Star Trek Guide

Star Trek: Picard Has Its Most Shocking Betrayal Yet

WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Season 1, Episode 5 of Star Trek: Picard, "Stardust City Rag," now streaming on CBS All Access.

In a way, one of the biggest underlying themes in Star Trek: Picard has been betrayal and the misplacement of trust. After a lifetime of service in Starfleet and the Federation, the institutions that Jean-Luc Picard had espoused and literally bled for had betrayed him, taking on a more isolationist, fear-mongering policy that left the decorated Starfleet admiral to retire in disgusted protest. This policy shift was brought on by its own betrayal of sorts, with rogue synthetic beings turning Starfleet's automated planetary defense systems around Mars to turn on the planet. That attack resulted in the deaths of thousands and set fires that are still burning decades later.

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And in the latest episode of Picard, the crew of La Sirena is rocked by a big traitor in their midst yet: Doctor Agnes Jurati.

Agnes was one of the Federation's leading experts on artificial intelligence and synthetic life researching, based out of the Daystrom Institute back on Earth with Star Trek: The Next Generation character Bruce Maddox as her mentor. After the devastating attack on Mars and the Federation's shift towards outlawing A.I. and synthetics, the Institute was severely defunded and its research shelved, leading Maddox to retreat to the lawless world of Freecloud. With Agnes joining up with Picard aboard La Sirena, the researcher had come off as goofy, inept and severely out-of-place among the stars rather than in the comfort of her lab on terra firma. However, this is all apparently a ruse as she has shown her true colors.

Left alone with Maddox aboard La Sirena's sickbay as the ship sets out to locate the android woman Soji, a tearful Agnes remarks that she has seen traumatizing things before killing him. The murderous turn is the most shocking for the series to date, taking the fish-out-of-water comic relief provided by Agnes and turning her into a traitor lurking amongst La Sirena with the rest of the crew none the wiser. Agnes' trauma may be linked to the synthetic attack on Mars and, given that she joined up with Picard after learning of his mission to track down Soji, she may be a mole planted by the Romulans.

Continuing on the theme of betrayal, the Romulans were revealed to have infiltrated the highest levels of Starfleet, with a new clandestine organization known as the Zhat Vash committed to eradicating synthetic life across the galaxy. Commodore Oh was revealed as a high-ranking member of the Zhat Vash, who tasked her agents to kill Picard for learning of the organization's existence. Another Romulan operative has grown closer to Soji in an effort to use her to track down other unidentified androids, presumably for their destruction in keeping with the Zhat Vash's main goal.

Most of La Sirena's crew appears to be united by a sense of betrayal, including Raffi and Elnor, two characters who feel personally betrayed by Jean-Luc Picard for their own respective reasons. However, Agnes Jurati's heel turn marks a true traitor among the intrepid, unauthorized ship's crew. The seemingly naive exterior appears to have been a show for something much darker and completely willing to murder her former mentor, certainly explaining why Agnes was so eager to join Picard in space in the first place.

With La Sirena en route to the Romulan Reclamation Project on board the Borg Cube, Picard's next confrontation with the Zhat Vash is something of an inevitability. However, the venerable admiral has no apparent idea that the Romulans may already have an operative in their midst, having just committed murder and likely ready to kill again to prevent Picard from completing his mission.

Star Trek: Picard stars Patrick Stewart, Alison Pill, Michelle Hurd, Evan Evagora, Isa Briones, Santiago Cabrera, and Harry Treadaway. New episodes of the series premiere every Thursday on CBS All Access.

Source: www.cbr.com