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porgthespacepenguin · 2 years

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Thoughts about episode 2.9 (1/2)

Just finished the episode. I’m still shaking. What a gut punch.

Anyway, by now you know me: first post will focus on Qcard, and let me tell you, there’s a lot to talk about. Next post will cover the rest (hopefully).

I must warn you in advance, however. This episode killed me just to watch me die, so don’t expect my usual level of semi-coherence. This post consists mostly of me screaming into the void about the episode, with occasional flashes of analysis sprinkled throughout.

If that’s not scared you off: bravo, and onwards!

(Major spoilers under the cut: you’ve been warned.)

[Trigger warning: this post contains mention of suicide, including an image you may find disturbing.

The image, and the main discussion, are in the next section, so you can skip ahead to “End trigger warning” if needed.]

Where to even start? Oh, yeah: to borrow words from a great man,

"Boy, do I hate being right all the time."

I know, I know. So I’m definitely not right all the time. But I did nail a few of the twists, so let me enjoy my agony success in peace, all right?

[Start trigger warning]

* * * * *

Come find me

Wish I had been wrong

In a previous meta, I had called it: Jean-Luc had opened the door once before, but it resulted in his mother’s death. Hello, childhood trauma.

So, turns out I was right. Wish I wasn’t, though. Sorry about that.

Look, I’ll be honest: this topic is too personal, too triggering for me to dwell too long on it. So this section will be short.

Suffice to say, Maman hung herself in the winter garden, and Jean-Luc has been blaming himself for it since he was a child,

"I let her out, you see. If only I had left that door closed, she might have become an old woman."

Of course, it wasn’t his fault. Maman was sick, and in her sickness had made Baby!Picard a parentified child (which, by the way, explains a lot about him as an adult).

So when Maman begged him to help, he did what she asked. Of course he did.

He opened the door, and it cost him everything:

"I loved her. Desperately."

It wasn’t anybody’s faut, really. But it still broke him. And so Picard locked the door again, shattered the painted windows, and closed his heart to love.

Darker still

By the way, if you thought the foreshadowing surrounding Q’s fate was loud in 2.7 and 2.8... it’s deafening now.

Maman and Q have been mirrors of each other since 2.7, both explicitely through the sun symbolism they share, and implicitely, like in the conversation with Renee in episode 2.6.

And now we learn that, lost in the darkness, Maman has killed herself. In her death, she’s even shown to be wearing a white robe, much like Q was in Tapestry when Picard died:

As always: this isn’t a coincidence. There are no coincidences in big productions like Star Trek Picard. This is a choice.

And so Q’s fate grows ever darker.

(Also ... isn’t that line from earlier -- “I loved her. Desperately.” -- rather loud? If they bring it back in some form next episode, we’re in trouble, folks.)

* * * * *

[End trigger warning]

The key, at last

Having unlocked the memory of what truly happened to his mother, Picard can now finally start to come to terms with it, to heal from it, and move on.

Although, there’s still a significant element of mystery left. As Picard finally sees the dungeon from his dreams, he realizes that the wood of the platform is intact: his foot didn’t get caught in it like he had imagined.

But then what happened? How did he get stuck?

EDIT: @theboardwalkbody pointed out that they’re in the past, so nothing has happened yet. Doh! Wonder why the show made such a fuss about it then.

Did he turn around and try to escape, leaving her mother to her sickness? Did his mother, although lost in darkness, prevent him from following her after all?

And yet. I can’t help but notice that in Jean-Luc’s dream, he stepped into the light when he got stuck.

Is it possible Q intervened, saving his life yet again?

(Which would bring the current tally to 6 saves, and a nice round 7 if he does it again next week...)

Regardless, whatever or whoever held him back did save his life. And we’ll most likely find out next week, since, you know. Only one episode left!

Anyway, moving on.

Picard now holds the key to his own heart. Literally, even:

Q has given him this key, like he gave Kore the cure in episode 2.8. And now, also like her, all Jean-Luc has to do is choose to open the door and step through it.

Yet it may be too late to stop the sun from setting. Forever.

A lonely star

Before we continue, it’s imperative that you read @celestialwarzone‘s Q-sun meta if you haven’t already.

It establishes how and why Q is symbolized as the sun, and that information is critically important to understanding the importance of the next section.

With that out of the way, let’s jump in.

Episode 2.7 essentially threw the Q-sun model at our faces with the subtlety of a brick. Episode 2.8, meanwhile, drove the point home like a knife with Q’s dying star monologue.

Well, friends, episode 2.9 looked at them both and went, “hold my glass of Chateau Picard”.

The dark before the dawn

I predicted that this episode would be the despair event horizon, and in a way it was. But I was a tad pessimistic, as it turns out. This is Star Trek, after all, as @celestialwarzone often reminds me: a utopia.

So, overall everything went badly, but it could have been so much worse.

Regardless, this episode functions essentially as team Picard’s dark night of the soul.

Literally.

The sun goes out, the storm rises, and everything falls apart. They are separated, outnumbered, outgunned and trapped like rats in the dark chateau. Though they are fighting hard for their lives, and the future, all hope seems lost. The night is winning.

And then the sun rises.

Right away, their luck starts to turn: Agnes wakes up and forges a new destiny for the Borg, but not before healing Seven, Picard finally faces his mother’s true fate, Rios manages to beam back just in tie to save them...

The light symbolism in this episode, I swear!

Incidentally, there are plenty of other darkness and light references scattered throughout the episode:

The green lasers of the soldiers;

“Wars have been fought on lovely days”;

Picard, having a flashback from a flash of light;

"Why don’t we continue somewhere less bright", right before the game takes a turn for the worse;

The darkness of the chateau and dungeon;

"You're my light Jean-Luc”;

Picard and Estonia lighting a torch in the dungeon;

Baby!Picard stepping into a light patch;

Elnor coming back as a hologram to save them;

The red light when the key flies out;

Maman killing herself at night;

The gentle sunrise bathing Seven as she accepts herself;

Agnes literally flying into the same sunrise;

And others I’m most likely forgetting right now.

Oh, and, by the way: Maman’s fairy tale winter garden? Is actually a solarium.

A literal place of sunlight. And the exit from the dungeon.

(*pterodactyl screeches*)

The star gazer

Once Maman��s dark episode starts, she drags Baby!Picard down with her into the dungeon, where the sunlight cannot reach them.

Baby!Picard just wants them to go back up, and study the stars together, but Maman is already too far gone,

"Stars... Did you know that space is so vast, so infinite, it takes billions of years for that tiny pinprick of light to make that lonely journey from its star to our eyes?"

So. This... this is Q. A lonely star, whose light and love took billions of years to reach Picard across time and space.

Picard, who’s been living in the stars his entire adult life, looking up at them as a child and starting his career as a captain on a ship called the USS Stargazer.

Picard, the literal star gazer.

Let’s make a detour back to 2.1 for a second. When Picard blows up the new Stargazer, there’s a bright flash of white light, and then a shot of a starry sky which eventually resolves into...

... Picard’s eye.

Yeah. There are no coincidences here. The subtext is almost text at this point.

A lonely star

Maman continues her desperately sad speech,

“The brilliance you see in the night sky, Jean-Luc, that exquisite light, it’s just an echo, really...”

... like me.”

Oh, but it gets worse. Infinitely worse. Exquisitely worse:

"When you remember me, promise me you'll ignore the coldness of a dying star, and remember instead her light and the infinite love she so very much had for you."

Make no mistake, this is Q. We’re not even mirroring here, we’re channeling.

The coldness of a dying star? Q, the sun, disappearing into nothing, colder and harder than we have ever seen him... Begging Picard to instead remember the warm, infinite love he holds for him.

Q, like Maman, is going to die. He has essentially doomed himself for Picard. But where Maman killed herself in spite of her love for Jean-Luc, Q is killing himself out of love for him.

It makes all the difference in the world, but I fear it may be a very cold consolation for Jean-Luc.

(I’m speechless honestly. This episode is killing me. If you need me, I’ll be huddled in the corner. Sobbing.)

The Q-bayashi Maru

I had planned to include this section as part of my retrospective on 2.1, but considering all the foreshadowing, we might as well get it over with.

So, remember how @celestialwarzone and I theorize that Picard will likely have to make a terrible choice: save the timeline and kill Q, or save Q and kill the timeline?

In other words, a no-win scenario. Remind you of anything?

That’s right, the Kobayashi Maru.

If you’ve been living under a rock, here’s the basic outline of the test: a civilian ship, the Kobayashi Maru, is in danger. The cadet can attempt to rescue them, or leave them to die. But the test is rigged, and they’ll die regardless.

(Say, friends, did you know that Starfleet’s most infamous training exercise was first depicted in Wrath of Khan?

The movie in which Spock dies, sacrificing himself for Kirk and the crew?

The movie which was then followed by Search for Spock? In which Kirk and his crew mutiny, steal a ship and go save Spock?

Well, did you?)

Anyway, I’ve long thought that this impossible choice would be a direct call back to the Kobayashi Maru every Starfleet captain has to face as a cadet.

And would you look at this scene from episode 2.1:

(Oh, you are, Jean-Luc. You certainly are. And mark my words, you’ll rue the day you ever even thought about it.)

Anyway, if the above wasn’t clear enough, at the end of episode 2.9 Picard tells us outright,

"I refuse to accept an outcome that has not yet occured."

Sounds like "I don't believe in the no-win scenario" to me, but what do I know. I just write metas and screech incoherently into the void.

Don’t leave me behind

There’s more Q-bayashi Maru foreshadowing scattered throughout the episode, but one moment stands out in particular, and no surprise, it’s a Trios scene.

As we established in 2.8, Teresa and Rios are Qcard mirrors. This trend absolutely continues in 2.9, and it’s beautiful.

(Also excruciating. But mostly beautiful.)

As the Borg board the ship, Q-Rios regrets putting Teresa-Picard in danger:

(Oh look, another AGT reference. I’ve lost count by now.)

They escape to the chateau, and Rios is wounded. Picard orders him to go with Teresa, then prevents him from coming back, for his own safety.

So. We have a wounded Q-Rios, locked out and powerless, unable to help Picard. And things abruptly go from bad to worse.

(Need I remind you that the sun is out, and they’re all in darkness? We’ll come back to that.)

Teresa takes care of Rios (take note Picard!), and objects strongly when he decides to go back, dropping this little gem of a line,

”I’d like to rewire your brain.”

Fair enough, Teresa-Picard, fair enough. Lord knows Q has been doing it to Picard all season, so. His turn.

Teresa-Picard then drops another bit of Q-bayashi Maru foreshadowing:

"Knowing that win or lose, I'll have to let them go."

Ostensibly, she’s talking about the tricorder here, but that’s not at all what she means. She’s talking about her miracle: Q-Rios. She doesn’t want to lose him. But she has no choice in the matter.

And still the countdown climbs up, as implacable as fate in a greek tragedy.

Teresa is getting desperate,

“What if I don't want you to go? What if I want to see your face again, or something crazy like that?“

And Q-Rios tells her the truth: he’s thought about it, and he wants nothing more than to stay. But there’s no other way,

"This isn't my timeline. The future is yours (...). I'm just trying to protect it."

If you’ve read my time meta, you know that I speculate that Q may not be able to join the new timeline at all. So that’s not ominous or anything...

Regardless, Teresa-Picard isn’t convinced. She doesn’t believe in no-win scenarios either:

"What if your future is here and it was always supposed to be?"

What she’s really saying, of course, is: what if your future is with me?

And then Rios kisses her.

(Damned if I can’t picture Picard saying the exact same thing, and Q silencing him with a kiss, hating what’s coming but knowing he can’t change it.)

Q-Rios almost manages to tell her that he loves her, but is interrupted again as the transporter activates, and he disappears in front of her eyes.

He reappears right where he’s needed, placing himself squarely between Picard and danger -- nearly getting killed for his troubles.

How delightfully Q-like of him.

The search for Q

Speaking of which...

If you’re at all familiar with my posts, you know that @celestialwarzone and I have long thought that season 2 may end with Q’s death, leading us into a Search of Spock scenario in season 3.

(We’re entering galaxy brain territory, folks. Hold on to your seats.)

The wound

His mother’s death is Jean-Luc’s original trauma, a trauma he can’t get over,

"This moment I am so powerless to reverse."

Leaving aside the guilt of a parentified child unable to save their sick parent, loving and losing his mother in such a tragic fashion nearly broke Jean-Luc.

Another loss of this magnitude would have destroyed him completely. And so he protected himself, walled off his mechnical heart from love. To survive.

As Estonia points out,

“Love can be a source of great grief and immense pain. Of tremendous guilt.”

No wonder he’s been running from Q’s love.

But fear hasn’t held back Q. And however much love may hurt us, shackle us...

“... it's a gift."

For all these years, Q’s love has been a gift to Jean-Luc, whether he was able to accept it or not.

And for a very long time, he wasn’t. But now, as Jean-Luc embraces his feelings once more, he may well find himself opening up and facing another such soul-destroying moment when Q dies.

Because if Q and Maman are mirrors -- the show certainly seems insistent about it -- then their fates are likely to be similar to a degree: both of them lonely suns, both of them loving Jean-Luc infinitely...

Both of them eventually killing themselves.

And so Picard has kept himself away from Q, not letting himself know him, because to know him would be to love him.

And therefore to lose him.

The prince wins

When Baby!Picard wins the game of hide-and-seek, finding his mother sitting despondently in the dark, she says:

Just like in Maman’s story, the prince wins the game, and the Sorcerer dies. Picard will figure out the escape and save the timeline, but in all likelihood, it will be at the cost of Q’s life.

This time is different

(Jean-Luc’s subconscious is certainly worried about the idea, and who can blame him?)

So, is Jean-Luc doomed to love again, and have his heart broken a second time? Maybe. But only temporarily.

Ultimately, Q is not Maman. And her fate need not be his.

Jean-Luc isn’t a child anymore, powerless and small: he is an adult, a Starfleet admiral, tempered by time and loss.

He could not prevent his mother’s death, but he will undo Q’s dark fate,

“In those moments, tragic endings might rewind into joyful beginnings. Moments of loss into those of gains."

From death will come rebirth, from despair happiness, and from loss...

Love.

After closing such a terrible chapter of his life, Jean-Luc will be able to move on, freed, and take his first steps toward his true final frontier: ascension.

Exploring and travelling the stars, with Q at his side, for...

(It would be the perfect ending for both Jean-Luc and Q, now, wouldn’t it?)

Next, on Porg the space penguin:

So, one post down, one to go (or perhaps two). Next up:

All hail Queen Agnes

Integrating the self

More Raffi and Picard mirroring

New time shenanigans?

And maybe more...

As always, I hope you enjoyed, and I want to thank you for reading. ❤️

#star trek #star trek spoilers #qcard #star trek picard #star trek picard spoilers #star trek theories #star trek speculation #star trek: picard #star trek picard season 2 #season 2 episode 9 #porg has qcard thoughts #q of the continuum #star trek q #jean luc picard #tw: suicide

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mushroom-for-art · 3 months

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Thing I did a while ago and forgot to post silly me, presenting Vector across the like spectrum of mew to two, rambles under read more

So Little Blue is the mew that Vector started out as originally, in honesty she likely would've gotten quite fluffy into adulthood also sporting the iconic ear fluffs however I forgot this until it was all done/it's a representation of her unchanged from her original rebirth state as she was probably a smooth furred little mitten who would've grown into her fur eventually, not much to say slightly bigger than average shiny baby

Now what if somebody saved Little Blue before her mind and body was fully pushed and contorted and experimented on until she entered into her Vector state? Vector Glimmer represents that possibility, she is still altered having some human dna in her and her own extra dna is locked and altered in particular ways but she's not near enough a mewtwo she's still a mewish creature. This version came to mind when talking to @mewtwoevolution wherein Nine showed up to protect the poor mew from experimentation taking the trembling mitten who's body was morphing out of her control and took care of her, her name coming from the other definition of Vector as Nine had found her with direction and magnitude and then she showed growth to match while also getting their last name becoming Nine and Glims weird little daughter it's very wholesome, side ref to show that despite being mostly mew she is still a bit altered/abnormal

Vector is well Vector, her canon interation the feral girl herself changed forever by cruel experimentations pushing her biology as she harbors a disease developed in her body from so many tests and exposures her jelly like sections used to feed and nourish the pathogens that do not affect her.

Subject V, a Vector that they'd kept contained and pushed further into the mewtwo change or probably more likely from this point she is a clone made from Little Blue that was also experimented on her body still mixed with diseases she still adapts a jelly section for dealing with it all but not a full mewtwo yet but increadly close! She was likely the only one to survive the tests her batch was put through hence being so late in the alphabet they perfected whatever they were doing with her.

Finally the full mewtwo variant Subject - 273, absolutely a clone from Little Blue don't look at how big of a number that is or think about how many they made, did they all fail did they get sold to buying customers or sent to other labs for more experiments? We don't know... Her number is actually an incredibly obscure reference to the character of mine that she is based off of, it makes me happy.

Subject V and Subject - 273 do both have 3 fingers like classic mewtwo I was just struggling to draw them so hidden hands go brr. Subject V likely has two second necks still but they are significantly more fused together and cannot move unlike Vectors meanwhile Subject - 273 likely has a singular neck with a ridge line implying it has started to split but never full did

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