Star Trek: Picard: Episode 2: Maps and Legends
There was bound to be a drop off. It was probably too much to expect to think that episode two of Star Trek: Picard (STP) would live up to the standard set by episode one.
It is also completely understandable that the show will need some time to set the stage, lay the ground work, for the rest of the series, making it difficult to incorporate too much in the way of plot development so early on. This is a complex story, based on an even more complex history that spans more than four decades of television – STP needs to be true to Star Trek lore to please the die-hard fans, it needs to be complex enough from the outset to keep their interest but it must also provide enough basic information to attract an entirely new audience.
All of that being said, STP Episode 2, “Maps and Legends”, still came as something of a disappointment after the remarkable quality of the premiere “Remembrance”.
The quality of the visual and audio presentation has slipped somewhat – as if not quite as much time and care have been put into the episode – and “Maps and Legends” plays more like a series of incidents, each including a scattering of important nuggets of information, than a cohesive plot.
And the writing, though it has its moments of splendour, is also sloppy.
Sloppy writing can be highly problematic when the creative team is also working very hard to build a layered mystery, a Game-of-Thrones-like complexity where it is impossible to know whom to trust, to understand who is on whose side, or even how many sides there are.
In its original form, Star Trek began as an almost strictly episodic franchise. In TOS, there was slow development of characters and relationships with no over-arching plot that linked the episodes together. In TNG, this pattern held to a significant extent, though the character development was enhanced and, thanks to characters like Wesley Crusher and Q, there existed a certain amount of linear story development.
DS9 had, at its core, the developing stories first of the repatriation of Bajor and the Station from the Cardassians and then the war with the Founders and was, therefore, less episodic; even so, the underlying stories were reasonably straightforward in their trajectories.
Voyager, by definition, was the story of one Star Fleet ship’s desperate effort to cross vast spans of space to return home. Ironically, despite this clear, consistent, ever-present basic plot, Voyager represented a return to a more episodic approach, an approach that was mirrored in the early seasons of Enterprise. With the introduction of the Xindi plot, Enterprise’s final seasons featured a single story-line.
And then came Discovery, a series that is as firmly set in the 21st century as it is in the more distant future. Driven almost entirely by continuing story lines, Discovery layered conflict on top of conflict on top of conflict, obfuscating the true nature of just about every major character so that, before three episodes had been completed, viewers had absolutely no idea who was good, who was evil and who was simply caught up in the conflicts.
And that’s clearly where STP is heading. The search for Data’s progeny is the core story line that will drive at least the first season of the show and, as Episode 2 clearly demonstrates, the focus of each episode will be more on layering complexity and nudging the core story line forward than on creating independent stories.
Is this a good thing? For the older members of the fan base, probably not. We’re the kind of people that found The Orville a more familiar successor to the Star Trek we love than Discovery. For the younger potential fans, perhaps this approach is good thing. It falls in line with the way most successful modern television shows are going – The Wire, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, these highly successful shows and many more sacrifice short episodic story-lines for the greater story and expect fans to tune in faithfully every week (or binge watch) to keep track of the story.
By the end of STP episode 2, our understanding of the players in the central conflict has been significantly undermined. We have Picard, who is clearly good. And then we have everyone else. We meet the Commander in Chief, who opposes Picard directly, Commodore Oh (Vulcan or Romulan?) who appears, without a hint of deference, to report to and support the CinC, only to reveal that she is a counter-agent. Her staff person, Rizzo (Human or Romulan?), appears to support Oh, but perhaps she and her brother(?) Narek may be working against Oh. Even Narek may be working against his sister(?) who may be working against Oh who is working against the CinC.
Is Soji good or evil? Is Bruce Maddox good or evil?
What does the Tal Shiar have to do with all of this and, even more importantly, who are the Zhat Vash and what is their role in the current troubles? Who is Raffi, what is her relationship to Picard and whose side is she on?
To be frank, I think this kind of obfuscation to be a bit of a cheat that permits the writers to move the story in any direction they wish to turn it, at any time, rather than moving forward with a straight-forward plot that requires them to be skilled in creating tension. Tension is created by surprise, not by careful planning and excellent writing.
But that’s just me.
Let’s talk in a little more detail about “Maps and Legends” and how it moves STP forward.
Episode 2 introduces us to the Zhat Vash, the top secret Romulan organisation that operates behind the veil created by the already fearsome Romulan Secret Service, the Tal Shiar.
Laris first introduces Picard to the ZV and, even as she does, Zhaban undermines our belief in what we are learning. Laris tells Picard that the ZV is a “much older cabal” than the Tal Shiar and later that, “at the heart of the Zhat Vash mission” lies a “deep unassuageable loathing” of artificial life. That, in itself, appears to me to be contradictory – if the Tal Shiar is an ancient organisation and the ZV is even older, how is possible for artificial intelligence to be at the core of the ZV mission when artificial intelligence is a relatively recent development – i.e. in the past four hundred or so years.
Through this process, we realise that Laris and Zhaban are, apparently, members of the Tal Shiar who have, by assignment or voluntarily, taken responsibility for the safety of the great Picard. And, worse, that the ZV appear to be carrying out covert operations on Earth, with technology that appears to outstrip anything the Federation has to offer.
Picard continues to focus on the task he has decided is more important than anything in the galaxy – tracking Data’s other daughter, Soji – despite the fact that several people (including the CinC and Laris) mock him for his hubris in deciding that a mission that is so personally important to him must also be important to the universe. He creates a confrontation with the CinC that ends, inevitably, in shouting, with Picard starting with requests, rising to demands before finishing with threats.
This sets off the chain of communication that establishes for the viewer the layers of complexity in the forces that oppose Picard, and each other.
Meanwhile, at the Borg Artefact Research Institute, Soji and Narek are getting to know each other a little better and we are getting to know what the Institute is up to – and it has to do with understanding the Borg even better. Hmmm…. Considering the very pointed explanation about how the Borg Collective disconnects itself from the drones on dead cubes, do you think maybe, just maybe, that, at some point, the ultimate haters of cybernetics (the ZV) and the galaxy’s most perfect cybernetic collective (the Borg) may come face to face with the fate of the Universe hanging in the balance?
And the only man who, apparently can bring that confrontation to a positive conclusion is dying from the after effects of a Borg implant?
Some other things we learned:
· Food replicators aren’t as good in the post TNG days as they were in TOS days – the Utopia Planitia skeleton crew complain about the food, though one charmingly asks his colleague: “Do you want fries with that?”;
· There exists some kind of anti-cybernetic society in the Federation that calls its members “Sisters”;
· First Contact Day is apparently a thing, though it was never a thing at any time in any previous Star Trek series;
· The Gorn Hegemony has risen to the level where it stands beside the Federation, the Klingon Empire and the like;
· There may just be a “nest” of synthetic beings in addition to Soji and her now dead sister, though where it might be located, we do not know.
Some excellent or useful lines of dialogue:
· The artifact is lost, severed from the collective, vulnerable
· I find beauty in imperfection
· For a relic, you’re in excellent shape
· Maybe, if you’re lucky, it will kill you first.
· Sheer fucking hubris
· The pitiable delusions of a once great man desperate to matter
· This facility has gone 5843 days without an assimilation
· I never really cared for science fiction; I guess I just didn’t get it
· If it’s important to Jean Luc Picard, it’s important to the whole galaxy
Episode 2 was not as good as episode 1. There is no doubt about that. In fact, Episode 2 wasn’t really an episode at all. It was a base coat, a set up, the stage directions at the beginning of a potentially wonderful play. It had its moments, to be sure, and its true value will only be known once we see what it leads in future episodes.
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