Are you robosexual?
I’ll start by saying that episode 3 of Star Trek: Picard was less infuriating to me than last week’s. At the very least, it did far fewer things that I could immediately object to. Deep down, I know that this is merely the calm before the storm, though. But I’ll take what I can get.
We start with a flashback to when Mars was attacked, and Picard was trying to get the Romulan rescue effort off the ground. Which, as an aside, has stuck in my craw for a little while, now. Because it initially struck me as a notion of writers being bad at sense of scale, planets naturally having far more people than you could expect a few, or even an entire fleet, of ships to be able to evacuate. And, indeed, old material backs it up. From the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, page 176:
We were consulting with writer Lee Sheldon, who wanted to know how long it would take the Enterprise to evacuate the entire population of a planet for the episode “Devil’s Due.” Based on maximum rates mentioned here, we estimated that the transporters and shuttlecraft could bring approximately 1,250 persons per hour to the ship. It would therefore take about twelve hours to bring up 15,000 people, the theoretical maximum. If they were taking these people to a planet five light years away
at Warp 9, it would take about forty-eight hours for the round trip. Adding twenty-four hours for loading and off-loading, this would average out to about 200 people an hour. If the planet had four billion inhabitants, it would therefore take the Enterprise about 1,900 years to evacuate everyone, assuming they lived that long. (Melinda Bell points out that things would be made even worse if they had children.)
… this, keeping in mind that the Enterprise-D is a Galaxy class ship, which were freaking massive (they had dolphin tanks, man!). Even if you assume that you may fit more if you were running a skeleton crew, utilizing all quarters as general communal quarters for multiple refugees, and probably lining all non-work-necessary decks with even more refugees, you’re still talking tens of thousands, rather than millions or billions, the latter being more the expected population of a planet. But I digress.
Picard pulls the only remaining card that could possibly work with obstinate top brass, and argues that they’ll either accept his plan, or his resignation. And they basically just accept the resignation of one of their most decorated flag officers. This fucks over his then-subordinate, Raffi, who gets fired soon after for currently nebulous reasons.
Which leads into why she’s not terribly enamored with his shit in the current day. Michelle Hurd turns in a great performance, here. To be fair, that’s true of pretty much everyone in the episode. But some of her lines seem a bit sharp and acidic, in a way that’s mildly worrying to my stupid nerd brain; I know they’re setting up something stupid, here, I just don’t know what. Which once again means that my major problem, as usual, is less cast (which has been great overall) and more material. Maybe its due to trying (and failing, admittedly) to write fiction for many years, but I see most, if not all, the dirty little tricks they’re pulling, and I don’t like it. But once again, I digress.
The major introduction this episode is to Cristobal ‘Chris’ Rios (Santiago Cabrerra). He’s the pilot in this show, and he’s the owner of the ship Picard meets him on. He’s got an ENH that seems to have some sort of personality, and when we meet him, he’s got a fuckhuge chunk of tritanium stuck in his shoulder. I like the character, though as written, he’s definitely not what I’d consider typical even for a Trek character that lives on the edge of what’s considered standard for someone from a Federation-aligned planet. Honestly, I’d rather wait and see.
Dr. Jurati gets visited by the evil Admiral Commodore Oh, who is obviously a Romulan spy, because they weren’t even subtle about it last episode. She, for some reason, shows up wearing sunglasses. Which might seem like an oversight for someone pretending to be a Vulcan, since Vulcan is a sunblasted desert planet that’s about as toasty as such things seem to get, and they don’t even have sunglasses. They’re nice sunglasses, though, so, good on ya? The doc spills everything she talked to Picard about to the Commodore, except, as we soon find out, the fact that she plans to go with him. Which I doubt the Commodore cares about, since she probably plans on icing everybody involved, anyway.
This leads into a scene where Jean-Luc is preparing to leave on this trip, with his Romulan buddies helping him pack. When all of a sudden, super-secret-Tal-Shiar attacks! They manage to, once again, Worf the super-secret bad guys, and even capture one. or some reason, they decide to interrogate the guy and, despite the fact that Picard should know the dangers thanks to episode one, stand really close to him. He, of course, bites down on what I can only assume is the secret-Tal-Shiar suicide pill of choice, fails to actually get one of Jean-Luc’s Romulan buddies, and disintegrates. As this happens, one of the guys the thought they dropped gets back up. But it’s okay, because Dr. Jurati somehow found a disruptor rifle, and finds out the hard way that disruptors don’t have a stun setting.
As for the Borg cube hijinks, well, Hugh is back. I have no idea why he’s working with the Romulans. It’s nice to see him, though. Soji’s entire thing seems to be the fact that she subconsciously hacked a bunch of Romulan documents then tricked herself into believing that people told her because she was polite or something. Regardless, this is the first time we’ve seen her do her actual job here: therapy of liberated Borg. Hugh’s willing to let her talk to a specific case named Ramdha. She, along with the others in the room, were among the last people assimilated by this particular cube, all Romulan. For some reason, assimilation does weird things with Romulans for reasons I’m sure will make me facepalm later.
Ramdha spends most of the scene messing with these triangular cards that seem to me like Romulan Tarot, or something. Soji eventually asks her the wrong thing, and Ramdha has a massive freakout, demanding to know which one Soji is; the one that dies, or the one that lives, “the destroyer”. She gets one of the guard’s weapons and goes to try and kill herself, but Soji busts out her superspeed android waif-fu and disarms her. Honestly, the whole thing here this episode reeks of mystery box myth arc stuff, and I don’t trust it.
“Hot Romulan Guy” is still drilling Soji, and his sister still disapproves. Notably for a deep cover agent, when she shows up this episode, she has her Romulan ears back. Which is odd to me, since I’m pretty sure she needs to go back, so why bother? Just do what you did last episode.
This episode didn’t cause the eye rolling in me that the first two did. But I know that’s going to change in a flash. After all, we’re getting Romulan Refugee Legolas next episode. I’m tolerably sure that’s going to be a whole thing. Jeff Russo, please keep saving me.
Episode 3 of Star Trek: Picard is a decent episode that sets up elements for later.
Grade: B
“Star Trek: Picard” airs Thursdays on CBS All Access.“
About Author
