A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Payoff! Things happening! Forward progress! Okay, that’s really only the last thirty seconds but still! A third of the way through, this show might actually get somewhere before it’s done!

I’ve finally realized what it is about Star Trek: Picard that’s stopping me from locking in fully. You ever see the ’90s remake of Sabrina? Not the teenage witch; the Audrey Hepburn movie. Sabrina is the daughter of the chauffeur to a rich magnate, and she’s got a huge crush on the cute, immature son, and then she goes off to school and gets glamorous and he starts to reciprocate, so the gruff, mature older brother has to intervene in order to prevent the scandal of a rich guy shacking up with a filthy poor (Everyone’s more sympathetic in the remake, so it’s less about her being poor and more about him already being engaged), but the older brother ends up falling in love with her. The remake is mostly good, and fixes a lot of things in the original that don’t age well (Like the fact that you end the original reckoning that Sabrina marrying into this family of bougie capitalist pigs is not actually a win for her), but it has one big weakness in its casting. In the original, the older brother is played by Humphrey Bogart, while in the remake, it’s Harrison Ford. On the one hand, this seems like a very natural choice. But… Look, Humphrey Bogart’s entire career is exactly this sort of thing. Up to the day he died, you bought him as this character. But by the late ’90, to be completely honest, no one saw thirty seconds of Harrison Ford playing the gruff asshole and didn’t already know where this was going. The catharsis of the climax – where the older brother chooses not to be an asshole and instead be the hero – hinges on the fact that the audience believes (or rather, that the audience is able to bracket what they know about how movies work and engage the movie’s emotive logic as if they believe) that he might not. You could always question whether Bogart was going to side with the angels or the devils. That basically went out the window for Ford when the Millennium Falcon showed up to cover Luke during the Death Star trench run. It’s not that he’s objectively worse, but Harrison Ford romantic movies are about watching the gruff asshole’s tough exterior slowly crack. Sabrina is a movie that’s structured around a different kind of tension, and you’re supposed to spend most of the movie viewing his character as the foil.

I bring all this up because the problem I’m having with Picard is that, as a character-driven show, the direction of the narrative is being driven by character traits that are so established that it telegraphs every turning of the plot weeks in advance. Also because we introduce a new character this week in the person of Picard’s new pilot, Captain Rios, and Captain Rios is clearly the product of a transporter accident involving Inigo Montoya and Han Solo. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We left Picard at Vasquez Rocks with Raffi, who doesn’t like him, but triggers on the words “Romulan conspiracy” and agrees to hear him out. While Picard recaps the first two episodes for Raffi’s benefit, we cut away to a flashback showing the day Picard quit Starfleet. We learn that Raffi was Picard’s second on the Romulan rescue project (I notice that he never calls her “Number One”, though possibly that’s because he’s technically not at the point we join the story. She calls him “JL”). She’s extremely passionate about the project, and I think we’re meant to take away that she’s a savant at logistics: she’s worked out the numbers for moving forward with a scaled-back rescue mission by taking old ships out of mothballs and reactivating Starfleet reservists and using a lot of synths. Picard drops the bombshell about the synth ban, which he and Raffi both agree is ridiculous. He drops the bombshell about his retirement, and she’s shattered when he goes on to explain that quitting was his desperate last-ditch plan, and since it hasn’t worked, he’s going to fuck off back to France to make wine and write books of military history. She leaves in a huff after being summoned by the commandant to get fired as part of what I assume is a purge of Picard-supporters.

In the present, Raffi points out that it was real dumb of Picard to go telling Starfleet about the secret Romulan conspiracy and asking them for a ship to go fight it with, since it’s pretty obvious that a secret Romulan death squad couldn’t operate on Earth with impunity unless Starfleet was in on it. THANK YOU. It still doesn’t really get into why Picard was so chatty about it last week, but at least we are acknowledging that it was a dumb move and Picard should’ve known better. We get only the barest outline of Raffi’s deal. She’s spend the past fourteen years in a tailspin, unemployable, possibly drug-addicted, and I think we’re supposed to have concerns about her mental health. There’s a strong vein of “conspiracy theorist” about her, but of course we know she’s right. She blames Picard for the turn her life has taken, and she’s mad at him for never having checked up on her until he needed something (Yeah, it’s clear she wouldn’t have wanted to see him, but it’s very human that she would still resent him for not having tried), but she promises to put him in touch with a pilot.

On the cube, Soji’s work – in particular, that she spoke to a reclaimed Borg (they call them “the Nameless”) in its native language – has been noticed by the project director. The director is Hugh Borg. This is a complete un-reveal and nothing is said about his backstory and nothing is explained about where he comes from and I think they only say his name once, late in the episode, so if you aren’t up on your Borg Lore (Ahem), you wouldn’t have any idea who this guy was or if it mattered. Even if you were, the actor is 25 years older and in completely different make-up, so you still might not put two and two together.

For the sake of anyone not up on their Borg Lore, Hugh is the first ex-Borg. Late in TNG’s run, they rescue a Borg drone, and while they’re contemplating whether they can weaponize him to undermine the collective, he goes and develops an independent sense of self and they name him “Hugh” and he decides he wants to be a real boy. So they end up not turning him into a Borg Bomb, and instead send him back to the collective, thinking that maybe this whole “Be your own person” thing might spread and take down the Borg in a less genocidal way. And it kinda works but also backfires, because it does spread and a bunch of Borg do go rogue, but they don’t have the life skills to make it without the collective and things go very badly for them, until Data’s asshole brother Lore manages to get himself crowned King of the Borg and organizes them into pretty much space pirates. Now, the weird thing here is that as far as the TNG series goes, this was the end of the Borg. They don’t appear again after this in TNG, and it was widely presumed that Hugh’s revolution was the final end of the Borg. There’s at least one TNG-era novel which flat-out says that the collective was destroyed at this point. It gets walked back in First Contact without any real explanation – no one on-screen is surprised that the collective is still around (Again, if you read the books, there’s one where Picard has it explained to him that the Borg were able to cut off the affected “branch” before it spread to the wider collective).

Hugh is so impressed that he’s going to let Soji interview Rahmda, which apparently is a thing she’s been asking about. Last week, we were being guided toward questioning what hidden agenda has (probably unwittingly) brought Soji to the cube. Turns out Soji’s actually an anthropologist, not a medical doctor, and… I don’t think they’ve explained enough of this to fully make sense of it, and they might never do that since her explanation is probably a cover. Rahmda is a Romulan ex-borg who used to be an expert in Romulan mythology, and Soji is interested in mythology, I think, as a way for ex-borg to contextualize their experience?

Rahmda is one of “The Disordered”, who are ex-Borg that are confined due to bog standard TV mental illness. They’re all Romulan, and, according to Hugh, they’re the only Romulans ever to have been assimilated. Rahmda in particular is playing a Mad Prophetess archetype. When we meet her, she’s doing Romulan Tarot, which Soji understands well enough to explain for the audience’s benefit, such as an interesting detail about how Romulan houses have fake doors in the front, and real doors in the back. Gee, I wonder if it’s important that Romulans are real secretive. (Even with the themes they’re going for, that frankly seems excessive). Soji is very polite and speaks to her in Romulan, but never actually gets around to asking her about mythology in more than the most abstract terms. Instead, she tells her things she isn’t supposed to know about the circumstance of her assimilation, and presses her on why the cube broke down pretty much immediately upon assimilating them. Which is a surprise even to Hugh. So this is why we’re here, I assume. The terrible secret of space which the Romulans hide can function as a weapon against the Borg (this is probably secondary to its main deal).

Rahmda “recognizes” Soji and asks which sister she is – the one who dies or the one who kills everyone else. She identifies her as “the destroyer”, which all the other disturbed Romulans notice, then steals the guard’s weapon, points it at Soji, but then tries to shoot herself. Soji reacts with what I assume is android powers and disarms her. The guards are all upset, but Hugh tells them it’s their own damn fault for not keeping their weapons properly secured. Soji goes back to her room and calls her mom, who tells her that Dahj is fine, but Soji blacks out during the call. Guessing mom is not even a real person. Karen wakes her up, and she assumes he’s bothered by her knowing state secrets (she’s shook by this too, since she can’t remember how she knew it), but he deflects by professing his love for her. I would not even question that he’s just manipulating her, but Rizzo is clearly worried that he might legitimately like-her-like-her. Rizzo’s on the cube now, by the way, and has had her ears re-pointed. So her being a deep cover operative in Starfleet isn’t going much of anywhere.

While all that was going on, we are finally introduced to what I assume will be our “Hero ship”, the La Sirena. Though dimly lit, it is very clean and spacious for a shady rogue’s unlicensed ship that can do the Kessel Run in- I’m getting off track. Picard meets Captain Rios, who, as I mentioned, is basically the result of a transporter accident between Inigo Montoya and Han Solo. We are shown that he is rough and tumble and handsome and roguish by the fact that we first meet him smoking a cigar and having a big piece of shrapnel removed from his shoulder by his emergency medical hologram. The hologram is played by the same actor as Rios, only better groomed and dressed, with what I think is an Irish accent. He tries to be all gruff and Bogarty about how he doesn’t care about nothing but getting paid, but Picard sees right through him because he keeps his ship clean and his equipment properly stowed and he “smells like Starfleet”. Rios had been the XO on the USS ibn Majid (a name I assume will anger the same Islamophobic sad sacks who blew their tops when Star Trek Online introduced a Dervish Class), which Picard won’t have heard about because Starfleet redacted it. His former captain was some sort of noble idealist who met a very messy end, and I assume we will learn more details later. Later, Rios’s Emergency Navigational Hologram fanboys over Picard a little to persuade Rios to take the job. I don’t know why; I don’t recall any point at which there was any question of it.

Commodore Oh visits Dr. Jurati, which I assume is the setup for her turning on them later because that’s telegraphed pretty transparently. Zhubin packs a lunch for Picard as he is about to set out on his dangerous space mission, then more masked Romulans show up and try to assassinate the lot of them. Fortunately, two middle-aged retired spies and their old man boss are even better at murder than this Romulan death squad, and they dispatch them in a fight scene which is just a tiny bit too frenetic. Also, Laris and Zhubin have apparently taped guns to the underside of every piece of furniture in Picard’s house. No explanation. “Retired spies keep guns handy all the time just in case” is an okay trope I guess, but this isn’t even a surprise to Picard either. They miss one assassin, but Jurati shows up and shoots him in the back before he notices her. “Maybe it was set to stun?” she hopes, having only slightly more trouble dealing with the fact that she just killed a dude than anyone has had dealing with anything in this show. “Romulan disruptors don’t have a stun setting,” Laris reassures her. She tells them about meeting with Commodore Oh, and how she spilled the beans about everything because the head of Starfleet Security spooked her real good. They interrogate the one assassin who isn’t quite dead yet, and he tells them that the Tal Shiar are definitely gonna kill the other Asha sister before Picard finds her, and also refers to her as “The Destroyer” (this scene plays out in parallel with the one on the cube, so Rahmda calls Soji this just a few seconds before this guy does). He uses his own acid spit (Funny Laris and Zhubin didn’t think to check him for that) to self-destruct, taking Zhubin’s vest with him. Zhubin is able to get it off before he’s hurt.

Dr. Jurati asks to come with Picard because she thinks she can be useful and she wants to help and totally not because she’s been turned by Commodore Oh. Rios beams them up, leaving Laris and Zhubin to deal with the additional assassins who are definitely on their way to scourge the shire. On the La Sirena, they find out that Raffi’s decided to come along. She’s still pissed at Picard, but she’s worked out that Maddox is somewhere called Freecloud, and she wants a ride. A few bars of Jerry Goldsmith swell as the fanboys finally get the “Picard points his fingers and says Engage” scene we’ve all been waiting for finally happens.

Woof. It really does keep getting better, but it’s still slow going. My “This conspiracy is gonna be too damned complicated” hackles are up a bit, but at least we’re finally getting into space. Though who knows how long it will last, given that I’m pretty sure that the trailers have shown Earth scenes that haven’t happened yet. Also, we haven’t had the Jonathan Frakes cameo we were promised yet (Technically we don’t know if that’s on Earth, but it sure did seem like it. It seems like it just goes without saying that everyone in the future retires to their home planet. Though this has some ominous implications given that Beverly Crusher’s home planet is Mars…)

• I don’t like how wishy-washy they’re being about Captain Rios. He’s screaming “Bogart character played by Ford,” with the whole “Starfleet, tragic past, walked away but still longs to serve on the side of the angels” thing.
• But I love his rapport with the hologram. (Holograms? He refers to the hologram in two different scenes by two different designations, but they’re played by the same actor and act the same, so it’s not clear whether they count as distinct characters or, like, two different “modes” for the same character). They’re basically an old married couple. Which is funny because the hologram and the captain are the same actor.
  • This also showcases that despite the ban on synths, holograms of significant sophistication are still permitted. This may relate back to the way Control in the last season of Discovery couldn’t become “fully sentient” without the Sphere Data, despite the fact that it sure did act like it had free will and a human-like intelligence. I am content with the idea that there really is a distinction to be made here, but I’m wondering whether they’ll ever do the work of actually making it for us.
• Hugh claims that the The Disordered are the only Romulans ever to be assimilated. This is not consistent with past Trek: Voyager encounters a Romulan among a community of liberated Borg, and when the Borg are teased in the first season TNG finale, part of the story is that Romulan and Federation colonies have been mysteriously vanishing at the hands of a then-unrevealed force that later turns out to be the Borg. Hugh reasonably might just not know about the first, but the second was known to the Federation, so it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t get back to him even if the Romulans were covering it up.
• After I praised the first episode for the way Dahj seems to reference mental illness without attaching any sort of stigma, it’s not cool to reach the level of cliche that worked into the depiction of The Disordered.
• For that matter, I think they’re signalling that Raffi isn’t neurotypical – that her skills at “seeing what others miss” might be form of what TV Tropes used to call a “disability superpower”.
• Raffi also has a substance abuse problem, which is clearly being presented as her self-medicating. Her whole character is a tough fit for Star Trek. Unless her lifestyle is self-imposed (which it may well be), someone like her being “discarded” like this is pretty grim even for this darker and grittier version of Star Trek. 
• I don’t see how the story would unfold to fit it in later, so I’m a little disappointed we don’t get more detail about how Picard’s resignation led to Raffi’s decline. In the flashback, it just sort of goes without saying that she’s going to be fired from Starfleet, but, like, “Your commander quit so you are now out of the service,” is not how much of any sort of real-world military or even civilian organization works. He’s her boss, not her patron.
  • Could possibly make sense if I’m right about Raffi having some mental abnormality: Picard may have needed to pull strings to get her a dispensation to qualify for service.
• Between The Disordered, Raffi, and Picard’s brain failure, I’m starting to think that brain irregularities are thematically important in this show. Or maybe it’s because I just watched SuperGreatFriend’s LP of AI: The Somnium Files, a game in which half the major characters have severe neurological abnormalities.
• La Sirena does not really impress me much. The streaming era has been kind of weak on its Starship Porn, aside from Pike’s Enterprise. Most of the ships we see are kinda visually boring.
• Commodore Oh wears sunglasses. Vulcans don’t normally wear sunglasses. They’ve got extra eyelids instead. I don’t know if this is going to be relevant. Probably not, but, like, what if she’s half-Terran? That would be… Well, needlessly complicated, really, but still.
• So we can assume Jurati is a spy, right? I mean, not for certain, but they clearly want us to think that. We cut instantly away from Commodore Oh introducing herself, and then the next time we see Jurati, she’s decided to demand Picard take her along. We’re supposed to think that Oh promised her something or threatened something. Maybe even the attack at the Chateau was a setup to create a context for her to show up where Picard would be pressured to take her along. I mean, she did successfully sneak up on and murder a Romulan assassin.
• The reveal that Picard’s resignation was more a matter of Starfleet calling his bluff than anything else makes a lot of logical sense, but isn’t quite as emotionally satisfying as him more directly resigning on principle.
• “Freecloud” definitely sounds like a Nerdy Galt’s Gulch.
• Raffi believed the Tal Shiar were behind the Mars attack from the beginning. That’s why Picard mentioning them got her interested. She also reckons that Starfleet must’ve been complicit. This goes a long way to explaining why everyone seems to be taking this all in stride. Both in the flashback and in the present day, Picard is reluctant to believe that Starfleet is collaborating with the Tal Shiar, but he still acknowledges Raffi’s insight as valid here. Are they setting up Picard’s inability to let go of his faith in the integrity of Starfleet as his fatal flaw?
• The Fourteen Years Ago Starfleet Uniforms look a little goofy. Starfleet seems to go through a lot of uniforms. I’m not sure if it’s actually a lot compared to real-world militaries or not, but it seems like it.
  • Perspective plays into it, though; if you know someone in the Navy who works an office job, you may well have seen them in four different uniforms over the past ten years, not because the Navy changes which uniforms they have a lot, but because there are several uniforms in use at the same time, and the rules about which one you wear for which occasion can change.

 

Man, they are really dedicated to having things emphatically fail to happen. This episode doesn’t even have a fight scene.

Quick Precis: Picard goes around telling everyone he can find that there is a secret and very dangerous conspiracy going on, causing the secret and very dangerous conspiracy to take an interest in him.

Fourteen years ago, construction workers go about their day building ships for Picard’s big rescue armada, including getting an android out of their big storage unit full of androids. They’re friendly with it, trying unsuccessfully to tell it jokes and admonishing the coworker who says something mildly racist about androids, but this robodude is no Data, and can’t really interact with them on anything like a human level. The android’s eyes go all evil-blinky (the effect is completely different from Control infecting Ariem on Discovery, but the way it’s shot is the same, and it conveys pretty clearly that he’s being controlled by an outside influence. He walks over and shuts down the defense systems and picks up some kind of laser-tool and murders all the humans and then shoots a hole in his own head while the shipyards are attacked outside.

Back in the present, Picard and his housekeeper review the footage of Picard getting tossed by an explosion. So that’s public record. When the authorities found Picard, there was no question that the old man had just fallen down and hit his head or whatever. But Dahj has been edited out of the footage, and Laris thinks this must be the work of the Zaht Vash – the Romulan secret cabal that’s even more secret than the secret Romulan Cabal her and Zhabin used to work for. Oh yeah, Picard’s housekeeper is a former Tal Shiar spy. Zhabin doesn’t even think the Zaht Vash is real; just a bedtime story they tell to keep little baby Romulan spies in line. Anyway, the Zaht Vash are so super secret that no one knows what their deal is exactly, but rumor has it that it has something to do with the fact that Romulans have an ancient cultural hatred, aversion, and fear of anything to do with androids or AI.

You’d think this would’ve come up last week, after Picard told them the android girl had been assassinated by Romulans. Picard and Laris beam into Dahj’s apartment (I guess you can just beam uninvited into someone else’s home?) and she uses magic Romulan Spy Surplus CSI tools to reconstruct Dahj’s ill-fated date from last week’s episode. But they can’t see the actual murdering, because the bad guys used even more magic technology to scrub the place. Laris hacks what I guess is the Star Trek equivalent of Dahj’s Echo. That’s been scrubbed too, but they missed the where Dahj’s Alexa logged the fact that it had confused her and her sister for a second, and that gives them a record of a long-distance call. They are thus able to narrow down Soji’s location to “Literally anywhere else in the universe other than Earth.”

Meanwhile, literally anywhere in the universe other than Earth, Soji is sleeping with Karen. That escalated quickly. They have this episode’s second conversation about how secretive Romulans are. I wonder if they think it’s important for us to remember that. They’re keeping their relationship on the DL. There’s a newcomer at the Borg Cube, giving Soji a chance to do a little expositon about how this is a dead cube whose occupants the Romulans have spent the past few years un-borging. A Romulan with a fauxhawk gives them a safety speech about the dangers of working in a Borg Cube, and the new girl mentions how very secretive the Romulans are. I wonder if they want us to remember that. Karen watches Dahj un-borg someone and makes a meaningful aside about how he can casually bypass Byzantine Romulan bureaucracy.

On Earth, Picard has his old doctor from the Stargazer days over to certify him for space. Only it turns out that Picard is in the early stages of brain failure. He’s got a problem with his parietal lobe, though the symptoms they mention aren’t actually linked to that part of the brain from what I’ve read. Picard talks him into signing the doctor’s note anyway, since hopefully this big dangerous adventure will kill him before the brain failure does. Picard takes his shiny doctor’s note to Starfleet headquarters and asks for a ship. The admiral tells him to go fuck himself. That’s not even hyperbole. She’s very pissy about the whole “Had a big shouty fit about how pissed he as at Starfleet on intergalactic TV last week” thing. She also mentions that a bunch of Federation worlds had threatened to secede over the whole Romulan rescue thing, so maybe he needn’t have gotten all up on his high horse over them not tearing the Federation apart over a rescue they couldn’t have even done anyway given that they didn’t have a fleet any more.

She also calls Commodore Evil, a stern Vulcan who’s the head of security. Commodore Evil says that Picard’s story about a secret Romulan conspiracy operating on Earth and meat androids, but then she turns around and summons Special Evil Operative Rizzo to yell at her over the fact that Picard found out about the secret Romulan Conspiracy and how they blew up Dahj without interrogating her first and how she doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the operative they’ve set on Soji. Rizzo hologram-calls Karen to reveal that she’s actually a secret Romulan and his sister, and she too has concerns that he’s too busy getting laid and not working hard enough at finding the “nest” of the “abominations”.

Allison Pill visits Picard for some tea and to tell him that Dahj’s backstory was an obvious fabrication, so probably there is some kind of secret plan behind her having been set up to go study AI at the Daystrom institute and also to Soji working on a Borg Cube (They don’t know this yet, but we’re clearly meant to be wondering it). Picard gets out his old commbadge and tries to call someone.

Picard tells Laris and Zhubin that he plans to go borrow a ship off of someone and go into space anyway, and Laris is like, “You can’t do that, you’ll get killed.” And Zhubin is like, “You can’t do that, we’ll go with you,” which pisses his wife off. Picard needs them to stay on Earth and tend the vineyard anyway. Zhubin namechecks Riker, Worf and LaForge, but Picard has decided he doesn’t want to get anyone he cares about killed, and besides, if the whole cast were senior citizens, it probably wouldn’t work for CBS’s target demographic, so instead, he’s going to conscript people who hate him.

The specific people who hate him is Raffi, the person he called last night. She lives in a trailer in the shadow of that mountain where Kirk fought the Gorn. She points a gun at him and tells him to fuck off (this time it’s hyperbole), but he’s brought a bottle of the good stuff and a story about secret Romulan conspiracies, so she agrees to hear him out.

So, despite the complete lack of forward progress, this episode felt a lot better-paced than the previous one. There’s still some exposition-heavy scenes, but they feel a lot more organic. The only bit that really felt like filler was the scene with Dr. Jurati, which I think really should’ve happened before Picard went to Starfleet. The big wall-banger of this episode is Picard’s complete lack of chill about telling basically everyone he meets about this incredibly dangerous conspiracy. Okay, he tells Starfleet command. That’s kinda fair. But Jurati? Stargazer Doctor? He makes a big deal out of not wanting to involve the TNG cast since he doesn’t want to get them killed, but he’s oddly cool about telling strangers all about the Romulan Secret Police So Secret That Their Name Literally Means “The Corpse Squad (coz we kill anyone who learns our secret)”. It keeps getting stranger how no one seems all that bothered by the conspiracy.

Some other things:

• There are two things in this episode I find incredibly funny, one of which is intentional:
  • On the Cube, there is a sign that says “THIS FACILITY HAS GONE 5843 DAYS WITHOUT AN ASSIMILATION”.
  • The doors to Starfleet Command are just normal doors. You pull them open by hand. They’ve got pneumatic closing mechanisms at the top.
• The replicator in the Mars scene is very clearly a modern 2019-model 3D printer.
• I think Doctor Benayoun is the first of Picard’s Stargazer crewmates that we’ve seen in the flesh. I don’t think he was ever mentioned by name before. The other two Stargazer crewmen whose names we’ve heard are Jack Crusher and someone named Vigo. They’ve only ever appeared in holograms and hallucinations.
• Picard clearly expects the guy at reception to recognize him… And he does not. So Picard responds by spelling his name for him.
• All the trailers showed the hologram of the Enterprise-D that hangs in the foyer of Starfleet HQ. What they didn’t show is that it actually alternates between the Enterprise-D and the original Enterprise (Discovery-styled). The other Enterprises? Fuck ’em I guess.
• The exact details of the conspiracy at Starfleet Security are not at all clear yet. Rizzo is revealed as an undercover Romulan. Possibly Commodore Oh is too, but it doesn’t seem like it. She’s part of the conspiracy, sure, but Rizzo’s conversation with Narek implies that she’s a pawn they’re manipulating. It’s possible that Oh is indeed Tal Shiar, while Rizzo and Narek are Zaht Vash. Also, Oh asserts that they’ve only got “one more chance”, while Rizzo mentions a “nest” – they’ve pretty much confirmed at this point that there’s more than two androids, but possibly Oh doesn’t know about the others. I have a bad feeling this conspiracy is going to get needlessly complicated.
  • Also, Rizzo’s first reaction when Oh tells her about Picard is pretty much, “So you want me to kill him?” And Oh’s reaction is pretty much, “If anyone’s going to kill Picard, it’ll be me.”
• There’s a big upgrade to Romulan mythology here with the Romulans are secretive and insular not simply because they started out as an analog for Red China in the days when American pop culture perceptions played up the idea of the Chinese as “mysterious” and “inscrutable”, but rather for the somewhat less racist reason that there is some terrible secret of space they must protect at all cost.
• What are the Romulans doing with the defunct cube anyway? If Romulans have this huge cultural bugaboo about cybernetics, wouldn’t they just blow it up rather than trying to save the borg? Also, saving the borg seems awfully, um, “nice” for the Romulans. I mean, even if they were a culture known for philanthropy, the Romulans have fallen on hard times recently and this seems like a big undertaking that is outside their wheelhouse.
• I had to re-watch to catch that the new doctor on the Borg Cube is a Trill. I heard them say she went to Trill Polytech, but her facial markings are subtle enough that I couldn’t make them out the first time I watched it.
• Picard suffering from a degenerative neurological condition in the 2390s was part of the anti-time future in the series finale of TNG. Obviously, a lot of that timeline has already been taken off the table by changes in the behavior of the Enterprise crew, but apparently that timeline wasn’t a total fiction.
• I like how Benayoun couches his diagnosis – the brain problem might be something treatable, but “treatable” here is down to whether he’s got a few months or a few years. Picard mentions that he’d been told it might be a problem some day, which I assume is a reference to “All Good Things”.
  • There, it was an excuse to have Picard’s former colleagues be skeptical of him: the old man’s gone space-senile, for parity with the past-Picard, whose crew was skeptical of him because they’d only just met, with present-Picard, who had the absolute faith of his crew, mediating. I am hopeful that there will be no attempt at playing this off as a reason for people to doubt Picard’s sanity later.
• I dig fauxhawk Romulan and I don’t know why exactly.
• Oh, turns out that Soji’s last name is “Asha”, not “Aster”.
• During the Previously…, Dahj’s death is re-cut so that it’s clear that yes, the gun exploded, not Dahj herself. I guess I’m not the only one who thought the visuals were weird.

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A Musing. This episode calls back a little to “All Good Things”, of course. We’ve observed already that the anti-time future has diverged significantly from the canonical one. Assuming that Q hadn’t contrived the circumstances of that timeline to begin with, some of the divergences are fairly straightforward. In the anti-time future, the Enterprise crew had drifted apart not long after the end of the series. This would’ve changed the circumstances of the movie-era. If, for example, Geordi had left the Enterprise by the time of Generations, it likely wouldn’t have been destroyed. And changes to the outcome of Insurrection could easily have altered Starfleet’s character following the Dominion War. Somewhat harder to explain is the fact that the Romulan supernova doesn’t appear to have happened in the anti-time future. What’s up with that? From what we know, my best guess is that it is related to the change in Picard’s career path. In Picard, he retired as an admiral. But in “All Good Things”, he’d become an ambassador instead. The version of events from Countdown has it that Spock had worked with Nero to prevent the destruction of Romulus, but bureaucratic interference from both the Empire and the Federation had delayed the process too much. Perhaps where Admiral Picard had led an ill-fated rescue armada, Ambassador Picard instead had succeeded in normalizing diplomatic relations with the Romulans years sooner, making it possible for Spock to act more quickly and save Romulus outright, only for it to later fall to a more aggressive Klingon Empire.

Well here we go. I’m not over the moon, but I liked it. So far they’ve mostly avoided the places I’d feared they were going to go, and there’s a healthy dose of, “Let’s just go fucking nuts,” in the premise.

We actually open on the Enterprise-D, which hasn’t received a visual reboot the way the TOS era did; the design of the ship is largely unchanged, though the color seems more gray and less blue, and the texture of the hull is more pronounced. Data and Picard are playing poker in Ten-Forward. Data’s in the TNG Movie-era uniform, while Picard is in his civvies, and isn’t really acting like the Captain Picard we remember; he’s much more relaxed and casual, teasing Data about his tell (Which Picard recognizes as a deliberate misdirection). If we were to understand this scene as occurring in the “real world” of the show, in the timeframe leading up to Generations, Picard would seem out-of-character, but the scene is coded with an otherwordliness that makes it clear that it’s a dream being had by an older Picard who has cast off the formality and sense of duty that comes with command. Data successfully bluffs Picard by virtue of having five queens, and Picard is surprised to notice Mars out the window just before it explodes.

In his waking reality, it’s between twenty and thirty years since the destruction of the Enterprise-D, and Picard is a decade retired from Starfleet, writing books about military history and running Chateau Picard with his housekeepers Laris and Zhaban, who are Romulan refugees, hopefully to infuriate any Trump supporters still watching. Picard’s agreed to an interview about his involvement in the destruction of Romulus a decade earlier (They play up that it’s the anniversary of the supernova, though it seems to be like the twelfth anniversary I think?), but the interviewer is a total jerk and goads him, despite having promised not to mention it, into dumping the backstory on us about why he’s retired. So the backstory is that Picard convinced the Federation to assemble a massive armada to evacuate the Romulans, and put him in charge of it. The attack we saw in “Children of Mars” happened while the armada was being assembled, and in its wake, all synthetic beings were banned and the evacuation of Romulus was cancelled, and Picard disagreed with the former and was apalled by the latter, and quit in protest.

Meanwhile, we have a cute date between Dahj and her boyfriend in Boston where they celebrate her getting into the Daystrom Institute and then a bunch of helmeted bad guys beam in and murder him and rough her up and put a bag over her head and get ready to kidnap her. Only Dahj “activates” and discovers she is able to trivially murder them all. She also has a vision of Picard, who she later recognizes when the interview airs. So she schleps over to France to see if an elderly vintner knows why she has superpowers all of a sudden, and Picard is surprisingly cool with all this. Picard and company put her up for the night, and Picard has another dream about Data, this time at the vineyard in his TNG uniform, painting a picture which is almost but not quite the same as the one he has hanging over his desk. Dahj has gone on the run again for fear of endangering anyone else, so Picard hops over to San Francisco to have a look at his private stash in the Starfleet Museum’s archives. Turns out that the painting in Picard’s office is one of a pair Data painted thirty years ago called “Daughter”, and while the subject is facing away in Picard’s copy, the one in the archive has Dahj’s face.

Dahj calls her mom from Paris, who acts super sketch and tells her to go find Picard. Dahj tries to question this, since her mom very clearly knows what is going on and won’t tell her, but she feels compelled to hack the internets to track Picard down instead. They meet up in San Francisco and he tells her that he thinks she’s an android. Dahj does not take this well because remember, in this world, synthetics are basically The Boogeyman. Picard tries to assure her even if her dad is an android, he was pretty great and she is not any less real or good and she probably isn’t a mass-murdering psychopath (That is literally what she is afraid of when Picard tells her she’s an android). Then the bad guys chase them up a building. She murders a bunch of them (one of them gets beamed up as he’s falling off the roof), and she unhelmets one of them so we can see that they’re Romulan. The last attacker pukes acid on her (This is not a normal thing Romulans can do) and she explodes. Picard is knocked unconscious and wakes up back at the chateau where Laris and Zhabin take the whole, “I got assaulted by an army of space ninjas who exploded the girl I was protecting,” thing in stride. Picard declares that he’s done enough winemaking and history-book-writing and it’s time to start acting like a CBS All-Access Original Streaming Adventure Series hero, and zips off to the Daystrom Institute to ask our next new regular to exposition at him.

The Institute has an android department, but there’s not much to it since building androids has been illegal for a decade. Doctor Jurati tells him that making a sentient meat android is impossible (Yeah, meat; there’s no question that Dahj was physically close to human), but then she goes into more detail and says that vat-growing a meat-android body is actually not that big a deal, but no one had ever been able to create an artificial sentience like Data’s. Then she shows off the disassembled body of Data’s brother B-4, and confirms that the download Data did back in Nemesis didn’t take. But when Picard shows him Dahj’s necklace, Jurati recognizes it as the symbol of a crazy idea her former boss (who disappeared after the android ban) had where you could take a single cell from Data’s brain and use it to clone yourself a pair of new sentient android brains. Which could be glued into a vat-grown meat-body. Which means that Dahj has a twin sister somewhere.

“Somewhere” is the Romulan Reclamation Site, where Soji Aster is a medical doctor tending to Romulan refugees. She meets a young cute Romulan named Narek who in poor light looks enough like Ethan Peck’s Ungroomed Spock that I was confused for a bit. They hit it off, with her clearly not noticing how he is subtly coded as evil, and we end on the camera pulling back to reveal that the Reclamation Site is built on a defunct Borg Cube.

Wooh. Wow. This actually covered way less ground than I was expecting. And I’m largely happy about that. There’s a nicely slow pace to it, with things taking time to unfold. The only downside to it is that there’s a lot about where the plot is going that has a strong air of inevitability, and a slow pace combined with inevitability can make you start longing for them to just get on with it – I’d find the slow pace more comfortable if by the top of act two, you weren’t already dead certain that Old Man Picard is going to go have fun adventures in space. I live in fear that the show will descend into a string of, “How do we keep Picard from just solving the whole plot a quarter of the way through the season?”

But I shouldn’t really worry; they’ve given me no cause to. I mean, possibly the thing I like best about this episode is something that is almost gobsmackingly conspicuous by its absence: the refusal of the call.

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned my disdain for the Campbellian Monomyth before. But I hate it. Campbell was convinced that all epic adventure stories followed the same basic pattern, and because of how influential he was in the publishing of sci-fi/fantasy, he basically caused it to be true, to the point that it’s much harder to get published or produced if your story does not cleanly follow the outline of his One True Plot. One of the biggest indicators of that plot is the bit at the bottom of act 1 where the hero has been Called to Adventure, but refuses. He doesn’t want to leave the Shire to go take the One Ring to Mount Doom; especially when he’s got to help Uncle Owen on the moisture farm. The initial conditions for Star Trek: Picard seem to scream for this scene. For Old Man Picard to turn Dahj away because he’s “not that man anymore” and he just wants to be a humble farmer and take his dog for walks and drink his Tea, Earl Grey, Hot. And he only gets forced into action when the bad guys burn down the chateau (boy would that be a kick in the feels, since Picard undoubtedly has a sensitive nerve about the fact that his brother died in a fire at the chateau) scourge the shire and torch the moisture farm.

But that just doesn’t happen. The instant Dahj shows up, there’s no question of him helping her, and no question of how far he’ll go to do it. There is, in fact, no bullshit whatsoever in this episode – though I’m not optimistic some won’t show up as we go on; pretty sure there is a “Picard goes to Starfleet Command to ask them to give him a ship and they respond with bureaucratic bullshit,” episode coming up. Everyone is helpful; everyone believes everyone else; no one lies for dumb reasons or withholds information for dumb reasons. ’90s Star Trek was plagued by this constant need to have people who are experts and professionals and well-versed in how weird the universe is suddenly act like unprofessional morons who are randomly skeptical of anything they haven’t seen before and several things that they have, all in the name of “conflict”. Discovery showed us that Star Trek can find other ways to deliver conflict and character drama than people just being jerks to each other, and Picard embraces that wholeheartedly.

What I’m not crazy about is the pacing. There are three big expository scenes in this episode, and they go over kinda like a lead balloon. Picard’s interview is awkward and kinda ugly and there just to drop the backstory about Picard quitting Starfleet. Picard’s conversation with Dahj, where he tells her she’s an android. That’s a big emotional moment, and Patrick Stewart is doing a great job, but again, it sort of brings the forward momentum of the story to a crash, and I spent a lot of it wondering how wise it is to accuse someone of being a secret android in public right in front of a Starfleet facility given that androids are illegal. The third scene, with Dr. Jurati, is carried well enough by Allison Pill being adorkable and Patrick Stewart being Patrick Stewart. But after the big action set-piece and Picard’s declaration that he’s going to go do adventuring again, “Picard has a long talk with an academic” is not the most natural place for the story to go.

Continue reading Some Blundering about Star Trek: Picard 1×01 “Remembrance”

Star Trek, in the Discovery era, is a show which is much more about people than about plot. That’s largely how television in general works these days, and I’m pretty much all for it. Sure, there’s been times when Discovery has fallen short in its plot logic, but I tend to find that far less offputting than a flaw in character logic. One of the aspects that has aged poorly from ’90s Trek is how often character logic is sacrificed in the name of the plot. From the constant and mundane, “Characters experience severe personal trauma that should affect them for years but which is never mentioned again,” to the more acute, “This week, the galaxy’s greatest engineer is a complete moron because otherwise the plot would be solved 30 minutes too early,” or the recurring, “Despite having worked closely with these people for seven years, no one notices that their crewmate has been possessed by alien ghosts.” And heaven forfend the writers actually have a social point to make, in which case all of the sudden Riker will reveal that he’s actually an overt racist so that he can learn how racism is bad.

If Discovery is more about character than plot, that’s double – nay, quadruple true for Short Treks. We’ve had none of them so far, and they’ve all been far more about character study than about any particular events. Tilly. Saru. Mudd. Craft. Una. Edward. Sidhu. Ephraim. Proxy-Michael-Burnham. Now, this recent run of five has been a bit strange, because who are these characters anyway? In the first season, two of the minisodes were about series regulars and the third was about a recurring villain. The last one is weird, because it’s a character we never see before or after, but it’s so damn good that I don’t care. This time, the focus characters, excepting Michael, are all one-offs, it’s not clear yet how these stories will tie in with what’s to come, and three of them, while good, aren’t in and of themselves compelling enough for me to really understand why I should bother with the emotional investment.

“Children of Mars” is, again, a character study of a pair of one-off characters we’re probably not going to see again. It’s very different from “Q&A”, “The Trouble With Edward” and “Ask Not”, though, in that it’s very clear why this story is here and how it impacts what’s to come. It is, as is probably the ideal mode for Short Treks, a side-story. The main story of the minisode is not really relevant per se, but it’s a story which happens simultaneously with and whose climax is driven by what I can only assume is the key backstory of Star Trek: Picard.

So here’s the story: Kima and Lil are two grade school students who don’t get along and whose parents happen to both work at the Utopia Planetia shipyards on Mars (where, for the sake of continuity, the Enterprise-D was built, but that’s only very broadly relevant). Lil is having a particularly bad day (her dad just told her he’s not coming home for her birthday) and takes it out by launching an escallating tit-for-tat series of scuffles with Kima, culminating in a knock-down drag-out assault in the halls.

Then, while they’re in detention, Mars gets carpet bombed.

This is a very visual epsiode. There’s hardly any dialogue, but it communicates a lot. Like, we have sympathy for Lil, because we start by seeing her home life, how upset she is by her father’s very straightforward, “I’m an ’80s Family Movie Dad Who Puts Career Ahead of Family.” And this is absolutely critical to come first because otherwise, I think we’d be inclined to hate her. There’s a lot coding her as the one we’re supposed to hate. Very straightforwardly, “she started it”: she pushes Kima for no reason, and causes her to miss the shuttle. But also, Lil is human and white and she’s got a kind of patrician bearing to her, and her father is a manager and she hangs up on him in anger. She’s got a clique. Kima is an alien. With face-bumps and neon blue blood and a really long tongue (I mean Gene Simmons-long, not Madame Vastra long). Her mom is a greasemonkey. Kima and her mom wiggle their tongues at each other in what is clearly a cultural show of affection. The principal eyes her suspiciously at one point for no clear reason. Her attacks on Lil are unsophisticated and childish. Everything about the pair is deliberately designed, even in this futuristic egalitarian post-capitalism society to code Lil as a snobby rich kid and Kima as a working-class kid from an immigrant family who gets bullied for not “fitting in”.

There’s lots of other things about the episode visually that make this world feel real in a way that ’90s Trek rarely did. Now, I’m a big defender of the way Trek has depicted Starfleet as real, real stiff – an idea that goes back to Roddenberry’s original concept of Starfleet as being a very different breed of person than the common man, people who are always very formal, very clean, very stiff (And I think there are some places in the canon which do a great job at justifying this – space is hard, and even the pros stand significant chance of death). But this isn’t Starfleet; this is Earth. Se we have a school full of kids who are messing around on their phones. The only difference from modern teenagers is that the phones have holographic screens. The kids in the hall cheer Kima and Lil on when they come to blows. The school itself is very big and very clean and very airy, but it still looks recognizably schoolish. The principal is a Vulcan but he’s coded so hard as a principal that you just know it by looking at him.

There are oddities too, though. The shuttle that takes them to school is the same model we see in Discovery. Two of the ships under construction at the shipyards are the same class as the Corbett, and two more are a class I haven’t seen before, but they look like possibly a TOS/Discovery take on the Miranda class – a very TOS-era looking saucer with two round nacelles underneath like pontoons. The staff at the school use handheld flip-communicators rather than commbadges (They do have screens, though. which is probably why). In fact, the first thing that actively positions the episode in time comes only a minute or so before the end, when a screen shows Jean-Luc Picard, identified as an admiral expressing shock at the attack. Now, I knew this was a prequel to the new Picard series, and you have to imagine everyone else did too. But the visual design of this episode makes me think that possibly they meant for that to be a surprise. By showing us nothing that placed this in the post-Nemesis era, perhaps we weren’t actually supposed to think it was set in the twenty-fifth (fourth? I think some of the Picard stuff claims that it’s set in the 2390s, but that doesn’t seem like enough time after the end of the ’90s Trek era) century until they showed us Picard? That would also explain why the title card – which is done in Crilee, the TNG episode title font, rather than the TOS font used for the other minisodes – only appears at the end.

It’s also weird that the news report only claims three thousand casualties when what we see looks like carpet bombing across the entire surface of a planet that, at this point in Trek history, is supposed to have many major cities on it. And I’m not quite sure I am happy to accept the entire, “Oh I have a lot of work on Mars and can’t come home for your birthday,” thing in the TNG era. It’s – I can’t believe I am saying this – only Mars. Especially after Discovery had this whole thing where Cornwall and Sarek could basically show up anywhere in the entire galaxy at any time with no notice, I don’t feel like Mars-to-Earth is plausible as more than an ordinary sort of daily commute. (Hm…  I guess I can’t be one hundred percent sure that this is meant to be set on Earth. Technically they could be on some more distant planet I guess). Why aren’t these girls on Mars with their parents anyway? That’s what I’d expected from the trailer, a story of two rivals who become friends while surviving some kind of disaster that strikes at their school on Mars. Instead, “Children of Mars” as a title is figurative: they are “Children of Mars” in that their formative experience is born out of the tragedy. Mars is metropolitan in the TNG era, not some remote outpost. There’s a tacit implication here that Mars is kinda like an oil rig or something. That Mars is not… a… place… to… raise… your… Oh. Y’got me, “Children of Mars”.

The big “this is important going forward” thing, of course, is the nature of the attackers. They fly nondescript black kite-shaped ships and are described as “rogue synths.” Combined with the Picard trailer, it seems pretty straightforward here that we’re dealing with androids. Probably Starfleet-manufactured androids, possibly based on study of Data’s corpse. I mean, sure, “Starfleet would like to take Data apart and figure out how to make a whole army of him,” was, in fact, the plot of a TNG episode. But still, with Discovery‘s presumed decision to base its third season plot on Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, having Picard‘s backstory appear to have been cribbed from Battlestar Galactica is making me pessimistic. “Starfleet created an army of android slaves but they went rogue and want to overthrow their former masters,” is not a place I want Star Trek to boldly go.

I hope we’ll see Kima and Lil again. Probably in a small role. My impression is that this attack depicted here is meant to be the inciting event prompting Picard’s retirement (either directly, or with a few more steps in the middle), so this is likely set many years before the series. I’m curious what becomes of them. The minisode ends with the girls acknowledging their shared pain and holding hands, but since there is literally nothing after that in the episode, it’s not really payoff. Hardly, “The day two enemies became friends,” that the trailer promised. It is quite literally the beginning of their story, so I hope it goes somewhere. Somewhere good, not “They grow up to be obstructionist bureaucrats who hinder Picard because they blame him for dropping the ball on the Mars thing.” I don’t want obstructionist bureaucrats in my Star Trek any more. I got enough of that in the TNG era. I got so much of it that I kept misreading the actually-turns-out-they’re-not-obstructionist-bureaucrats in Discovery.

As a means of doing compelling character drama while conveying some important elements of backstory and foreshadowing, I really appreciate this one. The fact that it’s such a downer keeps it in the realm of “appreciate” more than “love” though. Three night beasts out of four.

So, the pattern. As previously discussed, I seem to like the even-numbered Short Treks more than the odd-numbered ones, and having selectively chosen to place this episode in the number 5 slot, I have self-fulfilled the prophecy.

The story isn’t bad or anything. But, like “Ask Not”, it lacks the Mad Fun of “The Trouble With Edward” and “Ephraim and Dot”. More than any of the minisodes we’ve had so far this interseason, it feels like a preface to the upcoming third season of Discovery. Whether it’s meant in a narrative sense or just a metaphorical one remains to be seen, and I guess could go both ways.

Even though it lacks “Ephraim and Dot”‘s mad whimsey, “The Girl Who Made the Stars” is far from being a conventional episode, though. It does have an in-universe presumably-canon framing device (There’s an obvious reason, but I feel like it might have been nice to have done the framing sequence as live-action rather than animation for this reason), but the story proper is a fable.

The story, told to a young Michael Burnham by her father, is a version of a story from, I think, the Saan people of south-western Africa. As an adult, Michael would allude to a different version of the myth in reference to the Red Signals. It’s a combination of a Just-So story and a coming of age story (The original myth sounds like it may be a parable about menarche).

In the story, the First People were hunter-gatherers. Soil-exhaustion prevented them from transitioning to agriculture, as they could not expand their farming range farther than a single day’s travel for fear of the Night Beast which stalked the starless night.

A young girl defies the tribe’s elder and sets out on her own at night, determined to prove that there’s arable land over the horizon. She almost falls victim to the Night Beast (a big-ass flying snake), but it’s scared off by the light of a falling star. The girl follows the star to find an otherworldly being. It commands her to lead her people out into the universe, and gifts her with a glowing orb. On returning to her tribe, she responds to their chastisement by breaking open the orb, releasing starlight to fill the night sky. The little girl would grow up to be a great explorer and a great warrior, shown (though the narration doesn’t give details) as an adult slaying the Night Beast.

This is a cute and pleasant story and I have no real objection to it. One thing I particularly like is that Mike Burnham refers to the otherworldly being as repairing its ship and taking off, and he quietly includes the concept of soil exhaustion in the backstory. Obviously, an actual ancient African myth in its original form would have the visitor be explicitly supernatural. But this is a twenty-third century dad telling a story to his twenty-third century daughter. Of course he’s going to unthinkingly describe the otherworldly being who falls to Earth from space in terms of an alien whose ship made an emergency landing. I like that he’s not coy about it. If I tried to tell this story to my kids, they’d absolutely suggest that it was an alien. There’s an obvious stylistic contradiction in that this story is set in a universe where stars aren’t naturally occurring but come out of a magic orb, but who cares? A writer writing a fantasy story might object, but a dad telling his daughter a bedtime story?

And I like that the Night Beast is “real” within the context of the story – it’s not a baseless superstition. There really are monsters out there in the dark, and the light of knowledge doesn’t dispel them, rather it equips us to defeat them. That’s a pretty darn Star Trek sentiment. That kind of mixing of real and fantasy is how myths really work, and that’s something that modern retellings of ancient myths often downplays – because ancient myths aren’t, by and large, our myths, we tend to retell them from an outsider perspective, fixing them and pinning them down in a canonical form, and making sure they’re devoid of anachronism. So I dig a story that treats the myth as a living thing that can adapt itself to fit the sensibilities of the audience.

In light of all that, then, why do I say that I don’t like this one as much as the even-numbered episodes? Well obviously, there’s the question of, “What’s this doing here?” What light does this story shed on the rest of the Star Trek universe. Based on the Discovery season 3 trailer, I feel like the primary relevance of this story is allegorical. I am not overly crazy about Discovery trying to morph itself into a remake of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda to begin with, but there certainly seems to be a thematic resonance here. The trailer places symbolic import in the reveal of a future-past Federation flag, one showing only a few stars. When you take into account that the nameless girl of the fable is the same CGI model as young Michael Burnham, it seems like they’re laying on pretty thick that it is Michael’s Big-D-Destiny to “Bring Light to the Universe” and “Slay the Beast in the Darkness”. It’s all a bit The Chosen One for me.

But even this is a fairly modest complaint. The much harsher criticism I have of “The Girl Who Made the Stars” is this:

It looks like hot garbage.

“Ephraim and Dot” was very stylized. It mixed a few disparate elements in its art style, drawing mostly from Disney for the visual style of Ephraim, and a sort of comic book style for the Enterprise with a few other things going on there which all worked together to give the whole thing an air of not-quite-reality that helped you remember to not take it too seriously (and if you really want, you can also interpret it as a visual interpretation of the fact that we are watching these events from the perspective of a being that does not experience reality the same way we do).

“The Girl Who Made the Stars” is straight-up Pixar-style CGI animation. And the big problems here are, one, that it is Pixar’s visual style being used on precisely the things that style is least good at – normal human beings – and two, this was clearly not made on a Pixar budget by animators of Pixar’s skill. Both animated shorts look like they were made on the cheap, but “Ephraim and Dot” wisely chooses to give us a slightly surreal world. “The Girl Who Made the Stars” gives us Mike and Michael Burhnam having a conversation in a bedroom on a Starfleet space station, only she’s got Anime Eyes, her lips don’t move quite right and she’s made of plastic. They’re using a visual style that maximizes the uncanny valley effect, and on top of that, they aren’t even doing an especially great job at it.

Maybe there’s going to be a more literal connection between these events and season 3 of Discovery. Certainly the premise as we understand it so far isn’t going to be enough on its own to carry the show with the strength it had last season. So maybe the Night Beast or the alien who gave the girl the power to make the stars will have some more direct counterparts to help flesh out the story. “Discovery tries to restore the fallen Federation,” is not honestly a good enough story arc, but it could be a good enough background premise in which to tell a good enough story arc about something else. That would be nice.

In any case, I’ll give this one a solid two Space Lincolns out of four.

 

Hm. Upon reflection, Space Lincoln is not really all that distinctive when changed from color to monochrome.

We’ll return for “Children of Mars”, which I’m told is a prelude to Star Trek: Picard. See you then.

First, a leftover observation from “Ask Not”:

The episode ends with Pike dropping Cadet Sidhu off in Engineering. As in, he walks her to the door and shows her the engine room, and just leaves. He doesn’t hand her off to anyone. He doesn’t even point and say, “That guy over there? He’s your new chief. Go ask him for your first assignment.” Is that a normal thing to do? In fact, it kinda looks like the place he drops her off is like some kind of balcony overlooking engineering without any obvious way to get down from there to the rest of the ridiculously huge engine room. Is this another test?

Anyway, “Ephraim and Dot”. I was a little unsure about doing these in this order because Wikipedia and Memory Alpha disagree on the order of the episodes. But putting it here makes a certain pattern emerge: “Q&A” was pretty much just a straight vignette giving a B-plot from a hypothetical Star Trek series set on Pike’s Enterprise. So was “Ask Not”. Between them was “The Trouble With Edward”, a short little dive into utter lunacy that is just fucking nuts and I love it to pieces, and I’m sure the fanboys will all get angry because they want Star Trek to be SRS BSNS and be more obsessive about continuity.

If they’re working to a pattern then, it might make sense that if episodes 1 and 3 are played-straight Traditional Star Trek b-plots, then episode 4 would, like episode 2, be something wacky.

“Ephraim and Dot” is Star Trek doing Tom and Jerry. You should leave now if you can’t handle that.

The short begins in the style of a Black and White, 16 millimeter, ’50s educational short film about the life cycle of the interstellar tardigrade. I have not explained much about interstellar tardigrades in Trek, but Discovery season 1 established that man-sized tardigrades have an innate ability to navigate magic mushroom space purely of their own volition. That’s why Hugh got himself tardigraded up. In the real world, tardigrades are cute little near-microscopic critters that became trendy in pop science for a while because they’re cute and they’re weird and they have shown impressive resistance to conditions such as heat, cold, radiation, high pressures, low pressures, and space.

One of the large interstellar variety, named Ephraim (Nothing in the show actually tells us which one is Ephraim and which one is Dot, and the traditional style of these cartoons would imply that the tardigrade’s name should come second, as it’s the prey, like Jerry or Tweety or the Roadrunner. But there’s an established “DOT-7” model of robot in Discovery and real-world tardigrades were discovered by Johann August Ephraim Goeze, so draw your own conclusions), is looking for a safe place to lay her eggs when the Enterprise bumps into her asteroid.

Ephraim pokes around it a bit, giving us a chance to see Kirk and McCoy meeting Khan through a window. Dot, a maintenance robot, identifies Ephraim as an intruder and pops outside to taze her. But Dot falls through the service hatch, causing a tumble and a chase to ensue.

Ephraim eventually finds herself in the warp core, where it lays its eggs. Dot catches up and drags the tardigrade away, almost jettisoning it, but Ephraim gives the robot the slip and buries it in a pile of tribbles. Dot finally manages to eject Ephraim while a shirtless Sulu threatens Kirk with an epee outside.

Using the mycelial network, Ephraim chases the Enterprise past the giant glowing green hand of Apollo, past the doomsday machine, through the Tholian web, and around Space Lincoln. It finally catches up to a refitted Enterprise as it battles the Reliant, and enters the ship through a hole blasted by Kruge’s Bird of Prey. Dot roughs the tardigrade up pretty good, but Ephraim goes full-on Mama Water Bear and is about to clobber Dot with a wrench but a pile of debris falls toward the clutch of eggs.

Dot tazes the distracted Ephraim again and forces it out an airlock. But when the robot returns to putting out fires from the battle, it notices one of the eggs. It locates the clutch just as the computer announces the self-destruct sequence.

Ephraim rushes back toward the Enterprise, but is cold-cocked by the explosion, waking up just in time to see the flaming wreck do its final death-dive into the atmosphere of the Genesis planet. A badly damaged Dot drifts by, and Ephraim prepares to vent her rage on it, but Dot opens its chest panel to reveal a pile of happy tardigrade hatchlings. The nature film narrator muses on what adventures might await them as Ephraim clutches Dot to her chest in a (water) bear hug and the happy family magic mushrooms away.

This is adorable. It feels very Chuck Jones, despite the fact that it doesn’t really fit the usual pattern – those cartoons always focused on the pursuer getting battered as fate favored the plucky prey animal. You never really worry about Jerry the way you worry about Ephraim, because you know that Tom’s the one who’s about to get an anvil on his head. One thing that they do particularly well here is that you feel entirely sympathetic to both of them. Dot is just doing its job; Ephraim is an intruder. And Dot isn’t even being mean about it or anything. It even says, “Live long and prosper,” when it kicks Ephraim out the airlock the first time. Ephraim isn’t taunting Dot or trying to cause trouble. It’s not clear how much Dot understands about what it’s encountering on the Enterprise, but, like, it starts out trying to dig a hole in the side of the ship, and that’s not really something they can just let slide.

I feel like there’s probably a better match for the archetype they’re homaging here than Tom and Jerry, but I can’t recall a specific one (I feel like I have literally seen an old Warner cartoon where the pursuer finally succeeds in evicting the prey, then discovers that aw shucks it was only guarding its babies, and has to go out and rescue its vanquished foe).

It’s real cute. It’s also a bit of an egg hunt in the non-literal sense as well, as a big chunk of the episode is excuses to play archive footage. This sort of thing often bothers me, but here, I’m cool with it, since it’s all down to little background details rather than intruding on the story. One oddity of the structure, though, is that it clearly is meant to take place over the course of years (this is set up early, as the nature film narrator mentions that tardigrade eggs take a long time to hatch), but it is not edited to make it feel like a montage – rather, the action feels continuous. Maybe that points to something else, since it’s established that tardigrades have an unusual relationship with time.

The animation is… Well, it’s not great, to be honest, but it’s passable. It’s a cel-shaded computer animation style that reminds me a lot of the past few generations of Transformers. Elements don’t quite meld correctly. Dot, for instance, looks very CGI, in a way that makes you imagine it’s supposed to look like it was added in post – just as a DOT-7 would look in live-action Discovery. The human characters look sort of flat and slightly uncanny. They remind me of the flash-animated reconstructions that the BBC has done for some of the missing Doctor Who episodes, where it’s an uncomfortable mix of the minimalism of old Filmation stuff and the hyper-realism of Ralph Bakshi’s rotoscoped stuff. The Enterprise itself has a kind of comic book look, and if you told me that the short was actually meant to look like a comic book overall, I’d buy it. Ephraim, on the other hand, has elements of Disney-cute mixed with a Warner toon’s immateriality. It moves very fluidly and stretches and snaps and springs like a Looney Tune. And, of course, there’s the fact that it is incredibly obviously modeled on Stitch.

Other visual elements are all over the place. The M-113 salt monster which appears as part of the nature film’s opening sequence looks great and a bit Scooby-Doo. The planet-eater looks awful. Lincoln doesn’t look like Lincoln at all, but possibly he does look like Lee Bergere.

Most interesting for fans, of course, is the TOS-era Enterprise. It’s done in the Discovery style, with the double pylons, long shuttle bay, and lots of red detailing in hallways that have windows everywhere. This was to be expected, of course, though according to some of the people that worked on the Constitution-class redesign for Discovery, one of their design principles was make changes that could conceivably have been “removed” in later refits – leaving open the possibility that by Kirk’s time, the Enterprise would’ve been “upgraded” to its classic look.

The Enterprise as it appears in the Star Trek II and Star Trek III scenes is pretty much unmodified from the movie-era design, meaning that we might well assume that Discovery’s “visual reboot” only covers the TOS era – that’s pretty consistent with my general feeling that while the visual style of Discovery does not fit in with TOS, it does actually look very plausible as “A few years before the movie era”. One particular oddity of the short, though: in those last scenes, the Enterprise’s hull is clearly marked NCC-1701-A. Which is not just wrong, but it undermines the plot of the episode: the whole point is that it’s the same ship. It’s weird if this is a mistake, and weirder if it’s on purpose. The Enterprise also shows far less damage from the battle with Reliant and far more from the battle with Kruge (Actually, the damage in that sequence looks more than anything like the Enterprise-A’s battle with Chang from Star Trek VI), and there’s one shot where the ventral hull markings are rotated about 45 degrees, which is weird. Again, getting the Enterprise’s hull markings right seems so straightforward it’s hard to imagine no one noticing they’d gotten it wrong, but what could it possibly mean if it were on purpose?

In the course of this article, I’ve deliberately avoided gendered pronouns for Ephraim and Dot, because this is real weird. Neither one of them actively asserts a gender (Though the narrator does use “her” for Ephraim once). Whether tardigrades have multiple sexes actually varies by species among real-world ones, but you’d think that egg-laying should code Ephraim as female, while being the pursuer in a Chuck Jones-style cartoon should code Dot as male. But to be honest, insofar as either character seems to be deliberately gender-coded, I feel like the writers imagined Ephraim as male and Dot as female. Especially given that they gave them names that aren’t especially gender-neutral. Or that the baby tardigrades literally gestate in a compartment in Dot’s abdomen. But I certainly wouldn’t call anyone wrong who interpreted them as any other combination of genders you like.

As with the other minisodes, I can’t really see how this one might be prefacing events from the next season of Discovery, but it’d be hella cool if it did. I’m giving this one three and a half needlessly sci-fi gimp hoods out of four.

 

I shall return after Christmas to address “The Girl Who Made the Stars”.