Bosc wrote:
Yeah, my wife and I are watching this but don't have the background either.
Quick recap (but still kinda long, sorry):
Commander Data sacrificed himself to save Captain Picard and his crewmates of the Enterprise in Star Trek: Nemesis 20 years ago when he blew up a Romulan/Reman weapon. He had downloaded his entire neural net previously into B4, a prototype version of himself. This was obviously meant as a possible way to bring back Data in case they ended up making another movie, but it turns out B4, at some point, broke down and was disassembled, and all but a shred of Data's memories were lost. It looks like Bruce Maddox, a cyberneticist who once almost had Data impounded for research purposes, somehow took that last shred of Data's "essence" and created at least two new androids. At least...that's the story that we are led to believe, there could be a twist coming later.
In the events depicted in the 2009 Star Trek movie, the sun around which orbited Romulus and Remus was going supernova, we find out in the series that Picard, now an Admiral, put together a massive effort to move the entire population of Romulus (guess we don't give a shit about the Remans) to safety. But before the fleet could be built, the robots that were working the Utopia Planitia shipyards on Mars attacked their human masters and killed thousands. Since then there has been a ban on any form of android/robot/artificial life form. This is kinda interesting because during the whole run of TNG, it was implied that creating a fully sentient artificial life form was still damn near impossible. Even Data himself tried to create an android, Lal, and she ended up having a brain meltdown. I guess at some point the Federation was okay creating some generic data clones for slave labor purposes.
Rather than try and build a new fleet, Starfleet and the Federation decided not to help the Romulans, which prompted Picard to resign his commission in disgust. Apparently he did somehow put together some kind of effort and saved a few Romulans, two of which live on his vineyard in France. The vineyard, by the way, was once owned by his brother Robert, who died along with Picard's nephew, in a fire.
For all its utopian dreaminess, Star Trek sure can get hella dark at times.
Oh, and it was revealed in the final episode of TNG that there is an anomaly in Picard's brain that could allow the manifestation of "Irumodic Syndrome," which we're led to believe is like Alzheimer's but way worse. Sounds like this might get exacerbated when he's in space.
The villains appear to be a secret Romulan order even more secret than the Tal Shiar, which was the Romulan equivalent of the KGB. And for some reason they REALLY don't like androids. And apparently they have infiltrated the highest levels of Starfleet.
Lastly...somehow the Borg are involved, because at some point the show is gonna bring the whole "Recovering Borg Support Group" together again, featuring Picard, Seven of Nine, and Hugh. There's also a very mysterious abandoned Borg cube that the Romulans have taken over and are allowing Federation scientists to study. How they tie in with the androids is something we have yet to find out.