Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 3×07: Dominion

Well okay. This was… Hm.

I mean, it’s pretty good. But at the same time, it was painful to sit through this episode knowing full well that this is the kind of show where the heroes are not going to get a respite and partial-victory in episode 7, so the entire time that it looks like things are finally going their way, we all know how this is going to end.

There is, I suppose, an interesting multilayered thing here. We know that Vadic is walking into a trap, because it happens immediately after Picard declares, “Let’s set a trap for Vadic.” Yet all the TV-making language shouts at us that this is one of those scenes where we’re not supposed to know that the Titan is faking it and it isn’t really crippled. But then Vadic never acts like she isn’t in complete control of the situation, and we kinda know, before Jean-Luc and Bev do, that she’s going to trivially escape and take over the ship so that we can go into episode 8 with the heroes in their darkest hour. More than that, even, the main tension next week isn’t going to be, “How will they get out of this?” but “How will they avoid getting out of this?” because we know episode 8 can’t end with the heroes victorious, but there’s only a limited amount of headroom for escalation left.

So after the exciting cliffhanger with Riker captured and Troi being held prisoner to blackmail him into talking… They is not in this episode. Neither are Worf or Raffi. Someone has to stay uncaptured to show up next week and save everyone. Instead, we get a celebrity cameo from Tim Russ as Not-Tuvok. Man, Tim Russ has not aged well. I didn’t see Tim Russ in anything for like 10 years, and now he’s in this what, a month after appearing in Poker Face? By the way, Poker Face is amazing and you should watch it. Tim Russ’s dramatic range is interesting. He is not good at conveying normal human emotion. This served him well as Tuvok, but I can also see him being really good in those sort of Adrian Paul roles where they’re playing a character who’s playing a character. He was just a victim in Poker Face, but man I could see him facing off against Columbo, presenting this carefully calculated false front that lets just enough slip that you know he’s not on-the-level. That was an interesting sequence, but it’s odd that Not-Tuvok was able to correctly respond to Seven’s comments about playing Kal-Toh (“It is to your chess, as chess is to tic-tac-toe,” Tuvok says, but I’m pretty sure it’s actually more like higher-dimensional Jenga), but screws up, “Vulcans wouldn’t go to the planet where they hate Vulcans.”

Fun fact: Tim Russ is the same age now as Mark Lenard was when he reprised the role of Sarek for TNG. I know some people are bothered that Tuvok looks a lot older at 137 than Sarek did at 209, but given that the actors were the literal same age, I think this does come down very straightforwardly to “Tuvok didn’t age gracefully.”

So no sooner did I concede that, yeah, Picard had Irumodic syndrome all along that this is called into question. Data, in a moment of lucidity, tells them that there’s something weird about Picard’s brain problem, that calls the diagnosis into question, as we kinda figured, what with Jack manifesting Plot Relevance. This has escalated now to telepathy, and possibly bodyjacking? Him and LaForge link brains to fight the skull-faced changelings. We seem to be rushing headlong into “There’s way too much going on for this to be satisfactorily resolved in time,” territory. It would probably be emotionally satisfying to end the series on a Picard-vs-Locutus showdown, which would hint at Picard’s brain problem actually being a remnant of Borg. But then, it’s weird that they wouldn’t involve the new friendlier collective at all (Also weird that Picard doesn’t reach out to them for help at this stage). I’m having a hard time speculating about what the deal is with Picard/Jack, since there’s no intersection I can find between plausible and non-stupid. Like, Jack’s eyes light up red, so maybe it’s Pah-wraith? But that’s just so random that it would really just completely collapse this whole season into “Oops all DS9”. The bare facts are that it appears something that happened to Picard prior to “All Good Things” modified his brain, and this has been passed on to his son in a further-adapted form, and somehow Jack and Picard’s corpse can be combined to do A Thing that will destroy starfleet. Again, storytelling rules suggest that the “something” is a callback to an actual thing in TNG. But what? Um. That time he got possessed by a space ghost? That time he crossed his own timeline and shot his future self? The Ressican business with the decades of gaslighting and flute lessons? There’s a ton of stuff it could plausibly be, but none of it has enough emotional weight to pay off the season. At best, it would just be another in a long list of easter eggs. “Oh hey a thing I never talked about that happened on the Stargazer,” makes more sense than any of it, but wouldn’t really be emotionally satisfying. Hell, let’s just say it’s Daimon Bok and be done with it.

This reveal serves as a concession to make the plot work. What I mean is this: they’ve got a pretty good idea why Vadic wants Jack and what she wants to do with Picard’s corpse. They’ve decided that she means to combine Picard’s corpse with Jack’s DNA to create a perfect impostor Picard to gain access to something at the Frontier Day festivities. This is not quite right, of course, and there’s flaws with the theory: they don’t want the actual Jean-Luc for this; they already have 100% Complete Control of All of Starfleet At Every Level, and why would retired zombie Jean-Luc have access to anything at Frontier Day that would help them? The actual real Jean-Luc can’t even divert a starship to the hinterlands. No, their real reasons have to do with Jack’s mysterious brain-damage powers, and that’s fine, but we need the gang to have a hint of this in order to explain why Geordi is trying to sort out Data at this point.

I mean, yes, obviously Geordi would want to bring back Data. It’s really when he gives his speech about the effect Data’s life and death had on him that LeVar Burton becomes Geordi again. But they’re right in the middle of something just now, so, like, maybe wait until after saving the galaxy? But they can’t, because Data might contain the secret of what the changelings are planning to do with Picard’s mortal remains. (Unfun fact: my wife and I talked a little last weekend about what we want to do with our own mortal remains when the time comes, and whether we want to be buried or donated to medical science or taxidermied or put on the mantle along with the cat and the father-in-law. Neither of us have strong feelings on the matter, and my wife offered the very lovely sentiment, “You should do whatever helps you and the kids the most.” She also pointed out that cremation is a lot cheaper than burial) So they plug him in to the ship’s computer because of course they do, and Lore gets to seize control of key systems for, near as I can tell, absolutely no reason other than to be a dick. I mean, maybe he’s deliberately working with Vadic? She seems super cocky when they catch her, so possibly she had anticipated them having Lore and Lore releasing her. But that would be kind of unfair Cartoon Villain prescience on her part, and while it’s in keeping with Lore’s character that he’d work with other bad guys to just fuck people over for the lulz, Geordi repeatedly stresses that Lore is an agent of chaos, so it seems like the argument is stronger that he’s just fucking around for fun.

Why did Soong decide to shove his mind in there again? They clarify that Soong and B4 are only memory backups (No mention of Lal; I thought her name came up last time), but Lore and Data are whole personalities, and Geordi speculates that Soong intended for the two personalities to merge to form a more complete and holistic individual consciousness, but partitioned them because he was worried that wouldn’t happen and Lore would just take over. I can sort of vaguely understand what Soong was trying to accomplish, but…. Man, this could have used another few lines of explanation and justification. There’s an implication here that neither Data nor Lore are complete individuals on their own, which would be a fascinating angle, but it isn’t one supported by the evidence in canon. And I’m not saying it makes it wrong; you could just add a little support for it. I can practically hear Geordi saying something like, “Altan believed that the reason Data always yearned to be human was because Doctor Soong deliberately omitted parts of the human experience from his positronic matrix because of his failure with Lore. He thought if the two fused, it would finally bridge that last unfulfilled yearning in Data’s core sense of self.”

Anyway, Lore hacks the ship, frees the changelings, Vadic takes over because Shaw is useless in a fight. Seriously, he shoots the changeling, gives the prone changeling a stern look, then moves on. Your gun has an Extra Tasty Crispy setting. We saw several changelings get splooshed earlier in the episode. Why do you have yours set to “Knock down but leave it ambiguous whether or not they’re dead”? Come on. Of course he’s not dead. And this wasn’t even “Everything happened very quickly,” moment. He shoots. The changeling goes down. Shaw looks at it. Then he keeps going so it can pop up and beat the shit out of him. Something like ten seconds pass between, “We won’t let them take the bridge!” and them taking the bridge. Even Tilly took longer than that to lose the ship.

Also, tangential and all, but why did everyone change into their civvies? Is it because they’re pirates now? I mean, not everyone. Seven and Shaw do, but Geordi, his daughters, and the cool-but-underutilized bridge crew don’t. So, is this a “Command staff take off their uniforms because they are technically on the lam” thing? Also, I should have brought this up last week, but can Picard project images out of his eyes too? I like that we start with, “Ultimate Data is Data, but as a Synth, with a synthetic-meat-body like Picard so he can age and stuff,” then instantly pivot to, “But also he’s got projector eyes and a plug in the back of his head.”

So aside from the Lore stuff and the takeover of the Titan, the core of the episode is the interrogation of Vadic, and here we get her satisfyingly terrible backstory. She was tortured and experimented on by Federation scientists to become a spy, because that makes total sense. I mean, Starfleet does indeed have a covert “Be super fucking evil” department specifically for this sort of thing, but, “Give our enemies in the war a serious reason to hate us and also give them greatly enhanced powers. This will surely work out well for us” is not a very practical evil plot, even for Starfleet’s Department of Cartoonish Nastiness. Did they contract this one out to Weyland-Yutani? Umbrella?

Vadic can pass on her mutation, at the cost of “constant pain” and “greatly reduced lifespan”, and if Beverly ever gets out of this, she can use the half-life of the chemicals involved to detect the newtype changelings, though I’m not sure we have enough show left for that to matter. We still know nothing about the scary face that is bankrolling Vadic, but we can guess that probably he’s offering her a cure for her excessive meatiness?

The possibility of Beverly building a changeling detector gives us an out of the moral dilemma the episode opens with. To safe the Federation and her son, Beverly is considering whether she can cross the moral line of developing some kind of bioweapon – essentially the sin that won the last Dominion war, when you get down to it. On the one hand, it’s a little cheap that we raise the possibility and then render it obsolete in a single episode. But on the other hand, every other sci fi franchise is about the grimdark decision to pragmatically compromise one’s morals in times of crisis for the greater good. I don’t want that shit in my Star Trek. My Star Trek is the one where we see that there is an immoral pragmatic answer, but we reject it. I’m glad they got it out of the way quickly. (They’re gonna come back to this again later, aren’t they?). This is mirrored later, when, upon hearing Vadic’s story, Jean-Luc can’t even bring himself to try a Rousing Speech to Try to Convince Vadic to Pursue Harmony. This, also, is good. Picard doesn’t try to defend Starfleet here. He doesn’t even try to defend the many, many people in Starfleet who were not involved in torture and unethical experimentation and would have disapproved of Project Proteus had they known. He knows that after what Vadic’s gone through, she’s not going to be swayed by words, and that he would sound arrogant and self-serving to try to claim the moral high ground from his position. He’s not going to give that speech while looking at the recreated face of the human who mutilated the physiology of the person he’s trying to convince.

What does cross the line into Karma Houdini territory, though, is the bit where Picard and Bev seem to reach the conclusion that, having lost the moral high ground, they are sufficiently compromised that it’s time to give up on A Better Way and just fucking shoot Vadic. On the one hand, it is too late in the franchise for me to want to see the story of “Nonogenarian retiree has to learn to live with the moral atrocity he’s committed by shooting an unarmed prisoner.” On the other hand, this lasts about thirty seconds before Lore conveniently lowers the force field so Vadic can escape because neither Bev nor Jean-Luc can get off a kill-shot at point-blank range.

So, next week I assume we will draw closer to learning what is really going on, but not actually getting closer to doing anything about it. Also, guessing we’re going to get more Worf and Raffi – who were absent this week – paired with some Riker? After the big exciting cliffhanger last week, it was surprising they decided to take a week off before resolving that. I’m torn between my desire to see the old married couple work together to totally kick the changelings’ asses and my desire to see Riker sus out the changeling impersonating his wife. Not sure there’s enough show left to do both. We shall see.