IR TV Review: STAR TREK - PICARD - EPISODE 5 (“Fly Me To The Moon”) [Paramount+-S2]
The devil is in the details and what "Star Trek: Picard" has been doing especially as it gets into its 5th episode of the 2nd season: "Fly Me To The Moon", is that it leaves enough crumbs to make many of the die hard Trekkers salivate. Granted this builds up the canon so much but it at times takes away from the character moments because it is trying to connect the dots. Again this is the beauty of what Alison Pill's character Dr. Jurati brings as a wild card. Most of the other characters, even the emotionally altered Seven, operate in a certain lane of reference. That is what makes the "Watcher" a neat side note in terms of what she represents. The episodes though lack a sense of wonder though. Much of the current "Star Trek" is obsessed with telling good stories...and they are tightly constructed. But mostly there is no time to breathe. Everything needs to have a reason. One nice character moment a couple of episodes ago which was not connected to anything was Seven joking with a security guard for her and Raffi to sneak on a roof.
After that moment, Seven had a beat of self reflection and it made that episode (while the resulting car chase added little real texture beyond moving the story along). This is a different era of Trek so that needs to be taken into account. There are small harks back to last season and strings that connect the dots, especially in one subplot which brings two actors together, using wordplay that one understands but it barely does. It would have been nice to just have one tongue-in-cheek where one of them acknowledges what we are seeing. The episode is directed by Jonathan Frakes ("Riker") so he undeniably knows what an audience wants to see in "Trek" but interestingly Lea Thompson in directing earlier episodes has a slightly lighter touch while playing to one now lauded scene that functioned as a drum tap of sorts. The story of Episode 5 makes good sense and follows an intrinsic pattern without still letting in why Q is doing this though its seems he is having difficulty of some sort. B
By Tim Wassberg
