Tsylyst

Oh you know that not only will we have a BB season at some point this year, but it will ALSO be virus themed for the exact reason MrsGryn mentioned. FUG can't pass up an opportunity to tie into something like that. Things that annoy us are her bread and butter! The twist will totally be something like "Surprise! Here's a family member you've already spent two months with in quarantine and want to strangle!" ETA: Or the opposite like "Surprise! Here are people you were kept apart from but now you're reunited under 24/7 camera intrusion!" Or a season of health workers who are finally taking a break from their duties. Or a season of people that had coronavirus and survived to tell their stories in the Diary Room (at least one of the cast will have this tale to tell, whatever the theme ends up being).

It's a pretty good excuse to cancel a what sounds like a shitshow of a season. Are they speeding up to crown a winner, or just shutting things down?

That transport system was from an episode of Voyager where the race that created it could send themselves vast distances, so it's one of the few things that made sense to me. (This was the early episode where Seska, Torres and some of the crew tried to steal the technology from the really friendly race that had it, behind the captain's back. It explored how not only did the Voyager crew need to follow Starfleet's Prime Directive in this new area of space, but also needed to honor the laws of the cultures they encountered along their journey home.) BUT, included with this easter egg in Picard is another one of those bits of tragedy I was talking about: To get the technology, the Borg eventually spread far enough in the Delta Quadrent to assimilate the Sikarians. That's almost all the way to where Janeway and her crew started their journey, meaning all the peaceful races Voyager introduced us to, including the Ocampa and Talaxians, are probably now wiped out or at the very least scattered and living on the run. I get that the holograms are supposed to remind us of, like, future versions of Alexa. But in Voyager, the term "enslaved" was repeatedly used to refer to service holograms. It's just kind of odd to see Picard so comfortable with that as if zero progress has been made in the decades since Voyager returned home. This is the same man that stood up for the rights of androids, indigenous peoples and so forth during the run of TNG and movies. It makes me wonder what happened to The Doctor -- his counterparts in the Delta Quadrent are no doubt destroyed by the Borg by now. It also bugs me that we saw so many androids had been created to do menial labor at the shipyard (and elsewhere, one presumes). The whole story of Data on TNG was to show that androids are people, not property. Yet the Federation created an entire race of beings with the intention of enslaving them...and again Picard hasn't voiced any discontent with that. Romulan influence or not, it's no wonder the androids would rise up against their masters.

I don't hate it by any means, and I agree that it is far superior to the hot mess of Discovery. But this whole season has so many plot holes you could fly the Excelsior through it if you ever got its warp engines working. Space orchids jumped the android shark for me. And I don't love that everyone we're running into from back-in-the-day now has some horrible tragedy in their lives to make them a total downer. Riker and Troi had a kid die and left Starfleet, Hugh never got to live a normal life or realize his decades-long mission of freeing the Borg drones, Seven is living as some sort of outlaw and had to kill Icheb (who got, like, two seconds of screen time)? I know we're living in the world of "Game of Thrones" and "The Walking Dead" and everything needs to be DRAMA DARK DEPRESSING SUSPENSE DANGER -- but I miss Trek that gives hope of a utopian future where people do the right thing and science/exploration is king. I also miss self-contained episodes. There are great shows that aren't self-contained eps. But that's not what I want from Trek. I want a new mystery/problem each week. ALSO, in a season that's all about synthetic life -- Picard is flying around in a ship with multiple Emergency Holograms that just sort of get made fun of, shut off because they're annoying or just basically treated like shit. After Voyager spent seven seasons developing that The Doctor (and some other photonics) was a real person, how is it that Picard is all about preserving android life but doesn't give a fig about using holograms like they are just spare parts? And we're supposed to be OK with it? And Seven spent time on that ship and didn't call them out on it? She was one of the biggest proponents of The Doctor being considered a life form.

It was renewed for a second season way back before this one premiered. Overall, I'd give this season an underwhelming "eh."

I thought the same thing about the smell, nixie! It's not like he has something else to wash it down with out there.

When Rob got the boot last week, I was like, "Ooh, Sandra better be worried." Then when she heard he got the boot and they showed her being all happy about it, I was like, "Yep, Sandra better be worried." So she's going to Extinction, but isn't her smartest move to just raise the sail and go home? She'll never win a competition to return, and there's no Sandra Sit Out Bench in that comp. Or is she really such a dedicated Survivor player that she'll want to sit on the jury even if it means suffering on that island for the rest of the season?

They already know they can use tokens to buy advantages in the return comp (at least, I think I remember there being a sign to that effect somewhere on the Extinction beach in the first or second episode). So I would rather try to save tokens for that.

Yes. Fisty barely survives the fall/winter seasons with any fur left.

They sequester at early/middle June. They might do casting, then sequester them longer to make sure they are not displaying symptoms. But likely, they will be delayed. Most scripted shows have now shut down production early for the current season, and the fall season probably won't be able to start filming in June/July like normal, so CBS (and other networks) will need reality shows and similar things to fill gaps in the schedule in the early fall. Plus, they were already worried about the fall season in case there is a writers strike (which seemed likely a while ago) and they didn't get to start filming at a normal time. So if we get BB, it's probably going to be a later start to the season. CBS is hoarding an Amazing Race season (filmed in 2018) that they could release in the summer to help fill the BB gap at least one night a week.

I feel like we could use a laugh in these troubled times.

I saw a person at the grocery yesterday with TWO grocery carts. One of them was filled with gallon jugs of water. I was like, lady...save some for the rest of us. But also zombies aren't attacking, Canada isn't invading and superwintersnowmageddon isn't coming to knock out power across the midwest. Was she trying to fill a swimming pool for the kids that are out of school? Things are going to get tight for a while and deliveries on some goods will probably slow down. But damn.

I seem to remember that with a lot of reality shows, contestants don't get prize money until the show airs. So that would be an even bigger wait -- you know a million bucks is coming ... sometime.

Just saw a story that they had started filming Season 33 (32 has already been filmed, like two years ago), but decided to delay and send everyone home because of the virus outbreak. https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/cbs-suspends-amazing-race-production-coronavirus-fears-1203519026/

Wish I could. It sounded beautiful, but I didn't recognize it. Google doesn't know either. The lyrics we heard were: Now that you're in it, what will you do? Keep your eyes open, they're comin' for you. I wonder if it was recorded specifically for that opening. It sounded like a self-contained clip. Jeff has said that the producers are really loving this new intro style of having a few seconds of clips from the episode at the top of the show. Maybe they're throwing some money behind it with new recordings to back it up that fit the theme of the ep.