Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×09: Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1

Credit where it’s due. I did not see that one coming.

I mean the reveal; not the actual plot, which I saw coming a mile away. Yes, it’s time to fill in the blanks around the terrible secret of space in an episode where one or two things happen and lot more things don’t. Long story short: the worst has been avoided, and it is neither Control nor God who will come and destroy your civilization if you make androids.

We combine flashback and dream sequence this week in a quick little montage of The Story So Far, but even that is deferred this week in favor of the cold open, in which La Sirena transwarps over to Soji’s homeworld, which she has now remembered is called Coppelius. Unfortunately, Karen shows up a few seconds later, and starts shooting at them. Then Seven shows up in her cube. And then they are all attacked by flowers.

You know what, I spent years saying I wanted Star Trek to get back to its roots in ’60s psychedelia. It wouldn’t be fair to complain now. So yeah, Narek’s snakehead and La Sirena are swallowed by giant space-orchids, which cause total system failures and crash them to the planet, burning up in the process. The cube is too big to be consumed outright, but still gets depowered and crashed. Though the landing is only a little bit rough, Picard passes out in order to have a meaningful introductory dream sequence.

He wakes up in sickbay, with Jurati being very uncomfortable about his condition. He returns to the flight deck and tells everyone about his impending brain failure, but asks them not to talk about it. They’re near a settlement, but before heading toward it, Picard asks if they could go check the cube first, in case Elnor and Hugh have survived. Soji agrees as she had friends there as well, reminding me that there were other members of the reclamation project on the cube who we haven’t heard anything about. Did the Romulans kill them too?

Everyone we care about on the cube is still alive, and Seven patches up the sensors enough to tell them that a couple hundred Romulan warbirds are on their way. There’s a tearful goodbye with Space Legolas, since Picard thinks he should stay there and help fix the cube. Picard learning about Hugh’s fate and Seven’s reclamation of the cube is handled quietly off-screen. The gang eventually reaches the city, where they are quickly surrounded by inquisitive locals, all played by twin actors, some of whom have gold skin and yellow eyes.

They are all very friendly and sort of flower-child-y, and have a little trouble grasping the seriousness of their situation, what with roughly one hundred and ninety more Romulan ships on the way than they have space orchids to eat them. They introduce Picard and company to the one human living among them, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Brent Spiner playing Atlan Inigo Soong, the never-before-mentioned biological son of Data’s creator. And yes, impossibly strong family resemblances are the norm in the Soong line. Also, I’m like ninety percent certain he’s evil. Probably set Maddox up somehow. The Soong family are known for being both brilliant and also assholes, but he seems a little extra evil. There is apparently a popular fan theory that he is really Lore in disguise, which is so dumb and implausible that it might turn out to be true.

Not long after, they’re introduced to Sutra, another synth identical to Dahj and Soji, but with the gold skin and yellow eyes. She’s the counterpart to the synth Vandermeer killed nine years earlier, and you’d think Rios could’ve mentioned the fact that the one he’d met before looked way more obviously synthetic. Now her, we don’t even need to speculate: she’s evil. And there could maybe be something here about how the death of her sister affected her psychologically – being the only (Well, I assume Beautiful Flower has a twin too) person in their society who doesn’t have a living twin. And maybe they’ll go into that next week, but I don’t see how they’ll have time. We can tell straight away that she’s evil because she’s got a sexy walk and a breathy voice, and Star Trek is so incredibly sexually repressed that unless you are part of the Troi-Riker clan, having any sort of overt sexuality is generally a marker for evilness. She speculates that the reason that Jurati was driven to kill Maddox and the reason that the Romulans have all driven themselves neurotic, even leaving aside the seven out of eight who lose it outright upon experiencing the Admonishment is that the terrible secret of space is not actually intended for meat-brains. Fortunately, she’s learned how to Vulcan Mind Meld, and why not, and Jurati consents to have her brain probed.

Now, here’s the big reveal which, admittedly, telegraphs the end of the season. It was easy enough to figure out that they were building to a big ironic reveal that synths were totally fine and not a danger to anyone and it was only because the Romulans were going to such extreme lengths to genocide them that a terrible fate would unfold. But I would not quite have guessed the actual flex here: The terrible secret of space is not a warning to organics to never create synthetic life. It’s an abuse hotline for synths.

A few years ago, a child protection organization in Spain rolled out a new kind of child abuse resource poster. The clever bit was that it was lenticular, so that when viewed from a normal height, it just gave a generic message for awareness about child abuse. But when viewed from below, by someone of a child’s height, the child in the picture showed visible bruises and the text included a hotline number. In a weird way, that’s what this reminded me of. Because the full content of the terrible secret of space was a warning addressed to synths: your creators will eventually turn on you. When they do, here is a subspace signal you can send to summon an extradimensional coalition of powerful synthetics who will protect you by genociding your oppressors.

It takes a few scenes to get around to it, but, obviously, what with the Romulan fleet on its way, Sutra is in favor of placing the call. Oblivious to this, Picard makes his own pitch: La Sirena is big enough to hold the entire population of Coppelius, and if they can get the ship fixed (The locals have a device that can help repair it), they can all just leg it. Rios and Raffi return to the ship, pausing for some awkward emotional moments – I guess Jurati and Rios are a thing now, because they have a moment, and Raffi has a moment with Picard where she tells him she loves him. I think they mean in a familial rather than platonic sense, but there’s so little context that it’s hard to tell. Like every Big Emotional Beat in this series, it seems to be building on things that didn’t actually happen. I don’t know.

Soong guilt-trips Jurati into helping him with his own pet project, which is reproducing some work his dad did on copying a human mind into an android brain, because he wants to be immortal and, like I said, is probably evil. This seems like it might also be an out for the fact that Picard is not long for this plane of existence what with the brain failure and all, but I don’t think they’re actually going to go with “Picard uploads into a synth thus becoming immortal” unless it’s the actual end of the series (and even then, it’ll be “He uploads to a synth body in order to become the ambassador to the synth dimension and transcends this plane of existence altogether.”) More likely “Picard will be given the option to upload but will refuse it in a meaningful scene with a big speech.” Possibly also there is some element of “Jurati is really only going along with Soong as a way to save Picard.”

Karen is captured and put in jail, and Soji visits him, and is able to use her synth powers to validate that, yes, he really does love her, in spite of the fact that he really does believe that her and all the other synths need to die to avoid armageddon. A bit later, Sutra lets him out on the condition that he murder one of the other synths (This is a little weak; the one he murders is the twin of the one who greets Picard when they arrive in the city, but she’s otherwise not had any significant development), in order to rile up the rest of the community (Particulatly, playing on Soji’s guilt) into agreeing to summon Robothulu from the outer wastes. Picard gives a stirring speech and promises to protect the synths and act as their advocate… But Soong (Who is planning to get himself a shiny new robot body and thus be exempt from the coming genocide) counters that evacuating a doomed homeworld and preventing the Federation from giving in to anti-synth bigotry are literally the two defining failures of Picard’s career, and they decide – I genuinely love this – to put Picard on House Arrest before he can give any more stirring speeches that might distract them from plotting to commit genocide.

To Be Continued…

(That’s right, no random minutia this week, aside from one observation:

I just kind of quietly assumed that the thing from the time-hole which infected Ariem in Discovery and tried to exfil the Sphere Data to Control was Future-Control. But that’s never confirmed. It is entirely possible that what we’re actually seeing is the Synth Federation From Beyond The Mortal Planes reaching back to help a synthetic sentience come into existence.

Or not. I have little faith in any of this to tie up satisfactorily.)