In season three of Discovery, Janet Kidder played the antagonistic character of Osyraa, the leader of the criminal organization known as the Emerald Chain. Introduced in “The Sanctuary,” she was not all that great a bad guy, just kind of there. It wasn’t until she was paired up with Oded Fehr’s Admiral Vance to negotiate for an alliance between the Federation and the Chain in “There is a Tide…” that the character finally worked and came alive.
Watching this week’s Picard, I was having Osyraa-in-“There is a Tide…” flashbacks in watching the character of Todd Stashwick’s Captain Liam Shaw, which is one of several things I really really liked about this excellent sophomore episode of the third season…
There was a lot of speculation in the comments of my review of “The Next Generation” about certain things, including two questions that were answered in “Disengage,” and which I’ll get to in a bit.
But first, let’s talk about Shaw, because he was one of my least favorite things about the premiere, and if he’d been written there the way he was written in “Disengage,” that might not have been the case. (Stashwick, by the way, is fantastic in the role no matter how it’s written.)
The problem with Shaw last week is that the deck was stacked against him to the point of absurdity, starting with his reprehensible forcing of Seven to use her birth name of Annika Hansen. Dead-naming a character we have known and loved for two-and-a-half decades instantly casts Shaw as a total dick, and then they pile on by having him diss Picard’s wine and Riker’s favorite music, assigning his VIP guests a shitty room, and starting dinner without said guests who were specifically invited to dine with the captain. His rejecting the notion of traveling to the Ryton system therefore is just the cherry on top of his being a total douchenozzle—
—except that refusal is completely reasonable. And his anger at his orders being disobeyed is even more completely reasonable. And so we get the writer’s trick of having him be a schmuck in order to make Picard and Riker look better. It would’ve been much more effective to have him totally fangoober Picard and Riker and treat them like the VIPs they are, and then when they ask for the course change, then he becomes a hardass, because there’s no reason to divert to Ryton (that Picard and Riker are willing to explain, anyhow).
This week, however, Shaw comes across better. He’s smarting from Seven disobeying his orders, and initially, he’s perfectly happy to leave the “two relics who think a couple of brass medals make them golden boys” to their fate. But he comes around to do the right thing on two different occasions. The first is after Seven reminds him that it’s better to be the hero who saved heroes than to be the asshole who let two legends die.
The second dovetails nicely with one of our answers to last week’s unanswered questions: who is Crusher’s kid’s Dad? Before we find that out, we find out who he is generally. His name is Jack Crusher (yes, Beverly named her second child after the long-dead father of her first child). He deals in black-market medical supplies (as shown in the teaser, which takes place two weeks prior to the episode). His mother has apparently been helping him with this. And, as revealed at the very end of the episode, Jean-Luc Picard is the baby-daddy.
Because, apparently, speaking English with a British accent is totally inherited, he says rolling his eyes so hard he can see out the back of his head…
Ed Speleers is very engaging as Jack, at least, though he’s a bit too much of the charming-rogue cliché that everyone and her sister has been doing in science fiction since Harrison Ford did it in 1977. His conversation with Picard in the Titan brig is one of the episode’s many high points, as the admiral tries to find out more about Crusher’s kid (he doesn’t yet know he’s Dad, and, to be fair, neither does Jack). The reason for the talk is that Jack is wanted all over the galaxy—and has used several other identities besides Jack Crusher—and a rather nasty bounty hunter named Captain Vadic is after him.
The trailers for Picard season three have shown three different antagonists for the season, and we meet one of them this week: Amanda Plummer, having a grand old time munching scenery as Vadic in a role that is favorably and gleefully reminiscent of her father’s performance as General Chang in The Undiscovered Country. She’s the captain of Shrike, the big-ass ship that’s been chasing the Crushers around, apparently to get her grubby hands on Jack.
This provides us with the episode’s primary conflict. Yes, Jack is wanted, but the humane thing to do is to bring him to a Federation facility to stand trial. Vadic is not likely to deal in any kind of justice that anyone on Titan can live with.
Jack certainly isn’t willing to live with it, and to show that, we get one of the worst Trek clichés, incompetent security! Jack has a doodad on his person that somehow was missed by internal sensors, and he apparently wasn’t searched before being jailed, and then Jack tricks his guard into getting close, and Jesus fucking Christ, Starfleet security is the worst. (It really is just Starfleet, too. The one and only competent security chief in the entire history of Trek as a franchise was Odo, who was part of the Bajoran Militia, not Starfleet, and who actually understood how to do his job. This makes him unique, with the possible exceptions of La’an and Shaxs, on whom the jury is still out, the former because we haven’t seen enough of her on Strange New Worlds, the latter because most of what he does is off-camera on Lower Decks.)
The problem our heroes face is that Titan is almost comically outgunned. Shrike is massively over-powered and over-weaponed. Riker at one point describes it as not so much being a ship as a guillotine. Shaw himself comes out and says that Starfleet doesn’t negotiate with bounty hunters, but he’s also not willing to sacrifice the five hundred people under his command. So Shaw is, reluctantly, willing to hand Jack over.
And then Crusher finally comes out of her coma, and Riker brings her to the bridge, and she just nods at Picard, at which point the admiral realizes that he’s a father. (And yes, Gates McFadden got a special guest star credit in an episode in which all she does is walk out of a turbolift and nod. Nice work if you can get it…)
At that point, Picard puts on his admiral hat and belays the order to let Jack go—because he’s his son. To Shaw’s credit, he is not at all willing to let a person turn over his offspring to a psychopath, and so Titan fires weapons and goes deeper into the nebula in the hopes of making it out alive…
That’s where the A-plot leaves off. Next week should involve lots of chasing through nebulae and maybe finally getting Crusher’s side of what she’s been doing with her kid, since the only source for what they’ve been doing is Jack, who is far from a reliable font of information.
Meanwhile, we have the second question from last week that’s answered: who is Raffi Musiker’s handler? And it’s my personal favorite punch-the-air moment in the entire short history of Star Trek: Picard as a TV series.
Said handler is seemingly very obdurate. Musiker is feeling the weight of the attack on the Starfleet recruitment office, in which one hundred and seventeen people have died because she didn’t act fast enough. She wants to continue the investigation, but the handler—still communicating only via text messages—says that they have a suspect and she’s to stop pursuing it for the time being. But Musiker knows the suspect in question: Lurak T’Luco, a low-level Romulan criminal, who is very unlikely to have graduated from hijacking and petty thievery to terrorist attack. She wants to go after a Ferengi named Sneed who brokered the deal with T’Luco; her handler says no; she goes anyhow.
As is often the case with Picard’s erstwhile aide, Musiker has to deal with crap from her past in order to do her job in the present. In this case, we meet Jay, who is the father of her son, whom we met back in “Stardust City Rag.” Jay has a more subdued version of the hostility their son showed in that first-season episode. Musiker’s ability to see patterns is so focused, so intense, that she goes down rabbit-holes, ones that often have addictive narcotics somewhere in the hole. Her search for Sneed against the wishes of her handler is a big red flag for Jay, but he helps her anyhow. Randy J. Goodwin does an excellent job of showing Jay’s exhausted frustration with his ex.
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And then we meet Sneed himself, played by Aaron Stanford, with whom show-runner Terry Matalas has worked before on Nikita and 12 Monkeys. Stanford is a perfect Ferengi, and watching the back and forth between him and Musiker is beautifully scripted by co-executive producers Christopher Monfette and Sean Tretta and acted by Stanford and Michelle Hurd. Musiker takes a drug called Splinter to “prove” that she isn’t a narc, and she keeps to her cover story—that she’s working for T’Luco and wants to know why Sneed framed him—even while high. Sneed, however, has an ace up his sleeve: T’Luco is dead, and to prove it, he presents T’Luco’s disembodied head.
High as a kite, Musiker is convinced she’s about to die until someone shows up and takes out Sneed (beheading him as he beheaded T’Luco), then picks up Musiker and tells her that he told her not to engage. Director/executive producer Doug Aarniokoski does a beautiful job of showing us this bit from Musiker’s blurry POV, keeping us from seeing who it is until the punchline, when we go from Musiker being picked up to swing around to see the face of her savior: as many speculated in the comments last week, it’s Worf.
Amusingly, there are hints prior to that. When Musiker is talking to her handler, every once in a while there’s a quick music cue that sounds a bit like the Klingon theme from The Motion Picture, which has been used to symbolize Worf on more than one occasion (notably in TNG’s “The Enemy” and in First Contact). It’s used more overtly when Worf’s face is revealed.
This was a punch-the-air moment for me for several reasons. For starters, Worf is one of my two favorite Trek characters (the other being Kira Nerys). I also love Michael Dorn’s new look as a white-haired Klingon. It suits him remarkably well. And finally, I really like the idea of Worf working for Starfleet Intelligence.
Two potential issues from this B-plot. One is Sneed’s offhand mention of Section 31. Apparently everyone at Secret Hideout has forgotten that 31 is supposed to be a secret, not known to most folks, and it’s not the same as Starfleet Intelligence. The other is that one thing that was seen in the publicity for this season is Worf declaring that he has renounced violence and is a pacifist now, which is at odds with the rather brutal treatment of Sneed and his people here. Having said that, that was one out-of-context line of dialogue in a trailer. I’m real curious to see what the context is. (Something else to keep in mind is that, as we’ve seen with Musiker in just these two episodes, working in Intelligence often means lying like a cheap rug, so Worf’s pacifist line could be part of a cover story…)
Worf’s involvement gives this side plot an additional link to the main plot. We already had one with Musiker’s involvement, what with her connection to both Picard and Seven, and this episode provides another in its revelation that the Crushers are dealing in black-market material, which could conceivably link to the theft of classified weaponry that Musiker and Worf are looking into…
I’m feeling much better about this season than I was a week ago. Part of it is seeing Plummer’s gloriously over-the-top Vadic, part of it is Stanford’s excellent performance as Sneed (and I regret that his decapitation means we won’t be seeing more of him, except maybe in flashback), part of it is the much less biased portrayal of Shaw, part of it is the expected joy of seeing Hurd, Sir Patrick Stewart, and Jeri Ryan play their characters in any context, and, at least for me, a big part of it is seeing Dorn back. Worf was a last-minute add-on to TNG’s cast, and from the sheer power of Dorn’s awesomeness, he is now making his 276th appearance in the role of that character, which is by far a record for a single actor playing a single character on Trek.
This season is already doing one thing better than either of its predecessors. Season one took forever to get the story moving, while season two kept shifting the goalposts as to what the story actually was in its first three installments. These two episodes already form a more coherent whole than the early days of the last two seasons, which gives me a modicum of hope.
Looking forward to seeing more than eight seconds of Dorn next week…
Keith R.A. DeCandido recently had a Star Trek Adventures role-playing game module (written with Fred Love) published, entitled Incident at Kraav III. He has a new Trek story coming out in April, entitled “You Can’t Buy Fate,” which will be in issue #7 of Star Trek Explorer.
