“Computer, dictate the file logged Shit-I-Stole-From-The-Borg-Queen.”
I’m back from a week in (extremely) sunny Los Angeles, which times out nicely, because Star Trek: Picard is about to spend the rest of its season there. Season two has made the jump backwards in time, and films 2022 for 2024 with no adjustments, save the Hollywood Hills being on fire. I’ve no idea what the creative brief was on this season, but “saving money” would be a good bet. It doesn’t count as a bottle episode/season, but using undressed L.A. exteriors and interiors for all of the location work this year — even Jeri Ryan’s prosthetics are temporarily gone — probably let the production siphon as much cash as possible into season three, to pay for all the rest of the Next Gen cast to return. Get used to spending time in those sunny streets, folks: we’re going to be here a while.
The definitive “L.A. is a character” treatise remains Darren Franich on Star Trek: Into Darkness, wherein he rather cannily connects that production’s location choices to the architectural legacies they (almost certainly unwittingly) call up. Franich went on to look at the first few episodes of the first season of Picard and bail; I have wondered since if he ever went back to it, or stuck to his guns. I’d genuinely love his thoughts on the second and third years; and inevitably, I’d love to know what the hell he thinks about the L.A. situation this season. I’m not an L.A. guy — even with Google Maps, that place is an absolute bastard to understand, geographically — so I can’t even work out which neighbourhoods the sequences in “Assimilation” take place in. I was staying in Los Feliz; I walked up in Griffith Park a lot (which has featured in a few different Star Treks, over the years); and every time I had to drive anywhere, it took a half an hour (which was actually 45 minutes). I can tell you one thing though: the homeless encampment that Raffi lands in (and in which she is then immediately robbed at gunpoint) is fake, probably because putting the cast in any of the hundreds of real ones would have been too, well, real.
Yup, it’s time to dial up some classic, overwrought Star Trek social commentary, which is even more over-the-top and unpalatable here than usual, because it’s no longer speculative fiction. There’s something wildly distasteful about the surface-level head-pats that “Assimilation” gives the real social crises in Los Angeles, a city which feels plenty mid-apocalyptic without any set dressing. The Sanctuary Districts that Deep Space Nine anticipated are repurposed here as the tent cities that are popping up all over the world (including Toronto), and I.C.E. turns up to arrest Chris within minutes of his arrival in Los Angeles, for being an undocumented immigrant. There’s the usual “woe is me, why is it like this” speechifying from the 24th-Century people, and it’s gross, given where it was filmed, what was sanitized, what was recreated, and what was left out.
In the plus column, at least the episode is absolutely vicious in assuring the audience that the mid-21st Century apocalypse, which all of Star Trek canon has alluded to for decades, is within moments of starting. Raffi wonders aloud at how a society with such wealth disparity could exist for so long and “not collapse sooner than it did,” while Seven notes that those California wildfires are the beginning of the decades-long slide that sees us lose access to food, water, and breathable air. I don’t disagree with either character, on any of these points, and it’s grimly fun to imagine any delusional audience members being unnerved by the sheer matter-of-factness of it all. The collapses forthcoming have always been part Star Trek’s 21st Century timeline, and whoops, we made them real. The fancies of the ’60s and ’90s are the reality of the ’20s. There’s an inevitability about every word that feels further ahead in its conviction than most of the rest of this episode, season, or series.
If “Assimilation” had been only a one- or two-episode time travel jaunt, honestly, it probably would have been great. This episode is fun, and Back to the Future‘s Lea Thompson — directing — perfectly mimics the time travel sequence from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, then keeps the sense of mission focus and propulsion at a high pitch throughout the initial L.A. adventure. But we’re going to do eight episodes of this, and if I recall correctly, the gas is completely run out of the car by the midpoint.
This is also the episode where another of the season’s creative briefs pushes forward, which is to get rid of the Picard supporting cast so that the Next Gen supporting cast can come in. Elnor is killed off at the top of the order. Chris meets the 21st Century woman that he will inevitably fall in love with, which plays about as well as that time Tom Paris fell in love with Sarah Silverman in 1995 on Star Trek: Voyager. Meanwhile, Agnes gets assimilated by the Borg Queen, which plays better, even if the outcome of that plotline is just icky as hell. Allison Pill is far and away the MVP of this episode: she plays an emotions-on-the-loose scene against Picard that nicely calls back to Stewart’s own performance in “Sarek,” and mind-heists the god damned Borg Queen herself while the demented dominatrix is fiddling around with her endless crush on Picard.
Both Pill and Cabrera, who I find worthy and estimable contributors to the success of Picard as a whole, will be written out by episode 10 of this season, and (for the most part) the Borg Queen along with them. (Annie Wersching, who takes on the latter role this season, will pass away far too young, before season three airs.) Elnor will be resurrected by time travel magic, but won’t recur in season three. Maybe I understand the creative brief after all: get Picard the hell away from season one, so that we can all get to Next Generation season eight.
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.