By The weaknesses of Star Trek: Picard comes to bear, in the clumsy first part of the two-part season one finale.
Star Trek: Picard has certainly had its moments and a number of very strong elements along the way, despite a spluttering start. The stage was a little rocky going into the start of the season finale, but there was undoubtedly promise too. Sadly, that promise gets a little lost along the way in ‘Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1’, an episode lacking the smarts to truly excite, and sometimes coming across a little lazy in the process.
The episode starts off promising enough, with what is possibly the strongest action sequence of the series so far, and one that ends in bombastic fashion. Arriving at Soji’s (Isa Briones) home planet populated by advanced synthetics, Picard and his crew crash land pursued by Narek (Harry Treadaway) and accompanied by the sudden arrival of the abandoned Borg Cube, with Elnor (Evan Evagora) and Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) still on board, with all their spacecraft being engulfed by trippy giant orchids. So far, so pleasingly weird.
Once on the surface of the planet, we are met with Soji’s home and the rest of her siblings. The design of the planet, run by seemingly the most advanced race of synthetics ever seen in the show, is disappointingly bland. It’s the kind of cleanly designed world we’ve seen countless times in the show’s past, with very little attention given to the tech of this advanced world, and all the androids have a gold pigmentation applied that looks distractingly cheap at points. It’s a disappointing design element of an episode that ends up making a few confusing and questionable leaps of logic along the way.
Full review at THN, originally published March 23rd 2020.
Andrew Gaudion 