For the first time this season, the Star Trek: Picard writers appear to have decided they wanted to do something enjoyable and didn’t care how they got there. The problem with this is that it makes things a lot less pleasant unless the audience is ready to turn their minds off completely. This has come up in bits and pieces in the past, but Star Trek: Picard Season 2, Episode 6 may have been the first time they simply let it go and chose to let it all hang out. Unfortunately, this means that this is by far the poorest episode of the season thus far.
That isn’t to say that everything in this Star Trek: Picard episode is awful. However, there is far more bad than good. There has to be some hope that this is a one-time occurrence. Season One, on the other hand, had some interesting elements that gradually degraded into something that appeared to be more concerned in presenting a story than in how they got there. That appears to be the situation with this episode as well. The degree to which “Two of One” requires you to suspend your disbelief.
Stars from Star Trek: The Next Generation, including LeVar Burton, are set to join Picard’s third season.
The show continues up just where the last episode left off, with yet another Star Trek robbery that may have been exciting. Dr. Jurati has been detained by event security and is shackled to what appears to be a bus seat a few feet behind them. It’s unclear why there was a bus seat in the security room, but it’s also not that significant. At least not until she grabs something from her pocket and tries to scooch the seat forward in order to get the keys to her cuffs.
One of the wonderful things about this season of Star Trek: Picard is that Jurati has supplied some dry humor and comic relief without coming across as too goofy, and this moment still manages to elicit a giggle without being overly ridiculous. The audience can assume her to be unaccustomed to breaking free from confinement, thus she didn’t think clearly about what to do next after “knocking out the guards.”
Unfortunately, this is the first scenario in which a leap of faith is required to believe it could work. While it’s never explained exactly how the Borg work, it seems improbable that a Borg Queen residing within someone’s head could give them the strength to break handcuffs as if they were made of paper. Yes, something like an unfiltered spike of adrenaline could help a person acquire strength, but it’s still shattering steel, it wouldn’t be a 10-second task, and there would be a lot of squeezing and suffering both during and afterward. Picard does a lot of other things in this episode that is borderline absurd.
When the show isn’t dealing with Jurati and the Borg Queen, things seem a little less ludicrous, yet it appears like the show is desperately trying to portray depression as a severe problem that is also relatively easy to overcome? Renee Picard attends the party before embarking on a mission that has been portrayed as extremely vital, but no one aboard Picard knows why. Part of the difficulty with this episode is that it appears like the show has lost sight of the reality that it does need to explain why it’s essential at some point. The writers appear to have lost the thread as the focus is dragged in far too many places.
Captain Picard discovers his distant relative, who is about to terminate the space program, in tears. However, a brief 30-second conversation with a complete stranger appears to turn her around and save the mission. However, he needs a distraction in order to do so, which leads to the most absurd moment in the entire Star Trek: Picard series. Agne Jurati performs as a lounge singer.
It’s vital to recall that security considered Agnes Jurati to be a significant threat, thus she was shackled in the security room. There are a few difficulties with her being gone for so long, including the fact that no one has discovered the two guards who were knocked out by the gadget that was never really brought up or addressed. However, it appears that if the power goes out and this random woman begins to sing, someone from the security crew will recognize her and determine that she must be arrested immediately.
There’s also the reality that a high-security event like this won’t let anyone just go up to the platform and start singing (again, amid a power outage). It’s improbable that the band would just start playing the song’s music without some queries about who she is and why she’s there. But there’s no way someone at the party wouldn’t have approached her after the song and asked what she was doing there. When the country’s best astronauts are in attendance, cheering and then moving on is simply not an option. It’s a huge security blunder. Someone in the Picard writer’s room should have brought it up and said, “At the very least, we need to have her cover be that she was there to sing.” Regrettably, all of this was meant to demonstrate that the Borg Queen had more authority over Jurati than she knew.
Other portions of this episode of Star Trek: Picard are a little frustrating simply because the scenarios require a certain level of suspension of disbelief. Despite being fully healthy, a man is in a coma. There’s another example of technology that will not exist in 2024, no matter how brilliant the inventor, and an explanation regarding assimilation that appears to be the result of writers who couldn’t think of any other way to make the plot work. All of this adds up to an episode that is both short and badly done.
