This is what she had to say:
I'm not sure I agree entirely with your take on Picard. I don't read him as naive so much as betraying his white masculinity. He was once extremely powerful and revered. He appears to have had a 2-decade temper tantrum -- not entirely without reason -- after the Federation accepted his resignation. He has less power now but he still acts like he has it all and he is getting resistance, especially from women he has known for a long time -- the admiral who refused him a ship and then Raffi. I hope this might be conscious on the part of the writers and that they might show him becoming more self-aware. But who knows. His brilliance and bravery is still there.
She also asked me if I know Michael Chabon and his published novels.
How prescient does Karen seem now, after STP Episode 8, “Broken Pieces”? Written by Chabon, this episode is driven by powerful women, from Soji, Jurati, Seven, Admiral Clancy and Raffi to Rizzo, Oh and the female-led Zhat Vash. Picard is still a powerful force but he is dwarfed by the women who surround and challenge him, his power diminished, the reverence in which he is held not sufficient to cover the fact that his motivations are questionable, his decisions often unsupportable.
There is a moment near the end of Episode 8 that I think brings everything Karen said into focus: Picard takes the centre seat of La Sirena, the TNG theme swells in the background, and then... the music fades and Picard is forced to admit, “Actually, I don’t know how to work this”.
Is he becoming more self-aware? Is he recognising that his time has come and gone and that the people who surround him, the women who surround him, have surpassed him?
“Broken Pieces” is a remarkable episode, filled with fantastic performances, wonderfully evocative technical work and some brilliant writing that addresses all of the minor criticisms I have had the temerity to raise in the past several blog posts.
Let’s talk about the technical stuff first. Let’s take a moment to admire the dramatic rhythm of Episode 7, the movement between intensity and comfort, the bouncing back and forth from action to exposition, the delicate balance of brutality and humanity. The behind the screen creative team creates the perfect complement for the exceptional on-screen performances that mark this episode as special.
We have scenes of quiet, almost gentle character/plot development, shot in long takes, with space around the characters, with gentle humour even. Take, for example, the conversation between Picard and Soji about Data, in which Picard recognises that he himself is as emotionally reticent as his synthetic friend/son and which ends, so beautifully, with “He loved you”, followed by Patrick Stewart’s very subtle facial movements in response.
Or the scene where Raffi brainstorms with the five Rios’ Emergency Holograms, a funny scene that takes what could have been a boring process of exposition and makes it interesting, enjoyable and significant in the development of several characters.
Or the Ready Room scene (that takes place La Sirena's dining table) that contains an amazing shot: Raffi ,central, facing the camera, controlling the conversation; Soji and Jurati to the left and right, fully in the shot but with their backs to the camera, and then Rios and Picard, only the backs of their heads visible, obscured by the women.
We have scenes of remarkable intensity, shot with the cameras tight on the actors, the cuts quick and rhythmic, like that incredible scene where Picard interrogates/interviews/counsels Jurati. Tight two-shot after tight two-shot, with Alison Pill giving a tour-de-force performance, a poem of intensity, lubricated by subtle camera movement. Jurati’s tears, her nose flaring, her lips quivering, the clenched jaw when she spits, “I don’t want to talk about it”.
This scene is interwoven with the scene of Raffi and Rios talking through what happened on the USS IBN Majid, which, in a nice continuation of the diversification of Star Trek, is named after an Arabian navigator and cartographer born in the 1430s, according to Wikipedia. Both scenes end on the same note, the recognition that at the heart of it all is Commodore Oh.
Moments later, Jurati meets Soji and, in a charming scene that shows the other side of Pill’s brilliance, Jurati displays joy, fascination, amazement, at the perfection (the “artistry”) that is Soji, though she cannot bring herself to admit that she sees Soji as a person.
And then there is Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine, coming out of nowhere to save Elnor before taking control of the Borg Cube. Ryan delivers with an affecting performance, communicating clearly the anger, pain, fear she feels when she is forced to step back into a Borg Collective, to bring other drones back with her.
“Assimilate them. Invade their minds. Suppress their identities. Enslave them. Again,” she says, agony and anger in equal parts in her voice. “They won’t want to be released and I might not want to release them”. The pain in her voice reaches a crescendo when she has to admit that there is something seductive about being part of the Collective and that she is not certain she can resist it.
As you can probably tell, I loved this episode. And I loved it even more for the little touches that Chabon includes along the way, touches that harken back to earlier versions of Star Trek or that address the criticisms I have raised in the past:
- · The tracking substance that Jurati ingests is Veridium – in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Spock places a Veridium patch on Kirk’s jacket just before Kirk beams over to the Klingon flagship so that Kirk can be tracked;
- Commodore Oh is established as half-Vulcan, half-Romulan, which explains why she is capable of the mind-meld;
- Elnor explains how he was able to abandon his oath to Picard and remain on the cube: “Picard released me. I found a cause even more lost than his”;
- La Sirena is off to Deep Space 12 to rendezvous with Star Fleet;
- Rizzo is accompanied by a “Centurion”, a reference right back to the first appearance of the Romulans in TOS episode “Balance of Terror”;
- Picard served as an ensign on the Reliant, a ship that has featured several times in Star Trek lore, most notably as the ship Khan commandeers in the second TOS film, and franchise saviour, The Wrath of Khan.
This episode offered so much more that I don’t have space to discuss: Aia, The Grief World and the Admonition; Captain Alonzo Vander Meer and Rios’ history; the second coming of the Destroyer; the re-emergence of Star Fleet and the Borg; Rizzo’s personal story; Soji’s other sister; Picard’s politically current philosophy about fear being the destroyer.
I can’t wait for Episode 9.
