Star Trek: Picard 3-06: The Bounty (Quick Review)

Episode:

26

|

Writer:

Christopher Monfette

|

Director:

Dan Liu

|

Air Date:

30-Mar-2023

---

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the 26th episode of Star Trek: Picard, which also happens to be the number of episodes Star Trek shows used to have each season. If Picard was like a 90s show this would've been the season 1 finale! But it's not, it's halfway through the final season. In fact there are only four episodes left, so if my maths are correct Picard is going to end up falling a little short of Next Gen's 176 episode run.

The episode is titled The Bounty and now I suddenly I want a chocolate bar with a coconut filling. It's not an unattainable goal, but I'll get this done first.

There are going to be SPOILERS, so if you don't want everything ruined you should stop reading.

---

RECAP

---

Worf and Raffi team up with the fugitive crew of the Titan just in time to join Riker on an away mission to investigate Daystrom Station. Meanwhile, Picard needs to hide the ship, so he sets a course for Geordi La Forge's Starfleet Museum.

The away team get past a fake hologram of their old buddy Hologram Moriarty and discover an android that looks like Data. It turns out to contain the memories of Data, B-4, Lal and Lore, along with his creator Altan Inigo Soong, who passed away in the meantime. Back at the museum, Jack teams up with Geordi's daughters Sidney and Alandra to take the cloaking device from the Klingon Bird-of-Prey that Kirk dropped into San Francisco bay, but they have to persuade Geordi to install it. They use the cloaked Titan to save the away team and Riker stays to cover their escape.

Geordi activates the android and discovers that the Changelings' true objective at Daystrom was to steal Picard's human body, which was killed by the same Irumodic Syndrome that Crusher believes is giving Jack his hallucinations. Meanwhile Vadic has captured Riker and reveals that she has something that will make him betray Starfleet: Deanna Troi.


REVIEW

---

They should've called this episode Reunions in the Transporter Room, because it's a more poetic title and because that's what kept happening. First Picard and Riker meets Worf, then they meet Geordi, then Geordi meets Worf and Data!

Or maybe Museums of Light and Darkness, as we get to see both sides of Starfleet history here. The iconic and heroic, and the nightmare lair of forbidden science. This is what I mean when I talk about certain writers having a very different idea about what the Star Trek universe is than I do, because Daystrom does not fit my vision of the Federation at all. It's the kind of thing Lower Decks would do as a joke, before revealing that it's just misunderstood.

Though in some ways this is the most Lower Decks episode of Picard, as it's wall-to-wall Trek references. It's basically what the fans wanted and Patrick Stewart didn't.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

I was kicking myself when it was revealed that the title refers to the HMS Bounty from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. It didn't occur to me at all and it hasn't even been that long since I wrote about the movie!

And the characters will probably be kicking themselves when Worf points out that the Defiant also has a cloaking device they could've stolen, one that isn't 100 years out of date!

Actually, hang on, that got blown up with the original Defiant, never mind.

I don't know how the Klingons feel about this ship being in a Starfleet museum, maybe they'd respect the fact that it was kept as a trophy of Kirk's victory. Though it's probably actually there because it saved Earth from a whale probe.

They couldn't put the original USS Enterprise in the museum, but the ship that helped to blow it up is the next best thing.

Well, aside from maybe the Enterprise-A!

I believe this is the first time the ship has ever been seen in a live action Star Trek TV show, so it's been 32 years since its last appearance. It looks absolutely beautiful in my opinion, and the VFX team even knew to leave the blue engine glow off when it's not at warp. Plus I have to give them extra credit for having the name and number facing the right way, which is apparently a thing you can get wrong!

Short Treks - Ephraim and Dot

I can't even tell if all the mistakes in Ephraim and Dot were deliberate or not, but they were relentless. That isn't even meant to be the Enterprise-A. Okay fine, the ship looks identical to the refit Enterprise, but c'mon.

Speaking of ships that look (almost) identical to the Enterprise...

We also got to see a TOS-style Constitution-class ship, which made my whole week. We've already seen the Strange New Worlds design show up in Picard season one, so getting this here hints that the stuff going on in the Kurtzman-era prequel series hasn't retconned the Original Series and it's all exactly as it should be. I mean the ship isn't an exact match for the USS Enterprise, there are a few differences, but it's not the Enterprise, it's the USS New Jersey so there's zero contradiction there.

Man, I can't believe they had the classic ship design fill the frame in a modern live action series like this. I thought the current producers were too embarrassed of it and didn't think it held up in HD.

This also means that Trials and Tribble-ations and In a Mirror, Darkly are both still canon as well, at least according to Star Trek: Picard. Incidentally, I think the 20-year-old In a Mirror, Darkly has a better looking CGI ship, but that actually makes sense considering it gets way more screen time than the New Jersey. Picard had to share its CGI budget with a whole museum full of ships including the Defiant, Voyager and the NX-01 refit.

The moral of this episode is that evolution isn't preservation, it's addition... but they parked the Titan-A in a ring next to the old ships, so it's clear that some things have to be preserved in order for other things to be added.

The episode actually manages to justify this nostalgia by having a scene of Seven being nostalgic about Voyager with Jack, so it all feels earned.

Well, except for the NX-01 getting a refit, when the hell did that happen? The last we saw of the ship was in Enterprise's finale just before it was decommissioned, so they weren't exactly going to give it an upgrade then. Though hang on, I don't think we ever see the outside of the ship during These Are the Voyages..., and it takes place after a time jump, so the characters could've been on the refit ship the whole episode!

Damn, how am I supposed to complain about a retcon when it doesn't contradict anything and makes a small group of fans very happy? You win again Picard!

The episode's so committed to bring back faithful recreations of the past that we even got freezer spacers as the ceiling of Data's lair.

Though could Daystrom have been any more ominous? They had a living AI chained up as the security program because they couldn't be bothered to finish the initial startup process to activate him as a person, that's kind of dark. Also, they called him Android M-5-10, apparently in honour of Dr Richard Daystrom's M-5 multitronic unit that went crazy and attacked a bunch of ships!

At first it seemed like the AI guardian was Moriarty and I'm not sure what I think about that being a red herring. On the one hand, it makes total sense that his program would end up in this collection of artefacts so making him an illusion feels like a cruel trick on the audience. On the other hand, I'm okay with Moriarty keeping his happy ending in his make-believe universe and I'm glad I was wrong when I suspected that he was the target of the Changelings' theft.

Fortunately the away team had Riker, the only person in the galaxy who could've figured out the musical code to get past fake Moriarty, with aid of a flashback to Encounter at Farpoint.

Man, I haven't seen this clip since the Next Gen season 2 clipshow Shades of Gray! It was great seeing footage from the 36-year-old pilot episode processed to look like it had been filmed yesterday. Maybe we could get some updated footage from Deep Space Nine and Voyager next. Like 7300 minutes of each.

Funny thing is, it seems like all they really did here was crop it for widescreen and maybe make it a bit darker. This is basically what the Next Gen Blu-rays look like.

It turns out that Soong stuck Data, Lore, B4... a whole bunch of personalities inside the same body with the hope of integrating them, which is definitely an original approach. I mean, I'm interested in seeing where it goes, but it's downright weird.

Almost as weird as his hologram eye-projectors, which are straight out of the live-action Cowboy Bebop reboot. It's not a good idea to make the same choices as the Cowboy Bebop reboot.

It was also weird seeing Worf hanging out on the ship watching him get activated, right after a scene where he said he'd stop at nothing to rescue Riker! The dude seemed to be out of the door already, he'd done the 'farewell and good luck' handshake and everything.

Poor Riker got captured by the bad guys in this episode, and by that I mean Starfleet. I mean look at those two officers just standing there watching Vadic beat the crap out of their prisoner. In any other Trek series this would be a real 'What the hell is going on?' moment, but Picard doesn't seem to even realise it's doing something strange. It's things like this that stop me from taking this show entirely seriously.

On the other hand, I liked that the motivation for the rogue Changelings is strongly implied to be the Section 31 virus. The Section 31 conspiracy believes that they're justified in going to any lengths in order to protect the Federation, but whoops they've accidentally doomed it by creating fanatical terrorists. Though it seems like Starfleet will share some of the blame for the upcoming catastrophe by being dumb enough to bring all their ships into one place. I have a feeling that the line about modern ships all talking to each other is the clue to what will go horribly wrong.

Frontier Day is 72 hours away, so there are 3 days left until disaster. Hang on, wasn't there three days to disaster in season 2 as well?

Speaking of talking, there's a lot of that going on here, as the plot was basically just 'Riker's team walk down a hallway while the Titan-A crew chat about things'. This was a very character-driven episode, all about people trying to find a family, longing for connection and being seen, and other Star Trek: Discovery words.

I think the main theme is parents worrying about their children and what they've passed along to them, so it's fitting that Worf is a joke for the whole story. Well he's the comic relief anyway, getting most of the comedy (and delivering it well). I don't remember any mention of Alexander, or how badly he messed up raising him. We don't get any Kendra Troi-Riker either, which is a shame as I really liked her in Nepenthe.

Jack's chats with Picard are falling into a bit of a pattern, but they're still good scenes so I'm fine with that. Plus it's nice to see him getting along with other characters more, hanging out with Seven and the LaForges.

The reveal that his condition is caused by Irumodic Syndrome is strange though, considering it didn't affect Picard until he was elderly and the content of his visions seems a bit too meaningful to be the result of an inherited mental condition. Then again maybe the Changelings are actually after Jack because of something he inherited from Picard; it would explain why they took Picard's corpse.

Incidentally, why the hell is Daystrom keeping a collection of dead Enterprise captains? To be more specific, why did the writers think this was a good idea?

RATING

---

To properly rate this episode I'm going to first put it against the 6th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 3rd season: Booby Trap. Both are Geordi episodes featuring ancient starships and holograms, but only one features Leah Brahms... thankfully. I mean I liked Booby Trap, but Geordi can do better than fantasies and I hope he married someone else. I also think this episode did a little better than the Next Gen story.

It does lose points however for all the grimdark campiness, as its tone gets more incongruous the more classic characters (and spaceships) show up. I wish they'd take the universe more seriously. But on the other hand, we've finally left M'Talas Prime behind, Captain Shaw wasn't being a dipshit and the USS New Jersey brought joy into my life, so my rating is...

 8/10

---

COMING SOON

Alright, I'm firmly into the second half of the season now, with just four more episodes to go. Next up it's Picard episode 7: Dominion. But you can talk about The Bounty right now.