Star Trek: Picard - Season 2 Review, Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm finally getting back to Star Trek: Picard's second season! I realise that people are more interested in the third season right now, which is about halfway through at the time I'm writing this, but I need to catch up first. Though to be honest I actually wrote the episode reviews themselves ages ago right after they came out. I just didn't want to publish this until after I was done publishing my reviews of Discovery's fourth season, and that dragged on a little longer than expected. 

Sadly we've lost a member of the cast in the meantime, as Annie Wersching died earlier this year. I'll tell you right now that her performance as the Borg Queen was a highlight of the season for me. She seemed to be having the most fun.

This week I'm covering the middle four episodes of season two, which are:

• 2-04 - Watcher
  
• 2-05 - Fly Me to the Moon
  
• 2-06 - Two of One
  
• 2-07 - Monsters

There'll be SPOILERS for these episodes (and earlier Trek series), but I won't be spoiling a thing about what happens next. Even though I totally could. I know all kinds of stuff about season 3 now.

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Note: I rate episodes on a 1-9 scale, with 5 being where my attention starts to fail.

Star Trek: Picard - Season 2
2-04	Watcher		6
Episode: 014 | Writer: Juliana James & Jane Maggs | Director: Lea Thompson | Air Date: 24-Mar-2022 Seven and Raffi go to the police to find information on Rios, but Raffi's in a bad mood and they're soon being chased in a stolen cop car. Fortunately Dr Jurati is able to get the Borg Queen to help her get the transporters ready for a last minute beam out. Though they still need to save Rios, who's stuck in a cell the whole episode getting first hand experience of how crappy the 21st century can be. Meanwhile Picard uses the information that Jurati got from the Borg Queen to track down the Watcher, who turns out to be Guinan! Except not really, but she knows how to find them and Picard has to give her a speech to bring back her faith in humanity before she'll tell him. One thing I really liked about episode two this season was that the characters immediately figured out their situation, knew what to do about it, came up with a plan, and then executed it. But now the characters don't really know what they're doing, they still don't know what the divergence they're trying to fix is, and the episode mostly feels like a lot of wheel spinning. Literally in Seven and Raffi's case, seeing as they're driving a car around aimlessly. And Rios is just waiting for a bus the entire episode. To be fair, Captain Rios getting locked up after the raid on the clinic is very Star Trek (Captain Kirk and Captain Archer would find it especially familiar). But most Star Trek captains would've gotten out before the end of the episode. This side of the plot achieves three things: it gives Rios a chance to chat with Teresa some more, it gives the writers a chance to drag the story out, and it makes the case that America's approach to dealing with illegal immigration is kind of terrible. Picard is really not pulling its punches when it comes to social commentary this season. Oh, plus it lets Rios do the thing where a time traveller tells someone the whole truth knowing that they'll never believe them, with a bonus of him admitting he doesn't actually get what Robot Picard's deal is! Seven and Raffi's job for the episode is to find Rios and get him out. They're supposed to be looking for the Watcher and figuring out what caused the divergence in time, but they're doing this instead. I can't really complain too much about their part of the storyline as the two characters work well together and have some good lines, but they basically just break into a police car and use the computer while doing a tiny bit of a car chase. But only a tiny bit of one, as they're on a TV budget. Still, it's probably the third best car chase in Star Trek history, after the race through the space station in Lower Decks and the dune buggies in Nemesis. Unless there's a fourth one that I can't remember right now. List your favourite Star Trek car chases in the comments! There's plenty of scathing social commentary in their side of the story as well, if you're the mood to be angry, frustrated and depressed, but the actual plot didn't really stir up any emotions in me. To be fair I think I might have ruined it a bit by watching the trailer, as I knew that Seven and Raffi were going to rescue Rios from ICE before the season even started. Though actually I suppose I was a bit sad at one point, when Seven just started driving a 21st century car without any mention of getting lessons from Tom Paris. Surely someone in the writers room had seen Voyager. I know they've seen The Voyage Home. I'm not sure what I thought about Star Trek 4's Punk on Bus finally making a reappearance after 40 years (not counting his cameo in Spider-Man: Homecoming). I guess I was mostly confused, because the way he reacts to Seven and Raffi telling him to turn his music down implies that the events of Star Trek 4 still happened, but Guinan doesn't remember Picard meeting her in Time's Arrow. I'm fine with the idea that this is the Confederation timeline right now, so they have to fix the present to create a future in which Kirk and Picard go back to alter the past. But something's gone wrong if Punk on Bus can sense an alternate past and Guinan with her time powers can't! Speaking of time paradoxes, why does Guinan have a bar called 10 Forward hundreds of years before the Enterprise exists? I'm also not sure I liked how the episode went a bit Cause and Effect with Dr Jurati experiencing a subconscious recurrence of the number 15 and Picard jumping to the assumption that it means they have 3 days to fix history. That was just bad writing. Though I did like that he clarified why they were able to park a spaceship next to his house without anyone noticing. Plus I was relieved when he dragged Jurati away her away from the Borg Queen and took her to the abandoned chateau... even if she just went right back over to her again! The Queen's still trying to tempt her, she even uses Discovery's season 4 arc word 'connection', but she doesn't make much progress this episode. Even her attempts at being poetic are ineffective. Meanwhile Picard goes on his own mission to find the Watcher and actually succeeds! It takes a bit of work though, as first he has to convince Guinan to take him to them, and she really doesn't want to. Mostly because she's pissed off and depressed, and even someone coming from the future with news that humanity sorts itself out isn't enough to snap her out of it. I was a bit surprised to see that they'd cast a different actress for 21st century Guinan, especially as we've already seen 19th century Guinan in Next Gen and she looked like Whoopi Goldberg, but I guess Picard doesn't have those Disney dollars for deep-faked digital de-aging. I liked the actress though so I was able to go along with it. I was less keen on the episode giving me another lecture about how reality sucks however, and it was frustrating to watch her talk so much about how change is taking too long while she was the obstacle in the way of Picard changing the future! And then the Watcher turns out to be Laris with human ears, so that's... weird. There's also a bizarre scene at the end of Q sitting outside of Jackson Roykirk Plaza, reading a newspaper and doing a bit of watching of his own. I'm not sure what to take from it, except that he's in disguise as someone working on the Europa Mission, he's trying to manipulate someone, and his powers aren't functioning great right now. Overall I thought this was the weakest episode of the season so far. I mean it wasn't bad, but with Guinan being such an unnecessary obstruction and Seven, Raffi and Rios just trying to solve their own problem, it felt like an extremely skippable piece of the story. Here's a question though: is episode four better than Next Gen season 2's fourth episode, The Outrageous Okona? The one where Data tries to learn humour from Joe Piscopo. Yes, yes it is, because Outrageous Okona is bloody awful. Though they do both have lots of Guinan in them.
2-05	Fly Me to the Moon		7
Episode: 015 | Writer: Cindy Appel | Director: Jonathan Frakes | Air Date: 31-Mar-2022 Seven and Raffi rescue Rios from an ICE bus and then also free all the prisoners for some reason. Jurati has less luck when the Borg Queen lures a French cop onto La Sirena, and she ends up having to kill her with a shotgun to save him. We later learn that this is extra bad because the Queen has copied her consciousness into Jurati's brain and no one knows! Meanwhile Picard discovers that the Watcher Tallinn (who looks like Laris) is watching over his ancestor Renée, who is an astronaut with mental health problems... and Q is her therapist! Q's been busy as he also contacts Adam Soong (who looks like Altan Inigo Soong) to offer him a miracle cure for his daughter Kore (who looks like Soji). Reneé is about to make a fateful spaceflight that brings about the good future so Picard comes up with a plan to infiltrate the gala she's attending to make sure nothing can impact her mental health before she goes into quarantine. But Kore's cure turns out to be temporary and Q tells Soong that to get the real cure he has to do something for him. Picard is making a habit of setting up a situation and then ending the episode with a cliffhanger just as it's getting somewhere. It's not the worst way to write a serial, but it can backfire a little when we're left waiting two episodes to find out how Rios gets out of custody and the answer turn out to be 'Seven stops the bus with a tricorder'. It's like an anti-climax, except worse. The only interesting part of the scene was Raffi seeing Elnor for a moment, just like Picard sees a Gary Seven-like Supervisor that looks like Laris, and we're seeing a Soong and his daughter that look just like Altan Inigo Soong and his robot daughters. It hints that there's something more to the bizarre use of familiar faces than just giving the actors some work, but maybe I'm just hoping for too much. Speaking of things that are like other things, isn't Tallinn the capital city of Estonia? Oh it can be a first name too? Okay, just wondering. The episode finally ends the three-part 'Raffi, Seven and Rios achieve nothing' saga and starts to reveal what Q's actually done to change history, which I definitely appreciate. Though we haven't quite got the full story yet. We know that Q's apparently trying to get Reneé Picard to miss her space mission, but he's also pulling a John Harrison (from Into Darkness) and blackmailing geneticist Adam Soong into doing something in exchange for a cure to save his daughter... we just don't know what yet. It was interesting seeing Soong use same shield technology here as we saw in the evil future, hinting at what he might have given the Confederation timeline to earn his future statue. I'm not sure why he turned it off his daughter's sun shield the instant he injected her with Q's cure though. I know Star Trek likes to have its fun with DNA, but even at its worst it usually waits a few hours before someone's completely transformed! The episode also features the crew planning to infiltrate a gala on a secret Mission: Impossible spy mission to... protect an astronaut's mental health. Okay, I can't say I've ever seen that plot before and there's probably a very good reason for that, but I'm curious to see where they're going with it. Plus there was something darkly amusing about the fact that the episode had a room full of people spying on Reneé Picard's private therapy session. That's just the kind of thing viewers with mental health issues don't need going around their mind! Though 'Therapy Trek' is Discovery's turf right now, so Picard needs to watch itself. Also the Borg Queen used one of Discovery's words again, talking about how with her Jurati can finally feel 'seen'! It's become obvious that Jurati really doesn't need the Borg Queen trying to get into her head all the time, so it's a bit of a shame she's pulled a DS9's The Passenger and copied her consciousness into her brain! I could guess that Jurati was hiding something about what actually happened when she rescued the French cop, but I wasn't quite expecting that. At least she wasn't assimilated and turned into a drone I guess! Plus sci-fi has actually had a really good track record when it comes to heroes with imaginary villains in their head, so I'm cautiously optimistic about how this is going to work out. I'm kind of torn on this story overall however. On the one hand it's nice that the plot's moving forward, on the other there were a lot of things that made me go 'huh?' Like the fact that this gala in 2024 Los Angeles has better security technology than anything Starfleet has ever faced in 800-something episodes of Trek. It's getting exciting now though. I mean, we're five episodes into this ten episode season and it finally seems to be moving past the setup! But is the episode better than Next Gen season 2's fifth episode, Loud as a Whisper? The one where Troi has to help an arrogant mediator get over the death of his translators and get his job done. Personally I'd say yeah it is, as that episode bored the crap out of me. Come on Next Gen, Picard's giving you tons of chances to score a point with these weak episodes it's putting out and you're just letting them all sail by.
2-06	Two of One		6
Episode: 016 | Writer: Cindy Appel & Jane Maggs | Director: Jonathan Frakes | Air Date: 07-Apr-2022 Picard's mission at the Europa Mission gala hits a bit of a setback when Soong makes a huge investment in order to get the authority to have security kick him out. But Dr Jurati and the Borg Queen in her head start singing as a distraction and he's able to slip away and give Reneé a speech to restore her confidence. Soong switches to Plan B and tries to run her over with a car, but he hits Picard instead. He survives, but they have to take him to Teresa's clinic. Also the Borg Queen manages to take full control of Jurati's body and goes rogue. Picard actually went and did the "34 minutes earlier" thing again! The one where an episode starts by showing a dramatic event and then jumps back in time to show the events that led up to it. They already pulled this crap once with the season premiere and I wasn't impressed by it then either. It's such a worn out trope and I can only really forgive it if watching the rest of the episode recontextualises the scene, flipping our understanding of it on its head, and that wasn't the case here. The episode doesn't even take place in real time, as it only takes 24 minutes to catch up with the event. I have to wonder if the episode was running short and they needed to pad it out a bit in editing, because this is easily the shortest episode so far. The last episode left me curious what the writers were going to do with the premise of a robot admiral, a Starfleet captain, a spy, a Gary Seven, Seven of Nine, one of the Federation's leading cyberneticists, and the Borg Queen on a mission to protect an astronaut's mental health at a party from a mad scientist and a mad god. It's not a typical Star Trek away mission. And it turns out that they didn't do much of anything with it. This is one of the most competent and resourceful teams you could ever hope to assemble in Star Trek and their plan was just to hang out. Really the only people who were needed for this job was Tallinn to scan Reneé's texts and Picard to give her a talk. Well, plus Jurati to deal with Soong sending security after them (with an assist from the band). Turns out that turning the power out for a moment and singing totally sorted that problem out! It was the kind of absurd situation that's perfect for the goofy Legends of Tomorrow crew to deal with, but Picard just doesn't have the correct tone to do anything fun or clever with it. The Borg Queen taking over Jurati's mind was surprisingly uninspired as well, leaving me feeling like I was missing out on some good conversations between the two. I'm a bit spoiled after watching Farscape and Battlestar Galactica I suppose, which this is definitely less than. I will give them credit though for actually having Jurati come out on stage and sing for real. I mean the whole situation was ridiculous and made no damn sense, unless she was using her Borg upgrades to control the spotlight, amplify her voice, and make the band play along, but I've seen the same kind of scene in two other series recently and both times it turned out they were just imagining it and it was a fake out, so Picard actually avoided a cliché here! And it was great seeing the Borg Queen get up on stage and take a bow Speaking of people infiltrating other people's brains, Raffi saw Elnor again at the party and I'm still wondering if it's due to something more than grief. Can Romulans upload their katra into someone else's mind like Vulcans can? It's a bit of a shame that Raffi, Seven and Rios were absolutely wasted here as characters, but I did appreciate how they got little moments like this. Like when Raffi avoided getting a drink because she's an alcoholic and didn't want to get absolutely wasted. Also I watched an episode of Voyager recently where Seven first started to socialise with others, so it was awesome to see her able to properly mingle with the guests here, completely free of all her Borg baggage. I'm getting a bit worried about Rios and Teresa though, as he is really falling for her if he's totally forgotten his ICE ordeal already. She literally runs a clinic called Las Mariposas (The Butterflies); if that's not a red flag for a time traveller I don't know what is. The dude needs to remember that they're trying to fix history, not screw it up worse. Like, by releasing a Borg Queen in 21st century Los Angeles at the end of the episode for instance. We also get a little more about Soong and Kore here and none of it's good. Soong's been creating children in his lab and the fact that they keep dying of genetic problems hasn't dissuaded him one bit. Plus we got a reverse City on the Edge of Forever with him, as he tried to run the woman who'll bring us to the good future down with his car, leading Picard to push her out of the way and get knocked down! It's a good thing that didn't have any kind of negative effect on her mental health. Also Isa Briones has really gotten the hang of learning that she was created in a lab by Brent Spiner by now. This is the third time it's happened in this series so far and I'm only halfway through season two! Overall I thought this episode was... alright, but I'm really getting tired of them padding out this threadbare LA story now. I was under the impression that the trailer was showing scenes from the first third of the season, and they'd be time travelling to new locations in Trek history (there was an ancient Bajoran tablet there on Picard's table!) but now it seems like this really is all we're getting. I am enjoying the series more than Discovery's fourth season though, purely because of the character interactions. Could this episode be better than Next Gen's The Schizoid Man however? That's the one where Data gets possessed by a narcissistic cyberneticist and turns evil, so the episodes actually have a lot in common. I've never liked The Schizoid Man much to be honest, so I'm going to declare that Next Gen has once again failed to defeat its successor. The classic series is going to get a win any time now though, I'm sure of it.
2-07	Monsters		6
Episode: 017 | Writer: Jane Maggs | Director: Joe Menendez | Air Date: 14-Apr-2022 An unconscious Picard finds himself in a strange office being assessed by a mysterious psychiatrist, who asks him to tell him a story. So Picard tells him a fairy tale about himself and his mother, where they have to go on the run from monsters. Back in reality, Picard's still lying in Teresa's clinic and Tallinn has decided to go inside his subconscious to wake him up from his coma. When Teresa finds them in her clinic she has questions, but Rios is able to get her to help treat Picard with a device beamed over from La Sirena. Then he takes her and her son to see his ship. Inside the dream, Picard discovers that the psychiatrist is his father and that his mother suffered from a mental illness that caused her to run and abandon him in the tunnels under the château. He realises that his father locked her in a room for her own safety. Meanwhile Raffi and Seven go looking for Borg Queen Jurati, who has decided to go to a bar and smash a window. Picard wakes up and goes to see Guinan in order to contact Q, but ends up getting arrested by the FBI instead. Monsters is an episode built around the mystery of what's really going on here. Who is the mysterious psychiatrist in Picard's head? What's the deal with Picard's fairy tale? What happened to Picard's mother? What is Borg Queen Jurati up to? What's Q's agenda? What's wrong with Q? And so on. I found it hard to form an opinion about the episode while I was watching it because it leaves you waiting for the answers you need to understand any of it... and then it doesn't even finish its story at the end! I'm glad the series is finally focusing on Picard's issues after introducing them in episode one and then ignoring them for the next five episodes. In a show like Deep Space Nine that'd be nothing, but it feels like forever in a season as heavily serialised as this. I'll also give the writer points for telling his past in the form of a fairy tale, with him as a prince and his mother a queen, as that's something I don't think Star Trek has ever done before. This is definitely not another variation on DS9's Distant Voices or Desperate Measures where they wander around his mind encountering aspects of his personality or whatever. Trouble is that there's not much going on here and all the revelations were very much 'uh-huh...' level reveals, rather than anything all that surprising or interesting to me. I even guessed that James Callis was really Picard's dad at the start, then wrote it off because he didn't recognise him. Meanwhile Raffi and Seven spend the episode looking for Jurati. Which is a lot like how they went looking for Rios in earlier episodes, except with less arguing and bigger stakes. We don't get much of them here, but they're a good pairing that works well together, so their scenes were fine. The scenes with Rios hanging out with Teresa and her kid in the clinic were nice too, but there's a huge sense of dread hanging over their whole relationship for me. Unless they learn that the two of them were destined to be crushed by a falling piano or something and he's able to take them to the future with him, I don't see this having a happy ending. Also that scene where he hands her a futuristic medical device to use to treat Picard was a bit weird, but I imagine it was probably a 'press the button and it works' thing and he was just trying to win her trust. I'm also a bit concerned that they're going to find out that his ship's from an evil future and assume the worst about him. Then again they brought Dr. Gillian Taylor to a Klingon Bird-of-Prey in Voyage Home and she wasn't all that bothered by how sinister it looked, so maybe it'll be fine. One thing that wasn't fine is Rios quoting the film, saying "I'm from Chile, I only work in outer space." Didn't like it, too cute. Overall I'd say the episode was a bit of a mess in retrospect, with lots of dream logic in the dream, and bad logic in general. Like how the characters jump to assuming that Picard's dream is part of Q's plan based on basically nothing at all. Plus it's kind of frustrating that right after they figure out that Q's the one that needs figuring out, Picard and Guinan get captured by the FBI. And it's all because Picard was dumb enough to use the transporter to beam somewhere in the open where people could see him! How is it even possible for a veteran Starfleet officer to screw that up? Or was the transporter still broken at the time and putting people in random places? I forget. But I'm pretty sure I enjoyed the episode regardless. The series has such a good cast that they don't even have to do anything and I'm still entertained. I'd watch a whole episode about Raffi and Seven trying to get La Sirena's computer un-Borged, or Rios painting spaceships on the wall with Teresa and her kid. Even Young Guinan was pretty good in this one! The season is consistently failing at plot but it's succeeding at people, for me anyway. I know that other people's mileage has varied quite a lot. Alright the final battle is going to be Picard 2-07 - Monsters vs Next Gen 2-07 - Unnatural Selection! That's the one where Dr Pulaski tries to figure out the cause of an illness that's making people grow old. I like Unnatural Selection more than a lot of people and Monsters is pretty weak, so this a tougher choice than most. I'm leaning towards giving this to Picard again though. Sorry about that. Hey, I'd like to make the argument that Next Gen was a far more competently put together Star Trek series, but it's not making it easy for me! Maybe you'd choose a different set of winners though. There's a comment box below if you'd like to share your thoughts.

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NEXT EPISODE

Star Trek: Picard will return with the final three episodes of its second season. But next on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm travelling back to the sixties for Star Trek: The Original Series' Assignment: Earth!