Star Trek: Picard 1.02 - "Maps and Legends"

[lizbee]

So I liked this a lot more than the first episode, but I also got up very early to watch it, and now I'm too tired for all the emotions I'm having.



Feelings in dot points:

• CSI: TAL SHIAR
• I adore Laris and Zhaban, but mostly Laris
• between this and the prequel comic (which was actually quite terrible, but anyway) it's clear that they have one brain cell between them, and it's in the sole custody of Laris
• Picard should not consider leaving the planet without her
• Zhaban can grapesit, Laris can look after Picard
• I'm very relieved that Geordi has been namedropped, as I was afraid he'd been killed in the attack on Mars; the prequel comic had him running the shipyards
• I assume Zhaban didn't suggest calling Beverly in because he knew that, unlike Riker, Worf and Geordi, she wouldn't go along with any nonsense and would instead drop everything to turn up in person to tell Jean-Luc he's being an idiot
• And he doesn't suggest Deanna because, well, someone who can successfully impersonate a Tal Shiar agent in the heart of the Romulan Empire is too dangerous to associate with
• This episode was also heavy on the exposition, but a lot of it came from Orla Brady so I don't mind
• I made a series of assumptions about Dahj and Soji, and they are nearly all wrong
• But we get to know Soji better, and she has a conversation with a nice Trill lady that passes the Bechdel test, so well done, everyone
• AND most importantly we have A PRAGMATIC AND UNAPOLOGETIC FEMALE ADMIRAL
• I choose to believe that, as soon as Picard was out of her office, Kristen Clancy called up Necheyev and was all, "Hey, guess who I just called out for his fucking hubris IN SO MANY WORDS?" and then they high-fived
• (The initials make me wonder if Clancy was conceived as Cornwell 2.0; I find the idea a bit off-putting, but I am nevertheless prepared to accept her into my heart)
• (Also it's probably a coincidence and the wallpaper in Picard's study is not actually sending me a secret message that I need to go create a Kat shrine in in the hart of Cardiff)
• So the synths who destroyed Mars were hacked, or, at least, experienced some sort of programming override. It's not clear whether they're sentient, but they certainly seem to have the capacity for sentience, so we had exactly the situation that Guinan warned against in "The Measure of a Man": a race of people who are treated as property.
• Like, I'm sort of judging Picard for not resigning from Starfleet over that.
• Unless he was already fighting on that front, and this is a "Society should be somewhat better"/"Yet you yourself participate in society, I am very clever" situation.
• Anyway, I look forward to learning more about them, and note with interest that the synth we follow on that fateful day is named F8, "fate".
• (Names are significant in this series! None of my baby name sources have origins for Soji and Dahj, save that "Soji" is occasionally used as a masculine given name in Japan. The conversation around the nameless Borg. The reluctance to use the B-word.)
• Is Commodore Oh a secret Romulan, or a Vulcan who decided it was logical to work with the Secret Secret Romulans to destroy an emerging strand of sentient life? I hope it's the latter, myself, especially since "Lieutenant Rizzo" is already a secret Romulan.
• Either way, as a fan of Babylon 5, who is quite fond of its terrible pilot, it's nice to see that Tamlyn Tomita is still working. In fact, she's working more now than back in the '90s. It probably helps that she more or less hasn't aged.
• Picard saying he never saw the appeal of science fiction is really quite on the nose, but not in a terrible way?
• I was more, "Ugh, Asimov", even though I'm pretty sure it was Asimov who developed the concept of the positronic brain, along with the whole robot thing.

I really only have a couple of quibbles this week:

• Dr Benayoun's "hey, maybe you'll die before the senility kicks in" is just really bad medicine in any era. But sort of fitting for his personality? I'm prepared to put it in the Inappropriate Black Humour Between Old Friends, Not Serious Advice box.
• Needed more Raffi

And I feel like this should have been combined with the first episode for a two-part premiere, in tried and true Trek fashion. (I hear that people are saying that about the third episode, as well.) It's not that the pacing is bad, but this is just so much stronger than the premiere, and I didn't like waiting a week to see Picard mourn Dahj.

Comments

[tellitslant]

I have to admit, two eps in and I'm a little over the Picard Yells At Women hour.

Thanks to this post, though, i desperately want to see Deanna hanging out with Picard's Tal Shiar pals.

[lizbee]

I have to admit, two eps in and I'm a little over the Picard Yells At Women hour.

At least this time she had authority over him, and used it to put it in his place. Baby steps.

But, at the same time, one of the things I always loved about Picard was how good his relationships with women were -- platonic, romantic, professional. Even with Necheyev, he approached her with respect and bent over backwards to make her like him. I don't feel like we're seeing that so much here.

[tree_and_leaf]

I agree, though that said, Doctor Benayoun did mention "inappropriate degrees of anger" as one of the symptoms of Picard's Future Alzheimers/ incurable brain tumour, so at least there's a canonical explanation for negative personality change :(

[kore]

Tamlyn Tomita!!

I'm just going to maybe headcanon that WAS Admiral Kat somehow, because I hated how she ended up.

I thought the synths were hacked on Mars from the description of it all happening at once and COINCIDENTALLY while a controversial refugee rescue was going on, and from the first "activation" scene.

I think the showrunners described this as "a ten hour movie" and CBS is also deliberately airing this in a non-bingeable way, like D+ did with Mandalorian and is going to do with its new MCU shows. It worked okay with the Mandalorian, because that was so deliberately episodic and nostalgic, but it'll be interesting to see how peak TV viewers do it. I believe a lot of streaming content providers are going back to doling episodes out (The Expanse S4 dropped all at once tho).

[tree_and_leaf]

I really enjoyed it! And I love Laris, though I'm slightly bemused by how all Romulans are either British or Irish now.

[starlady]

Rizzo's description of Oh as an "ally" says "Vulcan" to me. I also think the camera lovingly lingering on the Surakian bricabrac in her office is meant to remind us of a) the Vulcans being shady in ENT generally and b) the "logic extremists" in S2 of DSC. I also think that Clancy mentioning the threats to withdraw from the Federation over the Romulan rescue op is pointing forward to DSC S3.

When I watched The Measure of a Man last month I was struck by the fact that Picard doesn't realize that turning Data over is wrong until pretty far along in the episode, relatively speaking. (Unlike Riker, who gets it immediately and then has to play devil's advocate.) So it doesn't seem that farfetched to me that Picard and/or other people in Starfleet weren't automatically opposed to the existence of the synthetics, on top of their history of everything else.

The thing I like best about that scene between Picard and Clancy is that they're actually both right.

ETA: Has Michael Chabon read Murderbot? Also, why did he think it was okay to reuse the title of his essay collection for an episode that doesn't actually make use of the "legends" pun?