The reviews for Star Trek: Picard were generally good. Some said it was a little slow, while others wondered why Picard needed to be made into a synthetic life form at the very end. That said, the series was a great way to reboot the story of Jean-Luc Picard and the TNG timeline after Star Trek: Nemesis botched everything so thoroughly.
One thing that most fans could agree on was the lack of “diversity” among the ships which responded to Picard’s call for help. Just to recap a bit — the old captain made a desperate call for help to anyone who could hear them. He needed to stop the Romulans, under the command of Commodore Oh, who at the time, was prepared to sterilize the planet he was one. Picard’s old pall William T. Riker showed up at the helm of the U.S.S. Zheng He, which he said was “the toughest, fastest, most powerful ship Starfleet has ever put into service.”
There must have been hundreds of ships just behind the Zheng He-type ships. And only Zheng He-type ships — which are known as the Curiosity class. This was a bit of a disappointment, as on most shows from the past would treat fans to a vast fleet of Starfleet vessels, all from the various eras of the franchise. A good example of this was during the Dominion War — in several episodes, fans got to see ships from the TNG era, the TOS movie-era and the DS9 era all together, battling against the Jem’Hadar and the Cardassians.
What happened on that episode is now known as the “Copy and Paste Fleet” by many Star Trek fans, including the Trek fan site, Ex Astris Scientia.
But now, thanks to a talented fan of Star Trek, we now can get a look at what might have been, or rather, what we should have seen in the final episode of Star Trek: Picard — which was entitled “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2.”
He calls himself an amateur, but Sebastian Schmidt has been updating Star Trek: Picard for some time. Recently, Schmidt made an adjustment to the way Mr. Data (Brent Spiner) appeared in Picard. This won acclaim from many fans, although some questioned the point — since Data’s appearance was supposed to have aged much like a human.
This time, Schmidt has fixed the “copy and paste fleet” problem. Instead of seeing a hundred U.S.S. Zhengs warp to the rescue, Schmidt’s version now has Starfleet vessels from all different eras.
In his new YouTube video, took the time to add a bunch of recognizable Starfleet ships, including the Galaxy-class (for which the Enterprise-D was a part), and the Odyssey-class (from Star Trek Online), and many others.
“I really enjoyed the Starfleet scene actually,” said Schmidt. “It was the best part of this episode. But I wasn’t satisfied with the look of the fleet. [There were] too many identical ships — that’s why fans call it the ‘Copy and Paste Fleet.’”
“So, I started to learn 3D animation and got me some great 3D models — most of them are created by Marc Bell,” said Schmidt. “I’m still a beginner but I’m satisfied with the result now. I included a combination of older and newer ships to diversify the fleet.”
Schmidt’s work speaks for itself, as you can see. Since no one is perfect (not even the minds who create the current batch of Star Trek shows‚) we might see more ‘fixes’ in the future by Mr. Schmidt. Though he does say that he could use a new graphics card for his computer, which would make everything run a lot faster.
