LizstarTrek - Picard Season 2 episodes 6 -
Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!
I do not want to watch this I do not want to watch this I do not want to watch this I do not want to watch this I do not want to watch this.
Two of One - PIC 4/10
We get another in media res thing where we see Picard dying. Okay, we keep doing that. In media res isn’t just a cheat code, it needs to be good, too.
They’re continuing the heist that was set up last episode. Everyone is in a fancy party trying to… somehow make sure that Picard’s ancestor is still on the space mission. Dunno how they’ll do that off the cuff but alright. Meanwhile, Jirati has a new headmate and it is going Very Poorly.
Soong comes up and tells Picard to leave. Nothing really comes from this at all. Then Jirati is taken over by the Borg Queen entirely and she takes this time to do a big musical number, so Picard can sneak time alone with Mama Picard. They have a heart to heart and then Soong just fucking runs him over. In a Tesla. Well, at least it was the correct person who did that. An asshole tech billionaire. They take him to the doctor who saved Rios that one time, and its solved immediately. Uh, okay. See, when I said In Media Res needs to be good, I meant it means to MEAN SOMETHING. Not be something solved immediately with no reprecusions. You could at least draw attention to the fact he’s A FUCKING ROBOT. She’s not bothered by that, at all.
Soong is Sephiroth Posting around his house so his daughter googles him… or sorry, BINGS him for the first time and finds out that he is a mad scientist who cloned her, and in fact, she’s like clone #6, all the others died.
Picard is stuck in his mind due to being hit by a car, sure. They can maybe wake him up, using the Watcher’s mind probe. Meanwhile, Jirati is walking around as the Big Borg Bitch now, I’m sure that won’t be a problem.
Monsters - PIC 3.5/10
We get a scene of Picard talking to some guy. He’s some Federation guy, and they’re doing a basic psych evaluation. He makes her tell him a story. It’s making both of them uncomfortable.
He tells him a story that seems to be a retelling of a children’s fairy tale, told to him as a kid by his mother, and re-enacted out by child picard and his mother. Young picard gets to watch his mother be dragged away into the darkness by a monster yay :)
Meanwhile, Picard is still suffering and dying. Seven and Raffi head out to find Jirati, who has gone MIA. But they’re locked out of the ship by the Borg.
The Watcher uses some weird tech to mind meld with Picard so she can lead him out of his mind. So now the Watcher has to travel through the fantasy world in his mind and save child Picard’s mother, because he refuses to leave without her. All while we ALSO continue to get the framing device of Picard getting increasingly annoyed at his psychiatrist.
Meanwhile Picard and the Watcher appear to be having strokes so Rios has to rope the doctor into the whole space thing. “Are you from… outer space?” “Mmm? No, no, I’m from Chile. I just…. work in space.” A good line.
Turns out this is all daddy issues. The psychiatrist is actually his dad, who looks like an older Bashir tbh. We get some backstory that explains Picard’s parents. She got locked in a dark room for a while and went fucking nuts. He blamed his dad because he was a little kid. She clearly had some kind of disorder that y’know, could be easily treated cause it’s 2300. The way it’s all framed makes it seem like it’s the 1800s, but my man’s from the 2300s.
Now awake, Picard decides he needs to talk to Q. Like, actually talk, maybe he can figure something out. So he asks Guinan. Turns out she DOES have a way to summon Q. She has THE TRUCE BOTTLE, a magical bottle of wine that was used during the truce between the El-Aurians and the Q. I guess she just HAS that. Well, okay, she SAYS she can do it but when she tries it just doesn’t work.
Meanwhile, Seven discovers what exactly Jurati is doing. Well, the Queen in Jurati’s body. She’s forcing endorphins so that the assimilation process speeds up. I guess that happens.
The episode ends with an FBI agent arresting Picard after showing that they saw him teleport. Man, they just CAN’T not fuck up the timeline, can they??? God knows whats going on in the future right now.
Mercy - PIC 6/10
The FBI agent is not fucking around and threatens to just kill them if they don’t explain why they’re trying to sabatoge the Europa Missions. Which is really funny, considering that they’re trying to do the opposite. After a bit of faffing about he decides that’s fine and leaves.
We’re getting a fight between Seven and Raffi. Seven decides Raffi is abusive and manipulative because everyone has to be what Raffi wants them to be. I think this is just setting it up so they can be cute and make up later. I hope it is.
Agnes does a fucking Legolas across some cars to beat the shit out of them before leaving.
Rios and the doctor kiss, and it’s cute. This is a good plot line.
The other person doing the interrogation to Guinan is… Q! Who is NOT happy to see her. He explains he is dying and this is basically all a way to give his life meaning. Or at least that’s how Guinan sees it, Q doesn’t properly explain himself It’s a good scene but Q is really out there right now, what the fuck is he doing.
Kore, Soong’s daughter, walks out on him after letting him have it for being a weird incel fucker who cares more about his work and legacy than the actual living beings he was creating. While he’s sad about this, Jurati shows up. Uh oh.
Picard starts to psychiatrize Picard. We get the FBI agent’s backstory, where he explains that he saw a scary monster alien as a kid who pushed his hands into him and then disappeared before he could. Picard explains what that was. And also who and what he is. And he’s like “Now, to save the future, I need YOUR help”. Which hey, if he just told the FBI agent earlier when he was being an asshole, it wouldn’t work. But now he believes him 100%. Well done.
…The FBI agent is IMMEDIATELY fired, by the way, which is VERY funny. “The boy who cried alien was wrong once again”. So he can’t really do anything to help.
Soong summons some special forces mercenaries, and Jurati assimilates them. I dunno how she started assimilating people and then didn’t get shot up by the others. Well, they ARE paramilitary, they probably go “Wait, can we still kill people? Okay I’m good, let’s go.”
Hide and Seek - PIC 6/10
Jurati beams her new army to the ship, and Rios has to run the fuck away with his new girlfriend. Everyone beams in using the Watcher’s tech has to storm the ship, which now has an army of soldiers, who also for some reason changed the lasers on their assault rifles to green cause uh, Borg Branding?
Jurati FINALLY speaks up and starts stopping the Queen. Why it took her THIS long, I don’t even know. She stops her from taking the ship, declares that the only reason she even does the Borg thing is because she’s lonely, and then reveals she had made a COMBAT HOLOGRAM SHAPED LIKE ELNOR. Who can also hear her in the Borg Queen’s mind somehow.
Anyways there’s a big battle. Rios is injured immediately and they send him and the civilians back to the Watcher’s apartment. Let’s just write him out, poor guy. Soong mocks them for a bit, and they tell him to go fuck himself.
This is an image of Raffi and Seven working together to murder a guy by stabbing a knife into his eye. This, too, is yuri.
Anyways this was right after we went “you know this season hasn’t had nearly as much violence as the others recently”. Whoopsies!!!
We’re also STILL getting flashbacks to Picard’s childhood. I guess it IS in his childhood home. Now it seems like his mother was maybe trying to… kill him??? I don’t even know. Also where the fuck is Robert Picard in any of this? Y’know, Picard’s brother? His mother is like “You are my light, Jean Luc, the only reason for me to exist”. Fuck her other son I guess. No WONDER Robert fucking hated Jean Luc.
Seven and Raffi charge across the battlefield and meet with Elnor. Well, Elnor’s hologram. Raffi has a heart to heart with him, and he explains that he recorded Elnor’s last moments and knows he does not blame her. They all work together and have the Queen on the rungs, and theeeeeen nope, she’s all powerful and defeats them so it can be suspensful. She takes out Elnor, stabs Seven, and then does the fucking thing the Borg Queen ALWAYS does, gloat and monologue. She fucking loooooves the sound of her own voice.
Eventually, somehow, Jurati convinces her… NOT to be a weird murderous asshole. It’s easier to be nice and help people. And make a world where people could CHOOSE to be Borg and then would work hard because its what they wanted. It actually works somehow. Maybe cause this is the Borg Queen from a universe where she got her ass fucking handed to her.
The two fusion dance into a new being, save Seven, which makes her… look like she normally looks, with the borg implants. STATUS QUO! And then Rios comes back, saves Picard, aaaand he continues to hyper focus on his dead mother. And how he saw her hang herself. Okay. So yes, she was mentally unwell, and he let her out after she was locked in her room for her own safety, and she ended up killing herself, and he’s been trying to block it out.
….
So uh, the weakest part of Picard season 2 is… Picard himself? I didn’t need any of this, and neither did Jean Luc. Though again, no wonder Robert hated him.
Jurati flies off with the ship, and all’s well that- WAIT NO, RENEE PICARD. Also Soong is still out there. We’re not quite done yet.
We then see the ship blast off into space. A MILLION PEOPLE SAW THAT. A MILLION SATELLITES.
Farewell - PIC 7.5/10
The Watcher decides she’s gonna sacrifice herself to save Renee Picard… Uh, somehow. I dunno how that’d work? Picard tries to stop her and she legit gets offended about it. “It’s not up to you to decide? It’s my life and my duty, fuck off. I don’t need saving”.
Meanwhile, Soong’s backup plan appears to be launch drones to blow up the rocket, so the rest of the party is trying to stop that. I uh…. what is he gonna do? Blame it on the Russians??? How is this gonna result in the same ending??
The Watcher tries to talk to Renee to tell her she’s in danger. It doesn’t work, and she runs out freaked out and runs into… Soong, who is like “oh don’t worry I’ll help you :) Here, have some neurotoxin!” and poisons her, killing her. How is this guy justifying ANYTHING he’s doing?
Psych, it was the Watcher pretending to be her. She dies in Picard’s arm, seeing the rocket blast off into space. I think the weirdest part of this is that a human neurotoxin works on a romulan. Must have gotten lucky. Anyways, she dies. This is why they didn’t bring Talyn, I guess. So they can have consequences without having consequences.
Soong has lost, and then he sees his daughter delete all his files. I guess he doesn’t have backups. But he calms himself by looking pleased at a book about the Khan Project. What the fuck??
New cameo! Wesley is here. He for some reason is talking to Kore now. He’s here to invite her to be a Supervisor, like the Watcher. Hey, remember the last time we saw this guy he started the Maquis war??? Fuck this guy.
HOLY SHIT
HOLY SHIT WE ACTUALLY GET A KISS BETWEEN THESE TWO! YEAHHHHH!
It’s like we’re at the fucking moon landing here in my chat, we are all cheering.
Picard has one last sit down with Q, who’s been weirdly noticably absent the past few episodes. He apparently just stopped trying to cause the bad future. And he’s like “maybe this has taught you to learn to trust to love” THIS REALLY WAS ALL JUST A BIG LESSON FROM Q TO TRY AND GET HIM TO FUCK HIS ROMULAN GIRLFRIEND. HOLY HELL.
Picard is like “why are you ALWAYS doing this to me?” and Q makes it VERY clear.
He’s his favorite and he likes him a lot. That’s it.
Q is gonna use the last of his power to send them all home. Well, most of them. Rios is staying. He says he never really fit in the future. Dude you were a Starfleet Captain. Anyways, bye Rios. Try not to change the timeline too much.
Anyways, it’s time for Q to die. But not alone. Picard hugs him, and then they’re sent back to the future. This scene would hit REALLY REALLY well in a story that is slightly better written, maybe a movie? I dunno, it’s a good scene, but I need to ignore all the other shit from the rest of season that Q did and said. It feels like it doesn’t fit.
They go back to the very start, the Stargazer. Everything is back to normal, though uh, Captain Rios doesn’t exist anymore, and neither does Doctor Jurati. She’s, instead, the Borg Queen. There’s a galactic event where that X-box-ass energy field from episode 1 is gonna explode and kill everyone. The only way to fix this is if the Borg Queen uses TWO fleets of shields to create a giant shield. Okay, sure.
It’s working! Though one ship needs to fix it, they call it, and… Elnor answers! Why? He’s a Cadet? I know we had to let us know that Elnor is here and alive after all, but still, that’s very weird.
The explosive event creates a strange transwarp conduit wormhole. The New Borg request to join the Federation and guard the gates.
Picard has a chat with Guinan, and it’s clear that all of the timeline already happened like this. She explains Rios lived a nice long life with his new wife and they basically made the Doctors Without Borders. And he died in a bar fight. Uh, okay, weird addendum Guinan, kinda undercuts the whole thing.
AND PICARD.
STILL.
DOES NOT KISS HIS ROMULAN GIRLFRIEND. FUCKING KISS HER YOU DUMBASS.
Q DIED FOR THIS, YOU FOOL.
….Anyways this season was WAY better than expected. It’s not GOOD. But like, if this was a movie, I’d rather watch it than Star Trek Nemesis, sure.