Star Trek: Picard – Vox Review

There comes a point in every season of serialized television where the writers have to make a choice on just how to solve the conundrum that has been driving the plot forward until the climactic moment of the season. There’s no right or wrong answer to whatever choice they make. After all, it was the writers who came up with this problem in the first place, so their decision on how to solve it can’t, on a fundamental level, be wrong. However, there are better and worse options for the solution. You can pull something so far out of left field that the audience is forced to twist themselves in knots to figure out how all the pieces fit together. Or your audience can come up with their own options for a solution throughout the course of the season that inspires the fanbase and potentially make for a more interesting solution than the one the writers dream up. Or as was the case with Picard and the mystery of Jack Crusher, you can fall back on an old chestnut of a villain and then twist the storyline in knots trying to make this introduction seem novel. And then you can kill of the most interesting character to show up in live action Star Trek in years just to rub salt in the wound.

Of course it was going to be the Borg. I was hoping against hope it wouldn’t be – what with the disaster of their use last season – but here we are and it’s once again the Borg. But not just the Borg! Oh no. It’s a better Borg. A more cunning Borg. The kind of Borg who had the forethought to implant a Borg receiver into Picard’s DNA 35 years ago in hopes that it would be able to act as a means to keep tabs on the man, the myth, the legend. On the off chance that he might have a child which would then take that DNA and manipulate it into a transmitter, allowing this child to become even more important. The kind of Borg who are willing to team up with a race that has similar animosity toward the Federation and Starfleet so that they can work together to ensure that Picard’s particular DNA strand makes it into the transporter coding, infecting all Starfleet personnel (and presumably anyone else) under the age of 25 who uses the transporters, turning them, on command, into Borg drones*. A hell of a plan that somehow managed to be executed flawlessly. So many ways it could have failed, and yet, it didn’t.

*A kudos to the make-up team for coming up with a means to convey the horror of the young crewmembers turning into drones without the need for the complex exoskeleton make-up job. Effective and chilling, even when the story surrounding the make-up job wasn’t as much.

And yes, this is a sci-fi series so we’re expected to suspend our disbelief to a point. I get that. But let me tell you how much my eyes rolled when I realized it was going to be the Borg once more.* At least we didn’t suddenly get Jurati and her Borg rolling in to save the day – although there’s still one more episode in which that could happen (please god no). When you use a villain too many times, they start to become stale. Think back to how exciting it was to realize that the Changelings were back in the game. It felt new and fresh because we haven’t, as a fanbase, dealt with them since the close of DS9. There was a novelty to their inclusion. It was interesting to find out what they had been up to, to find out just how atrocious Section 31 had been in creating this cell of Changelings who wanted their revenge on the solids. It was compelling and different. But the Borg? We’ve dealt with them so many times that it’s hard to find the novelty in them anymore. Is this a slightly new use of them? Yes, but it’s also more of the same. They’re smarter, a bit more individualistic, but it’s still the same.

*And yes, we had plenty of foreshadowing that it would be the Borg. I mean, the Shaw speech about Wolf 359 reads as more than just wonderful character development. The voices aren’t just wisps of memory for Jack, but the Queen calling out to him. The red vines are like tubules, reaching for that one point of understanding for Jack. Plus, there’s all of last season and the Borg link there as well. The writing was well and truly on the wall.

Good writing makes sure contingencies are there to prevent holes from being poked in a narrative. On this level, this twist does check out. Why didn’t anyone figure out that linking the ships was a bad idea? Changelings. Why didn’t anyone think having the whole fleet on display at once was a bad idea? Changelings. Why didn’t anyone listen to the Titan before now? Changelings. What was once a great cool villain now becomes the excuse for all the plot holes. And that’s both a good thing and an annoying one. Because I wanted this ultimate reveal to be better, more interesting, and not just another “Oh hey, guess what? The Borg are once again meddling in Picard’s life!” I mean, my god. How many times must this man fight the Borg?

And then we come to the most frustrating element of the episode: The death of Shaw. This is where I felt the narrative was at its laziest. I can accept, begrudgingly, that we’re dealing with the Borg one more time. But to have Shaw get killed and then “accept” Seven of Nine? Ugh. That was so ridiculously telegraphed and lazy.* You know what would have been the more interesting choice? Keep Shaw alive. Follow him, Seven, and Raffi as they try to stay alive on the Titan while the Enterprise crew enact their plan (whatever it might be because we definitely didn’t hear a plan during that nostalgia bomb). And then, in the final episode, we get the moment where Shaw accepts Seven as herself and not as Commander Hansen. That’s the better arc. The more interesting story. And it preserves the best darn non-legacy character on the series for future installments. Yes, people die all the time and there doesn’t need to be a rhyme or reason to it. But you can raise the dramatic stakes without resorting to killing off a character who could have enhanced your final episode.

*While I hate that Shaw was killed, I did appreciate that it added some stakes to the storyline. You know what I absolutely don’t want to happen, even if it would mean the return of Shaw? Time travel to some how show up in the finale to wipe away everything that’s happened – all the dead bodies, all the people lost – and reset things at a point where we can all luxuriate in a happy ending. Even if that ending comes at the cost of a key character’s life (Jack, Picard, Data just because). Let’s not turn this into Black Widow jumping off the cliff in Endgame here. Please figure out something to solve this seemingly insurmountable issue facing our heroes without time travel.

There were better, more compelling ways to get our heroes into their endgame. Relying on the Borg yet again felt obvious and disappointing (although it was nice to have Alice Krige back as the voice of the Borg Queen once more). The death of Shaw was manipulative and lacked the dramatic stakes the writers seemed to believe would be generated by it. After a season that felt so fresh, so interesting, taking a right turn back to territory that has been well-tread time and time again and trying to make it interesting once more was a disappointing choice. We were so close to a truly great season of Star Trek. What a bummer.