Hide and Seek is a much better episode than last week’s. Last week’s wasn’t bad, per se, but it wasn’t great, and this one I felt was very good. So we’re still riding that every-other-episode ebb and flow this season’s had going on.
It’s a straight continuation. It picks up right where we left off, and if you recall, the concern last week was that the new Borg Queen, the Jurati Borg Queen, was going to start assimilating those special forces guys. It all happened very quickly at the end.
The episode starts with a push in on the ship. You see Rios, Teresa and her son, all concerned, and outside the window there’s a whole bunch of teeny tiny green transporter beams as Jurati’s new Borg collective begins to descend on the ship. Some of them beam aboard, Rios yells run, and he gets everybody moving toward the back.
The New Queen Takes the Ship
Then Jurati shows up, flanked by some brand new Borg soldiers, and she’s ready. She stalks on down to where they have her old body. She walks up completely naked and stands there looking at it, then she puts her hand out and these little Borg things come shooting out. I assume she’s grabbing whatever Borg tech is left living inside the former body. She turns herself into the brand new Borg Queen, and that’s when she walks out all big and bad in the outfit we’ve seen in the promos.
Picard and crew are still at the chateau, getting ready to go to the ship, when Rios shows up and tells them this is not good. Jurati’s already got the ship surrounded. Now everyone’s really worried, and you see these green laser sights crisscrossing everywhere. I love it, because laser sights, why wouldn’t they be green? It’s an artistic Hollywood choice and I’m down. It’s pretty awesome.
So the Queen goes to activate the ship and she can’t push through. Something’s stopping her, and it’s Jurati. She’s still alive in there and she’s trying hard. That’s when she reveals that she locked everything out with a special encryption code. You think I memorized it? And of course the Borg Queen is checking to see if she memorized it. Nope. She put the key someplace else. She embedded it in the ship’s ECH, the emergency command hologram or whatever, and the hologram has taken the form of Elnor.
I knew we’d get him back in here somehow.
Holo Elnor can apparently really fight, because he’s got all the skill that Elnor had, and what he’s doing is essentially playing keep away. It’s awesome. They do a little callback to Voyager, too. There’s a shoulder deal on him, a portable hologram emitter, so he can walk around.
The Memories, Finally in Order
Then we get another memory from Picard’s childhood, specifically his mother and him, and his dad’s there. Surprise, it’s James Callis, and he’s pretty awesome. You get the beginnings of that backstory, and this is our first view of the past that isn’t obstructed by imagination, dreams, nightmares, whatever.
Funny enough, these scenes from the past remind me the most of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s something about the way they’re filmed. It feels like that classic Star Trek look where there’s a filter over the lens. It looks nice.
This is very much about the journey Picard has to deal with. Is it convenient that he magically has to deal with all of this history he never knew about? Yes. When you’ve got a character with such a long history, it can be difficult to find an original place to stem from. I think you probably could’ve done a slightly better job, but I’m not going to make a judgment. I’m not one of the writers on that staff, and I think they’ve done the absolute best they can do. I like the story even if there’s some conveniences and contrivances in it. What story doesn’t have convenience and contrivance? Come on. Let’s be real.
Back at the fight, Tallinn’s got a big giant gun, Seven and Raffi are there, and Rios has taken a bullet to the shoulder. Picard tells Tallinn he needs her to transport Rios and the family to safety. As soon as they go, he tells her to shut it down, so Rios, back at Tallinn’s place, can’t transport back.
Then you see Soong, flanked by the Borg. Sorry, the nu-Borg. N-U Borg. That’s for you nu-Trek fans. He stalks up all big and bad and wants to have a conversation, and Picard’s asking what the point of all this is. At one point Soong tells him there’s no place left to run and no place to hide, and it’s that word, hide, that sends Picard in the direction he’s going to go.
They do this cool effect throughout the episode. He’s looking one way, and behind him you see what looks like a child walking through the background. It begins to inform the idea that there may be a place they can go.
Every scene that flashes back to Picard as a child with his mom is a scene we’ve already had in the previous eight episodes, but now you get them in order and in context. We’ve seen her say come along, Jean-Luc, let’s play a game, would you like to play hide and seek, something along those lines. What we didn’t get before is what happens next. She walks him down a hallway to a bookshelf, she turns a little thing on the frame, you hear a click, and she slides the bookshelf aside to reveal a stairway down.
Up to this point we just thought they’d gone down to some advanced wine cellar, and that the basement opened up into that sprawling area. They didn’t really set up that you were going to get a maze with a special door entrance thing. That’s totally fine. I’m down. I’m here for it.
So Picard and Tallinn go down, and at one point Tallinn says she’s been here before, in his memory, and she’s asking what happened down here.
Seven, Starfleet, and the Captain Who Threatens to Quit
Meanwhile the Borg are chasing Seven and Raffi through the house. They’re dodging and keeping away, and eventually they’ve got to fight one of these guys. Together they manage to take out one of the Borg soldiers with a knife. It’s a bonding moment. Nothing like killing your first alien monster with the person you love.
Then they have a moment where Raffi tells her she’d have made a great Starfleet captain, and asks why she didn’t try to join. And we get what happened to Seven after Voyager. She says flat out that she tried to join Starfleet and they refused, because of her Borg stuff. You find out Janeway even went to bat for her and threatened to quit.
Because apparently when you’re a rock star captain, that’s what you do. You threaten to quit. I take umbrage with the idea that the only way to get anything done in Starfleet is to be a famous captain who threatens to quit. That seems to be the running gag. Whatever works, man.
On the ship, holo Elnor is avoiding the Borg detail. He goes to a series of lockers and finds a weapon, then goes to the next locker and finds his weapon, which is to say Elnor’s sword. Now he’s really ready to go be awesome.
Rios, meanwhile, is looking for some way to rewire the transporter panel so he can get back. He asks Teresa to help him with the tricorder so he can fix his arm, and she starts using it to get the bullet out. Apparently they anesthetized it. Because reasons, and plot.
I’ll say this about the whole thing: the episode moves at a really good clip. It’s 49 minutes, almost 50, and it felt like a brisk, quick 30-minute episode.
What He Finds in the Cellar
As Tallinn and Picard walk through the underground area, they get to the one spot where, later on, his foot will go through the well cover. In the memory he walks in and his mom’s sitting there, and she tells him he’s won. She’s all despondent. We keep seeing visions of his father coming down to find them.
We already knew his mom suffers from mental health issues, and that’s a big burden for a kid to carry. It starts to inform the trauma, and why Picard has filtered out some of these fine details.
In the present, Soong and the Borg manage to find the doorway into the cellar. Picard and Tallinn are running, and Soong’s behind them telling everybody to find other entrances.
Back on the ship, holo Elnor kills a Borg soldier, and that’s when Raffi and Seven come around the corner. Seven finally gets to have a conversation with him. The ship took an imprint of Elnor right up to the time of his death, and he reassures Raffi that Elnor cared about her and loved her very much. She tries to apologize for having held him back.
Then he unlocks the ship for them, and Seven uses the transporter to start beaming the Borg soldiers into the foundation. It’s pretty cool. Down below, Picard and Tallinn are running through, the transporters go off, and you see these Borg guys half stuck in the rock. All right. That’s definitely one way to go.
They try to transport the Queen off, too, but with her Borg technology and her plot armor, she won’t be transported away. I’m kidding. I’m totally kidding about the plot armor. But that’s what it feels like sometimes, people.
So you get this really great sword fight, because Star Trek and reasons. She’s got a tool of some kind with a pickaxe thing on the end, he’s got his sword, and it’s a fairly intense fight. They stop her, and then she uses those convenient little scorpion tail things. One goes for Elnor, who disappears. The other slams Raffi back. And Seven gets punctured in the torso. She’s basically on her way to dying.
Soong, Chewing the Scenery
Picard and Tallinn walk into the atrium, and Brent Spiner’s Soong walks up and makes some comparison between captains of ships and captains of industry, how they’re above all this, blah blah blah. It’s a completely sanctimonious speech that I probably could’ve lived without, if I’m being real.
He’s chewing the scenery. And I’m sorry, but Brent Spiner’s face doesn’t make him the scariest enemy. All I see is Data. All I see is a kind of jowly-faced old guy.
Later they pick the conversation back up, and Picard lays it out for him: you’re helping them create a terrible future. And Soong’s answer is, what are you talking about, I heard it’s wonderful, everybody loves us. Picard tells him everyone fears you. Soong’s kind of like, meh, six of one, half a dozen of the other.
The Borg Always Lose
The Queen grabs a knife and she’s going to kill Seven once and for all, and that’s when Jurati stops her. She’s not going to let her do this.
In the vision state between the two of them you see a slew of holographic representations. It’s probably in their heads, but it looks like holograms of Borg ships, little Borg collectives, things like that, and every one of them gets destroyed. Now that Jurati’s in the Borg Queen’s head, she has that temporal understanding of events too, and she lays it out. You are the way you are because you’re stuck. You see all the destruction. The Borg always lose. You keep trying to conquer millions of worlds and millions of species, eventually they rally and fight you, and you lose.
But what if you didn’t have to? Instead of conquering, what if you were a savior?
Come on.
She appeals to the fact that assimilation has never really been about perfection. That’s the Borg propaganda. To me, none of this changes the through line of who the Borg are. It’s funny, I always hate stories that deconstruct the villain to make you sympathetic. But I kind of like that we’re just learning more. We’re learning new stuff about the Borg Queen, and that’s awesome. That’s exactly how it should be, in my opinion.
Where they land is that the Borg Queen is lonely and she wants to be accepted, and she’s gone about it by taking instead of asking permission. So Jurati tells her there are people out there who need to be rescued. The dregs of society, people who’ve been dumped on, who’ll volunteer to be part of something bigger.
It’s an interesting entreaty. We don’t have to be a collective that conquers people. We can be a collective of people who choose to be here. I think that’s a strong point. You can be forced in a direction or you can choose that direction, and are you stronger for having chosen it? That’s the part that excites me. I really like what they’re doing.
Then Jurati points at Seven. Look at this. She’s strong. She is who she is. We can create an entire collective of Sevens, and it can start with this one.
Okay. All right. You sold me.
And that’s the deal Jurati makes. You give Seven her life, we take the ship, and we go do something new. We go do something good.
Everybody might say the Borg have never done anything like this. Look. Are the Borg intelligent or not? Do they change tactics or not? If she’s witnessed infinite destructions of the Borg, infinite timelines and possibilities where the Borg don’t win, wouldn’t it be logical that she’d decide to change tactics? If the point is to survive and to be a collective, you change tactics. It’s only logical. It feels like the exact move a sentient, cybernetic, artificial intelligence whatever would make.
That’s the one thing I feel is extraordinarily accurate. The truth is, this entire series has been actually brilliant if you stop and think about it. If you put away your biases and look at the show itself, the show has moved the timeline forward. Some lessons of the past clearly haven’t been learned, and other lessons obviously have.
The Kiss That Should’ve Been the First One
Rios and Teresa have their moment in this one. Last episode we got a kiss and it felt fake. I said that at the time. I said it felt contrived and it didn’t feel earned.
The kiss in this episode doesn’t feel any less contrived, but no more than romances normally do in these things. This kiss felt better. If they’d given us one more episode and this had been the first kiss, I have the feeling it would’ve felt more earned, or at the very least I could’ve gone with it a little easier.
As the series goes, I’m still not that invested in the Rios relationship. But this episode made it feel more earned in the moment. Before, it was just, oh, but I love you and everything’s going to be okay. This time he’s saying I have to go rescue my friends, goodbye, you stay here, be safe. And she’s like, wait a minute, you’re saving my life. Then she wants to kiss him, and it’s wonderful, and you go, okay, I get it. I totally get it. He’s literally leaving her somewhere safe so he can go rescue his friends. That’s a boss move, man.
Then of course you get the rescue. Just as Soong is about to have them killed, and there’s literally a laser beam on Picard’s head, whoosh, the transporter goes and there’s Rios, and he puts down the guys, just blowing them up. It’s a cool shot.
Soong picks up one of the laser guns and points it, and he says he doesn’t think he has to be from their time in order to use it. Rios tells him no, but you’ve got to have my DNA. The gun starts to whine, it’s going up and up, Soong throws it in the air and it explodes. And it’s enough to distract you from the fact that Soong has escaped.
The Skeleton Key
Picard notices a skeleton key on the floor. He picks it up, he looks at it, and he remembers.
It’s interesting the way they chose to tell this part of the story. They do it in reverse. Behind Picard, as he’s having the memory, you see the blurred, out-of-focus view of a woman hanging in the atrium, and you see him as a boy standing there looking at his mother. He talks about how sometimes you see events in reverse, and the young boy walks backward down the hall, backward around the corner, and you watch the entire series of events until you get back to the moment he took the skeleton key and let his mother out of the room his father had locked her in.
They’d laid down together. She gets up in the middle of the night and realizes this is her one shot to end everything, and that’s what she does.
The memory was so traumatic that his child mind filtered it out. You see him as a boy on the day of the funeral, throwing a rock through the atrium window and smashing it. So now we’ve come full circle on why the atrium is the way it is.
Tallinn hugs him.
On the ship, Seven has to come to terms with the fact that she’s Seven again, Borg stuff or no Borg stuff. And the Jurati Borg Queen says, hey, we’re going to go try something new. She transports them off, she takes the ship, and she leaves.
So they know their new mission. Soong got away, and he’s going to do anything he can. But before the Queen goes, she leaves Raffi and Seven with one small piece of information: there have to be two Renées. One who lives and one who dies.
I don’t know where that’s going to go. But it’s leading us into the final episode.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Picard Season 2, Episode 9, “Hide and Seek,” is an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
This episode was far better than the last one. I gave that one a seven, and I’m giving this one an eight. The story seemed much more cohesive, and as penultimate episodes go, I really enjoyed it.
The reason I didn’t give it a nine is that the things they could’ve done better show out really, really bright in this episode.
Let me know what you thought of the episode, and if there’s something you’d like to know more about, ask me and I’ll answer it in an upcoming Trek Talk Tuesday. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
