“What the hell are you doing out here, Picard?”
Since Seven of Nine pops up at the end of the previous episode and now joins the cast of Star Trek: Picard (first irregularly, then permanently), some background context on my relationship with Star Trek: Voyager, from whence she hails, and this character particularly: it sucked, and I didn’t like her.
As such, it came as a surprise to me that Seven’s return was so warmly embraced by the fandom; and that even my cold heart would swell when Voyager‘s theme is quoted at two significant points in this season (one in this episode). Realigning Seven as a pirate/biker/badass is just as cloying a bit of fan wish fulfilment as creating a Baywatch Borg Babe in the first place, but I like her more here than I did there. Jeri Ryan has aged into the role beautifully (not that her performance was ever the problem), so having her in a marquee role is fun. Putting her together with Picard (and, indeed, they already know each other!) feels Avengers-y in a good way.
This episode, though, is a litany of failures. We begin with Vajazzle.
(I’m pretty sure that’s not her name. But it’s not not her name. However it’s spelled, it always comes out sounding like “vajazzle.”)
A mean ex-flame (?) of Seven’s who has taken to murdering the Borg kids Seven brought back from Voyager (?!), Vajazzle now has Bruce Maddox (!!?!) under lock and key, and Picard and the gang are gonna need to go get him. Vajazzle is played by a weird Deanna Troi lookalike in a sheer one-piece leotard, with shoulder pads made out of garden trellis. She’s surrounded by staffers who look — somewhat to their credit — like they wandered off the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So many science fiction and fantasy series have tried to do outer space crime lords, and Picard takes a chop at it here, and it is perhaps as tired and unconvincing as it has ever been, anywhere.
I don’t know why both Icheb and Maddox had to be recast for this show, or where Manu Intiraymi or Brian Brophy are at, career-wise. Per Picard‘s series of emotional shortcuts, it’s a bad move; here are actual (though limited) legacy characters that we might have a feeling about, except they have new faces, so those feelings are somewhat short-circuited.
Litany of failures 2: Agnes Jurati. In this episode we get a couple of surprises: first, that Jurati has a prior romantic relationship with Maddox. I have no idea how this would work, temporally, if he left Earth 15 years ago when synths became illegal, unless Agnes is meant to be, like, 45. (She plays mid-20s, at best.) I dunno, it’s Star Trek, there could certainly be time travel or slow-aging species involved, but the chronology of this show is fucking hard to follow at the best of times, and here we are again. Alison Pill tries her ass off to be a joy on this show (because she’s a joy in pretty much everything she’s in), but boy, Picard never figured out what to do with her, besides shadow-boxing holographic gatekeepers that get you onto Freecloud, or — here’s the other surprise — killing Bruce Maddox, out of nowhere, after suffering a panic attack strong enough that it called up the Emergency Medical Hologram on spec. It’s not just that the writers don’t know what to do with Jurati; it’s that they can’t even successfully map out the thankless, plotty shit they need her to do.
Litany of failures 3: Freecloud. It’s giving Rouge City from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and like pretty much every single attempt by Star Trek to do “grimy, Star Wars-y, dystopic,” it plays like what an 8-year-old boy trying to impress his friends would come up with when asked to describe what would be cool about a city in the future: guns, and boobs, and searchlights.
And, of course, litany of failures 4: the crew’s plan, itself, which requires them to sell Seven to Vajazzle, with Rios dressed like a pimp, and Picard playing a one-eyed Frenchman.
Wait a minute: isn’t Picard meant to be French?
Disregard: that’s always been a real mess, even back on TNG. But in Picard, for whatever reason, everyone decides it’s time to start lampshading Picard’s Gallic origins. He speaks French (very badly) to his dog in the premiere episode, and now he’s doing the worst French accent I’ve ever heard, which isn’t just illogical, but also pathologically un-funny.
It also brainwormed an idea into me, given that Stewart’s performance here is as cartoonishly over-the-top as Jessica Fletcher going “undercover” as a southern Belle: this series is Patrick Stewart’s Murder She Wrote. It isn’t by, or for, young people (or even people my age). It’s mystery dinner theatre for the oldsters, and as of exactly here, I really started to think I was goin Picard.
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.