ICE ICE Baby!
Assimilation! Get it? Like it has a double meaning. There’s the Borg, obviously, but it’s also about our heroes having to get used to a mad, crazy, outrageous time: San Francisco, 2024! They’re fish out of water. Won’t it be fun? Won’t it?
Having resolved the previous cliffhanger with more lethal measures – season two of Picard is racking up quite the body count of henchmen – the crew turn their attention to attempting time travel using an old-fashioned recipe to create a temporal rift the way James T Kirk used to make ‘em. Here’s a thought – just go and find the Nexus from Generations and nip back through there. Hell, Tolian Soran’s probably one of Picard’s besties in this universe.
The way, way back, it turns out, relies on the Borg Queen, who pinky-promises not to be evil or try anything and so back they go, arriving on target but out of power and careering towards the west coast. A quick intervention by Picard instead sends the crew crashing into the forests near the old Picard vineyard although the arrival of a sizeable object at terminal velocity seems to go undetected by any civilian or military authorities. It is France though, so any potential meteor may just have been dismissed with a gallic shrug and another drag on a Gitanes and a swig of Bordeaux. Perhaps it would have been a different matter if the vineyard had been in operation at the time?
Joking aside, Assimilation is perilously close to being a straight remake of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Elnor’s death aside (I guess they didn’t want a do-over of Spock’s bandana). But the crew arrive in Earths’ past, hide their ship (belatedly and conveniently) with a cloaking device then scatter into Los Angeles to track down their “W” – a watcher instead of whales. They even have the same power issues to deal with and do the same thing to Rios that The Voyage Home does to Chekov. Speaking of Chekov, Jurati reels off a list of narrative Chekov’s guns to avoid: authorities, security checkpoints, hospitals etc., basically signposting exactly how Assimilation is going to unfold.
We’re getting close to the meat of what Picard Season 2 is going to be about but there’s still plenty of action filler being deployed to hold our interest. Ironically this series is doing a better job of keeping the most senior officer on the ship than The Next Generation ever did although the debate over who should link with the Borg Queen to try and extract information underlines the series’ pathological aversion to allowing Picard to become Locutus again, even for a little bit.
Assimilation is actually decent fun. Santiago Cabrera’s Rios is always fun to watch and while it’s always trying a little too hard, the screwball bickering between Seven and Raffi at least covers up for their entire lack of chemistry. Between her relationship with Seven, her grief over Elnor’s death and her anger at Picard and Q, the writers are throwing every emotional arc at Raffi in the hope that something will stick, and goodness knows Michelle Hurd is doing everything she can but it’s hard to shake the impression that Picard has too many characters it doesn’t know what to do with.
Rios’ brush with ICE has, of course, only gotten more topical with time and it makes me wonder if we’ll end up dealing with the Bell Riots or some variation thereof.
Of course, Picard and Jurati are left to curse the Borg Queen’s sudden but inevitable betrayal. The thing is, for a superior being, she seems to lack imagination – or patience. Can’t she figure out a way to contact the Borg collective of the time? Or it’s 2024, she could just wait forty years for herself to turn up, she’s not short of options. Instead, she chooses to be outwitted by Jurati which has to be an all-time low for a race seeking perfection.
With The Watcher’s location identified, it should be a simple matter of beaming straight to that location – except Rios has gotten himself caught up in an immigration raid and is now a prisoner of ICE in one of Star Trek’s most genuinely chilling cliffhangers ever.
7/10
