Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 2×02: Penance

Okay, it’s Friday night, the wife is out with her friends, I’m home alone to guard the sleeping children, time to get loaded and watch me some Star Trek while trying to do intricate model-work. I am a responsible and mentally healthy adult.

When we left Old Man Picard last time, he was in a subtly evil but not really all that different version of his chateau, thanks to the machinations of Q, Picard’s Godlike Wacky Uncle and/or existential threat. Q takes great pleasure in showing off how much the universe sucks thanks to his meddling in history, but he’s really focused on just what a piece of shit this universe’s version of Picard himself is. General Picard, in his capacity as master of the starship “World Razer” has helped conquer half the galaxy, and keeps a trophy room full of the skulls of people whose names you recognize, like Sarek and Grand Nagus Zek, and I think it was Martok? Also Gul Dukot. That’s a little weird, because the point of that scene is for us to be shocked that in this universe. Picard outright murdered so many at-least-broadly sympathetic characters, but Dukot is one of the most unrepentantly, unabashedly evil characters in the entire canon. I suppose they needed someone we could be comfortable with having mortally wounded Picard – Old Man Picard still has a synthetic body in this timeline, but it’s the result of his duel with Dukot. Rather than turning the screw himself, Q leaves Picard to find out all on his own that he’s also apparently responsible for killing Laris and Zhuban in this world.

We also are told that this version of Earth didn’t manage to resolve the looming environmental collapse that, y’know, is actually going on in the real world – that force field around the planet we saw last time isn’t a defensive shield like I assumed; it’s more like the shield from Highlander 2 (a movie which definitely does not exist), to keep the planet’s corpse livable. This… Is not really implemented well or followed through on. Because we’re told about it, and Picard describes this Earth as “polluted”, but all we see of it still looks pretty much just like the same mildly sci-fi’d-up Los Angeles and/or San Francisco that they’ve been showing us as Future-Earth in every modern Trek. Only, with a goatee.

Also a little underdone is the idea that something is wrong with Q. He seems a bit meaner than we usually see him, and he does pop Jean-Luc in the nose when challenged, but it’s not at all clear to me what Picard is seeing that prompts him to ask after Q’s health. We don’t know Q’s deal yet, but he certainly seems to have a much more specific beef than in the past. Voyager revealed that the Q serve some function in maintaining the timeline, so some ideas come to mind. It feels like Q’s issue has something to do with the Terrible Secret From His Past that Picard has been angsting about. Is he angry that Picard wouldn’t make out with his housekeeper? I mean, it’s plausible at least that Picard is “supposed” to have descendants for some Very Important Reason, and his failure to get laid – and subsequent suicide-by-autodestruct has caused Q some consternation. Or perhaps, as I suggested last week, the Borg really were open to some kind of peace, and Q is angry that Picard blew himself up rather than finding a peaceful solution. That would be a very Q thing to do, but I wouldn’t want to really commit to anything in particular yet.

One thing I really like here is how willing everyone is to roll with it and respond strategically when they find themselves in an altered timeline. None of the usual cliché of the heroes immediately outing themselves by their inability to act like assholes. Seven is amazing. She wakes up to suddenly discover herself un-borged, AND married to a dude AND President of the freaking Earth, and she responds by doing a couple of quick tests to verify that she’s not hallucinating and immediately starts rolling with it, reading up as much as she can and framing her plans in a way that makes it seem consistent with her role as a totalitarian dictator in an evil world. So to get hold of Rios, she frames it as wanting “unfiltered” news from the front. She does a darn good job of selling herself as the Confederated Earth President, and she does a good job justifying her non-evil actions. Similarly, tradition is screaming for Picard to give a big speech to the assembled audience calling for humanity to take a kinder path and not be guided by fear and xenophobia, but he just doesn’t: he just goes all in on it, playing for the crowd and passing himself off as the butcher of half the galaxy. They also display a pretty cavalier disregard for the people of this Earth, with Picard and Elnor murdering a whole lot of Confederation soldiers. Small thing I notice: Confederaton phasers look a lot more like the phasers of the Kelvin Timeline than twenty-fifth-century prime timeline weapons.

Agnes and Elnor do worse, of course, but they hold their own, and even Agnes manages to awkwardly cover for their weird behavior, cooking up the story that Raffi had brought Elnor to the presidential palace to follow up on a claim from the Borg Queen.

Ah yes, the Borg Queen. She’s very close to her depiction in First Contact here, a terrifying and seductive presence, but also, she’s insane. She’s the last Borg, scheduled to be offed by Picard personally on this special holiday, and the loss of the collective has driven her mad, plus, she’s got some level of time-sensitivity and can sense the wrongness of this universe. She recognizes Picard as Locutus and Seven as “Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 01” (I note here that of course in this reality, Seven is “Annika Hansen”, but I’m very glad that her friends don’t call her that. It was widely presumed, from the Voyager days, that Seven would one day reclaim her birthname, but Voyager also did a pretty good job in several places of making it clear that Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 01 does not wish to be Annika Hansen. Annika Hansen was a scared child whose parents’ recklessness stole her youth, twisted her body and got her assimilated by space zombies; “Seven” just is who she is. Notice that even Raffi – her girlfriend – calls her that. When we look to last season, the people who called her “Annika” were not good people). The fact that they directly point out that this queen is “normal”, as opposed to the gimp-suit queen from last week feels like a huge hint. As I keep saying, we do not know all of what was going on with those Borg. Are we dealing with a bootstrap paradox here, and those Borg are actually the result of something the gang will do in 2024? Will the finale place everyone back on the Stargazer in time for Picard to unmask the Borg Queen, revealed to be a temporally-displaced Seven? Or for some reason Picard’s mother? This plot is edging toward possibly-trying-too-hard-to-be-clever, but the execution is far less muddled than last season, so I’m okay with it so far.

Another interesting thing we get is the first reference to TOS-style warp slingshot time travel. The previous generation of showrunners made it a point that the slingshot maneuver was “TOS’s thing“, and forbade its use in the TNG era. There were still plenty of ways to time travel; Enterprise does it at will based on a scan of what the Borg had done in First Contact, but that particular mechanism for doing it never came up. We get a hint of why, though not in a lot of detail: the calculations apparently can’t be done by a computer; you need a Spock. Hence the complication of them needing to borrow the Borg Queen, who will pass for a substitute Spock in a pinch.

In the end, of course, they get caught. Seven’s husband beams aboard La Sirena (Actually, I am not sure they have mentioned the name of the ship in this reality) and Elnor gets shot. Fortunately, he gets shot by the one guy who’s phaser is set to “Mortally Wound” rather than “comically nasty evaporation”. Despite Seven having done a pretty solid job, he’d been suspicious of her all along, which I guess is reasonable, given that he is the proper Annika’s husband, but there’s something kind of gleeful in his suspicion that tells me he’s not going to be overly eager to get “his” Annika back. There is something cute in its way that Seven was pretty good at passing for an autocrat, but not great at passing for a happily married heterosexual woman. Raffi sneaks in a little dig about Seven’s commitment issues.

Next week, they will, undoubtedly deal with this and make their way back to just-a-bit-after-our-time, which will mean saying goodbye to the world of the Confederation. This is probably for the best, because they are likely running out of Jubilee to adapt.

Yeah. About that. People who have never heard Rob Shearman’s Doctor Who audio drama “Jubilee” are inclined to claim that the revived series episode “Dalek” is an adaptation of it. But this is misleading. “Dalek” takes exactly one scene from “Jubilee”, completely replaces the context, and expands it out to an entire story. If you’ve seen “Dalek” but aren’t familiar with “Jubilee”, you probably have the barest bones of why I’m comparing “Penance” to it. “Dalek”, if you’ll recall, centers around the Doctor trying to rescue a captured alien being tortured by a… Let’s go with techbro, only it turns out that the captured alien is a Dalek. So you can see the parallels here with the Borg queen.

But that scene is inspired by “Jubilee”, only in “Jubilee”, the context is very different. It retains the concept of the sympathetic imprisoned and tortured Dalek, but that’s about it. The plot of “Jubilee” is that time shenanigans lead to the Doctor and his companion getting split, with one version of themselves arriving in the early 20th century just as the Daleks invade, and the version we actually follow arriving decades later, in a world where the Doctor’s technological assistance allowed Great Britain to not only defeat the Daleks, but conquer the entire world under a racist, totalitarian regime. But on top of that, the damage to the timeline has left everyone in this world with a vague sense that their history is “wrong”, and this has basically driven everyone insane, so pretty much everyone acts like a Futurama version of their Mirror-Universe selves: not just a bunch of fascist assholes who exaggerate the worst impulses of 19th century Old Europe empowered by the 20th century industrialization of brutality-at-scale, but cartoonish evil, evil well beyond what is productive, evil with facial hair. The British Government has the rest of the world send them tribute in the form of people with dwarfism, who can be shoved into Dalek casings to perform morality plays that end with the participants being killed. Use of contractions is a capital crime against the purity of the One True King’s English. The First Lady of England ultimately betrays her husband because she hates him for his weakness: she can tell that when he beats her, his heart isn’t really in it. Most tellingly, the last surviving Dalek is scheduled for public execution during the titular Jubilee celebration.

Now, that story gets kind of weird and esoteric at the end, because of temporal shenanigans; 1903 and 2003 converge, allowing the Lone Dalek to warn the rest of the invasion fleet what’s going to happen (The exact details have some similarity to another later-televised story, “Into the Dalek”, particularly the originally-scripted ending). Picard is going to go for something less esoteric, I assume, but there’s room here for a lot more overlap – the possibility of the Borg Queen, like the Lone Dalek, coming to understand the ultimate futility of her race’s behavior; could the appearance of the older, traumatized version of the 1903 Doctor in 2003 have inspired whatever secret the Gimp Suit Borg Queen is hiding? Or just in general, have we seen the last of the Confederation?

Also, how long before I can buy a Confederation-style commbadge? There still isn’t, as near as I can tell, a licensed 32nd century tricomm badge.