This entry was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, this television series wouldn’t exist. To learn more, visit the WGA strike hub and the SAG-AFTRA strike site.
“To share your own crude colloquialism: bullshit.”
In this one, Picard and the gang play Die Hard (actually, more accurately, third-act Skyfall) at Chateau Picard. Why are they at the chateau? Well, it’s probably a standing set from the season one budget; so the writers have decided that the property was completely empty, but unclaimed, between about the Nazi occupation in World War II, and the early 22nd century. Convenient cost-savings! Given everything going on with illegal Greenbelt development in Ontario right now, though, completely absurd.
So the Borg show up and there’s a lot of ray guns and pew-pew. Agnes is the Borg Queen now; have we covered that previously? I don’t know, I don’t care. Alison Pill does a brief nude scene cuz reasons, then gets into the Queen catsuit cuz reasons. Star Trek blah blah blah. Jurati is chronically lonely and has decided that the Queen is, too; this is why they’ll puzzle-piece themselves together and save the future, I guess. Elnor is back, having died five episodes ago, but they’ve kept Evan Evagora on the payroll for various flashbacks for guilt-stricken Raffi, and now he gets to play an Emergency Hologram version of Elnor to kick Borg ass. I like Evan Evagora well enough, for all the degree to which this show ever let him do anything, or even play the same character for two episodes in a row. He’ll be gone-gone, of course, at the end of the season, like the rest of the Picard crew.
The arc with Picard’s mom ends here. Yvette Picard committed suicide; Jean-Luc held himself responsible because he’d let her out of her bedroom that night (where his father had locked her “for her own protection” rather than, say, calling the Star Trek doctors); Picard’s grief was so immense that he actually blocked the memory and, to close the loop on “Where No One Has Gone Before,” says he spent his life imagining his mother as an old woman offering him a cup of tea (!!). Again: the exorbitant, casual cruelty of this imagining of mental health in the 24th Century simply boggles my mind. Let’s take just a minor part of it: the idea that, in that future time where headaches don’t exist, no one would have been looking after Picard’s recovery from this trauma; no one would have checked in. We see something similar with Shaw, next season. It’s just abysmally sad. It’s true to life, I guess, of what people experience now when struggling with grief, trauma, and depression; but to canonize it as part of Star Trek’s future makes me sadder than I can say.
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.