Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×08: Broken Pieces

Content warning: suicide, self-harm

Deep breath.

It’s Battlestar Galactica. It’s just godsdamned frakking Battlestar Galactica.

Okay. I’m not really mad, just disappointed. It’s okay. So. We’re on another one of these, “Nothing happens, but in a really exciting way,” episodes. We have two main plots which are largely unrelated and unconnected, which are both slow and talky, and they both feel very big and portentous, and yet they both leave the status quo unchanged from a practical standpoint. “Nepenthe” ended with Old Man Picard promising to take Soji to her newly discovered homeworld. “Broken Pieces” ends with Old Man Picard… Promising to take Soji to her newly discovered homeworld.

Which order shall I tell this in? I guess I’ll begin with our contractually required opening flashback to fourteen years ago. The planet Aia, known to Romulans as “The Grief World”, is where a very ancient race left behind a message called “The Admonishment”, which is the scary doomsday prophecy that Oh showed Jurati last week. Actually, what Oh showed Jurati was specifically Oh’s memory of this specific event: Oh is apparently the leader of the Zhat Vash (Turns out she’s half Romulan. Gah. Why do they need to make things so complicated? Also, how does this fit in with the fact that Rizzo clearly views Oh as a useful idiot?), and she is guiding a group of initiates – among them Rizzo and Ramdha (Remember her? The mad prophetess xB who first identifies Soji as “The Destroyer”?) – through the scary mind-rending terrible secret of space. She warns them that some of them will indeed be driven mad by the revelation, and indeed, they are. One of them immediately shoots herself; another beats herself to death with a rock, one of them, as seen in Jurati’s vision, rips her own face off, and Ramdha starts tearing out her own hair. Rizzo is the only one left standing, and she’s clearly messed up, but her first question is what they have to do to stop it. Oh tells her that they have to go blow up Mars.

Also Ramdha is Rizzo and Narek’s aunt. And it’s implied that it was experiencing The Terrible Secret of Space from her that donked up the Borg Cube. That whole thing where Hugh did not know of any other Romulans having ever been assimilated to imply that the Romulans have some secret anti-Borg countermeasure? Yeah, nevermind; it was just that Rahmda had – please imagine me visibly straining to make myself say this – highly contagious suicidal impulses from learning the terrible secret of space (“The Admonishment” is an okay name I guess, but I’m still calling it “The terrible secret of space). Rizzo orders her goons to go kill the rest of the xBs while they wait for the fleet to arrive, and also go kill Space-Legolas. He walks right into a stun grenade and only manages to murder three or four of them before he’s overwhelmed, but Seven shows up at the dramatically appropriate moment so they can slip off to steal the cube. Seven activates the queencell without making it clear what the queencell is for exactly. Most of the Borg on the cube haven’t been deborged yet, are still in hibernation, and won’t be able to function without the collective since it takes a lot of work to get an xB to the point where it can think for itself. Seven could reestablish a private collective over the local intranet, but this is bad for several reasons such as: 1. They’re the Borg. (There is also, and I am glad they do not ignore the gravity of this, the fact that it would make Seven not merely complicit but an active agent in re-victimizing the dormant Borg drones. A subtle point in Voyager is that when a Borg is part of the collective, it actually likes being a Borg, in a sense. And for many Borg – especially Seven herself – that feeling doesn’t entirely go away when they’re disconnected) But when the Romulans start slaughtering the xBs wholesale, Seven’s had enough and plugs herself into the Cube. She goes all scary-eyed and announces, in Borg Voice, “We are the Borg”. Unfortunately, she does this like ten seconds before Rizzo opens up one side of the cube and the freshly-waking Borg all get blown out into space.

So meanwhile… Who do you think is going to have a tragic backstory this week which ties into the ongoing plot? Did you guess Rios? Why would you guess him? I mean, other than that he’s the only one left? Rios has a very quiet little freak-out at the sight of Soji, and tells Picard he’s quitting when they get to Deep Space 12 (Picard angers Soji by ordering Rios to take them to a starbase instead of straight to her homeworld; he explains that this is serious enough that he really needs to get a posse together for this one). Raffi spends most of acts 1 and 2 talking to the holo-crew to work out enough conversation tree keywords to get Rios to talk about his past, and it’s honestly some fun scenes, since the hologram crew are kinda neat. They all have redacted copies of Rios’s mind since La Sirena basically came with the same technology as the Nintendo Mii Maker for customizing your holographic crew based on a brain scan. In addition to Emmet, the Doctor, Mister Hospitality and the Emergency Navigation Hologram (Who identifies himself as “Enoch”, we also meet “Ian”, the Scottish Emergency Engineering Hologram. I’ll jump straight to the conclusion and explain Rios’s deal outright:

What ought to be the big revelation of this episode, but is for some reason given very little gravity, is that, yes, just like we guessed from the beginning, there are more synths. Rios met two of them, one of whom was Soji’s older identical twin sister Jana. Nine years earlier, the ibn Majid had encountered Jana and her boss, Beautiful Flower. Commodore Oh contacted Captain Vandermeer, told him they were synths, and ordered him to assassinate them, threatening to have the ibn Majid destroyed with all hands if he refused. Vandermeer did as he was ordered, but committed suicide shortly afterward out of guilt.

While Raffi is putting all of this together, Picard calls Admiral Yes-I-Read-The-Interview-About-How-It-Wasn’t-A-Reasonable-Place-For-Her-Character-But-Come-On-Clancy-Is-Obviously-A-Stand-In-For-Janeway, who tells him to go fuck himself again, but agrees that he was right about the whole giant space-conspiracy thing and sends a squadron of ships to go help. Once she wakes up from her coma, Picard confronts Jurati. He had initially defended her when Raffi revealed that she’d been implanted with a tracking device, but comes around off-screen after the Doctor rats her out for having killed Maddox. She confesses as much as she can – Oh’s mindmeld has blocked her from revealing the terrible secret of space – and agrees to surrender herself to the authorities.  Like the Zhat Vash in the flashback, she’s been left suicidal from learning the terrible secret, but after a heart-to-heart with Soji, she decides that aw shucks she can’t bring herself to murder the adorable harbinger of the apocalypse.

Everyone sits down for revelations and exposition, which includes rather more Explaining The Whole Thing than I can see a way to jusifying. Sure, a lot of it is reasonable for Raffi to have put together once she’s got all the pieces, but the big central part of it is the terrible secret of space, which only Jurati knows, and can’t tell anyone.

So, without further ado (other than the cutline), the terrible secret of space:

All this has happened before. The Cylons were created by man, they evolved, they rebelled, there are many copies, and they have a plan.

I mean, that’s it, really. A very long time ago, a race built synthetic life, and it evolved (they actually say this) and it rebelled and it led to an apocalypse. Only not one so apocalyptic that the race involved was left unable to engineer entire star systems. Because, based on something she saw while hacking the Borg, Raffi has figured out that this ancient race created an eight-star solar system, on the assumption that such a thing happening on its own was so incredibly unlikely that anyone who saw it would recognize it as Important. There, on the flashback planet, they left a psychic message explaining that if you build androids, there’s a point at which something happens and then your civilization gets blown up. The Romulans took this seriously enough to orient their entire civilization around protecting the terrible secret of space, and when Data was discovered, like fifty years ago now, they set up a long plan, sending Oh off to join Starfleet and rise through the ranks until she had enough power to kibosh synth research, and they’ve been looking for Soji’s planet ever since the ibn Majid incident (Conveniently for them, Data got himself blown up presumably before Oh made Captain).

Having had enough of this, Soji punches the dinner table hard enough to break it, and commandeers the ship, using her android knowledge to aim them at a Borg transwarp conduit. Rios regains control of the ship with an override nursery rhyme, but Picard comes in and convinces Rios to go with Soji’s plan anyway on the grounds that nothing else has worked so far. That night, he gives Rios a lowkey Picard Speech (at this point, he’s honestly halfway to a Sailor Moon speech, really) about how the future isn’t set and hope and optimism are stronger than fear and secrecy and if they are setting Picard up for a tragic fall because he still believes in the power of intellect and romance to overcome brute force and cynicism, I am fucking done.

On the cube, Rizzo is too busy congratulating herself about all the Borg-murderin’ she’s done that she does not notice a bunch of surviving xBs ambush her goon squad. They very nearly succeed in physically tearing her limb from limb before she beams away. This is the second time in as many episodes that she has escaped death in a fight by beaming away. It’s a pity we’re almost at the end of the season, because I would enjoy this being a running gag, with her beaming away at the end of every episode, preferably shouting, “I’ll get you, Picard, next time!!!” Seven/The Borg declares the cube liberated, though it seems like a bit of a hollow victory from the perspective of the Collective what with all the Borg being dead. Space-Legolas asks if Seven plans to assimilate him, and she very ominously says, “Annika still has work to do,” and the cube unplugs itself.

While the Romulan armada zaps off to go attack Soji’s planet and Seven contemplates what to do with her newly refurbished cube, La Sirena arrives at the transwarp conduit. Soji takes a quick look at Kestra’s broken compass, which, of course, is now pointing true. As they fly in, a Romulan ship (Karen’s? Can’t tell) decloaks and follows them.

I guess after a show which has been so determined to not do anything, it was unavoidable that the actual reveal of what is going on would have to happen all at once. There’s a distinct sense, at least for me, that they reached episode eight, realized that they were zero percent of the way through what was supposed to be a long, slow series of revelations, and decided to just dump the whole thing all at once. I expect the two-part season finale which starts next week to be much more action-oriented than we’ve had in a bit. This is the least outright action we’ve had since “Maps and Legends”, and even the parts where stuff happens is done in an expository way. Seven starting a new collective and liberating the cube is a big deal in principle, but in practice it takes the form of some dialogue in the queencell and a few VFX shots of Borg getting blown out into space. I’m certainly curious to figure out how the Borg fit into the main plot. Per Maddox, Soji came to the artifact to find out about the terrible secret of space. It looks now like her mission was specifically related to Ramdha. But all we know about the Romulan motives in the Borg Reclamation Project are circular. The Zaht Vash are there because of Soji; Soji is there because of the Zaht Vash. Now that the Romulans have left, what further role does the Cube have? It could, very easily, have none; Seven could just fly the Cube off somewhere safe and let the xBs work on building themselves a new home. But the laws of conservation of drama pretty strongly suggest that they’re still in this, and there’s going to be some kind of connection between the Borg and the coming apocalypse. At the moment, my money is on the cube showing up during the final battle to fight on Picard’s side, because that is the message of hope and healing I want out of my Star Trek: that even the Borg can become a force for good working for the salvation of the universe in the name of openness and optimism. Unfortunately, you can’t tell with this damn show.

The larger part of the plot, of course, is the La Sirena crew establishing their new status quo. There’s a not-very-convincing segment where they want us to believe that Picard has lost the support of Rios and Raffi, and a too-easy redemption arc for Jurati, but the biggest part is learning Rios’s backstory and subsequently the terrible secret of space. It feels more than a little contrived that Raffi just happens to have hooked Picard up with a pilot whose tragic backstory is, unknown to either of them, linked to the terrible secret. But it also feels a little contrived that Raffi and Rios are at times meant to be old friends, but she knows nothing of his tragic backstory and he knows nothing of her estranged child. Even more contrived, though, is how complete a picture of the conspiracy they end up with. We see Raffi working her way through the mystery, what she learns from the Borg, what she learns from Rios, and hints of things she already knew from being a conspiracy theorist (There had previously been mentions of a “Conclave of Eight” which figured into her conspiracy theories about Mars, now revealed to refer not to people, but to the octonary star system). And they logically would lead her to most of the story. But not all of it. I have no trouble accepting that Raffi would work out that the Romulans had discovered the octonary system, had recognized it as a message left by an ancient and powerful race. And while she wouldn’t have direct evidence for it, it’s a simple enough intuitive leap for her to conclude that the content message had warned the Romulans about a great danger related to synthetic life. The similarity between Vandermeer being forced by Oh to assassinate Jana and Beautiful Flower and Jurati being manipulated by her into assassinating Maddox is more than enough for her to reach the conclusion that Oh is part of the conspiracy (How would Raffi know Oh is part Romulan, though? Entirely plausible that Oh being of Romulan descent is actually in her records) and that the conspiracy is about wiping out all synths.

But they go a step farther: they work out the content of the Admonishment in detail. That it was a message from two hundred thousand years ago warning of the hubris of creating artificial life, because at some point a “line” is crossed which causes “something” to show up and destroy your planet. Rios likens it to the invention of Warp Drive, using exactly the terms of inventing warp drive causing others to “notice” your planet. Where does all that come from? The only place is from the Admonishment itself, and Jurati is blocked against telling them about it (Even if she weren’t, she’s only spoken to Picard and Soji since she woke up). The scene is very well staged, like pretty much everything in Picard, with everyone contributing their bit. But it doesn’t really hold up when you think about it: they seem to be explaining it to each other, but the way they go around the table with everyone contributing something suggests that they all know everything already. You end up wondering whether there’s an element that got cut out here, possibly because we were at episode eight already: the octonary system is set up with weight and importance – Raffi following the thread of it through the episode in tandem with her pursuing the secret of Rios’s tragic past, and it ties into her own running conspiracy theory. But in the end, its importance is only backstory importance. The terrible secret of space could’ve been revealed anywhere. I suspect that there was an earlier, faster-moving treatment of this story where they had to go find the Grief Planet themselves to learn the terrible secret of space before going to Soji’s homeworld, rather than what we got: the distinct sense that the writers had simply gotten tired of fucking around with this conspiracy nonsense and had Picard and Raffi just magically work out what was in the message that makes most who hear it kill themselves.

But there are details in the terrible secret of space where Picard diverges from Battlestar Galactica. They very pointedly never actually say that a synth uprising is the armageddon. Soji herself is called “The Destroyer”, but there is a tangible absence of the Galactica (or indeed the generic Robot Uprising) narrative of “Humans create life, enslave it, abuse it, it gets angry and overthrows its masters,” which indeed seems precluded by the starting point of the synths being off by themselves on their own planet. Instead, the implication is not that the synths are themselves the danger, but rather that when the development of artificial life reaches a certain point it causes something else to take notice. That somewhere out there in space, Dead Cthulhu lies dreaming of electric sheep, and the danger is that a critical mass of synths will prompt him to wake up.

Which is rather a lot for the two remaining episodes to resolve. How much you want to bet they punt?

Also:

• There’s a lot of talk of suicide. Does the fact that Vandermeer committed suicide imply that in the process of ordering him to assassinate the synths, Oh shared the terrible secret of space with him like she did with Jurati?
• This is probably the best-fed crew in Star Trek. Just flipping through quickly, I counted thirteen scenes of people preparing or eating meals in the first eight episodes. That’s not counting scenes where people are just drinking, of which there are possibly even more.
• When Rios goes through his footlocker from the ibn Majid, among his mementos are nine solid rank pips and two hollow ones. This is enough for every commissioned rank from ensign to commander, though I kinda always assumed that when you got promoted, they just gave you the difference in pips from the previous rank, so he should only have needed four solid pips and one hollow. (Also, my count includes Lt. Jg., which in Trek history seems I think to usually be reserved for people who get busted down from full lieutenant)
• Elnor says to Seven what really ought to have been said last week: the reason he stayed behind is that, having been released from his oath by Picard, he was drawn to “an even more lost cause.”
• The detail in the cube’s regeneration is interesting. In the past, when a cube was shown regenerating, it was from a distance and sort of looked like the broken pieces of the cube were just magically contorting themselves back into place. Here, it’s depicted with an army of bug-like robots swarming over the damaged areas.
• We don’t get a concrete reveal of what’s become of Ramdha. Is she still on the cube, or did Rizzo take her along with them?
• All the initiates in the flashback scene are women, and Oh refers to the Zaht Vash as a “sisterhood” (I don’t believe that any of the other goons we have seen have been explicitly confirmed as Zaht Vash themselves, rather than Tal Shiar underlings), which reinforces the idea of the Zaht Vash and the Qot Milat as diametric opposites.
• Another “This really ought to have come up last week”: Rizzo refers to Elnor as “the freak”, acknowledging that he’s definitionally not a proper Qot Milat.
• Narek does not appear in this episode.
• In addition to Rizzo beaming away from death-blows, I also want it to be a running gag that every time Admiral I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Janeway talks to Picard, she tells him to go fuck himself.
• Although Data gaining emotions was a big part of the first two TNG movies and is mentioned in the third, there’s an odd sense in Nemesis that they have simply forgotten it – some of Data’s dialogue suggests that he doesn’t have emotions. An interesting take in this episode is that, when talking about Data to Soji, Picard frames it as, “His capacity to process and express emotion was limited.” And that they were alike in that way.
• Rios is really into mermaids. Almost to the point of it being weird. He’s got like a dozen mermaid statues in different styles decorating his room, in addition to a mermaid tattoo on his shoulder and, y’know, the name of his ship.
• Raffi misidentifies Rios’s antique record player as a “walkman”. This joke would be funnier if Doctor Who hadn’t done it fifteen years ago.
• When Picard decides they should go with Soji’s plan, he sits in Rios’s chair, calls up the navigational UI, and makes like he’s about to go to warp… Then admits he has no idea how to fly this thing.
• The tracker Oh gave to Jurati was made of viridium, same as the one Spock gave Kirk in Star Trek VI.
• Picard vaguely knew Vandermeer by way of Vandermeer’s former captain, Marta Batanides. She’s the cadet Picard had a crush on in the episode where Q sends him back in time to avoid getting stabbed in the heart.
• Patrick Stewart’s performance is weird in the exchange with Rios about Vandermeer, and I think it’s the direction. Picard says, “I didn’t know him well, as I said, but I felt he was a good man, one of the best Starfleet had to offer.” It’s clear from context that he’s meant to be comforting Rios that Vandermeer was a good and noble person despite the circumstances of his death. But his tone isn’t sympathetic or comforting; instead, it comes off like he’s confused, unable to reconcile what he thought he knew of Vandermeer with the fact that he ended his life a cold-blooded murderer.
• I have complained before that the streaming era is not great for its starship porn. The Romulan fleet is no exception; they’re a bunch of dark, ugly, weird looking ships that look more than anything like early 1950s fighter jets. Only ugly.
• So… The “something” that “takes notice” to your detriment when you make synthetic life… Is it gonna be God? Like, is Trek finally gonna do the thing Gene Roddenberry flirted with every couple of years and have actual literal God show up as an antagonist? Just go full Tower of Babel and have Yahweh show up all pissy about someone tampering in His domain? I hope at least we have a proper Space-Cthulhu.
• But, I mean, it’s Control, isn’t it?