Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 2×09: Hide and Seek

Showdown time, I guess. To a large extent, I think this is the real climax of the season. If we follow the pattern we’ve seen in the last season and in Discovery, we can expect next week’s finale to be to a certain extent pro forma with a lot of aftercare. This is the meat of it. We tie up the Borg arc, all except for a coda which now seems inevitable. We pretty much know where the Europa arc is going, we sort out the Terrible Secret of the Chateau, and we establish that the de jure “big bad” is going to be… Soong for some reason? Yeah, modern Trek just doesn’t do bad guys. Soong here is far closer to Osyraa last year than to Control or Oh or Saga. Tarka has obvious parallels, given that they’re both asshole tech-geniuses. But Tarka, of course, has his redemptive reading. Sure, he’s awful, but his reason for being awful is that he can’t deal with the death of his boyfriend. Heck, even Oh had that whole, “She thinks she is saving all sentient life from Robothulu, and she’s not even that far wrong,” thing going for her. Adam Soong is just an asshole techbro who is desperate to be relevant and doesn’t care how badly he fucks the entire rest of the world to do it – his only objection to murder is aesthetic. Honestly, I’m surprised he didn’t try to buy Twitter at some point. Fuck this guy.

We will get to Q’s whole masterplan and the insufficiently satisfactory reasons he’s doing all of it next week I assume. For now, let us just muse a minute over the possibility that the Picard writers are reading my Quora posts, because the big emotional climax to the Borg arc is that Jurati teaches the Borg the value of consent.

Yep.

So okay, we have, I think, talked about this before a little. We all know that the origin story of the Borg is that the original concept of an insectoid hegemony with a hive mind, whose lowest tiers were parasites that puppeteered hijacked human bodies proved impractical to film, so after TNG’s first season’s penultimate episode, the fluegill parasites never turned up again, and turned out not to have had anything to do with the missing colonies along the neutral zone border, and the plot arc that would have been theirs was instead retooled into a cyborg collective who spread through assimilation. There are other elements to the Borg, of course, than what they started out with. The body horror and assimilation they retained, along with the hive mind. But the means of their introduction – Q zapping the Enterprise to the opposite side of the galaxy specifically to meet them – added the angle that the Borg were on some level an enemy out of time. Like Nero in the Kelvin timeline, the Borg were a threat that the Federation “wasn’t supposed to meet yet.” This is why when they turn up in Voyager, they’ve been demoted from “The entirety of Starfleet, even with an assist from the Klingons, is wiped out by a single ship,” to “A smallish scout ship stranded by itself can successfully evade and even p0wn the Borg over and over for years.” It doesn’t quite work out in practice, but it’s a vestige of that original idea that the Next Generation wasn’t ready to face the Borg, but one day a Star Trek of the future would be. I do kind of feel at some level that one of the things that has gone askew with Voyager is that I think at some point in its conception, it really was meant to be set farther in the future. The holographic crewmember, the bioneural computer, the variable geometry ship, the new, previously unseen part of space. These all seem like they’re trying to recapture the Season-1-TNG sense of “Yes it’s Star Trek, but it’s not the one you saw before; it’s a whole new world and a whole new ship, not just another ship,” but at this point we were too invested in the 2370s, and they backed off, at a conceptual level, to it being another ship, though one with experimental technology in a distant part of space. We get a hint, though largely off-screen, of what would really have worked better with the Borg than Voyager’s tack: the Confederation clearly is up to the task of defeating the Borg, and by implication – proceeding from Seven’s assessment of the state of the collective back in episode one – the Federation of the year 2400 likely could wipe out the Borg too if they really set their mind to it.

But to the point of the Borg being an enemy-out-of-time, in a very real way, the Borg are a potential bad future for the Federation. We have seen one potential bad future in the form of the Confederation: humanity that refuses to embrace the diversity of the universe and seeks to dominate it. The Borg show the other extreme: they embrace the diversity of the universe so hard that they turn everything into a uniform melange. And the Borg represent what happens when the colonial instincts of a project like the Federation go unchecked. Remember the TOS episode “Spectre of the Gun”? Yes, the one where Kirk and company get abducted into a goofy reenactment of the gunfight at the OK Corral. The bulk of the episode is so weird that’s what dominates the memory of it, but have you ever really paid attention to how they ended up in that situation? Kirk shows up at a new planet, and just demands the locals listen to his sales pitch for joining the Federation. They say they are not interested and Kirk orders the Enterprise to keep going because come hell or high water they are going to listen to his sales pitch. Yeah. It’s downright imperialistic; he flat out ignores being told to leave and it comes off pretty strongly that they’re joining the Federation, like it or not. That’s what the Borg are about: we’re going to vacuum up your culture, take what we think is valuable, glue some robot parts onto you and erase your identity, whether you like it or not. The Borg are just The Federation plus Body Horror, minus Informed Consent. And contrariwise, the answer to the question, “How could the Borg come to be allies instead of enemies for the Next-Next Generation just as the Klingons had for the Next generation?” is straightforwardly to have the cut Pepe le Pew subplot from Space Jam 2 and have someone, possibly Kobe Bryant, teach them the value of consent.

And maybe it’s a bit unsatisfying to have the Borg dealt with so straightforwardly, to see the Queen cave so easily, but in my opinion, firstly, no defeat of the Borg was ever going to feel quite satisfying, and secondly, Jurati kind of nails it. She gets a big assist from little bits and pieces Seven had dropped earlier in the series, but Agnes, who has pretty much elevated her anxiety issues into a superpower, threads the needle and does the impossible: she sells the idea that becoming Borg could be attractive. It is a big, scary universe and some of us spend our whole lives in constant, mortal terror that we will be alone, that no one will ever stay with us in our loneliness, in our pain, in our abandonment; that no one will love us, or that they will love us only when we’re good, only when we’re successful, only when we’re strong. That if we falter, if we fail, if we are weak, they won’t be able to love us. That in our moment of need, we will reach out and ask, “Can you still love me, even when I’m like this?” and they will take our hand, but they’ll say, “I don’t know.” The Borg as a force that says, “Yes. We see you. We love you. We want you to be a part of us, forever and ever and we will never leave you and you will never, ever have to be alone ever again”? Sign me up. Also, you get a cool eye-laser.

I’m crying.

Okay, so, weird thing: this is almost straight up the plot of a Knight Rider crossover fanfic I read like 25 years ago; they defeat the Borg by manipulating them into assimilating a queen who is able to preserve the value of consent. And in this fanfic, the Collective raises the same objection that the Queen does: doesn’t this mean they’d be taking the dregs and the refuse, rather than the best the galaxy has to offer? It does not come up with Agnes’s answer, though. The OG Borg, it seems, are fated to lose – in every timeline it seems – because their form of bringing the best of the galaxy together, without respect for the individual and for consent, only ever produces a uniform slurry of mediocrity for them, while it ironically inspires everyone else to band together to bring the best of their biological and technological distinctiveness to bear against them. The strongest collective, the one that survives, is the one that listens to and respects its individual voices, that “loses no battles because it makes no enemies,” and whose members aren’t drones but full participants, each one valuable as an individual rather than as undifferentiated canon fodder.

So yes, I like this twist. I like the idea that the Borg are defeated by persuading them to try something new. I am somewhat less copacetic about the extent to which this telegraphs where the season is going. As with everything else in the season, it doesn’t quite make sense. Why, in four hundred years, will Agnes-Queen insist on wearing a needlessly-sci-fi-gimp-hood when she beams aboard Stargazer? Why will she insist on vigorous tentacle lovemaking with the ship’s systems before explaining herself? Why not lead off with, “Hi, it’s me, Agnes, with time travel. I need to plug into your fleet for reasons I will explain in detail right now.” I assume there will be some kind of “There wasn’t time!” explanation, but they had a good five minutes of action sequence and yonic Borg Ship Origami that could’ve been used for exposition. I guess since the Borg Queen can see across timelines, she checked all possible universes and the ones where she explains everything right away inevitably leads to the show getting cancelled for failure to have a plot.

Agnes vacuuming up the dead queen’s fetish gear seemed a bit unnecessary. Perhaps there’s symbolism there, but mostly it just seemed like an excuse to show Alison Pill naked from behind. I’ve seen Dear Wendy, so I have already seen what Alison Pill’s boobs look like, and thus did not really need this. Also, the claim is that the queen was remotely controlling La Sirena’s transporter to ferry her goons around, so why do they have green Borg transporter sparklies? And… Is France computer-generated? Because in the outside shots, the outside looks kind of weird. They know France is real, right?

Space-Legolas returns in the form of a hologram and they point out for the first time that La Sirena’s holograms use mobile emitters visibly descended from the twenty-seventh century mobile emitter used by Voyager’s Doctor. He serves little purpose other than to give Raffi closure, though. Also, why does the Confederation version of La Sirena have a Romulan sword in its weapons locker?

In between Seven kicking a lot of ass (This is how genre fiction usually handles female empowerment, but it’s good to see it tempered here by the extent to which Seven is also a badass for how she deals with her girlfriend’s attachment issues and her own personal setbacks), she and Raffi work on their relationship issues, which works in the reveal that Seven had tried to enter Starfleet but had been refused on the grounds of being ex-Borg. It could not be a straightforward de jure ban on xBs, given that we know Icheb successfully joined Starfleet, and surely Raffi would know if it were outright forbidden. But last season did a good enough job of showing the extent to which Starfleet Command had failed to use its own discretionary powers for nobler ends. My guess? Seven wasn’t given an exemption from certain human psychological standards that couldn’t properly be applied to someone who was raised Borg. She couldn’t pass a psych test that was calibrated for people who were both biologically and culturally human, and rather than signing off that because Seven wasn’t culturally human – and was biologically divergent from unmodified humans – she should be held to an alternative standard, they just declared her unfit. I like imagining this particular reason, because if you’ll recall, I speculated last season that the reason Picard’s protest retirement cost Raffi her job was that he’d needed to get her an exemption, because there’s something in her profile that should have disqualified her. This is all speculation, of course, but I’m sticking to it until the show tells me otherwise. The fact that Janeway threatened to resign over it is a nice little detail that totally would not have worked if they’d brought her back last season to tell Picard to go fuck himself. Seven is (ex-)Borg again too, Jurati installing new implants in the process of healing the mortal wound she inflicted. Among other things, this hints that the timeline will not simply magic them back home, but rather they’re going to be more mundanely time-traveled back to where they belong in their present forms. This bodes ill for Elnor, and even iller for fans of Jurati, which I assume are people who exist, probably. Seven is more comfortable with her identity as ex-Borg now, though, it seems. Maybe because her new implants were given as a gift to save her life rather than imposed by force to take it away.

While the emergence of a new, kinder, gentler Borg collective is the most interesting thing for the franchise, the biggest thing for the character arc of this particular television series is the rest of Picard’s story, revealed in a series of trauma-flashbacks as Picard and Tallinn flee Soong’s murderous Borg goons (And witness what I think is the first proper tele-fragging in Trek history. What exactly are Picard’s forebears going to make of the corpses of a couple of cybernetically modified mercenaries physically embedded in the walls?). Yeah, so it’s not quite as bad as The Seven Percent Solution, but it’s along those lines. We get the full context of the coma dream, with Yvette leading Picard down into the tunnels, where he became trapped and endangered, that Maurice had locked her up afterward for her own safety until the depressive episode had passed, but young Jean-Luc, who just wanted to be with his mother, let her out, which gave her the opportunity to commit suicide. Picard had suppressed the memory all these years, but his own feelings of complicity had left him with a lifelong inability to form secure romantic attachments – a refusal to be the little boy who loved his mother so much and wanted to be with her so much that he opened the door.

Men will embark on a sixty year career in deep space rather than going to therapy.

As if hearing the angry fanboys complain about that scene I mentioned before with Yvette as an old woman, Picard just outright explains it: part of his denial over his mother’s death involved imagining her as an old woman, offering him tea and a talk. That’s why her age in that scene doesn’t quite work out; it’s a child’s fantasy of his mother as an old woman.

He doesn’t explain why he also imagines her as having leaned way in on the whole French thing.

On the one hand, integrating the present-day chase through the chateau pursued by Soong and his Borg Pals with Picard’s flashbacks works much better than what we got two weeks ago, with the story coming to a crashing halt for half an episode to deal with Picard’s issues. On the other hand, “We’re in mortal peril but now is totally the time for Picard to zone out a minute to deal with his mommy issues,” is a weird place for the story to go.

Also, I don’t fully understand the bit about the key. I mean, I see that Rios shoots the mercenary, who splash-evaporates, and then the key goes flying and Jean-Luc finds it, and this is the key he will use three hundred years later to unlock his mother’s door. But I can’t quite close the loop on where the key came from. Was the mercenary holding it, but it slipped out of his hand before he vaporized? Did cast-off from the mercenary hit something and dislodge it from another hiding place? Had Soong found the key at some point earlier and dropped it in surprise when he saw the mercenary die? What’s the causal link (or any other sort of link, I guess) between Rios shooting the mercenary and the key falling to the ground? I feel like I missed something, some earlier scene establishing how the key would come to be revealed.

Did Q put it there? That would track, assuming that we really are going with, “Q altered the history of the galaxy and turned humanity into monsters purely to get Jean-Luc to work through his childhood trauma.”

We are approaching Disneyean levels of “Turns out the real main villain is the audience’s relationship with their parents.”

Also, right, Rios. He’s in this episode. His impact remains negligible. He gets shot early on, spends some time with Teresa, then shows up at the key moment to shoot a dude. I feel like his arc has to end with him and Teresa hooking up, something akin to Gillian Taylor going back with Kirk to the 23rd century, but we’ve been given no reason or motivation for her to relocate; she seems well-attached to 21st century Earth in a way that Dr. Taylor wasn’t. Or rather, in a way that we’d probably have felt she wasn’t had Star Trek IV been a ten-episode serial that had time to focus on that. We don’t actually see very much of her life outside of a few interactions with Kirk. But that’s just how movies worked back then.

Next week: showdown. We are left with the promise that Soong is still going to try to prevent the launch, because he’s an asshole, and the cryptic warning from the Queen: “There must be two Renees, one who lives and one who dies.”

I would love to imagine that the other Renee actually refers to Rene Picard, Jean-Luc’s nephew, who died off-screen at the beginning of Generations – that somehow Picard would have a chance to prevent his death. I could kind of see that. Picard, say, recognizes some vintage winemaking machine, notes that it was still in use when his family lived there, that his brother had restored it, and realizes that it was what started the fire. But… That’s emphatically not where this story is going. This story has been utterly disinterested in Picard’s feelings over the deaths of any of the members of Jean-Luc’s family other than his mom. Robert got one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference early on and then completely disappeared from the story (Still better than just how damn dirty George Kirk got done in Star Trek V when Kirk gives a speech about losing his brother except that he means Spock and not his actual literal brother who died horribly).

No, I think it’s actually pretty obvious what it means, and it’s that they’ve got to burn another cast member in some clever subterfuge. Someone’s going to nobly sacrifice themself in Renee’s place. And I’m guessing it’s the one who we established a while back has the technology to change her appearance. That‘s why we needed the scene earlier where Tallinn puts her ears back on, to establish that she’s got a limited-use ability to change what she looks like. This is sort of muddy when you mix in the fact that she can also body-jack people, but still. Let’s see how it goes.

There is basically no chance of tying up all these plot threads in a satisfactory way, is there? I mean, we’ve got Q, and Soong, and the Borg – I mean the ones in the future; the ones in the past seem sorted – and Renee and Kore and maybe Guinan? And FBI Guy, but probably not? Possibly even Rios needs some resolution because technically he has an arc now? And while we’re talking about Rios, why the the bridge of the Stargazer built smack in the middle of a flight of steps? How did OSHA let them get away with that? And, I mean, you reintroduce the Supervisors, a one off organization from a failed backdoor pilot from an episode of TOS. Are we going to find out what their deal is? That seems like the sort of thing that would be nice. Who’s behind that, after all?  Might as well just spin the wheel of godlike aliens.

I give up. Let it be a big confusing mess. Go fucking nuts. That’s what I want, for Picard season 2 to end by just going fucking insane in a big, glorious mess.