Team Picard is gearing up for a bumpy ride through 2024. Image: Paramount
Star Trek loves all time travel, but perhaps the time travel it loves the most is a chance to take a step back into our current moment. From Journey Home to Voyager to DS9 episodes like Future’s End and Past Tense, Star Trek at times can’t help but escape from their future to play with our modern times, and Picard was no exception.
“Assimilation,” the third episode of Picard’s second season, feels more like a middle chapter than a true progressive step forward in Picard’s current erratic adventure, piecing together both Q’s hilarious antics and a literal trip back in time. time. Immediately after last week’s escape from the fascist Confederation that replaced the Federation in this altered timeline, things start badly when poor Elnor gets shot. They then take a turn for the worse when Picard informs Rios that in order for them to know how and where the timeline was altered by Q, they must hand over La Sirena to the Borg Queen (or what’s left of her) to build a slingshot. around the sun, which will rip a hole into the past, and the location of the mysterious “Watcher” who will tell Picard’s team the next steps.
Image: Paramount
And if you thought Elnor’s death after La Sirena’s power went out after crash landing in La Barra (he could get better if they fixed the timeline, tbd, tbd) was bad, then for the crew things are even worse: they have to go to Los Angeles! Oh, and it’s 2024, so as diehard Trek fans know, the US wasn’t in a very good place at the time in terms of, well… anything, really. This is not depicted as much onscreen, although Raffi, who is putting aside her grief that Elnor will lead a mission to scan for traces that could reveal anything out of time to help track the Watcher, quickly shines near one from Sanctuary areas. stylized as “Past Tense” and nearly got robbed for good measure. But instead, Picard is using the chance to travel to a future very close to ours to explore contemporary themes and struggles in greater detail.
While Seven and Raffi head off to rendezvous at a nearby observation tower, hoping to get an accurate scan of the area, this study mainly focuses on poor Rios’s experience in 2024. Which, frankly, starts out hard – not exactly a working transporter. throws him into the air, leaving him with a hell of a hard landing – and gets even rougher when he has to confront both the state of modern American healthcare and the long, biased arm of American law enforcement. After being taken to a nearby medical center run by a young doctor named Teresa (guest star Sol Rodriguez), Rios finds himself not only shocked by having to vaguely adjust while trying to keep his time traveler nature a secret, but after the raid US Immigration officers at the center lead to the arrest of both Teresa and himself – his comb is left behind. He is left to grapple with a clearer idea of what it means to be an immigrant and specifically a person of color at a given point in time, an element that Star Trek’s past travels into “modern” periods have touched on but rarely had the opportunity to. center like Picard here, albeit not for long.
Image: Paramount
Meanwhile, all of today’s action in Los Angeles is pitted against another threat from the past that Jurati and Picard must deal with aboard the crashed La Sirena: the Borg Queen, herself momentarily disabled by power fluctuations and a crash landing, is now less of a nemesis and, what’s more, just, well… a good old enemy. The two’s risky plan to infiltrate the queen’s central systems – one considered too risky for Picard given his Locutus history, though his new body has no direct connection to his former assimilation – suggests that Jurati is exposing himself to potential assimilation through the connection. to the queen in the hope that she can access and at least partially revive the Borg matriarch and allow her to give them the information they need to know. It’s an incredibly tense sequence that plays on the rapport that Picard and Yurathi had throughout the first season: a cat and mouse game between them to learn more about each other, but in this case, the game that builds on that connection to keep Yurathi ingrained in his humanity. We learn more about her past and her real feelings for the people she now surrounds herself with in snatches, but it’s all laced with tension that the more human and open she becomes in trying to ground herself, the more the Borg Queen could potentially crush her.
This is arguably the most dangerous Borg in Star Trek in a very long time, and even in victory – when Picard rips Jurati out of flight at just the last second, and she commands the now jet queen that she has no power over Jurathi or Picard. with all the information they need in her head – the queen’s whispered threat that the real danger is that Jurati has impressed her makes for a scary enough moment. (And, of course, the inevitable hook in case things go even more horribly wrong for the crew at some point later in the season.) As Picard himself knows, no one follows the Borg and gets away unscathed—of It was learned from the last lesson that, like many of the classic Trek elements that Picard relishes here, they will become vital as this story progresses. I hope he can keep up that playful tendency to lovingly pay homage to Trek’s past adventures without evoking nostalgia for its own sake. But for now, even though the stakes are slowly rising, it’s good to see Picard having some fun at the moment.
New episodes of Picard air Thursdays on Paramount+.
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