Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 2×03: Assimilation

Well that’s sure to anger exactly the right people.

Four major things happen in this episode of Picard:

1. Seven of Nine maintains her perfect track record of murdering people who call her “Annika”
2. Raffi and Seven go sightseeing
3. Jurati plays the Borg Queen
4. ICE is depicted in an entirely accurate way

Also Space-Legolas dies. It is easy to forget this, because there was not honestly a lot for him to do this season. The weight of his death is somewhat lost in the shuffle. Raffi is the main one to react to it, which makes sense given that she’s his captain and he is likely the first person directly under her command as a captain that she’s lost. We did have that scene of them bonding last season which at the time I felt was odd. But again, his presence in this season has been sort of minimal. What is uncomfortable – not wrong, but uncomfortable in a way that feels Plot Relevant – is how unfazed Picard is about it. Though it doesn’t come across as strongly as perhaps it should, Picard is assigned a lot of the blame for Elnor’s death, because he stops Rios from shooting the Borg Queen when her own self-preservation mechanisms siphon off power from the biobed. We’re clearly supposed to view this as Picard choosing to save the queen over Legolas, playing into his personal arc: he saves the monster for the sake of the mission, sacrificing his own surrogate son, because Picard always puts duty above family. But it doesn’t quite work for me on a few levels. Firstly, with Elnor’s reduced role this season, they really haven’t done much to reinforce the relationship between him and Picard. More importantly, though, Picard’s decision to save the Borg Queen is held several steps at a remove from Elnor’s death. At no point is the decision actually put to him directly as “Save the queen or save Elnor.” It’s framed purely as “The queen is siphoning off our power, Rios wants to shoot her, Picard stops him.” Raffi is in the other room at the time. She’d told them the biobed was the only thing keeping Elnor alive, but that was a few minutes earlier and it’s a tense, chaotic scene. The causality between Picard’s choice to stay Rios’s hand and Elnor’s death isn’t as direct as the moral arc requires. There’s a grim and purposeful irony in the fact that Raffi struggles to find medical supplies on the Confederacy version of La Sirena when they’d previously established that hauling medical supplies was the main thing Seven did with the ship these days in the proper timeline.

Fun fact: we never learn the name of Annika’s husband. That’s how Seven gets caught: he asks her his name, and despite having read up on enough of Confederation realpolitik to pass for her counterpart, she did not bother to learn her husband’s name. Romantic relationships do not come naturally to Seven, and it does not even occur to her to make an effort with her husband. That’s fine; he’s dead now. You call her “Annika”, you get murdered.

The visual effects for time travel were pretty good. Not a direct lift of the Star Trek IV visuals, but not radically inconsistent. It’s an interesting detail that in the long shot, La Sirena vanishes when it goes to warp, even though it isn’t time traveling yet; it’s just moving faster than light, and therefore invisible from the stationary outside viewpoint. Also, I think this is the first time since season 1 of Disco that they’ve mentioned specific numerical warp factors.

Raffi and Seven don’t get the meaty parts of the episode’s central plot – their part is fairly straightforward since the worst obstacle they run into is a security guard who Seven somehow charms despite being verbally awkward. But there’s some very interesting – and possibly foreshadowy – character moments for her. Namely, the people of 2024 react positively to the confident, attractive blonde woman. The guard, and also a random child she happens upon. We established last season that Seven’s post-Voyager life has been marked by bigotry. Being ex-Borg, visibly marked by her implants, carries a stigma. She’s socially awkward too, of course, which doesn’t make it better. In some respects, the Seven of Voyager could be seen as neurodivergent, and while that’s far less true as she’s adapted to human life in the twenty-fifth century, she’s clearly thrown off guard by how people react to her in the twenty-first century. Could this be leading to a painful moment where Seven finds herself unwilling to reassume the physical indicators of her past? When she looked in the mirror last week, her only real reaction was confusion and fear, but now, it seems like she’s starting to appreciate what it feels like for people to see her and not react with fear. Also, makes you wonder how Detmer would find the twenty-fifth century. In her own time, she’d adapted well enough to becoming a cyborg, and there seems to be little stigma in the 32nd century when the Borg seem to be long gone, but somewhere in the middle, would she be mistaken for an XB?

Please, God, don’t let this series end with Seven reclaiming her human name as some form of “getting over” her assimilation. I haven’t even mentioned Agnes and the Borg Queen doing some brain-to-brain intimacy. I mentioned last time the possibility that the Other Queen might be someone we know in disguise. Agnes joins the suspect list now, as the Queen has made a stab at assimilating her, and has taken a very sexy sort of Personal Interest in Dr. Jurati. The depiction of assimilation as having an aspect of seduction is straight out of First Contact, rather than being consistent with the televised depictions of it before. The queen has oddly little interest in “Locutus” or even the Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix Zero One, but gloms on to Agnes pretty hard, finding her insecurities make her easy prey… Except that Agnes completely owns her, extracting the necessary information about Picard’s next MacGuffin without the queen even noticing it’s gone. And she saves it as “Shit I Stole From The Borg” dot txt. What will be the cost, though, I wonder.

The final arm of our plot will piss off all the right people. Probably all the same people who are angry about Stacey Abrams as the President of United Earth. And it’s fine. I felt like maybe there was enough emphasis on Doctor Ramirez and her son that if they don’t return, it will be strange, and if they do return, it will muddle the plot. The contrivance of Rios losing his commbadge is a little cliché by now, but hey, this does work into a scene from that fanfic I’ve been writing since I was 17 where the mid-21st-century academic agrees to help the temporally-displaced twenty-fifth century Starfleet crew because he recognizes their arrowhead “brooches”, having a whole display case full of ones he’d bought from antiques dealers and pawn shops (“This one dates back to San Francisco, 1893. And here’s one that I bought off a dude during the Bell Riots. This one was attached to a pair of pajamas left in a New York flophouse in the ’30s. Got this at a Cold War memorabilia sale. They say it came from a Russian spy in the ’80s.”). ICE shows up while Rios is recovering from a hard landing, looking for a fight for reasons that are not even thinly veiled racism, and when they find Rios doesn’t have papers, he is immediately hauled off on Suspicion of Being Mexican. Which is literally exactly what ICE does and likes to brag about doing, so of course a lot of people are angry about the “unrealistic” depiction and about Star Trek showing a flagrant “pro-illegal” bias. Next thing you know, they’ll be angry about the interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura, the fact that money isn’t a thing in the future, and Stacey Abrams being president of United Earth. I hope Ted Cruz cried.

We are now moving into Week 3 of no one telling Picard to go fuck himself. Throw me a bone here.