Stardate not given: A rising AI specialist, Dahj, is celebrating her acceptance as a research fellow at the Daystrom Institute on Earth, when a group of armed and armored men beam into her apartment. Her boyfriend is murdered, and somehow she survives the encounter, calling on self-defense skills in which she has never trained, overcoming all of her opponents. She has a momentary vision of a man’s face before she flees, and sets out to find him.
The man whose face she sees is hardly an unknown: retired Admiral Jean-Luc Picard is being interviewed on the anniversary of his attempt to evacuate the population of Romulus before its sun went supernova. When a surprise attack on Mars by rogue synthetic life forms caused Starfleet to abandon the massive rescue attempt, Picard felt that the Federation was no longer living up to its ideals and resigned his Starfleet commission in protest. In the years since, he has retreated to his family’s vineyards in France, a quiet existence that is disturbed a little by an intrusive interviewer, and disturbed more when Dahj shows up unannounced. She has never met Picard, but somehow knows he will be able to help her. When hints begin to point toward Dahj being a sentient synthetic life form, and possibly even a true descendant of Data, Picard grows more protective of her. But a second attempt on Dahj’s life proves to be deadlier than the first – she is destroyed before Picard’s eyes, but not before her assassins are unmasked as Romulans.
Picard goes to visit Dr. Agnes Jurati, one of the Federation’s foremost experts on synthetic life forms and a protege of cyberneticist Bruce Maddox, even though her research is now entirely theoretical since actual development of synthetics has been banned in the wake of the Mars attack. Jurati has B4 – the last known Soong-type android – in storage, disassembled – and theorizes that someone like Dahj would have to have been created by, or from, Data…and she also reveals that synthetics were previously produced in twinned pairs. Picard decides he must find Dajh’s twin before she suffers the same fate.
teleplay by Akiva Goldsman and James Duff
story by Akiva Goldsman & Michael Chabon
and Kirsten Beyer & Alex Kurtzman and James Duff
directed by Hanelle L. Culpepper
music by Jeff RussoCast: Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard), Alison Pill (Dr. Agnes Jurati), Isa Briones (Dahj / Dr. Soji Asha), Harry Treadaway (Narek), Brent Spiner (Lt. Commander Data), Orla Brady (Laris), David Carzell (Dahj’s Boyfriend), Merrin Dungey (Interviewer), Jamie McShane (Zhaban), Sumalee Montano (Dahj’s Mother), Maya Eshet (Index), Douglas Tait (Tellarite)
Notes: Picking up plot threads from both Star Trek: Nemesis (the death of Data) and the 2009 J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie (the supernova destruction of Romulus, which drove Nero to go back in time to change events), the first episode of Star Trek: Picard also references episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, including The Measure Of A Man (the only prior appearance of Bruce Maddox) and The Offspring (Data’s first attempt to create a daughter). In Picard’s imagined encounters with Data, the android wears both an original Next Generation uniform and the somewhat less colorful uniforms worn in Nemesis. The synthetics’ attack on Mars was shown in the Short Treks episode Children Of Mars.
LogBook entry by Earl Green