Some Blundering about Star Trek: Picard 1×01 “Remembrance”

Well here we go. I’m not over the moon, but I liked it. So far they’ve mostly avoided the places I’d feared they were going to go, and there’s a healthy dose of, “Let’s just go fucking nuts,” in the premise.

We actually open on the Enterprise-D, which hasn’t received a visual reboot the way the TOS era did; the design of the ship is largely unchanged, though the color seems more gray and less blue, and the texture of the hull is more pronounced. Data and Picard are playing poker in Ten-Forward. Data’s in the TNG Movie-era uniform, while Picard is in his civvies, and isn’t really acting like the Captain Picard we remember; he’s much more relaxed and casual, teasing Data about his tell (Which Picard recognizes as a deliberate misdirection). If we were to understand this scene as occurring in the “real world” of the show, in the timeframe leading up to Generations, Picard would seem out-of-character, but the scene is coded with an otherwordliness that makes it clear that it’s a dream being had by an older Picard who has cast off the formality and sense of duty that comes with command. Data successfully bluffs Picard by virtue of having five queens, and Picard is surprised to notice Mars out the window just before it explodes.

In his waking reality, it’s between twenty and thirty years since the destruction of the Enterprise-D, and Picard is a decade retired from Starfleet, writing books about military history and running Chateau Picard with his housekeepers Laris and Zhaban, who are Romulan refugees, hopefully to infuriate any Trump supporters still watching. Picard’s agreed to an interview about his involvement in the destruction of Romulus a decade earlier (They play up that it’s the anniversary of the supernova, though it seems to be like the twelfth anniversary I think?), but the interviewer is a total jerk and goads him, despite having promised not to mention it, into dumping the backstory on us about why he’s retired. So the backstory is that Picard convinced the Federation to assemble a massive armada to evacuate the Romulans, and put him in charge of it. The attack we saw in “Children of Mars” happened while the armada was being assembled, and in its wake, all synthetic beings were banned and the evacuation of Romulus was cancelled, and Picard disagreed with the former and was apalled by the latter, and quit in protest.

Meanwhile, we have a cute date between Dahj and her boyfriend in Boston where they celebrate her getting into the Daystrom Institute and then a bunch of helmeted bad guys beam in and murder him and rough her up and put a bag over her head and get ready to kidnap her. Only Dahj “activates” and discovers she is able to trivially murder them all. She also has a vision of Picard, who she later recognizes when the interview airs. So she schleps over to France to see if an elderly vintner knows why she has superpowers all of a sudden, and Picard is surprisingly cool with all this. Picard and company put her up for the night, and Picard has another dream about Data, this time at the vineyard in his TNG uniform, painting a picture which is almost but not quite the same as the one he has hanging over his desk. Dahj has gone on the run again for fear of endangering anyone else, so Picard hops over to San Francisco to have a look at his private stash in the Starfleet Museum’s archives. Turns out that the painting in Picard’s office is one of a pair Data painted thirty years ago called “Daughter”, and while the subject is facing away in Picard’s copy, the one in the archive has Dahj’s face.

Dahj calls her mom from Paris, who acts super sketch and tells her to go find Picard. Dahj tries to question this, since her mom very clearly knows what is going on and won’t tell her, but she feels compelled to hack the internets to track Picard down instead. They meet up in San Francisco and he tells her that he thinks she’s an android. Dahj does not take this well because remember, in this world, synthetics are basically The Boogeyman. Picard tries to assure her even if her dad is an android, he was pretty great and she is not any less real or good and she probably isn’t a mass-murdering psychopath (That is literally what she is afraid of when Picard tells her she’s an android). Then the bad guys chase them up a building. She murders a bunch of them (one of them gets beamed up as he’s falling off the roof), and she unhelmets one of them so we can see that they’re Romulan. The last attacker pukes acid on her (This is not a normal thing Romulans can do) and she explodes. Picard is knocked unconscious and wakes up back at the chateau where Laris and Zhabin take the whole, “I got assaulted by an army of space ninjas who exploded the girl I was protecting,” thing in stride. Picard declares that he’s done enough winemaking and history-book-writing and it’s time to start acting like a CBS All-Access Original Streaming Adventure Series hero, and zips off to the Daystrom Institute to ask our next new regular to exposition at him.

The Institute has an android department, but there’s not much to it since building androids has been illegal for a decade. Doctor Jurati tells him that making a sentient meat android is impossible (Yeah, meat; there’s no question that Dahj was physically close to human), but then she goes into more detail and says that vat-growing a meat-android body is actually not that big a deal, but no one had ever been able to create an artificial sentience like Data’s. Then she shows off the disassembled body of Data’s brother B-4, and confirms that the download Data did back in Nemesis didn’t take. But when Picard shows him Dahj’s necklace, Jurati recognizes it as the symbol of a crazy idea her former boss (who disappeared after the android ban) had where you could take a single cell from Data’s brain and use it to clone yourself a pair of new sentient android brains. Which could be glued into a vat-grown meat-body. Which means that Dahj has a twin sister somewhere.

“Somewhere” is the Romulan Reclamation Site, where Soji Aster is a medical doctor tending to Romulan refugees. She meets a young cute Romulan named Narek who in poor light looks enough like Ethan Peck’s Ungroomed Spock that I was confused for a bit. They hit it off, with her clearly not noticing how he is subtly coded as evil, and we end on the camera pulling back to reveal that the Reclamation Site is built on a defunct Borg Cube.

Wooh. Wow. This actually covered way less ground than I was expecting. And I’m largely happy about that. There’s a nicely slow pace to it, with things taking time to unfold. The only downside to it is that there’s a lot about where the plot is going that has a strong air of inevitability, and a slow pace combined with inevitability can make you start longing for them to just get on with it – I’d find the slow pace more comfortable if by the top of act two, you weren’t already dead certain that Old Man Picard is going to go have fun adventures in space. I live in fear that the show will descend into a string of, “How do we keep Picard from just solving the whole plot a quarter of the way through the season?”

But I shouldn’t really worry; they’ve given me no cause to. I mean, possibly the thing I like best about this episode is something that is almost gobsmackingly conspicuous by its absence: the refusal of the call.

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned my disdain for the Campbellian Monomyth before. But I hate it. Campbell was convinced that all epic adventure stories followed the same basic pattern, and because of how influential he was in the publishing of sci-fi/fantasy, he basically caused it to be true, to the point that it’s much harder to get published or produced if your story does not cleanly follow the outline of his One True Plot. One of the biggest indicators of that plot is the bit at the bottom of act 1 where the hero has been Called to Adventure, but refuses. He doesn’t want to leave the Shire to go take the One Ring to Mount Doom; especially when he’s got to help Uncle Owen on the moisture farm. The initial conditions for Star Trek: Picard seem to scream for this scene. For Old Man Picard to turn Dahj away because he’s “not that man anymore” and he just wants to be a humble farmer and take his dog for walks and drink his Tea, Earl Grey, Hot. And he only gets forced into action when the bad guys burn down the chateau (boy would that be a kick in the feels, since Picard undoubtedly has a sensitive nerve about the fact that his brother died in a fire at the chateau) scourge the shire and torch the moisture farm.

But that just doesn’t happen. The instant Dahj shows up, there’s no question of him helping her, and no question of how far he’ll go to do it. There is, in fact, no bullshit whatsoever in this episode – though I’m not optimistic some won’t show up as we go on; pretty sure there is a “Picard goes to Starfleet Command to ask them to give him a ship and they respond with bureaucratic bullshit,” episode coming up. Everyone is helpful; everyone believes everyone else; no one lies for dumb reasons or withholds information for dumb reasons. ’90s Star Trek was plagued by this constant need to have people who are experts and professionals and well-versed in how weird the universe is suddenly act like unprofessional morons who are randomly skeptical of anything they haven’t seen before and several things that they have, all in the name of “conflict”. Discovery showed us that Star Trek can find other ways to deliver conflict and character drama than people just being jerks to each other, and Picard embraces that wholeheartedly.

What I’m not crazy about is the pacing. There are three big expository scenes in this episode, and they go over kinda like a lead balloon. Picard’s interview is awkward and kinda ugly and there just to drop the backstory about Picard quitting Starfleet. Picard’s conversation with Dahj, where he tells her she’s an android. That’s a big emotional moment, and Patrick Stewart is doing a great job, but again, it sort of brings the forward momentum of the story to a crash, and I spent a lot of it wondering how wise it is to accuse someone of being a secret android in public right in front of a Starfleet facility given that androids are illegal. The third scene, with Dr. Jurati, is carried well enough by Allison Pill being adorkable and Patrick Stewart being Patrick Stewart. But after the big action set-piece and Picard’s declaration that he’s going to go do adventuring again, “Picard has a long talk with an academic” is not the most natural place for the story to go.

So, bullet points:

• I was hoping the sight of the Enterprise-D would give me tinglies. It didn’t. I wish they’d recreated the opening shot of “Encounter at Farpoint”, that big sweeping camera angle. Instead, we first see it at a great distance in a nebula, and it kinda downplays the bigness of it.
• The final version of Brent Spiner’s digital de-aging is not nearly as awful as in the early trailer. He mostly just looks a bit chunky and the oddness of his eyes is exaggerated. Nothing that is out of keeping with this being Picard’s dream.
  • By the way, I totally called it that Data would appear entirely in dreams.
  • Though I’m almost surprised they didn’t use a hand double. You get a good look at his hands several times and… Wow does Brent Spiner have Old Man Hands.
• Data’s Generations-era uniform fits terribly. Is that intentional? Like, maybe it’s a dream-logic thing? His TNG uniform fits fine.
• As I’ve mentioned before, there’s an interesting aside in the novelization of Star Trek (2009) that the names humans use for Romulans are deliberately wrong, because it’s less offensive to Romulans to be called by a different name than to have your actual name mispronounced. According to the convention from the book, the Romulan who flirts with Soji is actually named Karen.
• It’s neat that all the Romulans look noticeably different from each other. TNG-era Romulans all looked basically the same – slicked-up Moe Howard haircuts, dark complexions, big foreheads, and ridges over their eyebrows. Here, Laris looks almost human: you can easily overlook her ears due to her haircut, and her eyebrows, though angled, aren’t severe. Zhabin looks a lot like Nero’s crew, though he does have faint brow ridges. Dahj’s attackers look the most like TNG Romulans, but their hair is a lot thinner. And Narek, as mentioned, looks a whole heck of a lot like Young Spock. In interviews, the showrunners said this is deliberate, reflecting regional variations in Romulan appearance.
• Speaking of Star Trek (2009), the inciting incident of the Kelvin Timeline, the supernova that destroyed Romulus, is a major part of the backstory here, which is more of an embrace of that continuity than I expected.
  • Though it’s framed as being Romulus’s star that went supernova, rather than another star nearby. Possibly this is a simplification, and they’re refering to some kind of chain reaction.
  • Countdown, the comic prequel to the movie, is rejected in multiple ways, though, up to and including Picard’s role (in the comic, Picard had already retired from Starfleet, and is a diplomat working with Spock).
  • Though very strangely, one element not rejected from Countdown is the idea that the Romulan plan for rebuilding after the supernova involved leveraging scavenged Borg technology. This is an element I never really liked, since it proposes that the Nerada’s power was due to it being augmented with Borg technology to the point of being superior to the Enterprise-E in combat. I much prefer the idea that the Nerada is nothing more than a modest civilian mining ship, which is able to shred Starfleet purely because it is from a more advanced time.
  • The backstory fills in a lot about Nero’s motivations; in the film, the extent to which he blames Spock and the Federation comes largely down to Nero being an asshole. In this version, Nero’s sense of betrayal is much more justified when Starfleet called off the rescue.
• Picard drinks decaf now. Nice detail.
• This future feels very real in a way that previous Star Trek hasn’t done a great job with. Previously, people tended to either live in Very Sci-Fi Places or else in Incredibly Accurate Historical Recreations. Chateau Picard is a very realistic depiction of a believable future-house. It looks mostly like a modern “rustic” country manor, but there are modern 24th century elements integrated seamlessly. The kitchen has a replicator next to the sink. There’s a refrigerator, but it’s only for wine because this is a vineyard. I think there’s a little LED light on the faucet. There a device on the counter that bears a distant familial resemblance to an Echo, which Zhabin uses to watch the news while he cooks.
  • A lot of the tech just looks the same as Discovery though.
• I didn’t like the reporter character. She is an exception to the whole, “Maybe we can do conflict in ways other than by having people arbitrarily be assholes.” The extent to which she violates her interviewee’s trust and the terms of the interview is practically journalistic malpractice. It’s in keeping with the “Scuzzball Journalist” trope common in media, which I find grating to begin with, but especially so in Star Trek, which in its better moments is often pretty much “Competency porn” – the joy of watching people just be really good at their jobs.
• A lot of the things I found strange in “Children of Mars” become clearer now. Picard is the one who comments on the Mars attack because Picard was in charge of the armada being assembled there. Possibly the old ship designs we saw were, in fact, old ships being put back into service (the armada was huge). And the death toll has increased from 6,000 to 93,000. Which still sounds low given that Mars has been rendered uninhabitable (It’s still on fire), but plausible if most of the population was able to shelter until evacuated.
• The Daystrom lab Picard visits made the synths who attacked Mars. Based on what we learn from Jurati, the synths don’t have “full” sentience on the level of Data. There’s some obvious linkage here back to Control in Discovery. It seems less likely that this is a Battlestar Galactica situation where the synths evolved, rebelled, and had a plan. Given that the antagonists we have so far are Romulans, it’s possible that the synths were actually, in a “Self-driving-car trolley problem” sort of way, trying to protect the Federation by stopping the armada in order to doom the Romulans.
• As mentioned, Patrick Stewart is not playing a Picard who is much like the one we’ve seen before. Really, he’s most just playing himself – this is most especially clear when he speaks passionately about his humanitarian work. As I said above, it’s not wrong given where Picard is in his life now, but it’s very different.
• An interesting follow-on is that Old Man Picard seems mostly content with his life in this. Which isn’t what you’d expect from what I said about his quickness to accept the Call to Adventure. We don’t start with Picard as a sad, broken man. We start with a Picard who has moved on and found a place for himself… except. It gets a little hard to swallow when he claims that he’s spent the years since leaving Starfleet “Not living, just waiting to die.” It’s more of a lightweight, “His life is okay. He’s doing fine. He’s got a good support network with friends who care about him and a very good doggo and a nice house and a steady job. The only thing is that it’s not really his calling.”
  • Which TBH is kind of Peak Old White Man Character Drama. Now I’m sad.
• Is it weird that Dahj freaks out at the idea of androids and instantly links them with violent psychopathy when she is herself an AI researcher? She seems to know nothing about androids beyond the pop-culture perception of them as soulless murder machines. Though AI is a completely different department from androids – the two seem connected, but treating “robot” and “computer” as fundamentally unrelated is a thing that goes back to Asimov.
• I am intrigued by how comfortable Dahj is proposing that the appearance that she’s developed superpowers might actually mean that she has schizophrenia. She seems pretty okay with that, especially compared to the possibilities that she actually does have superpowers (which would make her a “freak”) or that she’s an android (which would make her a soulless murder machine). The lowkey implication here is that this is a society where mental illness doesn’t carry the same stigma it does in our society – there’s no “Oh no what if I have mental illness,” but rather, “Hopefully I just have a serious illness and what I need is medical attention, rather than me being some kind of strange preturnatural being doomed to be hunted across the planet by mysterious assassins.”
• Also, “Dahj and Soji from Seattle”.
• Soji’s last name is “Aster”. Probably just because it’s Latin for “star”, but there was a Jeremy Aster back in early TNG who was a kid on the Enterprise whose parents died.
• Dahj’s boyfriend is Xahean. That’s cool. Pity he didn’t have time to turn invisible.
• We see some people in modern Starfleet uniforms, which look mostly like DS9-era uniforms. We don’t get a great look at them, though. Seems possibly like they are cut like the Discovery Enterprise uniforms.
• The second “Daughter” painting is stored in a box with a Needlessly Sci-Fi origami lid, the same technology as the Needlessly Sci-Fi Gimp Mask from “Ask Not”.
• Picard’s private archive contains the “Captain Picard Day” banner from the TNG episode “Disaster”.
• The holographic guide in the archive has a weirdly taunting tone. Why?
• I’m not sure what is meant to have happened when Dahj dies. The Romulan spits something on her and her clothes start burning, and she looks at the gun she’s holding, and it seems pretty clear that the acid spit is causing the gun to overload. She drops it, but then she looks at herself, and she’s burning up – bits of her are actually flaking off and the explosion seems to come from the space around her, not from the dropped gun.
• So… The authorities find Picard alone on the rooftop, unconscious, having been tossed by an explosion. And they… Take him home and leave him on the couch to be tended to by his housekeeper? Are there not hospitals any more? Also, they took him home to France. I realize that the entire Earth has a common government now, but there aren’t jurisdictions and stuff? He got tossed across a rooftop by an explosion and he is, let us not forget, an old-ass man. He shoulda woken up to be told they’d just finished nano-welding all the bones in his body back together and growing him a new spleen.
• Minor Visual Egg: There’s a huge modern skyscraper visible in the distance from Picard’s vineyard. Just one. I assume that’s meant to be Paris.
• Despite the fact that he does speak a little French, Jean-Luc being a retired military officer who now drinks tea, manages a large estate and writes books of military history is possibly the most British thing ever.
• According to the backstory, Picard was still captain of the Enterprise prior to the destruction of Romulus, and only left to lead the rescue fleet.
• The guy who used to run the Android Department at Daystrom and may have created Dajh and Soji is Doctor Maddox. We saw him before in the TNG episode “The Measure of a Man”, where he tries to have Data disassembled so he can figure out how to make more of them. They became friends and stayed in touch later. It seems like he’d probably show up in person at some point, unless he’s been killed offscreen.
• They don’t give the details about what happened to B-4. It was widely supposed (confirmed by Countdown) that Data would be “reborn” by his identity subsuming B-4’s. I never felt comfortable with that, because, like, Data’s mind erasing another sentient (if stupid) being’s in order to survive feels like a betrayal of the character. Even Nemesis is kinda uncomfortable with the idea, having Geordi question Data’s decision to not just let B-4 be himself. So is B-4 in pieces right now because of the android ban? Or did Maddox have him disassembled for study? Or did B-4 just break down and fail, like Lal (Data’s non-meat android daughter who died of Brain Failure)?
  • I didn’t want Data to be reborn via B-4, but still, this does ruin that fanfic I wrote twenty years ago.
  • By the way, what became of Data’s other brother after they caught him leading the renegade Borg? Seems like his body ought to be around somewhere.
• Did Dahj know about Soji? She never mentions a sister and you’d think it would be relevant when she’s worried about being an android and/or being chased by assassins. But Soji knows she’s got a twin sister.
• Which leads me to the Big Theory: THERE ARE FIVE QUEENS. It’s a clue. Dahj and Soji aren’t the only Daughters of Data. If we assume that Lal counts, then two pairs of twin meat-android daughters would make five. Dahj might just have neglected to mention her twin sister, or maybe Soji is referring to a different sister – one of the other “queens”. The Romulans know what Dahj is, and they notice that she, “hasn’t activated yet”. This all sounds like they have done this before.
• So I was afraid this series was going to be Star Trek taking a stab at Battlestar Galactica, but maybe it’s actually going to be Star Trek taking a stab at Orphan Black.

I think that’s where we’re left. I look forward to episode 2, and I appreciate the show so far, but it has yet to reach the energy level I’m looking for. But I still think there’s a good chance that we’ll start to see the pace pick up once the exposition is out of the way.