‘Star Trek: Picard’ S2E3 Recap: Howdy, Los Angeles!

Immediately after two hrs of prologue, Period 2 of Star Trek: Picard last but not least crash-lands in its advertised environment of 2024 Los Angeles. Dropping Starfleet’s finest into a existing working day environment to remark on our present-day complications is a tradition relationship back again to The Unique Collection (see: “Tomorrow is Yesterday”) and codified in 1986 with the mainstream good results of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Dwelling. This week’s episode, “Assimilation,” dives headlong into critiquing fashionable The usa, but is hobbled by the hasty disposal of a person of its key characters and yet another in a extended line of uncomfortable failures for Star Trek’s final paper tiger, the Borg Queen.

The episode picks up in the alternate 2401 explored in very last week’s chapter, with La Sirena on the operate from the evil Confederation of Earth. Elnor (Evan Evagora) has been shot and is bleeding out, but 7 (Jeri Ryan), Rios (Santiago Rivera), and Raffi (Michelle Hurd manage to promptly flip the tables on the Accomplice boarding celebration and vaporize them with their personal weapons. (How Elnor ended up with a gap in his chest somewhat than his atoms scattered is a little something we’re not meant to assume about.) Raffi hurries Elnor to the healthcare bay for cure, but it’s no use — their unlikely ally, the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching) diverts the ship’s electric power to full and then get better from their leap into the past. La Sirena can make a managed crash landing in 2024 France, and Elnor dies on the running table. A distraught Raffi pins her hopes on their mission to maintenance the timeline, but Dr. Jurati (Alison Tablet) just cannot assure that stopping the temporal divergence will also undo Elnor’s death. 

As disappointed as I am that the storytellers have evidently composed Elnor out of the relaxation of the period, I am hardly amazed. When Elnor was launched early in Picard’s initial year, he experienced the prospective to be the thematic middle of the tale, the personification of Jean-Luc’s personal and specialist failures. Here’s a child who Picard normally takes below his wing and then abandons for a 10 years right after Starfleet cancels his mission to resettle Romulan refugees. When Picard seeks enable from an adult Elnor, Elnor is inclined but also wounded, and his code of “absolute candor” usually means carrying his disappointment on his sleeve. Having said that, over and above his debut, the writers seemed to have no notion what to do with him. He and Picard have handful of meaningful interactions for the rest of the season, and his place as the party’s significant hitter was straight away usurped by 7 of Nine, on whom he looks to imprint as a new mentor. By the opening of the 2nd season, he has grow to be Raffi’s pupil, evidently so that she can be properly devastated when he’s tossed in the fridge after contributing nothing to the story. 

A lot more than that, although, getting Elnor off the board feels like a subject of benefit. Our tale is set in 21st century LA, and he’s an extraterrestrial who does not know how to lie. You could disguise him with the previous “bandana about the ears” trick a la Spock or Tuvok, but his honesty would nonetheless be a hurdle to be resolved. Rather than make something out of that hurdle, possibly extraordinary (consider Elnor struggling with the constraints of his code in the facial area of galactic-level stakes) or comedic (envision him doing semantic gymnastics to stay away from lying outright about his nature), they just eliminate him, simply because that’s less difficult. Yes, it heightens the stakes for Raffi and places her in conflict with Picard, who hardly bats an eye at his erstwhile mentee’s loss of life, but the best endeavours of Michelle Hurd and director Lea Thompson (of course, that Lea Thompson) just can’t lend gravity to the demise of a character that the display does not treatment about. It reads as lazy, especially considering that I fully expect that the time journey escapades will conclusion with the total crew returned to the site of the Borg anomaly, Elnor integrated.

With no time to mourn, Raffi, 7, and Rios beam to LA in search of the “watcher,” an mysterious specific who the Borg Queen promises can pinpoint when and where by the calamitous transform in the timeline will acquire put. The Queen passes out right after the time soar and enters some kind of routine maintenance method, and without having her aid the absent workforce is forced to search for symptoms of an anachronistic presence in LA. The strategy is to climb to the optimum position in the metropolis (which the figures retain referring to as “Markridge Tower” for some motive?) and carry out some scans, but teleporting midway throughout the world when your ship is a wreck turns out to be a perilous prospect. Raffi and 7 arrive individually, blocks absent from the tower, and Rios materializes 20 ft in the air, slams his head on a hearth escape, and is carted off to a nearby urgent care facility. 

The Voyage Property-fashion materials is the episode’s most effective, losing no time in demonstrating us how our culture’s latest route could effortlessly guide to the hellish long term of the Confederation. Star Trek IV’s problems about 1980s Earth feel nearly quaint in contrast to what our heroes experience in a modern California that is continuously on fire. Raffi remarks upon the staggering distinction between the splendor of an approaching mission to Europa and the squalor of LA’s unhoused inhabitants. (Eagle-eyed viewers will see flyers referring to the “Sanctuary Districts” grimly predicted by the Deep Space Nine two-parter “Past Tense.”) 7 of Nine is taken aback by the warmth with which she’s greeted by strangers right here, without the need of her Borg implants or anti-Borg prejudice generating her an immediate pariah. We can also infer that she’s having fun with the privilege of being a very white girl in Los Angeles, in contrast to her biracial and Latino comrades. (This, also, was a big part of the subtext of “Past Tense.”)

But absolutely nothing hits the nail much more specifically on the head than the introduction of the story’s 21st century antagonists, none other than US Immigration Customs and Enforcement. When Rios is wounded, a excellent samaritan provides him to a clinic that presents lower-value, no-queries-asked health care treatment. There, he’s patched up by Teresa (Sol Rodríguez), the charming and witty doctor who runs the place. Each and every “Voyage Home” employs a character from the current working day who will become an ally to our timelost heroes, normally someone with values that align with the Star Trek long run, and Teresa suits the bill nicely. Rodriguez and Santiago Cabrera also have immediate intimate chemistry, the likes of which Cabrera and Alison Pill did not really share past year. When Teresa’s facility is threatened by an ICE raid, Rios attempts to assist and inadvertently helps make it even worse, acquiring them each arrested. Positioning ICE as both a small villain in the time and a portent of humanity’s foreseeable future as the xenophobic fascists of the galaxy is uncharacteristically daring of modern day Trek. Regardless of putting their finest foot forward in phrases of illustration (see Discovery’s racial and gender range), none of the existing demonstrates have been significantly for radical political statements, and this is a welcome case in point of Trek honoring its roots as a progressive establishment.

However, “Assimilation” also partakes in an additional, albeit youthful, Trek custom: Making the Borg Queen glimpse like a chump. Launched in the 1996 feature Star Trek: Very first Make contact with as a way of giving the Borg a villainous figurehead, the Queen also presents the or else unstoppable cybernetic pressure of character with a one, very exploitable place of failure. In brief, she exists to get punk’d, and her a number of defeats on Voyager reduced the Borg from Trek’s greatest baddie to just one more Alien of the Week. In this episode, Dr. Jurati deliberately connects her mind to the hibernating Queen’s in buy to support her restoration from the tiring time travel exertion, and not only avoids getting assimilated in the approach but methods her into revealing what she knows about the watcher. Even though the problems are unusual and Jurati’s brilliance has been properly-recognized, this is nevertheless a hell of a way to treat a character who represents the most terrifying power in the galaxy. Resistance has never ever been fewer futile. 

That claimed, I like Annie Wersching’s flippant, condescending choose on the Queen. Alice Krige performed her as a seductress in Very first Get hold of, Susanna Thompson as an abusive mom on Voyager Wersching’s Queen is a bully, befitting her function as a foil to the insecure Agnes Jurati. I like her new glance, courtesy of James MacKinnon’s makeup section, which pushes her even even more into H.R. Giger territory. But, if I might make a prediction, I really do not imagine Wersching’s Borg Queen is developed to last. The facial area beneath the mask of the 25th century Queen is bound to belong to an individual else, and right now the wise money’s on Agnes Jurati. But a great deal can transpire in seven months Let us see what is out there.