Following a couple of weeks of dragging its toes, Star Trek: Picard provides an action-large penultimate chapter that brings just about all of the season’s ongoing threads with each other. The street to the climax hasn’t been the smoothest, but this 10-hour Trek is at last commencing to fork out off with the simultaneously explosive and introspective “Hide and Search for.†The episode resolves a number of year-lengthy subplots in a way that is acceptable, but would be more gratifying experienced they been established up with much more treatment.
The finest of the bunch is, unsurprisingly, the thread that’s gotten the most focus: Picard’s repressed memories from his childhood. While sneaking by the tunnels beneath Chateau Picard to evade Adam Soong’s quasi-Borg strike force, Jean-Luc recalls the finish series of activities that motivated his fantasy-infused flashback from again in “Monsters.†As implied in that episode, there’s extra to this story than Picard experienced authorized himself to relive for the duration of his coma aspiration. That memory concluded when his father Maurice (James Callis) locked his mother Yvette (Madeline Clever) away through a manic episode. By the end of “Hide and Find,†we understand that younger Jean-Luc allow her out and that, later on that night, she took her own lifetime.
This period has been occupied with tracing the origins of Picard’s fear of intimacy back again to a critical moment in his previous. Providing this nicely-explored character a new, defining childhood trauma is a tall purchase to start with, especially since his hesitancy to dedicate to a passionate romantic relationship has always been offered as a consequence of his career. On the other hand, if you’re heading to give him a further psychological wound that informs his selections through his lifestyle, it should have some heft and some texture, and I consider the storytellers have completed this. In “Monsters,†we see Picard confront a mental projection of his father, who he’s always remembered as an abusive spouse who crushed his mother’s spirit. There’s the implication that Picard has lived with the panic of acquiring that very same darkness in himself and smothering any lover who comes close adequate, but that on your own would not be fully convincing. We have acknowledged Picard for above 30 a long time, and he’s in no way disclosed a trace of his father’s bitterness in any of his interactions. That doesn’t imply it can not be a thing he fears, but it does make it a weak psychological hook for his character.
The reveal that he unknowingly aided his mother’s suicide, even so, has a bit extra resonance to it. As soon as, as a boy, Picard manufactured a conclusion purely out of enjoy that experienced tragic effects. As well youthful to fully grasp that none of this is his fault, he determined that the way to steer clear of repeating this heartbreak was to preserve that metaphorical door to his heart shut, even (or particularly) when another person arrives knocking. In an exertion to abide by his mother’s past wishes, he buries this memory and, unconfronted, it quietly guides his behavior all over his existence. This is the level of deep-seated wound that works, a unique enough second to depart a powerful influence but a vague adequate lesson that it can fit in with what we know about the character. Still, Picard’s admission that he’s frequently fantasized about viewing his mother as an previous woman—a nod to her visual appearance as a manifested figment of his creativeness in an early Next Generation episode—might have been far more significant if we’d also viewed Aged Yvette this period, probably while checking out his subconscious back in “Monsters.†As an alternative of folding this retcon into the tale as a mislead that deepens the thriller, the storytellers just throw in a little bit of dialogue to assure die-hard enthusiasts that they haven’t neglected her before cameo.
The story of Dr. Agnes Jurati and the Borg Queen is also generally solved this week. Just after a heated battle aboard La Sirena, the Queen is about to land a killing blow on 7 of Nine, but the psychological distress that this will cause Jurati’s entire body lets her to assert some manage. Placing the battle on maintain, Jurati pitches the Queen a radical new strategy that she believes will reduce the Borg’s defeat in the two the Prime and Confederation timelines: rebuilding as a legitimate collective of willing members. As an alternative of mindless drones performing out the Queen’s commands, these new Borg would be people joined in both believed and reason, empowered with the positive aspects of Borg implants and none of their weaknesses. Agnes argues that there is previously an instance of her ideal Borg in Seven of Nine, a outstanding, daring, selfless hero who they have equally, at one time, loved. Intrigued by this proposal, Queen Agnes, now 1 being, drops off the rest of the crew and normally takes off into room aboard La Sirena to attempt this experiment. (We have most likely noticed the final results of this presently, in the time premiere, and will practically definitely see it yet again in the finale.)
This story, way too, has observed an ending that functions. This season has reframed the Borg Queen as pushed by the drive for relationship much more than the drive for electrical power. She has now experienced the rise and apparently inescapable slide of her empire across various timelines, and with the included, outsized impact of Agnes in her thoughts, it’s not unthinkable that she may possibly be willing to try out something new. It is also an intriguing plan on a narrative stage to shake up the Borg, who have grow to be less and fewer efficient as outright villains about time. When the original depiction of the Borg as an unstoppable drive of nature will probably normally be the coolest and most iconic, we’re now many years removed from it, and new Star Trek stories must be pushing ahead, not looking for routes backward. Queen Jurati restoring Seven of Nine’s Borg implants in buy to save her everyday living also dovetails properly with Seven’s arc for the time. Seven’s story may perhaps not have gotten a great deal time in the foreground, but the show has under no circumstances missing sight of the effect that living as a human for the initially time has experienced on her. For her to develop into Borg all over again, just as she was, but as an instance of a far better potential for the universe, helps her to come to be a lot more accepting of herself.
What is missing from this equation is connective tissue amongst 7 and the Queen, and specially amongst Seven and Jurati. The full fate of the galaxy hinges on Agnes and the Queen’s shared admiration for Seven, but neither character has used nearly any time with her this period. Even though supporters of Voyager are definitely acquainted with 7 and the Queen’s twisted mom/daughter connection, there is been small to reestablish it in this sequence. Even worse, Seven and Agnes have never seriously had a story jointly. They absolutely respect each individual other as colleagues, but there is hardly ever genuinely been any attempt to set up a specific dynamic between them on display. This does not outright destroy the affect of this episode’s climactic scene, but it does limit it noticeably.
The episode’s weakest factor is Dr. Adam Soong’s pursuit of Picard and Tallinn by means of the Chateau’s catacombs. Soong is a dull antagonist as opposed to the Borg Queen, and he’s stuck offering some generic and uninspiring villain speeches. It does not support that he’s flanked by an army of nondescript troopers who have seemingly received no benefits in any way from becoming crudely assimilated by the Borg Queen. Seeing them dispensed with by Raffi and 7 or a sword-wielding holographic Elnor is very good entertaining, but it does not do considerably to combat the perception that Dr. Soong is a born loser who accomplishes absolutely nothing on his personal or even with extraterrestrial support. This is a dilemma, specified that he’s our remaining danger for the season finale. He however plans to sabotage Renée Picard’s Europa Mission, but it’s tricky to envision him amounting to nearly anything much more than a nuisance, a distraction from the true most important function that is the last assembly concerning Picard and Q. However, this penultimate episode goes a prolonged way in the direction of worthwhile the experience of this time as a whole, and gives some hope that the finale will not only wrap points up properly but also go away the figures and the Star Trek universe in a new, far more attention-grabbing spot.
