about to just start inventing picard episodes

star trek picard episode whatever “Electric Sheep”: Cris, Raffi, and the gang beam down to pick up supplies for malfunctioning holograms. Soji and Geordi conduct an experiment on lucid dreaming. (geordi’s here because i love him and the experiment they’re doing is ‘if soji puts enough parts of her brain in sleep mode can she or geordi talk to a remnant of her dad in there’ and the result is ‘yes and there are seventeen individual lines of dialogue that will have you bawling like a baby’. then they have to pilot la sirena out of a contested patch of space together because they accidentally let her drift while they were doing weird science and everybody else is planetside having wacky market haggling shenanigans and emmett & enoch are still not online. do they sit in The Correct Spots On The Bridge? brother, it’s the only reason the scene exists)

star trek picard episode whatever 2 electric boogaloo “Dinner and a Holonovel”: Raffi and Seven go on their first official date. Meanwhile, La Sirena receives a coded message from one of Raffi’s mysterious contacts. (in this one Raf and Sev get dressed up but they’re both sort of uncomfortable doing so and they try to have a date but neither of them are enjoying themselves trying to be normal, because Raf’s an old reprobate who’s definitely forgotten how to Have Fun With Others and Sev never learned because it wasn’t relevant to her interests. but then they wind up in some trouble(maybe they deliberately seek it out sort of unconsciously bc they’re bored) and it becomes a fun bar fight date that they really enjoy. everybody else is playing twenty questions trying to figure out this weirdly-encoded message for her bc she’s busy. they come back all bruised and grinning and the whole gang looks up at them with this half-decoded message and is like what kind of life do you lead).

star trek picard episode whatever 2 the sequel “Dr. and Mr. Smith”: Raffi’s contact has asked the crew for their help in a...discreet political matter. (it’s a reverse heist episode starring everyone’s two favorite sort-of-semi-retired-?-spies (if we are spies no we are not. yes we are. no <3). julian and raffi have a very good rapport and sev and garak don’t understand each other AT ALL. yes they are together in this one. no i dont think we need much backstory on when or how it happened i will leave that to the experts and their fucking youtube plays. keep up the good work. what are they reverse-stealing? idk yet it’s just a vehicle for character dynamics anyway).

star trek picard episode we cry a lot “The Daughters”: Soji confronts her legacy when an old friend of her fathers hails La Sirena, eager to repay a debt. (although to be honest, when is our sweet girl NOT confronting her legacy? that bitch is all legacy; she’s got legacy frankly oozing out of her positronic pores. this is partly a story about soji, but it takes a while to get there. first it’s the story of Sarge, who had an imaginary friend when she was six...

she can’t pinpoint exactly when she came up with him, and she doesn’t even remember what she named him - but she knows it happened sometime around the evacuations, and when they all moved back home and the world started growing again - lush and fast from the rich volcanic soil - she used to spend hours playing around with her birthday-gift radio set, ‘talking’ to her imaginary friend. of course, she never got actual replies, but as she aged out of the phase she retained an interest in radio and communications, and her parents indulged it and bought her more and better equipment, enrolled her in science programs, fed her curiosity. until one day as a young adult doing a school project on theoretical outer space transmissions, she arrived at a theory which (she later describes it as a CLICK, like something is settling into place in her brain) could account for the existence of extraterrestrial life, just out of reach. and perhaps, she posits in her presentation, the reason no aliens had yet contacted her world had little to do with them not being there and much to do with them choosing not to respond. the goal, she concluded, was to continue reaching out - to close the gap. she wrapped up the presentation with a nod to nostalgia. “And maybe someday, those friends will be imaginary no more.”

she wins an award for the project, and begins work in her chosen field that’s extremely rewarding, but it is still years before she reaches her second conclusion: the logical leap that if future alien contact was not only possible but likely, her imaginary friend might have been a real person after all. she brings this idea up with her mother one night over dinner, and her mother is somewhat alarmed - what do you mean you think you were talking to aliens, you couldn’t do that on a child’s transmitter kit, adults??? adult aliens? what are you saying they said to you? - but she can’t answer. she doesn’t have clear memories of that time, only an unshakeable conviction that the life she may have contacted is closer than anyone could possibly imagine. and so she starts a new project. she digs out the old childhood kit, fiddles with the dials, finds the frequency she used to tune it to. in her mind’s eye there’s the impression of a clear, frank voice, but no words. she tunes her own, more modern and complex instruments, to the same frequency, and keeps listening.

one day, she hears something. this time, she doesn’t talk first. the next few months are a whirlwind of information-gathering. there are people out there. whole societies. she pieces together the basics of what she’ll eventually learn is the prime directive; enough ships pass by the atmosphere of her world that she’s able to form a working conclusion as to why the come close but never hail. they know we’re down here, she thinks, they just think we’re not ready.

and maybe they don’t have the kind of boats that could get you that far into the sky. but she’s always been resourceful. she picks up a new frequency, and starts listening to starfleet. and after a few months of listening and planning, she starts packing. she takes the kiddie transmitter kit, she takes clothing designed for all-weather wilderness exposure, she takes the kind of emergency preserved food that people used to keep by the pallet in case of earthquake, and she takes a few other trinkets she can’t live without. and when the time is right, she hails. it might be a combination of luck or goodwill, but she manages to convince a passing freighter that she is the stranded comms officer of a downed private ship, the only survivor of the wreck hiding out on a pre-warp world. they beam her up and the first few weeks are very touch-and-go, but she manages to convince them she belongs up here, that the people who look like her are very far away and not just under their feet, darting around her green little world like a hill of bugs under the eyes of giant birds. she gets off at the nearest starbase, and she starts exploring.

she takes numerous vessels to numerous worlds, gathering information all the time. she starts calling herself Sarge, instead of Sarjenka, and it makes people think she’s a military type and nobody bothers her. she stops at a library planet for a month and researches everything she can about the major governing systems in the galaxy. without much to go on - no name, only a vague physical description (tall? pale? humanoid?) - it’s hard to determine exactly what kind of vessel the Friend would have been on, if indeed he existed. the yellow clothes, one of her few clear recollections, lead her to guess starfleet, but starfleet is a massive organization and so many of its vessels have come near her homeworld that it seems unlikely she’ll be able to narrow it down like that. so she tries a different tack, searching for the other two vague faces that she can bring to mind. one is a middle-aged woman, humanoid, but the search turns up nothing; the woman is a doctor who has retired from the organization and now works at a teaching hospital near vulcan. the other is a bald man with a deep voice, humanoid, and his record turns up an absolute deluge of information. she skips past most of it; she’s inpatient now, if anyone knows about the Friend he will, and so she checks his last known location. on board the private supply-class ship La Sirena, captained by ex-starfleet officer Cristobal Rios. Rios is tall, dark-haired, and humanoid, but absolutely nothing about him rings that little mental bell. she checks his last docking location. the ship visited a reclamation site briefly, and then disappears from the record.

but Sarge is nothing if not a searcher, so she adjusts her frequencies and tries again. it’s months before they’re in proximity to one another, months in which she’s taken the opportunity to secure her own vessel, a little rented, dented passenger bucket that’s probably worth more in repairs than the price she got it for. but she trades radio repairs for ship repairs at the port where she buys it, looks up its name (Avis) and finds it acceptable, and then she’s in the sky. she tools around exploring new bases and stations, and keeps the hail open. and one day, it’s answered. a human voice answers. “Avis, we read you. What can we do for you?” they go on-screen with each other, and she sees first the captain - the bearded guy - and then...him. the old man. he is an old man, the bald guy, and his eyebrows raise when he sees her come on the viewer.

“Permission to come on board?” she asks. “I have something which might belong to one of you.”

the old man looks wary for a moment, but then he turns to someone behind him, they exchange some quiet words, and he nods. “Permission granted.”

there’s a young woman waiting for her at the transport platform. shorter than her by a good half meter, humanoid. pale. “Dr. Soji Asha,” she says, “You look...”

and Sarge could swear she’s about to say ‘familiar.’

“Sarge,” she says, and the woman’s small hand grasps her long one in a firm shake, and then waits patiently while Sarge performs greeting, letting her fingers just-not-rest on the woman’s shoulders and arms. “I’m actually looking for an old friend of mine, and I thought you might have his whereabouts. Tall, pale, starfleet officer? Ops gold. I know that’s not much to go on, but if it helps, he would have once contacted and established a rapport with pre-warp Drema IV? Humanoid, but not human. He...” It’s weird. standing here, explaining herself to this quietly-held young woman, Sarge is able to articulate better than ever before her half-formed memories. “He told me once he was a machine.” and then, like another CLICK is settling, she has a name. At last. “Data.” I knew he’d had a name.

the woman’s face lights up and falls in such swift motion it is hard to tell which comes first - the recognition or the sorrow. but they’re both there, clear and present. “Dad died almost twenty years ago,” she says. “But if it helps, I have a positronic clone of his brain.”

Sarge starts laughing; she doesn’t mean to, but the way the woman - Soji - says it, so matter-of-fact, so frank...she stops herself before it’s rude, but Soji’s laughing too. “Sorry, I -”

“No, don’t - how do you - how did you know Dad? Come on, come with me -”

“What happened? I didn’t know him for long, I barely remembered him, but I knew he existed -”

“That’s a long story. Do you want to meet the crew?”

Soji reaches for her hand, and with a feeling of mechanisms interlocking as they properly should, she takes it. they start walking. “Oh.” She’s almost forgotten. “If...if he’s not around to take it back, then this might belong to you.” She reaches in her pocket and holds it out: a small, ceramic singing bird.)