Stardust City Rag

The middle of the road for this freshman outing of the latest iteration of Star Trek and we kick off with a torture scene that’s set tongues wagging across the internet over the last few days until we wrote this review. On one hand the overt nature of the graphic content has only been set in precedence a handful of times before, but on the other it’s not unique and we’ve had significant confronting scenes previously.

From our point of view, the scene was necessary to show the brutal nature of Bjayzl and what Seven will do to protect others – especially since she failed her child Icheb.

Elsewhere in the episode, after a few episodes of talking about it, we discover Freecloud – complete with the 24th century version of internet pop ads. We catch nods to past Trek, in working for Mr Quark (and Quark’s Bar) as well as Mr Mot’s Hair Emporium… another nice touch is the return to a random beat for a dive bar, instead of 20th century music.

It was absolutely fantastic to have Seven swing by for a jaunt with Picard and company, Jeri Ryan literally picks up where we left off with the character in Endgame and adds some new layers. As for Raffi, Michelle Hurd also adds layers to her character – showing someone who was an addict and at the lowest point of her life, and while reconciling with her son we learn that there is a Conclave of Eight, the attack on Mars isn’t what it appears and something is definitely fishy with all of this.

We learn that Seven seemingly returned to using her human name for a time, while she was “close and personal” with Bjayzl and that our former Borg drone told her about Icheb which put the bounty on him. In a touching moment, as Seven departs, they confide in each other that they haven’t reclaimed all of their humanity… a defining moment of pure clarity for these characters we’ve known for so long.

I’m going to leave commentary on the final scene with Agnes and Bruce for the next episode.