Picard flogs the dead Borg horse.
Action stations on this week’s Star Trek Picard as Hide And Seek sees Alison Pill’s horribly unconvincing looking Borg Queen and her mercenary proto-hive attempt to take La Sirena, with only Jurati’s lingering consciousness and an Emergency Combat Hologram of Elnor standing in their way.
But if you’re worrying that the episode’s just going to be a wall-to-wall action-fest, fear not, as Picard decides that a firefight for survival is the perfect time to have some more reminiscences about his mother.
The confrontation between Picard and Soong is weak-sauce, symptomatic of the series’ refusal to put the character of Picard in the most interesting situations. A rematch with the Borg Queen? Nope, that goes to Jurati while Picard is stuck trading tired dialogue with rent-a-Soong Brent Spiner.
At least Picard’s matriarchal musings are of some use, as the memory of a game of hide and seek inspires a plan to evade Soong’s borgified goons. It doesn’t, though, explain why a child of twelve needs the rules of hide and seek explained to him (or, again, where Robert is).
Picard’s mother’s suicide is such a bleak and empty character development, dripping with prestige TV ambition but decidedly un-Star Trek (also completely contradicting the first canonical appearance of Picard’s mother in Where No One Has Gone Before) and the narration of the memory, and Stewart’s fading, cracking voice, seem more fitted to Vanessa Redgrave’s closing narration to a particularly maudlin Call The Midwife.
For an episode of Star Trek Picard, Hide And Seek is, at least, unusually thematically cohesive thanks to its parallel stories of the Queen hunting holographic Elnor and the rest of the squad hunting Picard and co through the tunnels and trestles of Chateau Picard’s vineyard. The action itself isn’t particularly thrilling but it’s competent if a little repetitive and, unfortunately, interrupted by a few too many forced character moments.
The resolution of this week’s drama – that Jurati can somehow assimilate the Borg rather than the other way around is an almost universe-breaking absurdity, while Raffi’s entire arc for the series basically boils down to pleading for people not to die. Seven’s reborgification just feels like fan service at this point.
Where it leaves us, in its penultimate cliffhanger, is in the realisation that the whole of Star Trek Picard season 2 has basically been a cross-over between Assignment: Earth and The Voyage Home and yet managed to have absolutely zero fun with those ideas at all.
