Spoiler Warning: This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery.
Last night, while waiting for my dinner to finish cooking (alright, reheating) I found myself scrolling through Instagram. I don’t follow a lot of accounts – aside from a handful of friends and colleagues, I follow a couple of sports teams and the official Star Trek page, and that’s about it. Tucked in amongst the cat pictures and social-distancing was a post from Star Trek. It was a video, and normally I skip past those. But the soundless preview showed Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, and Rebecca Romijn, so it piqued my interest enough to unmute the video and watch it in full. And wouldn’t you know it, they’re only making the Captain Pike show that everyone’s been asking for since Season 2 of Discovery aired last year!
In case you missed it, the announcement video is available on Star Trek’s official website, as well as YouTube. You can watch it below:
The series promises to be, in the words of Anson Mount, a “classic Star Trek show that deals with optimism and the future.” It’s far too early to know exactly what they have in store for Strange New Worlds, but I think we can make a handful of reasonable assumptions.
A “classic” Star Trek show. That’s a very specific way to explain it, and to me what I think it means is that we’re going to see a show with less of a focus on one main character, as Discovery and Picard have been. Past Star Trek series have been ensemble affairs, with other members of the crew besides one primary character being given storylines all their own, and while there were sub-plots in Discovery and Picard, those shows largely followed the story of their designated main protagonists. What I don’t think “classic” infers, at least at this early stage, is that we’ll see a return to wholly episodic television, with a “monster-of-the-week”, in which each episode forms a fully standalone story. Television storytelling has largely left that format behind, so what I think Strange New Worlds will offer will have at least elements of serialisation, including season-long arcs for its main characters.
Speaking of characters, we know of only three right now: Anson Mount’s Capt. Pike, Ethan Peck’s Spock, and Rebecca Romijn’s Number One/Una. All three reprise their roles from Season 2 of Discovery, where I think a lot of fans would agree that they were that season’s breakout characters. Before Discovery’s second season aired, ViacomCBS announced that there would be a spin-off: the still-untitled Section 31 show, starring Michelle Yeoh and (presumably, given where his character wound up at the end of the season) Shazad Latif. That announcement wasn’t the home run that it was meant to be, but it did indicate that the franchise was here to stay. However, when Pike, Spock, and Number One proved to be so popular with fans as the season rolled out, there was a sense that perhaps ViacomCBS jumped the gun and announced the spin-off too early; given the reaction fans had to the season, the obvious choice for a spin-off was one centred around Pike. So for over a year, in almost every interview and at every face-to-face meeting with Trekkies, Alex Kurtzman, Anson Mount, and others involved had been asked the question: “can we please have a Capt. Pike series?”
It took a while, but as Ethan Peck said in the official announcement video: “you asked, we listened!”
It’s definitely interesting to me that Strange New Worlds has a title and has had this announcement with much fanfare, but the Section 31 show remains without a title and with very little official information having come out about it. Hopefully this will be rectified in due course, because a show looking at the shadowy organisation has the potential to be very interesting too, and I am looking forward to it. I wonder if Strange New Worlds will be released first, especially with the disruption to Section 31’s shooting schedule that the coronavirus pandemic has caused. Both shows, I believe, have at least one set already built. In Section 31’s case, the ship used by Capt. Leland in Discovery’s second season was brand new and given that the spin-off had already been announced at that point, it seemed obvious that they were planning to use that set in some form for the new show. The Enterprise’s bridge had also been built for Discovery, and I don’t think that it was just a reworking of existing sets so perhaps that can be reused too. We’ll have to wait and see!
The bridge of the USS Enterprise as seen in the Short Treks episode Q&A.
I love the title – Strange New Worlds. Obviously this is taken from the famous phrase spoken by Captains Kirk and Picard at the beginning of their shows, and it encapsulates what Star Trek has always sought to do – to find these worlds, to explore the unknown, and to meet whoever is out there. This show sounds like it will be one in which exploration makes a return. Discovery has definitely had elements of exploration, bringing in new races like the Pahvans and the Kelpiens, and visiting their homeworlds. But it has largely been a show that followed its main storylines – war with the Klingons, escaping the Mirror Universe, and of course unravelling the mystery of the Red Angel. There wasn’t a whole lot of time to explore the galaxy for Burnham and the crew with all that to accomplish! Picard, of course, didn’t see La Sirena’s crew engage in any exploration, really. They did eventually travel to Coppelius and meet the synths, but those synths were human-built, so I don’t think we can really consider that to be a significant “first contact”! In short, it will be absolutely wonderful to get a Star Trek show where exploration is a key story element.
We’re still missing a lot of key information at this stage, information which I’m sure will come out over time. With the lockdown keeping production across the industry stalled right now, perhaps a 2021 release is a tad optimistic, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn Strange New Worlds is slated for a 2022 launch. One season has been ordered – and yes, it will be a show with multiple episodes and not a one-off television movie. While we don’t know how many episodes that will entail, recent Star Trek productions have offered 10-15 episodes per season. I’d guess they’re aiming for 12, like Discovery was, but perhaps with the potential to add an extra one or two if necessary – as Discovery did in both of its seasons.
There is perhaps the potential for crossover characters from Discovery’s first two seasons, provided those characters didn’t travel into the far future at the end of Season 2. Aside from obvious ones like Ash Tyler and Georgiou, we could perhaps see a return of Harry Mudd, Sarek, Tilly’s Xahean friend Po, Klingon Chancellor L’Rell, or Saru’s sister Siranna. We could even see the Prime Universe version of Capt. Lorca… somehow!
There will also be several spots for main characters, and if we’re thinking about “classic” Starfleet roles, there will need to be a chief engineer, helm officer, communications officer, doctor, and perhaps a tactical/security officer too. Some of those roles existed in The Cage – Star Trek’s original pilot which introduced Pike, Spock, and Number One. Perhaps those same roles could be recast, bringing us a return of Dr Boyce, José Tyler, or Yeoman Colt. I’d wager that there will be unique and original characters joining the crew too, of course.
Dr Boyce was the Enterprise’s doctor in The Cage… could he return for Strange New Worlds?
The team behind Star Trek’s recent successes, including overall head of Star Trek Alex Kurtzman, will be involved in Strange New Worlds. Akiva Goldsman, who wrote and directed the two-part finale to Picard, as well as serving as that show’s executive producer, will taken on a similar role for Strange New Worlds – and has already written the show’s premiere. Given how great Picard was overall, that’s something genuinely encouraging (even if the show’s first-season finale wasn’t exactly the best part!) And Rod Roddenberry, son of Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry, will also be involved behind the scenes, as he has been for Discovery and Picard.
There’s not a lot more to say at this very early stage, except how pleased and excited I am for this announcement. I keep saying it, but it really is a great time to be a Star Trek fan at the moment, with so much new content on the horizon. This series joins Picard’s second season as being what I’m most excited for, and I hope you’ll stay tuned here because as and when we get more news about Strange New Worlds – and other Star Trek projects – I’ll be sure to write about it.
Hit it!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will stream on CBS All Access in the United States. International distribution rights have not yet been announced. The Star Trek franchise – including Strange New Worlds and all other properties mentioned above – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: In addition to the spoilers for the Voyager episodes on this list, minor spoilers may be present for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise, including Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard.
Welcome back to the “Ten great episodes” series! In the first three entries, we looked at The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, so now it’s Voyager’s turn under the microscope. In the run-up to Star Trek: Picard premiering earlier this year, I looked at a few episodes and story points from Voyager, especially regarding Seven of Nine and the Borg, as she was scheduled to appear in the new series.
Voyager premiered in 1995, a spin-off from The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine occupying the same mid/late-24th Century setting. Voyager’s premiere episode, Caretaker, had scenes set aboard DS9 and featured Armin Shimerman’s character of Quark as a guest-star, tying the show to the expanded Star Trek franchise. Though The Next Generation had gone off the air six months before Voyager began, its cast were still together making films – Star Trek: Generations was still in cinemas at the time of Voyager’s US premiere. The show therefore joined a growing fictional universe, one which now saw two television series and a film series sharing a setting. There was potential for characters and themes to cross over, as indeed we would see with the Maquis – a faction of Federation rebels who debuted in The Next Generation and featured in multiple episodes of Deep Space Nine.
Where Deep Space Nine had been successful with the idea of a mixed crew of Federation and non-Federation personnel, one of Voyager’s weaker aspects was its attempt to use a similar formula. Chakotay and B’Elanna Torres were the two Maquis main characters, but aside from a few early episodes, and a couple of attempts to revisit the Maquis later on, Voyager’s crew quickly became an homogeneous group that was, for all intents and purposes, a Starfleet crew not dissimilar to what we’d seen on The Next Generation. In that sense, that aspect of Voyager’s story was wasted, or at the very least got lost in its “voyage home” storyline.
Voyager was the first Star Trek series to have a very definite goal or endgame in mind, and though it wasn’t strictly a serialised affair like later Deep Space Nine seasons would be, its one overarching story was the quest to return to the Alpha Quadrant. We’d seen Starfleet ships taken a long way from home before, in episodes like Where No One Has Gone Before, but by the end of the episode they’d always manage to make it home again. Voyager took that storyline but changed it up – leaving the ship and crew stranded on the far side of the galaxy, having to make it home on their own. That was a new direction for Star Trek, and allowed for a show that could be similar to Kirk and Picard’s voyages of exploration, but with a twist. The premise also meant that Voyager could introduce new factions and races without having to return to the Alpha Quadrant’s familiar Klingons, Cardassians, and Romulans, which would allow for more variety and for the show to remain distinct from both Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation and its films.
Star Trek: Voyager’s opening title.
Sadly, as with Deep Space Nine, Voyager has not been remastered, and remains in its original 1990s broadcast format. As a result, it doesn’t look as good on modern screens as the remastered versions of The Original Series and The Next Generation, nor Enterprise, Discovery, and Star Trek: Picard. This difference is noticeable, especially if you’ve got a decent HD or 4K television and are used to watching content in HD or on Blu-ray. I consider this to be a major mistake on ViacomCBS’ part, and I have an article calling on them to rectify the situation, which you can find by clicking or tapping here.
Just to recap this format, I’m not presenting this as a “Top Ten” list of the absolute best episodes. Instead, these are simply ten great episodes that I consider to be thoroughly enjoyable and well worth a watch – especially if you find yourself with lots of time on your hands at the moment. The episodes are not ranked, they’re just listed in order of release. I’ve tried to pick at least one episode from each of Voyager’s seven seasons.
Without further ado, let’s jump into the list – and this is your final warning that there will be spoilers!
Number 1: State of Flux (Season 1)
Janeway, Chakotay, and Tuvok in State of Flux.
One of the potentially interesting elements included in the premise of Voyager was the concept of “one ship, two crews”. Both a Starfleet crew, headed by Capt. Janeway, and a Maquis crew, headed by Chakotay, would have to work together on a single ship – and that scenario could lead to conflict and tension. Deep Space Nine had used a similar idea, bringing together Federation and non-Federation main cast members. However, even at this early stage in Voyager’s run, it was apparent that the writers and producers didn’t really know how to make this format work without one side or the other becoming antagonists.
Seska shook up that formula somewhat. Where Chakotay and B’Elanna Torres had largely settled into their roles as First Officer and Chief Engineer, Seska had failed to do so in her appearances across the first season.
Exposing her as a spy is a great story – because it shows a real conflict between Starfleet and non-Starfleet principles. Seska was willing to trade Voyager’s technology to the aggressive Kazon, not caring that doing so would shift the balance of power in the region because she doesn’t care one iota about the Prime Directive. Janeway would stick to this doctrine throughout Voyager – even though it could be argued that destroying the Caretaker’s station was interference in itself! But not everyone on the crew agreed, and certainly not all of Chakotay’s Maquis did.
Seska isn’t a Maquis, though. Like Tuvok, she was a plant on Chakotay’s crew; a Cardassian spy. By this point in the Star Trek timeline, the Cardassians were well-established as villains, so making Seska a Cardassian too was in keeping with that. It does mean, however, than within ten episodes, Chakotay has discovered that two of his senior crewmen were spies. I liked the way he angrily confronted Tuvok about this toward the end of the episode, furious with himself for not realising he was being spied on and manipulated.
Seska’s recurring role as a villain was established in State of Flux, and it was arguably the last good episode where the concept of “one ship, two crews” was genuinely in play, with the idea of a Maquis rebellion a possibility. From this point on, the Maquis would behave like any other Starfleet crew, and while it would be given lip service numerous times across the show’s run, any real conflict or tension between the two groups was gone with the departure of Seska.
Number 2: Tattoo (Season 2)
Tattoo sees Chakotay learn more about the history of his own people – from the aliens who once contacted them.
Robert Beltran played Chakotay in all seven seasons of Voyager, and has been vocal, both at the time and subsequently, about how he didn’t really enjoy it, especially in the latter part of the show’s run. Episodes focusing on Chakotay were infrequent, especially after Seven of Nine joined the crew – and this was a major reason why Beltran was dissatisfied. But Tattoo, from Season 2, is a great example of a Chakotay episode, and how good of an actor Beltran can be when given enough material to work with.
The basic premise of the story is that Chakotay’s Native American tribe had been contacted in the distant past by “sky spirits” – who were in fact aliens from the Delta Quadrant. After finding a clue to their existence on a moon where Voyager’s crew is collecting resources, Chakotay tracks them down.
Representations of Native Americans on television as of the mid-1990s hadn’t always been great. Chakotay’s role, at times, could lean into the trope of the “noble savage” – a character archetype going back centuries, presenting Native Americans as being inherently virtuous, especially prior to European contact. This story leans into that at points – the “sky spirits” claiming to have visited Chakotay’s people because they “respected the land”, and the overall portrayal of the “sky spirits” can both be seen as stereotyping.
Beyond that, however, Tattoo sees Chakotay rediscovering his faith and establishing a connection with his deceased father that he never had in his youth. In that sense, it’s a great character piece, looking at backstory to Chakotay as well as giving him a genuinely emotional arc.
The secondary plot of this episode looks at the Doctor and Kes – the Doctor learns about empathy by Kes putting him through a holographic illness. Kes was a character that I wish had more time on the series – she left the show at the beginning of Season 4, just as she was learning to develop her telepathic abilities.
Number 3: Basics, Parts 1 & 2 (Season 2-3)
In Basics, Maje Culluh and his band of Kazon capture Voyager and maroon the crew.
The Kazon had been antagonists since the very first episode of Voyager, but by this point in the series, the journey the ship was undertaking would soon have to leave their region of space behind – the Kazon, after all, did not span the entire Delta Quadrant. Seska’s decision to defect, as well as Crewman Jonas feeding them secret information, built up what was really a multi-episode story across Seasons 1 and 2 that needed a big payoff – and Basics, which ended the second season on a cliffhanger, definitely achieved that!
The Kazon formulate a plan, aided by Seska and the information from Jonas, to capture Voyager – and they’re successful, boarding the ship and capturing the crew. As punishment for refusing to share Voyager’s technology with the less-advanced Kazon, their leader, Maje Culluh, maroons the crew on a barren planet, forcing them to survive with nothing.
The resolution to this arc brought back Tom Paris (who had briefly disappeared from the ship as part of a ruse) and Neelix’s people, the Talaxians. As a duology of episodes which wrapped up the Seska storyline and was the last major engagement with the show’s first villains, Basics is fantastic. My only critique would be to say that it would have been potentially interesting to see the story last more than two episodes, and focus more on the crew surviving without much technology.
There was also a very funny moment involving the Doctor being holographically projected to the wrong location – in case you don’t remember I’ll leave you to spot it when you watch!
Number 4: The Q and the Grey (Season 3)
Q returns in The Q and the Grey, and Voyager is pulled into a Q civil war.
Bringing Q into Voyager posed a unique problem – as someone who is as close to omnipotent as any character in Star Trek, Q could have easily sent Voyager and its crew home. While his appearances throughout the series struggled, at points, to get around that obvious fact, Q did still manage to be an interesting recurring character for Janeway and co. to deal with.
The American Civil War is one of the periods in history that, for a variety of reasons, I find absolutely fascinating, and The Q and the Grey uses that setting and aesthetic to great effect. Depicting a war between two different factions of the Q Continuum, The Q and the Grey presents the familiar Q – the one we met in The Next Generation – as being on the side of the rebels, with those who supported the status quo opposing his faction.
Quinn, the renegade member of the Q Continuum that Capt. Janeway met in the second season episode Death Wish, was ultimately successful in committing suicide – spoiler warning for that episode. But his death shocked the Q Continuum and led to the outbreak of war. Q wants to have a child – initially with Janeway – as a way to bring about peace, but he’s too late and the crew of Voyager are dragged into the war.
The Q and the Grey built on Q’s previous appearance in the series and simultaneously set the stage for his return, but it was also an interesting episode in itself, and as a history buff I appreciated the reference to a time period I’ve long had an interest in.
Number 5: The Raven (Season 4)
Seven of Nine and Tuvok discover the final resting place of the USS Raven in The Raven.
LeVar Burton, who of course played Geordi La Forge in The Next Generation, stepped up to direct The Raven. After a trilogy of episodes had introduced Seven of Nine at the end of Season 3 and the beginning of Season 4, this was the first big Seven-centric episode in Voyager. I’ve written about this previously, but I wasn’t particularly a fan of Seven of Nine, especially by the time Voyager entered its final couple of seasons. Her character was incredibly static and one-dimensional, and I just found her to be repetitive and boring – probably not helped by the fact that many of Voyager’s later episodes gave her a large role. But we’re getting off topic! The Raven gets a pass as a Seven of Nine episode for two reasons – the first is that, as mentioned, it’s the first one. And the second reason is that this was taking place only a few days or weeks after her separation from the Borg Collective.
Because Seven of Nine experiences flashbacks ultimately caused by Borg technology, I often find myself confusing the events of this episode with the fifth season episode Infinite Regress, which sees Seven of Nine exposed to Borg technology and taking on the personae of assimilated individuals. However, in The Raven, Seven of Nine rediscovers her parents’ ship – the place where she was first assimilated by the Borg.
The Raven is thus the first episode to begin to dig into her background and humanise her for us as the audience. Having an ex-Borg crew member posed questions and issues for Voyager – most notably, how should she behave? Rediscovering all of her humanity and going on to act like any other human crew member would have been a waste, acting logical and aloof would have been too Vulcan (a role already filled by Tuvok), and so instead the producers chose this formula where Seven of Nine would be somewhat of a renegade among the crew while at the same time being taken under the wing of Capt. Janeway and the Doctor in particular to learn lessons in being human. She’d always seem to forget those lessons by the next episode, however, and that’s where my problem with her and the repetitiveness of her storylines begins!
Jeri Ryan is a great actress, though, and The Raven gave her an opportunity to take Seven of Nine away from being cold and methodical – we see her go through an emotional rollercoaster that lets Ryan show off her acting abilities in a way most other episodes don’t. The episode would also establish the existence of Seven’s parents – Magnus and Erin Hansen – who would be mentioned several times in Voyager and ultimately make an appearance.
Number 6: Message in a Bottle (season 4)
The USS Prometheus – a Starfleet vessel the Doctor visited in the Alpha Quadrant.
Message in a Bottle is a funny episode, despite its serious setting and the major change it offers to the overall story of Voyager. Robert Picardo’s portrayal of the Doctor often walked a line between serious character and comic relief, but in this episode he’s joined by Andy Dick, who portrays a different version of the Emergency Medical Hologram. The two must contend with a ship that has been captured by Romulans, and some slapstick comedy ensues.
Aside from the amusing script that gave Picardo a chance to run wild with the character, Message in a Bottle marks a significant turning point in the overall “voyage home” narrative of the series. After several prior attempts to contact Starfleet met with no success, the Doctor is finally able to inform Starfleet Command in the Alpha Quadrant that Voyager and her crew are alive and well, and headed home. This would not only change the way the crew approached their situation, it also set the stage for future episodes, including several appearances by Dwight Schultz’s character of Barclay, who was a key part of the project to establish communication with Voyager.
While this shake-up may not have been as major for Voyager as the introduction of Seven of Nine and the departure of Kes had been at the beginning of Season 4, it was another significant development for the show. The crew, from this point on, would know that Starfleet was looking for them and trying to find ways to stay in communication, as well as bring them home. That optimistic streak wouldn’t be present in every subsequent story, but it remained part of the background and lore of the series as it entered the second half of its run.
Number 7: Night (Season 5)
Harry Kim playing his clarinet in Night.
Night is fascinating for two reasons: firstly, and most importantly, it forces Capt. Janeway to reexamine and relive her decision to strand her ship and crew in the Delta Quadrant. We’ll look more at this in a moment. Secondly, it shows Voyager traversing a region of space with no stars – a void. Voids exist in nature, across the galaxy and of course in between galaxies. But Star Trek’s depiction of the Milky Way has usually been that it’s a busy, almost crowded place with plenty of star systems and plenty of aliens to meet. Changing that up entirely, and sending the ship into what seems to be dead space with nothing to explore is a fascinating concept. Personally I feel that it could have been something that lasted longer than half of an episode, and I would have liked to have seen a season or at least a multi-episode arc of Voyager in this kind of setting. There was scope, I feel, for it to have been fascinating as this kind of setting would have forced episodes to be set solely on the ship and we could have seen more interaction between different characters. But that’s a separate point!
Janeway squirrels herself away in her quarters, depressed. Looking back on a decision she took five years ago which left Voyager stranded, she’s wondering if she did the right thing after all. It seems like, in this moment, Janeway had been expecting the journey home to be easier and quicker than it has been, that some other way home would have presented itself by now. Five years is a long time – and Voyager is facing the prospect of still having decades to go. The starless void didn’t cause her to feel this way, it simply robbed her of her everyday distractions of exploring space and managing the running of the ship, leaving her with lots of time to think. This can be a bad thing for someone dealing with mental health (as I can attest).
The episode later introduces the Malon, a species who would reappear several more times and be minor antagonists in the fifth season. The Malon continue Star Trek’s long history of using science fiction to parallel real-world issues, in this case pollution and the emitting of greenhouse gases. Not only do the Malon pollute their environment and the environment of the native life forms, they’re unwilling to change when offered better technology – because changing the way they do things would lead to less profit and for waste exporters going out of business. I love the aesthetic of the Malon too; the dirty, grimy way that they and their ships appear was just perfect.
Number 8: Equinox Parts 1 & 2 (Season 5-6)
Capt. Ransom, from the two-part episode Equinox, is probably my favourite antagonist in all of Voyager.
I’m split on one of the story points in Equinox. While I adore the two-part story overall, the fact that it’s established that the Caretaker from Voyager’s premiere is responsible for bringing Capt. Ransom and the Equinox to the Delta Quadrant was, in my opinion at least, lazy and verging on nonsensical. To very briefly summarise why, Capt. Janeway destroyed the Caretaker’s space station, and that was the only reason Voyager couldn’t be sent back home. The story of Equinox ignores that, and says that the Caretaker would drag ships to the Delta Quadrant and then just leave them to find their own way home when it had already been established that that was not the case. Inconsistencies like this bug me, and while it did come over five years on from Caretaker, as an in-universe point it’s contradictory, and I feel that it would have been easy to find an alternative explanation for the Equinox’s presence.
What I love about Equinox is that it shows how bad things could have been for Voyager had circumstances been different. We got a glimpse of this in Year of Hell, but the Equinox is badly damaged and in far worse shape than Voyager, and the story Capt. Ransom tells of how they were starving and running out of fuel is indicative of just how difficult a journey like this can be.
Morality has long been at the heart of Star Trek, and the moral argument between Capt. Ransom, who believed he was justified in killing a large number of aliens to help his crew get home, and Capt. Janeway, who was outraged by his actions, was engaging and thrilling to watch. A sympathetic villain – which Ransom clearly is – can be absolutely fascinating, and this is an episode which asks us, the audience, the question: “what would you have done in his place?” As Ransom himself says: “It’s easy to cling to your principles when you’re standing on a vessel with its bulkheads intact, manned by a crew that’s not starving.” He isn’t mad, he isn’t evil, he’s a desperate man who was willing to do anything to save himself and those under his command. The responsibility of command, on a ship not suited for the kind of voyage it was being forced to undertake, pushed him to that point, and he’s absolutely one of Voyager’s most interesting antagonists as a result.
The entire premise of Voyager meant that encountering Federation ships would be incredibly unlikely, and while we had seen, by this point in the show’s run, familiar Alpha Quadrant races like the Ferengi, Klingons, and Romulans, this was the first time we got to see Voyager meet other humans and another Starfleet vessel. I’m glad it came late into the show’s run, when it had already found its feet, because I think an Equinox-type episode in Season 1 or 2 might have been too soon.
Number 9: Good Shepherd (Season 6)
Good Shepherd features Capt. Janeway teaming up with some of Voyager’s underperforming crewmen.
Good Shepherd uses a comparable setting to The Next Generation’s seventh season episode Lower Decks, focusing on three crew members who have fairly menial roles on the ship. When Seven of Nine points out that these three junior officers are “inefficient”, Janeway feels like she has personally let them down, that they’ve slipped through the cracks on her ship because of the situation she put them in.
In that sense, the episode is as much about Janeway as it is about the three younger officers. She decides to take them on an away mission to give them a chance to shine, as well as to give them some personal bonding time since she barely knows them. Naturally, not everything goes to plan while away from the ship, and luckily, Janeway and the trio rise to the challenge.
It can be great in any show to take a break from the main cast and focus on someone different. In a Star Trek show, we obviously know that there are more people involved in running the ship than just the bridge crew, so taking a step back and acknowledging that worked great, as it had done in The Next Generation too. Not all tasks on a starship can be epic in scale and heroic, and it was interesting to see the ship from the point of view of three characters in that position. I would have liked to see them return for future episodes, but unfortunately they never did.
The actual story of the away mission, pitting underperforming officers against dark matter aliens, was interesting enough, but Good Shepherd is really a character piece looking at them and their reactions to being thrown head-first into a situation they weren’t prepared to experience.
Number 10: Critical Care (Season 7)
The Doctor is forced to work aboard an alien hospital ship in Critical Care.
Star Trek has always had episodes with a message – and Critical Care takes a critical look at the healthcare system in the United States, particularly the influence of money in the system determining who can get the best care. Money in Critical Care is represented by a patient’s “treatment coefficient”, a complicated, impersonal representation of their perceived “value” to society, allocated to them by a computer. If a patient’s TC was too low, they would be refused medication.
When the Doctor is kidnapped and forced to work aboard a hospital ship using this system, he rebels, trying to force the higher-ups to change the system to provide life-saving care to poorer patients. The whole episode is a send-up of the US healthcare system.
As a character piece looking at the Doctor, Critical Care is great too. He’s come a long way from when he was first activated at the beginning of the show’s run, and the story puts his humanity front and centre – including the ability to be aggressive and devious. He makes the hospital’s administrator sick, deliberately infecting him with a virus. And then he denies the administrator treatment until he agrees to treat all of the poor patients as well.
When Voyager finally recovers him – their tracking him down was the secondary plot of the episode – he wonders if something happened to his ethical programming to allow him to behave that way, but nothing was out of place. He has to live with the fact that he was capable of breaking his own hippocratic oath in order to affect the changes he felt were important, and as a character point for a hologram, that’s very interesting.
So that’s it. Ten great episodes from Voyager’s seven seasons that are well worth a look if you have time. I was an avid viewer of Voyager during its original run, and it was the second Star Trek show I collected on DVD in the early 2000s. While it wasn’t perfect, and some characters and story elements didn’t work in the way the producers intended, it was a great show. Voyager took Star Trek to a wholly different region of the galaxy, one that has yet to be revisited. While it is very much tied to The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine in terms of its timeline, it’s also a unique show in that respect.
Capt. Janeway is definitely one of Star Trek’s best commanding officers. Her determination to lead her crew home, even through difficult circumstances, while maintaining her dedication to Starfleet’s original mission of exploration is admirable. I would love to see her return in some way in Star Trek: Picard or another future series or film.
Voyager would be the last new series set in the 24th Century until Star Trek: Picard premiered earlier this year. In fact, with the exception of Star Trek: Nemesis, everything produced between Voyager’s finale and Picard would be a prequel. Some prequels can be good, but I’ve never been fully sold on them as a broader concept. Voyager was thus the last Star Trek show of the “golden age” in my opinion.
Stay tuned, because up next we’ll pull ten great episodes from Star Trek: Enterprise!
Star Trek: Voyager is available to stream now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Netflix in the United Kingdom and other countries and territories. The series is also available on DVD. The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Voyager – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, and we’ll be looking in-depth at shots and scenes from the trailer for Season 3.
First of all, I hope you like the new look of the website’s homepage. It took a little while to get everything configured – and there are still some things to do. If the new logo and header-image look amateurish like they were made in Microsoft Paint, well… that’s because I made them in Paint. I never said I was a Photoshop expert!
When I logged into Facebook this evening, one of the first posts I saw was from the official Star Trek page – and it got me very excited! “The first Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 trailer has arrived”, or so proclaimed the post. The actual trailer – which you can find by clicking or tapping here (warning: leads to an external site) – was simply a repost of the only trailer we’ve seen for the season so far. Cue my disappointment!
The USS Discovery, pictured in the trailer.
While I might be overthinking things, I wonder if this marks the beginning of a social media push leading up to an announcement of the season’s release date – all we know so far is that it’s coming some time this year. I’d hoped to see a release date – or even just a release month – when the finale of Star Trek: Picard was released at the end of March, but ViacomCBS chose not to use that opportunity to plug Discovery. And that’s probably because of the pandemic causing delays to Discovery’s post-production work. Anyway, that’s not why we’re here.
Star Trek’s website and official Facebook page have chosen to republish the trailer, and while it isn’t exactly clear why they’ve done so (or why now), it does present us with a good excuse to take another look and see what we can gleam. The trailer was first published at New York Comic-con in October 2019, which was before I founded this website. While I’ve referred to the trailer a number of times in other articles, this will be my first breakdown of it in its entirety.
If you haven’t seen the trailer and want to head into Season 3 unspoiled, or if you haven’t seen Season 2 yet and want to avoid spoilers, this is your last chance to jump ship!
The very first shot in the trailer depicts Burnham – still in her Red Angel suit from Discovery’s finale – having crash-landed on a planet or moon. Obviously exiting the time-wormhole was not smooth, and while she’s survived the impact, she’s had a rough landing. The next frame shows her opening what looks like an emergency kit, and we see a phaser, a communicator, and a couple of other miscellaneous devices. The main takeaway from the way the trailer opens is that Burnham’s arrival in the future was difficult. I wonder if we’re seeing a hint that something went wrong – maybe this isn’t the full 930 years that she initially expected to travel. While I’ve all but given up on a link-up between Discovery and Picard, I still think keeping the franchise’s timeline as streamlined as possible makes sense. Either way, this crash-landing aftermath must surely be from the first episode of the season.
Burnham’s emergency kit.
“I’ve spent a year searching… for that domino, that tipped over and started all of this.” So says Burnham in a voiceover, as we see a brief progression of her as her hair grows out – a great way to represent the passage of time! The biggest questions I have from this sequence are – where is she? It looked like she was in a shuttlecraft, and while I couldn’t see exactly, the window of the shuttle looked dark, perhaps indicating she was in space? But Burnham arrived with just the Red Angel suit, so whose shuttle is it? Secondly, what is the “domiono” she’s referring to? Obviously we assume it to mean Control – the rogue artificial intelligence from Season 2, whose aggressive pursuit forced her to hide in the future in the first place. And that may absolutely be the case – but it could be a misdirect.
If we look at this sequence, it could be referring to events from later in the trailer – the loss of hope of the Federation official and/or the fighting group of Andorians, Lurians, Cardassians, and others. Burnham seems to have agreed to take on a task, later in the trailer, for the unnamed Federation official, and her remarks in the voiceover could be referring to that and not to Control.
The next shot is very brief, but it shows us a group, seemingly led by an Andorian, using a directed energy weapon of some kind – possibly aboard Discovery, but I couldn’t be 100% sure on that. This is one point I’ve picked on in previous articles – if 930 years have passed, shouldn’t there be better and more powerful weapons? What the Andorians were holding looked like big, chunky phasers, and the directed energy weapon they used sent some kind of shockwave, but it didn’t look like anything 23rd or 24th Century Starfleet couldn’t have had. Perhaps this is related to the broader setting being a kind of stagnant or even post-apocalyptic look at the future.
The Andorians.
We’re introduced to the new character of Booker – played by British actor David Ajala. He and Burnham walk across a landscape, and while we only see a snippet of their conversation, it’s an interesting one! Firstly, I love the location chosen for this trek. The moss-covered rocks look different and otherworldly, as well as being natural and unspoiled. One of the points of criticism you may remember me levelling at Star Trek: Picard was that all of the planets Picard and his crew visited – and indeed all of the different places they went on Earth, like France and Japan – looked exactly like California. Discovery, unlike Picard, is filmed in Toronto, so naturally they have a whole different set of filming locations to use. As someone largely unfamiliar with those locations, seeing them immediately gives the show a different look and avoids that repetitive feeling that built up across Season 1 of Star Trek: Picard.
Booker refers to Burnham’s Starfleet badge as representing a “ghost”. There are a couple of points to break down from this. Firstly, it’s implied that Starfleet as an organisation either no longer exists, or that no Starfleet vessel has ever been to Booker’s part of the galaxy, leaving him to consider the organisation little more than a legend. However, the good news is that Booker recognises the symbol – even if he’s never seen a Starfleet ship or met a Starfleet officer, the organisation is something he’s at least aware of and vaguely familiar with. Starfleet having been disbanded, or being reduced in size and effectiveness such that many people have never seen it, would tie in with the depressed Federation official that we’ll come to in a moment, as well as what seems to be the overall theme of the season – restoring hope to the people of this era.
The next sequence introduces the Federation official. He seems to be on a space station – that’s my guess, at any rate – and he unfurls a flag that is definitely worth a second look. The Federation emblem that we’ve seen a number of times in previous iterations of the franchise has far more stars than the one seen here. Stars on flags can represent states or regions that are members of the organisation – as we see with the flag of the United States, for example. The loss of many stars from the Federation flag could thus be seen as those worlds having seceded from the Federation. I think seceded seems more likely than them having been conquered by an outside power, because in such a case I’d have expected the Federation to consider those worlds still being its own.
The flag with the “missing” stars.
I didn’t like what the Federation official had to say, at least in part. I’m sure we’ll learn more when the season debuts as to why he’s been at this post, and what he’s been waiting for all this time. That part I have no issue with. But where Discovery has come undone at points in its first two seasons is where it was a show solely about one character – Burnham. Putting her at the centre of stories in which she, and she alone, was capable of saving the ship, crew, and indeed the whole galaxy weren’t the high points of Discovery, at least not for me. Sonequa Martin-Green plays Burnham very well, but as a protagonist Burnham can be very hard to root for at times. She can come across as self-assured to the point of arrogance, and her slavish devotion to her own interpretation of what seems “logical” can overcome her common sense. These are traits embedded in her by her Vulcan upbringing, and while we’ve seen Burnham emotional and suffering setbacks, I don’t feel that the idea of making every season a “Burnham saves the universe” story is a great idea. I would love if Discovery could give its other crew members a chance to shine – we’ve seen Saru and Stamets come close, but several others have barely got a look-in after two full seasons.
In fact, I think that really is my biggest concern headed into Season 3: another story where Burnham is the only one who can help, the only one who can save the Federation, the only one who can bring hope and peace and blah blah blah. If it was Star Trek: Burnham, maybe that would be okay – but even then I’d still argue we needed a central character with better-written, more easily understandable motivations. It isn’t Star Trek: Burnham, though, it’s supposed to be Star Trek: Discovery, and to me that naming scheme implies more of an ensemble show with other characters allowed some degree of agency instead of plodding along behind Burnham in her shadow.
Burnham has been the focus for Discovery’s first two seasons.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like in Burnham’s character and in Discovery in general. I love the show – I even picked it for my favourite television series of the last decade when I wrote a list back in December. I like the dynamic between Burnham and Tilly, for example, and her relationship with Ash Tyler showed how she can be emotional and conflicted. But generally speaking, Burnham hasn’t been my favourite element of the series so far, and after two season-long arcs which largely focused on her, I had hoped for a story that had the potential to bring in other crew members in a bigger way this time around. Who knows, perhaps that will still happen – Burnham’s mission might take place entirely off-screen and for the whole season we’ll hang out with everyone else!
The trailer re-emphasises the “930 years” into the future setting, and at this point it should be said that that looks very likely to be accurate. There’s no reason to be deliberately dishonest, and since the setting looks very much unlike what we saw, for example, in Star Trek: Picard, I think we have to take it as fact for now.
Discovery’s third season setting (probably).
This next part might be my favourite. Deep Space Nine gave us a deeper look at the Trill race, who had been introduced in The Next Generation. Jadzia Dax, and later Ezri Dax, were both Trill main characters, and in case you need a recap, the Trill were a conjoined species with a humanoid and a non-humanoid living together in one body. The non-humanoid symbiont was very long-lived and would be joined with several humanoid Trill over its lifetime. The pool depicted in the trailer looks like one seen in Deep Space Nine on the Trill homeworld, and we also see several Trill characters in the next shot. As far as we know at this stage, no Trill main character has been announced for the show. However, the species will clearly feature in some form. I can’t help but wonder if a return of Dax is on the cards. Trill symbiots could live for centuries – how many centuries is unclear. It’s at least plausible that the Dax symbiont could be alive in this timeframe, and even a cameo appearance would be an incredible callback to Deep Space Nine.
Saru gives an empowering speech in the next sequence. I would guess he’s now captain, or acting captain, unless a new character gets parachuted into that role. Both Capt. Lorca and Capt. Pike were great in their stories in Discovery’s first two seasons, but the lack of a recurring, permanent captain has left the show feeling, at points, somewhat rudderless. If there is to be fourth season – which it seems there will be – getting some continuity at the top is important for the show, I feel. Saru would be a natural fit for the position, as he’d been first officer and he’s a character we’re familiar with. I liked his speech, which was a rallying cry to “make the future bright”.
We also see Burnham reunited with the rest of the crew. It seems that this didn’t happen right away upon arriving in the future, and that may be tied to her “waited for a year” comment from earlier in the trailer. The reunion was nice, though, and seeing everyone happily back together felt good – something I hope translates to the full episode!
We see various members of Discovery’s crew, confirming that they all survived the trip through the time-wormhole. I wasn’t expecting any casualties as of the end of Season 2, but Burnham’s rough landing could have meant that the ship suffered a similar fate. Luckily this seems to have not been the case.
Dr Culber – and the rest of Discovery’s crew – seem to have survived their time-wormhole journey.
We see a couple of shots of Discovery being repaired – whether this is damage from the time-wormhole or from fighting a faction in the future is unclear. Interspersed with those shots we also see fighting between Discovery’s crew and what looks like the Andorian-led faction. Among the races seemingly working together in this group are Cardassians, Lurians (i.e. Morn’s species), and humans. Up next is confirmation that former Empress Georgiou made the trip with the rest of Discovery’s crew. Michelle Yeoh, who plays the character, is scheduled to headline the upcoming Section 31 series, which as far as we know is supposed to be set in the 23rd Century. How that circle will be squared is anyone’s guess at this point, but presumably she will have to travel back in time before the end of the season if that is to happen.
The trailer ends with Burnham telling the Federation official that she will go “wherever the answers are”. The obvious question this poses is: answers to what? It’s possible, in this scene, that Burnham is searching for the USS Discovery – that it has somehow become lost and she needs to locate it. However, it’s equally possible that it’s referring to something else entirely, something that may be connected to the Federation’s decline or demise in this time period. It could even be something related to the Control AI.
I’ve written previously why I don’t think a post-apocalyptic setting is a good fit for Star Trek, and I stand by that. The underlying premise of Star Trek, going right back to The Original Series and remaining consistent ever since, is that humanity had beaten the odds, overcome innumerable obstacles, and built a great future for ourselves and others. The tension and drama in Star Trek stories could come from external threats to the future we’d built, but never from that future not existing or having already been torn down. Changing that premise changes Star Trek at a fundamental level, and I’m not sold – at least, not yet – on that being a positive change. However, despite how the trailer feels overall, Discovery’s third season may not have a truly post-apocalyptic setting, and I think that’s something I’m hoping for.
Learning more about this renegade or rebel faction does absolutely interest me. I hope they have an interesting leader and genuinely understandable motivations for being opposed to Burnham and Discovery – and aren’t just “evil for the sake of it” villains. The reintroduction of the Cardassians and Andorians was fantastic – we haven’t seen the Cardassians since Deep Space Nine went off the air. Hopefully they’ll have named characters and won’t just be making cameos in the background. I’d love to know more about what happened to Cardassia after the Dominion War – but given that the season purports to be 800+ years in the future from that event, it probably won’t be discussed, at least not in detail.
A Cardassian (second from the left) can be seen briefly, along with a human, a Lurian, and an Andorian.
Otherwise, the trailer was interesting in parts, potentially concerning in others. Season 2 was definitely the better of Discovery’s offerings so far, and I hope that the show can build on what it’s already accomplished, while giving some of its other characters a chance to be centre-stage. Despite my complaints, Burnham is okay. I don’t hate her as a character and she can be genuinely interesting. But another story where she’s the only one who can save the galaxy, and where everyone else is just along for another ride on the Burnham Express isn’t something I’m particularly excited about. Star Trek works best when a diverse cast of characters work together, and when each of them gets a turn to be the focus of a story and to have some degree of agency. Saru got a couple of episodes in the first two seasons – Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum in Season 1 and The Sound of Thunder in Season 2 looked at him and his people. Stamets and Culber have had moments across both seasons too, and Tilly got a sub-plot in Season 2 focusing on a race that lives in the mycelial network. But largely the show has been about Burnham, and the biggest stories put her firmly at the centre. Shaking that formula up, even a little, would be great in my opinion.
Overall I’m really looking forward to Discovery’s third season – even if a couple of points make me nervous! Revisiting the Trill and Cardassians definitely piqued my interest, and I’m curious to see whether the 930-year time jump is actually completed. If Burnham and the crew end up in the far future, I hope the show will take time to slow down and give us a recap of some of the big events that have taken place in the galaxy since we last saw it.
So I’m still a little confused as to why the official Star Trek website and Facebook page republished the trailer. Perhaps there will be more details to come, or even a new trailer or release date, in the coming days. If I spot anything new, you can be sure we’ll discuss it here!
The trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 may be found on the official Star Trek website and Facebook page. The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Discovery – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the first season of Star Trek: Picard, as well as for Star Trek: Discovery and other iterations of the franchise.
The revelation in Star Trek: Picard that the Romulans had managed to plant an operative in Starfleet was an interesting one, especially because that operative – Commodore Oh – had managed to attain such a high rank. She’d been working in Starfleet since at least the time of The Next Generation and probably even before then, with the Zhat Vash deciding to make a move against the Federation from the moment they learned of the existence of Data.
There had been androids, artificial intelligences, and other forms of synthetic life present in the galaxy prior to Data, and it’s conceivable that the Zhat Vash may have taken action against those as and when they could. But Data represented a step forward in the development of synthetic life, and definitely would have been considered a threat.
There are two possibilities for how the presence of Commodore Oh could be interpreted. She may have chosen to remain deep undercover and stick rigidly to her mission, even if that came at a cost to the Romulan Empire. Alternatively, however, she may have used her position as a spy within the Federation’s ranks to relay information to the Romulans at certain points. This could have been dangerous to her mission, increasing her chances of being caught. The way Commodore Oh and the Zhat Vash were presented for the most part in Star Trek: Picard were as zealots, meaning they seem like the kind of organisation who would be willing to sacrifice the lives of their own people if it advanced their ultimate objective. Indeed, we saw this with their actions on Mars.
Commodore Oh was a major antagonist in Star Trek: Picard Season 1.
Let’s look at the timeline first of all. As early as the 22nd Century, Starfleet had encountered what could arguably be considered examples of artificial intelligence. In the Enterprise episode Dead Stop, for example, the ship encounters a fully-automated space station which seems to act of its own volition. There was also a certain Dr Soong in Enterprise’s fourth season, and while he initially worked with genetically enhanced humans, he indicated he would begin research into synthetics.
By the 23rd Century, Starfleet had developed its own AI. Control, as seen in Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery, would ultimately go rogue and kill a number of Section 31 operatives as well as commandeer a fleet of ships. There was also Richard Daystrom, who build an AI capable of controlling a starship in The Original Series episode The Ultimate Computer, as well as several different androids, automatons, and AIs seen in that series.
By this point in time, the Romulans were aware of the existence of the Federation and thus might’ve known about some of these developments. The key ones, in my opinion, which may be relevant to the Zhat Vash would be Control and the M-5 computer, both of which went rogue and may have fed into their fears about synthetic life.
Dr Richard Daystrom, namesake of the Daystrom Institute, invented one of Starfleet’s first sentient machines.
We should also note that there are different types of synthetic life. For some reason, the Zhat Vash seem exclusively focused on preventing the rise of androids as opposed to other forms of AI. That’s despite the fact that many of the dangers present when considering out-of-control AI – including the ability to receive the message on Aia – are common to other kinds of artificial life too. Or at least would be in theory. To use Control as an example, if it became aware of Aia and the message there, given how aggressively it pursued Burnham and the USS Discovery it seems certain that it would have taken the same action as Sutra and tried to contact the “Mass Effect Reapers” (the race of super-synths introduced in the finale of Star Trek: Picard). So why the Zhat Vash are okay with some types of AI and not others, and why holograms seem to be exempt, for example, hasn’t really been covered in detail in the series so far.
However, assuming that the Zhat Vash learned of some of these events they would surely have been concerned – at the very least about the possibility of further development and the creation of android bodies for these AI systems to inhabit.
After the mid-23rd Century, we have no real information on synthetic life until Lore was known to be active on Omicron Theta in the late 2320s or 2330s. Within Star Trek: Picard itself – notably the episode Broken Pieces – the crew of La Sirena assume that Commodore Oh first infiltrated Starfleet after Lore’s brother Data was discovered and activated in 2338 – and by implication, that was the time the Zhat Vash became convinced that Starfleet and the Federation were a threat due to their involvement with synthetic life. However, I think we can reasonably assume that the Romulans, and by extension the Zhat Vash, would have at least become aware of the Federation’s other ties to and encounters with artificial life – even if they didn’t learn about these events until afterwards.
Picard and the crew of La Sirena pieced together a basic timeline for Commodore Oh’s infiltration of Starfleet.
The decision to send an operative in undercover is not one that can be done on a whim – it needs careful planning. If Commodore Oh did infiltrate Starfleet beginning in the 2330s, the Zhat Vash would have needed months or years before she joined up to make preparations. Obviously killing Data wasn’t the objective, or she would have been able to do so any almost any point. Nor was her goal to stop someone like Bruce Maddox working on synthetic life, as he seems to have been free to do so for decades right up until the ban.
I would suspect that Commodore Oh may have worked behind the scenes to slow research into synthetics, perhaps trying to delay or sabotage work being done. While we don’t have a lot of evidence to go on for this, the fact that Bruce Maddox was considered by Data to be incapable of preserving his memories in the episode The Measure of a Man could, in retrospect, be seen less as proof of Maddox jumping the gun and trying to work on Data before he was ready, and perhaps as evidence that his work was being hampered without his knowledge by the Zhat Vash’s spy.
This is what I mean by the question “how does Commodore Oh affect other Star Trek stories?” There are several which we can look back on in the aftermath of Star Trek: Picard and wonder how the presence of Commodore Oh affected things.
Let’s start with the Federation’s two biggest forays into the artificial intelligence realm in the 23rd Century – the Control AI and the M-5 computer. Obviously these events took place long before Commodore Oh was embedded within Starfleet, but they may have laid the groundwork for her mission.
The Control AI went rogue in the 2250s.
Both Control and the M-5 computer went rogue. Their creators – Section 31 and Dr Richard Daystrom – lost control of them, and they began to act on their own, taking aggressive action against organic life. While the Federation will have wanted to cover up what happened – as indeed we see them do at the end of Discovery’s second season – the Romulans are known to be aggressive in their espionage operations, knowing far more about the Federation than vice versa. It would not be an unfair assumption that the Romulans would have come to know what happened in one or both of these cases, and thus it may have been around the mid-23rd Century that the Zhat Vash began preparing to infiltrate the Federation.
Thinking about these two stories from the point of view of the Zhat Vash – who, according to everything we know from Star Trek: Picard will have existed at the time – the events are very concerning. The Federation is barely a century old, with humanity only becoming warp-capable less than a hundred years before that. In a comparatively short span of time, humanity has developed intelligent machines that they went on to lose control over. Humanity must appear, to the Zhat Vash, to be incredibly dangerous, pushing further into unexplored space than any other faction had done, and building an inter-species alliance that even brought an end to the Vulcan-Andorian conflict. For Romulans, who like stability and predictability, the Federation had disrupted a state of affairs that had existed for centuries in the local region of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. Would it only be a matter of time before they spotted the octonary star system where Aia is located? That had to be a source of concern.
The next major event would be the activation of Lore and Data, and it’s suggested in Star Trek: Picard that it was Data’s discovery by Starfleet in the late 2330s that prompted the Zhat Vash to send Commodore Oh in undercover. Again if we try to look at this event from their perspective, the Federation’s AI research had now gone beyond shipboard computers and had culminated in the creation of a humanoid android – and it’s this type of synthetic life in particular which seems to concern the Zhat Vash. If Control and the M-5 computer were worrying and had caused them to begin planning, the knowledge that Data existed and had been accepted to Starfleet Academy would have been panic-inducing to the paranoid Zhat Vash.
Lore was active in the mid-late 2330s.
We should consider the Crystalline Entity’s attack on Omicron Theta and examine it through this new lens. Lore, Data’s brother, was responsible for leading the Entity to Omicron Theta, where it wiped out all life on the planet. But was Lore solely responsible? Star Trek: Picard showed us that the Zhat Vash had the ability to hack into synthetics, and that when they did, the synths could be reprogrammed to turn on their creators. The synths on Mars may have been somewhat basic compared to Data and Lore, but the underlying technology is the same, and it’s at least possible that the Zhat Vash hacked into Lore. This could explain not only the attack by the Crystalline Entity, but Lore’s selfish and evil persona.
Sticking with the Crystalline Entity, it may have simply been a convenient way to destroy the colony while having no fingerprints of Romulan involvement. Omicron Theta was a human colony, so if the Romulans were to simply destroy it from orbit with starships, that could lead to war with the Federation. Yet it makes perfect sense that they would see Dr Soong as his work as a threat and want to take every possible step to stop him.
Next we have Dr Maddox and his work with synthetics. We know that, despite Maddox’s objections, Data was allowed to enrol in Starfleet Academy. Around this time, which was roughly the same time of Commodore Oh’s infiltration, Maddox began working on synthetic life. There are two possibilities for why it took Maddox such a long time (fifteen years, give or take, from Data’s admittance to Starfleet Academy to the events of the episode The Measure of a Man) to make much progress with his work. One is that Maddox is simply not as skilled as Dr Soong was, which is what the episode implies. The other possibility has to be that part of Commodore Oh’s mission was to hamper any synthetic research going on within the Federation, and that she, somehow, undermined his work and slowed it down.
Maddox’s research, which we now know grew to include a whole department consisting of a number of scientists and researchers, may also be the reason why the Zhat Vash chose not to simply kill Data. At the time her mission began, Data was the only known extant android, so killing him would have made sense for the Zhat Vash. It would have been difficult to get at him within Starfleet, but they did have an operative. However, the realisation that the Federation would, sooner or later, be able to recreate the work, coupled with Data being confined within Starfleet and thus unable to strike out on his own and potentially discover Aia, may have focused the mission on stopping synthetic research, slowing it down, and gathering as much information on it as possible. As a Starfleet Officer, Commodore Oh would be well-placed to do those things.
Dr Bruce Maddox was the Federation’s leading synthetics researcher for decades.
The fact that it took Maddox a further twenty years to develop F8 and the other androids present on Mars could be taken as evidence of the Zhat Vash trying to undermine his work. How they could have done this is unclear, and they may have simply got lucky with Maddox not being better at his job. One question that has bugged me in the context of Star Trek’s sensors and replicators was this: how hard could it really have been to recreate Data using what they already knew about him? This was never really addressed on screen, but perhaps we can take the fact that the Federation was unable to do so as further evidence of their work on synthetics being slowed and undermined from within.
One faction I think we can safely assume would have fed into the Zhat Vash’s paranoia about AI would be the Borg. In the 2350s, many scientists in the Federation were working on the assumption that the Borg were a myth, or at least were so distant as to not be a threat. This was during the Romulans’ 50+ years of isolation, so we don’t know whether or not they had any more evidence about the Borg than the Federation. But there are two points of note: Star Trek: Picard established that, as far as anyone knew, the Borg had only ever assimilated one Romulan vessel. But in contrast to that, the region of space controlled by the Borg was vast, and they had vessels in the Beta Quadrant (where the Romulan Empire is largely based) during the 2370s.
Starfleet’s official first encounter with the Borg, as depicted in Q Who from The Next Generation’s second season, may have gone unnoticed by the Romulans, but the Borg invasion a year later, as seen in The Best of Both Worlds certainly will not. 39 Federation starships were destroyed, and an enemy ship made it to within a stone’s throw of Earth itself. If the Romulans had remained in blissful ignorance of the Borg up to this point, they will have known by the late 2360s that they existed – if for no other reason than Commodere Oh herself relaying that information.
When the Federation encountered the Borg the Romulans would have soon come to know about it.
The reason for the Romulans’ interest in the Borg in Star Trek: Picard must surely be twofold. On the one hand, selling the disassembled components is incredibly lucrative, and with the region’s sole supply the Romulans were in firm control of this market. Secondly, however, their fear of synthetic life must have been a major reason for studying the Borg so intently. For all we know, the “Mass Effect Reapers” were meant to be the Borg. But even if that isn’t true – and the Romulans don’t seem to know either way – the Borg, with their half-synthetic bodies and single-minded focus on assimilation, must have been a major cause for concern among the Zhat Vash. This can have only been exacerbated when two ex-Borg returned from the Delta Quadrant aboard the USS Voyager – Seven of Nine and Icheb.
Icheb would later be killed – butchered for his Borg components by an unnamed doctor at a facility run by Bjayzl. But who arranged for this? And why is there such a huge demand for Borg technology in the first place? I had theorised during the first season of Star Trek: Picard that the Romulans may be keeping a majority of components for themselves, but even if that isn’t true they have been studying Borg technology extensively. Icheb’s death seems to take place around the time that the Artifact came under Romulan control, so it’s at least possible that Bjayzl’s buyer was the Zhat Vash – that they were interested in learning about the galaxy’s preeminent synthetic race.
Icheb was murdered so his Borg components could be harvested.
Finally, we have B4. We know from Star Trek: Nemesis that the Romulans acquired B4 and placed his disassembled body in such a location that the Enterprise-E would be the closest ship available to respond to Shinzon. How did they know so much about Federation ship movements? Is it at least possible that Commodore Oh was relaying information to the Romulans at key moments like this? The possibility cannot be discounted – and this could even explain why, in Star Trek: First Contact, the Enterprise-E is assigned to the Neutral Zone. Perhaps someone in Starfleet had an inkling that a Romulan spy was in their midst.
Sticking with this theme of Commodore Oh being more of a general spy than simply a Zhat Vash agent, there are a number of Federation-Romulan encounters that she may have been involved in. Or, conversely, we can take the failure of certain Romulan plots as evidence that she was deliberately not involving herself!
For example, Sela’s attempt to interfere in the Klingon Civil War in Redemption ended in total failure – thanks in no small part to Data. A large Federation fleet deployed a sensor net to detect cloaked Romulan ships, thus preventing Romulan aid to the Duras faction. This was a major move on the part of the Romulans, and would have shifted the balance of power in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants had it succeeded. The Federation-Klingon alliance would have evaporated, and the Federation would be facing a Klingon-Romulan alliance alone. Sela’s second plan, to conquer Vulcan in the episode Unification, similarly failed, though this was due to the actions of Data, Picard, and Spock on Romulus and may not have been something Commodore Oh could have done much about – except perhaps warn the Romulans that they were coming.
We can further see this lack of involvement in Face of the Enemy, where Counsellor Troi impersonates a Tal Shiar operative and aids in the successful defection of a senior Romulan government official. A Federation defector to the Romulans is also successful in his efforts to return to the Federation in the same episode.
There is also In The Pale Moonlight from Deep Space Nine. In this story, Sisko essentially lies, cheats, and covers up murders to drag the Romulans into the Dominion War – a war that they had no need to participate in. At the end of the episode Sisko deletes the log in which he’d detailed his actions, and with his disappearance into the realm of the Prophets, only Garak remained as someone who knew everything that happened. But the trail of evidence existed, and could have been pieced together by a Romulan operative within the Federation. Sisko may have deleted his log, but as we’ve seen in other Star Trek stories, deleting data isn’t a straightforward process, and as we saw in The Undiscovered Country, it’s possible for logs to be downloaded and transmitted via subspace, even to foreign powers. Kirk’s own captain’s log was used against him in his trial in that film.
A Romulan senator was assassinated as part of a scheme to drag them into the Dominion War.
However, we could take the Romulans’ successes in episodes like Message in a Bottle – where they are able to commandeer a brand-new prototype Starfleet vessel – as evidence that someone within the Federation was feeding information to them.
So where does all of this leave us when it comes to Commodore Oh?
I feel positively certain that the Zhat Vash would have come to know about what happened with the Control AI, not least because it decimated Section 31. Whether they would have come to know about the M-5 computer is unclear, but even if they didn’t, the Federation’s research into AI would have been troubling to the Zhat Vash at least by the mid-23rd Century.
A major candidate for their interference is Lore and the attack on the Omicron Theta colony. This fits with how the Romulans and Zhat Vash operate, it fits with them knowing how to hack positronic brains, and if there was only one successful android builder (Dr Soong) and two extant androids (Data and Lore), the best course of action from the Zhat Vash perspective may have been to exterminate the colony and prevent that knowledge spreading.
When that failed, and when Dr Maddox had begun his own work on synthetic life, building up a team of scientists, eradicating the problem was clearly far less practical. Killing Data would have only set back the Federation’s research in a small way, and it may have been decided that the best course of action was to work from within to slow them down.
Commodore Oh aboard her ship – finally exposed as a spy.
Commodore Oh doesn’t seem to have actively interfered on behalf of the Romulans at key points where having an embedded operative could have been massively useful to the Romulan Empire. To me, the Federation’s successes against the Romulans in these stories implies that Commodore Oh was laser-focused on her own mission, and felt that stepping outside of her mission parameters, even to save Romulan lives in the short-term, was too great a risk.
Finally, when Dr Maddox was ultimately successful in creating synthetic life on a larger scale, and the rollout of F8 and the other androids went ahead, Commodore Oh felt that the time had come to act. Destroying a fleet intended to help the Romulans was simply unavoidable, because that’s where the synths were. Mars may not have been her first choice of target, but it was the only available target, and with synthetic life research and development accelerating, the time had come to act.
That’s how I see the timeline, and when taking a step back and looking at Star Trek as a whole, I don’t feel that the creation and retroactive inclusion of the Zhat Vash and Commodore Oh causes any major plot holes. Sometimes inserting characters and factions can have this effect, but in this case, I think we can find a way for episodes of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager to play out in such a way that is consistent. The Zhat Vash and Commodore Oh were depicted as zealots, and it would make sense that someone with that kind of single-mindedness would be 100% okay with allowing her own government’s plans to fail and to see Romulans die in order to remain on mission. The Zhat Vash were playing an incredibly long game – Commodore Oh was embedded in Starfleet for over half a century, and even by the standards of long-lived Romulans, that’s a very long time.
While Commodore Oh’s plan succeeded, in the long run the development of synthetic life couldn’t be prevented, and it will be up to future Star Trek stories to show what implications, if any, that may have for the Romulans, the Federation, and the synths themselves.
So this was a different type of article, a deeper dive into a single story point and how it can be seen to effect – or not effect – other stories in the franchise.
I liked the Zhat Vash overall, though the inconsistent way they were referred to throughout Star Trek: Picard’s first season wasn’t great, and I question their almost-immediate decision to withdraw in the finale. They brought a whole new dimension to the Romulans, and one aspect of that is that we can look back at other stories in the franchise and think about how the Zhat Vash may have been involved. As someone who loves Star Trek, this kind of theory-crafting is a lot of fun. I consider the ideas outlined above to be at least plausible, but remember to take all of these fan theories with a grain of salt!
Star Trek: Picard Season 1 is available to stream now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard and all other episodes, films, and series mentioned above – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: In addition to spoilers for the Deep Space Nine episodes on this list, minor spoilers may be present for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise, including Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard.
In the previous two entries in this series of articles, I picked out ten great episodes from both The Next Generation and The Original Series. This time, it’s the turn of Deep Space Nine to get a closer look. Thus far on the blog I haven’t spent much time with Deep Space Nine, which is mostly due to Star Trek: Picard taking up a lot of time, and because practically nothing from Deep Space Nine crossed over to that show. So this is a first!
The Next Generation had successfully proven that the Star Trek brand was bigger than Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in the late 1980s. With Gene Roddenberry terminally ill, Rick Berman took over the running of the Star Trek franchise, and by 1990, when the fourth season of The Next Generation debuted, was in full control. It was around this time that the concept of a spin-off from The Next Generation began to be taken seriously. It was decided that the show should be set on a space station so as to differentiate it from The Next Generation, which was still on the air at the time it premiered. Returning to the franchise’s western inspirations from way back in the mid-1960s, Deep Space Nine was based on the idea of a frontier town from those kind of stories – complete with a town sheriff, bartender, “mayor”, and “natives”.
Deep Space Nine represented the biggest change in the Star Trek franchise so far, and even in 2020 remains unique as a series not set on a moving starship. The fixed setting meant that the producers could bring in a number of secondary recurring characters in addition to the main cast, several of whom would go on to have increasingly large roles as the seven seasons of the show rolled out. Two major characters from The Next Generation crossed over to Deep Space Nine – Chief O’Brien was present from the beginning and Worf joined in the fourth season. This continuity of characters, combined with crossover episodes, firmly tied the two series together as separate parts of a larger ongoing fictional universe in a way that was unprecedented at the time. The Next Generation had gone out of its way to stand apart from The Original Series at least in terms of its characters and setting, but Deep Space Nine leaned into its sister-show.
The opening titles for Deep Space Nine.
Thematically, however, The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were worlds apart. From the very beginning there were tensions and conflicts among the crew, which was now made up of Federation and non-Federation personnel. The show would diverge even more from previous iterations of the franchise as time went on, becoming much darker in tone and eventually portraying a long, bitter war between the Federation and the Dominion – a new faction created for Deep Space Nine. The Dominion War storyline, which built up slowly between Seasons 2 and 5 and would explode into all-out war for the entirety of Seasons 6 and 7, marked Star Trek’s first foray into serialised storytelling. This more modern style of television storytelling would be employed in Enterprise, Discovery, and Star Trek: Picard as well.
For all of these reasons, Deep Space Nine was controversial in some Trekkie circles, and some fans of the two earlier shows weren’t keen on its static setting, darker tone, and serialised stories. Conversely, though, some Trekkies cite Deep Space Nine as their favourite entry in the franchise by far, precisely for those same reasons. I place myself somewhere in the middle; while it is different to what came before, that doesn’t make it worse and it is still greatly enjoyable Star Trek fare.
One final point worth making note of is that, as of 2020, Deep Space Nine has not been remastered and remains in its original broadcast format from the 1990s. I consider this to be a major mistake and oversight on ViacomCBS’ part, especially as they’ve been so keen to use the Star Trek franchise to drum up support for their streaming platform, CBS All Access. As a result, Deep Space Nine doesn’t look as good as most of the other shows (along with Voyager, which has the same limitation). I did write a piece about this, calling on ViacomCBS to remedy this situation. You can read it by clicking or tapping here.
If you missed the other posts in this series, here’s a recap of how the format works: this isn’t a “Top Ten” list of my all-time favourites. Instead, it’s a list of ten episodes (or rather, ten stories, some of which are multi-episode arcs) which I think are great and well worth watching – especially if you’re finding yourself with lots of time for entertainment at the moment. I’ve picked at least one episode from each of the show’s seven seasons, and the episodes are not ranked, they’re simply listed in order of release.
Let’s jump in and look at the episodes, and please be aware of spoilers.
Number 1: Emissary (Season 1, premiere)
Commander Sisko and Chief O’Brien in Emissary.
It’s rare for a series to kick off with one of its best episodes. What often happens in television is that it takes time for a show to find its feet as the actors and crew get used to working together and as characters and story elements develop. In the Star Trek franchise this is true too, but Emissary bucks the trend. Until very recently I’d have said it was easily the best opening episode of any Star Trek show, but it must now share that crown with Remembrance, the premiere of Star Trek: Picard – a review of which you can find by clicking or tapping here.
The episode begins with a flashback to the events of The Next Generation episode The Best of Both Worlds, around three years previously. Sisko, it turns out, had been aboard the USS Saratoga, one of the ships destroyed by the Borg. His wife had been killed but he escaped the exploding ship with his son Jake. Cut to the present day, and the Cardassians had finally withdrawn from Bajor after decades of occupation. Both factions had been introduced in The Next Generation too, so the audience would have been familiar with them. Both of these elements tied Deep Space Nine to its sister-show in a way that hadn’t really been seen before. Star Trek was expanding, but it was expanding in such a way that the shows being produced together would share a setting – we’d also see this in Voyager, and I’ve written previously about why it worked and why doing something similar would be good for Star Trek going forward. But we’re off-topic again.
Sisko and Jake travel to the Bajoran system and arrive aboard the newly-christened Deep Space Nine, a former Cardassian station. The episode introduces us to the crew – O’Brien, who’s obviously crossed over from The Next Generation, as well as Dax, Quark, Kira, Odo, and Dr Bashir. Interestingly, the role of Kira Nerys was intended to be filled by Ro Laren, another recurring character from The Next Generation, but actress Michelle Forbes declined the offer.
The episode sets up tension between Sisko and Picard; the former blaming the latter for what happened at Wolf 359. Sisko seems on the verge of resigning from Starfleet, but after discovering the Bajoran wormhole and encountering the noncorporeal Prophets, Sisko realises why he’d been unable to move on from those events, and approaches his new role with renewed vigour.
The only criticism I’d have of Emissary might be this: the story almost immediately took DS9 from being a minor frontier outpost to being a vitally important location. There was scope, I feel, for the show to have spent a little more time looking at DS9 as an unpopular posting, and at Bajor as a slowly-recovering backwater before introducing the Gamma Quadrant. I mentioned that Emissary stands up as being a pilot that’s one of the series’ best episodes and that’s true – in part because the discovery of the wormhole storyline could have been moved to later in the show!
Number 2: The Homecoming, The Circle, and The Siege (Season 2)
The Siege sees Bajoran rebels capture DS9.
I believe this trio of episodes form Star Trek’s first “three-parter”, and kicked off the second season of Deep Space Nine with an explosive story. It would’ve felt wrong to pick just one of the three episodes considering they form a single story, and I wanted to talk about it in its entirety.
One aspect of the story in Season 1 designed to cause tension was the idea that some Bajorans resented the arrival of the Federation so soon after the Cardassians had left. While Major Kira expressed this view in Emissary, she had largely stepped back from overt criticism of the Federation’s presence, yet it was something the show wanted to address. In this story, an aggressive group of Bajorans want the Federation gone. They don’t realise it, but they’re being manipulated by the Cardassians, and the whole scheme is a Cardassian plot to retake the station and the Bajoran system – which is now strategically valuable because of the wormhole.
DS9 would come under attack a number of times across the series’ run, but this is the first time we really see the station and its crew forced into such a difficult combat situation. Despite Starfleet’s order to withdraw – they were only there, after all, at the request of the Bajoran government – Sisko and the crew stay behind to fight off the Bajoran soldiers involved in the coup.
The character of Li Nalas, played by Richard Beymer, is one of the best one-time characters that appeared in the show, especially in the early seasons. A resistance hero who Kira rescues, Li is assigned to the station and ultimately loses his life to save Sisko from the rebels.
Vedek Winn – who would later be elected Kai, the Bajorans’ spiritual leader – returns in this story from her sole appearance in Season 1. While she had been presented as a thoroughly dislikable character in the episode In the Hands of the Prophets, it was here, at the beginning of Season 2, that her role as a villain begins to be fleshed out, as she is shown to be collaborating with the Cardassians and is clearly someone for whom power is the ultimate goal.
Number 3: The Wire (Season 2)
Dr Bashir tends to Garak in The Wire.
Elim Garak, the sole Cardassian aboard DS9, was an enigmatic and interesting character in his early appearances. Later episodes would flesh him out much more, especially during the Dominion War which of course affected Cardassia greatly. But The Wire was one of the first Garak-centric episodes, and it looked in detail at his past as a spy.
In fact, The Wire is the first episode to introduce the Obsidian Order – the Cardassian Empire’s secret police/intelligence agency. This faction would go on to be further developed as later seasons of the show rolled out, but here is where it was first introduced. We also meet its former head, Enabran Tain, for the first time. Tain would reappear several more times in Deep Space Nine.
Garak had been an enigmatic character, but prior to The Wire his status and his past were unclear, and his conversations, particularly with Dr Bashir but also with others, could be taken in different ways. It wasn’t until this episode that we get outright confirmation that not only was he once a spy, but that he’s in exile. His lies cloud the story somewhat, and even by the end of the episode the reason for his exile is not clear, but what is clear is that Dr Bashir had been right about him in a roundabout way – Garak had once been a spy.
Over the course of more than thirty appearances in Deep Space Nine, Andrew Robinson would make Garak just as much a part of the show as its main cast – especially in later seasons. It’s hard to imagine the series without him, as he would become such an important character, and from that point of view the story of The Wire is important. But as a work of mystery, and as an episode focusing on Dr Bashir as he tries to save a patient who, at times, treats him awfully, it’s a great work of drama too.
Number 4: The Search, Parts 1 & 2 (Season 3)
The Search introduced the USS Defiant.
The finale of Season 2 introduced the Dominion, the aggressive Gamma Quadrant faction that would become Deep Space Nine’s major antagonists. The Season 3 premiere picks up the story in the aftermath, and the crew set out to search for the Dominion – in the brand-new USS Defiant.
The Dominion were intended to be an anti-Federation faction. Where the Klingon and Cardassian Empires were monoethnic, the Dominion would incorporate several races under its banner, just like the Federation. But instead of being a democratic society with a focus on peaceful exploration, the Dominion would be a dictatorship, and its races would be split into castes – with the Founders being treated with god-like reverence, akin to something we might see in Imperial Japan before 1945 or North Korea. The Dominion also answered a burning question for Deep Space Nine, namely what to do with the Gamma Quadrant. The show was supposed to be set on a static station with less focus on exploration, but with the Gamma Quadrant beckoning just beyond the wormhole, a number of episodes had basically been about going there and exploring. The Dominion, and their iron grip on the territory beyond the wormhole, gave Deep Space Nine an excuse to cut back on exploration, and by extension, avoid becoming The Next Generation or Voyager, which was about to premiere. Voyager’s upcoming launch also changed the name of the USS Defiant – it was originally to be named the USS Valiant, but Rick Berman and other Star Trek producers didn’t want two ships whose names began with the letter V!
The introduction of the Defiant allowed for more stories away from the station featuring the full crew, not all of whom could seemingly fit on one Runabout. It shook up the show, and would set the stage for the more military direction that the showrunners intended to take.
The Search also introduces two key recurring characters – Michael Eddington, the Starfleet officer who would go on to become a leader in the Maquis, and the unnamed female changeling, who would be the Founders’ representative throughout the Dominion War. Odo discovering his people and realising for the first time that he isn’t alone was a major turn for his character too, one which worked brilliantly, especially in later stories. Indeed, much of what would come later in Deep Space Nine in terms of successful storylines premiered or was at least hinted at in this two-parter.
The Dominion here are shown to be very powerful, but their intentions are not yet clear. The Founders clearly have a major problem with any non-changelings, but they do concede to Odo at the end and allow everyone to return home. Obviously, however, this wouldn’t be the last we’d see of the Dominion or Odo’s people.
Number 5: Homefront and Paradise Lost (Season 4)
Admiral Leyton was the antagonist in Homefront and Paradise Lost.
Since discovering the Dominion and their shape-shifting Founders, the Federation had become increasingly worried – to the point of paranoia, in some cases – about being attacked or infiltrated by changelings. The basic story of Homefront and Paradise Lost sees a former commander of Sisko’s recall him to Earth to work on strategies to protect the Federation – but this officer, Admiral Leyton, played by Robert Foxworth, has another scheme in mind.
Believing the democratic government to be impotent and paralysed in the face of the Dominion threat, Leyton plans a coup to seize power for himself on behalf of a cadre of Starfleet officers, in a story with a genuinely sympathetic antagonist. What’s so engrossing about Leyton is that he’s not a typical villain. He and Sisko actually have the same morals and the same motivation – they just have very different ways of going about engaging the Dominion. Leyton genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing – and while in the episode itself he’s presented as being in the wrong, we can at least entertain the argument that the later Dominion War would prove that he was right to take the threat seriously.
We’ve visited Earth in Star Trek on a number of occasions, but this was our first significant look at 24th Century Earth outside of Starfleet Academy. The action takes place in several locations on the planet, including Sisko’s hometown of New Orleans. It also gives Nog, now a Starfleet cadet, something significant to do for the first time in a number of episodes, and sets the stage for his future development as a Starfleet officer.
I’ve always liked the character of Joseph Sisko, played by veteran actor Brock Peters. In this story, he’s presented as a voice of reason, standing up to Sisko’s increasingly paranoid behaviour as he searches for changeling infiltrators. Giving that role to Joseph Sisko worked so well in the story, and it’s one of my favourite storylines from this duology.
Number 6: Nor Battle to the Strong (Season 5)
Nor Battle to the Strong was a rare Jake-centric episode.
Despite being credited as a main cast member for all of Deep Space Nine’s seven seasons, Cirroc Lofton’s character of Jake Sisko made only 71 appearances out of the show’s 176 total episodes. For a long time, the show’s creators didn’t really know what to do with the character. Having him try to become a Starfleet officer would have been too similar to Wesley Crusher’s storyline in The Next Generation, and I have no doubt that there was an awareness on the part of the producers that Wesley had been, shall we say, not well-received by every fan. So there was a need to do things differently, but without any real sense of direction as to what that might be. Jake Sisko was created to be less a character in his own right than to give Benjamin Sisko a dependent, and it shows.
However, by the fifth season, the idea had been conceived to make Jake into a writer. Initially he wrote poetry and planned to write a novel, but in the episode Nor Battle to the Strong he branches out and begins writing articles and profiles about current events – in this case he uses the opportunity of writing about Dr Bashir as an excuse to get off the station, but ends up in a warzone when their ship is diverted. At this point in Deep Space Nine’s story, the Federation and Klingons are engaged in a brief war which had been set in motion by a Dominion infiltrator, but that really is’t the focus of the episode.
Jake is thrown into a warzone completely unprepared for what he’d find. He goes from enthusiastic to terrified in a matter of hours, and in a very powerful sequence finds himself alone with a badly-wounded Federation soldier, who dies in front of him.
Toward the end of the episode the Klingons attack, and Jake finds himself trapped and terrified in the Starfleet base. Firing his phaser randomly he inadvertently causes a cave-in, which stops the Klingons in their tracks. Hailed as a hero, Jake feels dejected and depressed, feeling that after abandoning Bashir and the dying soldier, he doesn’t deserve the label. He writes up his experiences in a powerfully honest piece which we see both Sisko and Bashir read.
Nor Battle to the Strong is an incredibly powerful story about the reality of war, told through the eyes of the kind of enthusiastic young man that our armies arguably consist of. At the beginning of the episode Jake is longing for action, to get away from the boredom of the station and a medical conference. He’d love to thought of as a hero, too. Yet by the end, after the horrors he saw and the trauma he went through, not only does he reject the label of “hero”, but he’s more than happy to be back aboard the station.
While he labels himself a coward, and perhaps not unfairly so, we sympathise with Jake. He wasn’t ready for what he saw, as indeed nobody can be until they see if for themselves, and he acted on instinct and out of fear. Jake could be any of us, and the episode challenges us as the audience as if to say: “you think you’d act any differently?” Nor Battle to the Stong also sets up Jake for his decision to remain aboard DS9 when it’s occupied by the Dominion at the end of the season. Having seen warfare first-hand, he’s more experienced and perhaps feels a little more ready for taking a big decision like that.
Number 7: Call to Arms (Season 5), Favor the Bold, & Sacrifice of Angels (Season 6)
The Federation fleet in Favor the Bold, en route to DS9.
This trio of episodes forms a single story, with several other episodes in between at the beginning of the sixth season. In Call to Arms, the cold war between the Federation and the Dominion finally boils over into all-out conflict, and as the gateway to the Gamma Quadrant DS9 is in the firing line. In an attempt to stop the Dominion’s military build-up in Cardassian space, Sisko and the crew plant a minefield at the mouth of the wormhole – self-replicating mines, designed by Rom, Dax, and O’Brien, which would also be cloaked for maximum effectiveness. While it had been clear for some time that the Dominion War would happen one way or another, in the end it would be Starfleet and the Federation who would trigger it.
We’ve touched on Deep Space Nine being darker before, and this decision is another example of that. Starfleet had evidently given up on the idea of a negotiated settlement, and as they could no longer stand a military buildup on their frontier, they took the first step – aggressive action which had no other possible outcome. In this sense, Starfleet is presented in a much more military light than usual, akin to some of the conspirators in The Undiscovered Country, which is perhaps the closest we can get within the franchise.
The minefield ultimately leads to the anticipated Dominion-Cardassian attack, and with the Federation’s resources focused elsewhere, DS9 is surrendered to their forces at the end of Season 5, and remains under their control for the first third of Season 6. I’d argue, by the way, that DS9 was so vitally important to the war effort, as it controlled the only travel route between Dominion space and the Alpha Quadrant, that all steps should have been taken to keep it safe. But a) there’s no denying it was a dramatic turn as a story beat, and b) we don’t know the state of Federation-Klingon forces at the time, and they may well have decided that trying to hold the station and the Bajoran system would be massively costly and ultimately futile. But we’ve gone way off-topic!
Favor the Bold sees Sisko come up with a plan to recapture the station, but with the Dominion close to destroying the minefield and unleashing a vast wave of reinforcements, they have to launch the plan ahead of schedule. I loved the way that they were able to communicate the information from DS9 to Sisko – Morn would become a courier, and I loved this way of using his character.
The story arc is finally concluded in Sacrifice of Angels in dramatic fashion, and features what is still one of Star Trek’s biggest space battles to date, possibly only behind a couple of later battles in Deep Space Nine and the one seen in Discovery’s Battle at the Binary Stars. The battle is also one of Star Trek’s finest, with the last-minute arrival of the Klingon fleet clearing a path for Sisko to make it back to the station. The next twist involves the Prophets, who finally involve themselves in the war on the side of the Federation – at least for a moment.
Practically every character gets a turn across this story arc, from Jake Sisko, who opts to stay behind aboard the occupied station, to Kira, who sees herself as a collaborator with the Cardassians, to side-characters like Rom, Nog, and Garak, who all have roles to play. Gul Dukat sees a massive turnaround in his character, going from achieving his wildest ambitions to tasting bitter defeat and painful loss, setting the stage for what would come next for him. Overall, a stunning story to kick off the Dominion War arc.
Number 8: Who Mourns for Morn? (Season 6)
Morn and Odo in Who Mourns for Morn?
In the midst of a what was a very dark season overall, Who Mourns for Morn? stands out as being a much more light-hearted episode. Focusing on the character of Morn, who was less of a recurring character than a true background character, this episode sees him “killed”, and Quark scrambling to recover his fortune.
Taking a break from the war and returning to the Quark-versus-Odo dynamic that had worked so well in previous seasons, the episode also brings in a number of guest stars to play Morn’s criminal associates. Each of these characters was fairly one-dimensional and even a little over-the-top, but in the context of a fun heist/mystery story they worked wonderfully, and gave Deep Space Nine some much-needed time off from the war.
René Auberjonois and Armin Shimerman worked so well together, not just here but throughout their stories together in Deep Space Nine. The two actors built up a chemistry and, reportedly, a genuine friendship – helped, no doubt, by the long sessions spent together having makeup and prosthetics applied.
Morn had been a part of Deep Space Nine from the beginning, but in a non-speaking role. This episode took a more detailed look at him, particularly his past as a criminal. It was genuinely funny to see the characters talking about Morn as someone who would never shut up in light of the fact that we never heard him speak on-screen, though the episode wasn’t universally well-received, as some fans felt it was too un-serious in the middle of a war, and that Morn was somehow “unworthy” of an episode dedicated to him. Some people are real killjoys!
Number 9: In The Pale Moonlight (Season 6)
In The Pale Moonlight spawned an early internet meme!
Deep Space Nine was much darker than any Star Trek show had been before, as we’ve already mentioned. It looked at themes like warfare and morality from a wholly different place than Gene Roddenberry had done, and In The Pale Moonlight sees the show at one of its darkest moments. What results is an episode that is divisive, at least in some circles. Fans of the more optimistic tone of The Original Series and The Next Generation may dislike what it brings to to the table, particularly in the way it shows how 24th Century humanity is susceptible to the same flaws and problems that we are today – but I’d argue that simply makes it more relatable, or even realistic.
With the Dominion War raging and many Starfleet officers dying on a daily basis, Sisko hatches a plan to bring the Romulans into the fight on the side of the Federation-Klingon alliance. Other episodes of Deep Space Nine had looked at the gritty reality of war from different angles, but In The Pale Moonlight showed the crew looking through reams of names of the dead and missing in a powerful sequence that showed just how many casualties were being inflicted.
The Dominion had been created to be an equal for – and to outgun, at points – the Federation-Klingon alliance. We’d seen even going back to their pre-war appearances how powerful their ships and weapons could be, so by this point in the show the fact that the war would see the Federation somewhere between a WWI-esque stalemate and actually being on the back foot is not unrealistic. The storyline builds masterfully on what has come before, especially earlier in Season 6, to present Sisko’s decisions in a sympathetic light.
Sisko employs Garak to aid in his scheme to convince a Romulan senator that the Dominion plans to attack them. As with any big lie, Sisko finds himself falling deeper and deeper into the scheme, crossing more and more lines in his quest to do what he believes is right. The episode thus looks as the concept of moral relativism and the question of whether the ends can in fact justify the means under exceptional circumstances. Sisko was ultimately okay with lying, forging evidence, pitting two powerful factions against one another, and dragging a foreign power into a war that they didn’t need to participate in. He was even content to cover up murders, all in the name of victory for the Federation. As Section 31 would say, sometimes saving the Federation means doing very un-Federation things.
Number 10: The Siege of AR-558 (Season 7)
Nog receives a serious injury in The Siege of AR-558.
Deep Space Nine’s seventh and final season was a war story, and the latter part in particular was one long serialised arc. It can be difficult to pull out single episodes from such a story, but for me, The Siege of AR-558 encapsulates perfectly what the show wanted to say about war.
Directed by Vietnam War veteran Winrich Kolbe, who directed a number of other Star Trek episodes too, The Siege of AR-558 has a claustrophobic feel, no doubt informed by its director’s own experiences. The fact that the planetoid is not even given a proper name adds to the sense of futility, and while there is a good reason to defend the captured position – it hosts an important Dominion communications relay – that hardly matters to the soldiers stationed there.
Nog’s character arc in Deep Space Nine, from petty thief to outstanding officer and war hero, sees major development as he suffers a serious injury. The way Aron Eisenberg approached the role of Nog is commendable, because he took what could have been a one-dimensional minor character, and foil for Jake Sisko, and turned him around into someone we could root for and feel for. Sadly, Eisenberg passed away last year.
The Siege of AR-558 is also a reminder that all wars see small acts of heroism on a regular basis, many of which go unnoticed and unreported. Sisko’s decision to stay and fight is one, Nog’s injury is another, but also we have the soldiers already present on the planetoid – not all of whom survive the episode. These characters show different reactions to life on the front lines, and the episode is much better for their inclusion.
The Siege of AR-558 also gives Ezri Dax something to do away from the station. Ezri was brought in at the beginning of Season 7 to replace Jadzia Dax – who had been killed at the end of the sixth season. Nicole deBoer played her very well in all of her appearances, but with only one season left before the show would end, Ezri didn’t have a lot of time for us to get to know her. Thus her role in an episode like this one, while not the main focus, is important for her character as the season unfolds.
So that’s it. Ten great episodes from Deep Space Nine. I tried to pick a couple of non-war stories to go along with all of the war-themed episodes. There’s more to the show than the war, but war and its associated themes are prevalent throughout the series, even from its opening scene which was set midway through a battle.
There are many other episodes which almost made this list, and Deep Space Nine has some great options to revisit time and again. I’ve seen the Dominion War arc more times than I can count, and even on a repeat viewing the war is still incredibly dramatic, tense, and exciting. For me, “modern” Star Trek began partway through The Next Generation’s run, perhaps around the third season, and Deep Space Nine carried on the trend of modernising the storytelling, taking Star Trek away from its 1960s roots. While some fans of The Original Series may not appreciate that, for me personally it works. I have friends on both sides of the argument of whether the Dominion War arc was a great idea or a terrible one, but again it’s a storyline that worked for me.
As I said last time when looking at The Next Generation, there were many other episodes that I could have chosen for this list. Deep Space Nine can be divided into at least three distinct parts – Seasons 1 and 2, prior to the introduction of the Dominion, Seasons 3-5 before the outbreak of the war, and Seasons 6 and 7 while the war raged. Within that framework there were changes, the two biggest ones being the introduction of Worf in Season 4 and Jadzia Dax being replaced by Ezri at the beginning of Season 7.
While I wouldn’t pick Deep Space Nine to be someone’s first introduction to Star Trek – especially as it hasn’t been remastered – it is nevertheless a great show, and one that takes the franchise to different places both in terms of its static location and thematically. It’s a very interesting part of Star Trek’s history, and one that I hope will be the inspiration for a new series in the future.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available to watch now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Netflix in the United Kingdom and other countries and territories. The series is also available on DVD. The Star Trek franchise – including Deep Space Nine and all other properties mentioned above – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: In addition to spoilers for the episodes listed below, there may be minor spoilers for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise, including Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard.
Welcome back to my series of articles looking at ten great episodes from each of the Star Trek shows. We looked at The Original Series last time, so now it’s The Next Generation’s turn. This is the series which first introduced me to Star Trek in the early 1990s, and it was Capt. Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D who really hooked me in and got me invested in this fictional universe. I will always hold The Next Generation in very high regard as a result, and of all the Star Trek shows, it has a special place in my heart.
Plans for a Star Trek series which would have featured a different cast to that led by William Shatner in The Original Series had been kicking around in various forms since at least the mid-1970s. One of the earliest concepts for a new Star Trek film or series, before work on The Motion Picture had begun, was for something set at Starfleet Academy. Buoyed by the success of The Original Series in syndication and of the first three films, Gene Roddenberry began working on a Star Trek spin-off in the mid-1980s. Unlike the films, which mandated a lot of influence from Paramount Pictures, Roddenberry was keen to retain as much creative control over the new show as possible, and kept The Next Generation on a tight leash until ill health forced him to step away from day-to-day work on the show. If you’d like to know more about the creation of The Next Generation there’s a documentary on the subject titled William Shatner Presents: Chaos on the Bridge, which was made in 2014. I’ll leave the question of how unbiased and accurate it is up to you!
Star Trek: The Next Generation ran from 1987 to 1994.
While The Next Generation retained much of what had made The Original Series a success, it did change up the formula somewhat, and not all of the changes made were well-received by longstanding fans at the time. As I noted in my article looking at divisions in the fanbase, some Trekkies actively refused to watch The Next Generation when it premiered in 1987, because for them, Capt. Kirk and his crew were the irreplaceable beating heart of Star Trek. While the show was only really controversial in some small fan circles, there was wider concern about its viability. At this point in the history of television, very few series outside of incredibly popular sitcoms and soap operas had ever successfully made spin-offs, so this was uncharted territory. Sir Patrick Stewart, who of course plays Capt. Picard, has gone on record as saying he did not believe the show would be a success, even saying at one point that the only reason he agreed to take on the role was because he expected it to be a one- or two-season commitment at most!
If you didn’t tune in last time, here’s how this format works. This isn’t my all-time “Top Ten”, because a ranked list for a show like The Next Generation comes with a lot of pressure! Instead, this is simply a list of ten episodes which, for a variety of reasons, I think are great and are well worth a watch – especially if you’re finding yourself with plenty of time on your hands at the moment! I’ve picked at least one episode from each of the seven seasons – and there are so many more I wanted to pick! The Next Generation has 176 episodes, so narrowing it down to just ten was a difficult task. There may very well end up being a second round of articles in this series to accommodate some of those great episodes which I couldn’t include this time. The episodes are listed in order of release.
So let’s go ahead and jump into the list – and be aware of spoilers (though do we even need to flag up spoilers for a thirty-three year old series?)
Number 1: Home Soil (Season 1)
Home Soil saw the crew of the Enterprise-D discovery a very unusual form of life.
Gene Roddenberry’s final episode as head writer is actually one of Season 1’s most interesting. Star Trek has always sought to seek out new life – but often that new life ends up looking and sounding remarkably similar to humans! Home Soil completely changes that, showing how the life that may exist beyond Earth could be very different indeed.
I tend to feel that stories like this play very well with a small group of fans – in which I must include myself, of course – but are less well-received in the wider Star Trek fan community. When we look at stories that tried to take very different looks at the kind of “new life” that may exist in the cosmos, they tend to be much more philosophical and ethereal, looking at concepts like how we categorise and qualify “life”, as well as about bridging the huge gulf between ourselves and them and coming to an understanding. We see this in The Motion Picture – and I have an article looking at the 40th anniversary of that film which you can find by clicking or tapping here. Many of the same issues are in play in Home Soil, but on a microscopic scale – The Motion Picture looked at a life-form that was almost the size of a solar system!
Home Soil also has something to say about the environment, particularly how we as humans can be destructive to the habitats of native species. Without meaning to in some cases – or by wilfully ignoring warning signs in others – we can cause damage which could ultimately be to our own detriment. This is a message that is still relevant today! Star Trek has often sought to use its science fiction setting to parallel real-world issues, and this is another good example of that phenomenon.
Number 2: Time Squared (Season 2)
Dr Pulaski in Time Squared.
Are you familiar with the term “jumping the shark”? It refers to the moment where a television series begins to see a major drop in quality with increasingly outlandish plots, and it’s taken from an episode of Happy Days. The opposite is called “growing the beard”, where a series greatly increases in quality, usually in its second season – and that term originates with The Next Generation, taken of course from Commander Riker’s beard, which debuted in Season 2. Just a little television trivia for you!
Season 2 saw changes to The Next Generation’s cast. Dr Crusher was gone, replaced by Dr Pulaski. There were apparently issues with Gates McFadden’s contract which meant she declined to return, and instead Diana Muldaur, who had guest-starred twice in The Original Series, was brought in. Dr Pulaski was an interesting character and I liked her McCoy-esque side which brought a different perspective to things. However, after McFadden agreed to return in the third season, Dr Pulaski was unceremoniously dropped without her departure being acknowledged on screen. Muldaur herself had not particularly enjoyed working on the show, especially after struggling with wearing heavy prosthetic makeup in the episode Unnatural Selection, and it seems that Dr Pulaski had not been as well-received by viewers as the show’s producers had hoped. The second season also saw a couple of cast members shuffled around to their familiar roles. Worf became the Enterprise-D’s security chief and replaced Tasha Yar at tactical. And after a first season without a permanent chief engineer, that role was given to Geordi La Forge, largely removing him from the bridge.
I’ve stated on the blog a number of times that time-travel stories are seldom my favourites because they can be so hard to get right. Time Squared is an exception to this rule, as it sees a time-travelling Picard picked up by the Enterprise-D’s crew. This alternate Picard is from only a few hours in the future, yet is unable to communicate. What is clear, however, is that the Enterprise-D has experienced a major disaster, and this alternate Picard appears to have abandoned ship! Given everything we know about the upstanding captain even at this comparatively early stage in The Next Generation, that seems unfathomable, and the crew work hard to unravel the mystery.
Time Squared also lets us get up close and personal with one of the Enterprise-D’s shuttlecraft. These smaller vessels have been present since The Original Series, and the design used here was used in The Next Generation’s earlier seasons before a larger shuttlecraft design was incorporated. But few episodes show us a shuttecraft in this much detail inside and out, so if you’re as interested in ships and shuttles as I am it’s interesting from that point of view. The fact that the shuttle had to be designed and built in such a way that its interior and exterior could be seen at the same time is also something worth noting, and must have been a challenge for those working on the show.
Number 3: Yesterday’s Enterprise (Season 3)
Yesterday’s Enterprise told the story of what happened to the Enterprise-C.
Season 3 dropped the spandex uniforms and replaced them with the more familiar high-collar variant that would remain in use for the rest of the series. As previously mentioned, this season also saw the return of Dr Crusher and the departure of Dr Pulaski, restoring her to the cast after a one-season break. However, Yesterday’s Enterprise completely changes things up and is set in an alternate timeline, one in which the Federation and Klingons are locked in a bitter war.
Broadcast almost two years before The Undiscovered Country brought the era of The Original Series to a close, there was still a lot left unexplained about the timespan between Capt. Kirk’s adventures and those of the Enterprise-D. One good question was: “what happened to the Enterprise-B and Enterprise-C?”, and this is something that Yesterday’s Enterprise sets out to answer, as well as filling in some of the blanks from those lost years. From that point of view, Yesterday’s Enterprise goes further than almost any other episode of Star Trek to date in exploring that era, and certainly further than any story had by this point in The Next Generation’s run.
Denise Crosby reprises her role as Tasha Yar, the Enterprise-D’s original security chief who’d been killed off toward the end of the first season. I think it’s pretty clear that by this point in the show’s run (and perhaps without many other roles coming her way), Crosby was regretting her decision to leave – and it had been entirely her decision, as she felt that Tasha Yar was not being given enough to do. How she could have come to that conclusion less than halfway through the first season, and knowing that the show would be returning for at least one more is anyone’s guess, but regardless. This alternate timeline version of Tasha Yar would be referenced in future seasons, as Denise Crosby would return to play her daughter, the half-Romulan commander Sela. Sela, by the way, is the one Romulan character I was glad not to see in Star Trek: Picard earlier this year!
The Enterprise-C’s Capt. Rachel Garrett, played by guest-star Tricia O’Neil, makes a great equal for Picard as the two Enterprise captains must work together. Picard’s admission later in the episode that the Federation was on the brink of defeat convinced Capt. Garrett to return the Enterprise-C to her own time, even though she knew doing so would mean sacrificing her life for the cause. The theme of sacrifice has been present in Star Trek before, notably with Spock in The Wrath of Khan, and would be seen again on several more occasions, but the Enterprise-C is a great example of how it can play beautifully in Star Trek.
Number 4: The Best of Both Worlds, Parts 1 & 2 (Seasons 3 & 4)
Commanders Shelby and Riker see the assimilated Picard for the first time in The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1.
For many fans, The Best of Both Worlds might just be their favourite episode in The Next Generation. The first part concluded the third season, leaving behind a jaw-dropping cliffhanger, and the second part was broadcast after several long months and brought the story of the Federation’s first Borg invasion to a conclusion. The events of The Best of Both Worlds would be revisited several times: in the fifth-season episode I, Borg, in Emissary, which was the premiere of Deep Space Nine, in the film First Contact, and most recently in Star Trek: Picard, particularly in the episode The Impossible Box – a review of which you can find by clicking or tapping here. Picard’s assimilation by the Borg would go on to be a defining part of his character in these stories and others, and while it didn’t fundamentally change him as a person, it did mean he would suffer from guilt and flashbacks, and when he crossed paths with the Borg again he’d find it hard to remain objective.
The writers of The Next Generation had been planning to introduce the Borg since the show’s first season. Both the neural parasite conspiracy, which took up two episodes of Season 1, and the destruction of Federation colonies near Romulan space seen in the first season finale The Neutral Zone were meant to tie into the Borg’s ultimate introduction in the second season. The neural parasite angle was (fortunately) dropped, and the Borg’s first major attack on the Federation unfolded in an incredibly dramatic fashion. The Best of Both Worlds is really two stories – Picard’s personal battle with the Borg, which includes the efforts to rescue him by the Enterprise-D’s crew, and the wider conflict between the Borg and the Federation, and both aspects are incredibly tense and exciting. The decision for Picard to be captured raised the stakes significantly; no longer was the conflict an abstract one with mostly nameless minor characters threatened, but Picard, who had been the cornerstone of The Next Generation since its premiere, was being held hostage and brainwashed. As much as we as the audience want to see the Borg stopped and Earth saved, we care even more about Picard and ensuring he can be rescued and de-assimilated.
Thanks to many subsequent appearances, particularly with the Hansen family storyline in Voyager and the Enterprise episode Regeneration, the in-universe history of Borg-Federation relations and contact is now a bit of a mess. In the run-up to Star Trek: Picard I looked at the Borg as a faction, including their history, so if you’d like to know more please check out that article by clicking or tapping here. But we have to try to remember to place The Best of Both Worlds in context – this was only the faction’s second appearance in Star Trek, and their first major attempt to attack the Federation. While in some ways the Borg and their modus operandi have become stale thanks to their repeat appearances, this is the first time many of the things we now think of as Borg tropes were seen. Even on a repeat viewing in 2020, the crew of the Enterprise-D first seeing the assimilated Picard on the viewscreen is still incredibly powerful.
The way in which the Borg were ultimately stopped – by Picard breaking through his Borg programming to give Data a message – shows, I think, just how strong Picard can be. And that the Borg could be ultimately defeated by a poorly-guarded computer algorithm definitely has a War of the Worlds vibe – the Martians in that novel were, of course, ultimately defeated by bacteria, which was something tiny and easily-overlooked. The frightening thing about the Borg – beyond their seemingly-invincible vessel that cut through an entire fleet with ease – is that every ally that our heroes lose can be assimilated and turned into another enemy to fight. The Borg are akin to zombies in that respect, and also show us a nightmarish vision of how technology could get out of our control. I wrote an article looking at the Borg as a storytelling element, and I go into much more detail about these points and others in that piece. You can find it by clicking or tapping here.
Number 5: The Wounded (Season 4)
The Wounded introduced the Cardassians, and was a big episode for Colm Meaney’s character as he prepared for his move to Deep Space Nine.
The Wounded marks the first appearance of the Cardassians, a race we’d become much more familiar with in Deep Space Nine, which had already been conceived at this point. As part of the slow buildup to Deep Space Nine, The Wounded also sees a big expansion in the role of recurring character Miles O’Brien, who had been present on the show since its premiere. Colm Meaney’s character would be transferred to Deep Space Nine when that show kicked off, and this was the second consecutive episode featuring him in a big way as part of fleshing out Chief O’Brien and preparing the character for the sideways move. Along with Data’s Day, Disaster, Power Play, and Rascals, and smaller appearances in other episodes, O’Brien would step up to become a major character in time for Deep Space Nine, and would go on to be the character with the second-highest number of appearances in Star Trek after Worf, who also appeared in both shows.
We get to see Starfleet through a more military lens than usual, as we learn some background to Federation-Cardassian relations. The two sides fought a series of wars along their shared border, which seem to have only recently come to an end. Many people, including O’Brien, still hold bitter feelings toward the Cardassians as a hangover from those war years, and Capt. Maxwell, whom the Enterprise-D is ordered to intercept, seems to be among them. Speaking as we were of The Next Generation establishing background for Deep Space Nine, the introduction of the Cardassians was another big step in that direction, as was the inclusion of border colonies – the foundations for what would become the Maquis storyline can be glimpsed here.
As a very military Star Trek episode, The Wounded is different to many that came before, and is perhaps closer in tone to The Undiscovered Country. The episode also channels the war film Apocalypse Now at points, focusing on a rogue captain heading into enemy territory, his mental health, and the need to stop him from doing too much harm. Just as that film is considered one of modern cinema’s best, so too is The Wounded one of The Next Generation’s, even though it is quite unlike many of the series’ other offerings.
Disaster would not be a good episode to use to introduce someone new to The Next Generation, as it takes the crew of the Enterprise-D and throws each of them into unfamiliar and difficult situations. For someone familiar with the series, however, this bottle show is absolutely fantastic, giving all of the main cast – and several recurring characters – a chance to shine.
When the Enterprise-D hits a strange anomaly in space, all main power is lost (except, as always, artificial gravity!) and the crew are trapped in whatever areas of the ship they happened to be in at that moment. With none of the main crew members at their posts, and with the ship having suffered serious damage in some sections as a result of the anomaly, the various pairings and groups have to work together, and it’s a great chance for some cast members who don’t often get much time together to interact. Dr Crusher and Geordi are paired up, Counsellor Troi is left as the senior officer on the bridge with Ensign Ro and Chief O’Brien, Worf is in Ten-Forward and must deliver a baby, Riker and Data undertake a dangerous trek to engineering, and Capt. Picard is stuck in a turbolift with a group of frightened children. All of the characters are given their own challenges to overcome, and the episode doesn’t feel like it’s one which belongs to any of them; it’s a true ensemble story with everyone having a role to play.
Almost every season of every Star Trek show ended up having what came to be known as “bottle shows”; episodes which took place wholly on the ship and without bringing in any expensive guest-stars or using too many special effects. These episodes do vary in quality somewhat, but Disaster has to be one of the best. Though it does end up featuring some great special effects – which look especially good in the remastered version – it’s a self-contained story set aboard the ship.
I had previously included this episode on one of my two lists of episodes to watch leading up to the release of Star Trek: Picard, as I felt it was an episode which took the captain out of his comfort zone. Disaster happens to be one of my all-time favourites as well, which isn’t surprising considering it’s on this list!
Number 7: Unification, Parts 1 & 2 (Season 5)
Leonard Nimoy returned as Spock for Unification, a two-part episode.
When considering episodes for this list, both Unification and Relics were major contenders. Both episodes feature a returning cast member from The Original Series: Scotty would be back in Season 6’s Relics, and Unification sees the return of Spock. Both episodes are well worth a watch and I hope to talk more about Relics on another occasion. Unification, Part 1 was the first episode to be broadcast following Gene Roddenberry’s death, and carries a special title card honouring Star Trek’s creator.
Without telling anyone his intentions beforehand – perhaps fearing they’d try to stop him – Spock has travelled to Romulus. This is of course a problem for the Federation, who even fear he may be defecting, and enlist Picard’s help to find out what happened. The episode marks the final appearance of Mark Lenard as Sarek, before the character was recast for the JJverse films and Discovery, bringing to a close a role he’d played in The Original Series, The Animated Series, three films, and a previous episode of The Next Generation. Lenard’s role, while fairly short in the episode itself, was one of the highlights as he gives an amazing performance. The tension between Sarek and Spock has been ongoing since his first appearance in Journey to Babel, and I think it’s one that many audience members can relate to, so seeing his death and Spock’s reaction to it was a continuation of that.
What’s great about Unification for a Trekkie is that brings together elements from different Star Trek stories. Of course there’s the inclusion of Spock, but the episode also harkens back to prior events in The Next Generation – notably Picard’s involvement with the Klingons. It’s an episode which explores both the Romulans and their connection to the Vulcans in far more detail than anything that had come before, and that makes it fantastic to geek out to! Spock’s involvement with the Romulans in Unification also laid the foundations for his appearance in 2009’s Star Trek, and that film’s destruction of Romulus storyline – a plot thread which was later picked up in Star Trek: Picard.
Leonard Nimoy’s portrayal of Spock has always been outstanding, and as the first character from The Original Series to cross over with The Next Generation in a major way (Dr McCoy’s appearance in the premiere was little more than a cameo) it goes further than almost any other episode had previously to really tying the two shows together, and succeeds as being an episode that really feels that it was made for fans. The decision to keep The Next Generation largely separate from The Original Series in its first few seasons allowed the show to really stand on its own two feet, and that’s an incredibly positive thing; too many crossovers and callbacks would, I feel, have been to the show’s detriment. But at this point in its run, The Next Generation was on a much more secure footing as one part of a growing franchise and thus the decision to include such a major character as Spock feels justified – and it’s a great story to boot, one which allows Spock to shine.
Number 8: Realm of Fear (Season 6)
Realm of Fear showed us in much more detail what using the transporter feels like.
Lieutenant Barclay is a recurring character we haven’t got to talk about yet, and he’s one of The Next Generation’s most interesting. First introduced in the third season, Dwight Schultz’s character has cropped up a few times since, and would often end up the butt of jokes both for the Enterprise-D’s crew and for the show itself. Realm of Fear is a little different, however, as it gives Barclay agency within the story and the chance to become somewhat of a hero for once.
While investigating a ship whose crew appears to have gone missing, Barclay – who has a phobia of transporters – begins to think he’s losing his mind as he keeps seeing strange shapes inside the transporter beam. After investigating what’s happening, he’s able to save the crew of the stricken ship.
It’s a story that only Barclay could really pull off, because his unique position among the crew of the Enterprise-D as a hypochondriac and as someone with a history of fears and exaggeration lends credence to the idea that Capt. Picard and others would dismiss his report. And in that sense, the episode makes great use of the established character of Barclay – who is played in a wonderfully neurotic way by Schultz.
Realm of Fear takes a deeper look than almost any other episode at the process of using the transporter, and that’s fascinating to me as someone who loves this technology. Star Trek can, at times, fall into the trap of using things like the transporter as a macguffin to drive the plot forward, and thus its in-universe use and status isn’t always consistent. The concept of the transporter, by the way, was an invention of Gene Roddenberry to allow the crew of The Original Series to visit different alien worlds without having to land the Enterprise every time – something he was told would be costly from a special effects point of view. It was thus a cost-saving measure, and while the idea of teleportation is nothing new, Star Trek gives it a uniquely technological spin.
Number 9: The Pegasus (Season 7)
Riker is forced to confront his past – and a former commander – in The Pegasus.
The Pegasus now forms a duology of episodes with the Enterprise series finale These Are The Voyages, which was set during the events of this episode. Whatever one may think of Enterprise’s take on things – and it’s an episode which remains controversial – the original episode from The Next Generation stands on its own two feet and is a fascinating look at Riker’s past, as well as relations between the Federation and Romulans. It also features one of The Next Generation’s best performances by a guest-star, as future Lost star Terry O’Quinn takes on the role of Riker’s former commanding officer.
One valid question within Star Trek is why the Klingons and Romulans have cloaking technology but the Federation do not. It’s shown numerous times across the franchise – from the cloak’s first appearance in Balance of Terror in Season 1 of The Original Series right through to the Klingon war arc in Discovery’s first season – just how useful this technology can be, and how dangerous it can be in enemy hands. The Pegasus attempts to answer this question, by saying that the Federation has refused to develop the technology as a result of a treaty they signed with the Romulans decades before The Next Generation is set. As with other technologies in Star Trek, the cloak can be a bit confused, especially with the prequel shows establishing the existence of the technology before Capt. Kirk made Starfleet’s first encounter with it. My own personal head-canon to get around this is that there are just different types of cloak which the Federation are constantly figuring out how to scan through, and once one type is “cracked”, the Romulans and Klingons have to invent a new kind. Cloaking, despite how we usually see it presented on screen, doesn’t merely render a ship invisible, it must also conceal it from sensors and scans – something crews see on a viewscreen represented by the ship disappearing. But we’re getting off-topic, and none of that is actually canon, just my own thoughts.
In The Pegasus, Riker receives a visit from Admiral Pressman, his former commanding officer. Pressman is looking to track down his old ship, which had been presumed destroyed but had been reported to have been found by the Romulans. Aboard the ship was an experiment that would be illegal under the Federation-Romulan treaty, as under Pressman’s leadership, Starfleet had been working on its own cloaking device.
The episode presents Riker as deeply conflicted between two senior officers. His unwillingness or inability to tell Picard the full truth shows us a depth to his character that we don’t always see a lot of – Picard may be his current commanding officer, friend, and someone he respects, but he has other loyalties too. His decision at the end to tell Picard the truth about what happened aboard the Pegasus, and how he and Pressman barely escaped a mutiny, is an important moment for him and his relationship with Picard.
Number 10: All Good Things… (Season 7, finale)
All Good Things sees the return of Q, and he has a challenge for Picard.
After seven years on the air, The Next Generation finally came to an end in 1994. But All Good Things was less a finale than another instalment, as Star Trek: Generations would be released a mere six months later, kicking off the era of The Next Generation’s crew on the big screen. Indeed, a good deal of the work on Generations took place prior to and alongside All Good Things, and the film would reuse many of the familiar Enterprise-D sets. So in a lot of ways, the episode doesn’t feel like a finale. While it does bookend the series nicely, with Q returning and the action jumping back in time to the Enterprise-D’s first adventure, as the episode’s story draws to a conclusion the ship and crew warp off to their next destination, just as we might expect them to at the end of any other episode. Both of the other finales of this era – Deep Space Nine’s What You Leave Behind and Voyager’s Endgame – are very definite ends, with the story arcs for many characters within those shows wrapping up. All Good Things isn’t like that, largely because the Enterprise-D and its crew would be moving on to their next adventure in short order.
Encounter at Farpoint, the show’s 1987 premiere, introduced Q, the omnipotent quasi-villain who put Picard on trial for the supposed “crimes” of humanity. Q had promised then that his people would be observing Picard on his mission, and he cropped up on several other occasions in The Next Generation. In All Good Things, however, Q makes good on his words from right at the beginning of the series, and gives Picard a time-bending puzzle to solve – one which could result in the destruction of all humanity if he fails!
The puzzle essentially boils down to an understanding of time – is it always linear and moving in a single direction? When Picard finally learns to think outside the box and realises that, in this particular circumstance, events in the future were having an effect on events in the past rather than vice-versa, he’s able to unravel the mystery. Q compliments him on his thinking, and explains that the whole thing was a test to see how humanity was progressing.
So that’s it. Ten great episodes from The Next Generation that are well worth your time – especially if you have more time than usual for entertainment at the moment. I feel that The Next Generation is, in some ways, a series in two parts. The first part, which encompasses the first and second seasons, as well as parts of the third, is very similar to The Original Series in its format. The second part, which was certainly in place by the time of the third season finale, is much closer to modern television storytelling. As plans for Deep Space Nine stepped up a gear, Star Trek edged closer to being a serialised franchise, and with that came recurring themes, factions, characters, and story elements.
The Next Generation was my first encounter with Star Trek some time in the early 1990s. The first episodes I have solid recollections of are The Royale and Who Watches The Watchers from Seasons 2 and 3 respectively; I’m pretty sure I was an avid viewer by about midway through the show’s second season. It was also the first series I began collecting, initially on VHS but later on DVD in the 2000s. On a personal level, the series was a major part of my youth and adolescence, providing entertainment and escapism when I needed it. While I have enjoyed all of the other Star Trek shows, The Next Generation will always be special to me for that reason.
Up next in this series of articles I’ll be looking at ten great episodes from Deep Space Nine, after which I’ll move on to Voyager and then Enterprise, as well as do a “bonus” piece which picks ten episodes from The Animated Series, Discovery, and Short Treks. So I hope you’ll come back to take a look at those over the next few weeks.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available to stream now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Netflix in the United Kingdom and other countries and territories. The series is also available on DVD and Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including The Next Generation and all other properties mentioned above – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: In addition to spoilers for the episodes listed below, there may be minor spoilers for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise, including both Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard.
This is the first part of a new series of list-articles in which I’ll look at ten great episodes from each of the Star Trek shows (except for Star Trek: Picard, which only has ten episodes in total at this point!) I didn’t want to call it a “Top Ten List”; that comes with a lot of pressure to both choose my all-time favourites as well as how to rank them! Instead, this is a list of “ten great episodes”, and they’re in order of release.
Star Trek – retroactively titled The Original Series to prevent confusion – premiered on American television in 1966. It ran for two seasons, with a third being granted in 1968 following an extensive letter-writing campaign by fans who feared its perpetually low ratings would lead to cancellation. Its third season would be its last, however. It was only when the series was syndicated and rebroadcast in the 1970s that its fanbase grew, leading to both an animated series in 1973 and finally a feature film in 1979. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was actually the culmination of several years’ worth of attempts to bring the franchise back to the small screen, which seem to have kicked off around 1975.
This is the series that spawned all the others, but as the fanbase has grown over time, many self-proclaimed Trekkies aren’t as familiar with The Original Series as they are with the Star Trek shows of the 1990s. For me, The Next Generation was my first encounter with the franchise, and it wasn’t until some time later that I got to see The Original Series. While it is dated by modern standards almost across the board – acting, set design, effects, and even storytelling – it is still worth watching for anyone who wants to see where the franchise began. Given that you may find yourself with time on your hands at the moment, it could be a great time to check out this classic series.
So let’s dive into the list – and be aware that there may be spoilers. (Do spoilers for a fifty-year-old series still need to be flagged?)
Number 1: The Cage (Pilot)
The bridge of the USS Enterprise at the beginning of The Cage’s very first scene.
Star Trek had two pilot episodes, the second of which – Where No Man Has Gone Before – was successful and got picked up for a full season. But before we got to meet William Shatner’s Capt. Kirk and the rest of the crew, Star Trek’s first pilot was rejected by television network NBC. Practically all of the footage shot for The Cage would end up recycled into a two-part episode in Star Trek’s first season, titled The Menagerie, but the episode would not be seen in full on its own until after The Next Generation premiered over twenty years later. It’s rare in television for a rejected series to get a second chance, and there have been many rumours over the years as to exactly how things went down in 1965 leading to the decision to make a second pilot, including that Lucille Ball – famous for her role in the classic 1950s series I Love Lucy, and co-owner of Star Trek’s production company Desilu – intervened on the show’s behalf.
An actor by the name of Jeffrey Hunter took the lead in The Cage as Capt. Christopher Pike – a character most recently portrayed by Anson Mount in Star Trek: Discovery. The USS Enterprise is lured to the planet Talos IV by a faked distress call, and Pike ends up captured by the Talosians – a race capable of using their minds to create illusions indistinguishable from reality.
Even in its remastered form, The Cage is janky and dated by today’s standards. With the general exception of Jeffrey Hunter, most of the performances are very much of their time – which is to say not particularly convincing. Acting has come a long way since the mid-1960s, and there’s a lot to be said for how much better, in general, the quality of acting performances are today than they were back then. Many aspects of the episode’s visual design are also not what you’d expect from a show made today. The indoor sound stage which was used to represent the surface of Talos IV is obviously artificial, as are the papier-mâché and polystyrene “rocks” and “mountains” which form the landscape of the planet. There are also some outdated references – at one point, Capt. Pike says he can’t get used to the idea of “a woman on the bridge” of his starship. But this was the reality of storytelling at the time, and for all of its flaws by today’s standards, this is where Star Trek began.
I’d argue that very few television series begin with a pilot that ends up being one of the best episodes overall. Shows take time to find their feet, for cast members to get to know each other and develop chemistry, and for writers and production staff to get into a rhythm. The Cage is our first introduction to all of the Enterprise’s crew, and with the exception of Spock, we wouldn’t see any of them return in a meaningful way until the second season of Star Trek: Discovery just last year reintroduced Capt. Pike and Number One. Those recast characters are so far removed from their origins in The Cage that they’re halfway to being new characters altogether, but we’re getting off the subject. The Cage in some ways contradicts or at least undermines some elements that would come later in Star Trek as its first season rolled out. For example, Spock behaves in an altogether different way to his usual cold and logical self. The one consistent character in both The Cage and Star Trek’s first season is actually inconsistent in his characterisation. Seeing Spock showing such emotion and behaving in a manner that is so human can be a jolt – so be prepared!
Number 2: Court Martial (Season 1)
Lawyer Samuel T. Cogley meets with his client, Capt. Kirk, in Court Martial.
Of all the first-season episodes which deal with Kirk, I feel none are quite so influential as Court Martial. By this point in its run, Star Trek was finding its feet. The core trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy was developing, and the Enterprise had a handful of adventures under its belt that had set the tone for the show. Kirk had been established as a caring commander, someone who would bend the rules for the sake of his ship and crew, but never for himself. So when we see him accused of negligence, manslaughter, and ultimately murder, and trying to cover his tracks to save his own neck, we know enough about the Enterprise’s captain to know this can’t be true!
The Star Trek franchise has some great episodes featuring courtroom drama. There was The Measure of a Man and The Drumhead from the second and fifth seasons respectively of The Next Generation, Rules of Engagement from Deep Space Nine’s fourth season, Death Wish from Voyager’s second season, and even a sequence at the end of Battle at the Binary Stars, which was the second half of Discovery’s premiere. All of these episodes, and others not mentioned, owe a lot to Court Martial for establishing courtroom drama as one thing that Star Trek can do exceptionally well. As an aside, I recently re-watched The Measure of a Man during Star Trek: Picard’s first season, and you can see the resulting article by clicking or tapping here.
Court Martial also makes good on the original pitch of Star Trek as being a “wagon train to the stars” – i.e. a western-inspired series. Old country lawyer Samuel T. Cogley – based, undoubtedly, on famed American lawyer Clarence Darrow – steps up to defend Kirk in what seems to be an open-and-shut case against him. The roles of Cogley and Dr McCoy in Court Martial would be just as at home in one of the many westerns of the time which Star Trek was influenced by. While the concept of an old country lawyer can hardly be called unique to the Star Trek franchise, Cogley has become somewhat of a cult character, with homage and parody paid to him in shows like Futurama.
Number 3: Space Seed (Season 1)
Space Seed sees the crew of the USS Enterprise tangle with Khan for the first time.
Khan would later become far more famous – and arguably a cultural icon – from his appearance in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in 1982. But Ricardo Montalbán’s character debuted in Space Seed during Star Trek’s first season. One of the great things about The Wrath of Khan as a story is that it doesn’t make this episode essential viewing in order to follow the plot; it was, after all, released years before home video was commonplace. However, if you’re a Wrath of Khan fan who hasn’t seen the episode, or if you simply haven’t seen it in a long time, it does provide great background to the film.
In the far future – by 1960s standards – of the 1990s, a tyrant by the name of Khan would arise on Earth. Precisely how seems to have been lost to history, but Khan and his followers were genetically engineered and considered themselves to be super-human. After a conflict known as the Eugenics Wars, Khan was defeated, but he and some of his followers secretly fled into space, where they remained in stasis… until Capt. Kirk and the Enterprise crew discovered them!
Our understanding of Khan as a villain is largely based on his second appearance in the franchise, which, as already mentioned, can be taken as a standalone story. However, many of the elements that would be developed further in The Wrath of Khan are on display here, and this is where Khan’s rivalry with Kirk began. One element from the film is that Khan had a wife – her death is part of the reason he’s so angry with Kirk. While it has never been confirmed on screen, Enterprise crewman Marla McGivers is a solid candidate for who it could be. She was set to be included in The Wrath of Khan, but sadly actress Madlyn Rhue was ill with multiple sclerosis by 1982 and her character was written out of the film and not recast.
Number 4: The Doomsday Machine (Season 2)
In The Doomsday Machine, Commodore Decker is the sole survivor aboard the USS Constellation.
Season 2 is where Star Trek really hit its stride. At least in my opinion, most of the best episodes come from this season, which improved on Season 1 and came before the reduction in the series’ budget which contributed to a generally lacklustre third season. Though it can be hard to name an “all-time favourite episode”, The Doomsday Machine is definitely a contender for that title.
A thinly-veiled analogy for the issue of nuclear proliferation during the Cold War – which spills over at the end of the episode into in-your-face social commentary – The Doomsday Machine is a fascinating piece of television history, and a great example of how the Star Trek franchise can use its science-fiction setting to draw attention to real-world issues. When the episode premiered in October 1967, it was almost exactly five years to the day since the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world as close as it arguably ever came to nuclear armageddon. Thus any examination of the episode has to understand its place in time. The Cold War was still rumbling on, with the Vietnam War approaching its apex. Practically everyone watching in 1967 would have vivid memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even younger viewers would be acutely aware of the threat of nuclear war, as civil defence was taught to all schoolchildren in this period. While we may look back at it now as something rather dated, in its time, The Doomsday Machine was relevant social commentary.
But analogy and commentary alone do not make for entertaining television – and can, in some cases, detract from it. So what makes The Doomsday Machine such a standout episode is that floating atop the deeper meaning is an engrossing story. Commodore Decker is introduced as a broken officer, who had commanded the USS Constellation, a sister-ship to the Enterprise, when it encountered a plant-killing superweapon. With the ship damaged, Decker evacuated his crew to a nearby planet, only for the planet-killer to destroy it and kill them all. Devastated and clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress, Decker becomes obsessed with revenge – channelling Capt. Ahab from Moby-Dick – and tries to take down the planet-killer, even if it means putting the Enterprise in danger.
William Windom, who plays Decker, carries large parts of the episode in a way most guest stars don’t, even in more modern shows. His performance was inspired and riveting, and the raw emotion Decker is feeling at the loss of his crew plays exceptionally well against Spock’s cool, logical persona in particular.
Number 5: Journey to Babel (Season 2)
Sarek arrives aboard the Enterprise in Journey to Babel, and is greeted by Kirk, Spock, and Dr McCoy.
Journey to Babel introduced Sarek, who would become a recurring character in the franchise. Meeting Spock’s father, and seeing the cool, logical tension between them is, in a curious way, relatable to many of us in the audience. Mark Lenard, who took on the role, had previously played the unnamed Romulan commander in the first season episode Balance of Terror, which didn’t make this list but is itself well worth a watch as it introduces the Romulans for the first time.
The episode gives some fascinating backstory to the Federation itself, which would be built up much more in Star Trek: Enterprise in particular. We meet the other core races who founded the Federation along with humans and Vulcans: the Tellaraites and Andorians. Both species have cropped up at various points in other iterations of the franchise.
There are two story elements at play – the aforementioned family drama between Spock and his father, and a murder mystery which threatens the peace between the Federation’s races, in which Sarek is a suspect. Both stories are intertwined perfectly, making Journey to Babel tense and dramatic throughout. While father and son don’t exactly resolve their differences, the intervention of Dr McCoy using Spock’s blood to save Sarek’s life does go some way to improving things between them, at least for a time.
Number 6: The Trouble With Tribbles (Season 2)
This scene from The Trouble With Tribbles is arguably one of the most famous in all of Star Trek!
When fans and non-fans alike think about The Original Series – and the Star Trek franchise in general – one of the episodes that often springs to mind is The Trouble With Tribbles. The episode has become synonymous with the series in our broader cultural imagination in some ways, and while many people would struggle to think of any other story from The Original Series, I bet most people could recall The Trouble With Tribbles.
The little furry creatures have themselves become an inseparable part of the franchise – up there, I would absolutely argue, with the Borg and the Klingons as something that people inherently associate with Star Trek. That’s probably helped by their cute appearance and gentle purring noise – they’re like round, faceless cats!
The Star Trek franchise has itself leaned into this cultural trope. For its 30th anniversary in 1996, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine released a groundbreaking episode – Trials and Tribble-ations – using footage from the original episode with the Deep Space Nine cast creatively worked in. This technology was pioneered in the film Forrest Gump a couple of years earlier, but it was the first time it had been used on television, and the budget for Trials and Tribble-ations was sky-high as a result. More recently, Tribbles have featured in the Short Treks episode The Trouble With Edward. If you can find a copy – Short Treks is currently unavailable outside of the United States – it’s absolutely hilarious and well worth a watch.
In The Trouble With Tribbles, Capt. Kirk and his crew visit a space station which is holding a vital shipment of grain destined for a planet that both the Federation and Klingons want to control. In the midst of it all, a rogue trader has arrived at the station with, among other things, Tribbles for sale. Several crew members are immediately taken with the cute critters, but with a mystery to unravel and Klingons to outwit, Kirk has his work cut out for him! This is Star Trek at its best, blending different genres together and with a healthy side of humour to boot. No wonder the episode has become so famous.
Number 7: The Ultimate Computer (Season 2)
Dr Richard Daystrom introduces Dr McCoy, Spock, and Kirk to the M-5 Multitronic Unit in The Ultimate Computer.
The Ultimate Computer was, in many ways, a story ahead of its time. The idea of rogue artificial intelligence has become more common in sci-fi since 1968, and of course is a real-world concern too, being discussed even by the likes of (Star Trek: The Next Generation guest star) Stephen Hawking. The Star Trek franchise has used this concept to great effect with the Borg in particular – you can see my thoughts on the Borg as a story element by clicking or tapping here. It’s also been explored in great detail in Star Trek: Discovery’s second season with the Control AI, and of course in Star Trek: Picard’s first season with the rogue synths.
Star Trek: Discovery came closest to channelling The Ultimate Computer at points in its second season storyline, and the fact that the concept is just as interesting and frightening today as it was in 1968 makes this episode a great watch. Unlike some episodes of The Original Series, which can feel very dated, in that sense it is oddly timeless. Our collective fear as a species of out-of-control AI is one that is still present, arguably even more so today than when The Ultimate Computer premiered.
The episode also features one of Star Trek’s best guest performances by actor William Marshall, who took on the role of computer scientist Dr Richard Daystrom. Marshall’s role is another great example from Season 2 of Star Trek using its futuristic setting to address real-world issues – in this case, the issue of race. While Uhura had been a constant presence on the show since its second pilot, and Star Trek had already been in many ways groundbreaking in the way it dealt with black Americans in particular, Dr Richard Daystrom is yet another middle finger to the newly-desegregated Southern states, showing an incredibly intelligent engineer working in the future – who happened to be black. There was nothing in-your-face about it, no monologues to the camera or wry remarks by Kirk and the crew, simply the presence of a black man in a senior position being treated as normal and commonplace. It absolutely is those things today – or at least it should be – but in the 1960s race relations in parts of America were still very complicated.
Dr Daystrom’s legacy lives on within the Star Trek franchise, as he’s the namesake of the Daystrom Institute. This organisation was first mentioned in The Next Generation, and has recently appeared in Star Trek: Picard.
One thing that many fans don’t realise is that James Doohan was an accomplished voice actor. In The Animated Series he would often be called upon to voice guest characters, and in fact his Scottish accent was not his normal speaking voice; Doohan was Canadian. In The Ultimate Computer, he lends his voice to the M-5 Multitronic Unit.
Number 8: Spock’s Brain (Season 3)
In Spock’s Brain, Dr McCoy must tend to a brainless Spock.
Let’s be frank for a moment – Spoack’s Brain could well be the worst episode of The Original Series. Both in terms of its premise and the way it was executed, the third season’s premiere was poor. But amongst the wreckage of the story are some unintentionally hilarious moments, and the episode is well worth watching for that alone. In that sense, it’s akin to a classic B-movie.
If all of Star Trek had been on the level of Spock’s Brain, it would never have lasted even one season, let alone been renewed for an animated series, films, and spin-offs which now span more than half a century! But despite that, it’s worth coming back to episodes like this to see what The Original Series was beyond the familiar elements like starships and Klingons. Aside from the first couple of seasons of The Next Generation, which followed a similar format to The Original Series in many respects, episodes like Spock’s Brain aren’t made any more, and haven’t been since the dawn of the 1990s.
The episode aims to be a kind of sci-fi concept, looking at both the potential for technological dependence and how advances in medical technology could lead to things like brain transplants. But neither of these story elements landed, and it’s not without reason that the Star Trek franchise has never revisited Sigma Draconis VI.
Number 9: The Tholian Web (Season 3)
Caught between parallel universes in The Tholian Web, the USS Defiant glows an eerie green on the Enterprise’s viewscreen.
Perhaps it’s because we’ve seen The Tholian Web’s USS Defiant crop up in both Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: Discovery, but I feel that The Tholian Web is one of the third season’s high points. Many stories in The Original Series are unique to this show in the sense that they wouldn’t translate well to other iterations of the franchise, but The Tholian Web absolutely would be at home in any other Star Trek show.
The Tholian Web is a space story first and foremost, and it brings to bear some elements from the claustrophobic war films of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those set at sea and on submarines. The USS Defiant – a sister-ship to the USS Enterprise – is adrift and caught between two parallel universes, and Kirk and the crew are called to investigate. The Tholians – a race who resemble insects – intervene, trying to claim both the USS Defiant and this region of space for themselves.
Despite being inspired by war films, The Tholian Web is pure space-based science fiction in a way that many episodes of Star Trek arguably are not, especially in the third season. The drama and tension come from an extraterrestrial race and the concept of an alternate dimension, both key elements in sci-fi. In that sense, and combined with its ties to more recent iterations of the franchise, The Tholian Web could be a great introduction for someone wholly new to The Original Series but familiar with other Star Trek series. As an episode which makes extensive use of sets normally used for the USS Enterprise, The Tholian Web is one of Star Trek’s famous “bottle shows”.
Number 10: Whom Gods Destroy (Season 3)
Having been locked up in the Elba II asylum, in Whom Gods Destroy Garth of Izar attempts to commandeer the Enterprise.
Depictions of mental health on television have, in some ways, changed over the years. The presentation of mentally ill people as being dangerous and criminal was commonplace in the 1960s and earlier, as our understanding of mental illness was poor. The Star Trek franchise still has issues in the way it presents mental health – look at my thoughts on the Star Trek: Picard episodeThe End is the Beginning for how stereotypes and tired clichés are still present, or the portrayal of the genetically-engineered characters in the Deep Space Nine duology of episodes Statistical Probabilities and Chrysalis – but overall, audiences today have a better understanding of mental illness and thus, the way it is presented has evolved.
Whom Gods Destroy is, in some ways, a product of its time. However, what it does is introduce hope – hope that in the future, mental illnesses can be cured even in the most extreme cases. This kind of hopeful narrative is exactly what Gene Roddenberry wanted to use Star Trek to explore. His vision of the 23rd Century was one where humanity was working hard to overcome all manner of problems, and Whom Gods Destroy looks at how there may yet be hope for curing severely ill patients, which I feel is a positive message, even if the portrayal of Garth of Izar and the other Elba II inmates is very much dated.
The character of Garth of Izar is interesting, and the episode teases fans with some hints at Starfleet’s history prior to Capt. Kirk’s five-year mission. Kirk himself says that Garth’s exploits were required reading during his time as a cadet. As of 2020, Garth has yet to make another appearance, despite the era of Star Trek: Discovery potentially crossing over with the time he was an active officer in the fleet. However, a fan project titled Star Trek Axanar will take its own look at the character and the decisive Battle of Axanar when it eventually premieres. This project has been controversial in some Star Trek fan circles, but the passion of those behind it is unquestionable, and it will bring back several actors from past iterations of the franchise.
So that’s it. Ten great episodes from The Original Series that are well worth a first or second look. Many of the episodes I’ve chosen are closer to other iterations of the Star Trek franchise, but The Original Series also featured many episodes which looked at settings and concepts that future Star Trek shows would generally not touch, simply because television storytelling and science fiction in general had moved on in the intervening years.
When we consider the incredibly large and broad question of “what is Star Trek?”, for many fans The Original Series is the answer. It’s episodic television, with influences from westerns, World War II films, and other mid-century dramas. It’s also quite different, both in the way it looks and the way it’s presented, from much of what would come later. Whether that’s something you like or dislike is something personal and subjective, of course, and I’m not passing a judgement either way. These aren’t episodes which I’m saying are “objectively the best”, nor even are these my top ten favourites. To reiterate what I said at the beginning, these are simply ten great episodes that, for various reasons, are worth your time.
Stay tuned for more in this series of articles over the next few weeks. I will take a look at The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, and pick ten great episodes from each of those series as well. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we’ll hear a solid release date for the third season of Discovery, too, and when we do I’ll be taking a look at each of those episodes as they’re released. In short, there’s much more Star Trek content to come here on the blog!
Star Trek: The Original Series is available to stream now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Netflix in the United Kingdom and other countries and territories. The series is also available on DVD and Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including The Original Series and all other properties mentioned above – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for the films on this list.
One of the things people will ask about any franchise, really, is “what’s your favourite film in the series?” And it can be a difficult question to answer, especially in a franchise like Star Trek where the films tell different kinds of stories. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a very different entity from its sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – and those are just the first two titles! The former is a more ethereal, slow-paced affair, whereas the latter is very much an action-sci fi film. People have preferences over which style they prefer, of course, and that’s to be expected, but comparing different styles of film and different kinds of stories is difficult. It’s like asking “do you like comedy or horror?” The answer can be “I like both”, or “it depends what I’m in the mood for in a given moment” – but neither of those answers makes for a satisfactory ranked list!
There have been, as of 2020, thirteen Star Trek films – with a fourteenth rumoured to be in the early stages of production. The films were released between 1979 and 2016, making Star Trek one of the longest-running film franchises, alongside such series as James Bond and Star Wars. The films have featured three different casts: the cast of The Original Series, led by William Shatner; the cast of The Next Generation, led by Sir Patrick Stewart; and most recently the reboot cast, led by Chris Pine. I have long felt that there is scope within the franchise for other crews to get a look-in; don’t get me started on the idea of a Deep Space Nine film or we’ll be here all day!
Initially I planned to do a proper ranked list, with each film in order from 1-13, but that was just too difficult. Instead I settled on this approach: the films will be split into four groups, which reflect their rough positions in my ranked list. There will be a bottom three, a lower- and an upper-middle, and a top three. Within the sections, films are listed in chronological order by year of release. It’ll make sense when you read it, don’t worry!
So without further ado, let’s rank the films!
The bottom three:
This wasn’t a particularly easy task, because generally speaking, I have enjoyed at least parts of all of the Star Trek films. While some of them do have issues in terms of things like plot, special effects, and dialogue, every single one has redeeming qualities that make for worthwhile and entertaining viewing. However, when considered alongside other offerings in the franchise, these are the films I feel are the weakest. Remember that these sections are in chronological order of release, not ranked in order of preference.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
Sybok, Spock’s half-brother, was introduced in The Final Frontier.
Where The Final Frontier arguably came undone was William Shatner’s involvement as writer and director. Due to contractual obligations with Paramount, after Leonard Nimoy had his turn in the director’s chair with The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home, William Shatner was able to exercise his right to write and direct his own Star Trek film. And he seized the opportunity to put Kirk at the centre of the story, as Sybok (Spock’s long-lost half-brother) used his power of pain removal to corrupt members of the Enterprise-A’s crew.
There were specific issues with some of the film’s visual effects, too, notably in its climactic final act. The “god entity” which Kirk and the crew encounter was widely criticised, even at the time, for being sub-par, and a now-infamous sequence with rock-aliens ended up being cut entirely from the film due to the visual effects being so poor. Shatner would blame this on using a new special effects company, as his first choice was busy on another project.
There are some great moments in The Final Frontier, though. The camping scene with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy was touching at points, and ended up being one of the last times we got to see the trio alone together before The Original Series era was over. The shuttle crash was also a high point for me, being sufficiently tense and dramatic. Scotty saying he knows the Enterprise “like the back of his hand” and then immediately walking into a bulkhead was genuinely funny – if slapstick. And finally, the setting of Paradise City on Nimbus III managed to perfectly convey that it was a run-down failure of a settlement – a metaphor for the peace initiative that it was founded for.
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
Nemesis would be the final outing for the crew of The Next Generation… until Star Trek: Picard brought some of them back!
Nemesis was, until January 2020, the furthest point in the main Star Trek timeline (except for some sequences set in the far future), and because of that I think its status may have been over-inflated. It isn’t a bad film per se, and it does try to tackle a number of different issues. Firstly, the premise of Picard vs Picard is interesting in theory, as is the film’s exploration of Romulan society and the introduction of the Remans. The Romulans had had a long presence in Star Trek, but Nemesis was the first time we’d seen them in such detail.
It’s often criticised for being “not very Star Trek-y”, with much of that criticism being aimed at its director, Stuart Baird, who admitted up front that he wasn’t familiar with the franchise when making the film. However, the main points about Picard being cloned, the Remans being telepathic, and the references to Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War story arc did, at least in my opinion, tie it to the rest of the franchise in an adequate way.
Data being killed off was also a point of significant criticism at the time, not just for the death itself but for how Data was handled in the story. Star Trek: Picard has recently rectified that – Data was able to have a proper goodbye, and it was shown how his legacy remains in the way his friends think of him. But for eighteen years the way Data’s death was handled was, for some fans at least, a bone of contention.
The buggy sequence at the beginning of the film – complete with a car-chase – was also something that many fans felt did not work. And it does, at the very least, feel like something that was shoehorned in rather than an organic element of the story.
Star Trek (2009)
Putting Spock and Kirk at odds with each other for much of Star Trek was seen as jarring by many fans.
Star Trek had been in continuous production for 19 years (or longer, depending on how we count things) when Star Trek: Enterprise was cancelled in 2005. For many, it felt like the end of an era and it seemed for a time that Star Trek was dead and not coming back. However, in 2006 rumours began circulating of a new film being in production, and this project – helmed by JJ Abrams – would eventually become Star Trek.
This film was a significant change from anything that had come before in that it was a stylised, action-heavy film – with some sci-fi trappings. The franchise had dipped its toes in the action-sci-fi world before (more on that in a moment) but for many fans, Star Trek took too much of an action-oriented approach to its story. While there were familiar elements – most notably the appearance of Leonard Nimoy as Spock – the time-travel and alternate universe elements of the story took a back seat to fighting and drama.
The decision to recast The Original Series characters, instead of using a new crew, was also a problem for some fans – I know several people who still, more than a decade on, have refused to see Star Trek simply for that reason. There were major aesthetic changes that went along with the recasting – notably the USS Enterprise itself, both inside and out. Many of the sets – which included a Budweiser brewery as the Enterprise’s engine room – simply felt very far removed from what had come before.
The recast crew behaved very differently to their Prime Timeline counterparts, which only added to the feeling that Star Trek was something radically different. The decision to have Kirk and Spock be at odds for large parts of the film may have given both characters a chance for development over the course of their arcs within the film, but was incredibly jarring to longstanding fans of The Original Series.
All in all, a combination of the various factors listed above came together to make 2009’s Star Trek a major change for the franchise. There are great moments in the film, but they’re interspersed with action sequences that would be more at home in another franchise.
The lower middle:
Leaving the weakest films behind we’re now approaching the middle of the road. All of the next four films have great moments – and a smattering of issues. They are, however, better than the ones we just looked at.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
The original USS Enterprise was destroyed in The Search for Spock.
For some reason, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is the first film with The Original Series’ cast that I can remember watching. It’s possible I’d seen others while very young, but if so I can’t remember them. Because The Search for Spock is the middle part of a trilogy, I think some aspects of it were confusing in that first viewing!
I’ve mentioned a number of times on the blog, but my introduction to the Star Trek franchise, in the early 1990s, was The Next Generation. It wasn’t until later that I was introduced to The Original Series, and this film may well have been my first point of contact with its crew. So on a personal level, I think I have more of a connection to The Search for Spock than I otherwise might!
There’s a great villain here – Kruge, played by Christopher Lloyd of Back to the Future fame – and his relationship with Kirk, particularly in the latter stages of the film, is genuinely interesting. The death of David Marcus was also something shocking an unexpected for a Star Trek film of this era – particularly as he was a returning character from The Wrath of Khan.
The main thrust of the plot is somewhat convoluted, however. The idea of a death-and-rebirth narrative is interesting, but it’s also one which can be complicated and difficult to get right – as The Search for Spock shows in places. It also works to undermine Spock’s sacrifice in The Wrath of Khan, which was the emotional crux of that film. That’s not to say I want Spock to stay dead considering some of his subsequent appearances, but an immediate (or almost-immediate) resurrection can make a character’s death or sacrifice lose some of its impact, and I’m afraid that definitely happened here.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Scotty interacts with a 1980s computer while Dr McCoy looks on in The Voyage Home.
Time-travel stories are among my least-favourite in Star Trek. The mechanics of time travel are inconsistent across the franchise, with it being shown to be both something routine that starships are capable of as well as something technologically difficult or impossible to achieve. I also dislike stories where the crew travel to the present day, as I feel in every single case where it’s happened the stories have become dated.
The basic premise here is interesting, though, and it’s a great example of how Star Trek can use its science fiction setting to highlight real-world issues – in this case, the issues of pollution and a loss of biodiversity in the oceans. While the whale-probe was, I felt, visually uninspired and seeing the crew in the mid-1980s after travelling back in time dates the film considerably, there were some fun moments.
Scotty interacting with a 1980s computer was funny, as was the line about changing the timeline by giving someone the formula to make “transparent aluminum”. The franchise has always had a sense of humour, and after the very serious tone in both The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, it was a welcome change to see a film which brought back these lighter moments.
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
Sulu, Kirk, and other bridge crewmen in Into Darkness.
In the months before Star Trek Into Darkness released, there was rampant online speculation about Benedict Cumberbatch’s character. Many fans correctly guessed that “John Harrison” was actually legendary Star Trek villain Khan, so going into the film having read all that the revelation didn’t surprise me as much as it should have.
However, Star Trek Into Darkness is, in my opinion, a decent homage to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that manages to celebrate elements from that film without going too far and crossing the line into copying and ripping it off. Considering JJ Abrams would later cross that line – twice – in the Star Wars franchise, I’m thankful that he didn’t do so here.
Many of the issues I mentioned with 2009’s Star Trek are still present, but the Khan story always worked well in an action setting so I think that aspect of it, at least, can be forgiven. And despite the fact that we haven’t known this version of Kirk and Spock for very long, Kirk’s “death” in the Enterprise’s engine room was still an emotional hit in the same way Spock’s had been in the original.
Star Trek Into Darkness aimed to be a spiritual successor to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and it did largely succeed. While it’s definitely the lesser of the two, it was a significant improvement over Star Trek, and remains for me the high-water mark of the JJverse trilogy.
Star Trek Beyond (2016)
Beyond’s release was overshadowed by the death of Anton Yelchin.
Star Trek Beyond is the most recent of all the Star Trek films (at time of writing). Director JJ Abrams left the franchise to focus on Star Wars, but his style was nevertheless present. Beyond attempted to move away from the high-octane action of Into Darkness and tell a story which focused on characters and the dangers of interstellar exploration.
There were some great visual moments – notably Starbase Yorktown, described as a “snow globe in space” – and the story did tie into some elements from Star Trek: Enterprise, which was a nice nod to fans. I also noted, in Chris Pine’s portrayal of Kirk, something that felt like a throwback to Jeffrey Hunter’s original Christopher Pike at the beginning of the film, as he deals with the heavy burden of command.
Penned by Simon Pegg, who also played Scotty, I appreciate what Beyond tried to do. It’s clear Pegg is a huge fan of the franchise, and that he wanted to tell a story that would have been at home in The Original Series. There were hits and misses in terms of the story, but he did an admirable job trying to nudge what was in danger of becoming an action franchise closer to past iterations of Star Trek.
One point I greatly disliked was Jaylah. Not the character herself, nor her portrayal, but the name. A homophone for “J Law”, aka actress Jennifer Lawrence, who at the time was famous for her role in The Hunger Games, I just felt that the reference was stupid and unnecessary.
Sadly, the film was overshadowed by the losses of both Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yelchin – the latter having taken over the role of Chekov, and was killed in an accident at the age of 27. While Nimoy’s passing was acknowledged in the film, the filming and much of the post-production work had already been completed at the time of Yelchin’s death, and while a simple message at the beginning commemorated him, some argued at the time that the producers behind Beyond should’ve done something more.
The upper middle:
Now we’ve arrived in the top half – and we’re finally looking at films which are good all-rounders. Any one of these could have broken into the top three, and they’re all films which I’m happy to go back to time and again.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
The Undiscovered Country featured an assassination… and purple-blooded Klingons.
According to some rumours, The Undiscovered Country almost wasn’t made following the reaction to The Final Frontier two years earlier. However, the cast did reunite for a final outing – and this film finally saw them earn a decent pay packet for their roles. Gene Roddenberry saw The Undiscovered Country shortly before he passed away – and he hated it. It was a shift in tone from The Original Series, and he felt that presenting Starfleet as a military organisation, and in particular some of Kirk’s anti-Klingon racism had no place in his vision of the 23rd Century.
Regardless, his objections were overridden and what resulted was a much better film – in my opinion – than any other since The Wrath of Khan. Kirk’s portrayal was humanised by his flaws and failings, and the plot was dramatic and tense as a conspiracy within Starfleet – aided and abetted by the Romulans and some within the Klingon Empire – sought to disrupt a budding peace initiative.
The film’s special effects were great – and many even stand up today. The “Praxis Effect” is named for a location from The Undiscovered Country, and has been used many more times in subsequent pictures, which is certainly a testament to that particular visual effect!
The final scenes of the film are especially touching, as it was clear even at the time that this was to be the final outing for the cast. Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov would return in Star Trek: Generations and of course Spock was back in the JJverse, but this was the last time the full cast were together, and the ultimate finale of The Original Series in that respect.
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
The events of First Contact had a huge impact on Picard.
A lot of people (of my generation, at least) would surely pick First Contact as their favourite Star Trek film. It’s often held up alongside The Wrath of Khan as one of the absolute best, and it’s hard to disagree with that assessment.
Picard is forced to confront the worst moment in his past when the Borg return, hell-bent on assimilating Earth once again. Though defeated in the Battle of Sector 001, the Borg and the Enterprise-E travel into Earth’s past – specifically to the day where humans and Vulcans made first contact.
Sir Patrick Stewart gives what is one of his best performances both inside and outside of Star Trek here, as Picard is haunted and overwhelmed by his history with the Borg. And the Battle of Sector 001 was one of the franchise’s best space battles – the last-minute arrival of the Enterprise still gets me even though I’ve seen it countless times!
Worf, who was a regular on Deep Space Nine at this point, did feel like he’d been shoehorned in as temporary captain of the USS Defiant, but that didn’t really detract from things. While I freely admit time-travel is not my favourite premise, because the setting was still in the future – the year 2063 – it didn’t feel awkward in the way some episodes and films do. And seeing humanity’s first warp flight, as well as learning a little more about the events in Earth’s history prior to the founding of the Federation was interesting!
Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
Insurrection showed us Riker and Geordi as we don’t usually see them!
I feel like Insurrection gets an unfairly bad rap. While it could be argued that there were sillier elements to the film’s “fountain-of-youth” story, I feel like the points people often criticise about some of the behaviour of the main characters are actually the things I enjoyed most.
Picard and his crew travel to the Briar Patch, where Data has malfunctioned and gone rogue, exposing a secret Federation mission to observe a humanoid race. It turns out that the observation mission was simply a cover to harvest the planet’s life-preserving natural wonders – a scheme dreamt up by a rogue Admiral and a race called the Son’a. In what could be considered a mutiny, the crew race to save the planet’s inhabitants.
This kind of story, where a small crew has to work outside of the law to do the right thing, is exactly my jam. I love these kinds of stories – both inside and outside of Star Trek – so Insurrection was great for me. It also marked a change from seeing Picard and his crew as totally straight-laced, giving them freedom to let their hair down a little. It’s primarily for that reason – the crew seemingly acting “out-of-character” – that some people don’t like it, and I do understand and respect that. Sometimes that can be jarring. But in the context of Insurrection’s story, I just feel that it worked. And as a film that wasn’t just an action-fest but that told a story with heart, I feel that it captured perfectly the spirit of what Star Trek has always tried to be. Insurrection is the kind of story that could have been an episode of The Next Generation – which is why I like it.
The top three:
This is it, then! Out of all of the Star Trek films, we’ve arrived at my personal favourites.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Seeing the Enterprise for the first time in The Motion Picture is one of my favourite sequences in all of Star Trek.
Last year marked The Motion Picture’s fortieth anniversary. I wrote an article to commemorate the occasion – you can find it by clicking or tapping here. In short, The Motion Picture succeeded for me for several reasons. Firstly, as a slower-paced, ethereal story with a message, I feel that it fits in perfectly with what Star Trek is and aspires to be. Secondly, it set the stage for Star Trek coming back into the popular consciousness in a big way, and launched the franchise into the 1980s – the decade which would see several good films and a return to television with The Next Generation. Thirdly, much of the aesthetic of Star Trek, things we consider inseparable from the franchise, had their roots here – not in 1966. The sets built for The Motion Picture would be in continuous use on other Star Trek projects for years afterwards, in some cases right up to the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005.
The Motion Picture succeeded in bringing Star Trek back. And while it may not be everyone’s favourite, if it weren’t for the modest success it enjoyed in 1979 and early 1980 there would have been no more films, and probably no additional series either. Star Trek would have fizzled out and would be remembered today as a cult 1960s show with one failed film. That isn’t the case – and everything that’s happened in the franchise since 1979 has happened on the back of what The Motion Picture did.
As a story, I like that it’s not about defeating or killing an enemy. Instead, the climax of the film is about understanding, merging, and the creation of new life. Star Trek set out to seek out new life – and The Motion Picture showed us that the new life we might discover out in the cosmos could be almost entirely beyond our understanding. But despite that, Kirk, Spock, and the crew managed to bridge the gulf, solve a mystery, and save the Earth in the process.
While The Motion Picture may be, in some respects, dated from an aesthetic point of view (some sets and costumes are very seventies!) I do like some of the visual sequences. When Kirk and Scotty travel by shuttlepod to the refit Enterprise, it’s a genuinely emotional moment to see the ship in all its glory. And the music adds to that. While we’ve come to know The Motion Picture’s theme better as the theme to The Next Generation, it debuted here, as did Star Trek’s “golden age”.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Kirk in the captain’s chair in The Wrath of Khan.
The Wrath of Khan needs no introduction. For many fans, this is the best film that the franchise has to offer – and arguably it’s the best story featuring the cast of The Original Series. Supervillain Khan returns, having been exiled by Kirk in Season 1 of The Original Series, and he’s determined to have his revenge.
The maroon uniforms that debuted here are among the franchise’s best, and aesthetically the film looks amazing. Some moments have been dated somewhat by the passage of time, but the recent 4K rerelease still held up on my television at least!
Featuring some amazing performances, including from Ricardo Montalbán, who reprised his role from The Original Series, The Wrath of Khan is a classic revenge tale in a 23rd Century setting. There are some amazing twists along the way as the Enterprise is catastrophically damaged, Kirk and his crew end up trapped inside a planetoid, and a project created by Starfleet scientists for the purpose of terraforming is co-opted and turned into a weapon of mass destruction.
The Battle in the Mutara Nebula was arguably Star Trek’s best ever space battle at the time – inspired by classic war films set on submarines, it was a claustrophobic, edge-of-your-seat ride as the damaged Enterprise tries to hide from and battle Khan’s USS Reliant. Both ship designs are now considered iconic in the franchise. The battle still holds up today, even compared to the franchise’s more recent offerings.
Spock’s sacrifice is hard to put into words. Though we now know he survived – after a fashion, anyway – the raw emotional moment of seeing him die in front of his friend, and then be launched into space, is incredible. Both Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner are outstanding here, and while Shatner in particular can be justly criticised for some of his performances in The Original Series, any critic should look at this film and the sequence with Spock in particular before writing him off.
Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Generations saw Kirk and Picard team up.
Dr McCoy made a cameo appearance in The Next Generation’s premiere, and both Spock and Scotty would also crop up in later seasons. However, for the most part, the show trod its own path and stayed clear of The Original Series. This was a good decision overall, as allowing the franchise the opportunity to flourish without its original crew arguably opened the door to its future success. But by 1994, The Next Generation was over as a series – Deep Space Nine and the soon-to-premiere Voyager were continuing in the 24th Century. It was also approaching Star Trek’s 30th anniversary, and so it was decided to bring together the two different eras and tell the ultimate crossover story.
Seeing Kirk and Picard together on screen, working in common cause, was amazing. It’s absolutely one of the high points of the franchise for me personally, as both characters are fantastic. Both Sir Patrick Stewart and William Shatner are on top form, and Kirk’s death toward the end of the film was a truly heartbreaking moment. The early part of the film also explored a small portion of the unseen years in between The Original Series and The Next Generation – an era which, I’d argue, would make for an interesting prequel film or series.
Malcolm McDowell plays Soran, who is a devious and truly impressive villain, and the film ties itself neatly to The Next Generation with the return of the Duras Sisters. Kirk’s death wasn’t the only devastating loss in Generations, either, as we also have to say goodbye to the Enterprise-D after seven years. Just as in The Search for Spock a decade previously, the loss of the Enterprise was a genuinely emotional moment.
Star Trek can tell deeply emotional stories – and Picard’s arc in the film as he loses his only remaining blood relatives, and is then tempted by the Nexus giving him a family of his own is a great example of this. The Nexus itself, and how exactly it works, is left a little ambiguous as of the end of the film, but it managed to avoid the trap of The Final Frontier and stay clear of portraying it in a quasi-religious way, even though the whole story with Soran being desperate to get back can, in some ways, be taken as an analogy for religious zealotry.
As a fan of both The Original Series and The Next Generation, and both captains, this crossover story always feels fantastic.
So that’s it.
I managed to get the films into some kind of vague ranking! It wasn’t an easy task, because on a given day I might have a craving to sit down and watch The Final Frontier or Star Trek Beyond, and even though I don’t consider them as good as others in the franchise, they still have enjoyable moments. When films in a series can be so different from one another, it can be hard to pin down which ones are subjectively “better”.
Nevertheless, I gave it my best shot!
The Star Trek franchise, including all films mentioned above, is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Star Trek is divided right now. No, I don’t mean the divisions in the fanbase – though you can read my thoughts on that by clicking or tapping here – instead I’m referring to the fact that The Original Series, The Next Generation, Enterprise, all of the films, and all of the new series are in HD, while Deep Space Nine and Voyager aren’t.
Streaming has quickly become the biggest thing in home entertainment, replacing our DVD collections. Even ViacomCBS realised this, and set up their own streaming service. It’s thanks to the existence of CBS All Access, and the need to provide that new platform with original content, that Star Trek has been renewed at all. But before Star Trek found a new digital home, The Original Series and The Next Generation were remastered in high definition and got Blu-ray releases. Blu-ray, in case you didn’t know, is the optical disc format which was supposed to replace DVD a few years ago. Blu-ray discs can store much more digital data – 25GB as opposed to a mere 4.7GB for DVDs – meaning that full HD video content was possible.
The opening sequence of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The resulting change from DVD-quality video, which had a resolution for digital video of 720×480 pixels, to Blu-ray, which offers a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, meant that older episodes of Star Trek, filmed for television in the 1960s and 1980s-90s, had to be remastered. The remastering process exposed lower-quality special effects, which had to be entirely redone in order to look presentable at the higher resolution offered by Blu-ray. This was especially notable with some of The Next Generation’s early-90s CGI, which had been designed to be broadcast on the smaller screens of that era. Therefore the remastering process was far less straightforward than simply copying all of the broadcast episodes, upscaled, onto Blu-ray discs. Each episode had to be worked on, and new special effects and digital effects created from scratch, adding to the cost of the work.
By the time The Next Generation’s final season released on Blu-ray in 2014, a combination of factors came together to leave sales underwhelming from CBS’ perspective. Firstly there was the move by many consumers to online video streaming. Blu-ray had seemed exciting in the mid-late 2000s when it was new, but as platforms like Netflix gained traction in the 2010s, Blu-ray just never took off in the same way as DVD had a decade prior. Secondly, many people already owned The Next Generation in full either on VHS, DVD, or both. And despite the promise of remastered episodes with all-new digital effects, we were being asked to essentially buy the same product again for a second or third time. This combination of many fans already owning the full series plus Blu-ray and optical media as a whole feeling decidedly “last-gen” in a world of digital streaming meant many folks, myself included, didn’t pick up The Next Generation on Blu-ray.
I certainly felt, in the mid-2010s, that sooner or later Star Trek would join one of these new streaming platforms and that I could simply watch the HD versions at that time. As someone who had been collecting Star Trek on DVD since the early 2000s (when The Original Series came in chunky plastic boxes), I already had the full collection by the time Blu-ray was out – I even had Enterprise, despite that being my least-favourite Star Trek show! The idea of having to re-start my Star Trek collection on a new format just wasn’t something I was keen on, so I waited it out. And, to be fair, the remastered episodes of both The Original Series and The Next Generation are now available for streaming – on CBS All Access in the US, or on Netflix in the rest of the world (though I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon Prime Video snaps up the international rights now that they also have Star Trek: Picard).
Star Trek: Voyager ran from 1995 to 2001.
Unfortunately, though, the lack of interest in The Next Generation on Blu-ray has meant that Deep Space Nine and Voyager never made it to the remastering suite. They remain in their original format, in what we’d call “standard definition” or DVD quality. And there’s nothing wrong with that – they are, still, perfectly watchable on DVD or on streaming. But as television screens get larger and better, the difference in quality between a remastered episode of The Next Generation and an episode of Deep Space Nine, unchanged since its early-90s television debut, is incredibly obvious and offputting.
An increasing number of viewers expect HD content nowadays. With some shows – like Netflix’s The Witcher or Amazon Prime Video’s The Grand Tour – being broadcast in 4K resolution, which is one step higher even than Blu-ray, standard/DVD-quality content just doesn’t look good enough for a lot of people, and they don’t enjoy watching it. On a modern 4K television that could easily have a screen size of fifty inches or more, such content looks mediocre at best, and pretty crappy when compared to anything in HD.
ViacomCBS have their own streaming service now – CBS All Access – which is billed as the new home of Star Trek. However, two of those flagship shows, which people remember with fondness from the 1990s, are not up to current standards when it comes to visual quality, and that’s something ViacomCBS should address.
The remastering of Deep Space Nine and Voyager, combined with their permanent home online, would pull in subscribers to CBS All Access. Even fans who haven’t been moved by Discovery or Picard could be convinced to sign up to the platform if it would be the only place to watch their favourite series in HD. And I’m sure many of them would also give Discovery or Picard a try while they were there – it wouldn’t cost anything extra, after all. There would be no need for an expensive Blu-ray release, with the cost of printing thousands of discs and shipping them all over the world no longer necessary. And I’m sure Netflix and/or Amazon Prime would happily snap up the rights to a newly-remastered “classic” of the 1990s. Nostalgia is a big deal in today’s media landscape, after all.
A lot of folks seem to have given up on the idea of ever seeing those series in HD given the move toward online streaming and The Next Generation’s lacklustre performance on Blu-ray, but CBS All Access should be Deep Space Nine and Voyager’s ticket to a full-HD remaster. The Star Trek brand would then be all together, all remastered, all fully in HD ready for new and old fans to join the party. I’m absolutely certain that, in the long run, ViacomCBS would find it worthwhile. What We Left Behind, the recent documentary about Deep Space Nine, included some remastered scenes, and its successful crowdfunding campaign should demonstrate that there is a viable market for such content.
The CBS All Access logo.
From a branding point of view, it isn’t a great look for CBS All Access to be offering some of its content for its flagship franchise in DVD quality. Netflix doesn’t do that, Amazon Prime Video doesn’t do that, and Disney+ certainly doesn’t do that. CBS All Access is the only paid-for streaming platform in the world right now offering two full seven-season series in low quality, and that’s bad for the brand. It makes it seem like ViacomCBS can’t be bothered to put in the effort; it makes CBS All Access look cheap. And for fans who don’t follow all the ins and outs of Star Trek, it could be an unexpected disappointment: they sign up, log in for the first time, and choose their favourite episode – only to find that it looks poor on their big-screen TV.
So come on ViacomCBS! Remaster Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Bring the final two Star Trek shows into the 2020s and give your own platform a nice little boost in the process.
The Star Trek franchise – including all titles mentioned above – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: While this essay doesn’t go into many plot details, there may be minor spoilers ahead for the Star Trek franchise, including for Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Discovery.
I’ve seen a number articles and videos over the last couple of years, really since Star Trek: Discovery premiered, looking at how the Star Trek fanbase has become divided into fans of “old” Star Trek and “new” Star Trek. However one may feel about the various films and series, it’s undeniable that there are many Trekkies who have jumped ship over the years and do not consider themselves fans of the franchise’s newer iterations – as well as plenty of casual viewers who have seen one series but not others. Given that the franchise is well past its fiftieth anniversary, perhaps that’s fair enough. But I did want to take a look at the phenomenon for myself and give my thoughts on how the franchise is split, some of the possible causes, and what that split could mean for the franchise going forward into the 2020s and beyond.
True hipster Star Trek fans only watched Star Trek when Jeffrey Hunter was in it. William Shatner? Pfft. Newbie.
Firstly, the question often asked in these articles is “how can everyone come back together?” Writers will often set up that question, pretending that they’re going to answer it fairly, only to basically end up saying “everyone will come back together if Star Trek does everything my way and gives me everything I want.” That just isn’t realistic, I’m afraid. And as with many cases of division, the reality is that there may not be a way to bridge the gulf and reunite everyone around one new Star Trek series or film. That may sound depressing, and it is in a way. But we have to be realistic – there are some people now who are literally making money from running anti-Star Trek groups online, and if anyone expects someone in that position to suddenly turn around and say “hey guys, I just saw the latest episode and it was amazing!” well, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. The truth is that some people aren’t interested in fair criticism. They have decided they want to hate, and just like fans of a football team could never support a rival club, no matter what, their hatred for the current and upcoming lineup of Star Trek shows and films will continue. It’s part of the tribal mindset that we as human beings all end up subscribing to in one way or another: “I support X, which is opposed to Y. Therefore, I can never ever like Y, because it would go against how I define myself as a person”. That’s true in sport, it’s true in politics, and it’s true in entertainment as well.
But before we can look at divisions in the fanbase, we need to examine the basic concept: what is “old” Star Trek, and what is “new” Star Trek? It’s a far more complicated question than it seems, and the answer will vary depending on how old a person is, and when they first encountered the franchise.
The bridge of the original USS Enterprise in the episode The Corbomite Maneuver. For many fans, The Original Series and its crew were irreplaceable.
There are several “turning points” in the history of Star Trek where fans jumped ship, and the easiest way to look at them is in chronological order. The first one was in 1987, when The Next Generation premiered. Until this point, Star Trek had been The Original Series with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the 1960s crew, and while there was excitement for Star Trek’s return to television – just as there was in 2017 – that was countered by a vocal number of fans who believed ardently that the original characters were the beating heart of Star Trek – and were irreplaceable. These people may have watched The Original Series and the first four Star Trek films (The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered County were released after The Next Generation premiered) but simply had no interest in a new crew, a new ship, and a new century. Indeed, Sir Patrick Stewart himself has said many times that he believed The Next Generation would not be a success – and would run for perhaps two seasons at most.
The NX-01 Enterprise leaves its dock in Broken Bow – the series premiere of Enterprise.
The second turning point is the one I’m most familiar with – because it’s the point I came very close to jumping ship myself: 2000-2001, when Enterprise was announced and entered production. In the aftermath of the disaster that was Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999, a prequel was just something that many fans, myself included, had little interest in. Star Trek – as I have often written here on the blog – had always been about pushing forward into the future, and yet here was a show that wanted to look back at its own past. This kind of navel-gazing just didn’t feel like a good idea, and the aesthetic of the show, with its boiler-suit uniforms, clunky starship design, modern (for the time) computer screens, and overreliance on not-quite-good-enough early-2000s CGI was not inspiring. There had been some real stinkers in the Star Trek canon when it came to individual episodes and stories – Spock’s Brain, Angel One, Shades of Grey, Threshold, and Move Along Home to name but a few – but this was the first time that the premise of a series itself seemed unexciting, at least for me. The introduction of Scott Bakula as the captain did go some way toward lifting the show for some fans who had been on the fence, but I confess that during Enterprise’s original run here in the UK I only tuned in sporadically, and it was only when I got the series on DVD a few years after it went off the air that I watched it in its entirety. Nowadays I often cite Enterprise as an example whenever I hear the argument: “nobody asked for this”. Nobody in 2000 was asking for Enterprise, yet it actually told some interesting stories and had a great cast of characters. I’m glad to have seen it, I’m glad it existed, and ultimately I feel its strengths far outweighed its weaknesses. Giving it a second chance was a good decision – even if the only reason I bought the DVDs was to complete my Star Trek collection!
The 2009 redesign of the USS Enterprise – and re-casting of the original crew – was too much for some fans.
Next comes our third turning point: when Enterprise went off the air, a spell was broken. Star Trek had, in some form, been in continuous production for almost two decades, beginning with pre-release work on The Next Generation in 1986 running all the way through to 2005 when the final episodes of Enterprise were produced and released. The cancellation of Enterprise was symbolic – the end of an era. And in that moment it seemed as though Star Trek was dead and not coming back. But it didn’t stay that way for very long at all, and within a year or so of Enterprise’s cancellation, word started going around about a new film – one which would be a reboot, recasting iconic characters like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. For many long-term fans – including some friends of mine – that was a bridge too far, and they were never interested in what would become 2009’s Star Trek and the “JJverse” or Kelvin timeline that it spawned. For others, Star Trek was too much of a departure from the rest of the franchise, with its visual overhaul and action-heavy story, and some fans who did give it a go were underwhelmed and didn’t come back for more.
The USS Discovery, as seen in the first official teaser trailer in 2016.
So we’ve reached the final turning point. 2017, and the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery is the moment that many of these articles and videos use when dividing “old” Star Trek from “new” Star Trek. Discovery had a somewhat troubled production, with Bryan Fuller departing before the show aired, and controversy surrounding CBS All Access as a platform for the show in the United States. There was also the “prequel problem” that plagued Enterprise, and as more details came out about the series, the visual style being more in line with the JJverse than The Original Series also became a bone of contention. As with each of the three previous turning points, a number of fans decided that Discovery just wasn’t for them and simply opted out.
The point of recounting this history of the Star Trek fanbase and the points at which some fans chose not to continue with new iterations is simple – this is not a new phenomenon. It has happened before in Star Trek, and, if we’re lucky enough for the franchise to continue into the future, it will undoubtedly happen again sooner or later. None of these moments destroyed the franchise or ruined the fanbase, nor drove Star Trek’s creators and promoters out of business for the simple reason that the fans who jumped ship were in the minority. A vocal minority, perhaps, but a minority nevertheless. And it’s the same with those who haven’t watched Discovery and Picard – and of course, those who make a big fuss about not supporting “new” Star Trek in online groups and on YouTube channels: they’re a minority.
“Real” Star Trek fans love The Final Frontier.
Trekkies have always been a minority of Star Trek’s audience. It’s a commercial product; a series designed to have appeal beyond a small niche of convention attendees. If it didn’t appeal to casual viewers it would never have survived or been reborn in the first place, at any of the points mentioned above. So to say that because a small number of Trekkies who liked the TNG-era shows don’t like Discovery there’s somehow a massive problem and that Star Trek today is fundamentally broken is nonsense. A minority of a minority, no matter how vocal they may be with their criticism and hate, don’t matter to ViacomCBS’ bottom line in any material way.
But do they have a point?
It’s a tough one for me to answer, and if you’ve been here before you’ll know why: I’m a big fan of “new” Star Trek, just as I’m a fan of “old” Star Trek too. I can see the point of view that says the newer shows and films are bad, but generally I don’t agree, so from my perspective they don’t have a point. Especially to those people who pre-judged Discovery and Picard based on what they read in anti-Star Trek groups online and never even watched the shows in the first place I’d really say they don’t have a leg to stand on in this argument. How can they possibly sit there and say something is bad when they haven’t given it a try for themselves? The biased “reporting” of some anti-Star Trek YouTuber is not the same as experiencing the film or series for themselves, and I’d really encourage everyone who falls into that category to at least stick with Discovery beyond its opening two episodes, which I fully concede were especially weak.
This actually ties into another point – most Star Trek series, with the exceptions of Deep Space Nine and Picard – opened quite underwhelmingly. And it took more than a few episodes for all of the Star Trek shows to really find their feet. The Next Generation’s first season isn’t anywhere near as good as its third, fourth, or fifth, for example, and Voyager similarly took at least a full season to get up and running. Even the beloved Original Series got off to a rocky start – so giving up on Discovery or Picard after one or two episodes isn’t really giving those shows a fair shake.
Lorca and Saru in Star Trek: Discovery.
Part of this is to do with binge-watching culture. For many Star Trek fans – and I include myself in this category to an extent, especially when it comes to Enterprise – they missed out on seeing most or all of “old” Star Trek when it originally aired. They could pick and choose which episodes to watch from DVDs or on streaming platforms, and watch them anytime they wanted to. Star Trek, to many Trekkies, was a complete product. Seven seasons of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, as well as three of The Original Series and four of Enterprise is a lot to wade through, and an individual bad episode is just a blip when you don’t have to wait a week for the next one and can skip ahead to another episode on the disc.
But there are changes in the way Star Trek has told stories over time, and we do have to acknowledge that. There has been a move away from episodic storytelling (aka the “monster-of-the-week” format) in favour of season-long story arcs and a serialised format. I confess I have a preference, in some cases at least, for episodic television. It’s nice to be able to jump into a random episode of a series without needing to know or remember everything that happened leading up to that point. It makes Discovery and Picard season-long commitments, instead of something fans can jump in and out of. And because, as mentioned, a lot of folks are used to Star Trek shows being complete products and in addition are used to binge-watching, having to wait a week between episodes of a partially-complete story can be annoying I suppose.
There has also been a shift away from the more ethereal, philosophical, and thought-provoking storylines that Star Trek used to do. Ironically, many of those stories and episodes are less popular among fans – The Motion Picture is always considered a poor relation to films like First Contact and The Wrath of Khan, which are both much more in the action-sci fi genre, just to give an example. I discussed this in a little more detail in my 40th anniversary look at The Motion Picture if you’re interested to read more. But there’s no doubt that Discovery and especially the JJverse films have gone in a much more action-centric direction, and for people who wanted to see more of the slower paced, thought-provoking stories, action-sci fi maybe doesn’t “feel like Star Trek” in quite the same way.
Kirk and Scotty in The Motion Picture – a less popular film than its sequel with many Trekkies.
Now we come to what is the single biggest point: nostalgia. People like what they grew up with. Heck, the whole reason Star Trek is being made again now, more than fifty years since it was first created, is because nostalgia is incredibly powerful and there’s money to be made from it. But nostalgia is a double-edged sword. Some people don’t want to see an “updated” version of the franchise they loved from childhood or young adulthood. If they want more of it in the first place, they want to see it exactly the same as before. No changes, no iterations, no modernising – a carbon copy of what came before. And that isn’t realistic.
Television storytelling has moved on since the 1960s and the 1990s – which are the two “golden ages” of Star Trek, depending on which fans you ask. Expecting to see The Next Generation Season 8 in 2020 was an unrealistic expectation. The way stories are told, and what television audiences expect from their shows, are just different nowadays. For fans of episodic television that might seem disappointing, but as with Trekkies in general we’re in a minority there. Shows like Lost, Breaking Bad, and of course Game of Thrones had such a huge impact on television that they fundamentally changed the way audiences approach their favourite franchises – and in order to stay competitive, Star Trek has to recognise that and keep up.
There are undeniably a lot of positive feelings attached to a franchise from childhood. The return of Star Trek (and other franchises too, like Star Wars) was designed to play on those positive feelings to sell a product – that’s basically the point of resurrecting franchises in the first place. For a minority of fans who only liked things when done the old way, that hasn’t worked and the updates and changes mean they don’t get the same feelings that they do when re-watching an old episode or film. But for a lot of people, these shows have been a hit. They hit the mark where it mattered and got many fans clamouring for more. And in a few years or a few decades from now, Discovery-era fans will be just as excited for the return of Burnham and Saru as I have been to see Picard and Seven of Nine.
Seven of Nine returned in Star Trek: Picard.
In fact, one of the things I was genuinely concerned about with Star Trek: Picard is that they were going to fall into the Star Wars trap of overplaying the nostalgia card. I didn’t want The Next Generation Season 8, because that show has ended. It’s over. What Picard represented is something practically no other series or franchise will ever get – a new iteration. Picard is the same man, and he’s the core of the show as he was in The Next Generation. But surrounding him are new characters, and I wanted to make sure that they would have the chance to become fan favourites for the next generation (pun absolutely intended) of Star Trek fans.
My introduction to the franchise was The Next Generation. And it wasn’t until a few years later – probably in the mid-1990s – that I got around to watching any of The Original Series. For some people, Picard and Discovery will be their first port of call as Star Trek fans, just as The Next Generation was for me. Those of us who’ve been around Star Trek for twenty-five years or more still have a place in the fandom, but things are changing. With new shows in production, new fans are coming on board who may not be aware of Picard’s top-secret mission to Celtris III, or that Kirk and his crew once visited a parallel universe where magic is real. If we try to be gatekeepers and say “you aren’t a real Star Trek fan because Discovery isn’t as good as the show that I like” then the fandom isn’t just going to be divided, it’s going to become toxic. Instead of being a “big tent”, recognising that the franchise means different things to different people, some folks seem to want to claim the fandom for themselves and exclude anyone who doesn’t share their belief about what Star Trek means.
And frankly, that’s just sad.
Star Trek has always tried to use its science fiction setting to tell stories that reflect contemporary issues. There are countless examples, and this could be an essay in itself, but suffice to say many of those stories resonated with fans in the past. The Original Series challenged the Cold War concepts of superweapons and mutually assured destruction in the episode The Doomsday Machine to great effect, and fans will laud that. But when Discovery uses Ash Tyler’s trauma as an analogy for underreported male sexual abuse, those same folks scream about “too much politics”. As I’ve said before, to anyone who says there’s “too much politics” in modern Star Trek I’d ask one simple question – “have you seen Star Trek before?”
Spock and Kirk at the end of The Doomsday Machine from Season 2 of The Original Series. They talked about nuclear weapons – a massive issue in the 1960s.
The problem here is that, when it comes to The Original Series and the shows of The Next Generation’s era, we’re watching them decades on from their original release. Many of the people complaining about politics in modern Star Trek weren’t even born when The Next Generation and its sister shows were first on the air. And very few people now can remember watching The Original Series when it was new. The political themes in many of those episodes are less prickly and less relevant today, and though they would be instantly recognisable to contemporary audiences, watching them today fifty years later or thirty years later, they’re harder to spot. And if someone is watching an episode for the tenth or twentieth time, an episode they first watched at age five or six, it’s even harder to be objective and pull the themes and messaging out of the drama and presentation. Taking a step back and looking at a favourite show or episode objectively is very difficult. I made an attempt to do so when I re-watched The Measure of a Man from The Next Generation’s second season, but it wasn’t easy.
Star Trek has always been a political show, even if as kids we didn’t realise it. And it has always taken a “progressive” political position on contemporary issues. If an individual can’t stand that, and is only content to watch entertainment that is either wholly politically neutral or agrees entirely with their own political biases, then that’s okay. No one is forcing anyone to watch a television show that they don’t like. And if they don’t like something, it’s easier than ever to change the channel. They can pick a new show on Netflix or Amazon Prime or CBS All Access and watch that instead, or go back to a previous Star Trek series that they do enjoy. Modern Star Trek is not mandatory viewing, and from my own point of view I can tell you I’m pretty brutal when it comes to switching off a show that I find boring or that I’m not enjoying for whatever reason.
In 2020 we live in a world where there is an insane amount of entertainment available to watch – and much of it can be found online for free with a basic knowledge of computing. So I don’t really understand why people would want to spend a lot of time watching a show that they don’t enjoy, then jump online to share their dislike with others – not when there are so many other things to watch. A few people who run websites, groups, or YouTube channels, make money by doing this. And I guess that’s fair enough – if people will pay for it, and you can make money at it, that’s okay. But for everyone else, I don’t really see what they gain from it – aside from the feeling of inclusion being part of a “tribe”, or perhaps a feeling of superiority to think they know better than the show’s creators?
Some people have been unhappy with Star Trek: Picard.
To get back on topic, and draw this essay to a conclusion, there are differences between Star Trek today and Star Trek in the era of The Original Series and The Next Generation. For some fans, the difference is too stark and they don’t want to watch whatever they consider to be “bad”. I’m okay with that – we can all have our own opinions about the franchise. I just don’t like the toxicity and gatekeeping that has plagued some – thankfully small – groups within the fandom.
Speaking for myself, I’ve enjoyed Star Trek’s return to television. Star Trek: Picard has been the better of the two offerings so far, but I’m genuinely excited at the prospect of a Capt. Pike series and at Lower Decks’ different take on the franchise. It’s a great time to be a fan right now, simply because there’s so much Star Trek – and sci fi/fantasy content in general – in production. We won’t always be so lucky to have this, and even though I wasn’t a big Enterprise fan during its original run, I was still sad when it went off the air and there was just a big void of nothing. That isn’t a scenario I’m keen to see repeated, and while I admit there have been hits and misses in modern Star Trek, I’d rather see it continue to be made than simply scrapped. By diversifying the kind of stories it tells – Picard and Discovery are very different in tone, for example, and Lower Decks will be something different again – hopefully Star Trek can build on what has been accomplished already and bring in more people. If some people decide not to stick with it because of the changes, that’s okay. But I firmly believe that the core or the heart of Star Trek is the same as it was in the 1960s – and that it has remained that way for its entire run.
Star Trek is a complicated franchise that means different things to different people. But there is room in the fandom for everyone – at least, everyone who wants to participate. If someone dislikes Picard or Discovery but loves The Next Generation, as fans and as people who know how to behave civilly, we can still have a great conversation about Star Trek without treading on each others’ toes. And it’s my hope that there’s more that unites us as fans of this great franchise than divides us – after all, Discovery and The Next Generation have much more in common than The Next Generation does with, say, the latest iteration of some celebrity reality show. At the end of the day, I’m happy to share a franchise and a fandom with some very passionate people – even if we can’t agree on a lot of things.
The Star Trek franchise – including all series and films mentioned above – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for the first four episodes of Star Trek: Picard, as well as for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise, including Star Trek: Discovery Season 2.
Jonathan Frakes delivered a great episode with this week’s Absolute Candor, and as I mentioned in my review of the episode, it was the first time I felt that we were starting to turn the page from setting up mysteries and questions to exploring and beginning to unravel them. Picard has his whole crew assembled now, and we’ve finally met every main character. Absolute Candor also gave me several new theories for where the story could go next – as well as debunking two that I’d written about in previous weeks.
I’m absolutely okay when a theory turns out to not be true! Some people get overly attached to fan theories, but at the end of the day it’s the showrunners, writers, and creators who determine where a story will go. Theory-crafting is a bit of fun, allowing us to spend more time in a fictional world that we enjoy while we wait for the real story to unfold in the next instalment.
Let’s start by taking a look at the two debunked theories after Absolute Candor.
Debunked theory #1: Picard put together a new fleet after the attack on Mars to help the Romulans.
Laris and Zhaban’s relationship with Picard made me think he’d done more to help the Romulans.
Based on the steadfast loyalty Picard has from Laris and Zhaban – the two Romulan assistants he has at the vineyard – I extrapolated that he’d done something between the rogue synths’ attack and the supernova to help the Romulans, even if it was wholly without Starfleet’s support.
There’s a gap of around four years between the destruction of the majority of his fleet on Mars and the supernova, and I speculated that Picard could have taken action in that time to put together a fleet and save as many lives as possible – winning the loyalty of Laris and Zhaban along the way. It would have also tied into the line from the first trailer about Picard having commanded “the greatest rescue armada in history”. While he did technically command the very large armada, the majority of it was destroyed before it was ever used, and far from saving 900 million Romulan lives – the goal stated in Remembrance – we only know of 250,000 Romulans who Picard and Raffi evacuated to Vashti. There may have been others taken to other destinations, but it’s a far cry short of what was intended.
I theorised that Picard could have used his contacts with factions like the Klingon Empire, Tamarians, Bajorans, or others we know he had worked with in The Next Generation – calling in all of his favours to put together a new armada.
In Absolute Candor, it’s revealed that after Picard’s resignation, he simply gave up on the rescue effort. “Because you could not save everyone, you chose to save no one” – those were the words of the Qowat Milat nun, and Picard confirms it. He never returned to Vashti after the synths’ attack, and it seems most Romulans – at least those on Vashti – regard him with contempt, both as the face of Starfleet who betrayed them and on a personal level for failing to uphold his promises.
Debunked theory #2: Soji and Dahj are human augments and not androids.
Dahj in Remembrance.
This one was always a real long-shot, so I’m not at all surprised to see it collapse! I had theorised that Soji and Dahj might not be synthetics after all, mostly because they appear to be fully human. It isn’t just a case of their outward appearance – which obviously looks very different to Data or F8 and the other synths from Mars – but that they appear fully human on scans and sensors.
Soji in particular is allowed to access the Artifact – a restricted and heavily fortified derelict Borg cube under Romulan military jurisdiction. Given what we know about the Romulans, they must have pretty good sensors and scanners, and if Soji did not register as anything other than human, they’d have been immediately alerted to her real nature.
There was also a line in The End is the Beginning that caused me to bring this theory back last week. As Picard and the others are interrogating a captured Zhat Vash attacker, he says that Soji and Dahj are “not what you think” they are. Because everyone was, at that point, absolutely convinced that Soji and Dahj were androids constructed by Bruce Maddox, what did that line mean? I interpreted it as meaning that they may not actually be synths at all.
However, in Absolute Candor we saw Rizzo and Narek interacting on board the Artifact. Rizzo refers to Soji as Narek’s “robot girlfriend”, confirming that the Zhat Vash know that she’s synthetic. There are still questions about the exact nature of Soji and Dahj – particularly how they have been able to survive unnoticed and undetected for three years, as well as whether they may be some kind of organic-synthetic hybrid – but the idea that they’re wholly non-synthetic can be firmly debunked at this stage.
So those are the debunked theories. And not for the first time, there are several new ones to replace them! Absolute Candor gave me several new ideas, as well as advancing a few others.
Number 1: Picard’s decision to tell everyone that their opponents are the Tal Shiar – and not the Zhat Vash – will come back to haunt them.
Elnor in Absolute Candor – he doesn’t know who Picard’s enemies really are.
In Maps and Legends, Laris told Picard about the Zhat Vash for the first time. And Commodore Oh also used the name in that episode, feeling that Picard was getting too close to finding out about the faction. Yet in Absolute Candor, Picard tells his new crew that they’re facing off against the Tal Shiar. And crucially, he also tells this to Elnor when recruiting him for the mission.
There are suspected to be links between the Tal Shiar and the Zhat Vash. Laris described the Tal Shiar as a “mask” that the Zhat Vash wears – but Zhaban is also implied to have been a Tal Shiar operative, and he was unconvinced that they’re real, so it’s clearly not the case that the two factions are one and the same.
When it comes to Elnor in particular, knowing who his enemy is could be incredibly important – and the Qowat Milat seem likely to know something about the Zhat Vash, and may even have techniques for dealing with them. Knowing who Picard’s enemy is may have even been a factor in agreeing to join the cause – the Qowat Milat and Tal Shiar are said to be enemies. Would Elnor have joined the crew if he knew they were taking on the Zhat Vash?
Most importantly, will it come back to haunt Picard that he wasn’t up front with everyone? Does he simply not fully believe in the Zhat Vash’s existence, as they are such a secretive faction? He has, after all, only heard about them from one person – with the only other Romulan present dismissing them as a myth. Regardless of the reason, I wonder how Elnor will react if and when he learns about the Zhat Vash.
Number 2: Narek is going to go rogue.
Rizzo had to half-choke Narek to get him to tell her what he knows about Soji – despite them being on the same side.
Last time, I speculated that Narek will end up turning on the Zhat Vash out of love for, or loyalty to, Soji. The two have been getting close since we met them at the end of Remembrance, though Narek does have an agenda.
In The End is the Beginning, he told Soji that he was falling in love with her, and shortly thereafter was rebuked by Rizzo, his superior, for getting too close. She explicitly warned him not to fall in love with her. Two references to that in a single episode seemed like foreshadowing something to me!
We saw this theme developed a little during Absolute Candor. Narek tracks Soji to the medical bay where Ramdha, the Romulan who accused her of being “the destroyer”, is in stasis or undergoing treatment. They then share a drink, in which Soji seems to hint very clearly that she’s developing feelings for him. And he takes her to a deserted part of the cube where they play and share a kiss – before he pushes her too hard for information and she storms off in a huff!
Narek was also less than keen to divulge the small amount of information he’s gleamed from Soji so far when Rizzo visited him later; she had to half-choke him to get him to confess Soji could be “the destroyer”. As she threatens she will give him one week to get the rest of the information the Zhat Vash want, he looks genuinely worried.
It’s a trope we’ve seen before, especially in spy fiction which this side of Star Trek: Picard’s story is clearly borrowing from; an agent falling for his target and renouncing his loyalty to save her. And I feel that there are hints at that already in the Narek-Soji-Rizzo storyline. It could be an elaborate misdirect, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Number 3: Dr Jurati isn’t who she appears to be, and may be a double-agent.
Dr Jurati talking to Capt. Rios on the bridge of La Sirena.
In what was almost the final scene in The End is the Beginning, Raffi seems incredulous at Dr Jurati’s inclusion on the mission to Freecloud – saying that she hasn’t run any kind of security check on her. Because of her knowledge of synthetics, Picard considers her important to the mission – and I’m sure that on a personal level he values her company, as she’s the only person on the mission other than himself who’s genuinely invested in finding Maddox and Soji.
But what are her motivations for doing so? And should Picard trust her? I have to admit that Raffi’s line has me seeing Dr Jurati in a whole new light. And where I thought I saw an academic who was genuinely excited at the prospect of seeing her theoretical work brought to life, what we may instead be seeing is someone who has manipulated the situation to ingratiate herself with Picard. Her arrival at the vineyard mere moments after the attempted assassination of Picard, as well as her ability to use a Romulan weapon, were examples I cited in evidence for this last time, as was her insistence on signing up.
Absolute Candor, it’s fair to say, was not a Jurati-centric episode. But the one significant scene she featured in could lend some credence to this theory, depending on interpretation. During a conversation with Capt. Rios on the bridge of La Sirena, she appears bored by space travel, despite it being implied it’s either her first time in space or at least not something she does on a regular basis. Her chat with him, while it could be perceived as social awkwardness, might also be seen as probing him for information – in a deliberately disarming manner.
She also shows a keen interest in the Qowat Milat – again with the same semi-childish wonder that Alison Pill portrays so well. But again I’m left questioning her motivation for prying so much into everything going on. Is it genuine academic curiosity from someone who seldom gets to see the stars? Maybe. Is she tapping Picard and the others for information because she’s a double-agent?
If Starfleet wanted to get a spy into Picard’s group, they have all the facts they need to do so, and with Dr Jurati being Earth’s most senior researcher into synthetics, it would make sense that Picard would reach out to her – of all people – in the aftermath of what happened with Dahj.
There’s another possibility, which is that she’s being manipulated from behind the scenes, or spied on herself. Her conversation with Commodore Oh was almost entirely off-screen – could she have been threatened or manipulated in that conversation? We know she told Oh everything about Picard’s plan to track down Maddox – was that under duress or was it an operative being debriefed by her superior? Time will tell!
Number 4: There are other Soji and Dahj lookalikes out there – and the Romulans – or the Borg – have encountered at least one already.
Ramdha seemed to recognise Soji – and reacted with terror.
Why did Ramdha say she recognised Soji? Was it simply confusion due to her damaged psychological state; a hangover from her assimilation? That’s possible – Hugh and others on the Artifact would certainly seem to think so. Soji isn’t convinced, though, and neither is Narek. In fact, he uses the phrase “Seb-Cheneb” – “the destroyer” – to refer to Soji, which was the accusation Ramdha levelled against her too.
That can’t be a coincidence. In Absolute Candor, Ramdha (in a holo-recording from before her assimilation) said that Seb-Cheneb was related to a day called “Ganmadan” – or “the annihilation”. The only way this day could be in the future is if we’re dealing with premonitions and time travel, but maybe it’s a reference to something in the past.
The only way Ramdha could recognise Soji is if she’d seen her before – or someone who looks identical. Picard said that Soji and Dahj are “more than twins”; they should be absolutely indistinguishable in appearance. So if the Romulans encountered a Soji-type android in the past, or if the Borg did, that could explain Ramdha’s reaction. If the Borg had encountered a Soji-type android, their knowledge of her appearance could have been conveyed to Ramdha while she was linked to the hive mind. And if the Romulans met such an android, it could be something Ramdha was familiar with through her academic work. Ramdha may have even shared a spot on the transport ship she was on with a Soji-type android – Soji knew a lot about the ship and its crew, after all, and that information has to have come from somewhere.
Narek and Rizzo know Soji’s true nature, and Narek at least is convinced that Soji is this Seb-Cheneb figure. Given that their plan is to find out from Soji the location of her creator’s base of operations or place of origin in order to go to that place and destroy other androids, the Zhat Vash seem to believe that Soji and Dahj aren’t the only two out there. So there could be more – and they could have been flitting about the galaxy for a number of years.
Number 5: Section 31 is involved with the story… somehow.
A black Section 31 badge – held by ex-Terran Empress Philippa Georgiou.
I have several Section 31 theories kicking around, so I thought I’d roll them all into one. With the organisation having featured very heavily in Discovery’s second season, and with a new Star Trek series in production based around Section 31, it would make a lot of sense from a production point of view to include them in some way in Picard too. It would be a consistent thread running through the modern-day Star Trek shows that would tie things together and give casual viewers at least a basic point of reference.
There are several ways Section 31 could crop up, in my opinion, and we’ll look at them in turn.
5 A: Section 31 hacked the synthetics and attacked Mars.
Does this moment show F8 being hacked by Section 31?
There wasn’t any new evidence regarding the Mars hack this time, but to summarise from my previous theory posts, I consider Section 31 one of two likely culprits for the atrocity, along with the Zhat Vash. They have the means, the technical ability, and the callousness to pull it off. And in addition, if any faction within the Federation would be opposed to helping the Romulans, given the history of warfare and distrust between them and the Federation, it’s Section 31. They consider themselves above such things as law and ideology, and would do anything in order to advance their cause – even killing Federation citizens.
5 B: Capt. Rios worked for Section 31 when he was aboard the Ibn Majid.
Chris Rios has since left Starfleet… but did he once work for Section 31?
Again, no new evidence for this this week. Last time, Capt. Rios told us about his past service as the executive officer aboard the Ibn Majid. Aside from his captain being killed (which we’ll look at in a moment), the standout bit of information from this is that the ship was erased from Starfleet records. That isn’t something we’d expect to see – but it absolutely fits with Section 31’s modus operandi.
5 C: Seven of Nine is working for Section 31.
Seven of Nine in Absolute Candor.
Seven of Nine had an incredibly powerful – if small – ship in Absolute Candor. It was able to disable the attacking bird-of-prey despite that ship being a lot larger and more powerful, and come to the aid of La Sirena, which on paper looked like a bigger and more powerful spacecraft.
In addition, she was able to track La Sirena while remaining hidden, and may have been tracking Picard since his earliest encounters with Dahj in Remembrance. One organisation that we know would be able to pull off a covert track-and-protect mission like that would be Section 31. Though why they’d want to protect Picard is unclear – and it wouldn’t make sense if they’re to be an antagonist.
However, Section 31 were always interested in technology and in unique individuals. As a human ex-Borg who spent a long time as part of the Collective, and who journeyed through the Delta Quadrant, Section 31 may well have wanted to have a chat with Seven of Nine after Voyager got back to Earth. Perhaps they recruited her.
Before the end of the season, with the Section 31 series on the horizon perhaps for early next year, I think we will at least hear some mention of the organisation, even if it isn’t in any of the ways listed above.
Number 6 A: The Romulans experimented with synthetics and/or AI in the past – with disastrous consequences.
A Zhat Vash assassin on Earth – why do they fear synthetic life so much?
Why do the Romulans fear synthetics and AI? And why do the Zhat Vash hate them with a burning passion? We saw the synths go rogue and attack Mars beginning with the Short Treks episode Children of Mars, so the idea of rogue AI is definitely a theme running through the series – one which plays on our own fears in the modern day.
The Zhat Vash have already won, essentially. A “galactic treaty” now prohibits the development of synthetic life, and while holograms seem to be exempt from that (for some reason), the Zhat Vash should be celebrating. Perhaps they see themselves as enforcers of the ban, or perhaps Starfleet turned to them when they believed Maddox was still alive and flouting the ban by continuing his work.
But the reason for their quasi-religious zeal, and for their crusade, is unknown. It doesn’t feel like altruism; like they’re trying to save the galaxy from something. It seems to be driven by a primal fear – they’re terrified of what could happen if synthetic life became commonplace. Why that is is the key question. In the past, did the Romulans try to develop some kind of synthetic that went rogue?
6 B: Could the Romulans’ experiments with synthetics and AI have been related to or stemming from the Federation’s work with Control – the AI in Discovery?
Control used nano-technology to take control of Capt. Leland.
Tying Picard to Discovery is something that I’m sure the creators want to do. It’s hard, given the 150-year time gap between the two series, but one possible way to do it would be to make the Romulans’ hatred and fear of AI be related in some way to the AI storyline from Discovery’s second season.
To briefly recap, Section 31 built an AI called Control in the mid-23rd Century, and after the Klingon war ended, Starfleet began to rely heavily on Control. The increased use led Control to develop an aggressive personality, and in its quest to become fully sentient it tried to gain access to data from an ancient lifeform that was stored in Discovery’s computer. If it had been able to do so, it would have chosen to wipe out all organic life in the galaxy, resulting in a bleak, lifeless future which Michael Burnham, Spock, and Burnham’s mother saw. The only way to prevent Control gaining this information was for Burnham and Discovery to travel into the future.
It seems logical to think that, if Starfleet were working on an AI at that time, other factions may have been doing so as well, leading to a kind of AI arms race in the mid-23rd Century. Starfleet’s AI went rogue, so perhaps the Romulans’ did too, if they’d been developing one at the same time. Or perhaps Control attacked Romulan ships and colonies in the same way it attacked Starfleet, and this is what led the Romulans to adopt their anti-synthetic position.
As Picard and Discovery were in production almost at the same moment, it would make sense to think we might see some story element cross over, and this could be one such possibility. We haven’t really seen any significant Discovery references thus far, at least not that I’ve noticed. Could they be saving it for a big reveal that Control is part of why the Romulans and Zhat Vash hate synthetics?
6 C: The Romulans’ AI/synthetic life experiments led to the creation of the Borg.
The Artifact is a Borg cube under Romulan control… but did they accidentally create the Borg?
One thing I’ve been wondering since the end of Discovery’s second season is why Control didn’t end up being a Borg origin story. All of the pieces were there, and right up to about two-thirds of the way through the final episode it seemed like a strong possibility. Could the reason be that Picard’s creative team stepped in while Discovery was already in production with their own Borg origin pitch, forcing the show to change tack?
Again tied into the Zhat Vash’s hatred and fear of synthetics, could it be that the reason they’re so determined to quash all synthetic life is because their own synthetic experiments culminated in the creation of the Borg? It may explain why the Romulans were able to disable a Borg cube while keeping it largely intact, a feat not even the Federation could manage. It could also explain why “all of the disordered are Romulans” – because something about Romulan physiology is present in the Borg and thus they’re affected differently and more severely when disconnected from the hive mind.
Laris says that the Zhat Vash are “far older” than the Tal Shiar. We know that the Romulans achieved interstellar spaceflight in the early years AD in our calendar, as that’s when they left Vulcan. We also know that a millennium or so later, the Borg only controlled “a handful” of systems in the Delta Quadrant, at least according to an episode of Voyager. So it’s possible, if somewhat messy, to fit it all together. Given the Borg’s unflinching nature, however, it raises questions of how the Romulans avoided total assimilation – as well as how and why the Borg ended up in the Delta Quadrant instead of somewhere closer to Romulus.
So those are all of the theories that are either new or were developed further in Absolute Candor. As I did last time, and for the sake of keeping everything in one place, I’m going to briefly recap the remaining theories I had from previous episodes that Absolute Candor neither advanced nor debunked.
Number 7: Picard is terminally ill with Irumodic Syndrome.
Picard is aware that his time is running out.
This disease was first mentioned in the finale of The Next Generation, which sees Picard visiting an alternate future timeline. Dr Benayoun in Maps and Legends brought Picard the bad news that he’s dying, and referred to the collection of possible diseases as “syndromes”. In Absolute Candor, Picard made reference to his declining health, saying he “may never pass this way again” when discussing the diversion to Vashti.
Number 8: Soji and Dahj’s necklaces are a deliberate symbol from their creators – designed to communicate with other synths and/or synth builders.
Soji, with her necklace on full display.
Setting aside my complaints about the necklace as a prop, why would Bruce Maddox give Soji and Dahj a very obvious symbol of their true nature to wear? Surely anyone in the know would recognise it – including anti-synth factions like the Zhat Vash. It’s the equivalent of painting a big bulls-eye on both of them – unless it was a deliberate, planned action to communicate with other synthetics or synth creators. Maddox may have said “look out for someone with this necklace”, and that would make it easier for others to make contact with Soji and Dahj – perhaps even to download or upload new information to them.
Number 9: The Trill doctor from Maps and Legends is going to end up assimiliated.
Soji’s new friend on board the Artifact.
There seemed to be a lot of foreshadowing of this in the only episode in which this Trill doctor has appeared so far, so I would not be surprised at all if she meets an unpleasant fate on board the Artifact.
Number 10: Bruce Maddox is somehow responsible for the attack on Mars.
Bruce Maddox preparing to give evidence against Data in The Next Generation Season 2 episode The Measure of a Man.
If this is the case it’s certainly an accident, but I suspect that something Maddox did or didn’t do led to the synths being easily hacked or reprogrammed, the result of which was the attack on Mars. This could be why he fled – not to avoid recrimination but to try to continue his work, hoping to undo some of the damage or alleviate his guilt.
Number 11: Starfleet is conspiring with the Zhat Vash.
Rizzo arrives to meet Commodore Oh.
Raffi is convinced that this is true, and that the conspiracy dates back to at least the attack on Mars. She didn’t know the Zhat Vash existed then, so she assumed it may have been the Tal Shiar or a rogue faction. But Commodore Oh is definitely working with the Zhat Vash, and though it’s possible she’s a Romulan agent herself, my money is on her being a Vulcan collaborator. Perhaps she enlisted their support to destroy the fleet because she felt helping the Romulans was a mistake, and the Zhat Vash were happy to collaborate as it would lead to the treaty prohibiting synthetic life. Or it’s possible her involvement is more recent, and she’s working with the Zhat Vash as they have the necessary experience when it comes to hunting synths.
Number 12: The captain Rios served under on the Ibn Majid is a character we’re familiar with from a past iteration of Star Trek.
Could Harry Kim or Chakotay have been in command of the Ibn Majid?
I gave a few names last time for who Rios’ captain might be. This character’s death is an important part of Rios’ story, as the death, and the brutal nature of it, scarred him and drove him away from Starfleet. The two main characters I think are contenders are Harry Kim and Chakotay, both from Voyager, simply because of Kim’s desire to become a captain and Chakotay’s command experience. There are other side characters it could be, but there are so many people we’ve met that meet the criteria – a male commanding officer – that there are too many to list!
Number 13: The synths were hacked.
The synths on Mars, prior to going rogue.
We’ve got a decent amount of evidence pointing to this. There’s the Commodore Oh conspiracy, Raffi’s comments, F8’s eyes in the flashbacks, the work crew with F8 describing him as “compromised”, and the very particular way the attack was carried out. It was a deliberate strike against a well-chosen target, and rather than continue the carnage, after Mars and the fleet were destroyed, the synths simply killed themselves. I mentioned earlier that Section 31 could be responsible, but it could very well be the Zhat Vash, who have been set up thus far as Picard’s primary antagonists, at least in this season.
So that’s it. Those are my extant theories at this point, four episodes in. It will be funny to come back to this series of posts when the series has ended and we have all the answers – I bet I got far more theories and ideas wrong than I got right! Absolute Candor was the first episode which I felt began to unravel some of the mysteries, and finding out more about Picard’s background in between Nemesis and Remembrance was both interesting and heartbreaking.
The next episode, Stardust City Rag, will be the second directed by Jonathan Frakes, and it looks like we might finally catch up with Bruce Maddox. Will he be able to help?
The fourth episode of Star Trek: Picard, titled Absolute Candor, is available to watch now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom and other countries and territories. All previous episodes from Season 1 are also available to watch. The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers for the first three episodes of Star Trek: Picard – as well as for The Measure of a Man from TNG Season 2.
When I was compiling two lists of episodes to watch prior to the release of Star Trek: Picard, I only included The Measure of a Man, from The Next Generation’s second season, as an afterthought in one of my “honourable mentions” sections. Despite having seen some androids briefly in one of the trailers, and even after having seen Mars come under attack in the Short Treks episode Children of Mars, I still wasn’t convinced this episode would be important. I wound up including it in my second list of episodes, but not because of androids or Bruce Maddox, but because of how it showed an aspect of Picard’s character – his staunch defence of the rights of different life-forms.
We now know, of course, that Maddox has a key role in Star Trek: Picard, though whether he’s actually going to appear in person or is merely a narrative force is unclear right now. And of course we’ve learnt a lot more about synthetics and the development and subsequent prohibition of synthetic life. Thus, at this point, The Measure of a Man warrants a re-watch and a closer re-examination.
Watching an episode so long after its original airdate, and after we’ve seen so much Star Trek content that was produced subsequently, it’s worth trying to stay objective and be aware of where the three characters we’ll be focusing on are at this point in the timeline. Obviously Maddox was a guest star, and aside from a reference in the fourth season, was never seen or heard about again until Picard premiered. But Data and Picard are arguably different than we might remember considering how early we are in The Next Generation’s run. This episode aired before Q Who introduced the Borg, before Picard was assimilated, and before Data had really developed a strong personality that extended beyond his original programming.
Data plays poker with his crewmates in the opening scene from The Measure of a Man.
The Next Generation operated differently to Discovery and Picard – it was much more of an ensemble show with each crewmember having their own stories and episodes, rather than focusing primarily on one character’s story. So Data and Picard, by this point in the show, still have significant parts of their backstories unexplored.
The episode opens, as many episodes of The Next Generation did, with Picard narrating his captain’s log. Nothing too exciting – the Enterprise-D is due to dock at a starbase, pick up and drop off some members of the crew, and switch out some science experiments that have presumably been running in the background. On board, we see Data, Riker, O’Brien, La Forge, and Dr Pulaski playing poker. Data seems confused by some of the “superstition” that the others apply to their playing – he can’t quite grasp the concept of “luck” in a game of chance. Again, it’s worth remembering how early we are in Data’s story! This might be the first game of poker he’s played, and just as he struggled with the others feeling lucky or unlucky, he was completely unprepared for bluffing – it’s such an illogical way of playing, after all.
In this moment, Data is still very much a machine, regarding the game as “simple”, based around mathematical probability and assuming that everyone will play logically. Having this sequence be the setup for an episode about taking him apart to find out what makes him tick is an interesting choice; we see Data at his most mechanical, but we also see in him an adaptability and a desire to learn and grow. The costuming choice to give Data a poker visor was also a great call – he’s approximating and mimicking human behaviour, but without fully understanding it.
Seeing Data easily outmanoeuvred by Riker – despite holding a better hand – emphasises how much he still has left to learn. Riker wasn’t betting on the strength of his cards, he was simply betting that Data would fold – Data thus missed a key element of playing poker. But he learns from this experience, much like a child would.
As an interesting aside, the next shot shows the Enterprise-D approaching Starbase 173. The model used for the Starbase was in fact a re-use of the Regula One station from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and is virtually unchanged in its appearance (except for, I believe, its scale in relation to the Enterprise-D). This model was itself a re-use from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. With CGI generally being so good nowadays, it’s almost hard to imagine a time when a single model would have to be re-used over and over again – and The Measure of a Man was not the last appearance of this model by any means.
Aboard the station, Picard is reunited with Phillippa Louvois, accompanied by a very romantic soundtrack. He seems very surprised to see her, and she is clearly an old flame of his – someone who he didn’t part with on good terms judging by their conversation! But the passage of time can be a great healer, and where other people may have held a grudge, Picard is amused, and maybe even happy to see her again. The credits roll, and then we’re back with Picard and Louvois, sitting down to have a longer conversation.
Louvois holds the rank of captain – putting her on equal footing with Picard – and her uniform matches his. She’s not the first woman captain featured in The Next Generation – there was at least one other in Season 1 – but she gets a significant amount of screen time here. She explains that she’s the JAG (judge advocate general – i.e. a military judge, or in this case a Starfleet judge) for this sector, and the way she talks about it makes it seem like a remote part of the Federation, far from any other Starbases. It’s the frontier!
The Enterprise-D at Starbase 173.
We find out about Louvois’ history with Picard – she was the officer responsible for his court-martial after his previous command was lost. We’ve seen the Stargazer before in The Next Generation, in the episode The Battle, and we also know that Dr Crusher’s husband was serving on the Stargazer under Picard’s command when he was killed. Louvois says that a court-martial is “standard procedure” when a ship is lost, but Picard accuses her of being overly aggressive in her prosecution of him – and says that’s why she left Starfleet for a time. There’s a very complicated history here. Louvois calls Picard out on his arrogance – which to be fair, he actually was in this scene. But the chemistry and sexual tension between them is noticeable – there’s much more to their relationship than something professional or friendly.
After the awkwardness of seeing Picard called a “damn sexy man”, an Admiral approaches and Louvois excuses herself – but not before taking the opportunity to try to embarrass Picard in front of their superior. The Admiral introduces Commander Bruce Maddox, but they don’t immediately discuss Maddox’s proposal as the Admiral wants a tour of the Enterprise while it’s visiting his new Starbase. Maddox joins the Admiral on the tour, and they visit the Enterprise’s bridge. There is some discussion of the Starbase’s location being near the Neutral Zone, but the focus is clearly on Maddox, cutting to a close-up of him staring at Data.
Maddox interrupts the small-talk about the Romulans and the legacy of past starships Enterprise, clearly impatient. The Admiral tells Picard that Maddox is here “to work on your android”, then promptly leaves the bridge. Data, Picard, and Maddox have a conversation set to a backdrop of very tense music. Clearly all is not well. Maddox, it turns out, opposed Data’s entry into Starfleet Academy some years prior, claiming Data was not a sentient being and was thus not eligible. Picard asks what Maddox plans to do and he replies calmly that he is “going to disassemble Data.”
The way Maddox has been set up thus far is of someone who is impatient and impersonal – arguably lacking in empathy. He refers to Data as “it”, a term one might use for an inanimate object. Data is, anatomically speaking, male. In the second episode of The Next Generation’s first season, The Naked Now, Data sleeps with Tasha Yar and though we don’t see it on screen it’s confirmed that he is, for all intents and purposes, male. So Maddox dehumanising Data in this way, while subtle, shows us the kind of person he is.
Maddox explains his reasoning in the next scene – seeing Data when he first applied to the Academy sparked a desire in Maddox to learn more about the work of Dr Soong, Data’s creator. His intention is to dismantle Data, learning how he functions, in order to recreate him and produce copies. Maddox believes himself to be close to a breakthrough, and Data is intrigued at the prospect, in part no doubt because he’s been essentially alone as the only one of his kind. Riker, on the other hand, seems much more concerned. Data asks Maddox a technobabble-laden question, and when Maddox replies that he hasn’t been able to get the basics of a positronic brain working, Data’s tone changes from interest to concern – and after a couple more questions from both Riker and Picard, Data pipes up and says that Maddox’s research is inadequate. Picard says he will not allow Data to undergo the procedure, but Maddox has a trump card – Data is to be reassigned under his command.
Maddox makes his case to Picard – as well as to Riker and Data – in the briefing room of the Enterprise-D.
In the next scene, Data arrives in Picard’s ready room and the two have a conversation about what to do regarding Maddox. Data says he will not undergo the procedure, but Picard is playing devil’s advocate – wondering aloud whether there is merit to Maddox’s idea. Data uses the example of La Forge’s visor, and claims that his status as a non-human is why Picard would even consider letting Maddox experiment on him. Picard dismisses him but is clearly troubled by the implications. He gets to work reading Starfleet case law regarding officer transfers.
After what must be some time, Picard visits Louvois in her office aboard the Starbase, and is clearly very angry about Data’s forced transfer. The usual calmness we associate with Picard is gone, replaced by a firey demeanour borne perhaps from a combination of frustration at the legalese he’s been trying to wade through and his previous conversation with Data. After all, Data did essentially say that Picard and Maddox are being racist (or species-ist) in their treatment of him. Louvois gives Picard a “nuclear option” for getting Data out of the procedure – his resignation. There’s no other way to stop the transfer, and as Picard doesn’t trust Maddox, this seems to be the only way. Again the complicated past between Picard and Louvois complicates their conversation, but the advice she gives him is sound. And as she’s the senior officer in the sector for legal matters, that should be it.
Back aboard the Enterprise-D, Data is packing his belongings, and pauses briefly over a hologram of Tasha Yar. Maddox enters the room while Data has his back turned, and picks up a book that Data had been reading. Barging in without ringing the door chime is another way Maddox demonstrates to the audience that he doesn’t regard Data as warranting the same rights or respect as a human or other life-form. He tries to reassure Data that his knowledge and memories will remain intact despite the procedure, but Data retorts that the facts may remain, but the feelings associated with them will be lost. He then uses the example of the poker game from earlier in the episode – that the moment-to-moment reality, the essence of his experiences, is not just a case of data and facts. Maddox, Data claims, does not have the necessary expertise to preserve Data’s memories and personality.
It’s at this moment that Data explains that he has resigned. Maddox becomes angry and tells him that one way or another he will serve under his command – and undergo the procedure. It’s clear that Maddox’s attempts at gentle persuasion were all for show; this is how he really feels. Believing Data to be a “thing”, an object not a person, he pays lip service to Data’s feelings while not understanding them or even recognising their existence. In the next scene, Picard and Maddox are in Louvois’ office, where Maddox has started a legal process to prevent Data leaving Starfleet, saying that as a non-sentient being he cannot resign of his own volition.
Maddox presents the argument that if he’s successful, every Federation starship could have its own Data on board, allowing for much greater exploration and potentially even saving lives. He’s “sick of hearing about rights” – a shocking statement in and of itself – and selfishly makes the point that this is his life’s work, and he doesn’t want it to be ruined by what he sees as the ignorance of Picard and Louvois. Data, in Maddox’s view, is “just” a machine, and because of that does not have the right to either refuse to undergo the procedure or to resign.
While Picard listens in, Maddox makes his case to Capt. Louvois.
Picard has a great line here: “Starfleet is not an organisation that ignores its own regulations when they become inconvenient.” In Remembrance, the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, this is essentially his own reasoning for leaving Starfleet. He felt that they had an obligation to help the Romulans and failed to do so – ignoring their own regulations, and a promise made, because it had become difficult in the aftermath of the attack on Mars.
Maddox manages to convince Louvois that there may be law to support the notion that Data – like the Enterprise’s computer – is not a “person” in the legal sense, but is merely the property of Starfleet. Picard urges her to use the same passion she showed at his court-martial. Though Maddox and Picard don’t interact much here, as they mostly direct their remarks to Louvois, it’s clear that they have very quickly developed a loathing for one another. Picard feels Maddox is essentially ignoring Data’s rights as a sentient being, and Maddox believes that Picard doesn’t understand the issue and is unfairly getting in the way of his work.
Back aboard the Enterprise, Data is attending a farewell party. Riker, Troi, Worf, Pulaski, and Wesley are all present in Ten-Foward, and Data receives several gifts from his friends, but La Forge is sat alone, away from the group. He’s feeling very down about the whole situation. In this moment, we see Data at his most human – La Forge is arguably his best friend among the crew, and when he says he will miss him, he really means it.
Louvois summons Riker and Picard to tell them that, according to her research and legal precedent from 300 years ago, Data is legally the property of Starfleet and not a person. Picard challenges her ruling, but the fact that the Starbase is new and she has no one working with her threatens to cause a problem. The solution is that Picard and Riker will take on the role of advocates – Picard arguing for Data and Riker against him.
This is the point in the episode which is the most questionable, I feel, as a point of plot. Riker is chosen to prosecute Maddox’s case as a senior officer, but Maddox himself is of equal rank to Riker and would be a better candidate – especially as Riker states very clearly that he can’t advocate a position he fundamentally disagrees with. I’m no expert on the law, let alone on military law, but surely there must be someone else who could have taken on the position. Or, if not, it should have been possible to send for lawyers from elsewhere – Maddox’s experiment is not time-sensitive and could have waited for the case being resolved. As it is, however, Riker and Picard agree to proceed with the case.
La Forge wishes Data good luck at his going-away party aboard the Enterprise-D.
As the scene ends, I think we see the real genius of setting up Louvois as having history with Picard. If he’d been facing off against a random, faceless judge or JAG, we would know the stakes but we’d be confident in his abilities and ultimate victory in the case. But knowing Louvois is a “hardball”, someone who prosecuted Picard aggressively in the past regarding his conduct on the Stargazer, it raises the stakes and there’s a real sense in this moment that Picard and Data could lose. Because we’ve always seen Picard to be a rule-following officer, an exemplar of Starfleet’s code of conduct, and an all-round upstanding captain and diplomat, knowing that Louvois went after him in the past makes her seem all the more aggressive in her handling of the law. We get the sense that things could end badly, that the one factor Picard has no control over in the case – the judge – is someone who will work hard against him and Data. This information, conveyed only in a few brief lines of dialogue in their earlier two encounters in the episode, has set the stage and told us all we need to know.
Data again visits Picard in his ready room, and Picard explains the ruling and the challenge he’s making to it. He offers Data the opportunity to select another officer to provide his defence, but Data declines – an important moment given the earlier conversation they had in the same room. We then see Riker studying the law in preparation for the case, feeling pretty rotten about what he has to do. He looks up Data’s technical schematics, smiling to himself as he thinks he’s found something – then his mood and the background music turn sour as he realises the implications. Riker doesn’t want, after all, to win the case. And getting caught up in it for a moment and allowing himself to feel excitement at a breakthrough ends up making him feel worse about the task.
At the hearing, Riker calls Data to take the stand. Could Data have refused, as he’s essentially being compelled to serve as both evidence and a witness for his own prosecution? I think that’s a matter of law again! And if he did refuse to take the stand, would there have had to have been another case to answer the question of whether he has the right to refuse to testify? Regardless, Data takes the stand and his commendations and decorations from Starfleet are listed by the Starbase computer (notably not the usual computer voice). Riker asks the simple question “what are you?” to which Data responds that he is an android. Riker pushes him for the definition of the word, which includes a sentence that androids “resemble” humans, but are obviously not, in fact, human. He then pushes Data on his creator, making the point that Data was artificially made.
None of this, really, seems relevant to the hearing. Data’s nature is known to all parties and his defence does not depend on proving himself to be anything other than an android. But for dramatic effect it’s important, as essentially the fact that Data was man-made is the entirety of the prosecution’s case against him. Interestingly, and completely unrelated to the events of the episode, Data states that his total memory capacity is “800 quadrillion bits”. If a 24th Century “bit” is assumed to be the same as today’s computer bits, that would put his memory at 800 petabits, or 100 petabytes as there are eight bits to one byte. While this is a lot of memory, it’s not as huge as it may sound even by today’s standards. It’s roughly an order of magnitude less than the most up-to-date estimates of the size of the data stored on the internet, for example. And that’s something which is growing all the time. It is, however, much greater than the capacity of a human brain or memory – though the comparison is an inexact one as we don’t store and process memories and information in the same form. But there are computers and servers in the world today which can store as much or more information that Data can – something which would obviously have been hard to conceive when The Measure of a Man aired in 1989, before the invention of what we know of as the internet today.
Riker looks up Data’s schematics in preparation for the hearing.
As Riker continues with his demonstrations, Maddox is seen smiling to himself – he seems to think the two of them have the case sewn up. Data is forced to bend a steel rod to demonstrate his physical prowess to the hearing, and Riker then removes his forearm and hand – apologising to Data as he does so. Riker then tries to explain that Data was made “to serve human needs”; that is his sole purpose. Of course, having already seen Data with his “brother” in the first season episode Datalore, we know this isn’t really true. Lore was a companion to the colonists on Omicron Theta, and Data was designed to be so too. Riker has also fallen into the habit of referring to Data as “it” in this moment, and as he continues his speech about Data he walks behind him – hitting a hidden “off switch”, which we’d previously seen Data show to Dr Crusher and others in the aforementioned episode Datalore.
Picard and Louvois are both shocked by this, and Riker sits back down. He clearly thinks that this is a case-winning move, and the look of shame and self-loathing on his face confirms that. Maddox smiles, smugly. Picard requests a recess and tells Guinan, back on board the Enterprise, that Riker’s words in the hearing “almost” convinced him of Data’s status.
Guinan’s response, that if Data is ruled to be merely property, it could pave the way for “whole generations of disposable people” warrants a closer look. And we have to step back and consider The Measure of a Man and its place in our own history. In 1989, we’re 25 years out from the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act which put an end to legal segregation in parts of the United States. In living memory for a significant portion of the audience was segregation – itself a hangover from the days of slavery. And this line, delivered in a very calm manner by a black woman, absolutely references slavery without her ever using the term by name. The implication for Picard is clear – if he loses the case, and androids are ruled to be property and not people, it’s the first step to the creation of a slave underclass in the Federation.
This moment changes the way Picard approaches the case. The word “property”, he believes, is merely a euphemism for slavery. And he returns to work with a renewed sense of purpose. Again, given his state of mind in the first three episodes of Star Trek: Picard, I’d direct anyone who says that Picard “would never get depressed” to look to this moment and others from The Next Generation to see how he can become defeatist and sit in self-pity. It took Guinan here to give him the kick he needed, just as it took Dahj to snap him out of how he’d been feeling in Remembrance.
During a recess in the hearing, Picard is counselled by Guinan.
Back at the hearing, Picard says that humans are simply “machines of a different type” to Data, and his mechanical status is not relevant to the case. Picard asks Data to return to the stand, and presents him with the bag he packed earlier in the episode – demonstrating that Data has a semi-emotional attachment to things like his medals and a book gifted to him from Picard. The final item from Data’s bag is the hologram of Tasha Yar, and after some gentle prompting from Picard, Data discloses he and Yar had been intimate – to the surprise of Louvois and Maddox.
Maddox then takes the stand, and Picard runs him through three tests for sentience. This is also, by the way, the first time the Daystrom Institute is named on screen. Maddox lists three criteria for sentience – intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness. Picard proceeds to quiz him on why these apply to him – a human – and not to Data. Maddox is forced to concede that Data is intelligent and that he’s self-aware, as Data’s intelligence was never in question and he’s clearly aware of his place in the hearing and the potential consequences it could bring.
Maddox then talks briefly about his plans to disassemble Data – to rebuild him and thousands more like him. Picard challenges that by doing so, he will be creating a race of beings – a race that meet two of Maddox’s own criteria for sentience. If there’s even a chance that Data could meet the third, would the Federation have created a race of slaves? This is where we see Picard at the most passionate he gets, not just in the context of this episode but in almost all of his appearances in Star Trek to date. Aside from the emotional reaction he has to the Borg in First Contact, I can’t remember seeing him more energetic and involved. He cares for Data’s rights, but his conversation with Guinan shifted his whole perspective on the case, and now he has an even greater passion and reason to win. He admits to the court that he doesn’t know whether Data has consciousness, nor what that would mean if a race of Datas were created from Maddox’s work. But the implication he makes, as Guinan did earlier, is clear – they’re on a cliff-edge, with slavery at the bottom.
Picard also turns on its head the Starfleet mantra – “to seek out new life”. “There it sits,” he says as he gestures to Data. As he concludes his speech we see Riker smile for the first time since the hearing began. He’s never seen Picard so animated, and he clearly thinks the argument is a case-winner. And in short order he’s proven right. Louvois says she must allow Data the freedom to explore his life and consciousness for himself, and without explicitly ruling on his “personhood”, she rules that he is not the property of Starfleet and that he has the right to choose.
Bruce Maddox takes the stand.
Maddox and Data have a moment of semi-reconciliation at the end of the hearing, as Maddox cancels the order to have Data transferred, and Data tells him to keep working and suggests that he may be able to agree to the procedure in future when more work has been undertaken. Maddox, disappointed by the ruling no doubt, appears to have had his opinion and perspective on Data shifted at least slightly by Picard’s argument – emphasised by his use of the word “he” right at the end.
Picard invites Louvois to dinner – as they reconcile too. Back aboard the Enterprise, Riker has declined to attend a party in Data’s favour, feeling that he came too close to costing his friend his life. But Data reminds him that if he had refused to participate, the ruling would have been made against him, and the episode ends with the two of them heading to the party.
So, when considering Star Trek: Picard, what do we get from The Measure of a Man? Obviously we see Dr Maddox, some thirty-five years prior to the events of the new series. We see his attitude toward androids – he considers them to be tools, not people. But we also see his attitude shift right at the end, swayed by Picard’s argument and the time spent with Data over the course of the episode. Maddox, despite moments of smugness, isn’t a classic villain. Instead, the episode shows what is basically a difference of opinion. Maddox, having studied androids from a theoretical standpoint for years, but with no practical real-world experience in living and working with Data holds the opinion that Data cannot be sentient. But Picard, Riker, and others, despite not having the same technical background as Dr Maddox believe Data to be their friend despite his synthetic nature. The episode thus shows the difference between theory and practice – and why practice is usually better and more appropriate!
Maddox obviously continued his work, as Data encouraged him to do. In the episode Data’s Day from Season 4, he dictates a letter to Maddox, confirming this. However, by the time of Star Trek: Nemesis, which takes place around fifteen years later, Data is still believed to be the only extant android – Lore having been disassembled. The discovery of B4 – an earlier version of Data – in that film is thus presented as a big deal. However, as we now know from Short Treks and Star Trek: Picard that teams of androids – albeit rather basic ones from a personality point of view – were working on Mars only a few years after Nemesis, Maddox must have been quite far along in his work by that point. It’s also possible that the discovery and disassembly of B4 provided Maddox with some of the missing pieces of the puzzle that he’d hoped to gain by dismantling Data.
Watching The Measure of a Man divorced from all thought of Picard is difficult, especially as we’re partway through the first season of the new show. But taken as a standalone episode, it’s an interesting piece of drama, the kind Star Trek has always been good at. Without any battles, explosions, or really any action at all, the episode manages to be riveting, especially in the hearing scenes. And of course it’s a great example of Star Trek using its science fiction setting to talk about real-world issues. In this case the issue was slavery rather than artificial intelligence, but looking back on it knowing the way technology has changed since, it can absolutely be viewed through than lens too.
Maddox was, aside from his single reference a couple of years later, a one-off character who served a fairly one-dimensional purpose for most of the episode. Bringing him back in a big way for Picard is something I absolutely was not expecting, and whether we get to see him on screen or not, his influence is all over the show. The Measure of a Man is not required viewing for Picard. The new show is structured and written in such a way that the role Maddox takes in the story could be swapped out for any other name and the story would be identical. But it does provide interesting background and backstory.
The development of a “race” of androids was clearly successful in the years after Nemesis.
Having had Maddox’s name dropped multiple times across the first three episodes, I would be surprised to learn we aren’t going to see him at all. A single reference would’ve been a cute throwback to The Measure of a Man and Data’s Day; a wink to returning fans. But with him being set up as perhaps the creative force behind Soji and Dahj, and with tracking him down being the driving force for the current storyline, I think he practically has to appear – at least in some capacity, even if it’s just in recordings – before the end of the season.
The legal precedent laid down in this episode was clearly not applied throughout the Federation. In the Voyager episode Author, Author, not only does The Doctor – a sentient hologram – have to undergo a very similar legal hearing, but we learn that thousands of Emergency Medical Holograms are being used as labourers in mines and on vessels across the Federation. And of course, in Picard we see that Maddox had been somewhat successful in creating his “slave race” of android labourers. There are disturbing implications there, which I wonder if the show will touch on in later episodes.
I enjoyed going back to The Measure of a Man. I wouldn’t like to guess how many times I’ve seen it already; as with most of the rest of The Next Generation and its spin-offs I’ve watched and re-watched it on a number of occasions.
The fourth episode of Picard premieres tomorrow here in the UK – though if you’re in America you may have seen it already! I’m looking forward to seeing if Picard and his new crew stay on Maddox’s tail as they head to Freecloud.
The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Picard – are the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the Star Trek franchise, including Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 and the first three episodes of Star Trek: Picard.
As part of a series of articles I wrote leading up to the release of Star Trek: Picard, I covered the Borg from an in-universe perspective, as well as looking at some possible options for their role in the new series. You can read that article by clicking or tapping here. While Star Trek: Picard remains a mysterious show even now that we’re three episodes in, the Borg’s role has been somewhat on the sidelines so far, as we’ve really only seen a few former Borg and the disabled Borg cube used as a setting.
For a while I’ve been wanting to look at the Borg from a storytelling perspective, because I think they’re one of Star Trek’s most interesting villains. Not only that, but they have an analogue outside of the franchise which we can compare them to – zombies. Both the Borg and zombies fill a similar role in the stories they appear in, and both can fall victim to the same storytelling pitfalls.
Let’s start with the most obvious comparison – and why both the Borg and zombies are a frightening adversary for any heroes to be pitted against. With the exception of the Borg’s first appearance in The Next Generation’s second season episode Q Who, the Borg’s sole purpose has been assimilation. By forcibly injecting their nano-technology into both machines and living organisms, practically anything they touch can become part of the Borg Collective in a matter of moments. Zombies are a low-tech, biological version – in almost every zombie story, the zombie infection spreads through biting. Thus both Borg and zombies don’t just kill, they turn everyone the heroes lose into another enemy to fight. And the infection or invasion can never be truly over until every last individual is defeated, because if even one Borg drone or one zombie remains, there’s the possibility for them to attack others and start all over again.
The Borg take on a similar role in some respects to zombies – such as those in The Walking Dead.
This one factor – that every friend lost doesn’t just reduce the numbers on the heroes’ side, but increases the number of enemies to fight – is huge. It means that a story featuring a Borg or zombie attack is completely different in tone and scope from any other war or invasion or battle that we might see in science fiction. And it’s a frightening prospect, seeing allies quite literally turned into enemies before the very eyes of the heroes. In fact, it’s arguable that the Borg’s appearances are as close as Star Trek as come to crossing over into the horror genre. The underlying premise, certainly, would be at home there. And if ViacomCBS ever chose to go down that route, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a Borg-themed horror film or series.
One of the great things about entertainment and storytelling is that it’s subjective. The audience can interpret themes and points in a story in different ways, and anyone who’s ever taken a literature class can attest that! When I was in school and in the few literature classes I took at university, my teachers were always talking about analogies and themes and metaphors. And when it comes to the Borg, there are different interpretations as to a real-world analogue.
One of the most obvious is communism. Despite what’s often been said, Star Trek doesn’t really depict a “communist utopia”. The economy of the 23rd and 24th Centuries has always been deliberately ambiguous, and really I think it’s fairer to describe it as a post-scarcity economy, thanks in large part to technologies like food replicators and interstellar travel. Humans in Star Trek can still, for example, own and inherit property – like we see Joseph Sisko and the Picard family do – something which indicates that we’re not looking at communism. But that’s rather beside the point. The Borg, to get back on topic, with their lack of individuality and aggressively expansionist mindset, are arguably a metaphor for Western fears of communist states during the latter part of the Cold War. The history of Star Trek is littered with Cold War metaphors, and at the time the Borg were created and debuted on screen in 1989, the Berlin Wall hadn’t yet fallen and the Soviet Union was still the world’s “other” superpower.
Since the concept of the “walking dead” came to mainstream attention in the 1960s, critics have said the same thing about zombies, too – that they’re a metaphor for America’s communist adversaries. The comparison plays on a crude stereotype – that all people in a communist state are brainwashed and forced to do the state’s bidding. However, my intention isn’t to critique the concept, merely to acknowledge its existence. In a very real sense, part of what makes zombies and the Borg so frightening is the idea of losing oneself, and suffering “a fate worse than death”. For many in the Cold War era, ideas like communist infiltrators and brainwashed citizens returning from overseas – including former prisoners of war – were genuine concerns, if somewhat overstated and exaggerated.
Picard’s transformation into Locutus of Borg was shocking.
It’s those underlying real-world fears that give power to the Borg when they appear. They wouldn’t be so scary if it weren’t for a shared fear we have of losing our identity – stoked by fears from the Cold War era, perhaps, but just as relevant today in the age of radicalisation via social media. How many young men – and it is almost always young men – have been involved in mass shootings or terrorist attacks after being radicalised online? The concept of brainwashing – and our collective fear of it – is still very much alive in society today. The emphasis has shifted from the state to individuals, perhaps, but the basic fear remains the same. And it continues to make villains like the Borg intimidating.
When it comes to turning that into an exciting, heart-stopping story, though, it’s all too easy to fall flat. What we’ve seen in Star Trek, especially in Star Trek: Voyager, is the overuse of the Borg. The same thing has happened to the zombies in The Walking Dead, and can happen to other villains in other series too – the Daleks from Doctor Who come to mind as another example of overuse. The fundamental problem with having the heroes outsmart and defeat the same villain too many times is that they simply lose their fear factor – no matter how powerful it may once have been and what underlying social factors are propping it up.
Every victory over the same opponent adds to a feeling that victory for the heroes is inevitable. And in many cases, we know that. Even in a series like Game of Thrones, which could be utterly unpredictable, nobody was genuinely expecting that the Night King would be victorious – we all knew that somehow, some of the heroes would survive and find a way to win. That didn’t make the story any less exciting, and nor is Star Trek: First Contact any less exciting for first-time viewers who expect Picard and his crew to find a way to defeat the Borg. The tension and drama comes on a moment-to-moment basis, and also, as in many stories, part of the enjoyment comes from the journey even if the overall destination – victory, in this case – is known.
But when the same scenario plays out over and over again – a scrappy Starfleet crew faces off against impossible odds and beats the Borg, for example – it gets less and less tense and less and less dramatic with each new revision. When we see the Borg lose to Janeway for the fourth or fifth time having already seen them bested twice by Picard, they become stale, and the stories in which they appear become uninteresting.
The addition of the Borg Queen is symptomatic of this. After several prior Borg stories, and with their first big-screen appearance looming, there must have been some discussion about how to make the Borg intimidating again. It wasn’t enough to have this faceless mass any more, the Borg needed something new in order to fit the bill as big-screen villains. Part of that stems from the need to keep the story cinematic; to have those moments where Picard is traumatised by his memories of the Borg Queen, to have Data tempted and taunted by her in a way a nameless drone couldn’t, and to be able to have dialogue between heroes and villains which is often a tense yet satisfying part of storytelling in and of itself. But a significant part of the Borg Queen’s role in First Contact and subsequently has been to rejuvenate the Borg as a faction from a storytelling perspective.
The Borg Queen in First Contact.
Telling unique and different Borg stories has become as much of a problem for Star Trek as making the zombies scary again is for The Walking Dead. Unlike that series – which I’d absolutely argue had a natural lifespan (forgive the pun) of about four seasons and should have ended at that point – Star Trek has a much richer galaxy to explore and plenty of other villains to play with. The Borg are not essential to Star Trek in the way that zombies are to zombie stories – and that’s definitely been a saving grace.
With the exception of the Star Trek: Enterprise episode Regeneration in 2003, there hadn’t been any Borg stories in Star Trek since Voyager’s finale in 2001 – and none which were set further forward in the Star Trek timeline. After an absence of close to two decades, then, there’s an argument to be made that enough time has passed for a renewed look at the Borg. For new fans and younger fans who didn’t see every single appearance in order, and for more casual viewers who may not have seen any Star Trek episode or film since the turn of the millennium, that’s probably a fair point. But even then, because the Borg are essentially “space zombies”, in an era where zombie stories have become a television and cinematic genre in their own right with dozens of examples, perhaps we’re still burnt out.
Here’s where the Borg’s trump card comes into play – they aren’t just a metaphor for our fears of communism or brainwashing. Because of their technological nature, they can absolutely be an analogy for our overreliance on technology and for our fears of the evolution of technology in the future. This is what Star Trek: Discovery’s second season did, very successfully in my opinion, with the Control AI. Now I’m absolutely convinced that Control was meant to tie in somehow to the Borg and their origins when the story was originally written. Why that angle was scrapped (if indeed it has been wholly scrapped) is unclear, but it could be related to the Borg being an integral part of the story of Star Trek: Picard. That’s my current theory on that, at any rate.
The whole point of the Control storyline in Discovery was that artificial intelligence might not be a good thing to pursue. When an AI surpasses humanity in its abilities, it becomes inherently unpredictable. It can overwrite its own programming and could turn on us. This isn’t just a science fiction story trope – scientists like Stephen Hawking have expressed genuine concern that an AI could ultimately be harmful. Technological progress has advanced so rapidly from even when The Next Generation was first on the air and computers were basically glorified calculators and typewriters to the modern day where everyone has an internet-enabled super-smart camera-and-microphone connected-to-everything always-on computer-phone about their person 24/7. Those changes have, thus far at least, been a net positive for humanity. In Africa, for example, the rise of mobile phones has meant many of the world’s poorest citizens have access to the internet and information, as well as the ability to send and receive money securely without relying on banking. But with change comes fear, or at least a sense of uncertainty. Discovery played on those fears and concerns about the pace of technological change quite expertly.
The nanobots Control used to “assimilate” Capt. Leland are reminiscent of Borg technology, and play on the same fears of out-of-control AI.
The decision to have Control be an invention of Section 31 was another masterstroke. Since Edward Snowden and Julian Assange (and many others, of course) have demonstrated to the world that major governmental organisations run hidden technological surveillance on, well, everyone, mistrust of technology and technological communication has only grown. The idea that we’re all being watched all the time by “big brother” in the various three-letter agencies, and their international equivalents, has caused a lot of people to be incredibly uneasy about technology in general. Once again, Discovery tapped into this to great effect.
To get back to the Borg, regardless of whether or not Control was meant to be related to them in some way, the same principle is at work. The relentless march of technology could see us literally plugging ourselves into some giant network of machines, or augmenting our bodies with technological upgrades. In a sense, we already do. Our phones and computers are arguably an extension of ourselves, we’re almost constantly networked to billions of others via the internet, with all of their experiences and information only a few keystrokes away, and as medical science advances we’re able to replace defective body parts – like hips, for example – with synthetic replacements. The Borg are simply a few steps further along from we currently are in their embrace of technology.
For many people, the unstoppable march of technology is something they find intimidating. It means that the future is always changing – and people in general have an inbuilt mistrust or fear of change. Thus the Borg stand out in stories that feature them as a kind of nightmarish vision of a future gone wrong.
By playing on these two deep-rooted, almost instinctive fears, the Borg are truly a frightening opponent for the heroes in Star Trek stories to face.
Keeping that fear alive is a task for the new creators of Star Trek. In Discovery, Control hit the reset button by showing us at least a potential precursor to the Borg we’ve seen before. Enterprise threw 24th Century Borg against a 22nd Century crew – not that it was always apparent, but that was part of the goal of that episode. And finally, in Picard we have the Borg absent from their own setting – a derelict cube being slowly picked apart and studied. There’s an inherent creepiness to the aesthetic of the cube – a kind of cold, inhuman feel, amplified by the lack of windows and endless maze of identical rooms and corridors. If the showrunners wanted to play up that aspect they absolutely could, and it will be interesting to see where Picard takes this angle.
What has to be avoided, however, is the trap that ensnared Voyager’s Borg episodes. Repetition leads to a loss of that fear factor, and without it the Borg become stale and boring – it would be better to see the faction utterly defeated in a climactic battle than to have them crop up again and again in random episodes over several seasons. The serialised nature of current Star Trek storytelling, which has replaced the episodic, “monster-of-the-week” format, means that we’re less likely to see individual Borg-centric episodes any more. And that’s probably a good thing overall – despite my personal preference for episodic storytelling in Star Trek.
The episode Q Who introduced the Borg for the first time.
At the end of the day, the question for the Star Trek franchise and its new creative team is what to do with the Borg in future. We saw what I’m certain was an abortive attempt to show some kind of origin story in Discovery’s second season, and now in Picard we have the creepy abandoned cube as a setting, as well as the return of Seven of Nine and Hugh as liberated ex-Borg. Both of these approaches are different, and that’s good. As great as The Best of Both Worlds and First Contact were, those stories were lightning in a bottle – not something that can be recaptured or repeated, at least not to the same effect. And the way stories approach and treat the Borg will have to change if they’re to be as intimidating as we want them to be. That doesn’t mean the Borg have to change in their core outlook or philosophy; doing so would mean they’re no longer the villain we remember, after all. But it does mean they have to be written in a different way and that their inclusion in future Star Trek stories has to be very carefully considered.
In a sense, the Borg’s greatest and most frightening aspect – their relentlessness and faceless nature – is also part of their undoing when considering their inclusion from a storytelling point of view. Because of their philosophy and the way they approach their assimilation targets, the Borg are very much a one-trick pony. They show up, either en masse or on a single vessel, overwhelm their opponents, forcibly assimilate them, and move on. They have one unwavering goal, and essentially only one method of achieving it. There are no Borg spies, no Borg generals to be outwitted, no Borg personalities to provide personal drama and conflict in a story. With the exception of the Borg Queen – who isn’t even really an exception as she is simply the face of the Borg, not a leader – the Borg operate as one entity with one goal and one approach.
The Voyager two-part episode Scorpion, which introduced Seven of Nine, took one of the most interesting looks at how the Borg’s single-mindedness can be their undoing. By presenting them with an opponent in Species 8472 who could not be assimilated, the Borg were on the back foot as the only method they had of information-gathering and conquest – they use assimilation for both purposes – did not work. This was a unique take on the Borg in Star Trek, but it had the unintended consequence of making them less intimidating as a result. As previously mentioned, any time we see a supposedly imposing villain failing in their objective, beaten and in retreat, it lessens the fear factor. As the audience, we know that they can be beaten – changing how we perceive stories. It stops being a question of “will the heroes prevail?” and instead becomes “when and/or how will they prevail?”
We need only look to Doctor Who for a case in point. Since its 2005 reboot, Doctor Who has seen its main villains, the Daleks, so thoroughly overused that they long ago became completely dull and unexciting. And two other villains, the Cybermen and Weeping Angels, have suffered from overuse too. As a result, since the latter half of Matt Smith’s tenure as the Eleventh Doctor, the show has limped along feeling played out. New villains and storylines have fallen flat – a consequence of mediocre writing – and the show is absolutely ready to go back on hiatus as there are no good ideas. It’s a lesson for Star Trek to learn, especially as production ramps up and there are multiple shows (and at least one film) all in various stages of development. Sometimes less is more. And also, when a storyline has run its course, and when a villain has done all they can reasonably do, unless there’s a new way to approach that story it’s time to put an end to it and move on.
The Borg haven’t yet reached that point. There is still space in Star Trek for new and exciting Borg stories, but they will have to be properly planned, not simply thrown in at the last minute. Like Doctor Who’s Daleks, the Borg are an iconic villain, emblematic of the franchise that spawned them. But they aren’t an infallible storytelling device that guarantees a successful film, season, or episode. And mishandled or overused, all the threat, tension, and drama they can bring will melt away leaving a bland, uninspiring film or episode behind.
The Artifact represents a new direction for Borg-related stories in Star Trek.
Between the zombies in The Walking Dead and the Daleks in Doctor Who, we have two great examples of how to mishandle and overuse villains like the Borg. Star Trek is fortunate to have such a rich history of alien races to draw on, and can hopefully avoid those pitfalls as we move into what will hopefully be the franchise’s second “golden age”.
The Borg are a frightening and compelling faction in the Star Trek universe, and there is still scope to learn more about them and see them return – in both big and small ways – in future episodes and films. And I’m looking forward to that, as well as to seeing what Picard has in store for this absolutely iconic faction. As I’ve said many times already, it’s a fantastic time to be a Star Trek fan right now. There’s just so much going on, and so much more to come. Discovery has had hits and misses, but in my opinion at least, Picard has been outstanding so far, and I’m interested to see what will come next. Surely, after the success the franchise has experienced over the last few weeks, this won’t be our last look at the 24th and early 25th Centuries – and unless something major happens to the Borg by the end of Picard’s first season, I’m sure that sooner or later we can expect to see them back once again.
The Star Trek franchise, including all films, episodes, and series mentioned above, is the copyright of ViacomCBS and Paramount Pictures. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for the first three episodes of Star Trek: Picard as well as for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise.
The End is the Beginning gave me several new theories – it was a fascinating episode in that respect. There are so many mysteries that Star Trek: Picard has set up that it’s hard not to analyse every little detail and get lost in theory-crafting!
So without further ado, let’s jump into the theories. You may remember some from my previous two posts, but others are new based on what we learned this week. There was only one theory that’s almost certainly debunked, so let’s look at that first.
Debunked theory: Sentient holograms (like The Doctor from Voyager) are outlawed as part of the ban on synthetic life.
I had previously theorised that Index, the hologram from Remembrance, might be sentient.
This was one of my earliest theories, beginning almost as soon as we heard of the ban on synthetic life in Remembrance. My idea was that the term “synthetic” hadn’t really been used before in Star Trek to describe androids – it’s a much more broad term, perhaps covering other forms of artificial intelligence too. And aside from androids like Data, the only other sentient AIs we’ve seen in a major way in Star Trek have been holograms.
But in The End is the Beginning, Chris Rios has several holograms aboard his ship, La Sirena. They all share his appearance, which is a bit of fun in and of itself, but the interesting conversation he had was with his ENH, or Emergency Navigational Hologram. This hologram wasn’t just interactive, it was talking to Rios like a real person would. It was clearly far more than just a computerised tool with a human appearance – it was a full AI, as close to sentience as possible.
Based on this conversation, as well as the appearance of La Sirena’s EMH, I consider this theory debunked.
So that’s the only debunked theory from The End is the Beginning. Now let’s take a look at some new ones, as well as those from earlier which are still potentially in play!
Number 1: Dahj and Soji are human augments/genetically enhanced.
Soji on board the Artifact in The End is the Beginning.
I dropped this theory last week after having proposed it in my first theory post, not because it had been in any way debunked; I just felt it was a real long-shot. But one phrase from The End is the Beginning prompted me to bring it back.
When Picard, Laris, and Zhaban are questioning their Romulan captive, shortly before he ends his own life he says “she’s not what you think she is” – referring to Dahj (and also to Soji). Well, Picard is 100% convinced at this point that Dahj and Soji are androids built by Bruce Maddox. But if they aren’t, because the Romulan assassins know what they’re looking for, what could Dahj and Soji be?
In Remembrance, Dahj wasn’t just able to fight well. She could tell that she and Picard were going to come under attack minutes before the attackers appeared. They weren’t in the area for her to see out of the corner of her eye – they beamed in. That’s bordering on a telepathic premonition, and I don’t believe we’ve yet seen an android in Star Trek capable of that. In the same episode Dahj was also able to leap several dozen feet during the fight on the rooftop – again not something we’ve seen Data or other androids do. And finally, on the Artifact in The End is the Beginning, Soji seems to have a telepathtic experience too – knowing the name of the ship Ramdha was on before she was assimilated.
Could these abilities point to Dahj and Soji being genetically augmented humans? I think at this stage, as unlikely as it may seem, we can’t rule it out. For me, the biggest piece of evidence pointing to this is that Dahj and Soji must appear to be fully human on all sensor scans – because if they didn’t, Starfleet or someone else would have realised a long time ago that they aren’t. And then there’s the absolutely huge difference when comparing androids like F8 with Dahj and Soji. F8 was not a sentient machine – not even close. He was several steps behind Data from even his earliest appearances in The Next Generation. Yet somehow, Maddox has apparently managed not only to recreate Data, but to create a better, more human version of Data that can fool all sensors and security scans, in a little over a decade – without the support of any government, or many of his colleagues like Dr Jurati. Seems a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it?
Number 2: Dr Jurati isn’t who she seems to be – and could be a double-agent.
Dr Jurati immediately after killing a Romulan attacker.
Speaking of Dr Jurati, Alison Pill has been outstanding in the role so far in Star Trek: Picard. And were it not for one comment right at the end of The End is the Beginning this theory would not exist.
As Picard and his new crew prepare to warp off to Freecloud, Raffi seems incredulous at the inclusion of Dr Jurati. “You didn’t even ask me to run any kind of security check,” she exclaims, “not even the most basic!” Dr Jurati clearly has Picard’s trust – but Raffi is right, he doesn’t really know her and her desire to go on the mission is at least a little suspect.
What do we know about her? She’s a synthetics expert who has managed to retain her job despite the ban on synthetic life, conducting theoretical experiments while not actually being allowed to build anything. If her whole field of study had been effectively outlawed fourteen years ago, why would she still be working on it? What benefit does it bring the Federation or the Daystrom Institute to conduct “theoretical” research into synthetics?
When Commodore Oh visited Daystrom in The End is the Beginning, Dr Jurati looked surprised to see her – and a little intimidated. But their conversation wasn’t seen on-screen; instead Dr Jurati only tells Picard – and us as the audience – afterwards that she confessed everything. She also says something that I’ve only ever heard really good liars say: “I’m a bad liar.”
Next, she turns up at the château at almost the same moment as the Zhat Vash attackers. She picks up a discarded Zhat Vash weapon and uses it to kill the last remaining operative before he can harm Picard. Was that a genuine attempt to save his life, or a way of ingratiating herself with him? And how did she know how to use a Romulan disruptor? Are they just point-and-shoot weapons, or do you need to have some idea of what you’re doing in order to use one?
Finally, there’s the way she insists on joining Picard on the mission. She uses her credentials and experience with synthetics, but she also seems like she won’t take “no” for an answer at this point. Could all of these things be exactly what they seem – an academic who’s excited to have the chance to finally see a real synthetic after more than a decade in the wilderness? Possibly. But could she also be a sinister double-agent waiting to pounce?
Number 3: The synthetics were hacked.
This moment could be F8 being hacked.
The evidence for this one keeps stacking up. We saw F8 again, and got another close-up of his eyes as he seems to be receiving new orders or some kind of transmission. I couldn’t pause every single frame, but in some frames you can see words of what looks like computer code reflected in his eyes.
Raffi also adds to this theory when she talks to Picard in The End is the Beginning. While telling Picard about her evidence for a Starfleet-Romulan conspiracy, she says that the Romulans may have aided Starfleet or been aided by Starfleet to attack Mars and destroy the fleet. Picard scoffs at this and seems to dismiss it – why, after all, would the Romulans want to destroy a fleet built to help them? But I said right from the start that a rogue Romulan faction opposed to Federation help might just have done that – and the Zhat Vash fit the bill.
Other pieces of evidence we’ve collected along the way are: the suicide of F8 (and presumably the other synths as well), which prevented anyone from analysing them to discover what happened; the work crew on Mars describing F8 as “compromised”, a word which could absolutely describe a hack; the choice of target within the Sol system; the fact that the attack was clearly a coordinated effort and not random; and the fact that we can think of at least two factions who have the means and ruthlessness to do something like this.
They are of course the Zhat Vash, who have been set up as the antagonists in Star Trek: Picard, but also the Federation’s own Section 31.
Number 4: Chris Rios worked for Section 31.
Ash Tyler worked for Section 31 in Discovery; could Rios have also worked for the organisation?
Before he quit Starfleet prior to the events of the series, Chris Rios served as the XO – executive officer or first officer – of a Starfleet vessel named the Ibn Majid. This mission scarred him, as he saw his Captain – a man he had great respect for – brutally killed.
But he describes the Ibn Majid as having been “erased” by Starfleet after the events of this mission, and that doesn’t seem like something Starfleet would do. But it absolutely is something that Section 31 would do.
Section 31 is the secretive, black-ops division of Starfleet intelligence, who run off-the-books operations in a clandestine manner. With Section 31 having recently featured in Discovery and with a new series based on the organisation in the works, it seems like the creators of Star Trek would want to fit in some reference to it here in Star Trek: Picard. Having Section 31 be in Rios’ backstory would be a way to do that without it being a huge part of the plot, and his line about the Ibn Majid at least hints at something like this.
Number 5: The captain of the Ibn Majid was a character we’re familiar with.
Could Harry Kim or Chakotay have been in command of the Ibn Majid?
While we’re talking about Rios’ former captain, one theory I have is that the deceased officer is someone we’re familiar with from a previous iteration of Star Trek. This would be less likely, perhaps, if Section 31 is involved, but if they aren’t and the ship he was on was just a regular Starfleet vessel, there are several candidates for who it could be – at least in my opinion! The only clue we have to this person’s identity is that they were a captain and they were male.
Chakotay – The former Maquis and first officer of Voyager had been a Starfleet officer before he resigned to fight alongside the Maquis. Ordinarily this would preclude him having a senior role, but his time on Voyager under Janeway’s command, and the experience he gained in the Delta Quadrant, may mean he could have rejoined Starfleet officially after Voyager’s return.
Edward Jellico – Seen in the TNG two-part episode Chain of Command, this hardball captain assumed command of the Enterprise-D when Picard undertook a secretive mission in Cardassian space. He clashed with Riker and others aboard the Enterprise, but ultimately managed to outmanoeuvre the Cardassians and win Picard’s freedom.
Capt. Bateson – Played by famous actor Kelsey Grammer in an episode of The Next Generation, Captain Bateson and his crew found themselves displaced in time from their 23rd Century origins to the mid-24th Century thanks to a temporal anomaly which also ensnared the Enterprise-D.
Harry Kim – Another officer on Voyager’s long trip through the Delta Quadrant, Harry Kim set his sights on command, and would often command Voyager’s night shift in the years before they returned to the Alpha Quadrant. In an alternate timeline he’d been promoted to Captain by the early 25th Century.
Solok – The Vulcan captain from the Deep Space Nine episode Take Me Out to the Holosuite was a decorated officer during the Dominion War, and a friendly rival of Benjamin Sisko.
There are others characters it could be, if indeed Rios’ captain is someone we’ve met before, but as there are literally hundreds of male Starfleet officers who either were captains or could have become captains, there are too many to list individually! I think this is at least a possibility. However, considering Rios’ former captain was killed it would be a shame to learn it was someone important from a previous Star Trek series as it would preclude us seeing them again in future.
Number 6: Narek is going to go rogue.
Narek told Soji he’s falling for her in The End is the Beginning.
In The End is the Beginning, Narek confesses to Soji that he’s “falling in love” with her. Whether this is true or merely a part of his act to get close to her, he’s almost immediately scolded by Rizzo, his superior officer, and warned not to fall for Soji. Could this be some foreshadowing?
If he does develop feelings for Soji then it makes sense to think he’d want to protect her from the Zhat Vash. He knows what they plan to do to her – interrogate her, according to Commodore Oh – but given the Zhat Vash’s apparent hatred of Soji and Dhaj, as well as their fear of them, Soji is in serious danger. Could Narek go rogue, turning on his current friends and allies, in order to save Soji from harm? If he’s seen to be failing in his mission, could she do something to save him, winning his loyalty?
Harry Treadaway has turned in some solid performances thus far in Star Trek: Picard. But it’s interesting to note he’s the only starring cast member to be on the opposite side to Picard and his crew – could that be an indication that we’re going to see him switch sides? With the exception of Mirror Lorca, whose true nature was concealed until the last minute, Star Trek has never had a villain as a main character before. And other Zhat Vash and co-conspirators, like Rizzo and Commodore Oh, are merely guest stars. Not sure how relevant this is, but it adds to the sense that we could be seeing Narek join forces with Picard and company.
Number 7: Starfleet is conspiring with the Zhat Vash.
Commodore Oh in her silly sunglasses.
Commodore Oh is looking less and less likely to be a Romulan agent and more like a co-conspirator. Raffi believed that the attack on Mars was a coordinated effort between a corrupt high-ranking Starfleet officer and the Romulans – though at the time she was unaware of the Zhat Vash. Picard told us that Raffi has a unique talent for seeing connections between seemingly unrelated things so she could be right!
Even if Commodore Oh isn’t a Starfleet officer, if she is truly a Romulan operative, it raises the serious question of how the Romulans were able to replace or have one of their operatives promoted to head of Starfleet security. It seems practically impossible to do without outside help.
The question is, aside from the obvious anti-synthetic crusade, what is the ultimate purpose of this conspiracy for both the Zhat Vash and Starfleet? The Zhat Vash have already won – synthetic life is banned, and the Federation and all other parties to the “galactic treaty” will crack down on synthetic research and development, as well as presumably shut down any rogue operators like Maddox who have flouted the ban. So what is the ultimate endgame? This is completely unclear.
Those are all of the new and updated theories after The End is the Beginning. But there are a few more theories, ones which this week’s episode neither advanced nor debunked. If you want a full breakdown of these, check out my last couple of theory posts, but I’ll list them here briefly.
Number 8: Picard assembled a new rescue fleet to help the Romulans after his resignation.
Picard with Laris.
This stems from the steadfast loyalty of Laris and Zhaban – as well as from the line in the first trailer which says that Picard “commanded the greatest rescue armada in history”. There were around four years in between the destruction of his fleet and the Romulan supernova – plenty of time for Picard to do something to contribute to the rescue effort.
Number 9: Bruce Maddox is responsible for the attack on Mars – but it was probably an accident.
Picard with Bruce Maddox aboard the Enterprise-D.
In The End is the Beginning, immediately after the attack the synths were described as having a “fatal code error”. Maddox was one of the senior people in Starfleet’s synthetic research – could this be his fault? I don’t think we’ll find out until we either meet Maddox in person or learn what happened to him.
Number 10: The Trill doctor from Maps and Legends is going to wind up assimilated.
Is this Trill doctor about to wind up assimilated by remnants of the Borg aboard the Artifact?
This one feels like a horror film cliché, but I have a feeling that the Trill doctor who Soji befriended in Maps and Legends isn’t long for this world!
Number 11: Soji and Dahj’s necklaces are a symbol from Maddox – or whoever created them – to communicate with other synthetics and creators or to deliver a message.
Dahj’s necklace. Soji has one just like it.
It strikes me as odd that Maddox would give Soji and Dahj a very obvious symbol of their synthetic nature to wear. Surely this is like painting a giant bullseye on both of them – and it may even be what led Starfleet and/or the Zhat Vash to notice Soji and Dahj in the first place.
Number 12: Picard is terminally ill with Irumodic Syndrome.
Dr Benayoun brought Picard bad news in Maps and Legends.
Dr Benayoun brought Picard bad news in Maps and Legends – an abnormality in his parietal lobe is in fact a terminal condition. It could be one of a number of syndromes, all of which “end the same way”. This ties into the finale of The Next Generation in which Picard was in the early stages of Irumodic Syndrome.
So that’s it. Those are all of my current theories regarding Star Trek: Picard. It’s possible that, as we approach the midpoint of the season,we’ll start to find out more solid information about what’s going on. Right now there are so many mysteries to unravel!
I can’t wait to see the next episode – which will be titled Absolute Candor. This will be the first of two episodes directed by Jonathan Frakes. His work on Discovery was outstanding, and it’s not unfair to say that he has unique knowledge of the Star Trek franchise. So there’s undoubtedly more good things still to come!
The first three episodes of Star Trek: Picard are available to stream now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom and in other countries and territories. The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Picard, as well as for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise.
Last week I wrote a post in which I began theorising about the story of Star Trek: Picard. I didn’t intend for it to become a weekly series, but I think it probably will be. I’ll be updating my theories after each new episode, as well as deleting theories that seem to have been debunked, and adding new ones as I come up with them!
Let’s start with those theories that Maps and Legends debunked.
Number 1: The Romulans who attacked Dahj were the Tal Shiar.
We now know these operatives work for the Zhat Vash.
In my last theory post I said that this theory, out of all of my pet theories for Star Trek: Picard, was the most likely to be correct… oops.
The Romulans who attacked Dahj are now suspected to be the Zhat Vash. I also said that we’d only seen the face of one of Dahj’s attackers, so the fact that he was Romulan might not mean that all of the attackers are – it could have been a multi-faction collaboration to take down synthetics, perhaps a group enforcing the ban. But the discussion of the Zhat Vash in Maps and Legends seems to confirm that the people who killed Dahj – and those hunting Soji – are Romulan.
They may, however, be getting help from Starfleet itself. Lieutenant Rizzo is an undercover Romulan agent – this much was also confirmed in the episode – but her handler, Commodore Oh, is much more ambiguous. She absolutely could be a Romulan – but it’s just as likely she’s a Vulcan and is simply conspiring with the Zhat Vash.
Number 2: The attack on Dahj (and the hunting of Soji) are in retaliation for what happened on Mars.
The attackers aren’t looking for revenge for the attack on Mars.
When speculating on the motives that Dahj’s attackers had, I said that they may have been seeking revenge for the synthetics’ attack on Mars. This wasn’t so much because Romulan lives were lost – 90,000 people died in the attack, and it’s conceivable that Romulans were among them as the fleet was destined to help Romulus – but because the loss of the fleet led to many more deaths in the supernova.
That was my theory, and it made a certain kind of sense. It would have depended, of course, on what happened in the aftermath of the attack. The Federation pulled out of helping the Romulans, despite Picard’s fleet being intended to save 900 million lives. Surely not all of those lives were lost as a result, but even if Picard managed to assemble another fleet, potentially fewer lives were saved.
However, the Zhat Vash’s motivations are much more clear-cut: Romulans have a longstanding fear and hatred of synthetic life, and the Zhat Vash amplify that. They have, for centuries, it seems, hunted down and killed synthetics – and not just in Romulan territory. There was mention of Zhat Vash operations in Gorn and Klingon space as well, and of course in Federation territory as we saw.
With a “galactic treaty” now prohibiting synthetic life, the Zhat Vash should be feeling pretty smug – this is a huge victory for their cause, at the end of the day. Given that they’re specialists in hunting synthetics, it’s at least possible that they see themselves as enforcers of the ban, or even that other governments have requested their help in getting rid of any remaining or undercover synths.
So those were the debunked theories. Now let’s take a look at some theories which are still at the very least possible – even if they’re unlikely! Some of these you may remember from last time, others are new based on what we saw in Maps and Legends.
Number 1: Starfleet is conspiring with the Zhat Vash.
Commodore Oh in her office.
Who is Commodore Oh? Maps and Legends implied that she, like Lieutenant Rizzo, is a Romulan agent. But is this really the case? We saw a Vulcan emblem on her desk, which could be part of her act, but it could also be a subtle hint to the audience of her true identity.
I mentioned this previously, but a Commodore is a very high ranking position for an enemy agent. It’s plausible that the Zhat Vash would have been able to plant a fake Lieutenant, but a Commodore? And not just any Commodore – one in a senior position in Starfleet security with a responsibility for protecting Earth itself? It’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that Commodore Oh is a Vulcan.
If she is, then she’s part of the anti-synthetic conspiracy along with the Zhat Vash – and a collaborator.
If it turns out that Commodore Oh is in fact a Romulan, then I still believe that there’s some merit to the theory that some in Starfleet are co-conspirators, because it would raise questions about who helped her infiltrate Starfleet and who helped elevate her to a senior position.
Number 2: Picard put together another fleet and still managed to save many Romulan lives.
Laris and Zhaban are very close with Picard.
Why are Laris and Zhaban so loyal to Picard? It seems that they’re ex-Tal Shiar operatives (or at least that Laris is), so why would they be so steadfastly loyal to a retired Starfleet officer as to live at his home on Earth?
In the first trailer for Star Trek: Picard, a voiceover says that Picard put together “the greatest rescue armada in history”. This absolutely could be referring to the fleet that was destroyed in orbit of Mars… but if that fleet was destroyed, would it really have gone down as the greatest in history? If it never left its home base it seems unlikely to be remembered as such. Given that, it’s at least possible that Picard was able to pull some strings with other factions and acquire ships to use in a new rescue armada.
When Starfleet pulled the plug and refused to rebuild the lost ships we know Picard was furious and resigned in protest. But the timings of these events is unclear. Mars was attacked fourteen years before the events of the show, but in Remembrance the supernova is stated to have taken place exactly ten years ago. So there was a span of time in between the destruction of the fleet and the supernova in which Picard – either as a Starfleet admiral or not – could have done something else to help the Romulans.
It’s possible he could have used friendships with people like Spock, or his relationship with factions like the Klingon Empire, Bajorans, or Tamarians to help him put together a fleet. Picard made first contact with a number of species during his tenure aboard the Enterprise-D, and also offered help and assistance to many others. There will have been people and factions throughout the Alpha and Beta Quadrants who “owed him a favour”, if you will, and if he called those favours in he could’ve built up a decent sized fleet.
The only evidence we really have, however, that Picard went above and beyond to help the Romulans is the unwavering loyalty of Laris and Zhaban. And it’s possible that whatever he did to win their trust was something specific to the two of them rather than something so grand in scope.
Number 3: The ban on synthetic life includes sentient holograms like The Doctor from Voyager.
The Doctor during his time in the Delta Quadrant.
In previous iterations of Star Trek, the term “synthetic” was rarely, if ever, used. When referring to Data and others, the preferred term had been “android”, and even in The Original Series this was the word that was used. So why has the word “synthetic” come into play?
“Synthetic life” is a much broader term than simply “android life”; it suggests a wider category of artificial life forms which would include AIs and, crucially, self-aware holograms. If this is the case, then Voyager’s Doctor could be among those forcibly shut down in the aftermath of the attack on Mars.
I mentioned in my last theory piece that Index, the hologram at the Starfleet archive visited in Remembrance, seemed to be giving a few very subtle hints that she had a greater understanding of what was going on, and may have been sentient. This time I’m extending this theory to say that sentient holograms are banned under the “galactic treaty”.
As an interesting note, Robert Picardo (the actor who played The Doctor in Voyager) was reported to have said he’d be interested in having a role in a potential second season of Picard, back while Season 1 was still in early production. Some people seem to have taken these reports as confirmation that he definitely will have a role, but after looking into it I couldn’t see anything solid. If he does come back, however, it could be an indication that this theory is incorrect – or it could be an interesting plot thread for Season 2 if the “galactic treaty” is overturned.
Number 4: The synthetics were hacked.
Does this moment show F8 being hacked?
After the opening scene in Maps and Legends, where an android named F8 is shown during the events of the attack on Mars, I think we can treat this one as much more likely.
During a work shift, F8 pauses, appears to receive a transmission or to be processing new information, and then immediately begins to take down the Martian defence network at least in his sector. Moments later the attack on Mars unfolds.
F8 was in a room with several humans at that moment, and if he’d suddenly been overcome by an urge to rebel, starting by attacking them would make more sense. The attack on Mars was a coordinated action against a deliberate target – all of the synthetics acted together.
The work crew with F8 describe him as “compromised”, which I think sounds like they’re describing a hack or that he’s under the control of someone else.
Why didn’t the synthetics continue their attack? With powerful ships under their command, and knowledge of Starfleet defences, they could have proceeded to attack Earth and other targets in the Sol system. They could have also kept the ships that they’d commandeered and left the system, but instead it seems that they all committed suicide after the attack was successful – could this be someone trying to cover their tracks by preventing the synths being forensically studied?
I think the primary culprits are Section 31 and the Zhat Vash, or another Romulan faction opposed to Federation help. Last time I did mention a few others who could be responsible – the Borg, the Klingons, or the Dominion – but these seem less likely given the show’s focus on the Romulans and the synths.
Section 31 would be an interesting choice. We’ve just seen a Section 31 storyline in Discovery, and production has supposedly begun on the Section 31 spin-off series with Michelle Yeoh and Shazad Latif. So from a production point of view, there’s a reason to keep Section 31 in the minds of viewers. They are also a faction who are not above such things – they infected Odo and his people with a disease that would have wiped them out, after all. Covering their tracks by using hacked synthetics is also something we could imagine Section 31 doing, and if they believed helping the Romulans to be a mistake, they’d be prepared to take any action to stop it, including killing Federation citizens.
However, the Zhat Vash could also be to blame. From their point of view, the Federation’s continued development of androids would be abhorrent. And as people like Dr Maddox got better and better at building them – to the point where whole work crews made up solely of androids could be rolled out – then they may have felt they had no choice but to act. By attacking only ships designed to aid Romulus, rather than Earth itself, perhaps they felt that the risk of triggering a war if they were caught was reduced. They may have also been opposed to Federation help. However, if the Zhat Vash are as staunchly anti-synthetic as they claim to be, would they have had the knowledge to hack them?
Number 5: Bruce Maddox caused the attack on Mars – probably by accident.
Could the attack on Mars – and 90,000 deaths – be a result of something Dr Maddox did or didn’t do?
Dr Maddox going missing is an interesting story point. Dr Jurati and others stayed at the Daystrom Institute, continuing to work on synthetic life if only from a theoretical point of view, so there’s no reason Maddox couldn’t have done so. But Dr Jurati says that he “disappeared” – not that he resigned or was fired, but just vanished.
Commodore Oh expressed surprise that Maddox is still alive, but given her clandestine nature she may know more than she’s let on about that. I don’t think Maddox’s name would have been referenced so many times in the first two episodes if we weren’t going to learn more about him and what happened to him – a single name-drop would have been a fun little easter egg for fans of The Next Generation, but the continued discussion of him suggests he will have a bigger role.
I think we’re going to learn that Dr Maddox did something wrong in the run up to the attack on Mars – something which left the door open to the synthetics being hacked. And that his disappearance and continued work on androids isn’t merely because he’s someone dedicated to that idea, but because he has an incredible sense of guilt over what happened, and he wants to prove that not all synthetics are bad – and that what happened won’t be repeated.
It’s also possible, but far less likely in my opinion, that Maddox was deliberately involved in the attack. He may have been working with Section 31 – if they are the culprits – to prevent Federation help going to the Romulans.
Brian Brophy, the actor who portrayed Maddox in The Next Generation, hasn’t made any statement regarding the new series that I could find, nor is he confirmed to be among the cast.
Number 6: The Trill doctor is going to end up assimilated.
The new Trill doctor doesn’t seem long for this world!
This one seems almost a given considering the amount of foreshadowing present in Maps and Legends! The Trill doctor who meets Soji aboard the Artifact – I had to look up her name, apparently it’s Naáshala Kunamadéstifee – is nervous about her first shift. Soji reassures her several times, telling her that the Romulans’ warnings are just “drama”, and telling her she will be fine.
It’s a cliché from the horror genre, but almost any time a non-main character is in this situation they end up meeting a nasty end. Aboard a Borg cube – even a disabled one – surely this means assimilation.
Further foreshadowing came from the Romulan guard himself, saying that once in the “grey zone” the assembled researchers should assume anything they don’t personally know to be safe is “malignant”, and of course there was also the sign hanging in the checkpoint area which was featured prominently on screen – saying it had been 5843 days since anyone was assimilated. While this should be reassuring, what it actually does is remind us, as the audience, that assimilation is still a possibility.
With Soji working to dismantle dead Borg drones, could she end up finding her new Trill friend on her operating table before too long? I wonder. In any case, this character seems almost certain to wind up assimilated – or meeting a similarly unpleasant end.
Number 7: Picard’s terminal illness is Irumodic Syndrome.
Dr Benayoun brought Picard bad news in Maps and Legends.
This disease was first mentioned in All Good Things, the finale of The Next Generation. And while I’m sure I wasn’t alone in speculating prior to Star Trek: Picard’s premiere that his illness might come into play, we got confirmation in Maps and Legends that Picard is indeed in the early stages of a terminal condition.
Dr Benayoun, who Picard served with prior to taking command of the Enterprise-D, brings him the bad news, and while Irumodic Syndrome is not mentioned by name, there were two hints from this conversation that it’s what we’re dealing with.
Firstly, Picard says that he knew that the issue in his parietal lobe could become a problem – a nod to his time-travelling adventures in All Good Things, I’m sure. And secondly, Dr Benyaoun refers to the group of potential conditions as “syndromes” – another clear nod. While there hasn’t yet been a formal diagnosis, it’s looking likely that Irumodic Syndrome will be mentioned before too long.
The only question I have from this, really, is why Picard didn’t tell his doctor about this possibility. He knew, thanks to Q’s actions, that Irumodic Syndrome was at the very least a possibility, yet it seems to have taken Dr Benayoun wholly by surprise. There may be a reason why he chose not to mention it, but you’d think he might’ve wanted to provide his doctor with that information so that the necessary tests could be run and the situation could be monitored.
Number 8: Soji and Dahj’s necklaces are a deliberate sign from their creator.
Dahj’s necklace.
Why would Bruce Maddox – or whoever is responsible for Dahj and Soji’s creation if it isn’t him – give them each a necklace which would be immediately recognised by anyone who works in the android creation field? Given the ban on synthetic life, it seems like he painted an unnecessary bullseye on Soji and Dahj – and that may even be how the Zhat Vash were able to track them down.
I felt that the necklaces were actually quite weak props, probably the least visually interesting of the major props seen thus far in Star Trek: Picard, simply because of their understated design – they look to me like cheap costume jewellery. And honestly, learning more about the necklaces and seeing how important Soji’s is to her just amplified that feeling. Because they’re so bland from an aesthetic point of view, it made Picard’s interest in Dahj’s necklace seem quite forced in Remembrance.
However, from an in-universe point of view, if someone is manufacturing illegal androids using illegal methods, why would that person then provide both androids with a very obvious visual symbol – something so (allegedly) distinctive as to be eye-catching even to someone not aware of its meaning? It seems completely illogical – unless Dahj and Soji’s creators are trying to communicate with someone, or otherwise use the symbol to show off or make some other point.
From a story point of view it made sense in Remembrance; the necklace served as a clue for Picard and Dr Jurati to begin to unravel what was going on – and set the stage for them tracking down Soji. However, unless there’s more to it than meets the eye it doesn’t make a lot of sense for an android builder to do that.
So that’s it. At least for now anyway, those are my theories. As I said last time, they could all be wrong – but I’m feeling good about the synthetics being hacked! Then again, I said last time that I was confident in the Tal Shiar being responsible for the attacks and that didn’t pan out! So take the above with a pinch of salt. And after all, this is only for fun!
Theorising and speculating about a show with so much mystery is all part of the experience of watching it, and thus far I’ve really enjoyed the return to the 24th Century that Star Trek: Picard has afforded us. Friday can’t come soon enough!
The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. The first two episodes of Star Trek: Picard are available now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for Maps and Legends and Remembrance, as well as for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise.
Maps and Legends was a solid episode, and a good continuation of the story that Remembrance set up. Despite not quite reaching the same heights as the first episode of the season, it was enjoyable nevertheless, and we got a lot of new information that, while setting up story elements for later in the season, also tells us about the Star Trek galaxy in the final year of the 24th Century.
You can read my full review of Maps and Legendsby clicking or tapping here, and in this article I’m going to look at ten points of interest from the episode as we wait impatiently for the next one!
Number 1: The Romulans seem to be doing better than we thought.
One of the Romulan guards aboard the Artifact.
Because Picard has at least two Romulans working with him at the Château, and because of the total destruction of his planned rescue armada, I surmised after watching Remembrance that the Romulan situation was pretty bad. Though I wrote then that “they aren’t completely out of the game”, it seemed that things were rough for the surviving Romulans.
But we learnt a lot more in Maps and Legends about the status of the Romulans, and it seems things aren’t actually as bad as we’d thought. Obviously the supernova and the loss of their capital has caused significant upheaval, but the Romulans seem to be doing remarkably well despite this.
The Romulan Free State – which I’m assuming is a successor to the Romulan Star Empire based upon its control of the Artifact and that it seems to have a strong military – remains an independent faction. While there is cooperation with the Federation at least, as seen from Soji and other non-Romulans aboard the Artifact, they seem to be in a pretty good position all things considered.
Not only are their operatives – now known to be a new Romulan faction called the Zhat Vash – able to freely operate on Earth, even at the heart of Starfleet, but Romulan intelligence agents have penetrated Starfleet itself.
My personal belief at this stage is that Commodore Oh, despite what was hinted at in Maps and Legends, is actually a Vulcan who’s simply a co-conspirator. But Lieutenant Rizzo is absolutely confirmed to be a Romulan agent. The goal of the Zhat Vash is seemingly to track down and eliminate synthetic life, but I’m sure having an operative strategically placed within Starfleet intelligence brings the Romulans other dividends! And if they managed to get one person in, given an organisation the size of Starfleet it’s at least possible that there are others.
The Romulans have always been a secretive faction, and their power plays in other iterations of Star Trek have tended to be more covert than overt, so this really fits nicely with what we know about them and how we might expect them to behave.
For a more detailed look at the Romulans, I wrote an article before Star Trek: Picard premiered which you can find by clicking or tapping here. Suffice to say, however, that this isn’t their first tussle with Starfleet, nor their first time using undercover agents to try to gain the upper hand. The Khitomer conspiracy, which Kirk and his crew managed to stop at the last moment, had heavy Romulan involvement. Indeed, this seems to be one of the inspirations for the Starfleet conspiracy aspect of Picard’s storyline.
Number 2: The Borg survived the events of Voyager’s finale.
Endgame saw a time-travelling Admiral Janeway infect the Borg with a virus and provide future technology to Voyager’s crew.
It was always a bit of a long shot to think that Admiral Janeway’s actions in Endgame, the finale of Star Trek: Voyager, would have wiped out the Collective entirely. After all, they survived the loss of one Borg Queen during the events of First Contact, and that barely seemed to affect them at all. Not to mention the war they fought against Species 8472 that was said to have cost them thousands of ships and millions of drones.
One of the reasons that the Borg are so dangerous is their adaptability. And the virus that future Janeway introduced, as well as the upgrades she provided to Voyager, may have worked in the short term, but once the Borg have adapted they essentially become useless. This makes me wonder very much about the grey badges worn by Soji and others aboard the Artifact – will they lose their effectiveness, and if the remaining Borg on that “graveyard” were to wake up, would they be able to adapt to the technology the Romulans and others have deployed?
Borg stories can be difficult in Star Trek for the simple reason that the Borg Collective, in theory, is an overwhelmingly powerful opponent for our heroes. A single Borg cube was able to destroy almost 40 Federation ships in their first engagement, and a second cube came very close to assimilating Earth a few years later. In Voyager we saw them deploy dozens of ships against a Delta Quadrant species, conquering and assimilating the planet very quickly. If they used similar tactics against the Federation they’d surely be successful. So just knowing that the Collective still exists, that they’re out there waiting, is dramatic in itself.
Ever since the Enterprise-D first confirmed the existence of the Borg more than thirty years prior to the events of Star Trek: Picard, Starfleet has maintained a tactical division working on technologies and strategies to defeat them. But as we saw in The Best of Both Worlds and in First Contact, Federation technology lags far behind what the Borg are capable of. If they could so easily shrug off a devastating war against Species 8472, the damage inflicted upon them in Endgame would have scarcely registered. The lost ships and complex could be easily rebuilt – the Borg control so much Delta Quadrant territory as to have near limitless resources – and the virus that future Janeway used would be rendered harmless once an adaptation could be found. Adaptations to the virus and the technology she brought from the future would be rolled out to the entire Collective in a short span of time, and it would all be essentially useless thereafter.
The Artifact is cut off from the Collective, and given it has been under Romulan control for a long time (possibly even a couple of decades depending on how we interpret the number of “cycles” that the Romulans claim to have had it) it seems unlikely that the Borg are coming back for it anytime soon. But there could still very well be dangers lurking in the “grey zone” – and as I said in my review, I have a feeling that Soji’s new friend, the Trill doctor, isn’t going to last very long. There was too much foreshadowing for that not to happen!
Number 3: It’s looking increasingly likely that someone hacked the synthetics and compelled them to attack Mars.
The moment F8 turns on his human colleagues – was he hacked?
I wrote previously that the attack on Mars was not random. It was a calculated, deliberate action against a well-chosen target. For the synths to all malfunction at once, and all decide to go after Mars instead of, for example, other Federation targets, or instead of simply killing nearby humans or going on a rampage, strongly suggests that they were being controlled by an outside force.
F8, the synthetic who the first part of the episode focuses on, appears to receive a transmission, or to be processing something. He stops what he’s doing, his eyes change, and then he begins to take down the Martian defences in his sector. It’s only when the humans on his work crew attempt to interrupt him that he fights them; if he and the other synthetics had suddenly been overcome with a simple urge to rebel, it seems more likely that he’d have just attacked the people in his vicinity rather than performing the complex task of compromising the shields and defensive weapons around Mars.
Because the entire attack unfolds in a matter of just seconds, whatever happened to F8 had to have affected all of the synths practically simultaneously. This adds further credence to the idea that they were hacked, as does F8’s suicide. If this had been some kind of synthetic rebellion, a terrorist attack to highlight the plight of synthetics or to inspire rebellion among others, it wholly failed because as a consequence of what happened on Mars, synthetic life was banned and synthetic research largely shut down. The suicide of F8 – and presumably the other synths as well – would make sense if an outside hacker were covering their tracks. By destroying the synths after they’d achieved their goal of destroying the fleet and shipyard, there was no evidence to understand what happened, nor point to any culprit other than the synths themselves.
When it comes to who was responsible for the hack, however, we can only speculate as there’s basically no evidence to go on at this point in the story.
Number 4: Starfleet has been infiltrated.
Lt. Rizzo and Commodore Oh are co-conspirators.
I mentioned this above when discussing the Romulans, but at least one Romulan agent has managed to infiltrate Starfleet, and not just any branch of Starfleet, either. Commodore Oh appears to be a senior officer in Starfleet security, specifically the department of Starfleet security responsible for security on Earth.
There were a couple of elements in play here that I felt riffed off past Star Trek storylines. Star Trek: Picard has been great at that so far; throwing the audience little hints, names, visual details, and now thematic elements that harken back to previous iterations of the franchise. In particular, the Commodore Oh-Rizzo-Narek group of characters plays on themes we saw in The Undiscovered Country. In that film, Romulan agents, including undercover agents in Starfleet, attempted to disrupt Federation-Klingon peace efforts. There were also very subtle hints, I felt, at The Next Generation’s first season, particularly the episodes Coming of Age and Conspiracy – a duology of episodes dealing with parasitic organisms which were attempting to gain control of the Federation.
Playing up these themes is great; returning fans get further confirmation that this really is Star Trek, taking place in the same timeline, and for new fans it’s so subtle that it doesn’t get in the way of the story one iota.
From a story point of view, I have a suspicion that Commodore Oh is in fact a Vulcan, not a Romulan, and is simply a co-conspirator. Perhaps the Zhat Vash, because they have centuries’ worth of experience in tracking down synthetics, are a natural ally for someone like Oh as she tries to enforce the “galactic treaty” banning synthetics.
Lt. Rizzo, however, is very much a Romulan agent. Whether she’s the only one of the Zhat Vash undercover in Starfleet isn’t clear, but she definitely has it in for Soji.
Number 5: The show has broken viewership and streaming records.
The logo for CBS All Access original shows.
Star Trek: Picard was the most-watched series ever on its channel when it premiered on Canadian television. More than 1.1 million viewers tuned in to the CTV Sci-Fi Channel to watch Remembrance last week, which is a new record for the channel. Great job, Canadian Trekkies!
Additionally, CBS All Access broke the 10 million subscribers mark in the week leading up to Picard premiering. It’s possible that, due to the way CBS All Access reports subscriber numbers, not all of those are paid subscriptions as some may be a free trial, but it’s good news regardless. CBS All Access is the platform for Star Trek in the United States, and if the franchise is to survive long-term we need CBS All Access to succeed. This is a good indication that it’s on track to do well at least for now.
Finally, both Remembrance and Maps and Legends are among the most-pirated television episodes right now. While this of course means that CBS and others aren’t making money from those views, it does indicate that there’s a huge number of people interested in seeing Picard right now. Discovery, by the way, never came close to being the most-torrented or most-downloaded show, not even its premiere. Other shows that have been massively pirated in the last twelve months include Game of Thrones, The Witcher, and Chernobyl – all of which were hugely successful for their parent companies. Piracy should be seen as a reflection of how much interest there is in a series, so seeing Picard right up near the top is, despite what ViacomCBS might be inclined to think at first, remarkably good news.
The level of excitement for Picard was sky-high before Remembrance premiered. I’ve had friends and family who didn’t watch Discovery and who may not have watched any Star Trek property since the 1990s asking me about Picard and telling me they’re going to tune in, so I think that the show is really riding high right now. Hopefully the interest and excitement can be maintained over the whole season and the series can continue to be the biggest hit – so far, at least – for this new generation of Star Trek shows.
Number 6: The rank of Commodore still exists!
Commodore Oh in uniform.
In The Original Series, and I want to say in The Animated Series as well (but I’m not 100% sure on that), there were several characters who held the rank of Commodore. Starfleet ranks imitate United States Navy ranks, where a Commodore is essentially a nonspecific rank offered to senior Captains. Previously the rank was used for a Captain who was in command of more than one ship – a kind of half-step between a Captain and an Admiral.
But since the era of The Original Series we haven’t seen anyone in Starfleet holding that rank (at least not in canon). It was possible that, as in the United States Navy today, the rank was less commonly used or only honorary, but this is evidently not the case.
Commodore Oh is clearly a senior commander in Starfleet security on Earth, and may even be wholly in charge of Earth’s security as she seems to report directly to Admiral Clancy, who is in charge of Starfleet. This is a serious responsibility, and her rank reflects this.
Her uniform is a point of note, however. Red has been the colour of command officers since the The Next Generation era, yet she is wearing the yellow/gold of security. Her uniform is also the same as Lt. Rizzo’s, and not the same as Admiral Clancy’s, despite both a Commodore and an Admiral technically being flag officers. She has a single rank pip, which presumably denotes her status as a Commodore, and her rank pip has a background to it as opposed to the pips Lt. Rizzo has, which are plain.
I looked at the combadges used in the new Starfleet uniforms in my review of Maps and Legends, but hopefully as we see more of the uniforms in the next few episodes I’ll be able to do more of a breakdown. One thing I did spot, though, was that the coloured portion of the uniform features a Starfleet logo pattern, similar to the uniforms of the Kelvin-timeline films.
Number 7: There may be more Sojis and Dahjs out there.
Picard with Bruce Maddox – the man who we assume built Soji and Dahj – aboard the Enterprise-D.
This was implied during the conversation between Rizzo and Oh. They talk about finding a “nest” of synthetics, and interrogating Dahj and Soji to learn where they came from so they can be tracked to their source.
It makes sense that, if it was possible to create Soji and Dahj three years ago, there could be more that have been built subsequently. When Soji said, at the end of Remembrance, that she had a sister I wasn’t convinced that she was referring to Dahj at first. I thought it might’ve been an interesting story point to learn that she was talking about someone else, but Dahj’s last name being confirmed seems to put that particular theory to bed.
However, it’s possible that there are still others out there like Soji, and that she and Dahj weren’t the only ones created by Dr Maddox – or whoever it turns out is ultimately responsible.
Number 8: The Artifact may have been under Romulan control for decades.
The Romulans have controlled the Artifact for a long time.
I hinted at this above, but three moments in Maps and Legends suggest that the Romulans may have been holding onto that Borg cube and its technology for a very long time.
Firstly we have the sign hanging in the checkpoint area. It says, in English and in Romulan, that the Artifact has “gone 5843 days without an assimilation”. 5843 days is around sixteen years, so the Romulans must’ve had control of the Artifact for at least that long.
This ties in closely with the next scene, where Soji is assisting with the dismantling of Borg drones recovered from the Artifact. The drone she and her Romulan colleagues are working on – that the Romulans call “Nameless” – is said to have been in regeno-stasis for fourteen years. Depending on what precisely regeno-stasis means (a combination of stasis with Borg regeneration?), this drone has been inactive for some time. However, the most recent assimilation aboard the Artifact took place longer ago than the drone has been inactive – so that raises the question of what was happening aboard the Artifact at that time. Were there still Borg alive and working on board when the Romulans first arrived? If so, were they still connected to the Collective at that time? The Collective currently sees the Artifact as a “graveyard” according to Narek, but if there were still Borg alive for potentially two years after the Romulans captured it, could the rest of the Collective be aware of what’s going on?
Finally, back at the checkpoint scene, we have the number of “Ops Cycles” stated by one of the Romulan guards. Maps and Legends takes place during or at the beginning of Ops Cycle 9834. If Ops Cycles are equivalent to standard Earth days, that would mean that the Artifact has been under Romulan control for almost 27 years – which would put them capturing the Borg vessel sometime around the year 2372. This would coincide with the second season of Voyager and the fourth season of Deep Space Nine, prior to the outbreak of the Dominion War. While this is a possibility, I think it’s more likely that we’re looking at a 14-16 year timeframe for the Romulans’ capture of the Artifact, which would place it not too far away from the attack on Mars. Could the Borg have been involved with that?
Number 9: The Romulans have a new emblem.
The Romulans’ new emblem.
This was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it affair, but the Romulans do indeed have a new emblem. It appears to be a stripped-down version of the one we’d seen in The Next Generation era. That emblem featured what appeared to be a winged creature gripping something in its talons, and this design, in a dark red/maroon colour, is a similar shape with a spread-wings design.
It can be glimpsed briefly behind Soji while she’s working on the Nameless Borg drone, and if I had to speculate – which you know I do – I’d say it’s the emblem of the new Romulan Free State.
The new emblem can also be seen – though much less clearly – on the railings in the checkpoint scene aboard the Artifact. There may have been other appearances that I didn’t notice!
Number 10: Picard is dying.
Dr Benayoun brought Picard the worst possible news.
This was arguably the biggest revelation of the episode. Picard asked his doctor – who happens to be an old crewmate from the Stargazer – to certify that he’s fit for duty to Starfleet as part of his plan to get reinstated. But his scans revealed something in the parietal lobe (a section of the brain).
Dr Benayoun isn’t sure exactly what the abnormality represents, but all of the conditions it could cause “end the same way” – i.e. in Picard’s death.
In The Next Generation’s finale, All Good Things, Picard learned that he would suffer from something called Irumodic Syndrome, and this was clearly a reference to that. Picard tells Dr Benayoun that he had been told this parietal lobe issue could become a problem, and Benayoun refers to the collection of conditions that could afflict Picard as “syndromes”. Irumodic Syndrome looked to be something similar to Alzheimer’s disease insofar as it was a degenerative condition.
Later in Maps and Legends, Laris sarcastically asks Picard if he’s suffering from “dementia”, which I think is another reference to Picard’s age and state of health.
This diagnosis, such as it is, changes the tone of the show. No longer is Picard merely coming out of retirement, overcoming his depression, and finding a cause worth getting involved with. All of those elements are still present, but in addition is the sense that his time is running out. Whatever condition he has – presumably Irumodic Syndrome – is terminal. And, if Dr Benayoun is right, it won’t be a pleasant death.
Picard is now a man facing his own mortality, and more than that, he’s facing the prospect of losing himself before the disease kills him. This is clearly an allegory for degenerative conditions faced by many people today as they enter old age – I mentioned Alzheimer’s disease but there are many others. Many of us will have known someone who suffered from such a condition. There are several people I can call to mind in my family and among friends and neighbours. There will be consequences for Picard as a result of this diagnosis. We may not see his decline and death on screen – though that may be something the showrunners have in mind for later seasons – but as Picard assembles his crew and ventures into space, at the back of our minds we’ll be wondering if this really will be his final mission. Unlike in the past, when he’d been able to escape even what seemed to be insurmountable challenges like being assimilated by the Borg, this time there is no escaping his own mortality.
So that’s it.
Ten things from Maps and Legends. Despite being two episodes in already, Star Trek: Picard is still playing its cards close to its chest; we have far more questions than answers right now. The biggest answer we got from Maps and Legends, or at least the closest thing to an answer we got, is that the synthetics on Mars were almost certainly hacked or otherwise interfered with. Who did it and why, however, remains unknown.
As I said last week, I’m glad that we’re getting the episodes on a weekly basis instead of having the whole season at once. Star Trek: Picard has a lot going on, and I think if I’d binge-watched the full season I would have missed a lot of things, especially little references, throwbacks, and easter eggs.
I’m incredibly excited to learn more about the conspiracy in Starfleet, Soji and Dahj’s origins, and to finally meet the rest of the main cast – we’re almost certainly going to meet Santiago Cabera’s character next week and I’m a fan of his. There’s so much still to come, and The End Is The Beginning can’t come quickly enough!
Maps and Legends, the second episode of Star Trek Picard, is available to watch now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom and other countries and territories. The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers for Remembrance, the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, as well as potential spoilers for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise.
I don’t read a lot of reviews. Maybe you could tell from the amateurish way that my own review of Remembrance (the premiere of Star Trek: Picard) was written! But I do check in with Star Trek on social media, and I sometimes watch a couple of folks on YouTube who discuss the franchise. In the aftermath of Remembrance last week, some people seem to be pulling at the threads of the story expecting it all to unravel.
There are a few points that I saw being raised multiple times, especially in comments on other sites and on social media. Makes me glad to not have comments enabled here, really! I thought I’d go through and take a look at a few of the complaints people had, because they’re all nonexistent as far as I’m concerned.
Remembrance was a stunningly good episode. Sir Patrick Stewart was outstanding as Picard, despite an eighteen-year absence from the role. And the three new actors who took starring roles – Harry Treadaway, Alison Pill, and Isa Briones – were on top form. I could nitpick a handful of very minor things (and I did), but that’s always the case with practically every work of fiction. And in case you missed it, Star Trek’s canon has always been a bit of a mess – just look at warp factors as one example.
So here’s a list of a few criticisms folks have thrown out regarding Remembrance – along with my own deconstructions and why I don’t think they’re relevant.
Please don’t take this as a personal attack – if you didn’t like Remembrance that’s okay. Even as Star Trek fans, we like different kinds of stories within the franchise – and that’s okay too. Entertainment is always going to be subjective, and we don’t all enjoy the same things. This isn’t meant to insult or attack anyone; if anything it’s a response to general points I’ve seen made, and it’s really just an excuse for me to get my own thoughts in order.
That said, if you can’t tolerate disagreement, now’s your chance to jump ship!
Number 1: Wasn’t it the “Hobus” star that went supernova?
The planet Romulus is destroyed in a supernova.
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: I spent a while going back and looking at 2009’s Star Trek to see where this word came from. Even I knew the word “Hobus”, and although I didn’t remember where I’d heard it spoken, it surely had to come from the 2009 reboot film, right?
Wrong – no one in that film uses the word “Hobus”. It was only ever mentioned in the Countdown comic book series that preceded the film. Since those comic books aren’t canon, it doesn’t count.
In the film itself, Spock simply says that “a star” went supernova, and that he raced to get there in time before it destroyed Romulus. For some people – probably some of the same people now getting upset about “Hobus” – this was always a bit of a plot hole in Star Trek, because supernovae can’t really destroy planets in nearby star systems, nor threaten “the galaxy”. At least that’s our current understanding of the phenomenon.
In 2009’s Star Trek, Spock never uses the name “Hobus”.
In that sense, changing the star that went supernova to be in Romulan system actually closes a plot hole rather than opens one.
And even if we’re so attached to the word “Hobus” that we can’t let that slide, it could simply be the Romulans’ name for their star, in the same way that we call our star the Sun or Sol. Thus it’s possible to have your cake and eat it: Hobus was the name of the star in the system containing Romulus, and it went supernova.
Number 2: How many Romulans are there?
A Romulan crew seen in Balance of Terror from The Original Series. The exact Romulan population – and even a guesstimate – is unknown.
Some people seem to be confused by the “900 million” number given by the FNN interviewer when discussing Picard’s evacuation of Romulus. I can kind of see why; it seems like a low number on the surface given that there were 50 million people just living on Earth’s moon in the 24th Century.
I tried looking for sources on the population of the Federation as a whole for some kind of guide. There’s nothing “official”, only non-canon sources like reference books which don’t really count. But there’s no reason to believe it would be a small number – tens or hundreds of billions people could easily be in the ballpark. So the population of the Romulan Star Empire, which controlled a large expanse of space, should be somewhere in the region of tens or hundreds of billions too, right?
Data and Picard went undercover on Romulus during the events of The Next Generation’s two-part episode Unification – and they saw a populated, but not overcrowded, city.
Well there are a couple of issues here. First is that we have absolutely no idea. We’ve only ever seen a handful of Romulans on screen all at once, and even their biggest fleets at the height of the Dominion War weren’t huge – so it’s conceivable that their population wasn’t as large as their territorial expansion would suggest. That could be for many reasons, like their empire containing a large number of uninhabitable worlds. Pure speculation, but it fits with established canon.
Secondly, and most importantly for this discussion, nobody said that Picard was evacuating the entire Romulan Star Empire – it was probably just Romulus and Remus and any bases or stations in that system. Add to that the fact that the Romulans have their own shipyards and their own fleet, meaning they could conduct a significant portion of any evacuation themselves. Starfleet wasn’t doing the entire thing while the Romulans sat on their hands – they would have been constantly evacuating as many people as possible while the fleet was being built. The 900 million figure is what Picard was able to contribute – and based on what he said about arguing with Starfleet Command, I bet he wanted to have more capacity on that fleet.
Thirdly, 900 million people could easily have been the population of the Romulus system – with billions of other Romulans spread throughout their Empire.
A combination of factors is actually the most likely – the Romulans were evacuating as many people as they could, but they needed extra support. The Federation, under Picard’s command, could get 900 million Romulans out of danger, which was a contribution to the effort but not the entire thing by any means. 900 million may have been the leftover population of Romulus by the time the fleet was being built.
See? It doesn’t have to be a problem at all.
Number 3: Too much politics!!!
If someone told me they’re upset by the intrusion of politics and political themes in Remembrance, I’d ask them one question: “have you ever seen Star Trek before?” Since its 1960s origins, Star Trek has used its science fiction setting to highlight real-world political issues.
In The Hands Of The Prophets from the first season of Deep Space Nine was a deeply political episode tackling the issue of religion in schools – a clear metaphor for the teaching of creationism and evolution.
If someone first watched the show while very young these things would go over their head, which is perfectly understandable. And if they watched it two decades or more after its initial airdate, many of the issues raised wouldn’t be obvious because they’re no longer current affairs. They were important socio-political issues at the time, but may no longer be something we’d even think about. So it’s easy to miss if someone didn’t watch each series when they were originally broadcast.
Let’s look at a handful of examples of where the Star Trek franchise has brought in potentially controversial political themes:
The Doomsday Machine (TOS, 1967) This episode featured Kirk and Spock discussing nuclear weapons and how good it was that they were never used, as well as looking at the concepts of superweapons and mutually assured destruction – both massive topics during the Cold War.
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (TOS, 1969) This episode looked at racism and the consequences of holding on to hate for a long time. It was an attack on racist attitudes held by some in 1960s America.
Ethics (TNG, 1992) This episode dealt with the concept of ritual suicide in other cultures, disability and suicide, the concept of moral relativism, and the ethics of experimental medical procedures.
Relics (TNG, 1992) This episode looked at how we treat older people, and how people can make valuable contributions regardless of age.
Melora (DS9, 1993) This episode dealt with disability and how disabled people can be treated differently, looked down on because of their condition, and underestimated.
Jetrel (Voyager, 1995) This episode looked at the consequences of using chemical weapons and weapons of mass destruction – and the toll it can take not only on the victims, but the perpetrators too.
Rejoined (DS9, 1995) This episode is famous for featuring one of the first female same-sex kisses on American television. It touched on homosexuality and LGBT+ issues.
Death Wish (Voyager, 1996) This episode dealt with the concepts of suicide and euthanasia, as well as whether a “right to die” exists or should exist.
Stigma (Enterprise, 2003) This episode looked at the stigma of living with a disease that only “undesirable” people would have contracted. It was an allegory for the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Damage (Enterprise, 2004) This episode tackled addiction, and the long-term effects it has on people.
The Original Series could be incredibly political. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, from Season 3, was intended to me a metaphor for race relations at the time.
So there’s a few episodes from all the iterations of Star Trek prior to Discovery that dealt with contemporary issues. There are literally hundreds of other examples, including smaller points in episodes about other topics. This could be a full article in itself, but anyone suggesting politics “has no place in Star Trek” hasn’t been paying attention.
As a final note on this, I didn’t really think that Remembrance got particularly political. The section of the interview regarding the evacuation of Romulus could be taken as allegorical for the modern-day migration crises facing Europe and the United States, and it could also be taken as a critique of isolationism as a broader concept. That’s really the only point that was “politically charged”, and even then it wasn’t the focus of the episode. That scene was there to provide some backstory.
The only other point where I think people have seen the episode through a political lens is the rooftop fight scene, where Dahj takes on the attackers while yelling at Picard to take cover. For some people with preexisting biases, perhaps they took this as “Strong Woman has to defend Old White Man” – she’s strong, he’s not, so it must be a feminist political point – or so goes their argument. But Picard is an old man, even by 24th Century standards – and more importantly he’s unarmed. Dahj, by contrast, is a newly-activated butt-kicking machine – probably literally a machine. Picard would have been useless in that fight, so she was the only one of the two characters who, in the context of the story, could have made a stand. It was just a fight scene – not a political attack on one group or another.
Sometimes we all need to deactivate our political lenses when watching something that’s designed to just be entertainment. If we turn every single thing into a political fight, there’ll be no room for entertainment or anything else.
Number 4: Technology is wrong – it’s not advanced enough!
So firstly, the episode took place entirely on Earth. As a result, we don’t get to see as much technology as we would if we were on board the Federation’s newest flagship. Secondly, Château Picard – the setting for much of the episode – is deliberately rustic. Picard’s family, if you recall from The Next Generation, were quite traditionalist. Picard was the first in his family to have left the solar system, and the way the house is built and decorated reflects the past deliberately. But even here at the Château, we see an updated LCARS display, a food replicator, holo-screens, and other trappings of the 24th Century.
An updated LCARS panel and a food replicator at Château Picard.
The transporter – as used by the attackers anyway – also seems to have been updated. Whereas the transporters of the TNG era took several seconds to fully materialise, in Remembrance the attackers appeared practically instantaneously – the transporting process now taking less than a second.
There’s also the archive. How exactly it works isn’t clear, but I’d speculate that the all of the items are held in some kind of transport buffer, able to be materialised at will. That’s a pretty impressive feat, and not something we’ve seen before, at least not on this scale.
We’re also looking at Earth a decade after the attack by rogue synthetics. The synths were living technology – and perhaps as a result of their actions, people are less enthusiastic about trying out new technology.
Sisko’s Creole Kitchen in New Orleans wasn’t a high-tech establishment – clearly a lot of people on Earth in the 24th Century appreciated that.
Finally, when we’ve seen Earth in other iterations of Star Trek, technology was never front and centre then either. Sisko’s restaurant in New Orleans is a good example – where was the technology there? We hardly saw any. It’s possible that the Federation likes to keep Earth looking as pristine as possible, at least in some regions, without too much tech everywhere. These could also be aesthetic choices by citizens of Earth to hide as much of their tech as possible. And of course, it’s also possible that, since the TNG era, miniaturisation has occurred, allowing formerly large devices – like the computer panels that took up a whole wall that we saw on starships at that time – to be much smaller.
Number 5: Picard is depressed.
Well, yes.
He lost a very close friend in Data, who sacrificed himself to save Picard. That isn’t something you can just snap your fingers and get over. It came only a few years after his brother and nephew died, too, with that loss (seen in Star Trek: Generations) affecting him greatly as it meant he was the last living member of his own family – and the end of his family line.
I’ve lost friends and family in my life, and I still think about them, I still visit their graves, and I’m still sad about them no longer being here even decades later.
Picard and Data, mere moments before Data’s death. The loss of his friend has clearly weighed heavily on Picard in the years since.
In addition to his personal loss, he went through a series of traumatic events. Firstly, the attack on Mars destroyed his fleet and killed over 90,000 people – many of whom he will have known. It’s even possible that Geordi La Forge was among those killed – he was working on Mars in the Star Trek: Picard Countdown comic book series (which is confusingly not the same Countdown as the 2009 series mentioned above), though whether this is fully canon or not is unclear. Next the Romulan supernova hit, and despite his best intentions it seems clear that he wasn’t able to save as many lives as he hoped. Finally, he’d been a Starfleet officer since he was very young – we’re talking six or seven decades of service, practically his entire adult life. And in an instant it was all over – he resigned in protest at Starfleet’s decision to pull out of helping the Romulans. No one stopped him – perhaps this is part of what he meant by his “offended dignity” remark.
We were warned a number of times that Picard might not be the same way we remember him, and in that sense it’s true. He’s missing a part of himself because of what he’s been through. But at the same time, the man we knew is right there under the surface. The way he speaks with passion and anger during his interview, defending the rights of Romulans and synthetics alike was absolutely pure Picard, and anyone who thinks otherwise must’ve skipped episodes like The Drumhead, The Measure Of A Man, Who Watches The Watchers, and countless others because the way he reacts in that moment is absolutely the way we would expect him to.
I felt the same way when I read so much criticism of Luke Skywalker’s characterisation in The Last Jedi too, and the two characters and their situations are somewhat comparable. But anyone saying “my childhood hero would never ever become depressed!” clearly has no understanding of depression and mental health. They’ve almost certainly never experienced it in their own lives or within their own families or peer groups, because if they had – and they were capable of basic empathy – they’d know that depression can afflict anyone. Sometimes it’s a result of circumstances – in Picard’s case, the loss of his friends and his treatment by Starfleet. In Luke Skywalker’s case, it was one moment of weakness that had disastrous consequences. But sometimes depression comes out of nowhere and hits you like a ton of bricks. Anyone who’s lived a life will know that there are good moments and bad moments. If we’re lucky, the bad moments don’t last long. But for Picard, his bad moment clearly has.
Picard’s mental and/or emotional state has been a point of contention for some viewers.
This is a much broader point. Life happens – and the way a person is at age twenty isn’t the same way they’ll be at forty, and the way they are at forty will change again by the time they’re sixty or seventy. We haven’t seen Picard in two decades – in which time he’s been though some really difficult experiences. It’s no wonder he’s stepped back.
But the point of these kind of stories isn’t that he’s a depressed old man, it’s that something gave him a reason to get involved again. There’s a mystery to unravel, a long-lost friend’s family to find – and suddenly Picard has motivation and confidence again. It took the extraordinary events of Remembrance to remind him that he can still make a difference. And a similar story plays out in The Last Jedi – Luke eventually realises that he can’t just sit around and die, he has to take action because there’s a cause worth believing in.
This is a twist on a very classic adventure story setup. I mentioned this in my review, but Remembrance plays up some of the elements present in classics of the genre like The Hobbit – Picard is living a quiet, rural life, with no plans to leave his home or do anything significant. But his life is interrupted by someone new, who drags him into a mystery and sends him on an adventure. The added twist is that Picard used to be an adventurer of sorts, but he ended up depressed and back at home before someone reignited that spark within him and gave him something to investigate and a cause to get involved with.
It’s an incredibly positive message: anyone can fall victim to this kind of mindset, but there is hope. Under the right circumstances, someone who has lost their way and who has been feeling down for a long time can find a way out of it. There’s light at the end of the tunnel, even for someone who had arguably lost all hope and was “just waiting to die”.
So that’s it.A few criticisms of Remembrance that I’ve seen people throwing around. Some were glorified nitpicks, like the Romulan population or the supernova’s name, and others were more to do with the themes and concepts the story established. But in both cases I’ve provided my rebuttal just based on my own viewing of the episode.
As I said before, this isn’t meant to call out anyone or criticise anyone. It’s totally okay to dislike the episode, it’s totally okay to have a different opinion to me on all of these points. Entertainment is subjective, and we all have different opinions about an episode or film. Some of these are informed by our own experiences in life.
For me personally, I hadn’t considered any of the above points to be problematic while viewing Remembrance, and a couple of them caught me completely by surprise when I saw people were upset.
I had expected the biggest criticism to be along the lines of “this is completely different from The Next Generation“, and while I’m sure there are people who don’t like the concept of the series, I haven’t seen a great deal of criticism centred around that point thus far.
Friday can’t come soon enough for me, though! Roll on episode two – Maps and Legends.
Remembrance, the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, is available to watch now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom and other countries and territories. The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers for Remembrance, the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, as well as for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise.
I don’t usually engage too much in theorising about my favourite shows, but Star Trek is somewhat of an exception! Remembrance, the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, introduced us to a lot of information about some of the events and individuals that have shaped the galaxy since Star Trek: Nemesis. And I got thinking about a few of those points, as well as other story points from the episode.
This is pure speculation. I don’t have “sources” – no one online does – and this is just a short collection of my own personal theories based on my viewing of Remembrance. It’s highly likely that none of these will turn out to be correct!
Number 1: Index, the hologram from the Starfleet archive, is sentient.
The hologram named Index in Picard’s personal archive.
After the attack on Mars, which was conducted by rogue synthetics, there was a “galactic treaty” which banned synthetic life. But “synthetic” is a very broad term – if they wanted to ban androids, why not just say “android”? If I’m right, then all sentient machines and AIs – not just androids – have been outlawed. This would include self-aware, fully sentient holograms.
We’re aware of three who fall into this category. Vic Fontaine, who was a recurring character on Deep Space Nine in its final seasons, Professor Moriarty, who was accidentally created by the Enterprise-D computer, and The Doctor from Voyager. Of those three, Moriarty’s fate is unclear – he was trapped in his own holographic world by Picard and his crew, but whether his programme survived the destruction of the Enterprise-D isn’t known. Vic Fontaine and The Doctor may very well have still been active around the time of the attack on Mars – so what happened to them? I wonder if we’ll find out.
Regardless, if there is a ban on all artificial intelligence, including holograms, that should mean that Index, the hologram at the Starfleet archive, is just a piece of software and isn’t self-aware. But when I watched Remembrance, there was something in the performance that indicated a greater understanding of what was going on. The eye movements, the tiny smile when showing Picard the painting, and other very subtle clues contributed to this feeling, at least for me. I don’t know whether we’ll see Index again, or whether it will even matter, but I have a suspicion that she is sentient.
I hope that, one way or another, the question of holograms is addressed. The Doctor was obviously a huge part of the Voyager crew, and Vic Fontaine was important too, so it would be nice to know one way or the other what happened to them – even if it’s only implicitly through some throwaway comment about holograms.
Number 2: Bruce Maddox inadvertently caused the attack on Mars.
Picard with Bruce Maddox aboard the Enterprise-D.
Mars came under attack by rogue synthetics, destroying the fleet Picard hoped to use to aid the evacuation of Romulus. At that time, a senior figure in the Federation’s synthetic research was Bruce Maddox – who we met in The Measure Of A Man from the second season of The Next Generation. After the ban on synthetics went into effect, Maddox went underground and – so it seems, anyway – continued his research into synthetic life.
The underlying cause of the attack on Mars isn’t known as of Remembrance, despite the attack taking place over a decade earlier. I wonder if Maddox did something while creating or programming the synthetics to cause them to malfunction. In Star Trek: Insurrection, Data goes rogue too, attacking a cloaked Federation outpost and exposing the officers to the Ba’ku, who they had been observing. The reason was that Data’s core programming took over, and all he knew was “right and wrong” – and believing the mission to forcibly relocate the Ba’ku to be wrong, he attacked his Starfleet colleagues.
So there is precedent in Star Trek for an android to malfunction in a similar way. If there were something wrong in the synthetics’ programming, or if Maddox inadvertently triggered something, that could explain why they went rogue and attacked Starfleet.
It might also explain why Maddox went into hiding, and why he continues to work on synthetics in spite of the ban – perhaps he feels guilty over what happened. And perhaps he’s trying to prove – to himself and to the galactic community – that not all synthetics are bad, and that what happened was a one-off mistake.
Either way, I’m certain we’ll learn the reason for the synthetics’ attack by the end of the season.
Number 3: The Romulans who attacked Dahj were the Tal Shiar.
At least one of these attackers was Romulan – possibly working for the Tal Shiar.
In Remembrance, Dahj is attacked twice by masked assailants, and during the second attack one of them loses his helmet and is revealed to be Romulan.
In the 24th Century, the Tal Shiar was the Romulan intelligence agency and secret police force. They were known to employ cutting-edge technology, and if any organisation had the capability to pull off two incursions on Earth without raising the alarm, it’s them. They were able to beam operatives to a location very close to Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, attack and seemingly kill a Federation citizen while she was with a retired Starfleet flag officer, and cover their tracks so that neither they nor their target appeared on Starfleet’s security monitors. That’s incredibly impressive, and of all the organisations we know of in Star Trek, the Tal Shiar are certainly near the top of the list when it comes to being able to pull it off. Given that at least one of the attackers was Romulan, it starts to add up.
It’s possible that the group weren’t all Romulan – we only saw the face of a single individual, after all – and even if they are, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re working for the Tal Shiar. However, the Romulan state has clearly survived in some form, and the Romulans remain an independent faction, so that implies that the machinery of their state, including the Tal Shiar, survived as well. The Tal Shiar and the Cardassians’ Obsidian Order were the two most significant intelligence agencies in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants the last time we saw the 24th Century, so if anyone could pull off an attack of this type so close to the heart of Starfleet – and manage to cover it up – it seems at least plausible that they’re involved.
Number 4: The Romulans/Tal Shiar are attacking synthetics as revenge for Mars.
Are these attackers checking to see if Dahj is synthetic?
Over 90,000 people died as a direct result of the attack on Mars. Some of those may have been Romulan, but by far the greater impact of the attack was that the rescue armada, designed to evacuate 900 million Romulans, was completely destroyed.
While the attack proved a significant blow to the Federation – losing a major shipyard and Earth’s closest neighbour becoming uninhabitable – the Romulans arguably suffered more as a result, not least because the Federation refused to rebuild the lost fleet. How many Romulans died as a result, because they couldn’t be evacuated before the supernova, isn’t clear at this stage, but it could number in the millions.
That gives Romulans a powerful reason to hate synthetics, and could explain why they send strike teams to Earth to capture or kill any synthetics they find.
Dahj describes synthetics as “murder machines” – a view tainted, no doubt, by the events on Mars. The Romulans, out of all the factions in the galaxy, would have felt that way even more strongly if the attack disrupted plans to evacuate their homeworld. Even more so than the Federation, this gives the Romulans a reason to be incredibly aggressive toward synthetics and a reason to strictly enforce the ban on synthetic life.
Number 5: Soji and Dahj aren’t synthetic after all – they’re human.
Could Dahj be human after all?
This one would be a major double-bluff. After Picard discovered that Data had painted Dahj’s likeness thirty years previously, it’s assumed by everyone that they’re androids created by Maddox – but what if they aren’t? What if, instead, they’re genetically enhanced humans? One of the ancestors of Data’s creator, Arik Soong, experimented with augmented humans in the 22nd Century. A trilogy of Enterprise episodes in Season 4 deal with this storyline: Borderland, Cold Station 12, and The Augments.
If Maddox – or someone else on his team – had shifted research away from synthetics to genetic engineering the result could be Soji and Dahj. Since Dr Jurati was absolutely convinced that sentient androids were a long way away from being achievable, it could make sense. Genetic engineering could also explain Dahj’s abilities, as we saw from augments in Enterprise and of course Khan that physical and mental abilities can both be enhanced. We also saw in The Next Generation that the ageing process can be accelerated for genetically enhanced children, so Dahj and Soji’s ages (twenty-ish) shouldn’t count against this idea.
In the 24th Century, the Federation could scan for life forms very accurately. Data would register on sensor scans very differently to a human, so if synthetic life was banned, surely the Federation would have measures in place to detect synthetics using already-available technology. Dahj and Soji weren’t detected as being out of the ordinary at all, so either their synthetic nature is completely concealed somehow, or maybe they’re not synthetic at all. If they are, as Picard puts it, “flesh-and-blood androids”, this raises an interesting question in itself – where do you draw the line between synthetic and non-synthetic? If Maddox and his team basically built two humans from the ground up, using organic materials and human DNA, are they human or synthetic?
The flip side to this theory – and the reason why it’s unlikely – is that genetic engineering is banned, just as synthetic research is. There’s no reason for Maddox and his team to switch lanes. And Maddox has been involved in android research for over three decades at this point – changing to genetic engineering would be a wholly new field of study.
Number 6: Someone hacked the synthetics.
More than a decade later, no one knows what caused the synthetics to attack Mars.
Why did the synthetics attack Mars? This is one of the key mysteries that Star Trek: Picard established, and I’m absolutely certain we’ll find out the real reason by the end of the season.
Connected to the idea above, that a mistake on Maddox’s part may have inadvertently led to the attack, it’s conceivable that someone hacked into the synthetics and commanded them to launch the attack.
The attack on Mars was a very specific action. The synthetics didn’t simply malfunction and attack any Starfleet or Federation personnel in their immediate vicinity. A team of them, working in tandem, took control of a number of ships, took down Mars’ defences, and launched a coordinated attack with all ships engaging simultaneously. That doesn’t seem like a malfunction – it was a specific, deliberate act.
If something Maddox did left the door open to a cyber attack that took control of the synthetics – or even if it was something he and his team could in no way have prevented – this would mean that someone deliberately targeted Mars, and by extension the rescue fleet.
The choice of target is also interesting – the synthetics could have attacked Earth, destroying the office of the Federation President and Starfleet Headquarters. That would have been a far more devastating blow to the Federation as a whole than the loss of one shipyard – which was building ships not even intended for the Federation to use for their own benefit. Again, this speaks to it being a deliberately chosen target, and thus a deliberate act by someone.
So who could the culprits be? Let’s make a list.
Section 31 – The shadowy, off-the-record intelligence agency has recently been featured heavily in Discovery (and is set to have its own series) and they’ve shown in the past that they’re not above taking incredibly aggressive action to further their objectives. If Section 31’s leadership believed the decision to help Romulus was a mistake – as they conceivably might have done – they may have decided to act to stop it.
The Borg – Borg technology is capable of things far beyond the knowledge of the Federation and other Alpha Quadrant powers. They’re skilled at working with AIs and machines as the Borg are themselves partially synthetic. They’re also no friend to the Federation or the Romulans, and we know thanks to the existence of a Borg cube that there has been some form of Borg activity in the region.
The Klingons – The Klingons and Romulans have cooperated in the past, but relations between the two Empires haven’t always been great. The Klingons may have seen the Romulan supernova as an opportunity to expand into Romulan territory, and may have decided to sabotage Federation efforts to help believing it would benefit them. While hacking synthetics and hiding behind the scenes may not be a stereotypically Klingon move, they may have chosen this route to avoid war with the Federation.
A rogue Romulan faction – It’s possible that elements within the Romulan government, military, or the Tal Shiar would have seen accepting Federation help as beneath them. Not wanting to be indebted to an old enemy, they may have sabotaged the evacuation, even if doing so condemned many of their fellow citizens to death.
The Dominion – Prior to the Dominion War, Dominion operatives attempted to break apart the Alpha and Beta Quadrant factions, pushing them into war with one another so that they could sneak in during the chaos. Their attempts to push the Federation and Klingons to war even worked for a time, before a changeling was exposed in the Klingon military. This fits with their modus operandi, at least as of the 2370s – whether the Dominion changed significantly as a result of their loss is unclear.
So that’s it.Six ideas that are probably all wrong, but were fun to write about nevertheless. I’m not the sort of person to get overly attached to any particular theory, certainly not to the point where I’d let it spoil my enjoyment of finding out what the writers and directors of the series actually intend to happen! I’ve seen that happen a lot in recent years – The Last Jedi probably being the best example, as a lot of people became very upset that their own pet theories about where the story would go didn’t pan out on screen.
Of the six above, Dahj and Soji being genetically enhanced humans seems the least likely, and the Tal Shiar being the mysterious masked attackers seems the most likely, at least to me. But as I say, they could very easily all be wrong.
Remembrance has set up some genuinely interesting story threads, and I can’t wait for Friday to get the next instalment and see where things go next.
The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. Remembrance, the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, is available to watch now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom and other countries and territories. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season 1, Episode 1: Remembrance. There may also be spoilers for other iterations of the Star Trek franchise, including Short Treks and Discovery.
I know that for the last couple of weeks the blog has been dedicated almost entirely to Star Trek: Picard, but to be fair it’s been my most highly-anticipated series of the last few years! I do have a few non-Picard articles in the pipeline, but before my memories of the episode fade too much, I wanted to go over a few things we learned in Remembrance.
Considering that the episode was our first real look at the 24th Century since 2002 – I’m not counting Children of Mars or the brief scenes in 2009’s Star Trek – there was a lot that longstanding Star Trek fans wanted to know. Remembrance was peppered with enough little hints and pieces of background information to tide us over till next week – but without drowning out the plot in fan-service and nostalgia. Take note, Star Wars!
I have a full review of the episode already published – you can find it by clicking or tapping here. In that article I cover the plot in more detail, as well as giving my thoughts on various elements of the episode. Spoiler alert: I loved it.
Number 1: The “Prime Universe” or “Prime Reality” still exists!
You may recognise this graphic from the official website; it shows the various Star Trek series and their place in the overall timeline of the franchise. Credit: Star Trek.com
This one should’ve been a given, considering everything we’d been told beforehand. But some “fans” – and I use the term very loosely – have been obsessed in recent years with convoluted “theories” that the Star Trek timeline ended or diverged after Enterprise went off the air.
The basic argument went something like this – the Kelvin-timeline films had a contractual obligation to make everything look 25% different from what had come before, and this carried over into Discovery, meaning the new shows are set in an alternate reality and not the original Star Trek timeline. Obviously that’s completely untrue, and Remembrance confirmed it. This is the original timeline, the one Spock left behind when he travelled to the alternate reality.
Picard has many artifacts in his personal archive from The Next Generation and the TNG-era films, so this is definitely, 100%, the same reality. Picard is the same Picard from TNG – just older. Enterprise, Discovery, The Original Series, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all took place in this timeline as well, before the events of this episode. Case closed, “theory” debunked. And as we saw dozens of TNG-era objects in Picard’s archive, the “25% different” nonsense is debunked too.
Number 2: The Ready Room – Star Trek’s aftershow – is actually worth watching.
Wil Wheaton now hosts The Ready Room – discussing each episode of Star Trek: Picard after it’s released. Credit: Star Trek on Facebook
During Discovery’s second season, I only tuned in to The Ready Room a couple of times, and I wasn’t particularly impressed. Airing on Facebook Live after each episode, the show would feature someone involved in the episode’s production and they’d discuss some of the behind-the-scenes goings-on with the host. This time around, the host of The Ready Room is Wil Wheaton – yes, Wesley Crusher himself!
And it’s clear that he’s a fan of Star Trek – a passionate one, too. He talked about Remembrance with such enthusiasm that he was a joy to watch, and the interviews with Hanelle M. Culpepper and Michael Chabon – the director of the episode and the showrunner respectively – were respectful and genuinely interesting.
Personally, I like to keep my in-universe and real-world experiences separate, so watching The Ready Room immediately after the episode isn’t something I want to do… I need to give myself a few hours at least to come back down to Earth! But when I was ready, I gave The Ready Room a chance and I’m glad I did. I look forward to tuning in again next week for another look behind the curtain.
Number 3: The Ferengi Alliance is still around – at least in some form.
The emblem of the Ferengi Alliance seen in Boston.
This one was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “easter egg”, but toward the beginning of the episode during an establishing shot of Boston, the emblem of the Ferengi Alliance can be seen. It’s projected on the side of a Bostonian building right before the scene with Dahj and her boyfriend, but I noticed it immediately.
Towards the end of Deep Space Nine, Grand Nagus Zek had begun implementing reforms to Ferengi society. Women were allowed to fully participate for the first time, and basic state assistance was put in place for financially unsuccessful Ferengi. Rom was chosen to be the next Grand Nagus when Zek stepped down. That’s twenty-five years before Star Trek: Picard’s setting, but it’s interesting to see that the Ferengi Alliance still exists, and is presumably still an independent faction.
Number 4: The attack on Mars was far worse than we realised.
Ships commandeered by rogue synthetics attacked Mars.
In Children of Mars, the attack by the rogue synths looked serious, but its ultimate outcome was unclear as the episode ended when news of the attack was only just breaking. Remembrance takes place over a decade later, and the extent of the damage is now known. Picard lost the entire rescue armada, and over 90,000 people died.
Worse is that Mars, which had been home to Utopia Planitia, is “on fire to this day” – strongly implying that the shipyards couldn’t be rebuilt and that the planet, which we know to have been inhabited, now might be wholly uninhabitable. The loss of the Federation’s most significant shipyard will have had repercussions, and the loss of Mars, Earth’s closest neighbour and one of humanity’s earliest colonisation targets, will have been a psychological blow.
Number 5: The Rogue Synths are no longer active.
I’m fairly sure that these are either the rogue synths or other androids shut down around the same time.
We speculated a little about who the rogue synths might be in my final article about the factions of Star Trek: Picard. The question of whether they remained an active faction after the attack wasn’t clear then, but the galaxy-wide ban on synthetics makes it clear that the rogue synths are no more.
What became of the individuals who attacked Mars isn’t clear, though. It’s possible that they and their ships were destroyed by Starfleet, but it’s equally possible that they were able to be peacefully shut down and are currently in storage, like the Data-esque characters we saw in the trailer.
However, with the plot of Picard currently fixated on synthetic life, I think that the rogue synths will come back into play somehow. And even if they were all destroyed – or rather, killed – in the aftermath of the Mars attack, I’m confident that by the end of the season we’ll understand what led them to rebel and attack the shipyard.
Number 6: The Romulan situation is bad – but they aren’t completely out of the game.
These Romulans were able to launch an undetected attack very close to the heart of Starfleet.
With Picard’s armada having been destroyed, it’s unclear how many Romulans were saved before the supernova. However, it seems unlikely that the planned 10,000 ships were able to be built elsewhere, and that whatever evacuation could be ultimately cobbled together saved far fewer than the intended 900 million lives.
However, the Romulans remain a force to be reckoned with. Armed Romulan operatives were able to transport to two locations on Earth and attack Federation citizens – all without raising any alarm. One of the attacks took place spitting distance from a Starfleet archive which required Picard’s Admiral-level clearance – and in addition, the Romulans were able to conceal themselves and the target of their attack in such a way that they didn’t even appear on any Starfleet security feeds.
So while it’s clear that the Romulan Star Empire has suffered, their intelligence and military technology is keeping pace with, and arguably outmanoeuvring, that of the Federation. Whether these operatives are the Tal Shiar (the Romulan secret police/intelligence agency) or whether they’re even formally affiliated with the Romulan government is still unknown.
Number 7: Androids are banned.
Picard and Dr Jurati examine the disassembled body of B4.
After the attack on Mars, a “galactic treaty” went into effect, prohibiting synthetic life forms such as androids. Picard considers this to be a mistake, even morally wrong, but nevertheless the ban exists, and it appears to be something that all of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants’ major factions have subscribed to.
Describing the ban as “galactic” may suggest that it even extends to factions like the Dominion in the Gamma Quadrant and possibly even Delta Quadrant factions from Voyager, but I think that may be taking the word slightly too literally. For all intents and purposes, though, androids and other synthetic life forms are banned, and presumably any synths that were active at the time of the attack have been rounded up and forcibly shut down – raising some alarming questions about how this was done and whether synthetic life forms had any rights.
What does this mean for self-aware holograms, like The Doctor or Vic Fontaine? It’s unclear whether they were affected by the ban too, as the only hologram we’ve seen thus far was Index – who did not appear to be fully sentient. Index may have given a couple of very subtle hints at sentience, though, or maybe that’s just my interpretation of her movements and expressions.
Number 8: Some people flout the android ban and continue to work.
Dahj’s necklace was a symbol representing a particular method of creating androids.
Bruce Maddox, last seen in The Measure Of A Man from the second season of The Next Generation, disappeared in the aftermath of the attack on Mars and the ban on synthetics. A symbol he used to illustrate one of his theories about creating androids was seen on Dahj and Soji’s necklaces – implying that he created them, if indeed they are synthetics.
As with many points above, this raises as many questions as it answers. Was Dr Maddox involved, even inadvertently, in the attack on Mars? What purpose does creating Dahj and Soji serve? Who is supporting his research, and where is it being conducted?
Most significantly, if Dahj appeared to be fully human, how did Maddox manage to pull that off? If synthetic life is banned, and the Federation has sensors capable of detecting synthetics, then Dahj must have either been fully anatomically human, or must have employed some kind of system designed to fake that on all scans. We know Federation sensors in the 24th Century could differentiate Data from a human, so how Dahj and Soji haven’t been detected remains a mystery.
Number 9: There has been Borg activity in the Alpha and/or Beta Quadrants.
The Romulans have a base aboard a Borg cube.
There had been two Borg incursions into the Alpha and Beta Quadrants that we knew about before Remembrance. The first was in The Best Of Both Worlds from The Next Generation’s third season, where a single Borg cube attacked Earth and destroyed a huge Federation fleet at the Battle of Wolf 359. The second came a few years later when the Borg again sent a single cube to Earth during the events of First Contact. Both cubes were completely destroyed, such that they couldn’t have been reassembled.
The existence of another Borg cube in Romulan-controlled territory strongly suggests another Borg incursion on this side of the galaxy. When this took place and what its objective was isn’t known, but the fact that the Romulans were able to defeat it and still keep the vessel intact must have been a huge coup. The knowledge they could gain about the Borg may have unlocked whole new technologies for them – perhaps even explaining how Romulan operatives were able to conduct covert operations in San Francisco.
Number 10: The Federation pulled the plug on the mission to aid the Romulans.
“We withdrew.” – Picard became very upset when pushed on why he resigned.
Picard as an individual has the loyalty of at least two Romulans – but relations between the Federation as a whole and the remnants of the Romulan Star Empire may be much more frosty. In the aftermath of the attack on Mars, the Federation abandoned the rescue mission and didn’t rebuild the destroyed fleet – presumably forcing Picard to use other means to aid Romulus.
He was clearly successful to an extent – the presence of such loyal Romulan aides confirms this – but he resigned from Starfleet in protest at the decision, perhaps calling their bluff in a last-ditch effort to force his superiors to reconsider.
Picard states that Starfleet “withdrew”, shirking its duties in the aftermath of the supernova – and possibly other significant events. Whether this represents a change in Federation policy to become more insular and/or isolationist isn’t clear, but from Picard’s perspective at the time that was certainly the case.
There are surely going to be consequences as a result of the decision to effectively betray the Romulans after they had been assured of help. The fact that we see Romulan operatives on Earth at least hints at this, but the extent of the relationship will be seen later as the story unfolds.
So that’s it.
A few bits and pieces that we learned from Remembrance, the first episode of Star Trek: Picard. Many of these points lead to more as yet unanswered questions, but a series as carefully constructed as Picard would seem to be would surely not be setting up mysteries it doesn’t intend to resolve. After all, this isn’t a JJ Abrams film!
As I said last time, I felt that Remembrance absolutely knocked it out of the park, and as far as Star Trek premieres go, it’s at least on a par with Emissary, the opening episode of Deep Space Nine.
While it can be nice to binge-watch a whole series at once, I think that weekly instalments like this give us time to digest each episode fully before moving on to the next. And I’m glad that Star Trek hasn’t gone down the route of doing full-season dumps like Netflix does for some of its original programming. Breathing room, especially after an episode as entertaining, exciting, and interesting as Remembrance can be important to us as viewers, and I’m glad that it’s being released this way. It gives me time to ponder some of those questions and speculate wildly about potential plot points!
If the rest of the episodes this season are even close to being as good as Remembrance, we’re in for an amazing couple of months. And I’m even more glad that a second season of Star Trek: Picard has been confirmed – hopefully production will begin shortly so the season can be released in about a year’s time.
Live Long and Prosper!
Remembrance, the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, is available to watch now on CBS All Access in the United States, and on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom and other countries and territories. Star Trek: Picard, and the entire Star Trek franchise, is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Picard Season 1, Star Trek: Nemesis, Star Trek: Discovery, and for other iterations of the franchise.
Star Trek: Picard’s opening title.
I don’t wear t-shirts very often. That’s just a personal style preference, I guess. But as I waited for Amazon Prime Video to make Star Trek: Picard’s premiere episode available here in the UK, I was wearing my Star Trek: Picard t-shirt which I’d managed to get a few days ago. As I watched the clock tick awfully slowly to the moment I expected the episode to go live, both of the promotional posters for Picard – the vineyard Starfleet logo and the one with Picard and his dog – were hanging framed on my wall. And my Jean-Luc Picard action figure stood proudly in my glass display cabinet. Suffice to say, I’m a fan.
I was a little concerned going into Remembrance, and I haven’t really discussed this on the website before. The director of Picard’s premiere, Hanelle M. Culpepper, had directed what I considered to be Star Trek: Discovery’s worst episode by far – Season 2’s The Red Angel. That episode failed hard, with incredibly cringeworthy attempts at humour, complete mischaracterisations, and the kind of stupid, paradoxical time travel storyline that really just encapsulated why I don’t like time travel as a concept – and was a great example of how it’s hard to get right.
One of my two framed Star Trek: Picard posters, and my Picard action figure. Both are permanent fixtures in my living room!
Some – perhaps even most – iterations of Star Trek have started with premiere episodes that weren’t especially great. In fact the only real exception to this is Deep Space Nine, whose first episode, Emissary, was fantastic. So in addition to my concerns about the director, there was precedent for Star Trek shows to have underwhelming starts. As excited as I was for Picard, there were those two factors gnawing away in the background making me nervous!
Finally, after hitting “refresh” for what must’ve been the hundredth time, Star Trek: Picard Season 1, Episode 1 was there! I was one click of the mouse away from Remembrance, and finally being back with Jean-Luc Picard for the first time in eighteen years – since I saw Star Trek: Nemesis at the cinema with my dad. I was still at university then. A lot has happened in my life since, and as Sir Patrick Stewart has told us in many interviews over the last couple of years, a lot has happened to Picard in that time too. I clicked “play”.
It was a nervous wait on the Amazon Prime Video page, waiting for Star Trek: Picard!
I’ve never been particularly impressed with Amazon Prime Video. When I watch something on Netflix, it’s always in 1080p high definition with no problems. On YouTube, for certain channels I’m able to watch videos in even higher quality – 1440p, a half-step between HD and full 4K. But Amazon Prime Video, at least in my experience, has tended to suffer from dips in quality where a high definition stream will suddenly and unexpectedly drop down to a much lower quality for a time. Obviously this is annoying, but luckily that didn’t happen on this occasion. I am disappointed, however, that Amazon Prime Video didn’t get the Short Treks episode Children of Mars. While I was able to watch it by “other means” – I even reviewed it – I think that it should have been made available to viewers outside the United States, preferably a few days ago prior to the start of the series. But we’re getting off topic again.
Remembrance begins with a dream sequence. We saw clips from this in the trailers – indeed, a significant portion of the content from the trailers was taken from this episode. Set to a forties- or fifties-inspired song, the camera pans over a nebula, and then we see the Enterprise-D, beautifully rendered in CGI. And sat in what I believe is Ten-Forward (though it may have been another observation lounge) are Picard and Data, playing cards. Data is wearing his First Contact-era uniform, which confirms this is a dream and not a flashback as that uniform was never used while the Enterprise-D was in service.
A brand-new CGI recreation of the Enterprise-D.
In the first trailer for Picard, I’d been a little concerned that Brent Spiner looked, to put it bluntly, too old to convincingly play Data. Indeed, Spiner himself said he felt he’d aged out of the role by the mid-2000s – which is why he opted not to appear in Enterprise’s finale These Are The Voyages along with Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes. Whatever makeup and/or digital effects have been applied to him, however, definitely looked better in the finished episode than they did in the trailers, and if we also remember that Data’s scenes are all taking place in Picard’s head, I think the way he looks is fine. It arguably wasn’t on the same level of digital de-ageing that we’ve seen in films like The Irishman or Captain Marvel, but it was good enough here not to be immersion-breaking.
Picard and Data continue their card game, and suddenly the Enterprise is in orbit of Mars. And just as in the Short Treks episode Children of Mars from a couple of weeks ago, the planet comes under violent attack, which finally jolts Picard awake. He opens the curtains and we see Château Picard – the Picard family vineyard in La Barre, France. The action then cuts to Dahj – the new character played by Isa Briones. She’s in her apartment in Boston when she and her boyfriend come under attack by unknown assailants. He is quickly killed, but the attackers place a device on her head and check to see whether or not she has been “activated”. She hasn’t, so they attempt to abduct her, but the violent nature of the attack causes whatever activation they were checking for to occur – and she quickly kills all three of them. For a military-esque team who knew what they were looking for, they went down remarkably easily against their target! But that’s very much a nitpick and not something that in any way hampers the story.
As Dahj mourns her boyfriend, she sees Picard’s face in her mind, and then the title sequence kicks in. The Next Generation had a memorable theme, taken from The Motion Picture a few years earlier, and aside from The Original Series’ theme, that piece of music is arguably the most iconic in the franchise. Picard’s theme is hard to explain in words, as music often is, but the best way I think I can describe it is that it’s somewhere between Discovery’s theme and the themes used on Deep Space Nine and Voyager. It’s slower in tempo and less adventurous in tone than The Next Generation’s theme, perhaps even reminiscent of something from The Lord of the Rings. The title sequence, as Discovery’s also does, runs through a few artistic designs of elements from the series – we see the vineyard, the damaged Borg cube, a planet breaking apart that I assume is Romulus, and what looks like DNA, before the sequence ends with Picard himself facing the camera. Obviously because I haven’t heard the theme more than a handful of times it doesn’t give me the same feelings as I might get from other Star Trek themes, but it is instantly recognisable as part of the show and it’s a perfectly creditable piece of music. The whole opening sequence is great, actually, and I wonder if they’ll do what we’ve seen in Discovery where they occasionally change up elements of the opening sequence to reflect what’s happening in that episode.
Picard at the end of the opening title sequence.
As the titles end we’re back at the vineyard, and Picard is with Number One – his pet dog. We briefly meet two Romulans who seem to be Picard’s assistants, and learn that he’s preparing for an interview to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Romulan supernova. In the 2009 film Star Trek it’s left unclear which star destroyed Romulus – Spock simply describes it as “nearby”. In this episode we learn that it was in fact the main star in the Romulan system. This closes what has been, for some people anyway, an annoying “plot hole”, as a supernova in one system shouldn’t have been able to travel far enough and fast enough to destroy a planet in another system based on our current understanding of supernovae in science. Hopefully that clears things up for those folks!
The interview Picard agreed to, however, turns into an ambush, as the interviewer aggressively pushes him on why he wasted resources to help “the Federation’s oldest enemy”, how he feels about “synthetics” like Data, and finally, why he quit Starfleet.
Picard is interviewed by the Federation News Network.
It turns out that the rogue synths, seen attacking Mars in Children of Mars, were in fact androids of Federation origin, though why they went rogue and attacked Mars is still unclear more than a decade later. We also learn more about Picard’s rescue armada – it was planned to be 10,000 ships capable of evacuating 900 million Romulans from their homeworld. Not only was the entire fleet destroyed by the rogue synths, but Mars even more than ten years later remains “on fire” – and presumably uninhabitable.
Sir Patrick Stewart had warned us heading into the new series that Picard may not be the same man we remember, but here in the interview he definitely was. He defiantly states that he left Starfleet because Starfleet tried to call off the rescue after the attack on Mars, something he felt was dishonourable and criminal, and that the lives at stake were simply “lives” – not “Romulan lives” as the interviewer coldly puts it. This reminded me so much of Picard’s staunch defence of Data in The Measure of a Man from The Next Generation’s second season. Picard has always argued in favour of the rights of life forms, and here he defends not only the Romulans but synthetic life too. Though he may have retired, he did so because he felt Starfleet no longer upheld its own ideals. He didn’t run away, and I’d argue that his decision to leave 100% re-emphasises that he is the character we remember. His morality and his code of ethics, at the very least, remain absolutely intact.
Picard ends the interview, clearly enraged by what he’s heard from the interviewer, and the action then cuts back to Dahj, who sees Picard’s interview on a screen and travels to find him. She’s clearly shaken, and despite the intrusion Picard welcomes her to his home. His Romulan assistants patch up her wound, and she’s invited to spend the night, but not before Picard is able to examine a necklace that she’s wearing. It’s a fairly plain silver necklace with two interlocking rings – I hadn’t actually noticed it until Picard asked for a closer look. Because the necklace was so plain I think this moment, of all the moments in Remembrance, felt forced. I understand it’s important to the plot, but I’m sure with a modicum of effort they could’ve made the necklace a little more visually interesting – as it is it looks like a piece of cheap costume jewellery from Claire’s Accessories! Again, however, this is really just a nitpick, and the necklace is only seen a handful of times across the episode so its appearance doesn’t really matter.
Dahj’s necklace.
Picard dreams again about Data, this time painting a picture – another scene from the trailers. Picard looks at the picture Data is painting – a portrait of a woman – and jolts awake to learn Dahj left in the night. Clearly inspired by the dream, he heads to San Francisco – but not to Starfleet Headquarters. Instead he heads to an archive, which holds (among dozens of TNG-era artifacts) a copy of the painting. In the dream it was incomplete, but the copy at the archive is fully complete and the woman Data painted thirty years ago is revealed to be Dahj.
Meanwhile Dahj is on the run, seemingly in Paris. She contacts her mother, who tells her to go back to Picard – even though Dahj never mentioned him. She then experiences another “activation” and hacks into Starfleet to track Picard down, and the two meet up outside the archive.
Picard thinks that Dahj is a synthetic – an android – and may be Data’s daughter. Data did attempt to create a “child” – Lal – in The Next Generation episode The Offspring. But Dahj is clearly not Lal – and believes herself to be human, perhaps suffering from a mental illness. The two are interrupted when Dahj believes they’re about to come under attack – and she’s proven correct. Another group of masked assailants appears – clearly the same faction as earlier – and they’re revealed to be Romulan. Shortly after the reveal, Dahj is killed. One of the attacking Romulans appears to spit something acidic at her, and his weapon overloads in a huge explosion which renders Picard unconcious. RIP Dahj!
Picard awakens back at the vineyard, and his Romulan assistants tell him that in the footage of the explosion there was no indication of anyone else being present – no masked Romulans, and no Dahj. Picard thinks she may have had some kind of cloaking device, and travels to the Daystrom Institute, which had been conducting research into androids – before such research was outlawed seemingly galaxy-wide.
At the Daystrom Institute. Named for a TOS character, the Institute has been mentioned a number of times in Star Trek.
He meets Dr Jurati, played by Alison Pill, and she explains that Bruce Maddox – presumably the same character from The Next Generation episode The Measure Of A Man – had been working on developing sentient androids which appeared to be human. Picard describes Dahj as a “flesh-and-blood” android. Here it’s also disclosed that B4 (from Star Trek: Nemesis) lacked the capability to take on Data’s memories and that despite Data’s attempts to copy his programming to B4, that information has been lost.
The necklace comes back into play – it’s a symbol used by Dr Maddox, which Dr Jurati recognises. And she reveals that, for some reason, part of the creation process for androids like Dahj means they’re made in pairs – so there may be another Dahj, another “daughter” of Data, somewhere out there.
The action then cuts to a Romulan base where we immediately meet Dahj’s twin, wearing the same necklace. She meets a Romulan – Harry Treadaway’s character – and they have a short conversation, before the camera pans out revealing that the Romulan base is aboard the Borg cube we’ve seen in the trailers, and the episode ends.
I feel that the trailers kind of spoilt that moment, because it would’ve been apparent from the decor of the Romulan base that it was inside the Borg cube to anyone who’d seen the trailers, yet the episode itself treated the reveal that the Romulans were on this Borg cube as a pretty big deal. In that sense I think the creative team and the marketing team may have not been working in tandem as well as they should’ve!
The Romulan base is revealed to be a Borg cube – and it looks a little different from the trailers.
Overall I was incredibly impressed with Remembrance. It was a very strong start for the series – setting up enough mystery to drive the plot forward. There were some looks back, and some “easter eggs” for long-time fans, but these complemented the plot rather than interrupting or overwhelming it. The emblem of the Ferengi Alliance pictured for a couple of seconds, the LCARS computer displays at Picard’s home, a TNG-era Batleth in Picard’s archive, the First Contact and TNG uniforms worn briefly in dream sequences, and many others that I’m sure I’m forgetting seasoned the episode with just enough nostalgia to say “hey, you’re definitely watching Star Trek”, but without drowning out the plot or any of the new characters.
Picard always had to find a way to get that balance right, and I think that if the season continues in a similar way to Remembrance, they’ve managed to pull it off.
The Romulans are clearly in a very bad situation. Picard initially intended to save 900 million lives – but after Mars was attacked and his fleet destroyed, it isn’t clear how many he was ultimately able to rescue before the supernova hit. Whether the Borg cube is their headquarters isn’t clear, but it just might be. If that is the case, it raises the question of why they didn’t settle on one of their colonies – the Romulan Star Empire was known to control other worlds and a significant amount of territory.
Picard’s Romulan assistants, Laris and Zhaban. How many other Romulans survived is unknown.
Dahj being killed off was a shock, and it was a story point put in purely for that reason – shock value. Though by the end of the episode it’s revealed she has a “twin”, the character we met who set in motion the events of the series is gone, and – barring any technobabble explanation for how she survived being disintegrated – isn’t coming back. That’s a new one for Star Trek, and it’s something you’d expect to see in a show like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead. Dahj’s twin looks much more settled than Dahj did, but whether she too is going to be “activated” is unclear.
Indeed, it’s unclear what exactly was “activated” in Dahj. It’s apparently some part of her synthetic programming, something designed to keep her safe, but why it would direct her to the retired Admiral Picard instead of, say, sending her back to Dr Maddox if she got into trouble or came under attack is unclear.
I wonder if we’re going to see Dr Maddox in the flesh later in the series. Brian Brophy – the actor who portrayed Maddox in The Measure Of A Man way back in 1989 – wasn’t mentioned as being in the cast, and according to his IMDB page doesn’t seem to have had many film or television roles since the turn of the millennium. It’s possible, of course, that the character has been recast.
Picard and Bruce Maddox in The Measure Of A Man.
Remembrance played out like a the beginning of a classic adventure story. The protagonist – Picard, in this case – is living a quiet, rural life. His life is disrupted by a mysterious newcomer – Dahj – and he becomes embroiled in the mystery, setting the stage for the adventure to unfold as he chases down the solution.
It also had a very “Star Trek” feel, and moreover, it did feel like a continuation of the Star Trek story as a whole. For all of the high points of Enterprise, Discovery, and the Kelvin-timeline films, what was missing from those stories is a sense that things were moving forward, that the overarching narrative of the entire franchise was progressing. Prequels and mid-quels (or however we’re to describe Discovery) can be great, but pressing forward into the future is what Star Trek has always been about – at least, when it was at its best. Picard feels like a return to that, and a significant part of that is Sir Patrick Stewart’s performance.
I mentioned that he spoke passionately and angrily about helping the Romulans and about the ban on synthetic life, and that was absolutely pure Picard. The man we met in 1987’s Encounter At Farpoint was on full display in that moment, and his willingness to help Dahj, even before he knew who she was, shows he’s the same compassionate person we knew, even despite what happened with Starfleet and the Romulans.
Dahj, coming to terms with the idea of being an android.
There are parallels to Luke Skywalker’s characterisation in The Last Jedi in the sense that both men have left the institutions to which they belonged and from which they seemed inseparable. Both sought solitude and a quiet life – as Picard says, he felt he wasn’t living, merely “waiting to die”. And ultimately, both found a reason to come out of isolation, finding an inspiring cause once again.
So what are the mysteries Picard aims to solve over the rest of Season 1? Part of it surely has to be the reason that the synthetics went rogue and attacked Mars. A cause has never been identified, yet surely we’re on course to learn they were hacked, attacked, reprogrammed, etc. by some nefarious villain. Next is Dr Maddox – is he out there, somewhere? Is he going to feature in later episodes, or will we only know him through Dahj’s twin? What are the Romulans doing on the Borg cube? And how do the ex-Borg Seven of Nine and Hugh fit in to all of this? At this point we have absolutely no idea – and that’s compelling me to come back next time and find out more.
When Discovery premiered, I felt that The Vulcan Hello and Battle At The Binary Stars were not a very strong start, and that’s for a variety of reasons. Remembrance stands in absolute contrast to that, and ranks up there with Deep Space Nine’s Emissary as one of the best premieres in all of Star Trek. It crammed a lot into its 44 minutes without any of it feeling rushed, without any of it feeling overwhelming.
One of my cats interrupts my viewing of Remembrance!
The introduction of the series’ main characters has felt deliberate, and we’ve only met three out of six so far – one only very briefly at the end of the episode. This is incredibly positive – a show that throws a huge cast of characters at you in episode one can be difficult to follow. Picard has clearly had a lot of thought put into every aspect, including the pacing.
Hanelle M. Culpepper, whose work on The Red Angel had me feeling a little nervous as I mentioned, really excelled. Each shot, each camera angle, and the way each scene unfolded all felt meticulously organised and planned. A lot of care was taken with Remembrance to get the look and feel just right, and it shows.
It’s hard to pick out a significant point to criticise, really. I was thoroughly enjoying myself from start to finish, and while I can (and did) find a few very minor nitpicks, taken as a whole, Remembrance was incredible. A worthy successor to The Next Generation, and a fantastic way to rejoin Picard and the Federation in the late 24th Century.
Remembrance, the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, is available to stream now on CBS All Access in the United States and on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and a number of other countries and territories. The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for the Star Trek franchise – including Short Treks, Star Trek: Discovery, and the trailers for Star Trek: Picard.
If you’re in the United States, you’ll be able to watch Star Trek: Picard tomorrow, you lucky thing! The rest of us have to wait an extra 24 hours… hopefully I can manage! This is the final part of my series of articles leading up to the release of the new show, and after this I expect my next piece – on the 24th or 25th – will be a review/breakdown of the first episode, which we now know is titled Remembrance.
Before we jump in and look at a few other factions from Star Trek, let’s briefly recap the articles here on the site in case you’ve missed any.
Firstly, I wrote a piece back in December explaining why I’m so excited for Star Trek: Picard. This was more of a personal look at my feelings regarding the upcoming series. The next piece I wrote was a review of Children of Mars – the Short Treks episode which was a prequel or prologue to the new show. Next, I wrote two articles which each highlighted ten episodes and/or films from Star Trek’s extensive back catalogue which may or may not be useful preparation for Star Trek: Picard. The first article contained episodes I think will surely have some relevance, and the second article looked at some episodes which are less likely to matter – but still might! After that, Picard had its red carpet premieres in Hollywood and London, so I wrote a short piece about that.
Finally, I began this series, looking at some of the factions we will encounter in Star Trek: Picard and giving some background information. First I looked at the Romulans, then the Borg, and finally the Federation.
This time – as a bonus and the final part of the series – we’re going to look at an assortment of other factions which seem less likely to be relevant to Picard. However, they may be mentioned in passing, may have been deliberately kept out of marketing material, or are just factions we know less about.
The Bajorans
Captain Picard has some history with the Bajorans, who were first introduced in The Next Generation. He took Ensign – later Lieutenant – Ro under his wing for a time, and was hurt by her ultimate defection to the Maquis. Of course most of what we know about Bajor and its people comes from Deep Space Nine, which was set in the Bajoran system.
Very briefly, the Bajorans were a much older race than humanity, and flourished more than 10,000 years prior to the events of Star Trek. In their star system is the only known stable wormhole – connecting Bajor to the Gamma Quadrant. The Prophets – a noncorporeal species with no concept of linear time – live in the wormhole and contacted the Bajorans throughout their history.
Ensign Ro and Captain Picard (with Worf and Data) visit a Bajoran refugee camp around the time the Cardassian occupation of Bajor was coming to an end.
In the late 23rd or early 24th Century, Bajor was violently conquered by their neighbours, the Cardassians. The Cardassian occupation stripped the Bajorans of significant quantities of resources, and many Bajorans were enslaved. A resistance movement sprang up, and for a variety of reasons the Cardassians withdrew from the Bajoran system in the mid-late 24th Century.
The new Bajoran government asked the Federation for help putting their planet and people back together, and a former Cardassian space station was occupied by the Federation and christened Deep Space Nine. The crew of DS9 discovered the wormhole shortly thereafter.
Bajor experienced a renaissance as a result of being the gateway to the Gamma Quadrant, and for a time many ships were passing through their system. However, their old enemies the Cardassians soon allied with the Dominion – an aggressive faction from the Gamma Quadrant – and when war broke out, Bajor – while officially neutral – was again occupied by the Cardassian-Dominion alliance until the Federation were able to drive them out.
Bajor came very close to joining the Federation! A ceremony to officially bring them into the fold was ultimately disrupted, and Bajor had not attempted to re-apply as of the end of Deep Space Nine.
Prior to the Dominion War, Bajor was a candidate for Federation membership. At one time they were on the cusp of being accepted, and an official ceremony was even planned to mark Bajor’s admission into the Federation. However, as of the finale of Deep Space Nine, Bajor had not yet officially become a Federation member – though it’s heavily suggested that it was still their goal.
In Star Trek: Picard, look out for signs that Bajor is a full Federation member, and that they have begun to heal after such a prolonged period of conflict. Also listen out for any mention of Deep Space Nine, as the station is located in the Bajoran system.
The Cardassians
The Cardassians, as mentioned above, occupied Bajor for a long period from the late 23rd Century through to the mid-late 24th Century. They were, as of the mid-24th Century, a regional power comparable in strength to other factions in the Alpha Quadrant – including the Klingons, Romulans, and even the Federation.
In wars and border conflicts with all of the aforementioned factions, the Cardassians held their own and even forced the Federation to concede settled planets as part of a peace treaty. These concessions, along with continued Cardassian aggression toward Federation border worlds, would ultimately lead to the Maquis attempting to secede from the Federation.
Despite the end of hostilities, some in the Federation retained a dislike of Cardassians even years later. Here, aboard the Enterprise-D, Miles O’Brien is forced to deal with Cardassians for the first time since he fought against them.
The Cardassian Union was, in some respects, similar to the Romulan Star Empire in that it was heavily militarised, and with a very powerful intelligence agency that also operated as a secret police. The Obsidian Order, as it was known, was responsible for keeping order in the Cardassian territory, and dominated the Cardassian state.
In the 2370s, the Cardassian Union entered a period of decline, withdrawing from Bajor and fighting a losing war against the Klingons. As a result, Gul Dukat was able to seize power and allied Cardassia with the Dominion – formally becoming a member of the Dominion under their rule. This would ultimately lead to the outbreak of the Dominion War, as a reinvigorated Cardassia sought to reconquer all of its old territory – including Bajor.
The dramatic moment when the Cardassians switched sides mid-battle, joining the Federation alliance and turning on the Dominion and Breen.
At the end of the war, fed up with an increasingly authoritarian Dominion occupation and too many concessions made to the Breen, a mass revolt began among Cardassian troops and later even Cardassian civilians. The Dominion responded by attempting mass genocide of the Cardassians, devastating Cardassia Prime in the process. Fortunately, the end of the war saved the Cardassians from complete extermination – though they were left in a thoroughly ruined state.
Again, be on the lookout for mentions of Deep Space Nine – as this station was close to Cardassian space. We may hear about the reconstruction of Cardassia after the war, and what state the Cardassian Union is in. It’s also possible that – due to the extent of the devastation inflicted – Cardassia has become a Federation protectorate.
The Delta Quadrant factions
The crew of the USS Voyager encountered dozens of species during their journey through the Delta Quadrant. From Ocampans and Talaxians to Kazon, Vidiians, Brunali, and Hirogen, each had their own territory and technology. Some Delta Quadrant races came into contact and conflict with the Borg, and if the Borg have resumed their expansion efforts in that region some of these species may be in jeopardy.
Jabin, a Kazon, and Neelix, a Talaxian. Both races were native to the Delta Quadrant.
With Star Trek: Picard seemingly taking place firmly in the Alpha and/or Beta Quadrants, I’d be surprised to see any Delta Quadrant factions making an appearance. However, it’s possible that an individual from one of these races may be encountered, especially given that part of the plot, as hinted at in the trailers anyway, may involve dealing with ex-Borg. If the Borg had assimilated a Talaxian, for example, and that individual had been de-assimilated in the Alpha Quadrant, it’s possible we could see them. It’s also possible that new technology allows for travel between the Alpha and Delta Quadrants, but again I think this is unlikely.
The Dominion
The Dominion, as mentioned above, originated in the Gamma Quadrant and allied with the Cardassians and Breen to attempt to conquer large parts of the Alpha Quadrant. At least three distinct races make up the Dominion. Their leaders are shape-shifting beings called The Founders. They designed and bred two servant races: The Jem’Hadar, who served as the bulk of their forces during the Dominion War, and the Vorta, who serve more as diplomats and an officer corps.
Aboard an occupied Deep Space Nine, Jake Sisko tries to talk with the Vorta named Weyoun while two Jem’Hadar soldiers look on.
I don’t expect the Dominion to feature in a significant way in Star Trek: Picard. They had, as of the end of Deep Space Nine, been forced to withdraw behind the Bajoran wormhole, and while they may be mentioned in passing, I would be surprised if they have a significant impact here.
The Ferengi
Early appearances in The Next Generation attempted to set up the Ferengi as a major antagonist to replace the Klingons, who had been pacified, and the Romulans, who had isolated themselves. This never really worked from a storytelling perspective, however, and the Ferengi quickly shifted into the money-obsessed species we saw in Deep Space Nine.
The Ferengi proved very aggressive during early encounters with the Federation.
The Ferengi, starting after The Next Generation’s first season, were a neutral power, more concerned with their own finances than galactic affairs. War could be profitable for them, but they also saw that a prolonged, devastating conflict (like the Dominion War) could be financially ruinous, and were cautious about becoming involved. They preferred to stay on the sidelines and trade.
Having been incredibly aggressive with their approach to capitalism for a long time, by the end of Deep Space Nine the Ferengi government was beginning to implement some reforms – this process may have continued under Rom, who was appointed the Ferengi Grand Nagus in 2375.
Rom would go on to become Grand Nagus of the Ferengi Alliance after his predecessor, Zek, set in motion a series of major reforms.
As an independent, neutral power, the Ferengi may prove useful to Picard and his crew if they need to operate outside of the jurisdiction of the Federation and other factions. However, aside from maybe the odd passing reference, I would be surprised to see much from them at least in Season 1.
The Klingons
A cold war between the Klingon Empire and the Federation had been building since the mid-22nd Century. The Klingons, upset by Federation exploration and expansion, ultimately ended up at war with the Federation in the mid-23rd Century – and the war proved devastating for a time.
However, after the crew of the USS Discovery were able to stop a plot by Starfleet which would have devastated the Klingon homeworld, the Klingon Great Houses came together and the Empire, under new leadership, sued for peace.
Federation and Klingon fleets face off at the Battle of the Binary Stars, which started the Federation-Klingon war.
Relations would remain frosty for much of the rest of the 23rd Century, but the destruction of the Klingon moon Praxis led to a peace agreement with the Federation called the Khitomer Accords – a peace treaty which would remain in place (with one brief lapse) for the duration of the 24th Century.
The Khitomer Accords would ultimately evolve from a peace treaty into an alliance, and Captain Picard himself spent time on the Klingon homeworld and was trusted by Klingon Chancellor K’mpec to be a neutral party as the Klingons chose a new leader. Gowron, despite breaking the peace treaty for a time, ultimately became a firm ally of the Federation during the Dominion War, and for a time, the Federation and Klingons stood alone against the forces of the Dominion.
Worf was the first Klingon to serve in Starfleet, serving on both the Enterprise-D and on Deep Space Nine. Also in the 24th Century, the Federation and Klingons participated in an exchange programme where officers could spend time serving on each other’s starships.
Captain Picard, immediately after officially installing Gowron as the new Klingon Chancellor.
With the Klingons having featured so prominently in Star Trek: Discovery, I’m sure there will be at least some reference to them in Picard. Keep an eye out for Worf – it’s possible he may make a cameo appearance or at least be mentioned, and the last time we saw him he was scheduled to become the Federation’s Ambassador to the Klingon homeworld. However, it’s possible that relations have deteriorated – we’ve seen in some episodes set in the future (like Endgame and All Good Things…) that the Klingons were once again enemies of the Federation.
The “Rogue Synths”
This faction was mentioned in the Short Treks episode Children of Mars. They were identified as being behind the attack on the Utopia Planitia shipyards on Mars, which set back Admiral Picard’s fleet as he attempted to aid the Romulans.
Who they are and where they came from is unclear, as this isn’t a faction we’ve met before.
The “stingray ships” operated by the “rogue synths” during their attack on Mars in the 2380s.
Based on the designs of the ships they used, I made stab-in-the-dark guesses that they could be affiliated in some way with the Klingons or the Romulans, as I could see that design of ship being a natural evolution from the 23rd and 24th Century ships used by those factions. However, it’s likely that I’m way off base with that.
The word “synth” seems like it’s short for “synthetic”, and the term has been used in other science fiction works to describe robots, droids, and artificial or machine intelligences. In the trailers for Picard, we’ve seen glimpses of a number of Data-esque characters who appeared to be in stasis or shut down, so the rogue synths could be a race of androids or AIs – perhaps even androids created by the Federation themselves.
Could these android-esque humanoids, seen in the trailers for Star Trek: Picard, be the “rogue synths”?
The attack on Mars seemed to be significant at the time – though it doesn’t appear to have set back the Federation in a major way. Who the rogue synths are, and whether they are still even an active faction during the new series, is something yet to be revealed.
The Suliban and Xindi
Two of the biggest antagonists in Star Trek: Enterprise, both the Suliban and Xindi were aided by time travellers to grow in power and strength. Following the NX-01 Enterprise’s intervention in the “temporal cold war”, the Suliban eventually became a somewhat-ally of Earth, even giving Captain Archer the information that showed it was the Xindi who were responsible for attacking Earth. What became of the Suliban Cabal after the 2150s is unclear, and as a new faction featured only in Enterprise, we haven’t seen them since.
The Xindi were a collection of five races: humanoids, arboreals, aquatics, reptilians, and insectoids, who all originated from one planet and achieved sentience together. Having been manipluated by extra-dimensional time-travelling beings known as the Sphere Builders, the Xindi attacked Earth with a weapon-probe that killed over 7 million people in the 2150s. The NX-01 Enterprise was dispatched to stop them before they could deploy an even larger weapon capable of destroying entire planets. Captain Archer and his crew were able to stop them, and in the process swayed some Xindi – primarily the humanoids and arboreals – to become friendly to Earth and her allies.
Degra, a Xindi-humanoid, and Jannar, a Xindi-arboreal.
By the 26th Century, the Xindi had joined the Federation, though whether this took place before or after the events of Star Trek: Picard is unclear. If we see any Xindi officers serving in Starfleet, that would be a good indication that they’re at least close to becoming Federation members, though it’s possible we may not see any indication of the Xindi or the Suliban, especially given that Enterprise wasn’t as successful as the TNG-era series.
So that’s it.
I think we’ve recapped pretty much all of the major factions encountered in Star Trek up to this point, or at least all of the ones who have a chance of being connected to the plot of Star Trek: Picard.
I’m hopeful that Picard will surprise me, and that we’ll not only see some glimpses of returning factions, but also some brand new ones, as well as new alliances or groupings that change things up.
Star Trek: Picard has to walk a fine line between looking back at Star Trek’s successes and building something new for the future. I’ve said before that, as excited as I am to see returning characters like Riker and Seven of Nine, I want the series to give new characters like Chris Rio and Dahj a chance to shine too. Spending too much time looking back would stray too far into fan-service, and as Star Wars has been learning to its cost, that doesn’t always work. When it comes to factions and species, the same is true.
As fans, we absolutely want to see the Klingons and the Cardassians and the Xindi – but only if doing so moves the story forward. Picard has its own story to tell, and while I hope we’ll find out a great deal about the shape of the galaxy and its factions as that story unfolds, there should to be new things in there too. We’ve already seen one new potential faction – the “rogue synths”. What role they have to play isn’t clear, but some of you will find out tomorrow!
Star Trek: Picard is upon us, and as I said I’ll be taking a short break until I’ve seen the premiere, then I’ll be back with a review. Live Long and Prosper!
The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. Star Trek: Picard premieres on the 23rd of January in the United States on CBS All Access and in the United Kingdom and other countries/territories on the 24th of January on Amazon Prime Video. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for every iteration of the Star Trek franchise, as well as from the trailers for Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Discovery Season 3.
The Federation crest in the 22nd Century.
Over the last few days we’ve looked at a couple of the main Star Trek factions that seem certain to make an appearance in Star Trek: Picard. In case you missed them, you can find my articles on the Borg by clicking or tapping here, and on the Romulans by clicking or tapping here. In this article I’m continuing to look at some (hopefully) useful background information as we prepare for Star Trek: Picard, and oh boy, today’s faction is the big one!
Introduction
The United Federation of Planets – or simply “the Federation” for short – is the faction to which our protagonists and heroes in every iteration of Star Trek belong. Okay, maybe that isn’t strictly true, because we’ve seen non-Federation citizens as main characters in Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and because of its setting technically no one in Enterprise was a Federation citizen until after that show’s finale. But you know what I mean!
The Federation is not to be confused with Starfleet. Starfleet is the Federation’s deep-space exploration and military arm, but it is not synonymous with the entire Federation. Starfleet officers and enlisted personnel may hail from non-Federation worlds, and being a Federation citizen does not make an individual a member of Starfleet.
Members
The Federation, at the moment of its founding in 2161, consisted of four species, and throughout its history – with the possible exception of the future glimpsed in the trailers for Discovery’s third season – remained a faction which incorporated many different species under one banner.
The four founding members were: humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites. These four species’ homeworlds are in relatively close proximity to one another in the Alpha Quadrant, and Vulcans were the first extraterrestrial race encountered by humanity.
The founding member species of the Federation: Vulcans, humans, Tellarites, and Andorians.
Other important members, as of the late 24th Century, were as follows: Betazoids, Bolians, Catians, Deltans, Rigellians, and the Zakdorn. The Federation also offered protectorate status to some species, including the Evora. The Bajorans, because of the heavy Federation presence in their system, could be arguably considered a Federation protectorate too, and were a candidate for full Federation membership.
Two of the most important criteria for a species to meet before being permitted to join the Federation were a united planet/species not divided into factions or nation-states, and having achieved the technological milestone of warp drive. Some species, like the Bajorans, fulfilled these criteria, but other factors prevented the Federation from seeing them as viable members for a time.
Amanda Grayson, Michael Burnham, and Sarek at a meeting of the Vulcan Expeditionary Group in the mid-23rd Century.
Members of the Federation were fairly autonomous. The Vulcans, for example, were seen to maintain their own fleet of starships, their own science academy which was at least equal in standing to Starfleet academy, their own “expeditionary group”, and their own government – even into the 24th Century. Spock was the first Vulcan to serve in Starfleet, though many others would follow. In the 24th Century, there were Starfleet ships whose crews were entirely made up of a single species – often Vulcans. However, the norm appears to be for multi-species crews.
22nd Century
In the aftermath of conflicts and skirmishes with the Klingons, and especially with the Romulans, four Alpha Quadrant powers – the Vulcans, humans, Andorians, and Tellarites – agreed to work together in the interests of safety and technological cooperation. The Andorians and Vulcans had long been adversaries – even before humanity achieved warp drive and joined the galactic community – but were able to set their animosity aside and band together. The ceremony which marked the Federation’s official founding took place in San Francisco on Earth.
Earth was arguably chosen to headquarter the Federation as a neutral venue controlled by neither the Vulcans nor the Andorians – whose confrontational past was still an obstacle to be overcome. Regardless of the reasoning, Earth remained the Federation’s headquarters into the late 24th Century, seemingly hosting the entire Federation government as well as Starfleet.
Travis Mayweather, Hoshi Sato, and Malcolm Reed of the NX-01 Enterprise attend the founding ceremony of the United Federation of Planets in 2161.
By the end of the 22nd Century, the Federation’s economy transitioned entirely away from money, as technology had improved for all members and was able to provide a better standard of living for all citizens. The Federation retained some form of “credit” which could be considered a currency, but by this point it’s assumed that technology like food synthesizers and the availability of energy to power everything meant that the entire economy was transformed. Picard states that, as of the 24th Century, the goal of humanity was to “better itself” rather than pursue material goods. This was a core part of Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future.
23rd Century
In the 23rd Century, the Federation was focused on exploration of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. First contact was made with many species in this region, and several would join the growing Federation. The Klingons were left feeling ill at ease with this expansion, particularly the presence of human colonies, and a cold war between the Federation and Klingons began brewing. This ultimately boiled over into a very costly war between the two factions, which was only ended when Starfleet threatened to use a superweapon to trigger mass volcanic eruptions on the Klingon homeworld which would have devastated the Empire. The Klingon Great Houses were thus forced to sue for peace, despite the Federation’s weakened position as a result of the war.
The crew of the USS Discovery discuss the tactical situation near the end of the Federation-Klingon war.
The Federation recovered quickly, however, and resumed the scientific and exploratory work that they had been engaged in prior to the Klingon war. In this era, Constitution-class starships, such as the USS Enterprise commanded by Captains Pike and Kirk, made up the bulk of Starfleet. The Federation also discovered the Mirror Universe around this time, populated by an aggressive, expansionist empire led by that universe’s Earth.
Aside from brief skirmishes with the Klingons and Tholians, the Federation remained mostly at peace in the second half of the 23rd Century, though it did face challenges such as a rogue AI created by Section 31, a planet-killing superweapon that entered the Milky Way from another galaxy, V’Ger, a hyperintelligent machine, Khan, a 20th Century despot who had been genetically enhanced, and a probe that threatened Earth.
The Federation continued its exploration, however, including missions further and further into deep space, often requiring ships and their crews to spend years at a time away from the faction’s core in the Alpha Quadrant.
An assembled Starfleet crew during the V’Ger incident in the late 23rd Century.
By the end of the 23rd Century, the Federation and Klingons had signed a peace agreement and were working together to alleviate the problems on the Klingon homeworld caused by a devastating explosion on the moon of Praxis. The Khitomer Accords would remain in force throughout the 24th Century – with a brief lapse in which the Klingons and Federation again engaged in a few skirmishes over the course of a few months.
24th Century
The Romulans and the Federation had a Neutral Zone separating their territories, and after failed attempts to invade and then to disrupt the budding peace process, the Romulans remained inactive from the Federation’s perspective for most of the first half of the 24th Century.
In the years prior to The Next Generation, which takes place in the 2360s, the Federation were involved in conflicts, wars, and/or skirmishes with: the Breen, the Cardassians, the Gorn, the Tholians, and the Tzenkethi. None of these wars appear to have been as significant nor as damaging as the earlier Klingon war.
Calvin Hudson, a former Starfleet officer, was an early leader of the breakaway Maquis.
When the Cardassians and Federation agreed to a peace treaty, several Federation worlds were transferred to Cardassia and were no longer under Federation jurisdiction despite being home to colonies. Some of these colonists, along with others on the Cardassian border, broke away from the Federation. Calling themselves the Maquis, they would attempt full secession from the Federation, which considered them little more than terrorists, but were ultimately eradicated in brutal fashion when the Cardassians allied with the Dominion.
By the mid-late 24th Century, the Federation’s two biggest adversaries were newly-contacted factions: the Borg and the Dominion. The Federation faced two major Borg attacks, where each time a single Borg vessel was able to take on a huge fleet of Federation ships, and a protracted war against the Dominion. Both events significantly drained the Federation’s resources.
The Borg, seen here on the viewscreen of the Enterprise-D, would attempt to assimilate the Federation twice in the mid-late 24th Century.
Prior to the outbreak of the Dominion War, a Starfleet Admiral named Leyton attempted a military coup against the democratic government, under the impression he was the only one capable of “saving” the Federation and its ideals from the manipulations of the Dominion and their shape-shifting Founders.
During the Dominion War, the Cardassians and Breen allied with the Dominion – who were originally from the Gamma Quadrant – and inflicted heavy losses on Starfleet and their Klingon and Romulan allies. Many ships were lost, and key Federation worlds such as Betazed were captured, as well as Deep Space Nine, which was the gateway to the Gamma Quadrant. It was only thanks to the intervention of the Prophets – a noncorporeal race who live in the Bajoran wormhole – that Dominion reinforcements were prevented from arriving, paving the way for the Federation alliance’s victory, but not before the Breen attacked Earth itself.
The Breen’s attack on Earth damaged Starfleet headquarters, and while it was able to be repulsed, it left many in the Federation badly shaken and emphasised how close they were to defeat.
Federation troops prepare to battle the Dominion on the planetoid AR-558 at the height of the Dominion War.
Shortly after the war’s end, the USS Voyager returned from the Delta Quadrant, bringing knowledge of that region as well as technology designed for battling the Borg. The Federation would also face an attack by the Romulans shortly thereafter, though relations between the two powers looked set to improve when the leader in power was defeated, and Romulan ships came to the Federation’s aid to prevent an attack on Earth.
Relations between the Romulans and Federation had reached a point where the Romulans turned to the Federation for help when facing the supernova crisis. Admiral Picard would lead a rescue armada to save as many Romulans as possible, though an attack by a faction called the “rogue synths” against Mars destroyed at least a portion of this fleet.
Beyond the 25th Century…
This should bring us up-to-date… only it doesn’t, because we’ve also seen some glimpses of the Federation’s future.
The crew of a 31st Century Federation timeship.
Cardassians, Xindi, and Klingons would all seem to have joined the Federation by the 26th or 27th Centuries, and by the 31st Century, the Federation was routinely travelling through time in much the same way as they had explored space from the 22nd-24th Centuries. They considered themselves in this era to be a kind of temporal police force, correcting errors in the timeline and trying to prevent other factions in a “temporal cold war” from rewriting history.
By the time the USS Discovery arrives – supposedly the late 32nd or early 33rd Century – the Federation appears to be in a much weaker state, perhaps having suffered numerous secessions and being set back technologically. But that’s a problem for Discovery to deal with in Season 3!
Society and Culture
The Federation, as a loose union of many races, doesn’t have one single culture of its own. While all member planets are committed to the principles of peaceful exploration and democratic governance, they each have their own distinct histories and cultures which mix together in the Federation without any one culture being dominated and forced out by another.
The crew of the USS Voyager celebrate First Contact Day – a Federation holiday marking the anniversary of first contact between Vulcans and humans.
Though we see far more humans than any other species, this is arguably for production reasons – it’s cheaper to have Ensign McRedshirt who will only be on screen for three seconds in one episode be human than have to put him through expensive prosthetic makeup or use time-consuming digital effects. So it’s worth remembering that while we, as the audience of a television series, see the Federation as a primarily human enterprise, humanity is just one part, and there were, as of the 24th Century, more than 150 Federation members. Some of these will have been colonies, but many were distinct species.
It isn’t exactly clear what the majority of Federation civilians do with their time. We’ve only seen two main characters in Star Trek thus far who were non-Starfleet Federation citizens: Wesley Crusher and Jake Sisko. Wesley would, in fairly short order, become an acting ensign and later go to Starfleet Academy, so he doesn’t really count. Jake was a bit of a drifter for much of DS9′s first half, until the show’s writers eventually settled on making him a novelist and journalist. We’ve seen his grandfather, Joseph Sisko, as a restaurateur, though in a world without money and with access to food replicators, how much of a need there is for that job and how he came to own/use the building is up for debate. We’ve also seen Picard’s brother, Robert, and his family running the vineyard that Picard himself will take over in the new series. Other non-Starfleet personnel we’ve seen have been primarily scientists or diplomats, and there was clearly a huge amount of scientific research being conducted in the 24th Century.
“I’m a reporter.” – Jake Sisko became a writer and journalist, showing one of the roles non-Starfleet personnel could play in the 24th Century.
The government of the Federation is similarly vague, but we know it has a legislature called the Federation Council, and an executive branch headed by a President. There is also a judicial system – though when it comes to Starfleet, military-style courts-martial rather than jury trials are the way justice is applied.
Technology
Vulcan was the first of the Federation worlds to develop faster-than-light travel, while humanity was still living in the Dark Ages around the fall of the Roman Empire! Andorians and Tellarites were also spacefaring before humanity, and the Andorians and Vulcans had a centuries-long conflict that was only resolved shortly before the Federation was founded.
Despite coming late to the party, humanity developed quickly from the end of World War III through to the mid-22nd Century, such that the Vulcans thought they were moving too fast and weren’t ready for significant missions into deep space. The Vulcans – and presumably the Tellarites and Andorians – had been somewhat conservative in their explorations prior to humanity becoming warp-capable, and by the 23rd Century, humans were venturing far deeper into the unknown than the Vulcans had in almost two millennia.
A late 23rd Century Starfleet away team with handheld phasers and a tricorder.
By the 24th Century, the Federation was one of the biggest powers in the Alpha Quadrant, and as such their technology kept pace with the Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and others. However, the Federation were limited by their lack of cloaking devices, which had been prohibited as part of an agreement with the Romulans. The Breen had a particular type of energy weapon which, for a time, was capable of draining even a fully-shielded Federation starship of all its power, and the Federation were similarly outgunned by the Dominion from the Gamma Quadrant, especially during early encounters. The Borg were also a significantly more powerful faction, as a single Borg cube was capable of defeating an entire Federation battle fleet.
Phasers were the Federation’s primary weapons, both shipboard and handheld. And photon torpedoes and later quantum torpedoes provided many starships with powerful antimatter explosives. The most powerful Federation starships were capable of surpassing warp 9.9 by the latter part of the 24th Century – though relative warp factors have always been a weak point in Star Trek storytelling! The Federation had sensors capable of penetrating certain types of cloaking devices, as well as scanning light-years away for very specific items, objects, or types of radiation.
Montgomery Scott invented “transwarp beaming” – a new kind of teleportation which was able to allow the Federation to transport huge distances, including from Earth to the Klingon homeworld and onto moving starships. This was invented in the late 24th Century, and Spock took it with him to the alternate reality’s 23rd Century.
The USS Voyager departs Deep Space Nine – she had a maximum cruising velocity of warp 9.975.
The Federation had experimented with time travel, artificial intelligences, cloaking technology – including a phase cloak capable of passing through solid objects, life-lengthening technology (such that a human living past 140 years of age was possible), and various trans-warp engines. Not all of these experiments were successful.
Conclusion
In the last two articles, I said that it was hard to know what state the Borg and Romulans were in as a result of two potentially massive catastrophes those two factions faced the last time we saw them. That doesn’t apply to the Federation, as everything we’ve seen in the trailers for Star Trek: Picard shows them running smoothly, just as we left them. It has been indicated that perhaps all is not well in the galaxy as a whole, but for the Federation it seems that, as of the beginning of Star Trek: Picard at least, things are going alright.
The trailer for Star Trek: Picard shows the Federation alive and well! But will it stay that way as the series progresses?
The Short Treks episode Children of Mars showed the Federation under attack by a faction called the “rogue synths” in the years prior to Picard. Whether this conflict lasted, and whether there were further significant losses beyond the Mars shipyards isn’t known, but again just going off the trailers it would seem that whatever impact the “rogue synths” attack(s) had was forgotten a few years later.
It’s only a couple of days now till we’ll have Star Trek: Picard on our screens. I’ve got one more piece planned in this series, and then I’ll probably take a break until I’ve seen the first episode (it comes out on the 24th here in the UK). I’m really looking forward to hanging out with Picard again and being back in the 24th Century. As before, I hope the information above has given you some background, or just a refresher, on the Federation as we await Star Trek: Picard.
The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for Star Trek, including the most recent season of Star Trek: Discovery, as well as the trailers for Star Trek: Picard.
As Star Trek: Picard gets closer, I’m continuing the series I began last time, looking at some of the factions we seem certain to encounter in the new series. We’ve already looked at the Romulans, as Star Trek: Picard will feature the franchise’s first ever Romulan main character. And today, it’s the turn of the Borg to be under the microscope!
History
There’s still a part of me that wonders if the AI named Control, featured in Star Trek: Discovery’s second season, will ultimately turn out to be connected in some way to the origins of the Borg, which thus far are shrouded in mystery. It definitely seemed for a while that the story was going to go that way, but for now we’ll have to treat it as unconfirmed at best.
The nanobots used by Control against Captain Leland are certainly reminiscent of Borg technology…
The Borg originated in the Delta Quadrant – the area of the galaxy farthest from Federation space. Due to the distances involved, the Borg had relatively few encounters with the humanity and the Federation prior to the 24th Century.
The Borg Queen claimed that the collective was developed over “thousands of centuries”, and began as any other organic humanoid species. The addition of their cybernetics came later. By the 15th Century, the Borg were known to other Delta Quadrant races, but they had only a few systems under their control. It’s implied that their technology was also much more limited, comparable to other factions at the time, though they were capable of faster-than-light travel.
Captain Janeway with Gedrin. His people, the Vaadwaur, encountered the Borg in the 15th Century.
Here’s where it gets a little messy – thanks to time travel.
In the 24th Century, as part of a plan to conquer the Federation, the Borg travelled back in time and attempted to assimilate Earth in the past: specifically in the year 2063, the year humans made first contact with the Vulcans. Though this attack was able to be thwarted thanks to the efforts of Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-E, several Borg drones, as well as wreckage from their vessel, crashed on Earth, north of the Arctic Circle.
Earth scientists uncover the remains of 24th Century Borg drones – in the 22nd Century!
These Borg were uncovered over ninety years later by scientists, who inadvertently awakened the drones – and were promptly assimilated. This marked the second “first contact” between the Borg Collective and humanity. Because the drones were few in number, and only had access to a sub-light shuttle, they were ultimately defeated by the crew of the NX-01 Enterprise: but not before they sent a message to the rest of the Collective. In this time period, the Collective was still in the Delta Quadrant, and the message would take over two centuries to reach them – coinciding with the Borg’s later appearances in the 24th Century. Whether this forms a kind of “time loop” paradox, or whether the Borg would always have been interested in the Alpha Quadrant by the 24th Century is unknown.
There was no contact between the Borg and humanity after this incident, and records of it seem to have been lost – or deliberately kept hidden – by the next time humans encountered the Borg in the 24th Century. However, sometime in the 23rd Century, the El-Aurians (Guinan’s species) were attacked by the Borg, and several hundred El-Aurian refugees came to Earth – bringing with them stories of what happened to their homeworld. It was at this time that Starfleet officially began researching the Borg – though no connection was made between the El-Aurian’s conquerors and the Arctic Circle incident.
Pictured on the viewscreen of the Enterprise-B, the ships SS Robert Fox and SS Lakul were transporting El-Aurian survivors of the Borg’s attack on their homeworld when they became trapped in the Nexus.
By the mid-24th Century, some in Starfleet considered the Borg to be a myth, but two exobiologists, a married couple named Magnus and Erin Hansen, took a small exploration vessel to try to track them down. Taking their young daughter, Annika, with them, they would eventually be successful in finding the Borg, and ultimately followed them all the way to the Delta Quadrant, collecting a huge amount of information. Unfortunately they were discovered and assimilated after approximately two years. Annika Hansen would later be better known as Seven of Nine after being liberated from the Collective by Captain Janeway and the crew of the USS Voyager.
Because of the distance between the Delta Quadrant and Federation space, the Hansens’ research and knowledge of the Borg was not communicated to Starfleet. Instead, the Federation’s first “official” encounter with the Borg came when Q used his powers to deliberately throw the Enterprise-D into the path of a Borg cube – some 7,000 light-years from Federation space in System J-25. Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D attempted to make contact, and soon found themselves horribly outmatched in a fight with the Borg vessel. Q, after being begged by Picard, saved the Enterprise-D by returning it to Federation space before the Borg could assimilate the ship, but this incident prompted Starfleet to finally take the Borg threat seriously, and a task force was formed to tackle a likely Borg attack.
Magnus and Erin Hansen were the first humans to extensively study the Borg, though their knowledge was lost before it could be sent to the Federation.
The incursion the Federation feared came within a year of the J-25 incident, leaving them little time to prepare. A single Borg vessel was dispatched by the Collective, and after assimilating Captain Picard, used his tactical knowledge against the Federation, destroying almost forty ships and assimilating or killing over 11,000 people – including civilians. With such a large part of Starfleet destroyed, Earth was effectively defenceless, but after the assimilated Picard – now called Locutus of Borg – was liberated by the crew of the Enterprise-D, Data was able to use his link to the Collective’s hive mind to force all the drones aboard the vessel to regenerate – or “sleep” – which ultimately led to the vessel’s destruction.
A year or so later, Third of Five was encountered by the Federation, the sole survivor of a Borg scouting mission near Federation space. Captain Picard wanted to use him as a weapon to send a virus back to the Collective, but as his individuality reasserted itself, the drone, now named Hugh, returned to the collective voluntarily. His newfound identity, however, proved difficult for the collective to handle and Hugh, along with several other rogue Borg, would leave the Collective soon after.
The Enterprise-D makes the Federation’s first “official” encounter with the Borg.
There was then a lull in the Borg-Federation conflict lasting several years, before the Collective again sent a single cube to attempt to assimilate Earth. This ship, commanded by the Borg Queen herself, was the one which travelled back in time to 2063, possibly setting in motion the chain of events which led humanity and the Borg to encounter one another in the first place as part of a “temporal loop” paradox.
A battle took place near to Earth before this cube deployed a smaller spherical ship to travel through time, and several ships, including the Enterprise-E and the USS Defiant – which would normally be stationed at Deep Space Nine – took part in the battle. This was the Borg’s most recent attempt to directly attack Earth.
The Enterprise-E engages the Borg during the Battle of Sector 001.
After the Battle of Sector 001, the only encounters between the Federation and the Borg took place in the Delta Quadrant, where the USS Voyager was making its way home. The Borg were engaged in a losing war with a race known only by their Borg designation – Species 8472. Under the command of Captain Janeway, Voyager and her crew came to the Borg’s aid, trading their tactical knowledge of Species 8472 for safe passage through Borg space. The Collective dispatched Seven of Nine to be their representative aboard Voyager, and the crew would liberate her from the Borg when they broke the alliance.
The Species 8472 war proved incredibly costly to the Borg, and arguably set back any plans they may have had for further expansion at that time. Their space was at least 9,000 light-years across, extending beyond the range of Voyager’s sensors, and even extended to near the Beta Quadrant.
Two Borg cubes under attack by Species 8472 during the conflict between the two factions.
On one occasion the Borg attempted to recapture Seven of Nine, hoping to use her new knowledge of humanity as part of a third invasion/assimilation attempt, but this was thwarted by Voyager, who managed to again liberate Seven from the Collective. Voyager was able to use part of the Borg’s extensive transwarp network to get significantly closer to home.
This feat would be overshadowed, however, thanks to the actions of a time-travelling Admiral Janeway. In her timeline, Voyager had managed to make it back to Earth, but it had taken a long time. By travelling back to a point around seven years into Voyager’s trip through the Delta Quadrant, future Janeway was able to simultaneously get Voyager home much sooner, as well as deal a significant blow to the Collective.
A time-travelling Admiral Janeway infected the Borg – and their Queen – with a potentially devastating virus.
By outfitting Voyager with technology from the early 25th Century, the ship was easily able to overpower a number of Borg vessels, and future Janeway allowed herself to be assimilated in order to infect the Borg – and the Borg Queen herself – with a devastating virus she hoped would spread throughout the Collective.
Voyager was able to use the transwarp network to return to Earth, around 25 years before the era of Star Trek: Picard. It’s unclear what happened to the Collective after this point.
Leadership
For a long time, the Borg were assumed to be leaderless. The nature of their “hive mind” – a mechanical-telepathic link that all Borg are connected to – implied that there was no one individual leader, and that the Borg made decisions as one Collective, operating with one mind.
A Borg Queen during the Collective’s second attempt to assimilate Earth.
While this is true in some respects, the Borg Queen acts as the Collective’s leader, and is the only individual Borg – outside of those liberated by Starfleet or otherwise disconnected from the Collective – who appears to have any semblance of individuality or personality. The Queen describes herself as simply “the Borg” – and the question of whether she is truly a leader in the sense that we would understand, or whether she is in fact a personification of the Collective, is up for debate.
At least two Borg Queens have died – and it is likely that when the physical form of a Borg Queen is destroyed, a new one is created. The loss of a single Queen does not seem to significantly hamper the Collective’s efforts – so it’s at least possible that there may be multiple Queens in existence at any one time.
Technology
The Borg have assimilated thousands of species in full or in part. Their attacks seem to begin with outer colonies – as happened to the Federation – before a significant effort is launched against the homeworld of that race. While Borg efforts to attack Earth have been limited to a single vessel each time – albeit a very large vessel with thousands of drones aboard – assimilation of other races, such as those on the periphery of Borg space in the Delta Quadrant, seem to proceed with multiple ships and millions of drones.
Hugh, a mid-24th Century Borg drone. Hugh was freed from the Collective – and is set to make a return in Star Trek: Picard.
As a result of their conquests and assimilations, the Borg have gained knowledge and technological advancements which – as of the late 24th Century – outmatched and outgunned the Alpha Quadrant powers. Federation successes against the Borg came as a result of Captain Picard’s unique knowledge as someone who had spent time as part of the Collective. Voyager’s successes similarly came from Seven of Nine.
When the Borg assimilated an individual, the sum total of that person’s knowledge would be disseminated across the entire Collective. The same applied to the assimilation of starships – and presumably other technology as well. In practice this meant that if the Borg assimilated an individual with tactical knowledge – such as Picard prior to the Battle of Wolf 359 – they could use that knowledge to adapt.
One of the Borg’s distinctive cube-shaped vessels near the Paulson Nebula in the Alpha Quadrant.
Adaptations were quickly sent out to all Borg. Once they had encountered a weapon setting more than a couple of times, it would have to be altered to remain effective, and the same applied to deflectors and shields. Remodulating phasers and shields became a key tactic of the Federation during Borg engagements.
Borg communications were still limited by subspace technology, as it was noted by the crew of the NX-01 Enterprise that a message sent by Borg near Earth to their home in the Delta Quadrant would take two centuries to arrive – though this may have been related to their use of 22nd Century technology.
Society and Culture
The Borg operate as a single mind – with the aforementioned exception of the Borg Queen. As such, they don’t have what could really be termed a “culture”.
The basic tenet of Borg philosophy is that assimilation of other races brings both the Borg and the assimilated race closer to “perfection”. By merging biological and technological together, they hope to achieve their goal of “perfection”. This seems to be the basic driving force behind the Borg’s activities.
The interior of a Borg cube could hold thousands of drones – all connected to the Borg’s collective consciousness and working as one.
In a sense, an individual assimilated by the Borg can never die, as every memory and experience they had, both before and after assimilation, is stored permanently by the Collective. However, that individual loses all sense of individuality in the process, and exists only as part of the single “hive mind” of the Borg.
The Borg will assimilate anyone they perceive as useful and attack anyone they perceive as a threat. However, they will often ignore the presence of intruders if they are busy or if they don’t consider them a threat. They will assimilate children as well as adults, and the children will be placed in “maturation chambers” until they have grown enough to serve as useful drones. The Borg will also opt not to assimilate a species they perceive as useless or that they feel would detract from the “perfection” they are trying to create.
The interior of a Borg maturation chamber – with an assimilated child.
As of the mid-late 24th Century, the Borg occupied a vast expanse of the Delta Quadrant, and operated an extensive transwarp network which allowed their vessels to be present in at least the Alpha, Beta, and Delta Quadrants. No Borg activity was noted in the Gamma Quadrant, but explorations of that region of space were limited by the Dominion War. There may have been trillions or quadrillions of individual Borg drones at that time – perhaps even more than that.
Conclusion
Because of the events of the Star Trek: Voyager finale, Endgame, it’s hard to know what state the Collective is in. Admiral Janeway, travelling back in time, brought the crew of Voyager technological advantages which the Borg struggled to fight against, but more significantly she infected the Borg Queen with a virus. This virus was disseminated to other ships in the Collective. In addition, the Borg Queen’s entire complex, as well as a significant part of the Borg transwarp network and a number of Borg vessels, were destroyed by Voyager before they arrived back in the Alpha Quadrant.
As a result of these actions, as with the Romulans we simply don’t know how badly affected the Borg may have been, and how long it will have taken them to recover. Assuming they could recover from the virus, we’ve seen the Borg able to repair and rebuild their ships and technology incredibly rapidly, so in theory they could have rebuilt the entire complex and replaced the lost ships without too much hassle.
A damaged Borg cube – seemingly under Romulan control – was seen in the trailer for Star Trek: Picard.
I would assume that the Borg survived what future Janeway tried to do. Two reasons for this: in-universe, the Borg are so adaptable, numerous, and widespread that the losses Voyager inflicted should be survivable, and on the production side, I think that Star Trek needs the Borg to still be around and be a threat, even if their role in Star Trek: Picard Season 1 is limited.
We’ve seen a Borg cube seemingly under Romulan control in the trailers for Star Trek: Picard, and we know ex-Borg Seven of Nine and Hugh will have roles to play in the story. Hopefully the information above will you some background information on this faction, regardless of how significant their presence is on the story of the new series.
The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead from most iterations of Star Trek. The article also references details from the production of Star Trek: Picard, including the trailers.
The emblem of the Romulan Star Empire, as seen aboard one of their vessels.
In past articles, we’ve looked at some episodes and films from Star Trek’s back catalogue which may or may not be relevant to Star Trek: Picard, which premieres next week. Before the show kicks off I wanted to take a look in a little more detail at a few of the factions that we’re likely to encounter in the new series. This time we’ll look at the Romulans.
Early History
The Romulans are, biologically speaking, the same race as the Vulcans. Around what we’d call the 4th Century (1,700 years before today) the Vulcans were a warlike people, and had begun to develop atomic weapons. They were even on the cusp of faster-than-light travel, but their violent ways threatened to destroy them and their planet. A Vulcan named Surak began to teach Vulcans how logic could be used to suppress their emotions, and they soon evolved into the peaceful, contemplative race that we know today.
Surak, the Vulcan whose teachings inspired his people to embrace logic – and inspired the faction who would become the Romulans to leave their homeworld and head out into space.
However, a large group of Vulcans were not swayed by Surak, and after a war they left the planet and ventured out into space. These renegade Vulcans – “those who march beneath the raptor’s wing” – would eventually become the Romulans.
The twin planets of Romulus and Remus, in the Beta Quadrant, were chosen by this group to become their new home. The planet Remus was home to a native sentient race – the Remans – who the Romulans conquered and subjugated.
22nd Century
By the mid-22nd Century (i.e. the era of Star Trek: Enterprise), no one besides the Romulans themselves were aware of the connection between Vulcans and Romulans. The Vulcans knew of the Romulans only by reputation, and first contact between humans and the Romulan Star Empire occurred when the NX-01 Enterprise inadvertently stumbled upon a planet that the Romulans had annexed. There was no visual contact between Enterprise and the Romulans at that time, so their identity remained unknown.
As seen on the viewscreen of the NX-01 Enterprise, a Romulan vessel appears, surrounded by Romulan mines.
As an interesting aside, it seems by this point that the Romulan language had entirely diverged from Vulcan, such that the two were not mutually intelligible or even recognisable – even to Enterprise’s Vulcan science officer T’Pol.
Also around this time, early attempts by the Romulans to conquer Vulcan – under the guise of “reunification” – were ongoing. Covert Romulan agents were present on Vulcan, and attempted to push the Vulcan government into war with Andoria and Earth – but these attempts were thwarted.
“They claim to have annexed the planet in the name of something called the… ‘Romalan Star Empire'” – Hoshi Sato makes a first translation of the Romulan language.
The Earth-Romulan war broke out a few years later (this was apparently one storyline under consideration for the never-produced fifth season of Enterprise) and resulted in the establishment of the Neutral Zone between territory controlled by Earth and Romulan space. The Neutral Zone remained in place after the founding of the United Federation of Planets (the war having taken place prior to this).
23rd Century
The Romulans seem to have entered into a period of isolation following the war, at least from the Federation’s perspective. There was no contact from the Romulan Star Empire for almost a century – until a ship armed with a new type of cloaking device and plasma torpedoes began attacking starbases across the Neutral Zone in Federation space. This ship would be defeated by Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise, but not before the Romulans were first seen and their links to the Vulcan people exposed for the first time.
The first Romulans ever seen by the Federation.
Around this time, the Romulans worked jointly with the Klingons – trading their technology for the Klingons’ successful D7 battle cruiser design. The Romulans built and used these Klingon-designed ships as part of their fleet. The Enterprise, still under Kirk’s command, was twice caught in the Neutral Zone by the Romulans, but neither occasion led to war.
Nimbus III – the “planet of galactic peace” – was established in the mid-23rd Century to be a place where Romulans, Klingons, and the Federation could cooperate peacefully. This planet was later attacked by Sybok, who commandeered the Enterprise-A.
Romulan representative to Nimbus III, Caithlin Dar (centre) aboard the Enterprise-A.
By the latter part of the 23rd Century, the Klingons and Federation were moving closer to peace. The Romulans attempted to disrupt this, assassinating Klingon Chancellor Gorkon and attempting to disrupt the Khitomer Peace Accords. Kirk and his crew stopped the plot, and the peace agreement went ahead.
24th Century
In 2311, an event known as the Tomed Incident led to a peace treaty with the Federation. Under the terms of the treaty, the Federation agreed not to develop cloaking technology, and the Romulans again withdrew behind the Neutral Zone. They would not re-emerge until several of their border outposts – as well as several Federation outposts – were mysteriously destroyed. According to the producers of The Next Generation, it was supposed to be the Borg who were responsible for this, but this was never confirmed on-screen.
Picard and Commander Riker attempt to hail a Romulan warbird, marking the first communication between the Romulans and the Federation in half a century.
In the mid-24th Century the Romulans and Klingons still engaged in skirmishes. One such battle saw the Enterprise-C destroyed while defending the Klingons. Thanks to time travel, this saw an alternate timeline version of Tasha Yar captured by the Romulans. She later gave birth to the half-human/half-Romulan Sela, who would go on to become a senior commander in the Romulan military.
The crew of the Enterprise-D, under the command of Captain Picard, tussled with the Romulans on a number of occasions. Geordi La Forge rescued an injured Romulan on the planet of Galorndon Core; Jarok, a senior admiral, defected to the Federation to try and prevent war; a Romulan agent escaped after impersonating a Vulcan ambassador; and the Romulans attempted to capture a space-dwelling lifeform.
Geordi La Forge trapped with a Romulan on the planet of Galorndon Core.
The Romulans also used experimental technology, including a type of cloaking device that would allow a cloaked ship to pass through solid objects. The Federation, in violation of the treaty mentioned above, also attempted to develop this technology – but both factions were unsuccessful.
Perhaps most significantly in this era, Spock – now an ambassador – travelled undercover (and without permission) to Romulus, to see whether genuine bilateral reunification would be possible with the Vulcans. Unlike Romulus’ attempts to conquer Vulcan, this would have been a peaceful coming together – but Sela hijacked the attempt and tried once again to invade. Spock’s movement, which brought Vulcan teaching to Romulus, had gained somewhat of a following, and Spock retained a connection to the Romulans even years later.
After the discovery of the Bajoran Wormhole, the Romulans and Federation began a collaboration effort. In exchange for the use of a Romulan cloaking device aboard the USS Defiant, the Federation agreed to share data with the Romulans regarding what they found in the Gamma Quadrant – including the Dominion. The Romulan intelligence agency – the Tal Shiar – allied with the Cardassian Obsidian Order to attack the Founders of the Dominion because they deemed them to be a threat – but this turned out to be a Dominion trap and the Tal Shiar lost dozens of ships.
Commander Sisko introduces Sub-Commander T’Rul, who oversaw the use of the USS Defiant’s cloaking device on a mission to find the Dominion.
When the Cardassians later allied themselves with the Dominion and war broke out between them and the Federation-Klingon alliance, the Romulans remained neutral. Captain Sisko and former Cardassian spy Garak hatched a plan to bring them into the war using a fake recording of the Dominion planning to invade Romulan territory, and it worked – though Garak had to commit murder to cover their tracks.
In the Dominion War, the Federation, Romulans, and Klingons worked together, and eventually the alliance was successful in defeating the Dominion and liberating Cardassia from their rule. Shortly before the war’s end, shadowy intelligence organisation Section 31 managed to place a Federation collaborator in a powerful and influential position.
Dr Bashir is interrogated by the Tal Shiar on Romulus during the Section 31 plot.
Friendly relations didn’t last, however, and shortly after the end of the Dominion War, a new leader rose to power. Shinzon was a clone of Captain Picard, and had a plan to attack Federation worlds using a new form of cloaking device and a powerful radiation-based weapon. Picard was able to stop him, but in the process Data was killed when he sacrificed himself to prevent the weapon being used to attack the crippled Enterprise-E.
A few years later, Picard – now promoted to Admiral – put together a rescue armada to aid the Romulans. A nearby star went supernova, and the supernova threatened not only Romulus and Remus but a number of other systems in their Empire. At least part of the intended rescue fleet was destroyed when a faction called the “rogue synths” attacked the Federation shipyards on Mars.
Ambassador Spock en route to Romulus during the supernova crisis.
The supernova could not be stopped in time, and ultimately destroyed Romulus. Ambassador Spock was able to use something called “red matter” to create a black hole and stop the supernova spreading further – but was attacked by a Romulan mining ship commanded by Nero. Both ships were sucked into the black hole, and ultimately travelled into a parallel universe – now known as the “Kelvin timeline”.
Society, Culture, and Technology
From a production point of view, the Romulans have two significant influences. First is the Roman Empire – much of the way Romulan society is organised, as well as the name “Romulan” itself, is derived from ancient Rome. Second is America’s Cold War adversaries, Russia and China. The concept of a Neutral Zone between the Romulans and Federation was based on both the Iron Curtain dividing Eastern and Western Europe and Cold War-era demilitarised zones, such as those in Korea and Germany.
The Romulan Star Empire wasn’t governed by an Emperor – at least, one is never seen on screen. Instead, a deliberating body called the Senate, led by a senior official called a Praetor, ran things in the Empire. A committee of the Senate called the “continuing committee” was seen as especially influential.
The powerful Continuing Committee of the Romulan Senate.
Despite these hints at democracy, the Romulan Star Empire was not a free society by any means. Being seen in public saying or doing the wrong thing could lead to imprisonment, and the Tal Shiar operated as a secret police as well as an intelligence agency. Because of the autocratic nature of the Romulan state, as well as the ever-present secret police, many Romulans became paranoid.
The Romulan military was powerful, and their technology kept pace with, and in some ways even surpassed, the other major powers in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants throughout their appearances on Star Trek.
Unlike their Vulcan counterparts, the Romulans never embraced Surak’s teachings, and as a result they held on to their emotions. Compared to Vulcans in Surak’s time, however, the Romulans seem to be more methodical and less quick to violence. They’re a faction who prefer to manipulate from behind the scenes rather than launch into a full-on conflict.
The main engine room of a Romulan warbird.
Romulan Ale was one of their more famous exports, but was illegal in the Federation. Not that that seems to have stopped plenty of officers indulging in it!
The Romulans used a different type of warp drive from the Federation and other factions. Their warp cores contained a “singularity” or a mini black hole, capable of powering their vessels. Their weaponry was similar to that of the Klingons, as shipboard and handheld weapons were called disruptors, not phasers.
Conclusion
The Romulans are a difficult faction to nail down when considering Star Trek: Picard, simply because we don’t know the extent of the damage the supernova inflicted upon them. Nor do we know what happened in the aftermath of the supernova regarding their relationship with the Federation.
The planet Romulus is destroyed by a supernova.
Logically, it would make sense that the Romulans set up a new capital on one of their colony worlds. As of the 24th Century, it’s implied that they control a vast expanse of space including potentially hundreds of worlds, and we’ve seen them assemble fleets with dozens if not hundreds of ships.
However, it isn’t clear what proportion of their population was on Romulus, nor how many other core Romulan worlds were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, and all of these factors could affect the Romulans and put them in a much weaker position.
A large Romulan fleet at Deep Space Nine prior to the outbreak of the Dominion War. Are the Romulans in the era of Star Trek: Picard able to produce such a number of ships?
To use a real-world example, if the UK lost London, the government would set up a new capital in another city like Birmingham or Manchester. It would be bad, but ultimately survivable. But if several major cities were lost it would be much harder to recover. Without knowing the extent of the damage to other Romulan worlds and their population, as well as significant infrastructure like shipyards and factories, it’s hard to estimate the situation they will be in.
Regardless, I hope the details above give you some information about this faction, given that they’re set to have a significant role in Star Trek: Picard.
The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Just a quick one today. I don’t set out to be a news site, but over the last couple of days Star Trek: Picard has had big premieres in Los Angeles and London – which I’ve seen thanks to following the official Star Trek social media sites. Supposedly the first three episodes of the upcoming series were shown to invited audiences – but no news of plot seems to have leaked out.
Which is fortunate, really. It’s nice to be able to go into the new series as unspoilt as possible. And as Star Trek: Picard gets closer and closer I’m actually tuning out of most online Star Trek news sources and websites in order to avoid spoilers. I did the same for Discovery, too. Sometimes with films I have no choice (health issues generally prevent me from being able to go to the cinema, so I end up seeing films later than everyone else) but for television series I really do like to go in unspoilt. And with Star Trek being so important to me, I’m especially keen to avoid seeing or hearing too much before I get to see Picard for myself.
Central London’s Piccadilly Circus underground station re-named in honour of Star Trek: Picard! Photo credit: startrek.com
One piece of news that has come out from the premieres, however, came from Alex Kurtzman – the head of Star Trek programming at ViacomCBS and the head of production company Secret Hideout. There had been gossip in the anti-Star Trek community that Kurtzman was on his way out, but this is clearly not the case.*
When discussing the current state of Star Trek production, Kurtzman dropped the bombshell that, in addition to the shows that had already been announced, two new, as-yet-unannounced live action series are in early production!
To recap, that means that we currently have the following Star Trek projects on the go: Discovery, whose third season is wrapping up and a fourth looks all but certain; Picard, which already has a second season confirmed; Lower Decks, whose first season premieres later in 2020 and was picked up for a two-season order; the Section 31 series, which is in pre-production with filming likely to begin shortly; the untitled kid-friendly animated series; and the two brand-new live action shows that Alex Kurtzman just told us about. By my count, that brings us to seven Star Trek series in various stages of production! And in addition to those, there’s a fourth Kelvin-timeline film in early production, as well as at least the possibility of Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek film somewhere down the line.
Alex Kurtzman on stage with Sir Patrick Stewart at the UK premiere of Star Trek: Picard. Photo credit: startrek.com
When I’ve said in the past that it’s an absolutely amazing time to be a Star Trek fan, some people will have shrugged. But with such a huge amount of content coming, there really should be something for everyone – even those who didn’t like Discovery or the Kelvin films.
We can speculate about what might be in the works in terms of new Star Trek series next time! But if you can’t wait, you can check out a few of my own Star Trek story pitches by clicking or tapping here.
I can’t believe it’s only a week until we get to see Picard. Live Long and Prosper!
The Star Trek franchise – including Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
*As an aside, I’m always incredibly wary of anyone online who claims to have “sources” close to the production of any major franchise. We’ve seen this with some people regarding Alex Kurtzman’s position at ViacomCBS/Secret Hideout, and it just isn’t true. A lot of incredibly negative “fan” channels on social media, which deal in practically nothing but hate and bile, make a living doing what they do. And they have an incentive to keep the clicks and views coming in – so they make stuff up claiming to have anonymous “sources” which never existed. Either that or they’re being trolled by someone! So remember to keep your wits about you, and take any such claims with a grain of salt.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers for the episodes listed below.
Last time, I covered a few episodes and films that I thought might be important to watch in the run up to Star Trek: Picard premiering. I had a few more episodes from the Star Trek canon that I was tempted to include, but for one reason or another it felt like the stories they told wouldn’t be likely to be relevant to the new show. Mostly this was because we were dealing with a somewhat obscure plot point, or a story which was only tackled in a single episode then never referenced again.
There’s a huge number of episodes and films in the Star Trek back catalogue, and figuring out which ones may have some relationship with the upcoming Star Trek: Picard is a bit of a guessing game!
Regardless, I had fun putting together the previous list, so here’s a few more episodes from previous iterations of Star Trek which probably won’t matter when it comes to Star Trek: Picard, but are still enjoyable and worth a watch.
Number 1: Balance of Terror (Star Trek: The Original Series, 1966)
The Romulan Commander and Centurion in Balance of Terror.
We know that Star Trek: Picard is going to touch on the Romulans in some form. Picard was supposedly involved with helping them evacuate in preparation for the supernova which ultimately destroyed their homeworld, and the series is set to feature the first ever Romulan main cast member, so why not take a look at the Romulans’ first ever appearance?
The Romulans, at least in early Star Trek, were based loosely on the Roman Empire. Their name is derived from Romulus, the legendary figure said to have founded the city of Rome – and for whom that city and its empire were named. Their military and civilian structure – an Empire and Senate, and with military ranks like Centurion – were all named for the Roman Empire. Though arguably the Romulans were also an analogue for America’s Cold War adversaries, particularly with the concept of a “Neutral Zone” being similar to the kind of demilitarized zones which existed in the world at that time – particularly in Korea and Eastern Europe.
Balance of Terror gives us a fair amount of background to the Romulans – they’d fought a war against Earth, and until the events of the episode, no human had seen a Romulan in person. The episode deals with their potential links to the Vulcans, after the crew of the Enterprise are able to hack into the Romulans’ ship and see them for the first time. Overall, an interesting introduction to what would become one of the franchise’s most significant factions. Mark Lenard – who would later become better known for his role as Sarek – makes his first Star Trek appearance here, as the unnamed Romulan Commander.
Number 2: Regeneration (Star Trek: Enterprise, 2003)
Scientists on Earth discover Borg remains in Regeneration.
Regeneration has a pretty silly premise from an in-universe point of view, but nevertheless churned out a solidly entertaining episode. Conceived as a way to bring the Borg into Star Trek: Enterprise at a time when it needed a boost, the idea is that the Borg who travelled back in time during the events of First Contact crash-landed in the Arctic, and were discovered during the events of Enterprise some 90+ years later.
Setting aside the notion that Picard and his crew would surely have scanned for and recovered or destroyed any Borg technology on Earth to prevent contaminating the timeline, this episode works surprisingly well as a standalone piece. The Borg – who are set to feature in some form in Picard – have always been a formidable adversary, even for the 24th Century Federation, so to see the impact even a small number of drones would have on a 22nd Century crew was interesting. The Borg had become stale across their multiple appearances in Voyager, and Regeneration aimed to bring back their fear factor. In that respect, it did largely succeed.
Though it’s arguably a nitpick given the messy state of Star Trek canon overall, this episode does retcon Starfleet’s first encounter with the Borg – Regeneration takes place over two centuries before the Borg’s first appearance in TNG. And that does raise questions, like why Starfleet seemed to keep no records of the encounter. However, as a standalone episode it’s one of Enterprise’s better offerings, and if you’re not interested in or can ignore the canon issues, it’s well worth a watch.
Number 3: Minefield (Star Trek: Enterprise, 2002)
As seen on Enterprise’s viewscreen, a Romulan vessel decloaks amidst mines in the episode Minefield.
As with Regeneration above, this episode serves as Starfleet’s first introduction to the Romulans in canon – placing the events of Enterprise prior to the Earth-Romulan war mentioned in Balance of Terror. Indeed, the war was supposedly a story element under consideration for a fifth season of Enterprise which was ultimately never produced.
In Minefield, the crew of Enterprise are continuing their mission of exploration when they encounter a planet that the Romulans claim to have annexed. They have placed a minefield in orbit, and Lt. Reed – Enterprise’s weapons/tactical officer – ends up pinned to the outer hull of the ship while attempting to defuse a mine.
The episode plays on Balance of Terror in terms of the claustrophobic ship-versus-ship atmosphere – itself lifted from war films featuring submarines. Unfortunately, as with Regeneration it does throw up some retcons/canon issues, such as the use of Romulan cloaking devices, which were supposedly new technology in Balance of Terror. My own head-canon to get around this – and similar issues raised by Discovery – is simply that there are different types of cloaking devices, and when one has been “cracked” it’s rendered useless. So if the Federation could render older styles of cloak inoperative, they could still be caught off-guard by a new type. That’s just my own personal take on it. But we’ve strayed off-topic.
Minefield is really a character piece, focusing primarily on Reed, who had been a fairly one-dimensional character in Enterprise thus far. He’s given more of a chance to shine here, and Star Trek has always been good at giving characters their own episodes in most of its iterations. As with Balance of Terror, it’s on this list for its Romulan connection.
Number 4: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Film, 1991)
Kirk and McCoy are put on trial by the Klingons (General Chang and Colonel Worf pictured) in The Undiscovered Country.
Gene Roddenberry hated The Undiscovered Country when it was screened for him shortly before he passed away. He didn’t like the military elements, and felt that anti-Klingon “racism” was beneath humanity in the 23rd Century. Whether you agree with him or not – he could be unflinching in his positive vision for humanity – the resulting film was a return to form for Kirk’s crew after the flop that was The Final Frontier a couple of years previously.
For our purposes, as we gear up for Star Trek: Picard, the film shows the events which led to a lasting peace between the Klingons and Federation – as seen in The Next Generation and the other 24th Century series. The Romulans are involved as they aid in a plot to sabotage the peace conference. Ultimately, Kirk and his crew are able to save the day and stop the conspiracy – which even involved some members of Starfleet.
It’s a nice swansong for Kirk’s crew – this would be their final appearance on screen together (save for a photograph in Star Trek Beyond). Whether the Klingons and Federation are still at peace by the time of Star Trek: Picard isn’t clear, but if they are then this is where that peace was won. As a film which looks closely at some of the politics in the Federation and the relationship between two of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants’ biggest powers, it has an interesting place in the Star Trek timeline.
Number 5: In The Pale Moonlight (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 1998)
Garak and Sisko watch a faked Dominion/Cardassian meeting on the holosuite during In The Pale Moonlight.
I included this episode in the “honourable mentions” section of my previous list, but I wanted to expand on what I said there and give it a full entry. With the Dominion War going badly for the Klingon-Federation alliance, Sisko conspires with Garak to bring the Romulans into the conflict on their side – but in order to do so he has to lie and cheat.
Garak ultimately commits murder to cover their tracks, and the plot works! The Romulans declare war on the Cardassians and Dominion shortly thereafter. And for the remainder of Deep Space Nine they remain a key part of the alliance – though by the events of Nemesis which takes place a few years later, Romulan-Federation animosity is once again present.
This one’s a bit of a long shot, and I freely admit that. While it’s one of Deep Space Nine’s finest episodes in my opinion, especially as a character piece looking at Sisko, its events were never referenced again and there were no consequences for the lying and scheming. My pet theory is that prior to the events of Picard, the Romulans learn the truth of how they came to be roped into the Dominion War, and that this will negatively impact relations with the Federation. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen, and it’s definitely a little “out there” as far as theories go. Even if none of that turns out to be true, the episode is fantastic and well worth a viewing in its own right. I’d be interested, though, to see the Federation get its comeuppance for the plot.
Number 6: Scorpion (Parts I & II) and The Gift (Star Trek: Voyager, 1997)
A partially de-assimilated Seven of Nine with Captain Janeway in The Gift.
This trilogy of episodes introduces Seven of Nine to the Voyager cast. Seven will have a role to play in Picard, so seeing how she came to be separated from the Borg Collective would make for good background viewing.
Seven of Nine was introduced to shake up the Voyager cast and replace Kes – though at one time it was supposedly Harry Kim who would be sacrificed in order to include her. Personally I found Kes a more interesting character in many ways, particularly as she began to develop her telepathic and telekinetic powers in Season 3. Nevertheless the producers wanted to make a change, and Seven of Nine was that change. As the first Borg crew member on a Star Trek series she brought something new to the table. My criticism of her really stems from later seasons – in which many of her episodes were all about the same thing. She’d learn some lesson or other about “what it means to be human,” only to seemingly forget it all by the next episode and have to learn another, similar, lesson.
Regardless of character critique, however, Seven of Nine is going to be in Picard, and from her scenes in the trailers she looks set to be very different from when we saw her in Voyager.
Number 7: Encounter at Farpoint (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1987)
Picard’s first on-screen appearance on the bridge of the Enterprise-D in Encounter at Farpoint.
With Picard about to return to our screens for the first time in almost two decades, maybe we should go back to where it all began. Encounter at Farpoint is the premiere of The Next Generation, and the episode in which Picard makes his debut.
Though we’ve been on many adventures with him since, Picard was – at least as of the end of Nemesis – fundamentally the same man, at the core, as we met in this episode. His style of captaincy was radically different from Kirk’s twenty years previously, and as a result the Kirk-versus-Picard debate has rumbled on in the fan community ever since! A more diplomatic and cautious style of command than we’d previously seen in Star Trek served him well, and was on full display here, even when beset by the dastardly Q.
Q wants to put Picard and his crew on trial to answer for humanity’s “crimes”. Picard refuses, and later impresses Q by solving the puzzle presented by the peculiar and slightly-too-perfect Farpoint Station.
Number 8: The Survivor (Star Trek: The Animated Series, 1973)
Kirk speaks with a Romulan official during the events of The Survivor.
The Animated Series is weird. And for a long time, there was a debate as to whether the characters and events it depicted should even be considered part of the official Star Trek canon. The answer to that is yes, technically it is all canon – but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll revisit the parallel universe where magic is real any time soon.
The Survivor plays out much more like a “normal” episode of Star Trek than many of its other animated outings. A rogue shapeshifter forces the Enterprise into the Romulan Neutral Zone, and of course the Romulans take the opportunity to pounce.
The shapeshifter ends up saving the day by protecting the Enterprise from the Romulan vessels, and though he agrees to be taken into custody, it seems that his actions defending the ship will greatly aid his defence. The episode is notable for being the Romulans’ only major appearance in The Animated Series, and while nothing here is going to be essential, the episode does discuss briefly the terms both the Romulans and Federation agreed to regarding the Neutral Zone.
Number 9: Starship Mine (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1993)
Trapped alone aboard the Enterprise-D, Picard must contend with mercenaries in Starship Mine.
Starship Mine is definitely one of my favourite TNG episodes. The Enterprise-D needs to be cleansed of baryon particles – a process which is described as “routine”, but which employs a beam that is deadly to humans. A group of mercenaries try to steal trilithium resin – a toxic byproduct of warp drive which can be used as a weapon – while the ship is unoccupied.
Picard finds himself trapped aboard the ship with the mercenaries while the deadly sweep slowly makes its way through the ship, and the way he is forced to deal with them, while having none of his crew or any equipment, is impressive. It shows off a side to Picard – his MacGyver-like ingenuity – which we don’t see very often.
We also see a rare instance of Picard’s calm brutality – by deliberately making the stolen chemical more volative, he condemns the mercenaries to death even as they escape. This prevents the trilithium resin falling into the wrong hands, but was nevertheless a brutal decision.
Number 10: Chain of Command, Parts I & II (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1992)
Picard is trapped and captured by the Cardassians in Chain of Command.
This one should’ve really been on my previous list, but never mind! In Chain of Command, Picard leads a secret mission to prevent the Cardassians developing a biological weapon, but it turns out to be a trap to lure him there, and he’s captured.
He’s subjected to torture by Gul Madred – a wonderfully villainous performance by David Warner – in an attempt to get him to reveal sensitive tactical information. Part of the torture is being told to say that he can see five lights where there were only four, and by the end, as he confesses to Troi when back aboard the Enterprise, he genuinely believed he could see five lights.
Picard’s strength, and his ability to survive impossible situations, is on full display here. Despite the horrible torture, he never breaks. Given that we’re about to jump into the unknown in Star Trek: Picard, he will need as much of that strength as he can muster.
Honourable Mentions:
Like last time, I couldn’t end the list without adding a few more episodes that I think are great – even if their relationship to Star Trek: Picard is likely to be tentative at best!
Final Mission (TNG, 1990) – Picard and Wesley crash on a desert moon and are forced to survive. Wesley’s last appearance in TNG as a main character. Unimatrix Zero Parts I & II (VOY, 2000) – Seven of Nine is drawn into a world where Borg drones exhibit freedom and individuality – and helps them carry that over into the real world, resulting in a minor insurgency among rogue Borg. The Enterprise Incident (TOS, 1968) – The Romulans’ second and last appearance in TOS sees Kirk try to steal a cloaking device. Redemption Parts I & II (TNG, 1991) – The first major appearance of Sela, the half human-half Romulan Commander who would tussle with Picard on at least one more occasion. Yesterday’s Enterprise (TNG, 1990) – The episode which sets up how Sela came to exist is an interesting time travel story in its own right, and shows how altering a single event can have major implications. The Search Parts I & II (DS9, 1994) – After the Dominion had been introduced at the end of Season 2, the start of Season 3 of DS9 saw the arrival of the USS Defiant to aid in the fight against them. Noteworthy because it shows Romulan/Federation cooperation – which allowed the Defiant to have a cloaking device. Eye of the Needle (VOY, 1995) – While trapped in the Delta Quadrant, Voyager finds a micro-wormhole to the Alpha Quadrant, but the only ship they are able to contact is Romulan. This episode has a final twist which is quite an emotional punch. The Pegasus and These Are The Voyages… (TNG and ENT, 1994 and 2005) – Though it can be jarring to watch these two episodes back-to-back, they present an interesting story about cloaking technology and a treaty between the Federation and Romulans, as well as giving some backstory to Riker – who will feature in some form in Star Trek: Picard. The Measure of a Man (TNG, 1989) – Picard must defend Data and prove to Starfleet that he is a sentient lifeform – if he can’t, they’ll dismantle Data to try to recreate him! The First Duty (TNG, 1992) – Wesley is involved in an accident at the Academy which kills a cadet, and Picard suspects he and his friends are covering up the truth.
So that’s it.
A few more episodes which are less likely to be relevant to Star Trek: Picard, but might be! One of the reasons I started this blog was to share my love of Star Trek, and even though I like to talk about other sci fi franchises too, and even some real world things, Star Trek really is one of my personal favourites. Writing these lists has given me inspiration not only to write more, but to go back and rewatch some episodes that I haven’t seen in years. It really has been a lot of fun putting these together.
When it comes to Star Trek: Picard, it was actually a struggle to narrow down which episodes to recommend. Particularly when it comes to The Next Generation, Picard was such a huge presence on the show that there are lots of episodes which feature him and show off his character – and which contain plot points and backstory that could potentially be relevant going into the new show. It was hard to resist the temptation to just say “oh my gosh, just watch all of TNG!”
On a personal note, The Next Generation was my introduction to Star Trek. The first episodes of the whole franchise that I can solidly remember watching are The Royale and Who Watches The Watchers.To have Picard back is really amazing and something I would have never expected. I can’t wait for the series to kick off, and it’s a mere ten days away!
Live Long and Prosper!
The Star Trek franchise – including all films, series, and episodes listed above – is the copyright of Paramount Pictures and ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers for the episodes and films on this list.
It’s only a few days till Star Trek: Picard premieres. Just saying that gets me excited, as I’ve been anticipating this series since it was announced! And in a broader sense, I’ve been waiting for the Star Trek franchise to move its timeline forward again since Voyager went off the air and Nemesis was in cinemas.
If you’re new to Star Trek, or haven’t watched any of the older series for a long time, it might be worthwhile to go back and take a look at some of the classics in anticipation of Star Trek: Picard. So let’s go together and get caught up on some of the episodes which may – or may not – be relevant to Picard’s story. At any rate, they’re all worth a watch before the show kicks off.
Number 1: Endgame (Star Trek: Voyager, 2001)
Admiral Janeway and the Borg Queen in the Voyager episode Endgame.
Before The Avengers ever thought of it, Voyager had the first Endgame! And it was a heck of a ride involving a time-travelling Janeway giving her past self technology from the future in order to defeat the Borg. By changing the past, Janeway was able to get Voyager home far sooner than she had in her own timeline.
Time travel paradox aside (how could future Janeway exist if she erased her own timeline by interacting with her past self?) the episode sets up what could be an important story point regarding the Borg. As Voyager prepares to travel home, future Janeway infects the Borg Queen with a virus – one that has the potential to devastate the entire collective. Voyager is able to easily destroy many Borg vessels – and the Borg Queen’s complex – thanks to the enhancements future Janeway brought them, and the end of the episode is the last time we’ve seen the Borg in the Star Trek timeline. What happened to them after Endgame is a key question, and given that we’ve seen a Borg vessel and ex-Borg in the trailers for Star Trek: Picard, it may be one that the series will answer.
Seven of Nine, a key member of Voyager’s crew in its later seasons, is also set to feature in some form in Star Trek: Picard, and her relationship with the collective was always a point of interest. I definitely think it’s worth giving Endgame a rewatch before Picard kicks off.
Number 2: Star Trek: Nemesis (Film, 2002)
Data and Picard in this scene from Star Trek: Nemesis.
This had to be on the list, right? Nemesis is as far forward as the Star Trek timeline had gotten – prior to last week’s Short Treks episode Children of Mars. And it was a Picard-centric story, focusing on his fight against a clone of himself created by the Romulans. As a story which features Picard heavily, as well as his relationship with the Romulans, this would already be an important one to watch. But because in this film Picard sees Data sacrifice himself to save him, it becomes even more meaningful in the story of Picard’s life.
We already know from the trailers that Data’s loss weighs heavily on Picard, and may even be a significant factor in his decision to leave Starfleet a few years after the events of Nemesis. As Data’s sacrifice is such an important moment in Picard’s later life, Nemesis is definitely worthy of a viewing before Picard premieres.
Other things to note from the film would be the Romulans and their relationship with the Federation. Nemesis takes place after the Dominion War (as seen in Deep Space Nine) and the Federation and Romulans had been allies. Is that alliance still in place? Is it possible that the surviving Romulans will have a good relationship with the Federation after the destruction of their homeworld? All interesting points to consider!
Number 3: Children of Mars (Short Treks, 2020)
Picard’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo appearance in Children of Mars.
I have a full review of Children of Mars already written and posted, which you can find by clicking or tapping here. Suffice to say that it wasn’t my favourite episode of Short Treks, but nevertheless it was created to be a prequel to Star Trek: Picard. While it’s unclear whether the two principal characters the episode features – schoolgirls named Kima and Lil – will cross over to the main series, there’s a significant event depicted which certainly will be a story point in some form.
A faction called the “rogue synths” launches a massive attack on Mars, where the Federation’s Utopia Planitia shipyards are located. Who this group are and what their aims were isn’t clear, but it seems as though this attack was designed to disrupt efforts led by Admiral Picard to assist the Romulans as they faced the supernova which would ultimately destroy their homeworld. In that sense, the attack on Mars looks set to be significant in the backstory to Star Trek: Picard.
Unfortunately if you’re outside the United States, as I am, you won’t be able to watch this episode by “conventional” means. Amazon Prime, despite having the rights to show Picard, don’t seem to have shown this episode of Short Treks. I suppose it’s possible that they will put up Children of Mars on their streaming platform before Picard premieres, but realistically if you want to guarantee seeing it before the main series you will have to find another way to access a copy. I can’t recommend any one website or other method, but if you know your way around a computer I daresay you’ll be able to find it.
Number 4: Disaster (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1991)
Picard and the children in the stuck turbolift in Disaster.
Disaster is one of my personal favourite episodes of The Next Generation. Perhaps I should do a list of those one day! It’s a bottle show (i.e. a show taking place entirely on board the ship – these were usually done to save money on building new sets) but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t tell a very interesting story – or rather, a connected series of stories. As the Enterprise-D hits a “quantum filament”, it is left without power to most of its key systems. The main crew are split up, and are forced to play different roles than they usually would.
It’s a great example of characters working in the face of adversity, and of how the threat and danger in an episode of Star Trek doesn’t have to come from a menacing evil alien. Worf ends up delivering a baby, Counsellor Troi is the senior officer on the bridge and is forced to make significant command decisions, and most significantly for our purposes, Picard is stuck in a turbolift with a group of frightened children.
We’ve seen Picard in command countless times and we know he’s good at it – with his own crew. What Disaster does is show us how Picard can take control of any situation, even one he’s uncomfortable in as he’s never been keen on children. He’s able to get the situation under control and lead the kids to safety in the face of a difficult situation. It may not be the most significant TNG episode ever from Picard’s point of view, but it is nevertheless worth a watch.
Number 5: The Battle (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1987)
Accompanied by a Ferengi Marauder, the Enterprise-D takes the USS Stargazer under tow in The Battle.
The Next Generation’s first season was all about the show finding its feet. With the Klingons having been somewhat pacified, the show was looking for a new antagonist, and the Ferengi were initially created to fill that role. Though over the course of Deep Space Nine we’ve come to see the Ferengi more as a neutral power, interested in their own finances more than in galactic events, in early TNG they were much more aggressive.
The Battle was only the Ferengi’s second appearance, though we’re not really interested in the episode for that reason. Dai’mon Bok, a Ferengi captain, has somehow acquired the USS Stargazer – a ship previously captained by Picard. Over the course of the episode, we learn Picard had been in command at an event called the “battle of Maxia”, in which he defeated a Ferengi vessel using a warp speed technique called the “Picard manoeuvre”. The story fills in some of Picard’s pre-TNG history and proved to be a great opportunity for Patrick Stewart to show off his acting abilities, as the episode takes the character through a moment of (induced) madness.
Number 6: The Best of Both Worlds, Parts I & II (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1990)
Picard transformed into Locutus of Borg in The Best of Both Worlds.
I’ve kind of spoilt it in the above picture, but Picard’s assimilation by the Borg in The Best of Both Worlds was a truly shocking moment for The Next Generation to end its third season on. This was the first time we’d seen assimilation on screen, and for a character as significant as Picard to be captured was a phenomenal moment. The entire two-part episode is beautifully constructed, and the moments leading up to the reveal of the assimilated Picard are perfectly shot and edited.
In terms of Picard’s life, his experience with the Borg, and the guilt and regret he felt over the attack on Starfleet ships at Wolf 359, would stay with him for a long time. In First Contact we see how it could influence his judgement – Picard was usually level-headed, calm, and neutral, but when it came to the Borg his emotions could get the better of him leading to irrational decisions. Seeing how this came to be, and how one traumatic event can affect his character, could be very important to understanding his decision-making in Picard, especially if the Borg are involved.
Family, the second episode of Season 4 of TNG, follows on from The Best of Both Worlds and would also be worth a look-in as an epilogue of sorts to this story.
Number 7: Star Trek: Discovery (2017-present)
Lorca and Saru during Discovery’s first season.
Given the significant changes to Star Trek storytelling that are present in Discovery, it would be well worth getting up to date with Star Trek’s most recent outing if you haven’t seen it already. I understand that some fans weren’t happy with the series for a number of reasons, but there are some definite high points in there which even the most hardline sceptic should be able to appreciate.
Jason Isaacs in Season 1 and Anson Mount in Season 2 both give amazing performances as two very different Starfleet captains, and Discovery tells two separate, season-long serialised stories in the style that Picard plans to adopt for its first season. If the Short Treks episode Children of Mars is any indication, the visual style of Discovery will also carry over to Picard at least in part. Whether you think this is a good thing or not is another matter, of course, but if you’ve somehow avoided Discovery this long, now could be a good time to give it a second chance.
Because of its serialised nature it’s hard to pull just one episode from Discovery and say “just watch this one”. But if I had to pick a single episode, I’d recommend An Obol for Charon from Season 2. Despite containing several ongoing story arcs, the main thrust of this episode – dealing with an ancient planet-sized lifeform – is largely a self-contained story, albeit one that would have a huge impact on the remainder of the season.
Number 8: Star Trek: Generations (Film, 1994)
Captains Kirk and Picard meet for the first time inside the Nexus in Star Trek: Generations.
“Don’t let them promote you. Don’t let them transfer you, don’t let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you’re there, you can make a difference.” Those were the words spoken to Picard by Captain Kirk in Star Trek: Generations. And for a time, it seemed as though Picard was following the advice his predecessor gave him. We saw Janeway promoted to Admiral in Star Trek: Nemesis while Picard remained a captain, even though for the audience she was a character we’d met much later and was noticeably younger. What could it have been that caused Picard to turn his back on Kirk’s advice?
In Generations, Picard loses several members of his family to a fire. Château Picard, where it seems he’s living in retirement at the beginning of the new series, was the place where his brother and family had lived. Family had been important to Picard, but he had been content that the family line would continue thanks to his brother having a family, but that was taken away from him in Generations. It’s a film in which he suffers another loss, too – the Enterprise-D.
Though casualties were said to be light, the loss of the ship he’d called home for more than seven years and had countless adventures aboard did have an effect on Picard, not that much of it is acknowledged on screen. Mostly, though, it’s Kirk’s sacrifice which is the key point worth noting from Generations, and even though the two men didn’t know each other particularly well, Kirk’s advice seemed to be taken to heart.
Number 9: Tapestry (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1993)
Given the chance to start over by Q, Picard ends up leading a very different life in Tapestry.
As Tapestry begins, Picard has been badly wounded. His artificial heart couldn’t tolerate the injury and he dies – only to be greeted by his long-time nemesis Q, and given a rare opportunity to make a fresh start.
Picard has an artificial heart because in his youth he was brutally stabbed! By choosing to avoid that fate, Picard set his life on a different path, one which didn’t lead to the man we knew, but a more timid and less successful man who had only made it as far as a junior lieutenant in Starfleet. He realises his mistake, and pleads Q to send him back to set things right, stating: “I would rather die as the man I was… than live the life I just saw.”
It’s another story that adds some colourful background to Picard’s story, and we see him in his youth before he settled down into the man we knew. Given that there are sure to be changes in his character between the last time we saw him and how he appears in Star Trek: Picard, it’s worth remembering that people do change over the course of their lives, and the person you are at 20 isn’t the same person you are at 50 or 70 or 90.
Number 10: All Good Things… (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1994)
Q takes Picard back in time in All Good Things…
The finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation was a strange one, with a time-travel concept and the return of Q. Across three time periods Picard had to figure out a puzzle – a spacial anomaly which would destroy humanity, and for which he was ultimately responsible!
If you’ve seen the science fiction film Arrival, then All Good Things… uses a similar concept. By learning to perceive time differently – realising that events in the future were impacting the past, not the other way around – Picard was able to prevent disaster. “We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.” So says Q, complimenting Picard on his ability to change the way he thought and attack the situation in a different way from a completely different line of reasoning.
Bringing to a close Q’s arc in The Next Generation, the episode also shows Picard as someone who is capable of things that he even doesn’t know about himself. Q gave him the push, but it was Picard who solved the mystery and saved humanity. We also get glimpses of Picard’s personal future – including his retirement at Château Picard. There’s the mention of a degenerative disease called irumodic syndrome which Picard is said to be suffering from in his later years – whether this will come into play in Star Trek: Picard is unknown.
Honourable Mentions:
I can’t end a list without adding in a few honourable mentions!
Star Trek (Film, 2009) – This is where we first hear about the supernova that destroyed Romulus from Spock. It’s a significant plot point in the film, but not one which is covered in great detail. What You Leave Behind (DS9, 1999) – Concluding the Dominion War arc, which brought together the Federation and Romulans as allies, this episode is the most recent in which we saw many Star Trek factions like the Cardassians and Breen. Skin of Evil (TNG, 1988) – Picard’s first on-screen experience with losing an officer and a friend, when Tasha Yar is killed in action. Time Squared (TNG, 1988) – Picard must contend with the idea that he abandoned ship in the middle of a crisis when a duplicate of himself from the future is discovered. The Defector (TNG, 1990) – A Romulan Admiral defects to the Federation to try to prevent a war, and Picard must deal with the information he provides. The Raven (VOY, 1997) – Seven of Nine experiences flashbacks and uncovers her family’s half-assimilated ship where she was first captured by the Borg. I, Borg (TNG, 1992) – The introduction of Hugh the Borg, and Picard’s attempt to weaponise him to defeat the collective. Human Error (VOY, 2001) – Seven of Nine begins to discover more about her human side after years away from the Borg. In The Pale Moonlight (DS9, 1998) – Sisko lies and cheats to bring the Romulans into the Dominion War as an ally – and Garak commits murder to cover up their actions. Did the Romulans find out between the end of the war and the events of Picard? Sarek (TNG, 1990) – Picard came to know Spock well, but also met his father. Picard helped Sarek stay in control of his emotions as he suffered a serious Vulcan illness.
So that’s it.
A few episodes and films that might feed into the plot and background of Star Trek: Picard. Perhaps not everything will be relevant, especially given the scant information about the show’s plot that we actually have. I’ve made two significant assumptions based on the trailer and cast information that we’ve seen so far – firstly that the Borg will have some role to play in the story, and secondly that the Romulans will too. But it could be an elaborate misdirect and both of these factions will ultimately end up being little more than backstory. We’ll have to see.
Regardless, the episodes and films above should go some way to showing off Picard and Star Trek at their best as we prepare for the new series. It’s been a long time since I was this excited about the premiere of a new television series, and I can’t wait to tune in when Picard kicks off in just ten days’ time.
Live Long and Prosper!
The Star Trek franchise – including all films, series, and episodes listed above – is the copyright of Paramount Pictures and ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the Short Treks episode Children of Mars.
For those of you lucky enough to live in the United States, the latest episode of Short Treks – and the final episode of the current “season” – premiered yesterday. Before we jump into the full review, I want to address again the stupidity of keeping these episodes away from the majority of the Star Trek audience and fan community.
ViacomCBS needs to get as many people invested in the Star Trek franchise as possible. It’s one of their main properties, it’s one they’ve invested a lot of money in, and in order to ever see a return on that investment – which in the days of the “streaming wars” is no longer guaranteed – they need as many people on board as possible. As Star Trek: Picard premieres in two weeks, now is the time to start a huge push to bring in as many people as possible – both returning fans and curious newcomers.
Children of Mars serves as a “prequel” to Picard. Its story is inherently tied to the upcoming series, and Admiral Picard himself even features – albeit very briefly and only on a screen. So why is this episode, of all the Short Treks episodes, not available outside the United States? Here in the UK, and I believe in other countries and territories too, Amazon Prime will be broadcasting Picard. Why are they not also showing this episode of Short Treks? Children of Mars wasn’t the best Short Treks has had to offer this season – spoiler alert for the review below, I guess – but it is a part of the Picard story, and one which at the very least would remind people that the show is coming and get people paying attention. With only a short time left until Picard premieres, now is the time for ViacomCBS to pull out all the stops and get the word out about this series.
Short Treks as a concept was designed for this very reason – to keep the Star Trek brand alive in the public mind while the main shows were in between seasons. And Children of Mars is literally made to be a teaser to get people excited for Picard.
With CBS All Access in a difficult market, and running an in-house streaming platform being an incredibly expensive endeavour at the best of times, Star Trek since 2017 has only been financially stable thanks to outside investment – first from Netflix, who essentially paid for all of Discovery‘s first season, and later from Amazon Prime, who snapped up the rights to Picard. Star Trek’s international audience is big – at the very least equal in number to the audience in the United States, and quite possibly bigger. Yet despite all of these factors, Short Treks hasn’t been made available to us, and despite the fact that the sale of international broadcast rights has been essential to Star Trek’s continued production in the wake of CBS All Access’ shaky market hold at home, ViacomCBS treats its international audience like second-class citizens. They don’t care about us, yet without our viewership, the money they’ve been getting from companies like Netflix, Amazon, and other broadcasters like Channel 4 would dry up, leaving not only the Star Trek brand but CBS All Access itself in a very perilous position.
This remains a source of considerable disappointment.
But that’s enough about that for now. When I tracked down a copy, I sat down to watch Children of Mars, and finally, for the first time since Nemesis in 2002 and brief scenes in Star Trek in 2009, we were back in the 24th Century.
Utopia Planitia as seen in Children of Mars.
Not that that was immediately obvious. Short Treks has worked very well in the past by reusing Discovery‘s sets, but obviously for a short-format show there’s a limited budget and not much scope to build whole new sets. And in this case, that was painfully apparent. The building representing the school had a definite modern-day feel throughout, despite the CGI trappings of the 24th Century, and unfortunately that was noticeable to me. Star Trek has always had a distinctively futuristic aesthetic, and even though the look has changed and evolved significantly between its 1960s origins and its more recent iterations, there were not many moments where as the audience we were knocked out of the future because what we were looking at looked like something from today. Children of Mars absolutely has this issue, and it runs through the entire episode.
Indeed many of the aesthetic choices are strange by Star Trek standards. The school uniforms would be just as at home in the modern day, and had no Star Trek elements at all. We’ve seen countless civilian and non-Starfleet outfits in Star Trek, but none looked like this. Again, it was a modern day school uniform with a white polo shirt and red blazer. And maybe this is a minor point and up for debate, but would 24th Century schoolkids need big school bags like those depicted in the short episode? On its own I wouldn’t have noticed, but as an accessory to a bland, modern day school uniform on kids running around a perfectly nice but definitely contemporary building, it just added to the impression that this wasn’t the 24th Century after all.
There’s also the fact that a significant portion of the first half of the episode has its soundtrack taken over by a modern pop song, which again adds to the feeling that we’re watching something from our own time with a few bits of CGI tacked on.
Transport shuttle from Children of Mars.
It’s difficult to tell a compelling story in less than eight minutes, and I understand that for budget reasons we aren’t going to be running around a brand new, never-before-seen starship and interacting with dozens of characters. My expectations for an episode like this are kept in check. But even so, I couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed.
It’s no criticism of the two young actresses, who gave fine performances, but they didn’t really have much to say, and all we really got for more than half the total runtime was a kind of overly-artistic, soundtrack-heavy sequence of two girls making their way to school. During which I just remember thinking to myself that “this doesn’t feel like Star Trek.”
So the basic premise is that there are these two girls who each have at least one parent who works at Utopia Planitia. If you don’t remember from previous iterations of Star Trek, Utopia Planitia is one of Starfleet’s biggest shipyards, and it’s on/orbiting Mars. It’s never fully shown on screen, but it has been referenced a number of times across several different series. Anyway, one of the girls is an alien – maybe from the same species as Tilly’s friend Po from the Short Treks episode Runaway, which fed into Discovery‘s second season. The other at least appears to be human.
I think we were meant to get the impression from the girls’ conversations with their parents that there’s some kind of class difference. One of the parents is an “anti-grav rigger”, and the other is a “quality systems supervisor”. It’s not clear, especially because both parents seemed to be dressed in engineering gear – complete with helmets – but I think we’re supposed to infer that Lil’s family is perhaps the Star Trek equivalent of the middle class, and Kima’s is working class. It seems like they were going for that, at least.
The majority of the episode doesn’t take place on Mars itself, as the girls seem to be living and/or going to school on another planet. I want to say on Earth, but this isn’t clear at all and realistically it could be any one of a number of Federation worlds. Lil’s dad tells her he’s too busy with work to come home, and she heads to school in a sulk, deliberately pushing Kima on her way to the shuttle, causing the latter girl to miss the shuttle. Kima eventually gets to school and the two girls continue their rivalry, silently bickering with each other until eventually a fight breaks out for which they’re both in trouble.
The way this was done was fine, it paints Lil as more of the aggressor than Kima, but ultimately they’re both responsible for continuing the feud and escalating it. As a work of characterisation it’s okay given the short timeframe and by the episode’s climax we know the girls greatly dislike one another.
As they sit a few metres apart in the school’s lobby area, either in detention or waiting for punishment, a couple of the teachers receive a message on handheld communicators. The message is soon broadcast all over the school, and shows a significant attack on Mars.
The stingray ships of the “rogue synths” attacking Mars in Children of Mars.
The vessels engaged in the attack aren’t any we’ve seen before, and it would be pure speculation to try to identify them. But hey, that sounds like fun so let’s do that. They’re described on-screen as “rogue synths”, but that doesn’t tell us anything of their origins. Purely from the design of the vessels, which had a kind of stingray-esque shape, my first thought was Klingons. I could see that shape of vessel being a natural progression from the Klingon ships of the 24th Century. But then we know Picard is going to deal with the Romulans, and that Utopia Planitia is building a fleet to help Romulans, so maybe it was a faction in the Empire opposed to Federation help. I could see vessels of that design being Romulan – again as a natural evolution from their 24th Century ships that we’ve already seen. I don’t think it was the Borg, as I can’t see them using ships of that type, nor carrying out an attack of this type. Their style has always been to assimilate instead of exterminate, so this wouldn’t fit. The other possibility is that these are Federation ships – or ex-Federation ships commandeered by a new breakaway faction like the Maquis.
The stingray ships, as I’m calling them for now, are by far the most interesting ship designs from Children of Mars. The Federation ships being built at Utopia Planitia – as glimpsed briefly at the beginning of the episode – looked decidedly 23rd Century to my eyes. They looked like ships better suited to the Discovery era than the Picard era, and considering it was all CGI I don’t really see why that had to be the case. For nostalgia’s sake they could’ve easily dropped a Galaxy-class or Excelsior-class ship in there instead of the Discovery-esque ships that we ultimately saw, as that would’ve avoided revealing too much about Picard-era ships if that was a concern for whatever reason.
Admiral Picard’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Children of Mars.
The CGI work for the shipyard and later for the attack on Mars was decent. Not cinema-level, perhaps, but good enough not to be immersion-breaking. At the end of the day, that’s its basic job and it accomplished it successfully, so credit to the animators involved for that. The way that the stingray ships seemed to glide while in flight was great, their motion was clearly unlike any heavier-than-air craft we have in the modern day, so that was a high point of the animation for me.
Children of Mars will feed into the events of Star Trek: Picard, though exactly how is unclear. Short Treks has had a strange relationship with the main Star Trek shows thus far, with some episodes like Calypso and The Escape Artist being true one-shots that didn’t tie into anything else in Discovery, and others like Runaway where a main character crossed over. It isn’t clear yet how this story will affect Picard, and whether the two girls featured, or their parents, will make an appearance. If I had to guess I’d say probably not, and that this episode was just a vehicle to communicate the attack on Mars, but we’ll see in a couple of weeks I suppose!
Unfortunately, Children of Mars didn’t tell the kind of story that I personally find very interesting. The attack on Mars itself will be significant for Star Trek: Picard, and in that sense I’m glad to have seen it and been aware of it. However, the majority of the episode wasn’t about that. Indeed the attack sequence takes up little more than one minute in total. The bulk of the story is the tension between the two girls, which immediately evaporates when they realise what’s going on.
And as a story concept, that’s fine. It’s nice to see two people who weren’t friends come together in the face of a crisis. As they hold hands at the end of the episode, it marks the end of their childish fighting, and because of the severity of what’s happened, arguably the end of their childhoods too.
Perhaps a short format wasn’t right for this story, or perhaps the episode spent too long building up the enmity and fighting before getting to the resolution, because the girls coming together at the end and just letting go of all their anger toward one another didn’t feel like it was earned or that it was plausible. And I know what some people would say, that looking for plausible outcomes in a Short Treks episode is too much. But Children of Mars presented itself this way, as an artistic-inspired, character-centred story. So how the only two characters involved in that story go from enemies to friends in a single moment is the absolute crux of the story, and it’s the part we should rightly be focused on.
I get what the director was going for. This was a story that wanted to say “people can put their petty arguments and rivalries aside in the face of catastrophe, and come together.” It’s an inspiring message of the kind Star Trek has always been good at delivering. But something about the overly-artistic way it was presented, with practically no dialogue, a heavy soundtrack, and stylised camera work just didn’t work for me. And the ultimate pay-off when the girls realise that they have to come together didn’t work either as a plausible outcome. As an artistic outcome, and as a philosophical outcome, sure, it makes perfect sense. But if we’re to treat the girls as real characters inhabiting this fictional galaxy, I just didn’t feel that they had gotten to a place by the end of the episode that the attack on Mars would bring them together in that way. Did they even know each other had a parent stationed there? That detail would’ve built up the emotional bond between them, but because it wasn’t made clear on screen how well they knew each other or if they knew about each other’s family, that moment was robbed of some of its dramatic effect.
Perhaps I’m being overly critical of a short episode. But this is the way ViacomCBS chose to present the “prequel” to Picard. They didn’t have to do it this way, they could’ve told literally any story they wanted if all it had to do was be a vehicle for showing off that Mars was attacked in the years prior to Picard. That they chose this story about fighting schoolgirls was an artistic one, and I respect that. It just didn’t come across as a strong story on its own, at least in my opinion. The sequence where Mars comes under attack is worth watching for anyone intent on tuning in for Star Trek: Picard, but as I said it’s barely a minute long, and the rest of the episode, while interesting in concept, ends up being little more than fluff.
Maybe we’ll see these characters again, if they crop up later in Picard. At this point that’s not confirmed, but if they do then maybe the episode will get some more context and will be worth a rewatch at that point. I kind of hope that turns out to be the case, because I feel Children of Mars is quite a weak story when taken as a standalone piece.
The aesthetic and design issues certainly hampered it too, and it would have been better to redress a Discovery set for the schoolroom than use whatever contemporary building they ended up going with.
Both the starships being constructed and the transport shuttle to take the children to school were both very much in the same style as Discovery. While I like that look overall, it’s a 23rd Century look, is it not? We should surely have seen some kind of change between Discovery and the era of Picard, and if they didn’t want to go to the trouble of making all new models and designs, it would have been better in my opinion to reuse some of the TNG-era designs than fall back on those from the Discovery era. I think seeing a familiar starship or shuttle design would’ve also been a nice little wink to returning fans.
Unless Children of Mars has a more significant relationship with Star Trek: Picard than I’m assuming at present, I’m in no hurry to watch it again. It was okay, but it wasn’t Short Treks‘ finest offering by any means, and as both a tie-in to Picard and a first look at the 24th Century really since 2002, it was a bit of a let-down.
The Star Trek franchise – including Short Treks and Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. Children of Mars is available to stream in the United States on CBS All Access – but not anywhere else at time of writing. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for Star Trek Discovery and practically everything else in the Star Trek franchise.
Welcome back! Last time, I talked about why I wasn’t keen on the post-apocalyptic setting that Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 is seemingly heading toward. And in the course of writing that article it got me thinking about what I’d prefer, and from there, what other settings the Star Trek franchise could use that might make for interesting stories.
This list isn’t even speculation, it’s purely fantasy. These are some of my own ideas for Star Trek that would take the franchise in a different direction. It was inspired by my concerns about Discovery Season 3, but it goes beyond Season 3 to look at other ideas as well. Like a lot of fan fantasies, some of these pitches wouldn’t have any real appeal beyond a small niche of Star Trek fans.
The list is broken into two parts. The first deals withalternative Season 3 ideas that Star Trek: Discovery could have chosen instead of the far future, and the second looks at a few other Star Trek series ideas that I think have some potential to be interesting.
Part I: Season 3 ideas for Star Trek: Discovery
Number 1: The 23rd Century, but with new crew members.
As Season 2 of Discovery drew to a close, it wasn’t at all certain that they were going to head into the future. The decision to do so was only cemented in the finale, leaving open the possibility that the USS Discovery could’ve remained in the 23rd Century. With Pike and Spock headed back to the Enterprise, there would be two openings for new cast members, and realistically I’d have liked to see two new permanent members added to the cast – with a view to having them stick around for future seasons.
Discovery has been, in many respects, a leaderless series. Michael Burnham is the protagonist, but her role across both seasons thus far has not been one of leadership, which has always been occupied by a Captain or Commander in other iterations of Star Trek. Gabriel Lorca was, at least for me, one of the definite high points of Season 1 – at least before his dramatic turn in his final episode, in which he became a one-dimensional, moustache-twirling pantomime villain. Lorca’s departure was an inherent part of Discovery‘s narrative in that season and was inevitable, but his loss did leave a void in the show, one which Capt. Pike – played so wonderfully by Anson Mount – stepped in to fill. But as with Lorca, Pike was strictly a one-season deal, and so we’ve seen two very different leaders come and go for the series.
Stopping the churn of characters, especially high-ranking characters, has to be something Discovery addresses going forward. One way to do so would be to promote a current cast member to the captaincy – most likely this would be Burnham, though how that would work from an in-universe perspective given her mutiny conviction would require explanation. Saru would also be a good candidate, and could be Star Trek’s first non-human commanding officer.
Alternatively an outside captain could be parachuted in, but after going through two captains in two seasons I think fans would be clamouring for some consistency at the top. New characters would be great though, such as a security officer to replace the departing Ash Tyler. It would also be an opportunity to get to know some of the secondary characters, like Detmer at the helm and Owosekun at operations, both of whom have had very little to say or do thus far. Seeing them both in their home environment would let us get to know them better than seeing them in a completely unknown future.
There was still scope for Discovery to tell interesting stories in the 23rd Century, and if the Control/Leland storyline had been concluded differently, there’s no reason why Discovery couldn’t be hopping about the galaxy with or without the Spore Drive on missions of exploration.
Number 2: Ditch Michael Burnham
Burnham has been Discovery‘s main character since it premiered – but as a protagonist she can be difficult to root for at times. It’s no criticism of Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays her very well, but Burnham’s Vulcan upbringing has left her with two of the least attractive Vulcan traits – a cult-like devotion to logic (or rather, her own interpretation of logic), and an aloof nature that can come across as arrogant. This isn’t helped by putting her in stories in which she, and she alone, is able to be the saviour of the ship and crew.
In The Vulcan Hello (the premiere episode of Discovery) her motivations for staging the mutiny are so poorly communicated to the audience, and her actions so incomprehensible, that on first viewing I genuinely thought the producers had pulled the ol’ switcheroo and were surprising us by making Burnham the antagonist of the series. Her storyline in that episode and the one that followed set up Discovery‘s whole Season 1, but it made no sense and has been a major contributing factor to how fans have come to view her character.
Star Trek series have never been primarily focused on one individual before – with the exception now of Star Trek: Picard, which kicks off in just three weeks. But every other Star Trek series has been about a crew, not a person, and losing or swapping out one individual shouldn’t bring the whole concept of the series crashing down. The crew of Discovery would cope without her, and one possible ending for Season 2 would’ve been to send Burnham and the data into the future, while Discovery and the rest of the crew stayed behind to have new adventures without her in the 23rd Century.
Getting rid of Burnham, and not replacing her with a like-for-like “main” character, would allow other members of the crew to shine, as we could spend more time with them. And whether they travelled into the future or not, I think that would be a net positive for the series, because as mentioned above, we still know very little about several of the main crew.
Number 3: Travel into the future – but only to the dawn of the 25th Century
As I wrote a couple of posts ago, I’m not convinced that having multiple timelines and realities on the go all at once is a good way to organise a franchise. If you’re trying to convince a friend to give Star Trek a shot, and you have to spend an hour explaining that Discovery is in the 33rd Century, Section 31 is in the 23rd Century, Picard is at the start of the 25th Century, and there’s a film coming out that’s in the 23rd Century – but a parallel universe – it starts to get so convoluted that it’s just offputting for newcomers. And as much as long-time fans might deride it, ViacomCBS needs new people to get on board if Star Trek is to remain profitable and viable into the future. So what better way to fix things than to bring as many of your shows as possible into the same time period?
If Discovery had to abandon its 23rd Century setting, this is by far the best option. By bringing Burnham and the crew into the same time frame as Star Trek: Picard there’s the possibility for characters, storylines, and themes to cross over, and for the franchise as a whole to build a solid foundation in this new era. Other series could take that foundation and build upon it, creating a new era of Star Trek with a 25th Century setting – in much the same way as The Next Generation did for Deep Space Nine and Voyager. And who would disagree that the 24th Century shows were Star Trek’s “golden age”?
Precisely because of their shared setting, having a similar aesthetic made sense. Similar visual effects, a similar level of technology, and the possibility for characters, factions, and storylines to cross over all contributed to those shows being Star Trek storytelling at its best. But instead of trying to recreate a formula that worked, ViacomCBS seem intent on splitting up all of their projects, even though they’re in production at the same time. To me that doesn’t make a lot of sense. The difference in how TOS and TNG looked was caused by the shows being produced 20 years apart, and the similarity in effects and technology in TNG, DS9, and Voyager was perfectly reasonable considering these shows were all taking place in the same era. But if Picard in the 25th Century looks the same visually as Discovery in the 33rd Century and Section 31 in the 23rd Century, the aesthetic of the shows becomes an issue – and people will be wondering how they all look the same and have the same level of technology when they’re supposedly taking place centuries apart.
Instead, how about this: something goes wrong during Discovery’s jump to the future, and instead of emerging in the 32nd/33rd Century, they end up at the beginning of the 25th. And who do they meet? Capt. Picard and his new crew, who bring them back to Starfleet for debriefing. Such a scenario would be easy to pull off with a little technobabble to explain how the time-wormhole collapsed.
Starfleet would be sure to find a use for the ship and crew, who would want nothing more than to get back to work. Having two series running in the 25th Century would also allow for more backstory – allowing us to catch up on even more of what’s going on in the galaxy, and because we’re seeing it through the eyes of newcomers instead of people who already live there, there’d be more excuses for exposition and explanation, perhaps allowing for a deeper dive into some of the events we’ve missed since Nemesis. If there were some kind of war or conflict, this would be a great excuse for Starfleet to be in need of every available vessel, again providing a reason for the Discovery to remain in service.
It would also allow for more Spore Drive-related adventures, which Season 2 mostly lacked. The Spore Drive as a whole has felt underused in Discovery, really just serving as a macguffin to allow for the jump to the Mirror Universe. Its potential is unlimited, and it would be interesting to see how Starfleet would react to its reemergence.
Number 4: The Borg
When we think about iconic Star Trek villains, the Borg have to be right up there as one of the best and scariest. And Discovery seemed, for a while at least, to be touching on the Borg in Season 2. Many fans speculated that the Control AI, with its nanobots and ability to take over (or “assimilate”) human bodies was somehow tied to the Borg, and the season could have ended as a Borg origin story.
If Leland/Control and Discovery were thrown backwards in time instead of forwards, we could have seen how the Borg came to be; how the technology of Control came to be used by another species or how Control took over another species and turned them into proto-Borg. I kind of like this one, because as a narrative device, the cyclical idea that Starfleet actually created its own worst enemy could be – if executed well – absolutely fascinating to explore.
This is pure speculation on my part, but at least part of me thinks that this may have been in the original story pitch for Season 2. So much of the Control storyline lines up perfectly with a Borg origin story that it hardly seems accidental. If it was part of the original premise, I wonder why they decided not to go down that route. As with the idea of leaving the 23rd Century, this concept was still valid right up until the finale, with the story in Season 2 being able to go many ways even that late. To me, that makes for good storytelling, and I can’t help but wonder how this alternate route would have worked.
The downside to the Borg idea is that overusing a classic villain is problematic. We’ve seen the Borg many times across Star Trek, and particularly toward the end of Voyager they had become stale. When a villain gets overexplained and we spend too much time with them, they can lose a lot of their fear factor, especially if our heroes come out unscathed time after time. Just look at the zombies in The Walking Dead – the concept is similar in that you have an enemy who massively outnumber our heroes, and who can grow in strength and numbers by forcibly turning anyone into one of them. Yet by the third or fourth season of The Walking Dead, the zombies weren’t scary any more, and the show has since focused much more on human villains. Nevertheless, it’s been more than fifteen years since the last Borg story in Star Trek, and there’s a case to be made that the time is right to reintroduce them.
Part II: Other Star Trek ideas
Number 1: A Deep Space Nine film or miniseries
In the finale of Deep Space Nine, Benjamin Sisko disappears into the realm of the Prophets, and the crew go their separate ways. Sadly, the losses of Aron Eisenberg and René Auberjonois in 2019 mean that the whole crew will never get back together, and that we won’t get to see Odo and Nog again, but we could catch up with Sisko.
Sisko did promise to return from the Prophets, and his return could be a great excuse to catch up with others on the DS9 crew, as well as to see the galaxy through the eyes of someone who’s been away from galactic events. I mentioned this above with one of my Discovery ideas, but using a returning character in this way really is a great storytelling device. It brings us as the audience up to speed without feeling like the explanations and exposition are unnecessary.
Unlike with Star Trek: Picard, which already has a second season on order, I don’t think there’s necessarily scope to turn a Sisko-helmed series into a full-blown multi-season show. Part of what Star Trek: Picard has to be careful of is not simply turn into TNG Season 8. While there’s nothing wrong with that as a concept, Picard is supposed to be a new story and has a new cast of characters. I’m excited to meet them and see what they have to offer, so the show has to strike a balance between looking back and moving forwards. A DS9 sequel would have to do the same, and that’s why a film or miniseries format would work better.
If the Star Trek franchise were producing all of its shows in the same time period, it would be easy for such a project as this to be a nice addition to other 25th Century Star Trek.
Number 2: A hospital ship
This is a series premise I’ve been thinking about on and off for years. Sort of a combination of Star Trek and medical shows like ER, this concept would take a medical ship (like Dr. Crusher’s USS Pasteur from All Good Things) as it travels around the Federation.
Unlike with real-world medical dramas, the series wouldn’t be constrained by real-world diseases, which would allow for a lot of creative freedom for the writers. I don’t mean Theme Hospital levels of silliness, but the conditions which afflict both human and non-human patients could be explored in detail. It would also be interesting to expand our understanding of many of the diseases mentioned on screen only in passing, as well as to learn more about medical equipment and procedures in the 25th Century.
If it were part of a broader franchise, again there’s the possibility for characters crossing over, and it would even be an option to have a former regular like Bashir or Crusher be a part of the show. Medical dramas are popular, and if a series like ER could run for fifteen seasons and still manage to be engaging for (most) of that time, I really feel like this concept could work in Star Trek too. It would be new enough to shake up the franchise by not simply being another exploration or “boldly going” show, but would be familiar enough with the starship setting to be appealing to fans.
Number 3: A series set on a colony
Deep Space Nine sought to break the Star Trek mould by being the first show not set on a moving ship. Thus far it’s the only Star Trek project to take this approach, but going a step further would be to set a series on a colony world. Not even in space, the characters would be firmly rooted to the ground, and we could see how a colony is established.
There are hundreds of possibilities for such a setting. If it were a colony on a disputed world, that could lead to tension with whichever other power wanted the planet. If it were a colony far away from the nearest starbase, there’d be a sense of isolation among the crew. And we’d get another opportunity for Star Trek to show off non-Starfleet personnel – something the franchise hasn’t always done very well.
When it came to the character of Jake Sisko in Deep Space Nine, it always felt like the show’s producers didn’t really know what to do with him. With Nog becoming the young person who went to join Starfleet, Jake was kind of in limbo much of the time and many of his appearances didn’t do much to show what civilian life was like in the 24th Century. Not to say that Jake should’ve enrolled in Starfleet – that wouldn’t have been right for his character, and making him Wesley Crusher 2.0 wouldn’t have made Deep Space Nine any better.
But civilian life in Star Trek is something we don’t see much of, at least not human civilian life. Quark showed us a lot about the Ferengi, but other non-Starfleet characters, like Kes and Neelix, were still crew members on a Starfleet vessel and thus had roles to play in that environment. It would be interesting to see a colony on a planet where there were perhaps one or two Starfleet personnel but everyone else was a civilian. The Star Trek galaxy has room for so much more than just Starfleet ships having adventures, and a colony could be a good setting for telling a long, serialised story. I know some people have talked about a series on Earth, perhaps at Starfleet Academy, but to me a colony has more potential to tell interesting and different stories.
Number 4: Something set between The Undiscovered Country and The Next Generation
This is less a series premise than a time period, but I’ve always been curious to see more of this eighty-odd year span. We’d see, for example, the Romulans going into isolation, as well as the growth in relations between the Klingons and the Federation in the aftermath of the Khitomer Accords. It would also be interesting to see first contact with some species we’ve only seen later, and it would be an opportunity to look at relations between the Federation and other Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers like the Tholians or Breen, and see how things progressed with them.
I know I’ve said before that I prefer Star Trek to look forward not back, and that the franchise should try to set its shows in the same era. Both of those are still true, but if a prequel (or mid-quel) is on the cards, this could be a fun era to look at in more detail. Plus it would be an excuse to revisit the uniforms of that era, which are among Star Trek’s best.
So that’s it.
As I said last time, it’s easy for someone to criticise and tear down, but much harder to come up with new and interesting ideas to create something. I hope that at least some of these concepts were of interest to you.
The Star Trek franchise, including all shows and films mentioned above, is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
In both the Short Treks episode Calypso and in the trailer for the upcoming third season of Star Trek: Discovery, we are given the impression that all is not well in the Star Trek galaxy. In Calypso, main character Craft tells the AI Zora of a war he’s involved in, and he later needs to use one of the USS Discovery’s shuttlecrafts to get home – his pod being slower and less advanced than a thousand-year-old shuttlecraft says a lot about the state of technology in this timeline.
Whether or not Calypso is fully canon, or whether its timeline has changed, and whenever it’s supposed to be set, if the trailer for Discovery Season 3 has correctly portrayed the environment they’re heading into and isn’t an elaborate deception, it seems that whatever era the ship and crew ultimately arrive in is also one where war and disaster have occurred. But is this kind of post-apocalyptic setting right for Star Trek?
The last few years have seen a glut of shows, films, games, and books choosing a post-apocalyptic environment. And many of these have been great – I Am Legend is a great film, The Last Ship is a great television series, and The Last Of Us is a great game, just to give three examples. Major franchises like The Walking Dead have helped popularise this sub-genre, and it’s become a popular choice for a lot of storytellers.It’s easy to see why – this kind of setting lends itself to high-stakes drama, and forcing characters to make life-or-death decisions. When survival is at stake, characters need to step up in order to just make it through the day, and that can be a strong driving force in any narrative when it’s done correctly.
The kind of post-apocalypse we seemed to glimpse in the trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 might not quite be at that same level, where it’s day-to-day surviving at the end of the world, but it certainly seems as though something absolutely massive has happened since we last saw the galaxy in the 2380s. Whenever the USS Discovery emerges from the time-wormhole it entered at the end of Season 2, it seems they’re heading into a challenging environment. In the trailer, we saw an official who seemed to represent the Federation saying that Discovery was his last hope, and unfurling a flag with a Federation crest that seemed to be missing many stars – perhaps indicating the loss or secession of planets from the alliance. The Starfleet badge Burnham was wearing was referred to as a “ghost”, and Saru, in a pep talk to the crew, tells them they need to “make the future bright”. All of which strongly imply that the Federation in this era is in serious trouble – if it still exists at all.
But what’s just as telling from the trailer is what we didn’t see. Where was all of the new technology that should surely have been invented by then? At one point, Burnham and a new character are walking across a landscape – why could they not transport from point to point like we’ve seen across Star Trek (and especially with the “transwarp beaming” concept from the Kelvin films)? The weapons used in the trailer also seem to be little more than energy weapons already known to exist, and we didn’t see any new starships or stations or anything that indicated the galaxy has advanced significantly. In a few episodes of Star Trek in the past, particularly in Voyager and Enterprise, we’ve had glimpses of the Federation in the 29th and 30th Centuries – and it seemed not only to be doing great but to have time-travelling starships, and that time travel was so common a concept that it was taught in schools. In short, where is the technology?
Wars and conflicts, especially long ones, can be devastating. But from war, technology often emerges. In the real world, as destructive as WWII was, it led to the development of such things as rockets and computers. So even if the Star Trek galaxy plunged into war in the 32nd or 33rd Centuries, we should still see at least the level of tech they’d got to before the war, and perhaps the emergence of new tech as a result of research during it. The fact that nothing of the sort was in evidence is interesting, and that’s why I’m calling the setting “post-apocalyptic”. At the end of the day, if people of the 32nd or 33rd Centuries are living with a 23rd Century level of technology, that would be a huge backwards step for them, even if it still looks cool and futuristic to us. If we were sent back technologically to the 1950s or 1960s, that would look incredibly impressive to a Victorian, but would feel apocalyptic to us. It’s that principle that feels like it’s in play with Discovery.
Regardless of the exact details of how far technology has advanced or regressed by the 32nd/33rd Century (assuming that’s when Discovery is going to be set – see my previous article for my thoughts on that) it certainly seems from the trailer that something big has happened. The Star Trek galaxy and the Federation are not where we would have expected them to be. Is the Federation in decline? Has it broken up altogether? It’s not clear, but it is definitely facing huge difficulties if the “best hope” they’ve had in years is a 930-year-old ship and crew.
In a media landscape dominated by war and aggression, Star Trek has always shown a more positive vision of the future. Where The Terminator and The Matrix showed us rogue AIs killing humanity, Star Trek showed us Data, the friendly android. Where Star Wars had an evil empire ruling the galaxy with an iron fist, Star Trek had an enlightened democratic society. And where Twelve Monkeys and 28 Days Later had humanity on the brink of extinction, Star Trek showed humankind flourishing, having overcome countless obstacles. As Trip Tucker puts it in Enterprise: “war, disease, hunger – pretty much wiped them out in less than two generations.” This, to me, is the core of what makes Star Trek what it is. And I don’t necessarily think that gels with a post-apocalyptic setting.
Partly, Star Trek’s optimism is a product of its 1960s origins. At the height of the Cold War, there was the legitimate possibility of nuclear war causing the end of human civilisation, and with TOS premiering a mere four years after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world as close to that fate as it arguably ever came, the need for optimism was great. But that optimistic approach has been a constant thread running through the franchise ever since. It’s been the one consistent thing in all of Star Trek, even at the height of the Dominion War in DS9, humanity was still there, and Earth was still a paradise worth fighting for. The drama in that story came from the existential threat to the optimistic future humanity had built, not from that future already being torn down. That’s what made it work as an exciting narrative within the framework of Star Trek’s optimistic take on the future.
A post-apocalyptic setting is, by its very nature, the exact opposite. Where Star Trek has presented an optimistic vision of humanity overcoming obstacle after obstacle, any post-apocalyptic setting says that the obstacles got the better of us. We went up against something – be it a disease, technology, warfare, etc. – and lost. Star Trek says that whatever life threw at us, we came out on top. That cannot be true in a post-apocalyptic setting, where we will have lost.
This represents a fundamental change to the nature of storytelling within the Star Trek franchise, greater than arguably any change made thus far. Enterprise took the franchise backwards in its own timeline, the Kelvin films were not only an alternate reality but changed the storytelling to be more action-heavy. But even these are not as major as changing the entire underlying premise of a positive vision of humanity’s future. In both 2009’s Star Trek and Enterprise, as well as the Dominion War arc of DS9 mentioned above, the basic concept that humanity had not simply survived but was thriving in the future was unchanged. The drama, tension, and narratives all came from challenges humanity faced within that framework, not that we’d failed or that something had beaten us.
Such a significant change risks Star Trek losing its uniqueness and, from a commercial point of view, one of its key selling points. Without its positive vision of humanity’s future, a fundamental part of Star Trek is missing – and without it, will the franchise still work? If Star Trek loses the one thing that makes it stand out, and continues its transition to primarily action-oriented stories, it risks becoming just another work in the generic sci fi and/or post-apocalyptic genres, losing its uniqueness and fading into the mass of action/sci fi franchises which already occupy that space.
Some fans would claim that this has already happened, due to a combination of the Kelvin timeline, Discovery, and even Enterprise taking the franchise to different places and by modernising the storytelling. But that alone isn’t enough to fundamentally change Star Trek. And at the core of Discovery and the Kelvin films, that optimism and positive outlook was still present, even if it wasn’t front-and-centre in the way it had been in prior series.
Taking a bleak setting, where the Federation is shattered and life for humankind is going backwards just doesn’t feel like Star Trek. Perhaps it could be a solidly entertaining sci fi series, but one of the core tenets of Star Trek would be lacking, and I’m certain that would be noticeable.
There’s another problem with this post-apocalyptic theme, too. As things sit right now, Discovery is the only Star Trek series taking place in that time period. Picard and Lower Decks both take place after Nemesis, and the Section 31 series is assumed to take place in the era Discovery left behind. With a second season of Picard on order now, all of these series will basically be prequels to Discovery – and if we see Picard and his crew fighting for the future of the Federation, when we know that actually the Federation has no future because we’ve seen in Discovery that things go very, very wrong, there’ll be a sense of “well what’s the point of this?”
I wrote previously how splitting Star Trek up into three timelines and two parallel realities is a bad decision for a franchise. With three live-action series in production practically simultaneously, there’s just no way to make them line up, let alone allow for any crossover of characters, plot points, and themes. It will make it harder for fans of one show to jump across to another, and will put off new fans altogether at a time when the shaky nature of CBS All Access in the midst of the “streaming wars” means they need those people more than ever. And having one show set in a future that’s potentially saying that everything that happens in the other shows comes to nothing is bleak, depressing, and offputting for both fans and casual viewers alike.
Now that all that’s been said, it should be pointed out that the trailer for Discovery‘s third season may be deliberately misleading, having been cut in a certain way. There are other explanations for what we saw in the trailer that don’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that we’re looking at a fractured Federation and a post-apocalyptic setting. And we won’t know for sure what’s in store until we see Discovery on our screens later in the year. But of all the seasons of Discovery so far, this is the one that has me feeling the most nervous. I want the show to succeed because I want the franchise to succeed so we can continue to enjoy new stories in the Star Trek galaxy for a long time to come. I’m just not convinced that this is the way to do it. And by abandoning one of the core parts of what makes Star Trek, well, Star Trek, the producers are taking a massive risk that could backfire.
As I’ve said several times before, I dislike the expression “nobody asked for this”. And there are two reasons for that: firstly, plenty of shows and films that “nobody asked for” actually turn out to be phenomenal. And secondly, because in a lot of online fan communities, the things that people are actually wanting and asking for are absolute crap. So in principle, the fact that I wouldn’t have chosen this route for Discovery and the Star Trek franchise doesn’t necessarily make it invalid or mean it will be bad. And I hope to be pleasantly surprised, because I’m always hopeful that new Star Trek will be enjoyable. But at the moment, I’m just not convinced it’s the best idea.
So what would I have rather seen? Anyone can complain and whine about what they don’t like, but not enough people are proactive in putting their own ideas forward for what they’d do instead. It’s easy to be negative and tear down someone’s ideas, but it’s much harder to imagine and create something.
So stop by next time and I’ll throw some concepts your way, both for Discovery and for the Star Trek franchise in general.
The Star Trek franchise, including Star Trek: Discovery, is the copyright of ViacomCBS. Star Trek: Discovery is available on Netflix in the UK and around the world, and on CBS All Access in the United States. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for Star Trek Discovery and Short Treks.
At the end of Season 2 of Discovery, Burnham led the ship and crew into a time-wormhole. For better or worse, they’re leaving the 23rd Century behind and heading into the future – but when, exactly? And how will it affect the rest of the Star Trek franchise now that there are other series joining Discovery on the roster?
Let’s start off by looking at the currently-announced Star Trek series and their supposed timeframes in the Star Trek universe.
Firstly we have Star Trek Picard, taking place in approximately 2399, as the 25th Century dawns. Then there’s Lower Decks, set in the 2380s. Next we have the Section 31 series, which is supposed to be set in the mid-23rd Century, possibly overlapping with TOS. Already that’s two very different time periods, and three concurrent timelines running within the Star Trek franchise. And in addition to these prime timeline settings there’s the alternate reality, where a fourth film is currently in pre-production, further complicating matters.
If we’re to believe the ending of the second season of Discovery, the ship and crew have travelled into the far future – the late 32nd or early 33rd Century, depending on how literally one takes “950 years” when it’s spoken in Discovery Season 2. So that would a third distinct time period, and one which would potentially undermine every other Star Trek series currently in production, as well as making the franchise overly complicated for newcomers.
CBS All Access, if it’s going to survive as a platform as the “streaming wars” ramp up, needs to bring in as wide an audience as possible. Realistically, most people who tuned in for Discovery are not hard-core Star Trek fans. They’re not the kind of people who argue about the length of time for subspace messages to travel from Earth to the Borg Collective in the 2060s, or who wonder why Tom Paris’ dad had a picture of him with him combadge on the wrong side framed on his desk. Most folks are casual viewers, tuning in to see an episode then moving on and doing other things. Having three entirely different time periods for one franchise risks being confusing and putting off those casual viewers who make up the bulk of any television audience.
In addition, setting Discovery in the far-future will adversely affect all the other Star Trek series currently in production – by essentially turning them into prequels. As a concept, some prequels can work. Rogue One, for example, is a great film and a direct prequel to the first Star Wars. But many prequels are robbed of a significant amount of tension and drama because we already know the outcome. In Enterprise‘s third season, the crew were facing down an existential threat to the Earth in the form of the Xindi’s planet-destroying superweapon. But having seen Earth in the 23rd and 24th Centuries, it was already known to most of the audience that there was no real danger. Thus, the storyline – while still arguably one of Enterprise‘s best – wasn’t as dramatic or edge-of-your-seat exhilarating as it could’ve been if an identical story had been made as a sequel set after Star Trek Nemesis.
By moving Discovery to a far-future setting, in which some form of galactic government and humanity still exist, any significant, galaxy-ending threat in Picard, Lower Decks, or the Section 31 series immediately loses much of its drama in the same way as the Xindi story. It constrains the direction of any future series, because we already know what direction the galaxy is headed. How we get there might be interesting – though Discovery will be under immense pressure to explain much of that backstory itself – but when the destination is known there are only so many options for the journey to take.
Unless the plan is for all of Star Trek to quickly shift to a 33rd Century setting as well, leaving behind almost everything we’ve known thus far, it seems like a bad storytelling decision – one which is sadly motivated by the vocal minority of fans who disliked Discovery‘s place in canon. And trying to run a franchise with three different timelines all running simultaneously will be a daunting task for Alex Kurtzman and others, not to mention that it precludes the possibility of cameos and crossovers.
As Deep Space Nine was getting established early on in its run, there were several crossovers with The Next Generation, which was also on the air at the same time. And Voyager also brought in settings, concepts, and characters from TNG and DS9. Those three shows all overlapped and all shared a single timeline, making it easy for fans to jump between series without getting confused, and with the ability to bring across even major characters like Worf. Aside from a dwindling number of fans who love only TOS, I think most people agree that the TNG era – including DS9 and Voyager – was the “golden age” of Star Trek. Current and upcoming series are trying to reach and surpass those heights, but may find themselves hampered by the decision to split up the timelines.
One of the biggest things getting people excited for Star Trek Picard are the cameos from returning main characters. And this isn’t something exclusive to Star Trek, either. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, crossovers and character cameos are a big deal, and that franchise is arguably the most successful in recent history. By having practically all of its titles in one timeline and one setting, Marvel’s superheroes can cross over from film to film, and fans can skip an entry and still be able to largely follow what’s going on without having to be brought up to speed. I hadn’t watched most of the films preceding Avengers Infinity War and Endgame, but I could still follow what was going on because it was familiar. A casual Star Trek fan who enjoyed Discovery trying to jump into Lower Decks might find themselves confused by the change in timelines, and that might be sufficiently offputting to stop watching. Having to have a chart or graphic to explain where each new series fits in the timeline means that the whole thing is convoluted – and that absolutely will put people off.
So those are the two biggest issues which stem from Discovery heading into the far future: the overly-complicated timeline situation, and the fact that any prequel series potentially loses a portion of its dramatic effect.
The solution is complicated, and would require a either a retcon of parts of the ending of Season 2, or yet another time travel story. So then, either the USS Discovery travels into the far future, then somehow comes back to the 25th Century, or it never travels into the far future at all. The latter is by far the more preferable outcome, as it would allow the series to tie in with Picard, and any future series and films set in that era. Star Trek should be aiming to bring its series together into one single timeline, and the ending of Discovery‘s second season actually gives them a great way to do so.
Instead of travelling 950 years into the future, the USS Discovery would emerge in the Picard era, perhaps in an area of space far away from the Federation or where Federation jurisdiction is in question. Nothing from the Season 3 trailer that premiered a few months ago is contradicted by a setting like that, and in my opinion it would allow for future Star Trek shows to work better as one single franchise, with related – if separate – stories. As things stand, the franchise is fractured by the huge gaps in its timeline between series, and aside from the briefest of references it won’t be possible to have any crossings over.
It would be easy to explain, as well. The Red Angel suit and/or Discovery herself malfunctioned, causing the time-wormhole to collapse before they had exited, thrusting both Burnham and the ship into the early 25th Century. That whole situation could be cleared up inside of the first ten minutes, and whatever we saw in the trailer could just as easily be taking place around the same time as Picard.
Part of Discovery‘s problem has always been its place in canon. I mentioned before the vocal minority of fans who’ve taken it on themselves to be hate mongers of the series and everything about it, but the show itself has provided them the ammunition. The silly thing is that there was no reason to make it that way – nothing about the first two seasons of Discovery would have changed if it were a sequel series, aside from a handful of TOS-era characters. The Mirror Universe plot would have been fine, either by saying the Terran Empire had reformed after the events of DS9 or by setting it in a different parallel reality. And the time travel/Red Angel plot would’ve worked too, and there’d have been no reason to end it by sending the ship away.
In a similar way to how Disney and Lucasfilm have approached the Star Wars sequels, it seems from the way Discovery and the other new Star Trek shows have been rolled out that ViacomCBS hasn’t had a consistent approach, nor really had any idea of what direction to take the rejuvenated franchise. The result in the case of the Star Wars films has been a failed prequel, a complete mess of a trilogy lacking a cohesive story, and one standalone film that was brilliant almost by accident. I hope the same fate isn’t in store for Star Trek, or the franchise could disappear just as quickly as it was renewed. At the end of the day, ViacomCBS brought Star Trek back for basically one reason – it was the biggest property they owned with the best name recognition, and they wanted to launch their own version of Netflix to try to get a piece of the streaming action. But if CBS All Access continues to struggle (at this point it’s not clear whether it’s actually been profitable or has a pathway to becoming profitable) there’s no reason for ViacomCBS to keep making new Star Trek. After all, what would be the point?
The Short Treks episode from its first season, Calypso, comes into play when talking about the direction Discovery could and should go.
Calypso is set after the USS Discovery has been abandoned for almost a millennium, and a human character – or at least, someone we assume to be human – comes aboard. Discovery’s computer has evolved into a full artificial intelligence, complete with emotions, but we don’t learn the stardate or exactly when it’s supposed to take place. If Discovery sets its third season in the 33rd Century, 1,000 years later would be the 43rd Century, which would set Calypso far beyond anything we’ve ever seen in Star Trek. And that still could be its setting, there’s nothing to say that doesn’t work in the context of Discovery setting itself in the far future. But it was interesting that this episode premiered just prior to the season where the USS Discovery and her crew also end up further ahead in the timeline from anything else we’ve seen before. Some people have suggested a connection, or that the galaxy we glimpsed in Calypso is the one Discovery will enter in Season 3.
There are some superficial similarities based on the trailer – both settings exclude Starfleet and suggest that the Federation isn’t present, both feature humans who are at war or in conflict, and both suggest that the level of technology present aboard Discovery is either roughly equal to that which exists in the future or is perhaps even something future people would covet. So is Discovery‘s third season perhaps in the Calypso timeline, and if it is, how would Calypso itself be explained given that the USS Discovery was abandoned? There are a lot of loose ends to tie up there.
It seems to me that at the time Calypso was being made, Discovery‘s future was in jeopardy, or at least in doubt. This would explain why Calypso exists as an epilogue – almost certainly one to an alternate ending for Season 2 where the ship is abandoned. If that had been one option the writers were considering, Calypso makes perfect sense. As things stand now, it’s a bit of an outlier.
I really feel thatbringing together Discovery and Picard somehow is a great option for Star Trek, and because of the nature of time travel stories it would be possible to do so in a convincing way that doesn’t feel too forced. Discovery has been a great reboot for Star Trek on television and it deserves more success than it’s arguably had thus far. But the time has come for Star Trek to stop looking back at its own past and do what it’s always done best – press ahead into the future. And if the future is the Picard era – which makes the most sense – then finding a way to tie Discovery to that is what needs to happen.
Whether I can call it a “theory” or not is questionable, because at the end of the day the most likely outcome is that Discovery does what everyone has said it will do and head into that far future setting. But my hope and/or my preference would be that it doesn’t. I don’t think it necessarily needed to leave the 23rd Century, and keeping it in that same setting would have allowed for some crossover with the Section 31 series. But if it has to leave and go into the future, ending up around the time of Picard just makes so much more sense.
If we think about technological progress in the Star Trek galaxy, in roughly 200 years we’ve gone from the tech available on the NX-01 Enterprise, with limited warp speeds and basic weapons, through Kirk’s time and greater exploration of the Alpha Quadrant, into the 24th Century with holodecks, slipstream drives, and the rollout of time travel. The level of technological change in 200-odd years is massive. Representing on-screen the level of change between the 24th and 33rd Centuries will be a huge challenge, and if the tech available to future Federation citizens in the 33rd Century looks oddly identical to that of the Picard era – and thanks to visual effects it will at least look similar – then that will have to be explained somehow. And from the trailer, it looks like Discovery is launching into an almost post-apocalyptic setting… that’s one way to explain it. But is it a good way to explain it? I don’t know. I’m not convinced post-apocalyptic Star Trek is what I want to see, and at the end of the day all of this speculation and hope is down to that fact. If Discovery couldn’t continue in its 23rd Century setting, then at the very least I’d much rather see it connect with Picard than try to explain why the future is so grim and technology has stagnated.
Whether it happens or not, I don’t know. I doubt it, but I still think that putting Discovery in that era gives the show and the franchise more options and better options than going such a long way into the future, beyond everything we’ve seen.
I had more to say on the potential for a post-apocalyptic setting, but I’ll save that for next time.
Live Long and Prosper!
As a final note, I just want to say that more Star Trek is always better than less or none, and whatever Discovery does and wherever it goes, I will always tune in to see what’s happening. As a fan, I’ll always want to see more and spend more time in that world.
The Star Trek franchise, including Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, and Short Treks, are the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: I will be looking at material from the two trailers for Star Trek: Picard, as well as discussing the most recent season of Star Trek: Discovery. There will also be spoilers for other Star Trek films and series.
In either 1999 or 2000 – I can’t remember which – I was listening to the radio when the news of a new Star Trek show was breaking. In the UK, the complicated rights agreements in place for broadcasting Star Trek meant that – at least for households which didn’t have satellite television – we were quite behind where the various series were in their US airings. The Next Generation had concluded its run, though Deep Space Nine and Voyager hadn’t yet, and I was very interested to see what would be coming next for the franchise.
When it was announced that the new series – later titled Enterprise – would in fact be a prequel, I wasn’t impressed. Star Trek was about looking forward to the future, I felt, so why did they need to go back in time to before Captain Kirk? In addition, Star Wars Epsiode I: The Phantom Menace had been in cinemas, and there was a lot of talk at the time about how prequels as a concept were bad – some of which admittedly went over my head in my youth.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t convinced about a Star Trek prequel and during Enterprise‘s original run on television over here, I only tuned in sporadically. It wasn’t until I got the series on DVD a few years later that I got to watch it in its entirety. Enterprise actually told some great stories – and is a good example of how a show that “no one asked for” can actually be worth watching after all. But this isn’t a review of Enterprise.
We’d have to go back to the 1990s to find a Star Trek series with a new cast that wasn’t a prequel.
Since just after the turn of the millennium, when Voyager went off the air and Nemesis hit cinemas, the Star Trek franchise hasn’t moved its timeline forward. Instead, we’ve had Enterprise and Discovery – both of which are set before Kirk’s original five-year mission – and the Kelvin-timeline reboot films – which are also set in the 23rd Century, but in an alternate timeline. In all that time we’ve had some admittedly interesting stories, and in 2009’s Star Trek a very brief glimpse at the post-Nemesis future, but no real advancement of the overall narrative of the franchise. And while Enterprise, Discovery, and even the Kelvin-timeline films have told some fun, interesting, and “Star Trek-y” stories, they’ve all been firmly embedded in a time period we’ve seen before.
Any prequel has an uphill struggle when it comes to telling a dramatic and interesting story, as well as building tension. The reason is simple – we know what comes next. You can have a galaxy-ending threat as part of your narrative, but if we’ve seen the galaxy fifty or a hundred years hence, we know that the threat isn’t serious – and even if in the moment it’s possible to get caught up in the story, at the back of our minds we still know that there will be a way out of it. At least, that’s how it works for me. As an example, in season 3 of Enterprise we follow the crew as they race to stop the Xindi planet-killing weapon from destroying the Earth. And that’s a very exciting story – arguably Enterprise‘s best season – but while watching it, at the back of my mind I was always aware that in the 23rd and 24th Centuries, we’ve been to Earth and we’ve seen that it clearly wasn’t destroyed. The journey can still be entertaining if the destination is known, but for me at least, knowing the outcome robs the story of some of its drama and tension.
This is why series like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead have been so successful with what I call the “disposable cast”. By routinely killing off key characters and getting rid of starring actors and actresses, simply being a main cast member isn’t enough to guarantee safety any more – and the sense that anything could happen is present all the time as a viewer, arguably raising the stakes.
Star Trek has occasionally lost main cast members, though these have more often been motivated by production reasons – such as a cast member leaving the series, or the showrunners deciding to “refresh” the cast by replacing someone – rather than for purely narrative ones. In most cases, as viewers we tend to feel that the main characters are safe, and it’s the redshirts like Ensign Bob, introduced for the first time five minutes ago, who are most in danger in any given scenario.
But as we’re now in a new phase of television, one dominated in the aftermath of shows like Game of Thrones with ideas like the “disposable cast” and serialised storytelling, there are new and exciting possibilities for Star Trek. We’ve already seen some of this in Discovery – the first two seasons each told season-long stories instead of being episodic, and we’ve seen characters like Lorca killed off, as well as Pike, Spock, and Una appearing for a single season, and of course Ash Tyler being left behind as Burnham leads the U.S.S. Discovery into the future. Sir Patrick Stewart, when interviewed regarding the new series, has gone on record saying that Picard will be “like a ten-hour movie” instead of a series of episodes – firmly stating that this will be another serialised show.
The vineyards of Château Picard form the Starfleet logo in the first teaser poster for the new series.
Personally I’m a fan of episodic television – I think it’s great to be able to drop into an episode of a show without needing to have followed the entire season to understand what’s going on. Previous iterations of Star Trek largely operate like this, though the aforementioned third season of Enterprise, as well as the Dominion War arc in Deep Space Nine, were serialised stories. But for shows like TNG and Voyager, it’s possible to jump into most episodes and follow a single story over forty-five minutes. I like that, and I think it makes for a good format. There’s no getting away from the move to serialised shows, though, and Picard is set to go down this route.
When the TNG-era series all concluded around the turn of the millennium, there were a lot of leftover story points. Although each crew had arguably reached their destination – Deep Space Nine ended its war, Voyager saw the crew make it home, and Nemesis saw the Enterprise’s crew go their separate ways – 500-odd episodes across 21 seasons of TV, along with four films, told over a 15-year period from 1987 to 2002 had a lot of stories to tell and taking that era of Star Trek off the air left a lot of open-ended, unfinished plot threads. There are too many to name here, but a few that spring to mind are: what would happen next for Cardassia after the war? How would the Klingon-Romulan-Federation alliance work with no common enemy? And what happened to the Borg after Voyager attacked their transwarp network and the Queen’s complex? In addition, finding out what happened next to a lot of the characters is something fans would like to know.
By this point in time, several members of Kirk’s crew have had their futures shown on screen. Kirk himself died saving Veridian III in Generations, McCoy lived to a ripe old age and helped christen the Enterprise-D when it launched, Spock ended up in the Kelvin timeline after trying to save Romulus, and Scotty emerged from transporter-suspension in the TNG episode Relics. But what happened next for the crews we’d seen in the TNG era is still unknown to fans – and there’s definitely scope to explore some of that within Picard.
I don’t feel that Picard should overload itself with characters, though. It’s a short series – clocking in at only ten episodes – and the more time it spends looking back, the less time there is to look forward. And the more time it spends with fan favourites of the past, the less time there is to show off the new crew. I’d like to give the new cast a chance to become fan favourites for the next generation (pun intended) of Star Trek fans. I really hope that in another thirty years’ time they’ll be clamouring to find out what happened next to some of these characters the way we are for those of the TNG era. So in that sense, Picard has to walk a line between what happened since Nemesis and what’s to come.
It’s my hope that Picard can strike that balance, and that while we’ll learn a great deal about the shape of the Star Trek galaxy and what happened next for some fan-favourite characters, we’ll also get an exciting original story in which those pieces of information are conveyed. The Next Generation didn’t spend too much of its time in its first season looking backwards – aside from DeForest Kelley’s cameo in Encounter at Farpoint and a couple of name-drops, TNG told its own story. Some elements of that story filled in the blanks for returning fans – we learn, for example, that the Klingons and Federation are at peace, and that the Romulans have isolated themselves for a number of years – but they weren’t in-your-face about it, and those story points unfolded naturally in the episodes in question. They didn’t feel tacked-on or shoehorned in in order to provide cheap fanservice – something I’d argue has happened in some recent Star Wars projects.
At the end of the day, Picard is taking the franchise forward in time – to the close of the 24th Century. And it’s the first time in a very long time that the timeline is going to advance. That is already a huge point in its favour, and without knowing much at all about the story, it’s enough to get me hyped up.
Jean-Luc Picard and Number One (the dog) on the second poster for Star Trek: Picard.
The two trailers for Picard have been great, and I can’t wait to catch up with Seven of Nine, Riker, Troi, and of course, Picard himself. I’m also really interested to learn more about the new cast – including, for the first time, a Romulan main cast member. It looks from the trailers that we’ll see some Borg story elements, as well as learning more about the Romulans after the destruction of their capital. All of those things seem absolutely fascinating, and while I have to admit I’d be hyped up for almost any Star Trek story that moves the narrative forward, the teases we’ve seen of Picard just look incredible.
I know that recent Star Trek projects haven’t thrilled everyone in the fanbase, but I really do hope that Trekkies who weren’t taken with Discovery will give Picard a try. The chance to see what comes next isn’t something we’re always going to get. A lot of shows – by far the majority – are one-off things, and when they’re done they’re done. Some even get cancelled too soon, before even the first part of their story can be told. So this opportunity that Picard presents is a rarity, one I intend to take full advantage of. If Picard is a success, it has the potential to be a launchpad for other series set in the same time period, taking the Star Trek franchise boldly into the 25th Century.
While I don’t expect Picard to spend its entire runtime catching up with galactic events and reintroducing old crewmates, I do hope we’ll get enough of that to feel like we’re back in that galaxy again – combined with enough new material and new characters to drive the story forward and give new fans a chance to get hooked in. Walking that line between the old and the new might be a challenge, but I’m confident that the producers, having cut their teeth on Discovery, can manage it with ease. And with Picard having just been renewed for a second season while I was writing this column, ViacomCBS are clearly confident of that too.
After almost two decades, Star Trek is finally ready to move forward again. With just over a month left to go, I can feel the excitement building already. Forget Christmas, forget New Year – it’s Star Trek: Picard that I’m most looking forward to right now!
Live Long and Prosper!
The Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Picard, and all other Star Trek properties mentioned above are the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the plots of both Ephraim and Dot and The Girl Who Made The Stars, as well as for Star Trek: Discovery. If you want to avoid spoilers, turn back now!
Star Trek: The Animated Series ran for two seasons in 1973-74. It featured the voice talent of most of the original cast (sans Walter Koenig), but since then Star Trek has stuck to live-action series and films. Until, that is, the latest two episodes of Short Treks, which were released a couple of days ago.
At least they were for Trekkies in the United States – ViacomCBS apparently places no value on its overseas fans. But let’s not get into that right now, because these two episodes were absolutely fantastic.
After I was finally able to track down copies, I watched The Girl Who Made The Stars first, as I thought I probably wouldn’t find it as interesting as the other episode, Ephraim and Dot. But The Girl Who Made The Stars was a cute, Disney-esque bedtime story, told by Michael Burnham’s father to her when she was a child. I got a distinct Moana vibe from this short episode, which tells of a young girl who teaches her tribe of ancient humans to overcome their fear of the night – aided, in true Star Trek fashion, by an ethereal alien.
The unnamed little girl in The Girl Who Made The Stars.
As in Moana, the key to defeating what the tribe’s elders called the Night Beast wasn’t violence, and hiding away from it didn’t help either. It took someone to be bold and head out beyond the safety of the tribe’s valley to overcome the imagined monster. How much of the episode was actually based on African legends is something I don’t know, but this was a uniquely Star Trek look at history and at Africa. Framed as a bedtime story, I’m certain we aren’t supposed to take the episode’s main plot as canonical, but it was an interesting look at Michael Burnham’s childhood. Burnham has been in some respects a hard protagonist to get behind in Star Trek: Discovery. Partly that’s a consequence of her internal struggle between a logical Vulcan upbringing and human emotion, which she has at times seemed to be confused with. And partly, it has to be said, it’s a consequence of a character whose motivations – especially in Discovery‘s premiere – were impossible to follow and understand. This short episode doesn’t change anything fundamental about her character, but it does show the audience that she’s human at her core. Something which may be important as Discovery travels to unknown destinations next season. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this bedtime story referred to, perhaps inspiring her to lead Discovery’s crew and/or the Federation in season 3.
The other episode was absolutely adorable. Ephraim and Dot told the story of a tardigrade, the species seen in season 1 of Discovery, laying its eggs. After trying to find a warm place, the tardigrade chooses the warp core of the Enterprise – by this time under Kirk’s command. We see an animated recreation of the TOS engine room, and this is where Ephraim (as I assume she’s called, she’s never named on-screen) lays her eggs, only to be kicked off the ship by Dot – an R2D2 or BB8-type droid, seemingly employed on the Enterprise to perform menial tasks and jobs humans wouldn’t be able to do.
Ephraim and DOT.
The episode then launches into a brief “greatest hits” of the Enterprise under Kirk’s command. We see Khan waking up in sickbay from Space Seed, the hand of Apollo, Sulu brandishing his sword, the Planet Killer from The Doomsday Machine, and a recreation of Lincoln featured in the episode The Savage Curtain. As the sequence continues, we see the refit Enterprise fighting Khan’s Reliant in The Wrath of Khan before Ephraim finally manages to scramble back aboard, just as the Enterprise is set to be destroyed over the Genesis Planet in The Search for Spock.
I’m going to let you guys in on a secret – I got legitimately emotional at this point. As Ephraim races to save her eggs from the crippled, soon-to-be-destroyed ship I was literally on the edge of my seat. And when Dot got to her first and threw her overboard yet again, I felt a real emotional stab. I’ve always been a sucker for animals in films and television, and the cute way Ephraim is styled here no doubt contributed to that.
Luckily, at the last minute Dot realises that the eggs are on board and manages to save them, delivering the newly-hatched babies to Ephraim after the ship has exploded. The two then disappear into the Mycelial Network – perhaps laying the groundwork for a future episode or an appearance in one of the two new animated shows? Gosh I hope so.
Ephraim embraces DOT.
These two episodes were absolutely unlike anything Star Trek has done before – at least not since some of the weirder episodes of The Animated Series in the 1970s saw a 50-foot-tall clone of Spock, or the Enterprise visiting a parallel universe where magic is real. Yes, those really happened. And yes, they’re canon. Deal with it.
These episodes were undoubtedly inspired by Disney – the storytelling, the use of animals, cute robots, and a child as the main characters all come together to make these the most child-friendly Star Trek episodes so far, as well as a fantastic way to introduce little ones to Star Trek. Ephraim and Dot in particular contained some very funny moments, complete with traditional cartoon sound effects. At one point, Ephraim is sucked into a tube and bounces through it, with the tube bulging out in a throwback to old-school cartoons.
The little girl and the alien in The Girl Who Made The Stars.
But at their core, these were just cute, heartfelt episodes. I’m sure that people who haven’t enjoyed modern Star Trek will hate them, and that’s fine because at this point those folks hate just about everything. Both of these episodes have something to say about Star Trek. Yes, characters are important. Yes, alien races and cool ship battles and the politics of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants are important. But at its core, Star Trek is about inspiring stories, and seeking out new life. The Girl Who Made The Stars tells such a story, and Ephraim and Dot takes a look at one example of the kind of new life that Starfleet has been seeking. And these episodes are presented in a cute, fun, approachable way. Show them to anyone sceptical of Star Trek and I bet they’d come away thinking about the franchise in a whole new light.
Overall, Ephraim and Dot and The Girl Who Made The Stars leave me hopeful that the new animated series – Lower Decks – is in good hands and will turn out to be a lot of fun. And moreover, that the currently-untitled animated series that’s supposed to be more kid-friendly will also have something to offer to adult fans like myself. The best kids’ shows manage to find a way to appeal to us too, and from these shorts, I feel like there’s a real chance that the new series will absolutely have something to offer older Trekkies.
Star Trek animation is back – with a bang!
There’s only one episode left in this season of Short Treks – and it’s set to be a prequel of sorts, leading into Star Trek: Picard. So I can’t wait to see that. And Picard is coming next month! It really is a great time to be a Star Trek fan right now.
The Star Trek franchise – including Short Treks and all other properties mentioned above – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. Short Treks is available to stream on CBS All Access in the United States, and is now available on Blu-ray elsewhere. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and other iterations of the Star Trek franchise.
On the 7th of December 1979, ten years after going off the air (and five years since The Animated Series went off the air), Star Trek was back. Star Trek: The Motion Picture premiered, and while it has been overshadowed in many ways by its sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the film was a success – albeit not an overwhelming one according to distributors and producers – and reinvigorated the franchise. Make no mistake, if it weren’t for The Motion Picture, Star Trek as we know it wouldn’t exist today – there would’ve been no Wrath of Khan, and from that there’d have been no Next Generation or any future series or film. In a very real sense, The Motion Picture paved the way for the franchise’s future, and the success Star Trek enjoys today owes a lot to this film.
The Motion Picture was a risk for Paramount Pictures. Star Trek had shown that it had a number of very vocal fans – the letter-writing campaign in 1968 to get the series renewed demonstrated this – but its wider popularity was an unknown quantity, especially on the big screen. Reruns of The Original Series had garnered a larger audience than its 1966-69 original run, but there were still question marks over whether to make a new television series or to go down the box office route.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture turns 40 in December 2019.
Indeed, the project that would eventually become The Motion Picture started out life as Star Trek: Phase II, a television series that was to reunite the original cast – without Spock – for another five-year mission onboard the Enterprise. After a project called Planet of the Titans failed to get off the ground in the mid-1970s, by 1977 Phase II was officially in production. It has been said many times that the success of another 1977 project – Star Wars – is what led Gene Roddenberry and Paramount to reconsider the television series and make a film instead. While there is undoubtedly a kernel of truth to that, there were other factors at play too. The script which would eventually become The Motion Picture was originally set to be the pilot episode for Phase II but after a series of revisions and discussions between the creative team and the studio, the decision was made to enter production as a film instead, and two versions of the script were submitted – one by Gene Rodenberry and one by Harold Livingston, who’d been a producer on Phase II. Livingston’s script was chosen (by Michael Eisner – future CEO of Disney) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture was officially greenlit.
As an interesting aside, Phase II remained officially “in production” even after the decision was taken to switch focus to a film, and for much of 1977 the official line from the studio was that a series, originally set at 13 episodes, was being produced. It wasn’t until 1978 that the film would be officially announced.
Concept art of the bridge of the Enterprise that was created for Phase II.
So that’s a brief potted history of how it came to be. But despite making around $139 million on a budget of $46 million, Paramount considered the film a disappointment. The big risk had paid off, but not as much as they’d hoped. The expensive special effects and continued revisions to the script even during production were cited as reasons why, as was the less action-heavy, more ethereal storyline.
For me personally, it’s the lack of action and the deliberate slow pacing that gives this film something that others lack – a sense of “Star Trek-ness”. Star Trek was always into the weirder, more esoteric side of science fiction, especially prior to The Motion Picture, and this film stands alongside episodes of The Original Series as a pure science fiction work, not an action-sci fi film like The Wrath of Khan or First Contact. While some people might find its slower pace to be a grind, to me it makes it akin to watching a feature-length episode of the series, rather than just another action flick.
Leonard Nimoy, director Robert Wise, Gene Roddenberry, DeForest Kelley, and William Shatner during production on The Motion Picture.
Because of the overwhelming popularity of The Wrath of Khan within the fanbase, The Motion Picture often gets a bad rap. People have said that “all of the odd-numbered Star Trek films are bad”, including The Motion Picture in with Search for Spock and The Final Frontier. Both of those titles have good and bad moments – the latter suffering perhaps from too much involvement from William Shatner – but to me, The Motion Picture is in a different league.
Some criticism of the film is that it feels like a two-and-a-half hour episode of The Original Series. But why should that be a criticism? The Motion Picture masterfully builds up its drama – the V’ger cloud’s attack on the Klingons, its destruction of the Epsilon IX station, and finally the death of new character Ilia all add to the stakes. While none of these are particularly dramatic, nor gory, that doesn’t detract from the threat, it heightens it. V’ger is shown to be a being of such incredible power that it can make whole fleets of starships vanish in a heartbeat. We don’t need huge explosions or a punch-out to learn this. V’ger’s power is also confirmed by the reaction of characters. So as the film progresses, we know what’s at stake.
Kirk and the away team encounter V’Ger.
To change lanes completely, I happen to really like the aesthetic of The Motion Picture. It’s very 1970s in some ways – the orange and brown tones, and some of the uniform choices in particular, but that’s not necessarily a negative thing. Kirk’s uniform as an admiral happens to be one of my all-time favourite Star Trek uniforms. The high collar, the belted tunic, and the simple curved lines in grey and white combine with a metallic gold Starfleet insignia to make an understated yet interesting uniform. I’m not a cosplayer by any means, but if I ever were to make myself a uniform, that would be the one I’d go for. And while we’re talking about things that look great, the sweeping shot over the Enterprise when Kirk is being taken aboard by shuttlepod is absolutely perfect. Combined with an amazing score – for which composer Jerry Goldsmith was nominated for an Academy Award – the full sequence is one of the most inspiring and moving in all of Star Trek, speaking for myself as a fan. When the music ramps up right as we see the Enterprise from the front for the first time, it can be quite emotional. I could happily watch that sequence over and over again.
Many of the sets built in 1978-79 were in continuous use (albeit in modified form) right throughto Enterprise‘s cancellation in 2005. Some of the reuses are quite apparent in The Next Generation, so in that sense, the design choices made in The Motion Picture carried through the next two decades of Star Trek as a franchise. The panelling and angles on corridors in particular can be seen on the Enterprise-D and the USS Voyager, and the idea of a warp core as a large upright glowing tube is also something that has carried on right through Star Trek – even cropping up in CGI form in the most recent of the Short Treks episodes. Much of what we consider to be “Star Trek” in terms of aesthetic has its roots not in 1966 but in 1979 – future productions built on what designers and artists had created here. The Next Generation and Voyager in particular owe significant parts of their design to The Motion Picture.
Some of these sets would be in continuous use – albeit with tweaks here and there – until Enterprise’s cancellation in 2005. They defined the “look” of Star Trek.
The storyline of The Motion Picture is certainly different from many science fiction outings. It isn’t a film about defeating and destroying an enemy, it’s a film about bridging the gulf and communicating with a new form of life. V’ger, set up to be the film’s antagonist, wanted to evolve – to merge physically with its creator. The crew of the Enterprise could’ve used that moment of weakness to attack it, and maybe even destroy it – and in a different film perhaps that would’ve been the finale. But The Motion Picture builds up to this moment, and it isn’t the death and vanquishing of a foe that we see, but communication, and ultimately the creation of new life. Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and the like may be fun to see on screen, but Star Trek is all about “seeking new life” – and what could be newer and more different than a hyperevolved, massively intelligent machine?
This side of Star Trek, though, has always been more of a niche product. When fans are asked about their favourite films, The Wrath of Khan and First Contact are usually somewhere up near the top, as well as episodes like The Best of Both Worlds, or DS9’s The Way of the Warrior. These are all action-heavy stories, and while Star Trek has enough room for both these and the slower-paced, thought-provoking ones, The Motion Picture falls firmly into the second category. With that comes being underrated and overlooked by fans who prefer more action-oriented stories.
Robert Wise, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Gene Roddenberry, and DeForest Kelley at the film’s premiere.
When Spock describes V’ger as being little more than “a child”, he sets the stage for understanding, and from that, communication. The ultimate revelation that V’ger was, in fact, a probe of human origin was truly unexpected. The Motion Picture had an incredibly ambitious story which sought to blend these elements together. The cyclical nature of a returning spacecraft, the massive differences that almost certainly will exist between humankind and anything we might encounter in outer space, and at the heart of it all, the returning characters – not all of whom had enough to do, arguably. But the core dynamic between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy was still there. Perhaps The Motion Picture needed more fine-tuning, and perhaps its scope was too vast for a single film to properly encompass, but as a story it makes you stop and think. The galaxy isn’t just going to be humanoids, there are going to be things out there completely beyond our understanding. And the choices we make today – like probing outer space – may have consequences well into the future that we could never foresee.
As an inspirational message, I think that can’t be understated. Seeking out new life and new civilisations – the raison d’être of Starfleet – isn’t always going to be smooth sailing. But if we’re willing to look at things from a different point of view, to listen, to understand, and to communicate, we can find a way to coexist even with someone who seems to be big and threatening. I know the real world doesn’t always work that way, but Gene Roddenberry was always about showing us how humanity can be better than we are in the present day. Speaking personally, I find that aspect of The Motion Picture to be inspiring. As a work of science fiction, that’s the kind of message I admire and what I’d like to see more of on our screens.
Above all, The Motion Picture relaunched the Star Trek brand for a new decade, one which would culminate in The Next Generation and a return to television. If it weren’t for this film, Star Trek would look very different today – if it even existed at all. We can argue about which Star Trek film we like best, and at the end of the day it’s always going to be a subjective choice, but I’d definitely rank The Motion Picture highly on any list. Not just for what it did for the franchise, though that is incredibly important, but as a work of science fiction that wasn’t afraid to tell a thought-provoking story.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture is available to stream now on Paramount Plus in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries and territories where the platform is available. The film is also available to buy on DVD and Blu-Ray. Star Trek, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and all other Star Trek properties mentioned above are the copyright of Paramount Global and/or Paramount Pictures. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Spoiler warning: spoilers ahead for Star Trek, including both seasons of Star Trek: Discovery. If you haven’t seen Discovery yet and don’t want to see any spoilers, you’re better off reading another article and coming back when you’re caught up.
Just to get this out of the way, more Star Trek on our screens is always going to be a good thing. Even when it’s at its worst – like some of the episodes in TOS season 3, or that weird TNG clip show in season 2 – it’s still better than having no Star Trek at all. When Star Trek: Enterprise was cancelled in 2005 I really felt disappointed. I wasn’t around through the dark days of the 1970s when it seemed like Star Trek was gone forever, so to me this was the first time I’d really seen it off the air. I’m not sure if you remember, but before JJ Abrams picked up the franchise for his reboot film, Star Trek really did look dead.
I also don’t like the expression “nobody asked for this”. A lot of films and series that nobody seemed to be asking for have turned out to be absolutely fantastic. And honestly, in today’s insular fan communities, a lot of what people seem to be asking for or think would be good would either turn out to be just god-awful, or at the very best a niche product that would be a commercial failure.
So with those two big caveats out of the way, I’m not really sold at the moment on the idea of a Star Trek series based around Section 31.
There are some interesting ideas within that concept, which, if properly executed, could work well. But there are some issues with the Section 31 show as currently envisioned that make me feel it might not be the best direction to take the franchise.
First is the timeframe. With Star Trek: Picard and Lower Decks returning to the late 24th Century and beyond, as well as Discovery‘s third season heading into an unknown future, I’m just not sure that the franchise needs to have three different eras on the go simultaneously. Aside from the fact that it’s convoluted to the point of being offputting for new viewers – people who CBS needs to hook in and retain if Star Trek is to survive long-term – it’s just not a good way to split up the narrative of the franchise. Personally I’ve been going back and forth on my pet theory that Discovery either doesn’t go as far into the future as was suggested last season, or that somehow its time travel narrative crosses over with Picard. It just makes more sense to me to do it that way; tying shows together when they’re set in the same universe and being produced at the same time makes a lot of sense. Look at how the Marvel films cross over with one another successfully. But that’s just one point.
The 23rd Century has been explored a lot recently, and Star Trek has been busy with prequels, reboots, and mid-quels (or whatever Discovery is) since the turn of the millennium. I don’t want to say it’s entirely devoid of storytelling potential, but Star Trek has primarily been about moving forward, looking to the future, and where it’s been arguably at its least successful from the point of view of its story is when it’s been looking back at its own history and tying itself in knots. After four seasons of Enterprise, three reboot films, and two seasons of Discovery, it’s going to be great to see Star Trek finally moving into the future again, and the Section 31 series taking place in the 23rd Century seems more than a little regressive when looking at Picard, Lower Decks, and Discovery‘s future.
The next issue is with the two main characters, or rather, the two characters returning from Discovery around whom the show is currently being built.
Ash Tyler – or Voq – has had his story fairly well explored already in his appearances in Star Trek: Discovery. Without inventing more backstory for him, it’s hard to see where he’d go and how he’ll be able to have a satisfying character arc. Having started out as a victim of Klingon manipulation, Tyler fought hard against his programming and fell in love with Discovery’s protagonist, Michael Burnham, who helped him overcome what had been done to him in what was a very interesting and inspirational rape analogy. Star Trek, for me, is at its best when it uses its sci-fi setting to tackle real-world issues, and the issue of under-reported male sexual abuse is something Ash Tyler’s story touched on perfectly. And in his second season role as an agent of Section 31, he overcame his Klingon heritage, had a child, gave up his child, and finally dealt with his feelings for Burnham – and hers for him. He’s been on a rollercoaster over the last two seasons, but what he’s been through has concluded, and while there may be lingering feelings left over from that, as a story arc it’s essentially done. Because of how much of him we’ve seen and how much he’s been through, he wouldn’t make for the best protagonist.
So that leaves the Mirror Universe version of Burnham’s old captain, Philippa Georgiou. Michelle Yeoh has been announced as the lead actress of this series, so her character would be central to the Section 31 show. But… what character is there, exactly? In terms of modern Star Trek, Mirror Georgiou is about as one-dimensional as it gets. She seems to like being evil for the sake of being evil – a 23rd Century Heinz Doofenshmirtz, perhaps, but with less backstory. No, Mirror Georgiou is the Star Trek equivalent of a villain from a bad direct-to-video kids’ film, the kind of person who wants to steal a puppy from a child or tries to shut down a sweet shop so she can bulldoze it to build an office block. She just isn’t interesting in the slightest.
I like Michelle Yeoh. As a supporting actress in Danny Boyle’s 2007 film Sunshine, she did a great job. But she’s unproven as a lead actress in a major series like this, and the character she’s set to play just isn’t one a lot of fans find interesting or relatable.
While there are positives to consider from a Section 31 series, such as exploring how the organisation changed and went entirely underground between its appearances in Discovery and Deep Space Nine, as well as the potential to see Star Trek cross over into the mystery/thriller genre, I’m just not convinced right now that it’s the right way to go.
Section 31 was announced too early. If CBS had waited to see how Discovery’s second season was received, then the obvious choice by far for a spin-off was an Anson Mount-led series, which would probably be set on the Enterprise. That would be the fan favourite choice for a 23rd Century spin-off at the moment. You can see the desire for such a series at conventions and panels, and whenever Alex Kurtzman and others are interviewed, it’s the one question that keeps coming up. Conversely, when was the last time you heard anyone asking about how the Section 31 show is progressing?
It is actually a really great time to be a Star Trek fan at the moment. There are three series scheduled to premiere in 2020 – Picard‘s first season, Discovery‘s third season, and the first season of Lower Decks which already has a second on order. And in addition, a fourth Kelvin-timeline film is in the works, and beyond that, a possible Quentin Tarantino-directed Star Trek film. More Star Trek on our screens is always going to be a good thing, and while I don’t want to say I don’t want Section 31, it’s just not at the top of my list right now. I want it to do well, and to be successful, because I want Star Trek as a franchise to succeed and carry on into the future. So while I remain more than a little cautious about approaching this new show, I wish it well and I will certainly tune in when it premieres. Perhaps in 2021?
Live Long and Prosper!
Star Trek: Discovery and all other Star Trek series and films are available in the United States on CBS All Access, and in other countries on Netflix. Star Trek: Picard premieres on CBS All Access in January 2020 and on Amazon Prime in other countries. All copyrights belong to Paramount and CBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 