No counselor will force treatment. Not ethical.
Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 2x09 - "Hide and Seek"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Thanks to Borgati's ingesting low-grade metals, the resulting nanoprobes were substandard and most likely unstable. There was exposition about this between Seven and Raffi. Nobody mumbled. The resulting dumb drones were compliant muscle, nothing more.
Then why assimilate them in the first place? These are military commandos who were already following orders. There wasn’t a need to make them more compliant.
It's surprising to me the number of people saying Yvette should have been thrown in a rubber room and compelled to take treatment regardless of her wishes. That's no less misguided than locking her in a room unsupervised.
The point wasn't "mystery." The point was to explore the impetus for why Picard has always, from "Encounter at Farpoint, Part I" onwards, had a fear of commitment and intimacy.
I thought the semi-assimilated mercenaries from "Hide and Seek" were the first time the Borg have been even a little bit scary since 1996.
Well, no, because if they remained human, 1) that would be inconsistent with the Queen's personality, and 2) the mercs would ask questions about the transporter tech and the purpose of the mission that would bog down the story.
Because it is a metaphor for self-acceptance.
Why you gotta kink shame?
The dead mercs in the walls are a legit potential plot hole. But they'd probably just think the bullet holes were from the war and ignore them.
I used to find RLM entertaining, but then I realized how disturbing their jokes about violence against women are.
Things like wide-beam settings were forgotten by the writers back in the Bush Sr administration. And we don't know that Confederation tech had such settings. Hardly fair to hold that against PIC but not the other shows.
I thought it was pretty clear that Holo!Elnor had a mobile emitter and that the emitter was vulnerable to physical attack. He pointed to it and everything.
I think Kore was depicted as dressing comfortably given L.A. heat and her confinement. The camera never lingered on her body -- she wasn't objectified.
Except I don't think he changed Picard much. Picard has always had elements that didn't quite fit with his general stiff-and-formal demeanor in TNG. Most of the time, TNG ignored those elements, but they'd bring them out in limited fashions for some episodes, like "Captain's Holiday" or "Tapestry."
What Stewart did in the films and is continuing to do in PIC, is he's trying to integrate those disparate elements of Picard's personality into a more coherent depiction of the character that encompasses all of the facets of his personality instead of only bringing out these other facets once in a while.
Naaaaaah. Shatner would never have allowed Kirk to be depicted as being as flawed as Stewart allowed Picard to be depicted. And Stewart hasn't insisted on trying to make Jean-Luc a late-Clint-Eastwood-esque implausibly-old-ass-kicker like Shatner did for Kirk in those books.
Eh, who cares? It bought them a couple of minutes; it's not like it was a McGuffin that solved all their problems.
Yes, Star Trek has never done a spectacle-driven action sequence before!
I don't really see why it's confusing? There are three basic plots:
Faced with a company of semi-assimilated mercenaries under the control of the Borg Queen, Picard and Co. split up. Picard and Tallinn attempt to escape the house through the same tunnels in which Picard once got hurt as a child. They are captured by the mercs and Soong, but Rios beams in and saves them at the last moment. The experience triggers his memories of the day his mother died.
Meanwhile, Seven and Jurati fight their way across the field and make it onboard La Sirena. They are aided by a combat hologram given the form and personality of Elnor by Jurati, who is fighting for control of her body against the degraded Borg Queen personality. Along the way, they open up about some of the pain they've been fighting and consider whether or not they have a future together once they get home.
As the Jurati and Queen personalities continue to vie for dominance over their shared body, the Queen almost kills Seven and Raffi. The Queen has never been able to fully assimilate this brain, however, and the effects of endorphins produced when she is thrilled to almost kill her enemies disrupts her control enough for the Jurati personality to save Seven. The Jurati personality then uses the fact that they are merging into one single personality and her insights into the Queen's psychology to persuade her that they should become a new kind of Borg -- a Borg Collective based upon mutual consent rather than conquest. The new Queen/Jurati personality saves Seven but is forced to restore her post-assimilation appearance, then agrees to leave Earth in peace.
Picard and company reunite and regroup, determining that Soong still threatens the Europa mission and thus might still cause the emergence of the Confederation of Earth if they don't stop him.
Yes. It is a metaphor for self-acceptance.
It makes perfect sense. Picard said in "Hide and Seek" that he would often imagine his mother as an old woman, and "Where No One Has Gone Before" was about people's thoughts being made into reality. Furthermore, it is extremely common for people who lose loved ones when those loved ones are relatively young to imagine what they might have become had they lived. My mother died in August a week before her 60th birthday, and I can't tell you how many times I've imagined what she might have been like had she lived into her 70s and had the opportunity to have a relationship with the children my fiancee and I plan to have one day.
Literally everything about this makes sense.
Do you really need this spelled out for you? PIC S2 has been pretty clear that Picard has a fear of commitment and intimacy as a direct result of him not having fully dealt with the trauma of losing his mother at such a young age.
Exactly!
He was not ready to "seal the deal" (Jesus Christ that phrase is gross) with Vash. A really important point of both "Captain's Holiday" and "Q-Pid" was that Picard was not willing to become truly intimate with her on an emotional level.
And the entire point of "Lessons" was that Picard was not able to overcome his fear of losing Daren to have a relationship.
And he was never willing to "do so" with Beverely, because he spent fifteen years jerking her around and giving her mixed signals.
Also: Sometimes, people think they're ready for intimacy, but then they try it and they can't or won't actually do the things that come with it! And sometimes people are able to make it work for a while, but then the trauma resurfaces and they stop coping as well as they did before. Trauma is not linear.
The CSS La Sirena is from a timeline thirty years in the relative future of the Enterprise-E. Its deflector array could be capable of transmitting to the Delta Quadrant without modification.
It's not a throwaway line. The primary function of the line is to express how enduring his grief has been. It has a secondary function of both explaining Yvette's appearance in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and of retroactively adding a new layer of depth to that scene. As someone who just lost his mother last summer, I related very deeply to Picard's line, as I noted above. It spoke to me very deeply.
It was not a throwaway line.
I can buy it. They established very early on that the Queen's assimilation tech was not up to snuff and so she was never fully able to absorb Jurati the way she normally would. Add to this the fact that Jurati is the first person to be in a situation where she's aware of the Borg being destroyed in multiple timelines, and the fact that the assimilation process apparently goes so wrong that it merges the Jurati and Queen personalities into a new construct instead of controlling Jurati and overwriting her with the Queen personality, and you've got a recipe for a plausible evolution of the Borg.
I dunno. I think it makes some sense that a force so universally threatening would eventually provoke its enemies to unite against it, as Jurati argues.
They explicitly say it's not just about the speech -- it's about Jurati's personality merging with the Queen's to produce a new personality, instead of the Queen's personality overwriting hers.
I would agree with this. We should have seen more signs of Jurati and the Queen merging.
A bullet wound is pretty damn debilitating in real life! That's not being a "wuss."
Eh. I don't mind Maurice not just being a horrible monster, but I think they should have written him to still be abusive. It reads too much like the "reasonable, put-upon man and the hysterical woman who needs a man to use force against her for her own good" trope.
Strongly agreed. And the idea that Picard's trauma over seeing his mother die would manifest as a lifelong fear of commitment makes perfect sense.
I do! I could easily imagine that a collective consciousness built upon the principle of mutual consent would be very attractive to some people. Particularly if it gives you de facto immortality, as Borg assimilation seems to.
I 100% buy it. First off, we don't really know the specifics; it's all very vague and filtered through Seven's POV. Was she actually denied a commission, or did Starfleet Security make her jump through so many hoops she felt like they were doing that without saying so? Second, Starfleet has never been the totally goody-two-shoes organization it was often framed as being. Even in TNG, Starfleet tried to kill and dissect Data, kidnap Lal, conduct and cover up illegal cloaking technology research, block Picard from joining the Battle of Sector 001, frame Bajorans for an attack on civilian shipping, etc.
How did hologram Elnor get all of his thoughts, even those just before death?
Yeah that part is weird. Some posters have theorized that La Sirena's computer was scanning his brainwaves and made an inference based upon that at the time of death. I think an even simpler explanation is that Holo!Elnor was lying to make Raffi feel better -- that he had no idea what Elnor was thinking at the end of his life but could at least infer that Elnor would want to give her comfort.
Which would, of course, be ironic, since real Elnor lived by the code of absolute candor.
I loved it. Every film and TV show can be improved with a musical number.
Plus, it's a creepy foreshadowing of the Borg's intentions. "Surrender all your dreams to me tonight..."
Okay, so, this is a point where your attempt to whine about the writing is borderline offensive because it implies you think there's something weird about how real people cope with grief.
It is extremely common to both imagine lost loved ones as reaching ages they never reached in real life, and to remember them as they were during specific times in their lives. Nothing about this is unrealistic or weird. I am not "weird" for both having days when I imagine my late mother in her 70s as the grandmother she never became and for having days when I remember her as she was in her 30s when I was a child.
Seriously. Think about the implications the things you're saying have for real people.
I hope we see the Prime Universe La Sirena and the Enterprise-E together.
Ask Borgati. People are missing the in-episode explanation. All I did was highlight it.
The trend I see is one of returning to institutionalization by attitudes expressed by younger adults. Due to similar attitudes being expressed in this thread.
Honestly, I think the issue of Yvette's mental illness might be a case of putting drama over "realism". Yes, if we want to faithfully adhere to Gene's vision then a simple tricorder scan would have revealed a chemical imbalance, Yvette goes to a Federation doctor who replicates a hypo spray with a cure and she is cured instantly and Picard lives a perfect childhood. But then there is no drama. The Picard writers wanted to tell a story about Picard's mother than plays into the themese of the season. Heck, even the TNG writers distanced themselves from Gene's "perfect humans" rule because it would have killed a lot of story ideas.
the whole thing would have made way more sense if it was a bunch of random people off the street.
Drones don't require explanations and don't question orders. And when you're the Borg Queen, everything looks like a drone. Pretty simple.
Well, that is depending on how you look at it. I am fully in with the idea of giving rates in some sort of a relative way - so taking movies you already know as some corner marks to inform your rating process.
But this isn't a naive Fahrenheit-process where you say "ok, I take 0 as the lowest I have seen until now and 10 as the heighest". For example, if I rate Star Trek movies, I adjust my scale taking all existing 10 Star Trek movies into account, but I wouldn't rate any of them as 0 or a 1.
In fact, there are additional influences taken into consideration: for example the idea of "what could have been". That means that one can look at a movie and see what they easily could have messed up and taking this into consideration of what a 0 or 1 would look like - and the same in the other direction: what they easily could have done to make it an even better movie to inform your idea of what a "10" is.
And then you give every movie a 10 that is basically "at least 95% as good as how good a movie can be".
Equally, you can have seen a movie that has a fantastic first half, but totally falls down in the end. And another movie that has a completely useless first half and brilliant in the second part.
(Or a movie with a brilliant story idea, but stupid dialog. And a movie with a stupid story idea, but fantastic dialog.)
So, each of the movies would probably be a 5 or a 6, but just by knowing these two movies you probably can image how a "10" would look like without ever having seen a 10 (by combining the strengths of both existing movies into one movie).
I am happy that I already saw some 10s, but that probably is only because of my lack of imagination what a 10 really looks like. So, if someone here says, (s)he has never seen a 10 and is waiting for the great day that it comes around, I am fine with that because I understand that many people don't want to play the "that's a 12 on a scale from 0 to 10" card too often.
(and similarly the so called Fahrenheit mistake, that you have to rate a movie "-3 on a scale of 0 to 10" since he just couldn't imagine how low it could go... He couldn't image it before we found out that Kelvin is the absolute low point).
So sitting by someone and offering to talk is not ethical, but just locking them away is ethical?
Lord Kelvin's absolute zero is very helpful in temperature scales.
If someone is refusing treatment you don't keep offering treatment.
But lock them away instead?
If they are proving a danger to themselves, then steps can be taken to ensure safety.
But an ethical counselor will not force treatment. Doing so violates the core principle of autonomy and informed consent. In the state I'm in, even if treatment is court ordered I cannot force participation.
So locking someone away against their will does not violate the principle of autonomy?
What if they refuse being locked in a room?
When they are a danger to themselves or others then that will take precedence. That's different than treatment.
