Exit Signs Tend to Congregate

After last week’s more middling performance in terms of “What are they on about? What is he on about? What are you all on about?” (Read like Bandit’s father from Bluey) everyone is going into this week hoping for some answers. “Well you’re DREAMIN’ mate!” While this week does contain some edge-on-your-seat-of-forever suspense leading into some amazing action, we’re still no closer to solving the core mystery of this entire series, and that is one Jack Crusher. However, if you were here for the TNG cast reunion, this episode will certainly tick off all of your boxes and then some.

Vadic has control of the ship, and will execute a bridge officer every ten minutes unless Jack comes up to the bridge. No one can access any of the ship systems as they’re locked out, with which we learn was a command code Riker gave Vadic, hoping Picard would employ a classic reverse gambit. Very trusting indeed. A few review outlets and Trek spots I frequent were lamenting over the sameness of Vadic’s character in this show, the whole slighted by the Federation or someone in their orbit, revenge, and so on. Seeing that play out in Vadic’s opening bit this week does iterate some of that sameness to previous villains, but I would wager that Amanda Plummer’s performance is a lot more nuanced, and a bit more frightening from a truly horroresque experience. Watching her just sort of shuffle, dance, and move her hands like a conductor to people’s screams and weapons fire, she truly has earned her place among Trek’s more psychotic villains, completely devoid of any kind of empathy or honor in her repertoire. For as somewhat awful as Star Trek Insurrection was executed, F. Murray Abraham’s Ru’aflo comes to mind as a villain who all but cast aside any kind of compass to achieve his goal. However the So’na ultimately wound up having a core empathy to them, a line they would not cross that separated the group from the star villain. Vadic has demonstrated she does not give a shit about her kind anymore than she does the Federation or solids in general. She accepted a self-destruction path from the start, and reveals in whatever or whomever gets swept up in it along the way.

Meanwhile Picard, Beverly, Jack, and Sidney are trying to regain control of the ship in one room, and Geordi and Alanna with Datalore are trying in another. Neither find success, and come to the conclusion that the only way to regain control would be to do it with the speed of a supercomputer. Namely Datalore. Only they are still fighting internally over control of the body they’ve been given. Brent Spiner has been dazzling us with his performances of Data and the Soongs for thirty years, and it’s a performance everyone says is one of his best. I listened to the season opener to Star Trek: The Pod Directive earlier this week with Jonathan Frakes, and he frequently talks about how goofy and amazing Brent is. He really has put a lot of effort into making the Soongverse work across multiple Trek series and movies. Check the spoilers before for more, but suffice to say he easily does his best work as the halves of Data and Lore compared to his various Soong fellows, which never really connected with me the same way the OG, Noonian Soong, did on TNG. The classic clash between Data and Lore was always a treat on TNG, and seeing that continue in this episode the way it does was great.

We have not seen much of Marina Sirtis’ Deanna Troi this season until Riker was captured and taken aboard the Shrike. One thing she mentions that might concern those who watched the first season of Picard, was that it seems Riker was replaced by a changeling when we first saw them all meet on the planet they lived in. “Good in bed, bad at making pizza!” I am not sure why she wouldn’t have picked up on that sooner given Betazoids cannot read changelings, as mentioned in DS9 with Troi’s mother and Odo. They did not dwell on that line for long though, and by now it’s a bit of a moot point. I kinda thought it was a writers’ room cheeky retcon of his bad pizza though. But now that Troi is back in the picture, it seems her role will be required in the next episode to unravel our big mystery. It feels real late to be doing this, in the penultimate episode, but I guess now is as good as time as any.

So in the first half of this episode, we’re dragged through a classic execute a hostage every ten minutes scenario to draw Jack up to the bridge. While I don’t really fault the writers for leaning on that sort of cliche villain moment, especially given how wonderful Amanda Plummer plays grand grandmother bird lady cheerfully executing the task, the way with which they are dangling this whole Jack’s abilities and powers thing is really, really trite. He’s fucking Bran from Game of Thrones. Vadic knows this. She knew the moment he possessed the bridge officer to input the cancel codes. So why not just spill the beans? Why not tell us what makes this guy special and how he got it? Was it from Picard’s body? Has Picard and others of his family been like this all along, but Jack was the first one to actually use it? Even when Jack shows up on the bridge and confronts her, she still does not indulge us. I like a good slow-burn story, and I like meaningful twists and reveals. This isn’t one of them, and it isn’t one of them because it doesn’t feel like it is going to make any sense or pay off in any meaningful way. Comparisons to the Red Angel from Discovery are apt, because throughout Disco S2 we’re told these wonderous stories about this winged thing executing all of these miraculous and often beneficial things in the galaxy, only for it to be fucking Burnham’s mother, somehow alive, somehow from the future or something, and that leads to the convoluted CONTROL plot and thrust into the future. I don’t need that here with Jack. I don’t need them to set up some big grandiose thing for him or the rest of the cast closing out this show. It seems like a neat power to be able to control another person, but then they should have figured it out mid-season, and used it to shadow Vadic on her ship or something sneaky, maybe obtain a list of all high-ranking Federation officers the changelings replaced. Or better yet, not do any of that shit, and just let Trek be Trek without some deus ex machina bullshit.

Once Picard and Co. link up with Geordi and Alanna, they reluctantly decide to remove the partition separating Data and Lore, so that the two personalities can have their fight. This was by far one of the best short sequences of the series, something I wish were applied to other subplots and scenarios. Data is seen pulling various memorabilia from his mind, things like Sherlock Holmes apparel, a deck of cards, and his cat Spot. At first Lore mocks him for even bothering with such things, as he only envisions power. But then Data seemingly hands them to him, insisting that he have the things he never got being offline or otherwise disassembled over the years while Data was not. Everything leads into this scene where you think Lore was successful at taking over Data, only for Data to flip the board around and actually win. But the way he wins isn’t by removing Lore, but absorbing his personality and experiences into his own, the way Altan had intended. In doing so, he regains control of the ship, and forcibly removes Vadic out the front of the bridge into space. The dialogue was amazing, and easily the highlight of all of this. Later he joins the rest of the Enterprise-D crew, a much more human Data than we’ve ever seen. They kind of acknowledged his “death” in the first season of Picard as being a different copy of him. The whole Soong android continuity can be disconcerting at times, but I am kind of just going with the casual hand-wave the writers here make of that and embracing the true return of Data since Nemesis. I’m with Geordi, it’s great to have our friend back.

So what now of our monolouging protoplasm? She was blown out into space, frozen, and shattered into pieces along the Shrike’s hull before the ship was blown up. We know from Odo that changelings can survive in space, typically in their original state. Considering how these changelings evolved to take on actual human organs and parts, I’d be curious if this means they are susceptible to space, or if she didn’t have the chance to morph back before space killed her. I’m also considering the fact that she could be T-1000’ing this and all of her pieces come back together in space, waiting for the next ship to pick her up. With two episodes left though, I am hoping the writers are not going to invoke some kind of Marvel-esque resurrection here, she’s dead-dead, and now we’re facing either the big-bad on her hand presumably somewhere else, or within Jack, or maybe they will do the 1000 Janeways ending like Into the Spiderverse. By now, Beverly should have really had some kind of detection and neutralization method cooked up for dealing with these new changelings, but she has been putt-putting around sickbay seemingly this whole series not really doing much. Perhaps that will be this second-to-last episode, alongside Deanna’s examination of Jack’s “red door”. Raffi and Worf’s rescue and retaking of the Titan was great, though we only got a couple scenes with each. I would have liked to see Worf take on Vadic’s big right-hand henchman there, that might’ve been good fun. Wonder if that ends up being deleted scenes?

Random Observations and Easter Eggs:

• Shaw is still holding on to calling Seven, Hansen, which she finally swiftly rebukes this episode. Poor Shaw is finally realizing how tough it has been for him to deal with this situation as his commanding officer did during Wolf 359. Sometimes it really do be a lottery, and that it’s okay to have that survivor’s guilt and process it.
• Worf upon meeting Troi again starts to go into this sort of gushing moment with her that invokes many of the former relationship angles they have during The Next Generation. He always had a little bit of a crush on her that became a rivalry at times with Riker. Of course, he moved on to Jadzia Dax on Deep Space Nine before presumably turning to more peaceful intentions after her death.
• Among Data’s memories are lines from TNG episodes where he played Sherlock Holmes on the holodeck, and items from that point, such as the hat and pipe. Lore on the other hand refers to how he was shut down and replaced by Data when Noonian Soong declared Lore “a failure” and removed all sense of emotion or treachery from Data’s programming.
• Picard’s original body is seen on the Shrike, but there is no mention of them taking it with them when they left. Did they take it with them, or is it a Viking funeral?
• “Hey Data, you used a contraction!” A realest of Trek nerds recall that during TNG, Data spoke in a way where he was not able to use contractions. So when he said “We’re good here.” it would normally be “We are good here.” A changeling would have a difficult time copying him for sure.

I wasn’t sure what this episode was going to entail from the previews. I knew from the promotional material that at some point, Vadic and Co. was going to board the ship, and Sidney’s face would go up against a forcefield. That would be this episode, seven in, with three left remaining. While this week slowed down a bit to try and actually frame Vadic’s backstory, it still packed some serious emotional punches, and a few actual punches as well. But perhaps very frustratingly in a good way, it ended on a helluva cliffhanger, something you don’t often do until the penultimate episode.

The episode opens with a conversation between Seven and a familiar face, trying to find more allies in their efforts to expose the changeling corruption within the Federation. The Titan has been on the run now for nearly the entire show if you count its initial encounter with the Shrike, but especially the last four episodes. Jack Crusher is sort of our meta-conduit for this show, as a lot of his dialogue and demeanor sort of reflect what we viewers are kinda feeling and getting out of this. So when he comes in and starts asking Picard about his condition, and then gets frustrated and says they should take the fight to Vadic, it definitely felt very like a obvious-meta nod to us viewers. Stop running, confront the giggly lady, turn the tables. So they proceeded to do just that.

Prior to this, we’re treated to another Snoke Hand scene between Vadic and whomever she’s been working with, or for, who wants Jack. They stress the importance of fulfilling this plan before Frontier Day. No giggles, no bravado, she seems very concerned about this and communicates it on her face. If you had told me Amanda Plummer was to play some new random Trek villain, I would have not been so sure how it’d play out, but now knowing Vadic is a changeling, and an especially tortured one, she’s been a fantastic choice for the role. I only wish Rene Auberjonois were still alive to play Odo, the two of them would have been amazing. This is continued later in the episode with her backstory told to Picard and Beverly. Unfortunately, while it was a compelling story, a lot of little details were omitted likely so as not to confuse newer viewers who hadn’t watched Deep Space Nine. Taken at face, Vadic is an extremely complicated character born out of laboratory experiments, seeking revenge. It’s not really a particularly novel storyline, and I kinda wish that they had spent a little more time giving the viewer a better synopsis of how Section 31 and Julian Bashir’s involvement, along with Odo, was instrumental in how the virus and its cure helped end The Dominion War.

The other big elephant in the room was DataloreB4. Geordi and Alanna are still working on trying to make sense of this creation, but there were a few lines Geordi made about the totality and legacy of the Soongs that I thought really spoke to Trek as a whole, and especially Brent Spiner’s roles throughout the franchise. He’s a literal madman, playing Data, Lore, B4, and four different Soongs throughout history in various examples. The whole underpinning of Trek’s cybernetics and the ethics of both cybernetic enhancements and cybernetic beings was always something very pivotal to a show about the future. We are starting to have those discussions with transgenderism, but that builds on to what a utopian society would look like when humans are free to change anything and everything about themselves and still be functional contributions to society as a whole. However, it’s unlikely we’ll get this far with DataloreB4, as Lore especially isn’t the biggest fan of humanity.

Opening the episode with Tuvok was somewhat expected, but I did not know it would be him. The Ready Room teased a special guest for this week, and many thought it might be another DS9 face, but I was not prepared for Tuvok. I was, however, prepared for it to not actually be Tuvok, even though they juked us several times at the start. I was a little curious though why he was presented older than I thought he should be. He was 107 when he served on Voyager in 2371, making him 137 by this episode. Vulcans generally lived well past 200 years. Spock was born only 34 years prior to Tuvok, and was 139 when he had encountered the crew of the Enterprise-D in 2369. So I guess Spock was just less wear-for-tear in his back-half. Tim Russ’ brief performance was good though, with that evil wry smile after being sussed out. Hopefully the real Tuvok wasn’t killed, I really would hate for this show to off anymore beloved characters even for a good villain plot like this.

Vadic’s backstory, as I said above, it was good, but it could have been better if they were willing to dive deeper into DS9 lore for it. Sloan, Bashir, Odo, The Vorta, it’s a bit too simple to suggest that Starfleet, unaware of the massive ethical violations that Section 31 did with Odo, would then authorize further inhumane experiments. So either Section 31 continued without Sloan, or Starfleet had already been corrupted from the start, and The Founders allowed the torture of their own kind in order to advance their cause forward, fully knowing it would take upwards of thirty years to realize. Based on her weird hand friend she reports to, I do think Vadic has been played this entire time by either the true Founder playing the Star Wars Emperor card. Another interesting observation is her extremely tall bird-man, who seems to be the sort of closest confidant to her, had a spoken line, and seems much more resistant to weapons fire. Is he a changeling too, or something else? And is it possible that someone on the good guys’ side is actually within her organization, waiting to make a move perhaps next episode? This is where Rene Auberjonois;s Odo would have played a masterclass role in turning out to be a double-agent within Vadic’s group who turns on her at the last moment. I suppose they could still do this, either with CGI and voice clips, or a very convincing recast. I don’t think that will be the case, and I don’t think I’d want that anyway.

Jack and Sidney, this one gets a little more complicated. So they are explaining his hallucinations and superhuman feats as aspects of Picard’s disease. I don’t think that’s the case, and this week’s episode where he is now able to hear Sidney’s thoughts, and seemingly telepathically convince her or control her to do things, that treads into some lesser territory of changelings, namely telepathy. It’s not mentioned much in DS9, but in several episodes they note that changelings have telepathic abilities between themselves, and to a lesser extend the ability to project them outwards. Betazoids were known not to be able to read their thoughts, as Lwaxana Troi could not with Odo. However, The Trill were able to transfer memories into Odo during one of their rituals, suggesting that their telepathic abilities are similar. Between all this and Vadic’s suggestion that everyone will see who Jack really is, I am guessing he is going to be a changeling, or possess changeling traits through some kind of DNA splicing. The question is, was he replaced by a changeling at some point in his life and his mother is dumb, or was he experimented on unbeknown to her or anyone by either the changelings, Starfleet, or Section 31? I also don’t know how Picard’s body fits into this. They suggest that his body and Jack’s blood would create a perfect duplicate of him, which reinforces Jack’s DNA has been tampered with, but if they’ve been able to infiltrate a lot of Starfleet’s top echelon so far with even their imperfect replicas, why expend the extra effort for a perfect copy? Certainly it makes for a foolproof plan, it’s just we’re going through a lot of motions here in this execution, so it needs to really pay off for both the heroes and the villains to feel satisfying. It’s not like Picard S1 where there were no stakes because no one knew what they were in the first place, or Picard S2 where the concept of stakes are moot when Q is involved.

Finally, DataloreB4, or maybe mostly Lore this episode. We didn’t really know much about what Lore would do with this show, and seeing him as part of a quadfecta of personalities in one android body could have been interesting, until they kind of predictably went Loreways with it and had him take over the ship and let the enemy in. First off, well fucking done on your firewall work, Geordi. That’s on you. Second, Lore’s whole evil-mans shtick is honestly kind of contrived and old, like a worn-out roleplaying storyline. Boo fucking hoo, you were built first, became a psychopath, got shut down, and a better android replaced you. Then the next few times you were turned on and offered redemption, you went back on your bullshit once more, hoping to get that W, except the W was never defined very well, and that’s why you always lost, and ended up sharing a positronic brain with two of your cybernetic brothers and the memories of all your dead creators. Actual hell week.

Which is why it would have been a better turn of writing on this show to actually let Lore have a redemption arc. Perhaps he will in time, as Geordi alluded to the fact that the system he and Data inhabit seems designed to force them to co-exist. We have to remember that Data’s aspiration to be human includes being a shitty human, doing the wrong things, getting people hurt, or worse, and learning from them. Lore quips about survival, but doesn’t seem to think the changelings won’t just obliterate him once they’re done with everyone else. That’s always been his flaw throughout TNG, trusting others to hold him in higher regard when everyone is largely out for themselves, himself included. Data regains control towards the end, which I hope means something soon, because if we’re bringing Data back a second time and he just kinda stands to the side, I am going to be disappointed.

One final muse, I felt a little underwhelmed by Picard’s confrontation with Vadic. I didn’t want him to go all movie Kirk and be like MAH SOOOOOON but he just kind of old-man bumbled about, after having set this elaborate trap. He barely negotiated, barely got a word in edge-wise, and was then all set to just waste her in the end. I get the struggle with ethics and values both characters face, but I’d argue they discarded them a long time ago. To get to this point now, they have to be committed on breaking every law, bylaw, and directive, and let the chips fall as they may. That might seem like an Action Picard trope, but it’s really more a sign of having nothing to gain and nothing to lose. Hell, Geordi appealed with more emotion to Lore knowing full well Lore would never reciprocate.

Random Observations and Easter Eggs:

• Odo is once again alluded to as being the “one of us” who stole and brought the cure to The Great Link. The people who actually stole the cure from Section 31 were Miles O’Brien and Julian Bashir, who administered the cure to Odo, and he subsequently cured the Dominion changeling and the rest of the link when the Federation voted not to cure them thinking it would continue the war. Mind you, Odo was the one who was originally infected first by Section 31, who spread it to the other changeling and the rest unknown to either of them. Also having been tortured and prodded, Odo seems to be far more forgiving than our dear Vadic.
• No Raffi or Worf this week, though it was mentioned they were off gathering information on Riker’s whereabouts. Is he not on the Shrike still?
• The opening shot of the Titan in the Chin’toka Scrapyards is a reference to several DS9 episodes during the Dominion War where the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans fought the Jem’Hadar, Breen, and other Dominion ships in the Chin’toka system. The floating debris is no doubt the remains of mostly Federation ships lost to Breen energy weapons at the time.
• Data’s memories appear to have no record after the movie Nemesis as indicated by his mention of the Scimitar. So that would suggest his transfer to B4 was successful, but also means his actions after are unknown to Data. Lore’s comments about everyone being so old though were funny.

Easter Eggs have been a ubiquitous term for surprises and callbacks to things from previous shows and canon in superhero, sci-fi, and fantasy shows over the last couple decades. The origin of the term actually goes back further to 1979 when Atari programmer Warren Robinett created Adventure and coded his name into the game itself, something that he later said Atari manager Steve Wright loved the idea of, comparing it to finding eggs on Easter morning. Its more modern usage was popularized by Marvel with much of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe to pay homage to its original comic creators and legends like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. For Trek, it has gotten a lot of use on both current and past shows in the form of character cameos, such as Doctor McCoy and Scotty on The Next Generation episodes, or Riker in Voyager and Enterprise. It’s also seen in the many little bits and bobs on desks and in installations. Lower Decks shamelessly shoved hoards of easter eggs into episodes, especially in “Kayshon, His Eyes Open” with the Collector’s Guild. It’s all shameless fanservice, of course, but it’s something fans love because it tickles their nostalgia, as well as helps them connect the then to now. Puritans certainly scoff, why wax fanservice when you can have better writing and screenplay. I don’t disagree, but the way Terry Matalas and his team have weaved it this season has been exceptionally masterful, albeit a few wiggles.

The Bounty opens up with a particularly good scene with Vadic’s Shrike and other compromised Starfleet ships searching for the Titan. Being a ship full of past and present talent, however, they’re one step ahead of her, employing various tricks to keep on the run. Frustrated villains being especially frustrated by technobabble tactics is a key aspect of the fun of Trek. Star Wars often explains these jukes in more simple terms, ion trails or hyperspace corridors. The Titan however has to run not only from non-Federation ships, but Federation ships as well, in a fleet that is explained in this episode to “be linked alltogether with one another”. So they simply can’t just dump their transponder and go off-the-grid. To me that sounds a little fishy, but it occurs to me that Starfleet essentially pulled a 25th Century Apple in doing that. The fucking hubris as one admiral said in the first season.

The conference room roundtable was also something I greatly missed from Trek. No one likes meetings that should be emails, and I imagine half of the reason that scene framing disappeared from Nu-Trek was because millennials hate meetings, but they are so much an aspect of Trek that needs to be shown. Because Trek at its core is about problem-solving as a team, usually in the same room. Even Shaw contributed to the overall puzzlement everyone had about what was in Daystrom that the Changelings needed to see out their plan for razing the Federation on their holiday. So the solution was to Ocean’s Three it, though not quite with the same glamour as Deep Space Nine did in the holosuite casino.

But the highlight of this week’s episode was no doubt the return of LeVar Burton’s Geordi LaForge, now a Commodore, and curator of the Fleet Museum, a starbase of Starfleet’s storied past and most famous starships. With him is both his real-life daughter, and in-character daughter, Mica Burton playing Alanna LaForge, an actual first for the franchise. We’ve had plenty of parent-child pairings in the show, such as the Crushers and the Siskos, but never played by parent-child actors. I have never watched The Ready Room at all during Nu-Trek, but I did watch this one with the two Burtons and Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut, who plays Sidney LaForge. All three are incredible as the LaForge family, and while Geordi is very apprehensive about getting caught up in Picard’s bullshit again, he begins to turn around after they retrieve another familiar face from Daystrom, and understanding more of the threat the Changeling infiltration has had on the fleet.

But probably what really did it for me, both fanservice and storywise, was the scene between Jack and Seven on the bridge as they scrolled through the catalog of ships in the Fleet Museum. The San Paulo Defiant, Voyager, Enterprise-A, New Jersey, and the HMS Bounty from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Not only was the music playing changing for each of their respective shows and movies, but when they got to Voyager, Seven gave a very emotional speech about how the ship was where she was reborn and was her family. Seven has been a great part to these three seasons of Picard, but so far none of her shipmates have shown up for a cameo or two, not even on comms. I really hope we at least get Admiral Janeway or maybe The Doctor even for a comms call by the end of this season, just to help her feel confident in staying in Starfleet.

There is so, so much in this episode to talk about it took me several days to write this up, around fixing said blog, of course. Raffi and Worf linking up with everyone and outlining the problem, and the need to return to Daystrom, of course set up this week’s most important puzzle piece of the plot, and that is Data. Recall in the first season, Altan Inigo Soong had used the golem he intended to transfer himself into to put Picard instead as he was dying of terminal illness. Although it worked, he apparently was not able to re-replicate the process on himself again, and prior to death, created a sort of golem-esque shell to house all of the Soong legacy. Data, Lore, B4, Lai, Noonian Soong, and perhaps others are represented. It’s this amalgamation that shows the crew the real theft of Daystrom Station, Picard’s human remains. Why they were remanded to Daystrom and not buried somewhere is worth knowing, but I suspect that answer may come next episode, hopefully. I am truthfully not sure how to feel about Data-ish being back. I can probably accept that pieces of Data, especially those he left in B4, combined with the other Soong androids is at least mostly plausible, but I think it would have been more satisfying for me had his second death in Picard S1 never existed. It would have been amazing to find out in Altan Inigo Soong’s final words that he was able to finally recreate Data’s memories from B4, but in the process had to use Lore and Soong’s other androids to achieve the end result, and that it would be incredibly unstable. I guess it still can feel that way, but knowing that Data wanted to essentially die previously, this feels like unethical necromancy.

Then we have Geordi LaForge. I honestly expected a little more warmer of a welcome from him, and was slightly taken back by his rougher demeanor, even offset by his hug with Beverly. I know age and job are considerations here, and he knows that Picard invites trouble wherever they go. We’re just so used to LaForge being the more benevolent soul of the ship, the Chief Engineer, the optimist, and the guy who gets it done. It makes sense that his engineering acumen would land him a job at the fleet museum, protecting Starfleet’s most treasured assets, and probably pulling at his penchant for working on older, more storied tech. But when he pushes back against not only his former captain, but Starfleet itself knowing full well the current danger it’s in, it felt a little incredulous. Wanting to protect your family from danger is one thing, but you have two adult daughters who are very much capable of their own feats and decisions. Having that parry between him and Sidney was great, and I love that she had such a bonding moment with Jack over the Klingon cloaking device Geordi had to pull a dad moment and say “Stay away from my daughter.” Many fans did note, however, that Geordi was once the helm of the Enterprise-D prior to taking over as Chief Engineer. So I am a bit puzzled he’d be upset Sidney went for piloting over engineering.

Finally, Daystrom’s toys and Moriarty. I didn’t know how Moriarty would be weaved into this story, given the last we knew of him, he was adventuring in his holocube unbeknown to him. I thought maybe they may have used him as the AI security, but as we find out they instead made DataloreB4 the keeper of the vault, he used Moriarty as a means to counter the trio, only there was a clever backdoor built in for Riker to exploit. I didn’t hate that idea, but it would have been more fun to actually know how ol’ Morty is doing these days, or maybe have him construct a more elaborate trap for Vadic and her goons. Daystrom’s other toys, which are part of this week’s easter eggs, include Genesis II, now with less Phil Collins, the remains of James T. Kirk since I guess they couldn’t just leave him on Viridian III, attack-tribbles, meaning I guess H. Jon Benjamin’s character in Short Treks who created the genetically-modified tribbles had a kid who continued the work, and other unnamed Section 31 goodies. I very much enjoy how Matalas and Co. added some of these bits in for flavor, but it does make me wonder why they kept bodies and other potentially-dangerous items for people to steal. Also, where is Peanut Hamper? The CBS AI? That would be a real funny call-forward to make to Lower Decks in a live-action series.

One last bit, Deana Troi at the end. Did they capture her? Is that a changeling? Has she always been a changeling? Hopefully that gets some answers this week.

Random Observations and Easter Eggs:

• In the overview shot of the Fleet Museum, you do see some additional ships not named during the episode, such as the original Stargazer, a Romulan bird-of-prey, the refit of the NX-01 Enterprise, a K’t’inga class Klingon battleship, and towards the top of the shot, a Nebula class starship, possibly the USS Phoenix or USS Sutherland. I want to say the one towards the right might be a Steamrunner class too. The NX-01 Enterprise is interesting because it was actually Doug Drexler’s design intended to be used for season 5 of Enterprise, but the show was cancelled after season 4. Even the spacedock itself was from the original movies.
• It’s difficult to see through the viewscreen, but Geordi’s desk also had a bunch of little items that reference his character and past Trek. If you watch this week’s The Ready Room there are some better shots of everything there, and Terry Matalas talking about the various props and easter eggs they’ve woven into the show.
• Irumodic Syndrome was referenced before in TNG’s “All Good Things…” as being the condition Picard suffered with in his old age, and implied what his mother suffered from in Picard S2. But neither really explained aggression or superhuman feats that allowed Jack to dispatch four changelings. So either they made a weak assessment here, or there is something more to the theft of Picard’s human remains.
• Seeing that Vadic can fully shapeshift puts out previous theories that she just had one for a hand, but now questions who she really is, and what they want with Picard. The changelings were mostly focused on DS9, so one has to wonder why they aren’t after Odo, Worf, Sisko, or others.
• A lot of people are trying to figure out this week’s episode, titled Dominion, as to if it has to do with The Dominion from DS9, or who might show up this week. With the passing of Rene Auberjonois, Odo would have been the character to really bring into this show, but instead, I would really like to see Weyoun or Garak. I am hoping this episode sheds more light on how the changelings fractured, and if there is any effort from The Great Link to reel them back in.