I think apart from the Q scenes at the beginning and end, this Easter egg scene (and the punk’s post-Spock reaction to being asked to turn down the music again) might be the only salvageable thing from that train wreck of a season.
Although it poses the question of how bus punk could have remembered being nerve pinched - since the past was changed, Kirk and co. almost certainly wouldn’t have gone back in time to 1986. My theory is that it was so impactful that he felt it across timelines.
As the second season of SNW demonstrated, time travel in Trek is firmly rooted in the ‘big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff’ theory. Contradictory time travel shenanigans happen all the time. The random accidental time travel, sporadic deliberate time travel, perpetual temporal war, and ocassional bored god-like being have really done a number on the universe’s temporal cohesion. They probably have less of a timeline and more of a time-bowl-of-spaghetti.
It gives me hope that maybe Picard took place in the alternate timeline. Although it kind of has something interesting to tell I don’t like how Picard made the Borg stupidly powerful. Basically no one should be able to survive them and yet somehow they basically are a non-threat like 95% of the time.
That’s been a problem for the entire series, not just Picard. The Borg have assimilated thousands of species, yet the (human-centric) Federation somehow manages to beat them every time because humans are special or something.
This moment has lived rent free in my head for most of my life:
Later I learned the guy playing the punk was Kirk Randolph Thatcher, a model maker at ILM and an AP on Trek IV.
this scene always cracks me up because like nobody on the bus knows that the punk isn’t dead
He also reprised the character in season 2 of Picard.
I think apart from the Q scenes at the beginning and end, this Easter egg scene (and the punk’s post-Spock reaction to being asked to turn down the music again) might be the only salvageable thing from that train wreck of a season.
Although it poses the question of how bus punk could have remembered being nerve pinched - since the past was changed, Kirk and co. almost certainly wouldn’t have gone back in time to 1986. My theory is that it was so impactful that he felt it across timelines.
As the second season of SNW demonstrated, time travel in Trek is firmly rooted in the ‘big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff’ theory. Contradictory time travel shenanigans happen all the time. The random accidental time travel, sporadic deliberate time travel, perpetual temporal war, and ocassional bored god-like being have really done a number on the universe’s temporal cohesion. They probably have less of a timeline and more of a time-bowl-of-spaghetti.
It gives me hope that maybe Picard took place in the alternate timeline. Although it kind of has something interesting to tell I don’t like how Picard made the Borg stupidly powerful. Basically no one should be able to survive them and yet somehow they basically are a non-threat like 95% of the time.
That’s been a problem for the entire series, not just Picard. The Borg have assimilated thousands of species, yet the (human-centric) Federation somehow manages to beat them every time because humans are special or something.