Somehow, Palpatine returned.
That’s kinda how I’m feeling right now. I didn’t want it to be the Borg, but I kinda knew it was, and there’s a distinct sense of “Okay, we tried something new and wild last time, and the fanboys rebelled, so let’s regress to something safe and familiar.” Technically they have not undone last season’s redemption of the Borg, but they might as well have. Technically they have not undone last season’s relationship between Picard and Laris in favor of JeanBev shipping, but they might as well have. Technically they have not undone the synth culture on Coppelius and Data’s decision to experience death, but they might as well have. Technically they have not undone Picard’s proxy-parent relationship with Space Legolas, his death and resurrection, and his joining Starfleet, but they may as well have.
Actually, Elnor might be dead again now. No one says anything about it. Maybe, maybe not. They blow up the Excelsior, which is the last place we saw him, but I don’t know that he’d still be there however much later this is supposed to be. I’ve been told this season is just a few months after season 2, which of course is impossible given the age of Raffi’s grandkid or the fact that she has had time to switch from being a commander on the Excelsior to being a spy with a rich backstory about falling off the wagon and breaking up with Seven. This season stinks of “soft reboot”.
So yeah, Troi looks behind Jack’s red door and despite telling him that she would be supportive and help him no matter what, she instantly freaks out, abandons him, and starts plotting against him because the Borg Seed in his head spooks her. God I hate this. Kudos to Jean-Luc for telling him right away rather than trying to lie to him about it, but man, “Jack finds out he’s got a Borg in his brain and immediately decides to abuse his powers to escape the Titan and go off on his own to personally hand-deliver himself to the Borg, where he immediately surrenders and gives them everything they want” is a very upsetting plot.
And it kinda has to be upsetting, because Jack can’t possibly do the right thing, since all acts of successful heroism must be done by legacy characters.
The devil of it is that this is a very clever and well-executed plan. The Borg (Changelings? Who? Oh, them, never mind. That plot is done. No more changelings.) aren’t just planning to hack the Borg-improved systems of the new fleet to seize control of the ships. They’re also Borg-hacking the people.
Let us pause a minute to take in, “The Changelings uploaded Picard’s DNA alterations into the transporter database so it would automatically install it in anyone who used the transporter.” You know what? All these years, I have been arguing against the “No really transporters kill you and replace you with a rapidly grown clone” thing by viewing the transporter as a high-speed Ship of Theseus. The fact that transporters have a baseline genetic image of every species, and just kinda quietly impose it on you when you go through is far more existentially horrifying than the normal round of transporter angst. And how do you do this plot without having some surprises based around people using or not using the transporter? You could easily have it turn out that Alandra hadn’t used the transporter recently and was thus uninfected but then tragically had to use it to escape the Borgified crew.
I’m getting just lost in the mess here of all the things in this plot that mingle really good ideas and really bad ones. We get to see the Enterprise-F, which is okay I guess. It kinda looks like a whale? It doesn’t do anything for me, in much the same way that the E didn’t do much for me, but moreso. I don’t hate it or anything, but it has a certain otherness to it.
Actually, it kind of reminds me of the Enterprise-B in that way. There’s nothing wrong with it. Objectively, the Excelsior class does what it was meant to when they revealed it in the opening of Star Trek III by giving you this sense of bigness and being impressive, and you can get behind the idea of Captain Sulu going off and having adventures on it. But when you say “And here’s the new Enterprise, which is one of those,” you kind of know in your heart that the Enterprise-B does not have what it takes to be “The Hero Ship”. It can only ever be the Guest Star. The F is like that.
Riker calls out the irony in Admiral Shelby – introduced as an ambitious officer angling for Riker’s job, and also the Federation’s Borg expert – supporting the plan to network the whole fleet with Borg technology. But, I mean, stealing your enemies’ most powerful technologies is kinda how the history of warfighting technology works. Is it weird that they didn’t have some kind of countermeasure installed after what happened with Queen Agnes? Yes, but not so weird as the fact that no one notices. There’s no quick line of dialogue to say, “How are they doing this after we changed the security protocols? The changelings must have compromised the new codes.”
It’s also not as weird as the fact that at no point do Jean-Luc, Raffi, or Seven bring up the fact that there is a whole second Borg collective who are their allies. No one says, “Hey, maybe we should call Agnes and ask if she knows how to undo this?” It needn’t even derail the plot; just add, “Can we ask our Borg allies for help?” “Unfortunately, the transwarp conduit they’re guarding is experiencing a Bullshittium Storm which blocks all communication.”
But the worst thing about all this, the absolute worst thing, is that in their rush to nostalgia, to set up their Big Damn Heroes finale, they had to go and betray the soul of Star Trek.
Okay, that is a bit hyperbolic. But look at what happened here. Everyone who used the transporter is infected with the Borg “biological receiver” which causes them to be assimilated, but it only works on people under 24, because that’s when the human brain is fully cooked. Now… Wait, though. If it’s working by altering DNA, then it should take time. If it’s altering brain tissue it should actually take years. But this whole plot is contingent on them stealing Picard’s body just a few days ago and using the Fleet Formation network to spread the reprogramming. If it’s not just altering the DNA but actually directly altering the brain structure, it shouldn’t be constrained by age.
But this is all just Dumb Trek Science, well within the bounds of the way Star Trek writers think DNA works. Hey, remember that time when over the course of a few hours, everyone on the ship transformed into animals because a virus “activated junk DNA”?
No, the problem here is the moral angle. What is the message of this plot? After spending eight weeks slowly making us love these new characters, making us open to a New Generation, bombarding us with themes about parenthood and passing the torch on to the Next Generation, this episode straight-out says, “Do not trust young people. Even if they mean well, they are weak and fickle and will be the unwitting pawns of the evil space commies who want to destroy our way of life. Only Old People can save us. Respect your elders.” This is a pretty straightforward betrayal of Star Trek’s position toward youth and counterculture on the level of the TOS hippie episode which does… Basically the exact same thing because punching hippies was just too much fun. Everything new is painted as the enemy, and salvation can only come by retreating into the beloved and comfortable past, which I will get to in a minute.
But more, let me dredge up what I said after the big reveal back in season 1:
It’s godsdamned frakking Battlestar Galactica.
Yeah, not only is it bad news to fill ships with Young People of Today, who can’t be trusted, but more, it’s that they foolishly networked their ships – the literal exact same thing that doomed the colonial fleet in Battlestar Galactica. And if you want, there’s kind of a “These kids with their facebooks and their myspaces and their tiktoks” thing going on too, because what is it that the youngs are so dangerously vulnerable to? The siren’s song of connecting. Of networking. The trait Jack attributes to his Borg heritage is the nagging feeling that the universe would be a better place if we were more connected and if people were better at seeing each other’s perspective- yes, folks, that’s evil: empathizing with the other. Jesus Christ.
But you know what’s just bizarre? It’s not just Battlestar Galactica. It’s also, of all the things in the whole damned universe, The Tomorrow People.
Yeah, back in the ’70s, the cheap-ass British sci-fi version of the X-Men did a serial whose premise was – sit down and have a drink, because this is a doozy – in the waning days of the Blitz, Nazi scientists sent over some bombs that contained biological agents. E Coli in the bombs was used as a carrier (This seems shockingly prescient on some aspects of the science of gene therapy given the vintage here) to infect British children with DNA that, when passed on to their children, would render the Young People of (1970s) Today susceptible to loving Hitler.
Who was actually still alive, having been secretly frozen a la They Saved Hitler’s Brain.
Also Hitler was an alien.
Whose true form was a whiffle ball covered in slime.
It was the ’70s.
This is stupid and awful and I hate it… And I love it too? The reveal that the Borg are targeting Starfleet’s very bodies rather than their tech? Data having to hold Geordi back from running to his daughters? The moment of thwarted hope when the Excelsior crew retake the bridge, only to have the fleet instantly destroy them? It’s really good stuff there.
And then, of course, they go and kill Shaw. The streak of what happens to you when you deadname Seven remains unbroken. It is very sweet that he calls Seven by her actual name with his dying breath. Also, he gets to die in a bookend to his own trauma, helping the others escape the Borg just as he’d been saved all those years ago. I hope whatever bullshit asspull they use to resolve the plot next week magically brings him back to life. Him and T’Veen. I wonder if the reason Vadic shot her was that she was for some reason unaffected by Borgjacking?
This all leads to where we leave our heroes. Seven and Raffi stay behind on the Titan… For some reason. I dunno. I mean, obviously, this will give them a chance to profess their continuing love for each other while evading Seven’s Borgified underlings. Everyone else takes a shuttle back to where they were a couple of weeks ago, the fleet museum, for a reveal that was sort of obvious, and is kind of “The show going up its own ass in the name of nostalgia” and kind of unbelievable, and also kind of inevitable and I can’t help myself but be happy about it.
Back when they first met Geordi a few weeks ago, Alandra alluded to something in bay 12 that could help them evade Starfleet. Geordi shuts her down. Now, the reveal: Geordi spent the last 20 years rebuilding the Enterprise-D in his garage from spare parts. Like the dude in the Hank Williams song. We even get a guest appearance of Majel Barrett’s voice as the computer. Barrett recorded a sound library before her death with the intention of continuing the voice the ship’s computer, but so far, the showmakers have decided this would be too creepy – totally fair since AI recreation of voice actors is a thing now and it does change the morality of things. We know Barrett was okay with them continuing to use her voice back then, but we don’t know if she’d feel the same knowing that using computers to fake the voices of dead actors was a thing that would end up threatening the livelihoods of voice actors.
Everyone is kind of in awe, and it’s very sweet, and Picard comments on having missed the carpeting, and it’s well lit, and the bridge consoles booting up looks super cool, and Data and Geordi taking their old seats is touching, and Worf is kind of grumpy and preferred the E, but they “obviously” couldn’t use that for reasons Worf swears are not his fault. Now, in command of the last remaining fully functional but unnetworked Battlestar of Caprica Starfleet vessel, the old gang sets a course straight back where they came from to… I guess go fight the entirety of Starfleet all by themselves with one ship that’s been obsolete for decades with a crew of seven pensioners.
Again, why are they going straight back to Earth? Why aren’t they calling Jurati? Or really anyone anywhere in the galaxy? Even if they do stop the Borg, the brain modification they did to Picard, now replicated in everyone under 24, literally killed him. Is Starfleet’s next generation doomed to an early grave? Or will Geordi come up with some transporter magic to fix everyone, which will coincidentally bring Shaw back to life? Will we get any closure on the changelings, or are they just going to be quietly forgotten now that the “proper” villain has surfaced? No, clearly we will not.
Deep breath. It’ll be okay. Just watch the D and geek out.
Ways this could end that definitely aren’t going to happen but would probably be better and more thematically appropriate than whatever they go with:
- Queen Agnes shows up with her own collective, plugs in, and the OG Borg are instantly overwhelmed by her superior power of love.
- All hope is lost so Jean-Luc goes scorched earth and has Data summon Robothulu. “We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.” “We are the synth confederation and you’re all meatsacks to us.”
- The Protostar shows up and unleashes the Living Construct on the Borg.
- Empress Emeritus Phillipa Georgiou pops out of the back end of the Guardian of Forever aboard the Enterprise-F and, without even knowing what the hell is going on, murders her way to a total Borg rout.
- Benjamin Sisko returns to the temporal realm with Space Jesus powers and nukes the Borg.
- A flashback reveals that during their final hug, Q quietly mentioned giving Jean-Luc one other parting gift. In a moment of desperation, as the Borg close in and prepare to destroy the Enterprise, Picard snaps his fingers and the Borg cease to exist. Also Shaw comes back to life. T’Veen too.
- Groppler Zorn. That’s it. That’s the twist.