Picard Turned First Contact Day Into Star Trek's Darkest Holiday
Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Picard's Season 1 Finale
Thanks to Star Trek: Picard, First Contact Day took a dark turn as it became the date of one of Star Trek's greatest tragedies. Star Trek: Picard is set in 2399 and centers on Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) embarking on a new adventure, wherein he ultimately saves the galaxy and determines the cause of one of the United Federation of Planets' most devastating incidents: the attack on Mars by rogue synthetics, which happened on April 5, 2385 - First Contact Day.
First Contact Day is a unique holiday in Star Trek canon that celebrates humanity's first warp flight, which subsequently led to Earth's first contact with an alien race, the Vulcans. First Contact Day occurred on April 5, 2063, when Zephram Cochrane (James Cromwell) piloted his makeshift, warp-capable starship, the Phoenix, into outer space. What the history books don't record, however, is that the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E played a pivotal role in Cochrane's historic achievement. As seen in Star Trek: First Contact, Captain Picard led the Enterprise-E to time travel back to 2063 to stop the Borg from assimilating Earth's past in order to conquer it in the future. While Picard battled the Borg aboard his starship, Commander Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) led a team to ensure that Cochrane's launched the Phoenix on schedule. Riker and Commander Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) were even Cochrane's co-pilots and it all went off without a hitch. As history recorded, the Vulcans detected the Phoenix's warp signature, landed on Earth, and met humans for the first time, which changed the course of humanity for the better.
Click the button below to start this article in quick view. Start nowAfter Star Trek: First Contact became a blockbuster in 1996, First Contact Day has become a holiday in Star Trek canon (and it's even celebrated by Trekkers annually). In Star Trek: Voyager; the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager recognized the holiday while they were lost in the Delta Quadrant, although to Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), First Contact Day was merely a chance for children to take the day off from school. However, Star Trek: Picard twisted the meaning of the holiday into something truly grim: On April 5, 2385, rogue androids attacked the Utopia Planitia Shipyards on Mars and destroyed the fleet under construction that was meant to save the Romulan people from their star going supernova. The Mars attack killed 92,143 people and as a result of the cataclysm, Mars was still burning 14 years later.
The tragic human toll of the Mars attack was depicted in the Short Trek episode, "Children of Mars", where youngsters of Earth (who did not get the day off from school) heartbreakingly found out that their parents, who worked at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards, were killed in the catastrophe. Politically, the Mars attack resulted in the Federation banning all artificial lifeforms for the next 14 years and this also had tragic results, like the death of Dahj (Isa Briones), one of Commander Data's (Brent Spiner) synthetic daughters, at the hands of the Romulan death cult, the Zhat Vash. Will Riker and Deanna Troi's (Marina Sirtis) son Thad also died from a fatal disease, which could have been cured by technology if synthetics hadn't been banned.
In Star Trek: Picard, Jean-Luc and his new ragtag crew uncovered the truth that the Mars attack was part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Commodore Oh (Tamlyn Tomita), the Head of Starfleet Security. Unbeknownst to the Federation, Oh was actually the leader of the Zhat Vash and she had manipulated the course of Starfleet's involvement with synthetics for decades, culminating in arranging the Mars attack so that androids would be banned entirely by the Federation. Thanks to Picard and the crew of the starship La Sirena, Oh's treachery was finally exposed.
By the end of Star Trek: Picard's season 1 finale, the ban on synthetics was thankfully lifted so that the androids built by Dr. Bruce Maddox (John Ales) and Dr. Altan Soong were no longer fugitives. This newfound freedom also benefits Dahj's twin sister, Soji, and Jean-Luc Picard himself, who died and was resurrected in a new synthetic body. Happily, Jean-Luc's victory in Star Trek: Picard set the Federation on course to righting the many wrongs inflicted by Commodore Oh - and hopefully, that includes reclaiming April 5th so that First Contact Day is no longer marred by the Mars tragedy and can again be about celebrating the hopeful optimism that Star Trek's universe is built upon.
Star Trek: Picard is available to stream on CBS All-Access and internationally on Amazon Prime Video.
Source: screenrant.com