It’s Thursday, which means Picard season two, and I’m telling you right now: “Mercy” is good, but it has trouble finding its speed.
It isn’t a bad episode. Just remember I review two shows on Thursdays, and the other one clearly had its head all put together this week. This one, while it’s not bad, is not great. A lot of good things happen in it, though.
A Kid, a Flashlight, and Vulcans
The episode starts very simply. There’s a young man who’s clearly running from something. He stumbles, he falls, and when he gets to the very bottom he finds his flashlight.
Let me ask you a question. Why in the world do movies and television keep trying to make us believe that flashlights are these big, clunky, silver metal things? I had a Maglite. It was a foot and a half long, it was slender, it was black, and if you put a bat emblem on it, it would be the Bat-Signal in the clouds. And these guys are stuck with this Goonies-era silver flashlight thingy. That’s just a little television-making-magic pet peeve of mine.
So he picks up his flashlight, holds it up to see where he’s going, and boom. Vulcans.
The FBI Sub-Basement
Then we cut to what looks like an FBI interrogation room. Agent Wells walks in with a briefcase, a man sack, a European man satchel, I don’t know, and proceeds to have a conversation with Guinan and Picard. He’s got a friend, they tell him things, they show him stuff. He asks Picard about his hand. At the end of the day he’s letting them know: you’re not in control of the situation, and you need to stop pretending that you are.
He puts a tablet in front of them and shows them CCTV feeds of all these people who happened to stumble onto something they shouldn’t have, right up to them crashing the Europa mission gala. He believes Picard and the crew are there to sabotage the Europa mission, not realizing it couldn’t be farther from the truth. And Picard realizes he’s going to have a very difficult time proving that.
Later Wells comes back and drops the bomb that he conveniently heard about Rios getting caught in an immigration raid. Why does that interest him in the least? Because he had his people go check out that clinic, and he found Picard’s alternate timeline combadge. Which, I will point out, is the same combadge that was conspicuously left behind at said clinic. Check the comments on the previous videos. You guys pointed it out.
So Picard’s getting cornered quick. Wells is boxing them in very fast, to the point where they have no other story to tell than the truth. Then he separates them. Guinan’s off in her own interrogation room, and he tells Picard that others are coming to get them. He filed the reports, any minute now they’re going to show up, and to them you’re a pig in a jar. That’s super intimidating.
Q Is Fading Away
Guinan, in her interrogation room, is paid a visit by none other than an FBI-jacket-wearing Q, who’s really surprised to see her. Turns out she did summon him. The problem is he ain’t got those kind of powers no mo’. It just took him a little while to get to her, because he had to go the old-fashioned way.
He gets indignant, as all Qs do. Then she makes the wide-eyed evaluation: you’re dying.
He explains that he’s not in fact dying, at least not how we understand it. He’s reaching the end of what he thought was the infinite. He figured he’d finally found the end of what he calls a long and meaningless existence, only to realize he’s not going out in some kind of blaze of glory, the way a star shines the brightest before it goes out. He’s just fading away.
Guinan asks if this thing with Picard is about finding meaning or absolution. She tells him Picard’s stuck here, stuck in his trap. And Q gets real angry about it. He tells her the trap is irrelevant. What matters is the escape.
Can I Solve the Puzzle?
I’m going to make an educated guess, Wheel of Fortune style. Can I go ahead and solve the puzzle?
I believe this entire scenario is a very petty one, as they all are when it comes to Q. Not to him, because when you’re omniscient and omnipresent, you’re godlike, little g. I do believe he puts Picard and humanity in these situations knowing what the outcome will be, meaning knowing they’re going to solve the problem. The catch is that when he’s at full power, he can control events to better suit his purpose. That’s not the case anymore.
So when he tells her the trap is irrelevant, I feel like he’s saying this part is stupid. Taking Riker and putting him on a fictitious planet to fight pig-men soldiers and giving him power. Taking Vash across the universe. The newborn Q, the little Q-ling that was born in that one episode. Those things don’t matter. The end result is what matters: Picard being able to give Q the big answer, and humanity being forced to move in a direction they maybe weren’t intended to go as a result of what he did. Their evolution.
It’s extinction-level-event thinking, which is that mankind evolves only when it’s hurt, when it’s damaged, when there’s an issue. That’s a big mentality for a Q to have, especially when you stop and ask why humans are so important to him. I think he might have stumbled on us in “Encounter at Farpoint” by accident, and he’s learned to find interest in humanity. So at the end of his life, who better to give that life meaning than for him to push humanity, one last time, in the direction they should go?
In his own demented way, it’s sort of an altruistic reason.
Picard ends up really fixated on the same thing once he and Guinan are back together and she’s explaining her encounter: that Q said the escape was more important than the trap.
Kore Walks Out
Kore’s still in Soong’s lab, investigating some more, because that’s what you do. Apparently the computer can render a 3D rendering of a 2D image. Okay. Because Star Trek. Maybe because in 2024 VR has gotten that good. I don’t know that we’re anywhere near that kind of technology at the moment, but I could be wrong. I don’t know what’s happening in the metaverse.
She puts on the little visor and walks through the room, inside the video she watched last episode, the one where she saw Soong had been lying to her and it’s all clones. Suddenly there’s a glitch and she sees Q, who explains that he’s a sentient program left there in the event she tried something just like this. Because sci-fi and reasons and writing. Whatever.
He picks up a vial and tells her he’s going to give her exactly what she’s looking for. She gets a notification on her phone: someone’s left a package at the airlock. It’s literally a little silver box with a red ribbon. Inside is a blue vial, the same kind of blue vial Q had given Soong, and attached on a thread is a little teeny message. It says “freedom.” He’s clearly given her the cure for what ailed her.
So she confronts Soong. She asks about the others and ends on: explain your experiment. He does his very best, the discussion escalates, and she argues that the things he told her, like about her mother, weren’t real. That triggers him. What’s real? Reality is a false construct, and so on. It’s a sanctimonious speech, the kind of thing megalomaniacs tell themselves. I’m sure it’s what Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos tell themselves about how they’re improving the world.
She asks him directly what his fear is. Does he fear losing her, or does he fear losing his legacy? Then she walks out the door.
He follows her out onto the lawn. At first I think he was worried she was going to die just by walking outside, and then he sees she’s going to be okay. He shouts that she can’t exist without him. She turns her back on him and says maybe he can’t exist without her. I think that’s very prescient, because lord knows he’s so damaged. He really is.
Seven, Raffi, and the Queen in the Parking Lot
Seven and Raffi are pretty much where we left them, at the bar where Jurati broke the glass last episode. The guy there tells them she left with a dude and went that way. They follow, and behind a dumpster they find a dude with a red beard. So Red Beard is dead now.
Raffi wants Seven to help track her down. Seven says no Borg implants. And Raffi says, well, you were a Borg, think like one. Seven gets really upset, because I think the arc we’ve watched for her is: I’m no longer beholden to the Borg mindset, I’m no longer a slave to it, and I don’t like being treated like that. She tells Raffi she manipulates people, and she goes off on her in a very funny, interesting way.
Just as she’s going off, Seven finds Red Beard’s cell phone. That gets them to lithium, and to the fact that the Borg have to inject a body with heavy metals for the nanite process to take place. So Jurati’s getting revved up and ready to start causing trouble. That sounds about right to me.
Then they hear a noise, the camera pans up, and there’s Jurati, who’s apparently been sucking down battery acid from about a half dozen cars all the way down the line. She notices them and does this whole Six Million Dollar Woman thing where she leaps up onto the trucks and runs across the cars right at them. She throws Seven aside like a rag doll, then slams Raffi by the neck and lifts her off the ground. It’s not a pretty sight by any stretch of the imagination.
Seven shakes it off and looks up to see Jurati holding Raffi aloft. And then Jurati exerts her own will. From inside her head you hear the Jurati voice go “no.” She drops Raffi, turns around and walks off like a boss. No, like a queen. My daughter’s going to love that.
When they pick themselves up in that parking lot, they realize Jurati is clearly still in there. She’s the one who gave mercy. Mercy is not a Borg trait. So there’s hope.
Raffi’s Confession
While they’re hooking the tricorder to the cell phone to get it powered up, Raffi decides to have a heart to heart with Seven. She tells her she’s right. She does manipulate people.
We get a flashback with Elnor, and he’s calling her out. Why are you being passive aggressive? Why are you over the top with here, let me fix it, let me help you on your way, since you so clearly want to leave? Elnor tells her he has to go. He’s been summoned back home to help the Qowat Milat.
Back in the present she looks at Seven and says he was going to go home, and I talked him into staying at Starfleet, and then he died in my arms.
It’s a little late in the game to be giving us this raison d’être. But I get it. The character needs growth. And I like that they’ve given us more than an obsessive mom who’s trying to make up for where she failed with her biological son, which by the way wouldn’t be a bad reason for existing already. We get something a little deeper. I’m here for that.
The phone finally comes back on and they look at her search history. All I know is this: if y’all ever find my cell phone, delete my cell phone history. Just saying. I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.
They cut away before we get to see what Jurati’s been looking for, because they want to keep us in the moment.
Rios Plays House
Rios, meanwhile, is playing house with Teresa and her son aboard the ship. She’s worried her kid’s going to launch a torpedo or something equally ridiculous, and Rios assures her there’s absolutely no way he could do that.
Then she starts this really weird line of questioning. It’s kind of a reverse interrogation, because she’s telling him a story, and you get the idea that at the end of the story there’ll be a question. Finally it shows up. She asks him to tell her a fundamental truth that in any other situation would have taken her probably ten years to learn. And then they kiss, because that’s what you do. Is anybody surprised?
They’ve done it, fine. Rios is clearly concerned very, very little about the temporal prime directive, and who knows how many butterflies are going to come out of this. They may end up tying a really neat bow around it, where she turns out to be the great-great-grandmother and it’s one of those self-fulfilling prophecy things. I tend to lean toward that not being the case.
This whole thing felt really contrived. She goes to deal with her kid, comes back, and that’s when they kiss, and I’m not buying it. Everyone’s acting fine. The actor who plays Rios is doing great work. Everyone’s doing good work. There just hasn’t been enough happening at this point for it to make sense to me.
Stuck in the Past
Soong is sitting at home drinking away his sorrows when the very first curveball in the series hits me. He hears someone come in, and Jurati shows up. Red dress, torn sleeves, the whole bit, because apparently clothes don’t matter.
We cut back to Picard’s interrogation. The lights flicker, and what you end up with is a semi-transparent Guinan, projecting from the other room, bloody nose and all, concentrating really hard. She repeats the thing Q said on his way out the door: all humans are stuck in the past.
Everyone got on me last week about Wells being played by the guy who played Ducane in Voyager, the temporal Starfleet officer with the time ship from the far-flung future, and the idea that Wells is that same man. I don’t think that’s the case, and especially not with the part of the story they tell us now.
Because we go to the past, and it’s the same kid from the very beginning. We’ve come full circle. The Vulcans are there, he sees them running some kind of experiment, they chase him, he falls, we get to the flashlight, and then we finally go past the flashlight moment. A Vulcan puts his fingers on the kid’s face.
Wells says they tried to drill into his head. Apparently this poor kid has been terrified of aliens this entire time, and that’s why he grows up to become Special Agent Wells of the FBI.
Picard asks him about the hand gesture. Wells puts his hand on Picard’s head and says they tried to push their fingers into my mind. And Picard says, are you sure it wasn’t like this? He puts his fingers on Wells’s face. Wells looks at him like, oh my God.
Then Picard explains everything. They were Vulcans. They were most likely trying to wipe your mind so you wouldn’t be stuck with the burden of this. And he says, okay, now it’s my turn. I’m from the future, the 25th century, I’m here to save humanity if not the whole galaxy, and I think I need your help.
Okay, bro. I’m with you.
Wells comes back later carrying a box. He’s been fired. He’s the crazy alien guy who messed up another lead. And Guinan gives him this really nice reassurance: nothing happens by accident. He asks if that means it happened to him so that he could one day be here, and she tells him yeah. Then she looks at Picard and says, I really can’t wait to meet you someday.
Right on. They did good there. They did really good.
The Queen’s Pitch, and Then the Whiplash
Queen Jurati tantalizes Soong with the idea of being the savior of the world. If Renée Picard goes on this mission, she’s going to make a discovery that makes everything he’s worked on irrelevant. You want to be irrelevant? Help me, and you’ll be the savior, the godfather of the world.
Look, the only thing she wants is to be the newborn queen and set up her new discount Borg empire. Or, as Seven says in this very episode, she wants a 400-year jump start on assimilating Earth.
At first I thought the Borg and Q being in the same story was a little much. Then I realized those two things are indelibly linked. We would never have met the Borg if not for Q. So at the end of the day that’s his fault, and it makes total and utter sense to me.
Remember I said at the very beginning that the episode is mostly good and then it just feels weird? Right after this scene, everything kicks into high gear. Soong’s got the ear of the generals. Raffi and Seven meet up with Picard at Ten Forward. Guinan says her goodbyes. Soong has some pull with a general, and an assimilation-ready Jurati has her opportunity and starts assimilating special forces soldiers.
Did you catch all that? Because my head hurts from the whiplash.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Picard “Mercy” lands at a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
The episode is rocky, and it can be a little bit all over the road. I think a seven out of ten is a respectful and respectable score.
One more thing. Next week I’m starting something brand new: Trek Tuesdays. Every Tuesday you’ll get an episode that isn’t tied to one specific series. I’m going to address Strange New Worlds, give you my belated series review of Discovery seasons one through four and my belated review of Picard season one, and talk Lower Decks, Prodigy, and some concepts and ideas I’ve had about Star Trek in general. There’s a short stretch coming where we’ll have very little Trek while they build up new stuff, and I want to keep this ball rolling. And of course we go into Strange New Worlds as soon as it releases next month. If you’ve got questions or things you’d like me to address about me and the Star Trek universe, let me know.
What did you think of “Mercy”? I’d love to get your thoughts on it. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
