Absolute Backstory
By: T.S. Mendola
Tags: Game of Thrones, Star Trek, Feminism, Science Fiction, Television

Star Trek: Picard, “Absolute Candor”

The best part of this episode.

“Dear Spock” will hopefully be a weekly recap of Star Trek: Picard, bookended by two longer review essays at LARB. You can read the first one of those, here. The rest are on my Medium. Spoilers, ahoy!

Dear Spock,

I truly did not anticipate that the best thing about Picard, four episodes in, would continue to be Patrick Stewart’s outfits. They are outstanding. They are also the only standout part of a season that continues to drag its feet.

This week, we have the rare pleasure of seeing Picard in yet more backstory. 14 years ago, he took on a Romulan refugee planet dressed in what looks like a white linen, Britian-colonial-era suit complete with wide-brimmed, white cowboy hat (see above). Flash forward to the present and we see him on the same planet, which he is visiting on a (literally) galactic guilt trip — one of the few good lines of dialogue here comes from Raffi sniping that he can’t “even do a guilt trip without a starship.” Now, however, the costume designer has changed him into a black leather-and-wool outfit with tailoring that resembles a Starfleet uniform, while unsubtly suggesting a certain complexity of character. It’s a bit on the nose, but the outfit construction is gorgeous and thoughtful. Still, I do wonder why present-day Picard doesn’t have a hat.

This Romulan planet (Vashti) should by rights be a thrilling interlude — it’s a gimme for a brilliant piece of Trek-style single episode drama. For fuck’s sake, there are Romulan warrior nuns who only speak the truth. I repeat: Romulan warrior nuns. But no. We simply see another tiring interlude of people Picard has, in fact, hurt — and hurt deeply — be mad at him for five minutes of screen time before deciding to join his enterprise. By the end of the episode, all that’s happened in the present-day Picard timeline is that he’s added a member to his quest party. The new member isn’t even a warrior nun, he’s a boy Picard abandoned to go fuck off and write books about Dunkirk with his grapes. The the nuns raised the kid instead and taught him to cut peoples’ heads clean off, an enterprise of which Picard firmly disapproves.

That’s it. That’s all she wrote. 7 of 9 does tumble (literally) into the plot in the last thirty seconds, though, so maybe she’ll do something plotty next week. Or maybe we’ll get twenty minutes of her backstory.

I have some thoughts about how the show’s inability to do one-off episodes due to its (1) intensive, single-narrative arc and (2) wildly high production value & how that is what’s causing things like the Vashti plot to fall so flat, but I’ll spare you until the end of the season.

But wait, you ask. What about Soji, Dr. Fuckboy,* and the Creepy Sister? Surely THEY did something exciting?

Oh, they did. They definitely did.

Everyone’s sister wakes them up in bed by pretending to be their lover, at least on Romulus, apparently.

This week we saw Dr. Fuckboy take Soji fake-ice skating in a corridor and “plant a seed” of doubt as to her android nature in her brain. Then his sister got impatient, snuck into his quarters, and woke him up by…stroking his ear, then looming over him like a creepy, sisterly dominatrix. Very normal. Nothing else happened. And unlike the Picard narrative, no one in this present-day section can dress for shit, with the exception of Romulan Cersei Lannister and her leather pants.

I do wonder about the increasing skewering of Romuluan culture as evil because it values secrecy in this episode. It smacks of the old Trek’s subtle valuing of American cultural norms as superior. But we don’t really get into it enough in “Absolute Candor” to say.

The good news here is that the trailer for next week indicated it will be extremely costume-focused, harking back to The Next Generation’s grand, hokey tradition of holodeck episodes where everyone got to play dress-up. Here’s hoping the show can recover a sense of fun and that some shit actually happens for me to write about next week.

Live Long and Prosper,

T.S. Mendola

*credit for Dr. Fuckboy as a nom de (heh) plume here to the InterTREKtional podcast, which may be found here.