A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

And now, the conclusion.

I’m still processing my feelings here. I think this finale needed more time to breathe. They managed to still have ten minutes for winding things down, but there’s so many prongs to the story that it gets cluttered. You can see why last season, they finished up with the Borg in episode 9.

I mean look, we go with all this going on:

• The Titan has to defend Earth from the fleet
• The assimilated Titan crew is trying to retake the ship
• Picard’s trying to save Jack
• Someone’s got to defeat the Borg queen
• The Enterprise has to destroy the transmitter
• Worf and Riker have to fight the Borg
• Also it would be nice if everyone got out alive

One negative consequence of this is that when we get to the climax, it feels like the plot keeps blocking on a mutex. The Enterprise makes it to the beacon and then has to wait while Picard tries to reach out to Jack. The Enterprise destroys the beacon and the destruction of the Borg cube has to wait while Riker and Worf go back for Picard and Troi locates them. Spacedock is destroyed, and the fleet targets every city on Earth… Then instead of attacking, waits for several minutes because the cast is busy elsewhere. Most egregiously, when the Enterprise destroys the beacon, the Titan crew keep carrying out their Borg orders (You hear a line which I think is meant to indicate that they’re defaulting to carrying out their last order when the signal is lost?) retaking the bridge, pointing their phasers at Seven and the gang… And then they just wait for like 30 seconds while we cut back to Jupiter to see the destruction of the Borg cube, and it’s only then, when the cube explodes, that the young’uns of the Titan de-Borgify and stand down. I have talked before about how different media have different modes of expression. This story structure really suffers from being a bad match with how the medium of Television expresses simultaneity. You really want a feeling of immediacy in a lot of these scenes, the sense that the fleet targeting Earth, the Titan crew breaching the bridge, the destruction of the beacon and the subsequent explosion of the cube all happen at effectively the same time, but of course they don’t. And it’s not just “Those two scenes took place at the same time but had to be shown serially.” There are logical interlocks in the plot. There’s no clear reason for the causal relationship between the destruction of the cube and the crew coming back to themselves when the loss of Jack’s signal clearly didn’t have that effect.

The whole structure of the episode is kind of dicey, in fact. Down to the whole ‘ONE YEAR LATER’ ending which feels a little confused about how much time has passed. There’s a conflict – similar to the one we saw at the other end of the season – between the fact that the epilogue is a direct continuation of the preceding. scene and also the acknowledgement that we logically need some time to get to where the story is going to leave off. You can’t just cut to the next day and have Stardock rebuilt and Jack an officer. At the same time, a year actually seems awfully quick for either of those things to have happened – they even comment on how quickly Jack made it through officer training (Similarly, Season 2 may not have even been a whole year before the beginning of this season yet Seven not only became an officer, but worked her way up to Commander and was recommended for promotion?). Yet in other ways it doesn’t seem like any time has passed. It does not help that everyone is wearing the same clothes. But also, “One Year Later” starts with Geordi parking the Enterprise at the museum and powering it down (Which is weird; if it’s part of the museum, wouldn’t they want the lights on and the consoles lit up? I suppose it’s just that “Power down” is pithier than “Computer, reboot in demo mode”). It took a whole year to put the Enterprise back in the museum? Are we to understand that the Enterprise-D was pressed back into service for a full year while the fleet recovered? Troi is still planning that vacation “One year later” that she was planning instead of doing her damn job during Data’s therapy session (Where the hell does this scene take place? Are they on a starship? Are they all active duty again?) . Yes, Data is boring his therapist. Ha ha, very funny. The dude just came back from the dead, ate his brother, became mortal, had his psychology radically changed at a fundamental level, and narrowly escaped dying again. Yes of course he is going to need therapy and a lot of it is going to be repetitious. If Troi can’t handle that for a good friend, I question how well she’s going to do with the fact that literally everyone in Starfleet probably has serious PTSD, and every single one of them over 24 has the exact same story of narrowly surviving being murdered by their kids, while every single one of them under 24 has the exact same story of having their minds and free will stripped away and being forced to murder their colleagues.

But I’m meandering. This episode is so full of loving nods to the past it doesn’t really have time to let anything just grow. We open up with a message from the Federation President warning folks away from Earth, and there’s so much going on right out of the gate. Much of the text of the message is taken directly from the president’s warning in Star Trek IV – even to the point of emphasizing the signal that’s controlling people in a way that kind of buries the lede of “Everyone under 24 has turned into Borg”.

On top of all the nods to The One With The Whales, then, we’ve got who the president is: Anton Chekhov. And the fact that the president of the Federation has the same name as one of the greatest writers in Russian history. The fact that he is named for the guy whose name is an eponym for the law of conservation of drama that requires the gun from act 1 to be fired in act 3, and in a season whose whole modus operandi is to bring back a flurry of nods to things from the past thirty years. The fact that the character is voiced by Walter Koenig, playing his own son, is possibly the funniest thing in Star Trek since “He was an idiot.” Possibly longer. It’s so funny that I completely overlooked the fact that they didn’t actually name him after the Russian Playwright; they named him after the actor who played Chekhov in the JJ Abrams films. But that’s also very amusing.

Another thing about “There’s just so damn much going on that nothing has room to breathe” is that last week we ended with Picard in his iconic position in the center seat of the Enterprise-D… But that isn’t much of this episode. Picard almost immediately relinquishes command. It is necessary and right thematically to do the climax with Picard and Jack – that is how this story needs to go – but at the same time, you worked so hard to get these characters here for this thing, and you immediately send three of the four characters whose most traditional and iconic places are on the bridge off on an away mission. We go into the climax, into the Big Exciting Death Star Trench Run Sequence (I know it is more like the Death Star II sequence, but I prefer the name of the first one) with Geordi in command – a thing which I believe happens only one time in TNG (“The Arsenal of Freedom”, which is also the second of the what, three times they do the saucer separation sequence? Weird little thing; the saucer separation sequence was billed as the Big Cool Thing the ship could do, TNG’s version of Turbo Boost or Morphin’ Time, but it was expensive and required the other set of filming models and so they only used it for the absolute most dire of emergencies… And also “The Arsenal of Freedom” for no really clear reason) – and Beverly shooting the guns, and, at the key moment, Deanna flying the ship. I’m not saying I don’t like it – I do, point of fact, like getting some redemption after decades of jokes about her flying the ship when it crashed. But you went to all this trouble to give us the Iconic One True Enterprise Gang Team Up, only to immediately shuffle everyone around into new positions that, with the exception of Data, we haven’t really seen them take during the series (And even Data doing the flying during the Death Star Trench Run isn’t quite his normal role; he traditionally did the non-driving parts of “Just run the whole rest of the ship.”).

It’s all very nice, even so, just that this was a lot of effort for the payoff. They all roll in in classic formation and instantly Picard announces that he’s fucking off to give his son a Talking To (Man, a Big Damn Picard speech from your dad?), and so of course it makes sense that Riker, who is himself also a Starship Captain, would take over, while Picard beamed over with the medical doctor who might be able to help Jack overcome his condition, and is also his mom and is also probably redundant in her professional capacity because death is likely to come so swiftly there will be no call for medical treatment, and maybe the could take Geordi for his engineering skill, or Troi for her telepathic powers to sense and contact Jack.

Oh. No. Riker’s going with Picard, and Worf is making it a threesome (“Do you even listen to yourself?” Not a bad joke. Still wish they’d leant in on Riker being a swinger instead of a prude, though). Okay, Worf makes sense to take along. Would also make sense to leave behind to defend the Enterprise, but it works at least. Riker… There is no argument for Riker being there. Letting Riker command the ship makes so much more sense. Of course, we need him to go for the resolution, but it’s such a weirdly small element of it. Frankly, it would’ve made more sense to send Troi in the hopes she could reach Jack telepathically.

But okay, it works on a different level. Geordi and Data were always the “soft boys” of TNG; Riker, Picard, and Worf were the “hard boys”. I mean, it’s TNG, so Jean-Luc is the gentle service top and everyone else is a total bottom, but there’s definitely that second tier there. The “soft” gang stays on the ship, the “hard” gang has fun storming the castle, okay, team work makes the dream –

Wow. Almost instantly, Picard declares that he’s got to go off and do this alone while the others find the (rolls D20) transmitter beacon that is allowing Jack’s powers to connect with everyone back at Earth. Kinda looks like the singularity core from Event Horizon, doesn’t it? Or one of those dimensional cuisinart thingies from Cube 2. They get to have an Old Man Fight scene that isn’t all that interesting and do some poking at a computer. Eh. It’s fine. It’s actually pretty solidly TNG-era Star Trek, so that’s good.

By the way, let’s take a second here to reflect that Shaw was basically wrong: The OG Borg weren’t still out there. If we take the queen at the surface, this is it for the Borg. Their last stand. She’s cannibalizing the drones themselves from this last cube to keep herself alive after Admiral Janeway poisoned her decades ago. If the changelings hadn’t teamed up with her, the Borg would have been well and truly extinct within a decade.

Changelings, right. They sort that, I guess. Two lines of dialogue in the montage at the end: Crusher, having returned to Starfleet as an admiral, pays off that one line from a few weeks ago about one of the chemicals involved in Vadic’s mutation by installing a de-Borger-and-Changeling-Detector in the transporters. Makes it easy! And I don’t really object that much, since we’re kind of out of time. But just the sheer amount of stuff this season has picked up and discarded. The changelings were the “big bad” for the first eight episodes, and then Vadic gets blown out the front of the Titan, and that’s that. Catching the rest of the conspirators is basically an afterthought. The portal weapon was a misdirect. The recruiting center attack was a misdirect. Vadic was a misdirect. That’s clever in its way, but it means 80% of the series as a whole was a misdirect. That is too much misdirect. That is too much of the running time burned on irrelevancy. Nothing Worf and Raffi do before episode 8 really matters all that much. For all their work, for Raffi’s sacrifice, all they learn is what the Titan gang works out at exactly the same time. None of it matters, it’s just there to set up some character moments. So little of what happens actually matters. Vadic ditches the portal gun  to go chase the Titan into the nebula and that’s the end of it, because it was only ever meant to be a distraction from the theft of Picard’s corpse. But also the attack on the recruitment center was a distraction… Only it doesn’t actually distract anyone because it gets immediately pinned on a random patsy. What was any of this actually for? You can basically skip the entire season up to the last 5 minutes of episode 8 and the show makes no less sense, really.

This, of course, does not even come close to the level of missed opportunity in the wholesale discarding of the past two seasons. Look, if you don’t want to bring Allison Pill back, that’s fine, but at least a brief, “Can we contact our Borg allies?” “No because of the reason.” exchange? And why isn’t anyone else coming to help? Where are the Klingons? The Romulans? The Vulcan Science Fleet? Again, you can say, “They are all busy soiling themselves that the Borg are back and have effortlessly absorbed all of Starfleet,” but you should actually say that. Say, “The Klingons are setting up a defensive line at their border,” say, “The Vulcans are preparing for refugees.” Say, “The Romulans are sending thoughts and prayers.”  (Not directly related, but I’ll step ahead to the end and complain that during the final goodbyes at Ten Forward, Data should really be talking about going to Coppelius to meet that entire race that he’s technically the father of.)

Now I shall stop being upset by that and gush for a while, because the Death Star Trench Run was, indeed, very cool. And the Titan’s strafing runs against all of Starfleet… Well, conceptually cool at least; in practice, you don’t really get a good look at much, and they don’t get as much screen-time as you’d like, but they wisely decide to keep the camera on the Titan itself and let us get a good look at her bobbing and weaving. Both it and the D look far more elegant as they do their big action sequences than the Enterprise did in its several Exciting Space Action sequences in Strange New Worlds. The D, of course, is flatter and longer than the original Enterprise, so it is easier to work with in these dogfight scenes, but the Titan’s proportions are close to the Constitution Class it’s a revival of, so I guess they just had a long think about how to film it.

And the bit there where the Enterprise has to outrun the fireball? But they can’t get a lock on the away team? Riker upsets me greatly by telling his wife and child to get stuffed so he could go die with Jean-Luc, but I forgive that for the cool thing where his bond with Troi is strong enough that she can use her telepathy to find them, at which point she takes the wheel and flies the ship right up over the Borg Queen’s room. That is pretty cool. Riker does not mention Kestra when he’s saying his little “Eliza, my love, take your time; I’ll see you on the other side,” bit.

Missed opportunity to have Worf inappropriately say, “I too often think of your wife when I am facing death.” Just to lighten the mood.

But, of course, there’s the big climax. And there is a ton going on here. I’ve said before: The Borg are not TNG’s enemy. They fall into that role because TNG failed to provide a properly iconic enemy for itself. Q, of course, but he very quickly evolves into “Picard’s Wacky Godlike Uncle”. The Ferengi were a major stumble, clearly meant to be the “New Klingons”, but utterly unsuited to that role. The Cardassians get thrown in late in the series, but mostly to set them up for Deep Space Nine (And the retcon of a Cardassian war a few years before TNG, I think, is not healthy for the mythos, which benefitted greatly from the sense of TNG starting out during a long period of peace that had prompted Starfleet to become more bureaucratic, less militaristic, but also encouraged them to pursue projects like the Galaxy Class – cities that could in principle fly off into deepest space for decades). Rather, the Borg are Voyager‘s iconic enemy. The point of them in TNG is like a kind of sneak preview. The thing Enterprise did over and over but not well: “What would happen if the iconic enemy from generation 3 shows up in generation 2?” TNG does this sublimely with the Borg, largely because they used the Borg sparingly.

I bring this up because the finale of Picard does something interesting with the Borg: it presents them as still being Voyager’s enemy. It’s strange that they chose this very TNG-centric show in its most TNG-focused incarnation for this, but even without bringing back the casts of Deep Space Nine and Voyager (Seven and Tuvok’s cameo excepted, of course), the plot arc of the season is a direct follow-up not really to anything specific from TNG (The Borg Queen, as a concept, remember, is introduced only in First Contact, thus well into the Post-TNG phase of the era). The Changelings are seeking revenge for the crimes committed against them by Starfleet during the war; The Borg Queen too is seeking revenge for Admiral Janeway’s attack on the collective. Both attacks, interestingly, consisted of biological warfare. The Queen wants revenge. And more than that, in possibly the only point of continuity from season 2, she’s addicted to the presence of the hive and is going insane from the silence. And just as the Changelings have evolved in the face of the biological attack by Section 31, the Borg too are evolving in response; you get the impression that she doesn’t intend to go back to bolting on laser eyes and tubes and wires and cube ships; from now on, it’s biological assimilation, piracy, and lots and lots of killing. Even if she did get Jack a high end Locutus cosplay suit.

Which brings us to the obligatory “Ross cries at the end of a Star Trek season and probably needs to talk about this with his therapist.” Because after failing to snap Jack out of it, and having learned that Jack can only survive disconnection if he does it willingly, Jean-Luc goes and stabs himself with a Borg wire and what do you know, this does indeed plug him back into the collective (Oh, duh, this makes sense; he’s a synth, and they showed us just a couple of weeks ago that synths can plug wires into the backs of their heads to access gentle blue glowing conversation voids).

How does he save Jack? Did you guess “A big speech”? Smart money, but no, not this time. This time, it’s something else. For whatever reason, the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking about the 1998 Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come. I won’t trouble you with the details of the movie, but the ending is largely the same as happens here. Jack is trapped not in hell, but in the false connection and companionship of the collective, but Picard’s answer is the same as Chris’s. Not to argue, or try to persuade, or show the evil of the collective, or speechify about the indomitably of the human spirit. But rather, to just… Sit with him. If you won’t leave hell with me, then I will stay here with you. Real connection to compete with the Borg’s false connection. God, this is such a hard thing. Star Trek gave a generation of geeky people a skewed understanding of empathy, what with the episode titled “The Empath” about a magic space lady  who can absorb the pain of others and take it away from them. That’s not this. It’s not “I will take this pain so you don’t have to.” It’s not even “I can’t carry it. But I can carry you.” It’s, “I will walk back into hell and sit down next to you there so you don’t have to do it alone.” They finally got it. Mmm.

And, of course, it works, and they even let Jack get the spotlight here. Rather than Picard, it’s Jack who gets to tell the queen off, because even without the collective, he will never be alone. Connection. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

So yeah, cube explodes, everyone gets better, happily the Changelings hardly murdered anyone (“But few of any sort, and none of name,” – Much Ado About Nothing, Act I, Scene 1) other than the one transporter operator and the thousands of people in Spacedock and anyone over 25 in the fleet and the entire crew of the Excelsior, so good times all around. We’re just left with a fun scene of friends hanging out, which is how it should be. I mean, it’d be nice if everyone had changed their clothes over the course of the year, but still. Guinan waves from off-camera. Data starts to recite the “Lady from Venus” limerick from “The Naked Now”. All fine stuff.

Oh, right. I glazed over the “Everyone goes to Starfleet” part of the ending. Jack enters Starfleet and completes officer training in a year, almost as fast as Seven went from ranger to first officer (I think we all have to accept that they intended this season to be 10 years after season 2. Beverly even says “The Borg haven’t been seen in ten years”. Also Ed Speleers being 24 is a STRETCH. Also, somehow Shaw was captain of the Titan for five years despite the ship only being a year old. You’re not going to convince me that the 2401 date wasn’t a retcon halfway through production). Beverly also goes back to Starfleet because fuck the Mariposas. And are we to assume Troi un-retired because she’s working as a councilor on a starship? Was Picard captaining the Enterprise that whole year? And Raffi’s back in normal starfleet having given up being a spy since Worf blew her cover so that her son would talk to her again (A small and kind gesture).

Which brings us to the Big Fun Sequel-Baiting reveal at the end, with the Titan rechristened as the Enterprise-G. If you only watched the show and did not read the supplemental materials, you might be wondering what happened to the Enterprise-F, but apparently it was scheduled for decommission right after Frontier Day, on account of some irreparable damage a bit before. Just as well, the bridge of the Enterprise-F appears to just be a conference room with one chair in it and nothing else. Like the Boss Fight room at Starfleet Headquarters from “Conspiracy”.

Some people are not happy with the rechristening. I get it. I do feel like it’s a little weird that the Titan’s “reward” for singlehandedly delaying the fleet long enough to save Earth is to essentially have its own legacy erased. I’m not as bothered by the fact that the Constitution III class isn’t as big and prestigious as the whale of a ship that just got decommissioned. The Titan is a workhorse. Not the biggest, coolest ship in the fleet, but the ship that does good, solid work. I am not crazy about the look of the Titan, but it’s a good ship, and the adventures of Captain Seven, Commander Musiker and Ensign Crusher aboard the Enterprise-G are something I’d probably watch. Probably should remove the staircase from the bridge though. Someone’s going to break an ankle.

The last note I’ll make is that a lot of folks were also disappointed that Kate Mulgrew didn’t get a cameo as Janeway granting Seven the captaincy. But the thing is, aside from the fact that calling Kate in for a cameo would be a waste, the scene just wouldn’t work. The love between those two would have to be the emotional center of the scene. With Tuvok, we get his stoic response to maintain the plausibility of the illusion that Seven isn’t about to be massively rewarded for her act of piracy (Characterizing Enterprise-G’s command staff as “A pirate, a spy and a thief” is great), and the emotional core of the scene gets to sit on Shaw, posthumously delivering Seven’s performance appraisal, seemingly drunk, to show that despite his own issues, his own struggle with Seven’s clashing style and what it means for his own place in the world, he recognizes her as the future of Starfleet. Emergency Holographic Dipshit for when they go to series, please (We never met Titan’s chief engineer; a holographic recreation of Shaw is plausible here). The only way you could wedge Janeway in there would be to do the scene as filmed up until after Shaw’s recording. Then have Janeway walk in and say “Resignation not accepted, Captain Seven.” But even that is not as good as just holding her back for some future project.

And so we are left with a new crew and a new Enterprise, and a path forward to the future. And the old crew fades into the sunset, still there if we need them, sure, but at a thematic level, sort of done. Complete. Where they needed to be. The TNG era is over. Time for something new.

Oh then Q shows up because mother fucker. Soft reboot. Yeah, yeah. Q still died at the end of season 2, but he’s a non-temporal being so it’s technically okay. Fuck you.

The post-credits scene I wanted was Jean-Luc waking up, hung over, slumped over the poker table and shouting, “Merde! I was supposed to call Laris a whole fucking year ago!”

Sheer. Fucking. Hubris.

See you in June.

Somehow, Palpatine returned.

That’s kinda how I’m feeling right now. I didn’t want it to be the Borg, but I kinda knew it was, and there’s a distinct sense of “Okay, we tried something new and wild last time, and the fanboys rebelled, so let’s regress to something safe and familiar.” Technically they have not undone last season’s redemption of the Borg, but they might as well have. Technically they have not undone last season’s relationship between Picard and Laris in favor of JeanBev shipping, but they might as well have. Technically they have not undone the synth culture on Coppelius and Data’s decision to experience death, but they might as well have. Technically they have not undone Picard’s proxy-parent relationship with Space Legolas, his death and resurrection, and his joining Starfleet, but they may as well have.

Actually, Elnor might be dead again now. No one says anything about it. Maybe, maybe not. They blow up the Excelsior, which is the last place we saw him, but I don’t know that he’d still be there however much later this is supposed to be. I’ve been told this season is just a few months after season 2, which of course is impossible given the age of Raffi’s grandkid or the fact that she has had time to switch from being a commander on the Excelsior to being a spy with a rich backstory about falling off the wagon and breaking up with Seven. This season stinks of “soft reboot”.

So yeah, Troi looks behind Jack’s red door and despite telling him that she would be supportive and help him no matter what, she instantly freaks out, abandons him, and starts plotting against him because the Borg Seed in his head spooks her. God I hate this. Kudos to Jean-Luc for telling him right away rather than trying to lie to him about it, but man, “Jack finds out he’s got a Borg in his brain and immediately decides to abuse his powers to escape the Titan and go off on his own to personally hand-deliver himself to the Borg, where he immediately surrenders and gives them everything they want” is a very upsetting plot.

And it kinda has to be upsetting, because Jack can’t possibly do the right thing, since all acts of successful heroism must be done by legacy characters.

The devil of it is that this is a very clever and well-executed plan. The Borg (Changelings? Who? Oh, them, never mind. That plot is done. No more changelings.) aren’t just planning to hack the Borg-improved systems of the new fleet to seize control of the ships. They’re also Borg-hacking the people.

Let us pause a minute to take in, “The Changelings uploaded Picard’s DNA alterations into the transporter database so it would automatically install it in anyone who used the transporter.” You know what? All these years, I have been arguing against the “No really transporters kill you and replace you with a rapidly grown clone” thing by viewing the transporter as a high-speed Ship of Theseus. The fact that transporters have a baseline genetic image of every species, and just kinda quietly impose it on you when you go through is far more existentially horrifying than the normal round of transporter angst. And how do you do this plot without having some surprises based around people using or not using the transporter? You could easily have it turn out that Alandra hadn’t used the transporter recently and was thus uninfected but then tragically had to use it to escape the Borgified crew.

I’m getting just lost in the mess here of all the things in this plot that mingle really good ideas and really bad ones. We get to see the Enterprise-F, which is okay I guess. It kinda looks like a whale? It doesn’t do anything for me, in much the same way that the E didn’t do much for me, but moreso. I don’t hate it or anything, but it has a certain otherness to it.

Actually, it kind of reminds me of the Enterprise-B in that way. There’s nothing wrong with it. Objectively, the Excelsior class does what it was meant to when they revealed it in the opening of Star Trek III by giving you this sense of bigness and being impressive, and you can get behind the idea of Captain Sulu going off and having adventures on it. But when you say “And here’s the new Enterprise, which is one of those,” you kind of know in your heart that the Enterprise-B does not have what it takes to be “The Hero Ship”. It can only ever be the Guest Star. The F is like that.

Riker calls out the irony in Admiral Shelby – introduced as an ambitious officer angling for Riker’s job, and also the Federation’s Borg expert – supporting the plan to network the whole fleet with Borg technology. But, I mean, stealing your enemies’ most powerful technologies is kinda how the history of warfighting technology works. Is it weird that they didn’t have some kind of countermeasure installed after what happened with Queen Agnes? Yes, but not so weird as the fact that no one notices. There’s no quick line of dialogue to say, “How are they doing this after we changed the security protocols? The changelings must have compromised the new codes.”

It’s also not as weird as the fact that at no point do Jean-Luc, Raffi, or Seven bring up the fact that there is a whole second Borg collective who are their allies. No one says, “Hey, maybe we should call Agnes and ask if she knows how to undo this?” It needn’t even derail the plot; just add, “Can we ask our Borg allies for help?” “Unfortunately, the transwarp conduit they’re guarding is experiencing a Bullshittium Storm which blocks all communication.”

But the worst thing about all this, the absolute worst thing, is that in their rush to nostalgia, to set up their Big Damn Heroes finale, they had to go and betray the soul of Star Trek.

Okay, that is a bit hyperbolic. But look at what happened here. Everyone who used the transporter is infected with the Borg “biological receiver” which causes them to be assimilated, but it only works on people under 24, because that’s when the human brain is fully cooked. Now… Wait, though. If it’s working by altering DNA, then it should take time. If it’s altering brain tissue it should actually take years. But this whole plot is contingent on them stealing Picard’s body just a few days ago and using the Fleet Formation network to spread the reprogramming. If it’s not just altering the DNA but actually directly altering the brain structure, it shouldn’t be constrained by age.

But this is all just Dumb Trek Science, well within the bounds of the way Star Trek writers think DNA works. Hey, remember that time when over the course of a few hours, everyone on the ship transformed into animals because a virus “activated junk DNA”?

No, the problem here is the moral angle. What is the message of this plot? After spending eight weeks slowly making us love these new characters, making us open to a New Generation, bombarding us with themes about parenthood and passing the torch on to the Next Generation, this episode straight-out says, “Do not trust young people. Even if they mean well, they are weak and fickle and will be the unwitting pawns of the evil space commies who want to destroy our way of life. Only Old People can save us. Respect your elders.” This is a pretty straightforward betrayal of Star Trek’s position toward youth and counterculture on the level of the TOS hippie episode which does… Basically the exact same thing because punching hippies was just too much fun. Everything new is painted as the enemy, and salvation can only come by retreating into the beloved and comfortable past, which I will get to in a minute.

But more, let me dredge up what I said after the big reveal back in season 1:

It’s godsdamned frakking Battlestar Galactica.

Yeah, not only is it bad news to fill ships with Young People of Today, who can’t be trusted, but more, it’s that they foolishly networked their ships – the literal exact same thing that doomed the colonial fleet in Battlestar Galactica. And if you want, there’s kind of a “These kids with their facebooks and their myspaces and their tiktoks”  thing going on too, because what is it that the youngs are so dangerously vulnerable to? The siren’s song of connecting.  Of networking. The trait Jack attributes to his Borg heritage is the nagging feeling that the universe would be a better place if we were more connected and if people were better at seeing each other’s perspective- yes, folks, that’s evil: empathizing with the other. Jesus Christ.

But you know what’s just bizarre? It’s not just Battlestar Galactica. It’s also, of all the things in the whole damned universe, The Tomorrow People.

Yeah, back in the ’70s, the cheap-ass British sci-fi version of the X-Men did a serial whose premise was – sit down and have a drink, because this is a doozy – in the waning days of the Blitz, Nazi scientists sent over some bombs that contained biological agents. E Coli in the bombs was used as a carrier (This seems shockingly prescient on some aspects of the science of gene therapy given the vintage here) to infect British children with DNA that, when passed on to their children, would render the Young People of (1970s) Today susceptible to loving Hitler.

Who was actually still alive, having been secretly frozen a la They Saved Hitler’s Brain.

Also Hitler was an alien.

Whose true form was a whiffle ball covered in slime.

It was the ’70s.

This is stupid and awful and I hate it… And I love it too? The reveal that the Borg are targeting Starfleet’s very bodies rather than their tech? Data having to hold Geordi back from running to his daughters? The moment of thwarted hope when the Excelsior crew retake the bridge, only to have the fleet instantly destroy them? It’s really good stuff there.

And then, of course, they go and kill Shaw. The streak of what happens to you when you deadname Seven remains unbroken. It is very sweet that he calls Seven by her actual name with his dying breath. Also, he gets to die in a bookend to his own trauma, helping the others escape the Borg just as he’d been saved all those years ago. I hope whatever bullshit asspull they use to resolve the plot next week magically brings him back to life. Him and T’Veen. I wonder if the reason Vadic shot her was that she was for some reason unaffected by Borgjacking?

This all leads to where we leave our heroes. Seven and Raffi stay behind on the Titan… For some reason. I dunno. I mean, obviously, this will give them a chance to profess their continuing love for each other while evading Seven’s Borgified underlings. Everyone else takes a shuttle back to where they were a couple of weeks ago, the fleet museum, for a reveal that was sort of obvious, and is kind of “The show going up its own ass in the name of nostalgia” and kind of unbelievable, and also kind of inevitable and I can’t help myself but be happy about it.

Back when they first met Geordi a few weeks ago, Alandra alluded to something in bay 12 that could help them evade Starfleet. Geordi shuts her down. Now, the reveal: Geordi spent the last 20 years rebuilding the Enterprise-D in his garage from spare parts. Like the dude in the Hank Williams song. We even get a guest appearance of Majel Barrett’s voice as the computer. Barrett recorded a sound library before her death with the intention of continuing the voice the ship’s computer, but so far, the showmakers have decided this would be too creepy – totally fair since AI recreation of voice actors is a thing now and it does change the morality of things. We know Barrett was okay with them continuing to use her voice back then, but we don’t know if she’d feel the same knowing that using computers to fake the voices of dead actors was a thing that would end up threatening the livelihoods of voice actors.

Everyone is kind of in awe, and it’s very sweet, and Picard comments on having missed the carpeting, and it’s well lit, and the bridge consoles booting up looks super cool, and Data and Geordi taking their old seats is touching, and Worf is kind of grumpy and preferred the E, but they “obviously” couldn’t use that for reasons Worf swears are not his fault. Now, in command of the last remaining fully functional but unnetworked Battlestar of Caprica Starfleet vessel, the old gang sets a course straight back where they came from to… I guess go fight the entirety of Starfleet all by themselves with one ship that’s been obsolete for decades with a crew of seven pensioners.

Again, why are they going straight back to Earth? Why aren’t they calling Jurati? Or really anyone anywhere in the galaxy? Even if they do stop the Borg, the brain modification they did to Picard, now replicated in everyone under 24, literally killed him. Is Starfleet’s next generation doomed to an early grave? Or will Geordi come up with some transporter magic to fix everyone, which will coincidentally bring Shaw back to life?  Will we get any closure on the changelings, or are they just going to be quietly forgotten now that the “proper” villain has surfaced? No, clearly we will not.

Deep breath. It’ll be okay. Just watch the D and geek out.

Ways this could end that definitely aren’t going to happen but would probably be better and more thematically appropriate than whatever they go with:

1. Queen Agnes shows up with her own collective, plugs in, and the OG Borg are instantly overwhelmed by her superior power of love.
2. All hope is lost so Jean-Luc goes scorched earth and has Data summon Robothulu. “We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.” “We are the synth confederation and you’re all meatsacks to us.”
3. The Protostar shows up and unleashes the Living Construct on the Borg.
4. Empress Emeritus Phillipa Georgiou pops out of the back end of the Guardian of Forever aboard the Enterprise-F and, without even knowing what the hell is going on, murders her way to a total Borg rout.
5. Benjamin Sisko returns to the temporal realm with Space Jesus powers and nukes the Borg.
6. A flashback reveals that during their final hug, Q quietly mentioned giving Jean-Luc one other parting gift. In a moment of desperation, as the Borg close in and prepare to destroy the Enterprise, Picard snaps his fingers and the Borg cease to exist. Also Shaw comes back to life. T’Veen too.
7. Groppler Zorn. That’s it. That’s the twist.

 

I suppose technically I could have been more wrong about how this week’s episode could go, but it wouldn’t be easy. I predicted this would be a “Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” episode with forces aligning to ensure things just kept getting worse for our heroes, in order that they could enter episode 9 at their lowest point. And, I mean, it was a close thing; they could easily have ended each story thread a few minutes early and this would have been a tense cliffhanger with Data gone forever, Vadic murdering the bridge crew, Jack surrendering himself, and half the cast under siege on the Shrike.

But modern Trek has learned the value of aftercare, so they get on with it, and at the end of this episode, Vadic is (probably) dead, the Shrike is destroyed, Zombie Picard is off the table, Data is back and better than ever, the Rikers have patched up their marriage, we had several minutes for everyone to just hang out around a conference room table and chat, spoon, smoke a cigarette, put a towel down over the wet spot, and the only real problem is that we do not have any idea what the next bit of plot is.

Actually, that is a bit of a problem. We’ve defeated the villains, blown up Picard’s stolen corpse (Anyone else notice how utterly chill Worf is about Picard’s corpse? “Do not worry; it’s not really, him, just his previous body.” While Raffi, who was there for the whole thing, is kind of a bit catty about it?), we’ve got Jack and he’s safe. Sure, there’s still changelings infiltrating Starfleet, but it seems like their actual big plan has been derailed at this point. I’m sure they’ll pick things back up, but at the exact point where the story this week stops, it seems like the right thing to do here is for the Titan to just light out for the west and spend a couple of days cloaked somewhere quiet so that Frontier Day can come and go with the conspirators bereft of their refrigerated French vintner, their war crimes mobile, the leader of the changeling faction, and Jack Crusher. I’m going to be upset if the Titan hand-delivers Jack to the climax specifically so he can play his role in nearly beginning armageddon.

Surrender is the title of the episode and also the name of the game this week. You could probably add, “But don’t give yourself away.” Once again, we amazingly have Jack actually talk to his parents about what’s going on with him. And while Bev does scan him to make sure he’s not hallucinating, they very quickly decide to roll with it and even exploit Jack’s mind-jacking powers on one of the captured bridge crew in an attempt to input Picard’s un-override code (In a brief aside, Riker reveals that he gave Vadic his own code to protect Troi, removing the need to imagine a Lore-Vadic alliance to justify her smugness last week). And that’s a really good scene. Vadic catches them, as you’d expect because it’s too early in the episode to turn things around. But it’s just, “She sees what he’s doing and stops him,” not “Turns out the whole thing was a trap and she was expecting them to do that and now her position is even stronger,” and it wasn’t a bad idea to try or hopeless from the outset: it just didn’t work out. Jack wants to surrender himself, like he did before, to stop the carnage, but Picard correctly points out that Vadic is definitely going to kill them all anyway. I mean, she’s cartoonishly evil. She even did the thing where she singles someone out, menaces them threateningly, then shoots the person next to them. Really sorry about that, Lieutenant T’Veen. They talked you up good in the promos. Maybe if they go to series, it’ll turn out that was a changeling infiltrator and Vadic was secretly doing her “Kill an underperforming subordinate” thing.

So Jack surrenders himself, but it’s a feint. And a double one. He shows up with one of them Thermal Detonator thingies like in Star Wars. He presents it as a legit surrender, but with insurance: he’ll blow himself up if Vadic doesn’t follow through on her promise to release the others. And she actually does, to her credit. Except that Seven refuses to be released, because she needs to “take responsibility” for failing to protect the bridge. Shaw had called her out on that before, and while we finally got the, “My name is Seven of Nine,” line out of her, Shaw really owns that exchange. She should have sacrificed him by blowing up the turbolift, rather than let Vadic take the bridge by using him as a hostage. But Shaw manages to bundle a bunch of stuff up into his accusation here. Because it’s not just Seven putting her personal moral code above her duty to the ship. We know what Shaw’s deal is now. This is not the first time that someone has chosen to save his life at the cost of others. Shaw’s survivor’s guilt has got to be triggered as fuck right now. Sure, Seven chose to save him rather than protect his ship, and that was not the logically correct decision. But more to the point, he failed to protect his ship, and worse, he failed to die rather than give up the ship.

I am not really sure what Seven meant to accomplish by staying behind. There’s a moment when you think she might have even made things worse by being there, but it works out okay. Really all she does is bear witness to Vadic almost-but-not-quite explaining Jack’s deep dark secret.

So about that secret. There really is no way whatever it is can be enough for the build-up. That feeling continues unabated. By the end of the episode, the heroes have some data from the Shrike that might explain what they wanted with the bits of Picard’s brain they took. It’s not clear whether those bits were still on the Shrike at the end, but I’m guessing those were already delivered, since otherwise there wouldn’t be any story left. Vadic knows Jack’s secret, even knows the red door imagery. Troi senses something dark and evil that is not of Jack but which is moving through him. There seems to be something evil and eldrich and very powerful which has been locked away and wants to re-enter the universe, and Jack, probably because of his inheritance from Picard, is the conduit through which it can.

There are two major popular theories right now about this. Neither one of them feels right. At the same time, both of them seem well-justified.

The first theory is that it’s the Pah-Wraiths, the Bajoran anti-gods who drove bits of plot arc in Deep Space Nine, with the final climax of the series being Benjamin Sisko sacrificing his corporeal form to defeat them. The Pah-Wraiths meet the criteria of being powerful, eldrich, and sealed away. Further, possession by a Pah-Wraith in Deep Space Nine was depicted with a similar red-eye effect as what we see when Jack uses his powers. Indeed, all the Pah-Wraith iconography lines up well with the “Red door” symbolism they’re using now.

The big problem, of course, is that the Pah-Wraiths are tied very closely to Bajor and Deep Space Nine, and have sweet fuck all to do with TNG. It being them would be the strongest argument yet that this plot ought to have been for a Deep Space Nine revival rather than a TNG one. There’s no justification whatever for Jack being connected to the Pah-Wraiths, and Picard even less-so. Picard’s brain issue was diagnosed well before the Pah-Wraiths were introduced into the franchise. It’s not a per se contradiction to use them here, but, again, a good story that serves as an endcap to the TNG era is not a naturally comfortable fit with a final reveal of, “Offscreen, before they were introduced, a secondary enemy from a different series that Picard never met or interacted with did something to his brain which was passed on to his son.”

The other contender is the Borg, of course, and here, we have the connection to Jean-Luc to lean on. Listening to Vadic talk about the secret thing behind the red door, the Borg make some sense: she alludes to Jack’s feelings of loneliness, his need to connect to others. Last season, we had this fantastic image of the Borg Queen not simply as the organizing element behind a horde of space zombies, but as someone desperate at a biological level for connection. And then there’s Vadic’s cryptic comment about it being fitting for Seven to be there to bear witness as she circumloqutes around explaining Jack’s deep dark secret. A Borg link would also make sense as an angle for destroying Starfleet, since last season established that the current generation of Starfleet ships are vulnerable to Borghacking due to their Borg technology – of course, you’d want a little more here to explain why this is a vulnerability different from the one last season, why Starfleet hasn’t patched their vulnerability after last season, and why they’re going to this much trouble when there is a nonzero amount of Borg technology and ex-borg you can acquire without all of this nonsense.

And, I mean, it probably is the Borg. That’s where the smart money is. But where this theory really falls short, though, is on the whole “ability to bodyjack” thing, and the implication that Jack is connected to a powerful entity beyond human comprehension that has been exiled from the universe at large. “The Borg left something in Picard’s brain” would be a plausible angle for a story, but I don’t think it works for this story, especially when the Borg still exist and are still out there, some of them on friendly terms. On the other hand, next week’s episode is titled “Vox”, which is Latin for “Voice”, and begs comparison to “Locutus” being Latin for “Spoken”. In fact, in the Shatner-ghostwritten novel “The Return” (Which the appearance of Kirk’s corpse brings to mind), “Vox” is the name of the Romulan analogue to Locutus.

But it probably is the Borg. Which will be unsatisfying. But then, so will anyone else it turns out to be. Unless they decide it is time to finally stop fucking around and it’s Groppler Zorn. Bring back Groppler Zorn, you cowards.

Meanwhile, we catch up with the Troi-Rikers and learn that part of Riker’s issue is that Troi used her Betazoid powers to mind-whammy him into getting over his grief. They don’t go into a lot of detail, but it’s a sad and lovely snapshot of a couple in pain. And then they lighten the mood by having her say that the changeling who captured her was good in bed but bad at making pizza, which Riker reckons is an accurate impersonation.  It’s kinda weird that 100% of Riker’s interest in cooking seems to be pizza-making. And that somehow he is bad at it. I mean, it’s “Put random stuff on a disc of bread”. Now, clearly Troi is joking, but I still like the idea that they are in fact the kind of couple where Troi might actually decide, “I’m going to go ahead and bone this impersonator, because it will be a fun story to tell later.” This illusion is shattered when Riker gets jealous and uncomfortable when Worf pauses during rescuing them to gush to Troi about his self-work. The scene works, since “People are kind of uncomfortable about this whole Sensitive New Age Warrior thing” has been the shtick they’re going for Worf, but I’ve never liked the Jealous Riker scenes. Much more upsetting is the dismantling of what we saw back in season 1: Mr. and Mrs. Riker both hate their wonderful sylvan life on Nepenthe in their rustic force-shielded log cabin surrounded by weird animals that are all basically just Earth animals with bits glued on. I loved that episode, and I loved their happy sylvan lifestyle and Kestra running wild through the woods. Apparently Kestra is meant to have gone off to the academy now? Holy fuck, can anyone in this show have a life path that isn’t Starfleet without it being depicted as “running away”? God.

Okay, but I will grant that “Feral Nepenthean Girl tries to adapt to the Big City” does have a certain Pippi Longstocking kind of charm to it.

Of course, this week’s real emotional core, though, was the return of Data, and… You know how it’s going to go, and I think you also know how it’s going to get there, which is interesting, if it’s a choice. I dunno, did anyone not figure it out immediately? You have one of those Me-vs-Me-in-the-Existential-Void confrontations, like you get. They pretty much always go the same way. The bad guy seems to be winning right up until the end – well played here by the map of Data’s brain changing from blue to red – smugly gloating in his victory, then suddenly it’s revealed that the hero had been in the dominant position all along. Hell, this scene has played out so long that it’s been forever since I can remember seeing it played as simply as, “The bad guy really was winning, but he gloated wrong at the last minute causing the hero to rally.” Your range of twists were usually something like, “I could have won at any time, but I needed to keep you distracted,” or, “Actually I defeated you a while ago and have locked you in this existential void fighting a fake version of me,” or, “Instead of fighting we’ll just hug it out.”

Or the one they chose, which is that Data Doc-Ocks Lore. For those not in the know, there was this whole plot arc in Spider-Man a ways back where Doc Ock is dying and switches bodies with Peter, and at the end of their Existential Battle For The Body, Peter straight-up loses and gets to die in Doc’s body. Except that instead of fighting Doc, Peter rigged it so that Doc would get his body, but would also get his memories, and more, he’d experience them as his own. And it turned out that it was basically the lack of memories of a loving childhood and good role models was the whole reason he became a villain, and with Peter’s memories, Doc decided to actually be a superhero. He was still a dick, but he did the right thing mostly.

So that’s what Data does to Lore. It’s obvious the second Lore starts gloating about getting rid of all Data’s precious mental mementos, symbolized by him taking Data’s Sherlock Holmes hat and vaporizing it. It’s well-played, reinforced when Lore snipes at Data about his own empty life and how he never had all these happy memories and friendships as he zaps Data’s pocket-sized Tasha Yar Holographic Gravestone. There’s this shift in Lore where he’s less snarky and cynical and becomes sort of eager to claim Data’s memories. And Spot. Oh Spot. Data hands Spot to Lore, and Lore is visibly delighted, because KITTY. I get it. My own cats will not let me pick them up.

That’s when the reveal comes, as the last bit of Data winks out, he explains that, yeah, Lore was right. Data had all these memories, and Lore had an empty life with nothing to look back on but chaotic dickishness. But it’s Data’s memories that defined him, and now the emptiness in Lore has been filled up with 100% Data. Unlimited Data, if you will permit me to make that joke again. That was always the difference between them, and now that Data has closed the gap, there’s nothing left that’s distinctly Lore. We get a good loving closeup of Data’s brain switching back from red to blue, but the camera oddly doesn’t make a big point of the later reveal, which you kinda see in the background while everyone’s rejoicing at Data’s rebirth: the final state of Data’s brain diagram isn’t blue. It’s purple. Data didn’t trick Lore into erasing himself, or find a sly way to take over. He did exactly what Soong intended, and merged into one combined being. It’s just that Data’s traits dominate the new being’s sense of self because Lore never had an identity of his own, only ever being defined in terms of what Data was not.

Also Data can use contractions and jokes now. You kind of get the impression that they’re memory-holing the fact that Data got that emotion chip back in Generations (where he also started telling jokes). Not quite clear. Nemesis did the same thing. I think there’s a good angle here that neither Nemesis nor this show have had time for, that could have really made for a good Talky Scene with LaForge about Data’s capacity for emotion even with the chip and how it differed from Lore’s. The emotion chip was, as originally presented, a simplification of Lore’s emotional capacity. I think you could make the argument that even when Data had emotions, he experienced them as “other” – something that he could experience but were not part of his core sense of self. They never come out and say this, but it’s one interpretation of a lot of the scenes in the movie era that deal with Data’s emotions, and a better one than “Insurrection decided the emotion chip was a dead end, so they consciously omitted it, and then Nemesis forgot about it.” But the conversation never comes. (And now that I’m thinking about it, it would be very easy for such a conversation to come off as ableist, given how easily Data is read as autistic).

Another conversation that they don’t have is to justify Picard’s belief that they should remove the partition and let Data and Lore duke it out, and hope that them standing around begging Data to win is going to resolve the matter. Kudos, though, to Picard for taking the time to check in afterward and make sure Data is okay with being alive again, after they had that whole big Thing about Data wanting to die. Data is ultimately like, “No, this is cool too. I can do both,” and that’s very sweet.

Data retakes the ship and that’s pretty much the end of Vadic’s plot. I referred to the Mysterious Device Jack brought with him when he surrendered as a “Thermal Detonator” – it’s a little wonky that it just comes out of nowhere. The changelings can’t identify the technology, which is a key point, but we also never see where Jack got it from either, making it feel a little ass-pully. I like that comparison, because the scene feels sort of anti-Star Wars. Vadic talking around Jack’s experiences with the Red Door and the Voice and his mysterious powers and how she can unlock the secrets for him are pretty reminiscent of Palpatine’s seduction of Anakin, and we’ve seen the scene a thousand times where the Chosen One is tempted in a scene like this and hesitates at the worst minute, or worse, cuts off Mace Windu’s arms. But Jack doesn’t do either of those things. He turns on the device which turned out to be a personal force field and not a grenade after all, Seven is close enough that her being there isn’t even a complication, and, in a bit of “Here is a very cool way to make the fans shut up about it,” it turns out that the great big “vulnerable” window in the front of the ship is not a window: it’s an emergency hatch. Data opens it, and the changelings all get blown out into space, giving Vadic just enough time for last words that for once in the franchise, are the villain’s own, rather than quoting Shakespeare or Mellville: “Fuckin’ solids.”

Is Vadic dead? I think so? She gets blown out into space. Can changelings survive in space?Oh, now she’s frozen. Can changelings survive being frozen? Oh, she’s drifting toward the Shrike. I bet she’ll luck into the open hangar bay and get recovered that- And she’s shattered. She just got Terminator 2’d. Can she come back from that? I can’t remember if changelings can actually separate their bodies into discrete parts and then reconnect and survive, and it sure looked like it was difficult when she kept cutting her hand off to talk to the MYSTERIOUS FACE. But maybe? Oh, now they just fucking blew up the Shrike. Even if she didn’t get roasted in the explosion, she’s currently drifting in a million pieces in a debris field. If she’s not gone, it’s gonna feel cheap.

It’s a weird move to kill your antagonist at the top of act 3. But I like it because Star Trek has rarely been about the big dramatic villains – and this cast in particular have been especially bad with them. What the show is really about is what comes next: everyone sitting around a conference table and talking things out. The recurring image of modern Trek, which is a distillation of the decades that came before, is that the Heart of Star Trek is people working together to heal, and when they do that, not only can they overcome their enemies, it’s not even hard. Vadic was winning because the heroes were divided. Data divided against himself, Picard and Riker divided over how to respond to the Shrike, Troi and Riker divided in their grief, Beverly and Picard divided over Jack, Geordi and Picard divided by the Titan’s fugitive status. Once everyone was back on the same page, dealing with Vadic was as simple as opening the front door.

Which is how we go into next week: opening a door.

Well okay. This was… Hm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know where I stand on this one. But I guess we’re really going with the changelings as the main antagonist here. That’s disappointing. There’s still something else going on; Vadic’s lament hints at there being something hanging over her head.  This whole conspiracy is hard to follow; the changelings seem to have complete control over Starfleet at every level, so… Why bother with this big complicated master-plan to destroy the fleet? Why not just… Like…. Have taken over? How can Vadic impersonate the lead interrogator beating the shit out of Riker, but apparently the other two guards – who are content to just stand there and let their boss commit war crimes – aren’t changelings so she has to murder them before revealing herself? She makes a wry comment about being forced into certain forms with no explanation, and there’s an odd line where Riker asks one of the underlings how much goo they needed to fill him with. I dunno. Changelings are a stupid main villain.

Also stupid: they need Geordi to explain to them that the thing that keeps giving their location away is that all the ships are “fully integrated” now, which I assume means that they’re all on the same wifi. None of them knew that?

Now, less stupid: I was happily wrong to assume Jack would keep his scary visions to himself. He told Bev off-screen between episodes, and she’s given him some meds to make the violent hallucinations go away. But he’s got Irumodic Syndrome, just like his dad (Finally confirmed; I know everyone took for granted that was what Picard had, since it’s what he had in “All Good Things”, but since they never actually said it, and the symptoms were completely different, I was leaning on Doctor Benayoun’s claim that it could have been one of several syndromes triggered by the same underlying brain defect). Only now it’s something that could cause hallucinations and violence at a young age rather than altzheimer’s-like symptoms in old age. Well never mind. It was pretty fun when Jack asks Picard how he survived it and he points out that he didn’t.

Obviously, that’s not going to be all there is to it. I don’t know exactly what the all-the-rest is, but it would be incredibly weird if Jack’s visions didn’t add up to anything. And don’t think I haven’t noticed how Vadic has transitioned to referring to Jack as “The son of Picard” in private, because it’s time to stop being coy about why they want him. Which we will get to.

The main part of Jack’s role this week, other than some flirting with LaForge, is in his exchange with Seven as they talk about found family while giving the audience a chance to geek out about slightly sub-optimal 3D reconstructions of ships we recognize. There’s the slightly too-shiny Defiant. The slightly too-shiny Voyager, a slightly too-shiny Constitution class ship we’ve never heard of before in the TOS-style, which is sure to spark some debates, what with on-screen graphics in season one showing the Enterprise in its Strange New Worlds style. You get a brief look at what appears to be a Columbia-Class ship, possibly canonizing the unused Season 7 idea for Enterprise of giving the NX-01 a refit that basically made it look like a Chibi-NCC-1701 (This would also provide a new and fun canonical origin of the “NCC” hull designation: that it originally meant “NX-Columbia Class”).  And then, of course, there’s the Enterprise-A, looking slightly funny and seen only at a distance, but still. We now at last know that the canonical end of the Enterprise-A is “museum”. But what drives the plot forward is a surprise: they’ve also got the H.M.S. Bounty, Kruge’s Bird-of-Prey from Star Trek III, later borrowed by Kirk. The exact sequence of events that allowed the Federation to hold on to a stolen Klingon warship for a century and then put it in their own museum is hard to imagine, but Geordi says they had a hard time finding it because the cloak switched on while it was sinking. In San Francisco Bay.

Okay, actually I can sorta imagine that Starfleet Intelligence kept telling the Klingon Ambassador, “Of course we’d love to return your warship; we’re not the sort of evil empire that goes around collecting spoils of war, particularly during these very tense times of peace negotiations. We just can’t find it. Oh, that superior Klingon cloaking technology!” until the Empire just said, “Fuck it, you can keep the damn thing.” It is harder to accept that this century-old cloaking device is still advanced enough to be useful, but whatever, it’s a cool enough idea that I will avoid asking questions, especially because I already have plenty to find dumb with the fact that their use of the cloak was, “Warp in uncloaked. Cloak. Decloak. Beam everyone up. Leave.” I’m happy to imagine an offscreen exchange like, “The only part of a cloaking device that we can’t recreate in software is the Unobtanium module, and those haven’t changed in centuries. We can plug in pretty much any cloaking device ever invented and just update the firmware.”

Meeting Geordi here is a lot like meeting Worf was a few episodes back. Or perhaps even more like meeting Wesley Crusher last season. This isn’t Geordi LaForge, chief engineer of the USS Enterprise; it’s LeVar Burton, beloved gentle, caring paternal figure and educator. Many of the legacy characters we’ve met in Picard have been in very different places than where we left them, except maybe Guinan. But in the previous seasons, the people we met all seemed to have followed the paths they had been on (I would say if any TNG character actually had a deliberate and consistent direction to their character growth, it’s Riker. Riker’s arc through TNG is a young, ambitious officer, who comes to understand why he wasn’t ready for the big chair, come to terms with it, grow to the place where he is ready, then finally reach the point where he’s ready to walk away from it. It’s a good arc.). Seven and Jean-Luc himself had the biggest transitions, but they did the work to show us how they got there. This season, we meet a Worf who’s clearly been through a transformative experience, and Ro who’s clearly been through a transformative experience, and Geordi, who became a dad – and this is a season about fatherhood, so it makes sense, but it’s a big ask to, without seeing any intermediate position, accept the version of Geordi who’s about to shrug off what is clearly the impending destruction of Starfleet to protect his own. I mean, look, the logical issue with “No, I’m going to let civilization collapse to protect my kids, ignoring the fact that the collapse of civilization will probably have a deleterious effect on my children,” is the sort of thing you can wave off as a very normal, human kind of myopia. But Geordi being the kind of guy to suffer that myopia could use some more build-up.

I did like Shaw’s adorkable hero-worship of Commodore LaForge, which makes sense for Shaw being an ascended grease-monkey. I like the idea of finally seeing what does work for Shaw, since Picard and Riker’s brand of heroism doesn’t. Shaw is not a Big Damn Heroes Trek-fan; he’s a Competency Porn Trek-fan. It’s kind of fascinating, and a counterbalance to the weird element of the show that has brought back the TNG cast – arguably the most thinky, competency-porny version of the show, but leaned heavily on them having been Big Damn Heroes.

Geordi in TNG of course was always at his best in his interactions with Data, and so it’s fitting that Geordi shows up when we also get Data back, in a twist that kinda beggars the imagination. Not sure what we’re calling this incarnation yet. I think people are floating “Ultimate Data”, which is sad because “Unlimited Data” was RIGHT THERE. This is a synth version of Data with the same kind of Golem body as Picard, which means he can age and be played by Brent Spiner without CGI. (never mind that I think in TNG they did in fact say that Data could age. Back in early season one, they hadn’t sorted out all the details about what kind of android Data was; I think they may have been imagining him as more like a synth himself initially. I mean, he gets drunk at one point. In the original pitch document, he was built by aliens and had an incestuous relationship with his mentally challenged sister). But also he’s schizophrenic on account of Season One Surprise Soong (now deceased) having installed ALL the Soong-type androids in one body – Data, Lore, Lal, B4, (Noticeably not his mom, since that would be weird), along with a bit of himself too I think, planning to just like stir them all together and make a new ego out of it.

This has not actually happened, and instead we get Multiple Personalities Data, who defends Daystrom Station with spooky lighting and threatening holograms, like Moriarty. Yeah, this is not – and Riker confirms it – the actual self-aware hologram brought to life by Doctor Pulaski back in season 2 of TNG; rather, it’s Data’s daydream of Moriarty, who just chases them around and mugs menacingly until Riker solves the requisite logic puzzle by reenacting his initial meeting with Data back in “Encounter at Farpoint” by whistling the last bar of “Pop Goes the Weasel”. The Data personality seems befuddled and inarticulate, so we don’t get any useful interaction between him and Geordi, but Geordi’s joy at seeing his old friend is hard to miss. This all builds toward the reveal of what the changelings were really after: the answer to the question I posed at the top of season 2. Yeah, turns out Picard’s original body isn’t on the mantle like my father-in-law; rather, he was put in storage in Daystrom Station.

What do they plan to do with it? Well, the stupidest and most straightforward answer is that they want to resurrect him somehow and then use Zombie Picard to reenact the battle of Wolf 359 – given that Shaw reminded us about that earlier, it’s a good fit. Of course, Locutus wasn’t so devastating at Wolf 359 because of his tactical genius; he was devastating because of his intimate knowledge of Starfleet systems, tactics, technology and protocols. It’s hard to imagine that Zombie Picard – who hadn’t been privy to sensitive Starfleet information in fourteen years when he died, and has been, y’know, dead during the refit of the fleet around new technology would have the same advantage. I mean, unless they actually mean to use his remaining Borg technology to hack into the Borg-enhanced fleet, just as Gimp Suit Jurati did? This seems overly complicated, given that XBs aren’t that hard to find and some would certainly volunteer for the job. Where does Jack fit into this? Does Jack have the ability to revivify Picard 1.0? Is Jack compatible with something they hope to extract from the Corpse Borg? Is it just the super dumb “We’re going to resurrect Picard and threaten his son unless he helps us?”

I’m having a hard time seeing a fully satisfying way this will go. Worse, this could easily lead to “Robopicard sacrifices himself so that Meat Picard can be the One True Picard because in this season of fanservice, they decided to fire Rian Johnson and walk back the big character changes to give in to the toxic fans who have been screaming that the S2 Picard isn’t “the real Jean-Luc””.  Best case scenario: we end up with two Picards, so one of them can date Beverly and the other can stay with Laris.

Oh, right. Laris. You know, this season would be a lot shorter if, upon learning there was a complex intrigue at the highest levels with covert infiltration, Picard remembered that his girlfriend is a master intelligence operative with legacy access to many of the resources of the Tal Shi’ar.

Anyway, Daystrom is also a big old easter egg hunt, most of which you need a good freeze-frame and zoom to make out, but I liked the attack tribble. There’s also “Genesis II”, which is a fun double-easter-egg since that was the name of one of Roddenberry’s failed ’70s pilots whose concept got folded into the series “Andromeda” years after his death. A new Genesis device would’ve made an interesting MacGuffin, you know. Not as rich thematically as Zombie Picard, but you could do some good closure. Have the changelings try to Genesis Earth, and the Titan gang mounts a daring rescue that can’t stop it, but instead diverts it into Mars, effectively reversing the damage done by the synth attack from the S1 backstory. Ah well.

They also have the corpse of James T. Kirk in a locker, which makes sense. First of all, you don’t want anyone stealing that and resurrecting him. There’s a whole Shatner-ghost-written novel about that (Seriously. The Romulans and the Borg team up to resurrect Kirk as part of a plan to… Okay, you know, I don’t think the book ever says exactly how a resurrected and brainwashed Kirk advances their plan to take down the Federation. He ends up, after being rescued and un-brainwashed, being the critical third part of the puzzle that lets Starfleet destroy the Borg, along with Picard’s Borg Security Codes and Spock’s V’ger knowledge of the location of the Borg homeworld, but I do not remember anything that explains why the Borg thought bringing him back to life was a good idea). But more pressingly, they need to ensure chain of custody on his DNA samples to settle ongoing paternity suits well into the twenty-fifth century. I rather liked this particular egg because, much like some of the “Audience figures it out before the characters” moments in previous episodes, it primes the pump so that when Data starts mumbling “Captain Picard” over and over, the clever audience members have a good idea that he’s answering the question about what was taken, rather than just muttering in confusion.

So where we stand at the end of the episode? Jack’s dying very slowly of Irumodic Syndrome. Seven and Raffi really did break up (another nice exchange from Worf where he starts a pep-talk and is like, “Oh thank god,” when Seven tells him she’s not going), which is enraging. Data is alive again, more or less, the Titan can cloak, Ro is still dead, Geordi is stuck on the Titan with both of his daughters, Robot Picard is on the Titan but Zombie Picard is presumably on the Shrike. Riker is also a prisoner on the Shrike (How did Vadic get him there, anyway?), and Surprise! They’ve also got Troi.

It feels like Troi’s character has been imagined as “Shrewish ’50s sitcom wife,” to be honest. She gets one line in this episode and it’s angry disapproval at seeing her husband has been badly beaten. I reckon it’s really her, because we need to get the whole cast back together for the big finale. But it’d be fun if it turned out she was a changeling. Riker agrees to talk to spare her, gives them everything they ask for, it leads them straight into a trap, and he very smugly reminds them that while he might be enough of a cliche of an emotionally distant husband to not be able to tell his wife is an impostor after thirty years of marriage, his actual wife is also a telepath. But again, it seems unlikely.

I’m on fan-service overload after this episode, and it’s got me nervous; this season is absolutely better-written, better-paced, and better-plotted than the first two. But at the same time, they don’t really feel like they learned the right lessons about constructing a storyline that can pay off its investments in a satisfactory way.

Okay everyone, too much excitement last two weeks, let’s slow it down a bit and have a slower, thinkier episode about conspiracies and inner pain. And also Worf. (Worf is fine this week. I don’t know what the deal was – mine or his – back in his last appearance, but he seems okay now).

The big news of course is that Michelle Forbes returns as Ro Laren, in order to be nobly sacrificed at the climax. Ro Laren appeared in a handful of late TNG episodes kinda as a way to tease Deep Space Nine. She’s the first Bajoran character we meet, a refugee with “attitude” who is introduced by handing Picard and Riker the idiot ball so they can fumble such basic things as “Objecting to someone wearing a permitted religious adornment despite the fact that Worf has been wearing a whole-ass sash for six years,” and “Being baffled by the existence of cultures where the family name comes first despite there being a bunch of those on Earth and hey also no one ever once calling Worf any of ‘Rozhenko’, ‘O’Mogh’, or ‘de Khitomer'”. She ultimately left the show when her character betrayed Starfleet to join the Maquis, a terror group primarily made up of disgruntled Federation colonists whose planets had been ceded to the Cardassians, named for the French resistance in World War II and heavily identified with the forced relocation of Native Americans, who would end up becoming half the cast in Voyager and having some recurring plots in Deep Space Nine before being wiped out by the Dominion. Ro was originally planned to be the Bajoran liaison on Deep Space Nine, a source of friction with Sisko, who, like Picard, would view her as a traitor, while her own government viewed her as a freedom-fighter. That role was reimagined into Kira Nerys, who like Ro was a former terrorist, but one whose scope was strictly limited to the Cardassian force occupying her homeworld, not anything to do with the Federation.

Also, in Ro’s first epsiode, there’s a scene where she takes off her uniform shirt to give to a cold refugee child, and they were super careful about how they filmed the scene so that you can’t see her zipper, because they wanted to maintain the idea that their uniform closures were something weird and sci-fi rather than just plain zippers. This was neat and completely overlooked the fact that there’s a scene back in season 1 where Beverly visibly plays with her zipper while feeling drunk and flirty, and also that as a result of the clever intercuts and camera angles, Ro’s communicator magically teleports onto her undershirt.

Anyway, the fate of Ro had been kept from us all these years. There’s conflicting versions in the EU novels, but they all generally agreed that she’d survived the Dominion war. Some have her arrested and serving out a sentence in Federation prison, others have her repatriating to Bajor. They all sort of converge on the idea that she does eventually end up back in uniform, either directly or as a result of the Bajoran military eventually becoming part of Starfleet, and in the later rounds of novels, she’s said to succeed Kira as commander of Deep Space Nine.

The canonical story we finally get here omits that last bit, instead having Ro recruited out of prison into Starfleet Intelligence, and she turns up here ostensibly to investigate Picard for the whole “Stole a ship and got it shot up good by a scary space lady,” thing.

Love Shaw in that bit, too. Soon as Riker gives him the keys back, he’s all like, “Yeah I turned you guys in, you’d better get your story straight. Hey Hansen, you want your job back so that you’re on the clock when they fire you?” Shaw is the right way to do an antagonistic “frenemy” character. He doesn’t obstruct more than is actually necessary, he sells that he is trying to do the right thing, and he’s kind of just delightful as an asshole. You kinda get the feeling that he’s not even happy at the prospect of Picard and Riker facing their comeuppance per se; rather, he’s neutral on the subject, and happy that he’s able to be neutral about it. They get hailed as heroes, fine; they get thrown in jail, fine; not his problem any more and that’s what really counts.

When Picard tells him they have to leg it because the Intrepid has been compromised and he calls security on him? Chef’s kiss. My only complaint about him this week is that he remains confused maybe one beat too long at the end, when Ro – in her official capacity – has explained what’s going on and nobly sacrificed herself and the Intrepid responds by very obviously being compromised, and he’s still not quite on the same page. But he recovers and we get another, “Well fine okay then we’ll be big damn heroes, but if this screws up my nap, I’m coming for you Picard,” moment.

Yeah, so Ro dies and that’s sad. You sort of knew very quickly that there were only two ways this was going to go. Either she was a changeling herself (Nice timing having her very aggressively make a point of showing off her blood in the minute between the audience learning that changelings can do blood now and Picard getting the memo), or else she was about to die. Her and Picard instead prove their authenticity to each other by crying over their past in Holodeck Ten Forward. Now, it has been a long time since I watched this late TNG arc, but I feel like I kind of remember the emotions being different here. I mean, this makes plenty of sense, but I remember Riker having a harder time with it, and Picard having some begrudging respect for Ro – or at least comprehend – when she decided to stick to her moral convictions over her duty to Starfleet. Here, Riker is willing to forgive and move one, which befits his more laid-back persona I guess. Picard, on the other hand, is still raw, and pretty galled at being accused of treason by Ro Laren, who in turn is hurt that Picard couldn’t accept her reasons or validate the pain it caused her. They’re playing on the idea of Picard struggling to separate his sense of duty from his sense of morality, which is an entirely valid character element for a character like Picard, but, I mean, I feel like that was pretty much settled in… I dunno, First Contact? Insurrection? Season 1 of Picard? Heck, that time Picard went to Starfleet command and murdered half the admiralty? I mean, what about the previous four episodes?

Anyway, we do get resolution, and it’s nice, and Ro gives Picard her earring, which is symbolic and also contains all her secret files on the conspiracy (I hope there’s a Lower Decks cameo showing maybe not how Riker is able to figure that out, but perhaps how he’s able to figure it out instantly?), and then she gets blown up because the two security people she brought with her are changelings, and is it weird that she’s been able to get this close to the truth but couldn’t avoid bringing a team with her which was in fact “Oops, all changelings”? In death, she manages to disable the Intrepid, buying time for the Titan to escape, which it almost squanders with Shaw’s aforementioned slightly-excessive-confusion.

The Intrepid is an intensely ugly ship. Just profoundly stupid-looking. Modern Trek seems to have an aversion to having two of the same kind of ship on-screen at once. I guess this makes sense in terms of making it easy to tell what’s going on (Though cough Sombra-class).

I really hope this isn’t going to be followed up with, “The conspirators announce that Highly Decorated Galactically Celebrated Admiral Jean-Luc Picard has gone rogue and must be shot on sight and everyone in the galaxy is happy to go along with that except for a handful of his oldest and dearest friends.” This is the Star Trek universe; they could just as easily announce that Picard got possessed by space ghosts and it’s important he not be allowed to give any speeches because that is how space ghosts reproduce. Insert joke about that time Beverly had sex with a space ghost here.

Meanwhile, Bev learns that the changelings have “evolved” and can now not only imitate internal organs, but retain their form even after death until subjected to serious tissue damage. This, rather than “It’s 2023” might be why they look so much meatier, and answers last week’s question about why Sydney LaForgery (God how did I fail to make that joke last week?) didn’t melt upon being shot. It’s a little weird to drop this tidbit after we saw the changeling Worf and Raffi caught struggling to maintain his form, and the whole thing with the bucket. If a changeling can hold their shape even after death, it’s weird that they would need to take regular goo-breaks while, y’know, living. Not saying it’s wrong, just a weird choice.

The changing of the lings points back at my unease last week over Vadic potentially being a changeling. Something has Happened to these renegade changelings, and possibly they are beholden to some outside force because of it. Who? There’s the rub. Obviously, someone new we’ve never heard of before would be a weird choice for the last season of the TNG Reunion Tour. But who, then? I mean, there’s a lot of candidates, I guess; various powerful entities who Picard dicked over. But I’m not overly sure there’s a fully satisfying answer for who would hold a grudge against Starfleet great enough to justify this plan (currently presumed to be wiping out the entire fleet during the Frontier Day celebration), powerful enough to pull it off, with the specific abilities to reengineer a species, and yet without the necessary resources to just mount a direct attack. But some of Ro’s language when talking about the conspiracy reminds me of some language from the TNG season 1 conspiracy arc. So… Could the flue-gill aliens be back and for some reason pursuing a changeling-based strategy?

Meanwhile, the Worf-Raffi side of the plot doesn’t actually go far, but it does it with style. I’m interested in how the show is playing with letting the audience know things before the characters do. Last week, I questioned the storycrafting in making it clear to us that LaForgery couldn’t possibly be the real deal before Seven figured it out. Similarly, they make a point of withholding the identity of Ro’s two trusted field agents even though we both know darn right well who they are. It’s not like Ro isn’t aware of the relationship between Picard and Raffi, much less Worf. Then, the camera isn’t shy about letting us see Raffi’s mobile emitter as she and Worf provoke the Shady Part of Town set until the local gangsters show up. And yet they try to present it as a great surprise when they shoot Raffi, only for her to turn out to be a hologram. But then there’s the double-twist: the gangsters knew she was a hologram as well, and have a man in position to catch the real Raffi.

But then there’s another twist, when Worf and Raffi are forced to fight to the death. But again, we all know full well that this is not how Worf is going to die, so the tension is weird. Raffi “kills” Worf, his body is carried away, then he shows up again having murdered everyone. I do really like when Worf starts to belt out one of his warrior monk aphorisms, but has to stop short because he’s lost quite a lot of blood.

I also dig the idea of a Vulcan gangster who got into the life because, given crime was inevitable, organized crime was more logical than disorganized crime. There’s also a great exchange where he points out that they can’t kill him since he has the chip they need to bypass Daystrom Station security, and Raffi counters that Worf has lost a lot of blood and isn’t necessarily going to be able to show the logical amount of restraint. It reminds me of my favorite bit in The Maltese Falcon, where Sam Spade explains that his goal is to make the bad guys angry enough that they make a mistake, but not so angry that the mistake they make is killing him before they get what they want from him.

So… bets on the “illogical” AI that protects Daystrom? Lore seems like an obvious choice, except that they have been very consistent so far that androids aren’t AIs. So… Moriarty then? That would be kind of funny. The Enterprise’s space baby? But honestly, it could be no one in particular. It could be Peanut Hamper. (It could not be Peanut Hamper)

We’re left then with the mystery of Jack, which I’m guessing we won’t be resolving for another episode or three. He takes out four changelings when they corner him by going all Matrix, in a scene that is so reminiscent of Dahj and Soji going Android Mode in season 1 that its reuse here almost feels like they forgot. He’s mostly worried about the possibility that he will be compelled to kill while red vines grow. He of course will not talk about this with his mom, because drama. Meh.

So… Red vines? Martian, then? I think we have to assume, due to the laws of conservation of storytelling, that Beverly was right and the interest the changelings (or their superiors) have in him is linked to Picard; it’s late in the season to add another big curveball about that part. So… Something that happened to Picard, which would be reflected in his son, but may not be reflected in Picard himself, whether due to age or because his body is synthetic. Logically, it would have to be something that happened to him specifically rather than the whole crew, as no one’s seeking out Kestra Riker or Molly O’Brien or the LaForge sisters. A side effect of Q whanging him around through time in “All Good Things”? Something to do with that time he got possessed by a space ghost, yes, that really happened and wasn’t just me making a Sub Rosa joke? You have to reckon it’s related to a TNG thing, just for the sake of being dramatically satisfying. Ooh, maybe it’s the Ressikans. Like, maybe they did something to his DNA in addition to 40 years of gaslighting and flute lessons?

There’s a bunch of ways they can go from here, and not all of them are good. But just for the moment, let’s have some faith…. of the heart.

Sorry this is late; provider has been up and down like a seventy-year-old captain and his fifty-year-old medical officer on a vacation.

It’s interesting to feel like I’m on the same page as the people who make this show so often. Because I’ll be damned if “No Win Scenario” doesn’t open up with Riker dropping in on Picard to confirm everything I’d been saying about him. He interrupts Picard’s apology to tell him that, yeah, he was right about attacking the Shrike, and more, that the reason he’s withdrawn from his family is to protect Deanna from his nihilistic grief over the death of his son.

Also I guess Vadic is a changeling? I’m not actually sure. There’s a scene where she cuts her own hand off and it morphs into a scary face that makes vague threats and orders her around. The whole scene really undermines what they set up with Vadic; she’s suddenly timid and fearful and Scary Face seems to have something on her, a threat to her entire race sounds like. If she’s a changeling, why is she making herself look like Amanda Plummer anyway? Changelings don’t like going around as solids, and the whole point seemed to be that this renegade faction wasn’t coping well with the loss of the war. Yet Vadic was having the time of her life in a humanoid form, chain-smoking and chewing the scenery. Whether she is or isn’t the sudden shift to her being scared and timid and deferential to the scary face is really ruining what they had built up. Heck, I’m not even sure if she’s going to be The Big Bad going forward; we leave her sort of spinning helplessly in space after Riker whangs an asteroid at her in what should probably have felt like a solid reversal after she opened by throwing the Eleos at the Titan, but there was already enough going on in that scene.

Maybe it’s going to turn out that she’s not a changeling, but that she for some reason has a changeling hand? It would be way more interesting if she is something else and she’s been, like, saddled with a changeling keeper that lives on her wrist to keep her in line than if she’s just a changeling herself and part of this changeling terrorist group. Here’s hoping.

Also, Vadic ditches the portal gun because she can’t carry it into the gravity well. Is this the end of the portal gun? I know we established last week that it was a diversion from the main point of the heist, but I still hoped we’d see more of it since it was pretty cool. Maybe someone else could retrieve it later?

The main thrust of the plot of the episode is a very traditional TNG sort of plot: the Titan is crippled and falling into what turns out to be a space jellyfish vagina (Okay, that bit is pure NuTrek), and there’s no hope of escape, but then they think of a clever gambit which requires pornographic levels of competence and it’s tense but they pull it off and there’s a payoff where they all have a life-affirming moment of looking at baby space jellyfish (They do not appear to be the same kind as in “Encounter at Farpoint”, but they’re similar enough that if they want to tell us this is what those look like when they’re babies, I’ll accept it. They’re a bit more squid than jellyfish, but it’s space, what do you want?). It’s a good, solid plot that looks good on-screen and really only struggles a bit with the fact that it’s sufficiently obvious that it again makes the Titan crew look bad for the fact that three pensioners come up with it all on their own while everyone else is busy making peace with their respective gods (Except the Bajoran. He’s wearing his earring on the wrong ear, which I think means he is an atheist. Being an atheist is a weird prospect on a planet whose gods are a scientific fact, but whatever).

Really, the main thrust of the episode is the character work, and while Picard and Son do a lot of the lifting here, Shaw is the real breakout somehow. Shaw spends most of the episode convalescing; he’s in comparatively good shape aside from a limp, but he’s hopped up on pain pills and declines to retake command from Riker, even though he’s fit enough to help out with the escape. And I like the way all of this is handled. Shaw is unapologetic, but he isn’t oblivious; he repeatedly owns the fact that he’s an asshole, and you kind of get the sense that he may have actually endeared himself to his own crew for the first time when he walks in on Picard and Jack’s touching moment to swear Picard out over the battle of Wolf 359. Yeah, as I was expecting, Shaw is an asshole because of his Tragic Past and survivor’s guilt. In this case, that he survived Wolf 359 only by virtue of being randomly chosen for the last seat in an escape pod. It harkens back to the introduction we got to Ben Sisko – also a survivor of Wolf 359 with a grudge against Picard. But that was ’90s Trek with its stiff characters whose professionalism doesn’t crack and where “character conflict” was sort of bolted on for the sake of drama. This is more visceral. Shaw walks in and basically tells Picard that given that they’re about to die and he is high as a kite, he would very much like to tell him to go fuck himself (He does not actually drop an F-bomb, but Jean-Luc does a bit earlier while relating an anecdote about a time him and Jack’s namesake got lost in an asteroid field while trying to get laid. It is slightly awkward just because of where in the sentence he sticks it. Also, kudos to Jack for calling out that it’s kinda weird his mom named him after his dad’s best friend). I love the little detail here that Shaw mentions that the “real” Borg are still out there, distinguishing them from the Federation’s new Borg allies. And also that he describes Locutus as, “The Borg so deadly they gave him his own name,” which seems like the sort of thing that ties back into his refusal to use Seven’s name.

(Incidentally, there’s a fan theory I love that the reason people swear so much in Picard is that after Wolf 359, there were so many new PTSD cases that it sparked a boom in trauma research, which led to the rediscovery of the therapeutic value of profanity, early-twenty-first-century knowledge which presumably got lost in the wars.)

There’s bonding between Shaw and Seven even. I’m not at all sure how the Titan works. No one seems to know each other, the crew seems to be very green, Shaw’s had the ship for years and been on a bunch of missions as its captain, though, and the nacelles are twenty years old. They released some concept art this week of the original Titan being being disassembled and its parts moved over to the new one by way of explaining the “refit” thing, so is it that Shaw commanded both Titans? How long has this one been in service? Is the whole crew new? I don’t know. Shaw and Seven seem to get along okay. Shaw laments the lack of marijuana on the ship, which is kind of wild. He helps her track the changeling, who is meatier than ever. And Seven’s track record remains solid: the changeling assumes the form of Ensign Laforge, but deadnames Seven, so she shoots her. I also really like that when Shaw asks her about this and Seven says, “Yeah, the real Laforge calls me by my actual name out of respect,” Shaw owns it. He doesn’t argue the point, he doesn’t justify himself; he just openly admits that, yes, he is a dick to her about that.

I’m starting to like Shaw as a character. He’s so open about the fact that he is an asshole. He knows it’s wrong, and he knows it’s not making him any friends. And you know what? He knows Picard isn’t to blame for Wolf 359, that Picard is a victim of the Borg possibly even more than he was. But trauma doesn’t listen to logic. When he isn’t about to die and high on pain pills, he can control himself and be reasonable about it, but it doesn’t make the feelings go away. He recognizes Seven as a supremely competent officer who he’s lucky to have, but he can’t help the fact that calling her by a Borg name is traumatizing to him. I don’t know how you square that circle. It’s not right for him to hurt Seven, but it’s also not right for him to have to self-harm. I mean, I get it. I’m reluctant to develop friendships with men named Chris. Fool me six times, shame on me.

It’s good TV, but I do have a little reluctance here that two seasons in a row, we’ve had a major character with serious psychological issues who isn’t getting treatment. Three if you count Raffi, which you probably should. This tracks with the real world, but it hurts like hell that things aren’t better in the twenty-fifth century. This is, after all, the Generation that gave us “Ships have a therapist on the bridge.”

My other issue with the scene is that the tension is all on the part of Seven. The audience never has any doubt that Laforge is the changeling. We just saw her on the bridge a few seconds ago (The immediately preceding shot is framed to not show her, but the one before that is basically, “Riker tells Laforge to fly the ship”), and Seven just got off the phone with Riker and told him not to send anyone. Plus, she’s incredibly sus, to the point that she practically went, “Mua ha ha” after asking Shaw whether or not whacking him in the head at this point would allow them to save the ship from otherwise certain death but still leave them easy prey for the Shrike. I guess this was intentional, to put us in the position of fearing for Seven. But there isn’t a lot of tension even that way. Seven is already on her guard, and we kinda know exactly where this is going the whole time. In fact, it feels more like a setup than anything else. Seven and Shaw have been working together to catch the changeling, Shaw and Seven go off to fix the nacelles. Seven says, “Hey, this would be a great time for the changeling to ambush us. I will just step out of the room for a moment and leave you unprotected.” If the changeling hadn’t already done a bunch of murders, we might be inclined to be worried for it, waltzing into such an obvious trap.

I am also confused by the fact that the changeling does not liquefy when Seven shoots it. Is it dead? Stunned? Wouldn’t a changeling revert to liquid in either of those cases? Earlier, Seven had raised the point that by crippling the Titan to the point of doom, the changeling had presumably failed in its mission to help capture Jack. They come back to that a little when the changeling makes it clear that he does want them to save the ship, just not escape. But they don’t close the loop on what the changeling’s full agenda is. In particular, if there’s an explanation for why, while posing as the transporter chief, he didn’t just beam Jack straight to the Shrike and save everyone a step, we haven’t got it yet.

I’ve talked around the exchange between Jack and Jean-Luc because I don’t really have much to say. It’s fine. I like that everyone acts like adults here. Jack isn’t pointlessly obstructive. We learn his reasons for staying out of Picard’s life, but there’s no vindictiveness to it. Unlike Shaw, Jack seems to be at peace with the fact that Picard never meant to hurt him and would have tried to do right by him if he’d had the chance. His heart isn’t open to reconciliation yet, but he isn’t turning against it. I think it’s telling that after Picard accepts the dressing down from Shaw, he gives up on the conversation with Jack as well. Shaw makes Jean-Luc see what he was missing: that Jack, like Shaw, is hurt, deeply, by Jean-Luc’s actions, regardless of the fact that Jean-Luc didn’t have any choice in the matter, and that’s a real problem for reconciliation. Picard can not be the one to make reconciliation happen because to do so, he needs to take responsibility, and how does he do that? Picard has never apologized to any of the victims of Wolf 359, because he is one himself. He was violated, forced against his well to become Locutus, to have his memories raided for the knowledge the Borg used to wipe out the fleet. How can he turn around after that and accept responsibility for those deaths? What’s he supposed to say? “I should’ve fought harder”? “I shouldn’t have put myself in a position to be captured”? “I shouldn’t have worn that short skirt”?

The nebula being a giant space jellyfish uterus was one heck of a twist, and it feels a little bit awkward that Beverly figures this out as a metaphor apparently using Mom Powers rather than the Star Trek tradition of “Science the shit out of this” and then it turns out to be literally true that the nebula energy was contraction. But okay, this isn’t really a “Science the shit out of this” kind of show, and I’ll grant that the Titan crew is busy holding the ship together. Still, it would be nice if the Titan crew – who were greatly talked up in the pre-release materials – actually did something on their own occasionally. This absolutely does not feel like a backdoor pilot for a Titan series; the Titan characters are just sort of “there”.

It also felt like it was a bit late in the day for Riker to still be resistant to trying their plan – his weird death-drive moment where he wants them to wait for rescue, because even if they all die, at least their bodies (and the letter he’s writing to his wife) might be found someday. But he caves when Bev reminds him that one of the running themes in modern Trek is that it’s actually fairly easy to solve these problems once the gang stops fucking around and actually works together. Given that I’d figured out that the solution was going to be “Hook up a lightning rod and let the energy waves jump start the engines” about forty seconds into the episode, I think they could have done a better job at selling us on how hard it was to come up with the solution.

The bonding moment between Picard and Jack also leaves a little to be desired. They have to work together, Jack calling out the positions of the asteroids while Picard navigates around them, a parallel to the anecdote Picard had told earlier about Jack’s namesake. But Picard’s role here is to shout orders to Laforge, so that’s kind of weird. Why not put Picard in her seat for that scene, actually manually flying the ship as he had La Sirena in season one? Picard’s presence is not strictly necessary for this, his big scene. But absolute kudos for another great example of saying things with just a look, the moment Picard recognizes Jack from the years-earlier scene at Ten Forward and realizes how he’d inadvertently hurt him by dismissing the idea that he had any need for a family of his own in what, to the audience of young officers he thought he was addressing, was just your standard inspirational Picard speech. That was pretty cool.

Also, now that they’re out of immediate danger, can they turn the lights back on. When Riker orders them to turn off life support and the lights got dimmer? There was a dimmer?

A bit of a mixed bag, this one. We are just going all in on the Sad Dad, aren’t we? Maybe even a little too hard. We end on a cliffhangery conflict between Picard and Riker whose moral crux is basically them trying to out-Sad-Dad each other. Picard accuses Riker of being too timid because of his Dad Sads, while Riker accuses Picard of being too reckless once Jack is injured, because of his own Dad Sads. And the moral beat of the show, with the climax of Riker throwing Picard off the bridge for having doomed them all feels like it’s aligned with Riker here: it’s Jean-Luc’s name on the title card, so he’s the one who will be having the character arc where he starts out emotionally compromised and has to work his way back.

And yet, of course, was Picard wrong? Riker only fired on the Shrike when they had no other choice; they couldn’t run after the changeling saboteur had blown up their macguffin. No, there’s the devil of it: Picard had been right earlier – they should have attacked first; Riker’s decision to play it safe didn’t pan out because of the saboteur. The problem was that Riker only followed Picard’s plan after it was too late.

The conflict between Riker and Picard is so good though. Putting Riker in the captain’s chair, with Picard as his “Number one” is a fantastic reversal, and, yeah, Riker flipping out like that is a perfect extension of his character. Riker’s upset because Riker did what he always does: he deferred to Jean-Luc, even though his gut told him not to. He’s angry with Picard right now because he is angry at himself: he fell right back into the pattern that kept him from advancing his career for seven seasons and four mostly-terrible movies.

Oh but the changelings. Yeah, it’s the changelings. Or at least, a breakaway faction. They simultaneously reveal it aboard the Titan and over on Terry Matalas Prime. Um… Okay, as a dramatic angle, changelings are a useful villain because of the shapeshifting. But… No, I do not want them to be the Big Bad. We already did that. And it’s not The Next Generation’s fight; it’s weird for them to bring back Deep Space 9’s big bad to be the final boss of Picard. I’m okay with them being here, but it had better turn out that Vadic’s using them, rather than the other way around.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I am starting to fear that Picard and Riker will spend the whole season in that nebula getting hounded by Vadic while Worf and Raffi handle the actual universe-impacting plot. Which is not good because I don’t care for the direction they took with Raffi’s arc and Worf…

Deep sigh.

Okay, on paper, I love the idea that when we rejoin Worf now, he has undergone Some Shit – it’s as if Worf was off doing “Star Trek:Worf” for the past two years and had his own emotional character arc about dealing with his unresolved childhood trauma and is ready to actually commit to dating his housekeeper (And now I see an article in my daily clickbait that this is literally what happened; Worf here is apparently based on a script Dorn had been pushing for a Worf series?). But in practice… I dunno. “I am Worf, son of Mogh, House of Martok, son of Sergei, House of Rozhenko, Bane of the Duras Family, Slayer of Gowron, and I have made some Chamomile Tea” absolutely fucking slaps as a line, but. But.

Something is wrong with Michael Dorn’s performance here, and I can’t put my finger on it. He doesn’t feel like Worf. More like “Michael Dorn playing Worf for a sketch while guest-hosting Saturday Night Live.” Interesting, though, that he describes himself as a “subcontractor”, which suggests that he’s no longer with Starfleet, obviously, but might mean something more. I’m pretty sure that’s how Retired Galactic Tyrant Phillipa Georgiou was described. Everyone’s eager to see if a new Trek will be announced now that Disco is officially ending, so is Star Trek: Worf going to be the angle they take for the Section 31 spinoff they’ve been proposing for years now? They could even bond over the mutual experience of having been rapidly whanged around an infinite number of parallel universes and that time they saw a gremlin on the wing of the plane.

Raffi and Worf capture and interrogate a street-level thug and they fall into a very standard Good-Cop-Bad-Cop routine, except that it doesn’t feel like Raffi actually realizes they’re doing that. She brings up some of the concerns I did, that Worf very easily could’ve let her in on a bit more instead of letting her think she’s been cut loose. Worf is the usual sort of irascible about it for no good reason. I have a hard time buying the justification for their prisoner holding his shape to the point of getting the DTs over it when he could have just, like, not done that and escaped. But we can’t have the reveal in their plot happen before Jack punches the Titan saboteur’s face gooey I guess. The changeling effects are interesting; with a couple of decades’ improvement in the CGI, the changelings are sort of… Meaty now? Like, the changelings in Deep Space 9 would basically do the same kind of liquid metal thing as the T-1000 back in Terminator 2, only amber. These changelings have color variations and texturing in their liquid form that definitely makes them look more organic. And gross. Our story-advancing reveal here is that the portal gun was actually a distraction and the “real weapon” was something far more dangerous. It’s going to be Lore, isn’t it? I don’t want it to be Lore.

Back on the Titan, we have a nice little scene with Seven and La Forge (Why is it that in my head, she is “La Forge” but her dad will always be “Geordi”?) where you almost see a little of ’90s Seven’s standoffishness, but it’s in the flavor of modern Angrier Seven. My poor little heart when Ensign La Forge calls her “Commander Seven”. Show, you had best not injure her for pathos.

Shaw, on the other hand, g’head and injure him. It was actually a really good scene that really gave us a lot to work with. Shaw takes a real bad hit, gets spun and tossed and he’s coughing up blood from an internal injury that Titan’s doctor will not diagnose (Seriously, what is it with these yoyos?) and, shaking with pain, he points with such vitriol and Riker and puts him in charge. I mean just wow. Compare that to the forced “character conflict” that ’90s Trek clumsily introduced once Roddenberry’s grip on the show weakened. Like, if you imagine this happening in TNG’s proper era, you’d have Shaw refusing to hand over command to Riker even as he lost control of the situation, letting his personal distaste cloud his judgment until it was too late. This episode would’ve been mostly about Shaw. But it isn’t, and Shaw is… Let’s say “gracious”? No, that’s too much. He’s lying on the floor, bleeding, badly hurt. These asshole old men have ruined his nap, dragged him to the wrong side of the galaxy, and put his ship and the lives of his crew in danger. He’s pissed. And yet, he still does his duty, still makes the best strategic move: he practically spits at Riker in his anger, but he gives him command, with the order, “You got us into this. You get us out.”

And to his credit, Riker takes his remit as serious as the grave, because Riker was the one egging Picard on last week to put the Titan in danger to save his son – very Riker, really: as a reservist and bereaved father, Riker’s focus is how his friend should protect his own. But once he’s the captain of the Titan, Space Dad Riker’s focus is on protecting his crew just as Shaw’s was. This of course leads to the first time we really get to see Riker as a captain in a tense situation, excluding Lower Decks (And honestly, Lower Decks disappoints me on this front, leaning in on the more freewheeling “pop culture” version of Riker). The fact that Riker does not do a great job at it honestly works for the character. He starts out too conservative, focused on escape. He only turns to attack when it’s too late.

Now, we do get some cool-looking space battles out of it, and the Shrike utterly dominates here, as befits this being the “things get worse” part of the season. I think maybe it would’ve been nice to give us one scene of the Titan holding her own; if for no other reason than to sharpen the blow when the Shrike dominates them in the end. I mean, we end out with the Titan literally shooting itself in the ass.

This is a small problem. It’s tricky. The battles look good. We get to actually look at things; they aren’t the chaotic mess of a lot of the space battle scenes in other parts of modern Trek. They only turn the camera upside-down once or twice. But part of the price of that is that some of the more complicated scenes are also a little slow. I mean, it looks great to see the Shrike fire its portal gun and a big hole open up in front of the Titan and another hole open up next to the Shrike and the Titan to slowly disappear into the hole, and then the Titan’s saucer to emerge back in the nebula even as the tail of the ship is still on the far side of the portal. But it’s also slow. And this happens multiple times. In the portal scenes especially, the Titan lumbers around with the agonizing sluggishness of an early TNG space battle. It sure doesn’t look like the portal weapon was so fast that the Titan couldn’t have juked around it. The first time, they don’t know what’s going on, so okay, but the second time?

And we end up, of course, with the tragic end to this phase of the cat-and-mouse chase, where the Titan shoots at the Shrike and the Shrike portals the torpedoes around to hit the Titan from behind. No one saw this coming? And it’s not like this was instantaneous; it comes off like none of them can figure out what’s going on. The second that portal opened up, Riker easily should have at the least figured out “Oh shit, we’d better dodge.” Again, using her portal weapon to make the Titan shoot itself is a cool tactic (I hope this is building to them turning the tables on Vadic later on by going the wrong way through a portal), but it all happens so lethargically on-screen and with so little apparent comprehension by the Titan crew that they don’t feel especially competent.

Having Riker take command, of course, frees up Jean-Luc to have his own emotional arc through the episode. And I do like most of this. Beverly’s reasons for keeping Jack from him are a little tired. It’s painful to once again have our themes hang so heavily on someone just not being willing to fucking talk about their issues, but I love her explanation that, having lost her parents, her husband, and her first son to SPACE (ps. I love that the lumps Wesley in there, because he might not be dead, but he’s still gone), she decided that she could protect the son of Beverly Crusher, but not the son of Jean-Luc Picard.

Also, it sounds like Picard had a way more action-packed Post-Nemesis career than the typical level of action-adventure during the proper TNG era, given that Beverly’s decision was informed by the series of kidnappings and assassination attempts (Including one by the Remans. If they just pretended that the whole Reman thing never happened, I don’t think anyone would complain) Picard experienced in the week following the entirely normal and mundane vacation-breakup-sex that led to her pregnancy.

So yeah, Bev’s argument is retreading the usual ground. Picard’s frustration is similarly cliche, even if it’s utterly understandable. The one point I do really like is that Picard calls back to last season’s events. He owns that, yeah, he had some serious issues that Beverly was entirely justified in fearing would be a problem for him taking on fatherhood. He is over them now, but more than that, he knows now that those issues were something he had the capacity to overcome. “I could have learned that lesson twenty years ago.” That’s the kind of musings on mortality from a nonogenarian android I want to hear from a show whose raison d’etre is to revisit Picard thirty years later. We later get Picard’s “Seventeen seconds” where Jack is hurt (Tiny aside here, how interesting that Shaw charges Jack specifically with figuring out how the Shrike is tracking them, leading to the discovery of the saboteur and his subsequent injury) and Picard’s brain rewires itself into Dad Mode, to parallel Riker’s flashback about Thad’s birth. The CGI-de-aging they do on the pair is way less obtrusive than it could’ve been, and I like that they seem to have made Riker kind of tubby in the flashback. Also, it does not seem like Riker has not owned any clothes that fit other than his deep-V-retired-swinger outfit from Nepenthe in the past thirty years. Having Deanna pop in on a transmission to be kind of shrewish was a little cringe.

Far more interesting than the parents’ argument, I think, is the not-yet-stated reason that Jack never sought out his father. Unlike David Marcus, Jack knows he’s the spawn of Old Man Picard, but he doesn’t want any of it. The other not-yet-revealed puzzle piece is of course why Vadic wants him. Beverly thinks it’s something to do with Picard. But, of course, Vadic doesn’t want Picard. And she could totally just ask. He would absolutely surrender himself for either the Titan or Jack. I suppose the obvious explanation is that she needs Picard-family-DNA, and whatever Picard has these days, it’s not human DNA. That would tie back to her calling out his “synthetic flesh”.

Is this Shinzon again? I mean, that is terrible, but, like, maybe? Shinzon was an uncompelling villain in a terrible movie. But since we also have the changelings back, possibly I could enjoy it turning out that the final boss of the TNG era is some kind of Legion of Doom, with Shinzon (or just “Another Romulan-made Picard Clone”) and the changelings and Species 8471 and the Pakaleds and Lore and Moriarty and a previously unknown Duras sister and the fluegill parasites and MOTHERFUCKING GROPPLER ZORN all teaming up. That would be the kind of absolute insanity that would justify this project.

Bring back Groppler Zorn, you cowards.

You know, I almost feel like the people who make this show actually listen to me. Possibly they listen to everyone, because they are heavy on the fanservice this season. Because you know how I complained a lot about the pacing of the last two seasons – season 1 especially. Well, that’s fixed.

I reckon most viewers went into this season already knowing through nerd-culture osmosis that our big bad would be Amanda Plummer as Vadic, and her ship was the Shrike, and the gang would be hanging out on the Titan. So… Yeah they don’t really waste time beating around the bush. The main thrust of the episode is that Vadic shows up, introduces everyone to her ship, announces herself as the Big Bad, and everyone goes back to the Titan. There’s no time-wasting with their mysterious adversaries refusing to identify themselves, or trying to sell us that she’s not the antagonist.

Star Trek has never been great at villains, and the Next Generation has been worse at villains than other series. I can count the number of truly great Star Trek villains on one hand, and I don’t even need the whole hand. The Next Gen was always better with Frenemies, really. Modern Trek has failed to give us a really compelling antagonist basically ever. Control came close. But then in saunters Amanda Plummer (Whose dad, I would say, is one of those very small number of truly great Star Trek villains) and lights a cigar and helps herself to a big heaping bowlful of the scenery and just goes to town. She casually tells Shaw his own first name to let us know that she’s got access to Starfleet personnel records (She hints at something in his past that will perhaps justify him being such a dick – something that necessitates him keeping is stress-level in check); we wouldn’t be surprised if she was instantly familiar with the famous Jean-Luc Picard, which of course she is (She also knows about Picard’s robot body, which is the closest we’ve gotten to addressing how well-known it is that Picard is a robot now), but she starts with Shaw, with the nobody we don’t especially like ourselves.

Now, we still have a huge bit being held back, because Vadic’s claim that she wants Jack for the bounty is clearly an incomplete view of things: the Shrike is a War Crimes Mobile, armed with mundane weapons in large numbers, and scary weapons in also large numbers, and a mystery weapon in the number 1. And her ante is to seriously damage the Titan not with any of her weapons, but by wanging the Eleos at it. There’s a huge shift here, because seasons 1 and 2 of Picard had a kind of Russell T Davies Doctor Who vibe to them insofar as for large chunks of them, the drama emerged from the fact that Picard was essentially in exile: he was constantly facing challenges where, as Captain of the USS Enterprise (Notice that despite feigning to not know who Picard is, Jack refers to him as “Captain”, ignoring his actual title in favor of the one everyone knows him for), he could have brought the full strength of the Federation to bear, but right now, all he had was a ranger, a drunk, a drug-addict and an AI developer with anxiety issues. Much of the drama came from the fact that Picard had nothing to fall back on, even his old friends. They faced enemies who were pirates and thugs, but weren’t about to take on Starfleet. But now, Picard has Riker backing him up, and he’s standing aboard a ship-of-the-line, and yet there’s Amanda Plummer, mouthful of scenery, just gleefully telling a Starfleet captain how she is going to tortuously destroy his ship and murder his crew. Episode one had a light implication that they were in danger because the Titan wasn’t there to back them up – that surely, these mysterious attackers would back down if confronted by Starfleet. But nope. She’s giggling over the prospect of fighting the Titan.

By the way, the visual of the Titan just ramming itself in-between the Eleos and the Shrike is pretty great. I’m not fully on-board with the ease of Seven shaming Shaw into rescuing them, but at the same time, a longer scene of her haranguing him to go save a couple of legends instead of being “The guy who abandoned Jean-Luc Picard to his death,” would have messed up the pacing.

I notice that there’s a big shift in Shaw’s characterization at this point as well. He’s still a dick, sure. But in the first few scenes, his, “Fuck Picard and Riker, they stole my ship, stole a shuttle, made me look bad and messed up my nap,” attitude is just purely dickish. But from this point on, every time Shaw is a dick, he frames in terms of his crew, and he is, of course not wrong. Picard says “but we can’t negotiate with terrorists,” and “But we can’t hand over a civilian to be murdered by the scary space lady,” and every time, Shaw answers, “There’s a fuckton of people on this ship and I do not want to get them killed.” That’s not just regulations. It’s not just being a pompous ass. He’s doing the math on people’s lives. The audience is primed to agree with Picard – Jack is a person with a name and a relationship to a series regular, and Vadic is a Disney villain with a ship full of isolytic weapons who, because of the laws of conservation of drama, is probably something to do with portal-gunning the recruitment center last week, and the good guys giving a poor sweet innocent con artist to the cartoonishly evil villain is just Big-W-Wrong. But… Shaw still isn’t wrong either, because, yeah, they drug his ship out here and got them in a fight they possibly can’t win against an urban legend and is it really “good guy” behavior to put his crew at risk for Picard’s friend’s kid? (They do not have any reason to trust that Vadic will let them go, and frankly every reason not to given just how over-the-top evil she’s being, but that’s neither here nor there).

I think we know where this is going, more or less. The thing that’s in Shaw’s past? The thing that makes it hard to sleep? Shaw got people killed, and so now he plays it safe. That’s where his arc is going.

Still needs to be kicked in the face for deadnaming Seven.

And Jack kinda gives them an out. Shame on Titan security for not frisking the guy, but he busts out of the brig and nearly hands himself over before Seven catches him. Shaw is ready to let him go ahead and do it – it’s a perfectly Star Trek sort of answer, frankly: if Jack goes willingly, Shaw doesn’t have to endanger his crew or compromise Starfleet principles by delivering him to his death. They can all be quietly respectful of Jack’s noble sacrifice. The needs of the many and all that.

Except, of course, for the Turn. Because Riker’s been alluding to it all episode, and Picard won’t come out and say it or pursue it (And no one on the Titan thinks to run a DNA scan… The Titan crew is not really distinguishing themselves with their competence). So Riker goes down and wakes Bev up (He’s allowed to walk right up to her, grab a hypo of stimulants and shoot her up with only a very weak “Hey, what are you doing?” from the doctor. Again, not sure about this crew) and brings her to the bridge.

And neither of them say it. It’s been twenty years. Picard has a girlfriend, he’s gotten over his mommy issues, he’s got a new body. They don’t have to say it. With a look, he asks the question, and with a look, she answers, and Admiral Jean-Luc Picard stops fucking around and takes command of the Titan, because he can’t let them hand over his son.

I mean, it wasn’t 100% certain, but we all figured that was probably it, right? It was him or Bev’s grandma’s Irish sex ghost (That’s a thing that happened). And I love that the second Picard says, “He’s my son,” Shaw just sighs and is like, “Okay fine we will be Big Damn Heroes.” Was it a son that Shaw lost?

Oh. Oh I get it now. Duh.

I was angry last week that they alluded to trouble at home with the Troi-Rikers. Of course Riker has to be the one to go and wake Beverly, because they don’t come right out and say it – in fact, you could easily miss the implications (This may be in part because Jonathan Frakes was always a better director than he is an actor, and he’s way out of practice now). Picard doesn’t want to pursue it, doesn’t want to even think about it. But it’s Riker who pushes him, who challenges him. Who won’t let him accept Shaw’s entirely correct assessment that there are a lot of people on the Titan and only one Jack Crusher.

Because Riker lost a son. That’s going to be at the root of his trouble at home, isn’t it? When we last saw him, he seemed to have it pretty together; he was living his best life. But grief isn’t linear. That wasn’t, “I got the Starfleet Bug back in me and have been a bad dad,” when he said Deanna and Kestra would be relieved to be rid of him; it was, “I have the big sads, and do not want to keep inflicting it on my telepath wife and daughter.” Will took one look at Jack, and he knew, exactly like he knew when he met Soji. His Strong Dad Energy kicked in, and he knew that was Jean-Luc’s son, and he could not just stand by and let his friend offer up Jack to his death rather than acknowledge it.

Gah, it is just all so lovely and I am kind of lowkey mad I have to wait a whole week for another episode. This is gonna be the Sad Dad season of Star Trek, isn’t it? Sad Dad isn’t really as big a genre for TV as it is for video games, but it’s certainly the sort of late-in-life meditation that fits with a cerebral show like TNG to go out on. We have a lot of parallels to The Wrath of Khan, and not just because I spent half a year rewriting The Wrath of Khan. The Corporate URW title card is feeling like more than an Easter egg: it’s establishing what we’re going for here. Season 2 was in many ways a mashup of Star Trek IV; Season 3 seems to be going for 2, with a bit of VI in there for good measure. We’ve got a potentially planet-killing superweapon, a smart, larger-than-life villain who revels in making big speeches over the viewscreen, a previously unrevealed son of the captain who’s been kept hidden by his doctor mom, a battle in a nebula… Wow this is kind of on-the-nose.

We have this B-plot too, which is a lot less interesting than the main plot, but has to go through its paces to get the story where it’s going. Just as the A-plot wastes no time revealing Vadic, the B-plot decides that one and a half episodes is exactly as long as they can expect us to pretend that we don’t know Raffi’s handler is Worf. He shows up to do some world-class decapitating and save Raffi’s bacon. Raffi is on the downward-spiral part of her character arc. Worf tells her to drop it after Starfleet fingers an obvious patsy to take the fall for the recruitment center attack, and come on. This all could have been avoided if Worf had just been like, “Disengage for now, I need to work this from a different angle for a while,” rather than letting her think he was going to just let the whole thing be swept under the rug. Raffi goes back to her ex, and they finally make explicit what I said last week and have been saying about her since the start, that her ability to see patterns is a Grim Superpower that also leads to her being a conspiracy theorist, which in turn leads to her drug problem. She makes the downward-spiral decision to pursue a Ferengi gangster toward the true culprets after her ex gives her the choice of him helping her with only one of pursuing the spy stuff or patching things up with their son. Then she misses the incredibly obvious hinting when she claims to have worked for the Romulan patsy and the Ferengi Gangster is like “Oh yes that is very interesting and I definitely believe you and do not know you are lying because I have already killed that dude and have his head right behind my divan.” Then she gets high on an unknown drug provided to her by the shady gangster to prove she’s not a cop, and of course it turns out to be something that will impair her too much to fight back and probably too much to maintain her cover. Good thing Worf showed up. Worf also conveniently commits a lot of homicide, clarifying that the bit from the trailer where he describes himself as a pacifist was a joke. He’s using proper sword now rather than a Bat’leth. Because he’s a ninja. I have this theory that the Bat’leth is actually a deliberately shitty weapon – that it was designed to be hard to use and inefficient (It’s a leverage-based weapon that you have to hold at both ends. You have to get way too close to the person you’re stabbing, and it’s too big to be maneuverable when you’re grappling) because Klingons are a Proud Warrior Race and want to show off, so they felt it would be dishonorable to use a proper killing-machine, and prefer to mezza-luna their enemies to death.

I’m excited. I’m hopeful that the cat-and-mouse in the nebula doesn’t last too long, because we’ve still got a bunch of other stuff to get to, but they’ve actually given me faith this year that they know where they’re going with this plot, which is way better than where we were at this point in either of the previous seasons.

Engage.

I want to be curmudgeonly, but I can’t. They did, so far, pull it off.

Most of the hype leading up to season 3 of Star Trek: Picard has been various forms of, “Oh thank God, they decided to stop fucking around trying something new and just do the TNG reunion nostalgia-fest we wanted the whole time.” If you have been reading my blog’s evolution into a “How is there this much Star Trek for me to talk about?” blog, and I hope you are, you might suspect that this is a marketing tactic that would not work on me so well as on, y’know, the people who keep posting questions on Quora that are thinly veiled rephrases of, “Please help me justify the fact that I can’t stand all the women, gay men, and people of color in Star Trek by making it sound like there’s actually something objectively wrong with it.”

So where are we at the beginning of Picard’s valedictory season? Well, the new Borg and the mysterious transwarp MacGuffin are nowhere to be seen. Rios has been dead for hundreds of years. Soji and Elnor are nowhere to be seen, Jurati is, I assume, off being the Borg Queen. I think Raffi’s got La Sirena for some reason (I didn’t get a good enough look to be sure they aren’t just using the La Sirena sets as a stand-in for “generic civilian ship of the sort a shady ex-starfleet type might use as a private operator”). Stargazer and Excelsior are nowhere to be seen, and we’ll get to Seven in due time.

We actually open on Bevery Crusher, who has become a cool action lady aboard a ship which Memory Alpha tells me is called the “Eleos XII”, though I thought she was saying “Helios” or maybe “Delios”. They’re being attacked by… Let’s go with “Bad Guys”, and she does a lot of murdering them while she waits for the engines to warm up. Her phaser rifle is pump-action, and has both “maim” and “sploosh” modes, switching between them haphazardly. Remember when phasers just had “stun”, “kill” and “disappear”? Okay, I know that they occasionally had to set their phasers to “Extremely nasty death” mode, like when they fought the parasite queen in Starfleet Headquarters’s Inexplicable Boss Fight Room (Seriously, why did they even HAVE a room which was just one big open room with a large throne-like chair and a map and nothing else? The chair had a Starfleet barcode on the back, so this was a normal thing for them to have there, not something specially built for the alien queen). Still. Pump. Action. Phaser. Rifle.

She takes one in the shoulder – fortunately, her attackers have phasers set to “Emulate small caliber gunfire” rather than “Sploosh” – a wound she is unable to treat despite being a doctor, and has to have herself put in stasis. But first, she sends a secret message to Old Man Picard, in the most roundabout and cryptic way she can think of, encrypted with a codec from an unseen adventure (To Rigel VII – the same planet where Pike had recently lost some crew in the original pilot) from the TNG era and obfuscated based on a Borg computer virus that happened off-screen in “The Best of Both Worlds”, transmitted directly to Picard’s old commbadge. I started out thinking it was a little too heavy on the memberberries by having Bev listening to Picard’s old logs when we join her, but I guess it’s actually meant to link back to her invoking the Hellbird virus when reaching out.

But let us pause a moment to contemplate that offscreen during the events of “The Best of Both Worlds”, the Borg infected the Enterprise computer with a virus that… Randomly added 3 to numbers? What, just to dick with them? And they named this virus “Hellfire”? Also, we have an actual canonical example of something mysteriously injecting the actual number 3 into Enterprise systems – that time they got stuck in a time loop with Kelsey Grammer.

Contrary to my fears, Laris has not been quietly killed off-screen; she and Old Man Picard are still very much a thing, and we greet them in the process of packing up the house because she’s got a gig doing security off-world, and her boyfriend is hungry enough for adventure that he looks forward to going with her to… Drink. This scene felt a little clumsy. Also, her job description sounds like a short-term thing, so why is he having the house packed up like he’s moving out? He wants to give Geordi the painting of the D (hee hee. I plan to make “the D” jokes a lot) that’s been hanging over his desk and which is identical to the poster that I think is still hanging in my childhood bedroom unless my mom finally moved it. She stops him.

Apparently, this season is set a few years after last season? (Or maybe not? There’s a ton of inconsistency in the dates of things) Which is a fair way to excuse the status quo being so different, but at the same time, it doesn’t seem to quite mesh with the sense that Laris and Picard’s relationship has a certain newness to it, or that Picard seems not to have kept up with Seven. Or the age of Raffi’s granddaughter.

Still worried they’re gonna fridge Laris in favor of shipping Jean-Luc with Bev, and after last season’s arc, it’s real rough to have him ditch her to go off on another adventure with the old gang, no matter how good a job the universe did at not giving him a choice.

No one from the old gang has heard from Bev in 20 years, and Picard says they parted under a cloud. 20 years would put it around the time of the Mars attack (More or less. I think the Mars attack is more like 17 years ago at this point? Rounding 17 to 20 is fair game in my book, but I bet the nerds are going to insist that they must be different), and I hope they remember that Beverly is from Mars, and probably has feelings about that.

So Picard meets up with Riker at Guinan’s bar because they’re both in town for Frontier Day. Guinan is not present at the moment, but has a lucrative side-line in selling Eaglemoss collectibles, a promotion that has aged like fine wine, what with Eaglemoss going bankrupt between the filming of this episode and the airing of it. She can’t shift the D (hee hee), because no one wants “the fat one”.

Let me tell you, no scene in Star Trek ever gave me tingles the way the reveal of the D (hee hee. Reveal of the D) did back in ’87, but I can totally see Kids These Days not being impressed by the smooth curves and Okudapunk aesthetic in our modern age of harder lines, dimmer lighting, and lens flare.

And… We get to the second Thing From Previous Seasons They Discarded And Made Me Angry: Riker alludes to things not being all fun and happy on Nepenthe, suggesting that Kestra and Deanna are happy to be rid of him. Fuck. Let Riker have his happy retirement, please? If they have it turn out that him taking command of the Zheng He at the end of season 1 reawakened the Starfleet Bug and he’s been neglecting his family, I will be Displeased.

This pretty much brings us to the centerpiece of the episode: the reveal of the Titan-A. Riker describes this as a “refit” of his old ship, but it’s blatantly a completely new ship, a “Neo-Constitution Class”. It looks way more like a Strange New Worlds design than a 24th century design; apparently the actual logic of its design was “What if Starfleet went through a “retro” period at the turn of the century?”

The Titan-A (Letter designators for ships other than Enterprise are a thing now. We had previously seen that in 32nd century on Discovery, but never in the TNG era. I choose to believe that Voyager was the second ship to have its successor get a letter, and once they’d done that, they decided to just make it policy) is not, in my opinion, an especially beautiful ship. Its secondary hull is kind of weird and Grissom-y, and it’s got way too many impulse engines. It’s got a very TOS-movie-era design sensibility, but in NuTrek colors, and while it evokes the original Constitution Class, it doesn’t do so overtly enough to justify selling it as a “New Constitution”.

But the approach scene? Letting the camera slowly make love to the ship as Picard and Riker get a good look at it on the way in? Best “Starship Porn” scene that the modern era has done. It’s everything a Starship Reveal should be, letting us get a good look at the ship and not being too busy or crowded or turning the camera upside-down.

As an aside, I have heard that there’s an explanation for Riker describing the Titan-A as a refit: that it’s essentially a mild sort of con, with the new Titan being built with a few parts salvaged from her predecessor. There’s a popular claim here in the real world – a probably apocryphal one, but one with a chance of being truth-adjacent – that the USS Constellation – a 19th century Sloop-of-War currently on display as a tourist attraction in Baltimore’s inner harbor, was built using timbers salvaged from the 18th century frigate of the same name, and that this might have been done as a legal maneuver to work around congress refusing to authorize a new ship, so the Navy did some creative accounting to “refit” a recently scuttled vessel. Like I said, this is probably complete bullshit, born out of wishful thinking by folks who wanted Baltimore’s tourist attraction to have the same provenance as Boston’s – the older Constellation was a contemporary of the USS Constitution, famously the oldest US Navy vessel in operation.

And then we meet the Titan’s first officer, Commander Seven of-

record needle scratch.

I have not been shy about the fact that I think of “Annika Hansen” as essentially Seven’s deadname. Everyone who uses it in the first two seasons dies. Seven does not want to go back to being the little girl whose parents stranded her in the Delta Quadrant and got her abducted by robot space zombies. She wants to be “Seven”, the identity she forged for herself after her liberation from the collective. So it was upsetting to me when she introduces herself as “Commander Hansen”.

But, again, they pulled it off. Because it’s not just a name; it’s the first hint we get about a man we haven’t met yet: Captain Shaw. And Captain Shaw? Is a dick. He calls Seven by her deadname. He also accuses Seven of siding against him with Picard as a “fellow Ex-Borg”, which is kinda racist? And he hates jazz. And he couldn’t be arsed to greet Picard and Riker. And he couldn’t be arsed to take the chair when they left spacedock. And he doesn’t like bordeaux. And, of course, when Riker and Picard set up a plan to get themselves out to the hinterlands to look for Bev, he just turns them down flat, refusing an order from an Admiral (Picard is retired again? Last year he was running Starfleet Academy. Riker was active reserve last time we saw him, but he doesn’t outrank Shaw).

Seriously, give this man a swagger stick, because he’s got strong Styles energy. I wonder where his arc is going? I assume he will be the person to tell Jean-Luc to go fuck himself this season, but what else? Will he come to see the value of the older generation’s cowboy ways (It’s so strange now to see Shaw dismiss Picard and Riker as being into action and explosions and crash landings, when The Next Generation was for the most part so much more of a regimented, cerebral, thinky sort of Star Trek, and it’s really only the movies where they got to be Big Damn Action Heroes)? Will he be part of the conspiracy? Not actually saying there is a conspiracy, but Bev sure seems to think Starfleet can’t be trusted. All I ask is that there comes a critical moment where Seven gets to say, “I’m not Borg. I’m Ex-Borg, and it’s not Hansen, it’s Seven, you son of a bitch,” then kick him in the face.

I do, though, love how Seven sees right through the subterfuge, and is instantly on-board to steal her own ship as soon as Picard lets her in on the secret.

Here, we pause a second to reflect on the interior of the Titan. It’s… Okay. Too dark, like most starships in this era of “Hey when you use a modern digital camera instead of an old fashioned analogue TV camera, you don’t need to light everything up as bright as the sun.”

I note that like the Stargazer, the bridge of the Titan is set into the middle of a flight of stairs, because there is no OSHA in the 25th century. I am fascinated by the workstations, too, because they have these huge curving screens that are consistent in style as an evolution of the TNG-era LCARS. The scale of them is a little weird though. I find myself imagining the crew constantly damaging their rotator cuffs to reach way up to hit a button all the time.

I think I mentioned that I bought a new car not long ago. Well, new to me; it’s a 2018. It’s my first car with a touchscreen, and its touchscreen is about twice the size of the one in Leah’s car. I test drove a more recent version of the same model, with an even larger touchscreen – basically the whole center console on the 2020 is a touchscreen, and it reminds me a lot of the big workstations on the Titan.

While all this is going on, we check in with our other returning character, Raffi. Who I guess was not the Excelsior’s captain last season, but just the Operations Officer? Because she’s a commander now, same as Seven. She’s also with Starfleet Intelligence, under cover with a secret handler who won’t meet with her in person and is evasive about his true identity and is definitely Worf. Raffi is under cover on M’Talas Prime. Seems early in his showrunning career for Terry Matalas to name planets after himself.

I have no complaints about Raffi’s scenes, unless it turns out that she really did break up with Seven. In particular, I love Raffi’s cover story. Normally, they’d do this thing where they try to sell that she’s gone all piratey and no longer cares about anything but money and her next hit and that she was out for evil. But instead, Raffi’s cover story is, “She fell off the wagon when Seven dumped her, got kicked out of Starfleet over her drug problem, but she’s desperate to get back in, so the reason she’s doing these shady things is that she hopes that a big score will get her back in Starfleet’s good graces.” This is a much more believable cover story than your usual “Nah she just went mercenary,” even if the audience themselves isn’t going to buy it – and they do not ask us to.

The score she’s chasing is a stolen Quantum Tunneling device. That is, a portal gun. I really like the scenes of her trying to interpret the “red lady” clue. I will leave aside how weird it is that her contact sold her the words “the red lady” with no context. I mean, where did he get that? It’s not quite as good as her tracking down Maddox in Season 1, but it’s nice to be reminded that Raffi is a savant at interpreting fragmentary data. That’s the positive side of her (probably neurodivergent) mental configuration that also led to her being a conspiracy theorist (The service record that flashes on-screen for a bit reveals that she stalked Janeway for a while!).

The fact that the Red Lady is a reference to Rachel Garrett is an interesting one, and I can’t help but wonder if our villains’ beef has something to do with defunct timelines – maybe Amanda Plummer is angry about the sheer fucking hubris involved in the Enterprise crew aborting the Klingon War timeline? Though my leading theory at the moment is that the bad guys have a beef over Starfleet allying with the Borg at the end of last season – the references to “The Best of Both Worlds” plus Shaw mentioning the Ex-Borg thing make me think it would be very satisfying for this to be revenge by people who were hurt by the Borg and now feel betrayed that Starfleet has made peace with them.

So the Red Lady is a statue of Rachel Garrett in front of a Starfleet recruiting center, which Raffi figures out just slightly too late to stop it getting Quantum Tunneled into a big hole in the ground, which then politely dumps it from the other end of the hole, way up in the air above. It is a pretty cool visual.

Seven derailing her career to do a solid for Picard and Riker feels nice – we get a very abbreviated sense that she’s chafing as Starfleet – the balance between following orders and following her heart is something that pretty much everyone in NuTrek struggles with. As I’ve said many times, I wish more characters would reach the conclusion that Starfleet wasn’t for them. But I think the arc we’re probably going for here is going to be another rehash of Seven ultimately finding her way while wearing the uniform. I dunno.

We end for this week with Picard and Riker having made it to the Eleos (wasn’t that a toaster pizza?) but under siege from the bad guys, who have returned in a giant sort of scorpion-like ship of a design I feel like I’ve seen before. Kinda like the Shadows from Babylon 5, but more straightforward. Almost thinking there’s a Transformer that turns into it. But our real shock twist is the new character who accosts them and identifies himself as Jack – Beverly’s son. (See? Get it? We called the episode “The Next Generation” and here is the literal son of the previous generation? I mean, actually, it’s pretty cool how the title seems at first to be fan-service reminding us that this season we are just gonna do full-on TNG Reuinion, but it turns out that it connects on multiple levels, with Raffi’s grandkid, and Bev’s son, and Riker’s replacement, and Geordi’s daughter, who is also there, but so far she’s just been a Demora Sulu-style wave and nod; maybe we’ll see more of her later).

Wow. This was a fun, zippy episode, and I really do lament that Picard’s final season has discarded trying to do something new and different in favor of “Let’s just do a proper TNG movie with the same feeling of get-the-band-back-together-after-years-apart that the TOS movies had”. But man, they do such a good job. This episode is so much more focused than the previous seasons of Picard were. And it just feels right. Like, they wham you up front with a title card reading “In the 25th Century…” that evokes the opening of The Wrath of Khan (down to the use of Corporate URW font, which appears only here and in the Star Trek II title cards). The music, which I think is based on the suite from Generations, has a very movie-era feel to it as well, along with a lot of the cinematographic choices. We dispense with the Picard-centric title sequence in favor of a simple title card, and episode titles are on-screen again. Also, along with Corporate URW, we get the return of the Crillee font for the credits. Where seasons 1 and 2 made a point to remind us that this is part of the New Generation of Star Trek – not simply a return to The Next Generation – every little thing they can cram in here seems to scream the message, “The Next Generation is back.” I don’t want to love it, but I kind of do.

Let’s see where they go from here…

PS: The end titles are chock full of little easter eggs on the display panels, revealing that the original Voyager (There’s a “C” now) and the Enterprise-A are both in the fleet museum. Is it too much to hope, I wonder, whether they might get a cameo for Frontier Day?

Yeah, it probably is. But still, would that not be fucking epic?