Picard S3E05: Imposters

by Equilateral Posted on March 16, 2023

The halfway point for modern Trek has historically always been the weakest point. Unlike syndicated Trek of yore, when you’re telling a season-long arc and you’re trying to start strong and finish strong, you often end up hung up in the middle trying to either answer questions from the beginning, or set up the pieces for the end. This week’s episode did a little of both, but apart from a wonderful interaction between Picard and another former Enterprise-D crewmen, the rest of the episode kinda fell a bit flat spinning on what we already know; Starfleet is compromised, just, like, way worse than we thought!

Captain’s Log-

If a few of the hints from previous episodes didn’t tip you off that not all is right with Jack Crusher, this week reinforces that theme in a much larger way, complete with hallucinations and voices that kind of echo what we saw with Picard’s mother in the last season. Either Jack is dealing with the same kind of issue that plagued Picard’s mother in his youth, or there is an external force pressing on our poor dude. Meanwhile, our dear ol’ Captain Shaw, dry and witty as always, went ahead and signaled for a Starfleet ship to come and take Picard, Riker, and Seven away. I very much enjoy Shaw as a character, and his many quips about their various failures and misdeeds in the past offer both a counter-balance to the sort of hero worship they often try to brag about, and a very meta-dripping take on the fandom’s own hero complex of the TNG characters. But Shaw does not represent the Nu-Trekkie either, because if he did, he would be all about trying to insert himself into the action hero complex. Rather, he just wants to punch in and punch out, daily. Perhaps the meta there is that of a Paramount exec.

Classic Worf Sparring

After their absence last week, our Power Duo Raffela and Worf continue their quest, but now this time it’s Worf’s Starfleet Intelligence hander who says not to try and seek out the Daystrom Institute for answers. Instead, they must pursue another means on M’Talas Prime. Up until the end of this episode, it felt like a sort of plodding B-plot, even if Our Man Worf was involved, but you’ll be glad to know that the streams finally cross as they learn of new information, and whom they can and cannot trust.

Two Starfleet ships? In a new Trek series? Impossible!

Shaw’s tattle-tale leads the USS Intrepid, which is not an Intrepid-class starship, to show up and make some interesting demands. What happens next is for the spoilers section, but as an executive summary, I will say this is easily the highlight of the episode, and a very good character performance by both actors. Though my only wrinkle, like with much of this series, is that it references things that happen in the thirty year gap that we don’t know, and they will not elaborate on further in a limited series. Hopefully books, comics, or other media will cover these stories.

Spoiler Talk

So someone on Twitter noticed with the last episode on a non-US streaming service that the subtitled directly referenced the Borg Queen as Jack’s voices in his head. That has some interesting implications if that turns out to be true, and calls into question if Borg nanomachines can be passed to the children of reclaimed Borg. I would have thought Beverly would have known about that or known what to look for sooner, but we will see if she will make that next logical leap now that he’s alluded to her everything is not alright after toasting four changelings, not knowing they were changelings. This could be why Vadic and the rogue changelings want him, but it’s also plausible that changelings were able to plant something in him, or maybe replace him earlier in life with a sleeper agent that is in the midst of activating. Something has to connect here soon on who he is, because he’s coming dangerously close to deus ex machina territory and that’s so overplayed in Nu-Trek.

The original Bajorian badass.

I admit, I very much did not expect Michelle Forbes’s Ro Laren to show up in this episode, or in Trek again, since her character’s defection to the Maquis in “Preemptive Strike”. Ro was originally intended to be Sisko’s Bajoran liason on Deep Space Nine, but Forbes turned the role down and it was reformed into Kira Nerys. At first I questioned why Ro, and even wondered if she was a changeling, but she actually was the perfect character test for Picard given the two character’s history. Here you had a Bajoran rebel-turn Starfleet officer whom he didn’t want on the Enterprise-D at the start because he was by-the-book and she wasn’t, but her skillset and tenacity proved herself many times, even when they both were turned into kids. Some of it felt a little forced to add a little more emotional weight to their scenes, but I didn’t really mind. I thought it was fantastic to see them both scoff at each other, and then reconnect on that personal level, before her sacrifice to try and buy time for the Titan to get away. Her turning out to be Worf’s handler in Starfleet Intelligence, and the communication linking both parties together at the end was a nice touch as well. Though it does raise a lot more questions on how deep the rabbit hole goes, and if there are members of Starfleet Intelligence who are also compromised. Or worse, Section 31.

Please identify yourself…

The new information that the changelings can now replicate organic matter and get around scanners placed after the Dominion War was an interesting tidbit, but not too far-fetched. You’ll recall when The Great Link punished Odo by “turning him into a solid” he in fact had organic everything until his changeling form was restored. So while this reveal makes for interesting television, as a trekkie you might be internally confused as to how Starfleet didn’t read any of Odo’s reports and consider this to be a potential factor over the next thirty years. Actually, they probably never read any of Odo’s reports.

o7

As for Ro’s sacrifice that cripples the Intrepid long enough for the Titan to escape, once again, the Picard series does away with another good legacy character just because. Hugh, Icheb, Ro, it kinda sucks a little because although it’s extremely unlikely we’d see any of them again in a live-action series, canonizing their deaths means the second-hand market won’t do anything with them either. It also just kinda feels like a cheap Tomino-style Gundam death. Even though we knew Ro Laren and of her interactions with the Enterprise crew, and her death does mean more than many, it’s like we were just brought in to say goodbye before the plug was pulled, and it feels fucking bad, man. It feels bad. It also felt bad that with our brief time, Picard tries to dress her down, and I loved her replies because it does kinda put that geriatric mess in his place. One of the prevailing themes of this series, and of Picard’s character long after the shows and movies, is that he isn’t what he was advertised as, the model Starfleet officer, sworn to duty and honor. Him trying to defend his legacy and the legacy of Starfleet to Ro over her defection to the Maquis echoed that of Benjamin Sisko and Michael Eddington in Deep Space Nine, only that saga unfolded over many episodes through multiple seasons. I have to give the point to Avery Brooks, he sold DUTY AND UNIFORM far better back then, and even still now than Patrick Stewart did in this episode. You know I love Sir Pat, but either he’s lost his touch a little, or the writers didn’t think this one out through.

Random Observations and Easter Eggs:

  • Among Shaw’s clapbacks to Riker and Picard about their few failures, “hot-dropped the saucer section of the Enterprise-D on a planet”, “that time someone threw out the Prime Directive to snog a villager on Ba’ku”, and “that time you boys almost wiped out all of humanity by creating a time paradox in the Devron system” refer to two of the TNG movies Generations and Insurrection, and the TNG finale “All Good Things”. It’s both in-character and out-of-character meta, and the way Todd Stashwick delivers it was great.
  • When Riker and Picard are reviewing all of the intelligence information, I could not make much out other than some stardates, which are recently and don’t mean much at the moment. A lot of redactions. It would have been neat to make get a couple peaks at the org chart of suspected changelings. One ship name I think I made out was the USS Cochrane, which was an Oberth-class starship that brought Weasley Crusher to the Enterprise when he was on leave, brought Bashir and Dax to Deep Space Nine on their first days, and fought in the Dominion War. Presumably this would be a new ship or a retrofit.
  • Admiral Janeway was once again mentioned by Picard as someone to go to. While I would love to see Kate Mulgrew give Patrick Stewart the business, I won’t hold my breath. If they really wanted to lean into some serious fanservice this final season, they would throw her in along with maybe Captain Harry Kim, maybe Garek, or someone else from the DS9 side in lieu of Odo. Having a whole plot that derives from DS9’s central theme demands a little compensation.
  • One of the production designers confirmed on Twitter that the USS Intrepid seen in this episode is a slightly different class, the Duderstadt-class. A lot of people thought that was a rear-facing deflector dish, but he replied that it was a sensor array. In terms of starship variety, the production team is doing much better this season, but I would have liked if they took a little more creative turns than just emulating the Enterprise-A. Even TNG had a lot of same-design with saucers and nacelles. Credit where it’s due though, the nacelle designs here are good.
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Picard S3E04: No Win Scenario

by Equilateral Posted on March 9, 2023

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.

Grandpa Simpson tells a story about his youth to the kids.

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.

Come, my boy, let’s have a holo-drink and holo-cry about our real-lives!

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.

Just some dipshit from Chicago
Spoiler Talk

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.

Captain Dick.

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.

“Will, did you just throw an asteroid?”

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.”

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Picard S3E03: Seventeen Seconds

by Equilateral Posted on March 2, 2023

One of the biggest questions going into this season was what the rest of Picard’s crew has been doing for the last 25 years in canon. The first two seasons of Picard alluded to how he dealt with the Romulans after the destruction of Romulus, the Utopia Planetia synthetic tragedy, and other events. It also showed glimpses of Raffi’s involvement with him. But neither season really told us anything beyond that. Which is not a bad thing, because it leaves that open to books, games, and other media to tell stories within that timeframe, as we’re unlikely at this point to get an official series aside from Lower Decks. I don’t think Mike McMahen will approach any of those subjects with his lighter-fare series.

Feels like the first time. Feels like the very first time.

The third episode opens on a flashback to Picard and Riker sharing a toast to Riker’s firstborn son, Thaddeus. As we already know from the first season Riker and Troi lose him later on to a condition that could have been cured by the advancement of synthetic treatments since banned by the Federation. A little big of de-aging was applied here to make them look at least fifteen years younger, though Riker still has the DS9/VOY-era commbadge on that I think would have been phased out by the LD-era design. Seventeen Seconds was what Riker mused it took for him to get from the bridge to sickbay, not knowing the condition of his son’s birth. This theme will be relevant later in this episode. We come back to the present and the Titan is still engaged with the Shrike, weaving around the nebula trying to lose it long enough to go to warp. Like many similar episodes of Trek involving ships evading in nebulas, it is a sort of Hunt for Red October kind of thing, underpinned by Vadic’s hodgy-podgy way of pecking at them with a purpose.

Meanwhile, Picard and Beverly have a very heated discussion about how she became pregnant with his child after another one of their romantic attempts shortly before she left the Enterprise-E. She then decided to be Médecins Sans Frontières in space along with her son, I guess. I admit that it feels a bit flimsy now than it would have been if we had the previous two seasons to maybe chew into that backstory a bit. This is, again, the major flaw of the Picard series. They had some really solid ideas, poorly executed. I just don’t know if it was the writers, or Patrick Stewart.

Klingon interpretive dance.

Worf’s introduction last week, beheading a bunch of dudes to extract Raffi from her pickle, solidifies this episode with a very major reveal I’ll detail in the spoiler section. As I mused last week, Raffi has been a very inconsistent and middling-written character throughout this series. If any character can kind of save her so to speak, it’s Michael Dorn’s Worf, and shit man, he can still play Worf as good as he did twenty-two years ago on Deep Space Nine. I enjoyed his witty one-liners delivered with that same Worf flair, like he would talking to a zoomer.

Getting shots of Federation starships in this season has been well worth the price of admission.
Spoiler Talk

Diving a little more into Picard and Beverly, last week I quipped that I wanted to hear a good explanation for why Beverely disappeared for 20+ years, and especially why she’d not tell him about his own kid. Her explanation this week initially came off to me as complete garbage, as if she just assumed everything about the man and how he would react, and just ran off. As I continued to listen and sort of took it all in, I’m back to about even-keel on it, though it’s still pretty fucked up. The relationship between Picard and Crusher in TNG was something that fans kind of shipped for themselves. The showrunners and writers never made any overt attempts to pair them off, and in fact solidified Picard’s position as a man of principle and rank. Even with his family, his father, and as we learn of his mother in last season, Picard’s stoic and complicated demeanor towards relationships and love meant he’s simply plow himself into his duty and obligation whenever possible. This was implied to continue after Nemesis with the events Crusher describes, and why she took Jack and went underground, becoming a medical-for-hire. It also leans into a more darker-Federation subplot suggesting they haven’t been keeping up on their commitments post-Dominion War. As much suffering as the poor woman has to deal with, I still felt like she was kind of shit for not telling him he had a kid, or giving him the opportunity to do something different. His anger was completely justified, and that’s why by the end of the conversation I felt this was precisely what Patrick wanted to do with Picard’s character from the onset of this show.

They did say we’d get our DS9 nod.

So the major reveal this episode by both the Titan and Raffi/Worf is that the Changelings are back. Jack encounters one sabotaging the ship, causing the trail the Shrike was able to detect. Raffi and Worf encounter another on M’Talas Prime. Worf did not mention him by name, but implied that Odo informed him of a sect of Changelings who broke away from The Great Link after they lost the war to come up with a new scheme to get back at The Federation. I admit, I did not think that the Changelings would be involved with this series, but there were some hints. It got me thinking a lot about the Typhon Pact book series that delved into a lot of politics and intrigue around the Federation after the events involving the Borg in the Destiny book series. Both reference the Dominion War and how the Federation was ill-equipped to help member planets after those incidents. Having a sort of overarching plot around a rogue faction of Changelings subverting targets and channeling them through other villains, such as bounty hunters like Vadic, or presumably Lore upcoming, makes for interesting stories. However it also doesn’t really play into our TNG cast. There has never been any canon appearances of the Enterprise-E in the war, and no direct mention of any of these characters except Worf having any direct contact with The Founders. So having to weave where they were then with relation to how they react to this threat now makes it interesting. Worf makes an excellent conduit for this plot because he has dealt with The Dominion and hopefully will link up with the rest of the crew. I just feel like if the Changelings are involved, it would have been neat to get a couple more DS9 cast involved. Unfortunately Rene Auberjonois passed away, or else Odo would be prime for this story.

Connect the branches indeed.

One final bit, Riker ejecting Picard from the bridge at the end, or in fact, their whole dynamic this episode. It felt a little bit off. Both of them went into this mission willing to risk the Titan and its crew, but then diverged midway into this episode. Picard wanted to go last action hero on Vadic while Riker just wanted to get the Titan out. It’d be a curious disposition except that after Crusher’s teardown of him, Riker was very much justified in his ejection of the Admiral and rejection of that plan, especially after getting a live demonstration of the portal tech used by the Shrike. A few of us joked how ineffective Picard has been for his limited series romp, mostly just sitting in chairs, old-man yelling, and frowning a lot. But it seems like this is an affirmation that Action Picard is no longer wanted, both in the show, and out of the show. It also just completely validates everything Shaw said in the first episode. Which is what got them here.

Random Observations and Easter Eggs:

  • If you’re wondering why some of the screenshots are brighter, it’s because I ran them through some post-processing prior to post. The show’s continued use of darkness is really rather annoying. Some shmuck on Twitter tried to point out the differences between older film types and digital, and I felt like I was being mansplained. It’s too dark because ever since GoT, everyone wants to make everything dark. Stop. Turn some fucking lights on. It’s not going to kill your budget.
  • Worf’s mention of “a man of honor” is no doubt paid homage to Constable Odo, played by the late Rene Auberjonois. It’s a shame we can’t see him in this show, because even though he was clumsy at love, he still did it better with Major Kira than Picard has with Crusher.
  • Shaw’s authorization code, 12-11-Bravo-Delta, itself, doesn’t seem to be anything interesting, but the formatting was in reverse of what was typically seen throughout 90’s Trek. The military phonetics would usually come first, followed by single-digit numbers. It’s not really a nitpick moreso as a fun observation, as codes and clearance levels were seldom standardized throughout the show and often ambiguous.
  • Beverly stating she “lost” Weasley is a bit harsh considering he became a Traveler. He’s still out there, as we saw last season with the recruitment of Soong’s alt-universe daughter. I don’t know if Wil Wheaton makes an appearance on this final run, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did somehow. I would also want to know why he wasn’t keeping tabs on her the last twenty years or helping her with this mess.
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