TREK REVIEW: Picard 1-6 - The Impossible Box

After last week's episode, which featured no scenes aboard the Artefact, this instalment spends almost all its time there, as the two storylines finally meet and Picard's search for Soji reaches its culmination. It's surprising that the series has taken so long to bring the two sets of characters together, with Picard's crew and the Romulan-Borg set-up being kept entirely separate until now. While last week's episode was eventful, little of it actually advanced the plot. This week things really kick into high gear, and while I've enjoyed the more languid pace of this series, it's good to have some forward motion at last.

We've been waiting some time to see Picard return to a Borg cube for the first time since “The Best of Both Worlds,” and this episode does not disappoint. Stewart gives us some of his strongest acting ever in this role – I don't think I've seen him put this much into Picard since the torture scenes in “Chain of Command.” In contrast to his barely suppressed rage when confronting the Borg in First Contact – which was almost a quarter of a century ago – Picard is visibly terrified of the prospect of boarding a cube. There's an absolutely beautiful bit of direction where he reviews the reports of his assimilation, and the image of Locutus overlays Picard's own face. It's a simple yet very powerful image, and pushes home how Picard still bears the internal scars of his assimilation. Once he's actually boards the cube, his terror is overwhelming, and Stewart's performance steps up again, as the XBs surround him and he is momentarily convinced they are moving to attack him.

“They don't change,” says Picard, “they metastasize.” It's an exceptional line, and one that reflects his, and most characters', understandable attitudes to the Collective. Of course, we know that the Borg, or at least individual drones, can change. Seven of Nine's guest role reminds of various rehabilitated drones on Voyager, while Hugh himself makes a far more significant contribution to this episode than in his previous brief appearance. In a heart-warming moment, Picard and Hugh embrace, suggesting they must have had some contact since they last met in “Descent,” where they were respectful of each other but certainly not friends. Hugh has developed significantly as an individual, and has helped other former drones become compassionate beings, even if they don't all show much in the way of individuality. When he speaks to Hugh, though, Picard shows a different attitude: “You're showing what the Borg are underneath. They're victims, not monsters.”

On the other end of the story, the incest twins bring their operation to a close, as Narek finally gets Soji to confront her past. The scene where Soji realises that all her memories are fabricated, and that everything about her dates back only thirty-seven months, is powerful. Isa Briones gives an excellent performance here, and shows that she's very good in the role when she's actually given something interesting to react against. With Narek's help, Soji accesses her only real memories, which have hidden in her dreams, and from this discovers the location of her home planet (although surely there must be more than one planet in the galaxy that could conceivably have a similar sky). He then proceeds to try to gas her to death, which is an especially cruel method of execution considering that he could just blast her. He seems genuinely upset as he walks away, suggesting he has real feelings for Soji, which if anything makes his actions even more disgusting.

He really hasn't thought it through, of course, as all this does is activate Soji, just as Dahj's assassination attempt activated her. We get some great action to lead the episode out, as Picard, Elnor and Hugh battle their way to the Borg Queen's chamber and make an escape through a spatial trajector. Picard saves Soji, for now at least, so his mission has been a success, but he's left Hugh and Elnor, plus everyone on La Sirena, deep in Romulan territory with little hope of escape.

On the whole, Picard doesn't actually come of very well in this episode, for all his bravery. He uses Raffi, who is visibly drunk and distressed, to gain entry to the Artefact, forcing her to utilise and endanger one of her few remaining friendships to ease the channels. His rescue of Soji is perfunctory by necessity, but he does little to put the poor girl at ease after her entire worldview has been upended. One gets the impression of someone for whom the mission is the most important thing, never mind what else gets broken on the way.

(Other) best line: Picard is “so Federation, his face is probably on the damn brochure.”

Sexy Trek: Dr. Jurati and Rios get sexy with each other, and while they both say it's a bad idea, you really can't blame either of them.

Thoughts and observations:

So, the poor old Sikarians from Voyager have been assimilated. The Borg have appropriated spatial trajector technology from them, which handily for the plot allows a quick hop through space, to anywhere up to 40,000 light years away. When Voyager tried to use this technology, they were scuppered by the fact that the planet Sikaris itself was essential to its function, but either the Borg or the Sikarians themselves seem to have overcome this. Quite why the Borg Queen needs an escape route, when she can seemingly survive death, is unclear.

I like the line, “The Romulans are in a 250-year bad mood.” Starfleet first made contact with the Romulans in 2152 on Enterprise, 247 years before this episode.

Hugh is a Federation citizen, which is intriguing. 

The hug between Hugh and Picard was apparently not in the script, but was worked out by Stewart and Del Arco. Which is just lovely.

TREK REVIEW: Picard 1-5 - Stardust City Rag

Two ex-Borg with snappy eyewear

First off, I've got some issues with the opening part of this episode. Bringing Icheb back just to kill him and give Seven a vengeful backstory is a bit cynical, but fine. It works, though, and to be honest, there isn't really much else to do with Icheb. What I dislike is the level of gore involved. I've a serious aversions to things happening to eyes, and I couldn't watch it at all, so the missus watched it for me, but she ensures me that it was very visceral, and I don't think that's really necessary for Star Trek. I'm fine with some blood and horror in Trek (I just watched “Conspiracy” from 1988, and that's gruesome) but this is over the top, and it really is cynical.

Apart from that though, this episode is great fun. It's a bit of a departure for a Picard-led Trek, the sort of grimy adventure we'd expect from the Kelvin films, or, well Star Wars. Any pretence of Picard being French has no gone completely out the window, with Stewart clearly having a whale of a time camping it up as an eye-patched scoundrel with a raucous French accent. Rios gets to play a ne'er-do-well who's a bit more untrustworthy and flamboyant than his usual style, and is clearly the sort of gun-happy character you want along on a criminal enterprise like this.

I'm really glad hats are back in the 24th century

Meanwhile, Raffi gets some considerable background exploration, as she takes the opportunity to catch up with her estranged son and we get a good idea just how badly her life has derailed since she dropped out of Starfleet. Hurd gives a wonderful, human performance in this episode, and I love that Star Trek is now exploring depression and addiction as ongoing issues, rather than assuming that these are things that will somehow have vanished by the 24^th century, or limiting them to one-episode morality tales.

It's still a bit unclear why Raffi's son has gone to Freecloud to look at fertility treatment with his Romulan partner, given that they're clearly not entirely unwelcome on Earth. Then again, it's never really been clear why humans or other Federation subjects would voluntarily go to live on a seedy, cut-throat world like Freecloud in the first place. Maddox is on the run, of course, because his work is now illegal, but so many characters through Trek's history seem to have upped and left the cosiness of the Federation to go work like a dog or take up crime for a living. It's pretty baffling.

Still, Freecloud is a great addition to the 24^th century, a wretched hive of scum and villainy that provides a colourful backdrop for the adventure and adds to the ever more richly painted picture of this post-Nemesis future. I dare say we'll visit there again in future Trek productions. Maddox has got himself in with the wrong crowd, of course, being in debt to a nasty crime queen called Vajazzle, or something. Not sure if she's human or not, really, but she's decided that the best way to make a living is to butcher former Borg for parts. It's a horrible concept, but an understandable one, given how advanced Borg tech is and how hated the ex-drones are. The fate of a former drone – even a Starfleet one, like Icheb – doesn't seem to bother anyone in the galaxy at large. While this episode doesn't feature any scenes on the Artefact – and they aren't missed, to be fair – it ties into the contempt with which the XB's are viewed by the Romulans studying them.

All of this, of course, is calculated to give Seven a reason to crash back into Trek. Jeri Ryan is excellent in this episode, displaying remarkable chemistry with Stewart in spite of their characters never having met before. While any number of Voyager characters could be brought back to the franchise, Seven makes sense, not merely due to her popularity, but because she has something in common with Picard. The chance to have the two Borg escapees interact and discuss their trauma is irresistible, and illustrates how different their characters are. This is a very different Seven to the one we knew on Voyager, and I can understand fans who say they don't recognise her, but I can see it. Seven has been back in the Alpha (and now Beta) Quadrants for twenty-one years now, and has naturally evolved in her time away from the Collective. This is a more human, perhaps more flawed Seven, but there's a lot of the old Seven still there: her drive, her resourcefulness, the vulnerability and emotion that she tries to hide under a colder exterior.

There's also been some outcry against Seven's decision to beam back down and exact revenge on the woman who tortured her surrogate son to death (by implication having formed a relationship with her to get to him). Picard bangs on about revenge being different to justice and sticking to their principles just like you'd expect, but this is a completely lawless area of space, where murder and extortion goes unpunished. Even the local militia, the Fenris Rangers to which Seven now apparently belongs, seem to have lost influence. There is no justice coming for this monster of a woman, and Seven's execution of her is completely justified. In any case, Picard, as the captain of a military vessel, has ordered the deaths of probably thousands of people in combat over the years, yet this is always considered to be acceptable and barely even remarked upon. Most of the Klingons, Romulans, Ferengi and Cardassians crewing ships destroyed by Starfleet were doubtless ordinary folk doing their jobs. Yet vapourising a murderer who would clearly otherwise keep on murdering is somehow below the belt.

In other news, Jurati is the murderous spy we all expected her to be, and Alison Pill gives a powerful performance as someone who's mission is clearly tearing her apart. There's a real sense that we can't quite trust anyone on this ship, and that Picard is becoming strangely complacent amongst them. For all that this is a fun and eventful episode, though, it's going to be remembered for the return of Jeri Ryan to Star Trek, still looking incredible and one of the best damned actors in the franchise.

Thoughts and observations:

There were a lot of fan-pleasing references in this episode. It's easy for these things to go too far and create a small-universe situation, but I felt in this episode they made it all feel part of the same future. Quark's Bar is now apparently a franchise, and Quark is famous enough to be name-dropped as part of a faked backstory. Dabo and Orion slave girls are among Freecloud's dubious pleasures. Mr. Mot's Hair Emporium was probably my favourite, though.

There's a lovely moment where a snatch of the Voyager theme plays over Seven's heart-to-heart with Picard.

Boozy beverages available on Freecloud include tranya – the First Federation drink from the TOS episode “The Corbomite Maneuver” - and Temtibi Lagoon, a cocktail named for a feature of the planet Risa. Seven drinks a straight-up bourbon, so clearly she can take her drink a lot better than in Voyager's time.

Neither Maddox nor Icheb are played by the original actor for the role. Actually, it's pretty harsh on Manu Intiraymi, who has spoken in the past how keen he would be to pick up the role of Icheb again, and apparently wasn't even approached for this. He has returned to the role for the fanfilm Star Trek: Renegades, which is set after the character's death here.

The planet where Icheb meets his unpleasant end is called Vergessen, which means “forgotten” or “oblivion” in German, and is located in the Hypatia system, named for the Byzantine physician and philosopher. It is, presumably, in the Beta Quadrant.

Freecloud is the Alpha Doradus system, which is a real star about 170 light years away in Dorado.

Vajazzle's right hand man is a hulking lizardman called a Beta Annari, a species that can apparently smell who you had for breakfast and what you last had sex with.

On the Origins of the Doctor

There is a ridiculous amount of ire being directed at the most recent episode of Doctor Who for its latest retcon. Some idiots have even complained to the BBC because they didn't like this latest work of fiction. Look, we fans are all invested in this show, and there's no obligation to like any particular element of it, but seriously?

The daftest thing is that's there was never a sacrosanct background for the Doctor. The ideas that fans are holding onto as the core mythology came in gradually, over years and years, and are in flagrant contradiction to many elements that came before, or even at the same time. Dozens of writers have twisted Doctor Who into different shapes and it's absurd to attack this latest revamp as if it's somehow cultural offensive.

Back when Doctor Who started, there was no series bible. The original character outlines suggested the Doctor was from the far future and was fleeing a galactic war, but none of this even made it into the final script for the pilot episode. In this, which you can easily see on The Beginnings DVD box set, the Doctor and Susan are a bit more concrete about their origins than in the broadcast version of An Unearthly Child. Susan specifically says she's from the 49th century, rather than just "another time, another world." There's nothing in either version to say that she and the Doctor are aliens, they could be humans from an advanced future civilisation. Indeed, the Doctor's line, "I tolerate this century but I don't enjoy it" suggests the latter.

Different episodes throughout the Hartnell era give hints that they are alien beings, but others suggest they are merely humans. The Doctor explicitly refers to himself as human more than once. Examinations only suggest one heart in his body, which continues through the Troughton years. On the other hand, the Daleks, in The Dalek Masterplan, when the Doctor is referred to as human, say "that is how he appears to you." In The Evil of the Daleks, they say his travels through time are what have made him "more than human." This is after his first change of appearance - not yet called a regeneration - which the Doctor says is "part of the TARDIS." In the original script for The Destiny of Doctor Who, which would evolve into The Power of the Daleks, the Doctor makes it clear he has changed before, but this doesn't make it to the broadcast version.

It's very clear in the earliest episodes that the Doctor built the TARDIS, and Susan evens states that she came up with the name. It's not until The Time Meddler in 1965 that we meet another member of their people, the Meddling Monk, and while retroactively he's been considered a Time Lord, there's nothing here that suggests he's not another advanced future human. It isn't until The War Games in 1969 that the Doctor gets an official backstory, and we learn that he is a Time Lord. He says the Time Lords are "immortal, barring accidents," but there's no hint that they can all change appearance like he has.

The shift into colour brings the Doctor down to Earth, but in retaliation to this, his background is now much more explicitly alien. The Pertwee Doctor has two hearts and inhuman blood, and displays numerous biological oddities throughout his tenure. We learn a lot more about the Time Lords during his era, meeting the Master, his one-time school chum, now best enemy, and later Omega, the founder of Time Lord society. The Three Doctors brings different Doctors together for the first time, with Hartnell's version called the earliest by the Time Lords, so that seems pretty clear cut. We hear the name Gallifrey for the first time in 1973. In Pertwee's final story, we get the first use of the word regeneration to describe the Doctor's transformations, and learn that it's something all Time Lords can do. We also learn that more accomplished Time Lords like K'anpo can project their own future incarnations for a little help around the house.

Tom baker's era is one of dark and mysterious forces from the dawn of time. Robert Holmes rewrote The Brain of Morbius, which provides a great deal of new Time Lord mythology, such as the war criminal Morbius and the Sisterhood of Karn, who assist the Time Lords when regeneration fails. The Doctor loses his mind battle with Morbius, being pushed "back - back to (his) very beginnings!" The eight faces seen after Pertwee, Troughton and Hartnell are very clearly intended to be earlier versions of the Doctor. This was explicitly the production team's intent, and they should know, they were those faces. However, the scene is ambiguous enough that fans have been able to interpret it other ways over the year.

Not much later, the same writer would give us The Deadly Assassin, a story that reworked the omnipotent Time Lords as stuffy old space dons and the Master as a cadaverous ghoul. Now it's Rassilon who founded Time Lord society; the black hole that powered it in The Three Doctors is called the Eye of Harmony and kept hidden under the Capitol. We get a limit on Time Lord regenerations - twelve regenerations, thus thirteen lives, in order to give the Master a mission. Even here when the limit is introduced, it's clear it can be overcome with enough power. Going by Morbius, it looks like Tom Baker must be the penultimate Doctor, barring a reprieve.

We see other versions of regenerations over the next few years. The Minyans rejuvenate thousands of times, Mawdryn and the mutants suffer endless mutation, both using Time Lord technology. The Master is able to steal an alien body, rejuvenating it in the process, using the power of the Source of Traken, and is offered a new set of regenerations in The Five Doctors. Oddly enough, he's offered this by Borusa, who is searching for the secret of immortality when he seems to already have it at his fingertips. This story has the Hartnell Doctor concretely state he is "the original," even though he's been recast, and when he meets Davison he exclaims, "Ah! So there are five of me now!" Mawdryn Undead also backs this up and states the Doctor has eight more regenerations left from his original twelve. So the Davison Doctor is the fifth.

Come Remembrance of the Daleks in 1988, and the new production team are sowing seeds of a new backstory, with the Doctor hinting that he was around when the first time travel experiments were happening on ancient Gallifrey. Oh, and Rassilon and Omega were contemporaries, so that solves that one. Lady Peinforte is ready to reveal the Doctor's secrets from the old time, but he doesn't seem to care. Over the years, the Docotr has suggested he left his home out of fear, or boredom, or a desire to be part of the universe, not just watch it. Here, though, he's been laying traps for deadly aliens, fighting Fenric and the Gods of Ragnarok "all through time!" and even took the Hand of Omega to London in 1963.

These developments continues in the New Adventures novels, culminating in Lungbarrow, which created an entirely new backstory for the Doctor. In this telling, Time Lords are woven from genetic looms in families of "cousins," a response to a curse of sterility in the ancient times of Gallifrey. Regeneration was created as part of this. The Doctor is, in fact, the reincarnation of the Other, the mysterious third architect alongside Rassilon and Omega, who was among the last of the womb-born. He through himself into the first Loom and was rewoven, centuries later, as the First Doctor. This makes Susan a bit of an anomaly, so it's revealed she's not the Doctor's granddaughter, but the Other's, and the Doctor went back and rescued her from ancient Gallifrey. The suggestion is that the faces seen in Morbius are the faces of the Other, although he explicitly can't regenerate.

The TV Movie comes along in 1996, revealing that the Doctor is half-human on his mother's side, and Lungbarrow gamely lays a few hints to this. The movie also moves the Eye of Harmony into the TARDIS, makes it operable by humans only, and also has the Master exterminated and turned into a body-snatching slug. This is all considerably upsetting to some fans, but the original treatments would have had the Doctor and the Master as half-brothers, sons of the Time Lord explorer Ulysses.

Just because this never makes it to the screen doesn't mean it doesn't factor into the novels. Lance Parkin had already suggested the Doctor was much older than he seemed in the Missing Adventure Cold Fusion, where he meets his million-year-old Gallifreyan wife and shares memories of an earlier incarnation who looks rather like one of the Morbius faces. He follows this up with The Infinity Doctors, a Past Doctor Adventures novel that takes all the lore about Gallifrey and the Time Lords from years of material and tries to weave it together, in spite of the contradictions. The Doctor involved sounds like he might be played by Paul McGann like in the movie, but he might not, and the story is notoriously impossible to place in location with others. Characters from this are mentioned in Blum and Orman's Unnatural History, an Eighth Doctor Adventure that sees the Doctor meet someone who might be his father, while also revealing that the Doctor's biodata - kind of temporal DNA - has been altered dozens of times, rewriting his history. According to this, he's always been half-human, but only since he regenerated into the McGann model. This isn't even the last of it.

The destruction of Gallifrey by the Doctor in a great Time War happens twice, first in the EDAs and then as part of the backstory of the revived TV series. As part of this, some authors work on the idea that Gallifrey was merely blown up, and others than it was erased from history. To resolve the paradox of the latter idea, Justin Richards rewrites reality so that the Doctor is actually a crystalline skeleton man from the end of the universe, who eventually turned into the First Doctor and landed in London, 1963. This does not stick. Parkin follows it up with the final novel in the range, which actually brings Ulysses and Penelope - a human character from the New Adventures - in for a flashback as the Doctor's parents. The Master's dad is in it too. At least, all this is heavily implied.

Doctor Who returns to the screen after a couple of false starts as animated webcasts, one of which brings back the McCoy Doctor, makes him the last of the godlike Time Lords, then kills him off, and another which makes Richard E. Grant the official Ninth Doctor before he's overwritten completely. Russel T. Davies avoids much continuity in the Christopher Eccleston series, although he states he's a Time Lord and we learn all the others were wiped out in a Time War. There's no Eye of Harmony at the heart of the TARDIS, but looking into it can grant superpowers and/or kill you. The next Doctor is played by David Tennant, and the references to classic material creep in. The Master is resurrected, the Doctor regenerates into himself, and a handy spare hand is grown into a new Doctor, who is half-human. The new Doctor doesn't like being half-human at all, so it certainly doesn't seem like his mum was human.

The Next Doctor plays with the idea of Tennant leaving by having a decoy next incarnation - "or next but one, a future Doctor anyway" - and there's no suggestion the Doctor is running low on bodies. He's not keen to regenerate when it comes, although the Master has apparently cracked immortality at last. The Time Lords return from the last day of the Time War, where the Doctor destroyed them to prevent them from unleashing hell and destroying the universe. They're led by Rassilon, who's looking decidedly more active these days.

Moffat takes over and Matt Smith becomes the Doctor. The sixth series sees the Doctor apparently die, but also shows he's clearly got some regenerations left. But the death is a ruse so perhaps the regenerations are too. However, Eccleston's reluctance to return for the 50th anniversary special sees Moffat create an entirely new version of the Doctor, played by the great John Hurt, only he doesn't call himself the Doctor so the numbering is maintained, arguably. We finally see McGann regenerate into a new Doctor, but not the one we were expecting. Time travel shenanigans mean that Gallifrey was never destroyed at all, as "all thirteen" Doctors, including the next one, hide it in a pocket universe from which there may be no return.

The next episode, it returns, speaking through a crack in time and almost triggering another Time War. The Matt Smith Doctor, who even calls himself the Eleventh, reveals he's actually the last, since John Hurt and the double-Tennant both use up a regeneration. The Time Lords give the Doctor a whole new bunch of regenerations. Regeneration number thirteen turns him into Peter Capaldi, and he wonders if he may ever stop regenerating. We've also learned in Moffat's tenure that Time Lords can change gender when they regenerate, something we've only seen in semi-official comedy stories before. Missy is revealed as the new Master. Gallifrey is moved out of its pocket universe to the end of time, the Doctor discovers the secret of immortality in two very different ways, and eventually, he is mortally wounded fighting the Cybermen.

He meets the First Doctor again, recast but still calling himself the original. The First Doctor reveals he actually left Gallfrey to explore the problem of good and evil in the universe. We learn that he refused to regenerate at first, which we certainly never saw in 1966, and he's a lot more sexist than we remember too. The two Doctors regenerate after giving each other a pep talk, and the Doctor finally becomes a woman, which makes a certain type of fan very angry.

Given all of that, getting upset about the Timeless Child seems a bit silly, really.

WHO REVIEW: 12-10 - The Timeless Children

So, has the whole of Doctor Who canon been blown open, irrevocably altered for ever so that nothing will be the same again?

Well, no, but it has been played with, enriched, and spun around. The thing is, Doctor Who has never really had a canon, per se. There's no specific, official edict as to what "counts," what is apocryphal, and what we should take as part of the "truth" of the story. Pretty much everyone agrees that if it's on TV, it's a part of "real" Doctor Who, although some still-angry fans refuse to accept anything since 2005, or even 1996. Even if we ignore the hundreds of books, audios, comic strips, video games, stage plays and sweet cigarette cards, there are still over eight hundred episodes broadcast over fifty-six-and-a-third years. The Doctor Who backstory has been rewritten and added to so many times it's barely coherent as it is.

SPOILERS FROM HERE

TREK REVIEW: Picard 1-4 - "Absolute Candor"

After all these years, are we still pretending that Jean-Luc Picard is actually French? Because he is every inch the Englishman abroad in this episode, striding into the relocation camp on Vashti in the prologue flashback in his white suit and broad-brimmed hat. He's got a serious case of white saviour complex in this episode, and in fairness, he has saved a lot of people, but Christ, does he know it.

While the long pilot ostensibly finished last episode, this instalment is another step in the building of the main cast, with Evan Evagora joining as the Romulan space ninja Elnor. He's basically an elf from The Lord of the Rings, isn't he? Evagora does pretty well as a stoic warrior boy from an advanced martial culture, although the Australian accent is slightly odd coming from a Romulan. Then again, in this series we've had English and Irish Romulans, so why not? Why should all the aliens sound American? I want a Brummie Klingon before the season's out, please.

We learn a lot about Romulan culture in this episode, both on Vashti and on the Artefact. We've never really seen much of it beyond the military, the government and Tal Shiar before, so having new elements to explore sets this series apart from earlier Romulan stories. The Qowat Milat are good fun – a group of warrior nuns with a vow of truth and honesty is just a great fantasy idea and nothing like what we've seen from the Romulans before. Elnor must have had one hell of a childhood, though, with all those women being relentlessly honest with him. I can't help but agree with Jurati – the “way of absolute candor” sounds pretty irritating.

Vashti itself is an interesting location. It seems that it was previously a Romulan/Federation cooperative, which is something that could never have existed in the pre-Nemesis period of the 24^th century, and it makes sense that this was a prime location for settling Romulan refugees. It's deteriorated since then, though, and the “Romulans Only” signs seem almost redundant as it looks like all non-Romulan elements have long since pulled out. Some commenters are questioning how poverty can exist in this beautiful future, but frankly, it's pretty clear that neither the Federation for what remains of the Romulan government has the resources to support every planet that needs help. Calling the UFP a post-scarcity society isn't really accurate, but it's certainly on its way to being one, but any society would need a huge infrastructure to keep things functioning. A major crisis – the destruction of Romulus or the attack on Mars – would lead to a huge change in both the availability and distribution of resources. If a colony was let go it would break down very quickly.

It's understandable that there's some bad blood towards the Federation from Romulan refugees, but the characters we meet here are particularly hate-fuelled. The big guy who stands up to Picard seems more pissed off that the Federation offered to help the Romulans in the first place rather than leave them to help themselves. It's a wildly inconsistent attitude, and while that's hardly unusual for someone with a bigoted point of view, it's annoying to see Picard shoulder the blame for that too. Frankly, even together it would have been impossible for the Empire and the Federation to save everyone on Romulus and Remus, but at least Picard's efforts helped save thousands. White saviour complex it might be, but it's gratifying that he'll take none of that shit from the Romulan survivors. He's guilty for not doing more, but he'll never apologise for trying.

Events on the Artefact stretch on, and to be honest they're becoming a little boring. The Incest Twins are becoming irritating in the extreme, and Soji isn't really being afforded much in the way of character. Dajh made more of an impression in her short screen time than her sister has in four episodes, and given that they're played by the same actress, it can only be the writing that's at fault there. It's interesting to learn more about Ramdha, and her insights into Romulan mythology, although the intention seems to be that she is somehow linking Soji with an impending apocalypse. Given that Romulus has been annihilated, you'd think that Romulan Armageddon has rather been and gone.

It's a mostly enjoyable episode, but one whose runtime is overshadowed by its final moments. The La Sirena crew spend a bit too much effort pushing that the pilot of the ship that has saved them from the Bird-of-Prey is a “he,” so it's pretty clear we're going to have the shock reveal they're a woman. Still, it's an effective cliffhanger, even if the reveal does swamp the rest of the episode. But who cares? Seven of Nine's back.

Thoughts: I like that we're explicitly spending some time in the Beta Quadrant, which has been skirted over in most series, even though logically loads of episodes before have to have taken place there, most of Enterprise and Discovery take place there and the USS Voyager, notoriously, should have reached it long before the series ended.

It makes sense that there's a power vacuum since Romulus was destroyed. So far we know that there's a Romulan Free State, possibly residual Romulan Empire, the mysterious Fenris Rangers and sundry petty warlords.

Random thought: what's the status of Nimbus 3 in this period? I can imagine that a lot of Romulan refugees would have made their way there, assuming it's still in neutral territory.

It's a Romulan Bird-of-Prey! Absolute classic starship, how dare Rios insult it?

With Orla Brady, Michelle Hurd and now Jeri Ryan, this series is full of sexy older women. Basically, I want a Trek version of Ocean's 8. (Ooh, my fanfic senses are tingling.)