Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard: 1×07: Nepenthe

These last two weeks have been a bit too much “stuff happening” for this show, so we dial it back this week, with only a bit of Happening in the B-plot, while the main thrust of the episode is just a nice nostalgic visit with our favorite TNG alums. Yes, contrary to my earlier statements about everyone going back to their homeworlds to retire, Nepenthe is, in fact, the home of Old Man Silver Fox William Riker and his wife, Hasn’t-Aged-As-Well-As-Her-Husband Deanna Troi-Riker.

But first, you guessed it, flashback! Three weeks earlier, on Earth, we get to see the rest of Jurati’s meeting with Commodore Oh. After a little bit of friendly intimidation, Oh “explains” her position on synthetic life by mind-melding with Agnes, to show her a nightmare blipvert of a Romulan woman ripping her face off and Earth getting destroyed. I’m like 90% sure some of those VFX shots are recycled from Discovery, which either confirms a connection between Control and the terrible secret of space, or is just them recycling an expensive effect to save money, like how the Duras sisters’s ship in Generations exploded in stock footage from Star Trek VI. You never can tell. Jurati throws up and then agrees to eat a tracking device, on account of the possibility of armageddon.

Three weeks later, you know how last time I was interested in the mention that Hugh is a Federation Citizen? Turns out that’s relevant for a hot second: Rizzo has a bunch (all?) the other xBs murdered in front of him when he won’t tell her where Picard and Soji got to, but because he’s Federation, she’s forbidden by treaty from doing the same to him. Though she’s very “Look what you made me do” about it. La Sirena’s being held by a tractor beam, but they get released once Karen’s made it to his “Snakehead” fighter in order to tail them. Space-Legolas refuses to be beamed back up, as he’s hooked back up with Hugh and vows to help him protect the xBs. Hugh decides to go back to the queencell and use its great and terrible powers to take control of the place. But it turns out this is exactly what Rizzo wanted, since it technically puts him in violation of the treaty, allowing her to murder him. Which she eventually does, though only after a pretty decent fight scene with Elnor, in which she acknowledges herself as Zhat Vash and recognizes him as Qot Milat (Though she does not comment on the fact that he can’t actually be Qot Milat on account of being a man). She beams away before he can finish her. Hugh dies in Elnor’s arms in a very HoYay scene that feels completely unearned, and tells him that he needs to find an xB to activate the queencell.

Meanwhile, Picard and Soji space-magic themselves to Nepenthe. And in spite of Picard having given Hugh nothing more specific than the planet, they have in fact materialized in Riker’s back yard, just in time for a fake-out scare where they are held at arrowpoint by a Wild Girl in possibly culturally appropriative war paint, who turns out to be Kestra Troi-Riker, out doing fun screen-free free-range-child stuff that reminds you that no one in Star Trek has hobbies whose popularity peaked after 1950. It’s framed like her and Picard know each other, though they can’t have met in-person given the series timeline. While she walks them back to her parents, Picard catches Soji up in the clumsiest way he can think of: Kestra assumes she’s Picard’s granddaughter, Soji corrects her that Picard is just an alleged friend of her father, and Picard clarifies that said father was Data. Soji takes this a lot better than Dahj, probably because Soji has already had one hell of a day, and also because she is defaulting to assuming everything anyone says to her is a lie right now. I mean, she did just walk through a magic mirror to a planet halfway across the quadrant. Kestra is very hard to read. She doesn’t have much of a reaction to Picard at all, which is one kind of weird. She bonds very quickly with Soji, and they set up a good reason for that but never actually sell it, and instead play up her interest as being largely along the android angle – she’s very impressed that Soji has snot.

For the second time in as many weeks, someone is happy to see Picard, as Deanna and Will immediately offer him a place to hide out as long as he likes. Riker puts up the shields and anti-cloaking scanners around his rustic cabin in the woods, which I kinda find a pleasant way of reminding us that this is indeed still the future and the fact that nothing looks overtly futurey is an aesthetic choice. Riker cooks while Soji and Kestra bond and Picard has some exposition with Deanna over the fact that it has apparently not been too long since the family lost their older son, Thad. Picard refuses to tell Riker anything about his mission, since he doesn’t want to endanger them, but Riker works it out anyway, since, for the only time in the series, Soji does Data’s characteristic head-tilt. Deanna just finds out because, duh, he told her daughter.

The Rikers had retired to Nepenthe to give Thad, who’d lived his whole life in space, a “homeworld” to die on, because he had a particular kind of space cancer for which the cure could only be cultured in an android brain and whoops, no androids. I mean. I. Um. Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t we? Picard eventually talks Soji through using her android senses to determine that he can be trusted (Though, and I like this, she only reaches the conclusion that Picard doesn’t think he’s lying, not that anything about this is legit), and she tells them about the moons she saw in her dream. It takes Kestra about ten seconds to text her buddy the eccentric old retired captain on the other side of the lake to find out what planet it is.

This episode is pretty rough about how it conveys the passage of time, because there are three plots moving at different paces. And no one but Kestra wears more than one outfit the entire time. I mean, they don’t actively try to depict the events on Nepenthe only taking a single day – I think Riker makes dinner three times – but it’s hard to hold onto it. It takes La Sirena several days to travel to Nepenthe, because the magic mirror is way faster than warp, but Picard seems worried almost immediately about not having heard from Rios, and the scenes on La Sirena only feel like they cover a few hours. The scenes on The Artifact seem to take even less time, but there might be some flexibility there, as Space-Legolas’s plot doesn’t necessarily end at the same time as the others.

While Picard was eating pizza with the Rikers, Rios noticed that La Sirena was being followed  (I am a little unclear on how it works for Rios to keep detecting that Karen’s snakehead is staying out of sensor range. What does “out of sensor range” mean if you can still detect someone who is there?

Rios pulls a Han Solo by hitting the brakes suddenly so that Karen will overshot them, but it’s not long before he’s found their trail again. Jurati has a little bit of a freak-out about wanting to just go home and not confront the terrible secret of space, so Raffi offers her drugs and cake. Jurati stress-eats until she throws up, which makes me wonder whether someone involved in the making of this just has an oddly specific kink for watching Allison Pill vomit. In sickbay, Rios tells her that he suspects Raffi might be giving away their location. That the circumstances of her returning to La Sirena after Freecloud were suspicious and maybe the Romulans planted something on her. Now, last week they showed Raffi telling Rios about what happened on Freecloud, so my assumption here was that Raffi and Rios had figured out what was up and were trying to get a confession out of Agnes. Maybe Raffi slipped something in the cake to neutralize the tracker and Rios is trying to manipulate a confession out of her. But that doesn’t quite track with the fact that Rios goes back to the flight deck and kind of insinuates that he’s considering the possibility that he might have to throw Raffi off the ship for their protection. Instead, Jurati uses the medical replicator (Which is even more blatantly a 3D-printer than the other replicators that have been 3D-printers so far) to make herself some drugs that I assume neutralize the tracker, but also make her foam at the mouth and go into a coma.

On the cube, Space-Legolas tries to figure out what to do, but fortunately, through contrivance that beggars the imagination, he randomly does a combat roll under a table where, randomly, Jean-Luc just happens to have dropped that Fenris Ranger Summoning Chip Seven gave him two episodes ago. And, well, he needs an xB.

La Sirena finally shows up at Nepenthe. Kestra gives Soji a broken compass as a token of their friendship, and everyone hugs it out before heading off to go protect Soji’s homeworld.

Well, that was… I mean… Okay. The slow talky stuff was, like, nice. It was just plain nice seeing Old Man Picard pal around with Silver Fox Riker and Heartachey Mom Troi. If the whole show had just been this sort of thing, I could live with that. But there’s also this damn apocalyptic conspiracy thriller plot going on, and I wish they’d pick a lane. In terms of the ongoing story they have determined themselves to tell, this is a regress to the way the first half of the season emphatically stopped things from happening. You’ve got three plots and none of them are quite accomplishing what this show needs. The stuff on Nepenthe is great, but it’s largely a nostalgic aside from the plot proper. The stuff on La Sirena is kind of a mess and a big chunk of it is just more wheel-spinning since the plot is organized around slowing them down on the way to Nepenthe… Which was several days away to begin with.

And the plot of the Borg cube has some good action, and the showdown between Rizzo and Space-Legolas is viscerally satisfying, but its emotional beats are mostly unearned. We barely know Elnor and we’ve barely seen Hugh in thirty years. Hugh has the end of a character arc where he decides to take a stand and reclaim the power of the Borg in defense of his ex-Borg brothers, but you know what we did not see even once? Hugh failing to take a stand or shying away from the power of the Borg or letting the Romulans walk all over him. If there had been some of that, it might have meant something that he dies thanking Elnor for making him “a hopeful fool again”. There is an intimacy between Hugh and Elnor in their scenes together which should be really lovely, except that it comes out of nowhere. Hugh does refer to his plan as a “lost cause”, and with Picard formally releasing Elnor from his oath last week, there’s a setup here for the idea that Elnor would bind his blade to the protection of the xBs, but it never actually happens. They spent so much time fucking around in the first half of the season that they never bothered actually giving us stakes for the big character moments later, so Hugh’s sudden crusade and Elnor’s sudden allegiance feels as unearned as Jurati jumping into bed with Rios last week. Or, for that matter, the claim Picard repeats this week that he’s adopted this quest because his life was empty and he was just marking time until death, despite the fact that what we saw of Picard before taking on this quest does not really depict that.

Similarly, it feels like there’s a real solid angle for Kestra and Soji to bond over the fact that they’ve both recently lost siblings. But neither Kestra nor Will ever actually mention Thad directly (Though, on the other hand, they do a decent job of depicting a family that is healing but is still raw. Kestra embraces her brother’s interests, but doesn’t talk directly about him. Will gets misty-eyed and wry talking about the healing properties of his adopted planet and about the difficulty of protecting the people we love. I’m reminded of Gene Roddenberry’s famous (and famously misunderstood) objections to the TNG episode where a kid’s mom dies. It’s often repeated as “He didn’t think children would be sad if their parents died in the future because humans would be past that sort of thing,” but I think what he was really objecting to is that his process of mourning her death is unhealthy, and it’s unhealthy largely because the people around him completely drop the ball on supporting him to deal with his emotions in a healthy way until the third act). And, hey, Thad died because of the synth ban, and now here is a new synthetic life form. Sure seems like that would make for some strong emotions among the Riker clan, but… Nope. Or, hey, Deanna makes a big point about how she’s “not as brave” as she used to be and having lost one child, she’s kinda worried that Picard showing up at her house with an illegal android and the Tal Shiar on his tail. You’d think there would be some tension there. But nah, more just, “I’m worried about something bad happening to my family… But yeah you guys can crash here as long as you like.”

Some other minutiae:

• Okay, so Riker and Troi’s kids are named Kestra and Thad. Kestra Troi was the name of Deanna’s older sister who died in childhood. Lots of people were hoping the Rikers would have a daughter named Kestra.
• Thaddeus Riker was a Civil War-era ancestor of Riker’s who survived the Battle of Pine Mountain thanks to the intervention of a member of the Q Continuum. No one was hoping they would have a son named Thad.
• Riker mentions some trouble with the Kzinti. This is the second time Trek has intersected Larry Niven’s Known Space universe. The Kzinti had previously appeared in the animated episode “The Slaver Weapon”.
• When Kestra points an arrow at him, Picard suggests that she should aim for his head rather than his heart, on account of, as I mentioned before, his heart is artificial.
• Jurati mentions a gormagander, which is the kind of space whale that Harry Mudd was wanted for, ahem, penetrating.
• Riker makes pizza with bunnicorn sausage. The bunnicorn is exactly what it sounds like, though apparently you have to remove their poison sacs before making sausage out of them if you do not want to die violently.
  • It’s homemade sausage. Kestra killed and de-poisoned the bunnicorn herself, and her dad made it into sausage.
• Narek has like one line in this episode (“Leaving now. Signal lock strong.”). He spends the whole thing in the cockpit of his fighter playing with a fidget cube.
  • I like that the Rubic’s Cube of Death he fidgeted with in previous episodes turned out to be plot-relevant, and now he has stopped using it possibly because it is a reminder of his betrayal of Soji, or maybe because it is covered in poison, but the fact that he’s a habitual fidgeter is a persistent part of his character, so he just got a new thing to fidget with.
  • Also, possibly this one unfolds into a sword or something, but it looks like exactly the same model of fidget cube I’ve got on the bin next to my seat right now.
• “What is the nature of your- Oh bloody hell.” – The EMH. Another thing that I thought was going somewhere but didn’t is that Raffi calls for the Emergency Hospitality Hologram when Jurati throws up, and he doesn’t appear. Coupled with the fact that we hadn’t seen any holograms since the end of “Stardust City Rag”, I was thinking maybe Jurati had disabled them to stop them ratting her out about Maddox. But I guess not?
  • Fridge thought: Unless she turned it back on again before dosing herself.
• Riker somehow knows about Picard’s impending brain failure and mentions it in passing. You know who does not? Deanna. I dunno. Maybe counselling someone who is living with an incurable degenerative disease is just too close to home for her?
• The fact that Oh mindmelds with Jurati probably rules out her being Romulan. It was widely speculated, you may recall, that she was, on account of her wearing sunglasses. Word of God is that she doesn’t need the sunglasses; they’re cop sunglasses, and she was just wearing them to intimidate Jurati.
• This, of course, raises other questions, if Oh is both Vulcan and apparently all-in on the conspiracy, rather than just being half-in as I assumed before. So it’s not just the Zhat Vash who know the terrible secret of space. The timelines don’t work out fully, but it would make a lot of sense for it to turn out that Oh is Section 31, Starfleet’s cartoonishly evil branch who has previously displayed a willingness to be cartoonishly evil in pursuit of their goals and which, per Discovery explicitly has “Prevent a robot uprising from destroying organic life” as part of its mission statement.
• They very clearly are setting us up to expect Seven of Nine to take control of the Cube, possibly becoming a new Borg Queen. But wouldn’t it be cool if the xB who activates the queencell instead turns out to be Picard? Picard embracing his identity as an Ex-Borg and taking on a leadership role among those liberated from the Borg would actually be a real chill place for his character arc to end.
• The “broken” compass Kestra gives to Soji spins wildly. What kind of “broken” makes a compass do that? The only broken compasses I’ve ever seen have just had a stuck needle. (It is logical, but not really satisfying in a narrative sense, that the compass isn’t actually broken; it’s just incompatible with Nepenthe’s magnetic field)
• The unseen character of Captain Crandall, Kestra’s friend, the eccentric old retired captain who is even older and saltier than Jean-Luc, is kinda a more interesting character than the ones we’ve seen, and TBH, a show about Kestra Troi-Riker as a weird, wild-girl dealing with the emotional trauma of her brother’s death by bonding to the reclusive retired Starship Captain who lives on the other side of the lake would be a much better premise for this show than the one we got.
  • You almost feel like this episode is a crossover, with Picard and his space-conspiracy thriller bumping into a more sedate, sylvan ’60s Wonderful World of Disney miniseries about The Rikers dealing with the death of their son. Can we have that show instead?
• Kestra is wonderful, by the way. Just lovely.
• Marina Sirtis is weird in this. I don’t know if it’s the writing or the direction or just that she hasn’t played Deanna Troi in fifteen years. When she’s being the mourning mother who is still hurting from Thad’s death but is working on it, she’s okay. But when she talks to Soji, there’s a cold aloofness to her which, again, could’ve been something – she could hate Soji as a proxy for hating the synth ban that cost Thad’s life, or she could hate Soji as a threat to her family (There’s some wonderful irony: one child dies because there are no androids, now the other child is in danger because there is an android). But I don’t even think it’s intentional: Soji refers to her as being, “all sensitive and caring” when she’s not. She’s being creepy.
• Jonathan Frakes, on the other hand, is okay. Mostly this is because he doesn’t really have to do any heavy lifting; he just needs to be supporting and charming and inexplicably sexy, and he does all of those things.
• Riker is really wonderful in retirement. There’s none of this “Old man who doesn’t know how to live his life now that he no longer has his job to define him” stuff they have with Picard – Picard, Raffi and Rios are all to different degrees haunted by their tragic Starfleet pasts. But Riker? Riker’s happy to just live in his rustic cabin in the woods with his family and turn the local wildlife into delicious sausages. Picard asks him about going back to Starfleet, and he’s like, “Yeah, I could I guess, but I don’t really want to.” He came to Nepenthe because his son was dying, and for Will Riker, his family was more important than his career, and now that he’s out he doesn’t especially care to go back.
• Deanna mentions that she can’t read Soji’s emotions. Which is an important  detail to fill in, but it does maintain her 100% track record of her empathic powers never ever being useful.
• I am glad they decided not to set this meeting during the period of her life when Deanna goes into Weird Horny Betazoid Menopause. Or maybe they did and that’s why Riker’s dressed like a swinger.
• Apparently Riker had told Picard that if he went off fourteen years ago to run the Romulan evacuation, he’d be, “Up to his ass in Romulans for the rest of his life.” Which is weird enough turn of phrase that it seems almost deliberately kinky.
  • Apparently “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget that you can drain the swamp,” is a saying? What?
• Killing off Hugh makes me very angry. Especially as they did it ten seconds after making me ship Hugh and Space-Legolas.
• Kestra gets all interested in the matter of Soji’s bodily fluids. And yet, despite the fact that Kestra is somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve-to-fourteen, she does not ask what seems like the most obvious question to ask in the real world or a streaming series where you can do that sort of thing. Damnit, tell us if androids get periods you cowards.
  • As far as I know – and admittedly, I missed a bunch of DS9 and Voyager – there has never been one single reference to menstruation in the entire Star Trek canon.

So weird conclusion: I didn’t like this episode as an episode of Star Trek: Picard. But this woulda been a good episode of some other, better show.