Some Blundering about Star Trek: Picard 1×03: The End is the Beginning

Payoff! Things happening! Forward progress! Okay, that’s really only the last thirty seconds but still! A third of the way through, this show might actually get somewhere before it’s done!

I’ve finally realized what it is about Star Trek: Picard that’s stopping me from locking in fully. You ever see the ’90s remake of Sabrina? Not the teenage witch; the Audrey Hepburn movie. Sabrina is the daughter of the chauffeur to a rich magnate, and she’s got a huge crush on the cute, immature son, and then she goes off to school and gets glamorous and he starts to reciprocate, so the gruff, mature older brother has to intervene in order to prevent the scandal of a rich guy shacking up with a filthy poor (Everyone’s more sympathetic in the remake, so it’s less about her being poor and more about him already being engaged), but the older brother ends up falling in love with her. The remake is mostly good, and fixes a lot of things in the original that don’t age well (Like the fact that you end the original reckoning that Sabrina marrying into this family of bougie capitalist pigs is not actually a win for her), but it has one big weakness in its casting. In the original, the older brother is played by Humphrey Bogart, while in the remake, it’s Harrison Ford. On the one hand, this seems like a very natural choice. But… Look, Humphrey Bogart’s entire career is exactly this sort of thing. Up to the day he died, you bought him as this character. But by the late ’90, to be completely honest, no one saw thirty seconds of Harrison Ford playing the gruff asshole and didn’t already know where this was going. The catharsis of the climax – where the older brother chooses not to be an asshole and instead be the hero – hinges on the fact that the audience believes (or rather, that the audience is able to bracket what they know about how movies work and engage the movie’s emotive logic as if they believe) that he might not. You could always question whether Bogart was going to side with the angels or the devils. That basically went out the window for Ford when the Millennium Falcon showed up to cover Luke during the Death Star trench run. It’s not that he’s objectively worse, but Harrison Ford romantic movies are about watching the gruff asshole’s tough exterior slowly crack. Sabrina is a movie that’s structured around a different kind of tension, and you’re supposed to spend most of the movie viewing his character as the foil.

I bring all this up because the problem I’m having with Picard is that, as a character-driven show, the direction of the narrative is being driven by character traits that are so established that it telegraphs every turning of the plot weeks in advance. Also because we introduce a new character this week in the person of Picard’s new pilot, Captain Rios, and Captain Rios is clearly the product of a transporter accident involving Inigo Montoya and Han Solo. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We left Picard at Vasquez Rocks with Raffi, who doesn’t like him, but triggers on the words “Romulan conspiracy” and agrees to hear him out. While Picard recaps the first two episodes for Raffi’s benefit, we cut away to a flashback showing the day Picard quit Starfleet. We learn that Raffi was Picard’s second on the Romulan rescue project (I notice that he never calls her “Number One”, though possibly that’s because he’s technically not at the point we join the story. She calls him “JL”). She’s extremely passionate about the project, and I think we’re meant to take away that she’s a savant at logistics: she’s worked out the numbers for moving forward with a scaled-back rescue mission by taking old ships out of mothballs and reactivating Starfleet reservists and using a lot of synths. Picard drops the bombshell about the synth ban, which he and Raffi both agree is ridiculous. He drops the bombshell about his retirement, and she’s shattered when he goes on to explain that quitting was his desperate last-ditch plan, and since it hasn’t worked, he’s going to fuck off back to France to make wine and write books of military history. She leaves in a huff after being summoned by the commandant to get fired as part of what I assume is a purge of Picard-supporters.

In the present, Raffi points out that it was real dumb of Picard to go telling Starfleet about the secret Romulan conspiracy and asking them for a ship to go fight it with, since it’s pretty obvious that a secret Romulan death squad couldn’t operate on Earth with impunity unless Starfleet was in on it. THANK YOU. It still doesn’t really get into why Picard was so chatty about it last week, but at least we are acknowledging that it was a dumb move and Picard should’ve known better. We get only the barest outline of Raffi’s deal. She’s spend the past fourteen years in a tailspin, unemployable, possibly drug-addicted, and I think we’re supposed to have concerns about her mental health. There’s a strong vein of “conspiracy theorist” about her, but of course we know she’s right. She blames Picard for the turn her life has taken, and she’s mad at him for never having checked up on her until he needed something (Yeah, it’s clear she wouldn’t have wanted to see him, but it’s very human that she would still resent him for not having tried), but she promises to put him in touch with a pilot.

On the cube, Soji’s work – in particular, that she spoke to a reclaimed Borg (they call them “the Nameless”) in its native language – has been noticed by the project director. The director is Hugh Borg. This is a complete un-reveal and nothing is said about his backstory and nothing is explained about where he comes from and I think they only say his name once, late in the episode, so if you aren’t up on your Borg Lore (Ahem), you wouldn’t have any idea who this guy was or if it mattered. Even if you were, the actor is 25 years older and in completely different make-up, so you still might not put two and two together.

For the sake of anyone not up on their Borg Lore, Hugh is the first ex-Borg. Late in TNG’s run, they rescue a Borg drone, and while they’re contemplating whether they can weaponize him to undermine the collective, he goes and develops an independent sense of self and they name him “Hugh” and he decides he wants to be a real boy. So they end up not turning him into a Borg Bomb, and instead send him back to the collective, thinking that maybe this whole “Be your own person” thing might spread and take down the Borg in a less genocidal way. And it kinda works but also backfires, because it does spread and a bunch of Borg do go rogue, but they don’t have the life skills to make it without the collective and things go very badly for them, until Data’s asshole brother Lore manages to get himself crowned King of the Borg and organizes them into pretty much space pirates. Now, the weird thing here is that as far as the TNG series goes, this was the end of the Borg. They don’t appear again after this in TNG, and it was widely presumed that Hugh’s revolution was the final end of the Borg. There’s at least one TNG-era novel which flat-out says that the collective was destroyed at this point. It gets walked back in First Contact without any real explanation – no one on-screen is surprised that the collective is still around (Again, if you read the books, there’s one where Picard has it explained to him that the Borg were able to cut off the affected “branch” before it spread to the wider collective).

Hugh is so impressed that he’s going to let Soji interview Rahmda, which apparently is a thing she’s been asking about. Last week, we were being guided toward questioning what hidden agenda has (probably unwittingly) brought Soji to the cube. Turns out Soji’s actually an anthropologist, not a medical doctor, and… I don’t think they’ve explained enough of this to fully make sense of it, and they might never do that since her explanation is probably a cover. Rahmda is a Romulan ex-borg who used to be an expert in Romulan mythology, and Soji is interested in mythology, I think, as a way for ex-borg to contextualize their experience?

Rahmda is one of “The Disordered”, who are ex-Borg that are confined due to bog standard TV mental illness. They’re all Romulan, and, according to Hugh, they’re the only Romulans ever to have been assimilated. Rahmda in particular is playing a Mad Prophetess archetype. When we meet her, she’s doing Romulan Tarot, which Soji understands well enough to explain for the audience’s benefit, such as an interesting detail about how Romulan houses have fake doors in the front, and real doors in the back. Gee, I wonder if it’s important that Romulans are real secretive. (Even with the themes they’re going for, that frankly seems excessive). Soji is very polite and speaks to her in Romulan, but never actually gets around to asking her about mythology in more than the most abstract terms. Instead, she tells her things she isn’t supposed to know about the circumstance of her assimilation, and presses her on why the cube broke down pretty much immediately upon assimilating them. Which is a surprise even to Hugh. So this is why we’re here, I assume. The terrible secret of space which the Romulans hide can function as a weapon against the Borg (this is probably secondary to its main deal).

Rahmda “recognizes” Soji and asks which sister she is – the one who dies or the one who kills everyone else. She identifies her as “the destroyer”, which all the other disturbed Romulans notice, then steals the guard’s weapon, points it at Soji, but then tries to shoot herself. Soji reacts with what I assume is android powers and disarms her. The guards are all upset, but Hugh tells them it’s their own damn fault for not keeping their weapons properly secured. Soji goes back to her room and calls her mom, who tells her that Dahj is fine, but Soji blacks out during the call. Guessing mom is not even a real person. Karen wakes her up, and she assumes he’s bothered by her knowing state secrets (she’s shook by this too, since she can’t remember how she knew it), but he deflects by professing his love for her. I would not even question that he’s just manipulating her, but Rizzo is clearly worried that he might legitimately like-her-like-her. Rizzo’s on the cube now, by the way, and has had her ears re-pointed. So her being a deep cover operative in Starfleet isn’t going much of anywhere.

While all that was going on, we are finally introduced to what I assume will be our “Hero ship”, the La Sirena. Though dimly lit, it is very clean and spacious for a shady rogue’s unlicensed ship that can do the Kessel Run in- I’m getting off track. Picard meets Captain Rios, who, as I mentioned, is basically the result of a transporter accident between Inigo Montoya and Han Solo. We are shown that he is rough and tumble and handsome and roguish by the fact that we first meet him smoking a cigar and having a big piece of shrapnel removed from his shoulder by his emergency medical hologram. The hologram is played by the same actor as Rios, only better groomed and dressed, with what I think is an Irish accent. He tries to be all gruff and Bogarty about how he doesn’t care about nothing but getting paid, but Picard sees right through him because he keeps his ship clean and his equipment properly stowed and he “smells like Starfleet”. Rios had been the XO on the USS ibn Majid (a name I assume will anger the same Islamophobic sad sacks who blew their tops when Star Trek Online introduced a Dervish Class), which Picard won’t have heard about because Starfleet redacted it. His former captain was some sort of noble idealist who met a very messy end, and I assume we will learn more details later. Later, Rios’s Emergency Navigational Hologram fanboys over Picard a little to persuade Rios to take the job. I don’t know why; I don’t recall any point at which there was any question of it.

Commodore Oh visits Dr. Jurati, which I assume is the setup for her turning on them later because that’s telegraphed pretty transparently. Zhubin packs a lunch for Picard as he is about to set out on his dangerous space mission, then more masked Romulans show up and try to assassinate the lot of them. Fortunately, two middle-aged retired spies and their old man boss are even better at murder than this Romulan death squad, and they dispatch them in a fight scene which is just a tiny bit too frenetic. Also, Laris and Zhubin have apparently taped guns to the underside of every piece of furniture in Picard’s house. No explanation. “Retired spies keep guns handy all the time just in case” is an okay trope I guess, but this isn’t even a surprise to Picard either. They miss one assassin, but Jurati shows up and shoots him in the back before he notices her. “Maybe it was set to stun?” she hopes, having only slightly more trouble dealing with the fact that she just killed a dude than anyone has had dealing with anything in this show. “Romulan disruptors don’t have a stun setting,” Laris reassures her. She tells them about meeting with Commodore Oh, and how she spilled the beans about everything because the head of Starfleet Security spooked her real good. They interrogate the one assassin who isn’t quite dead yet, and he tells them that the Tal Shiar are definitely gonna kill the other Asha sister before Picard finds her, and also refers to her as “The Destroyer” (this scene plays out in parallel with the one on the cube, so Rahmda calls Soji this just a few seconds before this guy does). He uses his own acid spit (Funny Laris and Zhubin didn’t think to check him for that) to self-destruct, taking Zhubin’s vest with him. Zhubin is able to get it off before he’s hurt.

Dr. Jurati asks to come with Picard because she thinks she can be useful and she wants to help and totally not because she’s been turned by Commodore Oh. Rios beams them up, leaving Laris and Zhubin to deal with the additional assassins who are definitely on their way to scourge the shire. On the La Sirena, they find out that Raffi’s decided to come along. She’s still pissed at Picard, but she’s worked out that Maddox is somewhere called Freecloud, and she wants a ride. A few bars of Jerry Goldsmith swell as the fanboys finally get the “Picard points his fingers and says Engage” scene we’ve all been waiting for finally happens.

Woof. It really does keep getting better, but it’s still slow going. My “This conspiracy is gonna be too damned complicated” hackles are up a bit, but at least we’re finally getting into space. Though who knows how long it will last, given that I’m pretty sure that the trailers have shown Earth scenes that haven’t happened yet. Also, we haven’t had the Jonathan Frakes cameo we were promised yet (Technically we don’t know if that’s on Earth, but it sure did seem like it. It seems like it just goes without saying that everyone in the future retires to their home planet. Though this has some ominous implications given that Beverly Crusher’s home planet is Mars…)

• I don’t like how wishy-washy they’re being about Captain Rios. He’s screaming “Bogart character played by Ford,” with the whole “Starfleet, tragic past, walked away but still longs to serve on the side of the angels” thing.
• But I love his rapport with the hologram. (Holograms? He refers to the hologram in two different scenes by two different designations, but they’re played by the same actor and act the same, so it’s not clear whether they count as distinct characters or, like, two different “modes” for the same character). They’re basically an old married couple. Which is funny because the hologram and the captain are the same actor.
  • This also showcases that despite the ban on synths, holograms of significant sophistication are still permitted. This may relate back to the way Control in the last season of Discovery couldn’t become “fully sentient” without the Sphere Data, despite the fact that it sure did act like it had free will and a human-like intelligence. I am content with the idea that there really is a distinction to be made here, but I’m wondering whether they’ll ever do the work of actually making it for us.
• Hugh claims that the The Disordered are the only Romulans ever to be assimilated. This is not consistent with past Trek: Voyager encounters a Romulan among a community of liberated Borg, and when the Borg are teased in the first season TNG finale, part of the story is that Romulan and Federation colonies have been mysteriously vanishing at the hands of a then-unrevealed force that later turns out to be the Borg. Hugh reasonably might just not know about the first, but the second was known to the Federation, so it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t get back to him even if the Romulans were covering it up.
• After I praised the first episode for the way Dahj seems to reference mental illness without attaching any sort of stigma, it’s not cool to reach the level of cliche that worked into the depiction of The Disordered.
• For that matter, I think they’re signalling that Raffi isn’t neurotypical – that her skills at “seeing what others miss” might be form of what TV Tropes used to call a “disability superpower”.
• Raffi also has a substance abuse problem, which is clearly being presented as her self-medicating. Her whole character is a tough fit for Star Trek. Unless her lifestyle is self-imposed (which it may well be), someone like her being “discarded” like this is pretty grim even for this darker and grittier version of Star Trek. 
• I don’t see how the story would unfold to fit it in later, so I’m a little disappointed we don’t get more detail about how Picard’s resignation led to Raffi’s decline. In the flashback, it just sort of goes without saying that she’s going to be fired from Starfleet, but, like, “Your commander quit so you are now out of the service,” is not how much of any sort of real-world military or even civilian organization works. He’s her boss, not her patron.
  • Could possibly make sense if I’m right about Raffi having some mental abnormality: Picard may have needed to pull strings to get her a dispensation to qualify for service.
• Between The Disordered, Raffi, and Picard’s brain failure, I’m starting to think that brain irregularities are thematically important in this show. Or maybe it’s because I just watched SuperGreatFriend’s LP of AI: The Somnium Files, a game in which half the major characters have severe neurological abnormalities.
• La Sirena does not really impress me much. The streaming era has been kind of weak on its Starship Porn, aside from Pike’s Enterprise. Most of the ships we see are kinda visually boring.
• Commodore Oh wears sunglasses. Vulcans don’t normally wear sunglasses. They’ve got extra eyelids instead. I don’t know if this is going to be relevant. Probably not, but, like, what if she’s half-Terran? That would be… Well, needlessly complicated, really, but still.
• So we can assume Jurati is a spy, right? I mean, not for certain, but they clearly want us to think that. We cut instantly away from Commodore Oh introducing herself, and then the next time we see Jurati, she’s decided to demand Picard take her along. We’re supposed to think that Oh promised her something or threatened something. Maybe even the attack at the Chateau was a setup to create a context for her to show up where Picard would be pressured to take her along. I mean, she did successfully sneak up on and murder a Romulan assassin.
• The reveal that Picard’s resignation was more a matter of Starfleet calling his bluff than anything else makes a lot of logical sense, but isn’t quite as emotionally satisfying as him more directly resigning on principle.
• “Freecloud” definitely sounds like a Nerdy Galt’s Gulch.
• Raffi believed the Tal Shiar were behind the Mars attack from the beginning. That’s why Picard mentioning them got her interested. She also reckons that Starfleet must’ve been complicit. This goes a long way to explaining why everyone seems to be taking this all in stride. Both in the flashback and in the present day, Picard is reluctant to believe that Starfleet is collaborating with the Tal Shiar, but he still acknowledges Raffi’s insight as valid here. Are they setting up Picard’s inability to let go of his faith in the integrity of Starfleet as his fatal flaw?
• The Fourteen Years Ago Starfleet Uniforms look a little goofy. Starfleet seems to go through a lot of uniforms. I’m not sure if it’s actually a lot compared to real-world militaries or not, but it seems like it.
  • Perspective plays into it, though; if you know someone in the Navy who works an office job, you may well have seen them in four different uniforms over the past ten years, not because the Navy changes which uniforms they have a lot, but because there are several uniforms in use at the same time, and the rules about which one you wear for which occasion can change.