Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 2×06: Two of One

Well what the hell was that? Yes, they did it, and… Well I’m not angry. Maybe a little disappointed. But mostly confused, because after a season of pretty tight episodes, we’ve got two in a row that have reverted to just sort of meandering. Again, I’d had quite a lot of strawberry schnapps and burned my fingers pretty badly with the hot glue gun, so it is possible this episode was more coherent than I think it is.

We got a slow, talky episode, that might have actually resolved the series plot? I can’t tell for sure. But a whole lot of side-not-important happens for reasons that aren’t clear.

And Picard gets hit by a car. In fact, this happens right at the beginning and the rest of the episode is told in flashback.

And, of course, Jurati is time-sharing her body with the Borg queen. Consensually. Last week, it didn’t look like the queen had given her much choice, pumping her full of nanoprobes, but it sounds here like they’ve come to an arrangement, Agnes allowing the queen’s consciousness to reside inside her because they’ll need her to do the time travel calculations. The queen, of course, is working a scam. I do like the interactions between them; the decision to play up the queen’s seduction angle makes for a more interesting character. This version of the queen is drawn directly from First Contact; the queen on Voyager was very different. She did seem personally hurt over losing Seven, and passionate about the business of assimilation, but the sexual angle was entirely superficial. That queen wouldn’t spend half an hour macking on Rios and showing off Agnes’s cleavage and singing “Shadows of the Night” just for the thrill of it. This queen is a voyeur who gets off on feasting on everyone else’s suppressed desires (Actually a bit reminiscent of the Talosians now that I think of it). Turns out she did have an ulterior motive, of course, since apparently nanoprobes can juice up on endorphins, but still, this is the same queen who gave Data human skin so she could breathe on it seductively.

I gather a lot of people objected to the “Shadows of the Night” scene. I just wish they’d let her do the whole song. Sure. Stop the plot dead for four minutes so I can hear a jazzy Pat Benetar cover. That’s not even a joke; I’m really into that sort of thing, actually. Bossa Nova covers of ’80s ballads. Hair metal covers of showtunes. Basically everything Postmodern Jukebox has ever put out.

Rios’s fake ID is a complicated easter egg, referencing Karl Urban and De Forest Kelley. I’m not generally impressed by such things, but it’s fine. There’s also a model of the OV-165 from the opening credits of Enterprise, which will impress me if that’s meant to be the Europa Mission craft, but that isn’t clear in context. I think there’s also a model of Nomad in the background at one point. The Easter Egg that properly pleased me was that Renee’s boss is apparently Mae Jemison, who is a real person and awesome, and was inspired to go into the space business by Star Trek.

It’s not really all that clear what Rios, Raffi and Seven are there for exactly. Nominally, they’re running interference in case Q shows up, but he doesn’t, and they don’t honestly seem to be putting in much work. Raffi is tempted by a drink, which fits with her character though I’m not sure alcoholism was established as one of her specific vices. One thing that does come out of the presence of “And The Rest” is that Raffi calls Rios out on being sweet on Ramirez. There’s a lot of R-names in this show. Why do I care that Rios has a crush on a twenty-first-century free clinic doctor and single mom? Because it would be an actual character trait for Rios. Look, I enjoy the attitude and the personality and the holographic crew. But to expand a bit on what I said a few episodes back, Rios is the most passive, boring, underwhelming captain since John Harriman. If you think back over the series so far, Picard has always had clear motivations. Protect Dahj. Protect Soji. Fix the timeline. And Raffi has had her own agenda and her own motivations: find her son. Prove she was right about the conspiracy. Convince Seven to settle down and make an honest woman of her. And Seven has had her own agenda and her own motives. Revenge against Vagazzle. Protect the former Neutral Zone. (Spoilers) Recapture the Borg Queen. And Soji had her own motives and her own agenda. Figure out who she really is. Find her home. Protect her people. Agnes had her own reasons and motives and goals, even though they’ve been consistently bad: kill Maddox; make up for killing Maddox; save the queen; sneak out into Los Angeles on a sexy assimilation spree. And Elnor and his own drives. Protect Picard. Protect Hugh. Soji and Elnor both got written out of the show once those weren’t applicable. But Rios has always been a purely reactive character. He’s basically Picard’s chaffeur for most of the first season. He never takes any real initiative of his own. He has some backstory to provide angst, but it doesn’t really motivate his actions. He doesn’t come up with plans, he doesn’t pursue goals of his own. He’s introduced very obviously as a Han Solo-inspired character, but, critically, Han owed money to a gangster and was desperate to pay it off, and that was his motivation. Rios isn’t in debt to dangerous people. He hasn’t made enemies that he has to stay one step ahead of. He isn’t even doing something as banal as trying to get rich. In season 2, he’s Starfleet again, but his captaincy doesn’t actually involve much leadership. He’s operating much more in the mode of an Executive Officer – handling the logistics of managing the fleet that goes to meet the Vaguely Yonic Borg Ship. He defers immediately to Picard once he’s aboard, and I think the only orders we see him give are telling his crew to not do things. He’s not even very effective at that.

Rios is an entirely passive, reactive character. If he’s taking enough of an interest in Teresa that he’s considering fucking with the timeline over her, that would actually be the first time he cared about something enough to act on it of his own volition, and it would be nice to see that. We had the relationship with Jurati last season, but that basically came out of nowhere and went nowhere and just sort of stumbled into happening based on little if anything.

So… Picard gives Renee a speech and this convinces her to go through with the Europa mission. And… I mean, okay. What I was afraid of was the implication that Picard’s speech cures her mental illness, and… There is enough vagueness to leave that a problematic angle, but the actual text of his speech supports not the notion of him “curing” her anxiety and depression, but inspiring her to work with it. And, I mean, yeah, sure, he’s Jean-Luc Motherfucking Picard; he’s going to save the day by giving a speech. I mean, it was pretty charming last season when the synths locked him up specifically to stop him from giving an inspiring speech, and he escaped and saved the day by giving the inspiring speech.

And then he gets hit by a car.

Yeah. What’s the deal with Adam Soong anyway? Q recruited him to somehow stop Renee from going on the Europa mission, and I guess maybe the reason he did that is that Soong had access to the party (He donated a ton of money, which is the least realistic thing about him; they’ve written him as a techbro, yet he donated money to a NASA mission rather than just making his own private space agency) and was desperate. But Soong has very little in his repertoire; he sics security on Picard, but the nonogenarian meat-android gives them the slip the second the house lights go down for Jurati’s musical number. And having failed at that, Soong, desperate to save Kore, tries to run Renee down with his car. And again, it’s 2024 and he’s a techbro. Why doesn’t his car have fully automated next-gen collision avoidance?

They do a great job of conveying Soong’s desperation, and the toll it takes on him. He loves his daughter, he wants to save her, he’s willing to break the laws against genetic engineering. He’s willing to resort to shady business practices. But murder is still a pretty big deal, even for him (Also, he ran an old man down in full view at a high-security exclusive event and then just left and no one has come to collect him? This is… A stretch). But they fall short of really selling me on how we got here. Soong appears to have had basically no plan here.

Also, his lamentations about Kore being his “life’s work” are sufficiently creepy that she googles herself and finds out, fairly trivially, that she’s a clone. This is why he was weirdly evasive when she mentioned her mother before. She’s Soong’s fifth try at this, and the only one to survive to adulthood. This is a huge deal because… Man, I don’t know. They seem to be dedicated to not outright mentioning the Eugenics Wars, so I don’t know if this carries the weight of that. Trek has been wishy-washy about that whole thing. TOS placed them in the ’90s as a huge, devestating war, but 23rd century humans are kind of ambivalent about them, with Kirk being a little bit of a Khan fanboy initially (in a detached, Military Historian sort of way that is a reasonable mirror of how military historians often focus their interests in the mechanics of war and are less concerned about the moral dimensions once the period they’re studying is a century or two in the rear-view). TNG mentions them once in passing, but sort of hints that they took place later, since the late 21st century is described as “post-Eugenic”. But there also don’t seem to be any cultural or legal taboos against genetic engineering and transhumanism. DS9 is more explicit in their references to them, but is vague about the date, once suggesting they were in the 22nd century, but in a way that’s ambiguous enough that it might have been a mistake (I think it’s just that someone says they were “two hundred years ago”, which is the kind of vague language that leaves plenty of wiggle-room), but there’s a tremendous cultural taboo and legal prohibition against genetic engineering which is plot-relevant. Voyager shows the late ’90s with no visible evidence of the wars beyond an easter egg. As I discussed before, this isn’t evidence of absence, since that episode is set in Los Angeles, and if there is one place on Earth where it’s easy to believe folks would fail to notice a huge genocidal war going on elsewhere on the planet, it is Los Angeles. Enterprise does confirm the Eugenics wars and their rough timeline – a few generations before the show, still flexible enough to have taken place basically any time between Star Trek IV and First Contact. But genetic engineering is not only illegal but provokes a deep, paranoid, visceral horror from humans. Finally, in Discovery, genetic engineering is illegal, but doesn’t seem to carry the same emotional horror, and other forms of transhumanism seem entirely okay.

Anyway that is just me showing off my knowledge of Trek Lore. Or Trek Data. Kore is a clone and Soong doesn’t know how to make one that doesn’t end up defective, and he seems to genuinely love her and he’s clearly genuinely desperate to save her. And the character of it feels like this is legit parental love, but he’s such a douche and fits the techbro archetype, so should I trust that he really cares, or is this a “She is my possession and the living embodiment of my ambition and success and sense of self-worth thus I must protect her”? I mean, he loves her, but she’s his fifth try, which is consistent with the techbro attitude of “Actually it does not matter if my insane business venture fails; I’ll just cut bait and move on to something else; it’s only the people who actually need to work for a living who will be hurt.” But… He hasn’t cut bait on Kore. Is there a transformation in his backstory where the first four were disposable, but in Whoville, they say, Adam Soong’s small heart grew three sizes at some point and now he’s imprinted on this particular clone?

I don’t know, and I don’t really like this plot all that much and would be fine with them just dropping it.

I will admit to having been wrong about it being weird if they reintroduced Teresa. The setup of them needing a doctor to attend to Picard after Soong’s murder attempt, but not being able to go to a hospital is solid (I feel like the ease with which they hacked credentials for the party should have that covered – possibly a line here to say “Have Jurati hack medical records for him. Hey, wait, where’d she go?” would help. Or pointing out that a respectable hospital might keep records they do not want to go into a file somewhere). Saying he has “some transplants” is funny. I guess we get an answer to something I’d been wondering: in his new body, Picard’s heart is no longer mechanical. He fibrillates on the operating table. He’s biologically different enough from a human that defibrilating him damages Teresa’s equipment, but not so different that she can tell he’s synthetic from poking around inside him. So… Basically body built to human engineering design, but made of synthetic materials with different tolerances and chemical properties?

But this is the second week in a row where the episode breaks feel somewhat misplaced. If, last week, they had been a little slower getting into the Heist plot, we could’ve had Jurati’s planned capture be the Act 1 break this week, and ended on Picard getting run over. Instead, we gallop through the “Heist” and then get half of Picard’s treatment and recovery this week. Time is complicated and I am drunk, so I know what the bulk of next week’s episode is, and it too will have this “off by a bit” issue when the structure would, I think, work out better if next week’s episode had opened with them bringing Picard to Teresa, and followed on from there, saving Picard’s recovery for the final scene of that episode instead of – spoilers – having it happen at the end of act two.

This all leads us into our setup for next week. Because Teresa patches up Picard just fine, but he still won’t wake up, and because this is television, the reason he can’t wake up is psychological. He’s not comatose; he’s just got to work out some personal issues before he can wake up. Deep sigh. Look, this could easily be salvaged by some technobabble about the interface between his golem body and his meat mind. Can we please not do this “Severe unresolved emotional trauma from his relationship with his parents has plunged Jean-Luc into a coma that will require science fiction bullshit to resolve” thing unqualified? My parents called me lazy every day for fifteen years, could I please get a sci-fi nap out of it, preferably one that left me refreshed, rested, and with the ability to form secure attachments without anxiety?

This is the setup for next week, wherein Tallinn will dive into the mind of Jean-Luc in order to help him resolve his personal issues. Man, dudes will do anything to avoid going to therapy…