I don’t believe in god, but if I did, I would pray for the versatility and competence of a band
in a movie or TV show, because whenever some random weirdo just stands up and starts singing,
TV and movie bands always know what to do!
This is a review of “Two of One,” episode six of season two of Star Trek:
Picard. If you haven’t seen the episode yet, take heed: spoilers may be ahead.
So, you know how in the last episode they had that scene where the whole gang was together, and they
were gonna sneak into this fancy NASA party to protect Picard’s astronaut ancestor, and the
others were like, “How are we gonna do that, what about security, what about our IDs?” And Picard
was like, “Don’t worry, Jurati can hack the system to get us in, and then — I have a plan!” And I was
like, “Oh, it’s like an episode of Leverage — that could be fun,” and then the episode just
ended and I was like, “Well, I guess they’re saving the Leverage episode for next time”?
Well, it turns out, not so much. Picard’s plan — apparently — is to just have everyone kinda hang
out at the NASA party and watch Renee Picard. And . . . yeah. That’s it. Does the episode give us
any reason why every single member of Picard’s crew needs to infiltrate the party? Nope. Does
anyone other than Picard and Jurati have anything interesting or important to do at the party?
Nope — Rios does follow Renee at one point when she wanders off to escape the crowd,
but then he tags out to Picard, so maybe score that as an assist? I dunno.
Renee Picard is having a crisis of confidence, she thinks she’s not ready,
she wants to quit the Europa mission, she’s texting with her therapist — who is actually Q,
remember — who is encouraging her to quit. But, then Jean-Luc finds her and gives her a pep talk
about how it’s okay to be afraid, but fear is just fear — it means you understand the risks,
it doesn’t automatically mean you shouldn’t do the thing you’re afraid of. It’s actually
a nicely written scene — I want to pause and make sure I give the scene its due,
because there’s not a whole lot else for me to compliment in this episode, but this scene between
Jean-Luc and Renee is well scripted and well acted, so good job everyone on this one scene.
As for the rest of the episode, I guess the writers figured the sight of our heroes in tuxedos
and fancy dresses would be entertaining enough, so they didn’t bother to give them anything to do?
The episode is less than forty minutes long, so at least there is that mercy,
but it’s really not that interesting to watch people just kinda milling about at a party.
Jurati spends most of the episode talking to the Borg Queen, who lives in her head now,
and gets a brief but nonetheless mortifying musical number midway through — mortifying
because it feels so unjustified and out of place in this episode, let alone this series,
not because of anything Allison Pill does — she’s been doing a fantastic job with some very
underwhelming material this entire season, and this episode is no exception, plus she can sing,
so good for her. And I applaud the song choice — “Shadows of the Night,” my favorite Pat Benatar
song, nothing wrong with that. But, this scene as a whole had me staring at my TV like, “What?!”
Speaking of things in this episode that provoke that reaction: isn’t it nice
that Rios’s experience as a prisoner of ICE seems to have had no effect on him whatsoever?
He’s, what, a day removed from being arrested and held in a concentration camp where he
witnessed people being brutalized? And at the party he’s like, “I love the 21st century!
The cigars! The food! And look — real matches!” . . . I hate to repeat myself, but — what?!
The choices the creators of this show make are . . . baffling.
There’s also a vain attempt to manufacture suspense throughout the episode by showing
us these flash-forwards to a seriously injured Picard, so we’re meant to think
“Uh-oh, something happens to Picard! What happens to Picard? Is he gonna be okay?!”
It’s an extremely lazy trope that I dislike pretty much any time I encounter it. Instead of taking
the time to actually craft a suspenseful story, the episode just occasionally reminds us that
something bad is gonna happen, and then proceeds normally until something
bad happens. It’s a hackneyed attempt to disguise a dull story as an exciting one.
Anyway, the bad thing is, Picard gets hit by a car being driven by Adam Soong, who was trying to run
over Renee as a favor to Q, but Picard’s gonna be fine. At the end of the episode, he’s stable but
unconscious at the clinic run by the doctor Rios met in the episode where he was arrested by ICE,
and Not-Laris is like, “Well, if he won’t wake up on his own,
I guess I could go inside his mind and see what the deal is and try to, ya know, wake him up.”
So, I’d guess the next episode is going to be one of those “journey through a character’s
subconscious” shows that Star Trek likes to do from time to time — Data kinda got one on TNG,
Bashir got one on DS9, then Bashir and O’Brien did another one later on DS9 when they went inside
Sloan’s mind, and that was also kinda the conceit for the Voyager episode where Sulu guest-starred,
and didn’t they do one on Discovery last season, too, with Burnham and Adira? So,
it’s a sturdy premise that Star Trek has relied on before. If it gives us a mostly stand-alone
episode about Picard, centered on Patrick Stewart, and the writers are able to at least put
somewhat of an original spin on the whole thing — which, given how the rest of this season is going,
is a pretty big “if” — we might be in for a decent episode next time. Fingers crossed.
By the end of the episode, Renee Picard has apparently decided to go through with the Europa
mission and is now in pre-flight quarantine — good to know almost getting hit by a car
didn’t bother her that much, so the heroes’ primary goal — or at least,
what they think is their primary goal, which they didn’t know about until the previous episode — has
been accomplished, with four episodes left to go in this season. That means either
a) making sure Renee flies on the Europa mission isn’t what they needed to do in order to fix
the future, in which case we — and they — still don’t know what their actual goal is,
or b) the rest of the series is going to be taken up with the characters on clean-up duty, healing
Picard, dealing with Jurati, who is now under the control of the Borg Queen, and probably some other
stuff that has little or nothing to do with the reason they came back in time in the first place.
And then, presumably, they return to the future so we can get the
pay-off to whatever was going on with the other Borg Queen aboard the Stargazer,
which I’m sure will be totally satisfying and just tie the whole thing together.
I’m trying not to jump to conclusions. I’m trying not to write off the season,
because we do have four episodes left, and a lot can happen in four episodes. But at this point,
it’s really not looking good. One of the problems with season one
of Picard was that it felt like the writers had too many ideas — Borg stuff! Romulan
stuff! Android stuff! Picard stuff! Data stuff! Old characters! New characters! All of that,
combined with the poor pacing of the season which backloaded most of the important reveals
and resolutions into the final episodes, made that season feel too crowded,
nothing had room to breathe and so it didn’t have the impact it should have.
This season, on the other hand, has the opposite problem. Instead of too many ideas,
it has no ideas. A threadbare time travel plot that could easily have been two
episodes instead of ten, a subplot with political implications but nothing to say, characters with
unclear goals and vague motivations running around doing things that mean nothing.
Six episodes in, and this season is listless, aimless, and pointless. We’ll see if next week’s
episode of “Jean-Luc’s Head” breaks that pattern. I hope the show can somehow find its way back.
There’s still a light at the end of the tunnel, though at this point it’s only a glimmer.
Those are my thoughts on this episode. Please share your thoughts with me in the comments.
If you want to support my channel, you can become a patron at patreon.com/steveshives,
or become a channel member by clicking the join button, or make a one-time gift via
PayPal or Venmo — links to all of those are in the description. Thanks so much for watching,
and I’ll see you next week for a review of episode seven!