Maps and Legends

After an outstanding premiere episode, Star Trek: Picard took its foot off the gas a little bit with its second installment, "Maps and Legends." Still, it was an intriguing hour that deepened the mystery and kept me (heh, heh) engaged.

With help from Laris, Picard begins his investigation into the death of Dahj. After gathering evidence from her Boston apartment, he's off to convince Starfleet to reinstate his commission and give him command of a small vessel. But he quickly finds that he's burned bridges with his passionate rhetoric, and the people he needs to convince aren't inclined to believe in his wild conspiracies. Meanwhile, aboard the Borg cube serving as a Romulan Reclamation Site, Narek and Soji are involved in a relationship -- and it seems he knows her secret.

This episode continues to build out the world of the series in a compelling way. The opening flashback to the synth attack on the Mars shipyards is a great sequence. We get to see how basic this artificial life was (or seemed to be) in comparison to Data. More importantly, we got to see how coldly some people treated synths. It was perhaps a little on the nose to name the key synth in this flashback "F8" (read it like a license plate), but it really served well to contrast against our long experience on The Next Generation with the treatment of Data.

It was also fun to take boogeymen bad guys like the Romulan Tal Shiar and give them a boogeyman to be frightened of. It remains to be seen how the Zhat Vash will figure into the story to come, but the idea that they're some sort of vicious mafia-style "cleaners" of synthetic beings is an intriguing thread to weave into things. It's also great to see Romulans with real personality involved in the story. I've always found the Romulans to be a more nuanced adversary than many Star Trek staples, and now we have both good (Laris and Zhaban) and bad (Commodore Oh and... Narek?) in all this.

Of course, the show is named for Picard -- and the episode had some interesting developments for him too. Watching him hit a stone wall as he tried to get back into space was a bracing jolt of reality. Coming out of "retirement" isn't as simple as he'd like, even if he does have connections from his past commands. (Showing someone from the Stargazer was a nice way to do some fan service without immediately having another cast member from The Next Generation show up.)

But this episode did lay on the technobabble. Thick. From whatever mad science is going on aboard the Borg cube to the latest exposition from Dr. Jurati, there was a lot of hand-waving between the various "A"s and "B"s of this episode. The long early scene in Dahj's apartment was particularly egregious, a densely packed stream of difficult-to-follow nonsense from Laris that ultimately came off a bit silly, in my view.

If the storytelling technique was less refined than in the premiere, though, at least the story itself remained interesting. I give "Maps and Legends" a B. I remain eager for more Star Trek: Picard.