Stardust City Rag

DVD, Star Trek: Picard S1 (Stardust City Rag)

Watching this series makes me feel like I've been Bjayzled. This is the most horrific episode so far, and not just because of the gory scene of a legacy character being basically tortured to death. He may not be a much-loved character, but he's just one in a diabolically impressive list of three characters brought back only to be killed off, either physically or emotionally. Add to this the continued fracturing of established Trek continuity and the inspirational, hopeful future we watch it for, by the constant references to money (Maddox doesn't know how he'll repay Bjayzl's loan; the Fenris Rangers keep their money on Freecloud; Rios jokes his fee doubles for flying into Romulan space), visiting another seedy 'Star Wars' Planet Cantina, and the biggest slap in the face that suggests the old Trek way of showing good morals, hope and positivity, is the backward, naive and misguided notions of a past that is now gone, leaving in its place a jaded, depressing and negative depiction of life in the late-24th Century that is as divorced from the rest of Trek's optimistic vision as any other dystopian sci-fi. The fact that they use a genuinely much-loved character to do this makes it even worse, Seven of Nine may as well have just karate-chopped Picard to the floor, then kicked him in the head for all the respect that is paid to preserving what makes Trek, Trek.

For all that I still can't say I hate the episode or the series, but I do find it troubling and worrying, especially when you consider that it was written by Kirsten Beyer, a frequent Trek novelist, and directed by Jonathan Frakes - these are no newbies to the franchise, these are the bread and butter, dyed in the wool production members that know their stuff, have paid their dues and now have the opportunity to reiterate the values of Trek in the face of so much apparent opposition from writers and directors that don't have Trek experience and don't seem to like the Trek that we grew up with! I suppose their argument would probably be that this is all part of the development towards a positive ending, the constant refrain of serialised TV (especially in this new Trek era), when you're supposed to wait a whole season before anything positive happens and in the mean time have to put up with misery, darkness and depression on a circular basis, all stemming from the desire for cliffhanger endings that shock. When I first saw it I had the vision of Luke Skywalker saying: 'Then my Father is truly dead,' and dragging the dying remains through the disintegrating Death Star, with Trek as the almost-corpse. What is it that stops me from actively hating this episode in particular, I wonder? Because I don't hate it. I don't much like it, in fact I border on disliking it, but there is something special in there, seeing the two characters of Trek that had both been Borgified, but had never met on screen, interacting together…

When I first saw this I just thought how lovely it was to have Seven back almost twenty years since she last played the role, and Jeri Ryan did a good job at returning to her famous character. It's not like she's unrecognisable - I had been worried from reading comments from her and friend Jonathan Del Arco (Hugh, who doesn't appear in this episode - neither do Soji or the Romulans siblings), that she couldn't find the voice and ended up playing it more casual. I can believably see Seven ending up this way since the trajectory we left her on was becoming more human in those last few episodes of 'Voyager.' She almost came back for 'Nemesis,' which I'm not sure how would have worked, and in one sense it's wondrous that we have actors returning to their characters so long after it had seemed their time with Trek was done. We had Leonard Nimoy back as Spock, Patrick Stewart as Picard, Brent Spiner as Data, and now Jeri Ryan as Seven, four characters that, in the time of 'Enterprise' on TV and after 'Nemesis' at the cinema, you'd have thought a practical impossibility, yet here they stand! But it's not enough to simply have characters played by the original actors, as the latest 'Star Wars' trilogy proved. I suppose with things like the Kelvin Timeline films, 'Star Wars' and 'Dr. Who' all bringing back famous faces in the last decade or so you could say it was inevitable that the biggest guns would eventually return for Trek as that was the trend (still no Worf in the offing as far as I know…), and as long as they were going to try and resurrect the TV side of it, and pump money in, it was more likely than the more minor characters showing up.

It's not enough to pump money in, however, you need to pump creative juices in and Kurtzman Trek is the most derivative not just of Trek, but of any and all sci-fi and fantasy. In some ways they seem to strive to get things right, yet while they can throw in references to Tranya (Balok's beverage of choice in 'TOS'), or a sign for Mr. Mot's Hair Emporium (shame Picard didn't look him up, but then he'd probably never get away from the bald, voluble Bolian), or 'Mr.' Quark of Ferenginar, they get the broad brushstrokes so wrong. Take Seven of Nine. Or should that be Annika Hansen, as her human name goes? You would have thought, given how we left the character at the end of her series, developing her human emotions, having developed so much in the time she was on Voyager, that she'd have fully embraced her humanity in the years since we last saw her. Even her Borg implants were being reduced in the final episodes of the series, yet here we have the fully formed Seven, fully formed as in back to how she was, in some ways. She has the same eyebrow piece, in fact it looks even bigger, she has the same attitude, and no matter how charitable and heroic she's portrayed to be, trying to maintain order in a dangerous region of space that was apparently abandoned by the Federation when 'the rescues ended' (the Romulan rescues?), taking the law into her own hands, as Picard points out, she appears to have seriously regressed. If this isn't an example of the uninspiring, negative depiction of the Trek universe, I don't know what is!

It's true that we don't know the ins and outs of her life since returning to the Alpha Quadrant with her Voyager crew and what we do gather is that it wasn't a good time - she had dealings with this Bjayzl, a callous, empty villainess responsible for not only harvesting the Borg implants from living ex-drones, but specifically doing the same to Seven's beloved Icheb, a man who joined Voyager's crew and found a new place there, eager to reach their home, since he had none now, and to become part of their Federation. It's heartening to see that he did, wearing the uniform we've already seen depicted in other flashbacks to the mid-2380s. He was a science officer on the USS Coleman (where they never run out of mustard, I'm sure), but was somehow captured by Bjayzl's people who mercilessly extracted his vital components in 2386, leaving Seven to come and put him out of his misery since he was too far gone to rescue. That's a traumatic incident in her life and sets the tone for the episode, or at least, the partial tone. Just as I threw in that joke about mustard, they try to have some fun with a basic heist story that really doesn't go anywhere and doesn't fit the serious and tragic tone the episode began with. This unbalanced impression is something that blights this era of Trek far too often and is the result of poor writing or a lack of understanding in what makes Trek work: dignity of the characters.

It's not that you can't have fun with them, but you need to be especially careful not to undermine the seriousness of their intent and beliefs, and Patrick Stewart's wish to lighten up Picard by throwing in silly jokes, as I've learnt he was the one in favour of this, only makes things seem more frivolous - he's at his absolute worst in this episode, which is harder to take because he also has moments where he seems at his most Picard: standing outside Raffi's door when she's chosen to stowaway aboard La Sirena after they've left Freecloud; the scenes with Seven (the bits when she's not being condescending and humouring his silly old beliefs that have no place in this new, nastier, broken Trek universe). None of that can make up for the ludicrous hamming it up with a cartoon French accent and an eye patch, it really is excruciating to see. Rios has more of the calm detachment and quiet control than Picard exhibits, even while wearing a ridiculous hat and multicoloured 'futuristic' clothes! Oh dear, never try to go futuristic with fashion because it just looks silly - they have an entire bar full of 'exotic' outfits like the worst excesses of sci-fi films from the Eighties and Nineties, Trek occasionally included ('Star Trek III' comes to mind). It's all the fault of 'Star Wars' which did a fine job of creating such a weird and wonderful collection of motley aliens in its original trilogy that everyone else has been trying to ape that ever since. Bjayzl herself looks like she escaped the Dabo wheel at Quark's bar (she looks almost just like M'Pella!), and I must say I'm getting tired of these derivative visions they have for Trek.

Getting back to Icheb and Seven's difficult life post-Voyager, obviously she was going to be seriously affected by this. But why didn't she turn to her Voyager friends? We still don't know a thing about what happened to the ship or its crew, we don't know whether she ended up marrying Chakotay whom she'd become very close to in the final episodes, nor do we know why she ended up outside Starfleet. Was she eager to break away from the rigid regulations that had served to curtail her natural impulses so long? I can see something of the Seven in this new version, but it's all negative. Apart from her willingness for self-sacrifice, but then she learned that on Voyager. There's a backstory we're not privy to with Bjayzl, who calls her Annika, and my suspicion was that her experiences with this evil woman were what led her to abandon her human name, as if it was tarnished. In reality I suspect they wanted her to be as recognisable as possible to get all those 'Voyager' viewers back to Trek, so it's a marketing gimmick - same reason she's wearing the older eyebrow piece. But of course they wouldn't put her in the catsuit now, that sort of thing's frowned upon, right? Why bring back Icheb only to kill him? Just to make her life more tragic, and that's a very sad decision. I don't want to see the old characters return only to show them living in a hard, brutal, hopeless, bleak life, that's not what Trek's about. Sure, Seven isn't living in a cave, moping and mumbling about the past, she's chosen to actively pursue justice (or vigilantism), so that's positive in a way, yet it's a skewed and distorted positive, like she's lost the moral compass she had with Janeway, the Doctor and Tuvok, guides that were able to bring her along on the right path.

It's like she's thrown away all the lessons she learned and I can only imagine there was a big falling out with Janeway, and because Seven was no longer constrained to the microcosm of Voyager she couldn't be kept around until she saw the error of her ways, and simply up and left. But this is all speculation, an attempt to explain away her merciless, jaded behaviour, taking things into her own hands and giving the trailer for the series a chance to show a twin Phaser Rifle-toting Seven blasting a baddie to death. Once again we see that this era of Trek is tainted with the desire to appeal, not to the intellect, but to the emotion. They want us fist-pumping the air and yelling as one of our beloved characters metes out summary justice to someone evil. There's no possibility of reprieve, no chance to be better, Bjayzl is just a Khan, a Dukat. Actually she's not, because they were truly great and nuanced enemies and this Trek era can't seem to get beyond two dimensions for its villains. They don't seem to understand basic concepts of right and wrong, either, which makes it hard to create moral stories and only adds to the messy miasma of confused plotting. Morality isn't the only problem, we get constant references to money in this episode - I know we're supposed to be outside Federation space, but it's just one more thing that seems to be a continual reminder that the Trek universe we knew and understood is gone.

I wonder if Manu Intiraymi was approached to reprise Icheb? Maybe he was and declined (reading Memory Alpha, he wasn't, and would have liked to), thinking it was pointless to return only to be killed off? Look, Icheb was never that great a character, I can't say I was devastated when he died, but at the same time it was unnecessary - have him crippled for life, that would still be motivation enough for Seven to become one of these Fenris Rangers. And even now they could bring him back in flashbacks as they've done occasionally on this series, so it's not like there was no chance to ever see the guy again. I don't think this was the intent, but it was almost like they were having a little laugh with us, since I don't get the impression Icheb was particularly popular, so bring him back, then kill him off right away in the most gruesome manner. Or is it more sinister? I believe, though I've never seen them, the actor played the character in unofficial fan productions, so was this a way to get back at him? I hope not. It's not the first time he was played by another actor, as someone else took on the role of Icheb from a future time in 'Shattered' (ironically, set in 2394, only five years before this one and eight years after he died in this official timeline), one of the great 'Voyager' episodes that cleverly toyed with various different time periods at once. They didn't even get that guy back to play this iteration. Not that it mattered, it was a short scene, soon over and as I said, we didn't learn much about his career post-Voyager.

The next character brought back in order to kill him was Bruce Maddox. Once again he was played by a different actor - I heard that the original actor had moved on to teaching acting so maybe he was unavailable, but I feel like they should have made an effort to get Brian Brophy back. I know, it was a long, long time since we last saw the character, and unlike Icheb, who was in a number of episodes across the last couple of seasons of 'Voyager,' Maddox only appeared in one, and that was way back in Season 2 of 'TNG,' shown in 1989! But what an episode 'The Measure of A Man' was, the kind of proper storytelling you simply don't get on Trek any more, sadly. And he had enough resonance that he was mentioned at least once more. This new guy was fine, we never knew the character well enough for it to be jarring, and he's about thirty years or more older, plus he's killed off in this episode so it's not like he was going to become integral in Trek. And that's where we come to the most controversial moment of a most controversial episode: Agnes 'Aggy' Jurati's coldblooded murder of her former boss and partner. We'd already had to watch a slightly sappy recording of her and Maddox baking cookies, teeing her up for the shock one-eighty (why is it that people watch so much 2D screens these days when we know TV died out in the mid-21st Century - it couldn't be because we like to show off our effects? I can't help thinking Jurati would have more likely been watching that scene in the Holodeck, unless Picard hogs it all the time he's on board).

Jurati is set up as this weak, worried Hoshi Sato-alike, a puppy with big eyes and an eager disposition, unused to being outside a lab. It's a big deal for her even to be given the responsibility of beaming the crew off Freecloud in the event things go awry and we're always having slightly sickly scenes for her to be 'cute.' Not in the way Elnor is 'cute' by being one step behind everyone else all the time ('duh… are we still pretendin'…?'), but in an attempt to cue her up as 'loveable.' Rios certainly thinks so as you notice he's taken a shine to her which goes on through the season, maybe because she's an innocent and he's seen so much horror that's what he needs? Except she's not an innocent - ta-da! They pull the rug from under us by giving us a shocking, 'thrilling' conclusion where Jurati kills Maddox in Sickbay. It seems these Emergency Holograms have even less power than they did in Voyager's day as the EMH can be instantly overridden with no recourse to any warnings or flags about dangerous behaviour which you'd think would be in-built in the system! Maybe that's why they didn't set one of these holos at the Transporter console instead of Jurati (or even program the computer to do it on their signal!). In subsequent episodes we're led to believe Jurati was acting under the influence of a mind meld from Commodore Oh, but here she seems fully in control, and like hypnosis, it seems excessive that a Vulcan could force someone who isn't a killer by nature, to murder. Not saying it couldn't happen, I can't recall an example, but it's possible. It's just not the impression I got from the scene when she's saying she wishes she didn't know what she knows or was shown what she was shown.

Presumably this is referring obliquely to the 'vision' of the future seen by the Jhat Vash, which was about synthetic life breaking in from some other dimension or some other weird domain like something out of the 'Avengers Assemble' film. How much more evidence do you need that Trek takes its cues from Marvel fantasy now much more than science fiction or its own past? So she seems to be operating under free will, that Maddox is somehow responsible for this galaxy-ending (snore), event, but who knows? Why wouldn't the EMH alert someone? Why wouldn't the computer? How could this happen? Why would this happen? Ratings? Shock value? Again, Maddox isn't a beloved character so it's really neither here nor there, but it is a problem that this mild-mannered scientist becomes a murderer and then she's not even punished! Oh, it was a mind meld or something, she's not responsible, rap on the knuckles and on with your life. But that's all to come in the next 'exciting' instalment of 'Star Trek: Misery– sorry, Picard'! It was really a one-two punch to close out the episode, what with Seven murdering Bjayzl. It's not just the murder, though, it's the impression that Picard is some old-fashioned fuddy-duddy who needs to be humoured and then ignored because we don't want to ruin his quaint illusions about mercy, morality and all that guff. It is like pointing to past Trek and saying, 'sure it worked back then, but the world's tougher now, nastier and those silly ideals of yours don't work now.' It's distressing, disappointing, depressing and hateful, and it's not like the true Trek view is ever espoused.

Other than Picard, but he's shown to be just some old guy, so who cares. It's the greatest indictment of this era of Trek in the whole series and is the reason I came to like this episode less on second viewing. At least in old Trek when they put a point of view like that they also strongly showed the opposing one, but the writers make it seem like this is the prevailing attitude, the correct one, the one they believe. Even worse when Beyer is the credited writer so you'd think she had the strongest say on this episode. Did she really want to turn Seven into someone so broken? I get it, that's the theme of the series, brokenness, all of them are damaged in some way, but we don't get the catharsis of seeing things made right. Even what could be called the B-story of this episode, where Raffi tracks down her son, Gabriel Hwang, and his Romulan wife (love the hairdo, by the way - traditional is best), carrying her unborn granddaughter, and she's utterly rejected by him for leaving him and his Father - we're reminded she's a drug user ('I'm clean now'), and it just adds to that sense of hopelessness and misery that permeates this sorry excuse for Trek. Hopeless and pointless and exhausting, says Seven, describing her job as Ranger, a bit like Elnor and the Knights of the Romulan Women's Way, or whatever it was called, who only take on hopeless causes. Well, I guess at this time period they're all kept in constant employment, so that's nice, then, isn't it?

There's even time to show banal evil as Icheb gets sliced up to the accompaniment of classical music and a female technician who's completely detached from his humanity (or Brunali-anity, to be precise). She even calls him 'buddy,' and this is another of my major bugbears for the series and modern Trek in general: yes, I've said it before, but it's the casualness of the speech, the contemporary manner and style and words that don't fit with Trek's world. There's so much of it in this episode, perhaps not more than other episodes, but I've had a few weeks' break from it and coming back it stands out starkly, especially when you're used to watching the other series', as I do, particularly the 24th Century ones. It really takes me out of it, to the extent that, when Rios is instructing Jurati on the correct terminology and she uses words like 'affirmative,' it jars in a different way because that's how dialogue should be most of the time, yet isn't. There are the usual points of speculation or niggling nitpicks, but they're small fry compared to the glaring faults and horrors of this episode: how do Phasers kill without disintegration? I know they do this a lot on modern Trek, and 'at least' we got Bjayzl being completely disintegrated, although it was more like an explosion or bursting than the scything dissolution that was so effective in the past. Why didn't she just beam out like some of her patrons did, you'd think she'd have an escape route planned at all times? Seven's rifles are back to the pew-pew-pew projectiles instead of screeching beams. Seven is notorious, as Rios says, and Picard is clearly well known, so why wouldn't he be recognisable?

It was somehow typical of this generation of writers that they had a snatch of the 'Voyager' theme play as Seven beams back down to Freecloud to carry out her shoot-'em-up revenge scheme, as if they don't see any disconnect between that time and this. Picard says it best: 'murder is not justice, there is no solace in revenge.' The one genuine moment is when Seven asks Picard if he reclaimed his full humanity after he was freed from the Borg and he reminds her that they're both still working on it. In other words it's an ongoing process that will probably never end. Except it will end for him, much sooner than we could ever have anticipated since he basically becomes a Borg by the end of the season! That's where the series really came off the rails, if it was even on them in the first place, but we'll get there. I'm sorry, but we have to, I must finish reviewing this season as much as I'm going off this Kurtzman era, as much as I want to like it, I don't, and I don't see that changing, to the extent that I probably won't bother doing reviews for new Treks after this season. That's how far I am from enjoying and getting anything out of it that's in any way a positive. But hey, at least they have a high effects budget, as evidenced by all the animated Freecloud ads that pop up to 'greet' them while in orbit. Yeah, thrilling, really impressive, well done, good to see Trek isn't dead. Pointless gimmickry lives on! Oh, and I forgot to mention who the third character was that got killed off: Seven herself, she's no longer the same person and seems dead inside.

As 'DS9' is my favourite Trek I should give a little space to discussing the one reference we've had to that series (not counting Worf, who has basically been reclaimed by 'TNG' since 'DS9' ended). Rios is said by Mr. Vup, the Reptiloid with the snazzy sense of smell that can so easily be fooled, to have handled trouble with the Breen for a Mr. Quark of Ferenginar. Good old Quark, he's actually my favourite character in all of Trek, Armin Shimerman did such an incredible job over the years. I could imagine them bringing him back and I know Shimerman did don the makeup in recent years for at least one convention appearance (as the actors who played Gowron, Martok, Jadzia, Rom and Nog have also done), is still acting, and I think would be open to returning, though it would need to be worthwhile and not just a face on the viewscreen like his 'TNG' cameo was. At one time Shimerman was the Robert Picardo of 'DS9' - the Doctor kept showing up in films and TV, writing books, etc, but that all ended when 'DS9' ended, his cameo at the end of 'Insurrection' also cut just before. I liked the reference, it fitted with the kind of nefarious characters they were dealing with, and also we learn something about him: if he's 'of Ferenginar' that presumably means he never did get his own moon - perhaps he ended up returning to the Homeworld as his brother was Grand Nagus and could get him some lucrative contracts (I'm sure there's a Rule of Acquisition about that sort of thing, and I don't mean 'never let family stand in the way of business,' or maybe I do!), but it would have been better if they'd said 'of Deep Space 9,' as I like to think of him still there on the station, tending bar, the last one left.

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