Star Trek: Picard season one, episode 8 recap: Broken Pieces
By Monita Mohan
The Origins of the Zhat Vash
The first few episodes of Star Trek: Picard established that the Romulan sect, the Zhat Vash has a vendetta against synthetics.
We learn in ‘Broken Pieces’, that the Zhat Vash is an ancient sect of Romulan women who go through a ritual called the ‘Admonition’ that shows them the horrors of the past. Fourteen years before the events of the show, Commodore Oh led a group of women through the ritual on Aia, the Grief World.
The visions drove most of them mad, including Ramdha. But, while she survives, the others killed themselves to purge their minds. The only remaining Zhat Vash was Narissa, who had a mission to destroy the destroyer.
Narissa and Narek were taken in by their auntie, Ramdha, when their parents were killed. There’s some affection between Narissa and Ramdha in the present, but it appears that Ramdha’s sole purpose following the Admonition was to take down the Borg.
Narissa and Ramdha were on separate ships when the Borg attacked, and Ramdha’s ship is the one that was assimilated. Ramdha’s unstable mind destroyed the hive mind – this may explain why so many of the xBs continue to be mentally ill.
Commodore Oh used her half-Vulcan stature to weasel her way into Starfleet and has climbed to the top rank of Head of Security. This gave her the ability to stage the synth coup that led to the ban of all synths. Oh secretly lit the fire that burnt the synths down. Now she’s set Narissa, Narek, and Jurati on the same path to kill Soji and her people.
The Ibn Majid
When Soji arrives on La Sirena, Rios is catatonic in her presence. He’s seen her before but it’s going to take some investigation by Raffi to figure out where and how. While Rios hides out in his quarters, Raffi assembles all five of his holographic doppelgängers to uncover the mystery behind his behavior. Each of the holograms has a full-blown personality.
There’s the earnest and polished EMH; the hospitality hologram who knows people but doesn’t know about personal space and we’ve met Emmett, the swaggering Latino tactical hologram.
In this episode, we are introduced to Enoch, the eager and friendly navigation hologram who rocks an Irish accent, and the engineering hologram Ian, who appears to be Scottish. Let’s put it this way; no harm ever came from having more Santiago Cabrera. He somehow imbues each character on La Sirena with its charm and personality.
From the moment Rios first appeared on Star Trek: Picard, it was apparent that he was traumatized by the loss of his previous Starfleet captain. They were very close, and we learn that Captain Alonzo Vandermeer of the Ibn Majid was a great man, and Rios considered him his father. He nearly called him that to his face.
Rios didn’t just idolize Vandermeer; it’s obvious he loved him, which makes Vandermeer’s consequent actions particularly despicable. The Ibn Majid picked up a couple of life forms near the Vayt System, and while eating dinner with the ambassador Beautiful Flower and his protégé Jana, Vandermeer got a call from Oh and proceeded to kill both of them. That was Starfleet protocol when it came to synths, and Vandermeer had to abide by it, or his entire ship and crew would be destroyed.
Rios was having none of it. He ripped into his captain and went at him hard. The guilt was so much that Vandermeer shot himself with his phaser right in front of Rios. Horrified, Rios ejected the bodies into space and covered up his captain’s suicide. But the incident led to Rios being discharged from Starfleet for post-traumatic dysphoria. So, what does all this have to do with Soji?