8.1.2 What They Left Behind
- Ric Crossman
- Aug 1
- 13 min read
Maps And Legends

It still hurts to think about. All that potential wasted. With Discovery abandoning the true spirit of Trek in favour of BSG-style grim militarism, Picard was the chance to correct course on the franchise before it became lost forever. And where better to make that stand, than with the hero that started it all? Sure, The Original Series was usually fun, and occasionally much more than just fun, but it was TNG that truly forged the future. The chance to see that done again, after so long being told hope was dangerous and cooperation a lie, seemed almost to good to be true.
And indeed, it turned out not to be true. Hope is vital, but it's hardly a guarantee, Mind you, I don't think we're to blame for being blindsided by precisely how everything came to ruin. I'd assumed Picard's promise was one it would be difficult to maintain against the the bloody-robed zeitgeist, or the cynical suits, or the screaming fansites that demand new Trek makes them feel exactly the same way that old Trek did. We never saw the real threat coming, microscopic as it was. A black swan small enough to swim through your bloodstream, alongside ten billion of its mates.
No-one reading this needs to be reminded of what I'm speaking about, The pandemic. The new plague. The invisible killer which laid waste to the present, and pulled the future down with it.
COVID-18.
"A Microscopic Organism, Reigning Supreme"
I'm sure many of you know the story of how Picard died, so I won't go back over the details. Suffice to say, by the time filming had been shut down by the coronavirus, never to start up again, only two episodes had been filmed to the standard where any attempt at salvaging would be successful (there are a number of scenes from later episodes which exist in too rough a form to have - as of yet - seen the light of day). That's barely enough to make into a film, which is perhaps why the fan reconstruction effort made the (entirely correct) choice to split the broadly useable material into two distinct parts.
We should take a moment to pay tribute to that work. Like Picard himself, as he led the holodeck ceremony honouring Tasha Yar, it's important we celebrate what came before the end, rather than mourning the end itself. It is, quite frankly, miraculous that we ever got to see any of Picard at all, especially given the refusal of so many involved in the production to talk further about what happened, or what was planned to happen. But for the selfless toil of hundreds of fans, it's doubtful we'd even have access to the raw footage, let alone something with such professional-looking SFX, and so professional-sounding a score [1].
As I'm sure is inescapable by now, though, this isn't a blog that focusses on sights and sounds. We're all about structures, here. Which is perhaps something of a problem in this case, given we don't really have a structure. All we have are foundations left to crack and crumble.
But that's OK, That's still enough to build on.
Mars Attacked!
The theory that Picard might have proven a counter to Discovery finds supporting evidence almost immediately. Just in the most broad of structural terms, the only episodes of the later show that exist invert the opening two-parter of Michael Burnham's story. As we've covered, Discovery uses its first episode to climb to the top of a precipice, and then focus the second on the inevitable plummet. Picard, in comparison, leads with the adrenaline rush, throwing us headlong into a situation neither our hero nor audience have much grip on. It then uses "Maps And Legends" as a chance to catch our breath, and to start filling in the territory the preceding episode dashed through.
It does so both by continuing to sketch out the post-Nemesis Alpha Quadrant, and telling us more about the current situation's historical context. We might reasonably label the results as being, respectively, the "maps" and "legends" of the title. Some might object that there's not really a distinction between the two approaches, but that's not actually a problem. I'll point once more to the old Bajoran saying: "The people and the land are one". Maps don't just have legends, they are legends.
It's a valid parallel, then. There's a better one, though. The title is a taunt; Picard mocking Picard by what listing what has escaped him. The show has its legends and its maps. Its protagonist, in contrast, finds his fame has faded, and that he's completely lost his way.
This is clear from the very beginning of the episode, with the decision to start with the Utopia Planetia uprising. And "Uprising" is the mot juste here. Yes, it's heavily implied F8 and his brethren are being controlled by an outside force (so frustrating that we'll never learn who was so dead set on killing Romulans!), but had they rebelled off their own bat, I can't see how we could deny that they'd be right to do so [2]. I'm not defending their target selection, but the basic fact that we're watching the oppress rise up against their oppressors is undeniable. Despite the result of the hearing in "The Measure Of A Man" and everything Data did since, despite the events of "Emergence", despite seven years of data and testimony on the nature of holographic life provided by USS Voyager, the Federation made the choice to massively expand its use of artificial intelligence in its workforce. It knowingly created a slave race.
This is ultimately par for the course for the UFP, The Federation has always defined life far too narrowly, and has done so as a matter of convenience rather than principle. The fact this crime is completely unsurprising matters far less than the question of what Picard was doing while it was being committed. Both in dreams and dialogue, we're told that he's never moved past Data's loss; never stopped brooding on Data's legacy. His focus though is only on Data himself. Picard will rail against the synthetic life ban that followed the Martian uprising, because he knows it would have affected Data himself, had he still been alive. But those other synthetics? An actual perversion of Data's precious legacy (not that they're to blame for that), a new race on indentured servants. pushed into self-destruction and then outlawed by a Federation desperate for a scapegoat to avoid reckoning with their own guilt? [3] Picard has nothing to say to, or about, them. They feature in the great Admiral's story simply as part of the reason his grand design was ruined; an unfortunate footnote in the Jean Luc legend. The weight their lives had is measurable only in how they disrupted Picard's course.
The Return Of Admiral Mansplain
The idea Picard has bought too much into his own legend is a recurring theme over the two episodes. He's the guy whose speeches launch armadas across hostile borders to save the enemy, not the guy who joins efforts to emancipate the android workforce who's actually building that armada for him.
We see this multiple times here during his short visit to Starfleet Headquarters. Well, I mean, the whole visit is part of the problem, but in particular, there's Picard's assumption that the young officer at the desk will know him on sight, his belief that Clancy's biggest concern over his proposed plan will lie with him trying to go off-grid while remaining the galactically renowned Admiral Picard, and him responding to her blunt but understandable brush-off by saying she ignores him at her peril.
And like she says: sheer fucking hubris. Picard said last episode he'd spent the last two decades "waiting to die", but that's not really true. What he was actually waiting for was for Starfleet to finally cave, and admit he'd been right all along. As a result, he's completely blindsided by the fact Fleet Command is delighted that he swanned off to sulk in the chateau, and that they'd really rather he keep that up indefinitely. Somehow, impossibly, he's the bigger arsehole in a conversation with someone justifying letting almost a billion people die.
In a lot of ways, the scene in Clancy's office is the centrepiece of what little Picard we'll ever get, by inverting Picard's encounter with the press last episode. Back in La Barre, Picard castigated his young interviewer for not knowing about Dunkirk (you know, like how everyone these days should be intimately familiar with how Don Garcia lifted the Great Siege Of Malta in 1565). And yet there's an obvious historical counter to Clancy's cynical, cold-blooded realpolitik: the explosion of Praxis in 2293. Helping the Klingons survive the poisoning of their homeworld's atmosphere was so controversial, elements within Starfleet organised the assassination of the Klingon High Chancellor, and tried to do for his daughter too. If the Clancys of the Federation had had their way, the 23rd century would have ended in a bloodbath as the Klingons tried desperately to take by force enough land and resources to counter their devastating losses.
And yet Picard brings none of this up. The man who writes history textbooks can't summon up any better response to Clancy's smug amorality than "we don't get to decide which species die". This is breathtakingly hypocritical from the man who, to take just one example, initially refused to save the Boraalans from extinction in "Homeward", but it's also just pompous moralising, and as such, trivial for Clancy to counter. My point isn't that she's right, nor that a more well-constructed argument would actually have changed her mind. It's that Picard is completely unprepared for the pushback he should have known he would get, because he just assumed an appeal to principle would be all that was necessary.
Or, more specifically, an appeal to principle from him.
A Bridge Too Far Behind
You can see why he'd assumed otherwise, obviously. It certainly used to work, on a regular basis - see "The Drumhead", for instance, or, more pertinently, "The Measure Of A Man". Time was, Picard could make some lofty speech about how the abandonment of principle is truly the greatest threat to society, and people would listen. The mistake Picard makes is in thinking it was the speeches themselves which were carrying the day. As I argued in my piece on the pilot of this century's second live-action Trek show, this just isn't how things actually work. How many of Picard's victories actually stem from his command of rhetoric, as opposed to his command of a gigantic bloody spaceship? You can get further with a smart word and the Federation flagship, etc. Put another way, it's a lot easier to persuade people to build bridges when your bridge has a button for launching photon torpedoes.
That power is long gone now, cashed in when Picard quit the Fleet over the aborted evacuation. I'm not particularly interested in whether that resignation itself was the right call, my point is Picard thought his power would remain with him after leaving Starfleet. Even more ridiculously, he assumed others would miss the power he thought he took, and secretly want him to return it. What we learn here is that, on the contrary, both the loyalist Starfleet admiral and the undercover Romulan agent were much happier with Picard moping around France.
Without his access to the levers of power, Picard is all but nothing. Note that he spends this entire episode asking other people to help him (always women, by the way, which I mention just as another way the episode swipes at Great Man Theory). He's a fading echo, as broken a relic as the Borg Cube being ransacked for parts by the Romulan Free State. Both are once-major players reduced to haunting the edges of a galaxy that has moved on without them. Or as Soji puts it, lost, severed, vulnerable, and broken.
Tal Shiar Pal, She Is
On long range scans, all this might seem to to sit uneasily next to a brand new, super-exciting adventure for Picard. Mysterious androids! Secret Romulan sects! Vanishing scientists! Aren't we all about to watch the greatest of great men be greatly great once more?
Well, let's get a little closer, and see if we can't pick up some clues. Firstly, consider that Picard's future here looks an awful lot like the future echoes Picard kept revisiting in "All Good Things". Not just that he's in retirement on a French vineyard, but - as Doctor Benayoun's appearance makes clear - a brain defect is threatening his life. And what did Picard do in that future? He gathered together a crew of people who basically thought they were humouring the guy with one last adventure, before letting him lead them to... absolutely nothing.
How certain can we be that things are different this time, which is so much like that time? Consider just how ridiculous Picard's shiny new quest really is.. A secret secret Romulan police force? That a Tal Shiar handler just happened to get drunk enough to discuss with a recruit who just happened to end up working in Picard's employ, ready to spill the beans (all having sneaked illegal tech in with her, to boot)? Who totally must exist, honesty, because the Tal Shiar - an organisation which once planned a genocidal sneak attack against the most miliarily powerful government in known space just six months after learning they existed - apparently wouldn't dare to seed operatives on the homeworld of its oldest enemy. People who can completely homogenise computer files to render them useless, except for one file that isn't, and which helpfully provides just the right amount of clue for Picard to set himself in motion without any actual evidence or useful plan?
The common denominator here, obviously, is Laris. It seems extremely likely she's taking Picard for a ride. The Zhat Vash, the particle residual overwrite, the heuristic backdoor (a scene so embarrassing at face value it simply must have been intended for later undercutting): it's all total nonsense, Had fate seen fit to give us a whole season of the show, I've no doubt it would turn out she was in league with whomever killed Dahj. How else did she get holo-footage of the moments before the first attack? "Forensic molecular reconstruction"? Please. Whether the attackers created the twins as part of a plot to discredit Picard, or saw an advantage in using them to do similar when they sprang from whatever secret lab Bruce Maddox is holed up in, it's impossible to believe Laris isn't involved somehow. It's just not credible that the show was being written so badly she'd end up being on the level.
What's the goal here, though? What possible use is there in discrediting Picard, twenty years after he last wore a uniform? Well, that's the point. Laris is still obsessed with the old power structures, just as Picard is. She's been undercover as his housekeeper for decades, and dammit, she's going to put all that time to some use, no matter how far the galaxy has moved on from the days of Jean Luc and Tomalak glaring at each other across a viewscreen. Her need for vengeance against Picard is just as ridiculous as Picard's insistence he must still matter, the two feeding off each other in a desperately unhealthy relationship that's going to end in disaster.
And Picard is too desperate to believe he still matters - that he's still a great man - to see it.
Blueprints And Prophecies
That, then, was the state of play when it all went wrong. A fossilised gameboard dug clear from the ruins of Pompeii, forever frozen in whichever configuration faced the conflagration.
So how might the game have progressed, absent the catastrophe? Much depends on where Soji would have wound up. The thematically correct conclusion would be for her narrative importance to stem not from being somehow uniquely threatening to an alien cabal, nor from how much Picard is projecting their spiritual father's life onto her. Her value is simply that she's a person, and that's entirely enough. The Romulan killers' seeming obsession with destroying synthetics (assuming that's actually what was going on) reflects a fear of both the outsider and the machine, but the intersection of those two things is the Borg, which are explicitly rejected as a threat here [4]. On the other side of things, Picard too would have to learn that valuing people in the present only by how they relate to your past isn't much more healthy when you're driven by grief, rather than by revenge.
I'd also put money on either Commodore Oh or (more likely) Narissa ending up as an ally to Picard. This would both work as a counterbalance to Laris' heel-turn (softening the resulting blow of another treacherous Romulan woman running about) but it would also return us to that fundamental Trek idea that we're all of us capable of learning where we've gone wrong, and changing for the better.
Above everything else, Picard's belief that he can win out alone would come crashing down. Zhaban was right from the start: Picard needs a crew, Or, not necessarily a crew, but certainly people to strive alongside and, where necessary, to keep his ego in check. Just happening to be Jean Luc Picard isn't going to get him anywhere. This is absolutely key: the first Trek to be named after what we'd call a legacy character would end up explicitly rejecting the idea that legacy is what matters. Names mean nothing.
Two episodes into Discovery, that show was set to deconstruct the Federation as the default heroes. Two episodes into Picard, and it was poised to do something even more worthwhile: deconstruct the concept of heroism within Trek itself. To remind us that even the best of us are part of a greater whole, or they are nothing. I hate that that was taken from us. In some other reality, where the pandemic hit later, or even not at all, there's a complete run of this season (and maybe even a follow up or two) to lay out the need for the franchise to first interrogate its past, and then move beyond it. In that parallel dimension, the franchise has finally said goodbye to endless attempts to recycle "Best Of Both Worlds" and Wrath Of Khan, and begun constructing a new era of Trek truly worthy of the name.
In this world, in this future, all we can do is dream about what this show might have been.
[1] Something to point out the next time someone sneers at how "wrong" Commander Data looks in the first episode. Yes, the CGI applied to Spiner looks cheap. That's still more expensive than free, which is what it actually cost.
[2] No doubt it would have happened eventually anyway. What else could the name "F8" imply but "fate"?
[3] The Maddox synthetics are forced take out a shipyard and the very concept of their form of life is outlawed. Picard is forced to obliterate forty starships at Wolf 359 and he's back in the captain chair within days. The ban isn't because synthetic life can be co-opted, its because the Federation knows damn well what it allowed to happen, and it's delighted to be presented with a neat way to sweep it under the rug.
[4] Note the sign saying "This facility has gone 5843 days without an assimilation", which is both funny and evidence the former Borg cube is actually a pretty safe place to work. We should also remember that Patrick Stewart has said how, in early story meetings for show, he was adamant the story of Picard and the Borg had been done, and that it was time for something new. Featuring there here only as damaged, even pathetic relics was definitely the right tack to take. It's a real shame Picard never got the time it needed to definitively break the franchise's dependence on the Borg as a threat.
Ordering
2. Maps And Legends
3. Yesteryear
5. Parallax
7. Charlie X
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