB are fascinating in that they could really stand in for a lot of different sorts of people. People disfigured from accidents or violence, refugees and victims of war. The Romulans treat them as a resource to harvest on a good day and a burden on less good days.

My main complaint here is that if the Romulans were supposed to be more sympathetic, then the relations between the XB and Romulans could have been presented as more amicable. The harvesting and trafficking of Borg tech from the Reclaimed could have been presented as an ugly but mutually accepted act of desperation to acquire the means to shore up their tenuous situation: acquire more and more sustainable infrastructure, do humanitarian outreach: that sort of thing. There was an opportunity here to show broken, untrusted people finding shelter in one another amidst a hostile universe and they just sort of went with something more like ISIL and the Yazidis instead.

Hugh’s return was a bright spot though. His bit of dialogue with Soji was heartbreaking:

“I find that if I ask people for help, they’re happy to give it.”

“That has not been my experience. Particularly with Romulans.” - Hugh.

Speaking of yikes…

Narissa and Narek’s interactions are as weird as I remember. A choice was clearly made here to give off Lannister vibes without any of the warmth that originally existed between Cersei and Jaimie. Maybe I’m just the product of a family that likes its personal space and less burlesque speaking voices so I’m being unfair. Whatever the history of these two siblings was, they clearly were very close once (maybe not quite that close) and clearly now resent each other.

For my two slips of latinum, Narek seems to have the right approach. The “activation” of Dahj under uncontrolled circumstances resulted in multiple fatalities and Commodore Oh having to exercise her authority to cover up a Romulan hit squad murdering Dahj’s boyfriend and then repeatedly losing goons trying to capture her across two discrete incidents. 

Then Oh sends hitters to try to take out Picard before he can chase the rabbit further. Which also fails and this time results in the production of tangible evidence she can’t destroy immediately, although for…reasons….Picard, Zhabon, and Laris don’t feel like they can take this evidence to Starfleet.

I sort of get Picard’s reticence to take this to the old crew on two levels. There’s the question of their safety, although his willingness to get Raffi and a naive scientist involved is a bit questionable. Although to be fair they are people with their own agency who more or less did exactly what Picard predicted his crew would do had they been given the choice, which is why he didn’t want to give the old crew the choice.

The second is more somber. Picard is on something of a post-depression apology tour. This is a term I picked up from social media to describe coming out of the lethargy and fog of a deep depression wherein one has been incapable of reaching out and performing the duties of friend, partner, family member etc. As Raffi is quick to point out, Picard shows up after fourteen years without so much as a hail and he doesn’t even open with a wellness check, he shows up with an agenda and bait he knows Raffi can’t resist, and perhaps even a dim awareness of what it costs Raffi to put herself in the frame of mind Picard needs of her.

We know Picard and Riker remained close while Beverly disappeared. We don’t (yet) know of his relationship with Geordi and Worf. As I write this, Picard season three has yet to drop its fourth episode and I want to get this in the queue before too much time elapses and I start losing my impressions of my rewatch of “The End is the Beginning” which was a week ago as of this writing. Who else might Picard owe an apology to and what would be the personal cost of having to show up to ask them to risk their life in a conspiracy involving spontaneous attacks by Romulan death squads?

Character growth: Picard

Picard starts to become a savvier, more self aware character after his failure to persuade Clancy. After his discussion with Clancy, he quickly pivots to being dismissive of consulting a lawyer before he does anything when discussing his plans with Rios. This is a hint at the Picard who had the ability to adopt a persona suited for undercover work back in the day, odd as it was for a Starfleet Captain to be infiltrating a criminal gang.

Picard also clocks Rios as ex-Starfleet and far more than a common smuggler or mercenary very quickly. His attitude towards Rios, pointing out all of the elements that suggested Rios was a better person than Rios might even believe of himself, reinforces my theory of Picard and Raffi’s past that Picard loves a misfit with potential. 

Perhaps this hearkens back to Picard’s own past as an unruly, arrogant mess of a young man. The sort of man who gets stabbed through the heart in a bar fight yet goes on to command the flagship of the Federation and write scholarly tomes. If anyone were inclined to map out a grand future for undisciplined and broken people and then proceed to maneuver them towards that future one nudge at a time in a very chess-master like fashion, it's Picard.

In the end Picard reveals his secret fondness for being a man of action with his farewell to Chateau Picard, “I tried my best to belong to this place.”

Which also incidentally is the first sign of romantic tension between Picard and Laris. RIP Zhaban, you were a fun character but surplus to requirements.

#star trek picard rewatch #star trek picard #star trek #the end is the beginning #picard s1e3 #romulans #XB #Borg #third of five

[degree-of-disorder]

i want to write so badly. i miss the flame under my fingertips as i wrote with such fervency you'd think something was at stake. and maybe something was at stake. maybe my body knew that this day would come when i would want to speak, but could only scream. when i would want to love, but could only fight. even my thoughts feel strange to me. as though i reside in a new body after a century of floating around. but here i am, tethered to these mortal bones; dying with each breath i take and grasping for the chance to truly live again.

what a strange new world we wake up every single day to find. nothing is ever the same as it once was - though i try to hold on to each piece of familiarity that i can as i realize that it is no longer. that i have to face the unknown for the rest of my existence.

i could make this about love, that i swore i found One that i truly did know at a time that i even knew myself. and that ever since i have been holding on to the piece of me who existed then, although she does not live now.

but even my memory is estranged from me. who is to say that what i thought, no, what i believed about then ever truly was? maybe it wasn't what i thought was knowing, but what was actually just recognizing how vastly lost a soul can be.

i don't want this to be about "love". i want to exist aside from that - if that is even possible. i want to feel alive without feeling as though i am losing all at once.

i don't want to sacrifice the vital essence of who i am to subjugate for another. i want to live fully as i am, as i am meant to be. if that entails a life alone, or a life unknown, i must hold deeply to what i know to be true. to what i know is unchanging - although it is ever changing.

#poetry #prose #writing #the end is the beginning