When you end an episode of Trek such as last week with a sort of dooming outlook, you reasonably know that this subsequent episode is either going to languish in that doom, or they’re going to solve the problem. After all, in almost any superhero, science-fiction, or fantasy setting, the heroes rarely all just get party-wiped like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Having an episode title rather infamous within the franchise’s canon also tends to reinforce the idea that in this week’s episode, Picard and Co. figure out how to get this season moving again. Thankfully, they do just that.

The episode once again opens to a flashback accompanied by regular human music to five years prior, when a group of cadets catch Picard in the Ten-Forward bar to ask him questions about an encounter with the Hirogen, among other tales. Old Picard might have scoffed at them and told them to return to their posts, but New Picard seems more than happy to regale them in song and cheer. Which is nice.

Fast-forward to present, Riker apologies to Picard and sorts his own emotional baggage with death and what comes after death that he has been dealing with since the loss of his son. Faced with a seeming uncertainty they were going to either be crushed by the nebula or run out of life support, he tells Picard to talk to Jack and sort his affairs.

What happens from here is just a whirlwind of what Trek does the best at, and that is people using their Starfleet-trained expertise and training to figure out how to solve a problem, even if that problem puts their own lives at-risk. But instead of blowing it all within the span of twenty minutes and not having anything to pontificate on after, it is fast-burned throughout the episode, with a lot of good character work in-between. Seven hunts for the saboteur from last episode, Shaw gets his much-awaited lick in at Picard, Riker contemplates his feelings for Troi, Picard and Jack have a chat, Beverly susses out the situation, and then they all come together to work on getting the ship out. It was an absolutely fantastic episode to watch, and truthfully I was concerned they were going to spend the entire episode focused only on Seven and the saboteur, or only on the exchanges between various crew members. Picard’s last two seasons suffered from mid-season pacing issues after they blew everything on the first few episodes. Discovery also tended to languish with its mid-season episodes before weakly wrapping up the big-bad plot. Jonathan Frakes does a fantastic job directing, but his better work comes from both acting and directing, especially with familiar faces and knowledge of those legacy characters. Terry Matalas’ writing also continues to underscore how well Nu-Trek works with people who love and care for the source material and want it to succeed.

There were only a couple of wiggles to be had about this episode, and most just center around the lack of Titan crew development. Now, this is extremely minor considering that we don’t have many episodes to really iterate through all of them, and if this show does serve as a backdoor pilot for a future Titan series, we can get our licks in there. But only Crash LaForge seems to be getting any real time compared to the other bridge crew, and when the overarching theme of the episode, and series, is trusting your crew and friends to rise to the occasion, I guess I wanted to see that just a little bit more. However, consolidating much of that onto Shaw and Seven’s scenes was still very successful and I was not mad at that.

No Worf or Raffi this week, though I presume their adventures will continue next week, likely by arriving at the Daystrom Institute and learning of Lore’s whereabouts. I expect next week we will see the Titan link back up with Starfleet, and for Geordi LaForge to show up with his other daughter, played by Levar Burton’s actual daughter. That will certainly be exciting as LaForge is one of my favorite TNG characters and definitely next in line to dress-down Picard for getting one of his ships dinged up. I’ll also be looking to see where Vadic’s next moves will be, as hopefully we’re going to start defining the relationship between her, our rogue adversaries, and characters we know appear this season like Lore and Moriarty.

I’m having a difficult time trying to peg a score to this episode for a Trek Facebook group I am in, because so much of this episode screamed a ten for me, but I so rarely score anything a ten. It has to absolutely just knock everything out of the park for me, and nothing Nu-Trek has reached that level for me, even with Lower Decks. I’m not even sure if anything Old-Trek was ten-worthy, though damn close for many of its best episodes.

A lot of that just comes down to how well this episode was written and structured. The creative use of Shaw here, building his character, giving him something to do that no other character could do, and giving him constructive dialogue with Seven that progresses both characters forward easily accounts for half of my score towards this episode. All of it was fantastic, and something I had hoped to see out of this season with these characters. Actual, honest-to-god, Captain-and-First-Officer bonding. This is why I tend to be negative on Discovery. Because they made the show so much about Michael Burnham, they never established a captain and first officer relationship, and by the time it got to Burnham and Saru, it was so weak it was ineffective. Meanwhile you have Freeman and Ransom doing extremely well, Pike and Number One, and even the Prodigy kids figuring out roles better than Discovery.

The use of this week’s flashback as a means of not only framing Picard’s infamous Starfleet perseverance and leadership, but also establishing that Jack Crusher did have a run-in with him before was very creative. It subtlety answered Picard’s question to him why he did not seek him out before. Turns out he did, but the response he got to asking Picard about what his family-life was outside of Starfleet, oof. I felt for him getting that cliché Picard response of Starfleet being his family. I felt a little disappointed that Picard never got past that notion in his time after the Enterprise-D, but I guess this kind of goes into the whole Beverly not telling him he had a kid in the first place. It’s a bit shitty to expect a different answer in front of a bunch of starry-eyed Starfleet cadets.

Shaw this week was up good, not only with getting his backstory and dig into Picard over the Battle of Wolf 359, but also getting to save the ship as being the only grease monkey available on the ship to open the nacelle covers to absorb the wave’s energy. The best part was they doubled as bait for the changeling, who tried to come in as Crash LaForge and got domed by Seven for incorrectly referring to her as Commander Hansen. A move that most certainly left a good impression on Shaw. That was absolutely a power move in a power scene, and easily one of the best this series and of Trek itself lately.

The other power move and power scene this episode was Riker throwing an asteroid at the Shrike on their way out. For a split-second, I thought they were not going to get out and this episode was going to trap us in another cycle of bullshit, but William “You’re goddamn right” Riker saves the day, and the Titan books it out of there.

I can only hope next week carries forth the momentum, but I suspect it will slow down a bit. I hope that a lot of the in-between to this episode though still moves forward. I want to see Shaw come back into the seat as a better captain, and maybe have just a little more respect for what Starfleet’s geriatrics can do.

Also, is Vadic also a Changeling? Or does she just have a Changeling for a hand that she has to cut off to talk to? Cause if the latter, Mike McMahen, I need you to riff on this immediately.

Random Observations and Easter Eggs:

• The LCARS easter egg from the ending sequence does indeed pay off, with the registry number of the USS Constance being mentioned by Shaw as the ship he served as an engineer aboard during the Battle of Wolf 359. This establishes not only his distaste for the Borg, but also of Seven and Picard as well.
• Riker’s lament over his son’s burial and that of what happens after death as being the reason he keeps volunteering for active duty and “running” calls into reference one of his lines from the movie Generations when he quips that he plans on “living forever”.
• It was real difficult to make out the items in the transporter chief’s quarters BECAUSE OF THE VERY DARK-DARK ALL OF THESE EPISODES ARE FILMED IN, but one item that was easily-seen was the Vulcan game of Kal-toh, which was featured in several Voyager episodes, and was also played by Seven and Raffi in the last season of Picard.
• While almost all of the Titan was retrofitted, not retrofitting the warp nacelles, and then staffing the ship with engineers who wouldn’t be familiar of the operation of said legacy nacelles, does not seem like the kind of move Starfleet would do, and seems more like the kind of move American Airlines would do.
• The Hirogen made it to the Alpha Quadrant? And fought Picard? As seen in Star Trek: Voyager, the Hirogen were aware of the Federation and the Alpha Quadrant from Voyager’s use of their long-range network to initially contact Starfleet. Some messed with Voyager a bit, which is why the group cited Admiral Janeway as a conduit for “advice”. I assume their arrival in the Alpha Quadrant either came from them cracking some kind of slipstream, or piggybacking off a Borg vessel and its transwarp conduit. I am sure Worf had a good time with that one, but I also would have bet if they ran into the Klingons, they would have met a fair fight.
• “Ensign LaForge always calls me Commander Seven. Out of respect.”