Picard decides to try turning the tables on Vadic, setting a trap for her forces when they come after the Titan. And it would have worked, if not for that meddling Lore; the latent personality inside the Daystrom synth surfaces to commandeer the Titan and sow chaos. Meanwhile, in fighting back against the Shrike's boarding party, Jack Crusher unlocks strange new abilities he did not realize he possessed.
This isn't exactly a "bad" episode, but it felt like a very messy one to me. In the effective juggling act that has been season three of Picard, there are now one or two too many balls up in the air -- so many that they cannot all even be addressed in one episode. For example, the cliffhanger at the end of the previous installment seemed to be telling us that The Most Important Consideration on the show right now was that the changelings had captured Riker and Troi, and were planning to use them against each other to force a betrayal of Picard and company. Big stakes! We don't want to see our heroes be tortured!
Well, lucky us (I guess?), because we're not going to see that. Now, it's true that television generally uses the torture trope a bit too readily, and we've all seen twelve versions of whatever scene we might have been likely to get. It's also true that Star Trek: The Next Generation already gave us the definitive look at torture, and that nothing more really needs to be said. Still, to ignore Riker and Troi in this episode -- and start out the episode by telling us that Tuvok, wherever he is, is probably being tortured too? It seems a lot of heightening the tension on a story that isn't going to be addressed this week. But okay, the cameo appearance by Tim Russ was great. It was a very well-written scene of Seven seeking authentication of Tuvok's identity, and Russ' transformation from his classic character to a sneering villain was chillingly effective. (A taunting "corpse Riker" was a great touch too.)
From there, though, the rest of the episode felt increasingly incoherent. Ultimately, we learn Vadic's back story; it is interesting, and delivered interestingly by Amanda Plummer. But the idea that she and the other "super-changelings" are the result of a Starfleet experiment sounds a bit far-fetched. Not that Starfleet (or Section 31 in particular) wouldn't do such a thing... but how exactly were they planning to control their creations and keep them from going rogue exactly like they are now? If Starfleet is going to be this stupid, seems like they should get what's coming to them. (And speaking of which, this is the second major time this season that a Jean-Luc Picard plan has blown up in his face. Not a good look for our esteemed hero.)
Over in the Jack Crusher story line, I'm back to being nervous again. Clearly, whatever is going on with him is not that he has inherited his father's brain condition. The emergence of some kind of mental powers did make for a great looking fight sequence (in which he seemingly "puppeteers" Sidney LaForge into self-defense)... but it was big stride away from the necessary central premise that Jack is Beverly and Jean-Luc's son, and I'm back to hoping the writers don't do anything to undermine the emotional heft of that.
The biggest disappointment for me in the episode, though, was the Data/Lore plot thread. There was stellar acting, to be sure; Brent Spiner always has fun mugging as Lore, and LeVar Burton was superb in Geordi's tearful pleas to Data and confessing the raw emotion of what it was like to lose him. But the entire arc of the subplot was nakedly manufactured. When it became necessary to introduce jeopardy in the episode, Lore surfaced for no particular reason. When it became necessary to resolve that jeopardy later, Data surfaced for no particular reason. It did not seem to me that Geordi did much to precipitate or address the danger -- it was purely a question of what page number of the script we were on.
There's a lot of story to tie up this season in not many more episodes, so I'm hoping that the messiness of this hour helped clean things up a bit for what's to come. And I'll acknowledge that even amid the mess, each subplot of "Dominion" did have at least one good moment in it. Still, the chaotic whole of the episode left me disappointed after so many consecutive episodes of effective build-up. I give the episode a B-.
1 comment:
Think of the Starfleet experiments on the Changelings as a metaphor for Covid and Wuhan. Trying to defend themselves Starfleet creates a bigger monster to deal with. Maybe stretching it, but that seems to jibe with a much earlier leak from the writer's room, that they were reflecting this. In a lot of the behind the scenes photos, the cast and crew are wearing masks. It could not be far from their minds.
Post a Comment