Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Ep 9, "Hide and Seek"

 

In this episode, we finally get to the root of Picard's trauma, a trauma that has been teased and hinted at all season long. It's mixed in with the crew's desperate flight from the Borgi-fied Agnes and her newly assimilated minions, with help from Brent Spiner's Dr. Adam Soong (who tips all the way into unhinged villainy in this episode, in search of his "legacy," and as a result becomes a lot less interesting). I will say this: the reveal does make some actual plot sense, as Jean-Luc's burgeoning memories does show the way to the tunnels hidden underneath Chateau Picard, the same tunnels he roamed with his mother on that fateful night. And the final scene that reveals exactly what happened to her doesn't take place until the very end of the episode, so at least Picard isn't having distracting personal flashbacks in the middle of a crisis (well, much). 

This does make the episode a little better than the past several senseless slogs, but I'm tempted to classify it as too little too late. Especially since it only deals with Agnes/the Borg Queen, and not the other problem of Dr. Soong stopping the Europa Mission (which will obviously happen in the finale). Also, at the end the newly unified Queen Agnes takes off in Rios' ship--Rios' Confederation ship--to where? the alternate timeline, or many alternate timelines across multiple universes? That question still remains to be answered, but it also leaves Picard's group seemingly stranded in the 20th century.

Acting-wise, Alison Pill again shines, with her dual (and dueling) identities as Agnes Jurati and the Borg Queen. But she's given a big climactic speech where she talks the Queen into cooperation instead of assimilation--a nicer, more wholesome assimilation, perhaps?--which sounds more like a plot coupon to me instead of a viable solution. (Oh, yeah, and Queen Agnes is totally going to be the Queen from the first episode, like I previously stated. Probably to set up this time loop so she can become the Queen who asks to join the Federation.) Patrick Stewart is also put through a bit of a wringer as Picard remembers what happens to his mother: Yvette Picard ended up committing suicide in Chateau Picard's solarium, hanging from the rafters in a very Gothic-looking and cliched white dress, a memory Picard apparently suppressed for decades. (This plot twist also sparked a somewhat heated discussion in the comments for this episode's review at Tor.com, with many people saying a) wouldn't the Federation have eliminated mental illness by the 24th century, or nearly so? and b) what was Picard's father doing locking Yvette in her room for the night in the first place? Had the chateau's transporter blown its gasket, so Maurice couldn't bring someone in to help Yvette, or take her somewhere to get treatment?)

The episode moved along fast enough where I didn't consider any of these issues as I was watching, but it fell apart as soon as I started thinking about it. Which, unfortunately, has been pretty much true for the entire season. 

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Ep 8, "Mercy"

 

I haven't said anything about the latest episode of Picard because I'm still so irritated with the direction this season is taking, but I suppose I ought to throw out a few words for completion's sake. 

At least we find out (some) of what's going on with Q: he's dying. How an immortal energy being can actually "die" is a theoretical exercise left up to the audience, but he states during a long soliloquy expertly delivered by John De Lancie that he is "fading away." That must be the reason his finger snaps don't work any longer, why it took him so long to respond to Guinan's summons, and why he is using Adam Soong to carry out his dirty work. What exactly Q's "dirty work" is remains firmly up in the air, as he insists that Picard & Co. came back to 2024 to fix the timeline on their own. So why, exactly, is Q even here? (Other than dragging back De Lancie for nostalgia's sake, as will happen to an even greater degree in Season 3 with the return of the entire Next Gen cast, with the woeful and shitty exception of Wil Wheaton. No matter Season 1's flaws, at least it had a forward-looking storyline and new characters, and a showrunner who seemed to have more or less thought his plot all the way through, as opposed to this chaotic bunch.) In Episode 1, Q snarled "the road not taken" to Picard as only John De Lancie can do, and it and the 2nd episode seemed to set something up that could have been exciting if it had been followed through on--the "Humans First!" Federation--but now that's been almost entirely dropped, in favor of Seven and Raffi chasing Agnes/the Borg Queen around Los Angeles.

To be fair, Alison Pill is acting the hell out of Agnes/the Borg Queen. Agnes is still in there fighting, as we see when she is cornered by Seven and Raffi, and in whipping both their asses, she grabs Raffi by the throat and lifts her into the air, then drops her instead of strangling her or breaking her neck. (And the Queen has stolen some black combat boots, which look entirely rad against that red dress.) Jeri Ryan also gets a very nice scene of Seven having a flashback to her own assimilation, which was entirely too short, and Seven also calls Raffi out for being manipulative (which Raffi admits to, in an obligatory let's-not-waste-Evan-Evagora-the-supposedly-regular-cast-member scene where she's shown to have talked Elnor out of going on a mission for the Qowat Milot and applying to Starfleet Academy instead, which indirectly led to his death). So there was all this hype about these two getting together this season, huh? Really? 

Picard and Guinan also get a weird little Trek/X-Files crossover, as the FBI agent who arrested them last episode is recovering from a childhood trauma of his own, namely stumbling across two Earth-spying Vulcans when he was a kid and their failing in a mind-meld to erase the memory. The agent then becomes a Mulder-lite (without a Scully by his side, although the young Guinan would have been a good one), which is why he latched on to the surveillance tape of Picard beaming into that Los Angeles street. Picard ends up coming clean and telling the agent the truth about why he is there, which I guess is meant to validate all the decades of the FBI guy "wanting to believe"; at any rate, he lets Picard and Guinan go after that. This is just in time for Picard to realize that the Queen is actually after Rios' ship La Sirena (which is from the alt-future where the Queen is the last surviving member of the Borg? And she wants to return to that? Huh?), and she is shown to be teaming up with Adam Soong to stop the Europa mission. The Queen has eaten enough lithium batteries (Agnes will definitely need a stomach/intestine and multiple organ transplant if she survives) to power up more nanobots, as we see at the end where the Queen is assimilating the strike team she'll be sending to capture La Sirena.

The season is still an honest-to-God mess. I'm not hating it mainly because of Patrick Stewart and John De Lancie, but man, it's disappointing. 

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Ep 7, "Monsters"

 

This episode is better than the previous one, but not by much.

We spend about half of it in Picard's head, with the Watcher Tallinn trying to "unstick" his consciousness. (In a neat bit of foreshadowing, the mechanism she plugs into to do so has an earpiece shaped just like a Romulan ear, which points to later on when she reveals she is Romulan, and presumably the ancestor of Laris. Although, as is pointed out by Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido, genetics doesn't work like that.) We also get a surprising guest star, James Callis from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (which is a sly Easter egg, since Picard is a kinda-sorta Cylon now, with his synthetic body) who plays both the therapist trying to get Picard to reveal the "monsters" of his childhood, and the father who turns out to not be an abuser after all. 

This part of the episode has chains, fog, spooky dungeons and roaring monsters, reminding me of the Original Series episode "Catspaw." Tallinn tries to "unstick" the young Picard, and we learn that his mother is actually a victim of untreated mental illness and his father was trying to help her (although Tallinn specifically says "there is more to this story"). But that will likely be left until later, along with the ten thousand other threads the season still has to tie up. 

Because Agnes Jurati/the new Borg Queen is still roaming the 2024 streets, punching out glass windows to get another rush of endorphins to hasten her assimilation; and Raffi and Seven, stopping in the middle of this crisis to argue about their relationship (which is a damned annoying habit of this season's writers), are trying to track her down; and Rios is so enamored of the 21st century, and Dr. Ramirez and her son, that he tells them he's from outer space and beams them aboard La Sirena (which isn't even his La Sirena, but the alternate timeline's), which is a bloody stupid decision by any measure and only irritates me with the writers and the new showrunner even more for making this character look like a damned idiot; and Picard is attempting to use Guinan to summon Q, which does give a bit of backstory with the el-Aurians and the Continuum, but which doesn't even work and promptly leads to another bit of wheel-spinning wherein a man who wanders into Guinan's bar turns out to be an FBI agent and arrests them both. 

Really? O.M.G. 

Honestly, I'm surprised Patrick Stewart signed off on this mess. He certainly gives it his all, and the scenes with him and James Callis are the best part of the episode. But it's frustrating, because aside from Episodes 1 and 2, this season is simply not good. Season 1 was not perfect, but it looks almost....Shakespearean compared to this. 

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Ep 6, "Two of One"

 

Wow, this episode was a clunker. I really miss the previous showrunner Michael Chabon. 

The cast did the best with what they were given, but what they were given--save for a few fleeting moments--was so slight it could have floated away on the spring breeze. We spend most of the 38-minute running time (actually less, since that also includes the opening and end credits) at the astronauts' gala, trying to keep Renee Picard together long enough to decide to go on the mission. There's a brief conversation between Picard and the Watcher Tallinn--who notes that he still keeps calling her "Laris"--where you get the sense that Jean-Luc is practicing lines to use on the real Laris, if he ever gets back to her. Rios fanboys over a non-replicated cigar and gushes over 21st century food. Raffi hallucinates poor Elnor again and remarks that Seven seems happier than she's been in a long time, having been stripped of her Borg implants. (Seven, on the other hand, has nothing to say about this issue, which should have been a major part of her characterization this season. As a matter of fact, I don't remember if she had a single line this episode.) Agnes argues with the Borg Queen in her head, speaking out loud to an invisible person, which should have attracted all sorts of attention. (She also has an absolutely cringeworthy scene that I shall get to.) Patrick Stewart gets to deliver a Patented Jean-Luc Picard Pep Talk to his ancestor Renee, but it's so short, only a few lines, that I don't see how that could have convinced Renee Picard to do anything, much less put aside her depression, imposter syndrome, and the effects of Q's manipulation, and decide to continue with the Europa mission. (And why is she still struggling with this on the eve of the mission anyway? I thought NASA's psychological requirements and screening for astronauts were a lot more rigorous than that. Unless the mission is going through SpaceX.) Dr. Adam Soong, given a decidedly more villainous turn by Brent Spiner in this episode, meets up with Picard at the party and informs him that Q has told him all about why they are there, and later on tries to run Renee down with his car, which causes Picard to push Renee out of the way and take the blow instead. This precipitates a medical crisis wherein the gang takes an unconscious and comatose Picard (who's nevertheless having flashbacks of his mother) to Rios' free clinic, where Rios apparently drags Dr. Teresa out of bed to treat him. Of course, given that Picard now has a fucking synthetic body, I don't understand why all this panic was necessary. Isn't the damn thing a lot more durable, and can heal itself faster, than frail organic flesh? Nevertheless, Picard is now somehow stuck in his own brain, and Tallinn says she can use her sonic screwdriver neuro-something-or-other to dive into his mind and free him. Which is apparently going to happen next episode, and will probably take up a good chunk. 

Unfortunately, all this isn't the worst part. The worst part was when Picard was going to talk to Renee but was surrounded by security tipped off by Dr. Soong, and needed a distraction to slip out of the gala. This was when the Borg Queen turned off the lights momentarily, allowing Agnes to gain the stage--where she proceeds to burst into a fairly credible rendition of a Pat Benatar song, "Shadows of the Night." 

Now, I take a back seat to nobody in my love of Pat Benatar. I fan-voted for her to be inducted into the goddamn Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But how the hell does Agnes Jurati, born 400 years in the future, know Pat Benatar existed? Did the Borg Queen get bored hanging from the rafters of La Sirena and tap into Sirius XM and/or Spotify? Is the Borg Queen a secret headbanger (although "Shadows of the Night" isn't a particularly metal song)? This was just ridiculous. Although I understand why that song was chosen, as the lyrics go like this:

He said oh girl, it's a cold world when you keep it all to yourself

I said you can't hide on the inside all the pain you've ever felt

Ransom my heart but baby don't look back

Cause we got nobody else

We're running with the shadows of the night

So baby take my hand, it'll be all right

Surrender all your dreams to me tonight

They'll come true in the end

Admittedly this does fit Agnes' lonely, isolated, vulnerable character and her synthesis/manipulation by the Borg Queen. But this use of the music to shed light on her was totally unnecessary, as it had already been discussed in her previous scenes. It was also unnecessary as a distraction, as she could just have pretended to be drunk, grabbed one of the jazz band's instruments, and tried to play it. The sight of Agnes onstage wrestling with a trombone would have accomplished the same thing: to take the security people's eyes off Picard.

I guess the only point of this stupidity was to give Agnes a rush of endorphins that allowed the Borg Queen to finally take her over (we see her eyes going completely black). This leads to the one genuinely suspenseful scene in the entire episode--the body of Agnes, now being controlled by the Borg Queen, marching in her red dress into the "shadows of the night."  

I called one of the previous episodes "wheel-spinning," but this one spun its wheels axle-deep into the mud, and the vehicle is going precisely nowhere. This does not fill me with confidence for the upcoming Season 3 of Picard and its just-announced The Next Generation cast reunion (except for Wil Wheaton, which seems a shitty thing to do), or for the rest of the season, for that matter. Maybe Michael Chabon wrote a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes and had a more deliberate pace in Season 1, but damn, you still felt like he was doing something with the characters. This new showrunner isn't. 

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Ep 5, "Fly Me To the Moon"

 

Well, this is a little more like it. The wheels have stopped spinning (for now) and we're getting some forward motion.

I shouldn't be sarcastic, I suppose. After all, I really liked the first season of this show, and it is arguably slower than this one. But the first season showrunner was the literary novelist Michael Chabon, and five episodes into this season, I can see that made all the difference. Chabon had a far better grasp of the characters and a knack for dialogue than the new guy (I think Terry Matalas is the new showrunner) and structured the episodes so well that I didn't care if the pace was glacial: the characters and their interactions held my attention throughout. The new showrunner is emphasizing plot and pace more, and for the most part the show suffers as a result, in my opinion.

One constant remains the excellent acting. Of course, with Sir Patrick Stewart you can't go wrong, but I have really been impressed by Alison Pill this season. Her scenes in the last episode when she went toe-to-toe in a mental battle with the Borg Queen were a tour de force. Brent Spiner returns in this episode, playing Dr. Adam Soong (the in-universe explanation for the uncanny resemblance of all the Soongs must be that they've been cloned for generations), and he has a couple of delightful, crackling scenes with John De Lancie. Michelle Hurd's Raffi is still unhinged by Elnor's death and not thinking clearly at all, and Jeri Ryan's Seven is trying her best to rein her in. I presume those two are going to get together at the season's end, but if so they need to show some signs of it. 

Plot-wise, we get quite a few answers in this episode. The Watcher is indeed "watching" a single person--Jean-Luc's ancestor Renee Picard, who apparently must participate in the manned mission to Europa to avoid fracturing the timeline. (This plot element makes me wish they had not set the show in 2024. We're not even getting back to the damn moon by then, much less anywhere else.) Q, who for some reason has been robbed of his power-generating snap, has been masquerading as her therapist, trying to manipulate and gaslight her out of going. The Watcher didn't realize this, of course, but Picard spots him right away. Since we still have the damn three-day artificial deadline, Picard's group cooks up a scheme to attend a gala held for Renee and the other astronauts on the night they go into quarantine for the mission, to watch and protect her from any interference. The obstacles inherent to actually getting in the room--coded invites, facial recognition and the like--necessitate Agnes Jurati using her "Intro to Ancient Coding" (!) college class to insert the others' IDs into the system. Of course, she also has a problem no one else knows about: while Picard was gone, the Borg Queen lured a hapless policeman aboard La Sirena to use as a hostage to force Agnes to hand over the ship, except that Agnes grabbed a gun off the wall and shot the Queen's legless ass. (Good thing a shotgun hanging on the wall of a house abandoned for decades would still have shells in it.) The Queen died, but just before she managed to touch Agnes long enough to inject some nanoprobes, so now Agnes is carrying around the Queen's ghost in her head. 

(And I am calling it now. I will bet that the Borg Queen we saw in the first episode, who beamed onto the Stargazer with a peculiar metal mesh covering her entire face, that Agnes, watching, remarked, "That's new," is Agnes herself, partially assimilated and needing Picard to trigger the auto-destruct to set everything in motion.)

Brent Spiner's Dr. Soong is introduced as a scientist whose daughter Kore has an incurable genetic condition that he has been trying everything to fix, including conducting illegal experiments on volunteer ex-soldiers. His license and funding is pulled, which is when Q steps in and offers a cure, if Dr. Soong will eliminate Renee Picard. We still have no idea why Q wants to splinter the timeline and why he can't just snap his fingers and do it, or why Renee's failure to go on the mission would be so catastrophic. 

One funny little scene occurs when Picard's gang gets back together. Of course, Raffi (and everyone else) sees the Watcher's resemblance to Laris. (Nobody remarks on how much Dr. Soong looks like Data, but Picard hasn't seen him yet.) Raffi confronts the good Admiral: "I know you said it was complicated, but are we going to talk about your new--"

"Not now."

"No, but she looks exactly like--"

"I'm aware."

"Well, doesn't that make you feel a little, kind of creepy--"

"Yes."

Patrick Stewart's stiff and abrupt line delivery is perfect for this scene, as you get the sense he's finally beginning to realize what an idiot he was for turning Laris down. 

I am enjoying this so far, but....I'm sorry, I don't think it's as good as the first season. But we shall see. 

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Ep 4, "Watcher"

 

This episode of Picard continues the split storylines of the previous episode: Raffi/Seven, Rios/Teresa, Agnes/the Borg Queen, and finally Picard/Guinan. This last is the most interesting, as Picard meets up with a younger, cynical and disillusioned Guinan, who is ready to close her bar and leave the human race to its just desserts. 

(No, we don't see a creepily de-aged Whoopi Goldberg. Ito Aghayere is the young Guinan, and she does a very good job. She also has upper arm muscles that make it look like she's been trading serves with Serena Williams. The scenes with Patrick Stewart are well acted. That said, since it's specifically stated that this takes place three days before the timeline divergence, it's a mystery to me how Guinan didn't recognize Picard, as they met more than a century earlier in the TNG episode "Time's Arrow." Oh well.)

On the hunt for the Watcher, Picard is beamed by Agnes into the same LA block we saw in previous episodes, which apparently have some prime preservation magic applied to the buildings, as Guinan's bar "10" is still there. Picard says he needs her help, and at first she refuses, saying she's closing her bar that day because of what she's seen from humans: "You know they're killing the planet? Truth is whatever you want it to be. Facts aren't facts anymore. A few people have resources to fix all the problems for the rest, but they won't. Because their greatest fear is having less. They got one tiny ball in the entire galaxy, and all this species wants to do is fight." A little later on, after Picard says, "Humankind will change. You must be patient," she bursts out again: "You know who has the luxury of patience here? Someone who looks like you and not like me. The hatred here? It never ends. It just swaps clothes. This century? It took off a hood and put on a suit." 

(Predictably, this caused whining from the "anti-woke" brigade. Ignore them. This is not subtle, for sure, but neither was "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" or "The Omega Glory.")

Picard tries to tell her humans can change, and even repeats the same words the older Guinan said to him in the first episode, causing this Guinan to get time-sick. But not even that and the fact that he knows she's an El-Aurian sways her, until he finally tells her his name. At that point she relents and takes him to see the Watcher: "You're looking for a Supervisor, also known as a Watcher. They're peppered throughout the galaxy, assigned to protect the destiny of certain individuals." The Supervisor/Watcher apparently has body-hopping capabilities, as it inhabits three different people as it leads Picard through the park, to make sure he isn't being followed. The last one turns to face him at the end, and we see she's a dead ringer for Laris. She surrounds them with a black box and they disappear. 

In the Raffi/Seven storyline, they're trying to hunt down Rios and end up at LAPD headquarters downtown. After Raffi yells at the policewoman manning the front desk and gets nowhere, a bystander tells them to look for Rios in the ICE facility. This ends up with Raffi storming out to the parking lot and breaking into a police SUV (honestly, she's been angry and aggressive ever since Elnor's death, which is understandable, but an experienced officer like her should know it's time to rein in her emotions and take control of herself) to hack the computer to find the facility (over Seven's objections). Some officers exit the building as this is happening, and Seven and Raffi steal the SUV and pull away, with Seven forced into driving. This interminable car chase takes up way too much of the episode's run time, and though I'm sure it was also meant to spotlight Seven and Raffi's frenemies-to-lovers burgeoning relationship, it just got tedious after a while. At the end, Agnes finally got the La Sirena's transporters working and beamed them out of the vehicle--after it had come to a stop, thankfully, so it didn't continue on and run over someone--to meet up with Rios.

Speaking of Agnes, the aftereffects of her entanglement with the Borg Queen lead to the revelation that the timeline divergence takes place on April 15, three days later. The cat-and-mouse interplay between Agnes and the Borg Queen continues, with the latter a lot more chatty after their partial merger. Finally, after Rios' arrest last episode, he is taken to the ICE holding facility and put on a bus for deportation (after a little more friendly chatting with Dr. Teresa). The bus is barrelling south, with somewhat of an implication that he's going to be taken to another facility near the border and simply disappeared, when Raffi and Seven are sent to meet him. We don't see any more of either of them, so they're evidently going to spring him next episode. 

Honestly, except for Picard and Guinan, this episode amounted to a lot of wheel-spinning. The only exception to that was the very last scene with Q, who was sitting with a newspaper in front of "Jackson Roykirk Plaza." He's watching a young blond white woman reading a "Dixon Hill" book and he's wearing a jacket with an "Europa mission" badge on it. So, since this is the second time we've seen a reference to it, the Europa mission must be the incident that splits the timeline. Q also tries to snap his fingers and do something to the blond woman, and nothing happens. Hopefully, the next episode will show us a bit more forward movement. 

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Ep 3, "Assimilation"

 

This season of Picard is a near-future time travel loop, which is made clear in this episode: we see Los Angeles two years from now (albeit with downtown homeless camps and a billboard advertising a manned Europa mission, which is a thing not happening in this reality any time soon, much less in two years). Observing what is happening in their 400-year past, Seven of Nine sees a fire on the distant hills--looking like it's close to the Hollywood sign--and remarks that she can see signs of the coming collapse. Whether Picard's time loop has anything to do with Deep Space Nine's Bell Riots time travel episode remains to be seen. 

Our characters are divided up into three storylines: Seven and Raffi searching for the mysterious "Watcher" the Borg Queen told them was here somewhere, which they do by climbing to the top of the tallest building in LA and using a repurposed tricorder (reconfigured to look like a very thick cell phone) to search for alien tech; Rios, sent along with them but separated by the glitching transporter, which materializes him about twenty feet in the air and faceplants him on the concrete; and Agnes and Picard, remaining behind at the crashed La Sirena and trying to extract vital information from the Borg Queen. This last storyline was by far the most compelling, with excellent performances by Alison Pill as Agnes and Annie Wersching as the menacing, creepy Borg Queen. In fact, after Agnes has finished riffing through the Queen's brain and removing the information needed (which she enters in a file she names "Shit I Stole From the Borg Queen"), Wersching utters the episode's best line: "What you've done here is more difficult and vastly more dangerous than you realize. You've impressed me." 

Rios, after his fall and subsequent injuries, is taken to a neighborhood free clinic, where lacking any ID he is taken to be an undocumented immigrant. The owner of the clinic, a young Latina woman named Teresa, patches him up (and eyes him up as well, as he does her). Teresa has a son, Ricardo, who discovers and starts playing with Rios' commbadge. (On that note: really? The detachable future tech lost in the past is way beyond cliche by now. Hasn't anybody in the 25th century invented implantable commbadges?) He doesn't have time to recover and leave before the clinic is raided by ICE, and of course he is arrested. The episode ends with him being dragged out as Picard's voice emerges from the abandoned badge. 

And then there's the low point of the episode: Elnor's death.

I expect he'll be brought back when the timeline is repaired. A grieving Raffi even mentions the possibility, to which Agnes stammers in reply: "I don't know." But just as it's bad to sacrifice a female character to motivate the hero, it's bad to sacrifice Elnor to motivate Raffi. The scenes of his passing and her subsequent rage--she even berates Picard for "playing games with Q for decades," when Picard had nothing to do with Q's reappearance--are well acted by Michelle Hurd, but dammitall, they're manipulative and unnecessary. I still maintain that Elnor is a fascinating character that could have contributed greatly to our heroes being stuck in the 21st century, and I fault the writers for not knowing what to do with him. 

This episode keeps up the season's faster pace, and is directed by, of all people, Back to the Future and Howard the Duck's Lea Thompson. I hope this thread of conflict and the uneasy dance between Agnes and the Borg Queen is followed through on, as it's the most interesting part of the season so far. 

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Ep 2, "Penance"

 

In this show's first season, the showrunner was the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, and you could tell. The pacing was contemplative and deliberate, concentrating more on character than slam-bang action set pieces. Of course, the show was also introducing new characters and their backstories (even as certain past characters, such as Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine and Jonathan Del Arco's Hugh, were carryovers from Voyager and The Next Generation respectively, and of course Brent Spiner's Data). Personally, I enjoyed the slower pace and greater emphasis on character in Season 1. Naturally, when you have such a superlative actor as Patrick Stewart anchoring the show (though surprisingly, Jeri Ryan stood up as the cast member most able to go toe to toe with Stewart), reading laundry lists could be made interesting. 

But now we have a new showrunner, Terry Matalas, and that also shows. The first episode was a little bit slower, setting up the season's themes and revisiting past favorites (such as Whoopi Goldberg's Guinan), and catching up on the cast in the approximately two-year break between the first season and the next. But with this episode and the appearance of Q, the story is moving briskly along, with crisp direction and some explosive set pieces. It does appear we're going to do time travel again (back to 2024--really?) to try to fix a break in time that turned the Federation into the xenophobic human-supremacist Confederacy, and our Captain into General Jean-Luc Picard, possibly the greatest war criminal in history. 

The jury is still out on this storyline, I think, if only because this is some pretty well-trodden road. However, once again Patrick Stewart delivers a great performance, sliding between shock and bewilderment when he confronts Q (played with delicious unhinged nastiness by John de Lancie--the opener with the two of them setting the stage is the best part of the episode), to despair when he sees a recording of himself as General Picard boasting about "subjugating savage civilizations and boldly conquering war-like alien worlds"--indeed, this entire sequence is really a horrifying inside-out reversal of Stewart's monologue over The Next Generation's opening credits--to horror over the murderous authoritarian megalomaniac he has to play as the General. But damn, Stewart does it so well it's just chilling, especially in the "Eradication Day" sequence near the end, when the General is supposed to execute the last of the Borg, the Borg Queen, before a bloodthirsty screaming crowd, and Stewart gets them pumped up even higher with a scowl and a few thrusts of his fist. 

(I also must highlight this episode's score. It's very martial, discordant, dark and creepy, and fits the setting perfectly.)

However, there are trade-offs for this faster pace, and the character moments I so enjoyed in the previous season are mostly missing here. What character moments exist are a bit cringing, especially when Agnes Jurati and Cristobal Rios start arguing about their failed relationship in the middle of a crisis. I do realize Agnes is the type to babble on and on about things as a way of focusing her mind, as if she could solve a problem by throwing words at it, but for crying out loud that was not the time. I also would like to rap the knuckles of whoever is mishandling one of my favorite characters from Season 1, Elnor, the fascinating combination of innocent Romulan child and deadly sword-wielder. The writers clearly do not know what to do with him, and of course in this episode he gets shot as our crew tries to make their escape back into time. 

I don't know how much we're going to see of the Confederation, as the show's next stop will be 2024. And a lot of themes were laid down in the first episode that remain to be followed up on, especially with Q's insistence that Picard has to do "penance." For what is still unstated, although Q insists that Picard knows. We shall see. 

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Ep 1, "The Star Gazer"

Sir Patrick Stewart is back with the next chapter of Jean-Luc Picard Post-Enterprise (and in this case, post-humanity, since he became a synth at the end of the first season). Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist, is now gone as showrunner, and one can tell the difference right away. There are a couple of talky scenes in this episode, but the elegiac, deliberate pace of the first season is not there, at least in this early outing. I'm sure a lot of people will be happy with this, but that was a big part of why I liked the first season so much. We will have to see. 

This shows up in the very first minutes, with a frantic barrage of a ship under attack, teams rushing to the bridge, familiar characters from last season shouting, "Forty percent bridge transfer control!" and Jean-Luc starting an auto-destruct sequence. I guess that was meant to immediately draw the viewer in, but it came across as rushed and cheap, especially since the next scene accomplished the same thing far better: we're back at Chateau Picard at the end of bottling season, with Picard and Laris sitting down to have a drink of their freshly bottled vintage. Their conversation brings the viewer up to speed. It's been at least a year and a half since the events of the first season, as Laris' husband Zhaban has died:

"Did you know we were promised to each other at birth?"

"I had no idea."

"Well, as is our custom. But we did learn to love each other. Truly. Remember that Romulans don't suffer loss as humans do. We love deeply, and then we honor that love by loving again, even more deeply still." 

She then asks why Picard's chosen to be alone, and his reply is: "The part of me that really wants has to wait in line, behind duty."

Well, if that isn't everything short of shouting aloud, "I WANT YOU YOU IDIOT," on Laris' part, I don't know what is. And they do indeed almost kiss, but Picard pulls back at the last minute. This incident is carried through to a later scene with Guinan (yes, Whoopi Goldberg returns, now managing the "Ten" bar in Los Angeles). Picard tries to pretend he's just coming to see a "dear old friend," but Guinan sees through that right away. The conversation continues thusly:

"It's not as if I haven't loved before. I have. Sometimes quite deeply."

"Yes, but always with those who would only be temporary."

"That's not entirely true."

"So you'd never have to fear any of them taking root."

"You think I'm the fearful sort?"

"Oh no. I think you've done a great many brave things, of a kind."

"It's too late. That particular ship has sailed. I watched it go."

"Jean-Luc, you're being ridiculous. It's not too late. The problem isn't time. It's you. You always talk about love as if you ever took it seriously. And you know the only things you ever put out there to break were your bones. And the only thing you ever risked losing was your life."

"That's not an insignificant loss."

"There are worse things than being dead. You know that better than anybody. You've been on your own for what, nearly a century? What's holding you back?" (Picard doesn't answer) "Okay, why did you decide to go to the stars in the first place?"

"We've discussed this many times. To explore. To meet new civilizations."

"Jean-Luc, since I've known you the only place you have been afraid to explore, be it flesh and blood or an artificial synthetic, is in here," points to heart. "What happened in there that you and I have never talked about?" (he still won't answer and Guinan lets it go) "You know what? I understand. I think your answers are not in the stars, and they never have been. Also, I suggest that we drink. Because I think there's one final frontier yet to come."

Hopefully, this scene went on so long for a reason: to set up the themes for this season. Time, regrets, second chances, and love over duty. 

Those may be the themes, but the season's storyline involves the appearance of a new kind of Borg: with an elongated spiky ship instead of the familiar cube, and a Queen with her face covered with black mesh and black tentacles emerging from her back. I'm not sure about this: it seems to me the Borg have pretty well been sucked dry as antagonists, unless they are built back up to the terrifying unstoppable steamrollers they were in The Next Generation. (This was one reason I really enjoyed seeing what Hugh was doing with that disconnected Borg cube last season, and I wish that storyline hadn't been eliminated. I think following Hugh's work would have been fascinating to explore.) The end of the episode (and the teasers for the remainder of the season) make it clear we're going to be thrown into an alternate-universe time-travel story: namely, the fact that Q appears, immediately changes himself up to match Picard's (and John De Lancie's) age, and proclaims: "The trial never ends. You've been talking a lot about second chances. Well, my friend, welcome to the very end of the road not taken." John De Lancie isn't the least bit amused or buffoonish as he says this, so perhaps we're going to get the nasty mercurial Q of TNG's earlier seasons. 

The rest of the gang from Picard's first season is also back: Chris Rios rejoined Starfleet and is now captain of the new iteration of Picard's first ship, the Stargazer; Seven of Nine inherited Rios' ship and is still working for the Fenris Rangers; Raffi Musiker is commander aboard the Excelsior, welcoming the first Romulan cadet to graduate from Starfleet Academy, the formerly sword-wielding Elnor (and I'm not sure I like that at all; Elnor seemed to me to be a fascinating character they did absolutely nothing with last season, and I rather wish they would have had him stay with Seven aboard the La Sirena where he could have used his sword to hack at pirates trying to steal the Fenris Rangers' stuff); Agnes Jurati, after being acquitted at her murder trial (it's a long story--watch the first season) is kinda-sorta working with Rios in some sort of unofficial capacity?; and Soji is apparently going on a tour round the Federation, reintroducing the newly recognized synths to member races. 

So this first episode is definitely setup. Now whether they will follow through on some of the things introduced/teased here remains to be seen.

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 1 Ep 10, "Et in Arcadia Ego Part 2"

And so we are at the end. I will start by saying that while I think the first season was (mostly) successful, the final episode was definitely a mixed bag. I think this episode laid bare showrunner Michael Chabon's flaws: while he is good with characterization and dialogue, he came up short on the plot end of the stick, at least for me. There were too many dropped and/or glossed over plot threads to make this conclusion successful. I hope some of these things will be dealt with in the second season. We shall see.

This episode foregoes the usual flashback and plunges right into the action: the downed Borg cube, sitting at the edge of a lake on Coppelius. (The bloody thing must weigh millions of tons--it's a wonder it didn't just punch a hole in the planet's crust.) We are given a sweet little scene of Elnor talking to Seven of Nine, asking her if the Ex-Borgs would be better off dead, given how the Romulans and the rest of the galaxy feels about them. Seven responds by asking him if she would be better off dead, if she should just put a phaser to her head and end it. Elnor says no, in his typical absolute candor-iffic fashion: "I'd miss you."

(And this is the first of my list of frustrations with the season as a whole. Elnor is a fascinating character, and they did almost nothing with him! Argh.)

We then switch between two scenes of Narek finding Narissa onboard the cube (I guess she didn't beam out to one of her ships when the Ex-B's piled on her in episode 8, "Broken Pieces," after all), and Soji coming to see Picard in house arrest. It occurred to me, watching this, that this is another hallmark of the series--intercutting two talky, exposition-heavy scenes with each other so the audience doesn't get bored. This editing trick has varying degrees of success--its best use was in the series' second episode, "Maps and Legends," with two scenes of Picard and the sorely missed Laris and Zhaban. In this case, we cut between the darkness of the downed cube and Narek and Narissa, and Picard in house arrest seeing the engineered Coppelian butterflies (which will be referenced later). Picard is still attempting to talk Soji out of activating the (apparently nanotech-based, self-building) beacon, and Narek is gathering some high-falutin', technobabbly grenades to use on the synth settlement. He also argues with Narissa, calling himself "the Zhat Vash washout who found Seb Cheneb" [the Destroyer]. He takes the grenades and leaves, followed by Elnor, and Agnes stands at the base of the beacon, watching as it goes up.

Aboard La Sirena, Rios and Raffi use the Magic Synthian Thingamajig given them in Part 1 to fix the broken intermix reactor and restore power, after which they are interrupted by Narek throwing rocks at the ship. He has had a change of heart after realizing Sutra intends to call down the Synthzillas on the galaxy's organic life. In all seriousness, actor Harry Treadaway gives a better performance in this episode than he has in all the episodes preceding, especially when the four of them (including Elnor, who has caught up with the rest), sit around the campfire and Narek relates the myth of Ganmadan, the Romulan equivalent of Ragnarok. If you remember, Narek and Narissa were raised by their aunt Ramdha, whose grasp on sanity after experiencing the psychic transmission of the Admonition was....tentative, to say the least. This last episode did a lot to expand Narek as a character, which is why (2nd on my list of frustrations), he simply vanishes during the climax, and Picard and Co. take off without a word said about him.

The four of them cook up a scheme to return to the settlement on the pretext of bringing in the Romulan traitor and turning him over to the synths. They hide one of Narek's grenades inside Rios' soccer ball. In the meantime, Agnes, who has been pretending to work with Altan Soong, distracts him while he is preparing to download the dead synth's memories and yank out one of the body's eyeballs, to use to scan at Picard's cell and gain entrance. (I swear, this series and eyes....) They make their way to La Sirena and Picard demonstrates how well he was watching Rios (apparently Rios and Raffi didn't get the Emergency Navigator up and running, which is my 3rd plot hole--a single line of dialogue would have taken care of this) when he manages to fire up the ship and get it on its way, in an attempt to stall the incoming Romulan fleet until the Federation gets there and/or he manages to talk Soji down. He's aided a bit in the "stalling" part when Altan Soong finishes downloading the dead synth's memories and realizes Sutra was the one that killed her, not Narek. This is enough to convince him that maybe, possibly, that beacon/portal shouldn't be activated after all, since his synths are no better than organics (apparently the idea of the Synthzillas destroying all organic life wasn't quite enough to change his mind), and he confronts Sutra and waves another Advanced Synthian Thingummy at her, shutting her off. (While Soji continues with her activation, but since she's a more advanced model than the golden-skinned, yellow-eyed Sutra, the Thingummy won't work on her, evidently. Though--#4--it would have been nice to have a quick aside of dialogue explaining this.) In the confusion, Rios charges forward, opens up his soccer ball, and hurls the activated grenade at the tower, and Soji catches it and throws it into the sky where it explodes.

Above the planet, the Romulan fleet pops in, and General Oh prepares to execute "Planetary Sterilization Pattern #5." Soji sends the giant orchids up, and there is a extremely CGI'd space battle with La Sirena swooping in and out of the orchids while they're being ripped to shreds. The orchids don't last too long, and Picard and Agnes cook up Stalling Tactic #2, which is a ripoff of the "Picard maneuver"--the one with the Stargazer, not the Captain's pulling down his tunic--mated with the Advanced Synthian Thingamajig, which projects an illusion of hundreds of La Sirenas, complete with warp signatures. (Apparently the disguised Commodore Oh missed reading about this maneuver during her Starfleet Security studies? #5 on my list.)

(Oh, and in another somewhat jarring intercut sequence, Narissa is attempting to get the downed cube's weapons systems on line, and Seven finds her. They fight, and Seven, with a magnificent snarl, says "This is for Hugh," as she drop-kicks Narissa down one of those endless, guard-rail-lacking Artifact chasms. Though we don't see Narissa hitting the bottom or a body, just in case they want to bring her back later.)

Back in space, the Synthian Thingamajig fakeout lasts just long enough for the Federation fleet to pop in, led by none other than Will Riker, who requested temporary reassignment once he learned of Picard's distress call. He tries to talk Oh down, but seeing as right at that moment Soji succeeds in opening the portal and some gigantic black metal Lovecraftian tentacles begin to slither through, Oh is preparing to fire anyway. Of course, this sets things up for one final stirring Picard-ian speech, of the type Sir Patrick Stewart does so well (and it's final in more ways than one, as Picard's brain abnormality has flared up and Agnes has to give him a shot of something to even enable him to talk). He manages to convince Soji to stand down and she closes the portal (#6--the mighty Synthzillas, responding to the call for help they encouraged fellow synths in peril to make, can't keep it open on their end?). At this Oh decides to beat a strategic retreat and Riker escorts the Romulans away, leaving the planet "in your [Picard's] capable hands," not knowing Picard is dying, as neither Picard nor Agnes says anything. (#7--Riker doesn't leave a few ships behind just in case the Romulans, notorious for being sneaky after all, don't double back? He doesn't even leave a ship to initiate First Contact and open diplomatic discussions?)

Soji disables the settlement's transporter block and beams Picard and Agnes directly down, but it's too late. Sir Patrick Stewart gets to do a death scene, which apparently actors love to do. Only he comes to sitting in a quiet library--and Data is there, or the remnant of Data from his downloaded memories into B4 and his one preserved positronic neuron, where he has been in stasis ever since the events of the final Next Generation film, Nemesis.

Thus Star Trek: Picard comes full circle from the first scene, as we have seen that Picard has been haunted by the android's death for twenty years. This was evidently done to give Data the sendoff he was denied in Nemesis. Data reveals that he is residing in a "sophisticated quantum simulation," and while everything around him is simulated, Picard is not--before his final brain death, Soji, Agnes and Altan Soong succeeded in downloading Picard's neural map into Altan's golem, and his new body is awaiting him. Data just has one favor to ask before Picard goes: he requests Picard turn off the simulation so he can experience the final step in his quest to become human, a human death.

#8 plot hole: This is a beautifully acted scene, but it's a bit of a crock. They can't create another golem and give Data another synth body, like they're doing with Picard? True, many of his memories would be missing, but what is remaining wouldn't be enough for him to function? Also, I'm sorry, I don't agree with the lovely philosophical bullshit Data is spouting--"Mortality gives meaning to human life," and (remember the synthetic butterflies) "A butterfly that lives forever is really not a butterfly at all." Brent Spiner certainly sells it, and of course he is too old to keep playing Data anyway. Still, the Data I remember from Next Gen (and it's certainly possible my memories are being viewed through rose-colored spectacles) would want to return and continue his journey, even if he had to relearn many things.

Anyway, Picard wakes up in his brand-new synthetic body, conveniently programmed to look just like his previous 94-year-old self, except that it's minus the brain abnormality. We find out Agnes tweaked it to age in line with what Picard's old body would have done, which presumably means she and Soong now know how long he will live. Picard fulfills his promise, turning off Data's quantum simulation while "Blue Skies" plays in the background and Sir Patrick Stewart gets to oversee another death scene, complete with Shakespearean quote: "We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." The song continues playing as Data visibly ages and his simulation fragments and falls away, and into the final scene: everyone gathered on La Sirena. Agnes is kissing Rios, Seven and Raffi are holding hands (Elnor has two mommies!), and Soji is coming along with them. Then Rios brings the ship's engines online, and Picard gets to utter his trademark "Engage!" as the credits roll.

All well and good, and Data's second death was incredibly poignant. However.

#9 plot hole on my list: What the hell happened to the cube, and all the remaining Ex-Borgs, and why is Seven just running off and leaving them? What happened to Narek?

Finally, #10, the last and biggest: what will happen in Starfleet and the rest of the galaxy going forward, given the fact that OH HAI Y'ALL JUST INVENTED IMMORTALITY?? I mean, think about it. Altan Soong and Agnes Jurati have now successfully integrated a dying human mind into an android body, with apparent full transfer of memories and consciousness, evidently accomplished on the quantum level. Picard specifically asked if they had made him immortal, and they said no--which means they could have. If this ever gets out, can you imagine the immediate stampede to that planet? People suffering from terminal illnesses, parents trying to rescue their dying children, old people looking for a new (young) body, politicians and crime bosses seeking to extend their power, and just about every other mortal sentient being who doesn't want to say goodbye just yet? Talk about opening a Pandora's box of galaxy-wide proportions.

Furthermore, in a related aside: We find out the ban on synths is repealed in a throwaway comment by Soji? Really? After fourteen years of an isolated, xenophobic Federation that Picard ended up quitting Starfleet over?

Sorry. Nope nope nope. I loved what Michael Chabon did with the characters, and the cast is excellent, but in terms of plot threads, he crashed nearly all of his desperately spinning plates in this final episode. I really hope they tackle some of these things in Season 2, or I will be a wee bit ticked off. Maybe Guinan's return (confirmed for Season 2 by Stewart himself) will screw Picard's synthetic head on straight.

Best episodes of Season 1: Ep 6, "The Impossible Box," Ep 8, "Broken Pieces," and Ep 2, "Maps and Legends."

Worst: Ep 10, "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2."

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 1 Ep 9, "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1"

It's hard to review this episode, as it is very much a setup for the season finale, with the fireworks still to come. Still, we get a surprise appearance, and a downer of a plot point, and a delightfully bonkers sort-of rescue on Soji's home planet.

No flashbacks, at least in the first scene: we're plunged right into the transwarp conduit, with La Sirena covering 25 light-years in 15 minutes. They shoot out above Soji's home planet of Coppelius, and unfortunately Narek's ship follows, firing on them. A brief engagement takes place, with Narek's ship disabled by Rios' fancy shooting. Soji, understandably, doesn't give a crap if Narek dies, but Picard (in a foreshadowing of the ethical issues he and Soji later debate) tells Raffi to beam Narek aboard. Before Raffi can do so, five bogeys ascend from the planet's surface--and these are honest-to-God giant orchids that grab the ships and bring them down to the surface. (They don't do so well with Seven of Nine's Artifact, which has followed La Sirena through the transwarp hub. The cube more or less crashlands and splits apart, although Seven, Elnor and many of the Ex-Borg survive and are trying to bring as many systems back online as possible.) This is about the craziest thing I have seen in a Star Trek episode--well, I guess TOS's planet-sized space amoeba is along the same lines--and it's so over-the-top (and so brief; they're only glimpsed in a couple of scenes and then vanish, and it's later established there are only ten of them, nowhere near enough to fight the fleet of 218 Romulan warbirds that is on the way) that it works. Unfortunately, on the way to the surface something happens to Picard; he blacks out, babbling incoherently.

Therein enters the depressing plot point: Agnes Jurati discovers Picard's brain disease, and that it has progressed to the terminal point. (Although one wonders how long this will stick, given that the series has already been renewed for Season 2.) Picard breaks the news to his crew, emphasizing, in Patrick Stewart's marvelous matter-of-fact delivery, that "Anyone who treats me like a dying man will run the risk of pissing me off." The orchids have set the ship down near the planet's main settlement, Coppelius Station, but our group first sets out for what remains of the Artifact.

There they reunite with Seven and Elnor, with--once again, grumble grumble--our woefully underused pair only getting a couple of scenes. Seven is once again, grumble grumble, given short shrift, as the aftermath of her hooking back up to a mini-collective is hardly dealt with. Elnor and Picard say goodbye, and Picard tells Seven "That's [saving the galaxy] all on you, now."

(Which of course is a prime and totally un-backdoor setup for The Qowat Milat Power Rangers or whatever they decide to call it. Nevertheless, pairing the cynical, ruthless, still-recovering Seven with the comparatively innocent and lethal Elnor is quite a thought.)

After Raffi plugs into the cube's long-range sensors and discovers the looming Romulan fleet, the group treks to Coppelius Station, where they discover the rest of the synths. (Anybody else get a strong "Way to Eden" vibe from this?) Soji tells her kin what is coming, and we meet the sister of the deceased Jana, Sutra--played by the same actor with Data-style golden skin and yellow contacts--who extracts the Admonition from Agnes Jurati's mind (because Sutra has apparently "taught herself" the Vulcan mind meld? Uh, sorry, that's a little bit far-fetched, people). The message of the Admonition drove so many Romulans mad because, as Sutra reveals, it was not meant for organic minds. It was meant for synthetics, a message from "an alliance of synthetic life" (presumably on a higher plane of existence?) that will, if summoned, rally to protect them from what these uber-synths view as an inevitable, murderous conflict between synthetic and organic life.

Speaking of Data...there is another appearance by Brent Spiner, in the form of the heretofore unheard of Altan Inigo Soong (A.I. Soong. Get it? Get it?), son of Data's original creator, who has been here working on the synths with Bruce Maddox. Altan, after delivering the mildest possible rebuke to Agnes Jurati ("Shame on you, Agnes") gives her the chance to redeem herself by carrying on Maddox's work. He reveals his so far incomplete creation: a golem, an as yet unactivated synth capable of holding an organic mind transfer. Altan hints he created this for himself...but this is surely the Big Bald Shakespearian Elephant in the Room, as I don't doubt this golem will be transferring an organic mind rather different from the one Altan intended.

Now that Sutra has unlocked the Admonition's message, she talks to Soji about summoning the higher-plane synths, viewing this as the only way to save themselves, even if the ubers wipe out organic life. Soji is very torn about this, and has a conversation with Picard about "the logic of sacrifice." She is about to reveal what Sutra is pressuring her to do when the newly captured Narek is dragged into the settlement. Narek is briefly imprisoned, but Sutra seizes upon his presence as a way to manipulate her people into doing what she wants, as she frees him (and either allows him to murder one of the synths or does it herself), and uses the woman's death to prod everyone into agreeing to broadcast the summoning signal.

Picard tries to shoot this down, making one of his trademark eloquent speeches about promising to advocate for them to the Federation, only to be shot down by Altan, who points out--somewhat rightfully, although he doesn't know that a Federation fleet is also coming--that Picard and Starfleet are hardly on good terms these days. The episode ends with Picard being placed on house arrest, Agnes Jurati throwing in her lot with the synths and working to protect them, Raffi and Rios off to fix La Sirena, and the final scene showing Commander Oh at the helm of her strike fleet, coming in on the synths' seemingly defenseless planet.

Again, it's a little hard to evaluate this episode without the totality of the finale. Still, like the last episode of Discovery's second season, I think we're in for some rootin-tootin', CGI-heavy space battles, with the additional excitement of a sword-swinging Elnor, judging by the previews. (Or at least I hope so.) We shall see.

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 1 Episode 8, "Broken Pieces"

This the episode where (seemingly) all the cards have been laid on the table, and the pieces set in motion for the season finale. We could have a few more surprises--additional cameos, for instance--but I believe everything is on board for the endgame.

Our flashback this week begins, as so many have, fourteen years ago, on the planet the Romulans call Aia, the Grief System. We see the dozen or so female leaders of the Zhat Vash there to read the Admonition, the two-hundred-thousand-year-old psychic warning about synthetic life from a dead race. It is being introduced by Commodore Oh, who is later revealed to be a decades-old Romulan plant and half Romulan/half Vulcan, which is why she was able to perform the mind meld on Agnes Jurati. Among the Zhat Vash gathered are our favorite incestuous sibling Narissa and her aunt Ramdha, the Romulan later assimilated by the Borg. The circle of women touches the Admonition, and the images they receive are so horrific--the same flashes of android eyes, nuclear explosions, and fracturing planets shown previously--that two of the women are driven to immediate suicide and one tries to claw her face off. Narissa is nowhere near as affected (I'd already come to the conclusion that she's a sociopath, although she does have a seemingly genuine affection for her aunt, which serves to humanize the character at least a bit), and back on the Borg cube in the present day, she is talking to her catatonic aunt and revealing the afterimages of the Admonition in Ramdha's mind are what shut down the Artifact. She's also figured out where Soji's homeworld is and is going to join the fleet she has summoned to raze it, once she has destroyed all the ex-Borgs on this cube.

There are two separate storylines in the episode, one showing Picard and his motley crew aboard La Sirena in the aftermath of his finding Soji, and the other aboard the Artifact with Elnor and Seven. Of the two, although I was happy to see Seven again, I felt she got the short end of the stick. She comes on board the cube in response to Elnor's triggering of the Fenris Rangers beacon in the previous episode, and saves him from a pile-on of Romulans. Which leads to him running to her and hugging her, a delightful little scene which serves to reinforce how young Elnor is--this is no doubt the first time he's ever been offplanet, much less in the midst of such a mess as Picard has gotten him into. (The first words out of Seven's mouth are, "Where's Hugh?" which only reinforces what a waste Hugh's death was. I would have loved to see him and Seven interacting.) Elnor explains what happened, as much as he has time for, and Seven finds the Queen's chamber and starts the process of the Artifact regenerating. Narissa, meanwhile, is striding down the hallways shooting XB's, and when Seven becomes aware of this she does what she has not wanted to do--link into the cube and become its Queen (albeit a self-contained Queen, as she does not restore the link to the larger Collective). Narissa, acting to stop the thousands of drones which would soon be awakened from stasis, has them all dumped out into space. Seven directs the remaining XB's--which I assume would still have enough Borg tech remaining inside them to be ordered by the Queen, even as Seven still has enough tech to link into the cube--to pile on Narissa, but unfortunately our Space Cersei is able to escape by beaming out to her fleet. Elnor, still all absolute candor-iffic innocence, asks Seven if she is going to assimilate him, and she replies, "Annika still has work to do," as she disconnects.

This seemed a bit shortchanged to me. This was a monumental step on Seven's part, and something she must have been terrified by, having worked so hard for so many years to regain even part of her humanity. Yet she does it. I would have liked at least one scene showing its immediate aftermath (and also to spend a bit more time with Elnor, a terrific character who has really been underused, at least so far). But there is a lot happening in this episode, and the showrunners probably felt they didn't have time for it. Too bad, because it seems very much like a missed opportunity.

On board La Sirena after Picard and Soji arrive, we finally find out more about Captain Rios. He was first officer on board the starship Ibn Majid, nine years ago when they made first contact with two residents of an unknown planet. Their names were Beautiful Flower and Jana, and after they had come aboard and were in the midst of negotiations, his Captain, Alonzo Vandermeer, was abruptly ordered to kill them both by Commodore Oh, in what Rios calls a "black flag" operation (sounds more like blackmail to me, as Oh threatens to destroy the Ibn Majid if Vandermeer does not comply). Oh knew they were synths from Soji's mysterious homeworld (the "how" of that is left unexplained), of course, and apparently so did Vandermeer, which is why he followed the order--Rios says he "thought he could live with it." Rios could not, and when he came down hard on his captain, Vandermeer committed suicide--and Rios covered the whole thing up. Six months later he was out of Starfleet. Naturally Jana was another twin of Soji (these synths are acting more and more like Cylons all the time), so when she beams aboard, Rios about has a heart attack. He agrees to set course for the nearest starbase and retreats to his quarters to get royally drunk.

Raffi catches Picard up on everything that happened while he was on the cube, including her suspicion that Agnes murdered Bruce Maddox. Agnes is still in a coma, but when she wakes up she confesses all. Oh put a psychic block in her mind along with the images of the Admonition during the meld, so she couldn't say anything (apparently accomplishing her task erased that), and she explains that the Admonition's warning amounts to drawing undue attention from....something....when synthetic life crosses a certain threshold, which must be avoided at all costs. (Alison Pill acts the hell out of all these scenes, by the way. When Agnes says, "I think of suicide every day," she makes you believe that it would come as a relief.) Of course, she is put to the test right after this, as she soon meets Soji. The excitement of talking to a synth who eats and drinks, who feels sadness and cries, falls away when in response to Agnes' exclamation, "You are a wonder," Soji replies: "Am I a person?" She says it again and again, not letting Agnes dodge the question. The question is answered, not only for Agnes but for the audience, when she and Soji appear a little later and Agnes announces she will turn herself in when they reach the starbase.

(Although they never quite get there, due to later developments. They also don't rendezvous with the fleet Admiral Clancy sends out to meet them. Athough Picard does get a wonderfully snotty I-told-you-so scene with Clancy, where he is clearly delighting in rubbing her nose in it.)

There's another good performance here from Michelle Hurd, who methodically puts together what happened to Rios by the clever means of talking to all the Rios holos aboard La Sirena. (If you can, turn on closed captioning for these scenes, as the Scottish [of course!] accent the actor affects for the engineering hologram, Ian, is so thick I couldn't understand him. Also, the Hospitality holo is rather pushy and more than a little creepy.) You can easily see why Picard depended so much on her, and I hope she can stay clean going forward.

Finally, there's a wonderful scene between Picard and Soji, where she asks him to tell her about Data. She asks what Data would say about Picard if their positions had been reversed and the Admiral had been the one to die before. Picard responds slowly, saying he was a superior officer and a friend who counseled Data when necessary and if not, "got out of his way," and Soji sums things up thusly: "He [Data] loved you."

After all this everyone gathers round the table and all the revelations are made. When Soji realizes that the Zhat Vash, using the information Narek gleaned from her, mean to destroy her home planet, she storms off. She starts to take over La Sirena, intending to direct it to the nearest Borg transwarp hub in an attempt to get there ahead of the Romulans. This is cut short by Rios' failsafe, a song he sings in Spanish to remove her protective force fields and stop her. But Soji still succeeds, when first Picard urges Rios to try things her way, and then when she simply asks him: "Captain Rios, please take me home. For Jana's sake."

In the face of this, Rios gives in, and La Sirena enters the transwarp hub--and the final shot is of Narek's little ship (and again the question is, "how?" Did Agnes not succeed in removing her tracker after all?) following them in.

This episode was written by Michael Chabon, which I think is why the Elnor/Seven storyline felt rushed, as he was clearly emphasizing all the character-revealing scenes on board La Sirena. I loved those scenes, but I wish Elnor and Seven could have been given a bit more. Although one presumes Seven will be able to detect Picard and Co's passage through the hub, and the reactivated cube will show up for the final battle. I hope so, anyway.

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 1 Ep 7, "Nepenthe"

I had high hopes for this week's episode after last week's excellent "The Impossible Box," but unfortunately those expectations were not entirely met. That's not to say this episode was bad. The characterizations, which is this show's strength, were on target, and the acting was mostly very good. But there were a few plot holes that tripped this episode up, and one plot point in particular had me vexed!--Vexed, I say!--

Why he was met even now
As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud,
Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds. (King Lear, Act 4)

--which I will get to. (Yeah, I had to put in something Sir Patrick Stewart would appreciate.)

This episode takes place mostly on the planet Nepenthe, where Picard and Soji fled via the Borg spatial trajector, in what Picard terms an act of desperation. Riker, Troi and their daughter Kestra (a neat callback to TNG, as Kestra was the name of Deanna's deceased older sister) live there. What follows is a series of scenes where both Troi and Riker immediately figure out Picard is in trouble and urge him to stay as long as he needs; Riker speculates about what is going on, quite rightly, even deducing that Soji is an android (via her unconscious tilt of the head which is just like Data's); Soji works through some serious and understandable trust issues, finally coming clean to everyone about what happened on the cube between her and Narek; Kestra and Soji bond; Troi gives Picard a much-deserved dressing-down, reading him the riot act over Soji (by my count, this is the fourth time various characters have ripped Picard new ones. Maybe this time he'll listen?); and as everyone sits around the dinner table brainstorming what to do next, Kestra discovers where Soji's "homeworld" is.

All these scenes are well written and very well acted. For someone who reportedly hasn't acted in about a decade, Jonathan Frakes slips back into Will Riker's skin with admirable ease, holding his own with Sir Patrick Stewart, as does Marina Sirtis. (Although I'm slightly peeved that they still couldn't resist dressing her in a cleavage-displaying blouse.) The pleasant discovery here is Lulu Wilson as Kestra, playing a completely believable pre-teen who is still in mourning for her brother Thad, who has recently died to a rare disease. (There's a nice scene between Troi and Soji where Deanna describes Thad's disease and reveals that he wasn't cured because the cure to this "silicon-based virus" requires a culture in a positronic brain, which couldn't be done due to the ban on synth research. I'm thinking, huh? That's some major technobabbling handwavium. But the emotion from both actors in this scene carries it through.) Kestra's and Soji's interactions are a delight, and Kestra is really the one who gets through to Soji and allows her to begin to trust Picard. This episode takes the time needed for both Picard and Soji to process their changed circumstances and what has happened to them so far and adjust.

This doesn't mean we don't see a fair amount of action, however. The opening scene is a flashback to when Commodore Oh met Agnes and recruited her to infiltrate Picard's mission, and convinces her with a forced mind meld. (Yeah, Agnes says, "Okay, but," but it happens so fast this isn't really consent. This also establishes that Oh is Vulcan, since Romulans can't do mind melds.) Oh projects images of nuclear mushrooms, exploding planets and rampaging synths into Agnes mind--though I'm wondering if these are real or something made up to manipulate her--and Agnes agrees to swallow the tracker Oh gives her and serve as Starfleet's (really the Zhat Vash's) spy. This comes into play in this episode, as back on the La Sirena Rios is trying to break free of the Artifact and head off to the rendezvous at Nepenthe. Narissa lets them free because she is aware of Agnes' tracker, setting Narek up to follow them. Agnes, meanwhile, is being eaten alive by her guilt over Maddox, especially when Rios tells her he suspects Raffi has a Romulan tracker. Agnes almost blurts out that Raffi isn't the betrayer. While Raffi and Rios are trying to shake Narek off their tail, Agnes uses the replicator to generate an injection which will dissolve the tracker (and possibly kill her) and injects it. Our Emergency Medical Hologram, previously missing in action, appears as she slips into a coma. But the tracker is taken out of action and Narek loses them, and they are able to warp away to Nepenthe.

Now, I'm going to provide a spoiler space to discuss the remaining plot thread in the episode. Proceed at your own risk.

(Yeah, that's the Artifact, the dormant Borg cube. Still creepy as heck.)

I talked about "plot holes" earlier, and the biggest one is what seems to be a missing scene on the Artifact. Right at the end of "The Impossible Box," Elnor and Hugh are seen facing down the oncoming Romulans, with Elnor ordering Hugh to get behind him and warning his enemies with what appears to be the traditional Qowat Milat invocation: "Please, my friends, choose to live." But at the beginning of this episode, Narissa has Hugh lined up with his ex-Borg patients with no indication of how everybody got there. Narissa does spout off a line about how they found four dead guards, but where the hell is Elnor? And how did he and Hugh get separated? Elnor doesn't show up until after Narissa has threatened Hugh and killed all his XB's.

After this loss, Hugh is apparently determined to return to the Queen's chamber and reactivate the whole damn Artifact to take it away from the Romulans, which gives Narissa the excuse she is looking for to kill him. Narissa and Elnor begin to fight, but Narissa tricks Elnor into sheathing his sword and fighting without weapons--by returning her huge-ass blaster to its holster--and of course she then pulls out a knife and flicks it into Hugh's throat. Elnor pulls the knife out and throws it back at her, but she beams away and Hugh dies, after telling Elnor an XB is needed to activate the Queen's chamber (which is presumably why we see Seven of Nine again in the previews for next week's episode).

Well, shit. This seems totally unnecessary. Jonathan Del Alco played it well, but I got the sense that Hugh was fridged just to yank Elnor out of his Qowat Milat naivete. Sure, he's trained for years at the monastery on Vashti, but was he ever in a real battle before? One gets the impression not, as otherwise he'd know better than to trust anything coming out of a Tal Shiar/Zhat Vash mouth.

Also, after Hugh dies and Elnor is alone on the Artifact, he is hiding under the catwalk and just happens to find a dangling Fenris Ranger SOS signaller? Really? Maybe this is the same one Seven gave Picard, but if so we should have been shown Picard passing it along.

These things may be niggling compared to the excellence of the scenes on Nepenthe, but they were enough to leave a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. I hope we get some justice for Hugh. If anyone can do it, Seven of Nine will.

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 1 Ep 6, "The Impossible Box"

There were not one but three "Impossible Boxes" in this episode. The first was the Romulan Rubik's Cube (tah zhekran) Narek kept fiddling with, first to needle his sister over the fact that he has patience and she does not, and then to lead Soji along the Zhal Makh, the maze he used to unlock the secret of her dreams; and finally, opening the deadly little thing up to release a red gas to kill her.

The second "impossible box" was the dormant Borg cube, the Artifact, utilizing modern CGI to be a helluva lot more frightening and creepy than anything in The Next Generation days. (And apparently Borg don't believe in handrails. I guess they don't care if individual drones fall off the walkways and go splat.) Portions of the walls moved--black interlocking lattices opening and closing doors and changing one room to another, either under Hugh's control or, more unnervingly, on their own. (This is one reason I still think this cube is going to wake up before the season is over.) This was really a marvelous set--and it looked like at least some of it was actually built, not just constructed in a computer--giving the effect of a murky greenish-fogged maze. We spent quite a lot of time there, as Picard beamed aboard in search of Soji, and Hugh--meeting him with an unrestrained, touching hug--led Picard through the hallways, showing him the work the Borg Reclamation Project is doing to de-assimilate drones. This fleeting glimpse of hope in the midst of former horror brought Picard out of his own series of trauma-induced flashbacks, and gave him the strength to resume his search for Soji.

The third box was Soji herself, who came face to face with the fact that her entire life is a fabrication only 37 months old. Narek seizes on her recurring nightmare to insist to his sister Narissa that Soji's positronic brain is struggling to reconcile her false humanity with the reality of her being a synth, and manipulates her into forcing herself to stay awake during one of her mother's fake "calls." Seeing her "mother" glitching before her eyes, Soji starts examining all of her possessions, none of which, even her childhood diaries, dolls and pictures, are over three years old. Narek conveniently shows up then, and vowing to "help" Soji figure out what is going on, takes her to a room in the heart of the cube, built with a wooden maze and lit with candles: the Zhal Makh. He leads her along the maze and succeeds in unlocking the nightmare: Soji is seeing herself as a doll in pieces in her father's workshop. Along the way she looks out a window and sees two red moons in the night sky and considerable electrical activity, which the eavesdropping Narissa uses to search for the planet where she came from, and where there are evidently many more synths.

Now that he has what he wants, Narek leaves Soji in the room and locks her in, and his Rubik's Cube releases the deadly gas. (Not without considerable conflict written all over his face: could it be the Tal Shiar, or rather Zhat Vash, agent, has fallen for the "robot girl" after all?) This, of course, activates Soji. She pounds through the chamber floor and jumps through the resulting hole to the levels below, and Narek sets off the alarm and goes after her.

But Picard is also there, using Hugh to track Soji down. This entire sequence of scenes for Picard, beginning with his explaining to Agnes and Elnor that he was once Locutus of Borg, shot with a tight closeup on Patrick Stewart's face to underscore the fact that Picard's thirty-year-old trauma has most certainly not gone away; beaming aboard the cube and immediately going into flashbacks, until Hugh brings him out of it; and meeting up with Soji and persuading her to come with him, then following Hugh to the "Queen's chamber" where there is a Sikarian emergency transporter to beam the Queen away in case of catastrophe--is something of an acting tour de force for Sir Patrick Stewart. He makes you feel every ounce of Picard's fear and trauma.

The rest of the cast have nice character moments as well. Raffi, dragged out of her room in a drunken stupor following the rejection by her son, manipulates an old friend into giving Picard diplomatic access to the Artifact, showing that she was as good a Starfleet officer as she was perhaps a not-so-good mother. A touching little scene with Raffi and Rios, after he takes her back to her quarters, shows their depth of their friendship. (And why didn't Picard help Raffi after that drunken show on his behalf? This shows his tendency to get so caught up in what he's doing he doesn't think about the people helping him.) Rios also has a good scene with Agnes, who is still reeling from what she has done (and everyone thinks she is just broken up over Bruce Maddox' plausible, natural-sounding death, which is why she is so far getting away with the murder), and reaching out to Rios, talks him into taking her to bed. Elnor, who is so far mostly standing back and observing everything that is going on--and occasionally making "absolute candor"-iffic comments about it--disregards Picard's orders and beams aboard the cube when things start to go south (leading to a laugh-out-loud exchange with Picard: "Elnor, I told you to stay on the ship!" "Yes. I didn't listen."), and proceeds to slice and dice some of the Romulans pursuing Soji, Picard and Hugh. (I hope we get more of him in the next episode, as he seems a bit underused, and he's a really interesting character.) The pacing is good throughout, ratcheting up the tension as it goes along. The very end, after Picard and Soji have stepped through the emergency transporter and beamed away to a planet called Nepenthe--where, judging from next week's previews, they will meet Riker and Troi--closes with Elnor facing down the Romulans in the hallway to cover Picard and Soji's escape and conceal the Queen's chamber, telling Hugh to get behind him. We fade to black, closing on Elnor's ominous, blunt warning: "Please, my friends. Choose to live."

This is hands down the best episode so far. It wasn't written by Michael Chabon, but it's keeping the mostly slower pace and balancing of characterization with action sequences. I know the various Star Trek series traditionally have poor-to-middling first seasons, but this one seems to be finding its stride fairly quickly. I'm really enjoying it.

Streamin' Meemies: Star Trek: Picard Season 1 Ep 5, "Stardust City Rag"

Hey. We finally get to the action!

On second viewing (I watch each episode twice--once for myself, and once to write up notes for review), this episode isn't as frantic as it would first seem. The pace is a bit faster (especially at the end), but there are still some meaty character moments. This episode was the first not written or co-written by Michael Chabon, but his steady, deliberate unfolding of the story is still holding.

As seems to be the usual modus operandi, we open with a flashback to thirteen years ago. This definitely comes with Content Warnings. In fact, if you're eating dinner or are squeamish about eyeballs, you had best fast forward through this or turn your gaze away, as this scene of an eye extraction on a former Borg drone is pretty gory. I'm surprised director Jonathan Frakes went there, but it soon becomes evident that this scene's purpose was there to set up the stakes for Seven of Nine. She barges into the chamber to rescue the young man on the table, and we find out this is Icheb, the former drone she more or less adopted aboard Voyager's journey through the Delta Quadrant. He is too badly damaged to save and begs her for death, and she accedes to his wishes.

Jeri Ryan is the guest star of this episode, and we find out what Seven of Nine has been up to since Voyager's return. After the fall of the Romulan Empire and the subsequent lawlessness in the former Neutral Zone (where the Freecloud system is apparently located), she joined a group called the Fenris Rangers to try to keep some sort of order. (This leads to a clash with Picard, who berates her for "taking the law into your own hands," as if this isn't what he's doing.) She is still onboard the La Sirena--Rios' ship, finally given a name--when they arrive at Freecloud, and when she learns they are looking for Bruce Maddox--and more importantly, who on Freecloud has Bruce Maddox--she promptly volunteers to help them.

This person holding Bruce Maddox, as it turns out, is a mercenary named Djayzl, who made a name for herself by her illegal harvesting of Borg implants. She has been on the Fenris Rangers' most-wanted list for some time, and as we soon learn, she has a personal connection to Seven in more ways than one. Our heroes set up a sting using Seven as bait, which provides some delightful character moments, particularly Patrick Stewart's black beret, eyepatch, and godawful French accent. Raffi is shown to be a master planner, and it's no wonder Picard depended on her so heavily during his Starfleet days. Elnor suddenly realizes, "It's a lie--everyone's behaving as if they're someone else," so he is told by Picard and Seven, "Then be Elnor, Elnor who never talks." Agnes has to stay on board the La Sirena to beam the group out following the sting and if they get into trouble, and she is shown to be growing more and more nervous and upset as the episode goes on--for entirely different reasons than her being a somewhat ditzy klutz, as we'll see at the end. Rios is stuffed into a flamboyant green costume and a ridiculous red hat, and the whole bunch beams down to Freecloud to wrest Bruce Maddox from Djayzl before she can trade him to the Tal Shiar.

As we find out when Seven is shown to Djayzl (who looks uncannily like a young, TNG-era Deanna Troi), they have a past. In fact, they're obviously ex-lovers. What Seven hasn't told Picard is that Djayzl is the one who kidnapped Icheb and extracted his implants "without anesthesia,"and she has been looking for her for quite a while. She fully intends to kill Djayzl, and Picard and Rios only narrowly manage to talk her out of it. Djayzl, knowing that Seven isn't bluffing, trades her life for Bruce Maddox, and everyone beams back aboard the La Sirena.

While this is going on, Raffi also beams down to Freecloud, to the Stardust City Reproductive Health Services, where she meets up with a young man called Gabriel, who we discover is her estranged son. Fourteen years ago, Raffi was so caught up in her conspiracy-mongering and subsequent drug abuse that she tore her family apart, and her son has never forgiven her. When his very pregnant Romulan wife emerges from the clinic, Gabriel introduces them and sends his mother away. This is a very good scene, well acted by Michelle Hurd.

Aboard the La Sirena, Agnes is getting more and more upset, to the point where the EMH appears and asks her, "What is the nature of the psychological emergency?" The first reveal about Agnes, earlier in the episode, is a brief memory hologram of her younger self, joking with a younger Bruce Maddox about chocolate chip cookies--and kissing him. Another pair of former lovers. When everyone returns with an injured Bruce Maddox, Agnes is pressed into medical duty (though I can't quite understand why, as she's a cybernetist), and is overseeing his treatment in sickbay. Picard manages to talk to him long enough to confirm that Soji is the dead Dahj's sister, she is aboard the reclaimed Borg cube in the former Neutral Zone (where our crew will be heading in the next episode), and Maddox sent the two of them out into the world "to discover the truth," both about the Tal Shiar and Starfleet. Agnes sends Picard away, claiming Maddox needs his rest, and she and Maddox talk. Maddox asks her if she saw Dahj, and says the twins are "imperfectly perfect," also declaring that Agnes' "contribution was essential." (Uh oh. I wonder if that contribution perhaps included Agnes' eggs?) "One more thing I have to atone for," Agnes says, wiping tears from her eyes. "I wish you knew what I know. I wish they hadn't shown me." She is again so upset that the EMH appears. She deactivates it--and kills Maddox.

(So. Agnes was indeed a plant, as many suspected. Was she possibly put under telepathic compulsion by Commodore Oh? I suspect we will find out. In the meantime, I wonder how she is going to hide this.)

There is another wonderful little scene I must mention, between Picard and Seven before she beams away from the La Sirena, ostensibly to a Ranger ship who has come to fetch her. We are reminded that Seven is not the only ex-Borg in this show, as she asks Picard, "After you returned from the collective, do you honestly feel you regained your humanity?"

"Yes," he says.

She presses him: "All of it?"

"No," he admits, "but we're both working on it."

"Every damn day," Seven declares. She beams away, taking with her a couple of phaser rifles from the La Sirena's weapons stock (and since Picard let her have them, I wonder if he guessed what was about to happen). Only she doesn't join the Ranger ship--she returns to Freecloud, where she confronts Djayzl.

"Picard still thinks there's a place in the galaxy for mercy," she says, explaining why she didn't tell Picard she was coming back. "I didn't want to disillusion him."

Then her reason for returning is revealed: "He was a son to me, Jay," she informs Djayzl, referring to Icheb. "This is for him." And she disintegrates Djayzl, and marches out to meet the oncoming security team, weapons blazing.

Whew. This made me long for a new Star Trek series entitled Seven and the Fenris Rangers (which is also the name of my next band). Seriously, Jeri Ryan was fantastic in this. Her ultimate fate isn't shown, and I hope we see her again.

So. Things are starting to wind up. We don't see anything of Soji and Narek, but that will obviously be remedied in the next episode. Starfleet's withdrawing into its ill-advised isolationist bubble has had some far-flung consequences, and I'm glad this show is exploring them. This clearly isn't Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, but it really can't be, not anymore. For better or worse, the world has changed,  and this is the story for that world.