“The future is left for us to write. And we have powerful tools!”
“Nepenthe” was my favourite episode of season one of Star Trek: Picard and remains the odds-on favourite to keep the crown for the whole series; but, when I first watched it, “Broken Pieces” did a capable job of maintaining the level, and convinced me that there might be some life in this show’s premise after all. Here’s why: it actually spends some time with the La Sirena crew and the emotional consequences of all the lunatic shit that’s happened in the first seven episodes of the season. Now that the relationships are developing, the episode got me on board with Picard’s “decidedly motley” new crew in a way where I could actually see following them through further adventures in an ongoing series. It gives the entire season plotline (plus or minus one ridiculous cold open with Romulans going nuts when they learn about the android prophecy) some much-needed room to breathe. For a NuTrek episode, “Broken Pieces” is… measured? Thoughtful? It’s the kind of storytelling that makes Prestige TV-type programming work, and it is a god damn shame that Picard — which is trying to be PTV so hard it hurts — only rarely manages to visit this mode.
The crux of all of this is a short two-hander between Soji and Picard, where they (finally, inevitably) end up discussing Data. Picard fumbles through describing his late friend, and Soji prompts him to describe how he hopes Data would remember Picard if their fates had been reversed. He does, and it’s beautiful; and Soji’s assertion that yes, the emotionless Data did indeed love Picard brings a tear to my eye. The scene is such a human means of examining the two men’s relationship in absentia, relying on no science fiction tricks (well, besides the existence of an android’s daughter) or contrivances, by simply sitting with the emotional weight of Picard’s memories of their friendship. I love it so much that it largely becomes a shame that the series does nonetheless bring IRL Data back into the fold directly, both in this season’s finale, and then wholesale in season three, via those aforementioned science fiction tricks and contrivances. I get that fans want nothing other than for all the things to be the way they were back when we were kids, but Data died — and I can count on one hand the moments in which the rest of the Next Gen crew has weighed the size of that loss. The Soji-Picard scene in “Broken Pieces” is one of the better ones.
Almost as good is the Rios plot here, where he has a post-traumatic reaction to seeing Soji for the first time, and the entirety of his Starfleet backstory is filled in as a result — the kind of thing that sounds like it should be clunky and forced, but somehow manages instead to be deft, expansive, and deeply insightful to character. Santiago Cabrera accomplishes a lot here, and you can really feel the loss of Captain Vandermeer and Rios’ relationship with the man, and Rios’ horrified shock at what happened on the U.S.S. Ibn Majid when they made accidental first contact with the android colony. That all of this plays out while including Cabrera also playing five alternate emergency hologram versions of Rios to Michelle Hurd’s bemused investigator Raffi, and that it works, basically cements Rios as a critical success on this series as a whole. I’d read an Ibn Majid novel series, Pocket Books: just sayin’!
And it’s an abundance of riches: we also get Jurati meeting Soji for the first time, which Alison Pill — chronically underserved by the writing on this series for her entire time on it — plays to the nines. We get the La Sirena crew having their first proper all-crew briefing room sit-down, as Raffi lays out her magnum opus, the connection of all the dots that have been driving her career off the rails since the attack on Mars, fourteen years ago. And we have Picard sitting quietly with Rios while the ship is at warp, talking about the holy wonder of deep space travel, before lecturing his younger counterpart on what is, I suppose, the thematic underpining of the whole season and/or the reason Stewart wanted to do the show in the first place: to preach against governments that let fear dictate their values. It goes back to the post-9/11 era for me, but I suspect Stewart is actually trying to talk about Brexit. Regardless, it washes out the same.
And boy: tying up the loose ends on the Artifact, now dwindled to an afterthought with the majority of the storyline’s business beautifully contained on La Sirena, really demonstrates how belaboured that entire plotline ended up being, and how badly it was dragging behind the better intentions of the show, like a rusty boat anchor shaped like a Borg cube. Seven of Nine comes back, becomes a Borg Queen, beats the Romulans at a stalemate. Who fucking cares? The only good idea to come out of that whole mess was the thing where Evil Femdom Romulan’s… aunt?… was so madness-stricken after learning about the coming of Seb-Cheneb that she broke the Borg cube in the first place, when they tried to assimilate her. I’d watch that cut scene!
Blogging the Next Generation: Picard runs Thursdays on tederick.com as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: Picard. The original BTNG did the same for Star Trek: The Next Generation.