Star Trek: Picard -- Season 1 Episode 2 (Maps and Legends)

It would appear that CVS All Access is giving everyone a free month.  I’m going to take advantage of this, since I’m stuck in the house for the foreseeable future.  The obvious thing to do is to review the rest of the first season of Star Trek: Picard.

This episode starts with the Mars rebellion 14 years prior to the main story arc.  It’s First Contact Day and a skeleton crew is working at the Utopia Planitia shipyard.  They’re interacting with a synthetic life form, basically teasing him.  The android, designated F8, seems to try, but just doesn’t get how to deal with humans.  His eyes change color and he subsequently starts the revolt.

The rest of the episode is also setup.  Picard, now a retired admiral, is trying to get a ship from Starfleet.  He wants to be reinstated and given a small crew.  He’ll even take a demotion to captain, if that would help.  He’s rejected.  Whatever he did, he apparently now has a lot of nerve asking to be reinstated.

This leaves Picard to find some other means to get into space.  He’s looking for Dahj’s twin sister, Soji.  Both were created from neurons from Everybody’s favorite android, Data.  With Dahj having died in the first episode, Soji is Picard’s only hope for finding answers.

The only problem is that he doesn’t know exactly where she is.  Unfortunately, she’s working on a Borg ship, working with former drones and helping to get as much technology as possible.  Oh, and she’s sleeping with a Romulan.

A lot of this episode deals with laying the groundwork.  We learn that Picard has burned a lot of bridges in his time.  It’s not going to be easy.  Even using back channels is going to be difficult.  In resigning, he made a few enemies.  (His former crewmates would seem to be the exception.  Any of them would go back into space for him.)

We also learn about the Tal Shiar, in that they may have been a front for a darker organization called Zhat Vash.  All we learn at this time is that they hated AI and androids.  They were the reason Romulans never had really great computers.

I suppose it would be a really short season if things were easy.  Alas, too many things have happened.  It’s going to be difficult for Picard to get off planet.  It’s also probably going to be difficult to find someone who has made it difficult to be found, even if subconsciously.  Finding Bruce Maddox would be a good start, but no one has seen much of him since the ban on synthetics.

So, it looks like that’s where the season is going.  Rather than a series of roadblocks, the major obstacles are being laid out for us early, which I think may prove to be a good thing.  It’s also implied that the collective wasn’t entirely done in at the end of Star Trek: Voyager.  It will be interesting to see if that plays into later episodes.

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