Author: Ross

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow or Let’s Kill (Baby) Hitler

See also: “The City on the Edge of Forever” (TOS), “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (TOS), “Time’s Arrow” (TNG), “Past Tense” (DS9), “Future’s End” (VOY), “Storm Front” (ENT), Star Trek IV, Season 2 (PIC)
Contains strange new worlds: Not unless you count Toronto.
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Not this time

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

• How many of us had to memorize this at some point?

The sidelining of Pike continues, oddly. Was Anson Mount busy? I don’t think filming for this season would have overlapped with Doctor Strange.

Anyway, for the second time, we get to hang out with Paul Wesley’s Jim Kirk, and I’ve just now realized that Paul Wesley played one of the vampire bros in the TV “adaptation” of LJ Smith’s The Vampire Diaries (Scare quotes here because the adaptation was incredibly loose, in the specific sense that they really just made a Twilight TV series and changed the title to a property they could afford the rights to. And, in a move that I hope will make the chronic complainers think twice before complaining about a line in the teaser, once again, he’s playing an alternate universe version of Kirk.

This gives me a segue to bring up something I wanted to mention last week, but didn’t because I ran out of time, what with it being midnight on Tuesday, and Dylan wouldn’t go to bed, and I’d had an absolutely miserable couple of weeks. One thing that’s conspicuously not addressed in “Ad Astra Per Aspera” is the fact that we kinda know that, had Pike not gone through his life-changing experience with his future self, Una would still be in jail. She would very probably be serving out the 20-year sentence for sedition. So what’s changed? It’s weird, because Pike is barely in that episode. The only thing he does is get Neera to agree to defend Una, and I can’t imagine he didn’t do that in the other timeline.

My best guess is that it comes down to Pike’s scene with Batel. Perhaps the unchastened version of Pike, the one who wrote the letter to Maat, would have insisted on taking the stand himself, and in doing so, given testimony that precluded Neera’s asylum defense. Or worse, he could have gotten himself into so much trouble that Una sacrificed herself to keep him from a court-martial. I can believe that the Pike who lived through the experience of “A Quality of Mercy” is one who is more willing to step back and let things unfold as they will, rather than forcing himself into the center of things, convinced – in a Jim Kirk sort of way – that only he could fix it.

Also, if I hadn’t run out of time, I’d have linked to Steve Shives’s Starfleet Lawyer video, because it’s hilarious.

But anyway, we’re full-circle around back to Kirk. I still don’t think Paul Wesley looks right for the part, but I’ll happily admit he acts right for the part. I’m really impressed by the extent to which they are writing him as a younger Kirk in the mold of TOS season 1 as it actually was, rather than the decades of pop culture that accreted around the character. He’s charming and he’s bold, but he’s not overly rogueish, not a huge rulebreaker, and incredibly intelligent. And where we see Kirk Swagger, it’s in him delighting in hot dogs and sightseeing, because he’s from a future where Earth is a barren wasteland. I love that they have him hustle chess to get them some spending money in 21st century Toronto. Apparently enough money that they can afford a three-room suite for a night in a downtown highrise. How much are hotels in Toronto? (Oh, and did you notice? Kirk says that 2D chess is a “child’s game.” Remember how Kirk ultimately beats Khan? By exploiting his two-dimensional thinking. And if you take a close look in the background when La’an meets her ancestor? He’s got a 2-D chess set in his room.

I love that this episode is set in Toronto. I love that Kirk mistakes it for New York. Despite the sign saying “Toronto” in the background.

So just like in Picard Season 2, the timeline gets broken and there’s no Federation. But there’s a nice balance here: humanity doesn’t go Full Nazi in this timeline; they actually do kinda okay for themselves, but not great.

Well, they’re doomed, but still. The Enterprise still exists, with nearly the same crew. But Kirk is the captain instead of Pike. And rather than forming a Federation, Earth goes it alone. But they’re not dicks about it; Kirk is perfectly cordial with this timeline’s Spock (whose existence implies that Earth maintains diplomatic relations with other worlds, even if they’re not allied), and humanity’s refusal to help their neighbors isn’t about xenophobia but resources. They’ve been losing a war to the Romulans for a very long time, and Earth itself is uninhabitable after wars, bombardments, and occupation. I mean, it makes sense that a Romulan seeking to destroy the Federation wouldn’t derail history in a way that causes the MUCH WORSE Earth Confederation to rise, so in this timeline, humanity goes in a similar direction to the prime timeline – they still seem to be doing the whole fully automated luxury gay space communism thing – but they’re in a weaker position with fewer friends.

Picard gave us a dark future where, by implication at least, because it was Soong’s shields rather than Europa’s microbes that kept the Earth alive, humanity never learned to look to the stars for their salvation. La’an mentions that in her history, it was the help of the Vulcans that lifted humanity out of the barbarism of the 21st century wars to start their utopian project. By implication here, in Kirk’s timeline, humanity never went through that barbarous period, never needed friends to help it stand. So whereas Rene Picard taught humanity to look to the stars for salvation, Khan Noonien-Singh taught humanity to look to itself as a source of danger. Remove the first, you get a xenophobic nightmare world that views the outside as a threat. Remove the second, you get a slowly dying state that thinks it has problems enough of its own to involve itself in outside affairs.

Yeah, so, Khan. This episode is in a very deliberate way a response to “The City on the Edge of Forever”. That episode hung on the contrivance that if Edith Keilor, a 1930s humanitarian, were allowed to live, Hitler would win World War II because the peace movement in the US would keep it out of the war. Here, we get basically the reverse: if Khan dies, there’s no eugenics war and contemporary human civilization doesn’t get swept away to make room for the Federation. Instead of killing the good person, we have to save the bad one.

Plus, y’know, Khan is La’an’s great grandpa or something. This is important to her personal journey, since we have several minutes establishing that La’an is having a hard time dealing with her ancestry. She cuts herself off from other people as a reaction to the bigotry she’s faced as a Noonien-Singh, and this episode is about her learning to move past that.

By saying that, no, really, it’s a good thing that grandpa was a genocidal maniac. In the long-term. One thing that is a little hard to take in this episode is just how long it takes her to figure it out. One has to assume it was not just dumb luck that led the dying time traveler to her; he presumably sought her out because of her familial link to Khan. They’re actively trying to figure out how the timelines diverge, yet when Kirk doesn’t recognize her name, she’s too overcome by the warmth it generates in her loins to not have the name precede her to notice that, hey, maybe the apocalyptic war that didn’t happen in the new timeline is the big change they’re supposed to fix.

Of course, it also takes Kirk a very long time to remember that Toronto is doomed to explode in the opening bid of the war his is currently fighting. He’s like, “Yeah, I remember reading about this bridge in Toronto exploding,” and it’s basically hours later that it occurs to him that, “And then a day or two later the whole city got blown up by Romulans.” Memory, she is fickle.

This leads me to the one big complaint I have about the episode, which is the extent to which the plot is driven by the characters just sort of luckily stumbling forward into things. The time agent just happens to escape to the Enterprise in front of La’an (Okay, he probably did that on purpose? Because she carries the genetic marker that unlocks the door? Now, having your door locks key to a genetic marker that is implanted in the user rather than using biometrics is dumb… But it is believably dumb for the sort of insane billionaires I imagine are running the Noonien-Singh institute. I bet they ) They just happen to get a hotel room with a view of the bridge, then just happen to encounter the Romulan agent when Kirk’s getting harassed by the cops, then literally wander around Toronto at night until they luck into wandering close enough to the secret underground fusion reactor to set off Pelia’s watch. And, I mean, that’s kinda how “City on the Edge of Forever” goes too – everyone just happens to show up at the exact right place and time for the climax. So it does end up working, I think, but it works on the strength of the character performance rather than the plot.

Like, Kirk is satisfied with his life and his timeline, despite the problems, and he calls La’an out on the presumption that she has a right to replace it with hers. What wins him over is the reveal that Sam is alive in her timeline. He doesn’t specify what became of Sam in his, but Sam Kirk is a rich source of tragicomedy. Sam died in Kirk’s timeline, but he’s also going to die tragically in the prime timeline. It’s just that it’s a few years off. Also, possibly to appease the fanboys, Kirk reiterates a point from “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” where he claims that everyone else calls him “George”: La’an simply calls him out as mistaken on this. It turns a continuity blunder into part of Strange New Worlds’s implicit running gag that Kirk is weirdly oblivious to the personal lives of those around him.

Kirk is oddly unconcerned with the fate of his crew, but never mind that. It actually feel pleasingly human to have him focus on the fact that, if they succeed, he personally will cease to exist, replaced by a doppleganger. Kirk, of all people, would accept this as his duty, and he kinda does. But it’s a hard thing to accept, and Trek is full of people in similar circumstances just stoically accepting it rather than expressing the fact that, yeah, dude is about to un-write his own past. La’an proposes that she might be able to save him, thanks to the time device’s ability to shield people from timeline changes, which is so obviously untenable going forward that her just saying it kind of seals Kirk’s fate.

Yeah, Kirk is going to die, much in the way that I kept expecting him to die last season. We’ll get to that.

Now, the plot is not entirely “People just wander around.” There’s a few very good setup-and-payoff scenes, it’s just that they’re not central to the plot. Like, we get a fun scene of Pelia at the beginning, framed as a combination of comic relief and insight into La’an estrangement from the people around her. But it ends up setting up La’an and Kirk’s trek out to Vermont to meet an inperceptibly younger Pelia. Who ends up not being able to help them, because she’s not an engineer yet. But that’s okay they just sort of luck into the fact that the radium hands on old watches (the ones that made the painters’ lips fall off!) would act as a fusion reactor detector anyway. Characters going back in time and pre-meeting their colleagues is something Trek’s done several times, but Guinan is the only one where we had the advantage of meeting them when they’re in a completely different place in their life.

It’s also pretty well-played how the Romulan agent sets up Kirk and La’an. That photo of a Romulan warbird is presumably fake – she faked it knowing Kirk would recognize it, in order to manipulate him into pursuing the fusion reactor, and leading her to the Noonien-Singh institute (Okay, wait, though. It’s on the wall in big letters. This is not a secret facility. Sure, what they do might be a secret, but who they are clearly isn’t. I’d been thinking that she blew up the bridge hoping to follow whoever came to retrieve the evidence. But she could’ve just looked them up in the Yellow Pages. Kirk and La’an needed to follow them because they didn’t know what they were looking for, but the Romulan did). She’s pretty great as an antagonistic character. I like the angle of her having been stuck on Earth for 30 years (But still isn’t used to the ears) because Khan wasn’t from the ’90s like he was supposed to be. “I hate temporal mechanics,” yeah, yeah. (My fan-theory: “Project Khan” was a ’90s genetic experimentation program. Khan was named for it. By the 23rd century, confusion in the historical record has caused people to conflate Khan the 21st century man with the older project. Khan himself might have encouraged this as propaganda to build up his own mythos). I like that on hearing La’an’s name, she tries to win her over with the promise that she can survive the change to the timeline. And it’s a nice callback to Picard that with her dying breath, she triggers her self-destruct implant. Harder to reconcile with Picard is that Romulan time agents don’t even know how their plans are supposed to work, they just do what the computer tells them. Romulans have a deep distrust of Thinking Machines according to Picard, so that’s hard to swallow. If she’d gone with, “I just follow orders; my superiors made the call,” that would fit a little better, since it would be reflective of the paranoia and secrecy of Romulan culture. I do like the idea of the assassin not really knowing how her actions are supposed to affect world affairs because knowing isn’t her job. Just find the details a little flaky.

Then, of course, there’s the dead body in the room. It’s pretty interesting that Kirk, famous for some high-stakes bluffs, dies from having his bluff called… Except, as he points out with his dying breath, he wasn’t bluffing. It doesn’t do much good, but he’s exactly right that shooting him would set off the alarms. It’s a solid choice that Kirk’s death isn’t some big noble sacrifice, too. You could easily see that coming, but no, he just gets shot by the bad guy in the course of the climax. Doesn’t even actually resolve the plot, since even with the alarm going off, they still make it all the way to Khan’s bedroom. They have done such a good job of introducing Kirk in a way that is true to TOS, but doesn’t allow Kirk’s gravity to become a black hole. Here, he’s just a good guy who’s fun to hang out with, and while we all know who he’ll be someday, he’s not the hero of this moment. So Kirk dies, Khan lives, history is saved. Green Omni, kid; good job. (I am pleased to see that I am not the only person on the internet who thought of Voyagers! when they saw the hand-held time device that lights up red and turns green when you’ve fixed history).

La’an can’t talk to anyone about it, and they even skip the expected scene at the end where Pelia reminisces about the mysterious woman who stole a watch and convinced her to go into engineering. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pelia doesn’t remember these events at all; it was a long time ago, after all.

Looks like next week, we’ll be getting back to more traditional ensemble adventures on strange new worlds. But before that, I’ll leave you with this thought: The assassin melts her body to nothing to destroy the evidence. La’an wipes her fingerprints from the gun then leaves it in a room with a young boy. Okay. Fine, I mean, this is baby Space-Hitler after all. But… There’s a dead body out in the foyer (A lot of people seem to take it for granted that Kirk’s body would disappear when the timeline corrected, but I don’t see how that follows. They’ve already diverged from his timeline before he dies; in his timeline, the Romulan blew up the fusion reactor, she didn’t try to assassinate Khan directly). A body that was killed with that gun.

Now, we do have to assume that this is a powerful, clandestine operation, so Khan isn’t going to be arrested or anything, but surely there is going to be some complicated questions over why he’s got the murder weapon from a crime that occurred in the foyer. Perhaps his start of darkness will be that time he was falsely accused of murder? Perhaps they brought him out there and asked if he knew anything about this dead guy… And Khan never forgets a face…

Ad Astra Per Aspera or Nobody Expects the Starfleet Inquisition

See Also: “The Menagerie” (TOS), “Court Martial” (TOS), “The Measure of a Man” (TNG), “The Drumhead” (TNG), “Author, Author” (VOY), “Doctor Bashir, I Presume” (DS9), “Supernova, Part 2” (PRO), ’90s Courtroom Dramedy, (I am purposefully omitting a ton of other episodes because they feel less influential)
Contains strange new worlds?: Sorta? Not really. There’s a cameo in the pre-title sequence.
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Sorta… It’s the Enterprise-era Starfleet Motto, which they talk about a few times.

Weird. Star Trek has had plenty of Courtroom Drama episodes over the years. But this one is very different from all of them, on account of… It’s actually a courtroom drama. We’ve had episodes with courtroom scenes, and we’ve had episodes that center around a trial, but I don’t think there’s ever actually been an episode where the whole of the episode is the process of a courtroom trial. “The Measure of a Man” comes closest, but even there, it’s mostly about the ensemble contemplating their relationship with Data.

Also, as court proceedings go, “The Measure of a Man” is bullshit. I mean, Starfleet declares Data to be property, and then has a trial where his captain is the defense and Riker is the prosecution, on the basis that they took a couple of classes in law school? And the good guys win on the basis of Picard giving an impassioned speech rather than any sort of legal anything.

There’s a DS9 episode about Cardassian courts and an Enterprise episode about Klingon courts, but they’re both not so much about making a legal argument as a philosophical one about how those respective alien judicial systems are broken and corrupt (I rather like the Enterprise one, because it justifies a lot about Klingon culture, establishing that Klingons go through cycles of being a basically functional civilization that frames a wide variety of social interactions as honorable contests of skill, and long periods of being stabby glory-hounds. Also, Archer loses his case and is sentenced to life imprisonment on the inescapable penal colony from Star Trek VI, whereupon everyone just shrugs and bribes the guards to let him escape. I love this because it honestly was kinda easy for Kirk to escape Rura Penthe).

The only time, I think, we see an actual lawyer in a Federation court is “Court Martial” (Nice touch that they brought back the “Stick your hand on this glowing cake pan when you are under oath” device from that, by the way). And, like most of the courtroom episodes, the trial is really more of a structural element; the main part of the story is really the investigation, the gang desperately trying to uncover the truth and find the “real killer”. Of course, finding the “real killer” is only a viable strategy when the accused is not, point of fact, guilty.

Which brings us here, to the most Actually Courtroom Drama-y of Trek courtroom dramas. Because Una is, point of fact, guilty, at the least, of the crime she was initially accused of: falsifying her paperwork. That’s how they getcha. That’s why employment forms have questions on them like, “Do you do drugs?” and “Are you a terrorist?”. Because “They lied on the form” is a very simple and trivial reason to fire someone and very hard to fight, whereas firing someone because in college, they signed up for the campus socialist club because there was a cute boy at the membership table might get you on the wrong end of a wrongful dismissal suit.

Now, the JAG decides to up the ante to sedition, on the surface, as retaliation for Una refusing to go quietly and spare them the embarrassment of a public trial of one of their most decorated officers for violating one of their most racist laws, and that’s a little bit of a stretch. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if this turns out later to be part of something bigger. Later, when Pasalk takes over and starts building the groundwork to threaten Pike and the rest of the Enterprise crew, he flashes a little but very un-Vulcan smug smile that almost makes me wonder if he’ll turn out to be a deep cover Romulan.

But the real joy of this episode is the legal argument. And also, structurally, how well the episode plays its cards. You have this tension between Una and Neera – Nera is the best Ilyrian civil rights lawyer in the galaxy, but there’s bad blood with her and Una. The bad blood is because Nera’s cousin was the victim of a hate crime that launched a persecution campaign that led to the ghettoization of Ilyrians on their home colony, and Una’s family evaded that by passing as human. There’s a lot going on there. Last season, I took a little bit of an issue that they’d chosen to tell the story of a persecuted minority who just wanted the freedom to live openly in her own skin through a character played by a Nordic supermodel. Hey, look, Strange New Worlds pays off my faith once again, because that’s basically the tension between Neera and Una. Neera even outright says it: Una has the privilege of being able to pass. Neera, played by not just a black actress, but a darker-skinned black actress, can’t (I kinda wish they had done something visual to show why Neera can’t pass; it seems clear that, yes, she would not choose to if she could, but it seems equally clear that she didn’t consider it even possible). Now, obviously it is a little bit of a cop-out to get Starfleet to make an exception for the Ilyrian who is a decorated officer and a Nordic supermodel whose augmentations aren’t especially scary, while maintaining their codified bigotry against the ones with funny ears or dark skin or X-ray-vision. But the actual history of civil rights in the US tells us that, yeah, you start with the case that’s easiest to make, you take every advantage you get.

So there’s times in the episode where you start to fear that Neera might be planning to throw Una under the bus – that she either thinks the case is unwinnable or worse, thinks that losing would be better for THE CAUSE – and is going to sacrifice Una to bring attention to the plight of Ilyrians. She attacks April on the hypocrisy of his strict adherence to the genetic augmentation laws given his personal history of laxity when it comes to the Prime Directive. (That’s a fun aside. For all that modern fans think of Kirk as this maverick rulebreaker, the canonical TOS Kirk was a very straight-laced military man; the fact that he sometimes broke the rules was not meant to depict him as a rule-breaker by habit, but rather to emphasize how extraordinary the circumstances were. Pike is far more relaxed than Kirk ever was, and he took a wonderfully casual attitude to General Order One on-screen both in “Strange New World”, and back in Discovery. And the incidents Neera mentions draw April as far more flagrant in his violations of the Prime Directive than Kirk ever was. I hope we get some more backstory about April someday.) April is hurt by this badly enough that he’s angry with Pike later, but April also shows a streak of bigotry as he defends the augmentation ban. It could be that, like with La’an, April is still smarting from the personal betrayal of learning that Una lied to him, but if so, that doesn’t come across here.

Speaking of bigotry, there’s a weird scene where Ortegas is bitter about Spock’s casual interactions with Pasalk, and when you combine it with her alternate-future-self getting Stiles’s unfounded suspicion of Spock last season, it makes a pattern I do not want from Ortegas. Don’t make her an asshole. She’s too cool to be an asshole. Fortunately, the scene ends up light and fun when Spock comes over to apologize – not for fraternizing with the enemy, but for his embarrassing lack of decorum in being so “obviously” passive-aggressive toward Pasalk, which went right over Ortegas, but not M’Benga.

One thing that is really interesting, as Neera builds up Una’s backstory for the judges, is how many things they’re doing here. With a presumed-primary-American audience, with Neera mentioning how slavery was once legal, with the deliberate casting of the dark-skinned actor as the Ilyrian who “can’t pass”, you’re primed to view this as a metaphor for the history of racism and Jim Crow. And it is. But it’s not just that. With the angle of Una being closeted, being unable to seek medical treatment, with the threat of even false accusation being deadly, you’re also primed to view this as a metaphor for gay rights and trans rights. And it is. But it’s also not just that either. What surprised me was Una mentioning that in utero genetic augmentation is a religious tradition among her people. That, in order to live on a Federation planet, her people agreed to give up the practice, but some, including her family, continued to practice in secret. What she’s describing is crypto-Judaism, with Ilyrians taking the role of conversos under the inquisition.

I’ve heard from some Jewish fans who are very tired of Star Trek’s various accidental stumblings into the Space Jew trope. This is a thing that happens a lot because we are in a culture so steeped in centuries-old antisemitism that far too many writers can say, “We’ll make the bad guys hook-nosed aliens who are secretive and love money and secretly run the galaxy from the shadows and have odd dietary restrictions,” and not even notice what they are doing. Even the Lantanites have a (far more benign, but still enough to make you wonder) hint of that – not-quite-humans who walk among us in secret acquiring wealth and power and having a funny accent?

But this is something far more deliberate, and I won’t dare speak to whether this makes it okay, but it’s certainly new and more thoughtful that ways in which Ilyrians are compared to Jewish people particularly in medieval-to-modern Europe aren’t your ugly, scary, “Use the blood of christian babies to make their bread” things, but more, “They’re persecuted and have to move around a lot,” and, “They aren’t allowed to perform their religious ceremonies publicly for fear of persecution,” and, “They are forced by the state to live in ghettos,” and, “The local government imposes pogroms against them,” or, “They are falsely imagined to be inherently dangerous just by virtue of bloodline.” Even more striking, it’s the Federation that’s being cast in the role of the Spanish Inquisition, or worse, certain Very Fine People On Both Sides. This might be subtle enough that no one is angry at NuTrek for being too “woke” by depicting pogroms as bad. Don’t worry, I’m sure the next twist will be obvious enough for them to get angry about.

Perhaps we will get it in a future week, but I’m sad we haven’t gotten to see Pelia and Una interact. Firstly, because Pelia is a joy, and second, because they have this shared experience of having lived most of their lives in the closet (Pelia even used the phrase “came out” last week). Also, I’m hoping Pelia will have charming anecdotes about her past which serve as easter eggs. “Back in the middle ages, I married a human medicine man. He called me a witch. Thought it was just charming misogyny; never had a clue I really was an otherworldly supernatural being,” or “Oh, I first got interested in engineering when I married a mechanic in the 1970s,” or “I took a job once dressing up as a fairy and roughing up millionaires.”

The whole Enterprise gang is mostly off-to-the-side this week, especially Pike, who barely has a line for half the episode. He’s got a strong first scene, persuading Neera to help, but after that, he’s very deliberately sidelined. Batel – who is both Pike’s Friend-with-Benefits and Una’s prosecutor (It’s explicit now that her primary assignment is JAG, avoiding the weird Trek stereotype of “Instead of actual lawyers, we just make the regulars do it”) – warns him off trying to testify himself, anticipating Pasalk’s attack. And he doesn’t even comment while he watches the proceedings from the Enterprise conference room. And it looks like he’s not in the bulk of next week’s episode either. This is a weird under-playing of them having access to Anson Mount and his hair. La’an gets the most plot of the cast, as she fears that it was her angry personal logs that outed Una. Neera talks her toward confronting her own internalized bigotry. Though not an augment herself, La’an inherited the modified DNA of her forebears, and a lifetime of ostracism because of that has instilled the fear that she might have inherited the tendency toward megalomania. But genetics aren’t destiny – a legitimate different angle for the episode to have taken might have been to point out the way La’an undermines the flimsy justification for the genetics laws. Obviously, it doesn’t make sense that she would be restricted by them: she’s not an augment. And yet, she, through entirely natural means, inherited the DNA that supposedly made her ancestors a risk. If the laws are really about protecting lives, La’an logically must be just as dangerous as Khan. If she is not inherently dangerous, then neither can we dismiss all augments as inherently dangerous. If she is exempt only because, not having been augmented herself, she had no choice in the matter and the Federation correctly does not punish the child for the crimes of the parent, then how can they punish Una, whose modifications were done before she was old enough to consent? Indeed, as far as I know, none of the augments we’ve ever met actually consented to their augmentations. Most of them were augmented before they were born, some before they were conceived. (Bashir and the other DS9 augments were augmented as children, but again, without their consent). The law is just plain racist.

So Neera does indeed do some Picardish things, calling out the inhumanity of Starfleet laws, the bigotry they codify. But the amazing turn here is that she doesn’t ask them to look in their hearts and be their better selves and set aside the law as unjust.

She just out-lawyers them. Or rather, she knows it would be too big an ask to get them to overturn the augment ban. But she also knows that the do get that Una’s good people and this law is hurting good people so she gives them a way out. And she carefully lined up all the pieces into place without it being obvious to the audience what she was really doing. Una’s childhood persecution – including the story of a life-threatening injury she could not have treated because of her biology – related on the stand was dismissed by Pasalk as an emotional appeal. I sure thought that was the point. But no: Una’s testimony established that she faced persecution for her biology and religious beliefs, and that she joined Starfleet to escape that persecution.

While Pasalk and Batel questioned the Enterprise crew to establish what they knew and when they knew it, Neera’s questions seemed to be establishing Una’s character. But they weren’t. They were establishing Starfleet‘s character. With La’an, she focuses on how Una was involved in La’an’s rescue and recovery after the death of her family. Even with April, while Neera clearly relished making him look bad, the thrust of her questioning was to establish something specific: that Starfleet captains have wide discretion in how they interpret the law for the purpose of saving lives.

And there we go. She saves Una and gets Pike off the hook too, and this is the comparatively timely social issue that I assume is going to have twitter angry about Woke Trek. Because we are living through years of posturing that sought to invalidate the experiences of immigrants trying to escape persecution in their home countries, conflates any failure to perfectly complete deliberately byzantine legal procedure as “lying”, and seeks to cut off the legal asylum process through trickery and deception. The legal requirements for asylum in the Federation appear to be pretty similar to the ones in the US: you have to (1) meet the definition of being a refugee (ie., be fleeing the threat of harm or persecution in one’s home or place of habitual residence for a protected reason such as religion or ethnicity), (2) Already physically be present in the place where asylum is sought, and (3) ask for it.  If you’ve watched The West Wing, you know that’s basically the whole thing: the paperwork, the procedural stuff, that goes into whether or not asylum will be confirmed, but if you’re there, you’re persecuted, and you ask, that starts the process and changes which rules apply. Boom.

While we all thought she was doing the Big Picard Speech thing, Neera was actually laying out the technical argument for asylum. Una’s testimony establishes her as a refugee. Joining Starfleet makes her physically present. And coming out to Pike, and subsequently turning herself in to Starfleet is the request. As established in her questioning of April, it was within Pike’s discretion as captain to grant asylum provisionally – it was, in fact, his duty to not turn her in until the process of making the final determination was completed; you are not, despite what certain government officials would like, supposed to arrest someone who’s asked for asylum. Thus, Starfleet has a choice: they can affirm Una’s status as a refugee and grant asylum, or they can reject her asylum request. I don’t think at this point they can even, legally, convict her of sedition; even a denial doesn’t make it sedition for her to have requested. They could, at best, give her the same deal they’d offered for a guilty plea, and discharge her for the paperwork thing.

I love this. I love that the emotional appeal didn’t end up being the point. I love that it really was the law that saved her. They call it a “technicality”, but that’s not the usual sense of the term; it’s not a matter of some piece of paperwork being incorrect or some loophole being inadequately covered. What they’re really getting at here is that it was a narrow ruling – a ruling that is based on the specific details of Una’s case, and therefore does not establish precedent going forward; they didn’t overturn the augment ban, they just decided that Una’s particular case fell outside of its auspices. That’s why Starfleet v. Bashir and Starfleet v. L’Rel are still a century and change away. But it’s something. It’s moving the needle a little. The next time someone wants to challenge the augment ban, they won’t be able to say that Starfleet v. Chin-Riley establishes a right for augments to serve, but they will be able to say that the service record of Commander Una Chin-Riley disputes the claim that augments are dangerous.

I am on vacation right now, but managed to cobble this together before I left. No idea if next week’s will come out in a timely manner.

The Broken Circle or The Roid Rage of Khan

See Also: Star Trek III, Most of Deep Space 9.
Contains Strange New Worlds?: Yep!
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Yep!

We’re off to a heck of a start. Weird decision to sideline Pike for the whole of the first episode, given how much Space Daddy Energy Anson Mount brings, but he’s off this week trying to find Una a lawyer. Man alive the cold open did some telegraphing. Pike thinks the admiralty is concerned about something, but he can’t be bothered, because Una needs a lawyer and there’s only one who could possibly save her, but she won’t return their calls and I guess that’s what the next couple of episodes are going to be about. The cliffhanger at the end at least explains that the Gorn are being more aggressive along the Federation border, enough that there’s talk of war, and that’s what’s got Bob April and the gang up-in-arms. Might end up dragging out the thing with Una for another week since there was no cliffhanger about Pike meeting the lawyer.

This episode is just packed with stuff. Uhura’s back, a full officer now. La’an is back too by the end. We get an adorable new transporter chief who kinda looks like Jett Reno’s mini-me. And the Klingons are back, and people are saying that these are “proper” Klingons with the TNG makeup, but, like, not even quite; they’re way smoother with less pronounced ridges, so somewhere in the middle? And we get an origin story for Spock playing the lyre? They look kind of crap, honestly – too smooth and too clean. I think there’s a Disco-style Klingon in one of the long shots.  (I kinda love this. The Klingons in this episode look stupid, but I am for anything that supports the reading of, “There’s just lots of ways for Klingons to look.”) And the fair folk are real I guess?

Yeah, wow, weird casual thing to just randomly drop there. Our new Chief Engineer (so far she’s an academy instructor who just stopped by for inspection, but she basically ends the episode saying she plans to stick around) Pelia is Lanthanite. I’m guessing the “lan-” part there is meant to be a derivative of Atlantis, because she’s actually an immortal near-human species from Earth, who went unnoticed by humanity until a century after First Contact. They’re out in the open now, but apparently still rare, as no one on the bridge had ever met one. Yeah. She’s a fairy. This kind of works, since Carol Kane is probably fey herself; I mean, when they first showed publicity shots of her, I thought, “I wonder where they found an actress who looks exactly like Carol Kane did thirty years ago?”. Accent is a bit dodgy though. But struggle through the weird voice and she’s a pretty wonderful character. She clearly draws a lot from Guinan – another nigh-immortal near-human who lived secretly among humans for centuries – but the tone of her character is completely different. I love that when she talks to Spock at the end about the downside of being an immortal among mortals, she rejects the Guinan answer – which is enough of an obvious cliche answer that even Spock guesses it. No, the hard thing about being immortal isn’t that you have to see the people you love die. She very wonderfully points out that seeing the people you love die is a thing that happens to everyone. No, what gets to her is boredom. Pelia is above mortal considerations by enough that the only thing that really gets to her is time itself. She’s unpredictable and weird and aloof enough that she immediately guesses that they’re faking a warp core problem in order to steal the Enterprise, and she just rolls with it and helps them out because it’s a lark. Also she’s friends with Spock’s mom, which is really fun. Also waiting for the chorus of people asking why no one mentions to Flint that it’s well-known that Earth has a small population of immortals.

We’re leaning in on Spock’s emotional turmoil, which just complicates the character’s timeline more and more. But I guess this does help play into building toward justifying Spock’s decision, in six years, to risk his career for Pike. Another thing I love is that M’Benga says that Vulcan emotions are stronger than human ones – something Spock alluded to in the original series, but it never really seemed to take with anyone. The next cool tweak to the mythos is that the way M’Benga talks about Vulcans suppressing their emotions via “cognitive blocks”, which hints at something more akin to a somatopsychic effect. I felt that they did a bad job last season with conveying the impact of Spock breaking through his emotional controls to go Beast Mode against the Gorn. And since they’ve decided that this is going to be part of the season’s through-line, that Spock is going to have some long-term damage from that, it’s good that they’re fleshing it out a little. In the moment, it just looked like him yelling a bit and then feeling shaken by it. Having now read half of van der Kolk’s book (Got to go slow with that book; it’s heavy stuff), I know that in the moment it might not look like much, but I am starting to believe that Spock’s experience with the Gorn has given him something which is distinct and alien, but akin in ways to PTSD. A traumatic experience forced his brain to rewire around cognitive blocks that Vulcans spend years building. And the effect of it is not the same as you’d expect on a human psyche, but it follows some of the same patterns.

Also, obviously, he’s hot for Christine. And I mean, who can blame him.

So Spock decides to steal the Enterprise to go rescue La’an after Uhura picks up a message from her, and everyone important decides to go along with it. Including Mitchell, a character who maybe we will learn more about this season, after her presence last season consisting of “And also Mitchell was there.”

Had I known Ortegas was planning to use “Vamoose!” as her “Make the ship go” thing, I definitely would’ve worked it into my fanfic. This whole, “Every captain has a cool thing they say to make the ship go,” idea… I like the idea of it; I like the idea of a Captain’s Catchphrase you can put on shirts and stuff. But… There are only so many cool and relevant phrases to come up with. Sure, Picard saying, “Engage!” was iconic, but there wasn’t really a “tradition”. I had to look it up to learn that Janeway fairly consistently said, “Do it.” I remember Kirk says, “Go, Sulu!” twice in the movies. But the idea of Every Captain Has A Thing emerged mostly in Discovery as a way to make a point of Saru’s difficulty adjusting. He never managed to stick a catchphrase, so when Michael takes over at the end of the season, they legitimize her command by having her immediately come up with the (frankly, just “okay”) “Let’s fly.” Shaw’s got his, “Ah fuck it, whatever.” They make a point of not revealing Seven’s “thing”. So we’re only at like 50% of these “Every Captain Has A Thing” things being something other than a joke. “I would like the ship to go now,” indeed.

But the main thing this episode is about is M’Benga and Chapel. Again, cool, fine. Chapel is probably the most compelling character after Pike, and M’Benga is delightful. It’s weird; I know Babs Olusanmokun looks nothing like Booker Bradshaw, but whenever I try to imagine TOS M’Benga, my brain just shows me a dude who looks like Babs Olusanmokun, but with bigger, more 60s hair. There’s a mention that Chapel applied to go study archaeological medicine on Vulcan for a few months. Don’t know if they will follow that up (A chance for a story where Chapel and T’Pring interact and sow the seeds for their respective future paths?), but I like that they’re leaning in on Chapel being an academic. A good way to redeem the somewhat shallow version of the character from TOS is to present her as this brilliant research scientist, who got a nursing degree mostly so she’d be qualified to do human experimentation, and then did a career pivot for personal reasons, so that during TOS she’s basically slumming it to pay her dues as she takes on the practice of medicine as a dual-class.

The Enterprise crew weren’t involved in the Klingon war. That was a big part of Pike’s Discovery arc, that he had serious survivor’s guilt because of it. That doesn’t factor into anyone particular’s story this week, but M’Benga and Chapel weren’t on the Enterprise during that period, and the did serve, and it comes up here. The titular circle are trying to restart the war in a shockingly cynical gambit to drive up dilithium prices. You almost expect Ferengi (or maybe Orions) to be unseen agents provocateurs in this. They’re building a Starfleet ship out of salvage inside a dilithium mine in order to launch a false flag against the Klingons, because it was really Antifa who stormed the Capitol and jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, and it was a perfect phone call and vaccines contain microchips and Hunter Biden’s Laptop. I don’t know. Mitchell identifies the ersatz ship as Crossfield class, but it looks… Nothing like that. It’s got a Crossfield-style saucer, but the rest of the ship is very similar to Riker’s Luna-Class Titan. Even more to the Ares class from the Axanar fan-film. I see some people suggesting that the Discovery and the Glenn are non-standard refits, and possibly a “stock” Crossfield would look like that, but it’s just as likely that the ship is a total kit-bash not conforming to any actual Starfleet design, and Mitchell is just giving the closest approximation possible based on the saucer.

So La’an left last season to reunite Newt with her two moms (Kudos Strange New Worlds for just them be quietly there as the entirely normal thing it is rather than awkwardly hanging a lantern on it just to make sure you got credit) but one of them is radiation-sick from a mining accident which is really due to the starship the bad guys are building. The rest of the gang goes off with La’an to investigate but honestly turns up nothing; M’Benga and Chapel stay to treat Newt’s mom, and get captured by the Klingons and taken directly to their secret lair. Here’s where we learn that ever since a horrific wartime incident, M’Benga carried a bottle of Super Soldier Serum in his medical kit, and him and Chapel shoot themselves up, hulk out and go on a murder spree. It’s pretty intense. They just murder the absolute fuck out of a ton of Klingons, and the whole time, they look sort of horrified at what they’re doing. The show doesn’t have time to deal with the fallout of this, but I assume it will be a deal moving forward. There’s nothing like this with any of the other doctors in Star Trek. Sure, we have Action Bev in Picard Season 3, but even that is sort of slow-moving and methodical, with time for contemplation of the moral complexity. Also, she fights with a phaser, and the only time she actually tries to kill someone who isn’t actively trying to kill her back, it’s when they try to execute Vadic. This is two of our heroes murdering their way through a ship not for their own defense, but to complete a mission, and doing it with their bare hands.

And at one point they turn the camera upside down for absolutely no reason. What the hell. I find a lot of the shots in this episode to be sort of muddy and hard to follow, especially with the amount going on on the screen during the asteroid belt sequence. CGI has made it possible for all sorts of shit to be on the screen, and modern Trek has not been super great about restraint when it comes to that.

And then to my mind, they were very brave about how they handled the climax. In most Treks, after Spock finally destroyed the renegade ship, there would have been a scene revealing that he had logic’d out that if they simply destroyed the ship undetected, the Broken Circle would have tried again. And worse, it was likely that firing on the ship would have alerted the Klingons to their presence. But by waiting until the ship had shown itself to the Klingons, then blowing it up, they created a narrative where the Federation was taking proactive steps to hunt down a rogue ship and had done the Klingons a solid by saving them from these rebels. Then maybe right at the end there would be a little “Or is it?” hinting that maybe that was just an excuse, but they’d leave it open-ended.

But they don’t do that. They leave us with the inescapable conclusion that Spock got lucky that he could sell that narrative to the Klingons; his real reason was quite straightforwardly that he didn’t want to sacrifice Christine. They showed us him abandoning the bridge to go to her, even. I like the bravery there, the willingness to commit, without a wink, to Spock having taken a big risk because his feelings got in the way.

I hope they tie this in to Spock’s larger arc. Back in Spock’s “Origin story”, in Q&A, they tell us that Spock wants his own command. But we know Spock ends up not wanting that. So it would be nice if Spock’s journey in Strange New Worlds shows him reversing on this, and “Spock eventually comes to realize that he is not suited for command because he can’t handle the idea of sending those he leads to their deaths” would be a very poignant way to do that.

I kinda want to take a little time doing nothing major to cool down from the volume of Trekwork.

Suggestions for Seven’s “Make the ship go” cachphrase:

• I would like the ship to go. Now.
• Let’s get dangerous.
• Shazam,
• Let’s rock.
• It’s morphin’ time
• Push the button, Frank.
• Stop. Hammertime.
• In the name of the moon.
• Yabba dabba do!
• Geronimo!
• Allons-Y!
• Excelsior!
• Fun will now commence.

And now, the conclusion.

I’m still processing my feelings here. I think this finale needed more time to breathe. They managed to still have ten minutes for winding things down, but there’s so many prongs to the story that it gets cluttered. You can see why last season, they finished up with the Borg in episode 9.

I mean look, we go with all this going on:

• The Titan has to defend Earth from the fleet
• The assimilated Titan crew is trying to retake the ship
• Picard’s trying to save Jack
• Someone’s got to defeat the Borg queen
• The Enterprise has to destroy the transmitter
• Worf and Riker have to fight the Borg
• Also it would be nice if everyone got out alive

One negative consequence of this is that when we get to the climax, it feels like the plot keeps blocking on a mutex. The Enterprise makes it to the beacon and then has to wait while Picard tries to reach out to Jack. The Enterprise destroys the beacon and the destruction of the Borg cube has to wait while Riker and Worf go back for Picard and Troi locates them. Spacedock is destroyed, and the fleet targets every city on Earth… Then instead of attacking, waits for several minutes because the cast is busy elsewhere. Most egregiously, when the Enterprise destroys the beacon, the Titan crew keep carrying out their Borg orders (You hear a line which I think is meant to indicate that they’re defaulting to carrying out their last order when the signal is lost?) retaking the bridge, pointing their phasers at Seven and the gang… And then they just wait for like 30 seconds while we cut back to Jupiter to see the destruction of the Borg cube, and it’s only then, when the cube explodes, that the young’uns of the Titan de-Borgify and stand down. I have talked before about how different media have different modes of expression. This story structure really suffers from being a bad match with how the medium of Television expresses simultaneity. You really want a feeling of immediacy in a lot of these scenes, the sense that the fleet targeting Earth, the Titan crew breaching the bridge, the destruction of the beacon and the subsequent explosion of the cube all happen at effectively the same time, but of course they don’t. And it’s not just “Those two scenes took place at the same time but had to be shown serially.” There are logical interlocks in the plot. There’s no clear reason for the causal relationship between the destruction of the cube and the crew coming back to themselves when the loss of Jack’s signal clearly didn’t have that effect.

The whole structure of the episode is kind of dicey, in fact. Down to the whole ‘ONE YEAR LATER’ ending which feels a little confused about how much time has passed. There’s a conflict – similar to the one we saw at the other end of the season – between the fact that the epilogue is a direct continuation of the preceding. scene and also the acknowledgement that we logically need some time to get to where the story is going to leave off. You can’t just cut to the next day and have Stardock rebuilt and Jack an officer. At the same time, a year actually seems awfully quick for either of those things to have happened – they even comment on how quickly Jack made it through officer training (Similarly, Season 2 may not have even been a whole year before the beginning of this season yet Seven not only became an officer, but worked her way up to Commander and was recommended for promotion?). Yet in other ways it doesn’t seem like any time has passed. It does not help that everyone is wearing the same clothes. But also, “One Year Later” starts with Geordi parking the Enterprise at the museum and powering it down (Which is weird; if it’s part of the museum, wouldn’t they want the lights on and the consoles lit up? I suppose it’s just that “Power down” is pithier than “Computer, reboot in demo mode”). It took a whole year to put the Enterprise back in the museum? Are we to understand that the Enterprise-D was pressed back into service for a full year while the fleet recovered? Troi is still planning that vacation “One year later” that she was planning instead of doing her damn job during Data’s therapy session (Where the hell does this scene take place? Are they on a starship? Are they all active duty again?) . Yes, Data is boring his therapist. Ha ha, very funny. The dude just came back from the dead, ate his brother, became mortal, had his psychology radically changed at a fundamental level, and narrowly escaped dying again. Yes of course he is going to need therapy and a lot of it is going to be repetitious. If Troi can’t handle that for a good friend, I question how well she’s going to do with the fact that literally everyone in Starfleet probably has serious PTSD, and every single one of them over 24 has the exact same story of narrowly surviving being murdered by their kids, while every single one of them under 24 has the exact same story of having their minds and free will stripped away and being forced to murder their colleagues.

But I’m meandering. This episode is so full of loving nods to the past it doesn’t really have time to let anything just grow. We open up with a message from the Federation President warning folks away from Earth, and there’s so much going on right out of the gate. Much of the text of the message is taken directly from the president’s warning in Star Trek IV – even to the point of emphasizing the signal that’s controlling people in a way that kind of buries the lede of “Everyone under 24 has turned into Borg”.

On top of all the nods to The One With The Whales, then, we’ve got who the president is: Anton Chekhov. And the fact that the president of the Federation has the same name as one of the greatest writers in Russian history. The fact that he is named for the guy whose name is an eponym for the law of conservation of drama that requires the gun from act 1 to be fired in act 3, and in a season whose whole modus operandi is to bring back a flurry of nods to things from the past thirty years. The fact that the character is voiced by Walter Koenig, playing his own son, is possibly the funniest thing in Star Trek since “He was an idiot.” Possibly longer. It’s so funny that I completely overlooked the fact that they didn’t actually name him after the Russian Playwright; they named him after the actor who played Chekhov in the JJ Abrams films. But that’s also very amusing.

Another thing about “There’s just so damn much going on that nothing has room to breathe” is that last week we ended with Picard in his iconic position in the center seat of the Enterprise-D… But that isn’t much of this episode. Picard almost immediately relinquishes command. It is necessary and right thematically to do the climax with Picard and Jack – that is how this story needs to go – but at the same time, you worked so hard to get these characters here for this thing, and you immediately send three of the four characters whose most traditional and iconic places are on the bridge off on an away mission. We go into the climax, into the Big Exciting Death Star Trench Run Sequence (I know it is more like the Death Star II sequence, but I prefer the name of the first one) with Geordi in command – a thing which I believe happens only one time in TNG (“The Arsenal of Freedom”, which is also the second of the what, three times they do the saucer separation sequence? Weird little thing; the saucer separation sequence was billed as the Big Cool Thing the ship could do, TNG’s version of Turbo Boost or Morphin’ Time, but it was expensive and required the other set of filming models and so they only used it for the absolute most dire of emergencies… And also “The Arsenal of Freedom” for no really clear reason) – and Beverly shooting the guns, and, at the key moment, Deanna flying the ship. I’m not saying I don’t like it – I do, point of fact, like getting some redemption after decades of jokes about her flying the ship when it crashed. But you went to all this trouble to give us the Iconic One True Enterprise Gang Team Up, only to immediately shuffle everyone around into new positions that, with the exception of Data, we haven’t really seen them take during the series (And even Data doing the flying during the Death Star Trench Run isn’t quite his normal role; he traditionally did the non-driving parts of “Just run the whole rest of the ship.”).

It’s all very nice, even so, just that this was a lot of effort for the payoff. They all roll in in classic formation and instantly Picard announces that he’s fucking off to give his son a Talking To (Man, a Big Damn Picard speech from your dad?), and so of course it makes sense that Riker, who is himself also a Starship Captain, would take over, while Picard beamed over with the medical doctor who might be able to help Jack overcome his condition, and is also his mom and is also probably redundant in her professional capacity because death is likely to come so swiftly there will be no call for medical treatment, and maybe the could take Geordi for his engineering skill, or Troi for her telepathic powers to sense and contact Jack.

Oh. No. Riker’s going with Picard, and Worf is making it a threesome (“Do you even listen to yourself?” Not a bad joke. Still wish they’d leant in on Riker being a swinger instead of a prude, though). Okay, Worf makes sense to take along. Would also make sense to leave behind to defend the Enterprise, but it works at least. Riker… There is no argument for Riker being there. Letting Riker command the ship makes so much more sense. Of course, we need him to go for the resolution, but it’s such a weirdly small element of it. Frankly, it would’ve made more sense to send Troi in the hopes she could reach Jack telepathically.

But okay, it works on a different level. Geordi and Data were always the “soft boys” of TNG; Riker, Picard, and Worf were the “hard boys”. I mean, it’s TNG, so Jean-Luc is the gentle service top and everyone else is a total bottom, but there’s definitely that second tier there. The “soft” gang stays on the ship, the “hard” gang has fun storming the castle, okay, team work makes the dream –

Wow. Almost instantly, Picard declares that he’s got to go off and do this alone while the others find the (rolls D20) transmitter beacon that is allowing Jack’s powers to connect with everyone back at Earth. Kinda looks like the singularity core from Event Horizon, doesn’t it? Or one of those dimensional cuisinart thingies from Cube 2. They get to have an Old Man Fight scene that isn’t all that interesting and do some poking at a computer. Eh. It’s fine. It’s actually pretty solidly TNG-era Star Trek, so that’s good.

By the way, let’s take a second here to reflect that Shaw was basically wrong: The OG Borg weren’t still out there. If we take the queen at the surface, this is it for the Borg. Their last stand. She’s cannibalizing the drones themselves from this last cube to keep herself alive after Admiral Janeway poisoned her decades ago. If the changelings hadn’t teamed up with her, the Borg would have been well and truly extinct within a decade.

Changelings, right. They sort that, I guess. Two lines of dialogue in the montage at the end: Crusher, having returned to Starfleet as an admiral, pays off that one line from a few weeks ago about one of the chemicals involved in Vadic’s mutation by installing a de-Borger-and-Changeling-Detector in the transporters. Makes it easy! And I don’t really object that much, since we’re kind of out of time. But just the sheer amount of stuff this season has picked up and discarded. The changelings were the “big bad” for the first eight episodes, and then Vadic gets blown out the front of the Titan, and that’s that. Catching the rest of the conspirators is basically an afterthought. The portal weapon was a misdirect. The recruiting center attack was a misdirect. Vadic was a misdirect. That’s clever in its way, but it means 80% of the series as a whole was a misdirect. That is too much misdirect. That is too much of the running time burned on irrelevancy. Nothing Worf and Raffi do before episode 8 really matters all that much. For all their work, for Raffi’s sacrifice, all they learn is what the Titan gang works out at exactly the same time. None of it matters, it’s just there to set up some character moments. So little of what happens actually matters. Vadic ditches the portal gun  to go chase the Titan into the nebula and that’s the end of it, because it was only ever meant to be a distraction from the theft of Picard’s corpse. But also the attack on the recruitment center was a distraction… Only it doesn’t actually distract anyone because it gets immediately pinned on a random patsy. What was any of this actually for? You can basically skip the entire season up to the last 5 minutes of episode 8 and the show makes no less sense, really.

This, of course, does not even come close to the level of missed opportunity in the wholesale discarding of the past two seasons. Look, if you don’t want to bring Allison Pill back, that’s fine, but at least a brief, “Can we contact our Borg allies?” “No because of the reason.” exchange? And why isn’t anyone else coming to help? Where are the Klingons? The Romulans? The Vulcan Science Fleet? Again, you can say, “They are all busy soiling themselves that the Borg are back and have effortlessly absorbed all of Starfleet,” but you should actually say that. Say, “The Klingons are setting up a defensive line at their border,” say, “The Vulcans are preparing for refugees.” Say, “The Romulans are sending thoughts and prayers.”  (Not directly related, but I’ll step ahead to the end and complain that during the final goodbyes at Ten Forward, Data should really be talking about going to Coppelius to meet that entire race that he’s technically the father of.)

Now I shall stop being upset by that and gush for a while, because the Death Star Trench Run was, indeed, very cool. And the Titan’s strafing runs against all of Starfleet… Well, conceptually cool at least; in practice, you don’t really get a good look at much, and they don’t get as much screen-time as you’d like, but they wisely decide to keep the camera on the Titan itself and let us get a good look at her bobbing and weaving. Both it and the D look far more elegant as they do their big action sequences than the Enterprise did in its several Exciting Space Action sequences in Strange New Worlds. The D, of course, is flatter and longer than the original Enterprise, so it is easier to work with in these dogfight scenes, but the Titan’s proportions are close to the Constitution Class it’s a revival of, so I guess they just had a long think about how to film it.

And the bit there where the Enterprise has to outrun the fireball? But they can’t get a lock on the away team? Riker upsets me greatly by telling his wife and child to get stuffed so he could go die with Jean-Luc, but I forgive that for the cool thing where his bond with Troi is strong enough that she can use her telepathy to find them, at which point she takes the wheel and flies the ship right up over the Borg Queen’s room. That is pretty cool. Riker does not mention Kestra when he’s saying his little “Eliza, my love, take your time; I’ll see you on the other side,” bit.

Missed opportunity to have Worf inappropriately say, “I too often think of your wife when I am facing death.” Just to lighten the mood.

But, of course, there’s the big climax. And there is a ton going on here. I’ve said before: The Borg are not TNG’s enemy. They fall into that role because TNG failed to provide a properly iconic enemy for itself. Q, of course, but he very quickly evolves into “Picard’s Wacky Godlike Uncle”. The Ferengi were a major stumble, clearly meant to be the “New Klingons”, but utterly unsuited to that role. The Cardassians get thrown in late in the series, but mostly to set them up for Deep Space Nine (And the retcon of a Cardassian war a few years before TNG, I think, is not healthy for the mythos, which benefitted greatly from the sense of TNG starting out during a long period of peace that had prompted Starfleet to become more bureaucratic, less militaristic, but also encouraged them to pursue projects like the Galaxy Class – cities that could in principle fly off into deepest space for decades). Rather, the Borg are Voyager‘s iconic enemy. The point of them in TNG is like a kind of sneak preview. The thing Enterprise did over and over but not well: “What would happen if the iconic enemy from generation 3 shows up in generation 2?” TNG does this sublimely with the Borg, largely because they used the Borg sparingly.

I bring this up because the finale of Picard does something interesting with the Borg: it presents them as still being Voyager’s enemy. It’s strange that they chose this very TNG-centric show in its most TNG-focused incarnation for this, but even without bringing back the casts of Deep Space Nine and Voyager (Seven and Tuvok’s cameo excepted, of course), the plot arc of the season is a direct follow-up not really to anything specific from TNG (The Borg Queen, as a concept, remember, is introduced only in First Contact, thus well into the Post-TNG phase of the era). The Changelings are seeking revenge for the crimes committed against them by Starfleet during the war; The Borg Queen too is seeking revenge for Admiral Janeway’s attack on the collective. Both attacks, interestingly, consisted of biological warfare. The Queen wants revenge. And more than that, in possibly the only point of continuity from season 2, she’s addicted to the presence of the hive and is going insane from the silence. And just as the Changelings have evolved in the face of the biological attack by Section 31, the Borg too are evolving in response; you get the impression that she doesn’t intend to go back to bolting on laser eyes and tubes and wires and cube ships; from now on, it’s biological assimilation, piracy, and lots and lots of killing. Even if she did get Jack a high end Locutus cosplay suit.

Which brings us to the obligatory “Ross cries at the end of a Star Trek season and probably needs to talk about this with his therapist.” Because after failing to snap Jack out of it, and having learned that Jack can only survive disconnection if he does it willingly, Jean-Luc goes and stabs himself with a Borg wire and what do you know, this does indeed plug him back into the collective (Oh, duh, this makes sense; he’s a synth, and they showed us just a couple of weeks ago that synths can plug wires into the backs of their heads to access gentle blue glowing conversation voids).

How does he save Jack? Did you guess “A big speech”? Smart money, but no, not this time. This time, it’s something else. For whatever reason, the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking about the 1998 Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come. I won’t trouble you with the details of the movie, but the ending is largely the same as happens here. Jack is trapped not in hell, but in the false connection and companionship of the collective, but Picard’s answer is the same as Chris’s. Not to argue, or try to persuade, or show the evil of the collective, or speechify about the indomitably of the human spirit. But rather, to just… Sit with him. If you won’t leave hell with me, then I will stay here with you. Real connection to compete with the Borg’s false connection. God, this is such a hard thing. Star Trek gave a generation of geeky people a skewed understanding of empathy, what with the episode titled “The Empath” about a magic space lady  who can absorb the pain of others and take it away from them. That’s not this. It’s not “I will take this pain so you don’t have to.” It’s not even “I can’t carry it. But I can carry you.” It’s, “I will walk back into hell and sit down next to you there so you don’t have to do it alone.” They finally got it. Mmm.

And, of course, it works, and they even let Jack get the spotlight here. Rather than Picard, it’s Jack who gets to tell the queen off, because even without the collective, he will never be alone. Connection. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

So yeah, cube explodes, everyone gets better, happily the Changelings hardly murdered anyone (“But few of any sort, and none of name,” – Much Ado About Nothing, Act I, Scene 1) other than the one transporter operator and the thousands of people in Spacedock and anyone over 25 in the fleet and the entire crew of the Excelsior, so good times all around. We’re just left with a fun scene of friends hanging out, which is how it should be. I mean, it’d be nice if everyone had changed their clothes over the course of the year, but still. Guinan waves from off-camera. Data starts to recite the “Lady from Venus” limerick from “The Naked Now”. All fine stuff.

Oh, right. I glazed over the “Everyone goes to Starfleet” part of the ending. Jack enters Starfleet and completes officer training in a year, almost as fast as Seven went from ranger to first officer (I think we all have to accept that they intended this season to be 10 years after season 2. Beverly even says “The Borg haven’t been seen in ten years”. Also Ed Speleers being 24 is a STRETCH. Also, somehow Shaw was captain of the Titan for five years despite the ship only being a year old. You’re not going to convince me that the 2401 date wasn’t a retcon halfway through production). Beverly also goes back to Starfleet because fuck the Mariposas. And are we to assume Troi un-retired because she’s working as a councilor on a starship? Was Picard captaining the Enterprise that whole year? And Raffi’s back in normal starfleet having given up being a spy since Worf blew her cover so that her son would talk to her again (A small and kind gesture).

Which brings us to the Big Fun Sequel-Baiting reveal at the end, with the Titan rechristened as the Enterprise-G. If you only watched the show and did not read the supplemental materials, you might be wondering what happened to the Enterprise-F, but apparently it was scheduled for decommission right after Frontier Day, on account of some irreparable damage a bit before. Just as well, the bridge of the Enterprise-F appears to just be a conference room with one chair in it and nothing else. Like the Boss Fight room at Starfleet Headquarters from “Conspiracy”.

Some people are not happy with the rechristening. I get it. I do feel like it’s a little weird that the Titan’s “reward” for singlehandedly delaying the fleet long enough to save Earth is to essentially have its own legacy erased. I’m not as bothered by the fact that the Constitution III class isn’t as big and prestigious as the whale of a ship that just got decommissioned. The Titan is a workhorse. Not the biggest, coolest ship in the fleet, but the ship that does good, solid work. I am not crazy about the look of the Titan, but it’s a good ship, and the adventures of Captain Seven, Commander Musiker and Ensign Crusher aboard the Enterprise-G are something I’d probably watch. Probably should remove the staircase from the bridge though. Someone’s going to break an ankle.

The last note I’ll make is that a lot of folks were also disappointed that Kate Mulgrew didn’t get a cameo as Janeway granting Seven the captaincy. But the thing is, aside from the fact that calling Kate in for a cameo would be a waste, the scene just wouldn’t work. The love between those two would have to be the emotional center of the scene. With Tuvok, we get his stoic response to maintain the plausibility of the illusion that Seven isn’t about to be massively rewarded for her act of piracy (Characterizing Enterprise-G’s command staff as “A pirate, a spy and a thief” is great), and the emotional core of the scene gets to sit on Shaw, posthumously delivering Seven’s performance appraisal, seemingly drunk, to show that despite his own issues, his own struggle with Seven’s clashing style and what it means for his own place in the world, he recognizes her as the future of Starfleet. Emergency Holographic Dipshit for when they go to series, please (We never met Titan’s chief engineer; a holographic recreation of Shaw is plausible here). The only way you could wedge Janeway in there would be to do the scene as filmed up until after Shaw’s recording. Then have Janeway walk in and say “Resignation not accepted, Captain Seven.” But even that is not as good as just holding her back for some future project.

And so we are left with a new crew and a new Enterprise, and a path forward to the future. And the old crew fades into the sunset, still there if we need them, sure, but at a thematic level, sort of done. Complete. Where they needed to be. The TNG era is over. Time for something new.

Oh then Q shows up because mother fucker. Soft reboot. Yeah, yeah. Q still died at the end of season 2, but he’s a non-temporal being so it’s technically okay. Fuck you.

The post-credits scene I wanted was Jean-Luc waking up, hung over, slumped over the poker table and shouting, “Merde! I was supposed to call Laris a whole fucking year ago!”

Sheer. Fucking. Hubris.

See you in June.

Somehow, Palpatine returned.

That’s kinda how I’m feeling right now. I didn’t want it to be the Borg, but I kinda knew it was, and there’s a distinct sense of “Okay, we tried something new and wild last time, and the fanboys rebelled, so let’s regress to something safe and familiar.” Technically they have not undone last season’s redemption of the Borg, but they might as well have. Technically they have not undone last season’s relationship between Picard and Laris in favor of JeanBev shipping, but they might as well have. Technically they have not undone the synth culture on Coppelius and Data’s decision to experience death, but they might as well have. Technically they have not undone Picard’s proxy-parent relationship with Space Legolas, his death and resurrection, and his joining Starfleet, but they may as well have.

Actually, Elnor might be dead again now. No one says anything about it. Maybe, maybe not. They blow up the Excelsior, which is the last place we saw him, but I don’t know that he’d still be there however much later this is supposed to be. I’ve been told this season is just a few months after season 2, which of course is impossible given the age of Raffi’s grandkid or the fact that she has had time to switch from being a commander on the Excelsior to being a spy with a rich backstory about falling off the wagon and breaking up with Seven. This season stinks of “soft reboot”.

So yeah, Troi looks behind Jack’s red door and despite telling him that she would be supportive and help him no matter what, she instantly freaks out, abandons him, and starts plotting against him because the Borg Seed in his head spooks her. God I hate this. Kudos to Jean-Luc for telling him right away rather than trying to lie to him about it, but man, “Jack finds out he’s got a Borg in his brain and immediately decides to abuse his powers to escape the Titan and go off on his own to personally hand-deliver himself to the Borg, where he immediately surrenders and gives them everything they want” is a very upsetting plot.

And it kinda has to be upsetting, because Jack can’t possibly do the right thing, since all acts of successful heroism must be done by legacy characters.

The devil of it is that this is a very clever and well-executed plan. The Borg (Changelings? Who? Oh, them, never mind. That plot is done. No more changelings.) aren’t just planning to hack the Borg-improved systems of the new fleet to seize control of the ships. They’re also Borg-hacking the people.

Let us pause a minute to take in, “The Changelings uploaded Picard’s DNA alterations into the transporter database so it would automatically install it in anyone who used the transporter.” You know what? All these years, I have been arguing against the “No really transporters kill you and replace you with a rapidly grown clone” thing by viewing the transporter as a high-speed Ship of Theseus. The fact that transporters have a baseline genetic image of every species, and just kinda quietly impose it on you when you go through is far more existentially horrifying than the normal round of transporter angst. And how do you do this plot without having some surprises based around people using or not using the transporter? You could easily have it turn out that Alandra hadn’t used the transporter recently and was thus uninfected but then tragically had to use it to escape the Borgified crew.

I’m getting just lost in the mess here of all the things in this plot that mingle really good ideas and really bad ones. We get to see the Enterprise-F, which is okay I guess. It kinda looks like a whale? It doesn’t do anything for me, in much the same way that the E didn’t do much for me, but moreso. I don’t hate it or anything, but it has a certain otherness to it.

Actually, it kind of reminds me of the Enterprise-B in that way. There’s nothing wrong with it. Objectively, the Excelsior class does what it was meant to when they revealed it in the opening of Star Trek III by giving you this sense of bigness and being impressive, and you can get behind the idea of Captain Sulu going off and having adventures on it. But when you say “And here’s the new Enterprise, which is one of those,” you kind of know in your heart that the Enterprise-B does not have what it takes to be “The Hero Ship”. It can only ever be the Guest Star. The F is like that.

Riker calls out the irony in Admiral Shelby – introduced as an ambitious officer angling for Riker’s job, and also the Federation’s Borg expert – supporting the plan to network the whole fleet with Borg technology. But, I mean, stealing your enemies’ most powerful technologies is kinda how the history of warfighting technology works. Is it weird that they didn’t have some kind of countermeasure installed after what happened with Queen Agnes? Yes, but not so weird as the fact that no one notices. There’s no quick line of dialogue to say, “How are they doing this after we changed the security protocols? The changelings must have compromised the new codes.”

It’s also not as weird as the fact that at no point do Jean-Luc, Raffi, or Seven bring up the fact that there is a whole second Borg collective who are their allies. No one says, “Hey, maybe we should call Agnes and ask if she knows how to undo this?” It needn’t even derail the plot; just add, “Can we ask our Borg allies for help?” “Unfortunately, the transwarp conduit they’re guarding is experiencing a Bullshittium Storm which blocks all communication.”

But the worst thing about all this, the absolute worst thing, is that in their rush to nostalgia, to set up their Big Damn Heroes finale, they had to go and betray the soul of Star Trek.

Okay, that is a bit hyperbolic. But look at what happened here. Everyone who used the transporter is infected with the Borg “biological receiver” which causes them to be assimilated, but it only works on people under 24, because that’s when the human brain is fully cooked. Now… Wait, though. If it’s working by altering DNA, then it should take time. If it’s altering brain tissue it should actually take years. But this whole plot is contingent on them stealing Picard’s body just a few days ago and using the Fleet Formation network to spread the reprogramming. If it’s not just altering the DNA but actually directly altering the brain structure, it shouldn’t be constrained by age.

But this is all just Dumb Trek Science, well within the bounds of the way Star Trek writers think DNA works. Hey, remember that time when over the course of a few hours, everyone on the ship transformed into animals because a virus “activated junk DNA”?

No, the problem here is the moral angle. What is the message of this plot? After spending eight weeks slowly making us love these new characters, making us open to a New Generation, bombarding us with themes about parenthood and passing the torch on to the Next Generation, this episode straight-out says, “Do not trust young people. Even if they mean well, they are weak and fickle and will be the unwitting pawns of the evil space commies who want to destroy our way of life. Only Old People can save us. Respect your elders.” This is a pretty straightforward betrayal of Star Trek’s position toward youth and counterculture on the level of the TOS hippie episode which does… Basically the exact same thing because punching hippies was just too much fun. Everything new is painted as the enemy, and salvation can only come by retreating into the beloved and comfortable past, which I will get to in a minute.

But more, let me dredge up what I said after the big reveal back in season 1:

It’s godsdamned frakking Battlestar Galactica.

Yeah, not only is it bad news to fill ships with Young People of Today, who can’t be trusted, but more, it’s that they foolishly networked their ships – the literal exact same thing that doomed the colonial fleet in Battlestar Galactica. And if you want, there’s kind of a “These kids with their facebooks and their myspaces and their tiktoks”  thing going on too, because what is it that the youngs are so dangerously vulnerable to? The siren’s song of connecting.  Of networking. The trait Jack attributes to his Borg heritage is the nagging feeling that the universe would be a better place if we were more connected and if people were better at seeing each other’s perspective- yes, folks, that’s evil: empathizing with the other. Jesus Christ.

But you know what’s just bizarre? It’s not just Battlestar Galactica. It’s also, of all the things in the whole damned universe, The Tomorrow People.

Yeah, back in the ’70s, the cheap-ass British sci-fi version of the X-Men did a serial whose premise was – sit down and have a drink, because this is a doozy – in the waning days of the Blitz, Nazi scientists sent over some bombs that contained biological agents. E Coli in the bombs was used as a carrier (This seems shockingly prescient on some aspects of the science of gene therapy given the vintage here) to infect British children with DNA that, when passed on to their children, would render the Young People of (1970s) Today susceptible to loving Hitler.

Who was actually still alive, having been secretly frozen a la They Saved Hitler’s Brain.

Also Hitler was an alien.

Whose true form was a whiffle ball covered in slime.

It was the ’70s.

This is stupid and awful and I hate it… And I love it too? The reveal that the Borg are targeting Starfleet’s very bodies rather than their tech? Data having to hold Geordi back from running to his daughters? The moment of thwarted hope when the Excelsior crew retake the bridge, only to have the fleet instantly destroy them? It’s really good stuff there.

And then, of course, they go and kill Shaw. The streak of what happens to you when you deadname Seven remains unbroken. It is very sweet that he calls Seven by her actual name with his dying breath. Also, he gets to die in a bookend to his own trauma, helping the others escape the Borg just as he’d been saved all those years ago. I hope whatever bullshit asspull they use to resolve the plot next week magically brings him back to life. Him and T’Veen. I wonder if the reason Vadic shot her was that she was for some reason unaffected by Borgjacking?

This all leads to where we leave our heroes. Seven and Raffi stay behind on the Titan… For some reason. I dunno. I mean, obviously, this will give them a chance to profess their continuing love for each other while evading Seven’s Borgified underlings. Everyone else takes a shuttle back to where they were a couple of weeks ago, the fleet museum, for a reveal that was sort of obvious, and is kind of “The show going up its own ass in the name of nostalgia” and kind of unbelievable, and also kind of inevitable and I can’t help myself but be happy about it.

Back when they first met Geordi a few weeks ago, Alandra alluded to something in bay 12 that could help them evade Starfleet. Geordi shuts her down. Now, the reveal: Geordi spent the last 20 years rebuilding the Enterprise-D in his garage from spare parts. Like the dude in the Hank Williams song. We even get a guest appearance of Majel Barrett’s voice as the computer. Barrett recorded a sound library before her death with the intention of continuing the voice the ship’s computer, but so far, the showmakers have decided this would be too creepy – totally fair since AI recreation of voice actors is a thing now and it does change the morality of things. We know Barrett was okay with them continuing to use her voice back then, but we don’t know if she’d feel the same knowing that using computers to fake the voices of dead actors was a thing that would end up threatening the livelihoods of voice actors.

Everyone is kind of in awe, and it’s very sweet, and Picard comments on having missed the carpeting, and it’s well lit, and the bridge consoles booting up looks super cool, and Data and Geordi taking their old seats is touching, and Worf is kind of grumpy and preferred the E, but they “obviously” couldn’t use that for reasons Worf swears are not his fault. Now, in command of the last remaining fully functional but unnetworked Battlestar of Caprica Starfleet vessel, the old gang sets a course straight back where they came from to… I guess go fight the entirety of Starfleet all by themselves with one ship that’s been obsolete for decades with a crew of seven pensioners.

Again, why are they going straight back to Earth? Why aren’t they calling Jurati? Or really anyone anywhere in the galaxy? Even if they do stop the Borg, the brain modification they did to Picard, now replicated in everyone under 24, literally killed him. Is Starfleet’s next generation doomed to an early grave? Or will Geordi come up with some transporter magic to fix everyone, which will coincidentally bring Shaw back to life?  Will we get any closure on the changelings, or are they just going to be quietly forgotten now that the “proper” villain has surfaced? No, clearly we will not.

Deep breath. It’ll be okay. Just watch the D and geek out.

Ways this could end that definitely aren’t going to happen but would probably be better and more thematically appropriate than whatever they go with:

1. Queen Agnes shows up with her own collective, plugs in, and the OG Borg are instantly overwhelmed by her superior power of love.
2. All hope is lost so Jean-Luc goes scorched earth and has Data summon Robothulu. “We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.” “We are the synth confederation and you’re all meatsacks to us.”
3. The Protostar shows up and unleashes the Living Construct on the Borg.
4. Empress Emeritus Phillipa Georgiou pops out of the back end of the Guardian of Forever aboard the Enterprise-F and, without even knowing what the hell is going on, murders her way to a total Borg rout.
5. Benjamin Sisko returns to the temporal realm with Space Jesus powers and nukes the Borg.
6. A flashback reveals that during their final hug, Q quietly mentioned giving Jean-Luc one other parting gift. In a moment of desperation, as the Borg close in and prepare to destroy the Enterprise, Picard snaps his fingers and the Borg cease to exist. Also Shaw comes back to life. T’Veen too.
7. Groppler Zorn. That’s it. That’s the twist.

 

I suppose technically I could have been more wrong about how this week’s episode could go, but it wouldn’t be easy. I predicted this would be a “Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” episode with forces aligning to ensure things just kept getting worse for our heroes, in order that they could enter episode 9 at their lowest point. And, I mean, it was a close thing; they could easily have ended each story thread a few minutes early and this would have been a tense cliffhanger with Data gone forever, Vadic murdering the bridge crew, Jack surrendering himself, and half the cast under siege on the Shrike.

But modern Trek has learned the value of aftercare, so they get on with it, and at the end of this episode, Vadic is (probably) dead, the Shrike is destroyed, Zombie Picard is off the table, Data is back and better than ever, the Rikers have patched up their marriage, we had several minutes for everyone to just hang out around a conference room table and chat, spoon, smoke a cigarette, put a towel down over the wet spot, and the only real problem is that we do not have any idea what the next bit of plot is.

Actually, that is a bit of a problem. We’ve defeated the villains, blown up Picard’s stolen corpse (Anyone else notice how utterly chill Worf is about Picard’s corpse? “Do not worry; it’s not really, him, just his previous body.” While Raffi, who was there for the whole thing, is kind of a bit catty about it?), we’ve got Jack and he’s safe. Sure, there’s still changelings infiltrating Starfleet, but it seems like their actual big plan has been derailed at this point. I’m sure they’ll pick things back up, but at the exact point where the story this week stops, it seems like the right thing to do here is for the Titan to just light out for the west and spend a couple of days cloaked somewhere quiet so that Frontier Day can come and go with the conspirators bereft of their refrigerated French vintner, their war crimes mobile, the leader of the changeling faction, and Jack Crusher. I’m going to be upset if the Titan hand-delivers Jack to the climax specifically so he can play his role in nearly beginning armageddon.

Surrender is the title of the episode and also the name of the game this week. You could probably add, “But don’t give yourself away.” Once again, we amazingly have Jack actually talk to his parents about what’s going on with him. And while Bev does scan him to make sure he’s not hallucinating, they very quickly decide to roll with it and even exploit Jack’s mind-jacking powers on one of the captured bridge crew in an attempt to input Picard’s un-override code (In a brief aside, Riker reveals that he gave Vadic his own code to protect Troi, removing the need to imagine a Lore-Vadic alliance to justify her smugness last week). And that’s a really good scene. Vadic catches them, as you’d expect because it’s too early in the episode to turn things around. But it’s just, “She sees what he’s doing and stops him,” not “Turns out the whole thing was a trap and she was expecting them to do that and now her position is even stronger,” and it wasn’t a bad idea to try or hopeless from the outset: it just didn’t work out. Jack wants to surrender himself, like he did before, to stop the carnage, but Picard correctly points out that Vadic is definitely going to kill them all anyway. I mean, she’s cartoonishly evil. She even did the thing where she singles someone out, menaces them threateningly, then shoots the person next to them. Really sorry about that, Lieutenant T’Veen. They talked you up good in the promos. Maybe if they go to series, it’ll turn out that was a changeling infiltrator and Vadic was secretly doing her “Kill an underperforming subordinate” thing.

So Jack surrenders himself, but it’s a feint. And a double one. He shows up with one of them Thermal Detonator thingies like in Star Wars. He presents it as a legit surrender, but with insurance: he’ll blow himself up if Vadic doesn’t follow through on her promise to release the others. And she actually does, to her credit. Except that Seven refuses to be released, because she needs to “take responsibility” for failing to protect the bridge. Shaw had called her out on that before, and while we finally got the, “My name is Seven of Nine,” line out of her, Shaw really owns that exchange. She should have sacrificed him by blowing up the turbolift, rather than let Vadic take the bridge by using him as a hostage. But Shaw manages to bundle a bunch of stuff up into his accusation here. Because it’s not just Seven putting her personal moral code above her duty to the ship. We know what Shaw’s deal is now. This is not the first time that someone has chosen to save his life at the cost of others. Shaw’s survivor’s guilt has got to be triggered as fuck right now. Sure, Seven chose to save him rather than protect his ship, and that was not the logically correct decision. But more to the point, he failed to protect his ship, and worse, he failed to die rather than give up the ship.

I am not really sure what Seven meant to accomplish by staying behind. There’s a moment when you think she might have even made things worse by being there, but it works out okay. Really all she does is bear witness to Vadic almost-but-not-quite explaining Jack’s deep dark secret.

So about that secret. There really is no way whatever it is can be enough for the build-up. That feeling continues unabated. By the end of the episode, the heroes have some data from the Shrike that might explain what they wanted with the bits of Picard’s brain they took. It’s not clear whether those bits were still on the Shrike at the end, but I’m guessing those were already delivered, since otherwise there wouldn’t be any story left. Vadic knows Jack’s secret, even knows the red door imagery. Troi senses something dark and evil that is not of Jack but which is moving through him. There seems to be something evil and eldrich and very powerful which has been locked away and wants to re-enter the universe, and Jack, probably because of his inheritance from Picard, is the conduit through which it can.

There are two major popular theories right now about this. Neither one of them feels right. At the same time, both of them seem well-justified.

The first theory is that it’s the Pah-Wraiths, the Bajoran anti-gods who drove bits of plot arc in Deep Space Nine, with the final climax of the series being Benjamin Sisko sacrificing his corporeal form to defeat them. The Pah-Wraiths meet the criteria of being powerful, eldrich, and sealed away. Further, possession by a Pah-Wraith in Deep Space Nine was depicted with a similar red-eye effect as what we see when Jack uses his powers. Indeed, all the Pah-Wraith iconography lines up well with the “Red door” symbolism they’re using now.

The big problem, of course, is that the Pah-Wraiths are tied very closely to Bajor and Deep Space Nine, and have sweet fuck all to do with TNG. It being them would be the strongest argument yet that this plot ought to have been for a Deep Space Nine revival rather than a TNG one. There’s no justification whatever for Jack being connected to the Pah-Wraiths, and Picard even less-so. Picard’s brain issue was diagnosed well before the Pah-Wraiths were introduced into the franchise. It’s not a per se contradiction to use them here, but, again, a good story that serves as an endcap to the TNG era is not a naturally comfortable fit with a final reveal of, “Offscreen, before they were introduced, a secondary enemy from a different series that Picard never met or interacted with did something to his brain which was passed on to his son.”

The other contender is the Borg, of course, and here, we have the connection to Jean-Luc to lean on. Listening to Vadic talk about the secret thing behind the red door, the Borg make some sense: she alludes to Jack’s feelings of loneliness, his need to connect to others. Last season, we had this fantastic image of the Borg Queen not simply as the organizing element behind a horde of space zombies, but as someone desperate at a biological level for connection. And then there’s Vadic’s cryptic comment about it being fitting for Seven to be there to bear witness as she circumloqutes around explaining Jack’s deep dark secret. A Borg link would also make sense as an angle for destroying Starfleet, since last season established that the current generation of Starfleet ships are vulnerable to Borghacking due to their Borg technology – of course, you’d want a little more here to explain why this is a vulnerability different from the one last season, why Starfleet hasn’t patched their vulnerability after last season, and why they’re going to this much trouble when there is a nonzero amount of Borg technology and ex-borg you can acquire without all of this nonsense.

And, I mean, it probably is the Borg. That’s where the smart money is. But where this theory really falls short, though, is on the whole “ability to bodyjack” thing, and the implication that Jack is connected to a powerful entity beyond human comprehension that has been exiled from the universe at large. “The Borg left something in Picard’s brain” would be a plausible angle for a story, but I don’t think it works for this story, especially when the Borg still exist and are still out there, some of them on friendly terms. On the other hand, next week’s episode is titled “Vox”, which is Latin for “Voice”, and begs comparison to “Locutus” being Latin for “Spoken”. In fact, in the Shatner-ghostwritten novel “The Return” (Which the appearance of Kirk’s corpse brings to mind), “Vox” is the name of the Romulan analogue to Locutus.

But it probably is the Borg. Which will be unsatisfying. But then, so will anyone else it turns out to be. Unless they decide it is time to finally stop fucking around and it’s Groppler Zorn. Bring back Groppler Zorn, you cowards.

Meanwhile, we catch up with the Troi-Rikers and learn that part of Riker’s issue is that Troi used her Betazoid powers to mind-whammy him into getting over his grief. They don’t go into a lot of detail, but it’s a sad and lovely snapshot of a couple in pain. And then they lighten the mood by having her say that the changeling who captured her was good in bed but bad at making pizza, which Riker reckons is an accurate impersonation.  It’s kinda weird that 100% of Riker’s interest in cooking seems to be pizza-making. And that somehow he is bad at it. I mean, it’s “Put random stuff on a disc of bread”. Now, clearly Troi is joking, but I still like the idea that they are in fact the kind of couple where Troi might actually decide, “I’m going to go ahead and bone this impersonator, because it will be a fun story to tell later.” This illusion is shattered when Riker gets jealous and uncomfortable when Worf pauses during rescuing them to gush to Troi about his self-work. The scene works, since “People are kind of uncomfortable about this whole Sensitive New Age Warrior thing” has been the shtick they’re going for Worf, but I’ve never liked the Jealous Riker scenes. Much more upsetting is the dismantling of what we saw back in season 1: Mr. and Mrs. Riker both hate their wonderful sylvan life on Nepenthe in their rustic force-shielded log cabin surrounded by weird animals that are all basically just Earth animals with bits glued on. I loved that episode, and I loved their happy sylvan lifestyle and Kestra running wild through the woods. Apparently Kestra is meant to have gone off to the academy now? Holy fuck, can anyone in this show have a life path that isn’t Starfleet without it being depicted as “running away”? God.

Okay, but I will grant that “Feral Nepenthean Girl tries to adapt to the Big City” does have a certain Pippi Longstocking kind of charm to it.

Of course, this week’s real emotional core, though, was the return of Data, and… You know how it’s going to go, and I think you also know how it’s going to get there, which is interesting, if it’s a choice. I dunno, did anyone not figure it out immediately? You have one of those Me-vs-Me-in-the-Existential-Void confrontations, like you get. They pretty much always go the same way. The bad guy seems to be winning right up until the end – well played here by the map of Data’s brain changing from blue to red – smugly gloating in his victory, then suddenly it’s revealed that the hero had been in the dominant position all along. Hell, this scene has played out so long that it’s been forever since I can remember seeing it played as simply as, “The bad guy really was winning, but he gloated wrong at the last minute causing the hero to rally.” Your range of twists were usually something like, “I could have won at any time, but I needed to keep you distracted,” or, “Actually I defeated you a while ago and have locked you in this existential void fighting a fake version of me,” or, “Instead of fighting we’ll just hug it out.”

Or the one they chose, which is that Data Doc-Ocks Lore. For those not in the know, there was this whole plot arc in Spider-Man a ways back where Doc Ock is dying and switches bodies with Peter, and at the end of their Existential Battle For The Body, Peter straight-up loses and gets to die in Doc’s body. Except that instead of fighting Doc, Peter rigged it so that Doc would get his body, but would also get his memories, and more, he’d experience them as his own. And it turned out that it was basically the lack of memories of a loving childhood and good role models was the whole reason he became a villain, and with Peter’s memories, Doc decided to actually be a superhero. He was still a dick, but he did the right thing mostly.

So that’s what Data does to Lore. It’s obvious the second Lore starts gloating about getting rid of all Data’s precious mental mementos, symbolized by him taking Data’s Sherlock Holmes hat and vaporizing it. It’s well-played, reinforced when Lore snipes at Data about his own empty life and how he never had all these happy memories and friendships as he zaps Data’s pocket-sized Tasha Yar Holographic Gravestone. There’s this shift in Lore where he’s less snarky and cynical and becomes sort of eager to claim Data’s memories. And Spot. Oh Spot. Data hands Spot to Lore, and Lore is visibly delighted, because KITTY. I get it. My own cats will not let me pick them up.

That’s when the reveal comes, as the last bit of Data winks out, he explains that, yeah, Lore was right. Data had all these memories, and Lore had an empty life with nothing to look back on but chaotic dickishness. But it’s Data’s memories that defined him, and now the emptiness in Lore has been filled up with 100% Data. Unlimited Data, if you will permit me to make that joke again. That was always the difference between them, and now that Data has closed the gap, there’s nothing left that’s distinctly Lore. We get a good loving closeup of Data’s brain switching back from red to blue, but the camera oddly doesn’t make a big point of the later reveal, which you kinda see in the background while everyone’s rejoicing at Data’s rebirth: the final state of Data’s brain diagram isn’t blue. It’s purple. Data didn’t trick Lore into erasing himself, or find a sly way to take over. He did exactly what Soong intended, and merged into one combined being. It’s just that Data’s traits dominate the new being’s sense of self because Lore never had an identity of his own, only ever being defined in terms of what Data was not.

Also Data can use contractions and jokes now. You kind of get the impression that they’re memory-holing the fact that Data got that emotion chip back in Generations (where he also started telling jokes). Not quite clear. Nemesis did the same thing. I think there’s a good angle here that neither Nemesis nor this show have had time for, that could have really made for a good Talky Scene with LaForge about Data’s capacity for emotion even with the chip and how it differed from Lore’s. The emotion chip was, as originally presented, a simplification of Lore’s emotional capacity. I think you could make the argument that even when Data had emotions, he experienced them as “other” – something that he could experience but were not part of his core sense of self. They never come out and say this, but it’s one interpretation of a lot of the scenes in the movie era that deal with Data’s emotions, and a better one than “Insurrection decided the emotion chip was a dead end, so they consciously omitted it, and then Nemesis forgot about it.” But the conversation never comes. (And now that I’m thinking about it, it would be very easy for such a conversation to come off as ableist, given how easily Data is read as autistic).

Another conversation that they don’t have is to justify Picard’s belief that they should remove the partition and let Data and Lore duke it out, and hope that them standing around begging Data to win is going to resolve the matter. Kudos, though, to Picard for taking the time to check in afterward and make sure Data is okay with being alive again, after they had that whole big Thing about Data wanting to die. Data is ultimately like, “No, this is cool too. I can do both,” and that’s very sweet.

Data retakes the ship and that’s pretty much the end of Vadic’s plot. I referred to the Mysterious Device Jack brought with him when he surrendered as a “Thermal Detonator” – it’s a little wonky that it just comes out of nowhere. The changelings can’t identify the technology, which is a key point, but we also never see where Jack got it from either, making it feel a little ass-pully. I like that comparison, because the scene feels sort of anti-Star Wars. Vadic talking around Jack’s experiences with the Red Door and the Voice and his mysterious powers and how she can unlock the secrets for him are pretty reminiscent of Palpatine’s seduction of Anakin, and we’ve seen the scene a thousand times where the Chosen One is tempted in a scene like this and hesitates at the worst minute, or worse, cuts off Mace Windu’s arms. But Jack doesn’t do either of those things. He turns on the device which turned out to be a personal force field and not a grenade after all, Seven is close enough that her being there isn’t even a complication, and, in a bit of “Here is a very cool way to make the fans shut up about it,” it turns out that the great big “vulnerable” window in the front of the ship is not a window: it’s an emergency hatch. Data opens it, and the changelings all get blown out into space, giving Vadic just enough time for last words that for once in the franchise, are the villain’s own, rather than quoting Shakespeare or Mellville: “Fuckin’ solids.”

Is Vadic dead? I think so? She gets blown out into space. Can changelings survive in space?Oh, now she’s frozen. Can changelings survive being frozen? Oh, she’s drifting toward the Shrike. I bet she’ll luck into the open hangar bay and get recovered that- And she’s shattered. She just got Terminator 2’d. Can she come back from that? I can’t remember if changelings can actually separate their bodies into discrete parts and then reconnect and survive, and it sure looked like it was difficult when she kept cutting her hand off to talk to the MYSTERIOUS FACE. But maybe? Oh, now they just fucking blew up the Shrike. Even if she didn’t get roasted in the explosion, she’s currently drifting in a million pieces in a debris field. If she’s not gone, it’s gonna feel cheap.

It’s a weird move to kill your antagonist at the top of act 3. But I like it because Star Trek has rarely been about the big dramatic villains – and this cast in particular have been especially bad with them. What the show is really about is what comes next: everyone sitting around a conference table and talking things out. The recurring image of modern Trek, which is a distillation of the decades that came before, is that the Heart of Star Trek is people working together to heal, and when they do that, not only can they overcome their enemies, it’s not even hard. Vadic was winning because the heroes were divided. Data divided against himself, Picard and Riker divided over how to respond to the Shrike, Troi and Riker divided in their grief, Beverly and Picard divided over Jack, Geordi and Picard divided by the Titan’s fugitive status. Once everyone was back on the same page, dealing with Vadic was as simple as opening the front door.

Which is how we go into next week: opening a door.

Well okay. This was… Hm.

I mean, it’s pretty good. But at the same time, it was painful to sit through this episode knowing full well that this is the kind of show where the heroes are not going to get a respite and partial-victory in episode 7, so the entire time that it looks like things are finally going their way, we all know how this is going to end.

There is, I suppose, an interesting multilayered thing here. We know that Vadic is walking into a trap, because it happens immediately after Picard declares, “Let’s set a trap for Vadic.” Yet all the TV-making language shouts at us that this is one of those scenes where we’re not supposed to know that the Titan is faking it and it isn’t really crippled. But then Vadic never acts like she isn’t in complete control of the situation, and we kinda know, before Jean-Luc and Bev do, that she’s going to trivially escape and take over the ship so that we can go into episode 8 with the heroes in their darkest hour. More than that, even, the main tension next week isn’t going to be, “How will they get out of this?” but “How will they avoid getting out of this?” because we know episode 8 can’t end with the heroes victorious, but there’s only a limited amount of headroom for escalation left.

So after the exciting cliffhanger with Riker captured and Troi being held prisoner to blackmail him into talking… They is not in this episode. Neither are Worf or Raffi. Someone has to stay uncaptured to show up next week and save everyone. Instead, we get a celebrity cameo from Tim Russ as Not-Tuvok. Man, Tim Russ has not aged well. I didn’t see Tim Russ in anything for like 10 years, and now he’s in this what, a month after appearing in Poker Face? By the way, Poker Face is amazing and you should watch it. Tim Russ’s dramatic range is interesting. He is not good at conveying normal human emotion. This served him well as Tuvok, but I can also see him being really good in those sort of Adrian Paul roles where they’re playing a character who’s playing a character. He was just a victim in Poker Face, but man I could see him facing off against Columbo, presenting this carefully calculated false front that lets just enough slip that you know he’s not on-the-level. That was an interesting sequence, but it’s odd that Not-Tuvok was able to correctly respond to Seven’s comments about playing Kal-Toh (“It is to your chess, as chess is to tic-tac-toe,” Tuvok says, but I’m pretty sure it’s actually more like higher-dimensional Jenga), but screws up, “Vulcans wouldn’t go to the planet where they hate Vulcans.”

Fun fact: Tim Russ is the same age now as Mark Lenard was when he reprised the role of Sarek for TNG. I know some people are bothered that Tuvok looks a lot older at 137 than Sarek did at 209, but given that the actors were the literal same age, I think this does come down very straightforwardly to “Tuvok didn’t age gracefully.”

So no sooner did I concede that, yeah, Picard had Irumodic syndrome all along that this is called into question. Data, in a moment of lucidity, tells them that there’s something weird about Picard’s brain problem, that calls the diagnosis into question, as we kinda figured, what with Jack manifesting Plot Relevance. This has escalated now to telepathy, and possibly bodyjacking? Him and LaForge link brains to fight the skull-faced changelings. We seem to be rushing headlong into “There’s way too much going on for this to be satisfactorily resolved in time,” territory. It would probably be emotionally satisfying to end the series on a Picard-vs-Locutus showdown, which would hint at Picard’s brain problem actually being a remnant of Borg. But then, it’s weird that they wouldn’t involve the new friendlier collective at all (Also weird that Picard doesn’t reach out to them for help at this stage). I’m having a hard time speculating about what the deal is with Picard/Jack, since there’s no intersection I can find between plausible and non-stupid. Like, Jack’s eyes light up red, so maybe it’s Pah-wraith? But that’s just so random that it would really just completely collapse this whole season into “Oops all DS9”. The bare facts are that it appears something that happened to Picard prior to “All Good Things” modified his brain, and this has been passed on to his son in a further-adapted form, and somehow Jack and Picard’s corpse can be combined to do A Thing that will destroy starfleet. Again, storytelling rules suggest that the “something” is a callback to an actual thing in TNG. But what? Um. That time he got possessed by a space ghost? That time he crossed his own timeline and shot his future self? The Ressican business with the decades of gaslighting and flute lessons? There’s a ton of stuff it could plausibly be, but none of it has enough emotional weight to pay off the season. At best, it would just be another in a long list of easter eggs. “Oh hey a thing I never talked about that happened on the Stargazer,” makes more sense than any of it, but wouldn’t really be emotionally satisfying. Hell, let’s just say it’s Daimon Bok and be done with it.

This reveal serves as a concession to make the plot work. What I mean is this: they’ve got a pretty good idea why Vadic wants Jack and what she wants to do with Picard’s corpse. They’ve decided that she means to combine Picard’s corpse with Jack’s DNA to create a perfect impostor Picard to gain access to something at the Frontier Day festivities. This is not quite right, of course, and there’s flaws with the theory: they don’t want the actual Jean-Luc for this; they already have 100% Complete Control of All of Starfleet At Every Level, and why would retired zombie Jean-Luc have access to anything at Frontier Day that would help them? The actual real Jean-Luc can’t even divert a starship to the hinterlands. No, their real reasons have to do with Jack’s mysterious brain-damage powers, and that’s fine, but we need the gang to have a hint of this in order to explain why Geordi is trying to sort out Data at this point.

I mean, yes, obviously Geordi would want to bring back Data. It’s really when he gives his speech about the effect Data’s life and death had on him that LeVar Burton becomes Geordi again. But they’re right in the middle of something just now, so, like, maybe wait until after saving the galaxy? But they can’t, because Data might contain the secret of what the changelings are planning to do with Picard’s mortal remains. (Unfun fact: my wife and I talked a little last weekend about what we want to do with our own mortal remains when the time comes, and whether we want to be buried or donated to medical science or taxidermied or put on the mantle along with the cat and the father-in-law. Neither of us have strong feelings on the matter, and my wife offered the very lovely sentiment, “You should do whatever helps you and the kids the most.” She also pointed out that cremation is a lot cheaper than burial) So they plug him in to the ship’s computer because of course they do, and Lore gets to seize control of key systems for, near as I can tell, absolutely no reason other than to be a dick. I mean, maybe he’s deliberately working with Vadic? She seems super cocky when they catch her, so possibly she had anticipated them having Lore and Lore releasing her. But that would be kind of unfair Cartoon Villain prescience on her part, and while it’s in keeping with Lore’s character that he’d work with other bad guys to just fuck people over for the lulz, Geordi repeatedly stresses that Lore is an agent of chaos, so it seems like the argument is stronger that he’s just fucking around for fun.

Why did Soong decide to shove his mind in there again? They clarify that Soong and B4 are only memory backups (No mention of Lal; I thought her name came up last time), but Lore and Data are whole personalities, and Geordi speculates that Soong intended for the two personalities to merge to form a more complete and holistic individual consciousness, but partitioned them because he was worried that wouldn’t happen and Lore would just take over. I can sort of vaguely understand what Soong was trying to accomplish, but…. Man, this could have used another few lines of explanation and justification. There’s an implication here that neither Data nor Lore are complete individuals on their own, which would be a fascinating angle, but it isn’t one supported by the evidence in canon. And I’m not saying it makes it wrong; you could just add a little support for it. I can practically hear Geordi saying something like, “Altan believed that the reason Data always yearned to be human was because Doctor Soong deliberately omitted parts of the human experience from his positronic matrix because of his failure with Lore. He thought if the two fused, it would finally bridge that last unfulfilled yearning in Data’s core sense of self.”

Anyway, Lore hacks the ship, frees the changelings, Vadic takes over because Shaw is useless in a fight. Seriously, he shoots the changeling, gives the prone changeling a stern look, then moves on. Your gun has an Extra Tasty Crispy setting. We saw several changelings get splooshed earlier in the episode. Why do you have yours set to “Knock down but leave it ambiguous whether or not they’re dead”? Come on. Of course he’s not dead. And this wasn’t even “Everything happened very quickly,” moment. He shoots. The changeling goes down. Shaw looks at it. Then he keeps going so it can pop up and beat the shit out of him. Something like ten seconds pass between, “We won’t let them take the bridge!” and them taking the bridge. Even Tilly took longer than that to lose the ship.

Also, tangential and all, but why did everyone change into their civvies? Is it because they’re pirates now? I mean, not everyone. Seven and Shaw do, but Geordi, his daughters, and the cool-but-underutilized bridge crew don’t. So, is this a “Command staff take off their uniforms because they are technically on the lam” thing? Also, I should have brought this up last week, but can Picard project images out of his eyes too? I like that we start with, “Ultimate Data is Data, but as a Synth, with a synthetic-meat-body like Picard so he can age and stuff,” then instantly pivot to, “But also he’s got projector eyes and a plug in the back of his head.”

So aside from the Lore stuff and the takeover of the Titan, the core of the episode is the interrogation of Vadic, and here we get her satisfyingly terrible backstory. She was tortured and experimented on by Federation scientists to become a spy, because that makes total sense. I mean, Starfleet does indeed have a covert “Be super fucking evil” department specifically for this sort of thing, but, “Give our enemies in the war a serious reason to hate us and also give them greatly enhanced powers. This will surely work out well for us” is not a very practical evil plot, even for Starfleet’s Department of Cartoonish Nastiness. Did they contract this one out to Weyland-Yutani? Umbrella?

Vadic can pass on her mutation, at the cost of “constant pain” and “greatly reduced lifespan”, and if Beverly ever gets out of this, she can use the half-life of the chemicals involved to detect the newtype changelings, though I’m not sure we have enough show left for that to matter. We still know nothing about the scary face that is bankrolling Vadic, but we can guess that probably he’s offering her a cure for her excessive meatiness?

The possibility of Beverly building a changeling detector gives us an out of the moral dilemma the episode opens with. To safe the Federation and her son, Beverly is considering whether she can cross the moral line of developing some kind of bioweapon – essentially the sin that won the last Dominion war, when you get down to it. On the one hand, it’s a little cheap that we raise the possibility and then render it obsolete in a single episode. But on the other hand, every other sci fi franchise is about the grimdark decision to pragmatically compromise one’s morals in times of crisis for the greater good. I don’t want that shit in my Star Trek. My Star Trek is the one where we see that there is an immoral pragmatic answer, but we reject it. I’m glad they got it out of the way quickly. (They’re gonna come back to this again later, aren’t they?). This is mirrored later, when, upon hearing Vadic’s story, Jean-Luc can’t even bring himself to try a Rousing Speech to Try to Convince Vadic to Pursue Harmony. This, also, is good. Picard doesn’t try to defend Starfleet here. He doesn’t even try to defend the many, many people in Starfleet who were not involved in torture and unethical experimentation and would have disapproved of Project Proteus had they known. He knows that after what Vadic’s gone through, she’s not going to be swayed by words, and that he would sound arrogant and self-serving to try to claim the moral high ground from his position. He’s not going to give that speech while looking at the recreated face of the human who mutilated the physiology of the person he’s trying to convince.

What does cross the line into Karma Houdini territory, though, is the bit where Picard and Bev seem to reach the conclusion that, having lost the moral high ground, they are sufficiently compromised that it’s time to give up on A Better Way and just fucking shoot Vadic. On the one hand, it is too late in the franchise for me to want to see the story of “Nonogenarian retiree has to learn to live with the moral atrocity he’s committed by shooting an unarmed prisoner.” On the other hand, this lasts about thirty seconds before Lore conveniently lowers the force field so Vadic can escape because neither Bev nor Jean-Luc can get off a kill-shot at point-blank range.

So, next week I assume we will draw closer to learning what is really going on, but not actually getting closer to doing anything about it. Also, guessing we’re going to get more Worf and Raffi – who were absent this week – paired with some Riker? After the big exciting cliffhanger last week, it was surprising they decided to take a week off before resolving that. I’m torn between my desire to see the old married couple work together to totally kick the changelings’ asses and my desire to see Riker sus out the changeling impersonating his wife. Not sure there’s enough show left to do both. We shall see.

I don’t know where I stand on this one. But I guess we’re really going with the changelings as the main antagonist here. That’s disappointing. There’s still something else going on; Vadic’s lament hints at there being something hanging over her head.  This whole conspiracy is hard to follow; the changelings seem to have complete control over Starfleet at every level, so… Why bother with this big complicated master-plan to destroy the fleet? Why not just… Like…. Have taken over? How can Vadic impersonate the lead interrogator beating the shit out of Riker, but apparently the other two guards – who are content to just stand there and let their boss commit war crimes – aren’t changelings so she has to murder them before revealing herself? She makes a wry comment about being forced into certain forms with no explanation, and there’s an odd line where Riker asks one of the underlings how much goo they needed to fill him with. I dunno. Changelings are a stupid main villain.

Also stupid: they need Geordi to explain to them that the thing that keeps giving their location away is that all the ships are “fully integrated” now, which I assume means that they’re all on the same wifi. None of them knew that?

Now, less stupid: I was happily wrong to assume Jack would keep his scary visions to himself. He told Bev off-screen between episodes, and she’s given him some meds to make the violent hallucinations go away. But he’s got Irumodic Syndrome, just like his dad (Finally confirmed; I know everyone took for granted that was what Picard had, since it’s what he had in “All Good Things”, but since they never actually said it, and the symptoms were completely different, I was leaning on Doctor Benayoun’s claim that it could have been one of several syndromes triggered by the same underlying brain defect). Only now it’s something that could cause hallucinations and violence at a young age rather than altzheimer’s-like symptoms in old age. Well never mind. It was pretty fun when Jack asks Picard how he survived it and he points out that he didn’t.

Obviously, that’s not going to be all there is to it. I don’t know exactly what the all-the-rest is, but it would be incredibly weird if Jack’s visions didn’t add up to anything. And don’t think I haven’t noticed how Vadic has transitioned to referring to Jack as “The son of Picard” in private, because it’s time to stop being coy about why they want him. Which we will get to.

The main part of Jack’s role this week, other than some flirting with LaForge, is in his exchange with Seven as they talk about found family while giving the audience a chance to geek out about slightly sub-optimal 3D reconstructions of ships we recognize. There’s the slightly too-shiny Defiant. The slightly too-shiny Voyager, a slightly too-shiny Constitution class ship we’ve never heard of before in the TOS-style, which is sure to spark some debates, what with on-screen graphics in season one showing the Enterprise in its Strange New Worlds style. You get a brief look at what appears to be a Columbia-Class ship, possibly canonizing the unused Season 7 idea for Enterprise of giving the NX-01 a refit that basically made it look like a Chibi-NCC-1701 (This would also provide a new and fun canonical origin of the “NCC” hull designation: that it originally meant “NX-Columbia Class”).  And then, of course, there’s the Enterprise-A, looking slightly funny and seen only at a distance, but still. We now at last know that the canonical end of the Enterprise-A is “museum”. But what drives the plot forward is a surprise: they’ve also got the H.M.S. Bounty, Kruge’s Bird-of-Prey from Star Trek III, later borrowed by Kirk. The exact sequence of events that allowed the Federation to hold on to a stolen Klingon warship for a century and then put it in their own museum is hard to imagine, but Geordi says they had a hard time finding it because the cloak switched on while it was sinking. In San Francisco Bay.

Okay, actually I can sorta imagine that Starfleet Intelligence kept telling the Klingon Ambassador, “Of course we’d love to return your warship; we’re not the sort of evil empire that goes around collecting spoils of war, particularly during these very tense times of peace negotiations. We just can’t find it. Oh, that superior Klingon cloaking technology!” until the Empire just said, “Fuck it, you can keep the damn thing.” It is harder to accept that this century-old cloaking device is still advanced enough to be useful, but whatever, it’s a cool enough idea that I will avoid asking questions, especially because I already have plenty to find dumb with the fact that their use of the cloak was, “Warp in uncloaked. Cloak. Decloak. Beam everyone up. Leave.” I’m happy to imagine an offscreen exchange like, “The only part of a cloaking device that we can’t recreate in software is the Unobtanium module, and those haven’t changed in centuries. We can plug in pretty much any cloaking device ever invented and just update the firmware.”

Meeting Geordi here is a lot like meeting Worf was a few episodes back. Or perhaps even more like meeting Wesley Crusher last season. This isn’t Geordi LaForge, chief engineer of the USS Enterprise; it’s LeVar Burton, beloved gentle, caring paternal figure and educator. Many of the legacy characters we’ve met in Picard have been in very different places than where we left them, except maybe Guinan. But in the previous seasons, the people we met all seemed to have followed the paths they had been on (I would say if any TNG character actually had a deliberate and consistent direction to their character growth, it’s Riker. Riker’s arc through TNG is a young, ambitious officer, who comes to understand why he wasn’t ready for the big chair, come to terms with it, grow to the place where he is ready, then finally reach the point where he’s ready to walk away from it. It’s a good arc.). Seven and Jean-Luc himself had the biggest transitions, but they did the work to show us how they got there. This season, we meet a Worf who’s clearly been through a transformative experience, and Ro who’s clearly been through a transformative experience, and Geordi, who became a dad – and this is a season about fatherhood, so it makes sense, but it’s a big ask to, without seeing any intermediate position, accept the version of Geordi who’s about to shrug off what is clearly the impending destruction of Starfleet to protect his own. I mean, look, the logical issue with “No, I’m going to let civilization collapse to protect my kids, ignoring the fact that the collapse of civilization will probably have a deleterious effect on my children,” is the sort of thing you can wave off as a very normal, human kind of myopia. But Geordi being the kind of guy to suffer that myopia could use some more build-up.

I did like Shaw’s adorkable hero-worship of Commodore LaForge, which makes sense for Shaw being an ascended grease-monkey. I like the idea of finally seeing what does work for Shaw, since Picard and Riker’s brand of heroism doesn’t. Shaw is not a Big Damn Heroes Trek-fan; he’s a Competency Porn Trek-fan. It’s kind of fascinating, and a counterbalance to the weird element of the show that has brought back the TNG cast – arguably the most thinky, competency-porny version of the show, but leaned heavily on them having been Big Damn Heroes.

Geordi in TNG of course was always at his best in his interactions with Data, and so it’s fitting that Geordi shows up when we also get Data back, in a twist that kinda beggars the imagination. Not sure what we’re calling this incarnation yet. I think people are floating “Ultimate Data”, which is sad because “Unlimited Data” was RIGHT THERE. This is a synth version of Data with the same kind of Golem body as Picard, which means he can age and be played by Brent Spiner without CGI. (never mind that I think in TNG they did in fact say that Data could age. Back in early season one, they hadn’t sorted out all the details about what kind of android Data was; I think they may have been imagining him as more like a synth himself initially. I mean, he gets drunk at one point. In the original pitch document, he was built by aliens and had an incestuous relationship with his mentally challenged sister). But also he’s schizophrenic on account of Season One Surprise Soong (now deceased) having installed ALL the Soong-type androids in one body – Data, Lore, Lal, B4, (Noticeably not his mom, since that would be weird), along with a bit of himself too I think, planning to just like stir them all together and make a new ego out of it.

This has not actually happened, and instead we get Multiple Personalities Data, who defends Daystrom Station with spooky lighting and threatening holograms, like Moriarty. Yeah, this is not – and Riker confirms it – the actual self-aware hologram brought to life by Doctor Pulaski back in season 2 of TNG; rather, it’s Data’s daydream of Moriarty, who just chases them around and mugs menacingly until Riker solves the requisite logic puzzle by reenacting his initial meeting with Data back in “Encounter at Farpoint” by whistling the last bar of “Pop Goes the Weasel”. The Data personality seems befuddled and inarticulate, so we don’t get any useful interaction between him and Geordi, but Geordi’s joy at seeing his old friend is hard to miss. This all builds toward the reveal of what the changelings were really after: the answer to the question I posed at the top of season 2. Yeah, turns out Picard’s original body isn’t on the mantle like my father-in-law; rather, he was put in storage in Daystrom Station.

What do they plan to do with it? Well, the stupidest and most straightforward answer is that they want to resurrect him somehow and then use Zombie Picard to reenact the battle of Wolf 359 – given that Shaw reminded us about that earlier, it’s a good fit. Of course, Locutus wasn’t so devastating at Wolf 359 because of his tactical genius; he was devastating because of his intimate knowledge of Starfleet systems, tactics, technology and protocols. It’s hard to imagine that Zombie Picard – who hadn’t been privy to sensitive Starfleet information in fourteen years when he died, and has been, y’know, dead during the refit of the fleet around new technology would have the same advantage. I mean, unless they actually mean to use his remaining Borg technology to hack into the Borg-enhanced fleet, just as Gimp Suit Jurati did? This seems overly complicated, given that XBs aren’t that hard to find and some would certainly volunteer for the job. Where does Jack fit into this? Does Jack have the ability to revivify Picard 1.0? Is Jack compatible with something they hope to extract from the Corpse Borg? Is it just the super dumb “We’re going to resurrect Picard and threaten his son unless he helps us?”

I’m having a hard time seeing a fully satisfying way this will go. Worse, this could easily lead to “Robopicard sacrifices himself so that Meat Picard can be the One True Picard because in this season of fanservice, they decided to fire Rian Johnson and walk back the big character changes to give in to the toxic fans who have been screaming that the S2 Picard isn’t “the real Jean-Luc””.  Best case scenario: we end up with two Picards, so one of them can date Beverly and the other can stay with Laris.

Oh, right. Laris. You know, this season would be a lot shorter if, upon learning there was a complex intrigue at the highest levels with covert infiltration, Picard remembered that his girlfriend is a master intelligence operative with legacy access to many of the resources of the Tal Shi’ar.

Anyway, Daystrom is also a big old easter egg hunt, most of which you need a good freeze-frame and zoom to make out, but I liked the attack tribble. There’s also “Genesis II”, which is a fun double-easter-egg since that was the name of one of Roddenberry’s failed ’70s pilots whose concept got folded into the series “Andromeda” years after his death. A new Genesis device would’ve made an interesting MacGuffin, you know. Not as rich thematically as Zombie Picard, but you could do some good closure. Have the changelings try to Genesis Earth, and the Titan gang mounts a daring rescue that can’t stop it, but instead diverts it into Mars, effectively reversing the damage done by the synth attack from the S1 backstory. Ah well.

They also have the corpse of James T. Kirk in a locker, which makes sense. First of all, you don’t want anyone stealing that and resurrecting him. There’s a whole Shatner-ghost-written novel about that (Seriously. The Romulans and the Borg team up to resurrect Kirk as part of a plan to… Okay, you know, I don’t think the book ever says exactly how a resurrected and brainwashed Kirk advances their plan to take down the Federation. He ends up, after being rescued and un-brainwashed, being the critical third part of the puzzle that lets Starfleet destroy the Borg, along with Picard’s Borg Security Codes and Spock’s V’ger knowledge of the location of the Borg homeworld, but I do not remember anything that explains why the Borg thought bringing him back to life was a good idea). But more pressingly, they need to ensure chain of custody on his DNA samples to settle ongoing paternity suits well into the twenty-fifth century. I rather liked this particular egg because, much like some of the “Audience figures it out before the characters” moments in previous episodes, it primes the pump so that when Data starts mumbling “Captain Picard” over and over, the clever audience members have a good idea that he’s answering the question about what was taken, rather than just muttering in confusion.

So where we stand at the end of the episode? Jack’s dying very slowly of Irumodic Syndrome. Seven and Raffi really did break up (another nice exchange from Worf where he starts a pep-talk and is like, “Oh thank god,” when Seven tells him she’s not going), which is enraging. Data is alive again, more or less, the Titan can cloak, Ro is still dead, Geordi is stuck on the Titan with both of his daughters, Robot Picard is on the Titan but Zombie Picard is presumably on the Shrike. Riker is also a prisoner on the Shrike (How did Vadic get him there, anyway?), and Surprise! They’ve also got Troi.

It feels like Troi’s character has been imagined as “Shrewish ’50s sitcom wife,” to be honest. She gets one line in this episode and it’s angry disapproval at seeing her husband has been badly beaten. I reckon it’s really her, because we need to get the whole cast back together for the big finale. But it’d be fun if it turned out she was a changeling. Riker agrees to talk to spare her, gives them everything they ask for, it leads them straight into a trap, and he very smugly reminds them that while he might be enough of a cliche of an emotionally distant husband to not be able to tell his wife is an impostor after thirty years of marriage, his actual wife is also a telepath. But again, it seems unlikely.

I’m on fan-service overload after this episode, and it’s got me nervous; this season is absolutely better-written, better-paced, and better-plotted than the first two. But at the same time, they don’t really feel like they learned the right lessons about constructing a storyline that can pay off its investments in a satisfactory way.

Okay everyone, too much excitement last two weeks, let’s slow it down a bit and have a slower, thinkier episode about conspiracies and inner pain. And also Worf. (Worf is fine this week. I don’t know what the deal was – mine or his – back in his last appearance, but he seems okay now).

The big news of course is that Michelle Forbes returns as Ro Laren, in order to be nobly sacrificed at the climax. Ro Laren appeared in a handful of late TNG episodes kinda as a way to tease Deep Space Nine. She’s the first Bajoran character we meet, a refugee with “attitude” who is introduced by handing Picard and Riker the idiot ball so they can fumble such basic things as “Objecting to someone wearing a permitted religious adornment despite the fact that Worf has been wearing a whole-ass sash for six years,” and “Being baffled by the existence of cultures where the family name comes first despite there being a bunch of those on Earth and hey also no one ever once calling Worf any of ‘Rozhenko’, ‘O’Mogh’, or ‘de Khitomer'”. She ultimately left the show when her character betrayed Starfleet to join the Maquis, a terror group primarily made up of disgruntled Federation colonists whose planets had been ceded to the Cardassians, named for the French resistance in World War II and heavily identified with the forced relocation of Native Americans, who would end up becoming half the cast in Voyager and having some recurring plots in Deep Space Nine before being wiped out by the Dominion. Ro was originally planned to be the Bajoran liaison on Deep Space Nine, a source of friction with Sisko, who, like Picard, would view her as a traitor, while her own government viewed her as a freedom-fighter. That role was reimagined into Kira Nerys, who like Ro was a former terrorist, but one whose scope was strictly limited to the Cardassian force occupying her homeworld, not anything to do with the Federation.

Also, in Ro’s first epsiode, there’s a scene where she takes off her uniform shirt to give to a cold refugee child, and they were super careful about how they filmed the scene so that you can’t see her zipper, because they wanted to maintain the idea that their uniform closures were something weird and sci-fi rather than just plain zippers. This was neat and completely overlooked the fact that there’s a scene back in season 1 where Beverly visibly plays with her zipper while feeling drunk and flirty, and also that as a result of the clever intercuts and camera angles, Ro’s communicator magically teleports onto her undershirt.

Anyway, the fate of Ro had been kept from us all these years. There’s conflicting versions in the EU novels, but they all generally agreed that she’d survived the Dominion war. Some have her arrested and serving out a sentence in Federation prison, others have her repatriating to Bajor. They all sort of converge on the idea that she does eventually end up back in uniform, either directly or as a result of the Bajoran military eventually becoming part of Starfleet, and in the later rounds of novels, she’s said to succeed Kira as commander of Deep Space Nine.

The canonical story we finally get here omits that last bit, instead having Ro recruited out of prison into Starfleet Intelligence, and she turns up here ostensibly to investigate Picard for the whole “Stole a ship and got it shot up good by a scary space lady,” thing.

Love Shaw in that bit, too. Soon as Riker gives him the keys back, he’s all like, “Yeah I turned you guys in, you’d better get your story straight. Hey Hansen, you want your job back so that you’re on the clock when they fire you?” Shaw is the right way to do an antagonistic “frenemy” character. He doesn’t obstruct more than is actually necessary, he sells that he is trying to do the right thing, and he’s kind of just delightful as an asshole. You kinda get the feeling that he’s not even happy at the prospect of Picard and Riker facing their comeuppance per se; rather, he’s neutral on the subject, and happy that he’s able to be neutral about it. They get hailed as heroes, fine; they get thrown in jail, fine; not his problem any more and that’s what really counts.

When Picard tells him they have to leg it because the Intrepid has been compromised and he calls security on him? Chef’s kiss. My only complaint about him this week is that he remains confused maybe one beat too long at the end, when Ro – in her official capacity – has explained what’s going on and nobly sacrificed herself and the Intrepid responds by very obviously being compromised, and he’s still not quite on the same page. But he recovers and we get another, “Well fine okay then we’ll be big damn heroes, but if this screws up my nap, I’m coming for you Picard,” moment.

Yeah, so Ro dies and that’s sad. You sort of knew very quickly that there were only two ways this was going to go. Either she was a changeling herself (Nice timing having her very aggressively make a point of showing off her blood in the minute between the audience learning that changelings can do blood now and Picard getting the memo), or else she was about to die. Her and Picard instead prove their authenticity to each other by crying over their past in Holodeck Ten Forward. Now, it has been a long time since I watched this late TNG arc, but I feel like I kind of remember the emotions being different here. I mean, this makes plenty of sense, but I remember Riker having a harder time with it, and Picard having some begrudging respect for Ro – or at least comprehend – when she decided to stick to her moral convictions over her duty to Starfleet. Here, Riker is willing to forgive and move one, which befits his more laid-back persona I guess. Picard, on the other hand, is still raw, and pretty galled at being accused of treason by Ro Laren, who in turn is hurt that Picard couldn’t accept her reasons or validate the pain it caused her. They’re playing on the idea of Picard struggling to separate his sense of duty from his sense of morality, which is an entirely valid character element for a character like Picard, but, I mean, I feel like that was pretty much settled in… I dunno, First Contact? Insurrection? Season 1 of Picard? Heck, that time Picard went to Starfleet command and murdered half the admiralty? I mean, what about the previous four episodes?

Anyway, we do get resolution, and it’s nice, and Ro gives Picard her earring, which is symbolic and also contains all her secret files on the conspiracy (I hope there’s a Lower Decks cameo showing maybe not how Riker is able to figure that out, but perhaps how he’s able to figure it out instantly?), and then she gets blown up because the two security people she brought with her are changelings, and is it weird that she’s been able to get this close to the truth but couldn’t avoid bringing a team with her which was in fact “Oops, all changelings”? In death, she manages to disable the Intrepid, buying time for the Titan to escape, which it almost squanders with Shaw’s aforementioned slightly-excessive-confusion.

The Intrepid is an intensely ugly ship. Just profoundly stupid-looking. Modern Trek seems to have an aversion to having two of the same kind of ship on-screen at once. I guess this makes sense in terms of making it easy to tell what’s going on (Though cough Sombra-class).

I really hope this isn’t going to be followed up with, “The conspirators announce that Highly Decorated Galactically Celebrated Admiral Jean-Luc Picard has gone rogue and must be shot on sight and everyone in the galaxy is happy to go along with that except for a handful of his oldest and dearest friends.” This is the Star Trek universe; they could just as easily announce that Picard got possessed by space ghosts and it’s important he not be allowed to give any speeches because that is how space ghosts reproduce. Insert joke about that time Beverly had sex with a space ghost here.

Meanwhile, Bev learns that the changelings have “evolved” and can now not only imitate internal organs, but retain their form even after death until subjected to serious tissue damage. This, rather than “It’s 2023” might be why they look so much meatier, and answers last week’s question about why Sydney LaForgery (God how did I fail to make that joke last week?) didn’t melt upon being shot. It’s a little weird to drop this tidbit after we saw the changeling Worf and Raffi caught struggling to maintain his form, and the whole thing with the bucket. If a changeling can hold their shape even after death, it’s weird that they would need to take regular goo-breaks while, y’know, living. Not saying it’s wrong, just a weird choice.

The changing of the lings points back at my unease last week over Vadic potentially being a changeling. Something has Happened to these renegade changelings, and possibly they are beholden to some outside force because of it. Who? There’s the rub. Obviously, someone new we’ve never heard of before would be a weird choice for the last season of the TNG Reunion Tour. But who, then? I mean, there’s a lot of candidates, I guess; various powerful entities who Picard dicked over. But I’m not overly sure there’s a fully satisfying answer for who would hold a grudge against Starfleet great enough to justify this plan (currently presumed to be wiping out the entire fleet during the Frontier Day celebration), powerful enough to pull it off, with the specific abilities to reengineer a species, and yet without the necessary resources to just mount a direct attack. But some of Ro’s language when talking about the conspiracy reminds me of some language from the TNG season 1 conspiracy arc. So… Could the flue-gill aliens be back and for some reason pursuing a changeling-based strategy?

Meanwhile, the Worf-Raffi side of the plot doesn’t actually go far, but it does it with style. I’m interested in how the show is playing with letting the audience know things before the characters do. Last week, I questioned the storycrafting in making it clear to us that LaForgery couldn’t possibly be the real deal before Seven figured it out. Similarly, they make a point of withholding the identity of Ro’s two trusted field agents even though we both know darn right well who they are. It’s not like Ro isn’t aware of the relationship between Picard and Raffi, much less Worf. Then, the camera isn’t shy about letting us see Raffi’s mobile emitter as she and Worf provoke the Shady Part of Town set until the local gangsters show up. And yet they try to present it as a great surprise when they shoot Raffi, only for her to turn out to be a hologram. But then there’s the double-twist: the gangsters knew she was a hologram as well, and have a man in position to catch the real Raffi.

But then there’s another twist, when Worf and Raffi are forced to fight to the death. But again, we all know full well that this is not how Worf is going to die, so the tension is weird. Raffi “kills” Worf, his body is carried away, then he shows up again having murdered everyone. I do really like when Worf starts to belt out one of his warrior monk aphorisms, but has to stop short because he’s lost quite a lot of blood.

I also dig the idea of a Vulcan gangster who got into the life because, given crime was inevitable, organized crime was more logical than disorganized crime. There’s also a great exchange where he points out that they can’t kill him since he has the chip they need to bypass Daystrom Station security, and Raffi counters that Worf has lost a lot of blood and isn’t necessarily going to be able to show the logical amount of restraint. It reminds me of my favorite bit in The Maltese Falcon, where Sam Spade explains that his goal is to make the bad guys angry enough that they make a mistake, but not so angry that the mistake they make is killing him before they get what they want from him.

So… bets on the “illogical” AI that protects Daystrom? Lore seems like an obvious choice, except that they have been very consistent so far that androids aren’t AIs. So… Moriarty then? That would be kind of funny. The Enterprise’s space baby? But honestly, it could be no one in particular. It could be Peanut Hamper. (It could not be Peanut Hamper)

We’re left then with the mystery of Jack, which I’m guessing we won’t be resolving for another episode or three. He takes out four changelings when they corner him by going all Matrix, in a scene that is so reminiscent of Dahj and Soji going Android Mode in season 1 that its reuse here almost feels like they forgot. He’s mostly worried about the possibility that he will be compelled to kill while red vines grow. He of course will not talk about this with his mom, because drama. Meh.

So… Red vines? Martian, then? I think we have to assume, due to the laws of conservation of storytelling, that Beverly was right and the interest the changelings (or their superiors) have in him is linked to Picard; it’s late in the season to add another big curveball about that part. So… Something that happened to Picard, which would be reflected in his son, but may not be reflected in Picard himself, whether due to age or because his body is synthetic. Logically, it would have to be something that happened to him specifically rather than the whole crew, as no one’s seeking out Kestra Riker or Molly O’Brien or the LaForge sisters. A side effect of Q whanging him around through time in “All Good Things”? Something to do with that time he got possessed by a space ghost, yes, that really happened and wasn’t just me making a Sub Rosa joke? You have to reckon it’s related to a TNG thing, just for the sake of being dramatically satisfying. Ooh, maybe it’s the Ressikans. Like, maybe they did something to his DNA in addition to 40 years of gaslighting and flute lessons?

There’s a bunch of ways they can go from here, and not all of them are good. But just for the moment, let’s have some faith…. of the heart.