Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×10: Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 2

The obvious joke I neglected to make last week:

The point of introducing the golem is so obvious that I assume when they were filming this episode, Walter Koenig showed up on-set because he heard someone wanted to borrow his phaser to hang on the wall.

“How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?” – James T. Kirk

Jean-Luc Picard dies. We need to get that out of the way right now if we want to talk meaningfully about the first season finale of Star Trek: Picard.

It is an odd thing to face, coming into this show. We were pretty much told in episode 2 that this was going to happen. It was reiterated last week. Heck, we were told this was coming twenty years ago. You somehow didn’t think it was going to happen, though, not least of all because the show’s already been renewed. But then everything about this show is weird, so it is natural that we find ourselves in the strange position of being surprised that they did the the thing it was incredibly obvious they were going to do. About Discovery, one big thing I pointed out is that it was a show which gave primacy to emotional logic over plot logic. It was always more important to its mode of storytelling that characters be true to their character than that the logic of the plot be consistent and coherent. Picard takes this even further. Too far, in fact: it takes it so far that it becomes an emotive-logic-oroboros. The emotional scenes happen because they “feel right for the character” rather than because they emerge naturally from the plot. In ’90s Trek, an individual character might act completely wrong for an episode – suddenly become stupid or beligerent or racist – for no reason other than because they needed them to do a certain action in order to make the plot work. In Discovery, a character will be consistently true to who they are even if in doing so, the plot is forced to hastily wallpaper over a big hole left by the fact that there is no one around to do the out-of-character thing that would make the plot link up. In Picard, plot and character aren’t completely divorced, but, well, let’s say that plot has packed a go-bag and will be staying with its mother for a few weeks. Rios is in love with Jurati not because he had previously shown any interest in her but because it is written down in the “Relationships” section of his character sheet. Raffi loves Jean-Luc because it says so on her Wikipedia page. Hugh felt disillusioned after years of failed attempts to expand rights for xBs but regains his faith when he nobly sacrifices himself to reclaim the power of the Borg from the Romulans, of course he did, it’s in the character bio on the package his action figure came in. None of these emotional beats are wrong – in fact, they all feel very right. But the underlying, supporting story to get us there? Not appearing in this series. It’s all very Star Wars. By which I mean Rise of Skywalker, where key information about how we got to where we are has been relegated to supplementary material that can be released after-the-fact when the writers have had time to think through stuff like, “Oh shit, we didn’t mean to make anyone contemplate the possibility that Palpatine fucks.”

Anyway, Space-Legolas and Seven have a conversation of misguided emotional beats over whether or not the xBs should commit suicide while Karen sneaks in and finds Rizzo. I guess she didn’t actually beam to the Romulan fleet two weeks ago, just to another room? Okay. They have a conversation that would probably be more meaningful if we actually knew anything about them other than that they are spies. He takes some grenades, saying he’s going to go blow up the orchids, leaving Rizzo to try to fix the cube’s weapons. Soji goes to visit Picard, and he unsuccessfully tries to talk her out of summoning genocidal Robothulhu. Jurati spies on her opening Picard’s door with her eye.

Raffi and Rios fix La Sirena using the MacGuffin Saga gave them last week, which just magics anything you imagine into existence. The tone makes it sound more mysterious than it is. I think it’s just a 3d-printer with mind-reading interface. Karen shows up and throws rocks at the windshield until they let him in. He explains about the Robothulhu summoning (He does not know all the details, but he saw that they were building a transmitter and he knows the Romulan interpretation of the terrible secret of space and put two and two together). Space Legolas shows up too and they exchange threats. Then they light a campfire and tell the Romulan Ragnarok Story. In the Romulan version of the myth, one demon sister plays a drum so hard that her heart bursts, then the other sister blows a demon horn so loud that it cracks the sky, letting in Very Bad Demons who kill everyone in a very florid manner. So they agree to hide his grenades in Rios’s soccer balls and slip back into the city under the pretext of having caught Narek and wanting to turn him in, since the synths should think they don’t know about the upcoming genocide.

Jurati’s deal turns out to actually be a bit of cleverness. See, last week, Sutra demanded that she promise she really was willing to die to complete the brain-downloading work, under the threat that, as a synth, they could tell if she was lying. But, as we established previously, she’s been suicidal ever since she learned the terrible secret of space, so the idea of dying gave her enough warm fuzzies to pass inspection. She does not, in fact, feel any maternal instincts toward the genocidal robots, and the whole thing has been a misdirect. She distracts Soong while he’s downloading Saga’s memories out of her corpse and steals an eye, which she uses to spring Picard. They head for La Sirena, conveniently missing the others on the way. The eye-stealing does not affect the memory download, though, and Soong is there when it completes to see that, while Narek held her down, it was actually Sutra who killed Saga. And you know how I had assumed Soong was evil? Turns out that nope, he’s a mensch. Because he immediately goes out and finds Rios, Raffi and Elnor to help them blow up the transmitter.

Picard and Jurati find La Sirena empty, and Picard gives a stirring speech to her about how life is a responsibility as well as a right and the synths have only had a couple of hermits and fear to teach them about living and how children learn best by example, and reveals that between the end of episode 7 and now, he paid enough attention to Rios that he’s learned how to fly the ship, because he’s got some dramatic self-sacrificin’ to do by singlehandedly delaying the Romulan fleet long enough Starfleet to show up if indeed it is coming. You’d think Rios would’ve taken the keys.

Soong confronts Sutra where all the synths have gathered to summon the apocalypse, laments that it turned out that she was no better than a meatperson, and, like, just turns her off with a remote control. Okay, to be honest, I’m kinda on the android’s side now. I was really hoping for a big dramatic “APE HAS KILLED APE!” scene with the other synths turning on her, but instead, no one really reacts to Sutra suddenly dropping dead. Instead, Karen shows up and starts a fight to cause a distraction and also beg Soji not to go through with it. Rios tosses the grenade, but she catches it and tosses it into space.

Seven catches Rizzo right as she’s about to use the cube’s weapons to blow up La Sirena, and they fight sexily for a while, but Seven’s lust for revenge outweighs Rizzo’s anti-Borg Racism and she tosses her to her presumable death (Rizzo refers to her as “Sad queen Annika,” making Seven 2 for 2 in murdering people who use her birthname). The Romulans show up, and the orchids are launched and the fight between two hundred Romulan warbirds and a dozen giant space orchids sounds like it would be cool, but come on. Once they said there were over two hundred Romulan ships, you should’ve anticipated that the ensuing space battle would be a giant mess that you could not possibly make sense of, and it is exactly that, just green disruptor beams and bits of orchid everywhere. Jurati kind of randomly recalls the famous Picard Maneuver, hinting that something like that might be useful.I’ll point out here that we’ve never really been told how the Picard Maneuver works. We’re told what it does, but that’s different. The basic idea of the Picard Maneuver is that you warp toward your opponent, and because you moved faster than light, they simultaneously see you where you currently are and also where you used to be. And this is tactically advantageous because they get confused and shoot at the wrong one of you. Only this doesn’t actually make a lot of sense, as it assumes that your opponent can only target one ship at a time, and that, upon seeing exactly two of you, they would pick the wrong one more than 50% of the time, rather than assuming it’s the new one. The one time we see this happen on-screen, it’s even more obvious which is which because there is a visible warp-trail connecting the current location of the ship with its after-image. The Picard Maneuver is the ur-example of Picard’s tactical genius, of course, as no one else had ever thought of the brilliant tactical strategy of “move”. (Though to be honest, at the time the maneuver was introduced into the canon, tactical maneuverability had never really been a thing in starship battles in Star Trek. And this really makes more sense than fans give it credit for. Watching ships dart around and dodge and stuff makes for better television, but if you really think about it, phasers are sensor-guided, move at-or-near the speed of light, and can pierce a ship straight through in a single shot if they get past the shields. In most cases, there wouldn’t be any practical advantage to zipping around and rolling and dodging and looking for an opening to get in a good shot.) Picard explains that it wouldn’t be any help against a fleet so big, and they’d need hundreds of false sensor images scattered all around, and Jurati picks up the MacGuffin and has it fake an entire fleet of La Sirenas warping in to distract the Romulans, but it only lasts until a lucky shot clips the real one. Despite Picard calling her up and asking her to reconsider in exchange for him martyring himself, Soji sends the signal and a big ol’ eye of Sauron opens in space. The Romulans get ready to zap the planet when the actual Starfleet shows up with a fuckton of really ugly starships.

Acting Captain Riker of the USS Zheng He calls up Oh and plays a recording of the call Picard made last episode, establishing that the Federation’s claim to the planet predates hers. Plus he is real, real pissed about the head of Starfleet security turning out to be a Tal Shiar spy. So two hundred Romulan Warbirds retarget their weapons at a fleet of, I dunno, I’m guessing slightly fewer of the most powerful ships Starfleet has ever put out…

No there is not going to be a giant space battle, of course there isn’t. You wouldn’t be able to tell what was going on anyway. Also, the gates of hell are opening up right next door and no one seems interested. Picard has Jurati shoot him up with some hardcore stimulants to keep him upright for just a couple more minutes before his brain fails, so that, one last time, he can save the universe in the most Picard way ever: by making a speech.

He opens up a four-way-call with him, Oh, Riker, and Soji, and asks her to hang up on Robothulhu, because he believes in her and saving each other is what people are for and because, hey, Starfleet literally did send a giant fleet to their defense. Soji turns off the beacon and the robo-tentacles of Robothulhu politely withdraw back to the space between spaces. The Romulans are sufficiently chastened by this to decide it is not worth starting a war with the Federation, and fuck off. Picard and Riker have a cute little goodbye wherein Picard is able to put on a brave enough face that Riker fails to notice that Jean-Luc is actively in the process of dropping dead, and Starfleet warps out to follow the Romulans back to the county line. Picard collapses, and Soji beams him and Jurati back down to the planet for everyone to be very sad as he says his goodbyes to the cast…

And then Jean-Luc Picard dies.

There are seventeen minutes left in this episode.

Rios and Seven share some shitty synth booze and commiserate. Seven’s a little broken up because killing Rizzo involved going to a real dark place for her… Or maybe she’s talking about when she killed Vajazzle. Rios is bummed because he let another self-righteous old captain into his heart only to watch him die. Raffi and Elnor just have a quiet cry from the cliff overlooking the town.

And then Jean-Luc Picard wakes up. In a slightly surreal version of the chateau (the clock has no face and all the pictures on the wall are blank). He has just enough time to complain about yet another dream sequence when Data shows up, still looking pretty weird, though not as weird as in the painting dream, and explains that he’s actually in a simulation. They discuss their respective deaths and mutual love for a bit, and then Data drops the bombshell on him that we all saw coming a mile away: yep. They uploaded his brain into the golem. He’s gonna wake up in a minute, and Data asks Picard to off him once he’s back into the land of the living. Not that Data wants to die per se, but the one quintessentially human experience he’s really jonesing for is knowledge of his own mortality. Unlike Picard, he does not remember his own death, since he’s based on an older backup.

To set the audience’s mind at ease, once he wakes up and settles down with a nice cup of tea, we’re told that Picard’s shiny new golem body has the strength and abilities of… An elderly frenchman. They decided it would be weird to give him superstrength or heat vision or whatever. And having listened in on the whole “Being mortal makes us human” conversation, Jurati and Soong rigged the body to last roughly the same amount of time his meatsack would’ve if not for the brain failure. Though Picard didn’t especially want to be immortal, he wouldn’t have minded a couple of extra decades. I will point out that in 2399, human life expectancy is something like 140, so even without an android extension, Picard has roughly the same number of years left to him as I do.

Oh shit. I’m sad now.

Everyone is duly sad, but no one fights Picard when he proceeds to give one more big speech and then unplug Data from the food processor on the counter. In the simulated chateau, Data changes into a smoking jacket and lays down on the couch, where the image of Picard, now in TNG uniform, takes his hand as he rapidly ages, then dissolves into nothing. That’s right, they brought Data back for real and for true just so they could kill him again in a way that has some extra definitive, “Okay this time he’s really gone forever and not coming back we promise,” like it’s 1995 and you’re writing fanfic about blowing up the Nexus because it really bugs you that its atemporal nature creates an “out” that might let them bring Kirk back someday.

A short time later, we jump to La Sirena, where Jurati and Rios are shamelessly flirting on the flight deck and Raffi and Seven are shamelessly flirting in the mess. I wholeheartedly approve of hooking up Seven and Raffi, but, um… Where the hell did that come from? Word of God is that this was foreshadowed in the scene back in “Stardust City Rag” where Raffi puts the trick handcuffs on her. I thought that scene was a little weird, but I did not pick up on that at all (I did think it was implied that Seven’s relationship with Vajazzle was romantic in nature. And I’ll grant that one they did communicate to the viewer appropriately. Though I find it only just plausible that someone like Vajazzle could earn Seven’s trust as a comrade in the Fenris Rangers; it stretches belief to the breaking point that she could impersonate a decent person well enough seduce her). Raffi and Seven don’t interact much and never spoke of each other. Honestly, Seven had more chemistry with Rios. And, conversely, Raffi had more chemistry with Jurati. Seven interacted more with Elnor than with Raffi – there’s no romantic overtones to that, but Elnor does seem to have bonded to her much more strongly than is justified by the script. Maybe that’s just supposed to be his personal quirk? Because he also latched on to Hugh pretty quick.

Remember how last year, it was a big huge deal for half the season on Discovery that Hugh Culber had come back from the dead with a shiny new body and this caused him considerable existential angst because he felt weird and disconnected even though medically he was the same as he ever was aside from the loss of his cool scar? Not that I need them to re-tread that material, but Picard is just completely, utterly chill and accepting of the fact that he has come back from the dead and isn’t even human any more. The synth ban having been quietly rescinded off-screen and the Romulans apparently having given up on the ancient conspiracy they built their entire culture around, Soji has decided to abandon her newfound home and join Old Man Robopicard I guess just bummin’ around the universe. Yeah… This is a real big “Emotional logic trumps plot logic” ending: La Sirena is an unlicensed private cargo-hauller. Rios works for hire. Picard hired him because he had this mission in mind to go save Soji and protect her people. That is now done. Nothing wrong with the gang deciding to keep hang out now, but… They’re not Starfleet (Is Picard still even an Admiral? Is he legally the same person he was before he died? One actually reckons this is the sort of legal question Starfleet has needed to resolve in the past, but I don’t know the official answer); they don’t have a mission or anyone to give them one. Is Season 2 going to be “Old Man Robopicard and his buddies just do odd jobs around the galaxy basically like Firefly but without the unfortunate Pro-Confederacy sympathies”? It feels like a good place for these characters to be, setting off for adventure with a new lease on life. But… It’s just a bunch of unemployed space folks setting out on what, near as I can tell, is a road trip. Which honestly would’ve been a fine premise for this show, but we got the conspiracy thriller instead, for the love of God pick a lane.

I’m not crazy about the ending, if you can tell. Turning Picard into an android ought to be a big deal, but it doesn’t really serve any purpose in the greater story here. It’s not part of a meditation on life, death and identity; it’s just a plot device to get around the brain failure they were under no obligation to have given him in the first place. The fact that Picard was dying was introduced back in episode 2, then ignored completely until last week, whereupon he has literally the exact number of minutes left to live as it will take to get to the climax. If we look to Discovery, we’ve got these parallels of Hugh Culber and Ash Tyler, both having essentially come back from the dead in a new body – Hugh having his rebuilt by magic mushrooms, and Tyler being effectively uploaded into a Klingon. And in both cases, the question of identity – are they still who they were before, and if not, is that okay, and who will they choose to be from now on – are huge to their respective arcs. Instead, Old Man Picard becoming Old Golem Picard is treated with the same lack of reflection as, say, Saru changing from a prey animal to an apex predator. He’s just like, “Oh, my expiration date has been reset? Cool.” It’s more an afterthought than anything. There’s an opportunity here to make something really huge out of the fact that Picard has become the physical embodiment of a fundamental connection between organic and synthetic life – the man who is both synth and human. That’s the synthesis that should’ve been the climax, and instead, it’s a postscript.

It is hard to get past just what a complete damp squib (squid?) the Synth Federation turned out to be. The terrible secret of space that the whole series was building to, backported as the motivation for everything about Romulan culture. And… We get a couple of tentacles extending out of a space-hole for a couple of seconds. And it turns out that the only indication we have of their threat turns out to be their own demo reel. We don’t see a devastated planet or a pile of dead bodies or a broken survivor. If the Admonition had indeed been a warning from the last civilization they destroyed, that would be one thing – a report of the fall of a civilization so terrifying that it induces madness. But it turned out that, no, we no longer know that the inspiration for Ganmadan is even actual history – even if it is, it’s no longer “A true report so terrible it induces madness,” but instead is “Bragging by the victors which induces madness on account of the delivery format is not compatible with meat brains.” There was a great opportunity here. Sutra, twisted by the death of her sister, is convinced that organics and synths can never coexist, summons Robothulhu. Picard manages to speechify the Romulans into standing down, but it’s too late, but by becoming a synth himself Picard proves that synthetic and organic life are fundamentally the same and this allows him to become a bridge between the organic powers of the galaxy and the synth federation. But instead, the synth federation is a non-starter and Picard’s transformation is an afterthought. Plus, there’s no real closure for Sutra; Soong just shuts her down (kills her?) and that’s the end of it.

The pity of it is that the climax we get is, in its way, very Star Trek. Much more Star Trek than the series has otherwise been. It recalls a lot of the best moments in Discovery, particularly the climax of the first season. Dig it: after ten episodes of Starfleet enacting a synth ban, letting the Romulans die, telling Picard to go fuck himself repeatedly and generally choosing pragmatic-evil over optimistic-good, in the moment of crisis, Admiral Picard sends out a call for help, and Starfleet sends a giant battlefleet. They send the fleet out to risk starting a war, to fight the largest Romulan armada ever seen, all for the defense of about fifty androids, whose very creation is a crime under Federation law, and whose very existence is likely a PTSD trigger for half the population. One thing the showrunners have said in interviews is that, no, this isn’t a Star Trek where the Federation has become grimdark and things are dystopian: for most people in the Federation, things are the same as they ever were; there’s always been edges to Trek’s utopia, it’s just that this show happens to be set there. Star Trek is a show about the work of utopia. It’s not a perfect world, but when push comes to shove, when the pragmatic choice would be to blow up Qo’nos or to let the Romulans murder all the synths, Starfleet says, “No, actually we’re going to send a giant fuck-off battlefleet to defend the people who are actively summoning Robothulhu.”

There is some very lovely thematic parallelism across the climax here: Soji summons Robothulhu because she feels like she has no choice. She says this repeatedly. Narek is a bit less explicit, but it’s still pretty obvious that his whole character arc is built around the conflict that comes from his absolute belief that this is the only way to prevent Ganmadan. The appearance of Starfleet gives Soji the freedom to choose not to be The Destroyer, and she takes it. Riker gives Oh the choice not to start a war, and she takes it. There is your theme: a bad choice is the one you make when you think you don’t have a choice. That is the heart of Star Trek: if you give people the freedom to make a good choice, they will.

This is really good stuff. I wish it had been integrated into a more cohesive story.

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• Narek says that the story of Ganmadan dates back to before his ancestors “came to Vulcan”. Is this a flub and he means Romulus? Is it a flub and he means “from”? Or did they just drop a fuckton of something else into the Romulan/Vulcan backstory? (Vulcans may not have originated on Vulcan; it’s never been confirmed completely, but Spock once mentions some oddities in Vulcan history that would be consistent with his people having been seeded there by a progenitor race)
  • Ganmadan is a fundamental element of Romulan mythology; even Elnor knows of it, though he thinks of it as a fairy tale; only the Zaht Vash think of it as a mythologized account of actual historial events.
  • Is it? Now that we know that the terrible secret of space was actually an advertisement by the synth federation, can we be sure that the mythological apocalpyse ever happened, or were the scenes of destruction a simulation to demonstrate what was on ofer?
• Oh was definitely referred to as “Commodore” by the Romulans last time, but they call her “General” today.
• Oh’s lieutenant says, “They have activated the beacon,” when the space hole starts to open. How do the Romulans know what the synths are doing anyway?
• If the whole point of all the synths being twins is that it’s fundamental to how Fractal Neuronic Cloning works, how can there be just the one Data? Or is that why Data exists in a simulation instead of getting a new body?
• So I guess we’re just not getting an explanation of why Maddox went to Stardust City or what happened to his lab and why he was on the run?
• Also I guess we’re not going to find out what became of Beautiful Flower’s twin?
• And… Just not gonna bother revealing what became of Rahmda?
• I know this isn’t a plot hole or anything, but I’m disappointed we got no closure for Laris, Zhubin, and Number One the Dog. Have they just been quietly running Picard’s vineyard this whole time with no more trouble from angry Romulan death squads?
• Why aren’t the Romulans more impressed when Ganmadan actually starts literally playing out right before their eyes? Okay, I can get behind Oh being all steely and determined, but we have established that the Romulans have culturally driven themselves neurotic over this, and now they see the mythological end of days directly start happening in the form of a big old space-hole full of robot tentacles, and every Romulan responds with just steely resolve, and not pants-crapping terror. Remember: learning about the truth of Ganmadan drives a significant percentage of Romulans literally insane. Where’s the weeping and gnashing of teeth?
• Rizzo’s death is well-done as a stand-alone scene, but in context, like everything else, it relies on emotional investment it expects as its reward for invoking the right symbology rather than because they earned it. Rizzo has been the primary face of the enemy for the majority of the series. She’s the master manipulator, setting things up. She was clearly treating Oh as a useful idiot early on, and the reveal that no, she is really just a particularly nasty underling feels false. She kills Hugh, she has a big fight with Elnor, but it’s Seven who kills her – avenging the death of someone she’s never shared the screen with (It’s implied that Seven knew Hugh personally, but there’s no detail to it and we certianly don’t see it). Picard is never even aware of her as a threat to La Sirena – Picard and Soji never even meet her. Elnor is the one who really should’ve done her in, redeeming himself after his failure to protect Hugh.
• Also the reactivation of the cube’s weapons ends up not mattering since Seven kills Rizzo before she can use them, then apparently does not use them herself to defend La Sirena.
• Holy crap, Oh is a singularly awful antagonist. Jurati and Rizzo are the only characters who interact with her directly, and even if you expand it out to people who facetime with her you only pick up Riker and Clancy. She’s just cartoonishly evil, with this complete, monomaniacal dedication to her cause, prepared to destroy Mars, sacrifice Romulus, and start a war with the Federation. And then she just caves. I mean, come on. They should’ve had her as a partially-witting pawn of Rizzo who dies two episodes before the end moments after she realizes she’s been used.
• By the way, why was Rizzo under cover as a human at the beginning? She’s just there to talk to Oh. They could’ve done that on the phone. Why did she need her ears docked to go under cover in Starfleet when Romulans are almost indistinguishable from Vulcans?
• Just a reminder: the best episodes of Discovery didn’t have a villain in them at all. Even characters who served an antagonistic role weren’t villainous, just at cross-purposes.
• You know who actually is a decent villain? Narek. He’s the only one who’s really believable with the whole, “He earnestly believes that he is doing the only thing he can to prevent the end of the world,” thing. Oh and Rizzo are just motivated by being assholes. Sure, we know that they also believe that their work is preventing the apocalypse, but Rizzo and Oh are both just nasty in ways unconnected to the terrible secret of space. Rizzo is all “I hate xBs and want to murder them all just for funsies, so I am hoping that my official job at protecting the terrible secret of space will give me an excuse to do some murder.” But Narek legitimately believes that he needs to kill the synths to prevent Ganmadan. And he keeps his eyes on the prize, switching over to destroying the transmitter once he gets that it’s the means by which The Destroyer will summon the Ch’kalagu to destroy the world.
• Narek completely vanishes from the story about eight minutes before the climax. He picks a fight with some synths to distract them, and is never seen again. Not expecting reconciliation with Soji without a lot more work first, but seems like we shoulda got something.
  • And, like, the question of what happens to Narek is pretty weird. Coppellius Station is protected by a beaming shield until Picard collapses. Which means that neither the Romulans nor Starfleet could’ve beamed him up. The only flightworthy ship on the planet is La Sirena. Logically, Narek is still in the city. The last we saw of him, he was overpowered and restrained by non-speaking-role synths. So… Did they just throw him back in jail? I suppose it’s entirely plausible that Narek is just locked up serving time for his role in Saga’s death. But that seems like a bit of a diplomatic faux pas given that he’s a spy in service to a nearby empire that really dislikes them. Or, since he mentioned to Rizzo in their last conversation that he’d washed out of the Zaht Vash, does he not have any official legal status and the Romulans would be just as happy to ignore him. Is it gonna turn out next season that they just locked him in a room on La Sirena and are gonna let Soji decide what to do with her “abusive ex”?
  • This reminds me. Not to lay too fine a point on it, but Jurati is still, y’know, a murderer. Even if she’s got a solid NGRI defense, they maybe ought to take her back to Starbase 12 to stand trial.
• What is it with the relationships in this show, man? Jurati and Rios end up together despite the fact that all of their interactions before and after sleeping together have been about nothing other than how much she dislikes space. Seven and Raffi end up together despite not having interacted at all really. The only believable couple in this series is Laris and Zhubin. I’m counting Riker and Troi here too, because they also barely interact with each other at all.
• Like, couldn’t they have put Seven with Raffi instead of Rios for the mourning scene? Show them bonding?
• And if you swap Elnor and Seven in the rest of the plot, that helps too: we can see Raffi and Seven bond as they work together and Elnor gets to be the one to defeat Rizzo.
• It is a sad missed opportunity that before kicking Rizzo to her death, Seven just says, “This is for Hugh,” rather than saying “This is for Hugh,” beating her bloody, then saying, “And this is for me,” before kicking her to her death.
  • A small part of me is hoping Rizzo secretly survived by beaming away at the last minute to turn up again next season like Murdoc on MacGyver.
• Especially in light of the fact that Seven hooking up with Raffi comes out of nowhere, it feels unearned that Seven has apparently joined Picard’s gang at the end. There as a clear setup for her taking Hugh’s place as leader of the xBs. Somewhere she could find family and purpose and belonging while doing good work. Instead, I mean, sure, Picard’s crew is cool and all, but her interaction with them was down to a single episode where they’re working partially at cross-purposes
• I imagine a lot of people were disappointed that the Starfleet armada was led by Will Riker on the Zeng He and not Captain Worf on the Enterprise-is-it-still-E-or-are-they-up-to-F-now. I am also disappointed, but, I mean, you can’t really let the Enterprise show up and steal the show like that.  An Enterprise cameo would’ve been nice, but it would have to be something more in line how it was done in Discovery, with the Enterprise showing up just for a second at the very end to send out the call that would guide La Sirena toward the season 2 plot.
• Having Riker appear here is…. Complicated. He’s not as well-served her as he was in Nepenthe. But at the same time, it sets a strong dynamic for the show to have a TNG alum in that role. And honestly, it couldn’t’ve been Worf here either, because I think it is important that when Picard delivers his final speech, it’s a speech about unity and taking care of one another, and you could have a very fine show where the tension is coming in both directions and you’re not sure if Starfleet will side with Picard or with the Romulans. But it is genuinely more Star Trek that we go into this knowing that Riker has Picard’s back absolutely, and that although Starfleet sent an armada Starfleet did not come here looking for a fight. They came here with overwhelming force because they desperately wanted to not have to use it. They didn’t send a fleet so big it could defend the synths – they sent a fleet so big that it would give the Romulans second thoughts about even trying it. And you could do this scene with Geordi maybe, or Janeway, or Tom Paris or Harry Kim or Nog* or Sisko. But really? It does work best with Will Riker, because Will Riker is not a warrior. Will Riker is a protector. The very first thing we learned about him all those years ago is that he’d gotten in trouble with his previous captain for fighting him over going on away team missions. Riker spent years avoiding promotion like the plague, and the fanboys think this is because he was holding out for Enterprise but really? It’s because he doesn’t like being in charge. There’s a TNG episode where Troi decides to take the command officer’s test, and she keeps failing, and Riker advises her on it, because he recognizes what she’s doing wrong: she’s unwilling to send someone else to their death. And Riker recognizes it because they are the same. Riker obviously does accept a captaincy eventually and he obviously did pass the command test (so did Troi), but it’s not who he is. That’s why he was cool with leaving Starfleet. This was not a great use of Riker, but it was a role only Riker could really fulfill: being the commander of the most powerful battlefleet in the galaxy, but still effortlessly, gracefully, and without question submitting to a ninety-four year old man who is literally five minutes away from death, specifically for the purpose of him making a big speech. It is possibly the most Riker thing anyone has ever done in Star Trek.
• After locking Picard up last week specifically to stop him making big speeches, this week he saves the universe by making a big speech, and I love it and when I told Dylan he was absolutely tickled by it.
• A thought: the climax of this season is that an old man with a British accent faces down two giant battlefleets and a robot tentacle monster from beyond space, and turns them back by giving a speech. Then he dies and is reborn in a new body. This isn’t Star Trek: it’s Doctor Who!
• Not to lay too fine a point on it, but where did Starfleet get an armada of over a hundred of their latest and greatest warships on twenty-four hours notice? Assembling a big armada is kind of complicated logistical matter this is an important part of the backstory to the series we are currently watching.
• They never once talk about the fact that the Zaht Vash deliberately derailed the evacuation of Romulus, dooming their own people, in order to stop the Federation from pursuing synthetic life. This should be a big deal. This should be the thing that establishes the stakes: we can only understand how dedicated the Zaht Vash are to their cause in the frame of “They literally allowed billions of their own people to die because that is how bad they thought it would be if the Federation’s synth program wasn’t stopped.” But no one ever brings it up.
• It’s not a plot hole or anything, but anyone else really curious what they did with Picard’s corpse? Did he get a military funeral? Did Picard get to attend?
• Yeah, no connection to Control at all. Weird.