Star Trek: Picard -- "Stardust City Rag"

There's almost no point in talking about this episode. Imagine a heist movie. Better yet, imagine Ariel or Trash, the heist movie episodes of Firefly. You now know almost everything you need to know about this week's episode of Picard. How it was written. How it was shot (mastermind explains the plan to her dimwitted colleagues at the same time that we, the audience, watch those colleagues execute said plan). Just replace "the crew of the Serenity breaks into a highly secure hospital to gain access to its very advanced maguffinatron, only to have their plan nearly go to pieces with Jayne betrays them" with "the crew of La Sirena breaks into a highly disreputable space casino to gain access to Doctor Bruce Maddux, only to have their plan nearly go to pieces when Seven-of-Nine lies to Picard" and you're all caught up. We do learn some VERY IMPORTANT FACTS along the way:

• Raffi has a son from whom she became estranged when she became more focused on unraveling the conspiracy than burned Mars than on living life with her family.  Apparently "the Conclave of Eight" is a thing we are going to have to worry about.
• Seven-of-Nine is a member of the Fenris Rangers, a group of interstellar vigilantes trying to protect those in need in a post-Federation galaxy. You would think I would be more bullish on the idea that the lawless frontier is being guarded by a small band of Rangers. Unfortunately, the concept looks fair and feels foul.
• Doctor Jurati, who opened the episode watching very twee holovids in which she argues with Doctor Maddux about the virtues of replicated versus backed chocolate chip cookies (there may also be kissing), was so disturbed by whatever Commodore Oh told her that, shortly after helping the rest of the crew rescue Doctor Maddux from his space gangster captors, she murders him by turning off the "hemorrhagic reparative bibbledy-bonker" to which he is connected. She does this in full view of Captain Rios' Emergency Medical Holoself, so it is unclear how this is going to remain a mystery to the rest of the crew for more than fifteen minutes. Also EVIL. 
• There is a booming black market economy in Borg implants, harvested from largely unwilling disassimilated persons and used for... reasons.
• Patrick Stewart absolutely does not have a French accent in him.

And now the gang is off to The Artifact/Romulan Reclamation Center. Never stop never stopping.

I remain begrudgingly interested in the show. This episode was almost unrecognizable as Star Trek, possibly because it was instantly recognizable as Firefly, or even Star Wars. If Patrick Stewart had looked out from the bridge of La Sirena and intoned "Freecloud... you will never find a more wretched hive of scum, villainy, and personalized holographic advertisements" I would not have been offended. I, however, am starting to realize that I am less interested in the whacky space adventure we are currently than I am in learning how we got to a place where said whacky space adventure even makes sense. Freecloud -- a semi-lawless, late capitalist afterscape run by racketeers and human traffickers -- did not feel like a place that belonged in the Star Trek universe, and yet, it is. How? Has it always been like this on the frontier (just as Mars was always an industrial wasteland), or have things really gotten that bad? What did Seven-of-Nine mean that, after the Romulan evacuation ended "the Neutral Zone collapsed and the law broke down"? What does literally anyone else think about the Federation's isolationism and the fact of a Romulan refugee state? I cannot believe that neither the Vulcans nor the Klingons had anything to say about the demise of the Romulan Star Empire, and yet, we have yet to see anyone with pointy ears who isn't a Romulan, and Irish Romulan's Husband's off-hand mention of Worf has been this show's only concession to date that Klingons even exist. Also: whose idea was it to write episodes that were not about Irish Romulan and Her Husband?

In my first post, I worried that this show was going to descend into the same morass of needless conspiracy and subterfuge that swallowed Discovery. Picard is clearly oriented towards unmasking a massive conspiracy but, for the most part, they do seem to have abandoned the notion that they can or should try to fool the audience for long. Unfortunately, I cannot definitively say that they have eschewed Discovery's roughly sketched shocks in favor of highly detailed explanation. How did Jean-Luc end up on his sofa after the attack at the Starfleet archives? How did Seven-of-Nine end up at Vashti just in time to save La Sirena's keister at the end of the last episode? The heist-threatening twist in the middle of this episode is that Seven-of-Nine is only along for the ride so that she can murder the woman currently holding Doctor Maddux hostage.  Turns out, Maddux's captor once stripped one of Seven's ex-Borg friends down for parts. But Seven-of-Nine did not learn that Jean-Luc and company were even going to Freecloud until the second act of this episode. What was she doing at Vashti? Furthering the plot, of course.

I really was starting to like this show.

Star Trek: Picard -- "Absolute Candor"

For nearly 20 years, the community of people who like watching spaceships on television has been haunted by one unanswerable question: “when are they going to make more Firefly?” I like to think that, whenever cast members of Joss Whedon’s seemingly universally loved space western gather together, they compare notes on how long each has gone since last being asked that question. The figure can’t be high. At long last, we have our answer, and it is “now.” Nathan Fillion can finally meet Gina Torres for coffee without the geekosphere exploding with unjustified hope. Technically, the question was answered in November 2019 when Disney gave us The Mandalorian, which I highly encourage you to watch, especially if the last Star Wars you saw was inflicted upon you by J.J. Abrams; Mando will wash that taste right out of your mouth. However, whereas the strength of Firefly was always its ensemble, The Mandalorian relied a little to heavily on “a guy who looks like that guy you think is cool but can’t articulate why” and the physical manifestation of cuteness. Picard, it would seem, is going to recreate the special sauce with a little more fidelity. A ragtag starship crew composed of equal parts comic relief, philosophical gravitas, and distilled violence attempt to navigate their way through a universe in which all political authority is corrupt and shadowy conspiracies abound. Turns out you can’t take the sky from me.

In case you can’t tell, I really liked this episode.

This week’s story focused on Jean-Luc’s attempt to recruit the presumably final member of his highly specialized rescue team. The pre-credit flashback (told you so) takes place on the planet Vashti, a Romulan refugee camp, on the day of Mars’ burning. Admiral Picard is visiting Vashti to check in on an order of nuns, specifically Romulan assassin warrior nuns, who have been instrumental in aiding his and Raffi’s efforts. He doesn’t actually have much to say to the nuns. He does, however, have a great deal to say and do and share with Elnor, a ten-year-old boy left in the nuns’ keeping until they can find “a more suitable home.” They fence together. They read The Three Musketeers together. They do all kinds of things that one would never expect of Captain “I need to to stand between me and the children, Number One.” And then Raffi calls. Mars is burning. Jean-Luc has to leave. Now. Apparently, it is a long time before he will ever return.

Fourteen years, to be exact. When we return to 2399, Jean-Luc has ordered Captain Rios to make a brief stop-over at Vashti. Raffi thinks this is a bad idea. She is probably right. She is usually right. I am choosing to interpret her yellow uniform in last week’s flashback as an indication that she worked in security, at which she is unusually good. Jean-Luc wants to engage one of the warrior assassin nuns on his quest. Of course, it is not just a matter of payment. You do not choose the warrior assassin nuns. The warrior assassin nuns choose you. Ka like the wind.

Vashti is not the way Jean-Luc left it. Or, maybe, it is exactly the way Jean-Luc left it, only more so. After the slipshod nature of the Romulan evacuation, the Romulans are living in a world devoid of any governmental structure. Captain Rios informs us that a handful of warlords have decided to try setting up shop in the sector, but it’s not obvious that anyone is in charge. Vashti itself remains poor and extremely volatile. The bar near Jean-Luc’s beam down site prominently displays a sign reading “Romulans only” (we never actually see anyone who’s not a Romulan on Vashti, either in 2399 or in 2385, but Jean-Luc is not pleased and we may safely assume that the sign did not used to be there). For all that, the warrior assassin nuns are actually glad to see Jean-Luc. They seem to be the only ones who are. Space twitter lights up with posts when he is sighted and, as Raffi notes, “they are not love letters.” The head nun suggests Jean-Luc engage Elnor’s services. A “more suitable home” was never found and he has just completed his training. Jean-Luc tells Elnor his story. Elnor cares (“You told me about Data… he had an orange cat named Spot”). Jean-Luc does not. Jean-Luc wants a warrior assassin. Elnor wants Jean-Luc to say that he came back because he specifically needed Elnor. Unfortunately, Elnor doesn’t have the power to throw Jean-Luc’s ship halfway across the galaxy to drive the point home. This is the second time in as many weeks that we have been confronted with the callousness of nonagenarian Jean-Luc. Last week, Raffi told us that, after they were both drummed out of Starfleet, Jean-Luc completely lost touch with her. Apparently, a similar fate has befallen Elnor, one of the only five children Jean-Luc Picard has ever shown any affection for, hallucinatory children and grandchildren notwithstanding. This may be a part of a larger narrative questioning why we, as people, do the things we do, and if we ever actually do them for the right reasons. Raffi and Elnor were important to Jean-Luc when they were a part of a story Jean-Luc told about himself as the savior of Romulus. When that fell apart, they became reminders of his failure. It may also be part of a narrative about how, as we grow older, it becomes harder and harder to hold our lives together. In either case, I see this as a brutal, but welcome instance of reality intruding upon the Star Trek universe. Burn your idols. All of them.

Jean-Luc does a very stupid thing before leaving Vashti. Remember that bar with the “Romulans only” sign? He takes the sign down and tries to order a drink. This does not go well, and Jean-Luc is soon confronted by a gang of Romulans with swords (!) led by a former Romulan Senator. The Senator informs Jean-Luc that he wants neither his help nor his pity. He blames Jean-Luc for convincing the Romulans to doubt themselves, making them dependent on the Federation, and then yanking the rug out from under them at the last minute. To his credit, Jean-Luc denies the intent of which he is being accused of, but not the impact. Once more, reality brutally impinges upon the Star Trek universe. Charity is not an unalloyed good. It may not even be a good. It is, at best, a “better-than.” Charity is based upon a power dynamic, a model of savior and saved that reserves the ability to act almost exclusively for the former. In fifty years of replicating blankets, diverting killer asteroids, and stabilizing protonova suns, I cannot recall Star Trek ever acknowledging this reality. It is likely true that millions more Romulans would have died if Jean-Luc had not acted. It is also true that the way Jean-Luc acted deprived something vital from the Romulans who lived. This is not your parents’ Star Trek. This Star Trek has been paying attention.

The rest of the episode is fairly pro-forma. The Senator challenges Jean-Luc to a duel. Jean-Luc refuses to fight. The Senator is unimpressed. Elnor shows up to conveniently decapitate the Senator with a totally awesome mid-air twirl-and-attack. Apparently, the primary criterion for the warrior assassin nuns accepting a client is that the client’s cause be a lost cause. Commala come ko. A classic — I mean CLASSIC, as in Mark Lenard in The Balance of Terror classic — Romulan Bird of Prey (yes; that’s what they were called back then) shows up. There’s a firefight in which Captain Rios’ ship, the La Sirena, gets aid from a mysterious second ship. The pilot of said ship gets in trouble and has to beam aboard, and look! It’s Seven-of-Nine.

Our analogy is now complete. Seven-of-Nine and Elnor bring the highly competent violence of Zoe and Jayne. Jean-Luc brings the theological gravitas of Shepherd Book. Captain Rios is what Wash would have become if Wash had survived the experience of getting run through with a harpoon. Raffi embodies the space libertarianism of Mal. Doctor Jurati brings the scholastic professionalism and worldly naiveté of a Simon Tam and also she is definitely evil. Nothing concrete happened to further my case, but I am operating on a “guilty until proven innocent” model here. Burn the land and boil the sea. Engage.

Oh yeah: apparently “the Destroyer” is supposed to usher in Romulan Ragnarok, in which “all of the demons will break their bonds and answer the call of the Destroyer.” That was all fine and important, I guess. Everything in the Reclamation Center read like a romantic comedy if everyone involved in the romantic comedy were capable of acknowledging how creepy romantic comedies usually are.

Star Trek: Picard -- "The End is the Beginning"

Star Trek is big. It is too big for any one person to completely hold it in their mind (even if that one person is a Star Trek showrunner). It is definitely too big for any one person to love all of it simultaneously. It is probably too big to be about one thing. The Original Series was about proving that our conception of freedom is the correct conception of freedom, if only we could understand what it actually meant. The Federation was novel, or, at least, expanding, and surrounded on all sides by entities of nameless power and questionable intent. “Deep Space 9” was about learning that other people’s conceptions of freedom are probably also the correct conceptions of freedom. The Federation itself faced no real threat (until the Dominion War), but, at the borderlands, the intersection between the reality experienced by the luminaries of Earth and Vulcan and that experienced by everyone else was starting to come into question. “Voyager” was about a lot of deeply earnest people exploring the meaning of deep earnesty. “Enterprise” did not happen and I have no idea what you are talking about (see what I did there?). If I had to pick one thing that “The Next Generation,” my Star Trek, was about, “who gets to be a person?” is probably not a bad choice. The series begins and ends with Q threatening to wipe out humanity (and possibly all other carbon-based lifeforms) because we are either too barbaric or too stupid to be allowed to exist. The series is undergirded by a pervasive awe at the fact of Data and what that means in a universe permeated with machines that could easily pass the Turing test. Halfway through the final season of the series, the Enterprise — the actual ship — gives birth through the miracle of holodeck trains. Artificial life existed in the Original Series, but it was always a menace, threatening to consume everything that was born, not made. Thankfully, 1960s artificial intelligence was almost universally easily dispatched through exposure to the contradictions of being in the universe. Captain Kirk defended freedom against those who would take it from others. Captain Picard defended freedom against his own inclination to deny it to someone because they had been made, not born. It’s starting to look like he didn’t do nearly as good a job as we were initially led to believe. In the series “Picard” he is being given the chance to come to terms with that failure and to try to do better. Let’s do a recap, shall we?

Flashback to 2385, days (hours?) after the events of last week’s pre-credit flashback (I think this is going to be A Thing). Admiral Picard emerges from Starfleet Command where Lieutenant Commander Raffi, the woman from last week with the phaser and the “get the hell off my lawn you crazy SOB” relationship to Jean-Luc, is waiting for him. The revolt of the synthetics has destroyed the fleet meant to facilitate the evacuation of Romulus. Jean-Luc has just made his last, best effort to convince Starfleet to adopt a plan B which he and Raffi have cobbled together from a hodgpodge of decomissioned Starfleet vessels and an army of synthetic crewmembers, which Starfleet has just banned, to Jean-Luc’s utter bewilderment. “They say that [the attack on Mars] indicates a fatal coding flaw in the operating system,” Jean-Luc reports. There’s a lot going on there. One of the driving premises of this series is that Jean-Luc Picard has been fundamentally unable to move beyond Data’s final heroic sacrifice. I don’t recall Jean-Luc, Beverly, or Geordi ever referring to the vital forces driving Data’s positronic brain as an “operating system.” My phone has an operating system. I suppose one can argue that, insomuch as I am just a computer made of meat, I also have an operating system, but I doubt that any of my friends would feel comfortable saying that about me, especially after my death. I would expect Data to be afforded the same respect. I will reiterate that Jean-Luc and Raffi intended to make up for the loss of the rescue fleet’s crew by populating their ersatz fleet with synthetic crew members, none of whom, I assume, would be given the chance to volunteer. It does not bode well for any of us that the man who defended Data’s rights in “the Measure of a Man” thought that Starfleet’s use of synthetic labor was reasonable right up to, and presumably beyond the moment that they banned it. “Fortunately,” Starfleet is even further on the wrong side of the personhood question than Jean-Luc Picard. They have ordered all synthetic life forms disassembled and scuttled the Romulan rescue operation. In a final act of desperation, Jean-Luc demands that Starfleet accept either his plan or his resignation. They accept his resignation. A few minute later, “the CNC” (i.e. Admiral Can’t’Act) calls Raffi into Starfleet Command to be fired. All justice is political in the 24th century. Fun fact: the last time I heard the tearm “CNC” was in Star Trek VI. I think it refers to head of all Starfleet. Admiral Can’t’Act may yet go far in the annals of terrible admiralty.

In 2399, Jean-Luc Picard and Raffi are discussing the Dahj/Soji/Jat Vazh situation. Raffi seems to blame Jean-Luc for the premature end of her career, or maybe she blames him for the fact that he resigned and retired to a manor house on a vineyard, while she got fired and now lives in a trailer in the desert. The Federation is, indeed, a classless society; it’s just that “classless” is being used in a different sense than we all thought. Because of their divergent fortunes, Raffi wants nothing more to do with Jean-Luc, even though she loves a good Romulan conspiracy theory, having spent the last 14 years convinced that the Tal Shi’ar orchestrated the attack on Mars. She has no clear answer to the question “why would they attack a fleet designed expressly for the rescue of their own people?”

“That’s what happens in a cover-up; things disappear.”

I want to dismiss this as the post-fact schlock that it is, but the question is asked just too frequently and Jean-Luc dismisses it just too flippantly for the Tal Shi’ar not to have orchestrated the attack on Mars. All that remains is for the showrunners to tell us why.

Eventually, Raffi relents, agreeing to refer Jean-Luc — or “J-L” as she calls him; I will never get used to that — to a pilot who can aid him in his hunt for the missing sister robot.

Speaking of the missing sister robot*: we are learning things at the Romulan Reclamation Center. Specifically, we are learning that the Romulan Reclamation Center is run by the Reclamation Initiative and that the Reclamation Initiative is run by Hugh, Geordi’s second best friend turned resistance fighter under the Lore regime turned… what did happen to him after “Descent”? Whatever transpired, Hugh is now properly de-assimiliated. He is both a fully individuated being and a color indicative of circulation taking place in his capillaries. Only a few tastefully placed face rivets and a Frankensteinian network of scarring speak to his time as a member of the Borg collective. Hugh is very impressed by Soji’s work as a clinical psychiatrist for emerging post-Borg (ex-Borg, I guess; Hugh calls them “XBs”). Soji leverages Hugh’s good favor to get an interview with Ramda, the foremost scholar on Romulan mythology (because there’s only one Romulan mythology) before she was assimilated. Ramda is being kept in a wing of the center devoted to XB Romulans (XBRs?) who are having a particularly hard time adjusting back to individuality. We see Romulans with face rivets speaking to walls, frantically solving Rubik’s cubes, and, in Ramda’s case, playing with Romulan tarot cards. When Soji and Hugh arrive, Ramda is playing the tarot card with the door on it. Except it is not a door; it is a false door. “Traditional Romulan houses all have a false door at the front,” Soji explains, “to get in, you have to go around to the back.” Because of course they do. Exposition ensues. Soji is an anthroplogist who wants to build a “common narrative framework” to help guide Romulan Borg out of the collective. It’s fun to see Star Trek techno-babble cross the university quad into the humanities departments. Soji turns heads when she reveals that Ramda was one of the last batch of Romulans assimilated by this Borg cube before its “submatrix collapsed,” presumably severing it from the collective. According to the other Romulan Romulans and Hugh, Soji wasn’t supposed to know that. According to Soji, she doesn’t know why she does.

*If anyone wants to help me form a band named “Missing Sister Robot,” I am all in. I just need a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and a vocalist (you know: a band).

Back on Earth, Commodore Oh visits Doctor Jurati, the Daystrom Institute cyberneticist with whom Jean-Luc has been consulting.

In orbit around Earth, Picard meets Captain Rios (a lot of “R” names in this series), a cigar-smoking ex-Starfleet officer who is now a freelance captain whose only crewmember is a seven foot tall Wookiee… sorry, an emergency medical hologram that manifests as a projection of Captain Rios’ own self, speaking in an Irish accent rather than the Captain’s native Spanish accent. This is the part where my wife asks “didn’t Starfleet ban all synthetic life?” and I remind everyone that, even though “Doctor Soong was an unprecedented genius and no one has been able to reproduce what he did,” the USS Voyager’s emergency medical hologram was almost indistinguishable from a person within 12 hours of being left ever-on. The personhood question is messy. It probably has to be defined in the moment, and if you blink, you can find yourself on the wrong side of it. The fact that emergency medical holograms still exist after Voyager returned home and the Doctor integrated into polite society should have been the first warning that we were not learning the lessons we were supposed to be learning along the way.

Captain Rios agrees to take on Captain Picard as a client, but definitely not because Captain Picard is kind of a big deal. “I’ve already had a heroic captain in my life,” Rios tells his holographic alterna-self. “Every time I close my eyes, all I see are his brains and blood splattered on a bulkhead.” I have checked, and I am reasonably certain that Captain Rios is not Chief O’Brien with a fake beard on.

What happens next is interleaved with the end of Soji’s interview with Ramda.

Captain Picard is going to space, and Irish Romulan’s Husband has packed him a sack lunch complete with pâté, roquefort, and, oops, he dropped the apple. Just as he ducks to pick it up, a phaser bolt whizzes by where his head used to be. “Watch out: Jat Vazh!”

On the Reclamation Center, Ramda plays the tarot card with the twins on it, and she asks Soji, “are you this sister who lives, or are you the sister who dies?”

Irish Romulan and Her Husband kill a lot of Jat Vazh. I mean, a lot. It helps that there is a phaser pistol bolted to the underside of Jean-Luc’s side table.

The XBR solving the Rubik’s cube gets very excited.

Doctor Jurati shows up at Chateau Picard just in time to shoot the last Jat Vazh in the back and explain earnestly to Jean-Luc that Commodore Oh approached her and that “I told her everything; I didn’t know what else to do.”

Ramda pulls a disruptor from one of the many Romulan guards and points it at Soji.

Irish Romulan and Her Husband leave one of the Jat Vazh alive for interrogation. It goes about as well as you would expect. “You can’t protect her.” “We will find her.” And then, at the same time (whatever simultaneity means in a universe where superluminal spaceflight is possible), the Jat Vazh prisoner and Ramda say:

“She is the Destroyer”/ "You are the Destroyer"

The Jat Vazh prisoner bites down on his “cyanide” tooth and disintegrates. Don’t mess with Romulans.

Jean-Luc beams aboard Rios’ ship. Doctor Jurati comes with him. Raffi is also there. As I mentioned, she *loves* a good Romulan conspiracy, and has managed to figure out that their first stop should be Freecloud, where they are hoping to find Bruce Maddox, the man who probably made Soji and Dahj and, fun fact, is also the man who sued to have Data’s rights abolished in “Measure of a Man.” Raffi claims she doesn’t care about Soji or Doctor Maddux. She just wants to hitch a ride to Freecloud. By the way: she is very upset that Jean-Luc has accepted Doctor Jurati’s help without at least letting Raffi run a security check on her. Everyone takes their places aboardship. Captain Rios turns to Jean-Luc.

“Engage.”

At long last we are hurtling through space at many factors of the speed of light (I’m not going to fall into the trap of trying to define how the warp system works), bound for the new front lines in the never-ending fight against space fascism. Are we self-aware enough to avoid repeating the mistakes that got us here in the first place?

While evaluating Jean-Luc as a potential client, Captain Rios asks him “do you intend to break any laws?” to which Jean-Luc responds that he is “not in the habit of consulting lawyers before doing the right thing.” That is an odd thing to hear from the man voted “Most Likely to Uphold the Prime Directive” by the La Barre High School graduating class of 2325. Seriously, though, it is worth enumerating the absurd and questionably ethical things Jean-Luc has done in the name of the law. He ordered a little girl’s memories erased in “Pen Pals.” He ordered Ray Wise’s memories erased in “Who Watches the Watchers,” and, when that didn’t work, consented to getting shot in the chest with an arrow to prevent “the Cult of the Picard” from forming in one village on one continent for fear that it would ruin an entire planet’s civilization. In “Redemption: Part 1” Jean-Luc encouraged Worf to take a leave of absence to clear his father’s name, then scolded Worf for having the temerity to request access to the Federation communication records that were the only actual physical evidence of Mogh’s innocence. Which brings us to what, for me, has always been the most egregious example of the letter of the law trumping its spirit: Jean-Luc Picard consents to let an entire inhabited planet die rather than attempt an emergency evacuation of a pre-industrial civilization in “Homeward.” The parallels between what he didn’t do then and what he did do on Romulus are only just now sinking in for me. If Captain Picard never consulted lawyers before acting, it’s because he never needed to. Captain Picard was the foremost expert on Federation law in all of Starfleet. Casually disregarding legalistic mumbo jumbo was Captain Kirk’s schtick, a contrast almost explicitly drawn when Captain Picard chastises Ambassador Spock for practicing “cowboy diplomacy” in “Unification.” So long as the Federation was the last thing standing between the galaxy and the will to power, Jean-Luc was more than happy to stand atop the law, lecturing the masses about their first duty. Now that the mask has been torn off and we have discovered that the Federation has been debating personhood in bad faith this whole time, Jean-Luc needs to find a different justification for the way he has acted these past seventy years. Whether this justification will serve as a framework for making better choices or merely provide cover for restoring Starfleet to its elder glories remains to be seen.

PS I know that I am being part of The Problem by sustaining my weekly speculation regarding “who is evil.” Unfortunately, I can’t unsee "Discovery." The pivotal scene this week is, of course, the attack on Chateau Picard (which, I guess, was the only scene featuring Irish Romulan and Her Husband). It is very convenient that Her Husband has to duck to pick up an apple right as a Tal Shi’ar/Jat Vazh sniper is pulling the trigger. That being said, I can’t think of a good reason, if Irish Romulan and Her Husband are evil, that the Jat Vazh would want to fake at attack on the Chateau rather than just kill Jean-Luc. If not for the still poorly explained sequence of events leading from the roof of the Starfleet Archives to the couch in Jean-Luc’s living room, I would be tempted to say that the case for Irish Romulan’s moral turpitude is rapidly withering. That does not mean that I cannot think of any reason that the Jah Vazh would want to fake an attack on Chateau Picard. Recall that the conclusion of the attack is what introduces Doctor Jurati to Jean-Luc’s merry band of space pirates. She shows up just at the tail end of the fight and shoots the final Romulan with a disruptor rifle she finds… it’s not clear. She doesn’t read as someone who can handle herself in a fight. It is possible she picked up the rifle from one of the half dozen Romulans dispatched by Irish Romulan and Her Husband. It is also possible that the whole thing was a set-up designed to give Doctor Jurati cover to admit that she had spoken with Commodore Oh without prompting Jean-Luc to think too hard about that statement. So, after three weeks, the state of play is

Irish Romulan and Her Husband: “hopefully not evil”

Doctor Jurati: “definitely evil”

Oh yeah: Rizzo the Romulan is now physically on the Reclamation Center and looking like a Romulan again. Maybe the showrunners learned a little too much from "Discovery’s" shortcomings.

Star Trek: Picard -- "Maps and Legends"

“This is not your parents’ Star Trek.” That has been said before. It was a part of the official advertising campaign for Abrams Trek. A friend-of-a-friend once used it to describe Discovery. I do not usually respond positively to that formulation. I like my parents’ Star Trek, both literally, in that I still have a soft spot for the Original Series (though, admittedly, every time I have watched an episode since my 30th birthday, I have come away feeling… uncomfortable), and figuratively, in that I have taken “not your parents’ Star Trek” to mean “not a staid affair,” and I like it when Star Trek is a staid affair. I need a Starfleet captain to scold me every now and again. If I want laser guns and explosions, I will watch Star Wars. If I want a cosmic fungus providing the foundation for all space and time, I will watch Doctor Who. If I want a series of empty plot twists played exclusively for shock value, I will seriously reevaluate my life choices.

Star Trek: Picard is not your parents’ Star Trek in the sense that it has abandoned the central theme of Gene Roddenberry’s “wagon train to the stars.” This is not a hopeful depiction of a utopic future in which humans and aliens have come together to forge a more perfect union. This wagon train, like its historical counterpart, is carrying the vanguard of a decadent society that has decided to give slave labor a shot. On the frontier they have met a population of refugees representing all that remains of a lost power principally organized around a seemingly endless series of nested secret police forces. There is no hope here. Even our titular hero is resigned to the coming of an unnamed neurodegenerative disease (let’s be honest: it’s Irumodic Syndrome).

We start this week’s episode with a flashback to the burning of Mars. It is First Contact Day 2385 (so…. 14 years ago relative to the series). A group of construction workers at Utopia Planitia shipyards are lamenting the fact that they are the only ones not allowed to take the day off. Not quite. Their ample work force of synthetic life forms are also forced to work, when they’re not being forced to “sleep” in a cargo container between shifts, or serve as the butt-end jokes meant to illustrate the primacy of organic life forms. In other words, that thing that Guinan said would happen in the season two “Next Generation” episode “the Measure of a Man” — the mass-production of androids as slave labor for the Federation — actually did happen. Of course, Guinan projected this outcome if Data lost the court case to decide his rights. He actually won that case. Slavery came anyway. Fortunately, First Contact Day 2385 is the day that the synthetics have officially had enough. A synthetic named F-8 (that sound you hear is my best friend screaming at the screen that “ROBOTS CAN HAVE REAL NAMES, TOO!”), after watching his human overseers demonstrate their superior faculties by ordering the equivalent of a Tyson’s TV dinner from a machine that can make any food in recorded history, uses his workstation computer to deactivate Mars’ planetary shield just as a squadron of unmarked triangular starships arrives to begin bombarding the planet. There are also satellites with space lasers. F-8 takes, I’m going to call it a “plasma torch,” and murders his co-workers before blowing his own head off. Roll the title credits.

Back in 2399, Jean-Luc’s Romulan companions (whom I will call Irish Romulan and Her Husband until I can bother to learn their names; I guess I should confirm that they’re married; I get the impression that they are married), who are apparently and openly ex-Tal Shi’ar, are helping him try to puzzle out what happend to Dahj back at Starfleet Command (I should be more careful; she was killed at the Starfleet Archives; we’re going to visit Starfleet Command shortly). Irish Romulan tells Jean-Luc an interesting story about a Romulan police force worse than the Tal Shi’ar, the Jat Vazh (sp?), whose job it is to keep a Terrible Secret: Romulans hate artificial life forms and no one knows why. “Have you ever noticed,” she asks, “that our computers are limited to basic numerical functions? We do not research artificial intelligence.” She thinks that the Jat Vazh killed Dahj because… it’s not clear, but they hate artificial life forms.

Which is weird, because, in the third season “Next Generation” episode “the Defector,” Romulan Admiral Jarok looks Data straight in the eye and tells Data that he knows dozens of Romulan cyberneticists who would kill to be in the same room as Data. I love Star Trek. Really, I do. Its showrunners wouldn’t know continuity if it hit them with a Klingon pain stick. I guess Jean-Luc’s Romulan friends could be lying…?

Through ex-Tal Shi’ar jiggery-pokery, we are able to learn that Dahj was in contact with her twin sister Soji (I can’t tell you why, but I definitely walked out of the last episode under the impression that Dahj did not know she had a twin sister; she certainly didn’t *mention* one, which seems like an odd omission when trying to refute a kindly Starfleet Admiral’s assertion that you are an android) and that Soji is not on Earth. Recall that Soji is in the “Romulan Reclamation Center.” I now know what that is. Sort of. It is a Borg cube turned research facility run by the Free Romulan State where they are researching how to de-assimilate dormant Borg drones. A sign on the wall proudly proclaims that “This workplace has gone 5843 days without any assimilations.” Soji has started sleeping with that almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unattractive Romulan. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Jean-Luc goes to Starfleet command to visit this series’ entrant in the “worst admiral ever” competition. I don’t think Cornwell has much to worry about. Don’t get me wrong: this admiral is terrible but there is no indication that she is a) sleeping with her subordinates or b) toying with the idea of casual genocide as a warfighting tactic. Jean-Luc wants his commission reinstated so that he can go to space and save Soji from the Jat Vazh. Unfortunately, Admiral Can’t’Act (this is the one way in which she might make the podium in the Bad Admiral Olympics) saw the part on space CNN where Jean-Luc shamed Starfleet for turning its back on androids and Romulans, and impolitely tells him to go… away (that’s not actually what she says). The conversation is pretty boilerplate for things that happen in a Starfleet Admiral’s office, except for the notable exchange where Admiral Can’t’Act informs Jean-Luc that, if Starfleet hadn’t pulled its support for the Romulan rescue operation (an apparent side-effect of the synthetic revolt on Mars; I guess Jean-Luc just saved the Romulans himself? With space pirates?), “14 species would have left the Federation.”

“Starfleet doesn’t get to decide which species live and die,” says Jean-Luc.

“Yes we do.”

So…. yeah.

At some point after this, Admiral Can’t’Act puts in a call to her good friend, Commodore Oh, a Vulcan who appears to be in charge of Starfleet Intelligence and/or Section 31, informing her that “the hermit of La Barre” (I actually love this) is afoot with conspiracy theories about Romulan covert ops taking place on Earth. Commodore Oh promises to look into it. “Looking into it” means chiding her subordinate, Lieutenant Rizzo, for making such a mess of the attempt to capture Dahj at the Archives and promising that she herself will “take care of Picard” if things get out of hand.

It gets weirder when Lieutnant Rizzo, apparently a human, holographically visits Romulan McDreamy-Ears at the reclamation center to tell him to speed up his “work” on Soji (“Have you managed to learn where its nest is?”). The cute Romulan remarks denigratingly on Lieutenant Rizzo’s surgically rounded ears and assures his older sister that he has the situation under control. It is left ambiguous whether or not Commodore Oh knows she is being played by… that Tal Shi’ar? The Jat Vazh? Am I spelling any of these words correctly?

In the final act of the episode, Jean-Luc specifically goes out of his way to crush all of our most fan service-saturated dreams by informing Irish Romulan’s Husband that he doesn’t want to ask Riker, Worf, or Geordi for help, because they might get themselves killed out of loyalty to him, and he “can’t go through that again,” not after Data (poor Jack Crusher). Instead, Jean-Luc goes to visit a trailer in a desert where I swear Captain Kirk once fought the Gorn and wherein now lives someone we’ve never met, who immediately pulls a phaser rifle and tells Jean-Luc to turn around and go home.  As he’s leaving, Jean-Luc mutters under his breath about “Romulan covert assassins operating on Earth.”

“Is that the ’83?” his new old friend, Raffi, asks of the wine bottle casually dangling from Jean-Luc’s upraised hand.

Jean-Luc nods and walks back towards the trailer. Think Arnold and Carl Wethers’ first meeting in “Predator.”

This episode was mostly exposition and connective tissue. In our post-Abrams Trek, post-Discovery world, that is high praise. I will gladly accept any Star Trek that feels confident enough to go more than seven minutes between explosions without fear of its audience getting bored. We clearly have not gotten beyond the over racialization that Star Trek has leaned on so heavily over the past 50 years of its world building. All Ferengi are venture capitalists. All Klingons love “Fight Club.” All Cardassians are mid-level bureaucrats. All Romulans are spies. My eyes rolled more than a little when I first learned that there was something worse and more secretive than the Tal Shi’ar.  Maybe that is the point, though. If I am allowed to be that guy who read a book once and is convinced that only that book matters: in “Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt posits that one of the methods by which Nazi social control functioned was by creating redundant bureaucracies with nominally overlapping responsibilities whose real responsibility was to spy on each other and prevent anyone from knowing where power actually lies. My first year college debate partner once posited to me that, in the same way that the Klingons are an allegory for the Soviets, the Romulans are an allegory for the Nazis (this sentence makes more sense in the context of the Original Series and its movie spin-offs than in literally any other Star Trek; there is very little about modern Klingons that is Soviet). If he was correct, then we should expect there to be at least a half-dozen more secret police forces on top of, beneath, and adjacent to the Tal Shi’ar and the Jat Vazh. Every Romulan is a spy, just on each other, rather than the Federation (though they all do seem to be spying on the Federation, too).

Abrams Trek (am I really about to say something positive about Abrams Trek?) gave Star Trek the opportunity to talk about what the 24th century looks like as things start falling part. Romulus and Remus were destroyed and the galaxy has been saddled with an enormous population of refugees who have never not lived in a totalitarian society. This is the limit of the ideal that we, and Jean-Luc Picard, thought that the Federation represented. Does the primacy of diplomacy, empathy, and attempted mutual understanding extend to space Nazis? Starfleet Command does not believe that it does. Jean-Luc Picard disagrees. What do the space Nazis think? It is not a good sign that their government appears very keen on dissecting a Borg cube.

Meanwhile, it appears that the Federation has also found ways to undermine the stories it tells about itself, without the need to refer to anyone else at all. I’ve already mentioned their dalliance with the idea of utilizing slave labor. I would like to dwell for a minute on the Tyson’s TV dinner that came out of that replicator minutes before F-8 freed Mars. It really did look that disgusting, and if you listen closely, you can hear the organic workforce complaining about “the amino acid matrix” use to supply the Utopia Planitia replicators. For the past 50 years, we have been presented the Federation as an exemplar of a post scarcity society, perfectly blending liberal values and Marxist concern with human welfare. There is no money. There is no need for money. No one has a job they don’t want. In the season 1 “Next Generation” finale, Captain Picard explains to an early 21st century American that Data accidentally brought out of hibernation that every citizen of the Federation is free to devote herself to “personal betterment” and the pursuit of passions. Mars is never more than 2.5 AU from the capital of the Federation. I don’t think I expected it to be fully terraformed. I did not expect it to be modeled after a 20th century industrial park, complete with lousy work-life balance and sub-standard food. Maybe this is a betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision of the future. Maybe that original vision has only ever been presented to us through the eyes of characters who have a vested interest in The Way Things Are. I hate to give credence to those who claim that DS9 is the best Star Trek, but Lieutenant Commander Eddington’s rant to Sisko about the arrogance of the Federation at the end of “For the Cause” is one of my favorite moments in all of Star Trek. “You’re worse than the Borg,” Eddingon says. “You assimilate people, and they don’t even know it.” After the assimiliation comes the exploitation. This is not our parents’ Star Trek. I’m starting to think that it is the Star Trek we deserve, though. Especially this week. The Federation is awful.

PS I have, to this point, completely ignored the question of whether or not the Irish Romulan and Her Husband are evil. The case is less strong that it was last week. If they were evil, I would expect the “Jat Vash” to be a cleverly constructed lie meant to distract Jean-Luc from whatever the Tal Shi’ar is up to, and I think I have managed to convince myself that it is reasonable for the Romulans to have at least two secret police forces. That being said, when Commodore Oh is dressing down Rizzo the Romulan, she goes out of her way to say “Admiral Can’t’Act just told me that Jean-Luc Picard paid her a visit and spoke the name of the Jat Vash openly, except that she didn’t say that last part, but I know it.” Commodore Oh does not divulge her sources, and, as far as I know, only Admiral Can’t’Act, the Irish Romulan, and Her Husband know that Jean-Luc is thinking about the Jat Vash. Granted, electronic surveillance is a thing. Irish Romulan and Her Husband turning out to be evil is probably a red line for me. Yes, every Romulan is a spy, but that can’t literally be true. *Every* human is not a plucky community builder. I am, at least, grateful that this is the only “shadowy figure” deception we are currently dealing with. Within ten minutes of introducing them, the writers showed us that Commodore Oh and Lieutenant Rizzo are not to be trusted (and did we ever really trust Romulan Commander Hot Pants?). Clearly, the showrunners learned something from the disaster that was Lieutenant Ash “Mom told me I don’t have to do the Klingon stuff” Tyler (See? I’ve clearly lost my touch). Here’s hoping that the “lie within a lie leading to a trap” doesn’t go too deep.