Previously on Star Trek: Picard...
I don't totally get it.
But I do know something really bad happened to you.
You don't have a mom and a dad. You have Captain Picard.
-I don't have Picard. -But you could.
And he could have you. And you could both have each other.
I already had one grand heroic captain in my life.
The last thing I need is another one.
Ten years on, I still can't close my eyes at night
without seeing the last one's blood and brains splattered all over a bulkhead.
We are gonna take this Cube away from them forever.
That sounds like a treaty violation to me.
Activate the Queencell.
In case you ever need a vigilante.
What is the nature of your medical emergency?
Deactivate EMH.
I wish I didn't know what I know. I wish they hadn't shown me.
Narek, the Tal Shiar agent,
was looking for an implanted memory of a real place.
And when I told him about the lightning and the moons,
he said, "You found home."
I want to help you to get back to that home.
Somebody's tailing us. Must be since we left the Cube.
Our foremothers came to this system
looking for an answer to the riddle of the Eightfold Stars.
What they found was a storehouse of preserved memories
that showed them the grim fate of the civilization
that perished here long ago.
We still do not know the name of the mighty race
who left behind this object,
this Admonition,
warning us of the horror and annihilation that came from the skies.
When our foremothers first endured the Admonition,
we, the Zhat Vash, were born.
For hundreds of years since, we have worked in shadow
to prevent a second coming of the Destroyers.
It is this dreaded work that you must now carry on.
What you are about to experience will drive some of you mad.
But those of you who endure...
will be stronger.
Witness the devastation that must be prevented.
Endure the Admonition...
if you can.
No more!
We have to stop them.
We will.
How?
Where do we begin?
On the world the humans call Mars.
Auntie?
No more.
We have our work to do.
Doctor Kabath says there's no medical reason for this, Auntie.
I do believe you're malingering.
You were never entirely sane to begin with, were you?
It was folly taking in Narek and me after our parents died.
And sheer madness submitting yourself for Admonishment.
Though, when you lost your mind, you certainly did it with panache.
Breaking a Borg Cube by the sheer force of your despair.
The Collective picked the wrong Tal Shiar ship to assimilate that day.
They ought to have picked mine.
I'd have made a much better Borg than you.
"Resistance is futile."
Narek's located the synthetics' nest.
I've dispatched ships.
I'll be joining them as soon as I've shut down this house of horrors.
If you wake up...
you can come along.
We've our work to do.
Tell me you found the freak.
Yes, Colonel.
We've tracked him to the office
of the former director of the Reclamation Project.
Where's Hugh?
What is happening on this Cube?
All right.
I'm here. It's all right.
Rios?
Rios, this is Doctor Asha.
I need a secure subspace link.
Rios?
Hey.
-Rios! -What?
I need a secure subspace link to Starfleet Command.
-What? -What?
And what's the nearest starbase?
Deep Space 12.
Lay in a course.
Hey, lay in a course.
I will lay in a course for DS12.
But after that, you're on your own, Picard.
I'm done.
You said you'd take me home.
Yes, and I will.
But we face a powerful enemy.
We can't do it without support.
Look, you have no choice but to trust me.
And I know that would make me angry too, but...
I understand.
Let me find you a cabin.
Hi. Raffi.
Soji.
Soji, I'm sorry, but your new best friend, Jean-Luc,
already brought us one adorable little homicidal double agent.
What the hell are you talking about?
I'm talking about how big a fool you really are.
Yeah. Come. I'm sorry about her rudeness.
Raffi!
A neuron. That's all you know about her.
You built this whole giant fantasy
of rescue and sacrifice and redemption out of one pissant little neuron.
Now you put that away or be prepared to use it on me.
Agnes Jurati had a tracking isotope in her blood.
She's a Romulan spy.
Fact or theory?
Theory.
-Come. -We think she killed Bruce Maddox.
Who is "we"?
She injected herself with a hydrogen compound.
She was trying to destabilize
the viridium tracker already present in her system.
And as soon as she did, we shook our Tal Shiar tail.
Fact. Not theory.
But to say that she's a Tal Shiar agent?
Maybe she didn't know about the viridium until you picked up the tail.
Maybe. Or maybe they put her on this ship to kill Bruce Maddox.
Right after they got done killing Soji's sister.
Tell me about Maddox.
His injuries need not have been fatal. She deactivated me.
Mm-hmm.
Then she turned off the hematic micro repair unit
that was stabilizing his cardiovascular function.
She was in distress.
Ugh. I-- I told you it was careless to bring her along.
Now you're telling us that we need to trust the synth girl too?
Tell me, JL, what is Soji really like?
Hmm?
Do you know?
Does she?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Where are you going, Raffi?
To tell Rios I was right about Jurati.
See if it feels any better to rub his face in it.
That's a hell of a report.
And you thought I was a desperate old man.
Quixotic, paranoid, possibly senile--
Let's just leave it at "quixotic."
And now the windmills have turned out to be giants.
You want an apology?
-I want a squadron. -Jean-Luc--
Clancy!
Out there, in the Vayt system, right now,
beings who have as much right to life and liberty as you and I
or Commander Data
are being hunted down by an enemy who seeks to exterminate them--
-Jean-Luc! -No, Clancy.
If you say this is not a job for Starfleet,
then I'm sorry, but you are a waste of space!
Admiral Picard, with all due respect and at long last,
shut the fuck up.
I'm sending a squadron to rendezvous with you at DS12.
Now stay put until they get there.
Clancy out.
Hmm.
You all right, buddy?
You seemed a little rattled back there.
Tell me how I can help you.
The Tal Shiar had a tracker inside your girl Jurati,
and it looks like she killed Bruce Maddox.
Well, that's bad news.
Uh. Yeah.
Unless you like giant, all-encompassing, paranoid conspiracy theories,
then it's, you know, kinda awesome.
You know, in a horrible way.
In bad situations, it's so important to try and find something positive.
Goddamn it. Which one are you?
Navigation. ENH. Call me Enoch.
Where is Rios?
After he laid in the course for Deep Space 12,
he activated us holograms and went to his quarters.
Did he tell you why he got so freaked out by that girl?
No, but...
he said if I kept smiling at him, he would punch me in the face.
Let me see if I can identify her for you.
Yes.
Her name is... Jana.
Mm-mmm. Her name is Soji.
-Ask me about astronavigation! -Ugh.
This caught my eye while I was surveilling the Cube.
All these Romulans sitting around drawing this over and over.
Eight circles. See?
Could those be planets?
Looks like an attempt to depict an octonary.
A what now?
A planetary system with eight component stars.
This is Nu Scorpii,
a septenary system, which are extremely rare,
-but an octonary? -Hmm.
There are accounts of one in some ancient Romulan star atlases,
but... they're considered apocryphal.
They don't appear in any of their modern charts.
The gravitational mechanics would have to be...
incredibly complex.
A-- All this time I've been thinking that the Conclave of Eight
was eight people who planned the attack on Mars,
but maybe the name refers to the place where they met.
You are my favorite holo.
Killed by a phaser.
The boy has a confederate.
Sub-sectors gamma 8.11 through .17 are currently in secure lockdown.
Fenris Rangers.
And it's not hard to guess which one.
Why didn't you go with them?
Picard released me.
I found a cause even more lost than his.
Is this where the Borg Queen lived?
No.
She used to visit sometimes?
I can explain, or I can steal this Cube.
What the hell is going on?
The Cube. It seems to be-- I would almost say it's regenerating.
We have to get rid of every Borg still held in stasis immediately.
Can they be gassed? Electrocuted?
We can blow the seals and jettison them directly into space.
Oh, I like that. See to it.
Yes, Colonel.
I'll get started on the xBs.
I'll need this one too.
Come.
Is it all right?
It's good.
Is there something you'd prefer?
Honestly, I don't know.
You don't know what it's like...
to have this vacuum inside of you, Picard.
To have someone ask if you like eggs and have no idea
if the answer is coming from you or your instruction set.
You're right.
I don't know what that's like.
I can only try and imagine it.
Your memories, your history,
to you feel like incidents you heard about,
something that happened to someone else.
Yes.
You feel that you don't have a past anymore.
-Because I don't. -That's not true.
You have a past.
You have a story just waiting to be claimed.
You're talking about Data.
Among other things, yes.
All right.
Tell me about Data.
What was he like?
Well, Data was brave.
Curious.
Very gentle.
He had a child's wisdom...
unclouded by habit or bias.
He made us all laugh,
except when he was trying to make us laugh.
And you loved him.
I...
Yes. In my way.
Did he love you?
Data's capacity for expressing and processing emotion was limited.
I suppose we had that in common.
If I could see you with his eyes, with his memories,
what would I see?
How would I know that?
What do you hope I would see?
How do you wish he would remember you?
You mean, if he had survived me rather than the other way around?
I hope he would remember Jean-Luc Picard as someone who believed in him,
who believed in his potential.
Celebrated his successes.
Counseled him when he fell short.
Helped him if he needed help,
and if he didn't need it, got out of his way.
Words to that effect.
He loved you.
Chris?
Are you Chris?
No, lassie. I'm the Emergency Engineering Hologram.
But I go by Ian.
First of all, I'm gonna ask you never to call me "lassie" again.
Duly noted.
Have you seen Rios?
No. Captain's still hiding out in his cabin.
Hiding out? From what?
From Soji?
I dinnae ken for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Sight of that lassie's bound to stir up unwelcome memories.
And why is that? Where does he know her from?
I dinnae have the faintest notion.
I ken it's true, but I dinnae ken why.
Mm.
Lot of that going around.
Uh, engineering, right? Let me ask you something.
What are the chances
that an octonary star system would occur naturally?
Close to--
Close to nil, I'd say.
Meaning it would have to be built.
You'd have to capture eight suns.
Move them across light-years of space and set them in motion.
Why would you want to do that?
Showin' off. Saying, "Look what I can do."
Or maybe you had something really important to say,
and you wanted to make sure that people were paying attention.
Like, if you wanted to leave them a warning.
I'm getting closer. Ian, I can feel it.
Aye. And how's it feel?
Absolutely terrifying.
Burgundy.
Red wine.
What is the nature of your hospitality emergency?
I need a glass of red wine.
You disabled alcohol service from your quarters two days ago.
Reinstate it. Override.
You locked yourself out of override and...
out of meta-override.
Then shoot me in the head.
What's with Rios? Should I be worried about him?
He could use someone to talk to.
Someone who doesn't look exactly like him, only better groomed.
How do you know that?
Are you all networked directly to Rios?
When Captain Rios acquired La Sirena, he selected the self-scan option.
He claims it was an accident, but he never bothered to revert it, so...
So, you're all Rios?
Overlaid on the five basic installs?
Not, not, not precisely.
He went in later and made some deletions. Careless ones, I must say.
Ask me the proper temperature for making Yridian tea.
I no longer have any idea. In any case, it's hard to explain.
But I am aware, or rather
my algorithms allow me to predict with a high degree of confidence,
that Captain Rios is in sore need of a confidant right about now.
Rios? Honey, it's Raffi.
Thought you might need some company.
Piss off.
Pissing off.
These are the ones Hugh reclaimed.
Thousands more are still in stasis.
-Wake them up. -They'll be useless,
lost without the voice of the Collective.
I could reactivate and reconnect their transceivers.
Create a kind of micro-collective of just the Borg on this Cube.
Coordinate their movements, deploy them against the Romulan troops.
That sounds amazing. Do that.
Assimilate them.
Invade their minds. Suppress their identities.
Enslave them again.
You can release them when we win.
They won't want to be released, and I...
I might not want to release them.
Hmm.
Maybe this was a mistake.
All right. Somewhere,
underneath this absurd spectacle I see before me,
are five broken pieces of Captain Rios.
It's like you each got dealt a hole card.
How about you turn them over, hmm?
Sit up.
Okay. L-- Let's start with the girl.
Um, Ian, you called her "Jana." You said you recognized her.
I did. I do.
-I do too. -Huh?
Yes, Jana. Poor thing.
It was just so tragic.
I...
No. Sorry.
It's like my knowledge of Medusan astrogation techniques, totally gone.
It's something to do with his time on the ibn Majid with his captain.
Aye. Captain Alonzo Vandermeer.
Oh... What about him? Were they close?
Is he alive?
It's, um...
The information's there somewhere. I can feel it...
but I can't quite get at it.
Emmet!
- What? - Ugh.
What happened to Vandermeer?
- Capitán Vandermeer? - Mm.
Oh. Well, that's awful.
- Do we know why? - It's one of those things
you ken but you do not say.
Turns out we don't actually "ken."
I can feel the answer, or a ghost of it.
This may violate my Hippocratic coding,
but after the whole thing was over,
Captain Rios suffered some kind of breakdown.
That's why he was discharged.
Wh-- Um. "Whole thing"? What whole thing?
Something happened on the ibn Majid,
something that had to do with Vandermeer and a girl named Jana.
Don't bother searching for ship's logs or personal records on the ibn Majid.
-Why? -It was all classified.
Because?
Oh. Oh, come on. One of you knows.
What happened on the ibn Majid?
One of us knows.
And he's sae fou as a piper an' awfu aff the fang.
So true, Ian.
I mean...
it's not even a language.
Did it work?
You neutralized the viridium, if that's what you mean.
We're no longer being tracked by the Tal Shiar.
We are now headed for Deep Space 12.
When we arrive, you will surrender yourself to the authorities
for the murder of Bruce Maddox.
I have been trying to work it out.
How you could have done such a thing.
He was your mentor.
Your... lover?
Why?
I had to.
When Commodore Oh came to find me that day, she--
She did something to me.
Poisoned me.
So, the head of Starfleet Security had you ingest a viridium tracker?
Yes.
But that's not what I'm talking about.
She put poison in my mind, Picard.
She...
put her hands on my head and poured in...
She put in a psychic block to keep me from talking about it.
Oh... you must fight--
I don't want to talk about it!
Do you believe in hell?
Yeah, neither did I.
Until I saw it.
Now...
I think about suicide every day.
That's how I comfort myself.
Was this experience,
this... vision of Oh's,
one that she lived through herself?
No. No.
It happened...
thousands of centuries ago.
Because of hubris. Hubris like Bruce's.
Because of synthetic life?
We are at a threshold.
I saw it, Picard. Oh showed me.
Unless we act quickly and destroy even the possibility of synthetic life...
Hell will come again.
And this threshold...
Is the coming of Seb-Cheneb...
the Destroyer.
Me.
So...
Captain Alonzo Vandermeer.
Is that his Walkman?
I used to pretend he was my father.
Called him "Pops" in my head.
Couple of times, it almost slipped out.
Kind of a surprise when he turned out to be a cold-blooded murderer.
Who?
Who did he murder?
Do you sleep?
Every night.
You sleep every night. My God.
Do you eat?
When I'm hungry.
What do you do when you're sad?
Cry.
Thirsty?
Drink.
You drink when you're thirsty.
That is so beautiful.
We were way the hell out in the Vayt sector.
Picked up a diplomatic mission out of nowhere.
Tiny ship. Unknown design.
Two passengers.
We scanned them. They checked out.
We sent the info to Starfleet and notified them of a first contact.
Then we beamed them on board.
The ambassador, Beautiful Flower...
and his young protégé.
Jana.
You have a constellation of three beauty marks on your right cheek.
Which is a good thing?
Which is artistry.
Noonien Soong, who made Data, thought of himself as an artist, but...
he never gave Data three beauty marks.
I also have a mole on my chest. And a crooked pinkie toe.
You are a wonder.
A... technological masterpiece and a work of art.
Am I a person?
We shake hands.
We sit down, have a bite to eat.
Few hours later, Alonzo Vandermeer kills them both in cold blood.
Takes them both out with two quick pops of a phaser.
Why?
Am I a person?
Not in theory.
To you, right now, looking at me, talking to me.
Do you consider me to be a person like you?
It was a black-flag directive, straight from Starfleet Security.
He told me they said if he disobeyed,
the ibn Majid would be destroyed with all hands.
What?
I went at him hard.
Pretty hard.
That's when he put the phaser in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Oh, Chris.
Raffi, then I covered it up.
Like he was supposed to do.
So it wouldn't all be for nothing.
So they wouldn't blow up the ibn Majid and everyone on it.
I beamed the bodies into space, deleted it from the transporter log.
Let the whole fleet know that Alonzo Vandermeer
had killed himself for no fucking reason at all.
Six months later, I was out of Starfleet.
They called it "post-traumatic dysphoria."
-But I was just-- -Broken.
I'm so sorry, babe.
When that girl beamed aboard today...
I mean, Raffi...
it's the same girl.
The other one sketched it while we were talking.
They were synths.
That's why they had to die.
Chris.
Who gave the order?
Commodore Oh ordered you to kill me too.
I would never give you the opportunity.
Now that I've met you,
I would never take it.
Never, ever again.
Okay?
I'm afraid I broke your gun.
Someone get me another weapon.
The lights are going out.
Are those Borg life signs?
This is not a protocol drill.
If you will not reach your evac station in the allotted time,
seek immediate shelter and employ all possible measures...
-Do they frighten you? -...to avoid detection.
I'd be a fool if they didn't.
Something far worse is coming, Centurion...
if I fail in my work.
We are Borg.
We are Borg. We are Borg. We are Borg.
-We are Borg. -Now.
We are Borg.
No!
No! No!
Well...
I'm done murdering people.
So, that's a good thing.
When we get to Deep Space 12, I'm gonna turn myself in.
Are you all right?
I'm sorry.
You all are the closest I've come in a long time...
maybe ever, to having a...
crew.
I'm sorry I had to fucking ruin it.
Should we get into it?
I'm sorry too.
Peppermint. French fries.
To me it looks kinda disgusting, but you love it, right?
How did you know?
We'll get there, honey.
Now listen.
200,000, 300,000 years ago,
somebody drags eight suns together.
They hang a planet in the middle.
And on this planet, they place a warning.
The Romulans call it the Admonition.
This warning says, "Don't do what we did.
We created synthetic life-forms, and"--
And they evolved.
And it did not go well... at all.
Meaning?
Apparently, these people believed there was a threshold of synthetic evolution.
A dividing line.
Like the Zefram Cochrane warp drive?
When you cross that line, somebody shows up.
Somebody really bad.
The Romulans, it seems, took this Admonition very seriously.
They created a group,
the Zhat Vash,
dedicated to finding
and terminating all synthetic life.
So, imagine 30, 40 years ago,
Doctor Noonien Soong starts turning out synthetic life
that's equal to human beings, superior in some ways.
The Romulans send in a mole,
a half-Romulan Vulcan named Oh.
She burrows into Starfleet,
rises through the ranks and becomes head of Security.
And all the while she has one mandate...
to put a stop to the Federation's research and development of synthetic life-forms.
To this end,
she decides to engineer a situation so terrifying
that the Federation's only response
will be to ban synths forever.
The Romulans were behind the attack on Mars.
Has a certain ring to it.
Am I right?
Carry on.
But the commodore's work wasn't done.
Nine years ago, a Starfleet vessel had first contact
with a pair of emissaries from a strange new world.
One called himself Beautiful Flower.
-The other one was-- -Jana.
How do I know that?
The same way I know you like to dip french fries in peppermint ice cream.
Jana and this Flower
came from the world that Bruce Maddox fled to
when he left Earth after the ban,
bound and determined to carry out his work.
And the Zhat Vash have been searching for this world ever since.
Which they have now found because of me.
Excuse me.
Soji, what are you doing?
Emmet, ayuda.
- Emmet! - I deactivated them. Don't worry.
I'm not going to hurt anybody. I just need to get back home.
You'll get your ship back, Rios, the minute we're there.
Kid, I understand why you're doing this, but it's not right.
-We wanna help you. You cannot just-- -How can you possibly understand?
Is someone trying to wipe out your family? Do you even have a family?
I do not.
Wh-- What is that? Is that some kind of subspace tunneling?
It's a map of the Borg transwarp conduit network.
At this speed, we're about nine hours from the nearest node.
I don't actually know how I know that.
I must have picked it up on the Cube while I was busy being Doctor Soji Asha.
The second I heard the truth about the ban, the Admonition,
and what happened to my brother and sister on the ibn Majid,
I suddenly seem to know a whole lot of things.
Do you know this?
It's a lullaby my mother used to sing to me.
She didn't like other people playing with her things either.
She's done it Maddox's way. She's done it my way.
Let's try doing it her way
and hope we get there in time to warn them.
Actually...
I don't know how to work this.
So, your plan is just fly into a transwarp conduit,
don't set up a structural integrity field, no chroniton field,
just jump right in, gravimetric shear be damned?
Sirena is my goddamn ship, hija.
Captain Rios, please take me home.
For Jana's sake.
I got you.
The fleet has the coordinates for the synthetic homeworld.
They're leaving now.
-Have all the Borg been jettisoned? -Yes, Colonel.
In an hour, we'll have the xBs mopped up and be ready to embark.
And is my ship ready for departure?
They are gone.
It is over. The Cube is ours again.
So...
are you gonna assimilate me now?
Annika still has work to do.
You know, I remember standing the night watch
as a young ensign on the bridge of the Reliant,
feeling I was the only one awake...
in all that emptiness,
all that silence.
I'd forgotten,
until...
just now...
how much I loved it.
I knew Alonzo Vandermeer slightly.
He was first officer to an Academy classmate of mine.
Captain Marta Batanides.
You knew her?
No, but... I felt like I did.
She was a legend to the old man, my old man...
Captain Vandermeer.
Hmm.
Did he know they were synthetic?
I have to believe that he did.
He must have thought that because of that...
he'd be able to live with it.
I didn't know him well, as I said, but...
I felt he was a good man.
One of the best that Starfleet had to offer.
He was.
I, um--
I hate that he died thinking it was really Starfleet that betrayed him,
betrayed itself.
But Starfleet did betray him.
We did betray ourselves,
long before Oh gave Vandermeer that order.
The ban itself was a betrayal.
Oh, the Zhat Vash, they set the trap.
But we could merely have sidestepped it.
Instead, we gave way to fear.
It took her all of five minutes to hack my ship, Picard.
And now maybe there's a whole planet of them?
Raffi said the Romulans call her The Destroyer.
What if they're right?
They may be right about what happened 200,000 years ago.
The past is written, but the future is left for us to write,
and we have powerful tools, Rios.
Openness, optimism
and the spirit of curiosity.
All they have is secrecy and fear.
And fear is the great destroyer, Rios, not--
We're there.