WHY WE LIKE IT: Cool new Borg Queen.
WHY WE DON'T: Throwing the baby out with the bath water.
REVIEW: I'm going to preface this review by saying that I basically frowned through this whole season, but that I'm doing my best to reassess it as objectively as I can. I know I'll still be hard on it, but hopefully fair. And though the first episode is very different from the rest, it nevertheless presents a big problem. Namely that after episodic Trek's biggest time jump (a year and a half), the show seems to have jettisoned its format for a different one entirely. Worse, everyone seems to die and the season's arc will be to restore a status quo in which we have no investment, for which we have no attachment. Yes, by all means, lets restore a future that we've just sketched in rather than the one we spent the previous season in. And I'm not even sure all this stuff couldn't have happened to La Sirena (with Starfleet backup) rather than having the various characters on different ships, etc. I don't get it, and it feels like a retooling à la Space 1999 or Buck Rogers' second seasons. Except... was anyone really unhappy with the La Sirena set-up? (And we're gonna wind up on La Sirena anyway so what's the point?) I'm not saying playing catch-up can't be entertaining, but in this case, it's not like it's setting up the format for the series.
Among the relationship changes that could have occurred over 18 months without shuffling all the cards, we have Raffi having become a maternal figure in Elnor's life - having "failed" a being a mother, we can understand it - but also have a difficult romantic relationship with Seven. When they introduced the idea at the end of Season 1, it sort of came out of nowhere. A year later, it still seems to come out of nowhere. And though the two of them will spend a lot of time being action partners during the season, its overt mention in episode 10 will AGAIN seem like it comes out of nowhere (even if it's obliquely referenced throughout). It's just not serviced enough. Jurati and Rios made a go of it, but broke up, agreeing (perhaps foolishly) to remain work friends. There's a whole missing season, basically, which I'm sure other media has been and will continue to take advantage of, but the television show makes promises, then jumps over them, saying they've been fulfilled. There's also a romance brewing between Picard and Laris following Zhaban's death in Season 1, but it's not going anywhere because of (checks) Picard's mommy issues. Oh boy.
I get that late in life, one might be tempted to look back. Picard has, after all, returned to the vineyard, so he's certainly "looked back" since Star Trek: Nemesis. That said, these flashbacks to his youth are bound to be a drag over 10 episodes (spoiler: they are) and whether one thinks they adequately explain why Picard has never found love, or indeed according to this season, SOUGHT love, is up for debate. Picard the Explorer is retconned as Picard the Coward, running to the stars to escape family trauma (which I don't think even the episode Family claims) and never seriously considering any of the love interests we've met over the years. Sad Picard from Generations is potentially back, or have the writers been watching Doctor Who? And though he argues his case, Guinan calls him out on it, so it has to be true, right? Whoopi Goldberg is back in the role, and it's cute that she now makes her home at 10, Forward Ave in Los Angeles, though I find it quite irritating that they feel the need to explain away Guinan's now older apparent age by saying El-Aurians can CHOOSE to age, which she does to make humans not freak out. Was this necessary? Why not just take it for granted that they hit a kind of menopause that makes them appear more aged towards the end of their lives? Soren certainly wasn't a spring chicken. For all these reasons, the reunion scene falls flat for me. Whoopi being asked to guest on the show on The View was 1000% more touching.
The time skip also allows for changes that go beyond evolving relationships and change the show's set-up in ways I don't think are earned. Soji is on a good will tour for synethetics now that they're citizens of the Federation (hey, wow, flirty Deltans). That's fine, though it means the character is written out of the series. Not the actress out of the show, as we'll see, but if you were a fan of Soji, she's not really in this. Her joining the crew after her story was technically over at the end of Season 1 is just another sign that they didn't have THIS Season 2 planned, and this episode has to do a lot of work walking back the finale's decisions. And while Starfleet might have extended invitations to the universe's saviors, having Picard, Rios and Raffi BACK in Starfleet, and Elnor as a cadet ready for his first training cruise is a big fat cheat. Picard being lured to hold an officious post at the Academy, yeah okay. But Rios and Raffi were true outsiders and it's hard to believe they would rejoin, and though Elnor gets to be the first full Romulan in Starfleet (the wording gives Saavik room to be of two worlds), it's not really an ambition he ever mentioned but I guess it gets him out of the Qowat Milat's hair. Seven inheriting La Sirena (she lost her own Fenris Raider ship last year) at least makes sense. Still, it's hard not to like Rios captaining the new Stargazer with a stogie in his mouth. Makes you wish we'd spend a season discovering his leadership style, but alas, it's not to be.
For some reason, the episode opens on the climax, giving away some of the game (the Borg Queen would have been cooler if introduced in sequence, no?), perhaps because it was felt the opening was too slow. Just relationship stuff and people giving speeches. An afterthought? The TRUE beginning zooming in on France to "Time Is on My Side" is more natural, though something feels wrong about using an English-language song there, even if it does fit the season's time travel plot. Well, fits and doesn't. Is time REALLY on anyone's side in this story?So we know what it's building to, even if we don't know the details.
Those details are where most of the season's budget went. A huge armada of Starfleet ships congregating at a space-time anomaly. The rift in space is shouting a message in every language: "Help us, Picard" and requesting to become part of the Federation. As all our characters find themselves there (except Soji), we discover the mystery aliens are the Borg, led by a new and very cool-looking Borg Queen, and the reaction is not good. Knowing how the season ends - and it takes us so long to get back to this moment that it's hard even now to know if it all connects as well as it should - I could easily call foul on this sequence. If the Queen's intentions are good (and though she hijacks the fleet, she does not kill or assimilate anyone), then why doesn't she explain herself better? In fact, she can't, because the characters have to go through this adventure before the right context is created. Though Picard entertains the idea of Borg allies - at least before the Queen boards the ship - it's Seven who is ironically the most against it. By the end of it, the Stargazer's auto-destruct has gone off, killing everyone aboard, and potentially characters aboard other ships (like Raffi and Elnor on the Excalibur). We should realize that whatever happens next, it'll be about preventing this tragedy from happening.
Cue: Tapestry Reduxe. Picard wakes up in Château Picard, but things are different. Laris doesn't exist and he's attended by a synthetic slave. He's got weapons littering the place. And Q is there - snapping his fingers to look age appropriate - telling Jean-Luc the trial STILL hasn't ended and he gets a second chance of some sort. Like the Queen, he's acting more sinister and threatening than he needs to, considering what we'll find out, but that's a tale for another day.
For Trek nerds, the episode still holds a lot of little gems. Picard credits his mother with saying "Let's see what's out there" in reference to the stars, his last words in "All Good Things...", for example, but mostly, it's all the ship stuff. There are plenty of new models in the fleet, but they're hard to see. The Stargazer is the big gun here, and though you almost think you're aboard a new Enterprise when Rios and Agnes talk about the ship having "baggage", it's a ship named after Picard's first command, appropriately for this show (the title also links the ship's name to Jean-Luc himself). Having been enhanced with Borg tech of course makes it easy prey for the new Queen, and we don't get to see what else it's capable of as a result. Too bad. Also too bad is the numbering scheme. Why isn't this the Stargazer-A (or B, etc.?), i.e. NCC-2893 instead of NCC-82983? What's that extra "8" all about? I know the DS9's Defiant didn't play fair with this, but as Discovery's shown the Voyager-J, I have to wonder what the rule is here. The Academy scenes mention a USS Hikaru Sulu, and memorial plaques on a balcony - largely illegible on screen, but they've been shown by the designer - reference Picard's first posting on a ship captained by Uhura, as well as the fact that Janeway's Voyager has been decommissioned and the Enterprise-D's saucer has been salvaged and turned into a museum. Mentioning a lot of this is kind of cheating, since it doesn't register onscreen, but I thought you'd like to know.
LESSON: Time is the fire in which we whine.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: It should be higher, but the fact that they've cheated a lot of show's progress and given us a new status quo it then proceeds not to use, brings the score down. At the time, the spoileriffic teaser for the first half of the season at the end of the episode also gave way too much away and accentuated how much of a Greatest Hits the season was going to be. Almost threw my remote at the TV in frustration.
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