2-10. Farewell.

Picard and Q share an emotional farewell.

Original Air Date: May 5, 2022. Written by: Christopher Monfette, Akiva Goldsman. Directed by: Michael Weaver.


THE PLOT:

The Borg Queen-possessed Jurati has gone, departing for the Delta Quadrant in La Sirena and leaving the others on 21st century Earth. They have no way to get home; but with Renée Picard ready to launch in the Europa mission in a matter of hours, at least the future seems to be back on track.

Except for Adam Soong...

Soong remains determined to stop Renée and to secure his legacy as the hero of a dark and twisted Earth. Wielding outsized financial influence like a weapon, he demands "face time" with Renée before launch - a one-on-one conversation that he will make sure is her last.

Picard and Tallinn beam to the launch site to stop him. Meanwhile, the others discover that Soong has a back-up plan: weaponized drones that are set to target the shuttle on lift-off!


CHARACTERS:

Picard: Accompanies Tallinn against her wishes, in large part because of his fear of losing someone else. On that mission, he proves to be approximately as useful as a spare tire with a nail through its center. Thankfully, he gets some good material in the back half of the episode: an emotional final scene with Q, then a return to the Borg confrontation that started all this, with him exhibiting both patience and authority.

Seven: There's a nice follow-up to her conversation with Raffi in the last episode, when she recalled her rejection by Starfleet - something that Picard effectively fixes with a single order. She's open to rekindling her relationship with Raffi. Not that she's blind to Raffi's flaws: When Raffi starts overthinking a kiss, Seven tells her to just "let it breathe" with a mix of exasperation and amusement.

Tallinn: "You won't let me? It's not up to you!" Finally, a spark of Tallinn's original characterization returns when she snaps at Picard after he insists on accompanying her. Not that one can blame Picard for assuming that he has a say in Tallinn's actions, given that Two of One was the last episode to see her do anything other than tag along after him. Tallinn finally comes face to face with Renée, the assignment who has become a surrogate daughter to her, in a well-written and heartfelt exchange. Her final scene with Picard, however, goes on far too long, with (yet another) speech that retreads a lot of the ground as her speeches in Monsters and Hide and Seek.

Adam Soong: He was introduced as a disgraced scientist who was begging for more funding. Um... why? Based on this episode, he must have enough money to make Elon Musk jealous. I'll ignore the military drones, as those presumably came from the Borg Queen - but he's somehow donated enough to the Europa mission to be able to demand "face time" with astronauts, violating protocols that even American Presidents are expected to follow and with not so much as a security escort. In reality, I'd fully expect his demands would end in "face time" with large, uniformed officers walking him to the nearest exit.

Guinan: Whoopi Goldberg returns to bookend her appearance in the season opener. She fills in the blanks for Picard's crew about what happened after they returned home, since she lived through all of it. She also has a good moment when she thanks Picard for "setting (her) straight" in the past when she was ready to give up on humanity.

Q: "Even gods have favorite, Jean-Luc, and you've always been one of mine." If this does end up being Q's last appearance, at the very least the character is well-treated. His interactions with Picard are emotional, but never too emotional for this mischievous god of sarcasm. He refuses to accept blame for Elnor's death, pointing out that he didn't kill the young man; Seven's "idiot husband" from the alternate timeline did. He also cleans up his mess. As was true in Q Who?, he transports Picard back to where he belongs, making sure his old friend is just a little wiser for the experience.


THOUGHTS:

"Must it always have galactic import? Universal stakes, celestial upheaval? Isn't one life enough? You ask me why it matters. It matters to me!"
-Q reveals the very personal reason behind his actions.

There is much that is good in Farewell. The scenes with Q, and the end scenes with Picard dealing with the Borg back in present, are excellent. Character material is generally strong - again, particularly in the second half, once the plot mechanics are out of the way.

Too bad there's roughly half an episode of crap to wade through to get to the good stuff.

Given that the midseason features so much wheel-spinning, why does all of the activity surrounding the Europa launch feel so rushed? It plays very much as if a full episode of material was condensed into about twenty minutes.

No character in this section of the episode faces any serious obstacles. Soong swans around (a startlingly empty) Mission Control like he's Madame Empress, sneering at actual officials for being "disrespectful" and making demands even though he has exactly zero official standing. I'd immediately give this episode two additional points if they'd thrown him out, forcing him to evade security and improvise in order to reach Renée. This would have created some suspense and would have made the worst part of the episode feel at least a bit more convincing... but it also would have taken time; and after deviations like an entire episode devoted to Picard's bad dreams, time is now a luxury the season just doesn't have.

The lack of obstacles applies equally to our heroes. Picard and Tallinn encounter the same absence of security - or any other staff - that Soong does. Tallinn steals a flight suit from one room, then walks right in on Renée in another. Convenience stores do more to guard chocolate bars! The episode at least pretends that it's hard for Rios, Raffi, and Seven to stop the drones... but it's still the work of a few minutes, with Raffi punching some buttons to gain manual control before Rios saves the day by essentially playing a video game.

The showrunners should have cut some of the fat out of the mid-season and used that extra time to develop the Europa launch into a full episode. Then the finale could have just been epilogue, which would have been a match for the premiere being the prologue. The Q/Picard, Seven/Raffi, and Picard/Borg scenes are the bits of the episode that work, so I certainly wouldn't object to there being a bit more of it. Maybe we could check in on Soji, who seemed to have a firm friendship with Jurati in the first episode. It wouldn't even have cost much extra, given that Isa Briones is already in the episode, and this might have shown Jurati's change affecting someone on an emotional level.

Oh, and I will give points to a surprise cameo by a TNG character. I did not see that coming, and I rather liked how this appearance was woven in.


OVERALL:

Farewell is an episode of two halves. The first part is mostly terrible, unconvincing and inexcusably rushed. The rest almost makes up for it with some excellent character material. Unsurprisingly, the scenes between Patrick Stewart and John de Lancie are the highlights, but there are good moments for almost everybody.

This episode is much like the season it closes. There are plenty of elements to enjoy... but enjoying the good requires having a fair amount of patience with the bad. In the end, I'd have to rate both this finale and the season itself as a disappointment.


Overall Rating: 5/10.

Previous Episode: Hide and Seek
Next Episode: The Next Generation

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2-09. Hide and Seek.

The Borg-possessed Jurati and her drones come for La Sirena!

Original Air Date: Apr. 28, 2022. Written by: Matt Okumura, Chris Derrick. Directed by: Michael Weaver.


THE PLOT:

Time has run out. The Borg Queen-possessed Jurati has taken control of La Sirena's transporters and has beamed herself and her Borg-possessed soldiers to the ship. Her intent is to take the ship, destroy the Europa from orbit to prevent the Federation from forming, and then get a 400-year head start on forming a Borg Empire capable of either wiping out or assimilating the fascist Confederation and anyone else who tries to get in her way.

Rios, Teresa, and Teresa's young son barely manage to escape the ship, even as Picard and the rest of his crew beam to the abandoned Chateau Picard. The primitive Borg drones, under the command of Adam Soong, have no intention of allowing Picard anywhere near the ship.

Rios is injured, so he is beamed to Tallinn's apartment with Teresa and her son. Seven and Raffi attempt to approach La Sirena from the side, hoping to avoid the bulk of the drones. It falls to Picard and Tallinn to draw Soong and his forces into the Chateau, where Picard uses the tunnels underneath to play a particularly deadly game of hide and seek...


CHARACTERS:

Picard: "I refuse to accept an outcome that has not yet occurred." Picard draws on his childhood memories of the tunnels under the Chateau to evade Soong's forces. He tries to persuade Soong that the future the Borg Queen has promised him is a horrible one, but he isn't at all surprised when the other man is unmoved.

Jurati: Even if she did a horrible job of guarding the Borg Queen, she at least had the presence of mind to take precautions against the Queen's desire to take the ship. She locked out systems with a security code that she took care not to memorize, transforming La Sirena into "the world's biggest paperweight." She challenges the Borg Queen about her own loneliness and points out that in every timeline, the Borg end up failing.

Seven: A few snatches of her post-Voyager life get filled in. She attempted to enter Starfleet after the ship returned to Earth, only to be rejected for being Borg. Janeway threatened to resign in protest, but Seven chose to withdraw her application and join the Rangers instead. It's unspoken, but she wasn't willing to see Janeway throw away her career on her account. She refuses to allow any illusions about their situation. The enemy soldiers are no longer human; they are Borg. When Raffi starts talking about what they will do after this crisis, she flatly states, "We're not getting out of this."

Capt. Rios: He's been sidelined for pretty much the whole season... and it happens again after he gets injured during the initial attack. Picard beams him to Tallinn's apartment, then locks him out of the transporter so that he can't come back. Rios spends the bulk of the episode trying to break into the system to get back to help. Both Picard and Teresa are right, of course; if he beamed back right at that moment, he would only succeed in getting himself killed. But his stubbornness does pay off at the end.

Elnor: One of Jurati's safeguards was to program an emergency security hologram with the likeness of Elnor. The hologram also seems to have both his personality and memories. He grins when picking up Elnor's old sword to fight the Borg drones, then does his best to console Raffi about Elnor's feelings for her.

Tallinn: Remember the tough, wary Watcher who trained a gun on Picard and told him that she didn't like time travelers? Or the uneasy ally who needled him about Laris? Well, now she's his unapologetic sidekick, tagging along after him like a lost puppy. Or possibly his roaming therapist, given how much time she devotes to trying to get him to reconcile with his childhood... while men with guns are chasing them. Even Troi would have more common sense. (Or, recalling some of Troi's TNG lowlights, possibly not). All told, it's a rather sad decline for an initially fun and interesting character.

Teresa: Is awed at Rios having what amounts to a full emergency room inside his pocket, and confronts him with the effect this has on her: "You have no idea what this is like for me, do you? ...Surrounded by miracles, knowing win or lose, I'll have to let them go?" This does not stop her from bluntly pointing out that the injured Rios is currently not in shape to help anyone. The Rios/Teresa scenes work much better in this episode than last time. I think the writers should have saved their first kiss for here, where the situation makes it feel more natural and less shoehorned-in.

Adam Soong: He was introduced proclaiming, "Imagine, if you will, I am a god." Here, he declares himself to be a captain of industry. He's neither. He's gone from being Q's lackey to being the Borg Queen's; from having the love of a daughter to being alone; and he's so self-absorbed that he's incapable of seeing that his obsession with legacy has all but guaranteed that he won't have one. Brent Spiner is very good, as he has been all season. It's notable that the same actor who made Data so beloved can create a villain so despicable and ultimately pathetic.


THE PICARD SLEDGEHAMMERS:

It might be more accurate to label this one the Jurati and Tallinn sledgehammers. Picard gets a speech, of course, talking about moments in time we wish we could return to - but it's actually fairly effective on its own. Too bad it's flanked by two that are much worse.

Jurati lectures the Borg Queen about embracing uniqueness and even apparent weakness; Tallinn earnestly talks to Picard about how love can be a source of grief, but it's always "a gift." Both of these feel ridiculously heavy handed, and coming so rapidly one after another, the speechifying destroys the momentum in the final Act.

I think this was entirely fixable. Tallinn's should have been dropped entirely, as Patrick Stewart and Orla Brady are more than capable of conveying Picard's acceptance of his past nonverbally. I also think Jurati's attempts to alternately needle and persuade the Borg Queen would have played more convincingly in small interactions spread across the full episode, rather than being compressed into a single monologue.

As it stands, though, the succession of speeches kills the momentum of the final Act - which is a shame, as the episode is generally gripping up to that point.


OF MONSTERS, MEN, AND FLASHBACKS:

Most of the flashbacks of this episode simply re-tell the "young Picard" story that had been told in Monsters, only minus the fairy tale nonsense. Hide and Seek tells it better, not least because this time the flashbacks are actually motivated by the present-day story, as Picard goes through the same tunnels he once went through with his mother.

Nearly all the information given in Monsters is repeated here, only with additional context and an ending. If you missed Monsters entirely, nothing in the flashback plot here would seem at all confusing. This episode, in itself, gives you all the information you need to follow along.

Meaning that, yes, one of the season's weakest episodes was also pure water treading.


OTHER MUSINGS:

For the most part, I quite enjoyed Hide and Seek. Director Michael Weaver does a fine job at keeping the pace moving and the action easily understandable. The script finds time for good character moments for multiple members of the cast - not only Picard, but also Seven, Raffi, and even Rios. The Elnor hologram even allows him to receive some decent material, six full episodes after his death.

As was true of Mercy, this episode builds some honest-to-goodness momentum, and it manages to maintain it even during the flashbacks. Yes, when Tallinn and Picard pause in the tunnels to have a chat, I can't help but snap: "Is this really the best time?" - but it doesn't lose the tension, particularly with Soong finding the secret passage soon after.

The episode ends with a strong final note. It's not quite a cliffhanger. "The Siege of Chateau Picard" is fully resolved here, and the characters aren't in any immediate jeopardy at the end. Instead, we end on the heroes fully resolved in their next course of action, which I think is a lot more effective than, say, having someone pop up and train a gun on them.


OVERALL:

Hide and Seek has its faults. Tallinn has been completely flattened as a character by this point, and scenes with her and Picard talking about his childhood while actively being pursued just... annoy. Worse, a series of speeches badly disrupts the final stretch.

I'd still rate it as a good episode, however. For the bulk of its run, it builds tension and momentum. It offers strong moments to several characters. And it does an excellent job of giving every character something to do, even the ones who have often been sidelined this season.

Had the speeches been reduced or at least better spread out, this might have been one of the season's best. Even as it stands, I'd rate it as solidly above average.


Overall Rating: 7/10.

Previous Episode: Mercy
Next Episode: Farewell

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