Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 2×08: Mercy

Do you like forward momentum? Well fuck you then, because not this week. Well, I judge too harsh, because I think some stuff happened? I don’t know. Before Picard, I tried to watch the new Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode and I think it sucked? I mean, I have not liked a single piece of the new season of MST3k yet, but I can’t tell if that’s because I’ve been watching them on my Sad Nights, or if I’ve outgrown MST3k, or because they do, in fact, just suck? I don’t know, man. I’ve been drinking.

So… The big main plot of this episode is “Picard and Guinan spend most of the episode locked in a room trying to help a character we haven’t met before and won’t see again to experience some personal growth unconnected to the rest of the plot linked to an experience with no relevance to anything else in the series.” Sure, other stuff happens, but that’s the main scaffolding the episode hangs on. This is a character growth episode, and what little plot progression happens is mostly setup.

Picard figures out that Wells’s backstory is that he got partially mind-whammied by a Vulcan, and he’s spent his life confused by that and thinking aliens want to eat his brain. Wells – I assume his first name is Herb – is a nothing character I don’t give a shit about and he backs down almost instantly. The more important thing that comes from this too-long bit is that Q finally shows up, answering Guinan’s call, and reveals that he’s powerless, which we knew (not so powerless that he can’t hack Soong’s computer or somehow pass himself off as an FBI agent), but also that he is straight up literally dying, which we heretofore only suspected. He does not reveal what the hell this is all about beyond the cryptic questioning whether a single act can change a lifetime. Which…. I think we already kinda knew? I don’t know, man, there is absolutely no way the payoff can be matched to the setup. It feels like we’re maybe back to Q trying to get Picard laid. (Also: I try not to complain about continuity, but Guinan knows Q can kill each other. I don’t believe that was something that had ever been tried prior to the Q civil war. Or maybe it’s just a “Hasn’t been tried in a very long time” sort of thing…)

More character development! A very cute romance between Teresa and Rios. Are they setting up Rios to remain in 2024, since he kinda is a wet rag as a starship captain? Are they setting up for Teresa to pop forward to 2400 because so far this season has largely been a remix of Star Trek IV and First Contact?

Raffi and Seven have it out a bit over Raffi’s issues. I am… Not entirely happy, given how much I have loved the relationship so far. If I want to see two people struggle with their relationship because the anxious one is engaging in protest behavior, I can just ask my therapist to repeat what I just said back to me. But… Yeah. So, the main thing I’m taking away here is that Seven is actually in just a remarkably solid emotional state. Because she’s able to confront Raffi’s issues and hold space for them without attacking. She calls her out, doesn’t let her get away with it, but Seven doesn’t engage in protest behavior herself, and she’s supportive of her girlfriend and understanding.

And then Agnes nearly chokes Raffi out. Also Agnes boned a dude off-screen then murdered him when sex turned out not to be enough to provide the Human Connection Fix the queen wanted. A single partner isn’t enough to sate the queen, sending her instead into a murderous rampage. We pause here because there are a lot of jokes for me to make, even if I limit myself to the better ones:

1. Sounds like that very particular genre of romance novels Leah likes.
2. Sounds like accidental polyamory but okay.
3. Sex is natural, sex is great, sex is best when it’s eight-on-eight.
4. It’s Star Trek and it’s called a “Borgy”
5. We are the Borg. We saw you from the end of the bar. We like your vibe. Resistance is futile.
6. Hey girl, are you Borg, because I’d like to add my biological distinctiveness to your own.
7. I can’t make the “Nice top”/”I have a name” joke because I don’t think the Borg Queen actually does have a name.

I sometimes feel like they wrote a lot of this script having confused the Borg queen for a Cenobite. In fairness, she’s got the look down, and holy shit a Borg Cube is basically a sci-fi puzzle box… Queen Agnes also eats a cell phone battery for the lithium, and goes on to eat some car batteries for the… Car batteries do not use lithium, except for electric cars, but never mind. Seven has nasty flashbacks of tasting the lithium they force-fed her as a child to help the nanoprobes take. I’m not clear on what Raffi means when she describes lithium as a “stabilizing metal”. The words on their own make me feel like they should mean that adding lithium to things would make it less reactive… But that isn’t…. how…. lithium…. works? Lithium is highly reactive and has a low binding energy in its nucleus; it’s great for nuclear reactions and chemical reactions. Lithium has a ton of uses, but the only one I can think of where I’d call it “stabilizing” is psychopharmacological – it’s pretty well-known that it’s used medically as a mood stabilizer. And that would make total sense, in context, given that we now know that the efficacy of Borg nanoprobes is impacted by brain chemistry. Except it’s weird that Raffi would go immediately there rather than mentioning the fuckton of other things lithium does, and Seven’s explanation doesn’t really sound like she’s talking about the effects of mood stabilizers. Also, this is probably just a matter of tone, but why does Seven need an explanation of what lithium is? It plays out like one of those, “Ah, your primitive Earth metals; my advanced people do not use such stone-knives-and-bearskins things,” as though lithium was a specific product of twenty-first century Earth technology rather than, y’know, an element.

The fourth leg of our plot is that Q provides Kore with the cure for her condition – the thing Soong had wanted from him. But since she knows her origin story now, this does not go the way he wanted, and Soong does a pretty straightforward heel-turn here where he makes it clear that, yeah, this is all about his ego. Why does Q do this? He set it up ahead of time apparently, but why? To punish Soong for failing to derail the mission? “You didn’t do what I wanted so to punish you I will give you the thing I promised you”? To set up Soong to be desperate again? But he still was? Maybe Q is just being a dick? Kore walks out on him, but, kind of inexplicably, the Borg Queen shows up to carry out the rest of Q’s plan by destroying the Europa mission.

This is a weird move. Soong only wanted to derail the Europa mission for the sake of Kore, but now Kore’s gone and he’s got what Q was offering, so he no longer needs to derail the Europa mission or torment himself by becoming a murderer. But then the queen pops in and explains that if he derails the Europa mission anyway, he can take its place as the savior of the Earth. Now, this some decent loop-closing. Adam Soong was a hero in the history of Confederated Earth, and now that we have the insight to frame it properly, the drone-operated sunshield he had flying over Kore before to let her go outside and test Q’s cure is clearly meant to be the antecedent of the global shield we saw from Picard’s window. So at this point, Q has become somewhat redundant. Note though that the thing the Queen is promising Adam is what leads to the destruction of the Borg collective. So she’s helping destroy her own people. What does she get out of it? According to Seven, the Queen wants to take La Sirena, so it appears that Soong’s side of the deal is that he’ll help her do that, and in return, she’ll help him destroy the Europa mission. So she’s planning to create the empire that destroys the Borg in return for a twenty-fifth century attack ship of modest size. Is she banking that she can reconnect with the collective of this time, and give them enough of a head start on the Confederation to change the outcome? This still seems like a bad plan. Why even dangle that as the prize for Adam? Isn’t there anything else she could offer? Or some other insane billionaire she could hit up for a gang of mercenaries? Or, like, a biker bar or something? Because that seems to be what she gets out of this: some mercenaries she can nano into a new race of Borg.

At this point, again, possibly because of the amount of creme de menthe in my system, it is getting hard to remember why we are on the precipice of the future turning out shitty. So let’s recap:

1. Originally, Q changes the timeline because… Mysterious reasons having something to do with wanting to know if one choice can change an entire lifetime. So he plans to play up Renee’s insecurities so she quits, derailing the mission. But he loses his powers and Picard shows up to give a Picard Speech, so Q hires Soong.
2. Now, Soong wants to derail the mission because that is Q’s price for curing Kore. Soong has no personal stake in the mission, but he is a donor, so he is presumably at least a little pro-mission. But Q gives Kore the cure anyway and she abandons her evil dad, so he responds like most of the people currently in the room with me when the threat of abandonment overwhelms him and hits the bottle.
3. Now, the Borg Queen should be invested in the success of the Europa mission, because its failure lead to the extinction of the Borg. But then, I guess, the Federation timeline didn’t go great for the Borg either, since Seven tells us that the Borg are on their last legs by 2400. But she wants La Sirena, so she reveals carefully selected details about the Confederation timeline to Soong, convincing him that he should derail the Europa mission.
4. So where we are at the end of episode 8 is that Soong now wants to destroy the Europa mission in order to prevent a discovery that will save the world, so that he can save the world instead (badly).
5. And now, in a feedback loop, the Queen wants to destroy the Europa mission because that is Soong’s price for helping her capture La Sirena. I feel like she’s taking a considerable risk here that Soong won’t just try to capture La Sirena himself in order to reverse engineer it.
6. I think at this point Soong buys Twitter, possibly so that he can use it to harass his ex’s new girlfriend?
7. And then you put the chicken in the boat and bring the fox back?
8. And what about Scarecrow’s brain?
9. You know what? Since no one else will step up and do it, I will. Jean-Luc Picard, go fuck yourself.