WiC Watches: Star Trek: Picard

Photo: Aaron Epstein (CBS Interactive)

Episode 109: “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1”

I am Dan Selcke, and I am taking over for David to review the penultimate episode of Picard’s first season. Let’s begin!

The second-to-last episode of Star Trek: Picard is mainly concerned with setting up the last episode. Nothing of huge consequence happens here, or at least, it doesn’t feel like it does. We finally arrive on Soji’s home planet, a visit a civilization made up of synthetic lifeforms. Picard and crew have gotten here a couple days ahead of the Romulan fleet thanks to taking a shortcut through a chronoton field, although Narek and the Borb Cube were both close behind. But absent a cool sequence in the beginning of the episode where Picard’s ship is brought down to the planet by what looks like a giant space-faring flower (“They hit us with a flower,” says Agnes, bemused), there’s nothing much to distinguish this colony: the peace-loving synths walk around placidly in flowing fabrics and gold foundation.

Brent Spinner, who played Data in The Next Generation, returns as the lone human in the group: Dr. Alton Soong, the son of the guy who actually created Data and now an advocate for the synths. The most interesting new character is probably Sutra, a gold-covered synth who looks exactly like Soji. Isa Briones has fun playing a different sort of character here. Sutra is basically Evil Soji. She mind-melds with Agnes to see the apocalyptic vision Commander Oh showed Agnes a bunch of episodes back, but interprets it differently: apparently it’s an encoded message that only synths can understand, one prompting them to call out to some kind of advanced synthetic lifeform out there who can swoop down and save them from attack by organics, as for example the Romulan fleet currently barreling towards them. (Apparently the idea of a non-Vulcan performing the mind meld breaks Star Trek canon, but as a Trek virgin, it didn’t bother me.)

But to do it, she’s gotta be sneaky. After the synths capture Narek, whose ship they drag down to the planet’s surface after he tries and fails to take down Picard’s ship, Sutra lets him go, sacrificing one of her people in the process. She uses this as justification for calling that uber-synth lifeform. False flag, false flag!

Anyway, Sutra takes control of the colony in the end, locking up Picard after he fails to convince the rest of the synths to flee the planet with him in a rousing speech. Agnes, who’s devoted her life to studying synthetic life, talks herself out of the brig by saying she can help Dr. Soong with his work. Soji is cool with locking up Picard, too.

So a lot of stuff that happened, but in the moment, none of it feels like it has much weight. Soji and Agnes’ decisions to let Picard be locked feel like hard left turns, and Picard’s speech feels hopelessly naive; how could he possibly have expected to convince anyone with that plan?

Earlier, Picard and company visit the Borg Cube, which crash lands on the planet’s surface. (Everyone’s fine, somehow.) Picard reunites with Elnor, and then immediately says goodbye again. Once more, we have a scene that feels like it’s supposed to hit hard that kind of falls flat. Since meeting up, Picard and Elnor have spent very little time together, to the point where I’ve wondered why they even brought him onto the show. I mean, they don’t seem to have much for him to do.

There were two parts of the episode that consistently held my interest: I liked the opening sequence in space, and I liked pretty much every scene with Narek. What can I say? This guy’s a dynamic character! Does he have real feelings for Soji? He claims to, and Harry Treadaway certainly sells it, but obviously he can’t be trusted, and he’s still hoping for the Romulan fleet to rain down fire on the planet. Soji’s conflicted over him and so am I, and that’s interesting, more interesting than a lot of the other stuff going down.

Basically, this episode feels like it should have hit harder than it did. Here’s hoping the show can tie together all the threads for the grand finale.

Episode Grade: B-

Bullet points, the final frontier

• Rios shouts a bunch of Spanish-language curse words during the opening
• I liked the one synth touching Picard’s face. It reminded me of other scenes in movies where humans touch robots’ faces in awe of how lifelike it is.
• Picard was so close to not returning Raffi’s “I love you.”
• “Is this how you treat your prisoners?” “We’ve never had a prisoner before. How do Romulans treat their prisoners?” “Let’s change the subject.”
• Narek and Soji had a full Star Wars moment there. “I love you.” “I know.”