Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×05: Stardust City Rag

Holy shit, you guys. A Thing Happened!

Okay, so, you know the drill: we start out years earlier, only this time, it’s only thirteen years ago, and it’s not a flashback about Old Man Picard and the Mars Attack and subsequent Synth Ban. No, this time we’ve got a Starfleet officer in the goofy decade-ago uniform being painfully dismembered by an alien doctor. She pops out his eye and then pokes around his head with a scanner, looking for his cortical node.

Oh. That explains it. With all the gore, it’s hard to tell, but I think the eye is artificial. A cortical node is a Borg implant that’s normally under a little door in the right temple. She does not get a chance to find it, as Seven of Nine appears and promptly murders her. Though she promises to save the officer, he recognizes that his injuries are fatal and asks for a different kind of rescue. Crying, she hugs him, calls him her child, and shoots him. She also says his name. Icheb.

Time for backstory then: Icheb was one of a group of Borg Babies rescued by Voyager. The others were eventually rehomed with native Delta Quadrant races, but Icheb’s parents were total assholes (Icheb, it turned out, had been genetically engineered as an anti-Borg weapon), so Voyager adopted him.  Also, just random fact, Icheb’s dad was played by Mark Sheppard, who you might know as Crowley on Supernatural or as Rolo Lampkin on Battlestar Galactica or as Canton Delaware on Doctor Who or as the fake Dr. Zito on the 2016 MacGyver or as Badger in Firefly or as the pyrokinetic guy in The X-Files. Or possibly you might know him as the son of W. Morgan Sheppard, who you might know as Blank Reg in Max Headroom or as the real Dr. Zito in the real MacGyver or as Canton Delaware in Doctor Who or as Dr. Graves in Star Trek: The Next Generation or as the prison warden in Star Trek VI or as Qatai in Voyager or as one of the miners in the last episode of Quantum Leap. Someday this information may be useful to you in Trivial Pursuit. And the reason the recently deceased doctor couldn’t find Icheb’s cortical node is that he doesn’t have one. Seven’s broke down and he gave his to her, as his young brain was still elastic enough to adapt to living without one.

So yeah. Icheb’s dead. Also, he’s played by a different actor now, probably because his previous actor said something very crass on the twits in response to Anthony Rapp’s (That’s Stamets on Discovery, for what it’s worth) accusations against Kevin Spacey.

We exit the flashback into another flashback, this one to just a few days ago. I still don’t have a complete sense of what Freecloud’s story is, but it seems to have respectable bits along with the seedy bits. Actually, I think its exact deal is that it is exactly Cloud City from Star Wars only without a Lando. Which means that there is very little detail in the actual canon but I’m sure the fanboys can tell you lots and lots of excruciating detail about how it all works. One of the seedy bits is Stardust City, which either contains a very flamboyant and seedy night club or else is a very flamboyant and seedy nightclub, which is run by a lady named Bjayzl, who I am going to call “Vagazzle” because it amuses me. Possibly she’s just an Important Person here and not actually in charge. They don’t specify. She reminds me a lot of Servalan from Blake’s 7 and looks enough like a young Marina Sirtis that I was kinda expecting a twist where she turned out to be a clone or a secret cousin or something.

She’s got an enforced named Bup or maybe Vup, who is a lizard man who can smell lies (also what you had for breakfast and your last sexual partner). We are told he is a lizard man; there’s nothing about his appearance that specifically communicates “lizard” the way, say, Linus’s does. He’s just big, gray, and bumpy the way lots of TNG-era aliens are. He tells Vagazzle that Bruce Maddox has shown up. He owes her money, so she initially orders Kup to kill him, but relents when it occurs to her that she can sell him instead. Maddox (who has been recast and now looks kinda like a transporter accident between Elliot Gould and Rainn Wilson) tells her that his lab was destroyed and that he thinks it was the Tal Shiar, before succumbing to the drugged Tranya she gave him (I hope he relished it). Vagazzle complains about the unpleasantness of having to deal with the Tal Shiar to sell him.

Aboard La Sirena in the present, Seven visits Picard in his holo-chateau and is snarky about it. She has gotten good at sarcasm, brooding, and all the important antihero skills in the decades since we last saw her. And I called it: she’s a Fenris Ranger, though sadly, this just means that she’s part of a vigilante organization which is trying to impose some semblance of law and order in the former Romulan Neutral Zone. Picard makes a point of objecting on principle, but is suitably chastened by being reminded that both Starfleet and Picard personally just bailed on the region. Seems to be a recurring pattern of Picard trying to assert old-school TNG morality, but just passively accepting it when people tell him it’s more complicated than that. Freecloud is a good place for Seven to hook back up with the Fenris Rangers, so she plans to hit Picard up for a ride, but when he tells her about his hopeless crusade, she’s sufficiently into it to help out.

On the flight deck, Raffi is looking up a Gabriel Hwang, who is at a medical facility on Freecloud. Jurati watches a home movie of her and Maddox which ends with them making out. Both of them look roughly the same age they are now, even though Maddox was supposed to have been in hiding since the Synth ban, but hey, fourteen years isn’t really that long I guess. They get to Freecloud, where the ship is inundated with targeted holographic popup ads. Elnor is disappointed that he didn’t get one. It seems like Elnor is slotting into the somewhat uncommon trope of the Sheltered Yet Badass Prince. I’ve mentioned the trope once before, of all places in reference to Ethan Ratkin in War of the Worlds II. This is a trope that you usually only see in cultural contexts that aren’t cynical about nobility. A young prince who’s never been outside the castle walls is forced out into the world. And he’s new to everything and has never seen all this stuff before… But he’s instantly good at everything, because it turns out that noble blood just makes you better. He provides a bit of comic relief in this episode, which works pretty well because it’s just enough to keep the episode from sliding all the way into relentlessly dire.

When Raffi finds Vagazzle’s “For Sale: One Gently-Used Bruce Maddox” ad on Freecloud Craigslist, Seven offers herself as bait in a trade, as her Borg parts are the only thing they’ve got that might equal what the Tal Shiar would offer. A flashback to the planning of the heist is intercut with the execution. Rios beams into Stardust City dressed like a pimp, posing as a “facer” – a flamboyant middleman for an unseen buyer. Nup gets edgy when Rios admits he isn’t there on behalf of the Tal Shiar, but a cocktail of time-release meds kick in to keep the lizard-man from smelling anything untoward. Picard, sporting a beret, eyepatch, and an outrageously overblown French accent, presents himself as a bounty hunter looking to trade an ex-Borg for Maddox. Seven, wearing trick handcuffs and with a transporter beacon secreted among her implants, is pretty much unique for having been assimilated as a child but liberated as an adult, and thus her remaining implants are more extensive and in better condition. Picard demands proof-of-life for Maddox before making the trade.

Meanwhile, Raffi goes to meet Hwang, who turns out to be her estranged son. He’s not happy to see her, but in a fairly mild sort of way, without a lot of angry shouting. She claims to be drug-free and working to turn her life around, but he trivially baits her into a conspiracy theory rant, proving his case that she was still unable to put her family first. He makes it clear he doesn’t want her in his life, but is still controlled enough to be polite and briefly introduce her to his heavily-pregnant Romulan wife. With nothing better to do, Raffi returns to La Sirena and hides in the closet.

Things hit the fan when Vagazzle shows up with Maddox (who for some reason they have beaten almost to death), and reveals that she and Seven know each other. Well enough that she addresses Seven by her birthname (deadname?), Annika. Though legitimate about helping Picard to recover Maddox, Seven had an ulterior motive in her participation: Vagazzle had infiltrated the Fenris Rangers years earlier, abusing Seven’s trust to gain the information that let her capture Icheb. The trick handcuffs allow her to get the drop on Vagazzle, forcing her guards to disarm. Rios shoots Mup before he can draw his backup. Aboard La Sirena, Jurati starts having a panic attack over her role in beaming everyone up. We’ll learn more about her game in a bit, but why she seems to be freaking out over operating a transporter in particular is either a mystery or shoddy writing. the EMH activates and asks the nature of the psychiatric emergency.

Picard tries to talk Seven out of revenge-killing with a very Picardish appeal to her humanity, but what actually works is Rios arguing that it wouldn’t be fair to involve Picard and Elnor in a murder that will definitely put a huge bounty on all their heads. Seven consents to trade Vagazzle’s life for Maddox, and the five of them beam up. Picard and Seven have a little heart-to-heart about their shared experience as ex-Borg in which Picard admits to only having regained most of his humanity. Claiming the Fenris Rangers have sent a ship for her, Picard gives her two phaser rifles in payment for her services (Though aren’t those Rios’s?), she gives him a holo-chip to contact her if he ever needs a ratings boost, and beams right back down to Stardust City to murder Vagazzle anyway, because Brooding Antihero and all.

So thing two I was right about: Dahj and Soji’s “mom” wasn’t real. Maddox detected that the “Mom AI” had activated, and has guessed that Dahj is dead. He reveals to Picard that Soji is aboard The Artifact, and that she was sent there because of the terrible secret of space, which has something to do with the synth ban and a conspiracy between the Romulans and the Federation, and, like, we knew all of this already, but it’s nice that halfway through the season, the main character knows it too. Of course Maddox doesn’t know anything properly useful for the audience, just than an unknown “they” are up to “something” for “reasons”. Jurati shoos Picard away because Maddox is basically one big hematoma at this point and needs to rest.

Only not really, because thing three I was right about (this is barely bragging, because as I have complained before, despite the big damn overly complex conspiracy structure, every plot twist has been telegraphed a mile away) is Jurati being a plant. When Maddox praises her for her role in helping him reproduce Soong’s creation of synthetic life, she calls it, “One more thing I have to atone for,” and shuts off his life support. She deactivates the EMH, who appears again in response to her emotional state and only notices Maddox later. As Maddox dies, she says that she wishes he knew what she knows, and that she didn’t know what she knows.

This has been a long time coming, but we finally have an episode that feels like it has a proper plot-in-itself rather than just setup-for-a-plot-later. The major weakness is that it’s a bit of a mish-mash. But having Picard and Rios dress up in ridiculous costumes to play Space Pimps? Yes, please. Seven’s Brooding Space Antihero stuff could easily have been cumbersome, but I think they did a good job of keeping it away from the boundaries of “People are just assholes for the sake of conflict”. As such, she’s very much in keeping with characters like pre-Control Leland or Evil!Georgiou or, to go earlier, Shran on Enterprise: someone who doesn’t (in Seven’s case, no longer) shares the values that Starfleet espouses, but still recognizes them as valuable. There’s no struggle to convince her to help, and even though she’s got her own agenda, she pursues it in a way that doesn’t interfere with Picard’s.

I also really like the reason behind Jurati’s betrayal: she knows the truth (or at least, some of it. I’ll be kinda upset if it turns out she knows the whole thing, because, like, Alison Jurati is not the kind of person I would choose to let in on the terrible secret of space which the Romulans based their entire culture around protecting at all costs even from themselves. I’m not even sure I find it believable that she knows as much as the presumably-partial-story Commodore Oh knows. I assume Jurati knows just enough to scare the pants off her, whereas Oh, if she is not a Romulan plant herself, knows more, but not as much as the Tal Shiar, and only the Zhat Vash know the whole story). She knows the something that is so terrible that she’s willing to kill her lover to stop it. Something directly linked to the creation of synthetic life.

There is an immediate question that comes up, though, which is why the Romulans, Starfleet, and Jurati don’t just tell Picard: why do they insist on withholding information that might persuade him to just, like, not unleash the terrible secret of space? But, in what is either good luck or this show demonstrating that, evidence aside, it actually does know a thing or two about writing, they’ve built up to the answer already. Last week, Picard identified his own tragic flaw as his willingness to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. He walked away from Starfleet because they wouldn’t continue with his evacuation plan. In this very episode, we have a parallel: Seven doesn’t tell Picard about her relationship with Vagazzle because she already knows that Picard wouldn’t stand for it. Picard could understand her vigilantism and he could even see how it was the best course under the situation. But he wouldn’t go along with it. The point they’ve been making here is that Picard is possibly the one man in all the galaxy who, if you told him, “Look, we’re not happy about it, but we need to murder this innocent girl in order to prevent the destruction of the universe and we are 100% dead certain of this,” would still give his life to protect her. What’s interesting is that the narrative seems to be allowing for the possibility that this is a bad thing about Picard. But still, why not tell everyone? This, I think, ought to be the space where “What the Tal Shiar knows” and “What the Zhat Vash knows” diverge.

Also:

• The popup ads are targeted. Picard gets an invitation to high tea at a five-star hotel; Rios gets an offer for an engine upgrade; Jurati is invited to Robot Boxing, and Raffi gets an ad for drugs. The reason Elnor doesn’t get an ad is because he spend his whole life in a convent and doesn’t have a social media profile. (Seven wasn’t on the flight deck at the time.)
• Rios’s ad is from a vendor using the name “The Red Bolian”. All the Bolians previously shown have been blue. One place where I think Picard is doing a good job with their background worldbuilding is the diversity among aliens. Trek has always been incredibly awful about depicting all alien races as monocultures – every single member of an alien race looks the same and has the same cultural values unless they’re “weird”. But in Picard, we’ve got aliens having both human-like racial diversity, and also orthagonal kinds of diversity that don’t map directly onto human ethnic groups.
• You would think that Elnor having been raised in a philosophy of absolute candor would be a big deal in this story where they have to play out a complicated rouse against an adversary who can smell deception. But it really only comes up in the form of it taking him a disproportionately long time to understand what the plan actually is. Three quarters of the way through the planning flashback, with Rios and Picard already in costume, he suddenly shouts, “Oh! We’re pretending!” Seven advises him to just not talk.
• On their return, we see Rios set the pattern enhancer down on the transporter console, and Seven picks it up again before she leaves. I’m not sure what that’s about. Possibly an angle for her to suddenly reappear in a later episode? Or is the idea that it allows her to beam back into Stardust City – the whole point of the thing is that it would let them beam out despite the club’s countermeasures, but I think you would need it to be inside the club for that to work.
• I also don’t quite know what to make of Bjayzl calling Seven by her human name. Unlike other ex-borg, Seven never reclaimed her original name, largely because she associates her birthname with the childhood trauma of assimilation. Lots of fans speculate that at some point, she would eventually start using it again, when she eventually felt she had fully reclaimed her humanity, but I’ve always preferred to think that if she ever decided to reject her Borg designation, it would be more in character for her to take an entirely new name, as a big part of her character arc is that she doesn’t want to “go back” to being Annika Hudson – the name given to her by irresponsible parents who endangered her in pursuit of their own goals – but rather to go forward to become her own self-defined person. The cliche read is that Bjayzl is presuming a false sort of intimacy with her – calling her by the name only those closest to her would use. Only, as far as we have seen, that’s not what her friends call her. But neither does it really work as a taunt. Possibly the best read is that she is calling her by a child’s name to belittle her.
• In that wise, the Seven we see here has clearly grown a lot since Voyager. She’s much more comfortable with her humanity, having, in a completely literal sense, let her hair down. But I wish she’d shown a little more of the complexity of Seven’s original character, that, despite having embraced her individuality, she still retained Borg “cultural values”, such as the desire for continual self-improvement toward a goal of attaining “perfection” and bringing order to chaos. There’s maybe a hint of that in her employment as a ranger, but it’s not emphasized.
• Maddox describes Soji and Dahj as “perfectly imperfect.” I wonder now whether that might have some relation to the obession with “perfection” that characterizes the Borg.
• If Jurati doesn’t have to explain to everyone why she shut off the EMH while Maddox was dying, I’ll be a little disappointed.
• There’s a little exchange near the beginning where Raffi explains who Seven is to Rios and confirms that Seven and Picard hadn’t met before but only know each other by reputation. Rios knew but had forgotten that Picard is also ex-Borg. Picard being ex-Borg and having some emotional issues related to that is one of those things that is hugely important to his character in like 4 episodes, but they don’t talk about the rest of the time. Canonically, Picard still has some Borg hardware himself, which I suppose might eventually become relevant as we’ve established that ex-Borg are hunted for their implants. Picard also has an artificial heart, but that’s Federation-tech.
  • Picard being ex-Borg adds some context to the cruel and dehumanizing things he says about Seven as part of his act
• With some prompting, Rios realizes that he knows of Seven by reputation as well – apparently “The ex-Borg Fenris Ranger from the Delta Quadrant” has some fame to her name. Or maybe not, since it takes him a few tries to get her number right. Which is weird because he was right there when Picard said it at the end of last week’s episode.

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Are we actually going to learn the terrible secret of space, or will it remain a tease even at the end of the season? Don’t know. We’re starting to get a picture of what’s involved in it, though how all the pieces fit together isn’t at all clear:

• The terrible secret of space has prompted Romulans to eschew synthetic life with hatred and fear
• The Romulan-Federation conspiracy banned synthetic life in the Federation, but this ban did not extend to holograms/AI
• Under Federation Law, some synthetic beings have been recognized as “life”, but AIs explicitly have not. Star Trek has actually been consistent about this distinction, even though it has never spelled out how it works.
• The Romulan armageddon involves a “destroyer” who will command “unleashed demons” and destroy all sentient life.
• The threat of “all sentient life” being destroyed seems like it must be a callback to Control.
• The Borg are involved in what is being covered up somehow, but it’s not clear how.
• But literally everyone who watched Discovery got real, real suspicious about how much Control’s possession of Leland resembled Borg assimilation.
• In line with the AI/Synth distinction, Control seemed like a sentient computer with free will and a “personality” comparable to organic life, but was explicitly “not fully sentient” and needed the Sphere Data to achieve sentience.
• At the end of Discovery season 2, Section 31 – which is the Evil Conspiracy branch of Starfleet – is explicitly working to prevent anything like Control from ever happening again.
• When Borg started getting liberated from the collective due to Hugh, they flocked to the leadership of Lore, one of two Soong-Type androids whose disposition is not known. (The other one is a reproduction of Data’s mom. She doesn’t know she’s an android)
• We do not know anything about the Borg that dates back as far as the time of the Vulcan/Romulan split. So it’s technically possible that proto-Romulans had some role in the prehistory of the Borg.
• In The Best of Both Worlds, the Borg, via Locutus, dismiss Data as primitive and irrelevant, though in First Contact, the Borg Queen deliberately seeks out Data for assimilation.

It sure seems like Control is involved somehow, but how that fits with the galactic timeline is hard to reckon. One possibility is that it’s not Control itself, but rather that Control was only one example of a repeating pattern. Of course, another possibility is time travel. What it looks like so far, though, is that there is a connection between the Borg, Control, and Soong-type androids. We could interpret the Armageddon prophesy as suggesting that Soji might, like her “uncle”, become the leader of a new race of Borg. Perhaps “true” synthetic life could be the last element the Borg need to discard organic components altogether and attain “perfection”?

But where do the Romulans figure into all of this? A conspiracy by Starfleet is easy enough to figure, in light of the connection (real or even just perceived) to Control. But where do the Romulans fit? How did they end up keepers of the terrible secret of space?

Or, and, honestly, this kinda seems more likely, it could all end up just being something very stupid and needlessly convoluted.

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I had another Picard-related dream. Another weird and implausible but somehow more interesting than what is liable to actually happen scenario:

This time, it’s the revelation of the grand conspiracy. It turns out that fourteen years ago, the attack on Mars was used as a cover for the conspirators to kidnap the Emperor of the Universe (Sid Haig), who was frozen in carbonite so that when the next supernova occurred, he could be released into it, which would cause it to form a wormhole leading to the back seat of a Saturn parked in Los Angeles in 1995, allowing the Emperor’s evil daughter to take the Star Trek Phase II concept version of the USS Enterprise back there in order to avert the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

For reasons.