Star Trek: Picard – Mercy Review

This week’s episode of Picard felt, much like Jurati’s mind, fractured in its effectiveness. Some elements worked very well – Jurati Queen’s continued plot to assimilate Earth, Soong’s downward spiral, the revelation that Q is dying and doesn’t seem to know how to go gentle into the dark night – while other pieces felt half-baked – the introduction of the FBI agent with a Vulcan encounter in his past, the still amorphous Raffi-Seven relationship, and Rios falling for the doctor. With a hodge podge of storylines that still seem like they need weeks to fully connect, we’re heading into the final two episodes of the season with a clear mission for the crew, but with too many dangling threads to possibly provide clean resolutions to as we hit the end of things.

First, the good. When it comes to huge, terrifying villains, less is more. And Picard has done a great job doling out small doses of Jurati’s Borg Queen – just enough so that we know she’s dangerous, but not too much to allow us to get stuck in her head and lose the effectiveness of her chilly exterior. Teaming the Queen with Soong – by appealing to his desire for fame and notoriety, no less – was a stroke of writing genius. This allows Alison Pill (who is doing a hell of a job sliding into this menacing character while still maintaining a few Jurati quirks) and Brent Spiner (who is just absolutely crushing it as this bitter, entitled shell of a man) to bounce off each other in delicious ways. And providing us the key element of why the timeline changed – if Renee Picard discovers the foundations for alien life on the Europa Mission, we get the beautiful future, if not, Soong’s advances in synthetics lead to the one where Earth is a genocidal monstrosity – was a nice touch and managed to tie off a seemingly forgotten storyline well.

Then there’s the Q of it all. So, our favorite omnipotent being is dying – which is a shock to him as well as Guinan, which suggests something sinister might be afoot here. But instead of a nice slide into nothingness, Q has been racked with fear as elements that make him him have begun to fail him. Yes, the analogy to how humans die of old age (the famed Seven Ages of Man speech from Shakespeare spells it all out better than I ever could here) is a bit on the nose, but John de Lancie sells it all. Losing his ability to snap is akin to a human losing their ability to walk, talk, or remember those they love. With age comes wisdom, but it also comes with a side of loss. Things that were once simple become complex trials.

While it hasn’t necessarily been the theme of this season – that would be reckoning with the past, in all the ways that statement resonates – age has been something that has been baked into the series from the start. Patrick Stewart is in his 80s now. Picard is an old man, much frailer than the one we recall from his days aboard the Enterprise. Similarly, all the returning Trek characters have aged. Riker and Trio retired. Data is gone, but we can see the age in Spiner as he plays Soong. To have Q grapple with what it means to approach death is a smart choice. I do wish the series was less concerned with all the bells and whistles it needs to inject in the story to make it “exciting” and opted to pull in a bit and really look at his internal struggles – there’s still time and I suspect we’ll get at least one great Picard-Q stand-off before all is said and done – but this was a lost opportunity for some real character work.

Speaking of the bells and whistles, oh boy, was the sequence with the FBI agent a misstep that added nothing to the series. Sure, it was interesting to see that the Vulcans made contact with a human far earlier than the official noted date of First Contact, but why put this into the series now? We could have accomplished everything those scenes did from a story and character perspective simply by having Q appear late to Guinan at her bar once Picard left. Why introduce a new character this late (an homage to Fox Mulder if there ever was one) and have him join the gang for the final chapter of the story? With the number of characters who know about the time travelers, they certainly could have done irreparable harm to the timeline already (although none of that matter if the Queen assimilates herself an army). These scenes felt like an attempt to pull in some of the warm, fuzzy feelings older Trek shows were great at producing – go to the planet, save the day, have a nice moral for the story. Only here, it was a half-baked attempt that didn’t land because the series simply scooped up the character and integrated him into the whole mess of a final act. We need forward momentum in the story, not side trips to recruit fired FBI agents.

And then there’s the show’s biggest failing: Navigating romantic relationships between its characters. The Rios falling in love with a woman from the past storyline is all well and good. Unfortunately, it’s become the only real arc for the character this season. He’s been wholly isolated from the rest of the cast for entire episodes at a time as the show attempts to build a relationship between two characters who only recently met. The only things that are making it work at all are the easy chemistry between the pair and the fact that we’ve seen this arc play out time and again in film and television, so we are comfortable enough with its beats to know where it’s going.

Now, the Seven-Raffi relationship is all kinds of disappointing. This is a classic case of telling where the show could be showing us how this apparent relationship developed and fell apart. We get a strange Elnor flashback (one that does, in fact, show us instead of telling us, but one that feels so out of place at this stage in the game that it actually detracts from the character development it’s trying to impose on the story since it comes far too late to feel like anything other than a last minute add-on), but we still have zero evidence of why Seven and Raffi care for each other. And let’s face it, where Rios has heaps of chemistry with his gal, there’s almost zero between Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd. Not their fault, it just isn’t there. They can bicker just fine, but I never see a spark beyond that. They seem like they don’t even want to be in the same room together – so how can we, the audience, root for their reconciliation? We also know nothing about the formation of the relationship and only know the bare minimum about its breakdown. Again, this is the writers trying to shoehorn a plot point into a series where we don’t need it. Just let them be colleagues and move on (and I say this as a queer woman who is always in favor of queer love stories – this isn’t one that works).

So, where does that leave us as the series approaches its end? Well, Q is dying, but the real threat is from the new Borg Queen who is assembling a team of highly skilled drones to take back the ship and then use it to assimilate Earth. All of that works incredibly well and should make for an explosive end to a pretty solid season of television. As for the rest of things . . . well, I suppose we’ll get some resolutions, albeit ones that may not feel wholly formed due to the writers taking some serious narrative shortcuts in the process. But, when it comes to comparing seasons, season two of Picard is leagues better than one – even if the writers are starting to fall into their past trap of too much plot just when it needs things to trim down.