A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Okay everyone, too much excitement last two weeks, let’s slow it down a bit and have a slower, thinkier episode about conspiracies and inner pain. And also Worf. (Worf is fine this week. I don’t know what the deal was – mine or his – back in his last appearance, but he seems okay now).

The big news of course is that Michelle Forbes returns as Ro Laren, in order to be nobly sacrificed at the climax. Ro Laren appeared in a handful of late TNG episodes kinda as a way to tease Deep Space Nine. She’s the first Bajoran character we meet, a refugee with “attitude” who is introduced by handing Picard and Riker the idiot ball so they can fumble such basic things as “Objecting to someone wearing a permitted religious adornment despite the fact that Worf has been wearing a whole-ass sash for six years,” and “Being baffled by the existence of cultures where the family name comes first despite there being a bunch of those on Earth and hey also no one ever once calling Worf any of ‘Rozhenko’, ‘O’Mogh’, or ‘de Khitomer'”. She ultimately left the show when her character betrayed Starfleet to join the Maquis, a terror group primarily made up of disgruntled Federation colonists whose planets had been ceded to the Cardassians, named for the French resistance in World War II and heavily identified with the forced relocation of Native Americans, who would end up becoming half the cast in Voyager and having some recurring plots in Deep Space Nine before being wiped out by the Dominion. Ro was originally planned to be the Bajoran liaison on Deep Space Nine, a source of friction with Sisko, who, like Picard, would view her as a traitor, while her own government viewed her as a freedom-fighter. That role was reimagined into Kira Nerys, who like Ro was a former terrorist, but one whose scope was strictly limited to the Cardassian force occupying her homeworld, not anything to do with the Federation.

Also, in Ro’s first epsiode, there’s a scene where she takes off her uniform shirt to give to a cold refugee child, and they were super careful about how they filmed the scene so that you can’t see her zipper, because they wanted to maintain the idea that their uniform closures were something weird and sci-fi rather than just plain zippers. This was neat and completely overlooked the fact that there’s a scene back in season 1 where Beverly visibly plays with her zipper while feeling drunk and flirty, and also that as a result of the clever intercuts and camera angles, Ro’s communicator magically teleports onto her undershirt.

Anyway, the fate of Ro had been kept from us all these years. There’s conflicting versions in the EU novels, but they all generally agreed that she’d survived the Dominion war. Some have her arrested and serving out a sentence in Federation prison, others have her repatriating to Bajor. They all sort of converge on the idea that she does eventually end up back in uniform, either directly or as a result of the Bajoran military eventually becoming part of Starfleet, and in the later rounds of novels, she’s said to succeed Kira as commander of Deep Space Nine.

The canonical story we finally get here omits that last bit, instead having Ro recruited out of prison into Starfleet Intelligence, and she turns up here ostensibly to investigate Picard for the whole “Stole a ship and got it shot up good by a scary space lady,” thing.

Love Shaw in that bit, too. Soon as Riker gives him the keys back, he’s all like, “Yeah I turned you guys in, you’d better get your story straight. Hey Hansen, you want your job back so that you’re on the clock when they fire you?” Shaw is the right way to do an antagonistic “frenemy” character. He doesn’t obstruct more than is actually necessary, he sells that he is trying to do the right thing, and he’s kind of just delightful as an asshole. You kinda get the feeling that he’s not even happy at the prospect of Picard and Riker facing their comeuppance per se; rather, he’s neutral on the subject, and happy that he’s able to be neutral about it. They get hailed as heroes, fine; they get thrown in jail, fine; not his problem any more and that’s what really counts.

When Picard tells him they have to leg it because the Intrepid has been compromised and he calls security on him? Chef’s kiss. My only complaint about him this week is that he remains confused maybe one beat too long at the end, when Ro – in her official capacity – has explained what’s going on and nobly sacrificed herself and the Intrepid responds by very obviously being compromised, and he’s still not quite on the same page. But he recovers and we get another, “Well fine okay then we’ll be big damn heroes, but if this screws up my nap, I’m coming for you Picard,” moment.

Yeah, so Ro dies and that’s sad. You sort of knew very quickly that there were only two ways this was going to go. Either she was a changeling herself (Nice timing having her very aggressively make a point of showing off her blood in the minute between the audience learning that changelings can do blood now and Picard getting the memo), or else she was about to die. Her and Picard instead prove their authenticity to each other by crying over their past in Holodeck Ten Forward. Now, it has been a long time since I watched this late TNG arc, but I feel like I kind of remember the emotions being different here. I mean, this makes plenty of sense, but I remember Riker having a harder time with it, and Picard having some begrudging respect for Ro – or at least comprehend – when she decided to stick to her moral convictions over her duty to Starfleet. Here, Riker is willing to forgive and move one, which befits his more laid-back persona I guess. Picard, on the other hand, is still raw, and pretty galled at being accused of treason by Ro Laren, who in turn is hurt that Picard couldn’t accept her reasons or validate the pain it caused her. They’re playing on the idea of Picard struggling to separate his sense of duty from his sense of morality, which is an entirely valid character element for a character like Picard, but, I mean, I feel like that was pretty much settled in… I dunno, First Contact? Insurrection? Season 1 of Picard? Heck, that time Picard went to Starfleet command and murdered half the admiralty? I mean, what about the previous four episodes?

Anyway, we do get resolution, and it’s nice, and Ro gives Picard her earring, which is symbolic and also contains all her secret files on the conspiracy (I hope there’s a Lower Decks cameo showing maybe not how Riker is able to figure that out, but perhaps how he’s able to figure it out instantly?), and then she gets blown up because the two security people she brought with her are changelings, and is it weird that she’s been able to get this close to the truth but couldn’t avoid bringing a team with her which was in fact “Oops, all changelings”? In death, she manages to disable the Intrepid, buying time for the Titan to escape, which it almost squanders with Shaw’s aforementioned slightly-excessive-confusion.

The Intrepid is an intensely ugly ship. Just profoundly stupid-looking. Modern Trek seems to have an aversion to having two of the same kind of ship on-screen at once. I guess this makes sense in terms of making it easy to tell what’s going on (Though cough Sombra-class).

I really hope this isn’t going to be followed up with, “The conspirators announce that Highly Decorated Galactically Celebrated Admiral Jean-Luc Picard has gone rogue and must be shot on sight and everyone in the galaxy is happy to go along with that except for a handful of his oldest and dearest friends.” This is the Star Trek universe; they could just as easily announce that Picard got possessed by space ghosts and it’s important he not be allowed to give any speeches because that is how space ghosts reproduce. Insert joke about that time Beverly had sex with a space ghost here.

Meanwhile, Bev learns that the changelings have “evolved” and can now not only imitate internal organs, but retain their form even after death until subjected to serious tissue damage. This, rather than “It’s 2023” might be why they look so much meatier, and answers last week’s question about why Sydney LaForgery (God how did I fail to make that joke last week?) didn’t melt upon being shot. It’s a little weird to drop this tidbit after we saw the changeling Worf and Raffi caught struggling to maintain his form, and the whole thing with the bucket. If a changeling can hold their shape even after death, it’s weird that they would need to take regular goo-breaks while, y’know, living. Not saying it’s wrong, just a weird choice.

The changing of the lings points back at my unease last week over Vadic potentially being a changeling. Something has Happened to these renegade changelings, and possibly they are beholden to some outside force because of it. Who? There’s the rub. Obviously, someone new we’ve never heard of before would be a weird choice for the last season of the TNG Reunion Tour. But who, then? I mean, there’s a lot of candidates, I guess; various powerful entities who Picard dicked over. But I’m not overly sure there’s a fully satisfying answer for who would hold a grudge against Starfleet great enough to justify this plan (currently presumed to be wiping out the entire fleet during the Frontier Day celebration), powerful enough to pull it off, with the specific abilities to reengineer a species, and yet without the necessary resources to just mount a direct attack. But some of Ro’s language when talking about the conspiracy reminds me of some language from the TNG season 1 conspiracy arc. So… Could the flue-gill aliens be back and for some reason pursuing a changeling-based strategy?

Meanwhile, the Worf-Raffi side of the plot doesn’t actually go far, but it does it with style. I’m interested in how the show is playing with letting the audience know things before the characters do. Last week, I questioned the storycrafting in making it clear to us that LaForgery couldn’t possibly be the real deal before Seven figured it out. Similarly, they make a point of withholding the identity of Ro’s two trusted field agents even though we both know darn right well who they are. It’s not like Ro isn’t aware of the relationship between Picard and Raffi, much less Worf. Then, the camera isn’t shy about letting us see Raffi’s mobile emitter as she and Worf provoke the Shady Part of Town set until the local gangsters show up. And yet they try to present it as a great surprise when they shoot Raffi, only for her to turn out to be a hologram. But then there’s the double-twist: the gangsters knew she was a hologram as well, and have a man in position to catch the real Raffi.

But then there’s another twist, when Worf and Raffi are forced to fight to the death. But again, we all know full well that this is not how Worf is going to die, so the tension is weird. Raffi “kills” Worf, his body is carried away, then he shows up again having murdered everyone. I do really like when Worf starts to belt out one of his warrior monk aphorisms, but has to stop short because he’s lost quite a lot of blood.

I also dig the idea of a Vulcan gangster who got into the life because, given crime was inevitable, organized crime was more logical than disorganized crime. There’s also a great exchange where he points out that they can’t kill him since he has the chip they need to bypass Daystrom Station security, and Raffi counters that Worf has lost a lot of blood and isn’t necessarily going to be able to show the logical amount of restraint. It reminds me of my favorite bit in The Maltese Falcon, where Sam Spade explains that his goal is to make the bad guys angry enough that they make a mistake, but not so angry that the mistake they make is killing him before they get what they want from him.

So… bets on the “illogical” AI that protects Daystrom? Lore seems like an obvious choice, except that they have been very consistent so far that androids aren’t AIs. So… Moriarty then? That would be kind of funny. The Enterprise’s space baby? But honestly, it could be no one in particular. It could be Peanut Hamper. (It could not be Peanut Hamper)

We’re left then with the mystery of Jack, which I’m guessing we won’t be resolving for another episode or three. He takes out four changelings when they corner him by going all Matrix, in a scene that is so reminiscent of Dahj and Soji going Android Mode in season 1 that its reuse here almost feels like they forgot. He’s mostly worried about the possibility that he will be compelled to kill while red vines grow. He of course will not talk about this with his mom, because drama. Meh.

So… Red vines? Martian, then? I think we have to assume, due to the laws of conservation of storytelling, that Beverly was right and the interest the changelings (or their superiors) have in him is linked to Picard; it’s late in the season to add another big curveball about that part. So… Something that happened to Picard, which would be reflected in his son, but may not be reflected in Picard himself, whether due to age or because his body is synthetic. Logically, it would have to be something that happened to him specifically rather than the whole crew, as no one’s seeking out Kestra Riker or Molly O’Brien or the LaForge sisters. A side effect of Q whanging him around through time in “All Good Things”? Something to do with that time he got possessed by a space ghost, yes, that really happened and wasn’t just me making a Sub Rosa joke? You have to reckon it’s related to a TNG thing, just for the sake of being dramatically satisfying. Ooh, maybe it’s the Ressikans. Like, maybe they did something to his DNA in addition to 40 years of gaslighting and flute lessons?

There’s a bunch of ways they can go from here, and not all of them are good. But just for the moment, let’s have some faith…. of the heart.

Sorry this is late; provider has been up and down like a seventy-year-old captain and his fifty-year-old medical officer on a vacation.

It’s interesting to feel like I’m on the same page as the people who make this show so often. Because I’ll be damned if “No Win Scenario” doesn’t open up with Riker dropping in on Picard to confirm everything I’d been saying about him. He interrupts Picard’s apology to tell him that, yeah, he was right about attacking the Shrike, and more, that the reason he’s withdrawn from his family is to protect Deanna from his nihilistic grief over the death of his son.

Also I guess Vadic is a changeling? I’m not actually sure. There’s a scene where she cuts her own hand off and it morphs into a scary face that makes vague threats and orders her around. The whole scene really undermines what they set up with Vadic; she’s suddenly timid and fearful and Scary Face seems to have something on her, a threat to her entire race sounds like. If she’s a changeling, why is she making herself look like Amanda Plummer anyway? Changelings don’t like going around as solids, and the whole point seemed to be that this renegade faction wasn’t coping well with the loss of the war. Yet Vadic was having the time of her life in a humanoid form, chain-smoking and chewing the scenery. Whether she is or isn’t the sudden shift to her being scared and timid and deferential to the scary face is really ruining what they had built up. Heck, I’m not even sure if she’s going to be The Big Bad going forward; we leave her sort of spinning helplessly in space after Riker whangs an asteroid at her in what should probably have felt like a solid reversal after she opened by throwing the Eleos at the Titan, but there was already enough going on in that scene.

Maybe it’s going to turn out that she’s not a changeling, but that she for some reason has a changeling hand? It would be way more interesting if she is something else and she’s been, like, saddled with a changeling keeper that lives on her wrist to keep her in line than if she’s just a changeling herself and part of this changeling terrorist group. Here’s hoping.

Also, Vadic ditches the portal gun because she can’t carry it into the gravity well. Is this the end of the portal gun? I know we established last week that it was a diversion from the main point of the heist, but I still hoped we’d see more of it since it was pretty cool. Maybe someone else could retrieve it later?

The main thrust of the plot of the episode is a very traditional TNG sort of plot: the Titan is crippled and falling into what turns out to be a space jellyfish vagina (Okay, that bit is pure NuTrek), and there’s no hope of escape, but then they think of a clever gambit which requires pornographic levels of competence and it’s tense but they pull it off and there’s a payoff where they all have a life-affirming moment of looking at baby space jellyfish (They do not appear to be the same kind as in “Encounter at Farpoint”, but they’re similar enough that if they want to tell us this is what those look like when they’re babies, I’ll accept it. They’re a bit more squid than jellyfish, but it’s space, what do you want?). It’s a good, solid plot that looks good on-screen and really only struggles a bit with the fact that it’s sufficiently obvious that it again makes the Titan crew look bad for the fact that three pensioners come up with it all on their own while everyone else is busy making peace with their respective gods (Except the Bajoran. He’s wearing his earring on the wrong ear, which I think means he is an atheist. Being an atheist is a weird prospect on a planet whose gods are a scientific fact, but whatever).

Really, the main thrust of the episode is the character work, and while Picard and Son do a lot of the lifting here, Shaw is the real breakout somehow. Shaw spends most of the episode convalescing; he’s in comparatively good shape aside from a limp, but he’s hopped up on pain pills and declines to retake command from Riker, even though he’s fit enough to help out with the escape. And I like the way all of this is handled. Shaw is unapologetic, but he isn’t oblivious; he repeatedly owns the fact that he’s an asshole, and you kind of get the sense that he may have actually endeared himself to his own crew for the first time when he walks in on Picard and Jack’s touching moment to swear Picard out over the battle of Wolf 359. Yeah, as I was expecting, Shaw is an asshole because of his Tragic Past and survivor’s guilt. In this case, that he survived Wolf 359 only by virtue of being randomly chosen for the last seat in an escape pod. It harkens back to the introduction we got to Ben Sisko – also a survivor of Wolf 359 with a grudge against Picard. But that was ’90s Trek with its stiff characters whose professionalism doesn’t crack and where “character conflict” was sort of bolted on for the sake of drama. This is more visceral. Shaw walks in and basically tells Picard that given that they’re about to die and he is high as a kite, he would very much like to tell him to go fuck himself (He does not actually drop an F-bomb, but Jean-Luc does a bit earlier while relating an anecdote about a time him and Jack’s namesake got lost in an asteroid field while trying to get laid. It is slightly awkward just because of where in the sentence he sticks it. Also, kudos to Jack for calling out that it’s kinda weird his mom named him after his dad’s best friend). I love the little detail here that Shaw mentions that the “real” Borg are still out there, distinguishing them from the Federation’s new Borg allies. And also that he describes Locutus as, “The Borg so deadly they gave him his own name,” which seems like the sort of thing that ties back into his refusal to use Seven’s name.

(Incidentally, there’s a fan theory I love that the reason people swear so much in Picard is that after Wolf 359, there were so many new PTSD cases that it sparked a boom in trauma research, which led to the rediscovery of the therapeutic value of profanity, early-twenty-first-century knowledge which presumably got lost in the wars.)

There’s bonding between Shaw and Seven even. I’m not at all sure how the Titan works. No one seems to know each other, the crew seems to be very green, Shaw’s had the ship for years and been on a bunch of missions as its captain, though, and the nacelles are twenty years old. They released some concept art this week of the original Titan being being disassembled and its parts moved over to the new one by way of explaining the “refit” thing, so is it that Shaw commanded both Titans? How long has this one been in service? Is the whole crew new? I don’t know. Shaw and Seven seem to get along okay. Shaw laments the lack of marijuana on the ship, which is kind of wild. He helps her track the changeling, who is meatier than ever. And Seven’s track record remains solid: the changeling assumes the form of Ensign Laforge, but deadnames Seven, so she shoots her. I also really like that when Shaw asks her about this and Seven says, “Yeah, the real Laforge calls me by my actual name out of respect,” Shaw owns it. He doesn’t argue the point, he doesn’t justify himself; he just openly admits that, yes, he is a dick to her about that.

I’m starting to like Shaw as a character. He’s so open about the fact that he is an asshole. He knows it’s wrong, and he knows it’s not making him any friends. And you know what? He knows Picard isn’t to blame for Wolf 359, that Picard is a victim of the Borg possibly even more than he was. But trauma doesn’t listen to logic. When he isn’t about to die and high on pain pills, he can control himself and be reasonable about it, but it doesn’t make the feelings go away. He recognizes Seven as a supremely competent officer who he’s lucky to have, but he can’t help the fact that calling her by a Borg name is traumatizing to him. I don’t know how you square that circle. It’s not right for him to hurt Seven, but it’s also not right for him to have to self-harm. I mean, I get it. I’m reluctant to develop friendships with men named Chris. Fool me six times, shame on me.

It’s good TV, but I do have a little reluctance here that two seasons in a row, we’ve had a major character with serious psychological issues who isn’t getting treatment. Three if you count Raffi, which you probably should. This tracks with the real world, but it hurts like hell that things aren’t better in the twenty-fifth century. This is, after all, the Generation that gave us “Ships have a therapist on the bridge.”

My other issue with the scene is that the tension is all on the part of Seven. The audience never has any doubt that Laforge is the changeling. We just saw her on the bridge a few seconds ago (The immediately preceding shot is framed to not show her, but the one before that is basically, “Riker tells Laforge to fly the ship”), and Seven just got off the phone with Riker and told him not to send anyone. Plus, she’s incredibly sus, to the point that she practically went, “Mua ha ha” after asking Shaw whether or not whacking him in the head at this point would allow them to save the ship from otherwise certain death but still leave them easy prey for the Shrike. I guess this was intentional, to put us in the position of fearing for Seven. But there isn’t a lot of tension even that way. Seven is already on her guard, and we kinda know exactly where this is going the whole time. In fact, it feels more like a setup than anything else. Seven and Shaw have been working together to catch the changeling, Shaw and Seven go off to fix the nacelles. Seven says, “Hey, this would be a great time for the changeling to ambush us. I will just step out of the room for a moment and leave you unprotected.” If the changeling hadn’t already done a bunch of murders, we might be inclined to be worried for it, waltzing into such an obvious trap.

I am also confused by the fact that the changeling does not liquefy when Seven shoots it. Is it dead? Stunned? Wouldn’t a changeling revert to liquid in either of those cases? Earlier, Seven had raised the point that by crippling the Titan to the point of doom, the changeling had presumably failed in its mission to help capture Jack. They come back to that a little when the changeling makes it clear that he does want them to save the ship, just not escape. But they don’t close the loop on what the changeling’s full agenda is. In particular, if there’s an explanation for why, while posing as the transporter chief, he didn’t just beam Jack straight to the Shrike and save everyone a step, we haven’t got it yet.

I’ve talked around the exchange between Jack and Jean-Luc because I don’t really have much to say. It’s fine. I like that everyone acts like adults here. Jack isn’t pointlessly obstructive. We learn his reasons for staying out of Picard’s life, but there’s no vindictiveness to it. Unlike Shaw, Jack seems to be at peace with the fact that Picard never meant to hurt him and would have tried to do right by him if he’d had the chance. His heart isn’t open to reconciliation yet, but he isn’t turning against it. I think it’s telling that after Picard accepts the dressing down from Shaw, he gives up on the conversation with Jack as well. Shaw makes Jean-Luc see what he was missing: that Jack, like Shaw, is hurt, deeply, by Jean-Luc’s actions, regardless of the fact that Jean-Luc didn’t have any choice in the matter, and that’s a real problem for reconciliation. Picard can not be the one to make reconciliation happen because to do so, he needs to take responsibility, and how does he do that? Picard has never apologized to any of the victims of Wolf 359, because he is one himself. He was violated, forced against his well to become Locutus, to have his memories raided for the knowledge the Borg used to wipe out the fleet. How can he turn around after that and accept responsibility for those deaths? What’s he supposed to say? “I should’ve fought harder”? “I shouldn’t have put myself in a position to be captured”? “I shouldn’t have worn that short skirt”?

The nebula being a giant space jellyfish uterus was one heck of a twist, and it feels a little bit awkward that Beverly figures this out as a metaphor apparently using Mom Powers rather than the Star Trek tradition of “Science the shit out of this” and then it turns out to be literally true that the nebula energy was contraction. But okay, this isn’t really a “Science the shit out of this” kind of show, and I’ll grant that the Titan crew is busy holding the ship together. Still, it would be nice if the Titan crew – who were greatly talked up in the pre-release materials – actually did something on their own occasionally. This absolutely does not feel like a backdoor pilot for a Titan series; the Titan characters are just sort of “there”.

It also felt like it was a bit late in the day for Riker to still be resistant to trying their plan – his weird death-drive moment where he wants them to wait for rescue, because even if they all die, at least their bodies (and the letter he’s writing to his wife) might be found someday. But he caves when Bev reminds him that one of the running themes in modern Trek is that it’s actually fairly easy to solve these problems once the gang stops fucking around and actually works together. Given that I’d figured out that the solution was going to be “Hook up a lightning rod and let the energy waves jump start the engines” about forty seconds into the episode, I think they could have done a better job at selling us on how hard it was to come up with the solution.

The bonding moment between Picard and Jack also leaves a little to be desired. They have to work together, Jack calling out the positions of the asteroids while Picard navigates around them, a parallel to the anecdote Picard had told earlier about Jack’s namesake. But Picard’s role here is to shout orders to Laforge, so that’s kind of weird. Why not put Picard in her seat for that scene, actually manually flying the ship as he had La Sirena in season one? Picard’s presence is not strictly necessary for this, his big scene. But absolute kudos for another great example of saying things with just a look, the moment Picard recognizes Jack from the years-earlier scene at Ten Forward and realizes how he’d inadvertently hurt him by dismissing the idea that he had any need for a family of his own in what, to the audience of young officers he thought he was addressing, was just your standard inspirational Picard speech. That was pretty cool.

Also, now that they’re out of immediate danger, can they turn the lights back on. When Riker orders them to turn off life support and the lights got dimmer? There was a dimmer?

A bit of a mixed bag, this one. We are just going all in on the Sad Dad, aren’t we? Maybe even a little too hard. We end on a cliffhangery conflict between Picard and Riker whose moral crux is basically them trying to out-Sad-Dad each other. Picard accuses Riker of being too timid because of his Dad Sads, while Riker accuses Picard of being too reckless once Jack is injured, because of his own Dad Sads. And the moral beat of the show, with the climax of Riker throwing Picard off the bridge for having doomed them all feels like it’s aligned with Riker here: it’s Jean-Luc’s name on the title card, so he’s the one who will be having the character arc where he starts out emotionally compromised and has to work his way back.

And yet, of course, was Picard wrong? Riker only fired on the Shrike when they had no other choice; they couldn’t run after the changeling saboteur had blown up their macguffin. No, there’s the devil of it: Picard had been right earlier – they should have attacked first; Riker’s decision to play it safe didn’t pan out because of the saboteur. The problem was that Riker only followed Picard’s plan after it was too late.

The conflict between Riker and Picard is so good though. Putting Riker in the captain’s chair, with Picard as his “Number one” is a fantastic reversal, and, yeah, Riker flipping out like that is a perfect extension of his character. Riker’s upset because Riker did what he always does: he deferred to Jean-Luc, even though his gut told him not to. He’s angry with Picard right now because he is angry at himself: he fell right back into the pattern that kept him from advancing his career for seven seasons and four mostly-terrible movies.

Oh but the changelings. Yeah, it’s the changelings. Or at least, a breakaway faction. They simultaneously reveal it aboard the Titan and over on Terry Matalas Prime. Um… Okay, as a dramatic angle, changelings are a useful villain because of the shapeshifting. But… No, I do not want them to be the Big Bad. We already did that. And it’s not The Next Generation’s fight; it’s weird for them to bring back Deep Space 9’s big bad to be the final boss of Picard. I’m okay with them being here, but it had better turn out that Vadic’s using them, rather than the other way around.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I am starting to fear that Picard and Riker will spend the whole season in that nebula getting hounded by Vadic while Worf and Raffi handle the actual universe-impacting plot. Which is not good because I don’t care for the direction they took with Raffi’s arc and Worf…

Deep sigh.

Okay, on paper, I love the idea that when we rejoin Worf now, he has undergone Some Shit – it’s as if Worf was off doing “Star Trek:Worf” for the past two years and had his own emotional character arc about dealing with his unresolved childhood trauma and is ready to actually commit to dating his housekeeper (And now I see an article in my daily clickbait that this is literally what happened; Worf here is apparently based on a script Dorn had been pushing for a Worf series?). But in practice… I dunno. “I am Worf, son of Mogh, House of Martok, son of Sergei, House of Rozhenko, Bane of the Duras Family, Slayer of Gowron, and I have made some Chamomile Tea” absolutely fucking slaps as a line, but. But.

Something is wrong with Michael Dorn’s performance here, and I can’t put my finger on it. He doesn’t feel like Worf. More like “Michael Dorn playing Worf for a sketch while guest-hosting Saturday Night Live.” Interesting, though, that he describes himself as a “subcontractor”, which suggests that he’s no longer with Starfleet, obviously, but might mean something more. I’m pretty sure that’s how Retired Galactic Tyrant Phillipa Georgiou was described. Everyone’s eager to see if a new Trek will be announced now that Disco is officially ending, so is Star Trek: Worf going to be the angle they take for the Section 31 spinoff they’ve been proposing for years now? They could even bond over the mutual experience of having been rapidly whanged around an infinite number of parallel universes and that time they saw a gremlin on the wing of the plane.

Raffi and Worf capture and interrogate a street-level thug and they fall into a very standard Good-Cop-Bad-Cop routine, except that it doesn’t feel like Raffi actually realizes they’re doing that. She brings up some of the concerns I did, that Worf very easily could’ve let her in on a bit more instead of letting her think she’s been cut loose. Worf is the usual sort of irascible about it for no good reason. I have a hard time buying the justification for their prisoner holding his shape to the point of getting the DTs over it when he could have just, like, not done that and escaped. But we can’t have the reveal in their plot happen before Jack punches the Titan saboteur’s face gooey I guess. The changeling effects are interesting; with a couple of decades’ improvement in the CGI, the changelings are sort of… Meaty now? Like, the changelings in Deep Space 9 would basically do the same kind of liquid metal thing as the T-1000 back in Terminator 2, only amber. These changelings have color variations and texturing in their liquid form that definitely makes them look more organic. And gross. Our story-advancing reveal here is that the portal gun was actually a distraction and the “real weapon” was something far more dangerous. It’s going to be Lore, isn’t it? I don’t want it to be Lore.

Back on the Titan, we have a nice little scene with Seven and La Forge (Why is it that in my head, she is “La Forge” but her dad will always be “Geordi”?) where you almost see a little of ’90s Seven’s standoffishness, but it’s in the flavor of modern Angrier Seven. My poor little heart when Ensign La Forge calls her “Commander Seven”. Show, you had best not injure her for pathos.

Shaw, on the other hand, g’head and injure him. It was actually a really good scene that really gave us a lot to work with. Shaw takes a real bad hit, gets spun and tossed and he’s coughing up blood from an internal injury that Titan’s doctor will not diagnose (Seriously, what is it with these yoyos?) and, shaking with pain, he points with such vitriol and Riker and puts him in charge. I mean just wow. Compare that to the forced “character conflict” that ’90s Trek clumsily introduced once Roddenberry’s grip on the show weakened. Like, if you imagine this happening in TNG’s proper era, you’d have Shaw refusing to hand over command to Riker even as he lost control of the situation, letting his personal distaste cloud his judgment until it was too late. This episode would’ve been mostly about Shaw. But it isn’t, and Shaw is… Let’s say “gracious”? No, that’s too much. He’s lying on the floor, bleeding, badly hurt. These asshole old men have ruined his nap, dragged him to the wrong side of the galaxy, and put his ship and the lives of his crew in danger. He’s pissed. And yet, he still does his duty, still makes the best strategic move: he practically spits at Riker in his anger, but he gives him command, with the order, “You got us into this. You get us out.”

And to his credit, Riker takes his remit as serious as the grave, because Riker was the one egging Picard on last week to put the Titan in danger to save his son – very Riker, really: as a reservist and bereaved father, Riker’s focus is how his friend should protect his own. But once he’s the captain of the Titan, Space Dad Riker’s focus is on protecting his crew just as Shaw’s was. This of course leads to the first time we really get to see Riker as a captain in a tense situation, excluding Lower Decks (And honestly, Lower Decks disappoints me on this front, leaning in on the more freewheeling “pop culture” version of Riker). The fact that Riker does not do a great job at it honestly works for the character. He starts out too conservative, focused on escape. He only turns to attack when it’s too late.

Now, we do get some cool-looking space battles out of it, and the Shrike utterly dominates here, as befits this being the “things get worse” part of the season. I think maybe it would’ve been nice to give us one scene of the Titan holding her own; if for no other reason than to sharpen the blow when the Shrike dominates them in the end. I mean, we end out with the Titan literally shooting itself in the ass.

This is a small problem. It’s tricky. The battles look good. We get to actually look at things; they aren’t the chaotic mess of a lot of the space battle scenes in other parts of modern Trek. They only turn the camera upside-down once or twice. But part of the price of that is that some of the more complicated scenes are also a little slow. I mean, it looks great to see the Shrike fire its portal gun and a big hole open up in front of the Titan and another hole open up next to the Shrike and the Titan to slowly disappear into the hole, and then the Titan’s saucer to emerge back in the nebula even as the tail of the ship is still on the far side of the portal. But it’s also slow. And this happens multiple times. In the portal scenes especially, the Titan lumbers around with the agonizing sluggishness of an early TNG space battle. It sure doesn’t look like the portal weapon was so fast that the Titan couldn’t have juked around it. The first time, they don’t know what’s going on, so okay, but the second time?

And we end up, of course, with the tragic end to this phase of the cat-and-mouse chase, where the Titan shoots at the Shrike and the Shrike portals the torpedoes around to hit the Titan from behind. No one saw this coming? And it’s not like this was instantaneous; it comes off like none of them can figure out what’s going on. The second that portal opened up, Riker easily should have at the least figured out “Oh shit, we’d better dodge.” Again, using her portal weapon to make the Titan shoot itself is a cool tactic (I hope this is building to them turning the tables on Vadic later on by going the wrong way through a portal), but it all happens so lethargically on-screen and with so little apparent comprehension by the Titan crew that they don’t feel especially competent.

Having Riker take command, of course, frees up Jean-Luc to have his own emotional arc through the episode. And I do like most of this. Beverly’s reasons for keeping Jack from him are a little tired. It’s painful to once again have our themes hang so heavily on someone just not being willing to fucking talk about their issues, but I love her explanation that, having lost her parents, her husband, and her first son to SPACE (ps. I love that the lumps Wesley in there, because he might not be dead, but he’s still gone), she decided that she could protect the son of Beverly Crusher, but not the son of Jean-Luc Picard.

Also, it sounds like Picard had a way more action-packed Post-Nemesis career than the typical level of action-adventure during the proper TNG era, given that Beverly’s decision was informed by the series of kidnappings and assassination attempts (Including one by the Remans. If they just pretended that the whole Reman thing never happened, I don’t think anyone would complain) Picard experienced in the week following the entirely normal and mundane vacation-breakup-sex that led to her pregnancy.

So yeah, Bev’s argument is retreading the usual ground. Picard’s frustration is similarly cliche, even if it’s utterly understandable. The one point I do really like is that Picard calls back to last season’s events. He owns that, yeah, he had some serious issues that Beverly was entirely justified in fearing would be a problem for him taking on fatherhood. He is over them now, but more than that, he knows now that those issues were something he had the capacity to overcome. “I could have learned that lesson twenty years ago.” That’s the kind of musings on mortality from a nonogenarian android I want to hear from a show whose raison d’etre is to revisit Picard thirty years later. We later get Picard’s “Seventeen seconds” where Jack is hurt (Tiny aside here, how interesting that Shaw charges Jack specifically with figuring out how the Shrike is tracking them, leading to the discovery of the saboteur and his subsequent injury) and Picard’s brain rewires itself into Dad Mode, to parallel Riker’s flashback about Thad’s birth. The CGI-de-aging they do on the pair is way less obtrusive than it could’ve been, and I like that they seem to have made Riker kind of tubby in the flashback. Also, it does not seem like Riker has not owned any clothes that fit other than his deep-V-retired-swinger outfit from Nepenthe in the past thirty years. Having Deanna pop in on a transmission to be kind of shrewish was a little cringe.

Far more interesting than the parents’ argument, I think, is the not-yet-stated reason that Jack never sought out his father. Unlike David Marcus, Jack knows he’s the spawn of Old Man Picard, but he doesn’t want any of it. The other not-yet-revealed puzzle piece is of course why Vadic wants him. Beverly thinks it’s something to do with Picard. But, of course, Vadic doesn’t want Picard. And she could totally just ask. He would absolutely surrender himself for either the Titan or Jack. I suppose the obvious explanation is that she needs Picard-family-DNA, and whatever Picard has these days, it’s not human DNA. That would tie back to her calling out his “synthetic flesh”.

Is this Shinzon again? I mean, that is terrible, but, like, maybe? Shinzon was an uncompelling villain in a terrible movie. But since we also have the changelings back, possibly I could enjoy it turning out that the final boss of the TNG era is some kind of Legion of Doom, with Shinzon (or just “Another Romulan-made Picard Clone”) and the changelings and Species 8471 and the Pakaleds and Lore and Moriarty and a previously unknown Duras sister and the fluegill parasites and MOTHERFUCKING GROPPLER ZORN all teaming up. That would be the kind of absolute insanity that would justify this project.

Bring back Groppler Zorn, you cowards.

You know, I almost feel like the people who make this show actually listen to me. Possibly they listen to everyone, because they are heavy on the fanservice this season. Because you know how I complained a lot about the pacing of the last two seasons – season 1 especially. Well, that’s fixed.

I reckon most viewers went into this season already knowing through nerd-culture osmosis that our big bad would be Amanda Plummer as Vadic, and her ship was the Shrike, and the gang would be hanging out on the Titan. So… Yeah they don’t really waste time beating around the bush. The main thrust of the episode is that Vadic shows up, introduces everyone to her ship, announces herself as the Big Bad, and everyone goes back to the Titan. There’s no time-wasting with their mysterious adversaries refusing to identify themselves, or trying to sell us that she’s not the antagonist.

Star Trek has never been great at villains, and the Next Generation has been worse at villains than other series. I can count the number of truly great Star Trek villains on one hand, and I don’t even need the whole hand. The Next Gen was always better with Frenemies, really. Modern Trek has failed to give us a really compelling antagonist basically ever. Control came close. But then in saunters Amanda Plummer (Whose dad, I would say, is one of those very small number of truly great Star Trek villains) and lights a cigar and helps herself to a big heaping bowlful of the scenery and just goes to town. She casually tells Shaw his own first name to let us know that she’s got access to Starfleet personnel records (She hints at something in his past that will perhaps justify him being such a dick – something that necessitates him keeping is stress-level in check); we wouldn’t be surprised if she was instantly familiar with the famous Jean-Luc Picard, which of course she is (She also knows about Picard’s robot body, which is the closest we’ve gotten to addressing how well-known it is that Picard is a robot now), but she starts with Shaw, with the nobody we don’t especially like ourselves.

Now, we still have a huge bit being held back, because Vadic’s claim that she wants Jack for the bounty is clearly an incomplete view of things: the Shrike is a War Crimes Mobile, armed with mundane weapons in large numbers, and scary weapons in also large numbers, and a mystery weapon in the number 1. And her ante is to seriously damage the Titan not with any of her weapons, but by wanging the Eleos at it. There’s a huge shift here, because seasons 1 and 2 of Picard had a kind of Russell T Davies Doctor Who vibe to them insofar as for large chunks of them, the drama emerged from the fact that Picard was essentially in exile: he was constantly facing challenges where, as Captain of the USS Enterprise (Notice that despite feigning to not know who Picard is, Jack refers to him as “Captain”, ignoring his actual title in favor of the one everyone knows him for), he could have brought the full strength of the Federation to bear, but right now, all he had was a ranger, a drunk, a drug-addict and an AI developer with anxiety issues. Much of the drama came from the fact that Picard had nothing to fall back on, even his old friends. They faced enemies who were pirates and thugs, but weren’t about to take on Starfleet. But now, Picard has Riker backing him up, and he’s standing aboard a ship-of-the-line, and yet there’s Amanda Plummer, mouthful of scenery, just gleefully telling a Starfleet captain how she is going to tortuously destroy his ship and murder his crew. Episode one had a light implication that they were in danger because the Titan wasn’t there to back them up – that surely, these mysterious attackers would back down if confronted by Starfleet. But nope. She’s giggling over the prospect of fighting the Titan.

By the way, the visual of the Titan just ramming itself in-between the Eleos and the Shrike is pretty great. I’m not fully on-board with the ease of Seven shaming Shaw into rescuing them, but at the same time, a longer scene of her haranguing him to go save a couple of legends instead of being “The guy who abandoned Jean-Luc Picard to his death,” would have messed up the pacing.

I notice that there’s a big shift in Shaw’s characterization at this point as well. He’s still a dick, sure. But in the first few scenes, his, “Fuck Picard and Riker, they stole my ship, stole a shuttle, made me look bad and messed up my nap,” attitude is just purely dickish. But from this point on, every time Shaw is a dick, he frames in terms of his crew, and he is, of course not wrong. Picard says “but we can’t negotiate with terrorists,” and “But we can’t hand over a civilian to be murdered by the scary space lady,” and every time, Shaw answers, “There’s a fuckton of people on this ship and I do not want to get them killed.” That’s not just regulations. It’s not just being a pompous ass. He’s doing the math on people’s lives. The audience is primed to agree with Picard – Jack is a person with a name and a relationship to a series regular, and Vadic is a Disney villain with a ship full of isolytic weapons who, because of the laws of conservation of drama, is probably something to do with portal-gunning the recruitment center last week, and the good guys giving a poor sweet innocent con artist to the cartoonishly evil villain is just Big-W-Wrong. But… Shaw still isn’t wrong either, because, yeah, they drug his ship out here and got them in a fight they possibly can’t win against an urban legend and is it really “good guy” behavior to put his crew at risk for Picard’s friend’s kid? (They do not have any reason to trust that Vadic will let them go, and frankly every reason not to given just how over-the-top evil she’s being, but that’s neither here nor there).

I think we know where this is going, more or less. The thing that’s in Shaw’s past? The thing that makes it hard to sleep? Shaw got people killed, and so now he plays it safe. That’s where his arc is going.

Still needs to be kicked in the face for deadnaming Seven.

And Jack kinda gives them an out. Shame on Titan security for not frisking the guy, but he busts out of the brig and nearly hands himself over before Seven catches him. Shaw is ready to let him go ahead and do it – it’s a perfectly Star Trek sort of answer, frankly: if Jack goes willingly, Shaw doesn’t have to endanger his crew or compromise Starfleet principles by delivering him to his death. They can all be quietly respectful of Jack’s noble sacrifice. The needs of the many and all that.

Except, of course, for the Turn. Because Riker’s been alluding to it all episode, and Picard won’t come out and say it or pursue it (And no one on the Titan thinks to run a DNA scan… The Titan crew is not really distinguishing themselves with their competence). So Riker goes down and wakes Bev up (He’s allowed to walk right up to her, grab a hypo of stimulants and shoot her up with only a very weak “Hey, what are you doing?” from the doctor. Again, not sure about this crew) and brings her to the bridge.

And neither of them say it. It’s been twenty years. Picard has a girlfriend, he’s gotten over his mommy issues, he’s got a new body. They don’t have to say it. With a look, he asks the question, and with a look, she answers, and Admiral Jean-Luc Picard stops fucking around and takes command of the Titan, because he can’t let them hand over his son.

I mean, it wasn’t 100% certain, but we all figured that was probably it, right? It was him or Bev’s grandma’s Irish sex ghost (That’s a thing that happened). And I love that the second Picard says, “He’s my son,” Shaw just sighs and is like, “Okay fine we will be Big Damn Heroes.” Was it a son that Shaw lost?

Oh. Oh I get it now. Duh.

I was angry last week that they alluded to trouble at home with the Troi-Rikers. Of course Riker has to be the one to go and wake Beverly, because they don’t come right out and say it – in fact, you could easily miss the implications (This may be in part because Jonathan Frakes was always a better director than he is an actor, and he’s way out of practice now). Picard doesn’t want to pursue it, doesn’t want to even think about it. But it’s Riker who pushes him, who challenges him. Who won’t let him accept Shaw’s entirely correct assessment that there are a lot of people on the Titan and only one Jack Crusher.

Because Riker lost a son. That’s going to be at the root of his trouble at home, isn’t it? When we last saw him, he seemed to have it pretty together; he was living his best life. But grief isn’t linear. That wasn’t, “I got the Starfleet Bug back in me and have been a bad dad,” when he said Deanna and Kestra would be relieved to be rid of him; it was, “I have the big sads, and do not want to keep inflicting it on my telepath wife and daughter.” Will took one look at Jack, and he knew, exactly like he knew when he met Soji. His Strong Dad Energy kicked in, and he knew that was Jean-Luc’s son, and he could not just stand by and let his friend offer up Jack to his death rather than acknowledge it.

Gah, it is just all so lovely and I am kind of lowkey mad I have to wait a whole week for another episode. This is gonna be the Sad Dad season of Star Trek, isn’t it? Sad Dad isn’t really as big a genre for TV as it is for video games, but it’s certainly the sort of late-in-life meditation that fits with a cerebral show like TNG to go out on. We have a lot of parallels to The Wrath of Khan, and not just because I spent half a year rewriting The Wrath of Khan. The Corporate URW title card is feeling like more than an Easter egg: it’s establishing what we’re going for here. Season 2 was in many ways a mashup of Star Trek IV; Season 3 seems to be going for 2, with a bit of VI in there for good measure. We’ve got a potentially planet-killing superweapon, a smart, larger-than-life villain who revels in making big speeches over the viewscreen, a previously unrevealed son of the captain who’s been kept hidden by his doctor mom, a battle in a nebula… Wow this is kind of on-the-nose.

We have this B-plot too, which is a lot less interesting than the main plot, but has to go through its paces to get the story where it’s going. Just as the A-plot wastes no time revealing Vadic, the B-plot decides that one and a half episodes is exactly as long as they can expect us to pretend that we don’t know Raffi’s handler is Worf. He shows up to do some world-class decapitating and save Raffi’s bacon. Raffi is on the downward-spiral part of her character arc. Worf tells her to drop it after Starfleet fingers an obvious patsy to take the fall for the recruitment center attack, and come on. This all could have been avoided if Worf had just been like, “Disengage for now, I need to work this from a different angle for a while,” rather than letting her think he was going to just let the whole thing be swept under the rug. Raffi goes back to her ex, and they finally make explicit what I said last week and have been saying about her since the start, that her ability to see patterns is a Grim Superpower that also leads to her being a conspiracy theorist, which in turn leads to her drug problem. She makes the downward-spiral decision to pursue a Ferengi gangster toward the true culprets after her ex gives her the choice of him helping her with only one of pursuing the spy stuff or patching things up with their son. Then she misses the incredibly obvious hinting when she claims to have worked for the Romulan patsy and the Ferengi Gangster is like “Oh yes that is very interesting and I definitely believe you and do not know you are lying because I have already killed that dude and have his head right behind my divan.” Then she gets high on an unknown drug provided to her by the shady gangster to prove she’s not a cop, and of course it turns out to be something that will impair her too much to fight back and probably too much to maintain her cover. Good thing Worf showed up. Worf also conveniently commits a lot of homicide, clarifying that the bit from the trailer where he describes himself as a pacifist was a joke. He’s using proper sword now rather than a Bat’leth. Because he’s a ninja. I have this theory that the Bat’leth is actually a deliberately shitty weapon – that it was designed to be hard to use and inefficient (It’s a leverage-based weapon that you have to hold at both ends. You have to get way too close to the person you’re stabbing, and it’s too big to be maneuverable when you’re grappling) because Klingons are a Proud Warrior Race and want to show off, so they felt it would be dishonorable to use a proper killing-machine, and prefer to mezza-luna their enemies to death.

I’m excited. I’m hopeful that the cat-and-mouse in the nebula doesn’t last too long, because we’ve still got a bunch of other stuff to get to, but they’ve actually given me faith this year that they know where they’re going with this plot, which is way better than where we were at this point in either of the previous seasons.

Engage.

I want to be curmudgeonly, but I can’t. They did, so far, pull it off.

Most of the hype leading up to season 3 of Star Trek: Picard has been various forms of, “Oh thank God, they decided to stop fucking around trying something new and just do the TNG reunion nostalgia-fest we wanted the whole time.” If you have been reading my blog’s evolution into a “How is there this much Star Trek for me to talk about?” blog, and I hope you are, you might suspect that this is a marketing tactic that would not work on me so well as on, y’know, the people who keep posting questions on Quora that are thinly veiled rephrases of, “Please help me justify the fact that I can’t stand all the women, gay men, and people of color in Star Trek by making it sound like there’s actually something objectively wrong with it.”

So where are we at the beginning of Picard’s valedictory season? Well, the new Borg and the mysterious transwarp MacGuffin are nowhere to be seen. Rios has been dead for hundreds of years. Soji and Elnor are nowhere to be seen, Jurati is, I assume, off being the Borg Queen. I think Raffi’s got La Sirena for some reason (I didn’t get a good enough look to be sure they aren’t just using the La Sirena sets as a stand-in for “generic civilian ship of the sort a shady ex-starfleet type might use as a private operator”). Stargazer and Excelsior are nowhere to be seen, and we’ll get to Seven in due time.

We actually open on Bevery Crusher, who has become a cool action lady aboard a ship which Memory Alpha tells me is called the “Eleos XII”, though I thought she was saying “Helios” or maybe “Delios”. They’re being attacked by… Let’s go with “Bad Guys”, and she does a lot of murdering them while she waits for the engines to warm up. Her phaser rifle is pump-action, and has both “maim” and “sploosh” modes, switching between them haphazardly. Remember when phasers just had “stun”, “kill” and “disappear”? Okay, I know that they occasionally had to set their phasers to “Extremely nasty death” mode, like when they fought the parasite queen in Starfleet Headquarters’s Inexplicable Boss Fight Room (Seriously, why did they even HAVE a room which was just one big open room with a large throne-like chair and a map and nothing else? The chair had a Starfleet barcode on the back, so this was a normal thing for them to have there, not something specially built for the alien queen). Still. Pump. Action. Phaser. Rifle.

She takes one in the shoulder – fortunately, her attackers have phasers set to “Emulate small caliber gunfire” rather than “Sploosh” – a wound she is unable to treat despite being a doctor, and has to have herself put in stasis. But first, she sends a secret message to Old Man Picard, in the most roundabout and cryptic way she can think of, encrypted with a codec from an unseen adventure (To Rigel VII – the same planet where Pike had recently lost some crew in the original pilot) from the TNG era and obfuscated based on a Borg computer virus that happened off-screen in “The Best of Both Worlds”, transmitted directly to Picard’s old commbadge. I started out thinking it was a little too heavy on the memberberries by having Bev listening to Picard’s old logs when we join her, but I guess it’s actually meant to link back to her invoking the Hellbird virus when reaching out.

But let us pause a moment to contemplate that offscreen during the events of “The Best of Both Worlds”, the Borg infected the Enterprise computer with a virus that… Randomly added 3 to numbers? What, just to dick with them? And they named this virus “Hellfire”? Also, we have an actual canonical example of something mysteriously injecting the actual number 3 into Enterprise systems – that time they got stuck in a time loop with Kelsey Grammer.

Contrary to my fears, Laris has not been quietly killed off-screen; she and Old Man Picard are still very much a thing, and we greet them in the process of packing up the house because she’s got a gig doing security off-world, and her boyfriend is hungry enough for adventure that he looks forward to going with her to… Drink. This scene felt a little clumsy. Also, her job description sounds like a short-term thing, so why is he having the house packed up like he’s moving out? He wants to give Geordi the painting of the D (hee hee. I plan to make “the D” jokes a lot) that’s been hanging over his desk and which is identical to the poster that I think is still hanging in my childhood bedroom unless my mom finally moved it. She stops him.

Apparently, this season is set a few years after last season? (Or maybe not? There’s a ton of inconsistency in the dates of things) Which is a fair way to excuse the status quo being so different, but at the same time, it doesn’t seem to quite mesh with the sense that Laris and Picard’s relationship has a certain newness to it, or that Picard seems not to have kept up with Seven. Or the age of Raffi’s granddaughter.

Still worried they’re gonna fridge Laris in favor of shipping Jean-Luc with Bev, and after last season’s arc, it’s real rough to have him ditch her to go off on another adventure with the old gang, no matter how good a job the universe did at not giving him a choice.

No one from the old gang has heard from Bev in 20 years, and Picard says they parted under a cloud. 20 years would put it around the time of the Mars attack (More or less. I think the Mars attack is more like 17 years ago at this point? Rounding 17 to 20 is fair game in my book, but I bet the nerds are going to insist that they must be different), and I hope they remember that Beverly is from Mars, and probably has feelings about that.

So Picard meets up with Riker at Guinan’s bar because they’re both in town for Frontier Day. Guinan is not present at the moment, but has a lucrative side-line in selling Eaglemoss collectibles, a promotion that has aged like fine wine, what with Eaglemoss going bankrupt between the filming of this episode and the airing of it. She can’t shift the D (hee hee), because no one wants “the fat one”.

Let me tell you, no scene in Star Trek ever gave me tingles the way the reveal of the D (hee hee. Reveal of the D) did back in ’87, but I can totally see Kids These Days not being impressed by the smooth curves and Okudapunk aesthetic in our modern age of harder lines, dimmer lighting, and lens flare.

And… We get to the second Thing From Previous Seasons They Discarded And Made Me Angry: Riker alludes to things not being all fun and happy on Nepenthe, suggesting that Kestra and Deanna are happy to be rid of him. Fuck. Let Riker have his happy retirement, please? If they have it turn out that him taking command of the Zheng He at the end of season 1 reawakened the Starfleet Bug and he’s been neglecting his family, I will be Displeased.

This pretty much brings us to the centerpiece of the episode: the reveal of the Titan-A. Riker describes this as a “refit” of his old ship, but it’s blatantly a completely new ship, a “Neo-Constitution Class”. It looks way more like a Strange New Worlds design than a 24th century design; apparently the actual logic of its design was “What if Starfleet went through a “retro” period at the turn of the century?”

The Titan-A (Letter designators for ships other than Enterprise are a thing now. We had previously seen that in 32nd century on Discovery, but never in the TNG era. I choose to believe that Voyager was the second ship to have its successor get a letter, and once they’d done that, they decided to just make it policy) is not, in my opinion, an especially beautiful ship. Its secondary hull is kind of weird and Grissom-y, and it’s got way too many impulse engines. It’s got a very TOS-movie-era design sensibility, but in NuTrek colors, and while it evokes the original Constitution Class, it doesn’t do so overtly enough to justify selling it as a “New Constitution”.

But the approach scene? Letting the camera slowly make love to the ship as Picard and Riker get a good look at it on the way in? Best “Starship Porn” scene that the modern era has done. It’s everything a Starship Reveal should be, letting us get a good look at the ship and not being too busy or crowded or turning the camera upside-down.

As an aside, I have heard that there’s an explanation for Riker describing the Titan-A as a refit: that it’s essentially a mild sort of con, with the new Titan being built with a few parts salvaged from her predecessor. There’s a popular claim here in the real world – a probably apocryphal one, but one with a chance of being truth-adjacent – that the USS Constellation – a 19th century Sloop-of-War currently on display as a tourist attraction in Baltimore’s inner harbor, was built using timbers salvaged from the 18th century frigate of the same name, and that this might have been done as a legal maneuver to work around congress refusing to authorize a new ship, so the Navy did some creative accounting to “refit” a recently scuttled vessel. Like I said, this is probably complete bullshit, born out of wishful thinking by folks who wanted Baltimore’s tourist attraction to have the same provenance as Boston’s – the older Constellation was a contemporary of the USS Constitution, famously the oldest US Navy vessel in operation.

And then we meet the Titan’s first officer, Commander Seven of-

record needle scratch.

I have not been shy about the fact that I think of “Annika Hansen” as essentially Seven’s deadname. Everyone who uses it in the first two seasons dies. Seven does not want to go back to being the little girl whose parents stranded her in the Delta Quadrant and got her abducted by robot space zombies. She wants to be “Seven”, the identity she forged for herself after her liberation from the collective. So it was upsetting to me when she introduces herself as “Commander Hansen”.

But, again, they pulled it off. Because it’s not just a name; it’s the first hint we get about a man we haven’t met yet: Captain Shaw. And Captain Shaw? Is a dick. He calls Seven by her deadname. He also accuses Seven of siding against him with Picard as a “fellow Ex-Borg”, which is kinda racist? And he hates jazz. And he couldn’t be arsed to greet Picard and Riker. And he couldn’t be arsed to take the chair when they left spacedock. And he doesn’t like bordeaux. And, of course, when Riker and Picard set up a plan to get themselves out to the hinterlands to look for Bev, he just turns them down flat, refusing an order from an Admiral (Picard is retired again? Last year he was running Starfleet Academy. Riker was active reserve last time we saw him, but he doesn’t outrank Shaw).

Seriously, give this man a swagger stick, because he’s got strong Styles energy. I wonder where his arc is going? I assume he will be the person to tell Jean-Luc to go fuck himself this season, but what else? Will he come to see the value of the older generation’s cowboy ways (It’s so strange now to see Shaw dismiss Picard and Riker as being into action and explosions and crash landings, when The Next Generation was for the most part so much more of a regimented, cerebral, thinky sort of Star Trek, and it’s really only the movies where they got to be Big Damn Action Heroes)? Will he be part of the conspiracy? Not actually saying there is a conspiracy, but Bev sure seems to think Starfleet can’t be trusted. All I ask is that there comes a critical moment where Seven gets to say, “I’m not Borg. I’m Ex-Borg, and it’s not Hansen, it’s Seven, you son of a bitch,” then kick him in the face.

I do, though, love how Seven sees right through the subterfuge, and is instantly on-board to steal her own ship as soon as Picard lets her in on the secret.

Here, we pause a second to reflect on the interior of the Titan. It’s… Okay. Too dark, like most starships in this era of “Hey when you use a modern digital camera instead of an old fashioned analogue TV camera, you don’t need to light everything up as bright as the sun.”

I note that like the Stargazer, the bridge of the Titan is set into the middle of a flight of stairs, because there is no OSHA in the 25th century. I am fascinated by the workstations, too, because they have these huge curving screens that are consistent in style as an evolution of the TNG-era LCARS. The scale of them is a little weird though. I find myself imagining the crew constantly damaging their rotator cuffs to reach way up to hit a button all the time.

I think I mentioned that I bought a new car not long ago. Well, new to me; it’s a 2018. It’s my first car with a touchscreen, and its touchscreen is about twice the size of the one in Leah’s car. I test drove a more recent version of the same model, with an even larger touchscreen – basically the whole center console on the 2020 is a touchscreen, and it reminds me a lot of the big workstations on the Titan.

While all this is going on, we check in with our other returning character, Raffi. Who I guess was not the Excelsior’s captain last season, but just the Operations Officer? Because she’s a commander now, same as Seven. She’s also with Starfleet Intelligence, under cover with a secret handler who won’t meet with her in person and is evasive about his true identity and is definitely Worf. Raffi is under cover on M’Talas Prime. Seems early in his showrunning career for Terry Matalas to name planets after himself.

I have no complaints about Raffi’s scenes, unless it turns out that she really did break up with Seven. In particular, I love Raffi’s cover story. Normally, they’d do this thing where they try to sell that she’s gone all piratey and no longer cares about anything but money and her next hit and that she was out for evil. But instead, Raffi’s cover story is, “She fell off the wagon when Seven dumped her, got kicked out of Starfleet over her drug problem, but she’s desperate to get back in, so the reason she’s doing these shady things is that she hopes that a big score will get her back in Starfleet’s good graces.” This is a much more believable cover story than your usual “Nah she just went mercenary,” even if the audience themselves isn’t going to buy it – and they do not ask us to.

The score she’s chasing is a stolen Quantum Tunneling device. That is, a portal gun. I really like the scenes of her trying to interpret the “red lady” clue. I will leave aside how weird it is that her contact sold her the words “the red lady” with no context. I mean, where did he get that? It’s not quite as good as her tracking down Maddox in Season 1, but it’s nice to be reminded that Raffi is a savant at interpreting fragmentary data. That’s the positive side of her (probably neurodivergent) mental configuration that also led to her being a conspiracy theorist (The service record that flashes on-screen for a bit reveals that she stalked Janeway for a while!).

The fact that the Red Lady is a reference to Rachel Garrett is an interesting one, and I can’t help but wonder if our villains’ beef has something to do with defunct timelines – maybe Amanda Plummer is angry about the sheer fucking hubris involved in the Enterprise crew aborting the Klingon War timeline? Though my leading theory at the moment is that the bad guys have a beef over Starfleet allying with the Borg at the end of last season – the references to “The Best of Both Worlds” plus Shaw mentioning the Ex-Borg thing make me think it would be very satisfying for this to be revenge by people who were hurt by the Borg and now feel betrayed that Starfleet has made peace with them.

So the Red Lady is a statue of Rachel Garrett in front of a Starfleet recruiting center, which Raffi figures out just slightly too late to stop it getting Quantum Tunneled into a big hole in the ground, which then politely dumps it from the other end of the hole, way up in the air above. It is a pretty cool visual.

Seven derailing her career to do a solid for Picard and Riker feels nice – we get a very abbreviated sense that she’s chafing as Starfleet – the balance between following orders and following her heart is something that pretty much everyone in NuTrek struggles with. As I’ve said many times, I wish more characters would reach the conclusion that Starfleet wasn’t for them. But I think the arc we’re probably going for here is going to be another rehash of Seven ultimately finding her way while wearing the uniform. I dunno.

We end for this week with Picard and Riker having made it to the Eleos (wasn’t that a toaster pizza?) but under siege from the bad guys, who have returned in a giant sort of scorpion-like ship of a design I feel like I’ve seen before. Kinda like the Shadows from Babylon 5, but more straightforward. Almost thinking there’s a Transformer that turns into it. But our real shock twist is the new character who accosts them and identifies himself as Jack – Beverly’s son. (See? Get it? We called the episode “The Next Generation” and here is the literal son of the previous generation? I mean, actually, it’s pretty cool how the title seems at first to be fan-service reminding us that this season we are just gonna do full-on TNG Reuinion, but it turns out that it connects on multiple levels, with Raffi’s grandkid, and Bev’s son, and Riker’s replacement, and Geordi’s daughter, who is also there, but so far she’s just been a Demora Sulu-style wave and nod; maybe we’ll see more of her later).

Wow. This was a fun, zippy episode, and I really do lament that Picard’s final season has discarded trying to do something new and different in favor of “Let’s just do a proper TNG movie with the same feeling of get-the-band-back-together-after-years-apart that the TOS movies had”. But man, they do such a good job. This episode is so much more focused than the previous seasons of Picard were. And it just feels right. Like, they wham you up front with a title card reading “In the 25th Century…” that evokes the opening of The Wrath of Khan (down to the use of Corporate URW font, which appears only here and in the Star Trek II title cards). The music, which I think is based on the suite from Generations, has a very movie-era feel to it as well, along with a lot of the cinematographic choices. We dispense with the Picard-centric title sequence in favor of a simple title card, and episode titles are on-screen again. Also, along with Corporate URW, we get the return of the Crillee font for the credits. Where seasons 1 and 2 made a point to remind us that this is part of the New Generation of Star Trek – not simply a return to The Next Generation – every little thing they can cram in here seems to scream the message, “The Next Generation is back.” I don’t want to love it, but I kind of do.

Let’s see where they go from here…

PS: The end titles are chock full of little easter eggs on the display panels, revealing that the original Voyager (There’s a “C” now) and the Enterprise-A are both in the fleet museum. Is it too much to hope, I wonder, whether they might get a cameo for Frontier Day?

Yeah, it probably is. But still, would that not be fucking epic?