Back to the action, after some delay, once again!
(and, once again, a blog post waits below, for anybody interested in what I thought of the first season of The Captain Picard Show, as it was originally airing!)
from Feburary 24, 2020 (about episode 5):
(I’ve mentioned my dislike for moment-by-moment recaps and reactions to TV episodes as being… not the kind of writing about television that I like. So, I’m going to go ahead and apologize for clogging the first few paragraphs of this write-up with exactly that kind of writing. In my defense, this fifth episode of THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW had more than one element into which I wanted to dig this week, so I figured I could hit a couple of plot points briefly, before getting into the real meat of what I found interesting in this episode. More spoilers than usual abound below.)
I wasn’t anticipating the search from Bruce Maddox* to be concluded as suddenly, or as definitively, as it was. I’d gotten the feeling – without any evidence at all to back it up – that we were in for more of a HEART OF DARKNESS/APOCALYPSE NOW-type deal with regards to tracking him down. Looking back through my list of things I’ve seen recently, it does seem like I’ve watched a good number of movies that are at least APOCALYPSE NOW-adjacent, so I certainly could’ve been imagining patterns that weren’t really there. Maddox seemed far too bound by procedure and decorum to go off and invent his own version of Harry Mudd’s android planet (STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES’ S2E08, ‘I, Mudd’), but, as nearly everyone else in the show seems to have had their fill of Starfleet, it wouldn’t have come as much of a shock, either.
I haven’t spent any time at all writing about Raffi Musiker, Picard’s ex-aide, who saw her own career shot out of a photon torpedo tube moments after he resigned to protest Starfleet’s abandoning of the Romulan evacuation plan. She might be the former Starfleet officer who’s fallen the furthest and hardest in her time out of uniform, living in a 24th-century trailer at Vasquez Rocks when Picard comes to recruit her for his mission, and drinking herself into oblivion. No synthehol in Raffi’s liquor cabinet, clearly. It’s in this episode, though, where we learn of Raffi’s involvement in the Martian synthetic worker sabotage conspiracy community. The synthetic laborers remain the element of THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW that’ve most captured my imagination, and it was gratifying to see the show return to them, even for a moment. More gratifying, still, was it to hear that the actions of the synthetics hadn’t been accepted by everyone within the Federation as a simple rogue act of destruction. Whether Raffi’s become the future’s equivalent of a 9/11 Truther, or she’s woven together threads that Starfleet Intelligence has refused itself to pick up, I hope this isn’t the end of the story of what happened on Utopia Planetia.
The seemingly endless failures of the Federation are, again, explored this week, though it’s not “just” enemies/outsiders/non-aligned species that are revealed to have been abandoned in the top brass’ quest to save its own skin. Additionally, somehow, former Borg refugees, freed from the control of the Borg Collective, with the opportunity to regain some semblance of a normal life, are allowed to slip through the Federation’s cracks. There appears to be a brisk black-market trade in the remaining Borg technology within these survivors; they are kidnapped and literally stripped for parts. Based on what we’ve previously seen aboard the reclaimed Borg cube with the Romulan survivors, and Seven of Nine’s failed rescue mission in the episode’s opener, it looks like Jean-Luc Picard is the only survivor of the Collective to be able to close that chapter of his life’s story (even if he’s living through yet another sequel to it, right now). While his mental and physical toughness can’t be discounted in his recovery, neither can the exalted status (and, presumably, resources) of a decorated Captain of the United Federation of Planets. Too, the Picard family estate back in France affords him a privilege many others lack. Though he and Seven of Nine survived similar experiences,** their outcomes have been as different as night and day.
Seven of Nine, like Picard, his ad hoc crew, and Maddox, has left the Federation behind. She’s joined an independent militia group, the Fenris Rangers, whose loyalty appears to be more to keeping the peace than to a particular political structure, as they specifically refer to their work on both sides of the former Romulan Neutral Zone. History is resplendent with groups of locals who step up to serve their communities when the distant governmental authority fails to act in their interest; in some ways, the Rangers are the heirs to the tradition of local service clubs, the Black Panthers, and the Rural Organizing Project. Clearly, the perpetual post-Dominion War Starfleet rebuilding project continues, decades down the line, with the Federation’s resources stretched too thin to enable them to effectively administer their territory. Well, they’re overstretched, and they’re probably disinterested. They don’t even maintain a presence near Vashti, which was physically closer to Federation space than Freecloud.
Picard remarks to Seven that, while he admires the Rangers, he is put off by their taking the law into their own hands. In the long list of hypocritical things Jean-Luc Picard has said over the years, this might actually be the most self-important, elitist, and hypocritical thing he has ever said. He has a substantial record of [un/wittingly?] looking down his nose at how less “sophisticated” societies organize themselves (the Ansata terrorists in TNG S3E12’s ‘The High Ground,’ the citizens of Ventax II in S4E13’s ‘Devil’s Due,’ the Bajorans, at least when he first meets Ensign Ro), but in this case, the Fenris Rangers explicitly set out to fill the power vacuum left by the withdraw of Starfleet’s presence from the area. What would Picard have preferred, for the former Neutral Zone space to have descended into unchecked piracy and violence, where the strong prey on the weak without any consequences or fear of retribution? Did he imagine the magic of diplomacy would descend upon the area like a warm blanket, and just magically civilize everything, the way the discovery of warp drive seems to for developing cultures?
Perhaps it is their surface-level similarities with the Marquis that make the Rangers so off-putting to Picard: both are stocked with disaffected Starfleet officers, who’ve elected to serve a cause rather than the Federation’s orders; both are embedded within the communities they serve, rather than stopping by on the way to observe a star’s collapse; and both rub Picard’s nose in the ways the Federation’s decisions have failed the citizens he’d once sworn to serve. Consequences are easy to avoid when you captain a Galaxy-class starship that can travel above Warp 9.6, but far more difficult when you have to wade back into the decay that you’ve tried to ignore for twenty years.
If the last decade-and-change have taught us anything, it’s that there are no real saviors. One person, no matter how prepared, how charismatic, how righteously indignant, will not be enough to save us. A single grand, sweeping heroic gesture is not powerful enough to stop our slide into whatever the future holds. For Jean-Luc Picard, whose failure to rescue an entire civilization from destruction will forever haunt him, saving a single person might be enough to restore his spirit. For us, living in the here and now, if we want to salvage our spirits, we have to save each other.
*I’d love to know why Brian Brophy didn’t come back to reprise Maddox. Based on what I read of his biography on the internet, he’s keeping plenty busy as the theater director at Caltech, but he wouldn’t have had to be away from his full-time gig for long to play the single-minded cyberneticist again. A chunk of the appeal of projects like THE CAPTAIN PICARD SHOW are in them getting the whole band back together, even if certain players only come onstage for a single solo. I don’t think I’ve ever seen John Ales, who took over the Maddox role from Brophy, in anything, and he certainly did a good job playing hangdog/exhausted/terrified, but he also wasn’t in ‘Measure of a Man,’ so he was distracting. That’s not his fault; it’s just how it was.
**I’d never stopped to consider the shared trauma that Picard and Seven shared. Getting to see them converse about their experiences, and the lives they tried to put back together afterward, was a highlight of this episode.