Some Blundering about Star Trek: Picard 3×03: Seventeen Seconds

A bit of a mixed bag, this one. We are just going all in on the Sad Dad, aren’t we? Maybe even a little too hard. We end on a cliffhangery conflict between Picard and Riker whose moral crux is basically them trying to out-Sad-Dad each other. Picard accuses Riker of being too timid because of his Dad Sads, while Riker accuses Picard of being too reckless once Jack is injured, because of his own Dad Sads. And the moral beat of the show, with the climax of Riker throwing Picard off the bridge for having doomed them all feels like it’s aligned with Riker here: it’s Jean-Luc’s name on the title card, so he’s the one who will be having the character arc where he starts out emotionally compromised and has to work his way back.

And yet, of course, was Picard wrong? Riker only fired on the Shrike when they had no other choice; they couldn’t run after the changeling saboteur had blown up their macguffin. No, there’s the devil of it: Picard had been right earlier – they should have attacked first; Riker’s decision to play it safe didn’t pan out because of the saboteur. The problem was that Riker only followed Picard’s plan after it was too late.

The conflict between Riker and Picard is so good though. Putting Riker in the captain’s chair, with Picard as his “Number one” is a fantastic reversal, and, yeah, Riker flipping out like that is a perfect extension of his character. Riker’s upset because Riker did what he always does: he deferred to Jean-Luc, even though his gut told him not to. He’s angry with Picard right now because he is angry at himself: he fell right back into the pattern that kept him from advancing his career for seven seasons and four mostly-terrible movies.

Oh but the changelings. Yeah, it’s the changelings. Or at least, a breakaway faction. They simultaneously reveal it aboard the Titan and over on Terry Matalas Prime. Um… Okay, as a dramatic angle, changelings are a useful villain because of the shapeshifting. But… No, I do not want them to be the Big Bad. We already did that. And it’s not The Next Generation’s fight; it’s weird for them to bring back Deep Space 9’s big bad to be the final boss of Picard. I’m okay with them being here, but it had better turn out that Vadic’s using them, rather than the other way around.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I am starting to fear that Picard and Riker will spend the whole season in that nebula getting hounded by Vadic while Worf and Raffi handle the actual universe-impacting plot. Which is not good because I don’t care for the direction they took with Raffi’s arc and Worf…

Deep sigh.

Okay, on paper, I love the idea that when we rejoin Worf now, he has undergone Some Shit – it’s as if Worf was off doing “Star Trek:Worf” for the past two years and had his own emotional character arc about dealing with his unresolved childhood trauma and is ready to actually commit to dating his housekeeper (And now I see an article in my daily clickbait that this is literally what happened; Worf here is apparently based on a script Dorn had been pushing for a Worf series?). But in practice… I dunno. “I am Worf, son of Mogh, House of Martok, son of Sergei, House of Rozhenko, Bane of the Duras Family, Slayer of Gowron, and I have made some Chamomile Tea” absolutely fucking slaps as a line, but. But.

Something is wrong with Michael Dorn’s performance here, and I can’t put my finger on it. He doesn’t feel like Worf. More like “Michael Dorn playing Worf for a sketch while guest-hosting Saturday Night Live.” Interesting, though, that he describes himself as a “subcontractor”, which suggests that he’s no longer with Starfleet, obviously, but might mean something more. I’m pretty sure that’s how Retired Galactic Tyrant Phillipa Georgiou was described. Everyone’s eager to see if a new Trek will be announced now that Disco is officially ending, so is Star Trek: Worf going to be the angle they take for the Section 31 spinoff they’ve been proposing for years now? They could even bond over the mutual experience of having been rapidly whanged around an infinite number of parallel universes and that time they saw a gremlin on the wing of the plane.

Raffi and Worf capture and interrogate a street-level thug and they fall into a very standard Good-Cop-Bad-Cop routine, except that it doesn’t feel like Raffi actually realizes they’re doing that. She brings up some of the concerns I did, that Worf very easily could’ve let her in on a bit more instead of letting her think she’s been cut loose. Worf is the usual sort of irascible about it for no good reason. I have a hard time buying the justification for their prisoner holding his shape to the point of getting the DTs over it when he could have just, like, not done that and escaped. But we can’t have the reveal in their plot happen before Jack punches the Titan saboteur’s face gooey I guess. The changeling effects are interesting; with a couple of decades’ improvement in the CGI, the changelings are sort of… Meaty now? Like, the changelings in Deep Space 9 would basically do the same kind of liquid metal thing as the T-1000 back in Terminator 2, only amber. These changelings have color variations and texturing in their liquid form that definitely makes them look more organic. And gross. Our story-advancing reveal here is that the portal gun was actually a distraction and the “real weapon” was something far more dangerous. It’s going to be Lore, isn’t it? I don’t want it to be Lore.

Back on the Titan, we have a nice little scene with Seven and La Forge (Why is it that in my head, she is “La Forge” but her dad will always be “Geordi”?) where you almost see a little of ’90s Seven’s standoffishness, but it’s in the flavor of modern Angrier Seven. My poor little heart when Ensign La Forge calls her “Commander Seven”. Show, you had best not injure her for pathos.

Shaw, on the other hand, g’head and injure him. It was actually a really good scene that really gave us a lot to work with. Shaw takes a real bad hit, gets spun and tossed and he’s coughing up blood from an internal injury that Titan’s doctor will not diagnose (Seriously, what is it with these yoyos?) and, shaking with pain, he points with such vitriol and Riker and puts him in charge. I mean just wow. Compare that to the forced “character conflict” that ’90s Trek clumsily introduced once Roddenberry’s grip on the show weakened. Like, if you imagine this happening in TNG’s proper era, you’d have Shaw refusing to hand over command to Riker even as he lost control of the situation, letting his personal distaste cloud his judgment until it was too late. This episode would’ve been mostly about Shaw. But it isn’t, and Shaw is… Let’s say “gracious”? No, that’s too much. He’s lying on the floor, bleeding, badly hurt. These asshole old men have ruined his nap, dragged him to the wrong side of the galaxy, and put his ship and the lives of his crew in danger. He’s pissed. And yet, he still does his duty, still makes the best strategic move: he practically spits at Riker in his anger, but he gives him command, with the order, “You got us into this. You get us out.”

And to his credit, Riker takes his remit as serious as the grave, because Riker was the one egging Picard on last week to put the Titan in danger to save his son – very Riker, really: as a reservist and bereaved father, Riker’s focus is how his friend should protect his own. But once he’s the captain of the Titan, Space Dad Riker’s focus is on protecting his crew just as Shaw’s was. This of course leads to the first time we really get to see Riker as a captain in a tense situation, excluding Lower Decks (And honestly, Lower Decks disappoints me on this front, leaning in on the more freewheeling “pop culture” version of Riker). The fact that Riker does not do a great job at it honestly works for the character. He starts out too conservative, focused on escape. He only turns to attack when it’s too late.

Now, we do get some cool-looking space battles out of it, and the Shrike utterly dominates here, as befits this being the “things get worse” part of the season. I think maybe it would’ve been nice to give us one scene of the Titan holding her own; if for no other reason than to sharpen the blow when the Shrike dominates them in the end. I mean, we end out with the Titan literally shooting itself in the ass.

This is a small problem. It’s tricky. The battles look good. We get to actually look at things; they aren’t the chaotic mess of a lot of the space battle scenes in other parts of modern Trek. They only turn the camera upside-down once or twice. But part of the price of that is that some of the more complicated scenes are also a little slow. I mean, it looks great to see the Shrike fire its portal gun and a big hole open up in front of the Titan and another hole open up next to the Shrike and the Titan to slowly disappear into the hole, and then the Titan’s saucer to emerge back in the nebula even as the tail of the ship is still on the far side of the portal. But it’s also slow. And this happens multiple times. In the portal scenes especially, the Titan lumbers around with the agonizing sluggishness of an early TNG space battle. It sure doesn’t look like the portal weapon was so fast that the Titan couldn’t have juked around it. The first time, they don’t know what’s going on, so okay, but the second time?

And we end up, of course, with the tragic end to this phase of the cat-and-mouse chase, where the Titan shoots at the Shrike and the Shrike portals the torpedoes around to hit the Titan from behind. No one saw this coming? And it’s not like this was instantaneous; it comes off like none of them can figure out what’s going on. The second that portal opened up, Riker easily should have at the least figured out “Oh shit, we’d better dodge.” Again, using her portal weapon to make the Titan shoot itself is a cool tactic (I hope this is building to them turning the tables on Vadic later on by going the wrong way through a portal), but it all happens so lethargically on-screen and with so little apparent comprehension by the Titan crew that they don’t feel especially competent.

Having Riker take command, of course, frees up Jean-Luc to have his own emotional arc through the episode. And I do like most of this. Beverly’s reasons for keeping Jack from him are a little tired. It’s painful to once again have our themes hang so heavily on someone just not being willing to fucking talk about their issues, but I love her explanation that, having lost her parents, her husband, and her first son to SPACE (ps. I love that the lumps Wesley in there, because he might not be dead, but he’s still gone), she decided that she could protect the son of Beverly Crusher, but not the son of Jean-Luc Picard.

Also, it sounds like Picard had a way more action-packed Post-Nemesis career than the typical level of action-adventure during the proper TNG era, given that Beverly’s decision was informed by the series of kidnappings and assassination attempts (Including one by the Remans. If they just pretended that the whole Reman thing never happened, I don’t think anyone would complain) Picard experienced in the week following the entirely normal and mundane vacation-breakup-sex that led to her pregnancy.

So yeah, Bev’s argument is retreading the usual ground. Picard’s frustration is similarly cliche, even if it’s utterly understandable. The one point I do really like is that Picard calls back to last season’s events. He owns that, yeah, he had some serious issues that Beverly was entirely justified in fearing would be a problem for him taking on fatherhood. He is over them now, but more than that, he knows now that those issues were something he had the capacity to overcome. “I could have learned that lesson twenty years ago.” That’s the kind of musings on mortality from a nonogenarian android I want to hear from a show whose raison d’etre is to revisit Picard thirty years later. We later get Picard’s “Seventeen seconds” where Jack is hurt (Tiny aside here, how interesting that Shaw charges Jack specifically with figuring out how the Shrike is tracking them, leading to the discovery of the saboteur and his subsequent injury) and Picard’s brain rewires itself into Dad Mode, to parallel Riker’s flashback about Thad’s birth. The CGI-de-aging they do on the pair is way less obtrusive than it could’ve been, and I like that they seem to have made Riker kind of tubby in the flashback. Also, it does not seem like Riker has not owned any clothes that fit other than his deep-V-retired-swinger outfit from Nepenthe in the past thirty years. Having Deanna pop in on a transmission to be kind of shrewish was a little cringe.

Far more interesting than the parents’ argument, I think, is the not-yet-stated reason that Jack never sought out his father. Unlike David Marcus, Jack knows he’s the spawn of Old Man Picard, but he doesn’t want any of it. The other not-yet-revealed puzzle piece is of course why Vadic wants him. Beverly thinks it’s something to do with Picard. But, of course, Vadic doesn’t want Picard. And she could totally just ask. He would absolutely surrender himself for either the Titan or Jack. I suppose the obvious explanation is that she needs Picard-family-DNA, and whatever Picard has these days, it’s not human DNA. That would tie back to her calling out his “synthetic flesh”.

Is this Shinzon again? I mean, that is terrible, but, like, maybe? Shinzon was an uncompelling villain in a terrible movie. But since we also have the changelings back, possibly I could enjoy it turning out that the final boss of the TNG era is some kind of Legion of Doom, with Shinzon (or just “Another Romulan-made Picard Clone”) and the changelings and Species 8471 and the Pakaleds and Lore and Moriarty and a previously unknown Duras sister and the fluegill parasites and MOTHERFUCKING GROPPLER ZORN all teaming up. That would be the kind of absolute insanity that would justify this project.

Bring back Groppler Zorn, you cowards.