On Elnor's Death and Raffi's Rage

The current crop of Star Trek series on Paramount+ frequently face heavy criticism by corners of Trek fandom for being inferior to previous incarnations, especially '90s shows The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Negative criticism focuses on different things, but the "writing" is often a large target. The writing is lazy, or it's bad, or it's full of bad characterization, or it has no larger meaning, or...or...or...You get the idea. To be sure, Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks have their writing challenges at different times. But as a frequent re-watcher of all Trek series, I can confidently say that people who act like those three series consist of over 150 episodes written under divine inspiration are wearing rose colored glasses. Suffice it to say, these generic old vs. new writing criticisms can often be unserious and unfair. Not surprisingly, with the second season of Picard underway, these debates are in full swing.

The following post will include spoilers for seasons one and two of Picard.

I found myself in a Twitter debate in the wake of episode 3 of the second season of Picard. It was a perfectly pleasant debate, primarily with another writer I enjoy interacting with. The debate started as a result of a post I made about Raffi's anger with Picard (played by Michelle Hurd and Patrick Stewart, respectively) in the wake of Elnor's death. I had asserted, in response to generic complaints about the scene's lazy writing, that I found the scene completely in keeping with Raffi's character. She was justified in her anger at Picard for his actions, and her tirade against him regarding Q was consistent with the idea of displaced anger in the wake of a traumatic experience. The debate meandered toward an agree to disagree conclusion (but not without a couple people chiming in to just blanketly say that all new Star Trek shows are poorly written--hardly helpful).

The sequence that served as fodder for all this discussion takes place in the teaser and first act of episode three, "Assimilation." Picard, Seven, Raffi, Elnor, Agnes, and Rios are onboard the La Sirena. They've just resisted a boarding party, killing all of them but not before Elnor is shot. La Sirena warps toward the sun, taking damage from pursuing ships along the way. The crew plugs the Borg queen into the ship's computer which allows them to travel through time back to 2024. Moments after they leave the temporal fissure La Sirena loses power and crashes on Earth near the deserted Chateau Picard. The Borg queen, who used all her energy to move the ship through time and who is essential to fixing the timeline, is sucking up the ship's energy to revive herself. Without power, the bio bed in La Sirena's poorly equipped sickbay cannot keep Elnor alive. The crew, Picard included, immediately sets about trying to disconnect the queen. When that seems to be taking too long, Rios draws his phaser, intent on destroying the queen. Picard instructs him not to. A moment later Elnor dies. In the aftermath of Elnor's death, as Picard begins talking about the need to press on with the mission to save time, Raffi explodes on him, blaming him for Elnor's death and the entire situation because of his relationship with Q.

The complaint about this scene seems to consist of three prongs:

1) Picard didn't actually make any choice or take any action that caused Elnor's death so the episode lets him off the hook, avoiding a feeling of guilt and the anger of his crew.

2) Picard has nothing to do with Q's behavior so Raffi getting angry with him lacks justification.

3) Raffi getting angry with Picard, justified or not, ruins her character by making her appear unstable and/or unprofessional.

The sequence of events that leads to Elnor's death in "Assimilation" is:

La Sirena arrives in 2024, loses power, and crashes.

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The crew discovers the Borg queen is draining power to revive herself.

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Raffi yells that the bio bed doesn't have power and Elnor will die without it.

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The crew attempts to disconnect the Borg queen from La Sirena.

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Rios decides to kill the queen to restore power and save Elnor.

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PICARD EXPRESSLY TELLS RIOS NOT TO KILL THE QUEEN BECAUSE THEY NEED HER HELP.

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Rios doesn't shoot the queen, and Elnor dies.

Picard did make a choice. He explicitly told Rios not to kill the queen, which seemed to be their fastest and best option for solving the power drain problem, after having learned that without the power she is draining Elnor will die. Picard placed the queen's mission value above Elnor's life. End of story.

What I gather that people did want is the serious version of the following:

CREW: Captain, if we do not disconnect the Borg queen, Elnor will die, and we can't take action without you telling us specifically what to do.

PICARD: As much as Elnor means to me, I am a paragon of Doing the Necessary Thing and must therefore sacrifice him on the alter of duty and the needs of the many. You now have permission to be mad at me while I suffer in silence.

The fact is the scene does exactly what people want it to without forcing an awkward binary choice into the dialogue. Picard has the information he needs to weigh his options, and he prioritizes the queen. The scene establishes, based on everyone else's dialogue and behavior, that Picard is the only one advocating for the queen. It's reasonable to assume that had Picard been absent for the exchange (unconscious, perhaps), the other characters would have attempted to save Elnor by sacrificing the queen.

For the sake of argument, though, let's imagine that such an obvious choice had been written into the dialogue, putting Picard on the spot to pick one over the other. The potential resulting character drama is the same either way (Picard's decision results in Elnor's death), so the only added value would be to attempt to induce in the audience tension over what Picard's choice will be. But this character is now in its ninth season of television (having been in four movies besides), so would Picard's decision really have been in doubt? His options are: Elnor dies OR time is changed and the galaxy is made an objectively worse place. There is no choice there. The only way to create any kind of second guessing tension would be to shoehorn in some kind of trapdoor: perhaps saving Elnor would require killing the queen but there's a small chance that she can be technobabbled back to life later (but probably not except maybe she can). That's the kind of scenario that actually does let Picard off the hook. And either way, neither this binary choice scenario nor what actually happened are likely to result in scenes of Picard expressing guilt. He's the captain, and it's long established that he's not going to do something like show doubt to his crew in the middle of a do-or-die mission.

The sequence of events in the episode that does lead up to Elnor dying is actually the superior option. It streamlines the situation, delivering all necessary information while the characters are taking action, and ultimately puts Picard on the spot in the same fashion. The episode doesn't let Picard off the hook in any way.

The other two prongs of the criticism involve Raffi's anger, whether it's justified, and what it says about her character. Obviously Raffi's anger at Picard's choices immediately preceding Elnor's death is justified; there's no way around Picard's culpability there. On the subject of Q, I think there are two things at work. One of them is Raffi's guilt by association tirade on Picard. The other is more complex.

What Raffi says about Picard and Q "jousting" and playing with people's lives could just as well be the writers speaking through her in an attempt to paint Q in a new light. Looking back on Q's appearances, no one really ever gets angry at him for the things he's done. The most grief Q ever got was in "Q-Less" when he's lost his powers and hasn't actually done anything bad; in that episode it was mostly characters venting frustration for past indignities. Setting that aside, the most upset Picard ever got with Q was in "Q-Who?" when he became quietly irritated after 18 people died when Q flung the Enterprise into the Borg's path. In "All Good Things..." Q attempted to wipe out all of humanity, and Picard never even raised his voice. The writers always let Q off the hook just enough to keep him more of a fun, intellectual, unpredictable antagonist rather than an actual villain. Given everything Q has done, though, is that really believable?

As for Raffi lumping Picard in with Q, let's return to the idea of displaced (or misplaced) anger because The Next Generation, with its aggressively Roddenberry message of a perfectible human, worked hard to convince its audience that humans in the 24th century are perpetually well-adjusted. Except they're incredibly not. Examples of 24th century Trek characters getting mad at the wrong people for things they didn't do: Picard at Robert in "Family", Troi at everyone in "The Loss", Wesley at everyone in "Journey's End", Sisko at Picard in "Emissary", O'Brien at everyone in "Hard Time", Torres at everything Klingon in all of Voyager.

When all is said and done, Raffi has real reason to be angry at Picard for Elnor's death. In that moment, it also makes sense that Raffi would include Picard as a target for additional anger over the situation Q created, especially since Q isn't present. As for the argument about this moment being a detriment to Raffi's character in some way...this is a person who was previously screwed over by Picard when he resigned, lost her family, retreated into substance abuse, tried to make amends with her son and fell hard into alcohol and drugs when he rejected her, and got Picard access to the Borg Artifact by backing an old friend into a corner using the threat (hopefully bluff) of starting a war with the Romulans. Thinking that Raffi isn't unstable, frankly, is admitting to not paying attention to rather consistent character development. In fact, if anything about Raffi in season two is hard to believe, it's that Raffi collected herself enough to get back into Starfleet.

Picard, like every Star Trek that preceded it, has its share of writing problems. Just in this season I can point to the botched Laris/Picard near romance that lacks weight despite the episode's insistence otherwise, the convenient and hard to believe reinstatement of the entire crew to even better positions, and the temporal logic of the entire time travel plot. But this moment simply isn't bad writing. People who dislike Raffi may end up liking her even less. People who want to see Picard rend garments out of excessive guilt over Elnor's death--well, that's unlikely to happen either way. As for people who think Picard needed to make a choice to cause Elnor's death--well, he did. If this story was not set in an episode of a series in a major franchise (and which is almost certainly not any viewer's first experience with Jean-Luc Picard) I might agree that there should have been an obvious binary choice with a moment of consideration. But it is. And the scene works very, very well.