This episode… really doesn’t impress. It ought to impress because it finally gets things moving—Picard (Patrick Stewart) heads to the Borg Cube to rescue Soji (Isa Briones). Briones is an android but doesn’t know it. Her lover, Harry Treadaway, knows she’s an android and wants to kill her for being an android because he’s a Romulan anti-android extremist and he’s basically nudging her towards realizing it. Will Stewart get there in time to save Briones from her self-discovery and whatever Treadaway’s got planned once she has it?
Initially, I liked Briones and Treadaway’s adventures on the Borg Cube because “Picard” was at least the fanfic takes on the Borg were interesting. Not lately. And definitely not this episode, which has Stewart hanging out with old Borg pal Jonathan Del Arco while suffering from PTSD while he walks through the Borg Cube. Incidentally, the empty Borg Cube looks like if someone built a TRON set instead of rendering it in CG. Doesn’t look good.
There’s a whole bunch of bad with Stewart and the Borg. Despite them using footage from Star Trek: First Contact, it turns out Picard hasn’t gotten much better about his time in the Borg Collective and he yells a lot about it at Alison Pill, who’s managed to become the show’s biggest liability at this point just because she’s pointless. I mean, Michelle Hurd’s pretty pointless too, but you’re at least supposed to feel sympathy for Hurd. She’s really bad during her big scene. It’s a chore. “Picard”’s a chore in general.
But Pill’s pointless. Her part’s crap. And her impromptu shagging of Santiago Cabrera is even more pointless.
There’s a big scene where Briones finds out she’s a Cylon but not done well. It leads to Treadaway taking her to a forbidden mediation chamber to psychologically damage her… but Briones’s such a slight character it doesn’t even matter. You can’t suspend the disbelief enough for Treadaway to actually be being a villain at the moment.
The show then fumbles a “Come with me if you want to live” scene, which shouldn’t even be possible.
Also, for fans of Star Trek: The Kelvin Timeline, it turns out the Borg made a trans warp drive. Hell yeah.
There’s another surprise at the cliffhanger, which I’m saving for next episode because I’m really hoping the show didn’t just spin its wheels with a character for three episodes for no damn point. But it really seems like there’s no point in hoping for “Picard” not to do something bad.
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