Star Trek: Picard — ‘The End is the Beginning’ [1x3] ★★★☆☆
By: Dan Owen
Tags: Star Trek, Review, Culture, Television, TV

Star Trek: Picard — ‘The End is the Beginning’ [1x3] ★★★☆☆

So far, Star Trek: Picard has been more serialised than Star Trek: Discovery, which intersperses its seasonal arcs with a few standalone adventures. “The End is the Beginning” is aptly named, as this third instalment felt like the end of Picard’s scene-setting phase, ending with Jean-Luc (Patrick Stewart) reprising his “engage” catchphrase and warping off into the cosmos as The Next Generation’s theme tune swells. Just like old times, eh?

This episode was foremost a ‘getting the gang together’ story, with Picard having to find a pilot and first officer for his mission to locate Dahj’s twin sister synth. The story opened with a flashback to 14 years ago, just like last week, to flesh out the relationship between Picard and Raffi (Michelle Hurd) and contextualise his fall from grace. It turns out Raffi agreed with Picard over wanting to rescue Romulans after their sun went supernova (a ridiculous notion, incidentally, as supernovas happen over aeons), and was present when Picard’s last-ditch effort to persuade Starfleet to help backfired. One presumes she was his ‘Number One’ after Riker left to command the USS Titan, but even that’s not clear yet.

Admiral Picard’s threat to resign was accepted by his superiors, synthetic life was outlawed after the Mars massacre, and a new evacuation plan to rescue the Romulans using mothballed craft was rejected. It seems unlikely this would be something Starfleet and the Federation would allow, given what we know about the organisation in all the previous Trek shows as a beacon of all that’s good and decent, but I’m starting to feel it’s something Picard needs viewers to just accept — otherwise there’s no real drama to anything. Raffi does have a theory the Tal Shiar were behind the Mars disaster and have infiltrated Starfleet (which is what I thought last week too), but Picard can’t comprehend why the Romulan secret service would want to ensure their own people aren’t saved — even by their enemies. And it’s a fair point, which I hope we get some answers to.

Back to the present and it’s clearer Raffi has fallen on hard times since leaving Starfleet. Although exactly why is kept vague, perhaps requiring a flashback specific to her past 14 years — which we’ll hopefully get soon. But it’s superficially easy to understand her bitterness. Picard has enjoyed retirement on his chateaux in luxury sipping fine wines, while she’s been living in a trailer in the middle of the desert vaping snake leaf. “J.L” (as she refers to him) hasn’t even visited her in years, which does seem uncharacteristic of the Picard we know. Again, just go with it? Oh, and I thought the Earth’s social and economic problems had been solved in Trek, so does anyone have to live in a crappy trailer now?

Later, Picard hires a starship captained by Cristóbal “Chris” Rios (Santiago Cabrera) in order to find Bruce Maddox (Starfleet’s A.I expert who appeared in “The Measure of a Man” as the prosecutor at Data’s trial), and these scenes are the episode’s most entertaining. Rios is a hardbitten hunk, bookworm (reading Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo’s 1912 novel The Tragic Sense of Life), and former XO of the USS Ibn Majid who now holds a grudge against Starfleet — probably something to do with his captain dying tragically. It’s fun that he’s alone on his ship but has a crew of holograms to keep him company, who all look identical to him but have different accents and personalities (we only meet the English medical hologram and the Irish navigation hologram). It’s fun to see Star Trek: Voyager’s tech on the show and the doppelganger holograms work as a symbol of Rios rattling around his own psyche, as the “images” seem to represent different parts of himself. Rio is already the best character after Picard.