Lip service lesbians, lip-locking South Americans, and Temo/Wish or whatever Fox William Mulder. This week, I don’t have to say much on the technical and production side: Joe Menendez returns to direct with Kristen Beyer writing her final episode alongside Cindy Appel. Thankfully we’ll see Appel again in season 3 for two excellent episodes, one of which is directed by Frakes. Though that’s getting ahead of ourselves. We’ve got one of the better episodes finally putting some pieces on the table to play with and pose what the hell is going on.

So Picard and Guinan are huckled into a drab FBI field office basement full of broken stuff, the lesbians are doing what all lesbians do on TV, fight, and the two unbelievably hot people love each other very much. It sounds very Star Trek when you put it like that; the Dominion War is shaking in its boots in everyone’s ranked lists for best Star Trek stories. When I say this is one of the better episodes, I’m not ranking it on a scale of episodes we’ve yet to see in this series or even the franchise as a whole, I’m comparing it to the last couple.

I’ve made it no secret that season 2 of Picard, much like season 1, is not great. If I were to expand my comparison, how I’m stacking “Mercy” against other episodes and as part of the current plot, then yeah it is terrible. I could honestly go without Soong and Kore altogether. I think the bickering over tiny things between Annika and Raffi is filler, and I’m honestly finding refuge in caring about Rios in the short term. Meanwhile, the blinding light in the distance is the interrogation by budget Duchovny, again because it is a special skill being used.

So the mad scientist who created his kid in a test tube is supposed to be the villain because he didn’t get his little kilobyte out and rub it on a woman. So am I supposed to hate people whose only option is IVF? I, for the life of me, can’t wrap my head around the morality and what it’s supposed to be because he’s playing god with DNA and all that, but that’s not enough, he needs to attempt to kill Jean-Luc Picard and bring about The Confederation. Do you want to give him a monocle and mustache too?

Meanwhile, all the subtlety and nuance of the Borg Queen has been flung out the window in an effort to shout, “She likes licking batteries!” You never licked a 9V battery as someone fondles you while dressed like Gaius Baltar? To quote the Legion of Doom, “Ooooo What a rush!” I’ve got one more reference before I stop trying to be funny, don’t worry. Before we had a decent bit of character between Agnes and the Borg Queen, but now it is boiled down to Neil deGrasse Tyson throwing his hands up to say he doesn’t want to be kicked in the face by her.

So much of “Mercy” should have been put in the bin and never retrieved for the sake of everyone’s sanity, but instead, it was filmed and put out as if it meant anything. It is stated here that the Borg Queen wants to get a 400-year jump on the whole assimilation nonsense by starting from 2024 and working her way towards The Confederation. The same Confederation that was minutes away from killing her in a public execution at the start of the season. So I’ll ask a question, what was the Borg Queen’s plan?

If we say that time is strictly linear and two forks in the road are whether Renée’s the one that solves the climate issue or if it is Adam Soong, one leading to The Confederation, the other The Federation. One is where she’s publicly executed by Jean-Luc Picard, the other is where she gets to live and continue the Assimilation of humanity and every other species in the universe. If her plan was always to side with Soong, then she’s signing her death warrant. I honestly don’t know what she’s supposed to be doing here.

You can hate the villain, but this was Voyager level of Borg stupidity, maybe worse. If there is one thing you should not be saying about the Borg it is that they are collectively stupid, that’s exactly what this “plan” is though, as it shows here. It is also a dumb time travel story because if you read it at face value “she has a 400-year jump on assimilation,” then there was no reason for Q to send our Jean-Luc into the past, which is the implication early in the season, therefore he doesn’t save her from execution to bring her back here.

The Borg Queen is supposed to be really smart, but doing that would create a paradox that means she doesn’t do the plan in the first place because she’d never have the opportunity to do so. She’d have already assimilated everyone on Earth, eventually expanding into the stars and attempting to take on every other race as we see normally. My point is that other than getting the crew to 2024 (and back), she has no purpose in the story. It is a contrived and dumb way of trying to keep her relevant until the end.

I like the verbal confrontation between Agnes and the Queen, I think that’s one of the lasting memories most have of Picard season 2. However, we don’t have that. Wersching appeared last in “Two of One” and won’t appear again until “Hide and Seek,” her last appearance. The Spark of the Borg Queen isn’t that she’s evil and doing evil things, it is that battle between good and evil. It was that confrontation between two characters for domination over the other that was exciting.

The very same style of confrontation between JL and Jay Karnes’ Agent Wells. One is simply trying to save the timeline as we know it, and the other is trying to figure out something from his own past, a parallel in the plot itself. The whole FBI field office basement segment is what saves “Mercy” from the bin altogether, as it allows Picard and Guinan to use their special skills and advance us along the plot a little.

After 7 episodes, we’re about five and a half hours into this plot about Q sending Picard and co into the past. A “one final game,” if you will. I could argue that it is fairly obvious but that’s just using commonsense, yet the idea of an immortal character being near the end could have been a more interesting concept played with if the writers knew the world. As we sort of established last time out with my lengthy rant, knowing the world and the characters isn’t the strength of the writer’s room at all.

So Q is dying because there is little chance of John de Lancie playing the character for the next 40-50 years as an actor now in his later 70s. That’s fine, but we’re an hour and a half away from the conclusion and we’re only now getting this down on paper, only now putting it on the board to play. A lot of what makes Picard difficult to enjoy is that it is a mystery box trying very hard to wrap up a show and character’s story now 8 (nearly 9) seasons and 4 movies in the making.

This writer’s room feels like it is staffed by people who’ve seen reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, who’ve seen an image of Picard’s ready room, and people who know bits of Picard’s story, but desperately don’t know Star Trek from a foundational level. Last season, this season, all of it screams people who want to look at the lifetime of Jean-Luc Picard through a very narrow lens, something very human and very dramatic, something that would work in every other CBS show. The trouble with Star Trek and this world is that it isn’t that.

The relationship between Picard and Q is more than that, it is more than that for his relationship with the Borg, it is more than that for his family, it is more than that for the people who he shared a ship with for several years. Yes, he was once human until someone who should be burning up in the atmosphere of the sun got his hands on running a certain show, but his experience is more than just that. The world is more than that.

A lot of this season and last wants to ground all the high-concept stuff in very human elements: Q is dying, therefore he has to walk to his next place. Why? What purpose does that serve other than you getting a small joke that isn’t funny out of it? The show doesn’t have to be fantastical and Game of Thrones-y, it can be set in the stars without having to place its head there too. Yet instead of having a show held aloft as the betterment of humanity and something to aspire to, the world and its characters are pulled down to us.

The interaction between Wells and JL is a great example of this and not because of the thematic cohesion between Picard being tormented by his past and Wells’ career being the search for what’s out there. It is simply the ability of the characters to connect and understand, it is about Jean-Luc Picard showing Wells that humanity’s fear and self-explanation of some Vulcans in his childhood being on Earth, it isn’t about domination, it isn’t about sucking his brains out. It is hope, it is understanding, and it is putting together a broken person with that hope.

Truthfully, “Mercy” is quite crap and could almost entirely be put in the bin, but much like Chibnall’s Who, when there is a hint of Star Trek in there I’m clinging onto it and I’m not letting Leonardo DiCaprio anywhere near it. Ultimately 90% of “Mercy” is worth skipping as it does very little and is quite terrible as Star Trek on its own. However, the last 10% (or whatever percent it actually is) does a lot to save the episode as a whole from having me write beat for beat why this season should also be placed alongside Michael Chabon and Chris Chibnall.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Star Trek: Picard "Mercy"

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• The interrogation scenes are actually the most Star Trek.
• John de Lancie is a delight with every second he's on screen.

Cons

• Why are you both about to roll around on the floor after 2 days?
• Why do I care about Agnes and the Queen at this point?