Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 2×01: The Star Gazer

When last we left our rag-tag group of misfits, Old Man Robopicard was about to head out to new adventures aboard La Sirena, accompanied by his young Romulan protégée Legolas, his fellow android (though she’s Assigned Android At Birth) Soji, disgraced ex-starfleet Captain Cristobal Rios, his new girlfriend, the suicidal robotocist Dr. Jurati, recovering addict and conspiracy theorist Raffi, and her new girlfriend Seven of Nine. They were on a mission to see the stars, find their place in the universe with a new lease on life and show that there are other paths than Starfleet open to people who want to have fun adventures in space.

Anyway, never mind all that, because it’s two years later and everything’s gone a bit more traditionally Star Trek. For Now, he typed in ominous boldface…

Yeah, this is not what I expected and not really what I wanted. But that’s cool. We seem to be going for a more tightly-focused story this season, which addresses my major problem with last season’s rudderlessness. But I keep hoping that Star Trek will do a little more looking into what it means to not be Starfleet in this universe, and they keep chickening out. When we rejoin our cast, Rios and Raffi have been brought back into the fold with their own commands, Elnor has joined Starfleet academy, and Old Man Picard has been welcomed back as the new commandant of the academy. Rios and Jurati have broken up, even though they still work together, Soji is a diplomat and only appears in one scene, and while it sounds like Raffi and Seven might still be together, there’s a tension between them that sounds like Seven isn’t looking for the relationship to progress in the way that Raffi is.

Oh, and Zhubin’s dead. He’s been dead long enough for a respectable period of mourning, so Laris is looking to get back into things. (According to the Expanded Universe stuff for the 2009 movie, Romulans traditionally mourn their dead for the length of time it takes a henna tattoo to fade, and then move on. This has not been confirmed in-canon, but it’s something of a lovely idea that is compatible with what we see here) And by “things”, I mean Picard’s pants. But he chickens out before she can ask if he’s Fully Functional, for reasons that I assume will be his character arc this season. They involve a flashback of his mother, who had previously only been seen as an elderly French woman, but in her youth appears to have been Peggy Carter. You did not know you wanted a canonical explanation for Picard’s accent, but here it is nonetheless. Picard’s mom was British in her youth. I hope you like references. Picard is sufficiently unnerved by the proposition that he tracks down Guinan to get his Traumatic Past alluded to. I have a terrible feeling that this is going to take a The Seven Percent Solution twist. Guinan makes an offhand comment that El Aurians can control their aging process, and she’s chosen to grow old with her human friends, to justify the fact that Whoopi Goldberg herself is not an immortal alien. That we know of.

I also hope you like Big Swirly Things In Space, because we’ve got another one. Someone pops open a Big Swirly Thing in space and sends out a distress signal in many languages asking if they could please come join the Federation, and would the Federation kindly send Picard personally to talk about it. This message is received by Captain Rios and his ex-girlfriend (Awkwardly exposition-dropped, but nice of them to mention: Jurati was cleared of Maddox’s murder due to temporary insanity) who is for some reason hanging around, aboard his ship, a brand new USS Stargazer. The episode leans into the symbolism of Picard’s first Space-love. Enterprise isn’t mentioned at all, but Picard gets all nostalgic about the ship he commanded before her. There’s a couple of references in TNG where Picard hints that, for all he cares about the Enterprise, he never loved it the way, say, Kirk loved his Enterprise, but he did feel that way about Stargazer. But this new Stargazer integrates some new Borg Secrets, learned from The Artifact, he ominously boldfaced…

It is, of course, a trap. I think. Maybe? To be honest, they are delightfully vague about this. The new vaguely yonic Borg ship emerges from the swirly, admits to being Borg, and asks to make peace. they’re pushy about it, but they keep maintaining the position that they are, in fact, here to negotiate. Seven, by the way, mentions that the Borg are in pretty dire straits. They do not say why exactly. As I mentioned a few times now, The Artifact is the only Borg cube we’ve seen since Voyager, so did Old Lady Janeway’s murder of the Borg Queen and destruction of the Transwarp Hub cripple the collective? Did Rahmda’s partial assimilation spread The Terrible Secret of Space beyond the one cube and drive most of the Borg mad from the revelation? Did the war with Species 867-5309 go badly? Is this even relevant?

The Borg beam over their queen in… Okay, it’s not really much more of a gimp suit than the fetish gear the Borg normally wear, but she’s got a mask on at least. And still they say they want peace, but also power and they start assimilating the Stargazer, using its Borg tech as a bridge to seize control of the whole fleet. But… The Queen defends herself by stunning, rather than killing, and only shoots at the specific officers who shoot at her first, leaving Picard, Rios and Jurati unharmed. She also avoids shooting Seven, despite Seven having it coming. So… What’s the deal here? It’s easy to adopt my Admiral Akbar voice and say, “it’s a trap!”, but what kind of trap? Is this just, “The Borg are low on supplies so they orchestrated this whole thing to seize a Starfleet armada”? Or do the Borg legitimately want some kind of peace, only they wish to negotiate from a position of power? Like, were they seizing control of the fleet so that when they proceeded to not murder and/or assimilate everyone, it would weigh in their favor?

None of this matters, because we’re apparently not even doing Fun Adventures In Space: Picard blows up the Stargazer (Do you like references? Let’s use the TOS self destruct code even though that’s not how autodestruct worked in TNG) but finds himself back on Earth, but evil. 

It is, as you all know, Q. He’s got one more “trial” for Picard (He says this. But I also know that next week he’s going to say that this isn’t a trial. Never mind).

The introduction of 2020s John de Lancie is done almost exactly the way I’d hoped. My one modification is that I’d have preferred them to introduce him not digitally de-aged before snapping himself to geezerhood, but instead to have him start out in extreme old-age makeup, claiming that he, “Didn’t want to make you self-conscious about your mortality,” then admit he’d overdone it a bit and “back off” to de Lancie’s actual appearance.

A small, strange detail: in her one scene, Soji is meeting with Deltans. This is the race of Ilia’s people from Star Trek: The Slow-Motion Picture. Their whole thing, according to the manual, is that they do not have any hair, and they are the galaxy’s most DTF species, so much so that it makes humans (who are, one gets the impression, one of the galaxy’s more prudeish races) uncomfortable. The only remaining hint of this in the movie as filmed is Ilia’s out-of-nowhere comment when she first meets Kirk, utterly bizarre given that all of its supporting context was cut, that she’s taken a vow of celibacy. (I mean, I guess if one is meeting Kirk, it’s a good idea to establish as early as possible whether one has taken a vow of celibacy, even if Kirk’s reputation is wildly overblown).

I love that in the Dark Timeline, we see a portrait of a Grumpy Young Picard wearing a black variation of the movie-era uniform. TNG established that Starfleet was using uniforms similar to the movie-era ones in Picard’s youth (He wears one in his academy days in “Tapestry”, and Jack Crusher wears one in a recording, but it looks like the TNG uniforms had come out by the time Stargazer was abandoned). I think there’s a bit of a misstep in the use of the visual showing Earth’s shields above the chateau as a shorthand to let us know we are in a scary dangerous place. It would have worked fine, except that Discovery already did the whole “Earth has full-time shields now” thing, and that worked out just fine; it’s not as scary as they probably intended. If anything, you might have a moment of wondering whether Picard was somehow sent to the 32nd century.

I am more ambivalent about the reference-fests. They’re fine and all, but don’t add that much for me. There’s some ambiguity about Raffi’s ship. It’s named the USS Excelsior, and it’s visibly similar to Sulu’s Excelsior, but not identical. Is this the same NCC-2000 after decades of refits? We know that the Excelsior class was still in service as late as the battle of Wolf 359, but seems like few survived much after that. It could, of course, like Stargazer, simply be a new ship of the same name. Rios’s Stargazer is a very Post-TNG-era design of ship (the first Stargazer had movie-era stylings), but clearly shows its heritage (Just as, say, the TNG Nebula class is clearly a TNG-styled take on the movie-era Reliant, or, for that matter, the Galaxy class is a clear modernization of the Constitution class). We only see Raffi’s Excelsior from a distance, but it looks less TNGish than Stargazer does, but who can say, and does it even matter?

I will give mad props though, that when they reveal the name of Rios’s ship, we actually, for once in the streaming era, get a full-on real-for-real Languid Starship Porn Tracking Shot as the camera slowly flies all around the ship to give us an eyeful. It’s still a little too close and noisy, but it shows real effort in an area where they’ve been annoyingly reluctant to waste time.

I will also express mild disappointment that no one, as of yet, has told Picard to go fuck himself. But there’s always next week.