Dr. Adam Soong (Brent Spiner) has his license and funding revoked. This leaves him in dire straits, for his research is primarily focused on finding a cure for a debilitating genetic condition that afflicts his daughter Kore (Isa Briones), a hikikomori who cannot go outside without risking her life. He's given help by someone he doesn't recognize: Q. However, the serum Q provides is temporary — enforcing his desire to have Soong make a Deal with the Devil with him. "Does the name 'Picard' mean anything to you?"
The Borg Queen hacks into local cellular telephone frequencies and lures a French policeman to the ship. She takes him prisoner and then calls to Jurati, who is asleep in Chateau Picard. Armed with a 20th-century shotgun, Jurati investigates the scene and ends the standoff the only way she can: by blowing away the Queen. Meanwhile, Seven modifies a tricorder to produce an EMP which stops the bus on which Rios is being carted away. Rios, grasping the situation intuitively, lures one of the ICE officers into a fight, briefing his fellow refugees to back him up; the prisoners are freed, and Jurati beams the three back to La Sirena.
Picard speaks with the Supervisor — who is not Laris but rather a separate individual named Tallinn (though she's still played by Orla Brady). She reveals that she's been sent here to supervise an astronaut who will crew the Shango through the Europa Mission: one Renée Picard (Penelope Mitchell), the young woman Q was observing at the end of the previous episode. Using purloined footage, they learn that the Europa Mission psychiatrist, with whom the brilliant but clinically depressed Renée takes regular sessions, is none other than Q (complete with bad Viennese accent), and is encouraging her to recuse herself from the mission... which, so far as Picard can tell, is the Point of Divergence between the Confederation timeline and the Prime timeline: her name is in the history banks because the Shango found microorganisms on the Jovian moon Io which she brought back to Earth for investigation, proving the existence of extra-terrestrial life and setting humanity on the path to The Federation and its Utopia.
Renée Picard is next to be seen in public at a gala for the Shango astronauts, and Picard outlines The Heist: Jurati will have to infiltrate solo and then hack into the gala's database and add everyone else's IDs, thereby allowing the rest of the team to observe Renée and convince her not to back out of the mission. Jurati is almost immediately captured... but it's All According to Plan, as they stash her in a room with server access. Besides, she's got a friend in there to help her: the Borg Queen, who transferred her consciousness to / partially assimilated Agnes before dying.
Tropes:
- Asshole Victim: The ICE agent who has been antagonizing Rios. When the bus gets disabled, Rios and a fellow prisoner knock him out in a fight.
- Brain Uploading: The Borg Queen uploads her consciousness into Jurati's head as she's dying, playing on Jurati's loneliness to make her let her guard down.
- Brought Down to Badass: Though Q has been rendered mortal and powerless, like all descended Q he still has knowledge that makes even 24th century humans look like cavemen by comparison. He is easily able to hack into Soong's system and engineer a temporary cure for his daughter.
- The Bus Came Back: Kinda. The Supervisors, to which Gary Seven and Isis belonged, finally return to on-screen Trek for the first time in over 50 years, although Gary and Isis themselves don't reappear.
- Call-Back:
- Picard mentions how Kirk's Enterprise encountered a Supervisor named Gary Seven.
- A famous ancestor of a Starfleet captain is once again instrumental to Earth's history. Previously, it was Janeway's ancestor, now it is Picard's.
- Call-Forward: Similar to the Soong family member in Star Trek: Enterprise, this Dr. Soong is interested in genetics.
- Canon Immigrant: Averted with the Supervisors, though it's a complicated example. While they had appeared during TOS, that was their sole appearance in canonical Trek for 50 years. The tie-in literature, by contrast, had fleshed them out considerably (most notably Howard Weinstein's comics and Greg Cox's Eugenics Wars trilogy) and had called the organization the Aegis. None of that world-building is canonized with their return.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: The Queen uses the fact that only she can get everyone home to convince Jurati to take on her consciousness. This is after Jurati had already fatally wounded her.
- Cliffhanger: Although Jurati being captured is part of the plan, the Borg Queen showing up in her consciousness is not.
- Continuity Nod: The male doctor at Soong's hearing is named Vasiliy Rozhenko. Rozhenko is the name of Worf's adoptive family.
- Creator Cameo: Lea Thompson, who directed the previous two episodes of the show, appears on the other side of the camera as the doctor in charge of the board which interrogates Soong.
- Deal with the Devil: Dr. Soong is offered a cure for his daughter's illness by Q, but it is quickly shown to be temporary. The full cure is contingent upon Soong helping him with Renée Picard.
- Delicate and Sickly: Kore Soong suffers from a genetic condition that not only means she can't breathe so much as a speck of dust without wrecking her lungs, but UV light turns her blood to acid. Despite being a geneticist himself, her father has been unable to devise a cure for her; Q is able to manipulate him to do his bidding by offering him one.
- EMP: Seven rigs the tricorder to emit a short-range EMP, disabling the bus that is transporting Rios.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Shortly before Renée's identity is revealed, a French flag can be seen on her suit as she exits the simulator.
- Foreshadowing: The set of drones that "sunblock" for Kore in the backyard when she takes the cure match the look of the Confederation Earth's planetary shield, and have the same purpose — shielding her from the UV radiation of the sun.
- Future Imperfect: Picard's knowledge of the Europa mission is at best spotty, since historical details from the 21st century are lacking. Nuclear war tends to muck up record-keeping, after all.
- Grand Theft Me: The Borg Queen threatening to do this to the French police officer unless Jurati is willing to offer herself in exchange; the Queen would prefer to join with Jurati, but the officer would do as a healthy and mobile host in a pinch. Jurati shoots the Queen to free him, but the Queen talks Jurati into getting close enough for the Queen to transfer herself into Jurati's head, albeit with Jurati still in control.
- I Minored in Tropology: Jurati states that she took "intro to antique coding" classes during school and now finally gets a chance to use it.
- Idiot Ball:
- Even as short-staffed as they are, apparently no one thought it would be a bad idea to leave the active Borg Queen unattended on their starship.
- The security guards are shown to be highly competent and quickly detect Jurati as an impostor. Then, instead of kicking her out, handing her to the police or locking her in an empty room, they take her into a security monitoring room which also happens to have the air-gapped identity servers in it.
- Inexplicably Identical Individuals: There is no explanation given for why Tallinn and Laris look alike.
- Lampshade Hanging: Picard's comment on records of the century before First Contact being spotty and chaotic is validated in-canon by a lengthy nuclear war, but also serves as a meta-joke on Star Trek's...casual relationship with a consistent history of the 20th and 21st centuries.
- Magic Antidote: After Dr. Adam Soong injects his daughter with the serum Q provided, it instantly gives her perfect health (for a few minutes), even though it shouldn't even have had time to spread through her system yet.
- Ms. Fanservice: Jurati wears a red dress to the gala that reveals a fair amount of cleavage.
- Not Helping Your Case: Picard and Tallinn beam onto the ship, with Picard assuring her that his crew are more than capable. Then they see said crew dragging a nearly-dead cop out of the ship. Picard assures her there's a good explanation for that, and that the cop probably isn't dead.
- Oh, Crap!: The French cop understandably freaks out when he sees the Borg Queen aboard La Sirena.
- Papa Wolf: Soong makes it clear he will do anything to fix Kore's condition.
- Precision F-Strike:
- The French cop says "Merde" when he stumbles into La Sirena.
- Dr. Soong gets the first one of the season when describing how he's constantly being approached by crackpots, including "basement-dwelling Nazis and rich heiresses who want me to clone their fucking cats."
- Proscenium Reveal: Renée Picard is in space attempting to avoid some debris from a damaged satellite. Things go wrong, the debris makes impact, then the simulation ends. The Europa mission is still a couple days away, after all.
- Rock Beats Laser: The Borg Queen is felled by an antique shotgun, though she survives long enough to upload her mind into Jurati's.
- Save This Person, Save the World:
- Renée Picard being s crewmember of the Shango appears to be the point of divergence between the Prime Timeline and the Confederation one. Picard himself does not know the details, handwaving by pointing out the lack of surviving historical documentation of the century before first contact.
- Q's interaction with Adam Soong hints that he might be the point of divergence, while Renée is just a Red Herring. In either event, Q is steering the two toward a meeting and manipulating both.
- Shout-Out: Jurati's fake id states her name as "Holly Eva Visser". There are several things this might be referencing including the "Section 47" play by email RPG Star Trek site that began in early 2000 which was operated by Ruud Visser, "Marian Visser" in the Theurgy collaborative fanfiction series, "Yolandi Visser" in the post-Nemesis-set "Road Not Taken" fanwork, and outside Trek, Eva and Visser One: a pair of characters with a host/parasite relationship that form an antagonist character in the Animorphs books.
- Surrounded by Idiots: Soong tells Kore that people are idiots after his funding is revoked.
- Swiss-Cheese Security:
- The Borg Queen is able to cycle through voices until she finds one authorized by the computer, even though none of those individuals are present on the ship and multiple invalid attempts at the same command have been made in close succession, starting with the Queen using her own voice. Brute force protections on modern computer systems can cause a temporary lockout in such cases and notify the administrator of the attempted intrusion.
- Averted with the Astronaut Gala, which has a significant presence of armed guards, security checkpoints, facial recognition, and RFID personalised invitations hooked into an air-gapped credential database that's secure enough that the Supervisor and Picard's crew can only get one person inside using their future tech, and require Jurati to hack it physically to add more people. The camera operator guard is good enough to pick up on Jurati talking to herself, has her arrested immediately, and they handcuff her. When you compare it to all the times that Starfleet has had their operations and starships infiltrated or taken over, this event in 2024 looks better protected than any other location the franchise as a whole has shown.
- The security team does still fall into Theory of Narrative Causality by bringing Jurati into the main security room with the identity servers. Instead of handing her off to the police for trespassing & hacking an event held by an agency of the United States Federal Government, or simply ejecting her from the Gala and deleting her ID code.
- Title Drop: The eponymous Frank Sinatra song is played at the gala by a jazz band.
- Uncanny Family Resemblance: Par for the course with the Soong family, another Dr. Soong appears who also happens to look identical to his descendants Arik, Noonien, and Altan Soong, as well as Data, Lore and B-4. This Dr. Soong has a daughter, played by Isa Briones, who also played Data's daughters Dahj, Sutra and Soji in Season 1.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Picard's infiltrate-the-gala plan is only shown to the audience up to the point where Jurati gets into the event to infiltrate security, which is also the point the episode ends. We don't get told what his plan to actually protect or convince Renée is.
- Voice Changeling: The Queen rotates through the voices of the crew, trying to access the ship's systems, eventually settling on Rios.
- Wham Line: The Europa mission astronaut that Q was following turns out to be Renée Picard.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: The Queen calls the local police and pretends to be in danger so she can lure an officer to her, whom she then uses as a hostage to extort Jurati. Jurati shoots her, but the Queen is able to transfer her mind to Jurati to survive.
