Star Trek: Picard - S2 E3 - "Assimilation"
By: Maggie Lovitt
From Collider
March 17, 2022
‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 2 Episode 3 Increases the Stakes as the Crew Arrives in the Near-Future | Review
The stakes are raised as the crew is dealt a devastating loss.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
If you thought that being trapped in a twisted timeline with fascist leaders was the worst thing that could happen to the crew of La Sirena, Episode 3 of Star Trek: Picard twists the knife in even deeper. “Assimilation” opens mere moments after the credits rolled last week, with Seven’s (Jeri Ryan) faux-husband the First Magistrate (Jon Jon Briones) holding them at blaster point while Elnor (Evan Evagora) bleeds out on the floor.
Fortunately, the Confederation members aboard La Sirena are easily dispatched without any other casualties. Honestly, what was the First Magistrate thinking when he blaster-whipped Seven with Raffi (Michelle Hurd) standing nearby? With Seven and the rest of the crew now safe, Raffi’s attention shifts to Elnor. He is, by all accounts, a son to her and her motherly affection has been on full display over the last two episodes, from Elnor getting accepted into Starfleet to her protecting him from the Confederation. Picard has actively reinforced the bond between them, and now they’re utilizing it to increase the stakes.
Rios (Santiago Cabrera), Picard (Patrick Stewart), and Seven head to the bridge to work on taking out the Confederation ships that are pursuing them, while Raffi takes Elnor to a sorely unprepared sickbay. The crew gets unexpected assistance from the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching) who escapes her containment and takes over the ship to “assist” in neutralizing the threats. In addition to wiping out the Confederation ships in hot pursuit, the Borg Queen begins siphoning power from the ship to push them well beyond Warp 9 and propel them back into the past. However, her actions come at a price. In order to harness enough power, she begins diverting energy from the medbay, cutting off the only thing keeping Elnor alive and, despite Raffi’s best efforts, he succumbs to his injuries.
Raffi is heartbroken and wants nothing to do with Picard’s rallying speech in the face of their uncertain futures–or pasts–and she lashes out at him, criticizing his leadership and blaming him for Elnor’s death because they’re all casualties in his decades-long game with Q (John de Lancie). What she doesn’t understand is that Q is impossible to contend with, his actions are unpredictable, but she’s hurt and Picard seems willing to let himself be the target of her ire.
Now that they have managed to travel back in time, they have an opportunity to stop the future from happening and prevent Elnor’s death from coming to fruition. At least, that’s what Raffi has convinced herself of. There is always the potential that they won’t be able to succeed in reversing Q’s actions, and they will all be stuck either in 2024 or further up in the twisted Confederation timeline.
The crew makes the decision to use the last remaining energy aboard La Sirena to beam down to Los Angeles to track down the ominous Watcher. Raffi, Seven, and Rios agree to venture down to Earth, while Picard, on the other hand, opts to stay aboard the ship with Agnes (Alison Pill) who concocts a plan to halfway assimilate herself in order to get more information out of the Borg Queen.
Despite the heavy tone in the wake of Elnor’s death, there is a great moment where Raffi, Seven, and Rios are finding new clothes to wear—because they can’t cause any butterfly effects with their current attire. Rios asks Seven if he looks less like a “fascist bastard,” and while she agrees that he looks a lot less fascist, she can’t agree on the bastard part. It’s a fun little moment that really pokes at Rios’ roguish charms.
Aboard La Sirena, Picard cautions Agnes about the risks associated with assimilating, halfway or otherwise, with the Borg, but she is insistent that she can safely get the information out of the Borg Queen. It’s a little touch-and-go, with the Borg Queen forcing Agnes to reveal a few things—her loneliness, the fact she views Picard as a father figure—but they do ultimately get through to the Borg Queen, even though they are no closer to locating the Watcher than they were at the start of the episode.
The trip to earth is uneventful for Raffi and Seven, but Rios has a pretty traumatic reentry into earth’s atmosphere. Raffi and Seven both land on their feet, but Rios is beamed down mid-air and ends up on a crash course with a fire escape. He is taken into a free clinic that deals with the “no hospitals, no cops” types, which makes his lack of identification easy to explain. He is pretty banged up, but the doctor (Sol Rodriguez) patches him and doesn’t ask too many questions about his situation. However, her son does steal his combadge, which effectively cuts him off from the crew. This subplot provides a refreshing change of pace and allows Rios to be a little more unrestrained, he shares a story about his childhood, he flirts with the doctor, and Santiago Cabrera gets to do what he has done best for nearly two decades: charm audiences.
Rios is such a fun character and I highly recommend that anyone who loves Star Trek: Picard should read John Jackson Miller’s Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements if they want a deeper look into who this character is. He might be a little rough around the edges at times, but he has a good heart and that’s put on full display in “Assimilation.” Given the nature of the clinic, the police show up towards the end of the episode to bust the place for caring for undocumented immigrants, and Rios is given the opportunity to run away with the rest of the patients. While he is partially driven by the need to get his combadge back, so it doesn’t cause butterfly effects, he seems genuinely concerned about what might happen to the doctor. So, rather than running, he dons a lab coat and tries to bluff their way out of trouble. It goes disastrously, and he is hauled off by the police.
Star Trek: Picard has been littered with Easter Eggs, from Picard gifting Spock’s book to Elnor to the character posters that all featured little hidden details, it should really come as no surprise that elements of the series feel reminiscent of stories that have come before. While watching “Assimilation,” I realized that Rio’s storyline in 21st century Los Angeles reminded me of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) end up going back in time to 1930s New York City. While the plot is certainly not a carbon copy, the two do make for a nice shot-and-chaser scenario, especially since Picard mentions how Kirk’s crew dealt with time travel.
Star Trek has never shied away from getting political and the franchise has traveled to the near-future before, but something about seeing a Los Angeles set just two years in the future was sobering. From the forest fires to the homeless to the police going after immigrants—Star Trek: Picard is connecting thematically with the present in unexpected ways.
Sorry, there doesn't seem to be a Ready Room for this week's episode, but here's a quick factoid instead... Seven's husband in the altered timeline is played by Jon Jon Briones, real-life father of Isa Briones, who plays Dahj/Soji/Jana/Sutra.
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I thought this was a pretty good episode, but how is it that Elnor was shot by the same type of weapon that vaporized everyone else in the opening scene but wasn't vaporized himself?
Anyway, fun stuff. Time flew by (pun intended) and it was over before I knew it, a sure sign of a good episode.
Raffi annoyed me a little in this one, but Agnes cracked me up again with that file name of hers — "Shit I stole from the Borg Queen," or something like that.
What did you guys think?
Exactly. I watched the first two Monday then the same two Tuesday thinking I might have missed some things.
So very well done!
Just finished watching, and enjoyed immensely.
Yes, he does.
And Agnes was brilliant. But that makes her all the more valuable to the collective, I'm afraid.
Also, this partial assimilation - at least in Voyager, once the Borg nanoprobes have been injected, they continue to assimilate whether there are assimilation tubules attached or not. The only ones I remember being partially assimilated were Janeway, Torres, and Tuvok, and they took some sort of inhibitor to block total assimilation. Are we not doing nanoprobes anymore?
Oh, good catch. They didn't even mention nanoprobes, did they? Weird.
Maybe they're setting it up so she really will become a Borg, like you and EG were talking about last week. At least in this timeline.
Only thing I did not care for and did not see coming was the demise on Elron. Other than that I thoroughly enjoyed that episode, the best one so far.
As a sideline, Watched the season finale of Discovery and wondered whose brilliant idea (sarc) it was to cast Stacey Abrams as the President of Earth? Woman got big dreams?
I'm thinking Elron is only dead in that particular timeline. I suspect we'll see him again.
As for Discovery, I haven't been watching since early season 3. Are they still far into the future?
Actually, in Season 2 Episode 3 they are back in 2024 thanks to intervention from Q.
I was asking about the other show, Discovery. You mentioned watching the season finale. When I stopped watching in season 3 they were hundreds of years in the future. Just wondering if they were still there.
My apologies. Yes, the Discovery and crew are still 900 years in the future.
Thanks.
Does anyone have any guesses about what Q might have changed to turn Earth into a totalitarian nightmare? Will it have to do with a person or event in established canon, or something entirely new? The time they went back to is before First Contact, and there's not an awful lot of canon there.
I recall coming across something about the possibility of an ancestor of Khan Noonien Singh showing up this season, with a female actor being cast in the role, so that might have something to do with it. I can't remember where I heard that, though.
Q implies that it's somehow Picard's fault that history changed, doesn't he? Or am reading that into the second episode?
He does, but if it does, this visit to earth predates Picard, so I am going along with the observer on earth at the time.
Ah, but Picard and Guinan (whom some of us hypothesize is the watcher) were in San Francisco in 1893 (I think).
They left Data's head there.
Oh yeah, that TNG episode with Mark Twain. Do you think whatever Picard did might have happened in that episode?
Good call Sandy. I totally forgot about that ep. Still, what Q is talking about is something that Picard did or didn't do at that date out of fear.
I'm engaging in total speculation at this point. The TNG series finale "All Good Things" sort of makes me wonder if something Picard did in the future could affect the past.
Trying to sort out temporal cause and effect gives me a headache. Especially when Q is involved.
I enjoyed the episode but I wonder if a Star Trek story will ever break free of sparks and explosions from equipment inside the ship (especially on the bridge). That always bugs me.
In this episode I also was surprised at how easily the Stargazer could take out the pursuing ships and how incompetent they were in hitting the Stargazer. Defensive shields no longer available? No locking on targets?
Despite the little nits, this is a great series and I cannot wait for the next episode.
Yeah, I was rolling my eyes at the sparks literally pouring out of La Sirena's ceiling in that one scene. That was way overdone.
Didn't they credit the quick defeat of the pursuing ships to the Borg Queen taking over the ship? The torpedoes even switched to Borg green (which to me seemed like an awfully fast conversion, but still).
They took out the middle ship before the Borg queen ‘eliminated the remaining threats’. Shields seem to not exist.
And Earth is supposed to be a conquering military superpower in that timeline, too. We can chalk it up to careless writing, I guess.
I just remembered a possible in-universe explanation for consoles and other things blowing up all the time during battles — the EPS power system, which is supposed to be Trek's futuristic method of energy distribution. High energy plasma or something. O'Brien was always fiddling around with EPS conduits on DS9. Some of the smaller ones just looked like strands of fiber optics. I suppose overloads during battles tend to make them explode.
Of course, the real reason is just for dramatic special effects purposes, lol.
Seems to me they could provide fail safe force fields, material shielding, etc. Exposing the crew to interior shrapnel and radiation does not seem to be necessary in their advanced reality.
True. Ships get the slightest little hull breach and force fields go up instantly.
What gets me is after the sparks fly and the fires are mostly out, somebody always manages to get power back to life support, or navigation, or whatever, but just fiddling with a console. They seldom seem to have to physically replace any circuitry to get things working again. Well, they do as part of routine maintenance, but it never seems necessary during battle.