Then again, I don't get any sense that the S2 showrunners understood Rios as a character at all. They did nothing, absolutely nothing all season to show that he felt he didn't fit in, as 2.10 claimed. I mean, he didn't leave Starfleet because he "didn't fit in". He left because Starfleet betrayed him and he was suffering from PTSD. But even after the institution he had admired since he was a little boy let him down, he was still "Starfleet to the core" - and then when we saw him commanding the Stargazer in 2.01 he seemed perfectly at home and had a great rapport with his new crew.
He doesn't spend his time around holos wearing his face because he "doesn't fit in with other people". Quite the opposite! It's clear from the word go that even though he tries to be grumpy and misanthropic and keep everyone at arm's length, he loves people and he lets them into his heart pretty much right away. He's not annoyed by Agnes bugging him, he's intrigued. He's unfailingly polite to Picard, he catches Agnes up when she can't follow the discussion, he geeks out over Seven, he is unfailingly gentle and kind to Soji despite being triggered into a PTSD episode by his first sight of her, even when she tried to hijack his ship. He has holos with his face because he is a people person. Because he gives his heart away quickly, freely, and completely. It's a (probably subconscious) way to protect himself from being hurt again - and a way to protect others from himself, since he blames himself for Vandermeer's death. It has nothing to do with not fitting in. And not having a blood family doesn't mean he had no meaningful connections with anyone in 2401. He spent the whole of season one building warm, strong bonds with the ragtag crew that Picard assembled aboard La Sirena - if Picard could call what was left of that team a family in 2.10, so could Rios.
The writers may have been able to sell us "he doesn't fit in so this is a good thing for him" if they'd worked for it, spent the season laying groundwork. But for that, they first would have had to understand who he was in season 1, what his damage was, and what his relationship to the people around him was. They could have used his scene on the Stargazer to show he's uncomfortable with his return to Starfleet, instead of showing him perfectly at home and at ease. They could have used his conversations with Teresa to tease out any regrets he has about returning to the service, instead of giving her lots of cute speeches while he simply sat there making heart eyes. They could have used his interactions with Raffi and Seven to show that their friendship had grown more distant as they each got lost in their romantic relationship - instead, we saw the opposite, he and Raffi were as close as ever in the scant few scenes they had together, while a more newly developed friendship with Seven was also very clearly established through the season (I really loved that dynamic - I loved that both Raffi and Seven had a strong friendship with Rios that was completely separate from their relationship with each other). They could have done so many things to make it seem like Rios doesn't fit in and is looking for meaning or somewhere he belongs. Instead they give Agnes an easily-missed half-sentence in the middle of a tense action scene and had Rios rave about "real" food and cigars, as if he couldn't easily get those in the 25th century if he wanted to.
(Also, because it bugs me: yes, he reads paper books. But Raffi has paper books on her desk, too, and Picard has a whole library. It's clearly not that uncommon. And the record player was Vandermeer's, not Rios's. I agree that he likes antiques and it's a good character trait of his. But it's not like it's a defining aspect of his personality.)
So yeah. I understand the writers just needed to get rid of him because they wanted to clear the deck for TNG season 8, and romantic love trumps all else, right? And leaving him in 2024 allowed them to put Seven in the captain's chair in his place, which they clearly wanted to do. So finding him a feisty Latina woman to fall in love with made sense to them, and as long as we establish that they have a ton of romantic chemistry, that means we can neglect all other aspects of his character, right? We are making it very clear that nobody should ever watch season 1 again, because it was dumb and doesn't matter, so if we just say he never fit in anywhere and he doesn't belong anywhere because holograms, then the people are gonna go "yeah, that makes sense, that's what his character was about", right?
Sheesh.
I know it is a Star Trek tradition for one of the crewmates to suddenly be ready to give up their current life for someone they fell in love with a few days ago. But they don't usually go through with it, and this feels like the worst possible example of that. You really gonna walk away from your communist utopia after receiving a crash course in just how thoroughly your rights will be violated if you stay? You sure you want that, Rios?
I mean, to have him choose to stay in 2024 without any mention at all of the imminent onset of World War III - and to air that episode on the same day that SNW aired a scene describing the horrors of that conflict in terrible, brutal detail. And to have nobody even mention it as an issue. They could have fixed it. Give him a line where he says, “Yeah, I’ve seen how terrible it is. I know what's coming. And that’s why I need to stay here. Because I know it can get better, eventually. So I can give these people hope. It’ll be hard, but it’s the right thing to do.” Instead, nothing. Guinan tells us after the fact that he and Teresa did a lot of good and helped a lot of people, but the scenario really, desperately needed to show us that Rios knew up front what he was getting himself into and was prepared for it, rather than just going with the cutesy, "I'm in love and this is my new family, I'm home," statement.
Not to mention that scene of Picard calling Seven, Raffi and Elnor his family, laughing happily together just moments after Guinan had described Rios's premature death in a bar brawl, of all things. 'Died as he lived' my foot. S2 tried to peg Rios as an impulsive type, but in S1 this was the man who talked everyone else down from an armed standoff and got the team home safely when even the great Picard himself had failed - how is being murdered in a bar brawl 'dying as he lived' for that guy?
None of it works for his character even a little bit, and it also doesn't work for the themes of the story, which are all about NOT getting stuck in the past, and it's an insult to the character, his deeply meaningful relationships to all the other characters around him, and it's frankly an insult to Santiago Cabrera. Writing him out of the show this unceremoniously with an alleged "happy ending" that reduces his character to a shadow of his former self and closes all doors for future projects so there will have to be tons of loopholes to contend with if anyone wants to bring his character back - it's a complete farce, start to finish.
It just makes me so furious how badly they butchered this layered, complex character and gave him basically zero motivation for ending the story the way he did beyond "romantic love is more important than friendship, found family, duty, community, and the prospect of horrific war, racism, and decades upon decades of suffering".
Bah humbug. Glad I've got that off my chest! I could probably rant a bit more about the deeply flawed structure of the show and how Elnor and Soji deserved better, too - not to mention Agnes, but this is a Rios thread so I'll shut up now.
