Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 2×10: Farewell

So last week when I said I didn’t care if it made no sense and I just wanted them to go fucking nuts… Probably shouldn’t have said that while holding the cursed money’s paw. Oh well.

Yeah, the resolution to the whole “Two Renees” thing is that Tallinn is going to impersonate Renee so she can get murdered by Soong. That’s certainly something. It feels like a waste. I mean, there was a perfect out here to have it turn out that Soong’s poison doesn’t work on Romulans. I assumed that was what was coming: send Tallinn to go do something that would’ve killed Renee because her Romulan physiology would protect her. That way she could go on to be Laris’s grandmom. Why is Tallinn Romulan in the first place? Just to explain why she looks like Picard’s housekeeper? Can’t it just be that lots of planets have an Orla Brady? Same as how lots of planets have a Jeffrey Combs? Also… We clearly see that she’s got her human ears on when they’re sneaking around the launch site. We established that she can only use her appearance-changing gizmo once every eight hours. Again, why?

We got this side-plot of the rest of the gang taking out Soong’s drones, but it seems like just busywork. It’s nice that it gives them something to do, and we have some semblance of traditional Trek competency porn for Rios and Raffi – who’ve largely been denied a chance to show off their skills this season. The real attempt on the mission is that Soong bullies his way into a private meeting and straight up murders Renee with poison. Or at least, he thinks he does. And remember, at this point the Borg queen is gone, Q is gone, Kore is gone; he’s doing this purely on the queen’s word that in the absence of Renee Picard, he will be remembered fondly in the fascist future. When it was to save his daughter, he was distraught and conflicted about resorting to violence. When it was to hold up his end of the deal with the scary space lady, he used hired intermediaries. But when it’s to make himself super famous, he’s willing to remorselessly murder a woman face-to-face with his literal hand.

It’s a good thing I lack the business acumen to be a techbro. Because when I look at that desperate, cloying fear that they will fade away and cease to exist if the world stops adoring them… Yeah, I could see myself trying to justify a little astronaut-murder. What I don’t like about Soong’s arc, though is just how hard he is to defeat. One thing I liked in Discovery is the extent to which their crap villains always turn out to be trivial to defeat once the crew stops fucking around. It’s a very clean message. Here, Soong, despite being kind of a joke of a human, takes just an infuriating amount of hard work and sacrifice from a crew that has mostly been all on the same page for this whole adventure.

Also infuriating is the extent to which Renee Picard is such a minor character in a story where she is the lynchpin of history. I mean, it’s a choice, I guess. Typically for modern Trek, the finale resolves the plot about 20 minutes in, leaving the rest of its runtime for

And in the end, Soong flies back into a funk upon learning that he’s failed to murder the right person, only made worse when his daughter deletes his life’s work. Which leads to him pulling out a folder about Khan that he keeps in his desk. Since there will be no follow-up on this next season, it feels like a waste. Not sure how this weaves into the retconning of the Eugenics war we’re simulcasting over on Strange New Worlds. Is this meant to mean that Soong is going to create the augments? Is Khan Noonien-Singh actually meant to be the second Khan, and the references to him being from the ’90s are the result of historians conflating him with the project that inspired Soong? Given Soong’s age, did he actually work on the augments back in the ’90s, and that folder is meant to be just the very oldest part of his research, all he’s left with now that Kore’s deleted the rest? Should I even care?

It is, of course, at this point in the episode that we reveal that the alien benefactors of the Supervisors are…. The Travelers?

I mean, it kinda makes sense. The Travelers are maybe higher-dimensional beings, which would explain why Gary Seven, despite apparently not having any time travel capacity of his own, knows enough future history to identify where Kirk and Spock come from, and how Tallinn can have an understanding of Renee’s destiny. On the other hand, the last Traveler we met had to hitchhike in order to get around on this plane of existence – their whole thing was bumming around the universe, trying not to get involved. They really seem to be possessed of any sort of material resources like bank vaults of rectangle-shaped smoke cloud transporters.

I’m burying the lede. The lede is that Wil Wheaton returns to Star Trek for a cameo as…. Well, if I’m being honest, he returns to play Wil Wheaton, Geek Icon and Geek Culture Commentator. It’s just that for some reason he’s doing a weaksauce cosplay of Wesley Crusher, a minor character he used to play back when he did dramatic acting before he found his true calling. This is fine, because Wil Wheaton generally a better person to be than Wesley Crusher. Wesley Crusher, for some reason, has come back in time to hire Kore Soong to be a Watcher. Since Isa Briones has confirmed she won’t be in season 3 of Picard, this plot point means basically nothing.

Also, they disappear in what look like standard 25th century transporter sparklies rather than a 2022 visual update of the original “phasing” effect or the Supervisor transporter effect. Boo.

Finally, we get to the showdown between Q and Picard and… They hug it out. Of course they do. Q derailed all of history for no better reason than to help Picard get over his mother’s suicide. Because he likes him. Q assures Picard that he has no higher agenda, nothing important is coming for which Picard needed an important lesson about trust and letting go of the past…. Except that is is plainly not true, as we see when the gang gets home. And why has Q been such an unrelenting asshole this whole time about it? He hit Picard at one point. Is that just the depression talking? His, mine, whoever’s.

So yeah, everyone makes up and it is very happy and sad, and Picard and Q hug it out like the old friends they kinda sorta are, because Picard put the skeleton key back in the hidey-hole where his younger self will find it three hundred years later. I’m still confused about where it came from. And it only cost a whole bunch of human lives, two Romulan lives, Jurati’s humanity, and a surprising number of windows. I note here that per Q, Tallinn dies “in every timeline”. I’d like to know how that works out, because it’s only due to Q’s interference that the danger Renee was facing ended up being a murderous techbro rather than her own personal demons. Tallinn only needed to sacrifice himself because Q and Agnes convinced Soong to stop the Europa mission.

Unless… Wait… Okay, is it possible that Q never actually did anything to the timeline? I brought up before that it seemed odd that, from Q’s point of view, he was messing with Renee after the Confederation Timeline was already established. So, if we compare this to, say, “All Good Things”, perhaps we should understand that it’s not a matter of Q manipulating the timeline. Rather, when Jean-Luc destroys Stargazer – and the Borg Queen with it, one assumes – this creates a paradox, and the timeline reconfigures all on its own, to a stable configuration where the Europa mission fails. All Q did was to preserve memories of the previous timeline in Picard and his pals – one last gift to his old friend. It’s easy enough to interpret Q’s belligerence back at the beginning of the season as frustration that even after all this time, Jean-Luc still responded to fear with violence, thus endangering the timeline. The problem here is still that we don’t have any good reason for why the Europa mission would fail: that doesn’t seem like a natural progression without Q’s interference. Could we imagine some other catalyst for Soong trying to off Renee? Or perhaps some other form that her anxiety might have taken – that without Q playing therapist to stoke her anxieties in one particular way that was amenable to a big Picard Speech, she might have bailed out of the mission anyway?

(Q also mentions that he is dying alone, which might prompt some to wonder about his wife and kid. But I think it was well established that family relationships among the Q are very different than among humans. Also, here I might invoke the EU novel I, Q. In that, it’s the universe at large rather than Q personally that is dying (God decides to commit suicide. It’s complicated),  and Q is the only member of the continuum who doesn’t see this as an exciting opportunity to embrace oblivion. If it’s the continuum as a whole rather than Q individually that’s dying, it could well be that everyone else, including Q and Q, have already moved on, and only Q has lingered behind on this plane of existence to take care of unfinished business.)

Rios deciding to stay in the past is just about the most satisfying conclusion his barely-extant character arc could have. The little detail that he goes on to die young in a bar fight is…. Okay. Am curious how a dude who escaped from ICE in a violent breakout and has no documentation is going to travel freely around the world or even get home from France, but I guess maybe they get to keep Tallinn’s stuff? And if you had any doubts about the things I’ve repeatedly said about how pointless Rios is, keep track of how long it is from when the gang returns to the Stargazer and when any of Rios’s crew notices that their captain is missing. (Also, no one notices that Agnes is missing, which I am sure would play merry hell with her abandonment issues if she had not gone off to found the moist space cenobite polycule). Besides, we could always have Santiago Cabrera return as La Sirena’s emergency holograms, most of whom were more interesting characters than Rios. Except that Santiago Cabrera has already confirmed that he won’t be in season 3 of Picard, so never mind.

Raffi and Seven are very cute in the back half of this episode. They don’t have much left to actually do, but it’s nice. Raffi gets to threaten Q over Elnor’s death, and I like the detail that Q seems not to know who Elnor is, but then casually deflects that it was Annika’s husband who killed him. Elnor gets better, of course, one last gift from Q born from the energy he has left over since Rios stays behind. Of course, Evan Evagora has already confirmed that he won’t be in season 3 of Picard, so this plot point means nothing.

The end for Q, parting with Jean-Luc as old friends, the reveal that he was, deep down, always his favorite, and that all these tests were, on some level, a kind of gift, is exactly the ending I always wanted for Q, and yet it doesn’t quite work, because it doesn’t feel earned. In their desire to avoid telegraphing the ending, they made the natural end of Q’s arc feel like an ass-pull. They made it feel like an ass-pull despite the fact that we all kind of knew this was where it had to go anyway. They failed to avoid telegraphing the ending but succeeded in making the only possible end not feel like the natural consequence of the story.

Back in the future, the Borg Queen fails to give any explanation for why she showed up wearing a mask and refusing to explain herself. I mean, she has a good reason for what she’s doing, but why be so cryptic about it when she literally could have just taken the damn mask off and saved everyone a lot of trouble? Maybe we are going with, “She looked at all possible timelines and decided this one had the most panache.”

I realize emergency powers and all, but I’m a little disappointed in Janeway if she “went to bat” for getting Seven into Starfleet but Picard could just snap his fingers and fiat her into a commissioned captain and give her a ship. Also not a great look for Raffi that she never returns to her own ship for the big exciting climax.

Which is… I mean… I guess we should just wait and see if they’re going somewhere with this? So it turned out that Old Lady Agnes and her giant Borg Space Vagina shows up and freaked everyone out because they needed a fleet of ships with Borg enhancements because she needed a fleet to protect the quadrant from an impending Big Swirly Thing In Space. We get absolutely no explanation for this Big Swirly Thing in Space and nothing happens with it other than that it turns into a “new kind” of Transwarp Conduit.

And then the Borg ask to join the Federation so they can hang out by the Big Swirly Thing in Space just in case anything nasty comes through. I mean, it’s kind of lovely – the Federation making peace with the Borg feels like the perfect endcap to the TNG era. And it fits fine with the one reference to the Borg we got from the 32nd century – referring to them as something relevant even in their time, but not presented as an ongoing or persistent threat. That’s compatible with the Borg of the far-future being a Federation ally of limited influence.

The devil’s in the details, though. Because the Borg have shown up now leading into a bigger mystery – the transwarp conduit is a very obvious setup for future developments. Only Allison Pill has already confirmed that she won’t be in season 3 of Picard, so this plot point means nothing.

There’s a ton of good stuff in this show, but it just does not hang together properly, and despite considerable improvements in pacing and focus, it still just can not commit to exactly which story it’s going to tell – and it sure does look like they’ve made the decision to completely retool for the final season and just become the nostalgic romp everyone wanted them to be. Maybe that will work, but dammit, you actually got me to be interested in some new stuff.

I don’t know. Maybe there’s a bit of a misdirect here. Given that Paramount has taken the tack of “You know what we need? More Star Trek series running concurrently,” this season will in retrospect turn out to have all been a backdoor pilot for Star Trek: Sexy Space Ladies, and will follow the 25th century adventures of Captain O’Nine (Don’t call her “Captain Hansen” or you will die) of the USS Stargazer, her girlfriend Captain Musiker of the USS Excelsior, and Queen Agnes of the USS Scary Space Vagina as they deal with Lovecraftian horrors that come through the transwarp conduit, ably assisted by Space Legolas and a challenging double-role for Isa Briones as Android Ambassador Soji and her identical great-grandmom Kore the Traveler. Guest stars Brent Spiner as a parade of identical Soongs and Jeffrey Combs as everyone else.

Okay, I’ve actually made that seem super cool. I just made that up in my head and I am more optimistic about it than the Section 31 spin-off that’s apparently still coming eventually.