It’s been a little bit since the last entry in my Fenris Rangers comic, but once again, we’re picking up right where we left off, with the Galor-class ship taking our heroes to the site of the mysterious attack on the Cardassian convoy!
(as always, there’s an archival blog post of mine regarding an episode of the first season of The Captain Picard Show below, if you care to peruse!)
from February 17, 2020 (about episode 4):
“Because you could not save everyone, you chose to save no one.”
This word bomb comes about twenty-six minutes into the fourth episode of THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW. It’s dropped upon Picard by Mother Zani, a leader of the Romulan warrior nun order Qowat Milat. This particular house of Romulan warrior nuns live on the planet Vashti, where many of the Romulan refugees settled after it became clear the Federation wasn’t going to RE-settle them anyplace else. Zani had worked closely with Picard in planning the evacuation, and had bought into his vision for the future of the Romulan people. So committed to the plan was she that Zani and her sisters took in a refugee boy, Elnor, even though their religious order excluded men. When Picard receives news of the synthetic worker uprising on Mars, he beams away without a word of explanation, leaving these people who’ve put all their faith in him to their own devices.
Picard, as many people including me have observed before, is very much a man of his time, both of the mid-to-late-24th century, but also the late 1980’s/early 1990’s. He talks a good game about his boundless respect for other cultures, and his confidence in the fundamental decency of all people, but Jean-Luc Picard, he’s living at the End of History! All the great challenges of humanity are behind, not ahead. We won! As an enlightened human, he can leave whole planets lurching around in the darkness, sentencing them to decades, maybe centuries of instability before they flip the magic switch of warp drive, and become worthy of the Federation’s attention (and the superior culture of humanity). It’s all right, though; it’ll all work out in the end.
Picard always had some of the old colonizer morality in him. His passion for archaeology, and its proud tradition of the theft of cultural artifacts, is evidence enough of this. One can only imagine how many artifacts from countless worlds across the galaxy are housed in Picard’s personal archives at Starfleet headquarters. A Picard fought at Trafalgar, he’s reminded us, and another was one of the first Martian colonists. I wonder if a Picard was around for incursions into the Louisiana territory, or worked in the French East India Company, or managed French assets in Algeria? Did Picards bring copies of The Three Musketeers to the children of the lands they came to colonize, and teach them to fence, too, as Picard did for Elnor?
The Federation’s Prime Directive, which forbids interference in the development of less-advanced cultures, was just as often a shield for Picard and his crew as it is for the unsophisticated people they claim to want to protect. It obviously doesn’t apply on Vashti – the Romulans were at least as advanced as the Federation, before the destruction of their homeworld – but the seven seasons of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION were absolutely lousy with Captain Picard and members of his senior staff transporting up from the surface of some planet not aligned with the Federation, whose problems were too complex for him to snap his fingers and solve them in 45 minutes, leaving thousands, if not millions of people to wallow in the mess they’d made for themselves. In ‘Symbosis,’ for instance (TNG S1E22), rather than follow Dr. Beverly Crusher’s advice, and provide treatment for the narcotic to which the entire population of the planet Ornara has been addicted for generations, Picard gives a pretty demeaning speech about the virtues of learning and personal responsibility, before gunning the Enterprise’s engines and putting as much distance between himself and the Delos system as he can. He’s done with Ornara and Brekka, and will leave them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
In the opening scene of this fourth episode of THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW, when Picard arrives on Vashti during the Romulan evacuation (in flashback), he’s dressed like an early 20th century European explorer, bound for Africa on a search for a lost city of gold. He’s not dressed in his Starfleet admiral’s uniform, even though this is before his protest resignation, but like a gentleman adventurer. It’s not surprising that the Romulans on Vashti don’t greet him with open arms upon his return; from their perspective, it’s like he quit helping them evacuate their planet when the project stopped being a fun flight of fancy. As Captain Kirk did with Khan Noonian Singh and his followers after dropping them off on Ceti Alpha V, Picard never bothered to check on the progress of the Vashti refugees. He didn’t return to explain himself or to take responsibility until he again needed their help. Elnor, the boy who idolized Picard, has grown up in the shadows, not truly a member of the Qowat Milat, but unable to go anywhere else to find a home, either. In fact, of all the members of Jean-Luc Picard’s rag-tag crew, Elnor may have been the one most let down by the Federation.
To Picard’s credit, he eventually understands the depth of his failure, though he then decides to bully his way into a Romulans-only restaurant and demand service from the staff on his way back to his orbiting ship. His command of the Romulan language, and his knowledge of their culture aren’t enough to protect him from the wrath of the people he abandoned. One can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Ambassador Spock hadn’t been yanked into the Kelvin Timeline of the last three Star Trek movies (STAR TREK [2009], STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS, STAR TREK BEYOND), and had remained in our Prime Timeline to broker the relationship between the Federation and the Romulans following the destruction of their world. Spock had, for decades, committed himself to building bridges between the two cultures, not by trying to override Romulan signifiers with Federation ones, but by immersing himself in the culture of his ancestral cousins. Both Spock and Picard severed their relationships with Starfleet when they could not compromise their ideals one more time to suit a bureaucracy that no longer stomached boldness, but Spock committed himself ever more fully to his ideals once he was out of uniform. Picard, as has been pointed out to him on multiple occasions in the show, ran back home to his vineyard. Only when something happened to him, personally, did he finally pull his head out of the dirt and take stock of what he’d allowed to happen by his absence.
With all this additional context about the current state of Romulan affairs, it’s a lot easier for me to understand why the remains of the Romulan government would take on a project as fundamentally dangerous as the reclamation of the dead Borg cube. When your entire society has its back up against the wall, when you’ve been purposefully forgotten by everyone else around you, In many ways, they have nothing left to lose, so why wouldn’t they swing for the fences, and reassert their power in the boldest way possible? What if they salvage enough usable technology to be able to fight off the space pirates that have infested their territory? Could the dreams of the next generation of Romulan children reach beyond the mud in which their refugee tents were planted?
As much as it might pain him to admit it, Jean-Luc Picard spent his adult life serving in the proudest tradition of Western colonizer powers. Leaving cultures considered “lesser” in the lurch, absconding with their best and brightest, failing to comprehend the difference in the values of the known and the unknown… Hundreds of years of our recorded history, and Picard’s, tell the same stories, over and over again. Maybe THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW will give my (our) hero an opportunity to really break the cycle. Maybe we’ll all be able to learn some lessons from it, by the season’s end.