“It must have taken appalling brutality to turn such a gentle soul to violence.”
After the season-high, one-two punch of “Nepenthe” and “Broken Pieces,” I cruised into Star Trek: Picard‘s two-part season finale more bullish on the show than I’d been since its announcement. And for a solid five minutes, I was not disappointed — as “Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 1” (woof, that title) opens with the dippiest Star Trek visuals since, without exaggeration, “Encounter At Farpoint,” plus or minus one time Paris and Janeway turned into slugs. La Sirena comes out of the Borg transwarp conduit above Soji’s homeworld and is promptly attacked by… giant flying space-orchids. Humungous flower petals that eat the damn ship!! This is fundamentally my shit.
It’s bright, it’s weird, it’s very Giant Green Space Hand. It’s the kind of hippie sci-fi shit that Star Trek used to be entirely about, while simultaneously feeling like the sort of wild-ass swing that the post-Abrams minders of Trek, including Patrick Stewart himself, have done their damndest to curb-stomp straight out of the lexicon, out of fear that it’s “uncool.” However it slipped past security, this sequence (which is also a pretty terrific space battle, given that the Artifact comes out of the transwarp conduit to save La Sirena from “someone’s asshole Romulan ex” and is also, equally, absorbed by space-orchids) is a warm reminder to me that, before Star Trek (and Stewart) became an éminence grise of the science fiction establishment, it wasn’t always taking every single thing so seriously. (See also: characters who didn’t need to be walking time-bombs of pent-up post-traumatic grief; seasons where the fate of the entire universe did not need to be at stake.) Trek used to think exploring space was gonna be fucking cool, and that we’d encounter some weird shit, and didn’t care how uncool it might be branded by the normies, for thinking so. NuTrek only hesitantly remembers to let its freak flag fly.
Well, good news anyway: there’s even more vintage Trek hippie shit coming, as Picard and the gang make landfall at Soji’s colony which, between the baked California modernism and the saris, feels very much like it came out of season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Also, half the people are duplicates of the other half of them; and half of them overall are gold. (Not quite Data-vintage gold; it’s remarkable how hard post-Next Gen makeup teams have found it to duplicate Brent Spiner’s original patina.) Does all this irrevocably end Soji’s status as a being who is, in any way, special? Unfortunately yes. She’s no longer “Data’s daughter” so much as a child of a large colony of Data descendents; and if she happened to be the one plucked from the crowd to go investigate the synth attack, she loses any specialness there by dint of having no memory of that assignment, and therefore any agency in its completion. (The series even underlines the point, by wheeling out Sutra, yet another Soji duplicate.) I really, really like Soji as a character and an idea, and I gravitated to her immediately when Picard began to air (or rather, to her sister). But, much like Dahj, it becomes sadly clear by now that this series has no real interest in her besides as a plot-moving device; and she’ll be written off the show in just two more episodes. It’s a damn shame: the premise, the character, and Isa Camille Briones all deserved better.
All of this is cemented by the fact that Soji’s arrival at the colony immediately reveals the prime article: Brent Spiner himself. Soji was never “the guy,” to paraphrase Austin Walker; she was “the guy who gets you to the guy.” People who generally like Picard (especially its third season) don’t like me dragging their buzz by being so anti the legacy character stuff, and I get it; but when the trick is as cheap as it is here — as though a million Trekkies cried out in one voice, “we don’t want new characters, we just want Data back” — it feels really cheap, wasteful, and disingenous.
The final cards of Picard‘s first season are being dealt; the endgame of its grand design. It shall turn out that “Nepenthe” and “Broken Pieces” were, indeed, the season’s high: an episode about legacy relationships, followed by an episode that strongly suggested that the new characters had a developing place in this world. The latter was a ruse, a scaffolding created around the limitations of a star who, as stars do, wanted his own private victory lap only — as we shall see next week.
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.