Saturday, 21 March 2020

Star Trek: Picard: Broken Pieces review


Broken Pieces
The eighth episode. Picard and Soji's arrival on La Sirena causes Rios to go into hiding. Jurati recovers. Seven of Nine arrives on the Artefact. The scene where Rios seems to recognise Soji was done rather well. The way he withdrew was very moving. More on Rios below. Raffi calling out Picard for bringing Soji on board was done rather well. (Like, of course, she would be suspicious of Soji!) Meanwhile, Jurati has recovered and confesses that she murdered Bruce Maddox. This part was done well also.
On the Artefact, Seven comes to the rescue. Her line “What is happening on this cube?” was rather good. Her and Elnor avoiding Narissa and the other Romulans was done rather well, but the most impressive sequence was when she temporarily became a Queen to defend the Xbs. Very impressive indeed. Hearing “We are the Borg” while Seven tried to save the XBs from being spaced by Narissa was rather chilling. Elnor's innocent “Are you going to assimilate me now?” was also rather good. But “Annika has work to do,” was the best line.
Back to La Sirena, Raffi's detective work while she tries to coax Rios out of hiding was very well conceived. Each Emergency Hologram is a reflection of a different part of Rios' personality. The way Raffi interviews each of them and then holds a group session was very good writing, very well presented. Of course, the Emergency Engineering Hologram didn't need to be Scottish, but it worked. The EMH and the Emergency Navigational Hologram “Enoch”were the best of the bunch. The scene where Raffi confuses Enoch for Rios was very good.
But there's another revelation, that what had happened on the Ibn Majid involved contact with synths, including one who looked like Dahj and Soji, named Jana. This is why Rios went into hiding, as it caused his captain to take his own life when Starfleet ordered him to kill them. Certainly an interesting development. And the Ibn Majid's design looks rather good, similar to a cross between a Sovereign and a Crossfeild. Jurati trying to share what she learned from Commodore Oh was done very well.
Some kind of warning for the future about synthetic life, which the Romulans had discovered and which is used by Zhat Vash for initiation purposes. That the Collective cut off the Cube rather than let the information disseminate through it seems interesting also. Overall a rather good episode. 8.7.5/10.



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