Spoilers for Episode 5 of Star Trek Picard
My relationship with this series takes a very strange turn. I’m really not sure if it needed the twelfth “our organization is being secretly infiltrated” storyline, and even within that context, little happens here that you haven’t seen a number of times elsewhere. But after I wrote down two and a half Word pages full of things that I found really, really stupid in episode one on the iPad while watching, things now look very different. I notice less and less nonsense, and today, in episode five, there are just two things on my note that made me roll my eyes.
Do you tell me if the series just gets better or if I’m getting stupider. In any case, I feel stupid when I look at the fuss that I wrote down here:
“Why is Beverly taking an order from pensioner Picard to examine the changeling?”
Then nothing comes for a long time and finally: “Raffi is stupid”. But my personal dislike for how this character is laid out is probably more that it reminds me of what was before this third season. As we all know, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, before this season, making it the first series in television history to go straight into season three. Otherwise yes: I really liked episode five, even if it didn’t take the story that much further overall, but only concreted fears and hunches. The way it happened, however, was compelling.
Sure, with the last few episodes it was already clear that this is what the most spectacular Trek returnee Ro Laren puts into words in the fifth act: The Federation has been infiltrated by the changelings of the Dominion. In addition, in some cleverly edited visions of Jack, we get a rather disturbing picture of the things that are bothering him at the moment. It almost took me a little too long for him to confide in his mother, but at least it happened at the end of the episode. Ed Speleers plays this really well.
In general, the performances are again mostly strong this time. Michelle Forbes in particular shows what an underrated actress she is. In episode five, she makes one final bow on her character, Ro Laren. The young officer whose deceit was allowed to leave one of the few permanent cracks in the otherwise flawless character facade of the TNG Picard. Picard’s look in episode 24 of the seventh season of The Next Generation had already indicated that something had happened inside him. In retrospect, he now builds a long bridge into the past that has nothing to do with the nostalgic comfort that the series has so dearly strived for.
The creators use this personal past of the two with some cleverness in a scene on the holodeck, in which Laren and Picard assure each other of their identity and work through their personal history at the same time. I would never have credited this series with this sensitivity. A-plot and character level edited all at once, and in such a deep cut without feeling forced or cramped. That was well done and the final farewell of the two was a meter too close to the water, but still deserved.
I also liked that right from the start you can see the crew of the Titan at work, everyone doing their thing, there’s techno-babble here and there and everyone is pulling together to get the boat running again. I’ve missed that for a long time, Starfleet officers who don’t just sit at their stations waiting for orders, but do their thing. Todd Stashwick continues to do a great job as Captain Shaw as he gleefully looks forward to what’s to come for Picard and Riker in the turbolift, unaware that this episode will be the end of his fun for good for the time being. He’ll have to deal with these two for a while.
And yes, then Raffi came and when she almost poked Worf from the series during a forced fight against her Klingon friend, the remote control almost ended up on TV. I didn’t like the scene that much overall because it felt constructed to me, although I like the idea of a Vulcan crime boss as much as Kirk Acevedo (“Fringe”) who plays him. Well, in the end Worf is alive and we find out that Ro Laren put Picard confidants like him and Raffi on the job for a reason. At the beginning of the series, I was concerned that the Daystrom burglary and Beverly’s 911 call would be merged by the hand of serendipity.
That’s how bad my trust in the authors was. But now it makes a hell of a lot of sense: these characters know each other well enough to do an impromptu changeling test at any time by asking a simple question that the other person can answer more plausibly. Oh, now I’m pretty impressed by what I see here. Is this what Stockholm Syndrome feels like?
