I don’t know where I stand on this one. But I guess we’re really going with the changelings as the main antagonist here. That’s disappointing. There’s still something else going on; Vadic’s lament hints at there being something hanging over her head. This whole conspiracy is hard to follow; the changelings seem to have complete control over Starfleet at every level, so… Why bother with this big complicated master-plan to destroy the fleet? Why not just… Like…. Have taken over? How can Vadic impersonate the lead interrogator beating the shit out of Riker, but apparently the other two guards – who are content to just stand there and let their boss commit war crimes – aren’t changelings so she has to murder them before revealing herself? She makes a wry comment about being forced into certain forms with no explanation, and there’s an odd line where Riker asks one of the underlings how much goo they needed to fill him with. I dunno. Changelings are a stupid main villain.
Also stupid: they need Geordi to explain to them that the thing that keeps giving their location away is that all the ships are “fully integrated” now, which I assume means that they’re all on the same wifi. None of them knew that?
Now, less stupid: I was happily wrong to assume Jack would keep his scary visions to himself. He told Bev off-screen between episodes, and she’s given him some meds to make the violent hallucinations go away. But he’s got Irumodic Syndrome, just like his dad (Finally confirmed; I know everyone took for granted that was what Picard had, since it’s what he had in “All Good Things”, but since they never actually said it, and the symptoms were completely different, I was leaning on Doctor Benayoun’s claim that it could have been one of several syndromes triggered by the same underlying brain defect). Only now it’s something that could cause hallucinations and violence at a young age rather than altzheimer’s-like symptoms in old age. Well never mind. It was pretty fun when Jack asks Picard how he survived it and he points out that he didn’t.
Obviously, that’s not going to be all there is to it. I don’t know exactly what the all-the-rest is, but it would be incredibly weird if Jack’s visions didn’t add up to anything. And don’t think I haven’t noticed how Vadic has transitioned to referring to Jack as “The son of Picard” in private, because it’s time to stop being coy about why they want him. Which we will get to.
The main part of Jack’s role this week, other than some flirting with LaForge, is in his exchange with Seven as they talk about found family while giving the audience a chance to geek out about slightly sub-optimal 3D reconstructions of ships we recognize. There’s the slightly too-shiny Defiant. The slightly too-shiny Voyager, a slightly too-shiny Constitution class ship we’ve never heard of before in the TOS-style, which is sure to spark some debates, what with on-screen graphics in season one showing the Enterprise in its Strange New Worlds style. You get a brief look at what appears to be a Columbia-Class ship, possibly canonizing the unused Season 7 idea for Enterprise of giving the NX-01 a refit that basically made it look like a Chibi-NCC-1701 (This would also provide a new and fun canonical origin of the “NCC” hull designation: that it originally meant “NX-Columbia Class”). And then, of course, there’s the Enterprise-A, looking slightly funny and seen only at a distance, but still. We now at last know that the canonical end of the Enterprise-A is “museum”. But what drives the plot forward is a surprise: they’ve also got the H.M.S. Bounty, Kruge’s Bird-of-Prey from Star Trek III, later borrowed by Kirk. The exact sequence of events that allowed the Federation to hold on to a stolen Klingon warship for a century and then put it in their own museum is hard to imagine, but Geordi says they had a hard time finding it because the cloak switched on while it was sinking. In San Francisco Bay.
Okay, actually I can sorta imagine that Starfleet Intelligence kept telling the Klingon Ambassador, “Of course we’d love to return your warship; we’re not the sort of evil empire that goes around collecting spoils of war, particularly during these very tense times of peace negotiations. We just can’t find it. Oh, that superior Klingon cloaking technology!” until the Empire just said, “Fuck it, you can keep the damn thing.” It is harder to accept that this century-old cloaking device is still advanced enough to be useful, but whatever, it’s a cool enough idea that I will avoid asking questions, especially because I already have plenty to find dumb with the fact that their use of the cloak was, “Warp in uncloaked. Cloak. Decloak. Beam everyone up. Leave.” I’m happy to imagine an offscreen exchange like, “The only part of a cloaking device that we can’t recreate in software is the Unobtanium module, and those haven’t changed in centuries. We can plug in pretty much any cloaking device ever invented and just update the firmware.”
Meeting Geordi here is a lot like meeting Worf was a few episodes back. Or perhaps even more like meeting Wesley Crusher last season. This isn’t Geordi LaForge, chief engineer of the USS Enterprise; it’s LeVar Burton, beloved gentle, caring paternal figure and educator. Many of the legacy characters we’ve met in Picard have been in very different places than where we left them, except maybe Guinan. But in the previous seasons, the people we met all seemed to have followed the paths they had been on (I would say if any TNG character actually had a deliberate and consistent direction to their character growth, it’s Riker. Riker’s arc through TNG is a young, ambitious officer, who comes to understand why he wasn’t ready for the big chair, come to terms with it, grow to the place where he is ready, then finally reach the point where he’s ready to walk away from it. It’s a good arc.). Seven and Jean-Luc himself had the biggest transitions, but they did the work to show us how they got there. This season, we meet a Worf who’s clearly been through a transformative experience, and Ro who’s clearly been through a transformative experience, and Geordi, who became a dad – and this is a season about fatherhood, so it makes sense, but it’s a big ask to, without seeing any intermediate position, accept the version of Geordi who’s about to shrug off what is clearly the impending destruction of Starfleet to protect his own. I mean, look, the logical issue with “No, I’m going to let civilization collapse to protect my kids, ignoring the fact that the collapse of civilization will probably have a deleterious effect on my children,” is the sort of thing you can wave off as a very normal, human kind of myopia. But Geordi being the kind of guy to suffer that myopia could use some more build-up.
I did like Shaw’s adorkable hero-worship of Commodore LaForge, which makes sense for Shaw being an ascended grease-monkey. I like the idea of finally seeing what does work for Shaw, since Picard and Riker’s brand of heroism doesn’t. Shaw is not a Big Damn Heroes Trek-fan; he’s a Competency Porn Trek-fan. It’s kind of fascinating, and a counterbalance to the weird element of the show that has brought back the TNG cast – arguably the most thinky, competency-porny version of the show, but leaned heavily on them having been Big Damn Heroes.
Geordi in TNG of course was always at his best in his interactions with Data, and so it’s fitting that Geordi shows up when we also get Data back, in a twist that kinda beggars the imagination. Not sure what we’re calling this incarnation yet. I think people are floating “Ultimate Data”, which is sad because “Unlimited Data” was RIGHT THERE. This is a synth version of Data with the same kind of Golem body as Picard, which means he can age and be played by Brent Spiner without CGI. (never mind that I think in TNG they did in fact say that Data could age. Back in early season one, they hadn’t sorted out all the details about what kind of android Data was; I think they may have been imagining him as more like a synth himself initially. I mean, he gets drunk at one point. In the original pitch document, he was built by aliens and had an incestuous relationship with his mentally challenged sister). But also he’s schizophrenic on account of Season One Surprise Soong (now deceased) having installed ALL the Soong-type androids in one body – Data, Lore, Lal, B4, (Noticeably not his mom, since that would be weird), along with a bit of himself too I think, planning to just like stir them all together and make a new ego out of it.
This has not actually happened, and instead we get Multiple Personalities Data, who defends Daystrom Station with spooky lighting and threatening holograms, like Moriarty. Yeah, this is not – and Riker confirms it – the actual self-aware hologram brought to life by Doctor Pulaski back in season 2 of TNG; rather, it’s Data’s daydream of Moriarty, who just chases them around and mugs menacingly until Riker solves the requisite logic puzzle by reenacting his initial meeting with Data back in “Encounter at Farpoint” by whistling the last bar of “Pop Goes the Weasel”. The Data personality seems befuddled and inarticulate, so we don’t get any useful interaction between him and Geordi, but Geordi’s joy at seeing his old friend is hard to miss. This all builds toward the reveal of what the changelings were really after: the answer to the question I posed at the top of season 2. Yeah, turns out Picard’s original body isn’t on the mantle like my father-in-law; rather, he was put in storage in Daystrom Station.
What do they plan to do with it? Well, the stupidest and most straightforward answer is that they want to resurrect him somehow and then use Zombie Picard to reenact the battle of Wolf 359 – given that Shaw reminded us about that earlier, it’s a good fit. Of course, Locutus wasn’t so devastating at Wolf 359 because of his tactical genius; he was devastating because of his intimate knowledge of Starfleet systems, tactics, technology and protocols. It’s hard to imagine that Zombie Picard – who hadn’t been privy to sensitive Starfleet information in fourteen years when he died, and has been, y’know, dead during the refit of the fleet around new technology would have the same advantage. I mean, unless they actually mean to use his remaining Borg technology to hack into the Borg-enhanced fleet, just as Gimp Suit Jurati did? This seems overly complicated, given that XBs aren’t that hard to find and some would certainly volunteer for the job. Where does Jack fit into this? Does Jack have the ability to revivify Picard 1.0? Is Jack compatible with something they hope to extract from the Corpse Borg? Is it just the super dumb “We’re going to resurrect Picard and threaten his son unless he helps us?”
I’m having a hard time seeing a fully satisfying way this will go. Worse, this could easily lead to “Robopicard sacrifices himself so that Meat Picard can be the One True Picard because in this season of fanservice, they decided to fire Rian Johnson and walk back the big character changes to give in to the toxic fans who have been screaming that the S2 Picard isn’t “the real Jean-Luc””. Best case scenario: we end up with two Picards, so one of them can date Beverly and the other can stay with Laris.
Oh, right. Laris. You know, this season would be a lot shorter if, upon learning there was a complex intrigue at the highest levels with covert infiltration, Picard remembered that his girlfriend is a master intelligence operative with legacy access to many of the resources of the Tal Shi’ar.
Anyway, Daystrom is also a big old easter egg hunt, most of which you need a good freeze-frame and zoom to make out, but I liked the attack tribble. There’s also “Genesis II”, which is a fun double-easter-egg since that was the name of one of Roddenberry’s failed ’70s pilots whose concept got folded into the series “Andromeda” years after his death. A new Genesis device would’ve made an interesting MacGuffin, you know. Not as rich thematically as Zombie Picard, but you could do some good closure. Have the changelings try to Genesis Earth, and the Titan gang mounts a daring rescue that can’t stop it, but instead diverts it into Mars, effectively reversing the damage done by the synth attack from the S1 backstory. Ah well.
They also have the corpse of James T. Kirk in a locker, which makes sense. First of all, you don’t want anyone stealing that and resurrecting him. There’s a whole Shatner-ghost-written novel about that (Seriously. The Romulans and the Borg team up to resurrect Kirk as part of a plan to… Okay, you know, I don’t think the book ever says exactly how a resurrected and brainwashed Kirk advances their plan to take down the Federation. He ends up, after being rescued and un-brainwashed, being the critical third part of the puzzle that lets Starfleet destroy the Borg, along with Picard’s Borg Security Codes and Spock’s V’ger knowledge of the location of the Borg homeworld, but I do not remember anything that explains why the Borg thought bringing him back to life was a good idea). But more pressingly, they need to ensure chain of custody on his DNA samples to settle ongoing paternity suits well into the twenty-fifth century. I rather liked this particular egg because, much like some of the “Audience figures it out before the characters” moments in previous episodes, it primes the pump so that when Data starts mumbling “Captain Picard” over and over, the clever audience members have a good idea that he’s answering the question about what was taken, rather than just muttering in confusion.
So where we stand at the end of the episode? Jack’s dying very slowly of Irumodic Syndrome. Seven and Raffi really did break up (another nice exchange from Worf where he starts a pep-talk and is like, “Oh thank god,” when Seven tells him she’s not going), which is enraging. Data is alive again, more or less, the Titan can cloak, Ro is still dead, Geordi is stuck on the Titan with both of his daughters, Robot Picard is on the Titan but Zombie Picard is presumably on the Shrike. Riker is also a prisoner on the Shrike (How did Vadic get him there, anyway?), and Surprise! They’ve also got Troi.
It feels like Troi’s character has been imagined as “Shrewish ’50s sitcom wife,” to be honest. She gets one line in this episode and it’s angry disapproval at seeing her husband has been badly beaten. I reckon it’s really her, because we need to get the whole cast back together for the big finale. But it’d be fun if it turned out she was a changeling. Riker agrees to talk to spare her, gives them everything they ask for, it leads them straight into a trap, and he very smugly reminds them that while he might be enough of a cliche of an emotionally distant husband to not be able to tell his wife is an impostor after thirty years of marriage, his actual wife is also a telepath. But again, it seems unlikely.
I’m on fan-service overload after this episode, and it’s got me nervous; this season is absolutely better-written, better-paced, and better-plotted than the first two. But at the same time, they don’t really feel like they learned the right lessons about constructing a storyline that can pay off its investments in a satisfactory way.
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