In “Monsters,” Tallinn journeys into the final frontiers of Picard’s mind, Rios pulls a Captain Kirk in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Seven and Raffi track down Jurati. Eventually, Picard meets back up with Guinan and they get arrested by Dutch from The Shield. Written by Jane Maggs, directed by Joe Menendez.
Mark Turetsky: Hello, Will. Thank you for coming to my office for this not at all nefarious analysis.
Will Nevin: Your office here on the Enterprise-E is quite nice. Roomy. I’m sure nothing bad will happen at all.
Mark: Well, I’m obligated to write for an hour. Why don’t you tell me a story?
Mazes and Monsters
Will: Mark, I was super confused this week when I fired up this week’s episode of Picard, and it turned out to be Pan’s Labyrinth. Paramount+ should really get that looked at.
Mark: If you’ve got a labyrinth under your château, you’re going to get Pans. That’s just the way it is with these things.
Will: I think that’s from the bible, right?
Mark: This is Star Trek, not Immortal Hulk. So, Picard imagines himself in his Enterprise E ready room in his security tux, being interviewed by none other than Battlestar Galactica’s own Gaius Baltar, James Callis! Were you a fan of BSG?
Will: I watch surprisingly little sci-fi TV, so that’s one of the things I missed. I’m not *not* a fan at least. And, oh, you forgot to mention that Picard imagined all of that stuff in addition to Callis being his dad. And a mean doctor. But by the end of the episode, we’re left at least a little conflicted: Maybe the real Picard Sr. wasn’t a bad guy?
Mark: I keep going back to Picard’s visions of his parents in TNG. I mentioned him seeing his mother, Yvette, in Where No One Has Gone Before, where he relished the chance to see her. He also sees his father in Tapestry, after he’s supposedly died on the operating table. His father, Maurice, berates him for running off and getting himself killed. He’s presented as overbearing and controlling, but this episode puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it? Picard had considered Maurice to be the monster in his life, but here he realizes that he was a man in an impossible position, trying to keep his wife and family safe.
Will: If Picard has lived his life only believing his father to be an abusive prick, that moment in Tapestry makes sense.
Mark: It also makes sense as a father worried about his son (chastising him for running off and getting himself killed), read through the lens of childhood resentment that Jean-Luc was carrying.
Will: Here’s a quick lil’ question for you: Where is older brother Robert during all of this?
Mark: It’s a good question. It seems like Jean-Luc and Yvette lived in their own little world together, whereas Robert took more after Maurice. So maybe Jean-Luc just didn’t really consider Robert in his memories of his mother. Also, Maurice likely was something of a prick. Like, he locked his wife in a room when she had manic episodes. Surely there’s a better way in the 24th century!
Will: You’d hope so, right? I’ll admit to being a little surprised that this didn’t turn out to be a straight up case of domestic violence since Stewart has spoken about his personal experience with that — seems like the sort of enticement you’d use to get an actor in the twilight of his career to do your streaming show.
Mark: Yeah, it’s a more complex situation. Yvette endangers Jean-Luc, leaving him trapped with his foot stuck for hours on end, which could have led to some really bad outcomes if Maurice hadn’t found him. And there’s the weirdness of the reveal that the counselor is Maurice. Why wouldn’t Picard recognize his own father from the start (apart from the re-casting)? It’s as if it’s purely there as a reveal for the audience. Still, I absolutely adore Callis’ performance in both roles. He’s worked consistently post-BSG, but seems consigned to genre TV limbo, when he’s quite a good performer who, in a just world, would be in more high profile stuff.
Will: Said the same thing in this here space about Brent Spiner. At least they both have the con circuit, right? And yeah, I’ll give you the fact that the reveal is a bit wonky, but Stewart really nailed the contempt Picard has for Maurice when he spit out the word “father” — that was a solid moment in his performance. Also, dreams are weird as hell, Mark.
Mark: It’s true. I just wonder if there was possibly a way to have Picard recognize him from the start but not to let the audience in on it until the reveal. Ah, who knows. It’s like the Q reveal from a couple weeks back: he put on a crazy accent for Renée, who wouldn’t recognize his voice even if he hadn’t. He was doing it purely for dramatic effect.
Will: At this point, Q’s powers might be down to costume changes and crazy accents. And gene therapies. Can’t forget about that last one.
Mark: We also get Tallinn’s cryptic statement that there’s more to the story that we haven’t learned yet. So this plotline isn’t over quite yet, I don’t think.
She’s Your Queen-to-be
Mark: The remainder of the episode has Seven and Raffi trying to track down Jurati, while Rios tries (unsuccessfully) to distract Dr. Ramirez from discovering that they’re future space people at the Mariposa clinic. Will, you said the lost combadge would never come back and here we are, with it… still not appearing.
Will: Not only is Rios unsuccessful, but he takes Dr. Ramirez and her son to the damn ship! (What a fun, dumb twist it would be if *that’s* the moment the timeline breaks.) Telling the saga of Jurati’s night on the town in flashback seems…like a strange choice, but I like it better than continuing to talk about brain chemistry and assimilation, which feels like it’s getting dangerously close to midichlorian territory.
Mark: So, if exhilaration causes the Queen to assimilate Jurati more quickly, then maybe bad feelings might slow the Queen. And luckily, every Starfleet sickbay comes equipped with a machine that does just that! They can plug her into the machine from TNG’s worst episode, “Shades of Gray!”
Will: Ugh. I can only hope my fiancee — who’s never seen TNG — can make it through these first two seasons. She survived “Code of Honor”…barely. “Writer’s Strike Clip Show” won’t be much better.
Mark: You at least have a few good ones in there. Like the horror/thriller “Conspiracy!”
Will: I’m hungry for some worms just thinkin’ about it.
Closing Time
Mark: Picard returns to Guinan, because he has a feeling that she can summon Q. And she tries to do that, by using a bottle with a trapped moment within it. Is Q a genie?! Anyway, it doesn’t work, but instead a fed comes into the bar, played by Jay Karnes, who arrests them both for being from space.
Will: Mark, I dinna like this at all. Not only is it another detour from the main story (if you didn’t like episode 7, “Picard’s Stuck in His Brain,” stay tuned for episode 8, “Picard’s Stuck in Federal Custody) but it just seems narratively stupid.
Mark: There’s a possibility here that maybe you didn’t consider: Jay Karnes also played a time traveling Starfleet officer named Ducane in the Voyager episode Relativity. What if this Fed is actually Ducane, sent to the past and trying to keep timeline shenanigans to a minimum? But wait, wouldn’t he be a Confederation agent, then? Trying to keep things on an evil path?
Will: That’s gotta be it — I can’t imagine burning off an episode breaking Picard out of custody without advancing our larger story, even as I’m becoming more convinced that this season will end in a cliffhanger. Time cops have generally been bad guys, right? Ones willing to do unsavory things in the name of temporal integrity? Maybe that makes Ducane (assuming he’s still from the world of the Federation) a hero in this moment.
Make It So On and So Forth
- If we presume Picard’s dream/nightmare was the captain’s psych eval on the Enterprise, that would explain the First Contact-era uniform. The texture and the color, though, didn’t seem to be quite right, but that could have been the lighting. (Will is a mark for those uniforms. SO DAMN SHARP.)
- I think the shoulder part is just too smooth and needs some kind of quilted texture to complete it.
- No Soongs, Qs, or Renées this week.
- Rios’ “No, I’m from Chile; I only work in outer space” is the tolerable (even enjoyable!) sort of reference that the earlier episodes in this season butchered.
- Conversely, they missed a trick by not having Dr. Ramirez make an “I’m a doctor, not a…” joke when Rios handed her the sci fi gizmo.
- Between James Callis and Jay Karnes, 2000s-tv-watching-Mark is doing fantastic!
- What, does Jerry O’Connell not return phone calls?
- He’s on Lower Decks, Will. Try to keep up!
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
