“I believe she’s close to discovering who she really is...”
Jean-Luc Picard in “The Impossible Box”
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Here we are… the sixth episode. We’re on the downward slide of the first season of “Star Trek: Picard.”
The episode is titled “The Impossible Box.”
In this episode, we start to see the narrative move forward a bit. Not a lot, but a bit.
Soji Asha (Isa Briones) learns she isn’t real. The initial clue is that she makes phone calls to her mother each night that last exactly 70 seconds. Digging further, she soon starts analyzing all her family photos, childhood drawings, etc.
All of those items are exactly 37 months old, suggesting her life is a fabrication.
This episode also sees her betrayed by Romulan love interest Narek (Harry Treadaway). He has been working undercover since the first episode to figure out her origin (Spoiler: she comes from a planet with two red moons that has electrical storms.)
Picard (Patrick Stewart) finally arrives at the Artifact and meets up with former Borg Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco). We get a little exposition (early in the episode) about Picard’s past experiences with the Borg (including his assimilation).
An unexpected moment in the episode finds Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) and Captain Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) kissing (apparently they’ve become romantically inclined since the last episode).
I don’t see them as a potential couple at all, and I’m not sure why the writers decided to have a romantic interlude. Whatever the outcome, this story arc feels rushed.
We apparently spent a significant chunk of episode 4 convincing the warrior Elnor (Evan Evangora) to come along on Picard’s mission just so he could sacrifice himself at the end of episode 6.
We might see him again, but he (apparently) makes the ultimate sacrifice so Picard and Soji can escape from the clutches of the Tal Shiar on the Artifact.
If this is the end, it seems like an unceremonious exit.
I feel like all of this is leading to a point where we discover that the android Data (Brent Spiner) is still alive. If so, it feels like we’ve invested a lot of time and money to make what is essentially a sequel to 2002’s “Star Trek: Nemesis.”
I was listening to “The John Campea Show” a few days ago, and Robert Meyer Burnett had some thoughts on “Star Trek: Picard.”
Burnett edited, wrote, and produced all the special features for the Blu-ray release of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” series boxed set.
Burnett has been tepid regarding “Star Trek: Picard,” and questions whether it is the forward-thinking vision the franchise needs.
“It’s so steeped in ‘Star Trek’ lore… I mean, you’ve got ‘7 of 9,’ and you’ve got the Borg, and you’ve got Hugh,” said Burnett. “If you’ve never watched ‘Star Trek’ before, ‘Picard’ is not a great place for you to jump on — because it’s so locked into what’s come before.”
I tend to agree.
What made “Star Trek: The Next Generation” compelling when it debuted in 1987 was that you didn’t need to have watched a previous episode or movie in the franchise to understand what was going on. Sure, there were nods to the original series, but it was far enough in the future that it was its own living thing.
So far, I feel like the first season of “Star Trek: Picard” is an interesting idea that could have been executed better. From a story perspective, it seems like the entire thing could have been a two-hour movie instead of a multi-episode series.
We’ll see what happens in the final four episodes of this season. Maybe I’ll be eating my words by the end… ;-)
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