There are episodes where you can tell that a novelist is writing them.
What They Say:
Picard and Soji transport to the planet Nepenthe, home to some old and trusted friends. As the rest of the La Sirena crew attempt to join them, Picard helps Soji make sense of her recently unlocked memories. Meanwhile, Hugh and Elnor are left on the Borg cube and must face an angered Narissa.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
For the viewers that are really hating the pacing of this series, this may be the hardest episode yet. And it’s little surprise that it’s one that I ended up loving the most. With Michael Chabon co-writing this episode with Kisten Beyer, the novel style storytelling really becomes all the more apparent. While we get some minor action here and there and a little nudge forward on a couple of other subplots, this is a big side story piece that takes us to Nepenthe for a reunion. It’s useful in a lot of ways but in that kind of way that you get from long-form writing in novels where it’s the time spent simply existing and talking that achieves things. Not with klaxons going off or huge arguments. Simple. Bloody. Talking.
The episode also does a wonderful job, with a big tinge of sadness attached to it, to give us more of an epilogue for a couple of very popular Next Generation characters. Before digging into all of that, the other areas of the show are easy to just kind of deal with. Elnor’s story has him working to defend Hugh, who is now intent on standing up for the xBs after Rizzo has started killing them while trying to find out where Picard and Soji went to. It’s a good moment for Hugh to stand up for his people but it breaks all sorts of treaties and earns him a death that I really wish wasn’t coming, but one I understand that happens in order to raise the stakes. This puts Elnor on his own in the Cube so we know he won’t be there by himself for long before that story changes. There’s some good action to this but director Douglas Aarniokoski sticks to the fast cuts to accomplish the quick moves of the character rather than giving us some solid hand to hand to really sell what he’s capable of.
The time about Rios’ ship is kept smaller and there’s not a lot here. It’s not that it doesn’t work it’s just that it doesn’t quite connect as well as it should. Agnes is really struggling with what she’s done with Maddox and we get a flashback highlighting how she was brought to do that thanks to Oh and the Vulcan mind-meld that was performed to show her a future where synths exist. You can see why it pushed Agnes to what she did but now she’s a basket case that wants to leaves all of this behind and is realizing that she’s the reason that Narek is able to trace them out of warp. There are some fun scenes in how everyone interacts with each other in different ways but I’m still trying to get a handle on Raffi the most as she was just all over the map not just in this episode but in the series as a whole so far as to how she views pretty much everyone.
The bulk of the episode, which clocks in at a full hour compared to most episodes being forty-five minutes, focuses on Nepenthe itself where Picard and Soji arrive thanks to the Voyager-era transporter within the Borg Cube in the Queencell. The episode is a big reunion piece overall by bringing in Will and Deanna Troi-Riker and it makes sense that Picard would go here to try and figure out what to do next when in a pinch like he was. Will’s all too ready to throw up the defenses and provide safe haven while Deanna does her best to try and ease Picard’s soul a bit as he’s definitely wound up. And with the slow reveal of Soji being an offspring of sorts of Data, there’s an ease that both of them feel toward her as well. A lot of the episode is focused on simply talking and getting some things out so that Soji can realize that Picard is someone to trust, but it’s understandable considering how they met and how her “life” is falling apart before her eyes. Something that Picard keeps forgetting, to be honest, but which Deanna reminds him pretty harshly.
What this episode does is to introduce us to Will and Deanna’s family and why they settled on Nepenthe. This is mostly through the roughly fifteen-year-old Kestra, a young woman who is definitely precocious but avoids – just barely, sometimes – becoming that obnoxious child. She’s grown up listening to the tales of Starfleet through her parents, likely met many over time and knows them to varying degrees, and is whipsmart and highly curious as she’s the one asking Soji all the questions about being a synth at a time when Soji had just learned about an hour prior. The two build a really good relationship and the dynamic that exists with Kestra in the space – and almost never told to leave the adults alone or get out of the way – feels just as comfortable at the table as the rest of them. It’s easy to be dismissive of her but she’s just as strong a contributor as the others.
What’s painful within the story of the episode is that we learn about her older brother Thaddeus who would be eighteen at this point. He had died years ago and we discover that he was a Human-Betazoid hybrid that suffered from mendaxic neurosclerosis five years prior. It’s an easy to cure disease – if there are positronic matrixes about. But the ban on synthetics meant that there were none and it meant he died. You can still see that scar on both parents even though they’ve moved on and lived since then, but remained on Nepenthe because it was a place for Thaddeus to try and heal and became his homeworld after spending his formative years growing up on starships. It adds another layer of tragedy onto this couple that really hits hard considering how many years they delayed their own relationship in service to Starfleet.
In Summary:
With a lot of time sitting around talking, going from cooking up pizza and other foods to doing some gardening along the way, Picard provides an episode that provides character growth and forward momentum in a way you usually don’t get. Even within the larger Star Trek milieu. We’ve had many stories over all the series where they’re dialogue-based, but this one has a very different focus because it’s not to solve an episodic device to bring closure. Here, it’s to help people simply understand each other more. I totally understand why there are people frustrated with the series and its pacing and this episode in particular really does slow things down. But as a longtime fan of Next Generation that watched it as it aired, curling up with Will and Deanna in a way we never really got to before made for an incredible episode that humanized everyone wonderfully. I’m thoroughly enjoying this show and hope Chabon’s influence lasts well into the next season.
Grade: A
Streamed By: CBS All Access
