Star Trek: Picard - Episode 3 "The End Is The Beginning"
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Caution: Spoilers
I'm going to start adding links to a couple of websites. The CBS videos are fine and do have interesting info (especially interviews with cast and crew), but to be honest they're not very good recaps, even though they're described as such in their titles.
The following are much more 'recappy', as Dr. Jurati might say, and contain several details you may have missed while watching.
From Space.com - Jean-Luc assembles a crew in 'Star Trek: Picard' episode 3
From Vulture.com - Star Trek: Picard Recap: Engage
Here's the only decent image I could find so soon after the episode aired of Cristobal Rios's ship, La Sirena (the Mermaid). It's pretty dark and viewed from below, but you can kind of get the gist of it. I'm sure we'll get better shots of her in the not-too-distant future.
Speaking of the new ship, here's the emblem the crew will apparently be wearing going forward. It's an artsy little mermaid, and is already being sold on merch at Star Trek.com .
Oh, and one last thing: It looks there's yet another new Star Trek show in the works at CBS - New 'Star Trek' series 'Section 31' to start filming when 'Discovery' season 3 wraps
Our dilithium chambers runneth over. 
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Favorite line from this one - Agnes to Raffi (in awed bewilderment) : "Who are you, lady?"
Well, okay, maybe my favorite should be Picard finally getting to say "Engage".
Thoroughly enjoyable episode, and literally the end of the beginning. I saw somewhere that these first three episodes were intended to be taken together as the series launch (instead of just the pilot episode by itself).
Now we're off and running.
I don't think I saw anyone board La Sirena with a bag, though. Let's hope Rios has a decent clothing replicator.
I am looking forward to next week. The adventure begins! Looks like Picard will accumulate a crew along the way.
It does indeed, and maybe a few enemies, too. But they laid a solid storyline and it's time for the fun to begin.
Btw. love the idea that the only people that seem to go insane from being assimilated by the Borg are the Romulans. I wonder if it has the same effect on Volcans since they are basically the same.
Yeah. I think they have to go pick up Legolas next week.
I wonder if Picard will ever be sitting in the captain's chair? It's not his ship, after all. He almost sat down in it in this episode, but thought better of it and walked on by. It won't feel right if he's not sitting in the command chair before long.
The show would not be right if Picard is not running things.
Did everyone notice Hugh? He's practically running things on the artifact, for some reason. It's the same actor from TNG, too, Jonathan Del Arco.
Also, when Laris slapped the captured Romulan's forehead (which had slight ridges) and said something disparaging to Zhaban (who also has slight ridges) about "you northerners", were we to take that to mean that the forehead ridges are mainly a northern geographical thing on Romulus? Is that supposed to explain why some have them and some don't in this show? If true, then Laris must be a southern gal. She doesn't have them.
Indeed we did and yes the hubby and I think it is the same Hugh.
And we were wondering what that comment about northerners meant, too. I think you might be right about the amount of ridging.
I've started to think perhaps the Romulans evolved like humans, but their versions of Neanderthals and Homo Erectus never went extinct. They're all still Romulans, but they have several different species.
Jonathan Frakes will take over as director starting with the next episode.
I wonder if his scenes as Riker will be in that one or the next one, then? He directed both and was conveniently on set.
The fun of the unknown Dig.
I was a bit disappointed that the end to this episode came so early. I felt like not much had happened, the fight in the chateau aside. But I suppose we have transitioned to the next act.
I liked how the setting kept switching back and forth between The Artifact and the chateau when they were trying to interrogate the Romulan assassin.
I'm a bit surprised that Romulans, who hate synthetic life, are trying to rehabilitate ex-Borg drones. I figured they'd just kill them. The Borg seem to be their worst fear.
Should Borg drones be considered artificial life, though? Aren't they just natural, biological life forms that have been augmented with technology? The consciousness of the Borg queen might be AI (I can't remember if that was ever firmly established, though), but the drones are just people who were captured and repurposed to serve the Collective, right?
Makes sense to me to consider the Borg drones artificial because their minds are artificial — preempted by technology.
I would consider them to be hybrids of natural and artificial life.
But they're enslaved. Sever their connection to the Collective and they regain their 'natural brain' individuality. Not without psychological difficulty, perhaps, but they can do it. The obvious examples are Picard, Seven, and now Hugh.
Others have apparently been freed from the Artifact as well, like Ramdha and the other Romulans we saw when Soji met with her. They didn't seem to be doing very well, mentally, but I don't see how they could be considered artificial life.
I think they're just supposed to be cyborgs. A combination of man and machine. That's where the name Borg came from in the first place, wasn't it? I'm pretty sure their artificial parts are just machinery, and not alive. Even their nanoprobes are just microscopic robots designed to co-opt living cells, but are not themselves alive. They have to be programmed, and can be reprogrammed like they did in Voyager a few times. They're just little machines.
Borg nanoprobes were apparently also designed to self-replicate, though, so I suppose this could turn into one of those "what qualifies as life" conversations pretty quickly.
I think it already has.
I see the nanoprobes as their method of reproduction, more or less replacing sperm and eggs. Yes, synthetic, but also capable of adapting and reproducing.
How about ‘effectively’ artificial? When the Borg technology is removed, the balance changes back to real.
That's a tough one. I'll have to think some more about that.
Something just occurred to me on this artificial life (or intelligence) subject. You know how Star Trek often incorporates plots that try to speak to real-life topics? Social justice, war, eugenics, that kind of stuff? Well, there's been an ongoing real-life conversation lately about the possible dangers of AI.
If the controlling intelligence behind the Borg (the queen) really is supposed to be AI, then that could maybe explain the whole Zhat Vash, anti-artificial life thing in this new series. It would be a contemporarily-topical storyline turning the Borg themselves into a sub-contextual societal warning. They would be an example of AI becoming one of the biggest threats to biological life we could imagine, because at its core, the Borg AI is something that survives by taking over and subverting biological life (like us) to its own purposes.
That might explain why all of a sudden the Romulans are being presented as blatantly anti-artificial life, and why a Borg cube is featuring so prominently in the story so far.
The android twins, on the other hand, might represent the other side of the argument, that AI doesn't automatically have to be thought of as bad, or as some kind of unavoidable, if not fated threat to existence. Soji is apparently supposed to be 'the Destroyer' though, so maybe not (unless that's just Romulan bias).
Now I'm wondering if something like that might turn out to be the underlying message of this new show. Star Trek does have a history of subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) wrapping its stories around real-life subject matters, even controversial ones from time to time, like the kiss between Kirk and Uhura (which was controversial back in the 60s).
Could this new story be trying to speak to the possible pros and cons of AI? Some prominent tech and science people have been talking about it recently. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking, to name a few. It's something that is in the public consciousness at the moment.
Then again, I could be waaaaay off. Probably will be, too.
It was fun to think about, though.
I guess so. Remembering the self-replicating nanoprobes has confounded my position a bit. I'm not so sure where I stand at the moment. I'll have to think about it a little more.
Possibly. But to keep the moral story consistent, the Zhat Vash would have to be vindicated somehow. Right now, the AI is pretty sympathetic, and the warning against AI (the Zhat Vash), not so much.
Right now, I prefer to think of Soji being the destroyer as a shot-in-the-dark "prophecy" based on Romulan mythology. I'm willing to bet that if Romulan history and culture were to be fleshed out more, there would be quite a bit of mythology regarding twins (the whole Romulus/Remus thing).
But yeah, it could be a warning. And it could also be showing the flip side - after all, Data was one of the most admirable of Trek characters. Dahj and Soji certainly have seemed to be moral women.
But Data also had a brother.
I always thought of the Borg as sort of a warning against AI, although they may well have been more a warning against groupthink.
I think the Borg are a warning about groupthink since they were not true AI. Data's apparent daughters and the synths are more about the dangers of AI. Heck, we have been warned since Frankenstein.
Everything that man invents has a downside that we only realize once the damage has been done and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
J. Robert Oppenheimer
That's why I suggested the controlling intelligence of the Borg would have to representative of an evil sort of AI, to provide a doomsday type of threat to base the Zhat Vash ideology on.
Oh, good call. There could even be a suckling she-wolf in there somewhere. A motherly, life giving protector figure of sorts.
And an evil one at that. Good point. I guess the good vs. bad AI thing has already been going for a while in Trek, huh?
I never did. I always thought they were just supposed to be the result of some very advanced species somewhere becoming evolutionarily entangled with cybernetics. I don't even know if I was familiar with the term AI until the early 2000s, after Voyager was over. Maybe I was, though. I can't actually remember.
Yeah, but a reminder now isn't a bad thing. The field of AI has advanced so much since TNG was in its first run. I think I first heard the term "artificial intelligence" in the mid 90s or so. Maybe a few years before the movie with Haley Joel Osment was released.
The appearance of the new EMH has me wondering if Voyager's EMH is still active.
Irish Romulans. An Irish EMH. Are we in Fairhaven on Voyager's holodeck?
Not just an EMH, but an ENH as well. Both of them with the appearance of their operator, Rios, who seems to operate his ship with a holo crew. Not an outlandish idea after what Voyager did with holograms, but still, something kind of new.
I've been wondering about the Doctor, too. Maybe Seven will tell us something about him later on. Robert Picardo might even make a surprise appearance before everything is said and done. Wouldn't that be great?
Yeah, I think that the worst part of the Borg is the idea of losing one's ability to think for oneself - submission to the collective. The prosthetics, chilling as they appear, would at least leave independent thought intact. The neural link is the ultimate personal intrusion.
Data actually had two brothers. B4 and Lore.
Ah, yes, I'd forgotten.
Good call Ed. I totally forgot about B4.
What's with the Romulan assassins and their extreme cases of halitosis when they get captured? Literal killer bad breath!
I've been wondering if it's actually from a device, like Leto Atreides' poisoned tooth from "Dune". If one is captured, simultaneously kill the captor and commit suicide to avoid interrogation.