Opening in 2385, 14 years before the show’s present and just after the Utopia Planitia Shipyards were destroyed by synthetics, “The End is the Beginning” fleshes out what was before mostly insinuated. While Picard is still bitter about Starfleet ending rescue operations to pull people from the radius of the approaching supernova, the destruction of the rescue armada on Mars represented a substantial material impediment. In the opening of Episode 3, we join Picard after an uncomfortable conversation with Starfleet’s top brass, where it becomes clear contempt for Romulans, political cowardice and isolationist retrenchment overshadowed any practical reasons to end the rescue operation. In conversation, Picard and Starfleet intelligence officer Raffi (Michelle Hurd) describe the lengths they went to secure resources for the rescue to continue.
“Mars is burning, tens of thousands are dead, and no one is thinking, nobody is listening. They’re just reacting,” Picard says, after offering his resignation as a final gambit. To his shock, Starfleet accepted it.
“You tender your resignation, and my a– gets fired,” Raffi laments.
In the present day, the episode’s early scenes are spent on Picard convincing Raffi to team with him once more. He finds her embittered, living in the future equivalent of a double-wide trailer and spending her days smoking “snake leaf” in between bottles of wine. Set north of Los Angeles at the Vasquez Rocks, which has doubled as an alien world in eight Star Trek episodes, the choice to return the alien location to Earth is one of the more dramatic illustrations of Picard’s work delimiting the utopian United Federation of Planets.
Citing his heirloom furniture and chateau opulence, Raffi reveals that deep inequalities continue on the Earth of 2399. It seems our planet is not quite the paradise depicted in Deep Space Nine, or as Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) described it to Mark Twain (Jerry Hardin), a place where poverty has been eliminated, and “hopelessness, despair, cruelty,” along with it.
Meanwhile, Soji is on the Borg cube “Artifact,” petitioning the Romulan reclamation authorities for access to a former Borg drone: a Romulan member of the cube’s final assimilated vessel, who Soji believes can help construct a common mytho-religious narrative for the former drones to rally their new lives around.
She finds an ally in Hugh, who briefly recovered part of his individuality in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “I Borg” and now speaks for his fellow recovered drones. Jonathan Del Arco returns to the role, bringing a chivalric peace to the character, who we last saw decades earlier (excepting a second TNG appearance), returning to the Borg Collective, to re-close eyes just opened.
We also meet Cristóbal Rios (Santiago Cabrera), another disillusioned former member of Starfleet, haunted by his previous captain, whose “blood and brains splattered all over a bulkhead.” A detached rogue with a heart of gold, Rios and Picard find common cause in their dislike of bureaucratic shackles.
Picard’s recruitment of Rios also introduces another updated Trek character, though not this time with a returning cast member. Aboard Picard’s new ship is a newer model Emergency Medical Hologram, or E.M.H., also played by Cabrera, this time with a brogue. Much like the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager, this new E.M.H. dispenses wisdom as much as medicine.
After a quiet moment of Rios and Picard looking to the stars, each reflecting on the journey ahead (“I don’t think I ever truly felt at home here,” Picard admits), Chateau Picard is attacked by a Romulan death squad, similar to the one that killed Dahj, the first introduced of Data’s twin daughters. Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) arrives in the aftermath, to insist on her inclusion in the coming expedition, pledging her expertise in synthetics to the mission.
The crew is complete, but the most consequential plot development in the episode is yet to come, revealed in tandem scenes. While Picard’s Romulan housekeepers (Orla Brady and Jamie McShane) interrogate a Zhat Vash (a cabal within the Romulan Tal Shiar) survivor, Asha speaks with a Romulan “disordered,” left traumatized after her de-assimilation. In the dueling scenes characters across the galaxy learn the same secret: Asha is more than a synthetic, but “the end of all” and “the destroyer,” whatever that might mean.
While the reveal that the Romulans see in Asha an undescribed danger will most propel the events of subsequent episodes, “The End is the Beginning” is also notable for just how much it reveals about the Romulans, who have endured as one of the most secretive of all the competing powers in the Star Trek galaxy, across more than half a century of episodes (the Romulans first appeared in 1966’s “Balance of Terror”). In Episode 3 of Picard we learn a variety of Romulan idiosyncrasies, including their preference for false front doors, with guests instead expected to go around to the back of a residence.
We also see the lengths the Zhat Vash will go to suppress synthetic life, with the episode heavily implying the disordered, de-assimilated Romulans were all part of the mission that first disrupted the Borg cube by causing a submatrix collapse. Whatever the Romulans fear in Asha, there also seems to be more to their plans for the Borg Artifact.
““The End is the Beginning” concludes aboard a starship captained by Jean-Luc Picard. They’re off to find leading Data expert (and the possible creator of his twin daughters) Dr. Bruce Maddox, who seems to have left Earth for something named Freecloud. But the destination doesn’t matter so much for the purposes of this three-episode introduction into the world of Picard. It was all leading to Picard’s command—“Engage”—a moment in Star Trek history the series can’t resist watching itself perform, cutting away to Dr. Jurati’s excited reaction as The Next Generation theme kicks in.
