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.
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.
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