Picard hides out with Soji on the planet Nepenthe, where Will Riker and Deanna Troi have made a home with their teenage daughter Kestra. They're eager to help their former captain, and we learn why he was previously reluctant to ask them: their family has suffered a tragic loss. Yet Riker, Troi, Picard, and Kestra all do their best to help Soji reckon with the massive revelation of her true identity. Meanwhile, La Sirena is being tracked by Narek on its way to Nepenthe, and Rios begins to suspect one of his passengers may be the means. On the Borg cube, Elnor tries to protect Hugh and get to safety.
I think it's a testament to the quality of this episode that even its more cliche moments still really worked for me. I still don't exactly buy Elnor staying behind on the cube, and it led to a trope parade of tossing aside weapons in favor of cinematic fist fights, and holding a friend as he dies in your arms. But hearing composer Jeff Russo use the Picard theme for Elnor as he heeded his call to adventure was as potent to me as it was meant to be. Hugh thanking Elnor for taking up his "lost cause" was sweet. (Would I have rather seen Geordi reunite with Hugh at some point? Sure -- but Hugh really had been dealt an unrecoverable emotional blow in the deaths of so many "xBs" at the start of the episode.)
The drama aboard La Sirena was more potent still. It was great to see Raffi, so broken herself, try to tend to someone else clearly breaking. She never fully understood Jurati's torment, but inched ever closer to it throughout the episode, "medicating" with cake and chocolate rather than her own choices of alcohol and vaping. Meanwhile, Rios was also misdiagnosing the situation, getting far enough to realize his ship was being tracked, but incorrectly identifying the traitor in his midst. Did he suspect Raffi because she's more obviously troubled? Or did he not suspect Jurati because he slept with her? Either way, he's in for some regret.
But nothing compared to the regret Jurati feels over what she did to Maddox. Sure enough, we got the inevitable flashback to Commodore Oh and the rest of her memorable, sunglassed visit to the doctor earlier in the series. Jurati seems neither to have been coerced nor brainwashed. She was just powerfully convinced... but in a way that fades as she sinks deeper and deeper into an espionage she simply isn't built for. Was she trying to put herself in a coma, or was the medical hologram's intervention enough to overcome a sincere effort to kill herself? My take is the latter, and that Jurati will awaken at a future point with a great deal of guilt to somehow work through.
Speaking of that flashback, arguably the biggest revelation of it was that Oh is actually a Vulcan (capable of performing a mindmeld) and not a disguised Romulan. We learn how Jurati was so deeply convinced to turn on Maddox and spy on Picard. Yet to be determined is why Oh herself is so convinced of the threat of synths. Is she a manipulator, or manipulated? How much does she really know about Rizzo?
As interesting as all those other elements were, though, the real centerpiece of the episode was the time with Riker and Troi -- every last moment of which was perfection. The tragedy of their back story was effective, giving them a reason wholly different from Picard to have left Starfleet, yet one also ultimately rooted in the larger story of the series. It was heartwarming to see that the loss of a child caused no rift between the two, instead bonding them together more than ever.
Riker and Troi could easily have been brought into the show to wave to the fans and exit stage, but it felt essential that it was the two of them, and at this moment in the story. Troi got to do actual counseling, as she only too rarely did on The Next Generation. She really drove at how profound an emotional crisis Soji was facing, and zeroed in on Picard's emotional state as well. Riker got to act as Number One one more time, offering his dinner table as a conference table, giving his captain his thoughts when prompted, and steering Picard onto the right track. And yet even as these three fell into a pattern defined by their old jobs, we saw interactions between them all that felt distinctly more personal than all that. They were friends first, colleagues second. It was a time that rejuvenated Picard and made him truly, fully ready to be Picard again.
And while these three actors, so beloved by Star Trek fans, were commanding all the attention, it might have been easy to overlook what a performance Isa Briones was giving as Soji. This was an unimaginably big upset to Soji's entire existence, and the episode was asking a lot of Briones to portray it convincingly. She did, wonderfully, and with great help from child actor Lulu Wilson as Kestra. The relationship between Soji and Kestra felt like something Star Trek has tried for before and never effectively reached -- like, say, when Data and the guileless kid in Star Trek: Insurrection became friends. Here, the writing reached for and grasped this important dynamic.
Even the little accents were on point: from references to the "gormagander" of Star Trek: Discovery to reminding us of Picard's artificial heart, to the names of Riker and Troi's children honoring family we already new about ("Thaddeus" being an American Civil War ancestor of Riker's; "Kestra" being Troi's decesased older sister).
It feels like they kind of made an episode of Star Trek: Picard right at me. And I absolutely loved it. It was a grade A, and as I said, the best yet for the series.
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