Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 2x09 - "Hide and Seek"

‪‪I went into it a bit a couple posts above yours, and ‪‪I think it relates directly to the “2 Renées, 1 who lives and 1 who dies” comment at the end of this episode. They need the timeline to split, and for the Prime Universe’s history to continue as it always has (or close to it), and for the Confederation and the new Jurati Borg Queen to continue on in a separate Universe so that they can complete the temporal causality loop that led to Agnes and the Borg Queen’s merging by crossing to the Prime universe and meeting the Stargazer when we see them in the season premiere.

 

Which will magically heal Q!

 

Could be. Or Q sacrifices himself to help Picard complete his mission, and he is instrumental in them splitting the timeline.

 

In a way, the constant complaints about how “old Stewart is and how slow Picard is” are a compliment to his acting abilities. Jean-Luc is over a decade older than Sir Patrick, he was made aware of this (no one ever told him on TNG) and that’s the way he’s playing him now; it’s much the same thing he did with Charles Xavier in LOGAN. People miss that point completely for some reason I have yet to figure out since I always thought it was common knowledge among Trekkies that Jean-Luc is quite a bit older than Sir Patrick. (Some miss the point deliberately because it gives them yet another incentive to complain about the show tho, of course.)

 

that’s what I’m getting at. No accident, meaning Kirk is back on Earth in time to enjoy dinner with Bones. Would also mean the E-D never gets destroyed because Soren wasn’t teaming with the Duras Sisters to return to the Nexus.

I saw your post and it makes sense. Just seems like a lot of unresolved issues that may just be hand waived away.

 

I can understand those concerns, but I’m hopeful the time travel logic will be solid, because of Terry Matalas’s handling of the Gordian knot of time travel plots in his 12 Monkeys series. It made sense within its own set of rules and felt internally consistent, with a lot of complex, interwoven and overlapping storylines told through multiple instances of time travel, and earned a lot of good will from me with his execution in that show.

Because of all the shows, including Picard, coexisting in the Prime universe, and the ongoing presence of Discovery, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, and even the next season with the return of the core TNG cast, ‪‪I think it’s a forgone conclusion that the timeline will end up remaining intact, without huge swaths of Trek history being undone.

 

It’s weird how some seem to have forgotten that Stewart is an amazing actor… I think fans have just got Stewart and Picard so intertwined in their minds that they have difficulty separating the two.

Of course he’s acting.

 

Time travel.

 

Tell me about it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Trekkies in the past 20 years in which I’ve been hanging around with them it’s that quite a few of them have extreme difficulties differentiating between Jean-Luc and Sir Patrick. It has an amusing side when he gets love from them with memes and whatnot (I mean even HE has said that he loves the JLP facepalm meme, it’s his favorite JLP meme) but also an irritating one when they literally go like “everything he does is just Picard on the holodeck hahahaha, career, what career, he is PICARD and NO ONE ELSE”.

However, as soon as Sir Patrick himself says he and Jean-Luc have become intertwined, like he recently did, some suddenly start screaming about “Stewart ruining Picard”. I guess the illusion is only supposed to work as long as it stays true to what THEY want for Jean-Luc to be - basically the same guy he was on TNG, not too many changes please, let’s disregard that 20 years have passed, please make the him as the lead character on a modern serialized TV series the very same guy we saw on an 80s/90s episodic television series. Oh and PLEASE don’t let him age, don’t remind us that people get older and that he is wrestling with old age issues now, we can’t have that, please make him command the flagship and chase the bad guys like he used to, and please, no unnecessary trauma, we don’t want tk be reminded of the fact that he has always been played as a very vulnerable character (as per Sir Patrick’s own words) but we could simply ignore it because TNG tended to not really dig that deep into his psyche, so please, we don’t want that now, we want our seemingly flawless father figure hero back…

I think that covers it?

But yeah of course Sir Patrick is acting. It is true that his voice isn’t what it used to be (he was a heavy smoker for many years and voices DO change with age, he has had issues with it for many years now) when he uses it too much but honestly that’s about the only thing I will grant. Everything else is him acting. When he talks in interviews or elsewhere everything is perfectly normal.

I mean look at the new scene in the

Spoiler

Dr Strange TV spot, his voice is almost as clear as it used to be (although as I said it has changed but that is normal), and there’s no trace of the slower way he talks as Jean-Luc. It’s… ACTING.

 

Are we sure that the Stargazer actually blew up?

If they go back to the future before the Stargazer blew up, that'll split the timeline.

If they go back to the future after the Stargazer blew up, they'll need Q to reconstitute the ship and crew, or there's a "Stargazer A" waiting in the wings.

If the Stargazer never blew up, and they escaped sideways to another universe seconds before they thought the ship was going to blow up, but it didn't, then everything is fine.

 

At the risk of missing a few things after skipping a lot of the thread...

Were they good episodes?

That line really touched me. I was prepared for them to just kind of ignore that scene from "Where No One Has Gone Before" -- but instead they made it better.

I mean, yes and no. First off, Jurati started with a revelation we'd never had about the Borg before: The Queen senses the inevitability of the extinction of the Borg Collective in literally every timeline. Like us, she knows she is doomed on some level but in denial about it, clinging to a paradigm she knows will fail.

And then, Borg!Jurati reveals something else to Seven and Raffi a few moments later: She is no longer truly Jurati or the Queen. What we were seeing, in other words, was not a mere argument between Jurati and the Queen; we were seeing a dramatization of the two personalities merging. So the Queen has been redeemed to some extent, yes -- but her redemption was only possible via her transformation into a new entity. In a very real sense, the Borg Queen is dead and this is a new person.

 

Exactly my sentiments. While the scene in WNOHGB was already somewhat moving in that this is an older man who is talking with a deceased parent (who at the time we assume did live to that age), the context that she never actually did live to be that age just deepens the feelings that scene brings and enhances it. I was genuinely surprised but pleasantly pleased they pulled that off, it only added to what was already there as opposed to ignoring it wholesale for the sake of a different creative direction.

 

I wonder, why aren't the Borg Queen's new drones actually turning into the Borg drones we all know and love? I thought the nanoprobes actually did most of the work of creating the Borg attire on someone after they get assimilated pretty quickly.

 

I think for some perhaps they feel the character has diminished as a by-product of age. It does stand in contrast to the character in TNG. I think maybe some just don't like to see their heroes get old maybe? But that's integral to the show and not any fault of Stewarts. His aging as much as the character gives the whole performance verisimilitude.

In a sense as well, when I watched Season 1 it made me feel old. I am now about as old as Patrick Stewart was when he started TNG.

But then that's part of the show. The character has aged as much as Picard has.

I have to confess I haven't watched any episodes yet, though I've spoiled myself to shit. I'm waiting till E10 drops and next week is a really quiet week for me at work, so I'll spend a few days binging it. I liked Season 1 more than I didn't like. I watched half of it (about) earlier in the year and I need to get on finishing that as well. It's not a lack of will, more a lack of time.

One thing @Lord Garth said recently affirmed some good feelings toward Picard. I haven't seen Nemesis for years, but it's pretty well known as an unideal end to a show like TNG. At least in Picard we are getting something brighter, vibrant and more varied to bookend a beloved show than a pretty wretched dying gasp of a movie. I'm all up for the reunion next year as well and I hope it's cheesy as fuck. It should be. It should be a love in for all concerned because TNG is a rightly beloved show that in it's longevity has earned a reunion like that. TNG is iconic and the best way to end it is to put it's icons back in the proper places. That's just storytelling and I think it's going to be joyous.

Say what you like about Picard as well, but usually for the good it sparks a lot of good discussion.

 

Imperfect metals will result in imperfect assimilations according to Seven in 2x08.

 

This is an interesting idea and the implication for future Trek is that the confederation universe will still be around in case they decide to revisit it, something interesting in the light of how silly the mirror universe has become (and it’s “drifting apart” anyway by now).

not necessarily: with this option they can have the cake and eat it too, with one Jurati leading the new borg and the other in her usual place, ready for season 3.

 

My real bugbear is Picards' mom suffering a long time from a mental illness. She's a federation citizen on earth, and the stigma if any, is much less than the jack pack on ds9. Nobody in the 2300's should be committing suicide due to a treatable mental illness.

 

Thanks! ‪‪I hadn’t even considered that aspect, but leaving the Confederation Universe as a viable option for cross-dimensional shenanigans does feel like a nice alternative to the fairly played out Mirror Universe.

That was sort of what ‪‪I was thinking as well, but ‪‪I failed to articulate it. ‪‪I just meant the Agnes who went through all this seems to have left, and will return to the Prime Universe through some sort of cross-dimensional/temporal incursion of her own/The New Borg™’s creation, and that presumably her consciousness won’t be reintegrated into their Prime Universe’s selves at the time of/shortly before the Stargazer’s self destruct sequence goes off, while the others ‪‪I would think will be returning.

But as you say, that would potentially/presumably leave a non-Borg Queen Agnes still there on the bridge of the Stargazer with the rest of them, just without the shared experience of going back in time with them, or the memories of consequences of the trip, as that transformed Agnes will be standing before them as the new masked Borg Queen.

 

Tell me you don't like complexity in your writing without telling me you don't like complexity in your writing.

Seven gives us only the barest of details, and the details she gives are heavily filtered through her point of view. We don't actually know the full situation. What we do know is that Seven is the one who made the decision to stop pursuing a Starfleet career. That means Janeway did not cave. That interpretation is in complete defiance of Seven's actual words.

That makes sense, and I do like that idea of reinforcing that even if we see tragedy hitting the protagonists of our shows, the Earth of the Star Trek Universe is one where progress is real and things like this are extremely rare.

That makes sense -- a rare tragedy occurring as a result in part of Maurice and Yvette maybe having an unhealthy distrust of modernity.

My condolences.

Not gonna lie -- I just lost my mother last August a week before her 60th birthday, and I think that scene from "Where No One Has Gone Before" is truly haunting now. One of the things I've bitterly regretted is that my mother passed before my fiancee and I have married or had children; we thought she would have at least another 15 or 20 years, and I've wondered a lot what she might have been like had she lived to become a grandmother -- what she would have looked like, what kind of relationship she would have had with my eventual children. If this is what losing out on another 20 years with her feels like, I can only imagine how much more profound his grief would have felt for Picard in "No Man" to see his mother after losing her 50 years before, aged into seniority, the woman she might have become had she lived to the old age she should have seen, had he gotten to have 50 more years with her.

It dovetails nicely with the Star Trek: Destiny novel trilogy by David Mack. That trilogy was written at a time when no one thought the 24th Century was coming back on film or in TV, and Mack's goal there was to explore the origins and ultimate fate of the Borg before resolving them forever as a plot element. Part of what he reveals is that

Spoiler: Star Trek: Destiny

the Borg Queen is an A.I. constructed around the remnants of the personality of an alien comprised of nanites whose mind had degenerated into desperate existential loneliness and pain as a result of being condemned to die in a desolate arctic wasteland alongside several humanoids. No longer capable of rational thought, when she forced herself to merge with a humanoid in an attempt to survive, the resultant hybrid mind was driven by this elemental hunger, this desperate need to absorb other minds to fill a howling void that will never end.

Same. I want to see the TNG crew paired with the PIC crew, dangit!

Also, I kiiiiiiiiind of want Rios to bring Teresa and her son to the 25th Century....

I interpreted it as, he never forgot it, but he may repressed the memory of finding her himself and the circumstances surrounding it.

Yeah, I liked that too. And Picard's horror at his "in another lifetime" line. "Listen, you little shithead, your descendant's android creation became my ersatz son, but I would never be friends with you."

They already established that the nanoprobes she was able to create aren't up to their normal specs.

Yeah. Star Trek: Picard is very much a show about needing to come to terms with mortality in order to find catharsis, and I think that bothers a lot of people. They don't want to think about Jean-Luc Picard as a person; they want to think of Captain Jean-Luc Picard Of The You-Ess-Ess Enterprise(TM), a fantasy of a heroic legend who shall never die and is virtually infallible.

I'm very much looking forward to the TNG crew reuniting, but I hope (and expect -- I think these writers are good) that they don't overshadow the PIC characters and turn it into TNG 2.0. Star Trek: Picard is its own narrative, and I hope their joining the cast reflects that. They're important because PIC the narrative needs to bring back characters from that important time in his life to give resolution and catharsis to Picard the character, but the show needs to stay Star Trek: Picard while doing so.

I hear you, and I certainly agree that by the 24th Century, there should be safe and effective treatments for mental illnesses and suicides as a result of mental illness should be virtually unheard of. This to me is one fault in the show -- I don't think they did enough to establish that Maurice and Yvette are outliers in the world of the 24th Century.

 

Just an observation: Seven's borgbrow was due to her ocular implant - correct? So, did JuratiQueen dissolve her biological eye and spawn a new eyepiece in those few moments?

Granted, this is beyond the pale so far as being a coherent, sensical show and none of these nit-picks matter a jot when there's so much else out of kilter. Just sayin'.