Back to form I guess, since this episode is a little bit of an unfocused mess, at least compared to how tight the first part of the season was. There’s a ton going on, which isn’t unusual this season, but it feels a lot clumsier about it. Like, the climax of the episode, insofar as there is one, is the reveal that we’re going to be doing a Good Old Fashioned Heist. That’s good. Possibly “The Heist Episode” is going to be a fixture of the mid-season in Picard. Given that there’s only one more season coming after this, trends are hard to analyze. But last season we had “Stardust City Rag”, and now we have the Europa Ball. But “Stardust City Rag” followed a standard The Heist Episode structure, where we introduce the heist, have a heist planning montage, execute the heist, then all hell breaks loose during the getaway.
“Fly Me To The Moon” introduces the heist in the third act, does its heist planning montage in the last five minutes, and ends on a cliffhanger immediately after step 1. I can see why they did it: they want to end the episode on the weight of the Imaginary Borg Queen Pal reveal. But it’s still a structural deficit, especially given how little time passes between the death of the Borg Queen and her return.
And all that goodness between Seven and Raffi gets sidelined this episode, because their bit is nearly perfunctory. It’s great to see their working relationship, and once again, I am impressed by the way they play against expectations, with Raffi, the Starfleet Captain, being impatient and impulsive, while Seven, the ranger who bucks authority, staying cool but still kicking ass. But it’s all over in a minute or two, and they don’t have a lot to do for the rest of the episode. I do note that they made a big deal about not bringing phasers, but Seven can apparently turn a tricorder into a stun gun. Though… Raffi has a phaser. Oh, do Confederation phasers not have a stun setting? That actually would have been a good thing to say two episodes ago when Agnes was telling them not to bring phasers. Her “butterflies” explanation is fine as far as it goes, but it would have been a little stronger had she clarified, “These phasers don’t have a stun setting, so we have to be extra careful not to murder our own grandparents.” Also, I realize “It’s different”, but it’s weird to put, “We can’t shoot the bus, that might change history!” right next to them liberating a busload of undocumented immigrants who were definitely about to be disappeared by racist cops. If you’re going to do a “We mustn’t alter the timeline! Ah fuck it, I’m not going to let these innocent people die,” reversal, it should at least give the impression that it’s being done knowingly and with some weight.
Picard takes a bit longer than felt reasonable to understand that Tallinn isn’t Laris, and I wonder now what the explanation will be for Picard’s twenty-fifth century housekeeper being identical to a twenty-first century diaspora human. Is it going to turn out that Tallinn is Laris, just not yet? I don’t like that possibility.
I almost didn’t realize it, but Tallinn’s mission explains why Guinan reacted like she did when Picard told her his name. At the time, you just assume Guinan’s Time-Senses are tingling. But now it’s clear that Guinan knows what Tallinn’s mission is, and twitched at the Picard family name. Picard explaining about Supervisors is one of the most awkward blocks of dialogue in the series so far, enough that I’m bothered when he talks about “Kirk’s Enterprise” with no clear referent and Tallinn mostly just ignores the whole thing. I do like that Picard objects to Tallinn eavesdropping on Renee’s therapy session. I mean, sure, he listens in anyway, but it fits in with the very respectful and supportive attitude 2022 Trek has taken toward mental health.
So the long and short of it is this: Picard’s great-great-aunt Renee (Also, coincidentally, his dead nephew’s name, but it’s not exactly an uncommon name. My mother-in-law is named Rene. And, as mentioned, my cat is named Orla) is destined to go on a mission to Europa, and on that mission, she’s destined to discover (deep sigh) a possibly-sentient microorganism, and for reasons none of the characters understand yet, this is key to whether or not humanity’s future involves being giant douchebags or not. But Renee suffers from anxiety and depression and Q is trying to spook her out of going. Why Q can’t simply kill her is undisclosed. I don’t mean “Why doesn’t he use his powers to disappear her,” I mean, why not just stab her or something? I have so many feels for Renee in principle: anxiety and depression are terrible on their own and terrible in tandem, and the anxiety of having been a gifted youth who feels like she’s going to fail and like she’s being set up to fail is something I have, like, aleph-null feels for. In theory. On-screen, this is largely an informed ability. What we see of it a very clumsily intercut flashback of her flubbing a flight simulation, so I don’t actually feel sold on the scope or intensity of her issues. Obviously, a real person has no responsibility to convince me of their mental health issues to earn my empathy, but Renee Picard is a fictional character in a story where those issues are key to the plot, and you should really show me such things rather than telling me if you want your plot to work. Film should not be coy.
What I am reminded of now a bit is the TOS novel Strangers from the Sky. That’s a weird but well-loved one with an odd framing story (The bulk of the narrative is set prior to the second pilot – McCoy isn’t on the Enterprise yet, Sulu is doing a tour in the science department, and Gary Mitchell is still around, but the story is framed during the movie-era and told mostly in flashback). In that story, Kirk and pals are sent back to mid-21st-century Earth and have to prevent First Contact.
First Contact, the film, established canonically that the first sentient aliens humanity encountered were the Vulcans, as a result of Cochrain’s warp test flight. But before that movie, it was widely accepted in Expanded Universe Trek that the first formal interspecies contact was pre-warp and not with the Vulcans. (Also, Cochrain was widely assumed not to have been human himself, given that he was described as being “of Alpha Centauri” in TOS. This was effectively retconned as an honorific rather than a demonym, and I think DS9 effectively establishes the Alpha Centauri system as having no native inhabitants)
The bulk of Strangers From the Sky concerns a crashed Vulcan research ship, whose crew the Enterprise gang has to rescue from a more-or-less benevolent military. The claim made by the book is that the natives of Alpha Centauri were physically and culturally close enough to human that humanity was better able to cope with meeting them, whereas Vulcans were too weird and meeting them first was liable to freak humanity out and cause them to retreat into xenophobia and isolationism. I could easily believe that Picard is picking up on those themes, and is proposing that Renee’s contribution – introducing humanity to non-Earth life in the comparatively harmless form of a solar-native microbe – paved the way for humanity to accept the Vulcans without going all genocidally racist.
Of course, there’s another player in the mix here: Adam Soong. Yes, Brent Spiner has been called into service once again to play yet another identical ancestor in the Soong clan. As with last year, I am immediately sus: the Soong family have a long history of being assholes. But Atlan last season turned out to be a mensch, and Adam seems to be pretty sympathetic. Also, he is properly derisive of Nazis, rather than saying that there are very fine people on both sides and being a Nazi is not as bad as banning one from Twitter, so he’s several steps less evil than several real-world insane billionaires I could name. On the other hand, I am told that in the Evil Future, there was a big statue of Adam chanting racisms. I did not actually notice this, because, as I mentioned, I was pretty drunk.
Adam’s a douchey techbro, but he’s also got a daughter, Kora, who is dying of an incurable genetic illness that makes her go all Korean Horror Movie in the presence of sunlight. Kora is played by Isa Briones, and is thus a doppleganger for Soji, indicating that the Soong family is incredibly inbred. This may explain her genetic defect. Anyway, Soong thinks that genetic engineering can cure her, but he’s getting in legal trouble because that shit’s illegal. Y’know, because of the big war over it back in the ’90s which we are carefully avoiding talking about because it is confusing for the people who need this 2024 to not feel divergent from our own, aside from the manned mission to the outer solar system. This may include the showrunners. Adam’s grandson is going to be a Khan fanboy, so okay, this is all reasonable. If, indeed, Arik is Kora’s child, it would even make plausible sense that he’d be a big fan of genetic engineering.
I will point out once again, that in the year of our lord 2022, the possibility of “There was a massive war that killed a significant percentage of the global population, but middle-class life in the US is still recognizably similar and most Americans have a hard time holding on to the fact that it even happened or that the rest of the world is, in fact, a real place with real people whose lives and deaths are of any real importance,” isn’t a plot hole. The US was at war with Afghanistan for 20 years and we just spent two years in a global pandemic that killed a million Americans and isn’t actually over yet. It’s not a stretch to say “Yeah, Khan happened, but the war took place mostly in the southern hemisphere so America largely ignored it even though a billion people died.”
His daughter’s condition has Adam over a barrel, so he agrees to help Q, as Q is offering him a cure. Maybe in the prime timeline, Renee’s microorganism provides a cure for Kora, thus convincing Adam to not be a racist? Q gets a little interesting here; there’s something personal in his philosophical waxing about how we are all hostages to what we love. I want it to turn out that someone else has Q over a barrel here, but exactly how that can all fit together eludes me for the moment.
And then we’ve finally got the whole big thing with Jurati and the Borg Queen. Love that the Queen’s plan is straightforwardly to call the cops. Hate that La Sirena is weak against voice imitation. There’s some reasonable attempts here, with the ambiguous cut when Jurati shoots the queen, making it seem at first that she’s shot the cop, then revealing she shot the queen, then later revealing that the dying queen nano’d her up and she had decided not to tell anyone. She may be under Borg Compulsion to not say anything; I hope that’s it, but she doesn’t seem to be controlled so much as seduced at the moment. But this episode is sort of scattered and ill-paced. The plot beats all happen so fast that they don’t have time to gel properly. There just isn’t time for us to get used to the fact that Agnes killed the cop before we find out that Oh No She Didn’t, she really killed the queen only Oh No She Didn’t, and now we’re planning a heist but Oh No She Didn’t this was all the Borg Queen’s machinations. Even as muddled as last season was, we at least had the space of multiple episodes from Oh putting the mind-whammy on Jurati to her killing Maddox to the reveal that she was acting out of compulsion because she’d been broken by the terrible secret of space. We basically have a similar amount of character twists for her all in the space of one episode. Not even one episode, because these all happen in the last ten minutes or so. This episode would’ve been so much more focused if they’d ended with everyone returning to La Sirena to find Jurati covered in blood and admitting to having killed the queen. Make the shooting happen at the end of act 2, spend more time with Seven and Raffi rescuing Rios, spend more time with Picard and Tallinn. Heck, spend more time establishing Adam’s character. Then everyone meets up at the end to find out that Jurati killed the queen. Next week we could do the Heist Planning Montage, and actually go all the way through the heist scene before revealing via flashback that the queen now lives rent free in Agnes’s head like a 2005 Battlestar Galactica reboot Cylon-Angel he typed foreshadowingly.
Also, I keep saying “heist”, just as shorthand, but there’s not really a heist about to happen in the literal sense. They’re going to go to a party in order to stop Renee from getting spooked, kidnapped or murdered. Not clear how a bunch of weird strangers crashing her party will do that. I have a feeling it will involve Jean-Luc giving an inspirational speech, just because that is a very Picard thing to do.
If Picard cures her mental illness with an inspirational speech, I will be very angry indeed.
I might even tell him to go fuck himself, since we’re overdue.
“it fits in with the very respectful and supportive attitude 2022 Trek has taken toward mental health.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
are we watching the same show?