Perhaps for the first time this season, it appears that the Star Trek: Picard writers decided they wanted to do some fun stuff and didn’t care how they go there. The problem with that, of course, is that it makes things quite a bit less fun unless the viewer is willing to shut off their brains entirely. This particular has cropped up every now and then in little bits and spurts, but Star Trek: Picard Season 2, Episode 6 might have been the first time they just let it go and decided to let it all hang out. Unfortunately, that means this is easily the worst installment of the season so far.
That doesn’t mean that everything in this episode of Star Trek: Picard is bad. But there’s quite a bit more bad than good. To some degree, there’s got to be some hope that it’s a one off. On the other hand, there were good aspects of Season One that very quickly devolved into something that looked like the writers were more interested in telling a story then in how they got there. That certainly seems to be the case with this episode. The amount of suspension of disbelief involved in “Two of One.”
Starting off with yet another Star Trek heist that could have been entertaining, the show picks up right where the last episode left off. Dr. Jurati has been detained by the event’s security and is sitting a few feet behind them, handcuffed to what looks like a bus seat. Why there was a bus seat in the security room is anyone’s guess but it’s not all that important either. At least it’s not until she pulls something out of her pocket that knocks her captors out and she tries to scooch the seat forward so that she can get the keys to her cuffs.
One of the nice things about this season of Star Trek: Picard is that Jurati has provided some dry wit and comic relief without coming off too goofy and this scene still does a fairly good job in wringing out a chuckle without it being too silly. The viewers can expect that she would indeed not be used to breaking out of captivity and so she didn’t think all that clearly about what the next step after “knock out the guards” would be.
Unfortunately, this is the first scene where it takes a suspension of belief to think it could work. While it’s never really made clear just how the Borg work, it seems unlikely that the Borg Queen living inside someone’s mind could allow a person to have the strength to break handcuffs as though they were made of paper. Yes, there is a chance that a person could gain strength with something like an unfiltered boost of adrenaline, but it’s still breaking steel, it wouldn’t be a 10 second task and there would be a great deal of pinching and pain during and after the fact. That’s hardly the only thing that Picard does in this episode that is borderline ridiculous.
When not dealign with Jurati and the Borg Queen, things do get a little less ridiculous, though it also seems like the show desperately wanrts to act as though depression is a very serious thing, but also quite easy to overcome? Renee Picard is at the party before she goes on the mission that has been billed as very important without anyone on Picard knowing exactly why it’s important at all. Part of the problem with this episode is that the show seems to have lost sight of the fact that it does need to tell people that at some point why it’s important. The focus is being pulled in far too many directions and the writers seem to have lost the thread.
Captain Picard finds his distant relative in tears as she’s ready to quite the space program. But a short 30 second talk from a total stranger apparently turns her right around and the mission is saved. However, in order to do this, he needed a distraction which leads to the most ridiculous scene perhaps in the entire Star Trek: Picard series. Agne Jurati and her lounge singer act.
It’s important to remember that security felt as though Agnes Jurati was a threat that was substantial enough that they handcuffed her in the security room. There’s a couple of issues with the fact that she’s been out for a while and apparently no one has found the two guards who were knocked unconscious by the device that was never really brought up or explained. But it still seems like when the power goes out and then this random woman starts to sing, someone from the security team would recognize her and decide that they needed to immediately arrest her.
There’s also the fact that a high-security event like this is not going to just allow anyone to stroll to the stage (again, during a power outage) and start singing. It’s unlikely the band would just start playing the music that goes along with the song without some questions as to who she is and why she’s there. But there is absolutely zero chance that no one at the party wouldn’t have immediately approached her after the song and asked what in the world she was doing there. Cheering and then moving on is simply not what would have happened when the country’s top astronauts are in attendance. It’s a massive security failure. It’s the kind of security failure that someone in the Picard writer’s room should have brought up and said, “we need to at least have her cover be that she was there to sing.” Unfortunately, all of this was supposed to be a way to show that the Borg Queen had more control over Jurati than she realized.
There are other aspects of this particular episode of Star Trek: Picard that is more than a little frustrating simply because of the suspension of disbelief the scenes need. There’s a man being in a coma despite being perfectly fine. There’s yet another instance of technology that absolutely will not exist in 2024, no matter how genius the inventor might be and there’s an explanation about assimilation that seems to be born from writers who didn’t know how else to make the plot work. It all combines for an episode that was extremely shallow and poorly executed.
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