Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×02 “Maps and Legends”

Man, they are really dedicated to having things emphatically fail to happen. This episode doesn’t even have a fight scene.

Quick Precis: Picard goes around telling everyone he can find that there is a secret and very dangerous conspiracy going on, causing the secret and very dangerous conspiracy to take an interest in him.

Fourteen years ago, construction workers go about their day building ships for Picard’s big rescue armada, including getting an android out of their big storage unit full of androids. They’re friendly with it, trying unsuccessfully to tell it jokes and admonishing the coworker who says something mildly racist about androids, but this robodude is no Data, and can’t really interact with them on anything like a human level. The android’s eyes go all evil-blinky (the effect is completely different from Control infecting Ariem on Discovery, but the way it’s shot is the same, and it conveys pretty clearly that he’s being controlled by an outside influence. He walks over and shuts down the defense systems and picks up some kind of laser-tool and murders all the humans and then shoots a hole in his own head while the shipyards are attacked outside.

Back in the present, Picard and his housekeeper review the footage of Picard getting tossed by an explosion. So that’s public record. When the authorities found Picard, there was no question that the old man had just fallen down and hit his head or whatever. But Dahj has been edited out of the footage, and Laris thinks this must be the work of the Zaht Vash – the Romulan secret cabal that’s even more secret than the secret Romulan Cabal her and Zhabin used to work for. Oh yeah, Picard’s housekeeper is a former Tal Shiar spy. Zhabin doesn’t even think the Zaht Vash is real; just a bedtime story they tell to keep little baby Romulan spies in line. Anyway, the Zaht Vash are so super secret that no one knows what their deal is exactly, but rumor has it that it has something to do with the fact that Romulans have an ancient cultural hatred, aversion, and fear of anything to do with androids or AI.

You’d think this would’ve come up last week, after Picard told them the android girl had been assassinated by Romulans. Picard and Laris beam into Dahj’s apartment (I guess you can just beam uninvited into someone else’s home?) and she uses magic Romulan Spy Surplus CSI tools to reconstruct Dahj’s ill-fated date from last week’s episode. But they can’t see the actual murdering, because the bad guys used even more magic technology to scrub the place. Laris hacks what I guess is the Star Trek equivalent of Dahj’s Echo. That’s been scrubbed too, but they missed the where Dahj’s Alexa logged the fact that it had confused her and her sister for a second, and that gives them a record of a long-distance call. They are thus able to narrow down Soji’s location to “Literally anywhere else in the universe other than Earth.”

Meanwhile, literally anywhere in the universe other than Earth, Soji is sleeping with Karen. That escalated quickly. They have this episode’s second conversation about how secretive Romulans are. I wonder if they think it’s important for us to remember that. They’re keeping their relationship on the DL. There’s a newcomer at the Borg Cube, giving Soji a chance to do a little expositon about how this is a dead cube whose occupants the Romulans have spent the past few years un-borging. A Romulan with a fauxhawk gives them a safety speech about the dangers of working in a Borg Cube, and the new girl mentions how very secretive the Romulans are. I wonder if they want us to remember that. Karen watches Dahj un-borg someone and makes a meaningful aside about how he can casually bypass Byzantine Romulan bureaucracy.

On Earth, Picard has his old doctor from the Stargazer days over to certify him for space. Only it turns out that Picard is in the early stages of brain failure. He’s got a problem with his parietal lobe, though the symptoms they mention aren’t actually linked to that part of the brain from what I’ve read. Picard talks him into signing the doctor’s note anyway, since hopefully this big dangerous adventure will kill him before the brain failure does. Picard takes his shiny doctor’s note to Starfleet headquarters and asks for a ship. The admiral tells him to go fuck himself. That’s not even hyperbole. She’s very pissy about the whole “Had a big shouty fit about how pissed he as at Starfleet on intergalactic TV last week” thing. She also mentions that a bunch of Federation worlds had threatened to secede over the whole Romulan rescue thing, so maybe he needn’t have gotten all up on his high horse over them not tearing the Federation apart over a rescue they couldn’t have even done anyway given that they didn’t have a fleet any more.

She also calls Commodore Evil, a stern Vulcan who’s the head of security. Commodore Evil says that Picard’s story about a secret Romulan conspiracy operating on Earth and meat androids, but then she turns around and summons Special Evil Operative Rizzo to yell at her over the fact that Picard found out about the secret Romulan Conspiracy and how they blew up Dahj without interrogating her first and how she doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the operative they’ve set on Soji. Rizzo hologram-calls Karen to reveal that she’s actually a secret Romulan and his sister, and she too has concerns that he’s too busy getting laid and not working hard enough at finding the “nest” of the “abominations”.

Allison Pill visits Picard for some tea and to tell him that Dahj’s backstory was an obvious fabrication, so probably there is some kind of secret plan behind her having been set up to go study AI at the Daystrom institute and also to Soji working on a Borg Cube (They don’t know this yet, but we’re clearly meant to be wondering it). Picard gets out his old commbadge and tries to call someone.

Picard tells Laris and Zhubin that he plans to go borrow a ship off of someone and go into space anyway, and Laris is like, “You can’t do that, you’ll get killed.” And Zhubin is like, “You can’t do that, we’ll go with you,” which pisses his wife off. Picard needs them to stay on Earth and tend the vineyard anyway. Zhubin namechecks Riker, Worf and LaForge, but Picard has decided he doesn’t want to get anyone he cares about killed, and besides, if the whole cast were senior citizens, it probably wouldn’t work for CBS’s target demographic, so instead, he’s going to conscript people who hate him.

The specific people who hate him is Raffi, the person he called last night. She lives in a trailer in the shadow of that mountain where Kirk fought the Gorn. She points a gun at him and tells him to fuck off (this time it’s hyperbole), but he’s brought a bottle of the good stuff and a story about secret Romulan conspiracies, so she agrees to hear him out.

So, despite the complete lack of forward progress, this episode felt a lot better-paced than the previous one. There’s still some exposition-heavy scenes, but they feel a lot more organic. The only bit that really felt like filler was the scene with Dr. Jurati, which I think really should’ve happened before Picard went to Starfleet. The big wall-banger of this episode is Picard’s complete lack of chill about telling basically everyone he meets about this incredibly dangerous conspiracy. Okay, he tells Starfleet command. That’s kinda fair. But Jurati? Stargazer Doctor? He makes a big deal out of not wanting to involve the TNG cast since he doesn’t want to get them killed, but he’s oddly cool about telling strangers all about the Romulan Secret Police So Secret That Their Name Literally Means “The Corpse Squad (coz we kill anyone who learns our secret)”. It keeps getting stranger how no one seems all that bothered by the conspiracy.

Some other things:

• There are two things in this episode I find incredibly funny, one of which is intentional:
  • On the Cube, there is a sign that says “THIS FACILITY HAS GONE 5843 DAYS WITHOUT AN ASSIMILATION”.
  • The doors to Starfleet Command are just normal doors. You pull them open by hand. They’ve got pneumatic closing mechanisms at the top.
• The replicator in the Mars scene is very clearly a modern 2019-model 3D printer.
• I think Doctor Benayoun is the first of Picard’s Stargazer crewmates that we’ve seen in the flesh. I don’t think he was ever mentioned by name before. The other two Stargazer crewmen whose names we’ve heard are Jack Crusher and someone named Vigo. They’ve only ever appeared in holograms and hallucinations.
• Picard clearly expects the guy at reception to recognize him… And he does not. So Picard responds by spelling his name for him.
• All the trailers showed the hologram of the Enterprise-D that hangs in the foyer of Starfleet HQ. What they didn’t show is that it actually alternates between the Enterprise-D and the original Enterprise (Discovery-styled). The other Enterprises? Fuck ’em I guess.
• The exact details of the conspiracy at Starfleet Security are not at all clear yet. Rizzo is revealed as an undercover Romulan. Possibly Commodore Oh is too, but it doesn’t seem like it. She’s part of the conspiracy, sure, but Rizzo’s conversation with Narek implies that she’s a pawn they’re manipulating. It’s possible that Oh is indeed Tal Shiar, while Rizzo and Narek are Zaht Vash. Also, Oh asserts that they’ve only got “one more chance”, while Rizzo mentions a “nest” – they’ve pretty much confirmed at this point that there’s more than two androids, but possibly Oh doesn’t know about the others. I have a bad feeling this conspiracy is going to get needlessly complicated.
  • Also, Rizzo’s first reaction when Oh tells her about Picard is pretty much, “So you want me to kill him?” And Oh’s reaction is pretty much, “If anyone’s going to kill Picard, it’ll be me.”
• There’s a big upgrade to Romulan mythology here with the Romulans are secretive and insular not simply because they started out as an analog for Red China in the days when American pop culture perceptions played up the idea of the Chinese as “mysterious” and “inscrutable”, but rather for the somewhat less racist reason that there is some terrible secret of space they must protect at all cost.
• What are the Romulans doing with the defunct cube anyway? If Romulans have this huge cultural bugaboo about cybernetics, wouldn’t they just blow it up rather than trying to save the borg? Also, saving the borg seems awfully, um, “nice” for the Romulans. I mean, even if they were a culture known for philanthropy, the Romulans have fallen on hard times recently and this seems like a big undertaking that is outside their wheelhouse.
• I had to re-watch to catch that the new doctor on the Borg Cube is a Trill. I heard them say she went to Trill Polytech, but her facial markings are subtle enough that I couldn’t make them out the first time I watched it.
• Picard suffering from a degenerative neurological condition in the 2390s was part of the anti-time future in the series finale of TNG. Obviously, a lot of that timeline has already been taken off the table by changes in the behavior of the Enterprise crew, but apparently that timeline wasn’t a total fiction.
• I like how Benayoun couches his diagnosis – the brain problem might be something treatable, but “treatable” here is down to whether he’s got a few months or a few years. Picard mentions that he’d been told it might be a problem some day, which I assume is a reference to “All Good Things”.
  • There, it was an excuse to have Picard’s former colleagues be skeptical of him: the old man’s gone space-senile, for parity with the past-Picard, whose crew was skeptical of him because they’d only just met, with present-Picard, who had the absolute faith of his crew, mediating. I am hopeful that there will be no attempt at playing this off as a reason for people to doubt Picard’s sanity later.
• I dig fauxhawk Romulan and I don’t know why exactly.
• Oh, turns out that Soji’s last name is “Asha”, not “Aster”.
• During the Previously…, Dahj’s death is re-cut so that it’s clear that yes, the gun exploded, not Dahj herself. I guess I’m not the only one who thought the visuals were weird.

A Musing. This episode calls back a little to “All Good Things”, of course. We’ve observed already that the anti-time future has diverged significantly from the canonical one. Assuming that Q hadn’t contrived the circumstances of that timeline to begin with, some of the divergences are fairly straightforward. In the anti-time future, the Enterprise crew had drifted apart not long after the end of the series. This would’ve changed the circumstances of the movie-era. If, for example, Geordi had left the Enterprise by the time of Generations, it likely wouldn’t have been destroyed. And changes to the outcome of Insurrection could easily have altered Starfleet’s character following the Dominion War. Somewhat harder to explain is the fact that the Romulan supernova doesn’t appear to have happened in the anti-time future. What’s up with that? From what we know, my best guess is that it is related to the change in Picard’s career path. In Picard, he retired as an admiral. But in “All Good Things”, he’d become an ambassador instead. The version of events from Countdown has it that Spock had worked with Nero to prevent the destruction of Romulus, but bureaucratic interference from both the Empire and the Federation had delayed the process too much. Perhaps where Admiral Picard had led an ill-fated rescue armada, Ambassador Picard instead had succeeded in normalizing diplomatic relations with the Romulans years sooner, making it possible for Spock to act more quickly and save Romulus outright, only for it to later fall to a more aggressive Klingon Empire.