Hoo boy, we're back doing one of these again apparently.
Talking to my dad about my severe disdain thus far for Star Trek: Picard (I think he's waiting to binge the season when it ends but doesn't mind these spoilers), he commented how episode five will be directed by Jonathan Frakes and if anybody can turn this mess around it'd be him. After all, Frakes is obviously very familiar with the Trek universe and directed some all-time classic episodes: The Offspring, The Drumhead, Cause and Effect, plus two of the TNG films! (I mean, one of those is Insurrection... but still!) So here we go... finally this dark convoluted sci-fi action show claiming itself to be "Star Trek" can start actually showing some of those key fundamental Trek elements, right? Right?
You know the answer to that. Well... this is probably the most watchable episode of the season thus far, I'll give it that. But, compared to what I've already endured? This was better in that I was just rolling my eyes at the predictable beats of the story instead of feeling outright hostility towards it.
Predictable is really the biggest problem, and of course spoilers ahead! You knew they were gonna rescue Rios from ICE, which I'm so very glad they did quickly instead of dragging out that flimsily conceived plot thread any longer. This show loves to point at social issues but not actually dig into the important nuances of how and why things happen... like you know, Star Trek does. The Borg Queen stuff is fine, I guess... but anybody could see the whole Agnes/Borg Queen merging thing coming from several episodes away. Making something like that so obvious can be fine if you do something interesting with it... instead of this whole "she's lonely! The Borg are never lonely!" schlock. And that's a part I didn't even mind too much, I can enjoy schlock and this episode has plenty of it.
Frakes' direction seems to get that point, dialing down the tedious melodrama significantly (bless him) and some parts seemingly played even as self-aware of it's schlock. The scene where Picard has the Watcher/protector/whatever (it's the same lady he almost kisses in episode 1) touring the ship and he's talking about how his ragtag crew is top notch and reliable, then right away she sees Rios, Seven and Raffi dragging that bloodied unconscious policeman. "Is that your crew? Why are they dragging that dead guy?" "Umm, uh.. I'm sure he's not dead. Probably." It's so goofy that it genuinely charmed me, actual silly humour a sweet breath of air as opposed to the constant "witty remark lacking any wit." bombarding the poor audience for laughs.
The episode is very hit or miss, and those hits are bloopers by the way. There are multiple parts that work, but geez the creators of this show just cannot help themselves from just adding more and more shit to this thing. Did any of you out there play a writing game in school, where you'd write a sentence or two of a story then pass it on to your friend, so that they would write more of it and then pass it to somebody else in class? That's what Season 2 of Picard feels like, a story arc written by a bunch of people making it up as they go along. It would explain why so much of what is actually happening and why is presented so cryptically vague.
The best part of Fly Me To The Moon is Brent Spiner appearing as a ancestor of Dr. Noonian Soong, yet again. I find it pretty funny at this point how all of the Soong family tree, even over the span of centuries, always have some scientific inclination towards creating artificial life. Didn't anybody in this family want to go into botany, or be a historian or something? Ah whatever. Spiner is always fun, subtly giving this new character the distinctive Soong arrogance, but a touching dash of human vulnerability, which is new. His daughter (played by the Soji actress... insert your own theories there I've stopped caring) has a rare terminal condition that he's trying to cure... and along comes Q to make a devil's deal with him.
These scenes with Spiner and de Lancie are the closest this show has gotten to finding that humanity so important to classic Star Trek. While it's certainly very different than when these two last acted so closely opposite each other (the great "Deja Q" episode, which likewise features Q losing his powers) this works because Q here is acting very coy and sinister, taking advantage of an intelligent but desperate man. I've always found that darker side of Q a very compelling aspect to his character: he's not exactly a true villain but he's certainly no hero either. He's Q. That's it.
Soong is even well aware of this Faustian bargain in this great exchange: ("If you have the cure, than I am a hostage to you") and Q's reply of "We're all hostages to what we love. The only way to truly be free is to love nothing. How meaningless would that be." ...I dunno I just think it's a great line, delivered with classic Q cold rationality and fairly consistent with the direction his character went as TNG continued and he grew to understand humanity further... perhaps early in TNG he would've not added that last part.
Despite these surprisingly strong moments in the middle, Fly Me begins pretty flat (the Rios rescue, Picard talking with Watcher Lady) and finishes quite lamely also... throwing some Oceans Eleven/Mission Impossible heist type storyline into the end. Oh my gawd... enough already. Apparently Q's plan is getting Picard's ancestor, Renee Picard, not to go on some key space mission she's scheduled for here in 2024. It's implied that her not going on the mission is what changes the timeline, because sure why not. At least "City on the Edge of Forever" had some natural logic as to how Edith Keeler's survival changed the course of history. Still, the scene where Picard discovers Q posing as Renee's therapist is downright hilarious. "That's no therapist... that's Q!" Stewart finally says it with that familiar indignation we saw for seven years on TNG. It's so dumb but the schlock warmed my cold heart just a bit.
They try the stupid heist movie plot where somebody (Agnes) has to sneak it to this high security gala, get captured on purpose so they can change the surveillance systems or something blah blah blah... I don't even know or care why exactly they're doing it. To keep an eye on Renee? Keep her away from Q? But they can't directly talk to her because it'll change the future? What's the point? And the big cliffhanger of the story, you guessed it, is the captured Agnes is revealed to have merged with the Borg Queen. Again, who watching this show could've possibly been shocked by that. At least this episode kinda tries misdirection with it, sort of kicking the "mystery" of what happened to the side and moving on, but there's only so much you can do with material that is so excessively predictable.
Speaking of a scene just before where Agnes shoots the Borg Queen, I couldn't help but notice something:
That's not the closed captioning from my media player, that's a subtitle from the actual show becuase the charatcter is speaking French. Seriously. Man, I hate when Borg Queens pop outta nowhere in abandonded houses.
Anyhow, there's not much else to say. Best episode of Picard I've seen thus far, with those couple tiny moments I legitimately thought were well done, both of serious and comedic variety. As for the rest of it, most of my enjoyment was derived from humour at the show's expense (like my screenshot above), which is still an improvement from the previous two episodes. I really couldn't give two farts about this vague "watcher" time travel plot, which is a problem considering it seems to be a key part of... well everything. The Renee Picard stuff isn't really interesting either, unless there's some good twist coming up (I'm sure there will be a twist, I'm just not excepting it to be good). It's also annoying that Seven and Raffi seem to be written as the exact same character a lot, which is first: dumb when you're trying to express personal relationship drama between them and second: as I will probably keep writing every episode this is not Seven of Nine. This is Jeri Ryan playing generic badass sci-fi mercenary lady.
An overall "meh" of an episode. More Spiner and de Lancie, please. Less, um, almost everything else. Can't wait to see what they screw up... I mean "do" next.
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