A little on-the-nose to say this about a time travel story, but better late than never, I guess.
This is a review of “Fly Me to the Moon,” episode five of season two of Star Trek:
Picard. If you haven’t seen the episode yet, take heed: spoilers may be ahead.
Well, we’re halfway through the season and the heroes finally have a goal related to the larger
story arc that is more specific than “stop the future from being changed.” And that goal is:
ensure an ancestor of Picard’s doesn’t back out of a scheduled space flight by
making sure she has a good time at a party. Okay. I’ll take it.
But, before we get to that, we also get the blessed mercy killing of the Rios/ICE subplot.
And hey, Rios finally does something! After just kinda standing around for an entire episode,
when Seven and Raffi show up to rescue him, he punches an ICE agent and disarms him. Yeah!
Thanks for helping out, Cris!
I’ll get back to the ICE subplot in a bit, because I have thoughts. But first, a bunch
of other stuff happens — er, half-happens. Picard and Not-Laris, the Watcher, have a chat about how
she’s been tasked with protecting the destiny of one of Picard’s ancestors, a great aunt of his
named Renee, who is the aforementioned astronaut set to fly on a historic mission to Europa,
only she might not because she’s having doubts and keeps crashing in the simulator.
Renee is the woman Q was spying on at the end of the last episode, and in this episode we
find Q masquerading as Renee’s therapist and apparently trying to undermine her confidence.
Q also reaches out to Adam Soong, which allows Brent Spiner to add another identical head to
his wall of characters who are relatives of Data but not Data. This Soong is a geneticist who wants
to find a cure for his daughter, who is allergic to the outside world and looks just like Soji,
and Q is like, “I can help you help your daughter, but first you need to help me do
something vague that has to do with Picard” — because not allowing us to know what characters
want or what motivates them is supposed to make us want to watch them more? I guess?
Also, the Borg Queen reminds us that she’s evil by calling the cops,
then Jurati blows her away with a shotgun to save the cop’s life, then Picard and Not-Laris
get back to the ship just in time to see the rest of the crew dragging the unconscious cop away, and
Not-Laris is like “These are the people you want to help us protect the destiny of your ancestor?”
And Picard says, “There must be a good explanation — I’m sure that cop’s not dead!”
A joke! An actually funny situation where the humor is derived from the timing and the
reactions of the characters based on what they do and don’t know about what they’re watching,
not just something that happened in another show happening again for some reason! A real,
honest to god joke! I knew they could do it! I’m so proud.
Anyway, it turns into an episode of Leverage for like one scene, as Picard announces that he has
a plan! Except we don’t get to learn what the plan is, because this isn’t actually an episode
of Leverage, even though this episode is also directed by Jonathan Frakes. All we learn for now
is that for some reason all of the protagonists need to sneak into the fancy party that they’re
throwing the astronauts before they begin the final prep for the Europa flight, but there are
security measures in place that prevent them from just beaming in undetected, so Jurati is going to
sneak in by herself and hack the security system so Picard and the others can enter. Except, Jurati
gets caught by security pretty much immediately! Uh-oh! Except, that was part of the plan.
Also, the Borg Queen lives in Jurati’s head now, which is bad news for the security guards,
I guess? Is this part of Picard’s plan, or is Jurati under the influence of the Queen
and going into business for herself? I dunno, it doesn’t matter, because the episode’s over.
So. First, the good stuff: the characters have a goal, an immediate, concrete goal
that relates to the larger story arc of the season. After five episodes, we finally
have a specific thing that the heroes need to accomplish. And, it has to do with astronaut
shit — I love astronaut shit, I love when Star Trek does astronaut shit. So, that’s good.
Q has stuff to do in this episode. It’s still all irritatingly vague,
but he has a couple of well-acted scenes with Adam Soong,
it’s not much, but given how inert so much of the season has been up to this point, I’ll take it.
And, Seven and Raffi rescue Rios from the ICE bus, which will hopefully mean the end of that subplot.
And since I’m back on the subject, let me talk about the ICE subplot
a little more. Because I feel like it speaks to a broader problem with the show this season.
So, history gets changed so that in Picard’s native time period Earth has become a xenophobic
dictatorship that makes war on non-humans. The protagonists travel back to the 21st century
to prevent whatever that change was from happening, and shortly after they arrive,
one of them, Rios, is arrested by ICE. Okay. This makes sense. You’re trying to prevent
a future where aliens are persecuted and demonized, and one of the characters winds
up in the clutches of a government agency — a very real government agency that we all
know about — with a track record of persecuting undocumented immigrants — sometimes referred to
as aliens — and depriving them of their rights and subjecting them to all sorts of horrific abuse.
Makes sense thematically. Seems like the show is winding up for some classic Star
Trek political commentary. Maybe we’re about to see Rios, one of our heroes,
stand up to these ICE thugs, or suffer at their hands to drive home the message that
this kind of treatment of minority groups — which happens in reality, not just on this TV
show — is on the timeline that leads to the horrible future they’re trying to prevent.
But then — eh. Nothing really happens. One of the ICE guards is a massive asshole.
Rios mostly just sits or stands around and waits to be rescued. And the show itself doesn’t
really seem interested in saying anything about ICE, or its role in our society,
or the fact that our society continues to tolerate it, other than “that kinda sucks, huh?”
The show sidelines one of its main characters for an entire episode, as part of a subplot that has
obvious potential political and social relevance, and it winds up just being a waste of time.
It’s just a thing that happened. Rios doesn’t do anything. The show seems like
it might have something pertinent to say, but it doesn’t. ICE is bad. Yeah, we know, thanks.
It’s like they were coming up with the story for this season, and someone said,
“Hey, one of our main characters is a member of an ethnic group that is
currently being mistreated by an agency of the U.S. government — if we’re having them
time travel to 21st century America, maybe we can do something with that.”
“Good idea, what’d you have in mind?”
“Um, maybe Rios gets arrested by ICE? And he doesn’t have any ID or anything,
because he’s not from this time, so they think he’s an undocumented immigrant and
take him to one of those camps in an abandoned Walmart where they keep people fenced-in.”
“Okay, okay. And then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Great, let’s go with it!”
It’s not even really a subplot. It’s an idea for a subplot. It’s half of an idea. It’s
notes before a first draft. And sadly, that’s what a lot of this season has felt like so far.
Potentially interesting ideas, underdeveloped and underwritten.
So, I’m glad they seem to have wrapped up the ICE storyline. That’s a good thing. But it’s
only a good thing because that storyline wound up being a waste of time, which is a disappointment.
The episode wasn’t a chore to watch. It moved pretty well. The pacing wasn’t
really a problem — although the pacing of the overall season is still a mess.
And so is the structure — where the producers are choosing to begin and end these episodes makes no
sense at all. This episode is a good example of that — the opening scene, with Raffi and Seven
rescuing Rios, belongs at the end of the previous episode, and the end of this episode, with Jurati
and the Borg Queen arrested on purpose, feels like it should be the beginning of the next episode.
And I know some of you will say, “Well, it’s a streaming series, streaming series
are just like that,” to which I say, “No, they aren’t.” I get wanting to end on a cliffhanger
or a note of “what’s gonna happen next?” in order to pull people into the next episode,
but there’s a difference between a hook, or a cliffhanger, and just stopping in the middle.
This episode of Picard feels like it starts with stuff they forgot to show us last time, and ends
with something they weren’t supposed to show us until next time. If you imagine the entire season
as a single timeline, and each episode as a window onto that timeline, it’s like the window has been
bumped out of position, so we’re seeing fragments of two episodes instead of one whole episode.
I don’t know why it’s like that. It’s bad, in a really fundamental way. It’s a failure of basic
mechanics that should have been corrected before a single actor ever stepped in front of a camera.
But, it’s better than the four episodes that came before it,
so at least there’s that. Hopefully that trend continues in the second half of the season.
Those are my thoughts on this episode. Please share your thoughts with me in the comments.
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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 six!