He said the thing! He said the thing! I know I said that the Easter eggs are largely unimpressive to me, but oh did it warm my heart when Rios tells Teresa, “I’m from Chile; I just work in outer space.” Also, for me it is later the same night as I watched “Fly Me to the Moon” and I have followed up the schnapps with a glass of lemonade-flavored vodka on account of I had been looking forward to showing someone appreciation for something, but the something didn’t actually happen, so it would’ve been weird to thank them for it.
So now we’ve reached the point in the story where the gang is ready to just say “Fuck it” to the timeline. Good on them. Rios takes Teresa and her kid to La Sirena, this being the easiest way to explain his deal to her and pay back her trust. Also, the kid runs off shouting, “I’m going to touch everything!” and that is delightful.
We’ll get the very good but shorter part out of the way first. We get some fantastic Raffi/Seven stuff. They even have a very lampshade-hanging scene where Raffi just straight up channels at least ONE audience member by complaining that they shouldn’t get Rios and Jurati back together because that couple is not interesting to the viewers, whereas her and Seven are quite clearly the One True Ship for this show. These two are so cute. And it’s just such a good relationship. I’ve said this before. Raffi and Seven both have their own individual issues, but their relationship isn’t defined by them; it might have started in an underplayed way but right now, this is one of the most naturalistic relationships we’ve seen in Trek – it doesn’t have the fire and fury of some of the “big name” romances, but it feels very real and very honest and very, just normal and sustainable and strong and supportive. #RelationshipGoals.
It looks like they’re going to introduce the obstacle of the queen having locked them out of La Sirena as something that will restrict them for a good chunk of the season, but it turns out to mostly be a mechanism for the gang to find out what’s happened to Agnes: the process of breaking the Borg encryption leads Seven to the records showing that it was Jurati that installed it. We also have a decent “figuring shit out” sequence with Seven smashing a bottle to work out that the queen is stimulating Jurati’s endorphins to speed up the nanoprobes. This plot, one assumes, is going to unfold in more detail next week.
The big Lore (not him) Thing of the episode of course comes at the end, when Picard visits Guinan and we finally get the backstory on something that was raised and the never followed up on thirty years ago. TNG did not merely hint that Guinan was more than a simple bartender. She might be psychic – it’s unclear – she’s sensitive to alterations in the timeline, and the first time she interacts with Q, she adopts a strange defensive posture, and Q cautions Picard about her. But the show never really decided what it wanted to do with all of that. By “Time’s Arrow”, they were ready to shift to the idea that Guinan’s people (I don’t believe they’re given a name until Generations) were extremely long-lived and had a culture that valued empathy and hospitality, but other than that, they were largely mundane, and whatever was going on with Guinan was personal – something that had happened to her between the 1890s and the 2360s. Generations revealed the details of this: Guinan had been left with time-sensitivity as a result of entering the Nexus.
The modern era of Trek has done a lot of mining of its old lore, and bringing back concepts that were discarded in the ’90s. The shift in Guinan’s nature during TNG feels very consistent with the evolution ’90s Trek underwent in what really feels to me like a quest for respectability. Guinan being some kind of fallen god or space witch is a little too Capital-W-Weird for a respectable science fiction show, so she was retconned to be, “Oh she got exposed to a big swirly thing in space which TECH her TECH causing a TECH to her quantum TECH.” So Picard is walking that back. Elaurians are naturally time-sensitive now, no Nexus required. And we finally – finally – get to see what the deal is with her and Q. We don’t have time to get much detail, and frankly I think it’s better to hint at it than explain it in detail anyway, but the Elaurians apparently had a cold war with the Q Continuum. What a wild thing. And Guinan carries around a bit of the truce captured in physical form as a bottle of booze from the treaty signing. This isn’t just bonkers, it’s downright religiously bonkers. Just straight-up Last Supper symbolism. And Guinan can quaff a bit of treaty-juice and use it to summon a Q.
Or rather, she could if Q wasn’t broken. Instead she summons budget-rate Fox Mulder who arrests her and Picard for being aliens. So many Easter eggs in this show, but getting David Duchovny to play the FBI agent was a bridge too far I guess. And Ito Agahayare is a pretty good Young Guinan here. She almost nails “Guinan, but younger, sassier, angrier, but a lot more tired.” I feel like there’s still a little something not-quite-there in her performance, but it’s close.
This brings us to the meat and potatoes of the episode: Tallinn popping into Jean-Luc’s subconscious to go help him deal with his daddy issues.
Speaking of Daddy Issues, last week I had my first real-for-real encounter with the well-documented phenomenon of Mysterious Forest Porn. On one of my walks, tucked against a tree, I happened upon a DVD of, ahem, “Daddy Says I’m The Best 3”. Which, tbh, is really where the series hits its stride.
Tallinn’s neural interface device was very obviously designed for a pointed ear, which was really interesting and curious and man, wouldn’t it have been nice if they had waited for next week to reveal what it’s foreshadowing instead of revealing it about twenty minutes later? This is what I’ve been on about with the episode breaks being weird in this show. They’re chopping the story in odd places in order to get the best cliffhangers rather than chopping the story in natural places to pause from the flow. This is an ’80 Doctor Who-level mistake.
But it’s not without some reason. Because if you don’t get Picard back on the hunt in this episode, what you’re left with is basically a slow, talky episode that loses most of the forward momentum the series had been working on. Everything after Picard wakes from his coma is really part of next week’s episode, but it’s here because it’s also the only time that our ongoing story arc progresses. Remember our ongoing story arc? Something something Q something Renee Picard something “Genocidal polluted xenophobic nightmare”?
(Apparently Renee is fine and getting ready for the Europa mission and Q is nowhere to be seen. Yeah, almost getting run over by a techbro and watching her great-great-great-grand-nephew get hit by a car didn’t have any sort of impact on her. We are running out of time for Renee Picard to be a character in her own right. If they even plan on bothering with that.)
I’m not saying that what happens in this episode isn’t good or interesting, it’s just that it is for the most part about Picard’s inner demons and the connection it has to the story they have been telling is thin at best.
Inside Jean-Luc’s head, Old Man Picard is having an adversarial therapy session with Extra Scruffy Julian Bashir. Oh, wait, that’s James Callis. Playing Picard’s imaginary brain-buddy. This is a much better Easter egg than the streaming era’s usual obsession with making sad sack fanboys feel smart for catching a reference to Gary Mitchell – those fanboys already hated this show for having girls and feelings and therapy.
Why is Picard’s therapist wearing a DS9 uniform, anyway? Actually, I can think of a plausible answer for that. The switch to those uniforms happened between Generations and First Contact. I bet Picard actually did see a therapist during that period. He’d just lost his ship, and more important contextually, his brother and his nephew had just died. Which also means that it was during that period when Picard took ownership of the chateau. So I think there’s good reason that it would be an element from that period in his life that Picard’s subconscious mixes in.
I also notice that Picard questions the presence of the therapist, saying that Starfleet doesn’t use such people any more. I can only assume he’s referring to what I assume is specifically traditional psychotherapy. The therapist makes a reference to Betazoids, though, hinting that in Picard’s time, therapists are exclusively telepathic races. This clearly isn’t the case in the 32nd century.
Or maybe he just means assholes. Picard’s session is way more adversarial than any actual therapy session I’ve witnessed. Tallinn experiences via the story Picard is telling his therapist, and I do really like the way that different layers of reality are interwoven in Picard’s fantasy. Picard is in an office aboard a starship, but he’s also in the chateau. Young Picard and his mom are in the chateau, but also in a dungeon. Also, of course, Picard fails to notice until the climax that his therapist looks exactly like a scruffier version of Julian Bashir. Also his dad.
Yeah, that’s pretty wild. The first half of Picard’s big reveal is that his mother was bipolar and refused treatment. His dad had to keep her locked up during her manic episodes, and Young Picard (Let’s not have this spin-off) interpreted this as his dad being the monster that had kidnapped the queen. With Tallinn helping him, Young Picard escapes the dungeon (Things are pretty metaphorical at this point so I’m not all that sure exactly what’s going on or why Tallinn’s presence makes a difference. I guess the idea is that she allows Young Picard to push through to the reveal instead of remaining in metaphorical denial?) and accepts the reasons behind his father’s behavior, and the specific incident that inspired this dream involved Picard himself nearly dying when his mother lost him in the vineyard’s underground tunnels during an episode.
Wow, there’s a lot going on here. First and foremost is how this sequence plays when you understand Patrick Stewart’s personal involvement. See, Sir Patrick supports two major causes: helping victims of domestic abuse, and helping veterans with PTSD. And the reason is that his father was abusive toward his mother. And only much later in life did he learn that the trigger that started that abuse was untreated PTSD from his father’s experiences in the war. If you’ve ever heard him speak about this, it is really just bone-shaking how he balances these things, that the PTSD doesn’t excuse or lessen his father’s behavior or his mother’s suffering, but he can still acknowledge how his father was suffering as well, and the basic fundamental unfairness that neither one of them got the help they needed. The situation for the fictional twenty-fifth century starship captain is different in key ways, but there is a fundamental similarity in the aspect of a late-in-life revelation which recasts his understanding of his parents’ relationship.
The detail that Yvette refused treatment is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Because it’s a bit of a problem for the Star Trekness of the setting to fall back on what would be a very reasonable plot for a mid-century drama or even a contemporary one, that mental illness carries a heavy stigma and treatment isn’t always available and lots of people never find a treatment option that works for them. Those are all true things about the world we live in, but this is Star Trek, and the idea that Yvette didn’t have access to treatment less barbaric than “Husband locks her up until she’s lucid,” in the twenty-fourth century is frankly too dire to contemplate, so the saving throw, that she refused treatment, shifts the conundrum into one of consent. Maurice wanted her to get treatment, but since she wouldn’t consent, he did the best he could. Perhaps he was wrong to do so – I’ve got to believe that level of child endangerment would justify her being committed non-voluntarily – but it’s not as clear-cut, and his failure is one of judgement rather than morality.
Oh and also Maurice says, of Jean-Luc, “You lived longer, but I kept my hair.” I will note that we did see Maurice Picard once in TNG, via a vision provided by Q, and he was as bald as the rest of the family. Actually, the actors who played Maurice and Robert in TNG kinda bore a familial resemblance to each other. A bit of one to Patrick Stewart, but not nearly so much. This also has me thinking about the time Yvette Picard appeared in TNG, via a Wacky-Space Induced Vision. She appeared there as a very French, very elderly woman drinking tea. I mean okay, maybe Picard’s mom got more French as she aged. But I do wonder now… I think Picard mentions that his mother had died a long time ago. But Picard is in his mid 60s when TNG begins, and his mother looks quite a lot older than that – I’d guess she’s in her late ’80s as depicted there, or older (The actress who plays her in “Where No One Has Gone Before” was 70 at the time; assuming the character is older than the performer by as much as Picard is older than Stewart, that would make Yvette there 85 at least. I’d suggest she might be considerably older than that even), closer to the age she would have been relative to Picard were she still alive. Does this mean that the elderly French woman Picard meets on the Enterprise should be interpreted not as how Picard remembers Yvette from her lifetime, but how he imagines she would look now? “As I get older, Number One, I find I imagine my mother as progressively more and more French.”
Not really important, I guess (or is it?). More interesting is the odd conclusion Picard and Tallinn jump to when he recovers from his coma: that this is what Q was trying to accomplish. That for some reason, this whole thing with altering the timeline and messing with the Europa mission has been about contriving for Picard to reevaluate his relationship with his father.
One: huh? I thought it was an unlikely ass-pull when Michael jumps clean to “Maybe they’re mining boromite,” about the 10-C, but this is… A big leap. And they keep going from there, with Picard further sorting out that this whole exercise has been a way for Q to force Picard to “know him”. Okay, so probably the point here is that Q wants Picard to understand that he’s actually had a good reason for being such a dick all these years – that like Maurice, Q’s monstrous actions – misguided or not – came from a justified place of wanting to protect… Picard? Earth? The Federation? Corporeal existence? From something dangerous and uncontrollable. To be honest, that is where I hoped this one last Q story would go: that something was coming which Q could not stop, and all the things he had done to Picard over the years were to prepare him to face it instead. Maybe that’s where we’re going? It could work. Q’s vitriol at Picard can be easily understood if, say, the Borg who appeared back in episode one really were going to sue for peace, and Q’s angry that after all he’s done, Picard still responded by trying to blow himself up.
But this is all a pretty big leap to make on the basis of Picard’s coma-dream. Picard got conked on the noggin and had a dream about his daddy issues. On the basis of that, he’s going to conclude that Q wanted him to rethink his relationship with his father and thereby come to understand Q’s own greater nature?
Two: Are we going to see Q, son of Q? Because that feels suddenly plausible, that all this is actually Q trying to teach not Jean-Luc, but his own kid the reasons why he’s been such a dick to the ephemerals. Also, as a corollary, it seems pretty likely that Q himself is on his way out. Dying in a literal sense, or about to enter a new phase of his existence, or I don’t know what. There’s a distinctly funereal sense to what Picard and Tallinn speculate about Q’s motives, that Q might be running out of time. Also, we know, but Picard does not yet, that Q’s losing his powers. And we know, but neither Picard nor even Q do yet, that this is likely the last time anyone in the Federation will hear from the Q continuum.
Three: And for no especial reason, Tallinn reveals that, oh, by the way, she’s Romulan, and maybe that is why she looks like Picard’s housekeeper, since people tend to have identical granddaughters in this universe. Is Tallinn going to be tragically sacrificed during the endgame, only for Picard to hook up with her granddaughter? (Where would she get a granddaughter living on Romulus anyway? Is Laris a supervisor as well? Supervisors would have been a closed community since they were descendants of ancient alien abductees, which might justify the familial resemblance). Is Tallinn actually the same person as Laris, having somehow not aged visibly in four hundred years? Why does Tallinn re-point her years for this reveal? Just to justify her not going along with Picard to Ten Forward to be caught with him and Guinan?
Will this be resolved next week? Or will we just fuck around with Budget-Rate-Fox-Mulder? Will he, perhaps, tell Picard to go fuck himself?
yes yes the cracks are showing, come down to misery with me. we have cake.