***Spoiler Alert***
Episode Seven of Star Trek Picard’s Season 2 has added much more plot, and this is unusual for a season that should be winding down (there are only three episodes left) and, by all rights, should be starting to tie up threads and answer more questions. To quote someone on the Picard discord that I frequent: “Guys, what is going on with this show.”
That being said, this episode, while not exactly “good,” was probably a marginally step up from the last episode, as it generally stayed focused on Picard himself. As expected, the Supervisor who looked like Laris only in human form (yet we do find out, in the late moment in this episode, is, in fact, Romulan) tries to navigate Picard’s mind while Picard, himself, is talking to a therapist from Starfleet who is part of his imagination. Escape the imaginary monsters! That is what both Tallinn (the Supervisor) and Picard have to face. Tallinn helps a young version of Picard and learns that it was his mother all along, while we learn that the Starfleet psychologist he’s been talking to has been a projection of his father, and eventually, he leads him to the same answer Tallinn learns at about the same time. This journey through the mind takes up the majority of the episode and is pretty standard stuff.
The plot in the real world begins to go a bit off the rails, seemingly just to give everyone in the cast something to do (everyone, except Elnor, that is) while padding out the runtime for the rest of the short season. Seven and Raffi try to track down Jurati, who is being influenced by the Borg Queen and may, in fact, become her if she is not stopped, while Rios takes his doctor friend and her son on a tour of the La Serena. No joke. There is no reason why he is doing this, save to call back to when Kirk beamed Gillian Taylor onto the Klingon ship back in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home. I guess this season will always live in the shadow of that film and Star Trek: First Contact.
Speaking of which, Renee Picard didn’t show up in this episode. Guess she is safely in quarantine, making final preparations for her rocket flight to discover a microbe (while discovering any form of life off of Earth is significant, I’m not sure how not discovering this will lead to a fascist-humans only society, nor does it have the cinematic appeal that came prepackaged in First Contact, as humans finally meet another intelligent race, and ones that fans are familiar with – the Vulcans – to boot), and I guess that plotline is going okay. We also don’t hear about Brent Spiner’s Soong character or his daughter, nor do we see Q in this episode.
Ah, Q. After waking up from his delusion, the screenwriters have to give Picard something to do, so he starts thinking (once again) that since Q is ultimately responsible for all this, he’s got to find him. So, he travels (I guess beams) to San Francisco to see Guinan, where she does some kind of ritual her species does to summon Q when needed, I guess (long time fans will notice a visual callback to the last time Q and Guinan met back in season 2 of The Next Generation).
With Guinan’s ritual not working, the episode ends with Picard and Guinan getting arrested. The show implies that there are HD CCTVs everywhere, so the footage Seven and Raffi are using to track down Jurati is just as clear as the footage the cops have of Picard beaming from place to place.
So with all the plot strings up in the air, I guess we really will be spending most of the time this season in 2024 with rather mundane present-day stories. I thought this was Star Trek.
Keep up to date on Pocono’s news, art, and events by following us on the Newsbreak app.
