#Dahj and soji

[fractalcloning]

At some point during his calm account of current events, Dahj's posture shifted unconsciously from obstinate to afraid--arms crossed defiantly over her chest became a way to surreptitiously hold onto herself. Suspicious glowering became more worry than anger. Despite her insistence that she be allowed to go with Picard, that she be on hand to defend him, Dahj was terrified. To herself, she could admit wanting to trail along after him, because he seemed to know what he was doing, seemed stable and kind--but she really, really didn't want to fight anyone, death squad cultists or otherwise. Still--she was furious at being denied and was ready to let him know all about that when he gave her assurances about Picard's safety. They were sending three people down with him? Wait--

"Wait, you aren't going with him?" Dahj asked, her fury wholly undercut by surprise and confusion. "Aren't you like…I don't know…friends?"

From the way Picard had waxed nostalgic about him, it sounded like they were almost family. The old Admiral had pledged himself to her, come hell or high water, based on nothing else but his guess that they were related. The idea that Data would let Picard go into--what did the doctor call it? A den of iniquity? Without accompanying him--? Dahj couldn't quite wrap her head around that.

Then again, if his invitation to play games while they waited was any indication, his priority must have been making sure she didn't pull anything while Picard was away. The suspicion stung, however implied, but it made a sort of pragmatic sense to Dahj. He didn't know her. Why would he leave her on his ship unaccompanied?

Dahj was silent as she considered him but, weirdly, his caution made him more trustworthy and not less. She wouldn't trust herself either. After a long moment Dahj heaved a frustrated sigh and uncrossed her arms. She held up her hands up in a casual sort of mock surrender before dropping them to her sides.

"Fine," Dahj agreed and it pained her dearly to make that concession. There was a beat of silence after she capitulated and, because she couldn't abide people being incorrect, she had to add:

"I'm not--" She drew a deep breath and let it out through her nose, tried to let it carry the rest of her frustration and worry. It mostly worked. "I'm not dangerous, not usually anyway. I'm not really into…jeapordizing lives. I'm a grad student, was a grad student I guess, before the two death squads." Matching his previous inflection was a petty bit of sass but she felt it was not out of line.

"And I am spectacularly bad at chess," Dahj told him. "So we can play but don't expect a challenge."

A preliminary observation pertaining to Dahj's comportment informed him that the present circumstances still confounded her, and that she, regardless of his efforts to ensure her that he was a trustworthy and amicable individual, still administered a significant dose of scepticism and reservation. Perhaps if they could sequester themselves from external stimuli, they could establish a more comprehensive understanding of what motivated the other, become better acquainted with the other's personality... However, the android extrapolated that it might take a considerable amount of time before Dahj would be willing to discuss such matters with a perfect stranger.

For now, Data could do nothing but offer her his undivided attention, and he listened attentively, maintaining his equilibrium throughout the duration of her rampage of falsifications and anxiety. He did not interfere while she verbalised her concerns regarding the Captain. The latter received a minimal ascend of the android's light eyebrows — he sincerely doubted Picard required protection, he had survived many decades in interstellar space, and the crew that accompanied him, was sufficiently competent and could haul him through every situation that would arise.

Data remained irresponsive, contemplating the most adequate avenue to explain to her that they had, in all likelihood, already been transported down to the planet. And even if they had not departed the Warbird yet, he would still forestall her affiliating herself with the team in any way — there were simply too many risks involved. Besides, he had promised Picard to keep her safe, and he could only guarantee her safety when she was with him, on the cloaked Romulan Warbird.

'I understand your eagerness to accompany the Captain and your concern about his wellbeing during this mission however misplaced your concerns may be... In addition, the Zhat Vash regard you as a threat, presumably of the highest category seeing that they deployed a death squad and have assaulted you. Twice. Therefore, I cannot permit you to transport down to the surface — request denied,' he said pragmatically, his euphonious voice was gentle yet pertinacious. 'Perhaps I could placate your perturbed mind by informing you that this is not a solo mission — he is in the company of three competent individuals. I trust they will deliver him back to the ship, his physical integrity wholly conserved,' he reassured Dahj.

Then, his optical units traced the boundaries of the forcefield and he was of opinion that the initiation of the safety measure had been imperative in preventing her from running rampant on the ship, in search of Picard. However, he was cognisant that prolonging her incarceration would not accomplish anything — if anything, it would render her more suspicious of their intentions, and probably more antagonistic.

'I see no further reason to restrict you to the infirmary — we could relocate to the observation lounge, if you would like? However, I am afraid this change of scenes entails being in my presence, indefinitely. Alternatively, I could allocate you to your own personal quarters, but then, I would be obligated to lock the doors lest you break free and accidentally end up jeopardising the lives of everyone we have rescued these last several decades. I cannot allow that, I hope you understand,' Data said composedly, his eyes analysing her countenance inquisitively. 'Personally, I would be... thrilled to get to know you better. Perhaps we could play a game of poker, or three dimensional chess.'

[the-lavender-clown]

Random Star Trek thought that pops into my head every once in a while.

I have the biggest bone to pick with ST Picard! Now I did enjoy the show but I have a lot of critiques for it too. My biggest one by far is how they made it so that Deanna and therefore probably other Betazoids and telepathic/empathic species can’t sense android’s at all. Like the amount of episodes that recons is something else!!

Remember how Deanna wasn’t there for Datalore? Most likely because she would have been able to sense the difference between Data and Lore. But maybe there was a real life reason for that like scheduling or whatever. Ok fine, then what about the episode where Ira Graves possesses Data’s body? Deanna could feel his ego suppressing Data’s (confirming that to at least some extent she can sense Data as well even if his presence might be so weak sometimes she doesn’t pick it up due to his lack of humanoid emotions). Then the episode Offspring. When Lal went to Deanna to tell her what was happening and how scared she was Deanna didn’t even hesitate to believe her and although I can’t remember the exact words of the conversation I’m pretty sure she said something like “you are scared” and was deeply concerned for Lal.

In conclusion, Data totally has an ego no matter how weak/different it is and therefore so does every other android and Deanna should have been able to sense Soji.

[startrekwintergiftexchange]

The 2024 Star Trek Winter Gift Exchange is here!

Q: What is the Star Trek Winter Gift Exchange?

A: It’s a fanworks exchange for any fandom within the Star Trek universe, from The Original Series to Strange New Worlds!

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Q: How does it work?

A: When you sign up, you’ll provide three options of gift ideas you’d like to receive, as well as gifts you’re open to making. Once sign-ups close, the mod will send you the url of the person you’ll make a fanwork for and their requests. You’ll have the month of January to fulfill one of the requests. Make sure your ask box is open so the mod or your Secret Santa can contact you!

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Q: Do I have to make fanart/fanfic for the exchange?

A: Nope! All types of fanworks are welcome :) Fics, art, edits, fanvids, playlists, moodboards, podfics, among other things! As long as you’re creating it, it’s welcome.

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Q: What are the important dates I should know?

A: December 29, 11:59 pm CST: sign-ups close

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If you have other questions, send an ask. And don’t forget to spread the word!

[pixiereblogs]

Pixie Recaps Picard | The Last Generation

[incorrectly-quoted-queers]

After Picard Season 3

Elnor: Welcome, brother

Jack Crusher: Where the fuck am I?

Wesley Crusher: The discarded-by-Picard-as-a-parental-figure club. We meet every Thursday

Jack Crusher: Discarded? But I'm not—

Data: Do not worry young Jack. It is the way of things. Like one might describe a life cycle

Meribor: We all keep each other company while he goes off on his next adventure

Elnor: You never know how long your journey with him will last, but it always ends

Wesley Crusher: Seems yours ended pretty quickly though

Dahj: Could've had worse. I got about a day

Jack Crusher: Just how many of you are there?!?

Soji: Oh buddy. You don't even know

[defconprime]

Isa Briones as Dahj and Soji.

[wingsofhcpe]

Thinking about Rios being Dad to Soji and Elnor, and possibly Dahj from that one au with @talvenhenki we bounced around the other day due to an edit post, and I want to cry because he'd be so hesitant at first but then he'd realise Soji and especially Elnor trust him without hesitation, and that would kinda drive him to try even harder to be good at it, such as:

Calling Elnor "hijo" and Soji "hija" (which is already canon!).

Teaching them to play football. Soji may or may not know some of the basics already, but Elnor definitely doesn't. It's all new for him and he's so excited, keeps kicking a ball around all the time and asking Rios if he's doing it right.

Bringing Soji her favourite snacks from the replicator, then hearing she developed a liking for real tomatoes while on Nepenthe and making sure La Sirena is always stocked with those.

Teaching them Spanish (especially swear words. Raffi and Picard are Not amused, but Seven totally approves).

Asking Elnor to teach him basic swordfighting skills as a bonding activity.

Play-wrestling with both of them. More often than not he ends up on the floor under them. (Raffi teases him about this, but honestly, what's a regular human guy to do against a Synth and a Qowat Milat? And Raffi can't prove that he'd let them win anyway!)

In the Dahj lives AU, he helps make a very traumatised and distrustful Dahj feel more at home onboard La Sirena. He's one of the first, if not the first, crewmembers that Dahj starts to trust.

He's also the only one (bar Elnor) who can easily tell the twins apart!

[lonely-night]

rewriting st picard in my head is super fun :)

[biblioflyer]

Five Episodes Later: Reevaluating Picard

I started this rewatch to refresh my memory so that I could tackle the question of whether the fandom had judged Picard too harshly and if it was as dark and dystopian as was commonly accused.

Through that process I have discovered much that is praiseworthy, some implications that bother me, and more than a few questions that pivot on one’s own subjective response to particular cues about whether and when the protagonists are objectively correct or if there is far more room for them to be messy.

For more like this check out my other essays reevaluating Star Trek Picard and interrogating the widely held fandom criticism that Picard made the Federation into a Dystopia.

The Dystopia Question

Ultimately what I’ve found is that Season One is less of a deconstruction of core ideas about Star Trek, than a richer exploration of the premises of Voyager and Enterprise: what happens when decent people are caught in ambiguous situations and without the resources of an entire Federation behind them? 

The backdrop of the failure of the Romulan resettlement effort after the destruction of Utopia Planitia also has resulted in a schism of sorts in the fandom wherein most people are horrified and immediately saw fit to draw analogies to Brexit or the Trump administration, while a disturbing minority shrugged off the catastrophe as the Romulans getting what they had coming to them and have argued the Federation had no moral obligation to help the Romulans.

My own examination of the evidence has led me to feel that there is a strong case for a murky middleground. We could presume for instance that Admiral Clancy is a reactionary who is overstating the case for Starfleet minding its knitting and having too many domestic obligations.

On the other hand we could steelman her case with a very large body of evidence consisting of a vast number of instances where it falls to Starfleet to provide timely disaster relief and protection to the Federation’s vast and underserved frontiers. We need look no further than perhaps dozens of TNG plots to support the idea that an overextended Starfleet would come with a bodycount.

This certainly pushes back on the metanarrative of the Federation and the implication of limitless resources. Although that has always been exaggerated. There’s material abundance enough to provide everyone who doesn’t intentionally seek to rough it on a colony with a comfortable life, even if you’re a disgraced former attache to an embittered former hero turned recluse. What there isn’t enough of is whatever handwavium and skilled personnel are needed to snap one’s fingers and produce a new rescue fleet without depriving others of humanitarian relief and protection.

Again, that assumes we steelman Clancy. There is a lot of narrative weight pushing us to trust Picard’s assessment of the situation post-Mars: he is the hero after all. The hostile interview of the first episode was loaded with a lot of not so subtle triggers for humanitarian minded viewers that seem very intentionally designed to place them in the emotional space of that creeping dread that empathy is dead, having been replaced by an unapologetically narrower conception of who is deserving of respect, comfort, and even life.

However, I think that given Picard the character will spend the first five episodes questioning his own place in the narrative of his life and the lives of others, I think the Federation as a character is owed a serious examination of whether we should simply throw out everything else we have ever known about the society the first time someone is rude to a father figure to many of us. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean the Federation was actually in the right to leave the Romulans twisting in the wind. It wouldn’t be the first time a judgment on which many, which few, and what needs results in painful and potentially unvirtuous choices: just ask the Maquis. 

Radical Kindness in a Dark World

If I could sum up the theme of Picard the series, this would be it. In the very first episode Picard the character is moved from despair to man of action by the opportunity to help a troubled soul. 

This message is something I think that really got lost. The part of the audience that was offended by the callousness of the Interviewer and Clancy and the implication that to be risk averse and reluctant to risk being the frog in the story of the scorpion and the frog was already primed to be irked by this theme. 

I suspect that the element of the audience that felt itself keenly under threat by forces outside the Star Trek setting that the series was gesturing at may also have missed this theme in their annoyance at sci fi Paladin, Jean luc Picard, being portrayed as defeated, depressed, and content to marinade in luxurious misery.

Quite a few people seem to react poorly to being told that a minimum level of mercy extended to a known villain might be virtuous and a long term investment that might create conditions of real peace.

Nor does anyone like being accused of sequestering themselves in comfort and nursing their grief when direct and easy solutions to vast and pernicious problems don’t miraculously appear.

So in this way, Picard called out a lot of its potential audience practically in the first episode.

These are hard questions to grapple with and I don’t want to trivialize them. When do we risk our safety to take advantage of an opportunity to end a conflict, make an ally, or even to simply show mercy with no expectation of benefit? 

We can't know with certainty when we're playing the part of the frog in the parable of the scorpion and the frog after all. Read that again with different emphasis.

How harshly should we judge others or ourselves for not being able to imagine a better world or being unable to find the steps we could take to make it happen when the easy steps like voting, protesting, signing a petition, or threatening to resign fail?

If TNG primed us to expect simple answers, those aren’t found in Season One. There is a mostly self consistent moral clarity that mercy and kindness are praiseworthy but the show’s world building doesn’t support the idea that these are always going to lead to just outcomes. 

The people who adhere to these ideals are generally, in my opinion, the more fun hang but whether they’re always right or not according to the narrative is troublingly ambiguous at times.

I have a suspicion that part of what appeals to people about Season Three, aside from the fact it brought back beloved and relatively uncomplicated legacy characters and largely benched the characters invented for the show, is that the morality of the show is just generally way less ambiguous. Unless you’re taking Shaw seriously that is.

Notably, the show by the end of episode five does step on this message just a bit. The midpoint of the season leaves us weighing whether or not Seven executing a gangster notorious for chopping up liberated Borg is harm reduction or a reduction of her humanity. The implications of this I found rather uncomfortable for the way the bleaker side of the scale seemed to have a lot more narrative weight.

Character Housekeeping

I have largely not really discussed Jurati, Rios, Elnor, Soji, and Narek up to this point. The reasons for this are relatively straightforward. None of them have really done anything that I feel the need to explore more deeply. This is not necessarily a dismissal of the characters, if you adore them we are not enemies, I’m simply just less interested in them than other topics at this point in the season.

Rios is a fun character and I love his holograms….and that’s about it. Up to this point he is interesting in terms of his relationship to Picard and what it says about Picard that he can clock a troubled ex-Starfleet officer within a minute of meeting them and, like Raffi, Picard seems to be inexorably drawn to people he can try to remold in his image.

Elnor is himself not very interesting to me, I don’t dislike the character, but he seems to function mostly as a narrative device to illustrate Picard’s failings after Mars and his tendency to struggle with expressing authentic emotions rather than praising people in the modality of a performance evaluation. He is also, if I recall, rather underutilized and developed as his own person going forward. He is almost entirely muscle and comic relief in episode five instead of making any meaningful connections to any other characters.

Soji was originally interesting the first time I watched the series largely because of the mystery she represented but I know the ending already. The character herself doesn’t provoke any response from me. That doesn’t invalidate someone else’s experience and if someone wants to write up a comprehensive analysis of Soji’s identity crisis as a metaphor for dysphoria or whatever, have at it. That’s not really my wheelhouse though and I’m content to let the people for whom that is a passion project do it infinitely better than I ever could. 

I may revisit Soji later because I am still troubled by her and Dahj’s story due to being somewhat unconvinced that it was necessary to conceal their memories and identities from themselves. It's unclear to me if there was a plan in place to recover them and then permit their true selves to reemerge in a gentler, more compassionate way after their mission was complete.

I’m far more sympathetic to Jurati this time around because I think her performance of being deeply disturbed by the Admonition is well done, but like Soji, at this point in the narrative I just don’t see anything I really care to talk about in any greater depth aside from observing that Jurati is a good surrogate for a particular kind of fan. Her performance of being unmoored by Oh’s psychic shenanigans was strong, but on a meta level if you feel like Maddox’s death was largely for shock value and unnecessary “edge” then I’m moderately sympathetic to you.

Screw Narek and his affected mental distress and gaslighting and double dumbass on his weird sister. I still don’t know who thought the implied incest stuff was a good idea or if there’s just something I’m missing, but its incredibly distracting.

Unanswered Questions

What is Seven’s arc like for the rest of the season? I don’t actually remember. Oh I remember what she does, I just don’t remember how it feels and to what degree it moves her closer to the less rampagey version who seems to be clinging harder to her humanity in Season Three.

What was the Synth plan? As Agnes notes, Maddox got a little “secret planny” so does this mean that no one else was in the loop for the plan to send Soji and Dahj out to uncover the truth behind the attack on Mars and the subsequent Synth ban and thus Maddox’s death screwed everything up? Was there a plan to recover them and restore their identities without the need for the traumatic rediscovery of their true selves through crisis and stress?

After Seven decided to solve her own personal trolley problem through summary vaporization, where does that leave the default moral assumptions for Star Trek Picard? Is this still a show where what is good is what is just or is virtue a luxury and justice is liquidating a mass murderer who can’t be practically brought to justice?

Is everyone, both the characters and the fandom, right about the Federation? Has it been irredeemably debased? Or is Picard, the character right, and what’s needed is to find the right sort of appeal to conscience?

For more like this check out my other essays reevaluating Star Trek Picard and interrogating the widely held fandom criticism that Picard made the Federation into a Dystopia.

[ofaflower]

muse tags

[raurquiz]

#happybirthday @TheIsaBriones #isabriones #actress #singer #Soji #Sutra #Dahj #jana #kore #startrekpicard #takers #BrownSoupThing #lonelyboy #americancrimestory #hamilton #goosebumps #startrek57 @TrekMovie @TrekCore @StarTrek @StarTrekOnPPlus

[ovenproofowl]

a lot of people have said it, but I’m throwing in my two cents just to get it off my chest.

Picard season 3 was . Bad . For a LOT of reasons . It felt like - as many before me have expressed - a self-insert fanfic with the dullest self-insert in history.

Jack Crusher wasn’t much of a character but he could have had some promise if they hadn’t spent an aggravating amount of time having him decree how different he always felt, you guys. Did you get that part? He’d always felt different. That sort of dialogue might have flown if we were dealing with Picard’s adolescent son, but instead we’re dealing with a 24 year old played by a 35 year old who looks every bit his age. (It was a hard 24 years, we must assume.)

The reason that Jack Crusher didn’t work for me personally, though, wasn’t because of how cliché his character was. I would have let that pass much easier if it wasn’t for the big ol’ elephant in the room. And that is simply that :

JACK CRUSHER WAS NEVER NECESSARY

Jack may have served a purpose to the storyline that was presented if only because he was the sole reason there was a Big Bad to be defeated in the first place. Everyone wanted to kidnap him, he brought the old gang back together just to protect him and then later save him from said Big Bad which was also actually .. him. Everything Was About Jack. But I’m not talking about the main plot. I Really Don’t Want to Talk About the Main Plot. Ever. What I want to talk about is what Jack represented that made him so unnecessary:

He was intended to represent Jean-Luc Picard’s only reason to start living.

Personally, that really, really offended me. Picard didn’t need to have a biological kid to have a purpose. In fact, it’s been established time and time again that he wasn’t ever really dad material. More of a... weirdly intense uncle. For a while, he wasn’t a fan of kids at all. Eventually, though, Picard is seen to warm to the idea of letting children within his general vicinity. This starts in TNG and continues on in season 1 of Picard. The Only Categorically Good Season of this whole. show.

In season 1, we see flashbacks of Jean-Luc’s relationship with a young Elnor, how he would read him stories and have sword fights with him. He was an absent father to an adopted child he hadn’t even realised he’d adopted and yet Elnor still fought for his hopeless cause. In much the same way, Picard meets Dahj and then later, Soji. He feels a kinship with these androids because of their connection to Data. He wants to protect Soji becase he couldn’t protect Dahj and Soji even canonically questions whether she should allow Picard to act as her father figure before she begins to remember where she came from. Both of these dynamics were infinitely more interesting and a lot deeper rooted. Soji and Elnor were both young twenty-somethings without parental guidance but found that guidance through Picard. Soji had her connection to Jurati, too, and Elnor had his with Seven and Raffi and that’s what made the whole group so intriguing to follow. They all had interesting connections to each other that had so many avenues to explore.

Unfortunately, the show decided to more or less write Soji and Elnor out of the story come season 2. Elnor was killed off for the majority of the season and only brought back by Q intervention in the last episode. Soji wasn’t even a part of the story at all. And do you know what’s sad about that? What’s really sad? Season 2 was trying to sell us the exact same message as season 3. That Picard needed a reason to live. But, like, not that reason. Not the reasons he’d already been given in the form of his found family with his Romulan and android adopted children, or even the rest of the La Sirena crew. No no no, we can’t have that, better get rid of them. This time, Laris is the focal point. Picard had been avoiding a romantic relationship with her because of a never before mentioned dark history surrounding his mother’s suicide. Because, sure, at this point, why not? While we’re at it, let’s also kill off Rios in the most slap-in-the-face out of character way possible and fling Jurati at the Borg for good measure just so she won’t be around for season 3. Her character development into the Borg Queen was pretty intriguing, but we’ll totally ignore that they even exist post her departure, just for funsies. Oh, and Soji and Elnor? Best not mention them at all come that third and final season. Otherwise, people might get the crazy notion that Picard already had a reason not to hunker down and die at the vinyard at the tender age of 104.

Season 3 picks up where season 2 leaves off in that Picard is now in that aforementioned romantic relationship with Laris. Except, no he isn’t because he immediately gets an emergency call from his ex and literally never sees or talks to Laris ever again. There wasn’t even a throw-away line or implied reference to her, but by now I’m sure you know the reason for that.

That’s right, folks. Because if we were allowed to remember Laris and what she meant to Picard, then we might just remember that other thing. Say it with me now!!

JACK CRUSHER WAS NEVER NECESSARY!!

In summary, there were so many brilliant options to give Picard for signficant found family dynamics, but the show just wasn’t interested in any of them. Season 3 wanted a Picard who had given it all up, who was ready to die because he’d never had a family to pass on his legacy. They wanted him at his lowest so that we’d all rejoice to see him return to the TNG crew. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a massive TNG fan and I could rave about the fan service and nostalgia porn for hours on end. If season 3 had stood alone as a singular unconnected event, it might even have been passable as a warm hug from old and beloved characters with some fun new spins to their stories along the way, juust so long as you didn’t squint too hard at the actual attempt at plot writing going on in the background.

But the fact of the matter is, Picard season 3 came far too late into the game. Season 1 held the building blocks to something new and interesting. By the end of season 2, it was becoming clear we were never going to see those blocks stand. By season 3, those blocks were just scattered headstones in a graveyard.

They teased us with the potential new show of Captain Seven and her Number One Raffi Musiker and that might have just been okay. . .

. . .If the La Sirena Crew had been allowed to be a part of that future.

In closing: Picard season 3? Too little, too late, mate. 👎🏻

[fractalcloning]

In the shadow of Ganmadan.

It was a little offensive, the clear sky and beautiful weather. It should be raining, thundering, like in her dreams--red and scary, foreboding--but it isn't. Jean Luc Picard died and it is...just another day. She knows that Alton Soong and Dr. Jurati are working on it, maping and copying his neural patterns into the golem Soong had reserved for himself. There's no guarantee it will work, that they can take the patterns off a dead man and expect them to function. He may not be restored at all, and Soji feels terribly lost. She has siblings here, dozens of them, but she's the odd one out. Not one of them can really comprehend what she's been through in the last few days. None of them can even start to relate. Dahj is gone. Her mother is an AI, a holo construct that was meant to keep her from breaking her cover. Narek is--somewhere outside. In a cell? The fact that she'd even consider talking to him only enhances her distress. She's all alone. Again. And the Romulan fleet is gone, but so is most of the Starfleet one. They are defenseless, completely out of orchids, and only Soji seems to recognize that the danger hasn't passed. That they aren't actually safe from anything. Another nudge to her bedrock could topple everything again, and again, and again and she chose to let the guarantee of safety go. She hates herself for giving that up, for shutting down the transmitter, and then hates herself in another way for even considering summoning the extra-galactic synthetics. Her life isn't worth every organic one. It's objectively true but so very hard to remember when the threat of death and destruction seems to hover over her like her own personal raincloud. So Soji sits, miserable and distraught, on the edge of Alton Soong's desk and tries not to think about it. Unfortunately the only distractions she has are the synthetics littered around the office. Alton Soong had been so proud, so excited to show her his prototypes. The golem, the next set of fractal clones, mice for Spot II to chase. Each one was meticulously designed and he loved them, truly. His crowning masterpiece was the reproduction of Data. It took up the center of the room and all Soji could do was stare. He looked peaceful, like he was sleeping and not just an empty, expertly sculpted husk in a stasis chamber. She was almost jealous, that he got to sleep so softly while she was vibrating with anxiety about the next calamity, the next loss, the next inevitable, crushing death. She runs both hands through her hair, tugging it to try and clear the maudline catastrophizing. It half works. "I wish I could have met you," Soji says to the stasis chamber and her arms drop back to her sides. "If half of what everyone said was true, you'd probably have something profound to say."

"Or...at least you might give me a hug."

She was tearing up, thinking of her Dad, the fake ghost in her dreams. He never existed but she had memories of him saying profound things. She recalled her mom trying to cheer her up--or Dahj, who may have actually done that before they were separated. Picard had even tried to comfort her, in his own way--and now she comes back to Narek again. The last man standing. God, her life was pathetic if the Tal'Shiar were her best choice for a hug. She wipes her eyes and tries to stop thinking again. It doesn't work any better this time. "Fuck," Soji says to the empty room. To the construct that is not her kind of father. It required a quantum computer to hold what they had of Data's neural patterns--if the code, the information, were any less she might have been able to boot him up, to talk to him through holograms like she did her mom, but even Soji understood that he was too complex for that. Data required a body and Soong had never completed the method to transfer-- "Wait--Agnes fixed it," Soji says, largely to herself, partly to the construct. Alton Soong had lamented how his masterpiece copy of Data would forever lie dormant. Because Bruce Maddox hadn't finished the work to make transfering consciousness possible. But Dr. Jurati had finished it. They were using it on Picard right now. Which meant-- Soji shot up from the side of the desk and all but darted to the stasis pod in the center of the room. Now, looking at the unoccupied copy, she saw something other than a hollow body--she could--she could put him back, right? If it were a copy of Data, he could work in this body? She immediately pulls up the controls on the stasis chamber and snatches a data slate off Soong's desk. Data was kept in the computer, he was the cornerstone of it, she should be able to just...run Jurati's protocols and put him into the duplicate, right? The tiny thread of hope that wrapped itself around her heart was as cutting as it was fragile, but Soji was desperate and so very alone. If she thought anything could work, anything at all, she couldn't have stopped herself from trying it.

[procrastinatorproject]

@lonely-night Currently a couple hundred words in the WIP folder, but I haven't looked at it in a few months I'm afraid.

Should really get back to it, huh? 😅

AGNES JURATI - STAR TREK: PICARD S1E10 Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2

[startreklasirena]

S1E01: Remembrance

Four years ago today, I saw the first episode of this new tv show which would become my new obsession and utterly change my life.

To celebrate, I thought we could take some time this week to remember some of the things we enjoyed about this episode, or that stood out to us.

I'll get us started with one of the things I truly loved about Ep 1x01:

Dahj! Just... Dahj!

We only got her for one episode, and she was suffering for most of it, but I latched onto her character straight away and real hard.

I love that even with her very limited screen time, I still got the feeling she was a distinct character from Soji. Maybe a little looser, more flowing... (And yes, this perception is reinforced by the different hairstyles, which is another detail I adore!)

(Look at these two! You can tell who's who at a glance from the body language, even before you look at the hair!)

Her little student apartment in Boston with it's Tragic Abundance Of Vanilla deserves to have a whole bunch of fics set in it! And even though it's just a cover story, I love her excitement at getting into the Daystrom! Just imagine the thrill, angst, and chaos if she had gone there and ended up working with Agnes - and the two of them discovering the truth about her that way.

Also, I love that Dahj is immediately adopted by Picards entire household, from the Romulan housekeepers/bodyguards...

... to the Number One Goodest Boy.

(No wonder the mom AI told Soji that Dahj was thinking about getting a puppy. It may have been a lie in the moment but clearly fit Dahj's character well enough to be believable.)

And of course there's so, so much more to love about her. Dahj's journey of self-dscovery, however chaotic and short it ended up being, was a great jumping-off point for the series, and by the end of episode 1, I was hooked!

I still have so many fond feelings for Dahj and I really hope I'll find the time and brain space to write about her some time.

How about you? What are some things you remember fondly from this episode?