Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 3×02: Disengage

You know, I almost feel like the people who make this show actually listen to me. Possibly they listen to everyone, because they are heavy on the fanservice this season. Because you know how I complained a lot about the pacing of the last two seasons – season 1 especially. Well, that’s fixed.

I reckon most viewers went into this season already knowing through nerd-culture osmosis that our big bad would be Amanda Plummer as Vadic, and her ship was the Shrike, and the gang would be hanging out on the Titan. So… Yeah they don’t really waste time beating around the bush. The main thrust of the episode is that Vadic shows up, introduces everyone to her ship, announces herself as the Big Bad, and everyone goes back to the Titan. There’s no time-wasting with their mysterious adversaries refusing to identify themselves, or trying to sell us that she’s not the antagonist.

Star Trek has never been great at villains, and the Next Generation has been worse at villains than other series. I can count the number of truly great Star Trek villains on one hand, and I don’t even need the whole hand. The Next Gen was always better with Frenemies, really. Modern Trek has failed to give us a really compelling antagonist basically ever. Control came close. But then in saunters Amanda Plummer (Whose dad, I would say, is one of those very small number of truly great Star Trek villains) and lights a cigar and helps herself to a big heaping bowlful of the scenery and just goes to town. She casually tells Shaw his own first name to let us know that she’s got access to Starfleet personnel records (She hints at something in his past that will perhaps justify him being such a dick – something that necessitates him keeping is stress-level in check); we wouldn’t be surprised if she was instantly familiar with the famous Jean-Luc Picard, which of course she is (She also knows about Picard’s robot body, which is the closest we’ve gotten to addressing how well-known it is that Picard is a robot now), but she starts with Shaw, with the nobody we don’t especially like ourselves.

Now, we still have a huge bit being held back, because Vadic’s claim that she wants Jack for the bounty is clearly an incomplete view of things: the Shrike is a War Crimes Mobile, armed with mundane weapons in large numbers, and scary weapons in also large numbers, and a mystery weapon in the number 1. And her ante is to seriously damage the Titan not with any of her weapons, but by wanging the Eleos at it. There’s a huge shift here, because seasons 1 and 2 of Picard had a kind of Russell T Davies Doctor Who vibe to them insofar as for large chunks of them, the drama emerged from the fact that Picard was essentially in exile: he was constantly facing challenges where, as Captain of the USS Enterprise (Notice that despite feigning to not know who Picard is, Jack refers to him as “Captain”, ignoring his actual title in favor of the one everyone knows him for), he could have brought the full strength of the Federation to bear, but right now, all he had was a ranger, a drunk, a drug-addict and an AI developer with anxiety issues. Much of the drama came from the fact that Picard had nothing to fall back on, even his old friends. They faced enemies who were pirates and thugs, but weren’t about to take on Starfleet. But now, Picard has Riker backing him up, and he’s standing aboard a ship-of-the-line, and yet there’s Amanda Plummer, mouthful of scenery, just gleefully telling a Starfleet captain how she is going to tortuously destroy his ship and murder his crew. Episode one had a light implication that they were in danger because the Titan wasn’t there to back them up – that surely, these mysterious attackers would back down if confronted by Starfleet. But nope. She’s giggling over the prospect of fighting the Titan.

By the way, the visual of the Titan just ramming itself in-between the Eleos and the Shrike is pretty great. I’m not fully on-board with the ease of Seven shaming Shaw into rescuing them, but at the same time, a longer scene of her haranguing him to go save a couple of legends instead of being “The guy who abandoned Jean-Luc Picard to his death,” would have messed up the pacing.

I notice that there’s a big shift in Shaw’s characterization at this point as well. He’s still a dick, sure. But in the first few scenes, his, “Fuck Picard and Riker, they stole my ship, stole a shuttle, made me look bad and messed up my nap,” attitude is just purely dickish. But from this point on, every time Shaw is a dick, he frames in terms of his crew, and he is, of course not wrong. Picard says “but we can’t negotiate with terrorists,” and “But we can’t hand over a civilian to be murdered by the scary space lady,” and every time, Shaw answers, “There’s a fuckton of people on this ship and I do not want to get them killed.” That’s not just regulations. It’s not just being a pompous ass. He’s doing the math on people’s lives. The audience is primed to agree with Picard – Jack is a person with a name and a relationship to a series regular, and Vadic is a Disney villain with a ship full of isolytic weapons who, because of the laws of conservation of drama, is probably something to do with portal-gunning the recruitment center last week, and the good guys giving a poor sweet innocent con artist to the cartoonishly evil villain is just Big-W-Wrong. But… Shaw still isn’t wrong either, because, yeah, they drug his ship out here and got them in a fight they possibly can’t win against an urban legend and is it really “good guy” behavior to put his crew at risk for Picard’s friend’s kid? (They do not have any reason to trust that Vadic will let them go, and frankly every reason not to given just how over-the-top evil she’s being, but that’s neither here nor there).

I think we know where this is going, more or less. The thing that’s in Shaw’s past? The thing that makes it hard to sleep? Shaw got people killed, and so now he plays it safe. That’s where his arc is going.

Still needs to be kicked in the face for deadnaming Seven.

And Jack kinda gives them an out. Shame on Titan security for not frisking the guy, but he busts out of the brig and nearly hands himself over before Seven catches him. Shaw is ready to let him go ahead and do it – it’s a perfectly Star Trek sort of answer, frankly: if Jack goes willingly, Shaw doesn’t have to endanger his crew or compromise Starfleet principles by delivering him to his death. They can all be quietly respectful of Jack’s noble sacrifice. The needs of the many and all that.

Except, of course, for the Turn. Because Riker’s been alluding to it all episode, and Picard won’t come out and say it or pursue it (And no one on the Titan thinks to run a DNA scan… The Titan crew is not really distinguishing themselves with their competence). So Riker goes down and wakes Bev up (He’s allowed to walk right up to her, grab a hypo of stimulants and shoot her up with only a very weak “Hey, what are you doing?” from the doctor. Again, not sure about this crew) and brings her to the bridge.

And neither of them say it. It’s been twenty years. Picard has a girlfriend, he’s gotten over his mommy issues, he’s got a new body. They don’t have to say it. With a look, he asks the question, and with a look, she answers, and Admiral Jean-Luc Picard stops fucking around and takes command of the Titan, because he can’t let them hand over his son.

I mean, it wasn’t 100% certain, but we all figured that was probably it, right? It was him or Bev’s grandma’s Irish sex ghost (That’s a thing that happened). And I love that the second Picard says, “He’s my son,” Shaw just sighs and is like, “Okay fine we will be Big Damn Heroes.” Was it a son that Shaw lost?

Oh. Oh I get it now. Duh.

I was angry last week that they alluded to trouble at home with the Troi-Rikers. Of course Riker has to be the one to go and wake Beverly, because they don’t come right out and say it – in fact, you could easily miss the implications (This may be in part because Jonathan Frakes was always a better director than he is an actor, and he’s way out of practice now). Picard doesn’t want to pursue it, doesn’t want to even think about it. But it’s Riker who pushes him, who challenges him. Who won’t let him accept Shaw’s entirely correct assessment that there are a lot of people on the Titan and only one Jack Crusher.

Because Riker lost a son. That’s going to be at the root of his trouble at home, isn’t it? When we last saw him, he seemed to have it pretty together; he was living his best life. But grief isn’t linear. That wasn’t, “I got the Starfleet Bug back in me and have been a bad dad,” when he said Deanna and Kestra would be relieved to be rid of him; it was, “I have the big sads, and do not want to keep inflicting it on my telepath wife and daughter.” Will took one look at Jack, and he knew, exactly like he knew when he met Soji. His Strong Dad Energy kicked in, and he knew that was Jean-Luc’s son, and he could not just stand by and let his friend offer up Jack to his death rather than acknowledge it.

Gah, it is just all so lovely and I am kind of lowkey mad I have to wait a whole week for another episode. This is gonna be the Sad Dad season of Star Trek, isn’t it? Sad Dad isn’t really as big a genre for TV as it is for video games, but it’s certainly the sort of late-in-life meditation that fits with a cerebral show like TNG to go out on. We have a lot of parallels to The Wrath of Khan, and not just because I spent half a year rewriting The Wrath of Khan. The Corporate URW title card is feeling like more than an Easter egg: it’s establishing what we’re going for here. Season 2 was in many ways a mashup of Star Trek IV; Season 3 seems to be going for 2, with a bit of VI in there for good measure. We’ve got a potentially planet-killing superweapon, a smart, larger-than-life villain who revels in making big speeches over the viewscreen, a previously unrevealed son of the captain who’s been kept hidden by his doctor mom, a battle in a nebula… Wow this is kind of on-the-nose.

We have this B-plot too, which is a lot less interesting than the main plot, but has to go through its paces to get the story where it’s going. Just as the A-plot wastes no time revealing Vadic, the B-plot decides that one and a half episodes is exactly as long as they can expect us to pretend that we don’t know Raffi’s handler is Worf. He shows up to do some world-class decapitating and save Raffi’s bacon. Raffi is on the downward-spiral part of her character arc. Worf tells her to drop it after Starfleet fingers an obvious patsy to take the fall for the recruitment center attack, and come on. This all could have been avoided if Worf had just been like, “Disengage for now, I need to work this from a different angle for a while,” rather than letting her think he was going to just let the whole thing be swept under the rug. Raffi goes back to her ex, and they finally make explicit what I said last week and have been saying about her since the start, that her ability to see patterns is a Grim Superpower that also leads to her being a conspiracy theorist, which in turn leads to her drug problem. She makes the downward-spiral decision to pursue a Ferengi gangster toward the true culprets after her ex gives her the choice of him helping her with only one of pursuing the spy stuff or patching things up with their son. Then she misses the incredibly obvious hinting when she claims to have worked for the Romulan patsy and the Ferengi Gangster is like “Oh yes that is very interesting and I definitely believe you and do not know you are lying because I have already killed that dude and have his head right behind my divan.” Then she gets high on an unknown drug provided to her by the shady gangster to prove she’s not a cop, and of course it turns out to be something that will impair her too much to fight back and probably too much to maintain her cover. Good thing Worf showed up. Worf also conveniently commits a lot of homicide, clarifying that the bit from the trailer where he describes himself as a pacifist was a joke. He’s using proper sword now rather than a Bat’leth. Because he’s a ninja. I have this theory that the Bat’leth is actually a deliberately shitty weapon – that it was designed to be hard to use and inefficient (It’s a leverage-based weapon that you have to hold at both ends. You have to get way too close to the person you’re stabbing, and it’s too big to be maneuverable when you’re grappling) because Klingons are a Proud Warrior Race and want to show off, so they felt it would be dishonorable to use a proper killing-machine, and prefer to mezza-luna their enemies to death.

I’m excited. I’m hopeful that the cat-and-mouse in the nebula doesn’t last too long, because we’ve still got a bunch of other stuff to get to, but they’ve actually given me faith this year that they know where they’re going with this plot, which is way better than where we were at this point in either of the previous seasons.

Engage.