Episode 101: “Remembrance”
“Remembrance” opens with Picard playing poker with Data aboard the Enterprise. The two are going back and forth, teasing each other about their tells, when Picard looks out the window to see Mars being destroyed. He then wakes up from his nightmare. Apparently he hasn’t been sleeping well in his old age, and it has to do with the guilt he feels over Starfleet abandoning the Romulan people before their planet was destroyed.
I’m not sure if de-aging technology was used to make Brent Spiner look like the Data of The Next Generation from the ’90s, but whatever the production team did really worked.
Anyway, it’s revealed that Admiral Picard resigned from Starfleet as a way to protest Starfleet’s use of the destruction of the Utopia Planitia Shipyards on Mars by the Rogue Synths as an excuse to stop the evacuation of Romulus.
Pictured: Isa Briones as Dahj of the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: PICARD. Photo Cr: Matt Kennedy/CBS ©2019 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Next, we meet the mysterious girl, Dahj (Isa Briones), who is at home in Greater Boston just hanging out with her boyfriend when assassins wearing helmets somehow beam into her apartment and attack the couple. The boyfriend is immediately killed, but before the assassins can kill Dahj, something inside her “activates” and she instantly becomes a living weapon, killing everyone in the room. She then has a vision of Picard, and after seeing him being interviewed on the Federation News Network, she locates him on his vineyard in France.
I wasn’t wild about the insta-travel from Boston to France, but this is the future, so maybe Dahj beamed over to Picard’s home? Who knows? And I’m not really sure it matters to the story.
So, Dahj seems to be content — for now — hanging out with Picard in France as he tries to figure out who she is. He remembers two paintings of a woman clad in a white cloak that Data made for him before his death. One hangs in his study at his vineyard, but in that one, the figure is shown from behind. The other painting is in storage, and when Dahj goes missing, something clicks for Picard, so he goes to look at that painting and the woman’s face can be seen…and it’s Dahj. When he asks the curator program the name of the painting, it replies, “Daughter.”
Pictured (l-r): Alison Pill as Jurati; Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard; of the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: PICARD. Photo Cr: Trae Patton/CBS ©2019 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Meanwhile, Dahj runs into Picard again. He tries to convince her to come with him only to be interrupted by those darn assassins. This time, Dhaj manages to unmask a couple of them, and they’re revealed to be Romulan. However, before she can kill the last attacker, he blows her up. Dahj is dead.
But all is not lost, because apparently, back in the day, there was an experimental procedure known as fractal neuronic cloning, which meant Dahj and a twin sister are both androids with an organic body but a positronic brain. We know Dhaj has a twin because Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) tells Picard the process always results in twins.
The episode ends in a Romulan reclamation site where a Romulan named Narek meets with Dahj’s twin, Soji. It doesn’t seem like Narek has anything pleasant in mind for her. As the final shot pans over the reclamation site, it’s revealed to be a damaged Borg Cube:
Dun dun duuuuun.
I enjoyed the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, but I must admit I was hoping for something along the lines of Star Trek: Discovery’s first action-packed episode. Once my expectations were tempered, I was able to sit back and enjoy watching Patrick Stewart reclaim the role of Picard. That being said, it’s clear Stewart isn’t going to be involved in many action scenes, and maybe that’s why a younger cast was brought on to be his crew.