A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Well what the hell was that? Yes, they did it, and… Well I’m not angry. Maybe a little disappointed. But mostly confused, because after a season of pretty tight episodes, we’ve got two in a row that have reverted to just sort of meandering. Again, I’d had quite a lot of strawberry schnapps and burned my fingers pretty badly with the hot glue gun, so it is possible this episode was more coherent than I think it is.

We got a slow, talky episode, that might have actually resolved the series plot? I can’t tell for sure. But a whole lot of side-not-important happens for reasons that aren’t clear.

And Picard gets hit by a car. In fact, this happens right at the beginning and the rest of the episode is told in flashback.

And, of course, Jurati is time-sharing her body with the Borg queen. Consensually. Last week, it didn’t look like the queen had given her much choice, pumping her full of nanoprobes, but it sounds here like they’ve come to an arrangement, Agnes allowing the queen’s consciousness to reside inside her because they’ll need her to do the time travel calculations. The queen, of course, is working a scam. I do like the interactions between them; the decision to play up the queen’s seduction angle makes for a more interesting character. This version of the queen is drawn directly from First Contact; the queen on Voyager was very different. She did seem personally hurt over losing Seven, and passionate about the business of assimilation, but the sexual angle was entirely superficial. That queen wouldn’t spend half an hour macking on Rios and showing off Agnes’s cleavage and singing “Shadows of the Night” just for the thrill of it. This queen is a voyeur who gets off on feasting on everyone else’s suppressed desires (Actually a bit reminiscent of the Talosians now that I think of it). Turns out she did have an ulterior motive, of course, since apparently nanoprobes can juice up on endorphins, but still, this is the same queen who gave Data human skin so she could breathe on it seductively.

I gather a lot of people objected to the “Shadows of the Night” scene. I just wish they’d let her do the whole song. Sure. Stop the plot dead for four minutes so I can hear a jazzy Pat Benetar cover. That’s not even a joke; I’m really into that sort of thing, actually. Bossa Nova covers of ’80s ballads. Hair metal covers of showtunes. Basically everything Postmodern Jukebox has ever put out.

Rios’s fake ID is a complicated easter egg, referencing Karl Urban and De Forest Kelley. I’m not generally impressed by such things, but it’s fine. There’s also a model of the OV-165 from the opening credits of Enterprise, which will impress me if that’s meant to be the Europa Mission craft, but that isn’t clear in context. I think there’s also a model of Nomad in the background at one point. The Easter Egg that properly pleased me was that Renee’s boss is apparently Mae Jemison, who is a real person and awesome, and was inspired to go into the space business by Star Trek.

It’s not really all that clear what Rios, Raffi and Seven are there for exactly. Nominally, they’re running interference in case Q shows up, but he doesn’t, and they don’t honestly seem to be putting in much work. Raffi is tempted by a drink, which fits with her character though I’m not sure alcoholism was established as one of her specific vices. One thing that does come out of the presence of “And The Rest” is that Raffi calls Rios out on being sweet on Ramirez. There’s a lot of R-names in this show. Why do I care that Rios has a crush on a twenty-first-century free clinic doctor and single mom? Because it would be an actual character trait for Rios. Look, I enjoy the attitude and the personality and the holographic crew. But to expand a bit on what I said a few episodes back, Rios is the most passive, boring, underwhelming captain since John Harriman. If you think back over the series so far, Picard has always had clear motivations. Protect Dahj. Protect Soji. Fix the timeline. And Raffi has had her own agenda and her own motivations: find her son. Prove she was right about the conspiracy. Convince Seven to settle down and make an honest woman of her. And Seven has had her own agenda and her own motives. Revenge against Vagazzle. Protect the former Neutral Zone. (Spoilers) Recapture the Borg Queen. And Soji had her own motives and her own agenda. Figure out who she really is. Find her home. Protect her people. Agnes had her own reasons and motives and goals, even though they’ve been consistently bad: kill Maddox; make up for killing Maddox; save the queen; sneak out into Los Angeles on a sexy assimilation spree. And Elnor and his own drives. Protect Picard. Protect Hugh. Soji and Elnor both got written out of the show once those weren’t applicable. But Rios has always been a purely reactive character. He’s basically Picard’s chaffeur for most of the first season. He never takes any real initiative of his own. He has some backstory to provide angst, but it doesn’t really motivate his actions. He doesn’t come up with plans, he doesn’t pursue goals of his own. He’s introduced very obviously as a Han Solo-inspired character, but, critically, Han owed money to a gangster and was desperate to pay it off, and that was his motivation. Rios isn’t in debt to dangerous people. He hasn’t made enemies that he has to stay one step ahead of. He isn’t even doing something as banal as trying to get rich. In season 2, he’s Starfleet again, but his captaincy doesn’t actually involve much leadership. He’s operating much more in the mode of an Executive Officer – handling the logistics of managing the fleet that goes to meet the Vaguely Yonic Borg Ship. He defers immediately to Picard once he’s aboard, and I think the only orders we see him give are telling his crew to not do things. He’s not even very effective at that.

Rios is an entirely passive, reactive character. If he’s taking enough of an interest in Teresa that he’s considering fucking with the timeline over her, that would actually be the first time he cared about something enough to act on it of his own volition, and it would be nice to see that. We had the relationship with Jurati last season, but that basically came out of nowhere and went nowhere and just sort of stumbled into happening based on little if anything.

So… Picard gives Renee a speech and this convinces her to go through with the Europa mission. And… I mean, okay. What I was afraid of was the implication that Picard’s speech cures her mental illness, and… There is enough vagueness to leave that a problematic angle, but the actual text of his speech supports not the notion of him “curing” her anxiety and depression, but inspiring her to work with it. And, I mean, yeah, sure, he’s Jean-Luc Motherfucking Picard; he’s going to save the day by giving a speech. I mean, it was pretty charming last season when the synths locked him up specifically to stop him from giving an inspiring speech, and he escaped and saved the day by giving the inspiring speech.

And then he gets hit by a car.

Yeah. What’s the deal with Adam Soong anyway? Q recruited him to somehow stop Renee from going on the Europa mission, and I guess maybe the reason he did that is that Soong had access to the party (He donated a ton of money, which is the least realistic thing about him; they’ve written him as a techbro, yet he donated money to a NASA mission rather than just making his own private space agency) and was desperate. But Soong has very little in his repertoire; he sics security on Picard, but the nonogenarian meat-android gives them the slip the second the house lights go down for Jurati’s musical number. And having failed at that, Soong, desperate to save Kore, tries to run Renee down with his car. And again, it’s 2024 and he’s a techbro. Why doesn’t his car have fully automated next-gen collision avoidance?

They do a great job of conveying Soong’s desperation, and the toll it takes on him. He loves his daughter, he wants to save her, he’s willing to break the laws against genetic engineering. He’s willing to resort to shady business practices. But murder is still a pretty big deal, even for him (Also, he ran an old man down in full view at a high-security exclusive event and then just left and no one has come to collect him? This is… A stretch). But they fall short of really selling me on how we got here. Soong appears to have had basically no plan here.

Also, his lamentations about Kore being his “life’s work” are sufficiently creepy that she googles herself and finds out, fairly trivially, that she’s a clone. This is why he was weirdly evasive when she mentioned her mother before. She’s Soong’s fifth try at this, and the only one to survive to adulthood. This is a huge deal because… Man, I don’t know. They seem to be dedicated to not outright mentioning the Eugenics Wars, so I don’t know if this carries the weight of that. Trek has been wishy-washy about that whole thing. TOS placed them in the ’90s as a huge, devestating war, but 23rd century humans are kind of ambivalent about them, with Kirk being a little bit of a Khan fanboy initially (in a detached, Military Historian sort of way that is a reasonable mirror of how military historians often focus their interests in the mechanics of war and are less concerned about the moral dimensions once the period they’re studying is a century or two in the rear-view). TNG mentions them once in passing, but sort of hints that they took place later, since the late 21st century is described as “post-Eugenic”. But there also don’t seem to be any cultural or legal taboos against genetic engineering and transhumanism. DS9 is more explicit in their references to them, but is vague about the date, once suggesting they were in the 22nd century, but in a way that’s ambiguous enough that it might have been a mistake (I think it’s just that someone says they were “two hundred years ago”, which is the kind of vague language that leaves plenty of wiggle-room), but there’s a tremendous cultural taboo and legal prohibition against genetic engineering which is plot-relevant. Voyager shows the late ’90s with no visible evidence of the wars beyond an easter egg. As I discussed before, this isn’t evidence of absence, since that episode is set in Los Angeles, and if there is one place on Earth where it’s easy to believe folks would fail to notice a huge genocidal war going on elsewhere on the planet, it is Los Angeles. Enterprise does confirm the Eugenics wars and their rough timeline – a few generations before the show, still flexible enough to have taken place basically any time between Star Trek IV and First Contact. But genetic engineering is not only illegal but provokes a deep, paranoid, visceral horror from humans. Finally, in Discovery, genetic engineering is illegal, but doesn’t seem to carry the same emotional horror, and other forms of transhumanism seem entirely okay.

Anyway that is just me showing off my knowledge of Trek Lore. Or Trek Data. Kore is a clone and Soong doesn’t know how to make one that doesn’t end up defective, and he seems to genuinely love her and he’s clearly genuinely desperate to save her. And the character of it feels like this is legit parental love, but he’s such a douche and fits the techbro archetype, so should I trust that he really cares, or is this a “She is my possession and the living embodiment of my ambition and success and sense of self-worth thus I must protect her”? I mean, he loves her, but she’s his fifth try, which is consistent with the techbro attitude of “Actually it does not matter if my insane business venture fails; I’ll just cut bait and move on to something else; it’s only the people who actually need to work for a living who will be hurt.” But… He hasn’t cut bait on Kore. Is there a transformation in his backstory where the first four were disposable, but in Whoville, they say, Adam Soong’s small heart grew three sizes at some point and now he’s imprinted on this particular clone?

I don’t know, and I don’t really like this plot all that much and would be fine with them just dropping it.

I will admit to having been wrong about it being weird if they reintroduced Teresa. The setup of them needing a doctor to attend to Picard after Soong’s murder attempt, but not being able to go to a hospital is solid (I feel like the ease with which they hacked credentials for the party should have that covered – possibly a line here to say “Have Jurati hack medical records for him. Hey, wait, where’d she go?” would help. Or pointing out that a respectable hospital might keep records they do not want to go into a file somewhere). Saying he has “some transplants” is funny. I guess we get an answer to something I’d been wondering: in his new body, Picard’s heart is no longer mechanical. He fibrillates on the operating table. He’s biologically different enough from a human that defibrilating him damages Teresa’s equipment, but not so different that she can tell he’s synthetic from poking around inside him. So… Basically body built to human engineering design, but made of synthetic materials with different tolerances and chemical properties?

But this is the second week in a row where the episode breaks feel somewhat misplaced. If, last week, they had been a little slower getting into the Heist plot, we could’ve had Jurati’s planned capture be the Act 1 break this week, and ended on Picard getting run over. Instead, we gallop through the “Heist” and then get half of Picard’s treatment and recovery this week. Time is complicated and I am drunk, so I know what the bulk of next week’s episode is, and it too will have this “off by a bit” issue when the structure would, I think, work out better if next week’s episode had opened with them bringing Picard to Teresa, and followed on from there, saving Picard’s recovery for the final scene of that episode instead of – spoilers – having it happen at the end of act two.

This all leads us into our setup for next week. Because Teresa patches up Picard just fine, but he still won’t wake up, and because this is television, the reason he can’t wake up is psychological. He’s not comatose; he’s just got to work out some personal issues before he can wake up. Deep sigh. Look, this could easily be salvaged by some technobabble about the interface between his golem body and his meat mind. Can we please not do this “Severe unresolved emotional trauma from his relationship with his parents has plunged Jean-Luc into a coma that will require science fiction bullshit to resolve” thing unqualified? My parents called me lazy every day for fifteen years, could I please get a sci-fi nap out of it, preferably one that left me refreshed, rested, and with the ability to form secure attachments without anxiety?

This is the setup for next week, wherein Tallinn will dive into the mind of Jean-Luc in order to help him resolve his personal issues. Man, dudes will do anything to avoid going to therapy…

Back to form I guess, since this episode is a little bit of an unfocused mess, at least compared to how tight the first part of the season was. There’s a ton going on, which isn’t unusual this season, but it feels a lot clumsier about it. Like, the climax of the episode, insofar as there is one, is the reveal that we’re going to be doing a Good Old Fashioned Heist. That’s good. Possibly “The Heist Episode” is going to be a fixture of the mid-season in Picard. Given that there’s only one more season coming after this, trends are hard to analyze. But last season we had “Stardust City Rag”, and now we have the Europa Ball. But “Stardust City Rag” followed a standard The Heist Episode structure, where we introduce the heist, have a heist planning montage, execute the heist, then all hell breaks loose during the getaway.

“Fly Me To The Moon” introduces the heist in the third act, does its heist planning montage in the last five minutes, and ends on a cliffhanger immediately after step 1. I can see why they did it: they want to end the episode on the weight of the Imaginary Borg Queen Pal reveal. But it’s still a structural deficit, especially given how little time passes between the death of the Borg Queen and her return.

And all that goodness between Seven and Raffi gets sidelined this episode, because their bit is nearly perfunctory. It’s great to see their working relationship, and once again, I am impressed by the way they play against expectations, with Raffi, the Starfleet Captain, being impatient and impulsive, while Seven, the ranger who bucks authority, staying cool but still kicking ass. But it’s all over in a minute or two, and they don’t have a lot to do for the rest of the episode. I do note that they made a big deal about not bringing phasers, but Seven can apparently turn a tricorder into a stun gun. Though… Raffi has a phaser. Oh, do Confederation phasers not have a stun setting? That actually would have been a good thing to say two episodes ago when Agnes was telling them not to bring phasers. Her “butterflies” explanation is fine as far as it goes, but it would have been a little stronger had she clarified, “These phasers don’t have a stun setting, so we have to be extra careful not to murder our own grandparents.” Also, I realize “It’s different”, but it’s weird to put, “We can’t shoot the bus, that might change history!” right next to them liberating a busload of undocumented immigrants who were definitely about to be disappeared by racist cops. If you’re going to do a “We mustn’t alter the timeline! Ah fuck it, I’m not going to let these innocent people die,” reversal, it should at least give the impression that it’s being done knowingly and with some weight.

Picard takes a bit longer than felt reasonable to understand that Tallinn isn’t Laris, and I wonder now what the explanation will be for Picard’s twenty-fifth century housekeeper being identical to a twenty-first century diaspora human. Is it going to turn out that Tallinn is Laris, just not yet? I don’t like that possibility.

I almost didn’t realize it, but Tallinn’s mission explains why Guinan reacted like she did when Picard told her his name. At the time, you just assume Guinan’s Time-Senses are tingling. But now it’s clear that Guinan knows what Tallinn’s mission is, and twitched at the Picard family name. Picard explaining about Supervisors is one of the most awkward blocks of dialogue in the series so far, enough that I’m bothered when he talks about “Kirk’s Enterprise” with no clear referent and Tallinn mostly just ignores the whole thing. I do like that Picard objects to Tallinn eavesdropping on Renee’s therapy session. I mean, sure, he listens in anyway, but it fits in with the very respectful and supportive attitude 2022 Trek has taken toward mental health.

So the long and short of it is this: Picard’s great-great-aunt Renee (Also, coincidentally, his dead nephew’s name, but it’s not exactly an uncommon name. My mother-in-law is named Rene. And, as mentioned, my cat is named Orla) is destined to go on a mission to Europa, and on that mission, she’s destined to discover (deep sigh) a possibly-sentient microorganism, and for reasons none of the characters understand yet, this is key to whether or not humanity’s future involves being giant douchebags or not. But Renee suffers from anxiety and depression and Q is trying to spook her out of going. Why Q can’t simply kill her is undisclosed. I don’t mean “Why doesn’t he use his powers to disappear her,” I mean, why not just stab her or something? I have so many feels for Renee in principle: anxiety and depression are terrible on their own and terrible in tandem, and the anxiety of having been a gifted youth who feels like she’s going to fail and like she’s being set up to fail is something I have, like, aleph-null feels for. In theory. On-screen, this is largely an informed ability. What we see of it a very clumsily intercut flashback of her flubbing a flight simulation, so I don’t actually feel sold on the scope or intensity of her issues. Obviously, a real person has no responsibility to convince me of their mental health issues to earn my empathy, but Renee Picard is a fictional character in a story where those issues are key to the plot, and you should really show me such things rather than telling me if you want your plot to work. Film should not be coy.

What I am reminded of now a bit is the TOS novel Strangers from the Sky. That’s a weird but well-loved one with an odd framing story (The bulk of the narrative is set prior to the second pilot – McCoy isn’t on the Enterprise yet, Sulu is doing a tour in the science department, and Gary Mitchell is still around, but the story is framed during the movie-era and told mostly in flashback). In that story, Kirk and pals are sent back to mid-21st-century Earth and have to prevent First Contact.

First Contact, the film, established canonically that the first sentient aliens humanity encountered were the Vulcans, as a result of Cochrain’s warp test flight. But before that movie, it was widely accepted in Expanded Universe Trek that the first formal interspecies contact was pre-warp and not with the Vulcans. (Also, Cochrain was widely assumed not to have been human himself, given that he was described as being “of Alpha Centauri” in TOS. This was effectively retconned as an honorific rather than a demonym, and I think DS9 effectively establishes the Alpha Centauri system as having no native inhabitants)

The bulk of Strangers From the Sky concerns a crashed Vulcan research ship, whose crew the Enterprise gang has to rescue from a more-or-less benevolent military. The claim made by the book is that the natives of Alpha Centauri were physically and culturally close enough to human that humanity was better able to cope with meeting them, whereas Vulcans were too weird and meeting them first was liable to freak humanity out and cause them to retreat into xenophobia and isolationism. I could easily believe that Picard is picking up on those themes, and is proposing that Renee’s contribution – introducing humanity to non-Earth life in the comparatively harmless form of a solar-native microbe – paved the way for humanity to accept the Vulcans without going all genocidally racist.

Of course, there’s another player in the mix here: Adam Soong. Yes, Brent Spiner has been called into service once again to play yet another identical ancestor in the Soong clan. As with last year, I am immediately sus: the Soong family have a long history of being assholes. But Atlan last season turned out to be a mensch, and Adam seems to be pretty sympathetic. Also, he is properly derisive of Nazis, rather than saying that there are very fine people on both sides and being a Nazi is not as bad as banning one from Twitter, so he’s several steps less evil than several real-world insane billionaires I could name. On the other hand, I am told that in the Evil Future, there was a big statue of Adam chanting racisms. I did not actually notice this, because, as I mentioned, I was pretty drunk.

Adam’s a douchey techbro, but he’s also got a daughter, Kora, who is dying of an incurable genetic illness that makes her go all Korean Horror Movie in the presence of sunlight. Kora is played by Isa Briones, and is thus a doppleganger for Soji, indicating that the Soong family is incredibly inbred. This may explain her genetic defect. Anyway, Soong thinks that genetic engineering can cure her, but he’s getting in legal trouble because that shit’s illegal. Y’know, because of the big war over it back in the ’90s which we are carefully avoiding talking about because it is confusing for the people who need this 2024 to not feel divergent from our own, aside from the manned mission to the outer solar system. This may include the showrunners. Adam’s grandson is going to be a Khan fanboy, so okay, this is all reasonable. If, indeed, Arik is Kora’s child, it would even make plausible sense that he’d be a big fan of genetic engineering.

I will point out once again, that in the year of our lord 2022, the possibility of “There was a massive war that killed a significant percentage of the global population, but middle-class life in the US is still recognizably similar and most Americans have a hard time holding on to the fact that it even happened or that the rest of the world is, in fact, a real place with real people whose lives and deaths are of any real importance,” isn’t a plot hole. The US was at war with Afghanistan for 20 years and we just spent two years in a global pandemic that killed a million Americans and isn’t actually over yet. It’s not a stretch to say “Yeah, Khan happened, but the war took place mostly in the southern hemisphere so America largely ignored it even though a billion people died.”

His daughter’s condition has Adam over a barrel, so he agrees to help Q, as Q is offering him a cure. Maybe in the prime timeline, Renee’s microorganism provides a cure for Kora, thus convincing Adam to not be a racist? Q gets a little interesting here; there’s something personal in his philosophical waxing about how we are all hostages to what we love. I want it to turn out that someone else has Q over a barrel here, but exactly how that can all fit together eludes me for the moment.

And then we’ve finally got the whole big thing with Jurati and the Borg Queen. Love that the Queen’s plan is straightforwardly to call the cops. Hate that La Sirena is weak against voice imitation. There’s some reasonable attempts here, with the ambiguous cut when Jurati shoots the queen, making it seem at first that she’s shot the cop, then revealing she shot the queen, then later revealing that the dying queen nano’d her up and she had decided not to tell anyone. She may be under Borg Compulsion to not say anything; I hope that’s it, but she doesn’t seem to be controlled so much as seduced at the moment. But this episode is sort of scattered and ill-paced. The plot beats all happen so fast that they don’t have time to gel properly. There just isn’t time for us to get used to the fact that Agnes killed the cop before we find out that Oh No She Didn’t, she really killed the queen only Oh No She Didn’t, and now we’re planning a heist but Oh No She Didn’t this was all the Borg Queen’s machinations. Even as muddled as last season was, we at least had the space of multiple episodes from Oh putting the mind-whammy on Jurati to her killing Maddox to the reveal that she was acting out of compulsion because she’d been broken by the terrible secret of space. We basically have a similar amount of character twists for her all in the space of one episode. Not even one episode, because these all happen in the last ten minutes or so. This episode would’ve been so much more focused if they’d ended with everyone returning to La Sirena to find Jurati covered in blood and admitting to having killed the queen. Make the shooting happen at the end of act 2, spend more time with Seven and Raffi rescuing Rios, spend more time with Picard and Tallinn. Heck, spend more time establishing Adam’s character. Then everyone meets up at the end to find out that Jurati killed the queen. Next week we could do the Heist Planning Montage, and actually go all the way through the heist scene before revealing via flashback that the queen now lives rent free in Agnes’s head like a 2005 Battlestar Galactica reboot Cylon-Angel he typed foreshadowingly.

Also, I keep saying “heist”, just as shorthand, but there’s not really a heist about to happen in the literal sense. They’re going to go to a party in order to stop Renee from getting spooked, kidnapped or murdered. Not clear how a bunch of weird strangers crashing her party will do that. I have a feeling it will involve Jean-Luc giving an inspirational speech, just because that is a very Picard thing to do.

If Picard cures her mental illness with an inspirational speech, I will be very angry indeed.

I might even tell him to go fuck himself, since we’re overdue.

Well, I guess I should’ve saved my comments about ICE being a bunch of fascists for this week, because man, without giving the assholes too much screen-time, they manage to very clearly convey La Migra as a bunch of white supremacist assholes who get off on violence to brown people (The agent who calls Rios “Juan” is a nice touch) and disappearing them to “sanctuary zones”, pronounced to rhyme with “death camps”. “Sanctuary zones” are a reference to a Deep Space Nine episode, where a temporally-displaced Sisko has to take the place of a twenty-first century civil rights icon, but that episode, being made in the ’90s, was far more coy, trying to give the idea of polite society trying to warehouse the poor safely out of sight. In very few words, Picard makes it much more clear that what we’re talking about here are death camps, where the designated okay-to-brutalize classes are sent to “disappear”. Hopefully through neglect, but I won’t be surprised if a later episode shows techbros paying off the ICE agents for a chance to get their Most Dangerous Game on.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on here. If Discovery‘s latest season is about grief, I think Picard‘s might be about anxiety. Are the Star Trek producers talking directly to my therapist now?

So, the rest of our plot. Like the last few episodes of Discovery, we’ve got a fuckton of stuff going on, but the plot doesn’t feel crowded. Leah and I watched the first part of Doctor Who: Flux this week, and man, what a contrast. Flux is crowded with plot, packed tight with just an absolute ton of shit happening and nothing having room to breathe and transitions that leave you unsure whether anything connects. Picard, on the other hand, squeezes in just as many plot threads, but keeps them all coherent. We get an alternative origin story for Picard’s accent, with Jean-Luc and Agnes retreating to the now-abandoned chateau (Did they actually explain until now that Picard had guided the crash to be at his vineyard? It felt right that this is what happened; I remember him giving Rios coordinates to aim for while they were crashing; but I don’t recall them ever actually saying that was what they were doing) and getting a little backstory about how the Picard family had fled to England during the war, only returning to the estate generations later. And a flashback of Little Boy Picard being comforted by his mother after some kind of unspecified anxiety attack. The ultimate reveal of whatever it is that Picard has been scared of since childhood is going to be disappointing, isn’t it?

(Also, I guess it makes sense that the chateau of 2024 looks like a run-down version of the chateau of 2400, but the chateau of 2367 looked very different. When the Picard family returned there in the 22nd century, they’d probably restore the place based on their budget and 22nd century aesthetics, but after the fire, Jean-Luc might have chosen to restore the original design rather than live in the place as it had been when Rene and Robert lived there. Except that it also looks the same in the flashbacks to Jean-Luc’s youth. Eh. Whatever.)

Jurati once again manipulates the Borg Queen, offering her companionship in return for fixing the transporter, only to renege afterward, though one feels very strongly that she is coming due for a comeuppance here. And, y’know, she plugged the Borg Queen into La Sirena’s systems for a bit so that’s probably bad. But the queen plays on Agnes’s anxiety, her loneliness and her inability to form secure attachments, and it’s clearly working, and at least this didn’t make me cry. I feel crying will come at some point with the way this is going.

Young Guinan is an interesting character. We’ve never seen a bitter, disillusioned Guinan before. I assume many people are angry that the Guinan of 1893 was played by the Whoopi Goldberg of 1992, but the Guinan of 2024 was not played by the Whoopi Goldberg of 2022. It’s fine, folks. I disagree that the actress they cast looks unambiguously younger than ’90s Whoopi. She does look younger-ish, but it’s not so patent that you can’t attribute it to clean living and cosmetics. Besides, they took all the trouble of having Guinan establish in dialogue that she could control her aging process. The Guinan of 1893 was less responsible and more of a gadfly; it’s interesting to see her here in a period of transition, when she’s living through the suffering that will make her future self what she is. And good on her for calling out how much easier it is to be patient for humanity to change when you’re an old white man than a young black woman. Also good on her for telling off the billionaires who could fix the world if it weren’t for the fact that it would exhaust their resources to the point that they would still have more money than you or I would make in a dozen lifetimes.

Picard does not mention what is going to happen to her homeworld and her people. Dick.

Also, I notice that this Guinan does not know Picard at all, despite them having met in 1893. This makes perfect sense, as the Picard of 2369 was now the genocidal captain of the CSS World Razer, so the events of “Time’s Arrow” never took place, but it’s interesting that Picard himself does not comment on this. He’s been pretty savvy about changes to the timeline so far, so it’s not really a logical problem that he just accepts and rolls with it, but it feels like a misstep for the character to not at least betray a little pain at the realization that Q’s meddling has changed this too. This is at least partially confirmed by the fact that Picard induces time-sickness in Guinan by repeating her future-words to her, something which he says happens when the timeline is altered.

Now, if you’re about to tell me that “Time travel doesn’t work that way!”, I should remind you first that we absolutely do not have any comparable situations: the only cases I can remember where someone traveled back from an alternative-present to before the point of divergence in order to set things right are “The City on the Edge of Forever” (TOS), “Past Tense” (DS9), and “Shockwave” (ENT), only the last of which includes evidence of something done by a time traveler from a now-defunct timeline, and it’s specifically time war technology.

And I should remind you second to not make me tap the sign again.

I do find myself wondering why the Borg Queen’s directions led him not to “The Watcher”, but to Guinan, given that she’s not the watcher herself, but just someone who knows how to find them. But never mind that; inexplicably, the watcher looks exactly like Picard’s housekeeper, only human. It wouldn’t make sense for her to actually be Laris; Romulans live longer than humans, but not as long as Vulcans, and 200 is elderly for a Vulcan. A temporally-displaced Laris during her previous career as a spy is possible, I guess, though I’m not aware of the Romulans having time travel of their own, particularly if the Confederation didn’t manage to snag it while conquering them.

And I don’t think that’s likely anyway, because Guinan describes the watcher as a “Supervisor”. Did not see that coming. If you asked me to rank Star Trek continuity references that they might incorporate into the new series, a Supervisor isn’t even on the list. Because holy shit, are they really referencing Gary Seven? Yeah, a one-off character from a failed backdoor pilot that ran in an episode of TOS. The premise aligns, the name aligns. The teleportation portal falls within the range of a modern-Trek-era-visual-retool. The body possession doesn’t align, but whatever. Yeah, the premise of Assignment: Earth was that a powerful and mysterious alien race abducted prehistoric humans, trained their descendants in the use of advanced technology, and returned them to Earth at various points in history to protect certain key events. The Supervisors themselves didn’t seem to have access to time travel, but Gary Seven did have knowledge of the future, at least enough to identify where the culture that Kirk and company came from. Who are they? Why are they? What’s their deal? Will we find out? Why does the Supervisor look like Picard’s housekeeper? Is it just because Orla Bradley is a darn fine actress and we are lucky to get more of her? Also, fun fact, “Orla” is my cat’s name. Complete coincidence; we didn’t name her. Will she tell Picard to go fuck himself?

But speaking of “Time Travel Does Not Work Like That,” we possibly see Q working his machinations by trying to induce anxiety in a random woman who seems to be associated with a space project. The details will come soon, I assume, but once again we have themes of anxiety. And the surprise reveal that Q can’t simply snap her into a panic attack. We’ve already hinted that something is going seriously wrong with Q, so is he losing his powers? Or, now that we know that the Supervisors are involved, perhaps she is somehow Protected. That would give us a piece of information about the scale on which the Supervisors’ mysterious benefactors operate. Perhaps this is down to some conflict between them and the Q? But the oddity: if this is indeed supposed to be Q altering the timeline, and he appears as his older self, that would indicate that from Q’s perspective, this is taking place after he meets with Picard in 2400. This is certainly odd; somehow he shifts Picard and company into an altered timeline, but does so before making the change to the timeline? I mean, he’s literally omnipotent, so okay, but how does this even work? It would make sense if Q’s interactions with Picard take place out-of-order: we see him here trying to alter the timeline, things start to go badly for him, and he skips forward to be angry at Picard about his powers going wrong. But then why alter his appearance? And, of course, Q doesn’t need to go back in time personally and intervene in a specific way to change the timeline; he can just declare a new timeline by fiat. I think. Not actually sure what the limits of his reality-altering powers are. So it seems that Q preserves Picard and company from the year 2400, then magically alters the timeline, then ages himself up, then goes back in time to give Renee (Yeah, that’s her name, per the credits) a panic attack, but that doesn’t work, so his plan has already failed, except that I assume he has a backup. Maybe I’ve got this the wrong way ’round. Maybe he did change the timeline by fiat, but that somehow weakened him, and now he’s got to go back and make the necessary supporting change to the past “by hand” in order to make it “stick”? There’s something similar in a Doctor Who novel where a race of aliens generate power by “borrowing” against future events, but have to pay that power back if the future events don’t play out the way they predicted (Their goal is to make the universe entirely predictable, and thus oppose the Doctor, who, as an agent of chaos, sows too much unpredictability until they can’t pay their power debt). Perhaps Q “borrowed” too much power to alter the timeline and won’t get it back unless he can make the Confederation timeline occur “naturally”. As support for this, consider that the other times we’ve seen alternate timelines result from Q’s interventions, he didn’t just snap Picard into another timeline: he sent Picard back in time and and manipulated him into doing the thing which altered history.

I hate temporal mechanics.

This leaves us with the thing which I think takes up the biggest part of the episode. I’m not actually sure it gets the most screen-time, and it’s not necessarily the most important to the plot, but it feels the biggest, and that’s Raffi and Seven pursuing Rios. And it is wonderful. It is just so full of wonderful moments. Like, the very least of these is the encounter with a much older Kirk Thatcher (A man whose name even sounds like some kind of really clever 1980s-Star-Trek joke), playing the punk from Star Trek IV, and listening to a sequel to the ’80s punk classic “I Hate You” too loud on the bus. And Seven tells him to turn it down, and with age and grace…. He does, thoroughly chastened. “I just really like the song is all,” he says.

Last season, I felt the relationship between Seven and Raffi came out of nowhere. They’ve really sold it, though. There’s some tension, sure; Raffi wants more commitment than Seven is ready for. But this is such a functional relationship, compared to the tumult we usually get. There’s one exchange on the bus where Raffi is dysregulating, because she’s messed up over Elnor and anxious over Rios and worrying about the responsibility of fixing the timeline, and Seven just quietly holds her hand. Seven isn’t great at relationships; her emotional development was stunted by the Borg; she struggled for years to integrate herself with a human crew, and faced tremendous bigotry when she entered Alpha Quadrant civilization. And you would expect that she’s the one fucking up the relationship by her unwillingness to commit and settle down and open up. You’d expect Seven to be avoidant, scared of intimacy. But she has this amazingly secure bond with Raffi. She coregulates. Raffi’s the one having a hard time here; Seven stays calm, diffuses tension, comforts her partner. And Raffi lets herself be comforted. Seven is this badass space-ninja, yet it’s Raffi who keeps getting worked up and wants to start fights. Raffi rubs against the traditional image of the cool, collected Starfleet captain. And that’s in keeping with what we saw of her last season, that she’s not well-regulated, that she’s prone to paranoia, and might have some emotional issues that she is working on. She is in this regard everything Janeway was not allowed to be: Raffi can be vulnerable because the showmakers have faith that the audience will still accept her even if she’s fallible, a courtesy never granted in the ’90s. And every time Jeri Ryan is called on to do Acting, I get a little angrier at Berman-Era trek for treating her like eye candy rather than fully appreciating her acting chops.

Spoiler: in the preview for episode 6, which dropped while I was writing this, Raffi basically brags that her and Seven are the OTP for this show and no one finds the Jurati-Rios thing especially interesting. And she’s right. I’m so fucking sick of genre fiction’s obsession with dysfunction. I get enough dysfunction and anxiety and avoidance and codependence and conflict in my home life. Give me secure attachment and loving families and healthy coregulation and kishōtenketsu.

(Also, I like Rios and all, but he’s an entirely reactive character. I don’t once think we’ve seen him present an agenda or goal of his own. Seven wants to protect the former Neutral Zone with the Fenris rangers. Raffi wanted to find her kid and prove the conspiracy. Jurati wanted to kill Maddox and salve her massive insecurities. Picard wanted to save Soji, then restore the timeline. Rios? Rios does what he’s told or responds to what’s happening to him. Even as captain of the Stargazer, he lets Picard set the agenda, and the only orders he ever gives are about how to respond to things. Even the best things he does are purely reactive, like going back to the clinic to help the doctor.)

I love these two. I want the Raffi and Seven Buddy Space Cop series. Do not kill either of them off, Picard.

Four weeks and Picard remains un-told-to-fuck-himself. Come on, people.

Well that’s sure to anger exactly the right people.

Four major things happen in this episode of Picard:

1. Seven of Nine maintains her perfect track record of murdering people who call her “Annika”
2. Raffi and Seven go sightseeing
3. Jurati plays the Borg Queen
4. ICE is depicted in an entirely accurate way

Also Space-Legolas dies. It is easy to forget this, because there was not honestly a lot for him to do this season. The weight of his death is somewhat lost in the shuffle. Raffi is the main one to react to it, which makes sense given that she’s his captain and he is likely the first person directly under her command as a captain that she’s lost. We did have that scene of them bonding last season which at the time I felt was odd. But again, his presence in this season has been sort of minimal. What is uncomfortable – not wrong, but uncomfortable in a way that feels Plot Relevant – is how unfazed Picard is about it. Though it doesn’t come across as strongly as perhaps it should, Picard is assigned a lot of the blame for Elnor’s death, because he stops Rios from shooting the Borg Queen when her own self-preservation mechanisms siphon off power from the biobed. We’re clearly supposed to view this as Picard choosing to save the queen over Legolas, playing into his personal arc: he saves the monster for the sake of the mission, sacrificing his own surrogate son, because Picard always puts duty above family. But it doesn’t quite work for me on a few levels. Firstly, with Elnor’s reduced role this season, they really haven’t done much to reinforce the relationship between him and Picard. More importantly, though, Picard’s decision to save the Borg Queen is held several steps at a remove from Elnor’s death. At no point is the decision actually put to him directly as “Save the queen or save Elnor.” It’s framed purely as “The queen is siphoning off our power, Rios wants to shoot her, Picard stops him.” Raffi is in the other room at the time. She’d told them the biobed was the only thing keeping Elnor alive, but that was a few minutes earlier and it’s a tense, chaotic scene. The causality between Picard’s choice to stay Rios’s hand and Elnor’s death isn’t as direct as the moral arc requires. There’s a grim and purposeful irony in the fact that Raffi struggles to find medical supplies on the Confederacy version of La Sirena when they’d previously established that hauling medical supplies was the main thing Seven did with the ship these days in the proper timeline.

Fun fact: we never learn the name of Annika’s husband. That’s how Seven gets caught: he asks her his name, and despite having read up on enough of Confederation realpolitik to pass for her counterpart, she did not bother to learn her husband’s name. Romantic relationships do not come naturally to Seven, and it does not even occur to her to make an effort with her husband. That’s fine; he’s dead now. You call her “Annika”, you get murdered.

The visual effects for time travel were pretty good. Not a direct lift of the Star Trek IV visuals, but not radically inconsistent. It’s an interesting detail that in the long shot, La Sirena vanishes when it goes to warp, even though it isn’t time traveling yet; it’s just moving faster than light, and therefore invisible from the stationary outside viewpoint. Also, I think this is the first time since season 1 of Disco that they’ve mentioned specific numerical warp factors.

Raffi and Seven don’t get the meaty parts of the episode’s central plot – their part is fairly straightforward since the worst obstacle they run into is a security guard who Seven somehow charms despite being verbally awkward. But there’s some very interesting – and possibly foreshadowy – character moments for her. Namely, the people of 2024 react positively to the confident, attractive blonde woman. The guard, and also a random child she happens upon. We established last season that Seven’s post-Voyager life has been marked by bigotry. Being ex-Borg, visibly marked by her implants, carries a stigma. She’s socially awkward too, of course, which doesn’t make it better. In some respects, the Seven of Voyager could be seen as neurodivergent, and while that’s far less true as she’s adapted to human life in the twenty-fifth century, she’s clearly thrown off guard by how people react to her in the twenty-first century. Could this be leading to a painful moment where Seven finds herself unwilling to reassume the physical indicators of her past? When she looked in the mirror last week, her only real reaction was confusion and fear, but now, it seems like she’s starting to appreciate what it feels like for people to see her and not react with fear. Also, makes you wonder how Detmer would find the twenty-fifth century. In her own time, she’d adapted well enough to becoming a cyborg, and there seems to be little stigma in the 32nd century when the Borg seem to be long gone, but somewhere in the middle, would she be mistaken for an XB?

Please, God, don’t let this series end with Seven reclaiming her human name as some form of “getting over” her assimilation. I haven’t even mentioned Agnes and the Borg Queen doing some brain-to-brain intimacy. I mentioned last time the possibility that the Other Queen might be someone we know in disguise. Agnes joins the suspect list now, as the Queen has made a stab at assimilating her, and has taken a very sexy sort of Personal Interest in Dr. Jurati. The depiction of assimilation as having an aspect of seduction is straight out of First Contact, rather than being consistent with the televised depictions of it before. The queen has oddly little interest in “Locutus” or even the Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix Zero One, but gloms on to Agnes pretty hard, finding her insecurities make her easy prey… Except that Agnes completely owns her, extracting the necessary information about Picard’s next MacGuffin without the queen even noticing it’s gone. And she saves it as “Shit I Stole From The Borg” dot txt. What will be the cost, though, I wonder.

The final arm of our plot will piss off all the right people. Probably all the same people who are angry about Stacey Abrams as the President of United Earth. And it’s fine. I felt like maybe there was enough emphasis on Doctor Ramirez and her son that if they don’t return, it will be strange, and if they do return, it will muddle the plot. The contrivance of Rios losing his commbadge is a little cliché by now, but hey, this does work into a scene from that fanfic I’ve been writing since I was 17 where the mid-21st-century academic agrees to help the temporally-displaced twenty-fifth century Starfleet crew because he recognizes their arrowhead “brooches”, having a whole display case full of ones he’d bought from antiques dealers and pawn shops (“This one dates back to San Francisco, 1893. And here’s one that I bought off a dude during the Bell Riots. This one was attached to a pair of pajamas left in a New York flophouse in the ’30s. Got this at a Cold War memorabilia sale. They say it came from a Russian spy in the ’80s.”). ICE shows up while Rios is recovering from a hard landing, looking for a fight for reasons that are not even thinly veiled racism, and when they find Rios doesn’t have papers, he is immediately hauled off on Suspicion of Being Mexican. Which is literally exactly what ICE does and likes to brag about doing, so of course a lot of people are angry about the “unrealistic” depiction and about Star Trek showing a flagrant “pro-illegal” bias. Next thing you know, they’ll be angry about the interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura, the fact that money isn’t a thing in the future, and Stacey Abrams being president of United Earth. I hope Ted Cruz cried.

We are now moving into Week 3 of no one telling Picard to go fuck himself. Throw me a bone here.

Okay, it’s Friday night, the wife is out with her friends, I’m home alone to guard the sleeping children, time to get loaded and watch me some Star Trek while trying to do intricate model-work. I am a responsible and mentally healthy adult.

When we left Old Man Picard last time, he was in a subtly evil but not really all that different version of his chateau, thanks to the machinations of Q, Picard’s Godlike Wacky Uncle and/or existential threat. Q takes great pleasure in showing off how much the universe sucks thanks to his meddling in history, but he’s really focused on just what a piece of shit this universe’s version of Picard himself is. General Picard, in his capacity as master of the starship “World Razer” has helped conquer half the galaxy, and keeps a trophy room full of the skulls of people whose names you recognize, like Sarek and Grand Nagus Zek, and I think it was Martok? Also Gul Dukot. That’s a little weird, because the point of that scene is for us to be shocked that in this universe. Picard outright murdered so many at-least-broadly sympathetic characters, but Dukot is one of the most unrepentantly, unabashedly evil characters in the entire canon. I suppose they needed someone we could be comfortable with having mortally wounded Picard – Old Man Picard still has a synthetic body in this timeline, but it’s the result of his duel with Dukot. Rather than turning the screw himself, Q leaves Picard to find out all on his own that he’s also apparently responsible for killing Laris and Zhuban in this world.

We also are told that this version of Earth didn’t manage to resolve the looming environmental collapse that, y’know, is actually going on in the real world – that force field around the planet we saw last time isn’t a defensive shield like I assumed; it’s more like the shield from Highlander 2 (a movie which definitely does not exist), to keep the planet’s corpse livable. This… Is not really implemented well or followed through on. Because we’re told about it, and Picard describes this Earth as “polluted”, but all we see of it still looks pretty much just like the same mildly sci-fi’d-up Los Angeles and/or San Francisco that they’ve been showing us as Future-Earth in every modern Trek. Only, with a goatee.

Also a little underdone is the idea that something is wrong with Q. He seems a bit meaner than we usually see him, and he does pop Jean-Luc in the nose when challenged, but it’s not at all clear to me what Picard is seeing that prompts him to ask after Q’s health. We don’t know Q’s deal yet, but he certainly seems to have a much more specific beef than in the past. Voyager revealed that the Q serve some function in maintaining the timeline, so some ideas come to mind. It feels like Q’s issue has something to do with the Terrible Secret From His Past that Picard has been angsting about. Is he angry that Picard wouldn’t make out with his housekeeper? I mean, it’s plausible at least that Picard is “supposed” to have descendants for some Very Important Reason, and his failure to get laid – and subsequent suicide-by-autodestruct has caused Q some consternation. Or perhaps, as I suggested last week, the Borg really were open to some kind of peace, and Q is angry that Picard blew himself up rather than finding a peaceful solution. That would be a very Q thing to do, but I wouldn’t want to really commit to anything in particular yet.

One thing I really like here is how willing everyone is to roll with it and respond strategically when they find themselves in an altered timeline. None of the usual cliché of the heroes immediately outing themselves by their inability to act like assholes. Seven is amazing. She wakes up to suddenly discover herself un-borged, AND married to a dude AND President of the freaking Earth, and she responds by doing a couple of quick tests to verify that she’s not hallucinating and immediately starts rolling with it, reading up as much as she can and framing her plans in a way that makes it seem consistent with her role as a totalitarian dictator in an evil world. So to get hold of Rios, she frames it as wanting “unfiltered” news from the front. She does a darn good job of selling herself as the Confederated Earth President, and she does a good job justifying her non-evil actions. Similarly, tradition is screaming for Picard to give a big speech to the assembled audience calling for humanity to take a kinder path and not be guided by fear and xenophobia, but he just doesn’t: he just goes all in on it, playing for the crowd and passing himself off as the butcher of half the galaxy. They also display a pretty cavalier disregard for the people of this Earth, with Picard and Elnor murdering a whole lot of Confederation soldiers. Small thing I notice: Confederaton phasers look a lot more like the phasers of the Kelvin Timeline than twenty-fifth-century prime timeline weapons.

Agnes and Elnor do worse, of course, but they hold their own, and even Agnes manages to awkwardly cover for their weird behavior, cooking up the story that Raffi had brought Elnor to the presidential palace to follow up on a claim from the Borg Queen.

Ah yes, the Borg Queen. She’s very close to her depiction in First Contact here, a terrifying and seductive presence, but also, she’s insane. She’s the last Borg, scheduled to be offed by Picard personally on this special holiday, and the loss of the collective has driven her mad, plus, she’s got some level of time-sensitivity and can sense the wrongness of this universe. She recognizes Picard as Locutus and Seven as “Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 01” (I note here that of course in this reality, Seven is “Annika Hansen”, but I’m very glad that her friends don’t call her that. It was widely presumed, from the Voyager days, that Seven would one day reclaim her birthname, but Voyager also did a pretty good job in several places of making it clear that Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 01 does not wish to be Annika Hansen. Annika Hansen was a scared child whose parents’ recklessness stole her youth, twisted her body and got her assimilated by space zombies; “Seven” just is who she is. Notice that even Raffi – her girlfriend – calls her that. When we look to last season, the people who called her “Annika” were not good people). The fact that they directly point out that this queen is “normal”, as opposed to the gimp-suit queen from last week feels like a huge hint. As I keep saying, we do not know all of what was going on with those Borg. Are we dealing with a bootstrap paradox here, and those Borg are actually the result of something the gang will do in 2024? Will the finale place everyone back on the Stargazer in time for Picard to unmask the Borg Queen, revealed to be a temporally-displaced Seven? Or for some reason Picard’s mother? This plot is edging toward possibly-trying-too-hard-to-be-clever, but the execution is far less muddled than last season, so I’m okay with it so far.

Another interesting thing we get is the first reference to TOS-style warp slingshot time travel. The previous generation of showrunners made it a point that the slingshot maneuver was “TOS’s thing“, and forbade its use in the TNG era. There were still plenty of ways to time travel; Enterprise does it at will based on a scan of what the Borg had done in First Contact, but that particular mechanism for doing it never came up. We get a hint of why, though not in a lot of detail: the calculations apparently can’t be done by a computer; you need a Spock. Hence the complication of them needing to borrow the Borg Queen, who will pass for a substitute Spock in a pinch.

In the end, of course, they get caught. Seven’s husband beams aboard La Sirena (Actually, I am not sure they have mentioned the name of the ship in this reality) and Elnor gets shot. Fortunately, he gets shot by the one guy who’s phaser is set to “Mortally Wound” rather than “comically nasty evaporation”. Despite Seven having done a pretty solid job, he’d been suspicious of her all along, which I guess is reasonable, given that he is the proper Annika’s husband, but there’s something kind of gleeful in his suspicion that tells me he’s not going to be overly eager to get “his” Annika back. There is something cute in its way that Seven was pretty good at passing for an autocrat, but not great at passing for a happily married heterosexual woman. Raffi sneaks in a little dig about Seven’s commitment issues.

Next week, they will, undoubtedly deal with this and make their way back to just-a-bit-after-our-time, which will mean saying goodbye to the world of the Confederation. This is probably for the best, because they are likely running out of Jubilee to adapt.

Yeah. About that. People who have never heard Rob Shearman’s Doctor Who audio drama “Jubilee” are inclined to claim that the revived series episode “Dalek” is an adaptation of it. But this is misleading. “Dalek” takes exactly one scene from “Jubilee”, completely replaces the context, and expands it out to an entire story. If you’ve seen “Dalek” but aren’t familiar with “Jubilee”, you probably have the barest bones of why I’m comparing “Penance” to it. “Dalek”, if you’ll recall, centers around the Doctor trying to rescue a captured alien being tortured by a… Let’s go with techbro, only it turns out that the captured alien is a Dalek. So you can see the parallels here with the Borg queen.

But that scene is inspired by “Jubilee”, only in “Jubilee”, the context is very different. It retains the concept of the sympathetic imprisoned and tortured Dalek, but that’s about it. The plot of “Jubilee” is that time shenanigans lead to the Doctor and his companion getting split, with one version of themselves arriving in the early 20th century just as the Daleks invade, and the version we actually follow arriving decades later, in a world where the Doctor’s technological assistance allowed Great Britain to not only defeat the Daleks, but conquer the entire world under a racist, totalitarian regime. But on top of that, the damage to the timeline has left everyone in this world with a vague sense that their history is “wrong”, and this has basically driven everyone insane, so pretty much everyone acts like a Futurama version of their Mirror-Universe selves: not just a bunch of fascist assholes who exaggerate the worst impulses of 19th century Old Europe empowered by the 20th century industrialization of brutality-at-scale, but cartoonish evil, evil well beyond what is productive, evil with facial hair. The British Government has the rest of the world send them tribute in the form of people with dwarfism, who can be shoved into Dalek casings to perform morality plays that end with the participants being killed. Use of contractions is a capital crime against the purity of the One True King’s English. The First Lady of England ultimately betrays her husband because she hates him for his weakness: she can tell that when he beats her, his heart isn’t really in it. Most tellingly, the last surviving Dalek is scheduled for public execution during the titular Jubilee celebration.

Now, that story gets kind of weird and esoteric at the end, because of temporal shenanigans; 1903 and 2003 converge, allowing the Lone Dalek to warn the rest of the invasion fleet what’s going to happen (The exact details have some similarity to another later-televised story, “Into the Dalek”, particularly the originally-scripted ending). Picard is going to go for something less esoteric, I assume, but there’s room here for a lot more overlap – the possibility of the Borg Queen, like the Lone Dalek, coming to understand the ultimate futility of her race’s behavior; could the appearance of the older, traumatized version of the 1903 Doctor in 2003 have inspired whatever secret the Gimp Suit Borg Queen is hiding? Or just in general, have we seen the last of the Confederation?

Also, how long before I can buy a Confederation-style commbadge? There still isn’t, as near as I can tell, a licensed 32nd century tricomm badge.

When last we left our rag-tag group of misfits, Old Man Robopicard was about to head out to new adventures aboard La Sirena, accompanied by his young Romulan protégée Legolas, his fellow android (though she’s Assigned Android At Birth) Soji, disgraced ex-starfleet Captain Cristobal Rios, his new girlfriend, the suicidal robotocist Dr. Jurati, recovering addict and conspiracy theorist Raffi, and her new girlfriend Seven of Nine. They were on a mission to see the stars, find their place in the universe with a new lease on life and show that there are other paths than Starfleet open to people who want to have fun adventures in space.

Anyway, never mind all that, because it’s two years later and everything’s gone a bit more traditionally Star Trek. For Now, he typed in ominous boldface…

Yeah, this is not what I expected and not really what I wanted. But that’s cool. We seem to be going for a more tightly-focused story this season, which addresses my major problem with last season’s rudderlessness. But I keep hoping that Star Trek will do a little more looking into what it means to not be Starfleet in this universe, and they keep chickening out. When we rejoin our cast, Rios and Raffi have been brought back into the fold with their own commands, Elnor has joined Starfleet academy, and Old Man Picard has been welcomed back as the new commandant of the academy. Rios and Jurati have broken up, even though they still work together, Soji is a diplomat and only appears in one scene, and while it sounds like Raffi and Seven might still be together, there’s a tension between them that sounds like Seven isn’t looking for the relationship to progress in the way that Raffi is.

Oh, and Zhubin’s dead. He’s been dead long enough for a respectable period of mourning, so Laris is looking to get back into things. (According to the Expanded Universe stuff for the 2009 movie, Romulans traditionally mourn their dead for the length of time it takes a henna tattoo to fade, and then move on. This has not been confirmed in-canon, but it’s something of a lovely idea that is compatible with what we see here) And by “things”, I mean Picard’s pants. But he chickens out before she can ask if he’s Fully Functional, for reasons that I assume will be his character arc this season. They involve a flashback of his mother, who had previously only been seen as an elderly French woman, but in her youth appears to have been Peggy Carter. You did not know you wanted a canonical explanation for Picard’s accent, but here it is nonetheless. Picard’s mom was British in her youth. I hope you like references. Picard is sufficiently unnerved by the proposition that he tracks down Guinan to get his Traumatic Past alluded to. I have a terrible feeling that this is going to take a The Seven Percent Solution twist. Guinan makes an offhand comment that El Aurians can control their aging process, and she’s chosen to grow old with her human friends, to justify the fact that Whoopi Goldberg herself is not an immortal alien. That we know of.

I also hope you like Big Swirly Things In Space, because we’ve got another one. Someone pops open a Big Swirly Thing in space and sends out a distress signal in many languages asking if they could please come join the Federation, and would the Federation kindly send Picard personally to talk about it. This message is received by Captain Rios and his ex-girlfriend (Awkwardly exposition-dropped, but nice of them to mention: Jurati was cleared of Maddox’s murder due to temporary insanity) who is for some reason hanging around, aboard his ship, a brand new USS Stargazer. The episode leans into the symbolism of Picard’s first Space-love. Enterprise isn’t mentioned at all, but Picard gets all nostalgic about the ship he commanded before her. There’s a couple of references in TNG where Picard hints that, for all he cares about the Enterprise, he never loved it the way, say, Kirk loved his Enterprise, but he did feel that way about Stargazer. But this new Stargazer integrates some new Borg Secrets, learned from The Artifact, he ominously boldfaced…

It is, of course, a trap. I think. Maybe? To be honest, they are delightfully vague about this. The new vaguely yonic Borg ship emerges from the swirly, admits to being Borg, and asks to make peace. they’re pushy about it, but they keep maintaining the position that they are, in fact, here to negotiate. Seven, by the way, mentions that the Borg are in pretty dire straits. They do not say why exactly. As I mentioned a few times now, The Artifact is the only Borg cube we’ve seen since Voyager, so did Old Lady Janeway’s murder of the Borg Queen and destruction of the Transwarp Hub cripple the collective? Did Rahmda’s partial assimilation spread The Terrible Secret of Space beyond the one cube and drive most of the Borg mad from the revelation? Did the war with Species 867-5309 go badly? Is this even relevant?

The Borg beam over their queen in… Okay, it’s not really much more of a gimp suit than the fetish gear the Borg normally wear, but she’s got a mask on at least. And still they say they want peace, but also power and they start assimilating the Stargazer, using its Borg tech as a bridge to seize control of the whole fleet. But… The Queen defends herself by stunning, rather than killing, and only shoots at the specific officers who shoot at her first, leaving Picard, Rios and Jurati unharmed. She also avoids shooting Seven, despite Seven having it coming. So… What’s the deal here? It’s easy to adopt my Admiral Akbar voice and say, “it’s a trap!”, but what kind of trap? Is this just, “The Borg are low on supplies so they orchestrated this whole thing to seize a Starfleet armada”? Or do the Borg legitimately want some kind of peace, only they wish to negotiate from a position of power? Like, were they seizing control of the fleet so that when they proceeded to not murder and/or assimilate everyone, it would weigh in their favor?

None of this matters, because we’re apparently not even doing Fun Adventures In Space: Picard blows up the Stargazer (Do you like references? Let’s use the TOS self destruct code even though that’s not how autodestruct worked in TNG) but finds himself back on Earth, but evil. 

It is, as you all know, Q. He’s got one more “trial” for Picard (He says this. But I also know that next week he’s going to say that this isn’t a trial. Never mind).

The introduction of 2020s John de Lancie is done almost exactly the way I’d hoped. My one modification is that I’d have preferred them to introduce him not digitally de-aged before snapping himself to geezerhood, but instead to have him start out in extreme old-age makeup, claiming that he, “Didn’t want to make you self-conscious about your mortality,” then admit he’d overdone it a bit and “back off” to de Lancie’s actual appearance.

A small, strange detail: in her one scene, Soji is meeting with Deltans. This is the race of Ilia’s people from Star Trek: The Slow-Motion Picture. Their whole thing, according to the manual, is that they do not have any hair, and they are the galaxy’s most DTF species, so much so that it makes humans (who are, one gets the impression, one of the galaxy’s more prudeish races) uncomfortable. The only remaining hint of this in the movie as filmed is Ilia’s out-of-nowhere comment when she first meets Kirk, utterly bizarre given that all of its supporting context was cut, that she’s taken a vow of celibacy. (I mean, I guess if one is meeting Kirk, it’s a good idea to establish as early as possible whether one has taken a vow of celibacy, even if Kirk’s reputation is wildly overblown).

I love that in the Dark Timeline, we see a portrait of a Grumpy Young Picard wearing a black variation of the movie-era uniform. TNG established that Starfleet was using uniforms similar to the movie-era ones in Picard’s youth (He wears one in his academy days in “Tapestry”, and Jack Crusher wears one in a recording, but it looks like the TNG uniforms had come out by the time Stargazer was abandoned). I think there’s a bit of a misstep in the use of the visual showing Earth’s shields above the chateau as a shorthand to let us know we are in a scary dangerous place. It would have worked fine, except that Discovery already did the whole “Earth has full-time shields now” thing, and that worked out just fine; it’s not as scary as they probably intended. If anything, you might have a moment of wondering whether Picard was somehow sent to the 32nd century.

I am more ambivalent about the reference-fests. They’re fine and all, but don’t add that much for me. There’s some ambiguity about Raffi’s ship. It’s named the USS Excelsior, and it’s visibly similar to Sulu’s Excelsior, but not identical. Is this the same NCC-2000 after decades of refits? We know that the Excelsior class was still in service as late as the battle of Wolf 359, but seems like few survived much after that. It could, of course, like Stargazer, simply be a new ship of the same name. Rios’s Stargazer is a very Post-TNG-era design of ship (the first Stargazer had movie-era stylings), but clearly shows its heritage (Just as, say, the TNG Nebula class is clearly a TNG-styled take on the movie-era Reliant, or, for that matter, the Galaxy class is a clear modernization of the Constitution class). We only see Raffi’s Excelsior from a distance, but it looks less TNGish than Stargazer does, but who can say, and does it even matter?

I will give mad props though, that when they reveal the name of Rios’s ship, we actually, for once in the streaming era, get a full-on real-for-real Languid Starship Porn Tracking Shot as the camera slowly flies all around the ship to give us an eyeful. It’s still a little too close and noisy, but it shows real effort in an area where they’ve been annoyingly reluctant to waste time.

I will also express mild disappointment that no one, as of yet, has told Picard to go fuck himself. But there’s always next week.

Lay down your load. We are only down the road. We have no gifts, but we are many – “All of You”, Encanto

Let’s get this out of the way first. I kind of broke down and wept like a baby at this bit.

You bastards, you made me empathize with Tarka. Fuck. Like, seriously, I recognize the weight of all the other emotional beats in this story, but nothing hit me as hard as Tarka – a character I absolutely loathe – breaking down and asking a cruel universe why the man he loved isn’t there to stop him. That is Encanto-levels of tear-inducing. And yes, I’d had a few, but no, I was not drunk.

Much like season 2, and to a lesser extent season 3, our fourth season finale sort of sorts itself out comparatively early in the episode to leave time for an extended coda which does nothing to set the stage for next season (Bryce’s disappearance a few weeks back to go work on Kovitch’s secret project is the only thing we’ve gotten which might be specifically setting up the future) but gives us some time to decompress and sort of come back down after spending so much of the episode clenched. In a season that has put so many characters through the ringer, it’s sort of fifteen minutes of aftercare to remind us that Star Trek still loves us and wants to take care of us. We get some pretty amazing stunt casting with Stacy Abrams as the president of United Earth. I didn’t really light up for it as much as some people will, but the knowledge that this would make the right people very angry warmed my bitter little heart. I never would have dreamed that Star Trek could have Ted Cruz and the National Review spitting in impotent rage that the scary dark-skinned lady was depicted in a position of power. Of course, one imagines that in 2028, the right is going to be presenting her as the scary dark-skinned lady who ceded United Earth’s sovereignty to the scary foreigners of the United Federation of Planets, but still.

Despite the enormous stakes in this episode, it’s an oddly toothless denouement. The peace and love doesn’t just win, but wins hard. Over and over, they set up these insurmountable dangers, and every time, it works out okay – there’s a great deal of sacrifice offered, but very little actually done. And… Okay? I mean, ever since Hugh came back from the dead, this has been a show that can straightforwardly just accept, “Actually not-dying is better than dying; let’s go with that one.”

In fact, let’s just go through how many times people don’t nobly sacrifice themselves. So, first pretty nice thing, General Ndoye immediately makes good. She surrenders even before she realizes that helping Book and Tarka was a terrible move: even thinking she was saving United Earth (I note and will follow suit in the fact that they are very consistent about referring to the polity as “United Earth” rather than just “Earth”), she was still willing to step up and own her complicity, then she offers herself up to go on the suicide mission to stop them in order to make things right. Which we are told is definitely a suicide mission… But just kind of isn’t, when they rescue her kind of anticlimactically.

But before any of that happens, there’s a hot minute where Michael announces that they’re gonna need someone to go out in a shuttle and sacrifice themselves and everyone looks at Detmer, because she’s the best pilot, and she’s very obviously rattled because of the whole “certain death” thing, but she also accepts it. But before she does, there’s this cut between her and Owo and… Are those two a couple? Because that was a very, “Please don’t send my girlfriend to certain death,” look out of Owo there.

Ndoye’s non-sacrifice is effectively the solution to the plot of the episode-qua-episode: she disables Book’s ship, rendering Tarka’s plan to blow up the hyperfield moot. But that kind of gets lost in how much is going on at the time and the fact that it’s shown from the perspective of Discovery’s bridge, and the fact that it does not really involve the regulars. This episode is pretty densely packed, and while not too much gets lost in the shuffle, this particular thing seems an odd one to downplay. It’s a strangely generous way to resolve the main conflict of the episode. Michael doesn’t need to shoot anyone; Book doesn’t need to throw anyone out of a turbolift; Owo doesn’t need to suffocate.

Between Ndoye’s confession and her attempt at heroic sacrifice, though, we have to get Discovery out of the 10-C’s goo-ball, and that involves the sacrifice of blowing out the spore drive (for the rest of the season; they’re careful to clarify that they can’t fix it without spacedock), which will force Discovery to take the decades-long slow road home. This is somewhat hard to understand, to my mind, because I don’t think they’ve been using the spore drive since the approach to the barrier, and it seems like conventional warp in the 32nd century is good enough to get you around the galaxy a lot faster than that – heck, Prodigy established that travel between quadrants was only “months” in the 2380s, even without a protodrive. Just showing Discovery magic mushroom on one of the past two episodes would have done a lot to justify this (It felt like they might have been claiming that the mycelial network does not extend outside the galaxy a few weeks back, but that feels wrong and dumb; if you assume that you can’t magic mushroom across the barrier, but the network still exists and indeed was needed to travel the rest of the distance, that would solve all of this). Also, pretty sure they’ve said they’re only, like 30 light years from the barrier. But it’s ultimately a non-issue, because the 10-C politely give Discovery a ride home once everything is sorted out, so that’s nice. Makes it easy.

We also have President T’rina risking her life to mind meld with the 10-C, but she recovers fine (Also, she agrees to pursue a relationship with Saru, but that has little impact on the story and is just a nice footnote). It’s… Not entirely clear what they got out of that. I mean, the story needs make some things clear, but the show doesn’t really connect the dots. The main thing we’re told that comes out of it is the understanding that the 10-C have no concept of individuality. This is a fairly small point for the plot: it really only justifies the difficulty our heroes have in explaining the concept that Tarka isn’t really “with” them. It feels like this should also link back to them being able to communicate more freely with the 10-C at the end: the last interaction they had was still limited to things they could explain in the form of a math problem. At the end, they’re still communicating with hydrocarbons and blinking lights, but they’re able to convey a full-on Aaron Sorkin West Wing speech. Maybe I missed a line somewhere about the 10-C sending them an improved lexicon after the mind-meld?

Back on the near side of the barrier, we get to see Federation HQ travel at warp to go aid in the evacuation of United Earth and Titan (“Titan” seems to be synecdoche for “Colonies in the outer solar system”, since they do namecheck Europa later. Synecdoche. Look it up.), and that is also kind of wonderful. As usual, we don’t get as much starship porn as you would hope: the overwhelming majority of ships we see are just nondescript, vaguely egg-shaped shuttles. But Federation HQ itself looks like a Christmas tree ornament, and it’s kind of goofy, yet it also has strong “Weird Crystal Spires Future” energy. I love it. And I love the very weird visual of individual decks of Federation HQ popping out like slices of a Costco bar cake. It does feel somewhat unbalanced that they’re only able to evacuate about half a million people from Earth. First real reminder that this is still a galaxy in recovery after the Burn.

On Federation HQ, we have another attempt at heroic sacrifice, with Adorably Professorial Lieutenant Tilly and Admiral Vance staying behind to buy the evacuation fleet a little more time, but of course, the BSTiS shuts down in the nick of time. Makes it easy!

I really like a lot of the details of the confrontation aboard Book’s ship. The little details of how Grudge’s collar has a holo-disruptor built in because the cat doesn’t like holograms. That’s cool. The fact that when Reno beams back to Discovery, she tells Michael exactly what Book said to tell her (She also, I assume, tells them the rest of Tarka’s backstory off-screen, because Michael is able to explain what Tarka’s deal was later in much more detail than she ought to have known). And of course the ultimate confrontation between Book and Tarka, where Tarka realizes that he wants to succeed less than he wants Othros to be there to stop him and now I’m crying again. He allows Book to take the last chance at escape, though even here, they pull their punch, since they leave open the possibility that Tarka’s dimensional transporter will work at the moment of impact. Book’s ship is the only real casualty here. Of course, it looks like Book didn’t make it, and holy shit, the restraint in not making Michael cry there, because she’s still got to handle negotiations with the 10-C. But they pull that punch too, because it turns out that the 10-C rescued him, and politely return him once they figure out what it all means.

The 10-C are a pretty good realization of an utterly alien race, within the constraint of having to keep the plot intelligible and not going all Solaris (I confess disappointment that they are less dragons and more jellyfish). That they lack the concept of individuality doesn’t add a lot to the story explicitly, but it feels thematic: you can sort of sense them struggling to grapple with the enormity of what they‘ve done when they realize that “You blew up my planet” actually means “Millions of individuals ceased to exist.” Usually, stories about aliens being really really alien focus on how hard it is for the humans to cope, but there’s a strong element here of how weird this must be for the 10-C. We know that the 10-C experience protectiveness toward their young and fear in the face of death, but for them, it’s a collective experience, when they ask, “Wait, how many of you are there?” there’s a real weight to it: the response “We are billions, but we are also one,” has got to be jaw-dropping for them. (Also, first direct reference to the Borg in the 32nd century. Not wanting to read too much into it, but I note that the Disco gang all understand the reference. Now, they’ve all been brought up to speed on the 900 years of history they missed. But the fact that they all catch the reference hints that the Borg are sufficiently important that a reference to them would be immediately understood by someone who only had a crash course in history, one focused on getting you up-to-speed for Starfleet active duty. What I’m saying is that the implication is that the Borg are still relevant whether or not they’re an active threat any more. Compare, say, to Captain America. By Endgame, you would expect Cap to be caught up enough to catch references to recent history, and you’d expect him to be broadly aware of the really big stuff. But he probably wouldn’t understand a reference to, say, Gilligan’s Island. Actually, I can imagine a fun exchange between Captain America and Star Lord, with the latter having a knowledge gap about recent pop culture from his time in space, while Cap was up to date on contemporary stuff but had a large gap for the ’70s and ’80s)

The 10-C are recognizable kind and compassionate, but only once they understand the ground rules. “Sorry about blowing up planets. We didn’t realize intelligent beings lived in the galaxy,” they say, and promise to only strip-mine uninhabited parts of space. And that would have been an okay place to stop, except that they, with the same tone as my daughter asking why I break down at the line, “Under the surface, I’m pretty sure I’m worthless if I can’t be of service,” ask why Michael is still sad, so she tells them about Book, and they’re like “Oh, yeah, we saved him. Did not realize you’d want him back. Here you go.” Makes it easy.

But yeah, Book surviving is better than Book dying. And more, it’s Book who puts his foot down and says, actually, no, strip-mining the galaxy with a powerful destructive swirly thing that poops subspace anomalies is not cool even if you avoid the bits with sentient species. Again, in a packed episode, this one thing gets a little less time than I would have liked, but Book uses his empath powers while explaining this, and while it’s not clear what he’s doing, I think he has to be helping the 10-C to understand the impact their operations have on the entire galactic ecosystem, beyond just the impact to intelligent life forms. Save the space whales. I reckoned Book’s empathy would come into play in the meeting with the 10-C, though I assumed it would be clearer what role it would play.

And just like that, without any argument or deliberation, the 10-C decide to give up on their fantastically powerful force field, and just live exposed out in intergalactic space. This is… Also kind of weird, because we have absolutely no idea what prompted them to build it in the first place, unless it’s just to protect themselves from the kind of natural disaster that destroyed their original homeworld? I mean, that hyperfield was a hell of an undertaking to just give up like that because Book tells them they need to get out more and not be weird shut-ins. But then, the 10-C are still reeling from the realization that they’ve committed mass-murder on an inconceivable scale, so maybe? This bit could have used a little more time to decompress, I think.

For our final Makes It Easies, Discovery is returned to known space just in time for United Earth to join the Federation – given that we had a whole episode about the political aspect of Ni’Var rejoining the Federation, this seemed a little quick. It’s allowable because we’re in the valedictory lap of the episode, but maybe dial it back just a little? Maybe, “We’re ready to open talks to rejoin” instead of leading off with, “Where do we sign?”

And of course, Book gets community service for his crimes. This is presented with a bittersweet tone – Michael laments that she doesn’t know when she’ll see him again. But… you’ve got a ship that can magic mushroom itself anywhere in the universe, even if you didn’t, travel to the Solar system is pretty quick and reliable, you know where he is, and you’ve got a job with a fair bit of down time. We took the effort to establish that Adira and Gray don’t have a problem doing an LDR, so why so glum over your boyfriend working the recovery efforts on Europa? Besides, there’s strong energy that this will be therapeutic for him.

You know what? It’s okay. It’s all okay. The resolution is a little bit toothless, but what, do I want to be in the position of rooting for death and destruction? It’s 2022 and I have very little appetite for “Well we just barely managed to squeak by, but at terrible cost, with many lives lost and our illusions about what unites us shattered forever.” I get enough of that from [insert something grimly comic here like “life” or “the news” or “my family”, but don’t go too depressing]. They learned the lesson from last season and dispensed with an obligatory “bad guy” in favor of antagonists who are simply operating at cross-purposes, the greater of which isn’t even aware how their actions affect the protagonists. This is all sort of maximum Star Trek, the vision of a world that is utopian not in the sense of having achieved a perfect world, but in the sense of everyone being on-board with the idea that my success is not your failure: that we can talk it out and find a way that everyone’s needs get met. And thus the real “threat” of the climax was never that the 10-C would go to war with the Federation or that Earth or Ni’Var would be destroyed: it’s what Michael says when explaining Book and Tarka to the 10-C: that in their pain and their grief, they broke away and became only their own individual “one”s, rather than being at once “one” and also “many”. And if this sounds a bit Borg-y, well why not? After all, what are the Borg but the dark mirror of the Federation: if Tarka and Book represent the dangers of losing sight of the value in communion, the Borg represent the dangers of losing sight of the value in individuality and freedom of choice.

But that’s for next time…

(I am practicing self-control in that I am not going to start in on Picard until I’ve finished Disco. Also in that I watched this episode sober, but I don’t promise this will be repeated.)

It never rains but it pours. Twice in a row now we’ve got episodes with a focus on good old-fashioned TNG-style competency porn. That can-do, “Let’s science the shit out of this,” spirit where we solve complicated problems with simple analogies. Just like blowing up a balloon.

So yeah, I guess the reveal last week was a lot more concrete than I realized. There is, as a I predicted, one more step to get from what I learned to communication, but it’s a much more straightforward step than I was expecting. Discovery hoses down the 10-C’s hyperfield with the hydrocarbon for “We come in peace”, and then get scared and try to flee when the 10-C respond by summoning them inside. But the real meaty part of the front half of the episode is what happens next. Because the 10-C show up and would point of fact like to have a word with them. We don’t get a good look at the 10-C yet; they appear only as a very indistinct and large “something” seen through the mist, but they seem to at least be a recognizable sort of lifeform, with physical extension and sensory organs.

Their communication method – or at least, the “bridge language” they invent to dumb down their communication for the bipeds – is a pretty good depiction of something utterly alien that can nonetheless be understood, and I enjoyed watching the process as the gang sciences the shit out of it. I didn’t quite get the significance of the hydrocarbons last week; they’re not just a byproduct of the 10-C’s biology, but rather they communicate directly with them. My gut tells me that their full means of communication is some form of sharing complete thoughts at their own full cognition directly via biochemical means – your Star Trek-style simple analogy would be like a precise and controlled form of the way that a certain innocuous smell can remind you of a very specific event from your past. That part reminds me of the old Trek novel Enterprise: The First Adventure, wherein Kirk and Company met a ship of bear-like beings whose natural communication was basically just sharing their entire life experience and cognitive process telepathically, and Spock goes crazy for a bit trying to handle it.

For the sake of the bald apes, the 10-C dumb it down to hucking a pile of chemicals at you which can be interpreted as numbers, mathematical symbols, and emotions, then blinking a sequence of lights to indicate what order to read them in, and that part reminds me a lot of decoding the faerie language in the first Artemis Fowl book. And, again, really good work at showing how they build from using this constructed language to just math at each other in order to establish the possibility of communication, to communicating more abstract concepts. The 10-C phrase their question as “(atomic number of isolitium) + (mathematical formula for the shape of the BSTiS controller) = (emotion of curiosity)”, though they are helpful enough to give them a reconstruction of Tarka’s bomb to provide the necessary context. The question is “Why did you blow up our thinger?” The answer the galactic gang comes up with is “(chemical composition of humanoid atmosphere) + (mathematical shape of BSTiS controller) = (emotion of terror)” ie., “Because your thinger scares the shit out of us,” which would seem maybe a bit vaguer than you’d want, but remember from last week that the particular form of terror they’ve isolated as a 10-C lexeme is specifically, “The existential terror of your planet being doomed,” which is a real lucky break for them. The 10-C respond, rather wonderfully, with a very simple “(emotion of sorrow)”.

Then, of course, Tarka fucks everything up, because fuck that guy. Back in our other plots, Zora can’t detect Book’s ship due to Tarka’s sabotage, but she feels that something’s a little “off”, and we have a second parallel “figuring shit out” plot going on simultaneously with the main plot about decoding the 10-C’s bridge language. But, despite this being Star Trek, it’s not so much a “science the shit out of this” as “talk therapy the shit out of this”. The only downside of this plot is that it doesn’t end up going anywhere – they discover Reno’s abduction and Tarka’s sabotage basically at the same time as Tarka makes his move. But it’s nice to see Zora, Paul and Adira all working together.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Reno, Tarka and Book have their own plot going on. Seriously, this episode is thick with plot, and it’s paced really well; you never feel overwhelmed and nothing feels too thin. Though I am having a hard time keeping track of the fact that the events before Discovery gets pulled into the hyperfield is the same episode as Tarka’s betrayal and the language parts. It feels like two episodes worth of stuff happening, but in a good way.

We don’t quite get a whole third “figuring shit out” plot because among Tig Notaro’s many many talents (seriously, can we just digitally replace all problematic white men in movies with Tig Notaro from now on?), “science the shit out of this” scenes are not. Though she can pull off just a simple “Explain complex concept with a slightly dodgy analogy.” It’s kind of neat, given that Tig Notaro in interviews really presents this image of an almost sublime lack of academic skills, the way they handle this plot is to simply declare that Tarka’s plan is so very scientifically complicated that there’s no point in even trying to explain it. Reno can just tell with a glance that the thing Tarka is plotting will genocide the 10-C, blow up Discovery and Book’s ship and doom Earth and Ni’Var, but the reason is just a pile of complicated math so there’s no explaining it – and I dig that she’s up-front with Book about it: “Ask him to show you the math,” she says. “It won’t mean anything to you. But his reaction will.”

Tarka is a hard nut to crack. Because this is real fucking evil shit he’s doing, but he’s doing it in desperation to ascend to a better universe to be with his boyfriend. How do you square “Willing to genocide possibly four entire cultures” with “Loves this one dude so much he’s willing to genocide up to four entire cultures”? In a 90s show, the answer would be “bad writing”, and it still might, sure, but I think Disco has earned the right to use “Because people be complicated, yo,” as an explanation. Discovery has always been a show about how trauma fucks us up.

This episode was good on many, many levels; its flaws are few. They even manage to do a convincing explanation for the generally infuriating decision that the team that goes into the 10-C’s hospitality goo ball consists of the highest concentration of senior officers to go on one away mission in the entire history of the show. I mean, yeah, it’s a diplomatic mission at the highest levels, so I guess it’s justified to send the presidents. And Michael and Saru are, point of fact, the experts in the exact fields relevant to the situation. It should grate, but how else are you going to do it? I do think they didn’t really give a good justification for why the 10-C sent them a goo ball containing a recreation of Discovery’s bridge – making a construct that recreates their environment makes sense and all, but it’s not clear why they couldn’t just keep conversing from the shuttle bay. If the goo ball was going to take them somewhere, it would make more sense, but of course, it just sits there waiting to dump them back on the floor when the 10-C get pissed at Tarka.

The finale comes next (It’s already in your past, of course, because of the time delay I incurred to handle Prodigy), and I’m hella curious how they’re going to sort all of this out. I think I have a solid guess about the broad strokes, but there’s elements where I’m not sure how far and how satisfying they’re going to go. Tarka seems ripe to die, either undone by his own failure to transcend his guilt, or self-sacrifice when he does. Book seems ripe to die in an act of self-sacrifce. But neither of these would put Michael as central in the ultimate resolution as you know the show wants (Admittedly, seasons 2 and 3 were both willing to share the glory in the final moments, with Michael’s contribution being critical, but not outsized. They let Georgiou defeat Control, and while Michael killed Osyraa, it’s Owo and Book that save the ship and Saru who saves the galaxy), and besides, Discovery’s go-to move in the end isn’t to win by sacrifice: it’s to win by healing.

Once again I find myself at the disadvantage of having been pretty drunk when I watched this episode. I’m going through some stuff right now. It’s fine.

Anyway, this episode has some ups and downs. It has a more solid “Science Fiction” plot than we’ve gotten out of Discovery in a while, but correspondingly less of the Discovery goodness that I’ve come to like. We spend a bit more time with Book and Tarka than I want, and honestly they aren’t doing great at justifying their part of the plot. I could’ve done with some more time for “character” stuff.

We don’t really learn a lot about the 10-C despite that being what the episode is ostensibly about. It’s called “Rosetta” because they’re meant to be discovering the key to communicating, and they probably do, but it’s going to involve one more ass-pull to get there (Betcha it’s Book. Book is, after all, an empath. Also, proper emotional catharsis requires Book, the face of having been hurt by the 10-C, be the one to heal the divide by connecting at an emotional level with those he holds responsible) because where they are right now is basically that they have discovered that the 10-C, despite possibly being GIANT FREAKING SPACE DRAGONS WHO LIVED INSIDE A GAS GIANT experience emotions that are entirely recognizable to galactic humanoids: fear of death; the desire to protect their young; self-sacrifice. Okay, cool, fine start. But we still need a little treknobabble to take the last step from there to communication. Which is plausible, since the key technical aspect of this discovery is that the remains of ancient 10-C impregnated their environment with hydrocarbons that can transmit their emotions to other lifeforms that touch them.

This is fairly close, on a technical level, to imagining one could relive the memories of a dinosaur by touching crude oil. It is quite mad and quite wonderful, and well outside the sort of thing “respectable” Trek tends to do, but is actually fairly in-line with some of the wild things I’ve seen in expanded universe novels, and in Doctor Who. But that said, “Aha! They have emotions!” isn’t on the surface as big a revelation as its weight in the story merits.

Meanwhile, Tarka and Book sneak aboard Discovery so that they can find a way to piggyback when it goes to visit the 10-C in their new home. We still haven’t gotten a really plausible explanation for what Tarka means to do now – he doesn’t have another isolytic weapon, and I see no evidence of him having an alternative plan for capturing the power source. Unless he just wants to sneak up to it and plug is interdimensional transporter into it. And I see even less why Book is going along with him: if Tarka had a plan to disable the power source, maybe. But given that Tarka doesn’t have a concrete plan and Michael does, why isn’t he just turning himself in and asking if he can do anything to help? Also, as much of a dick as Tarka is, I noticed that he made a point of referring to Zora by name. He unquestioningly and naturally accepts her for who and what she is despite the two never having directly interacted. This is a nice change from the expected cliche of, “Communicate that the character is a dick by having him refuse to use the sentient ship’s actual name.” It is possible that they really do mean for us to see Tarka as another “broken” character rather than the total dick they portrayed him as.

And then they accidentally kidnap Reno. Cool. Reno being snarky at Tarka will certainly make the next episode more fun.