SPOILERS from the beginning!
Picard is dead. Long live Picard.
Already the most talked about part of this two-part finale, and
deservedly so, it Picard's death and resurrection, his mind now
housed in a Synth golem. I'm certainly happy that we'll get more
Patrick Stewart in Picard's second season, but the
death-rebirth of the title character seems rather cheap, not to
mention predictable. From the moment it becomes clear that Picard's
neurological condition is taking its toll and he is unlikely to make
it through the finale, the golem that's lying on the slab is the
obvious way out. It's certainly not a rarity for a major character in
Star Trek to die just to come back again in short order; Spock
made a whole movie out of it, after all. It simply seems unnecessary.
Picard's neurological degeneration was seeded as far back as 1994,
when the finale of The Next Generation showed his future
battle with Irumodic syndrome. This could have made for some powerful
drama as he struggled with the illness, or they could have left it as
the sudden death it caused here. Instead, it's a minor inconvenience.
In fact, the way the final scenes play out make it look very much
like two endings were filmed. The first saw Picard dead and his crew
mourning, to stand as a final farewell if the series wasn't renewed.
The second saw him resurrected should the series get a second season.
In the event, the second ending is simply run after the first,
creating a rather dishonest emotional journey for the viewer. Picard
is ninety-four, for goodness' sake; it would be perfectly fitting to
have this be his last mission. No one asks the character if he wants
to be resurrected. It does give us a very beautiful scene with Data
(beautifully recreated by Brent Spiner), as the two old friends meet
in a quantum afterlife and discuss their respective demises. Whether
Data needed another final scene after his actual death in Star
Trek Nemesis is another matter, but this does provide some final
closure for the character and works well. I love his decision to die,
finally, noting that mortality is what gives life meaning. This,
though, just hammers home how Picard's reversed death is rather
meaningless.
Picard also has to come to terms with his new nature as a synthetic
human, which should provide some interesting material for season two,
although at first glance it doesn't appear to have changed him in the
slightest. Of course, this Picard is technically a copy of the
original, something which might not bother Data who was artificial in
the first place, but should surely cause some philosophical crises
for Picard as the story continues. Then again, this is a society that
regularly uses teleporters, so technically everyone's a copy...
It's a symptom of a finale that tries to do too much with too little
time, and leaves its many concepts underexplored. It's all very
exciting, very beautifully realised, and never anything but
entertaining, but it all rather falls apart when you think about it.
I've enjoyed the slower pace of the series, but the unfortunate
upshot is that a hell of a lot had to be covered in these two
episodes, and much of it failed to hang together. The society on
Coppelius (or Ghulion 4, if you prefer) could potentially be
fascinating, but isn't developed. Isa Briones impresses in the dual
role of Soji and her twin (triplet? Quadruplet?) Sutra, but there
isn't much more to Sutra than just being Evil Soji with classic
Data-colouring. She's dispatched so perfunctorily that we never get
to see if there is anything to her beyond malice and fanaticism.
Spiner, meanwhile, gets his own dual role, with Dr. Altan Inigo Soong
popping up as the previously unseen fourth Soong brother. Only this
is Noonien Soong's actual son, previously unheard of, and no wonder
Soong modelled all his androids after himself – judging by his
family, all male offspring are expected to look and sound identical
to their father. There isn't a great deal to differentiate Altan from
Noonien on TNG or Arik on Enterprise. I was expecting
him to turn out to actually be Lore in an upgraded body, but no, I
spoke to Soong.
He does bring out the best in Alison Pill, who excels as Dr. Jurati
in this episode, coming through her traumatic experiences as a more
confident, more capable person. She's still got off very lightly
though, with her murder of Maddox seemingly forgotten about and a
blossoming romance with Rios. A winning smile will get you very far,
it seems.
There's an absurd amount of switching sides in the final episode,
with Soji understandably jumping back and forth as she comes to terms
with her situation, but Soong and Narek changing motivations as the
slightest provocation. Narek's about-face is particularly hard to
swallow, even as it's clear he has real feelings for Soji. For that
matter, what happens to him? He just vanishes from the episode once
he's finished being useful. He doesn't even stick around to have a
word with Seven about his sister.
There are some amazing visuals and concepts here, though, and for
sheer space adventure fun, this really is top notch. The Borg cube
partly submerged in the sea is an amazing image, as are the orchids,
gigantic weapons that protect Coppelius from outsiders. It makes a
sort of sense that synthetic beings would use organic material in
their tools. The magic gizmo that Raffi and Rios, and later Picard
and Jurati, use is utterly ridiculous, a do-anything device that's
allows even lazier storytelling than the sonic screwdriver, but my,
it looks cool.
Riker swooping in with a huge fleet of starships to fight off the Tal
Shiar/Zhat Vash's similarly huge fleet of starships is, of course,
blatant fan service, but it feels appropriate in an episode that is
as much about celebrating TNG as rounding up the storyline.
Quite how Riker managed to swing that after several years of
retirement is as mysterious as how Oh could have a gigantic fleet of
ships at her disposal for her own mad vendetta, so at least that
evens out, and it's no less barmy than the Starfleet/Klingon/Kelpien
team-up against Control at the end of Discovery. Speaking of
which, the tentacled nightmare that starts to make its way out of the
wormhole above Coppelius looks very like Control's futuristic drones,
and it seems inevitable there'll be some link made in the future.
Lots of loose ends hanging, though. There's nothing to stop the
Synths from simply rebuilding the beacon and summoning the ancient
monsters again, and surely they now know where they are anyway and
could just come after them under their own steam. What's to say that
these very alien beings would have any affinity with the Coppelian
Synths, who are, after all, explicitly synthetic humans? Starfleet's
lifting of the ban on Synths seems undeservedly easy, especially
considering they've just proved that they're a major threat to
organic life. While Picard's saving of the Synths and his rebirth as
one of them resolves on side of his arc this series, his guilt over
his failure to save Romulus remains unresolved, although I suppose he
did help prevent them from all being slaughtered by evil AIs.
The first season of Picard has been a success, and even if the
finale didn't quite manage to do the story justice, it was suitably
entertaining. Strip away the Star Trek fanwank, though, and
what you're left with is extremely human AIs with organic spaceships,
huge space battles, and an ominous prophecy from the dawn of time
about how history will continue to tragically repeat itself. “Et in
Arcadia Ego,” is, at the end of the day, a perfectly reasonable
episode of Battlestar Galactica.
Thoughts and
observations:
Coppelius was supposedly traceable purely based on its moons and
violent storms in a red sky, yet when we get there, it's clear blue
skies for days. There's one brief scene featuring the scary sky.
It's very handy that there's a transwarp conduit with one end in deep
space and another in orbit of Coppelius, but no more unbelievable
than the one on Earth's doorstep in VOY: “Endgame.” Soong
and Maddox might even have chosen the planet due to its proximity to
a transwarp aperture.
The trip through transwarp takes La Sirena twenty-five light
years in fifteen minutes, although starships in recent Trek seem
to travel so fast this seems almost par for the course. In fact, for
a transwarp conduit journey this seems positively sluggish.
Picard and Jurati come up with a new version of the Picard Maneuvre,
the gambit first seen on TNG: “The Battle,” that Picard
devised during the Battle of Maxia against the Ferengi. As he points
out, this was on the USS Stargazer and it was a long time ago:
it was 2355, forty-four years before this episode. Sadly, Picard
doesn't perform the other Picard Maneuvre and tug his top down.
Riker captains the USS Zheng He, which he boasts is the most
advanced starship ever built by Starfleet. The remainder of the fleet
appears to be of the same class, though. No mention of any starship
named Enterprise – why not go the whole hog and have Riker
come to the rescue in the NCC-1701-E?
Narek believes the Romulan apocalypse myth dates back to before his
ancestors arrived on Vulcan. Spock previously theorised that Sargon's
people, the Arretians, may have been the ancestors of the Vulcans
(and by extension, the Romulans) in TOS: “Return to
Tomorrow.”
Picard is
so far the only Star Trek series
not to feature any Klingons. The Romulans have not appeared on
Discovery, so this
seems fair. I don't think any Trek series
has made so much use of having cast members filling multiple roles as
Picard, since James
Doohan provided about 90% of the character voices on the animated
series.
Raffi and Seven play kal-toh, the Vulcan game that appeared
throughout Voyager. Their hand-holding is sweet, and a
relationship between them could be wonderful, but they've not really
interacted a great deal so, again, it feels unearned. At least Jeri
Ryan got her LGBT Seven wish.
Dr. Soong has a synthetic cat, who he has named Spot 2.
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