Adrift in a nebula and out of options, the crew of the Titan has only the time to put their affairs in order. Picard tries to reach out to Jack. Seven tries to hunt down the saboteur before they do more damage, turning to unlikely help in her efforts. Meanwhile, Beverly discovers the situation may not be as hopeless as it seems.
The main characters of Star Trek rarely reckon, truly, with death. They're going to escape every dark situation in time for the next episode, and the writers know that we know that. Plus, the franchise is a fundamentally hopeful and optimistic one. So time is rarely spent on "well, I guess this is the end" fatalism; it would just ring false.
And yet, precisely because the franchise never goes there means that on this one occasion, when it does, it's quite effective. Wisely, the Worf and Raffi subplot is benched this week to give full focus to the crew of the Titan facing the prospect of their deaths. (Yeah, it does sort of retroactively make that subplot from the first three episodes seem more inessential, but it's the right choice anyway.) And it pays off in many ways.
Picard and Jack have a long conversation together, freighted with even more weight once you've seen the final scene of the episode and realize the stakes. Jack had Jean-Luc tell him, to his face, that Starfleet was the only family that mattered to him; no wonder he chose not to pursue a relationship with this distant and irrelevant old man.
Captain Shaw, from the beginning, was of course crafted as an icy character meant to thaw over time and save the day at some point -- so no surprise that this was the week he did so. Yet even as he saved the day, we got two other great moments with him. One preserved his status as a "villain" of sorts; Seven of Nine got to slyly tell him off for his insistence on calling her "Commander Hansen" (which read to me as a wonderful bit of meta-commentary on the phenomenon of "dead-naming" trans people, even though that surely was not the writers' primary intention).
Another great Shaw moment exposed where his animosity for Picard and Seven springs from. And while you could have guessed it had something to do with the Borg (and even Wolf 359 in particular), the way in which it was expressed was powerful. Picard has been the target of ire before, from no less than Sisko in the first episode of Deep Space Nine. But one thing Sisko did not feel was survivor's guilt; Shaw carries that to this day, and it's a powerful thing to see dramatized in the episode.
Last week, I noted that Picard had given Beverly Crusher (and Gates McFadden) her best material ever. This week, it might have done the same for William Riker and Jonathan Frakes. Riker was not a character so short-changed in The Next Generation, of course... and yet never have we seen the character so emotional as he was here, struggling to record a goodbye message to Deanna. Never had Frakes been asked to sell something as difficult as comparing the open hole of a grave to the blackness of space -- and he actually sold such an on-the-surface, seemingly silly metaphor. (All while directing himself! This was another stellar effort from Frakes in the director's chair.)
This was so unlike a conventional Star Trek episode in so many ways, and so very quintessentially Star Trek in one very key way: the revelation of the "space babies" at the end was, as Beverly literally put it, exactly the show's stated mission to "seek out new life." They even mentioned Farpoint by name, to bring things full circle back to the first adventure of the Next Gen crew. A wonderful moment for the episode.
And here are a few other moments that struck me, that don't seem to fit anywhere else in this stream-of-consciousness review:
- I love how gruesome changeling morphing looks now. Gelatinous changelings look like raw meat here.
- Behind Picard in the booth at Ten Forward is a Left Hand Brewing Company sticker! It's nice to know that with so many craft breweries struggling and going out of business these days, that Colorado staple is going to live on to the 25th century.
- The internet lost its mind because Jean-Luc Picard said "fuck" in this episode. In a situation that absolutely called for it. Picard can say fuck now, people; get over it.
For the second week in a row, I give Star Trek: Picard an A-. I'm loving this final season so far.
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