CONTAINS SPOILERS
Mark Twain once said, "There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope." And so it is with this episode of Star Trek Picard - there are a large number of recycled story elements here, which fit together but somehow feel as if they've been cut and pasted together rather clumsily.
We catch up with Picard, who's met the Watcher, or The Supervisor. She isn't Laris, although she looks like Laris - and we'll see more of this Character A who looks like Character B in this episde. Here, her name is Tallinn, and she's a supervisor in the same way as Gary Seven. Gary Seven was a character in the Original Series episode "Assignment: Earth", where he was Supervisor 194, responsible for watching, or overseeing, the human race and ensuring that it didn't wipe itself out with nuclear weapons. Tallinn, however, is responsible for watching over one of Jean-Luc Picard's ancestors, the astronaut Renee Picard. This is classic Back to the Future content - there's nothing quite like a family connection to make time travel personal.
Renee Picard is the character we saw at the end of the previous episode, whom Q was intending to influence into backing out of flying on an upcoming space mission - his finger-click didn't work, and now he is resorting to more mundane methods to persuade her to drop out. We meet her in this episode in a rocket simulator, practising dangerous scenarios and, by all accounts, failing. It's quite possible that Q has set these up - he will stop at nothing to keep her out of the mission.
Why aren't Q's powers working? Plot device?
Meanwhile, the Borg Queen (who reminds me of one of the Hybrids out of Battlestar Galactica with her ongoing babbling) has assimilated communications on board the Sirena. Obviously, she doesn't need ship-to-ship comms, but she is able to tap into the local mobile phone network and place a call to the local police department. A sole, unfortunate police officer attends the call, and is lured to the Borg Queen. Is she going to assimilate him and turn him into her first Borg drone here? That was my first thought, but for some strange reason, she doesn't. I'm confused - I know that these are unusual times and that she's missing some key components (a collective and a pair of legs, for example), but her change is tactics surprised me. She takes the police officer hostage.
Seven and Raffi continue their Thelma and Louise routine - with ongoing undercurrents of their recently-ended relationship - and find a way to stop the bus that Rios is being deported on. Seven uses a tricorder to generate an EMP blast and stop the bus - no butterflies, no phasers. The men on the bus immediately work out what's happening - even before the guards - and the rest of the escape/rescue is largely without incident (except Raffi is still suffering trauma following Elnor's death). It seems that the away team's mission has largely been a wild goose chase and a commentary on 21st century life... police car chases, immigration control in the USA and bureaucracy. They're all beamed back to the Sirena without any further incident.
Picard and Tallinn, meanwhile, swap notes on the life and history of Renee Picard. Tallinn is maintaining a constant surveillance of Renee, and is able to monitor her conversations with her pyschotherapist - all astronauts and astronaut candidates must have a psych evaluation. Tallinn identifies a key conversation between Renee and her therapist: I recognised the therapist's voice before Picard did, by the looks of it. Q is manipulating Renee by posing as her therapist to talk her out of the flight.
Q, meanwhile, is also pursuing a parallel plan involving one Dr Adam Soong. Dr Soong looks like Data from The Next Generation, and all the other various Dr Soongs we've seen since (including the Dr Soong who created him; the Dr Soong who was fiddling about with genetics and eugenics in the Enterprise series, and the Dr Soong we met in the first series of Picard who solved the puzzle of AI in flesh-and-bone bodies).
This incarnation of Dr Soong is the earliest (in chronological order), and he's working on genetics. His descendants will go on to create a race of super-humans through genetic modification/engineering, and we see how this starts. Interestingly (or lazily), this will go on to cause the creation of the genetic superhuman, Khan. In the recent Star Trek: Into Darkness film, Khan blackmails a Starfleet officer into setting off a bomb by providing a cure for his daughter's terminal incurable illness. In this episode of Picard, it's Q who has the cure, and Soong who has the daughter with the rare incurable disease (which turns her blood into poison whenever she is exposed to direct sunlight). Mark Twain was right, there are no new stories.
Dr Soong is cynical, weary and desperate. He presents his arguments to an ethics committee - he wants to pursue human genetic modification, and they are having none of it.
I should say at this point (because I didn't last time), that the previous episode of Picard was directed by none other than Lea Thompson, who played Marty McFly's mother Lorraine in the Back to the Future film series. Well, she definitely has experience of time-travel stories; and she features in this episode as the chair of the ethics committee. She did a good job last week, and was great this week too.
Anwyays: Dr Soong (who looks a lot like Data) can't cure his daughter (who looks a lot like Soji), and is approached by Q (who looks and acts the same as usual: dangerously selfishly). Q offers to help Dr Soong cure his daughter, but there will inevitably be a cost for this 'help,' and I suspect it will be something truly costly. Why is Q meddling here? It seems a bit superfluous at this stage, so I hope it has a decent tie-in with the main story.
The crew of the La Sirena are reunited, in a scene which shows what a wild-goose chase Raffi, Seven and Rios went on - Picard found the Watcher/Supervisor by himself.
Now that the crew know what they must do - get Renee Picard to fly her space mission - they send Agnes as an advance party to the astronauts' gala, to watch over Renee in her last few hours before pre-flight quarantine. Agnes has the prerequisite skills in 21st century computing; the character to pull it off, and a growing case of Borg assimilation virus. After shooting the Borg Queen to free the French police officer, Agnes spent too long, too close, talking to her and the Queen was able to scratch Agnes's face and introduce the Borg virus into her bloodstream. Agnes gets picked up by the gala security before she's even made a start on hacking the system... either because she was genuinely unlucky and the least suited to an espionage mission, or because the Borg Queen inside her head is sabotaging Agnes subconsciously.
Either way, Agnes now has the Borg Queen in her head. The crew has no way home (unless they can use the Borg know-how in Agnes's brain and then reverse the assimilation process... it's been done before, as Picard will confirm). Things are looking bleak, as Q continues to meddle infuriatingly with the timeline.
This episode recycled so many previous stories I lost count; showed up the Raffi/Rios/Seven subplot as a waste of time (apparently) but put the Borg Queen in Agnes's head (so Agnes is alone and the victim... again). Good, but not great.
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