WiC Watches: Star Trek: Picard
Pictured: Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine of the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: PICARD. Photo Cr: James Dimmock/CBS ©2019 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Episode 105: “Stardust City Rag”
Note: David is out this week, so this review will be written by your friendly neighborhood WiC editor Dan Selcke, who has watched all of Star Trek: Picard so far but has never seen another Star Trek thing in his life. Let’s see how it goes!
What a great body horror opening! This week’s episode opens with a flashback, which is pretty much standard for the show at this point. A scientist is brutally dissecting a former Borg drone, and has the nerve to be cavalier about it. “Where’s your cortical node, buddy? Gotta be in there somewhere.” It’s pretty chilling. In bursts Seven of Nine, who kills the surgeon and reunites with the drone, who’s actually Icheb, the teenage former Borg Seven basically adopted on Star Trek: Voyager. He’s too far gone to save, so she tearfully mercy kills him.
Now, I’ve never watched another Star Trek show before this one, and I think the opening would have worked better for me were I familiar with Seven and Icheb’s relationship. Still, this is a striking opening that keeps pace with the bleak tone the series has been setting up; the optimistic days of Starfleet past are gone, given way to isolationism and chaos. If that weren’t clear from the opening, it crystalizes at episode’s end.
That said, most of this episode is actually a fun sci-fi romp — it just takes a dark turn later. The gang has reached Freecloud, where they’re looking for scientist Bruce Maddox, who can help Picard find Soji. He’s being held prisoner by a shady underworld type named Bjayzl, who hopes to sell him to the Tal Shiar. Picard and his crew have to go undercover on what basically amounts to space Vegas to get him back. Time for a caper!
And there is some fun to be had, starting with the wacky getups everyone wears as part of the infiltration. Picard even wears an eyepatch, with the exaggerated evil French accent to match. “I thought I looked…appropriately sinister.” Let it never be said that Stewart can’t ham it up.
In fact, the design of Freecloud in general is a lot of fun. It’s kind of Blade Runner meets The Fifth Element meets Atlantic City. I liked the spam holograms that popped up when the gang was approaching the planet, and the giant wireframe babies outside the building where Raffi reunites with her estranged son.
Oh yeah, that happens. Remember: Raffi was only tagging along with Picard because she had her own mission. Apparently being involved with Starfleet in the aftermath of the synthetic attack on Mars distracted Raffi from her parenting duties way back when, and her son — Gabriel Wong — has never forgiven her for it. Even now, he’s clearly still bearing a grudge, and doesn’t welcome her back into his good graces. It’s an affecting scene well played by all the actors involved. If Picard does indeed last for a long time, it’ll pay to set up Raffi’s family connections now.
Back in the A plot, Seven volunteers to help the gang get back Maddox by offering herself as a trade, since Bjayzl is known to chop up former Borg for parts to sell. The details of the exchange are, again, good fun, as is the twist: Seven really just wants revenge on Bjayzl for torturing Icheb years ago, and there’s a tense standoff slightly hampered by how easily the gang are able to get away. I mean, they talked about how good Bjayzl’s security was beforehand, but apparently there’s time to have a leisurely discussion about the ethics of revenge while all of her guards just stand there letting Seven throttle their boss?
Clearly, the show is more interested in saying something about revenge than writing an airtight plot, which is okay when the denouement is this surprising: after agreeing with Picard that killing Bjayzl in revenge won’t do any good, Seven returns to the ship and parts with the former Admiral under good terms, even giving him a way to contact her if he’s ever in need of a badass vigilante freedom fighter. And then she goes right back down to Bjayzl’s casino or whatever and explodes her but good. And then she easily shoots her way out.
Again, it’s a little, ‘Where’s the security in this joint?’ but the twist is genuinely shocking, and sets up some potentially rich philosophical conflicts in the future. Picard believes that the universe can be reordered, that there’s still room for decency and hope. But Seven is jaded, a state of mind inspired in part by Starfleet — the institution Picard believed in for years — stepping back and leaving the universe to its devices. Things do not tend toward order. They fall apart.
Bleak, I say. Bleak on bleak. It makes me wonder how the season will wrap up. What will win: hope or despair?
Another twist: once Maddox is back on the ship, Agnes — with whom he was once very close — kills him. “I wish I didn’t know what I know,” she cries. “I wish they hadn’t shown me.” Oh my god, what does she know? What did they show her?
I’m guessing it has to do with Soji, who probably wasn’t fingered as “the Destroyer” by that Romulan ex-Borg for nothing. Soji sits this episode out, by the way, which I was fine with; it gave our main cast of characters time to gel as a unit, although I’d like to see how they function without a special guest star like Seven in the mix. The dud was Elnor, who was introduced with a lot of fanfare but this week only gets a couple of lame, “I’m not good at pretending” jokes. He didn’t even get to use those sword skills.
Mainly, though, this was an enjoyable episode. Now that the story is properly underway, I bet I could really grow to like this crew.