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Full spoilers follow for this episode. After last week’s strong outing, Star Trek: Picard stumbles a bit with Episode 8, “Broken Pieces,” as the writers attempt to connect various story threads heading into the final leg of the season. Right off the bat, we learn that Commodore Oh is in fact a member of the Zhat Vash -- it’s explained in this episode that she’s actually half-Vulcan, half-Romulan, and all-covert agent -- and that she and her fellow secret cabal members did incite the Mars synth massacre. This is told through another “14 years ago” flashback, as the Zhat Vash (are only women allowed to be members?) peer into the past (a flashback in a flashback) to see “the Admonition,” an ancient alien mind-trip cautionary tale of what happened/will happen when AI was/is allowed to rise. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=star-trek-picard-photos&captions=true"] That this process drives just about everyone who endures it insane is unexpected and well done, with Zhat Vash-ers phasering themselves or bashing their heads with rocks as a result. But Narissa Rizzo makes it through, while Ramdha -- the troubled ex-Borg from a few episodes back -- is revealed to be Narissa’s aunt. She
kind of makes it through the Admonition, or at least is driven just insane enough to, apparently, cause the shut-down of the Borg cube that will become the Artifact when she comes in contact with it at some later date. Is it because what she saw through the Admonition also drove the Borg insane, which is why the Collective disconnected from the cube? It’s unclear. And confusing. This all adds some much-needed texture to the Evil with a capital “E” Narissa, however, who we now see was deeply affected by that experience and at least has reason to be doing what she’s doing. She, and Oh, really do believe that androids will lead to the end of everything -- “hell,” as Agnes describes it. Meanwhile, Seven of Nine returns to save Elnor on the Artifact, who got in a bit over his head. It’s a great moment when she arrives and he jumps up to hug her. He’s still in many ways that little kid who Picard used to read The Three Musketeers to. It’s also interesting, and gratifying, that Seven’s first question to Elnor is, “Where’s Hugh?” But unfortunately, we get no follow-up on that. So Seven knew Hugh? Were they close? Did they used to work together? After Hugh was killed last week, it would’ve been particularly nice to hear that he had a connection of some kind to Seven, or to see her mourn him. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/picard-take-a-closer-look-inside-the-borg-ship"] But Seven is busy anyway, trying to take over the cube by jacking into the queenscell -- the Borg Queen’s tubes even come down from the ceiling to connect to her, and she gets all “We are Borg” about it! But this is a last-ditch maneuver as Seven knows that creating a mini-Collective this way, which will be controlled by her, is dangerous and possibly something neither she nor the Borg can come back from. What if she doesn’t want to disconnect after they beat Narissa and the Romulans? Well, as it turns out, that’s apparently a non-issue, because she disconnects just fine. Yes, this is because Narissa is successful in jettisoning most of the poor Borg (poor Borg? Yep, I said it) into space, leaving Seven with nobody to share a Collective with. But dramatically it becomes a whole bunch of nothing. Why set up this potential inner struggle for Seven only to completely deflate it? Over on La Sirena, the Picard Squad are reunited -- aside from Elnor -- and Rios is freaked out because Soji looks just like someone from his troubled past. In what surely is a galactic-sized coincidence, it turns out that while on the USS ibn Majid, he and his captain had encountered… wait for it… a pair of androids! And one was another Soji/Dahj model (so they’re not just twins?). Ordered by Starfleet (and more specifically, Commodore Oh) to kill the androids, Rios’ captain couldn’t handle the guilt of what he’d done and he committed suicide. It’s an interesting backstory but also feels a tad farfetched. Would a Starfleet captain really kill in cold blood like that? And again, what a coincidence that all these years later Rios was hired to track down another copy of that same android model. (Santiago Cabrera plays the lingering anguish of the incident well though.) [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/why-seven-of-nine-blames-picard"] In order to get this information, Raffi (who seems totally fine not drinking now, somehow) gets to interrogating the various Emergency Holograms onboard. This is all fun stuff, but it also seems a bit out of place, like it’s taking up precious time that we could be spending with Seven and Elnor, or maybe even with Jean-Luc, who has very little to do in this episode, really. As for Agnes, we now know that, yes, she was trying to get rid of the tracker insider her when she gave herself that shot last week, though whether it worked or not is unclear by episode’s end. Alison Pill is pretty great here, torn between her guilt over killing Maddox, her knowledge of what is to come if the androids inherit the Earth (figure of speech, even in space), and her fascination with Soji. Oh yeah, Soji -- she finally takes charge of her own destiny in this episode. As Picard says, “Let’s try doing it her way.” I think I like her better like this. Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:
- “The Grief World” is a pretty cool name for a planet.
- The Borg being blown out into space just as Seven is activating them is a very nicely executed visual.
- “So, are you going to assimilate me now?”
- Does Seven have a Borg spine? Why can we see it through her clothes? And did the Queen’s tubes leaves holes in her jacket?!
- Michael Chabon has written a lot of this season.
- “You are my favorite holo!”
- Picard’s chat with Rios about Rios’ old captain is a nice exchange for the pair. Starfleet bonding!
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/38OzTTX
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