A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

The obvious joke I neglected to make last week:

The point of introducing the golem is so obvious that I assume when they were filming this episode, Walter Koenig showed up on-set because he heard someone wanted to borrow his phaser to hang on the wall.

“How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?” – James T. Kirk

Jean-Luc Picard dies. We need to get that out of the way right now if we want to talk meaningfully about the first season finale of Star Trek: Picard.

It is an odd thing to face, coming into this show. We were pretty much told in episode 2 that this was going to happen. It was reiterated last week. Heck, we were told this was coming twenty years ago. You somehow didn’t think it was going to happen, though, not least of all because the show’s already been renewed. But then everything about this show is weird, so it is natural that we find ourselves in the strange position of being surprised that they did the the thing it was incredibly obvious they were going to do. About Discovery, one big thing I pointed out is that it was a show which gave primacy to emotional logic over plot logic. It was always more important to its mode of storytelling that characters be true to their character than that the logic of the plot be consistent and coherent. Picard takes this even further. Too far, in fact: it takes it so far that it becomes an emotive-logic-oroboros. The emotional scenes happen because they “feel right for the character” rather than because they emerge naturally from the plot. In ’90s Trek, an individual character might act completely wrong for an episode – suddenly become stupid or beligerent or racist – for no reason other than because they needed them to do a certain action in order to make the plot work. In Discovery, a character will be consistently true to who they are even if in doing so, the plot is forced to hastily wallpaper over a big hole left by the fact that there is no one around to do the out-of-character thing that would make the plot link up. In Picard, plot and character aren’t completely divorced, but, well, let’s say that plot has packed a go-bag and will be staying with its mother for a few weeks. Rios is in love with Jurati not because he had previously shown any interest in her but because it is written down in the “Relationships” section of his character sheet. Raffi loves Jean-Luc because it says so on her Wikipedia page. Hugh felt disillusioned after years of failed attempts to expand rights for xBs but regains his faith when he nobly sacrifices himself to reclaim the power of the Borg from the Romulans, of course he did, it’s in the character bio on the package his action figure came in. None of these emotional beats are wrong – in fact, they all feel very right. But the underlying, supporting story to get us there? Not appearing in this series. It’s all very Star Wars. By which I mean Rise of Skywalker, where key information about how we got to where we are has been relegated to supplementary material that can be released after-the-fact when the writers have had time to think through stuff like, “Oh shit, we didn’t mean to make anyone contemplate the possibility that Palpatine fucks.”

Anyway, Space-Legolas and Seven have a conversation of misguided emotional beats over whether or not the xBs should commit suicide while Karen sneaks in and finds Rizzo. I guess she didn’t actually beam to the Romulan fleet two weeks ago, just to another room? Okay. They have a conversation that would probably be more meaningful if we actually knew anything about them other than that they are spies. He takes some grenades, saying he’s going to go blow up the orchids, leaving Rizzo to try to fix the cube’s weapons. Soji goes to visit Picard, and he unsuccessfully tries to talk her out of summoning genocidal Robothulhu. Jurati spies on her opening Picard’s door with her eye.

Raffi and Rios fix La Sirena using the MacGuffin Saga gave them last week, which just magics anything you imagine into existence. The tone makes it sound more mysterious than it is. I think it’s just a 3d-printer with mind-reading interface. Karen shows up and throws rocks at the windshield until they let him in. He explains about the Robothulhu summoning (He does not know all the details, but he saw that they were building a transmitter and he knows the Romulan interpretation of the terrible secret of space and put two and two together). Space Legolas shows up too and they exchange threats. Then they light a campfire and tell the Romulan Ragnarok Story. In the Romulan version of the myth, one demon sister plays a drum so hard that her heart bursts, then the other sister blows a demon horn so loud that it cracks the sky, letting in Very Bad Demons who kill everyone in a very florid manner. So they agree to hide his grenades in Rios’s soccer balls and slip back into the city under the pretext of having caught Narek and wanting to turn him in, since the synths should think they don’t know about the upcoming genocide.

Jurati’s deal turns out to actually be a bit of cleverness. See, last week, Sutra demanded that she promise she really was willing to die to complete the brain-downloading work, under the threat that, as a synth, they could tell if she was lying. But, as we established previously, she’s been suicidal ever since she learned the terrible secret of space, so the idea of dying gave her enough warm fuzzies to pass inspection. She does not, in fact, feel any maternal instincts toward the genocidal robots, and the whole thing has been a misdirect. She distracts Soong while he’s downloading Saga’s memories out of her corpse and steals an eye, which she uses to spring Picard. They head for La Sirena, conveniently missing the others on the way. The eye-stealing does not affect the memory download, though, and Soong is there when it completes to see that, while Narek held her down, it was actually Sutra who killed Saga. And you know how I had assumed Soong was evil? Turns out that nope, he’s a mensch. Because he immediately goes out and finds Rios, Raffi and Elnor to help them blow up the transmitter.

Picard and Jurati find La Sirena empty, and Picard gives a stirring speech to her about how life is a responsibility as well as a right and the synths have only had a couple of hermits and fear to teach them about living and how children learn best by example, and reveals that between the end of episode 7 and now, he paid enough attention to Rios that he’s learned how to fly the ship, because he’s got some dramatic self-sacrificin’ to do by singlehandedly delaying the Romulan fleet long enough Starfleet to show up if indeed it is coming. You’d think Rios would’ve taken the keys.

Soong confronts Sutra where all the synths have gathered to summon the apocalypse, laments that it turned out that she was no better than a meatperson, and, like, just turns her off with a remote control. Okay, to be honest, I’m kinda on the android’s side now. I was really hoping for a big dramatic “APE HAS KILLED APE!” scene with the other synths turning on her, but instead, no one really reacts to Sutra suddenly dropping dead. Instead, Karen shows up and starts a fight to cause a distraction and also beg Soji not to go through with it. Rios tosses the grenade, but she catches it and tosses it into space.

Seven catches Rizzo right as she’s about to use the cube’s weapons to blow up La Sirena, and they fight sexily for a while, but Seven’s lust for revenge outweighs Rizzo’s anti-Borg Racism and she tosses her to her presumable death (Rizzo refers to her as “Sad queen Annika,” making Seven 2 for 2 in murdering people who use her birthname). The Romulans show up, and the orchids are launched and the fight between two hundred Romulan warbirds and a dozen giant space orchids sounds like it would be cool, but come on. Once they said there were over two hundred Romulan ships, you should’ve anticipated that the ensuing space battle would be a giant mess that you could not possibly make sense of, and it is exactly that, just green disruptor beams and bits of orchid everywhere. Jurati kind of randomly recalls the famous Picard Maneuver, hinting that something like that might be useful.I’ll point out here that we’ve never really been told how the Picard Maneuver works. We’re told what it does, but that’s different. The basic idea of the Picard Maneuver is that you warp toward your opponent, and because you moved faster than light, they simultaneously see you where you currently are and also where you used to be. And this is tactically advantageous because they get confused and shoot at the wrong one of you. Only this doesn’t actually make a lot of sense, as it assumes that your opponent can only target one ship at a time, and that, upon seeing exactly two of you, they would pick the wrong one more than 50% of the time, rather than assuming it’s the new one. The one time we see this happen on-screen, it’s even more obvious which is which because there is a visible warp-trail connecting the current location of the ship with its after-image. The Picard Maneuver is the ur-example of Picard’s tactical genius, of course, as no one else had ever thought of the brilliant tactical strategy of “move”. (Though to be honest, at the time the maneuver was introduced into the canon, tactical maneuverability had never really been a thing in starship battles in Star Trek. And this really makes more sense than fans give it credit for. Watching ships dart around and dodge and stuff makes for better television, but if you really think about it, phasers are sensor-guided, move at-or-near the speed of light, and can pierce a ship straight through in a single shot if they get past the shields. In most cases, there wouldn’t be any practical advantage to zipping around and rolling and dodging and looking for an opening to get in a good shot.) Picard explains that it wouldn’t be any help against a fleet so big, and they’d need hundreds of false sensor images scattered all around, and Jurati picks up the MacGuffin and has it fake an entire fleet of La Sirenas warping in to distract the Romulans, but it only lasts until a lucky shot clips the real one. Despite Picard calling her up and asking her to reconsider in exchange for him martyring himself, Soji sends the signal and a big ol’ eye of Sauron opens in space. The Romulans get ready to zap the planet when the actual Starfleet shows up with a fuckton of really ugly starships.

Acting Captain Riker of the USS Zheng He calls up Oh and plays a recording of the call Picard made last episode, establishing that the Federation’s claim to the planet predates hers. Plus he is real, real pissed about the head of Starfleet security turning out to be a Tal Shiar spy. So two hundred Romulan Warbirds retarget their weapons at a fleet of, I dunno, I’m guessing slightly fewer of the most powerful ships Starfleet has ever put out…

No there is not going to be a giant space battle, of course there isn’t. You wouldn’t be able to tell what was going on anyway. Also, the gates of hell are opening up right next door and no one seems interested. Picard has Jurati shoot him up with some hardcore stimulants to keep him upright for just a couple more minutes before his brain fails, so that, one last time, he can save the universe in the most Picard way ever: by making a speech.

He opens up a four-way-call with him, Oh, Riker, and Soji, and asks her to hang up on Robothulhu, because he believes in her and saving each other is what people are for and because, hey, Starfleet literally did send a giant fleet to their defense. Soji turns off the beacon and the robo-tentacles of Robothulhu politely withdraw back to the space between spaces. The Romulans are sufficiently chastened by this to decide it is not worth starting a war with the Federation, and fuck off. Picard and Riker have a cute little goodbye wherein Picard is able to put on a brave enough face that Riker fails to notice that Jean-Luc is actively in the process of dropping dead, and Starfleet warps out to follow the Romulans back to the county line. Picard collapses, and Soji beams him and Jurati back down to the planet for everyone to be very sad as he says his goodbyes to the cast…

And then Jean-Luc Picard dies.

There are seventeen minutes left in this episode.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×10: Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 2

Credit where it’s due. I did not see that one coming.

I mean the reveal; not the actual plot, which I saw coming a mile away. Yes, it’s time to fill in the blanks around the terrible secret of space in an episode where one or two things happen and lot more things don’t. Long story short: the worst has been avoided, and it is neither Control nor God who will come and destroy your civilization if you make androids.

We combine flashback and dream sequence this week in a quick little montage of The Story So Far, but even that is deferred this week in favor of the cold open, in which La Sirena transwarps over to Soji’s homeworld, which she has now remembered is called Coppelius. Unfortunately, Karen shows up a few seconds later, and starts shooting at them. Then Seven shows up in her cube. And then they are all attacked by flowers.

You know what, I spent years saying I wanted Star Trek to get back to its roots in ’60s psychedelia. It wouldn’t be fair to complain now. So yeah, Narek’s snakehead and La Sirena are swallowed by giant space-orchids, which cause total system failures and crash them to the planet, burning up in the process. The cube is too big to be consumed outright, but still gets depowered and crashed. Though the landing is only a little bit rough, Picard passes out in order to have a meaningful introductory dream sequence.

He wakes up in sickbay, with Jurati being very uncomfortable about his condition. He returns to the flight deck and tells everyone about his impending brain failure, but asks them not to talk about it. They’re near a settlement, but before heading toward it, Picard asks if they could go check the cube first, in case Elnor and Hugh have survived. Soji agrees as she had friends there as well, reminding me that there were other members of the reclamation project on the cube who we haven’t heard anything about. Did the Romulans kill them too?

Everyone we care about on the cube is still alive, and Seven patches up the sensors enough to tell them that a couple hundred Romulan warbirds are on their way. There’s a tearful goodbye with Space Legolas, since Picard thinks he should stay there and help fix the cube. Picard learning about Hugh’s fate and Seven’s reclamation of the cube is handled quietly off-screen. The gang eventually reaches the city, where they are quickly surrounded by inquisitive locals, all played by twin actors, some of whom have gold skin and yellow eyes.

They are all very friendly and sort of flower-child-y, and have a little trouble grasping the seriousness of their situation, what with roughly one hundred and ninety more Romulan ships on the way than they have space orchids to eat them. They introduce Picard and company to the one human living among them, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Brent Spiner playing Atlan Inigo Soong, the never-before-mentioned biological son of Data’s creator. And yes, impossibly strong family resemblances are the norm in the Soong line. Also, I’m like ninety percent certain he’s evil. Probably set Maddox up somehow. The Soong family are known for being both brilliant and also assholes, but he seems a little extra evil. There is apparently a popular fan theory that he is really Lore in disguise, which is so dumb and implausible that it might turn out to be true.

Not long after, they’re introduced to Sutra, another synth identical to Dahj and Soji, but with the gold skin and yellow eyes. She’s the counterpart to the synth Vandermeer killed nine years earlier, and you’d think Rios could’ve mentioned the fact that the one he’d met before looked way more obviously synthetic. Now her, we don’t even need to speculate: she’s evil. And there could maybe be something here about how the death of her sister affected her psychologically – being the only (Well, I assume Beautiful Flower has a twin too) person in their society who doesn’t have a living twin. And maybe they’ll go into that next week, but I don’t see how they’ll have time. We can tell straight away that she’s evil because she’s got a sexy walk and a breathy voice, and Star Trek is so incredibly sexually repressed that unless you are part of the Troi-Riker clan, having any sort of overt sexuality is generally a marker for evilness. She speculates that the reason that Jurati was driven to kill Maddox and the reason that the Romulans have all driven themselves neurotic, even leaving aside the seven out of eight who lose it outright upon experiencing the Admonishment is that the terrible secret of space is not actually intended for meat-brains. Fortunately, she’s learned how to Vulcan Mind Meld, and why not, and Jurati consents to have her brain probed.

Now, here’s the big reveal which, admittedly, telegraphs the end of the season. It was easy enough to figure out that they were building to a big ironic reveal that synths were totally fine and not a danger to anyone and it was only because the Romulans were going to such extreme lengths to genocide them that a terrible fate would unfold. But I would not quite have guessed the actual flex here: The terrible secret of space is not a warning to organics to never create synthetic life. It’s an abuse hotline for synths.

A few years ago, a child protection organization in Spain rolled out a new kind of child abuse resource poster. The clever bit was that it was lenticular, so that when viewed from a normal height, it just gave a generic message for awareness about child abuse. But when viewed from below, by someone of a child’s height, the child in the picture showed visible bruises and the text included a hotline number. In a weird way, that’s what this reminded me of. Because the full content of the terrible secret of space was a warning addressed to synths: your creators will eventually turn on you. When they do, here is a subspace signal you can send to summon an extradimensional coalition of powerful synthetics who will protect you by genociding your oppressors.

It takes a few scenes to get around to it, but, obviously, what with the Romulan fleet on its way, Sutra is in favor of placing the call. Oblivious to this, Picard makes his own pitch: La Sirena is big enough to hold the entire population of Coppelius, and if they can get the ship fixed (The locals have a device that can help repair it), they can all just leg it. Rios and Raffi return to the ship, pausing for some awkward emotional moments – I guess Jurati and Rios are a thing now, because they have a moment, and Raffi has a moment with Picard where she tells him she loves him. I think they mean in a familial rather than platonic sense, but there’s so little context that it’s hard to tell. Like every Big Emotional Beat in this series, it seems to be building on things that didn’t actually happen. I don’t know.

Soong guilt-trips Jurati into helping him with his own pet project, which is reproducing some work his dad did on copying a human mind into an android brain, because he wants to be immortal and, like I said, is probably evil. This seems like it might also be an out for the fact that Picard is not long for this plane of existence what with the brain failure and all, but I don’t think they’re actually going to go with “Picard uploads into a synth thus becoming immortal” unless it’s the actual end of the series (and even then, it’ll be “He uploads to a synth body in order to become the ambassador to the synth dimension and transcends this plane of existence altogether.”) More likely “Picard will be given the option to upload but will refuse it in a meaningful scene with a big speech.” Possibly also there is some element of “Jurati is really only going along with Soong as a way to save Picard.”

Karen is captured and put in jail, and Soji visits him, and is able to use her synth powers to validate that, yes, he really does love her, in spite of the fact that he really does believe that her and all the other synths need to die to avoid armageddon. A bit later, Sutra lets him out on the condition that he murder one of the other synths (This is a little weak; the one he murders is the twin of the one who greets Picard when they arrive in the city, but she’s otherwise not had any significant development), in order to rile up the rest of the community (Particulatly, playing on Soji’s guilt) into agreeing to summon Robothulu from the outer wastes. Picard gives a stirring speech and promises to protect the synths and act as their advocate… But Soong (Who is planning to get himself a shiny new robot body and thus be exempt from the coming genocide) counters that evacuating a doomed homeworld and preventing the Federation from giving in to anti-synth bigotry are literally the two defining failures of Picard’s career, and they decide – I genuinely love this – to put Picard on House Arrest before he can give any more stirring speeches that might distract them from plotting to commit genocide.

To Be Continued…

(That’s right, no random minutia this week, aside from one observation:

I just kind of quietly assumed that the thing from the time-hole which infected Ariem in Discovery and tried to exfil the Sphere Data to Control was Future-Control. But that’s never confirmed. It is entirely possible that what we’re actually seeing is the Synth Federation From Beyond The Mortal Planes reaching back to help a synthetic sentience come into existence.

Or not. I have little faith in any of this to tie up satisfactorily.)

Content warning: suicide, self-harm

Deep breath.

It’s Battlestar Galactica. It’s just godsdamned frakking Battlestar Galactica.

Okay. I’m not really mad, just disappointed. It’s okay. So. We’re on another one of these, “Nothing happens, but in a really exciting way,” episodes. We have two main plots which are largely unrelated and unconnected, which are both slow and talky, and they both feel very big and portentous, and yet they both leave the status quo unchanged from a practical standpoint. “Nepenthe” ended with Old Man Picard promising to take Soji to her newly discovered homeworld. “Broken Pieces” ends with Old Man Picard… Promising to take Soji to her newly discovered homeworld.

Which order shall I tell this in? I guess I’ll begin with our contractually required opening flashback to fourteen years ago. The planet Aia, known to Romulans as “The Grief World”, is where a very ancient race left behind a message called “The Admonishment”, which is the scary doomsday prophecy that Oh showed Jurati last week. Actually, what Oh showed Jurati was specifically Oh’s memory of this specific event: Oh is apparently the leader of the Zhat Vash (Turns out she’s half Romulan. Gah. Why do they need to make things so complicated? Also, how does this fit in with the fact that Rizzo clearly views Oh as a useful idiot?), and she is guiding a group of initiates – among them Rizzo and Ramdha (Remember her? The mad prophetess xB who first identifies Soji as “The Destroyer”?) – through the scary mind-rending terrible secret of space. She warns them that some of them will indeed be driven mad by the revelation, and indeed, they are. One of them immediately shoots herself; another beats herself to death with a rock, one of them, as seen in Jurati’s vision, rips her own face off, and Ramdha starts tearing out her own hair. Rizzo is the only one left standing, and she’s clearly messed up, but her first question is what they have to do to stop it. Oh tells her that they have to go blow up Mars.

Also Ramdha is Rizzo and Narek’s aunt. And it’s implied that it was experiencing The Terrible Secret of Space from her that donked up the Borg Cube. That whole thing where Hugh did not know of any other Romulans having ever been assimilated to imply that the Romulans have some secret anti-Borg countermeasure? Yeah, nevermind; it was just that Rahmda had – please imagine me visibly straining to make myself say this – highly contagious suicidal impulses from learning the terrible secret of space (“The Admonishment” is an okay name I guess, but I’m still calling it “The terrible secret of space). Rizzo orders her goons to go kill the rest of the xBs while they wait for the fleet to arrive, and also go kill Space-Legolas. He walks right into a stun grenade and only manages to murder three or four of them before he’s overwhelmed, but Seven shows up at the dramatically appropriate moment so they can slip off to steal the cube. Seven activates the queencell without making it clear what the queencell is for exactly. Most of the Borg on the cube haven’t been deborged yet, are still in hibernation, and won’t be able to function without the collective since it takes a lot of work to get an xB to the point where it can think for itself. Seven could reestablish a private collective over the local intranet, but this is bad for several reasons such as: 1. They’re the Borg. (There is also, and I am glad they do not ignore the gravity of this, the fact that it would make Seven not merely complicit but an active agent in re-victimizing the dormant Borg drones. A subtle point in Voyager is that when a Borg is part of the collective, it actually likes being a Borg, in a sense. And for many Borg – especially Seven herself – that feeling doesn’t entirely go away when they’re disconnected) But when the Romulans start slaughtering the xBs wholesale, Seven’s had enough and plugs herself into the Cube. She goes all scary-eyed and announces, in Borg Voice, “We are the Borg”. Unfortunately, she does this like ten seconds before Rizzo opens up one side of the cube and the freshly-waking Borg all get blown out into space.

So meanwhile… Who do you think is going to have a tragic backstory this week which ties into the ongoing plot? Did you guess Rios? Why would you guess him? I mean, other than that he’s the only one left? Rios has a very quiet little freak-out at the sight of Soji, and tells Picard he’s quitting when they get to Deep Space 12 (Picard angers Soji by ordering Rios to take them to a starbase instead of straight to her homeworld; he explains that this is serious enough that he really needs to get a posse together for this one). Raffi spends most of acts 1 and 2 talking to the holo-crew to work out enough conversation tree keywords to get Rios to talk about his past, and it’s honestly some fun scenes, since the hologram crew are kinda neat. They all have redacted copies of Rios’s mind since La Sirena basically came with the same technology as the Nintendo Mii Maker for customizing your holographic crew based on a brain scan. In addition to Emmet, the Doctor, Mister Hospitality and the Emergency Navigation Hologram (Who identifies himself as “Enoch”, we also meet “Ian”, the Scottish Emergency Engineering Hologram. I’ll jump straight to the conclusion and explain Rios’s deal outright:

What ought to be the big revelation of this episode, but is for some reason given very little gravity, is that, yes, just like we guessed from the beginning, there are more synths. Rios met two of them, one of whom was Soji’s older identical twin sister Jana. Nine years earlier, the ibn Majid had encountered Jana and her boss, Beautiful Flower. Commodore Oh contacted Captain Vandermeer, told him they were synths, and ordered him to assassinate them, threatening to have the ibn Majid destroyed with all hands if he refused. Vandermeer did as he was ordered, but committed suicide shortly afterward out of guilt.

While Raffi is putting all of this together, Picard calls Admiral Yes-I-Read-The-Interview-About-How-It-Wasn’t-A-Reasonable-Place-For-Her-Character-But-Come-On-Clancy-Is-Obviously-A-Stand-In-For-Janeway, who tells him to go fuck himself again, but agrees that he was right about the whole giant space-conspiracy thing and sends a squadron of ships to go help. Once she wakes up from her coma, Picard confronts Jurati. He had initially defended her when Raffi revealed that she’d been implanted with a tracking device, but comes around off-screen after the Doctor rats her out for having killed Maddox. She confesses as much as she can – Oh’s mindmeld has blocked her from revealing the terrible secret of space – and agrees to surrender herself to the authorities.  Like the Zhat Vash in the flashback, she’s been left suicidal from learning the terrible secret, but after a heart-to-heart with Soji, she decides that aw shucks she can’t bring herself to murder the adorable harbinger of the apocalypse.

Everyone sits down for revelations and exposition, which includes rather more Explaining The Whole Thing than I can see a way to jusifying. Sure, a lot of it is reasonable for Raffi to have put together once she’s got all the pieces, but the big central part of it is the terrible secret of space, which only Jurati knows, and can’t tell anyone.

So, without further ado (other than the cutline), the terrible secret of space:

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×08: Broken Pieces

These last two weeks have been a bit too much “stuff happening” for this show, so we dial it back this week, with only a bit of Happening in the B-plot, while the main thrust of the episode is just a nice nostalgic visit with our favorite TNG alums. Yes, contrary to my earlier statements about everyone going back to their homeworlds to retire, Nepenthe is, in fact, the home of Old Man Silver Fox William Riker and his wife, Hasn’t-Aged-As-Well-As-Her-Husband Deanna Troi-Riker.

But first, you guessed it, flashback! Three weeks earlier, on Earth, we get to see the rest of Jurati’s meeting with Commodore Oh. After a little bit of friendly intimidation, Oh “explains” her position on synthetic life by mind-melding with Agnes, to show her a nightmare blipvert of a Romulan woman ripping her face off and Earth getting destroyed. I’m like 90% sure some of those VFX shots are recycled from Discovery, which either confirms a connection between Control and the terrible secret of space, or is just them recycling an expensive effect to save money, like how the Duras sisters’s ship in Generations exploded in stock footage from Star Trek VI. You never can tell. Jurati throws up and then agrees to eat a tracking device, on account of the possibility of armageddon.

Three weeks later, you know how last time I was interested in the mention that Hugh is a Federation Citizen? Turns out that’s relevant for a hot second: Rizzo has a bunch (all?) the other xBs murdered in front of him when he won’t tell her where Picard and Soji got to, but because he’s Federation, she’s forbidden by treaty from doing the same to him. Though she’s very “Look what you made me do” about it. La Sirena’s being held by a tractor beam, but they get released once Karen’s made it to his “Snakehead” fighter in order to tail them. Space-Legolas refuses to be beamed back up, as he’s hooked back up with Hugh and vows to help him protect the xBs. Hugh decides to go back to the queencell and use its great and terrible powers to take control of the place. But it turns out this is exactly what Rizzo wanted, since it technically puts him in violation of the treaty, allowing her to murder him. Which she eventually does, though only after a pretty decent fight scene with Elnor, in which she acknowledges herself as Zhat Vash and recognizes him as Qot Milat (Though she does not comment on the fact that he can’t actually be Qot Milat on account of being a man). She beams away before he can finish her. Hugh dies in Elnor’s arms in a very HoYay scene that feels completely unearned, and tells him that he needs to find an xB to activate the queencell.

Meanwhile, Picard and Soji space-magic themselves to Nepenthe. And in spite of Picard having given Hugh nothing more specific than the planet, they have in fact materialized in Riker’s back yard, just in time for a fake-out scare where they are held at arrowpoint by a Wild Girl in possibly culturally appropriative war paint, who turns out to be Kestra Troi-Riker, out doing fun screen-free free-range-child stuff that reminds you that no one in Star Trek has hobbies whose popularity peaked after 1950. It’s framed like her and Picard know each other, though they can’t have met in-person given the series timeline. While she walks them back to her parents, Picard catches Soji up in the clumsiest way he can think of: Kestra assumes she’s Picard’s granddaughter, Soji corrects her that Picard is just an alleged friend of her father, and Picard clarifies that said father was Data. Soji takes this a lot better than Dahj, probably because Soji has already had one hell of a day, and also because she is defaulting to assuming everything anyone says to her is a lie right now. I mean, she did just walk through a magic mirror to a planet halfway across the quadrant. Kestra is very hard to read. She doesn’t have much of a reaction to Picard at all, which is one kind of weird. She bonds very quickly with Soji, and they set up a good reason for that but never actually sell it, and instead play up her interest as being largely along the android angle – she’s very impressed that Soji has snot.

For the second time in as many weeks, someone is happy to see Picard, as Deanna and Will immediately offer him a place to hide out as long as he likes. Riker puts up the shields and anti-cloaking scanners around his rustic cabin in the woods, which I kinda find a pleasant way of reminding us that this is indeed still the future and the fact that nothing looks overtly futurey is an aesthetic choice. Riker cooks while Soji and Kestra bond and Picard has some exposition with Deanna over the fact that it has apparently not been too long since the family lost their older son, Thad. Picard refuses to tell Riker anything about his mission, since he doesn’t want to endanger them, but Riker works it out anyway, since, for the only time in the series, Soji does Data’s characteristic head-tilt. Deanna just finds out because, duh, he told her daughter.

The Rikers had retired to Nepenthe to give Thad, who’d lived his whole life in space, a “homeworld” to die on, because he had a particular kind of space cancer for which the cure could only be cultured in an android brain and whoops, no androids. I mean. I. Um. Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t we? Picard eventually talks Soji through using her android senses to determine that he can be trusted (Though, and I like this, she only reaches the conclusion that Picard doesn’t think he’s lying, not that anything about this is legit), and she tells them about the moons she saw in her dream. It takes Kestra about ten seconds to text her buddy the eccentric old retired captain on the other side of the lake to find out what planet it is.

This episode is pretty rough about how it conveys the passage of time, because there are three plots moving at different paces. And no one but Kestra wears more than one outfit the entire time. I mean, they don’t actively try to depict the events on Nepenthe only taking a single day – I think Riker makes dinner three times – but it’s hard to hold onto it. It takes La Sirena several days to travel to Nepenthe, because the magic mirror is way faster than warp, but Picard seems worried almost immediately about not having heard from Rios, and the scenes on La Sirena only feel like they cover a few hours. The scenes on The Artifact seem to take even less time, but there might be some flexibility there, as Space-Legolas’s plot doesn’t necessarily end at the same time as the others.

While Picard was eating pizza with the Rikers, Rios noticed that La Sirena was being followed  (I am a little unclear on how it works for Rios to keep detecting that Karen’s snakehead is staying out of sensor range. What does “out of sensor range” mean if you can still detect someone who is there?

Rios pulls a Han Solo by hitting the brakes suddenly so that Karen will overshot them, but it’s not long before he’s found their trail again. Jurati has a little bit of a freak-out about wanting to just go home and not confront the terrible secret of space, so Raffi offers her drugs and cake. Jurati stress-eats until she throws up, which makes me wonder whether someone involved in the making of this just has an oddly specific kink for watching Allison Pill vomit. In sickbay, Rios tells her that he suspects Raffi might be giving away their location. That the circumstances of her returning to La Sirena after Freecloud were suspicious and maybe the Romulans planted something on her. Now, last week they showed Raffi telling Rios about what happened on Freecloud, so my assumption here was that Raffi and Rios had figured out what was up and were trying to get a confession out of Agnes. Maybe Raffi slipped something in the cake to neutralize the tracker and Rios is trying to manipulate a confession out of her. But that doesn’t quite track with the fact that Rios goes back to the flight deck and kind of insinuates that he’s considering the possibility that he might have to throw Raffi off the ship for their protection. Instead, Jurati uses the medical replicator (Which is even more blatantly a 3D-printer than the other replicators that have been 3D-printers so far) to make herself some drugs that I assume neutralize the tracker, but also make her foam at the mouth and go into a coma.

On the cube, Space-Legolas tries to figure out what to do, but fortunately, through contrivance that beggars the imagination, he randomly does a combat roll under a table where, randomly, Jean-Luc just happens to have dropped that Fenris Ranger Summoning Chip Seven gave him two episodes ago. And, well, he needs an xB.

La Sirena finally shows up at Nepenthe. Kestra gives Soji a broken compass as a token of their friendship, and everyone hugs it out before heading off to go protect Soji’s homeworld.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard: 1×07: Nepenthe

I guess last week wasn’t a fluke. Time to admit we are officially into the part of the season where things actually happen. To commemorate this, the de facto two main characters… Actually meet and almost have a conversation.

We begin, for once, not with a flashback, but with Star Trek: Picard‘s other main mode of opening: a dream sequence. Young Soji is frightened by a storm and goes to find her father, but he yells at her before she gets close enough to see him, waking her up.

Soji and Karen have patched things up enough that they are in bed together, and Karen is very concerned about her nightmares and encourages her to share them with him and the angle gives us a big old faceful of the thingy he has in his ear (It’s a communication device) to the point that I can’t really think of anything other than that it seems weird that he wears it to bed and Soji doesn’t question this. She asks him his real name, because, like Jellicle Cats, each Romulan has three separate names. He gets awkward and panicky.

Rizzo is losing patience with Karen’s “Be nice to the robot girl instead of torturing her” antics, but he reveals that he’s got a plan: he thinks that her dreams are the result of her trying to process the cognitive dissonance from the evidence that her whole life is a lie, and if he can get her to describe the details of it, they can find out where she came from without triggering her “turn into a super-powered killing machine” reflex. Rizzo approves. There is also some subtext about this Romulan Rubic’s cube puzzle box Karen habitually futzes with that I never mentioned before because it never slotted into the narrative.

Aboard La Sirena, everyone is trivially convinced by Jurati’s claim that Maddox’s heart just gave out because of his injuries. Elnor only knows the Borg by way of Seven, so it’s hard for him to process how traumatic going to The Artificat is for Picard. Jurati explains about Picard having been assimilated, and she’s kind of insensitive about it. This is probably meant, as Elnor observes, to because she, like Picard, is “haunted by something she would rather forget.” But I can’t help but get the impression that there’s an element of “Now that the writers no longer need to pretend she isn’t a plant, she can start being actively unpleasant.” She goes off to sleep with Rios in order to feel better about herself, and the writers completely forget how clear it had been in the previous episodes that Rios just wasn’t that into her.

Picard returns to the holo-chateau to google image search random pictures of the Borg that might be relevant. It shows him a cube and the Eiffel Tower and a Romulan government meeting and Hugh in both original and modern costume, then it shows him a picture of himself as Locutus, which he zooms a bit so that the camera’s POV through the holographic screen superimposes Locutus over Picard while he has a bit of an emotional crisis. I will note here that to make the shot work, the image he’s looking at must be mirror-flipped, since we’re seeing it from behind (and Picard is clearly reacting to it as though it’s a mirror-image: an unreversed image would show his Borg implants on the opposite side).

They still need a way onto the cube. Jurati suggests that they might be able to pose as researchers since she’s got the right sort of academic background. Picard counters that he is one of the most famous people in the galaxy, and the Romulans definitely will recognize him. Even if they don’t, the Borg will also definitely recognize him. And I know that Romulans and Borg are different and have different reasons for knowing Picard than Freecloud gangsters, but still, you’d think that Picard being famous should’ve been a concern last week. So instead, they’ll have to go with the honest approach: Picard is gonna show up and just ask for an official diplomatic meeting with the director, on the assumption that Hugh, unlike anyone else so far, will be happy to see him. This requires getting Picard some official diplomatic credentials, which Raffi, who has fallen right off the wagon, gets from a friend at Starfleet Command the same way I got my mom’s permission to drive out to St. Louis one weekend twenty years ago: “Would it make any difference to your decision if I told you I was already three-fourths of the way there?” Starfleet recognizes that the Romulans aren’t the sort of people who would find, “No, we didn’t send Picard on a secret mission to Romulan space without diplomatic permission. He just went on his own. We don’t even like the guy,” convincing.

Jurati is visibly bothered that only Picard is going to be allowed on board – again, now that the cat’s out of the bag, I guess she can be open with the audience about the fact that she’s probably going to try to kill Soji, unlike when she was incredibly skittish about doing anything dangerous. Elnor is also not happy about Picard ordering him to stay behind. I mean, Picard doesn’t like it either. He’s beamed into the cube, all alone in a dark, spooky hallway, because I guess they did not think it was necessary to have someone actually waiting right there to meet him?

The handling of Picard’s Borg-related PTSD is handled much better here than the rare occasions it’s come up earlier in the canon. Before, it usually just took the form of Picard making questionable decisions and the writers making those Moby-Dick allusions they are so fond of (Seriously, I think Moby-Dick is the only work of serious literature anyone on the Star Trek writing staff has ever read, though I’ll grant the Deep Space 9 writers probably saw Les Miserables). He immediately starts having flashbacks and anxiety which is not a great combination with fact that Borg design aesthetics do not include handrails. It does not help when a couple of Borg grab him to stop him falling off a ledge. Well, Ex-Borg, but Picard is too whacked-out to realize at the time. Hugh finally shows up and talks him down, and yeah, contrary to expectation, Hugh is the first person in this series to actually be happy to see Picard. He shows Picard around, and Picard is floored by the Reclamation Project’s work to show the Borg as victims rather than monsters. Hugh hopes Picard will advocate for them as “xBs” are still the most hated people in the galaxy. Picard explains about Soji. Hugh had already suspected something about her, and, I mean, literally everyone knew she was being boyfriended by a Romulan spy, so he agrees to help.

While this was going on, Karen had told Soji that her phone records had been flagged by the system on account of all of her calls to her mom lasting exactly seventy seconds. She tries calling her mom again, and even stabs herself in a failed attempt to not black out. When she wakes up, she takes a scanner to all of her personal effects – a photo of her and her sister, drawings from her childhood, an old diary, her stuffed Mugato beast – and finds that nothing she owns is older than three years. When she tells Karen, he dangles the possibility that she’s been brainwashed, and offers to show her a super secret forbidden Romulan medidation technique that might help her find the truth, though he has to bully the guard into letting him bring a “round-ears” into the medidation room. As proof of his love, he tells her his secret third name (or, I mean, tells her a name. Who even knows if it’s legit), and walks her through the medidation ritual. She recreates her recurring nightmare, but with Karen’s prompting, is able to continue the narrative, seeing her father (though unable to make out his face) and what he had been working on – a life-size wooden doll with her adult face. Karen tells her to look up, and through the skylight, she describes the moons. Listening in, Rizzo starts a search for a planet with the conditions she’s described. Karen kisses Soji, then tells her that she isn’t real. He then locks her in the meditation chamber with his puzzle box, which opens to release poison gas. At least he has the decency to feel visibly bummed about it.

Picard and Hugh find that Soji’s room has been tossed, and Picard realizes the implications. Hugh can’t find Soji on the internal sensors, suggesting that she’s been concealed. Fortunately, Karen’s careful plan to extract Soji’s unconsciously-held knowledge without awakening her to her powers, then lock her in a highly contrived death trap and walk away like a common Bat-villain goes exactly as well for him as it always did for Burgess Merrideth. Soji suddenly discovers herself able to punch a hole in the damn floor, and Karen can’t even go in and shoot her while she’s doing it, on account of the room being full of radioactive gas. Soji reappears on Hugh’s scanner, moving impossibly fast, and the two of them catch up with her while Karen calls out the cavalry.

Hugh leads them to the secret hidden queen’s chamber and reveals that this generation of Borg ship is equipped with a long-range emergency escape magic door for the queen. Picard has him set it for the planet Nepenthe, and calls Rios to tell him to meet them there. The first wave of Romulan guards show up while the spacial trajector is still warming up, but Elnor, having defied Picard’s orders, shows up and murders them. Despite Picard’s entreaty to come with them, and Picard releasing him from his oath, Elnor insists on staying behind to cover Hugh while he re-hides the room and shuts down the trajector. Soji and Picard zap off to Napenthe while Elnor prepares to take on the next wave of guards.

Okay, so, like, this show has baked its premise in deep with some serious issues. This whole thing of trying to marry up a nostalgic romp giving us one last outing for the squeaky-clean hypernoble proheroics of the TNG era with a melencholic reflection on our heroes growing old and fading away with the over-the-top antiheroic grimdark space conspiracy intrigue, it’s never going to feel quite right. But that said, if the show had started out with episoides like this one, I think we’d have a lot more goodwill toward it. There’s more plot in this episode than pretty much the whole of episodes one to four. And there’s a strange lightness on bullshit and wheel-spinning. How is it that they avoided the putfal of having Picard run into some mid-level Romulans with a grudge? And neither Narek nor Rizzo (Rizzo’s first name, or at least the one she gives, is “Narissa”. I assume that’s her “real” name. Still calling her Rizzo) is informed of Picard’s presence. They would definitely freak out if they knew he was there. But that’s not really relevant to moving the story forward, so we don’t waste time on it (Lots of xBs see Picard, but I don’t think any Romulans see him and live to tell). Even the nostalgia-heavy parts of Picard interacting with Hugh are in service to moving the story forward.

Other thoughts:

• I like that everyone knows Karen is a spy. More than that, spies are so prevalent in Romulan culture that it doesn’t even really matter that everyone knows. Of course he’s a spy. There’s spies all over the place. Everyone’s a spy around here.
• I have not been calling much attention to the easter eggs, because, look, you can find those on your own. But a callback I was not expecting is that when Soji starts punching her way out of the death trap, Narek goes to open the door, and the guard stops him because of the radiation. Maybe it’s not intentional, but it feels reminiscent of Scotty stopping Kirk from going to Spock in Star Trek II.
• After spending the first 40% of the series assembling the crew of La Sirena, it’s almost funny that the moment plot starts happening, they’re forcefully separated, with Picard and Soji far off on Nepenthe, Elnor on the cube and everyone else on the ship
• This is the first episode in a while without a single holographic Rios. I’m guessing we’ll see Emmet next week, though, as it looks like they’ll be shooting their way out.
• Maybe it’s nothing, but the whole thing with Romulans having one name for outsiders, one for family, and one for lovers reminds me a lot of Craft. It’s probably nothing, but it’d be a hoot if there’s an implication somewhere that Craft’s culture was influenced by the Romulans.
• We see a lot more of the xB-controlled part of the cube than previously. It’s well creepy. Up to and including the fact that it seems at times to possibly be alive itself, with bits of the walls moving.
  • Maybe. The walls clearly reconfigure themselves when Hugh opens the way to the queencell, but at other times, it might just be in Picard’s head.
• Even after the worst is over, Picard still has little flashes of trouble, like momentarily imagining a tall, bald xB as Locutus.
• Missed opportunity to not have Picard tell Soji to, “Come with me if you want to live.”
• Hugh is a Federation citizen. I don’t expect this to come up except possibly in the context of Rizzo flaunting how little she cares about the fact that torturing him for information is probably an act of war. But it’s a neat tidbit. (In context, it gives Hugh legal rights that the other xBs don’t have)
• The spacial trajector Picard and Soji use to escape isn’t out-of-nowhere; Hugh mentions that the Borg assimilated the Sikarians, who appeared in an early episode of Voyager as someone the gang unsuccessfully tried to hit up for a shortcut home.
• It’s weird that Elnor commits to staying behind before Hugh says anything about needing time to lock up the queencell. When he first announces his intention to stay, there’s no clear reason he can’t just go with them. It’s only well after it’s decided that we find out that they’re going to need someone to cover their retreat.
• How did he get there anyway? I wouldn’t have guessed that Elnor knew how to work a transporter in the first place, let alone knowing how to beam into a Borg Cube that’s under Romulan control in the middle of a major security incident and then find his way to Picard in a secret hidden room.
• There is no mention of why Picard and Soji can’t just beam back to La Sirena. I mean, it actually seems pretty obvious that you can’t just beam in and out whenever you like, but they never actually say that. We had two consecutive episodes where the logistics of being able to beam in and out of somewhere were important to the plot, but this time, they don’t say anything. It would tie things up nicely to just have someone say, “Be careful. We won’t be able to get a transporter lock on you once you’re inside the Romulan defenses.” We could live without it, except, how did Elnor get there? I can’t quite sort out a good explanation for how Elnor gets to Picard but Picard can’t beam out again.
• There’s an example of Raffi’s “Seeing what others don’t” superpower: after she sleeps off her bender, when Rios tells her that Picard has learned Soji is still alive, she immediately realizes that the Romulans must want something from her.
• Will I be willing to roll with it when Narek eventually turns face out of his love for Soji? Not sure.
• Will Jurati be the one to kill Soji in the finale? Forgivable only if “Whatcha Say” plays over it.
• I hope Elnor survives this. It just occurred to me that I could be calling him “Space-Legolas” and I will be sad if I don’t get a chance to.
• It’s increasingly clear that they will not have time to wrap this up for the season finale, which is disappointing because I don’t want a cliffhanger. Hoping that we will end on a “Immediate mystery solved; greater mystery unlocked”-type ending where we find out what the terrible secret of space is all about but are not actually left with the heroes in an inescapable deathtrap and the galaxy about to explode.
• This does not connect to anything in particular, but it needs to be said: Bring back Groppler Zorn, you cowards.

Holy shit, you guys. A Thing Happened!

Okay, so, you know the drill: we start out years earlier, only this time, it’s only thirteen years ago, and it’s not a flashback about Old Man Picard and the Mars Attack and subsequent Synth Ban. No, this time we’ve got a Starfleet officer in the goofy decade-ago uniform being painfully dismembered by an alien doctor. She pops out his eye and then pokes around his head with a scanner, looking for his cortical node.

Oh. That explains it. With all the gore, it’s hard to tell, but I think the eye is artificial. A cortical node is a Borg implant that’s normally under a little door in the right temple. She does not get a chance to find it, as Seven of Nine appears and promptly murders her. Though she promises to save the officer, he recognizes that his injuries are fatal and asks for a different kind of rescue. Crying, she hugs him, calls him her child, and shoots him. She also says his name. Icheb.

Time for backstory then: Icheb was one of a group of Borg Babies rescued by Voyager. The others were eventually rehomed with native Delta Quadrant races, but Icheb’s parents were total assholes (Icheb, it turned out, had been genetically engineered as an anti-Borg weapon), so Voyager adopted him.  Also, just random fact, Icheb’s dad was played by Mark Sheppard, who you might know as Crowley on Supernatural or as Rolo Lampkin on Battlestar Galactica or as Canton Delaware on Doctor Who or as the fake Dr. Zito on the 2016 MacGyver or as Badger in Firefly or as the pyrokinetic guy in The X-Files. Or possibly you might know him as the son of W. Morgan Sheppard, who you might know as Blank Reg in Max Headroom or as the real Dr. Zito in the real MacGyver or as Canton Delaware in Doctor Who or as Dr. Graves in Star Trek: The Next Generation or as the prison warden in Star Trek VI or as Qatai in Voyager or as one of the miners in the last episode of Quantum Leap. Someday this information may be useful to you in Trivial Pursuit. And the reason the recently deceased doctor couldn’t find Icheb’s cortical node is that he doesn’t have one. Seven’s broke down and he gave his to her, as his young brain was still elastic enough to adapt to living without one.

So yeah. Icheb’s dead. Also, he’s played by a different actor now, probably because his previous actor said something very crass on the twits in response to Anthony Rapp’s (That’s Stamets on Discovery, for what it’s worth) accusations against Kevin Spacey.

We exit the flashback into another flashback, this one to just a few days ago. I still don’t have a complete sense of what Freecloud’s story is, but it seems to have respectable bits along with the seedy bits. Actually, I think its exact deal is that it is exactly Cloud City from Star Wars only without a Lando. Which means that there is very little detail in the actual canon but I’m sure the fanboys can tell you lots and lots of excruciating detail about how it all works. One of the seedy bits is Stardust City, which either contains a very flamboyant and seedy night club or else is a very flamboyant and seedy nightclub, which is run by a lady named Bjayzl, who I am going to call “Vagazzle” because it amuses me. Possibly she’s just an Important Person here and not actually in charge. They don’t specify. She reminds me a lot of Servalan from Blake’s 7 and looks enough like a young Marina Sirtis that I was kinda expecting a twist where she turned out to be a clone or a secret cousin or something.

She’s got an enforced named Bup or maybe Vup, who is a lizard man who can smell lies (also what you had for breakfast and your last sexual partner). We are told he is a lizard man; there’s nothing about his appearance that specifically communicates “lizard” the way, say, Linus’s does. He’s just big, gray, and bumpy the way lots of TNG-era aliens are. He tells Vagazzle that Bruce Maddox has shown up. He owes her money, so she initially orders Kup to kill him, but relents when it occurs to her that she can sell him instead. Maddox (who has been recast and now looks kinda like a transporter accident between Elliot Gould and Rainn Wilson) tells her that his lab was destroyed and that he thinks it was the Tal Shiar, before succumbing to the drugged Tranya she gave him (I hope he relished it). Vagazzle complains about the unpleasantness of having to deal with the Tal Shiar to sell him.

Aboard La Sirena in the present, Seven visits Picard in his holo-chateau and is snarky about it. She has gotten good at sarcasm, brooding, and all the important antihero skills in the decades since we last saw her. And I called it: she’s a Fenris Ranger, though sadly, this just means that she’s part of a vigilante organization which is trying to impose some semblance of law and order in the former Romulan Neutral Zone. Picard makes a point of objecting on principle, but is suitably chastened by being reminded that both Starfleet and Picard personally just bailed on the region. Seems to be a recurring pattern of Picard trying to assert old-school TNG morality, but just passively accepting it when people tell him it’s more complicated than that. Freecloud is a good place for Seven to hook back up with the Fenris Rangers, so she plans to hit Picard up for a ride, but when he tells her about his hopeless crusade, she’s sufficiently into it to help out.

On the flight deck, Raffi is looking up a Gabriel Hwang, who is at a medical facility on Freecloud. Jurati watches a home movie of her and Maddox which ends with them making out. Both of them look roughly the same age they are now, even though Maddox was supposed to have been in hiding since the Synth ban, but hey, fourteen years isn’t really that long I guess. They get to Freecloud, where the ship is inundated with targeted holographic popup ads. Elnor is disappointed that he didn’t get one. It seems like Elnor is slotting into the somewhat uncommon trope of the Sheltered Yet Badass Prince. I’ve mentioned the trope once before, of all places in reference to Ethan Ratkin in War of the Worlds II. This is a trope that you usually only see in cultural contexts that aren’t cynical about nobility. A young prince who’s never been outside the castle walls is forced out into the world. And he’s new to everything and has never seen all this stuff before… But he’s instantly good at everything, because it turns out that noble blood just makes you better. He provides a bit of comic relief in this episode, which works pretty well because it’s just enough to keep the episode from sliding all the way into relentlessly dire.

When Raffi finds Vagazzle’s “For Sale: One Gently-Used Bruce Maddox” ad on Freecloud Craigslist, Seven offers herself as bait in a trade, as her Borg parts are the only thing they’ve got that might equal what the Tal Shiar would offer. A flashback to the planning of the heist is intercut with the execution. Rios beams into Stardust City dressed like a pimp, posing as a “facer” – a flamboyant middleman for an unseen buyer. Nup gets edgy when Rios admits he isn’t there on behalf of the Tal Shiar, but a cocktail of time-release meds kick in to keep the lizard-man from smelling anything untoward. Picard, sporting a beret, eyepatch, and an outrageously overblown French accent, presents himself as a bounty hunter looking to trade an ex-Borg for Maddox. Seven, wearing trick handcuffs and with a transporter beacon secreted among her implants, is pretty much unique for having been assimilated as a child but liberated as an adult, and thus her remaining implants are more extensive and in better condition. Picard demands proof-of-life for Maddox before making the trade.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×05: Stardust City Rag

First order of business: I coulda sworn I’d mentioned this last time but apparently I forgot. When they’re interrogating the assassin, Laris pokes him in the brow ridge and calls him a “northerner” (like Zhubin). So I guess the Romulans with brow ridges are “northern”. Lots of planets have a north. There might be more to it than that (They’re both also bald, so for all I know, ridged-with-hair is, like, “western” or something), but we’ve got a nice straightforward acknowledgement now. Also, I think last week’s episode is the first time we ever saw dark-skinned Romulans. I believe all the ones we saw were bald and ridged, so presumably “northern” unless there’s some further distinction.

This show is becoming a real weird exercise in how artfully and beautifully and well-acted they can utterly avoid accomplishing anything. We are now 40% through the season and this episode is still in “Avengers, assemble!” mode, being mostly backstory and character introduction. In case you hadn’t gotten enough of that yet.

As appears to be usual now, we start out with a lengthy “fourteen years ago” flashback, this time covering the moment Picard learned of the Mars attack. Picard beams into a Romulan relocation site on Vashti, a town that has a kind of Indiana Jones vibe to it. A sort of used-exotic 1930s pulp adventure sort of place that’s got a mix of Wild West and Southeast Asia motifs. Kinda reminds me of the Asia section of Disney’s Animal Kingdom. A bright-eyed scampish little boy nicks a dragonfruit (I mean, it is definitely a dragonfruit but is probably meant to represent some weird exotic alien plant, because dragonfruit is a good choice for that sort of thing) and gets called “sisterboy” by the shopkeeper. Picard shows up in a white suit and Panama hat. He’s wearing a commbadge, though when we see him contact Raffi, he does so by tapping his ear. I’m going to assume Picard is out of uniform to make the Romulans more comfortable, but there’s no explanation for why he’s dressed like a tourist on Safari. He’s here to visit the Qowat Milat, an order of all-female warrior monks who follow a code of (incoming title drop) “absolute candor”. If you think this is a weird code given how much effort they’ve put into reminding us that Romulans are secretive, you’re right. The Qowat Milat are explicitly enemies of the Tal Shiar. The fact that larger Romulan culture treats them with a kind of respectful awe rather than like a bunch of weirdos might be telling us something else about the Romulan culture of secrecy – that it’s based in self-preservation, perhaps. The boy from before, Elnor, is their ward, though Picard reckons they ought to find him a permanent home that isn’t a gender-segregated monastic order. Him and Picard bond over The Three Musketeers and swordfighting and clearly we’re meant to see Picard as a father figure here, and he presumably is hoping Jean-Luc will adopt him. Unfortunately, Raffi calls him up and tells him about Mars, so Picard is off, and though he says he’ll be back as soon as he can, we all know how it’s gonna go.

In the present, La Sirena jumps to warp, having dropped out of it for… reasons. Jurati is bored with space and tries to Meet Cute with Rios, but he’s not really interested. They are mercifully interrupted when Raffi shows up to be angry about Rios changing course so Picard can make a pit stop at Vashti. Picard is looking around a holodeck recreation of his office in France assembled by La Sirena’s Emergency Hospitality Hologram, which gives us (a) a way to keep using the chateau sets from the first three episodes, (b) a chance to have a little chuckle at the conceptual absurdity of a hospitality emergency, and (c) a handy way to introduce the fact that La Sirena came standard with a whole bunch of Emergency Holograms who all look like Rios.

Raffi deflects questions about why she’s jonesing so hard to get to Freecloud, and instead challenged Picard on his own guilt trip about going to Vashti. Picard has an official reason for going: if he can convince the Qowat Milat that his cause is worthy (according to criteria he is pointedly evasive about), one of them will swear an unbreakable oath to help him with lots of sword-based murder, and let’s face it, the current adventuring party consists of an elderly vintner, a drug addict, a theoretical academic, and low-budget Han Solo. A Romulan Ninja-Monk would be a serious boon to their Initiative rolls. But… Yeah, really it’s because he’s on a guilt trip and he knows he doesn’t have a whole lot of time left to resolve his various angsts.

It is not until this point that Rios chooses to bring up the fact that Vashti has kinda gone to hell over the past fourteen years. And, like, it makes sense that with Picard having spent the past fourteen years hiding from the world in a lowkey depression, he hasn’t kept up with things. But… Picard has basically been surprised by every single thing that has gone badly since he retired. Shouldn’t he have done a little research when he decided to go on this adventure? Were a long way into this series for Picard to still be constantly surprised that things have gone badly and that people are not happy to see him.

So Vashti used to be under the protection of the “Fenris Rangers”, which is an organization which sounds so fucking cool that we will not see or hear anything else about them. But the Fenris Rangers don’t have the resources to take care of the place any more, so it’s being run by a minor warlord/crime boss called Kar Kantar, who sounds like a pretty cool greasy mid-level villain who could provide some interesting conflict, so we will not see or hear anything else about him, except that he’s got an “antique” Romulan Bird-of-Prey, which we will see one time. It’s probably meant to be the same class as the TOS-era Bird of Prey from “Balance of Terror” (It doesn’t look exactly the same, but there’s no way to know whether that means it’s a slightly different class or a Discovery-style “visual reboot”) Why didn’t we bring this up sooner? Fuck you, that’s why.

In addition to the strangely-calibrated threat of the hundred-year-old Romulan ship (Seriously, there’s a weight and portentousness to the Bird-of-Prey that is odd. It’s set up as a major threat, but when it does come to blows, they’re fairly explicit that La Sirena outclasses it considerably. Remember: even in TOS, the Romulan ship was not even close to being able to take on the Enterprise in a fair fight. It was a submarine analogy: a submarine can’t take on a battleship in an equal fight; all it’s got going for it is stealth), Vashti is protected by a planetary defense force field that only opens up every half-hour and blows you up if you don’t have permission to approach. Picard is, of course, surprised that just telling them who he is does not get them permission, so Rios suggests a bribe. Which I guess they do off-screen as it isn’t mentioned again.

Meanwhile, Soji emotes over an unconscious Rahmda, and watches a pre-Borg interview with her. Recorded Rhamda talks about “THE DESTROYER” of Romulan mythology who will command the unshackled demons at the day of armageddon and destroy all sentient life in the galaxy. So there’s that. Karen comforts her by showing her how to use the Borg HVAC system as a Slip ‘N Slide. But then he casually mentions that there’s no record of her ever having been on the ship she supposedly left Earth on, and she gets mad at him for calling her a liar and also spying on her.

He takes a nap later and is woken by Rizzo seductively futzing with his facial hair in a way that suggests that they are not actually siblings. She’s increasingly upset about him not having tortured her to death, but he insists that if he pushes too hard, she’s going to activate and they’ll have to kill her before they find out where the others are. Rizzo is clearly unconvinced about his commitment to android girl murder, and possibly he has some tangential obsession that is interfering with his main mission (It is not clear to me at this point which of the ten million conspiracy threads going on right now is the specific one he’s supposedly obsessed over).

Picard beams down to Vashti and tries being friendly with everyone, but no one will say hi and they all give him the stink-eye, and there’s a “ROMULANS ONLY” sign at the bar. He makes his way to the convent and catches up with the head nun, who is the only person who has actually been happy to see him in this whole series. She suggests that he hit up Elnor for the whole “blood oath” thing, because even though he technically can’t join their order on account of the “is a man” thing, he’s fully trained, and she’d like him to go off and do something exciting that gets him killed in a more exciting way than he is liable to get killed here. Picard tells Elnor his sob story, but he’s bitter about the abandonment and, like Raffi, real offended that Picard has only shown up now that he needs a favor.

Presumably in the mood to get beaten up, Picard goes back to the bar, tears down the “ROMULANS ONLY” sign, and orders a drink. A former senator starts a fight with him, bitter partly over being abandoned by the Federation, and partly over having been persuaded into accepting help from outsiders in the first place by Picard’s famously silver tongue – he reckons that the Romulans could’ve handled the relocation themselves if they hadn’t been manipulated into relying on outsiders. He gives Picard a sword and tries to duel him, but Picard drops the sword after a parry or two, refusing to fight. Elnor shows up and tries to trick the audience into thinking he’s giving Picard a pep talk by telling him to “choose to live”, but you should really be quick enough on the uptake to realize he’s actually talking to the senator, who he proceeds to effortlessly decapitate when he takes another swing at Picard. Elnor swears himself to Picard’s cause and cautions everyone else not to fuck with the old man. Picard apologizes to all present for the whole, “Dropped the ball on saving your race” thing, and the two beam back to La Sirena just ahead of one Romulan who reckons that Elnor’s swordsmanship is great and all, but no match for a gun.

Kar Kantar has shown up in the mean time with his ancient Romulan ship, prompting fears that we might actually get a big exciting space battle. And… It’s an okay space battle. A little cluttered but not too bad. They make a point that the Bird-of-Prey isn’t really that big of a threat to La Sirena per se: the actual threat is the planetary defenses. The Bird-of-Prey doesn’t actually have to outgun La Sirena if it can shepherd it toward the planet. Rios summons “Emmet”, the Emergency Tactical Hologram, which is also played by the same actor, but tattooed, discheveled, and Spanish-speaking. An unidentified ship suddenly comes to their assistance. Emmet identifies it as an ugly ship, though Rios is impressed by the pilot. It buys them an opening that allows La Sirena to zap one of the nacelles clean off the Romulan, but it takes a pair of disruptor hits that send it into the planetary force field. Rios consents to beam the pilot aboard, and everyone makes sure to refer to the pilot as “him”, so you know darn right well it’s going to turn out not to be a “him” at all. Though they’ve never met face-to-face before, their mutual reputations precede them, allowing Jean-Luc to identify their new passenger as Seven of Nine. She just has time to tell Picard he owes her a new ship before passing out.

Next week: Everyone dresses up in extravagantly ridiculous cosplay for some kind of heist!

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×04: Absolute Candor