I really want to declare a moratorium on a trope of modern television that Aaron Sorkin did a lot on The West Wing, and which has since become both a cliché and a lazy crutch: starting the episode with something happening with no context, and then a title card that reads, “[a span of time] earlier” which is where the story actually starts. Picard was already guilty of this in “The Star Gazer” at the top of the season, and “Two of One” doubles down on it by starting every single act with Picard unconscious while voices talk around him before cutting back to the “present.” Doing it at the start of the episode is annoying but forgivable. Doing it several more times is tiresome.
Two episodes ago was pretty much all wheel-spinning, while last week finally gave us some forward movement. This week, we get a little of both, and I really don’t know what to make of it.
Parts of it are quite powerful. Kore’s discovery that she’s the latest in a series of failed clones created by Adam Soong is a revelation that actually lands pretty powerfully, for all that the very casting of Isa Briones as Kore and Brent Spiner as Soong makes that fairly predictable, given the roles the two of them have played in the past as Data and his assorted “daughters.”
I like the way Rios is nerding out over being in the twenty-first century—it reminds me favorably of how Terry Farrell played Dax in the twenty-third century in DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations“—with Santiago Cabrera playing the usually-quite-cynical Rios as a big dork who loves the book of matches and the yummy food—and the dishy doctor, of course. Sol Rodriguez returns as Dr. Teresa Ramirez, who gets the unenviable task of treating Picard, whose body, you’ll recall, is now entirely artificial, though it behaves like a biological one. That comes to light when she hits him with paddles and there’s rather a bit of a feedback.
I like the conversations between Picard and Tallinn. It’s not at all clear why Tallinn looks like Laris, but that she does leads to some interesting conversations. I’m guessing that the easy chemistry Sir Patrick Stewart and Orla Brady have is why they’ve been using her as Picard’s sorta-kinda-but-not-really love interest this season, and I’m enjoying watching Tallinn try to figure Picard out and Picard trying and failing to deflect her questions.
And I like the way Alison Pill and Annie Wersching are playing the titular combination, with the Borg Queen now in Jurati’s head and sometimes taking charge.
If only the actuality of what they’re doing made any kind of sense. Supposedly just by controlling Jurati’s body, the Borg Queen can make her strong enough to break handcuffs. Sure. And also can take possession of the electronics in the building (that I can buy), make the band play “Shadows of the Night” (um…), and have Jurati sing it (the hell?).
In the abstract, I’m more than happy to watch Alison Pill in a red dress singing the shit out of a 1982 Pat Benatar song, but having Agnes Jurati sing a 42-year-old song in 2024 at the instigation of the Borg Queen strangled my disbelief until it was lying dead on the side of the road. It threw me completely out of the story being told.
Not that the story being told was all that and a bag of chips. We did, at least, find out why Q targeted Soong in particular: he’s not just desperate, he’s also wealthy. Since Q’s powers seem to be diminishing, he has to manipulate Soong to do whatever it is he wishes to do to Renee Picard. Soong makes a major contribution to the Europa mission, which puts him on the Board of Directors. While this isn’t enough to get Renee kicked off the mission—and I’m grateful that the writers didn’t try to make that happen, as my disbelief is already gasping for breath—it is enough to allow Soong to have Picard and the gang kicked out of the party, thus cutting off their plan to keep her safe until quarantine at the knees.
That’s when Jurati and the Borg Queen distract everyone with blackouts and Benatar, enabling Picard to track down his ancestor and give her a pep talk.
Here’s another problem with the episode, and it’s something I never thought I’d say about a Patented Picard Speech: I wasn’t convinced. Which may be a first since the character was introduced in 1987. Even when he’s giving speeches in a dopey episode (e.g., his plea on behalf of Wes Crusher in TNG’s “Justice“), I’m usually totally there for it and completely accepting it.
But I just didn’t buy that Picard’s talk with Renee was enough to get her to go through with the Europa mission. At best, his encouraging talk would’ve been enough to get her to come back to the party and stop moping about, but I didn’t see anything in what he said that made me believe that it solved all her anxiety about the mission in the least.
And then Soong, having failed to keep the Picards away from each other, resorts to Plan B: running Renee over with a car. But Picard shoves her out of the way, and that’s why we keep seeing him in a coma in the near-future. Since they have no real IDs (beyond what Jurati hacked into the party), the only hospital they can take him to is Ramirez’s clinic.
I’m also waiting to find out what purpose Seven of Nine has this season. Jeri Ryan has been fantastic as ever, but she’s had jack-shit to do aside from worry over Musiker. This is especially frustrating in an episode that is at least partly about the Borg Queen’s influence over Jurati. Seven’s complete separation from the Borg Queen aspect of the storyline is a massive source of frustration, as is the fact that they’re doing almost nothing with Seven’s being free of her Borg implants for the first time in her adult life. There’s a metric buttload of story potential here that they have yet to do anything with.
In the “it’s nice work if you can get it” category, we’ve got Evan Evagora, who’s only been in four of the six episodes this season, and in two of them now his appearance has been for two seconds as a hallucination of Musiker’s. For this, he gets opening-credits billing. I mean, it’s a good paycheck for Evagora, and more power to him, but Elnor was the one person from last season in desperate need of more development, and instead they’ve completely marginalized him.
And in both those cases, it feels like decisions are being made, not because of character, but because of external plot and costuming needs. With the characters in 2024, we needed to have our characters blend in, so Seven loses her implants in the switch to an alternate timeline and the guy with the pointy ears and green blood is killed. (I mean, c’mon, he can wear a hat! Or a do–rag!)
Next week promises more clichés. Ramirez is able to stabilize Picard, but he’s not coming out of his coma. Tallinn can use her fancy-pants alien technology to ENTER PICARD’S BRAIN! Because they need his knowledge of Q to figure out the next step.
This episode is directed by Jonathan Frakes, who has become one of the best television directors in the history of the medium, and I have to give him special credit for the closing shot. At this point, I was already completely fed up with the episode, having not entirely made my way back into it after “Shadows of the Night” threw me out of it, and then they’re talking about ENTERING PICARD’S BRAIN! and then Musiker actually says, “How much worse could it possibly get?” and she really should know better than to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing, and I was just done with the episode—
—and then we get that closing shot. The Borg Queen-possessed Jurati, her back to the camera, walking purposefully down a Los Angeles street, her red dress billowing behind her like a cape.
And that brought me back into the episode, because with that shot, I was engaged in what might happen next week with the Borg Queen cut loose on L.A. I’m certainly way more interested in that than in ENTERING PICARD’S BRAIN! Although I will be grateful if we finally get some sort of clarity on what happened to his mother, since they’ve been hinting at it for six episodes straight, including a bunch of quick-cut flashbacks while Picard’s in his coma this week…
(Pat Benatar? Really? I mean, don’t get me wrong, Benatar is awesome, and I love that we finally live in a world where Star Trek is willing to shell out the money for music rights—see also “Space Oddity” and “Love and Happiness” on Discovery, not to mention “Time is on My Side” earlier this season on Picard—but that’s how the Borg Queen chooses to “help”? Really?)
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Fan Expo Philadelphia this coming weekend at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. He will be at Bard’s Tower selling and signing his books alongside fellow authors Claudia Gray, Dan Wells, and Brian Anderson and comics creators Wendy & Richard Pini. Other Trek folks who’ll be there include actors William Shatner, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner, John deLancie, Chris Sarandon, Ron Perlman, and Carlos Ferro (Carlos will also be at Bard’s Tower with Keith).
Right, it occurs to me that Seven would’ve made a far more interesting character to have the Queen in her brain. What a nightmare. What a story. And what more wasted potential we see from this series.
Haven’t had a chance to watch this episode yet (parent/teacher conferences are tonight), but…”Shadows of the Night” is in a Star Trek episode? At least on paper…freaking sweet. Easily my favorite Benatar-banger. Will have to see how the episode itself goes.
Having Adam Soong be a “mad scientist” who is into cloning could actually be a convenient way to explain why all the Soong men can be played by Brent Spiner; they’re all clones. Maybe at some point after his failures with his daughters Adam Soong manages to successfully clone himself.
To be fair, Jurati starts singing solo and the band doesn’t kick in until the second verse. Either they knew the song or they were just following her changes.
But otherwise, I agree. This was a mass of TV cliches — the suspenseful flashforwards (plural!!), the infiltration of a fancy-dress party, the character learning a dark secret about her past by going through video journals, the script bending over backwards to give a cast member an excuse to show her singing chops. And it served so little purpose. Hardly anything actually happened here. The episode was remarkably short, only about 38 minutes, but it was incredibly padded.
For me, the best part was Picard giving sage grandfatherly advice to his great-etc.-grandmother. I did think that Patrick Stewart sold it quite well, and it was a nice sweet moment. Spiner’s scene of Adam wrestling with his guilt at attempting vehicular homicide was fairly effective too, but it was the only thing that made the character at all interesting this week.
But I despise what they’re doing with the Borg Queen. There is nothing Borg about her. She’s a stock mustache-twirling villain and there’s no logic or coherence to how she’s portrayed. How can she “miss Locutus?” This Queen is from an alternate future where Locutus never existed. They made a whole thing in her first appearance about how she didn’t recognize Locutus until she probed her awareness of parallel timelines. And how the hell does she know a freaking Pat Benatar song? Or how does Jurati know it?
Also, how did Queen/Jurati turning out the lights and singing allow Picard to elude the security staffers that Soong sicced on him? Surely security personnel are trained to cope with minor distractions like that, but the threat they posed totally disappeared as soon as it was convenient for the plot.
I thought the choice of song was odd at first as well, until I listened to it again and paid attention to the lyrics. Then I was seriously creeped out.
This is the same message the Queen has been trying to implant in Jurati’s mind the whole time they’ve been together, but in this form Jurati doesn’t sense the danger. So what happens in the last scene? They’re running with the shadows of the night. It’s the second-to-last line that made me shudder: “Surrender all your dreams to me tonight….” That’s assimilation.
And it makes perfect sense to me that the probably very bored house jazz band would immediately pick up on a song they recognized and improvised an accompaniment.
Considering that Agnes seemed to have been injected with nanoprobes last episode and that superstrength is something that the Borg are established as possessing, that part didn’t bug me, though it seems unlikely that the Queen would be able to keep this as an unlockable bonus upgrade that only comes into effect when she’s given control. I also think that it’s not reasonable that Jurati herself might actually have just known the song; maybe she took a performing arts elective in high school, who knows. I am a bit weirded out that she came down the stairs after the lights mysteriously cut out and the love band and AV people just immediately shrugged and went with it.
One thing I should have mentioned is that the costume department did magnificent work here. Everyone looked smashing, and kudos to Sara Tolf at Tor dot com who picked the pictures, which sensibly emphasized how magnificent everyone looked in their tuxedoes and ballgowns. Especially Patrick Stewart and Alison Pill.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@.-@ / CLB:
But I despise what they’re doing with the Borg Queen. There is nothing Borg about her. She’s a stock mustache-twirling villain and there’s no logic or coherence to how she’s portrayed. How can she “miss Locutus?” This Queen is from an alternate future where Locutus never existed. They made a whole thing in her first appearance about how she didn’t recognize Locutus until she probed her awareness of parallel timelines. And how the hell does she know a freaking Pat Benatar song? Or how does Jurati know it?
Yeah, more and more, I can’t help wishing Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga hadn’t created the Queen for First Contact 25 years ago.
Something like the Queen was always inevitable given the dramatic problems of doing a hive-based antagonist. Hell, even Stargate had the same issue with the Replicators and necessitated the Human Replicator route eventuality).
And to be fair, Alice Krige created a great, defining Trek antagonist. She earned a place alongside Q, Dukat, Khan, and the best of the Trek ne’er-do-wells.
But…oh God, I’m just so, so sick of the Queen and the Borg. It’s just created more long-term problems.
@5/Chase: The band wouldn’t even need to recognize the song, just the chord progressions. My musician father explained this to me, how there are only so many standard chord and rhythm patterns that songs are built around, so once a band recognizes the “changes,” they can provide a generic accompaniment for any song. (As seen in Back to the Future with the “Johnny B. Goode” scene.)
@6/Iacomina: “it seems unlikely that the Queen would be able to keep this as an unlockable bonus upgrade that only comes into effect when she’s given control.”
It seems inevitable to me that she would, since that’s how she tempts Jurati into giving her more control, by not allowing her to access the strength boost until she does so.
“I am a bit weirded out that she came down the stairs after the lights mysteriously cut out and the love band and AV people just immediately shrugged and went with it.”
Everybody probably figured it was a surprise somebody else organized. Or they figured someone was seizing the moment when the lights went out and played along because her singing kept people calm until the problem could be sorted.
Yeah, but to have everyone shrug and go with it regarding Jurati’s impromptu singing doesn’t really track with an event with ridiculously tight security like this one….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
While I’m moderately enjoying the season, I think it’s pretty evident that they have two, maybe three episodes worth of story stretched out over ten. I am enjoying the use of Spiner though. Historically, the Soongs have kinda sucked as people.
@8/Mr. Magic: I can somewhat excuse this Queen being different because her Collective has been destroyed and she really is an individual at this point. And she didn’t really start acting like a full-on melodrama villain until she linked with Jurati, so I figure she absorbed some of Agnes’s garrulousness.
Still, whether I can rationalize it is not the important part. It’s just annoying to watch. It’s campy and ludicrous and tiresome. Not to mention, we already did the plot about Agnes Jurati being compromised and turned into a threat by a malevolent woman gaining mental influence over her. Couldn’t they have found something different to do with her this year?
@10/krad: “Yeah, but to have everyone shrug and go with it regarding Jurati’s impromptu singing doesn’t really track with an event with ridiculously tight security like this one….”
Right, good point. Same as what I was saying about Picard slipping away. The security is incredibly tight until the plot needs it to be lax. The Borg Queen is an alternate version unfamiliar with Locutus until the plot decides to treat her as the usual Borg Queen who remembers Locutus. They’re changing the rules when it’s convenient.
I acknowledge many of the criticisms of the episode (and even the season as a whole thus far). But at the same time, I enjoyed a lot of the parts of the episode in isolation. Jurati’s musical number was an odd choice, but as Chase said above, I liked the lyrical relevance. I also don’t quite know how to take this version of the Borg Queen, but her contest of wills with Jurati is fun to watch. I tend to think that Seven’s role in the overall tapestry will come into focus, just as Rios’ time with the doctor/clinic is now becoming meaningful to the plot. And I really liked the revelation regarding Soong and the clones; it was quite chilling in its delivery.
I suppose my one overarching thought is that Terry Matalas seems to be trying to take things that worked for 12 Monkeys and apply them to Picard. Which is mostly working all right for me, but I can understand differences of opinion on that.
Maybe she doesn’t actually remember Locutus, but learned about him through Jurati and is just throwing it out there to mess with her (like everything else she does).
@11 I did rather like the small twist that Soong isn’t desperate to save Kore because he’s a loving father, but because like all his “descendants” (except Data) he’s a raging egomaniac.
@10 / KRAD:
Yeah, but to have everyone shrug and go with it regarding Jurati’s impromptu singing doesn’t really track with an event with ridiculously tight security like this one….
Eh, I guess it’s no different than The Mask when the Coco Bongo Band starts playing “Hey Pachuco” rather than question why a green-masked guy is suddenly up on stage (or how he transformed their attire into Zoot suits).
@12 / CLB:
Not to mention, we already did the plot about Agnes Jurati being compromised and turned into a threat by a malevolent woman gaining mental influence over her. Couldn’t they have found something different to do with her this year?
Yes. THIS.
Thank you, you finally hit the nail on the head about what was bothering me about Jurati’s storyline. You’re right; we literally just had this exact story last Season.
What I would love to see is a Trek time travel story that does not revolve around either the Borg or Khan Noonien Singh. What about the Doomsday Machine? Gary Seven? The Mirror Universe? The Big Bad trying to keep Sarek from meeting Amanda? Maybe what happened to the cetacean expert after she decided to stay in the 23rd century?
Mr. Magic: In The Mask, there was magic involved. This was supposed to be science……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As with last season, I find myself most frustrated by the mishmash of good concepts that never get fully developed in any satisfying way. They’ll touch on something interesting, then quickly move on to something else.
I was excited by the premiere. The Borg wanting to make peace with the Federation and the suspense and distrust that would naturally entail was a great setup for an entire season worth of stories. They could’ve even used that as a commentary on the issue of immigration. But… uh… what happened? Did they blow their budget on the Stargazer sets? Which looked great, by the way. But come on, writers, you gotta pick a lane.
@17,
Yes, but in-story, the Club audience and the band didn’t know that.
They just shrugged it off and went along with. I’m just reminded of it here.
And…wow, I can’t believe that movie’s almost 30 years old.
I was watching with Closed Captioning on and noticed at one point Tallinn was labeled as “muttering in Romulan”. Error? Clue?
It’s not just that all of the Soongs look the same that makes me think that they’re all clones, it’s that they all seem to have the same interests and personality and are capable of planning and executing intergenerational projects. Maybe Adam Soong was lab partners with Stavros Kiniclius.
There’s no explanation needed for why all Soongs look like Spiner, and junking it up with “CLONE!” defeats the purpose as I see it. Which is that it’s a convenient shorthand for letting us know “This guy is a Soong—no fooling.” It avoids unnecessary exposition (which I know is a weird thing to worry about in a show that spins its wheels as much as season 2 of Picard) needed to inform us or convince us that some non-Spiner actor is a Soong relation. Plus, it nods to the time-honored motif of a protagonist looking at a portrait of an ancestor and it’s just him in sideburns and a cravat.
@18/Kal Kan: “The Borg wanting to make peace with the Federation and the suspense and distrust that would naturally entail was a great setup”
I never took that ‘peace” offering as anything more than a pretense, the bait to lure Picard out of retirement and out to the spatial rift.
@22/Puff: “Plus, it nods to the time-honored motif of a protagonist looking at a portrait of an ancestor and it’s just him in sideburns and a cravat.”
Now I’m imagining a version of this where Renee Picard was played by Patrick Stewart in a blond wig and dress. Thanks for nothing. :D
(23)
Right, and instead of going all Doc Ock, they could’ve expanded on that. Make it a mystery. Does the Borg really want peace? Is it a trick? A trap? What are they up to? Are they sick? Have they changed for some reason? Should we help them? Let’s make a story out of it. Let’s make ten stories. The seeds for it were all right there in that wonderful conference room scene with Picard and Seven arguing the issue.
But no, they had twenty thousand ripped-from-the-headlines topics and other ham-fisted references to cover.
@23: That’s funny, because I’ve felt since the beginning that is the lesson Q wants Picard to learn; in his (completely justified) fear, he tried to destroy the Borg Queen (probably assimilated Jurati at this point) instead of doing the compassionate human thing and listening with an open mind. I thought Q telegraphed that pretty clearly when they first arrived in the Confederation timeline.
Who’s the gal in the white dress?
^ Never mind, I found the answer to my question.
@25/Chase:
This could be brilliant, subtle storytelling… the problem is that we won’t know whether it was or it wasn’t until episode 8 or 9.
I get serialization but perhaps ten episodes was the wrong structure for this story. A mini-series of five or six feature-length episodes might have allowed for more payoff earlier in the season.
@28: That is a very common problem with today’s storytelling model, but I do think that Picard has done a better job with it than Discovery. I still think the characters could figure it out in the next episode or two, then have the last couple about returning to the future (thought I also think Q will just snap them back once they fix whatever it is).
Also, I think that despite the way things seem to be going, assimilated Jurati is not going to turn out to be the futuristic Borg Queen from the Stargazer bridge. Just like Guinan did not turn out to be the Watcher as things currently stand. Our writers seem to enjoy misdirection and surprise, and while there’s got to be a reason for that Chekhov’s mask in the first episode, they may just be keeping an ace up their sleeve.
I’m still hopeful that the masked Queen was not Jurati, but I think it’s heading that way and that there is a way to execute it well. Perhaps they come to a true symbiotic understanding over a period of time, and that’s what they want for all humanity. It’d be kind of like the “green ending” of Mass Effect 3.
I’m thinking it will end up being one of the main characters but Jurati is a red herring
Sounds like a headache inducing mess. I really hate Time Travel. Unless I’m doing it with an expert, like a time lord.
@17: They do say that advanced technology to an unaccustomed population can be indistinguishable from magic.
Anyway, I have to say that I do appreciate the discussion of mental health in this season and how depression/anxiety/fear can hold one back from their potential and it’s a constant struggle to keep it at bay, even if it’s just lip service from Picard.
Watching that reveal at the end about the Soong clones and the suffering that they all went through in dying was very sad to think about for Kore and those that had died previously. Though I’m wondering for as rich as he seems to be, why is Adam Soong stating that Kore is his last chance, age or does he no longer have access to certain “materials” after his expulsion or something else entirely as he got pretty unhinged pretty quickly?
But why should we care who is behind the Borg Queen’s mask? That’s the main question I have.
You can say this how serialization works, that we have to wait, but I don’t that’s the case. If I’m reading a novel and it’s asking me to care about this mystery box and I’m still struggling to care past the halfway point, there’s nothing wrong with me putting down that book and never picking it up again.
*Don’t think that’s the case.
I agree with Seven not being better utilized. I would really like to see a Seven/Borg Queen faceoff. There was mention in this episode that Picard is the only one who knows how Q works. Seven has met and interacted with Q (not to mention his kid). This season, she seems to not know Q at all. It strikes me odd each time they do that.
Bobby
The use and overuse of in media res in this episode seriously annoyed me — it looked desperate, frankly. It’s not something I expected from old reliable Two Takes. Mind you, I thoughtthe previous episode was curiously choppy, too, though many disagree. Given the prep time they had with this season, you’d think they’d get the scripts in better shape.
Amused at Penelope Mitchell being allowed to use her Aussie accent despite it being established that the Picards are British at this point. Maybe a branch buggered off to Melbourne.
Jurati’s Bollywood Moment (it needed more choreographed dancing) absolutely yeeted me out of the story, but I’m curious about where Borgrati is going.
One thing they have right with this episode is that this is the point in the story where everything goes worng and the stakes shift. Picard has solved Renee, but now he’s comatose, Tallinn is falling apart (and that Romulan mutter is intriguing), Rios is wavering towards going off the reservation (and in trouble with Dr. Ramirez), there’s a semi-Borg out exploring the nightlife, Soong is coming apart in a way suggesting he’s the inflection point, Raffi is losing it, Seven’s at sea, and Q is…where?
The core problem isn’t solved —they’re still there. The Confederation timeline is still there.
That was dreadful
There’s another Chek(h)ov’s Gun in this episode, one I think many miss — Picard asking Tallinn “And who is watching over you?” If they don’t drop Gary Seven in I’ll be very annoyed, especially as Tallinn’s mission is over (ostensibly) and now there’s the question of her being embroiled with time travelers…and time travelers annoy Supervisor 194. Plus we have yet to get the payoff to why Guinan fears her and why she hates Guinan.
Brent Spiner, I think, really committed to this. Soong is a man in severe emotional pain, and utterly desperate. I don’t think he’s cloning his daughter, either — more likely his wife. This might be connected to Khan, so the prop lens are coming from him trying to clone an Augment and, worse, trying to speed grow the clones.
On the possibility of Borg deception…Matalas wrote Star Trek: The Next Generation – Hive, which involves time travel, people getting assimilated, and a massive Borg deception play that succeeds until time-traveling Locutus fixes things. It was a Brannon Braga story, but Matalas seems to be bringing bits of it to this.
Who watches over the Watcher….
Although I took that line to mean that Picard was pressing her on whether her reluctance to connect emotionally meant that Tallinn was suffering from her own fears in much the same way as her protege — a question that she promptly deflected.
1) I agree with the framing choices being wrong on this episode. We didn’t need to see Picard in peril to be hooked by the episode.
2) However, I don’t get the criticism of the Borg Queen being a mustache villain. Call me dense, but I don’t see how her character is any different than the queen in First Contact.
In a sense (and as our reviewer suggests), the foreshadowing of Picard’s peril is another kind of misdirection.
We are repeatedly led to believe that we know going into the episode what the worst that can happen is — Picard’s serious injury and the possible failure of his mission.
We are thereby distracted from (and thus shocked by) the true disaster that has been looming all along — the Borg Queen on the loose in 21st-century Los Angeles.
The Borg Queen is a closet Pat Benatar fan. Who knew?
So assuming the earth in this fictionalized Star Trek universe of 2024, what with Pat Benatar and Teslas, is anything like ours, then there should be video cameras everywhere. This also includes outside where the gala was being held – meaning an APB from the LAPD should be issued seeking to apprehend Adam Soong for a hit and run. We’ll see if this actually happens but I doubt it.
Six episodes into this season and at this point it’s just pretty silly brainless entertainment, Not sure where it’s going (and characters like Seven, Elnor, and Soji have been pretty much marginalized or made irrelevant) but I’m still along for the mindlessly flashy ride.
@37/Bobby Nash: “Seven has met and interacted with Q (not to mention his kid).”
Well, she met his kid, but Seven and Q didn’t actually have any scenes together in “Q2.” Indeed, Seven is barely (pun intended) in the episode at all.
It is definitely contrived to pretend that Picard is the only person who knows about Q, given that we know from DS9 and Lower Decks that Starfleet officers in general get briefings about Q and what to do if they encounter him. At least this episode gave some indication of why they’re ignoring Seven’s knowledge, so that there’d be an urgent need to awaken Picard from his coma rather than just letting him heal naturally. But it doesn’t really work if you have to cheat to justify the urgency.
@43/M: “However, I don’t get the criticism of the Borg Queen being a mustache villain. Call me dense, but I don’t see how her character is any different than the queen in First Contact.”
I wasn’t crazy about FC’s introduction of the Queen and turning the Borg into a seductive villainess, but FC was a lot more subtle about it than this, and understood the nature of the Borg better. The Collective spoke through the Queen, but the Queen was explicitly just a manifestation of the entire Collective’s will — “I am the Borg.” Here they have her talk about leading an “army,” and saying things like how many words the Borg have for a concept, when the networked minds in a hive consciousness don’t use any words since there’s only one mind among them and it doesn’t need to talk except to outsiders. This version of the Queen is just written too much like an individual rather than an aspect of a hive. Okay, granted, that’s because this Queen has had her Collective eradicated and actually is an individual for the first time ever, but she’s being written about as subtly as Queen Arachnia in Captain Proton.
I’ve never been convinced that the Europa mission was actually the divergence point, that always seemed too easy. Especially because it doesn’t make sense that not discovering a lifeform on Io would lead to humanity becoming Xenophobic. As it is, there’s no evidence that the discovery did much to change human history; World War III happened afterward.
Given Soong’s prominence in the Confederation, it’s pretty obvious to me that something involving him is the actual divergence point. The easy assumption is that Q helping him save Kore’s life eventually results in other Augments with a human superiority complex taking over. But I do wonder if the twist might be the opposite.
@47.
The assumption that the point of divergence is the Europa mission is based only only on Picard’s (Guinan’s) assumption that the “watcher” alluded to by the Borg Queen is in fact the Supervisor, Tallinn. That assumption might turn out to be wrong, and is questionable for a couple of reasons:
1) Why did the coordinates stolen from the Borg Queen lead to Guinan’s bar?
2) Granting that the Borg Queen can sense the point of divergence in the timeline, why would the Collective have knowledge of a Supervisor whose job it is to watch over a single individual?
So those problems could be put down to sloppy plotting, or if intentional would mean that Picard and company are barking up the wrong tree. And if Tallinn isn’t the “watcher”, Renee Picard isn’t the point of divergence (or the only point of divergence).
Although if true, Q’s repeated attempts to keep her off the Europa mission can’t be explained.
@48 The coordinates given were to MacArthur Park, so I don’t know why Picard went to Guinan’s first. But that is where Guinan took him to meet Tallinn.
As for Q, I think his work on Renee serves potential two purposes: it makes the whole exercise more challenging/personal for Picard, and/or she has some crucial connection to Soong.
You know, I can’t even (can I swear on here?) prevaricate. This episode was a mindfuck. It was so tense in certain parts, and it was so moving in others.
Allison Pill absolutely slayed the FUUUUCK out of that song. I knew I was going to get into trouble with the Borg queen, because I was so gutted by how hurtful it was to watch her experiencing an over stacked cognitive load, having to interface with her trans-temporal doppelgängers, and having to wrap her inarguably brilliant mind around the genocide of the hive.
I love Agnes. She freaking shines like a supernova. I love how Agnes and the Queen play off of one another. Agnes holds her own, here, and proves again and again that there is nothing more dangerous than an infuriated nerdy genius who knows how to crystallize in a crisis, until we see a mash-up of Agnes and the queen.
And I love how it’s the Borg queen who is trying to get Jurati to unwind a little bit. Well, a lot. I’m a gay guy, and the Borg queen and Agnes getting thrown together reminded me of my best friend from high school, who is the smartest person I have ever met, and she is an expert on everything from biology and calculus, and the history of rock, and stuff I never would have ever tried, like dropping acid and going through a car wash seven times, and how to get a merit badge in shoplifting, ditching school, and how to bypass a burglar alarm to sneak out of the house at night.
I absolutely want to shift gears and talk about how wonderfully kind, gentle and absolutely gallant Jean-Luc is with Renée. He is such a loving and wonderful person, and I cannot think of anybody more qualified to guide an extraordinary person through a crisis of confidence. His empathy, his awareness, and his advocacy neither surprises me, nor ceases to amaze me, all at once.
Raffi has got some of the best wit I have ever seen, anywhere, ever, in the whole entire universe times infinity. I love how she can basically say whatever she wants, and get away with it, because of how incisive she is.
This whole storyline is so much more satisfying than I would have ever hoped. I usually feel like going back in time to now is kind of unfair, because I love starships, aliens, and the future, and our people are either not having any of it, like Raffi, who not only ruined her own mugging, but pistol-whipped the jackass who tried to shake her down, and then stole everything he had for the ‘apocalypse fund.’ And Rios is loving how intense it is.
I love Trek. I know some people are kind of defecating all over this episode, because it seemed to be contrived, and just unbelievable and crazy. But, seriously? Is there anything more unbelievable than our present? I get so into it, that I find myself saying, ‘yeah, this is happening. You just couldn’t make something like this up. Except this is Star Trek, and with people like Lea Thompson and Jonathan Frakes directing, of course they could. And they did. And it is awesome.
I hope all of you sweet, friendly lifeforms continue to have a magical day.
@50 – Eloquence in disagreeing there, kudos. Nice to see a different view.
The P2 scene was wonderful, and it caps Picard’s growth as an empathic being very nicely.
Other notes…I’ve been convinced from the start that Picard and his crew are haring down wrong avenues and not quite thinking things through, missing clues (like the prominence of Adam Soong in the Confederation timeline) and reaching wrong conclusions — like the belief they need the ship and needed the Borg Queen to get back. If they’ve achieved a reset, they’ll vanish. They need Q to get them reinserted *before* the Big Kablooie.
‘But Q…has major problems right now (hmm, maybe he can’t cross his own timeline?)
There’s big pieces missing. We should get the first corrective swerve in episode 8…episode 7 is where chaos really erupts, I imagine.
cant we just enjoy the show? lots of critiques from couch cowboys
@52 Half the fun of watching is kvetching from the couch.
Hm. Wonder if there’s juice in this speculative branch. One of the horrors of the traditional Borg collective is that it’s billions and billions of minds/souls making up the collective; sheer numbers are going to pound the resistance of any one opposing soul to thin, gruel mush.
But THIS Borg collective? Reduced to one Queen? What’s the nature of the collective as it grows? Is it going to be the same? Or will the early assimilated prove to have influence on the resulting collective?
But, yes….a missed opportunity with Seven, who HAS had experience being a queen of a collective.
@50/Samya Vance: I agree that Allison Pill has an excellent singing voice, but it was hard for me to enjoy her singing past my bewilderment that it was happening at all, and my annoyance that it was yet another of the hackneyed TV cliches this episode was mostly built out of.
As for how kind and gentle Picard was with Renee, come to think of it, it seems like Stewart was channeling Charles Xavier there more than Picard.
I don’t get all this talk of a missed opportunity with Seven not being the one struggling with assimilation.
Leaving aside the obvious — it’s nothing new for the character — it has to be Jurati, awkward and asocial, if we are to have a story about someone willingly drawn to and fascinated by the Borg Queen. Had it been Seven, there would have been a power struggle of one sort or another and perhaps some emphatic philosophical debate; but she would never have willingly been tempted by the promise of connection the Queen offered.
Also, the fact that Seven is being underutilized in this phase of the plotline doesn’t mean that she won’t be instrumental to its resolution. Personally I think I would far rather see Jurati overcome the Borg Queen’s influence on her own — her character arc demands it after last season — but if this is ultimately going to be be resolved through some kind of final showdown between Seven and the Borg Queen, it simplifies things for the writers if there are minimal encounters between that pair beforehand.
In any event, my prediction is that the futuristic Borg Queen from the Stargazer bridge turns out to be Seven….
@55/Sarek: “Also, the fact that Seven is being underutilized in this phase of the plotline doesn’t mean that she won’t be instrumental to its resolution.”
Except she’s been underutilized in almost every phase of the plotline. Her stint as president of the Confederation was the only time she’s really had a meaningful role to play, beyond just bantering with Raffi. So as Keith said, it’s hard to see why she’s even in this season.
“In any event, my prediction is that the futuristic Borg Queen from the Stargazer bridge turns out to be Seven….”
I wondered if somehow it might turn out to be Renee. Picard said “Look up” to her, which makes her the only character other than Picard and his mother who’s aware of that phrase, which the masked Queen said to Picard just before the kaboom. I don’t see how that could possibly make sense, but they obviously want the phrase “Look up” to be significant somehow.
@20 Not only does Tallinn mutter in Romulan, but she also refers to her probing technique as a mind meld. I mostly dismissed it as a cheeky reference (like the episode titles they kept throwing around the last couple episodes ), but there might be something there.
@1 Seven being hijacked by the Borg Queen would be just another misstep. Jurati made a deal, which Seven would not. I think Seven’s moment comes later, when she recognizes the signs of assimilation.
@57/lerris: Gary Seven was familiar with Vulcans even back in the 20th century (“Humans with a Vulcan? You’re from the future!”), and Tallinn is from his organization. So there’s no reason to think there’s anything more to it than that she knows what a mind meld is and knows that her listeners will recognize the metaphor.
Quoth trevor: “cant we just enjoy the show? lots of critiques from couch cowboys”
Well, that’s kind of what they pay me for. Also, critiques from couch cowboys is the whole purpose of a comments section……….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@56/CLB:
Not technically true, if memory serves. Didn’t Picard end his commencement/end of year speech at Starfleet Academy with that quote from his mother, in front of Raffi, Elnor, and a huge crowd of cadets?
I agree with you (and Keith) that Seven’s inclusion has had little payoff so far, in terms of plot. I think that in terms of characterization, there has been some significant development. We are seeing a more human and more integrated side of her than we did either on Voyager or Season 1 of this show. In the first season we saw her constantly challenging Picard, his authority and his value system (even to the point of committing what Picard would consider to be murder), and here she has lost that abrasive edge: she belongs, and our protagonist seems to have earned her respect and her loyalty. She and Rios have become the most dependable members of his crew. But It would be something like malpractice if her character is given no meaningful role in the major development of this season’s plot.
@52 Trevor – You do realize some of the commenters here actually spent years professionally writing Star Trek material, right? Not your average armchair quarterbacks.
I loved the nod to Mae Jemison, Star Trek the Next Generation guest star, and oh by the way, the first African American woman in space, during Picard’s chat with Renee.
(55, 57)
That depends on what the Queen could tempt Seven with. She’s not invincible. But my wish for Seven to be possessed is mainly due to my preferring her over Jurati, who I find cliched and annoying.
@63. Perhaps she could induce or threaten Seven in some way; but the prospect of assimilation itself would never be tempting to Seven as it is to Jurati. As emphasized in earlier episodes, Seven has remarkable compassion for ex-Bs but loathes and fears the Collective — not without reason — and would not hesitate to destroy it.
(64)
Precisely why I would want to see Seven struggle with this rather than Jurati. The greater the resistance the greater the drama, and so I would find it more interesting to see just how the Queen would try to outmaneuver her, just as she gradually wore down Data’s resistance. Something more subtle than twisting the proverbial mustache.
But this show doesn’t do subtle well, so that’s a nonstarter.
Thesis: Soong is the inflection point. Does he stop WWIII somehow?
@60/Sarek: “Didn’t Picard end his commencement/end of year speech at Starfleet Academy with that quote from his mother, in front of Raffi, Elnor, and a huge crowd of cadets?”
I don’t recall, but I’ll take your word for it. Still, none of them are likely to be candidates for becoming the masked Queen. I don’t see how Renee could be either, but the way they made a point of having Picard use the phrase to her made me wonder if it could have significance.
Honestly, I wish shows would stop trying so hard to come up with the next “Bad Wolf,” to build in seeded phrases or images with hidden meaning (or something like the recurring mystery melody in Discovery season 3, which was set up as a big deal and then just fizzled out with a throwaway explanation that didn’t explain its pervasiveness at all). Especially when sometimes they have no genuine meaning but are just a game to see if the audience can spot them, like the recurring use of butterfly imagery throughout the season. I don’t recall for sure, but I think Matalas played the same game in 12 Monkeys, with recurring memes popping up all over the timeline without any real explanation.
The song selection was BRILLIANT. Read the lyrics. Imagine the Borg Queen choosing a song that says “Surrender all your dreams to me tonight. They’ll come true in the end ” and making the body she’s trying to assimilate sing that? Chilling! I keep thinking about it days later.
As other commenters have said, I feel like there isn’t enough story here to fill a 10(?) Episode season. Either that or things are being revealed too slowly. This season feels like it would have at most been a two parter in TNG/DS9. Hardly anything seems to have happened in the 6 episodes we’ve seen. I also think this is a problem of modern TV feeling the need to have “mysteries” that are explored and revealed over a whole season. If we found out what the problem that the crew needed to fix was in the first 1 or 2 episodes the plot would have much more forward motion.
I more and more doubt that Renée is really the point of divergence. First, in The Star Gazer speaks of her as a “great-great cousin”, but in Fly Me to the Moon, the Watcher refers to her as Picard’s “ancestor”, so I am not really sure they are the same person. Second, the mission is to Europa, but Picard explains her contribution is bringing a microbe from Io to Earth. Maybe she should skip the Europa mission and wait for a future Io mission, assuming NASA sends two manned spaceships to the Jovian system within a timespan of at most one decade (which would be kinda stupid).
If any of these is the case, then Picard’s attempt to fix the timeline just messes it up even more. Q might just try to counteract. This, however, does not explain why of all people he enlists Adam Soong for help, for Soong is the hero of the Confederation, and it does not appear Q is a particular fan of that one. But then, he is clearly reduced in power; if the fight with the Borg Queen in Ep1 is the reason for this, then he might be willing to accept any future without that confrontation, even the dreadful Confederation.
Unrelated: I think it is really silly to recast actors to different roles. Isa Briones plays a character with a somewhat manipulated past in both seasons, and Laris/Tallinn might be the same person somehow, but would a Watcher really take up a job at the Tal Shiar (no good guys if TNG can be trusted)? Also, the Elnor cameos are stupid. Add to this that Agnes gets mentally possessed or remote-controlled by two different entities in two seasons, and we probably will see an “into the mind” scene for Picard for the second time. This all feels like heavily uninspired writing constrained by casting choices that didn’t work out.
This show is excellent. This episode was fantastic.
I’ve been watching Star Trek since the TOS reruns crosslegged on the floor in front of the TV console when I was a kid in the 70s..
Like with Discovery, which is also a joy, I find that spending less time trying to explain everything to myself and how it fits in canon and being all precious about it allows me to appreciate the creativity and originality of the work.
This is Star Trek how it should have been, without all the Rodenberry tight-assery and free of network television tropes, conventions, and restrictions. It is Roddenberry’s vision, without his hang ups.
I still hold that Q messing with Renee caused an unforeseen chain of events. Perhaps his interactions with Soong led to the future we saw. Like he was just sick of Picard and trying to sideline him, but created a massive issue instead. How could something be unforeseen by Q. Maybe the theory that the self destruct injured Q (perhaps mortally) could explain it.
Also, not sure if this is just me, but… In the second episode, where Q says something to the effect of he wanted to find Picard and just looked for the nearest explosion, that doesn’t really sound like Captain Picard. He wasn’t really known for blowing stuff up, but you know who probably was, General Picard. Just thinking maybe Q is hanging trouble distinguishing between realities.
To @52’s point, a bit unartful, but the point stands. Send like modern Fandom is much more focused on critique than enjoyment. Sure there’s issues (I also hate the x time earlier trope) but sometimes I just want to enjoy the ride. Don’t overthink it.
Ok, so let me get this straight. A show about people who time travel 200 years or so into the past, hang out with aliens, have synthetic bodies, and travel the galaxy regularly and people think it’s absurd that a character happens to know a Pat Benatar song. Really?? I for one would love more music in the Trek world that isn’t stodgy old classical,which is WAY OLDER! Sci fi is about suspension of disbelief, maybe thats why I don’t get upset about such things. If you dont like the show or modern Trek then please stop watching it just to complain every week.
It isn’t just the song… I think that a central feature of how the Borg Queen is being portrayed here is that she has (or seeks) comprehensive knowledge of target-species, their language, culture and individual vulnerabilities — and uses that knowledge to tempt them into addiction and surrender
Much like Renee, with her “mobile device”…
Soong has the worst internet media profile ever – “Mad Scientist” – but the Europa project accepts donations from him? That kind of prestige project would not be wanting that kind of publicity, frankly.
What’s Tallinn job? Does she just watch what’s happening like a time travelling historian or is she actually suppose to intervene under certain circumstances like a bodyguard? She seems to want to be very hands off but gets convinced by Picard. Does she know what she’s supposed to be doing? Did she inform her boss that something weird is happening?
Couldn’t Q have simply kicked Renee off the mission by just informing the board she’s not mentally and/or emotionally ready?
I can never tell if the actors are actually singing but if she was, Alison was great.
Thank you
@70/Luthien:”…the Watcher refers to her as Picard’s “ancestor”, so I am not really sure they are the same person”
No reason a great-etc. cousin can’t be an ancestor. There are different kinds of ancestors — direct and indirect, genetic and genealogical. A sibling or cousin of your direct ancestor is still one of your indirect ancestors.
“Second, the mission is to Europa, but Picard explains her contribution is bringing a microbe from Io to Earth.”
Io and Europa are adjacent moons. Most space probes sent to Jupiter have surveyed more than one moon; no reason a crewed probe couldn’t do the same.
I mean, really, given the effort it would require to send human beings to Jupiter, it would be ridiculous to go to all that trouble and not design the mission to explore multiple moons while you were there. I mean, they’re all there right next to each other. It’d be like taking a trip to Washington, DC and only visiting the Washington Monument even though the Lincoln Memorial and so many other things are right there.
@72/xtrasweetc: “Send like modern Fandom is much more focused on critique than enjoyment.”
That’s getting the cause and effect backward. I’m critiquing it because I’m not enjoying it, because it isn’t giving me enough to enjoy. If it were, if the story made any sense or had any originality rather than just throwing together a bunch of Trek continuity references and lazy TV cliches, then I wouldn’t be critiquing it as much.
It is bizarre to say that we’re doing something wrong by critiquing something inadequate rather than forcing ourselves to enjoy it. If a restaurant serves you a charred steak and a baked potato that’s still frozen inside, you’re not required to choke it down and pretend it’s fine. To say “You should stop complaining and just enjoy it” would be ridiculous and downright obnoxious. Enjoyment has to be earned. It’s the creators’ obligation to raise their standards to satisfy the audience, not the audience’s obligation to lower our standards to match whatever we’re given.
@73/Keith Morris: “A show about people who time travel 200 years or so into the past, hang out with aliens, have synthetic bodies, and travel the galaxy regularly and people think it’s absurd that a character happens to know a Pat Benatar song. Really??”
Yes, really, Suspension of disbelief is also something that creators have to earn from the audience, not something audiences are required to give blindly and unthinkingly. The full phrase is willing suspension of disbelief, not compulsory. If a story wants to sell a fanciful idea, it needs to justify it, to convince the audience that there’s a reason for it in context. The time travel has an explanation — they didn’t just walk through a door and find themselves in the past, they did a slingshot around the Sun. The aliens have an explanation — it’s the future and they have starships that can travel to other worlds. The synthetic body had an explanation. Is it so unreasonable to ask for an explanation for Jurati and/or the Borg Queen knowing a 20th-century Earth song? The reason it’s called suspension of disbelief is that it’s temporary, for the duration of the story. We’re absolutely allowed and entitled to ask questions afterward, and it’s preferable if there are actually answers to those questions.
Granted, we know from season 1 that Rios has a collection of vintage LPs. And he and Jurati are apparently a couple, or have been in the past. So that could explain Jurati’s knowledge of old music. But it would’ve been nice if that had been established at some point. As it is, it just pulls us out of the story by feeling more like the producers’ excuse to throw in a gratuitous musical number than something with an in-story justification.
Really, I’m disturbed by this recurring attitude I’m hearing that asking questions and thinking critically is somehow wrong. Star Trek is about celebrating curiosity and the inquisitive spirit. It’s about celebrating intelligence and expertise. It’s not supposed to be a “turn off your brain” experience. It’s supposed to give us a reason to turn on our brains. People today have forgotten that that’s the whole reason it became so huge and influential in the first place, because it was one of the vanishingly rare works of science fiction TV in its era that stimulated our brains rather than numbing them. The fact that we wanted to think about Star Trek‘s universe, to ask questions about it and speculate about the answers, is the reason we had fan fiction and conventions and bought tie-in books and comics, the reason we kept the show alive in our minds and hearts after its cancellation while other cancelled shows were forgotten. Picard and Discovery and all the other sequels wouldn’t exist if Trek fans hadn’t always thought and questioned and wondered and critiqued, and, yes, argued and complained as well.
@76/Antipodenaut: “Soong has the worst internet media profile ever – “Mad Scientist” – but the Europa project accepts donations from him?”
Yeah, that occurred to me after the fact as well. Yet another case of the writers seemingly changing the rules as they go when it’s convenient for the plot.
@77/Mike: “What’s Tallinn job? Does she just watch what’s happening like a time travelling historian or is she actually suppose to intervene under certain circumstances like a bodyguard?”
I think they’re going by how Gary Seven operated in “Assignment: Earth” — he intervened in secret to sabotage the orbital weapon platform and scare people out of launching more orbital nukes, but he strove to make sure he remained unobserved. So I figure Tallinn’s job is to protect Renee from harm and keep her on the path history needs her to follow, but to do so indirectly, without Renee ever knowing she’s there.
It’s rather different from how the Assignment: Earth spinoff was meant to work, based on the series proposal. That sounded like it would’ve been more the kind of show where the heroes get involved with different weekly guest stars who are potentially important to the future and helping to protect them from harm or prevent them from making terrible mistakes. It would probably have been sort of a high-tech secret agent show, the sort of thing like the bionic shows where the specially-powered protagonist goes around helping people who rarely find out exactly who he is or how he does the things he does. But surely it would’ve involved actually meeting and interacting with the people he and Roberta helped or the bad guys they fought. And it would’ve been different people every week.
“Did she inform her boss that something weird is happening?”
Her title is Supervisor, so she is the boss, as far as Earth is concerned. Her superiors are presumably back on that distant planet that Gary Seven was sent from.
“Couldn’t Q have simply kicked Renee off the mission by just informing the board she’s not mentally and/or emotionally ready?”
I’m not sure how extensively he was able to arrange his fake credentials, given how limited his powers are. It looked to me like he originally intended to do something to Renee with a finger snap, and only went the subtler route when that didn’t work. So while he was able to con Renee into thinking he’s her therapist, that facade might not be able to hold up to closer scrutiny.
“I can never tell if the actors are actually singing but if she was, Alison was great.”
Given how gratuitous the whole song scene was, I can’t imagine they’d have had any reason to include it if they hadn’t wanted to showcase Pill’s genuine singing abilities.
Not being a great fan of music I *didn’t* know that the Song Jurati sang was originally by someone else – I was listening to the lyrics and thinking that was truly the Borg Queen singing to Jurati (just out loud so we could all hear her) – the fact that it was an actual song… that’s a bonus point or really good research!
The biggest thought that’s throwing me out of the episodes I watch is the ‘All Good Things’ second guessing – which action are they initiating which they shouldn’t be which in turn will lead to the divergence – and therefore what will they need to correct in the next 24 hours or so… What assumptions are they making that the shouldn’t be – and in turn, what do the Aegis know and have told/not told Tallinn – why is Renee important – Gary Seven knew to stop that rocket and why; so surely Taillin should know why she’s protecting Renee and from what – and until when – 24 years seems an awfully long time to be protecting/guiding someone…
Or, was the action actually activating the Self Destruct – not taking the leap to ‘look up’ and take a change that the Borg were being peaceful.
We also know, either through the transcendental nature of the Borg Queen, or because the one who said ‘Look up’ *was* from the same reality and time-line as Picard, that the masked Queen doesn’t have to be Jurati or his mother or even Renee – all his memories as Picard up until the point he was assimilated and became Locutus would be present within the Hive Mind – and his mother telling him to ‘look up’ would certainly have come before that incident in his life!
The final thing which is nagging away at me currently, is the disbelief that a Soong ancestor looks like a Soong descendent. We know that Arik was a geneticist who then turned to Cybernetics – and we currently have the ability now to choose IVF embryos to have identical genetic codes to their siblings (Saviour Siblings) – so it’s not that unlikely that the Soong ego would lead to generations of cloning/identical offspring to parent – assuming they could get it to work successfully, we’re only looking at 2-3 missing links between Adam and Arik and another 2 or so to Noonien – not that many really, especially if, once they had a working method, they just re-used it. ((And there’s also the time-travelling Daniel Radcliffe trope which is out there – similarities in appearance do happen and crop up over time without needing to be related to them)).
Overall though, I enjoyed this episode – I agree that the pace is a little slow at times, it feels more like a 12-15 episode season than a 10 to be honest, but it might now be at the tipping point – I mean we have what, one day left to the divergence? I might need to go and count the days again. The real question is how many of the current crew will survive into Season 3 in a useful way after the First Contact Day trailer for Season 3!
@78 – I agree that the mission would cover multiple moons and that they would have the technology and ability to make it happen, but the analogy is pretty specious.
I’m no expert in general relativity, but I’m guessing jumping between two moons orbiting at different rates with an inconsistent distance between them and a signal delay over 30 minutes from your home base is SLIGHTLY more difficult than walking around a reflecting pool.
Also, Keith, I think that final shot would’ve been turned up to 11 if it was the queen herself in the red dress walking down the street. Even if you had to add a puddle or a window reflection to show that it wasn’t ACTUALLY her, but that she was in control of Jurati.
About the song selection: I really like how there are people portrayed as aficionados of the 21st. Pat Benatar is an awesome choice. These songs are already classics, and Allison Pill just blew me away here. Her head voice and resonance was powerful. And seeing her in that red dress, walking along a street, holding her shoes, was gorgeous. So was that red dress. I want one. Even if I have to shave my chest.
I haven’t finished the episode yet, but i don’t understand two things – they managed to patch up the police officer on the ship without any issues, so why not Picard?
Also isn’t Picard an android now since the end of the last season? Doesn’t that have any impact on what treatment he should get? I’m seriously confused.
@81/qbe_64: “I’m no expert in general relativity, but I’m guessing jumping between two moons orbiting at different rates with an inconsistent distance between them and a signal delay over 30 minutes from your home base is SLIGHTLY more difficult than walking around a reflecting pool.”
Yes, obviously the logistics are exponentially more complicated, but so are the logistics of getting from Earth to Jupiter in the first place. The point is, if you’re making a plan to visit DC as a tourist, you wouldn’t plan to visit just one landmark and then leave; you’d plan in advance on visiting multiple ones while you were in town, and you’d formulate your goals accordingly. And by the same token, if you’re designing a mission to Jupiter, you’ll probably design it in advance to visit more than one moon, and the logistical requirments thereof will be accounted for in the design and scheduling of the mission.
For instance, the ship might have ion engines to allow it to accelerate efficiently between different bodies, like how the Dawn probe went from Vesta to Ceres; or it might be equipped with automated probes that it will launch toward the other moons while the crew lands on Europa. I mean, if you know a thing about Io, you know that nobody’s actually going to set foot on the surface. It’s a constantly shifting volcanic hellhole, and it’s deep inside Jupiter’s lethal radiation belts so the crew would probably die before they even reached its orbit. The only reasonable way they could discover any kind of life on Io is through robotic probes. (For that matter, even going to Europa is pretty iffy radiation-wise. Ganymede might be okay if you stay low enough on the anti-Jovian side, but you’d be better off out at Callisto.)
Distance from the home base doesn’t matter; the whole point of sending a crewed mission is so the astronauts on the scene can handle things themselves in real time instead of needing Mission Control to do everything for them. And planetary/lunar motion is generally quite predictable, which is how we can send probes on courses that loop around multiple bodies and rendezvous with them right on schedule even a decade or two after launch. The basic itinerary could be worked out before the mission was even launched, and any unexpected variables could be accounted for by the crew on the scene if they had ion thrusters or some other suitably flexible propulsion system.
And general relativity doesn’t come into play at all — except in the microscopic influence it might have on chronometric calculations of the sort that GPS satellites have to correct for. The velocities involved are slow enough that the physics is effectively Newtonian.
@83/th1_: “they managed to patch up the police officer on the ship without any issues, so why not Picard?”
As I recall, they actually dragged the police officer out of the ship with the intention of calling an ambulance for him from the house.
“Also isn’t Picard an android now since the end of the last season?”
Picard’s android body was designed to work identically to a human one, right down to aging. Although apparently it’s different enough to short out a defibrillator.
@@@@@84. ChristopherLBennett Yeah, I’m just somehow not convinced enough that they are treating an android and that the ship was completely unsuitable for that…
But i’ve realised what annoys me the most – that we will spend the entire season to solve a problem that Q created for Picard. It worked for a few single episodes and for the closing double episode of Next Generation, but an entire season for solving an “artifically created” problem? This is just lazy.
For the record, I do not believe that Picard’s new body was ever referred to as android in dialogue. It was called a golem, synthetic, and most recently flesh-and-blood robot. The intent seemed to be that his consciousness is residing in a man-made organic body almost identical to his original one.
On the Stargazer bridge, Jurati joked that Picard looked “positively positronic”, which could have implied that his brain at least was organic, despite implications to the contrary in the Season 1 finale. But that seems precluded by the scene in the clinic, in this episode.
(Correction: that his brain at least was not organic)
Late to the party again. I have to say while I was a bit more positive on the episode than KRAD, I have the same issue with the season that he does. Basically Matalas constructed a seasonal arc which didn’t require any of the main characters save for Picard…and Jurati. And Jurati seems like a complete ass-pull, because Seven would have been the logical one to be involved with the Borg Queen, unless Jurati is headed on a one-way trip
But they wanted to somehow involve the Season 1 cast, so they came up with completely underwhelming/uninteresting B plots to keep Rios, Raffi, and Seven involved. They fridged Elnor to give Raffi motivation, and he’s now an extra. Hell, Seven was almost an extra this week, with a single line!
And then of course there’s adding main cast into different roles, like having Kore, Tallinn (who I guess could still end up being a past version of Laris), and yet another Soong.
Basically it seems this season is the epitome of plot-based writing. There was some “high-concept” idea involving Picard, and Picard only, which involved a bunch of new (to the show) characters. Then they decided how to fit the rest of the ensemble in afterwards. Honestly, I’d rather we didn’t see them after the first episode for the most part, given what they’ve done with them.
@78
I no way intended to insinuate that people should settle for watching something they don’t enjoy. What I don’t get is how fan bases, and not just here or even just in SFF, seems to have a vocal group who seem more interested in ripping apart the product than engaging with it. More commenting on an overall trend than a specific person or group.
That said, I think for those of us who are enjoying it, coming out to a community looking for discussion and being immediately hit with a giant wall of negativity is frustrating. And, the fact that it’s consistently coming makes me wonder why, if it’s so terrible, everyone keeps watching it. No one’s forced to watch it, (except KRAD, it’s his job) but folks do. It’s just curious.
@86/Sarek: I think the intent is that Picard’s body is inorganic, but replicates a human body exactly down to the cellular level, so it’s all but indistinguishable from the real thing.
Which, by the way, is an android. The term merely means an artificially created being in the form of a human, and being a convincingly lifelike replica is part of the definition. Synthetic/synth was used throughout PIC season 1 as a synonym for Soong-type androids.
Indeed, Data as originally conceived was meant to be at least somewhat humanlike on the inside as well as the outside — see “The Naked Now” where he’s affected by the Psi 2000 virus the same as the rest of the crew. “My chemical nutrients are like your blood. If you prick me, do I not… leak?” The original TNG bible says he’s “an android so perfectly fabricated that only a skilled biologist would know he is not composed of normal flesh and blood.” Which I take to mean basically the same kind of android that Picard is supposed to be now. I always felt it was dumbing it down when “Datalore” and later episodes established that he and Lore were more stereotypically mechanical on the inside, with hard flat surfaces and blinky lights, limbs that could be detached like a Ken doll’s, and not a trace of any “chemical nutrients.”
Keith Morris @73:
The counterpoint to this is that Bach’s and Handel’s pieces (for example) have been around for up to 300+ years now, so it’s not that big a stretch to assume that they will still be around 300 years from now. Whereas “popular” music from recent years may or may not survive the test of time.
That being said, although I am definitely a classical-music snob, I thought this song was an absolutely brilliant addition. (And I was able to apply the “Rule of Cool” and suspend disbelief because it was so on-point.)
@90/CLB
I can’t be sure, because nobody can explain it to me.
@89/xtrasweetc: “What I don’t get is how fan bases, and not just here or even just in SFF, seems to have a vocal group who seem more interested in ripping apart the product than engaging with it.”
I am not a “fan base.” I am an individual with my own opinions and my own reasons for enjoying or criticizing things, and I am in no way influenced by what anyone else says or does. I like plenty of things that public opinion tends to vilify (for instance, I think Star Trek Nemesis is actually pretty good), and I dislike plenty of things that public opinion tends to celebrate. I have never blindly followed the crowd. So kindly do not lump me in with the type of people who go out of their way to go negative so that they can get views for their YouTube videos.
Look at my Discovery comments this season and you’ll see mostly praise and satisfaction. They did a great job, for the most part, and I acknowledged it as such. But Picard is not doing a great job. It’s been very disappointing in a lot of ways.
“That said, I think for those of us who are enjoying it, coming out to a community looking for discussion and being immediately hit with a giant wall of negativity is frustrating.”
Which is how I feel coming to a Star Trek show and being hit with a wall of lazy cliches, excessive continuity porn, and inconsistent storytelling. It’s frustrating. I wish I were enjoying this season and could join you in feeling positively about it, but I’m not. That’s not my doing. I didn’t choose to be dissatisfied with it.
“And, the fact that it’s consistently coming makes me wonder why, if it’s so terrible, everyone keeps watching it.”
That’s not the way it works. We’re always hardest on the things we care about the most, that we love enough to want them to do better. Criticizing something doesn’t mean you hate it or don’t care about it. It means you do care enough that you aren’t ready to give up on it and still want to believe it can get better.
There are still enough points of merit in this that I want to keep watching. The production values are excellent, I mostly like the cast, and I’m invested in the characters and the universe and want to see how their stories unfold. And one of the show’s creators, Kirsten Beyer, is a friend of mine. That’s why I’m so disappointed by the aspects of the storytelling that aren’t holding together well or allowing me to enjoy it as much as I wish I could. I feel the show deserves better.
(89)
I keep watching because I really enjoyed the season premiere and I’m holding on to hope that it returns to that form. I engage with a TV show when I like it. I complain when I don’t. I shrug when it’s something in between. And since the second episode I’ve been doing a lot of complaining and shrugging.
@62 Yes! A brilliant allusion/shoutout.
S
The scene with the impromptu musical performance is not inexplicable, plot wise, so much as not fully realized. Cutting the power provided the team with the tactical diversion they needed. Presumably the security systems lost power or were hacked again at this point. To forestall the security team’s impulse to immediately lock the place down as soon as the lights went out, an innocuous alternate explanation needed to be constructed — namely, a show-stopping surprise musical performance.
As to why the event organizers, the band, and the security team go along with it — well, often enough that is exactly how things work in real life. Organizations have overlapping areas of responsibility and gaps where no one is responsible. Individuals will often respond by taking the path of least resistance. The security team had no reason to suspect that this was not part of the musical program, the musicians could have assumed this was a last-minute addition arranged by someone higher up the chain of command, and even the program organizers would think this a talented guest had talked the band into a little surprise. No harm done, and no reason to make a scene.
Act with enough confidence in yourself, and the army will follow — isn’t that exactly what the Borg Queen is showing Agnes?
Another horrible cliched trope we need to get rid of is the one where “Security is closing in!” …but then that’s ALL they do…
I actually SPOKE OUT LOUD to my computer screen during this episode, I said “Don’t bother going for the stairs, Jean-Luc, a security guard will appear from above and stare you down without apprehending you!”
I’ve seen this in countless shows. It’s an annoying, ineffective way to build tension.
So far, my favourite episode this season has been the third. Like, for context, I would have to give episode 3 a warp factor of 8, while all the rest are 5-ish-es. I loved the way they introduced the characters to the current century, with that gentle cover of California Dreaming, and then suddenly the usually impossibly reliable transporter malfunctions and drops Rios headfirst down a fire escape. I loved the Seven and Raffi Show. I even suddenly loved Alison Pill’s acting (I’d only ever seen her in American Horror Story, which is a thing that MULTIPLE girlfriends have tried to inflict upon me, and within which EVERYTHING – writing, acting, directing – is uniformly execrable) while she fought the initial battle within herself. I wish this season as a whole was up to that standard. It’s not that the show is badly written…per se…it feels more like the storytelling choices being made just lend themselves to cliches?
But oh, BOG, yes, please, can we just have narratives that start at a beginning and move through a story? How did Morty lampshade this trope in that episode where the lighthouse keeper forced him to listen to his terrible screenplay?
I don’t mind honest criticism, which I assign to the aforementioned Mr.Bennett/Krad etc.
But there is a segment of the internet that is interested in hyperbolic criticism for clicks/attention. To me, this shows up when new Trek is criticized for things old Trek was guilty of. And these unforgivable sins are mentioned *without any awareness* by the critic.
I for one find much to appreciate in other viewers’ reactions, whether delighted or critical. I think that a work of art — in any medium — is experienced that much more profoundly when seen through others’ eyes as well. Especially when one is at turns riveted and alienated by that work of art and could use help sorting out one’s own reactions.
One part of the problem seems to be that the writers are selling psychodrama, while the audience expectation is for action/adventure. The other part seems to be the “serialized mystery” format being used. It’s almost like reading through an Agatha Christie novel: they greatly vary in quality but you can’t really know what you think of a particular book until the very end, when everything has been explained perfectly (or not). The sense I am getting from many of the comments is that by the sixth episode, we should know more about where all this is going.
For what it’s worth, it seems that the trailer for the following week’s episode is released on Friday afternoons. For those who would like a glimpse of the next installment, it is now up at https://www.startrek.com/videos/preview-star-trek-picard-season-two-episode-seven .
This episode exemplifies the issue I’m having with this season — they’re sprinkling clues to a mystery into a storyline that’s assembled so sloppily it’s hard to distinguish what’s meaningful. How can anyone possibly have expected Jurati’s “get captured” plan to succeed? It only works because of the Borg queen’s help. Why would Picard and company try to get into the gala before they knew Jurati had succeeded? Why does the overall security operation not react when the two guards running surveillance stop responding? Why do none of the guards in the main room — who’ve already grabbed Jurati once — not grab her again when she shows up singing? How did Soong know his plan to stop Picard from talking to Renee had failed, and how did he know she’d be crossing a street right then so he could try to run her down? How do they get Picard’s body from the accident scene to the clinic? (Sure they could have a car or Tallinn’s transport device, but still there should be witnesses. And if Tallin was willing to use her tech for his, why not use her mind-control device on a guard to get access to the network?) And has Soong somehow kept Kore away from the Internet until now?
As for Picard’s synth status: Episode 2 established he has an android body in this timeline, but there’s no reason why this body would be as vulnerable to minor accidents as his main timeline synth body.
Back to the Masked Queen, are they heading in a direction to where Picard will have a do-over and not “blow up the damn ship” since he’ll see a familiar face in the Queen? Because it will be either someone he knows or it won’t, and the ship will blow up again or it won’t. So what’s the suspense here?
A friend made 2 points I had to admit were… good.
1. This isn’t the Borg Queen. This is a Drama Queen.
2. Why would you take Robo-Picard to a hospital? Isn’t he like Data? If he appears organic-like on the inside, cool. Makes the androids from last season make more sense how easily they blended in.
But me. This one had some good moments. Picard talking to Picard. That was nice. Though I agreed with my friends that the scary Borg are a distant memory now.
The season started off pretty well but at this point I’m bored. If this weren’t Star Trek I would give up on it and maybe binge the whole thing a few months later once all the episodes were out. Isn’t Picard a robot now? Or is that officially retconned? This episode felt like a generic heist similar to the one last season where they all got dressed up in costumes. And we get more Soong stuff. It feels like putting more Soongs in Star Trek is just fan service at this point. I wonder if Soong’s genetic stuff is going to start the eugenics wars or something and he will end up creating Khan. Or has the eugenics wars been retconned out at this point? I agree with everyone that doing this as a 10 hour movie isn’t working. I recently watched Squid Game which is another heavily serialized drama and that one had its ups and downs but keep me interested throughout the whole thing. The show writers for this need to figure out how shows like that do it and replicate the process.
I maintain that Q isn’t trying to teach Picard any sort of a moral lesson this time around; I think that he, personally, somehow has skin in the game.
Omigosh, I just *cannot* get invested in this show, no matter how hard I try. So many plot threads, many of them with such great potential, have either been dropped almost immediately after they were brought up, or resolved within one episode. Here’s a bright, cheery, 25th century that really feels like Star Trek; I wonder what fun stories can be told here? None, apparently, because now we’re in a pseudo-Mirror Universe! What weird adventures will our crew have to get out of here? Barely any, because now we’re in the past! Oh no, the environment of 2024 is polluted and on fire! No time to do anything about or even comment on that, because Guinan is sad about homelessness! Wait, no, she’s out of the story now, and besides, we’ve got to save Rios from ICE! Now it’s a show about immigration I guess! Nope, he got saved, nevermind, now it’s onto Picard’s ancestor getting nervous about space travel! Except Picard gave her a pep talk and she’s fine now, but oh no, a Soong almost killed him and also has a clone for a daughter! How will she deal with this stunning revelation? Will it take five minutes at the top of the next episode or will it just never be brought up again?
Packing all that into one paragraph made me realize that this season just feels like a long run-on sentence, like a young child trying to tell you a story they made up without pausing to breathe. The only real through-lines have been the Jurati/Borg Queen stuff, maybe the Picard’s Mom mystery (if you count vague flashbacks every so often as a “plotline”), and Raffi being sad about Elnor (I don’t count the Q stuff; he’s barely done anything). I can’t get invested because I don’t know what to get invested *in*, because I don’t trust the writers to pay anything off at this point in any but the most perfunctory way.
@104 lacomina: Yes that’s exactly my thought as well. My impression of Q from the second episode was “He’s not playing around or giving some lesson; he’s angry and desperate.” The later revelation that he’s unexpectedly losing some of his powers certainly seems to support that impression.
About the song choice: It felt a bit odd to me too at first, until the Borg Queen explained that she needed endorphins. I thought, “Oh, well, a round of Pat Benatar karaoke will give that to ya.”
Maybe when the Queen tapped into the cellphone network she also got on the interwebs. She learned about how 911 calls (or 112 in Europe) work and the protocol for dispatching an officer to investigate. And French. It’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that the Queen learned during their link that Agnes loved singing but not publicly and thus did a search for lyrics about not being able to hide pain, just have a song in her back pocket for a vulnerable occasion. A stretch but not impossible.
“I specifically need you, the world-renowned, cutting-edge biomedical researcher, to stop this woman from going on a space mission.”
“Right, hit-and-run it is.”
@98/M: “But there is a segment of the internet that is interested in hyperbolic criticism for clicks/attention.”
Of course there is, but it’s not nice or fair to bring them up every time anyone criticizes something, as if to imply that the existence of some illegitimate criticisms means that all criticisms are illegitimate. People should be judged by their own words and actions. Saying “Yes, but what about these unrelated people that did X?” is a non sequitur.
@99/Sarek: “One part of the problem seems to be that the writers are selling psychodrama, while the audience expectation is for action/adventure.”
I’m surprised by that, because it looks exactly the opposite to me. Season 1 of Picard was touted as a different, more dramatic and thoughtful, less action-driven Trek series, and that interested me. But by the latter half of the season, they seemed to have abandoned that in favor of a more conventional huge action blockbuster idiom. And this season has doubled and tripled down on that, making something that feels like an extended Trek feature film overloaded with attention-grabbing cinematic set pieces like space battles and car chases and Mission: Impossible party infiltrations and musical numbers, with the more psychological and character-driven aspects being trickled out here and there but generally lost in the clutter.
I think people today tend to forget that Star Trek was initially more a drama than an action series. Roddenberry aspired to make the first non-anthology science fiction TV show that was a sophisticated adult drama in the vein of Naked City or Gunsmoke, and though the show did have obligatory action sequences tossed into every episode, it still prioritized drama and character. ST:TMP stressed drama, ideas, and spectacular visuals over action; it may be the only Trek movie in which no phasers are fired (though ST IV comes close). And TNG often stressed drama over action as well. But ever since The Wrath of Khan, it’s been perceived as an action franchise, and that perception is often to the detriment of the dramatic and thoughtful stories it tries to tell (for instance, I felt Insurrection would’ve been far better without the gratuitous tacked-on space battles and gunfights, and the weakest parts of Discovery‘s mostly thoughtful and communication-driven season 4 were the overdone pyrotechnics and shakycam stuff during the ship-in-danger scenes).
@103/Tim Kaiser: “Or has the eugenics wars been retconned out at this point?”
The Eugenics Wars were in the 1990s, decades in the past. The story has already alluded to them by establishing that Adam Soong’s genetic experiments violate a pretty strict set of international conventions banning eugenics and human genetic engineering, a ban that was implicitly passed in response to the Eugenics Wars.
I don’t have a problem with misdirection and red herrings. I just feel like it’s all very clunky here, both within episodes and as a whole. It’s been oft-commented that writers in large part haven’t really figured out how to handle this 10-episode-miniseries format of storytelling, but it’s bizarre that even with the extra writing time they got from the pandemic they still have a series where half the main cast has pretty much nothing to do (so far?), and where they’re resorting to cheap tricks halfway into the season instead of trusting us to be engaged on the merits. I feel like they spent at least a third of the season treading water, waiting for the halfway mark so they could kick the plot into gear, and then immediately following that they shifted back into awkward filler.
But yes, many unanswered questions remain. “A splinter in her flesh”? A literal splinter, or, like, a splinter of another timeline? Literal flesh, or flesh as in family? What’s up with Q’s powers? The Borg agenda? Did the Queen send them to a point of divergence or is the whole thing a scam, a point of opportunity for her instead? What’s up with Tallinn’s Romulan? Red Herring or doppelgänger connection? Lots of things to answer and most of them have barely been touched upon with 40% of the season left to go.
@110/mastadge: “Did the Queen send them to a point of divergence or is the whole thing a scam, a point of opportunity for her instead?”
I’ve been wondering the same thing for weeks. They only have the Queen’s word that this is the point of divergence. It could be that she brought them here because she sensed it was the point where she could create a timeline that benefitted the Borg.
@109 “The Eugenics Wars were in the 1990s, decades in the past. The story has already alluded to them by establishing that Adam Soong’s genetic experiments violate a pretty strict set of international conventions banning eugenics and human genetic engineering, a ban that was implicitly passed in response to the Eugenics Wars.”
Terry Mataias on Twitter has hedged right around this by referring back to Spock in TOS talking about records being iffy because of WWIII, so the Eugenics Wars might come on the heels of this.
That said, there’s enough contradictory material in Trek-as-broadcast, I think, that one can conclude half a dozen different things about this. Still, it’s Word Of God, so it’s gospel until the next set of gods move in….
Actually I wonder if we’re losing the forest for the trees. The whole thing that keeps coming up with Jurati is how she’s always alone, and Soong’s pain is his failure to keep a family member alive, essentially — but that’s also where the season started with Picard. “The part of me that wants is the part that has to wait.” We keep quoting “Look up,” but that’s in the context of “when things get messy, look up and imagine how tiny the conflict is in the grand scheme.” The season premiere opens with “Time Is on My Side” and closes with “Non, je ne regrette rien”. What if all this about atonement isn’t about saving the world from a changed timeline, but about Picard stepping away from duty and obligation to meet his need for intimacy, or to face the fear of intimacy brought on by the violence in his family in his childhood?
@105 – That’s a really good way to describe the season. They don’t seem to have a really good through-line for the story. I mean, it could be fairly easy to draw a line from the ICE/Sanctuary districts/Guinan’s neighbourhood issues to the xenophobic Confederation of episode 2, although how that ties to the Borg of episode 1 or Q’s interest isn’t that clear. But then then they just keep bouncing along into other plot threads and characters, without really building off the previous plot threads, and not really moving the story along all that much either. It does make me wonder what the whole idea for the season really is, and why they can’t seem to just tell a straightforward story.
Yikes!?! There are only 4 left and… sooooooooo much left and still weaving more Q’s. And likely under 4 hours. This last one was what? Barely over half an hour.
It’s nice that they’re spending money on music, but that cover was absolutely terrible. Alison Pill was so stiff it was painful to watch. Apparently I’m the only one that thinks so, but to me it completely missed the spirit of the song.
I had to deal with multiple reactions to that song at once. Pill and the band sounded great. That arrangement was really cool. But… WTF? I’m still in disbelief over this bizarre trope popping up on this show. And hey, writers, I know the pair of security agents watching the monitors where Jurati was held were taken out but I don’t understand why the agent who first noticed her acting suspiciously wasn’t after her within seconds of her dramatic torch-song entrance.
More general comments:
I’m pretty sure Adam referred to Kore as kôr earlier, although my thoughts still went to the alternate name / aspect of Persephone from Greek mythology. This episode he definitely called her ‘kôr-ee — and, of course, Persephone was among the names of her other iterations in those files. It’s apt given that she was denied the sunlight.
When Rios first got to the clinic it felt to me like Teresa would end up revealed as his ancestor, story cliché and yet-one-more heavy coincidence though it would be. Now it strongly feels like they’re setting up the possibility of him staying behind in 2024 because of both her and how jazzed he is by life in this era.
I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been any real exploration this season of Picard’s new body, purely based on interviews with Stewart after last season ended in which he expressed curiosity in finding out what it could do.
Finally, while I know this isn’t entirely the fault of Picard, it bugs me that we don’t have a series exploring the 25th century, more or less the “present” of Trek now, between Picard doing time travel in this season and Strange New Worlds being yet another show set before the original.
@@.-@. ChristopherLBennett: And how the hell does she know a freaking Pat Benatar song? Or how does Jurati know it?
I guess not all records from this period are fragmentary. ;^)
Saw a Twitter comment comparing the relationship between cyberneticist Jurati and the Borg Queen to the relationship between computer scientist Baltar and Six from Battlestar Galactica, so I’m wondering how much Jurati wearing a bold red dress might be an homage to Tricia Helfer’s Six. (Though the Borg Queen looks more like Farscape’s Scorpius, the neural clone that infested and manipulated John Crichton.)
@109/CLB: I could probably have phrased that better. What I meant to say is that while the idiom of the show is indeed action/adventure — lots of it — the overall structure seems to be guided by considerations of subtext, symbolism, and character study rather than the logic of concrete plot elements.
Take the musical performance scene and the car chase scene as examples. From a plot-based, problem-solving perspective the logic is thin — not entirely inexplicable perhaps but dubious, or at least requiring more exposition than is given. But these respective scenes work great if we assume that they are intended as artistic vignettes expressing Jurati’s internal vulnerability to the Borg Queen or exploring Seven and Raffi’s characters and the tensions in their relationship.
I liked the little touch of having that ship model hanging from the ceiling that the two Picards talked about be the one from the “Star Trek: Enterprise” opening credits (which I can’t tell if anyone else here has also mentioned up to this point).
I think Kore is going to somehow be the divergence point. A few thoughts:
1.) In Greek mythology, Persephone, Kore, and Despoina were all variant names of the same goddess. That goddess was the daughter of Demeter (agriculture goddess) and Zeus. Persephone/Kore/Despoina is kidnapped and forcibly married to Hades, the god of death. In a nod to last season, the name Persephone means… “The Destroyer.”
2.) In her grief at losing her daughter, Demeter stops plants growing and causes a devastating future. It’s only after a compromise is reached through the assistance of Zeus that the future is saved, but the lasting effect is that the world now has six months of dead winter. Will we getting our old timeline back at the end with some unfortunate changes?
3.) So far the two seasons have seemed almost completely separate. But there are recurring themes. Jurati keeps getting her mind taken over (and seriously, what is up with that? Is there a “brainwashable” personality type?), and Kore/Soji is still someone with an ominous destiny that has holes in her mind as to her past. We’ve been thinking it sloppy writing to use the same actors for different characters, but maybe there’s a hidden meaning.
4.) What will this mean for Season 3? Will the synth and Borg storylines converge?
Inquiring minds want to know!!
My central reservation is that 60% of the way through, we still aren’t entirely sure what this show is about. For what it’s worth, here’s a quote from an article where Alison Pill offers her take on what the point of all this is:
(https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/alison-pill-interview-star-trek-picard-season-2-borg-queen-pat-bentar )
Previous versions of Star Trek have told us that getting assimilated by the hivemind of the Borg is always bad. What Jurati’s fusion with the Borg Queen suggests is… maybe it’s complicated?
Here’s Pill in her own words:
[…]
So, will Agnes Jurati become one with the Borg and give up her individuality in the process? Alison Pill isn’t so sure that’s even the right question anymore.
“I think we definitely all understand that humans are social animals and many animals are social,” Pill says. “So how do we organize ourselves by these principles that don’t put us in these individual black and white boxes and get stuck in the binary way of thinking? Of good vs. bad? Or with us or against us? How, how could we operate in society if those weren’t the only options? That’s what our show is about.”
@112/StevenEMcDonald: “Terry Mataias on Twitter has hedged right around this by referring back to Spock in TOS talking about records being iffy because of WWIII, so the Eugenics Wars might come on the heels of this.”
Err, except that Khan himself said in The Wrath of Khan that the Botany Bay was from 1996. And he was there.
I thought this week’s Patrick Stewart speech was very warm. Surprisingly so, I can see it being more Professor X than Captain Picard. But in this instance it was a bit more personal for him. He wasn’t counseling an officer, negotiating with a great foreign power, or extolling the values of the Federation or common decency or standing up for individual rights when superior officers had overstepped their bounds and good sense. He was talking to a family member someone he admired, who was struggling and lost her nerve. He was drawing on their familial connection…and his own personal experience. Jean-Luc is the Renee Picard of his generation, the brilliant dreamer, the stargazer, the one who could accomplish anything. He had his own traumas and his own doubts. But he is a version of Renee at the end of that journey. Who has realized all the promise, and reaped the benefits, and knows how fraught the path it…and how worthwhile journeying down it truly is. He is the beneficiary of her excellence, and like the students at the Academy, is paying it forward…or in this special case, backward. He can’t tell her the impact she’ll have, but he can let her benefit from his experience. He empathized with her, because they’re the same.
It was well executed too. He started by giving her something to take her mind off the problem, but by asking her about the shuttle, he refocused her on what she loves. She’s not an astronaut because she was forced along that path, but because she loves science. Like many of us, she loves ships, the tech, the possibilities. She even nicknamed the shuttle because of the engines.
I still love every scene with Jurati and the Queen, but I am a bit saddened with the Queen taking over. While I was thinking she was going to be the Agatha to Agnes’ Wanda, her just overpowering her kind of blunts that. And the WHERE IS SEVEN of it all is a bit stressful. Seven should be the one most cautious and vigilant about someone getting assimilated by the chief assimilatrex. Though Queenie sharing in the curtain call was hilarious. And again, that dress tho. Did not know Alison Pill had pipes like that, color me impressed. And I caught those creepy lyrics on first run. As for the Queen knowing the song…I mean all she’d have to do is assimilate a Pat Benatar fan and say, “wait…I like those lyrics.”
I’m a bit surprised that Rios didn’t have real cigars in the 24th/25th. I mean Picard is still making wine the old fashioned way, I would think that with the ability to easily reverse lung damage even with smoking going out of favor there would still be a few Cuban or Virginian tobacco farms making the old stuff. Though maybe Rios only smokes a variety of replicated cigar that does cause harm to the lungs..or at least no second smoke damage.
Can we say that Elnor was stuffed in the fridge? Because it seems they only killed him to knock Raffi off balance. She’s basically in the same emotional space as last season with having a relationship with a son destroyed. It pushes her back into that hyperfocused over-aggressive mental state that the Attack on Mars and Picard quitting did, but more recent and raw. I would’ve thought they would’ve shown us Raffi 100% on her game this season so we could see more of how she became Picard’s right hand.
I’m still hoping they’ll give us more of Seven being the more normal person now that she’s implant free, but they seem to be keeping us apart from that. Honestly Seven should be in the Dax position. Dax was a beautiful basically white lady who seemed to have gotten in some trouble and a guy immediately offered her help instead of tossing her in the Sanctuary District like the black and middle eastern man ended up.
Tallin’s appearance makes me think that this isn’t just time travel but a completely independent construct of Q’s as I think that’s a bit too much of a stretch that a Supervisor looks exactly like a Romulan that won’t be born for three centuries…unless Laris is also a Supervisor.
As for the Soong family…well, you can tell that Adam is Arik’s Great Grandfather. The aggressive refusal to accept defeat even against good sense is all there. The Kore reveal was expected, but also well executed. I’m glad they didn’t have the normal cliche of him finding her as she’s discovered the truth leading the melodramatic argument, which then leads to her being accidentally killed. I was waiting for the off screen, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
I would really like it if everything was because of an error Q made in his arrogance, it would be a nice bit of comeuppance. But I agree, having Renee be the local shatterpoint does seem to be too easy, too straightforward. Something’s off.
@125/Mr. D:
I think that is exactly what is so symbolic about the scene between Jean Luc and Renee. All season we’ve been negotiating the balance between Jean Luc Picard, military commander/security guard, and Jean Luc Picard, explorer/star gazer.
@125/Mr. D: “Though maybe Rios only smokes a variety of replicated cigar that does cause harm to the lungs..or at least no second smoke damage.”
Synthebacco!
Honestly, even aside from all the health issues, inhaling the smoke from something burning has always struck me as a terrible way to ingest a substance. If I were inclined to use recreational drugs, I’d go for something more like pot brownies. Although I’m perfectly content with just brownie brownies. Who needs other mood-altering substances when you have chocolate?
“Because it seems they only killed him to knock Raffi off balance… I would’ve thought they would’ve shown us Raffi 100% on her game this season so we could see more of how she became Picard’s right hand.”
That’s a great point. They had the chance to contrast with last season by showing Raffi at her prime, and instead they went for yet another rehash. Same with Jurati, having another malevolent female take over her mind.
This episode certainly stands out, for two reasons:
1. As @krad pointed out, it borrows the “flashback to an hour ago” trope that Sorkin’s shows have turned into a cliché (I should know; I watched every single one of them, and I hate the hell out of it, to the point where I avoid it if I’m writing any story).
Though to be honest, I don’t have a problem with that approach if there’s a narrative reason for it. But if the mystery is why Picard is comatose, then quite honestly it lands with a thud. We already know from last season that Picard is in an artificial body. It’s programmed to ‘die’ around the year 2430 or so. It wouldn’t just malfunction out of nowhere. Therefore, the only plausible explanation would be him suffering some kind of attack or some other external agent. Which makes Soong’s attempted murder all the more obvious and expected (well, not expected, but you expect danger the minute the club’s lights go out).
And then there’s reason number 2. I could be wrong, but I believe it’s by far the shortest live-action Trek episode ever made. Whether intentional or not, Matalas and the staff managed to pull a Mandalorian (a show that was advertised as an hour long drama, but barely breaks 30 minutes per episode). 39 minutes is a first. And I guess it’s because of reason number 1. They didn’t have nearly enough plot, and Jonathan Frakes always tends to keep things moving at a brisk pace in the edit. The minute they had that shot of Borg Jurati on that red dress facing the city, I knew they were going to cut to credits.
Also, I’m not buying Jurati breaking into song, and the band going along with it. Sure, it creates an instant mood, but plot-wise, it makes no sense. And this caper of an episode was all style and mood.
There are plusses, of course. I liked Picard’s pep talk with Renee quite a bit. I adored the scene of Soong’s guilt over running him down. And Kore discovering the extent of her father’s work was one of the most chilling sequences in a long time. For the first time, I can understand why the Omicron Theta colonists were so fearful of Noonian Soong. Other than Lore, we hadn’t yet gotten a real glimpse of how his vision could devolve into mad science and playing god to such a degree.
@128/Eduardo: “I believe it’s by far the shortest live-action Trek episode ever made.”
Not quite. Discovery: “Vaulting Ambition” from season 1 is slightly shorter, just under 38 minutes. And of course there’s the entire Short Treks series.
“Vaulting Ambition” was part 3 of the 4-part Mirror Universe arc, and I felt they could’ve tightened up that arc and gotten the whole thing into three or even two episodes. I feel the same here. The season is way too padded, and this episode had too little in it to justify being a whole episode, even a short one.
@129/Christopher: Second shortest, then. I’d forgotten the pacing of Discovery’s Mirror Universe episodes. Though I don’t consider Short Treks on the same category. They’re designed as 3 to 5 minute short stories, after all. I meant shortest in terms of shows that are designed and advertised as hour-long dramas.
@130/Eduardo: Well, in 1966, an “hourlong” commercial TV drama was maybe 50-52 minutes, but ever since the ’90s, more or less, an “hourlong” drama has generally been 40-44 minutes, sometimes less. So 38-39 minutes isn’t that bad. The way I see it is that if streaming episodes are typically in the range of 45-55 minutes, that’s a bonus, better than we’ve had on commercial TV this century.
@131/Christopher: Not that I’m complaining either. I actually enjoy Mandalorian‘s brief runtime, given how minimal the story is on that show. Shorter episodes can work remarkably well, and I welcome them. Given how much of a film/TV/book/gaming backlog I have, I’ll take a short episode over a longer one any day. It allows me to accomplish more each day.
It’s just unusual for a show like Picard, that’s all. We’re already used to 45-50 minutes, which makes 39 feel like a big difference. And given how overlooked Seven has been this season, it almost feels as if they’ve been cutting her scenes.
I don’t really care how long an episode is. It should be as long as it needs to be to tell its story, whether that’s 34 minutes or 74 minutes. One of the nice things about these streaming dramas has been that episodes aren’t confined to 42 minutes or some other specific standard to accommodate ads. Unfortunately, in this particular season I feel like they have ended some of the episodes at moments chosen to create cliffhangers instead of at what felt, to me, like more natural moments. For instance, I feel like the natural end of episode 2 was not when some random villain we don’t care about gets the drop on them, but when they do the slingshot maneuver. Episode whatever it was that we wasted on a pointless car chase should not have ended with Raffi and Seven waiting by the side of the road, it should have ended with the reunion of the team. Each episode is not an old-school season finale. We shouldn’t need these mini-cliffhangers to manufacture tension. We should be well along for the ride by the point in the series without that kind of manipulation.
I definitely agree with @133/mastadge about how unnecessary these cliffhangers are. I mean, if they dropped the entire season all at once, so people were binge-watching it, then the cliffhangers would make sense, but since we need to a wait a week for the next episode regardless, they’re just obnoxious. I also think that they could have done away with the silly car chase episode altogether and rolled the important plot points into the next episode.
I think it was Roger Ebert who said, “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is too short.”
All the men in the Soong family are self-absorbed asses.
I could not disagree more with those questioning the choice of the Pat Benatar song. As many have noted, lyrically it so freaking on point the song might as well have been written especially for the episode. And I rather liked the somewhat surreal break with Jurati’s performance. Weird, but fun.
Agree that it’s becoming ever more conspicuously curious that Seven is being left with nothing to do. During the debate between Raffi and Tallin it was almost painful watching Jeri Ryan in the background trying to figure out what her character’s reaction was supposed to be. It’s like they’ve completely forgotten about her except as a foil to Raffi.
All in all, not the greatest episode, but I’d rather watch this one ten times over then watch 5 minutes of Discovery. For better or worse I’m invested in these characters, while l I kind of wish the anomaly had vaporized the Galaxy over in the 29th Century or wherever they are. And sue me, but I like continuity porn laid on really thick when it comes to anything to do with Picard and TNG. More money shots please
Seven offered valuable commentary in early episodes regarding the capabilities of the Borg queen, and there’s no doubt she’ll have similar unique insights in the episodes to come. I’m looking forward to the developments of the next episode, provided we’re through with filler relative to the larger plot. I’d personally argue we’ve seen the least development with Rios, and I expect that trend to continue through his relatively inconsequential relationship with the doctor.
Picard seemed to name-drop “Who Watches the Watchers?” in this episode, in his conversation with Tallin about not contacting Renee (“Who watches over you?”). Any significance to that?
@139/Sarek: No, he was referencing how the Borg Queen had told him to seek a “Watcher,” which turned out to be Tallinn. Tallinn’s job was to watch over Renee, so Picard was asking who watched over her.
The TNG episode title was a quote of the line “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?“, i.e. “Who watches the watchers/watchmen?,” from the Roman poet Juvenal’s Satires in the early 100s AD, which was also the inspiration for the title of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Its meaning is quite different from Picard’s question, because it’s asking who keeps law enforcers from breaking the law, who keeps them honest. Picard wasn’t asking about watching in that sense, but in the sense of whether Tallinn had anyone to care for her the way she cared for Renee. It was more in the sense of the song “Someone to Watch Over Me,” though not necessarily a reference to it. (And yes, that was the title of a Voyager episode, but many Trek titles are references to earlier things, so it’s thinking too narrowly to assume that Trek only references other Trek.)
I could give a pass to Jurati’s singing not being stopped by security. I’ve been at enough events where some clever soul on the organizing committee forgets to tell everyone about every little thing. The security forces could easily assume this is part of the show. There are weaknesses, of course. Why isn’t the main office contacted; and why is there no suspicion when they don’t answer.
But how Jean-Luc was able to continue to find Renee without interference is incomprehensible to me. The sudden power failure should have heightened security’s suspicions and brought out more agents. Whey weren’t the regular attendees being evacuated? Or at least an attempt when the power went? That doesn’t make sense. If Soong has alerted them to remove Picard, they should have continued that effort through and after the power went out, even if they believed the power failure was part of the show.
Quoth costumer: “I’ve been at enough events where some clever soul on the organizing committee forgets to tell everyone about every little thing.”
Did those events also have incredibly tight and nigh-draconian security procedures to get in that were connected to an air-gapped computer system?
See, that’s the problem. On the one hand, this event was so hard to get into that it required massive hacking by our 25th-century heroes to even get into the place, but then that same tight security just disappeared once they got in. Plus, y’know, the person singing was the one they arrested…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido