Star Trek: Picard – Surrender Review

Well, that wasn’t quite the episode I was expecting at this stage of the game for Star Trek: Picard, but it did its job (which was to dispense of our first villain and move the story a step closer to resolving the main conflict of the season – what’s going to happen at Frontier Day). Was it wobbly at times, taking a few beats too long to get to the point that we knew it would reach? Yes. Did they once again punt the Jack Crusher question into another episode, annoying me and I suspect many others? Yes, although I do appreciate the writers allowing Troi a chance to get her piece of the storyline by experiencing the Red Door with Jack also adds additional stakes to the process that there wouldn’t have been had Vadic simply told us the secret or had Jack enter the door without possible collateral damage. But the bits that worked within the episode worked well, and there’s just something wonderful about seeing the entire Next Generation crew huddled around a conference room table once more.

The most interesting – and, for me, most impressive – aspect of “Surrender” was the brutality that was shown by the Changelings. Now, yes, this is a darker Trek – the benefit of streaming over network television is that you can swear, show blood and gore, and nudity, although so far we’ve been mostly spared of that – but I didn’t really think Terry Matalas and his team would let us see the execution of a member of the Bridge crew like that. Or those very dead bodies lining the halls of the ship – that one with the knife through the throat was, well, brutal. But in doing this, the series made clear just how much of a threat Vadic and her crew were to the Titan. Sure, Amanda Plummer has played Vadic with a humorous flare at times, but showing us just how vicious she could be, that she truly doesn’t value the lives of solids, well, that was completely effective.

For the first time in a long time, I was genuinely worried that there was going to be a slaughter of secondary characters. I was very worried Shaw would be one of the ones to die – and that says an awful lot about how well-crafted these Titan characters have been thus far. I even felt sad when Lieutenant T’Veen was the sacrificial lamb. Stakes, true stakes, have become such a rare thing in series like this, with key characters so wrapped up in plot armor that you don’t worry for their lives (see also the Data/Lore show down – was there ever any question that Data would be victorious?). But here, I was worried, not for our Legacy characters, but for the new ones that we have met and gotten to like over the course of this series. And that says a lot about how well the series has integrated these new characters, how strong the writing has been, and how good the acting has been, even in the smaller, less impactful roles of minor Bridge crew characters. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I would love to join in more adventures with the USS Titan at some point in the future.

Now, what was less impactful was dangling the Jack reveal and then pulling the rug out from under us again. Yes, it was mostly because we had a literal deus ex machina in Data magically taking over the ship and the expulsion of Vadic and her crew into the cold unforgiving reaches of space to freeze and die, but still, I wasn’t a huge fan of keeping that mystery for another week. With only two episodes left and Frontier Day “hours away,” we have very little time to learn the Jack secret (the seeming top vote getter online is now him being possessed by a Pah-wraith, which while cool, might be too deep of a DS9 cut for the series to work through at this late point in the game), process the impact of it on Jack, his family, and the crew, and then make it to Frontier Day and hopefully save the day (and get that Janeway cameo we’ve more or less been promised at this point). A major pet peeve of mine is when a series doesn’t leave itself enough runway to land its season storyline, and I have a fear that this might be the case here. Which would be a huge shame considering just how excellent this season has been thus far. A bit of a wobble like this episode is fine – and it brought us some great Troi moments, some fun Worf and Riker ones, and one last batch of Amanda Plummer chewing through the scenery, so there was lots to enjoy – but getting this story to a satisfying conclusion, with the weight of history and nostalgia bearing down on the series as well, isn’t an easy task.

Considering the strengths of this season’s writing, I do believe it can be done. We know what is left to cover, we have an idea of what might be to come (based on context clues we’ve been getting), and the hanging threads are few (which is always a good sign). But these next two episodes are going to be the trickiest of the bunch. I, for one, am excited to see just what’s in store for this final mission for the Enterprise crew.