WiC Watches: Star Trek: Picard

7 of 11

Episode 106: “The Impossible Box”

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!

Things are starting to come together. We’re just over halfway done with the season, and Picard and his team have finally arrived at the Borg Reclamation Project, within sight of their goal of finding Soji. And the payoff is about as good as we could hope it to be, but not necessarily because of Picard. No, the best thing about “The Impossible Box” was the climax of the relationship between Soji and Narek, at least for me.

All along, I’ve thought actor Harry Treadaway had skillfully woven the needle with his dashing Romulan operative. Was he really falling for Soji, or was he just conning her to extract information? As it ends up, both. In this episode, Treadaway finally gets Soji to tell him where she was made, information that she herself didn’t even know until he carefully drew it out of her. This greatly pleases his sister (Peyton List), who’s been leaning on him for a while to turn up the charm. And while Narek does indeed leave Soji to die in a sealed room on the Cube, he’s clearly torn up about it. There’s no going back for the two of them, but I think this makes Narek a far more interesting character than if he had never never had real feelings for Soji, or if he had given into them completely. He’s torn, and that’s fertile ground for future stories. I don’t know whether I want Soji to kill him or for them to make up, and that’s a great place to be as a viewer.

Happily, Soji’s synthetic instincts activate and she escapes Narek’s trap, meeting up with Picard and hightailing it out of the Cube. Elnor and Hugh, who helps Picard find Soji, stay behind to face down the Romulan forces coming to stop Soji’s extraction. I have to believe Elnor will survive, because otherwise he’s pretty much been a waste of a character. I liked the episode where Picard picked him up but he’s had no development since. They wouldn’t introduce him just to write him off the show, would they?

Besides the Soji-Narek stuff, the best part of this episode was watching Picard struggle with his past as part of the Borg hive mind. Now, as someone who never watched a Star Trek show before this one, I didn’t fully understand what was going on, but Patrick Stewart is such an emotive actor that it still worked for me. He was clearly in pain, and I sympathized.

I think this was the best episode of Star Trek: Picard so far! And with a climax this early, I’m curious about what they have in store for the end of the season.

Episode Grade: A-

Bullet points, the final frontier

I wasn’t mad at Rios playing soccer on the bridge shirtless, just saying.
What the hell kind of future cigarette was Raffi smoking?
Raffi was solid this episode, by the way. She’s still despairing over her disastrous reunion with her son, but pulled it together enough to sweet talk the Federation officer into letting Picard board the Cube. “Every part of that guy who’s not ego is rampaging id.”
The set design on the Borg Cube is great, all hard angles and harsh metal lights.
The Romulan ethnic slur for humans is “round ears.”
It sounded like Narek said his true name was Ryan, but with a weird inflection.
Kudos to director Maja Vrvilo on the sequence where Soji was walking through the Romulan meditation exercise. All she was doing was putting one foot in front of the other, but it felt very tense.

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