Star Trek Picard
I sort of had a smell of where they were going.
In the penultimate episode of season1 of Picard. Our scruffy heroes in their scruffy ship make it to the world Coppelius
But pretty boy Romulan agent guy is right behind them. They get into a fight and then Seven of Nine arrives in her battered Borg cube.
But all three ships are disabled by weir CGI space Orchids. These giant flying flowers fly into orbit, and wrap around intruding ships, neutralizing them. Affected ships lose all power. Even the Borg cube.
The Orchids them try to bear the disabled ship to the ground, with varying levels of success.
Picard and company go to a small settlement and find an idyllic, almost utopian community where the people are all data style androids.
They're all pretty and dressed in very light, flowing clothes. The building look very modern and comfortable.
I pictured myself laughing as I walked into this place going "Another small, out of the way idyllic utopia. Enjoy it. You know they're going to try and eat our brains, later. " Because how often do we see Star TRek people find a small, idyllic utopia and NOT wind up on the wrong end of attempted mind control, murder to keep some secret or getting sacrificed to some god or some computer?
Brent Spiner appears as Soong, Jr, the son of the original Soong and continuation of his fathers work. I don't believe it for a second.
So apparently Maddox and Soong Jr fled the Federation after the ban on Synths and built their own little android utopia. So far so good. The party meets "Arcana" an android played by the same actress as Soji and Dahj, but wth Gold skin and gold eyes.
Arcana has mastered the art of the Vulcan Mind meld. So she takes an image of the "Admonishment" from Agnes Jurati. Arcana understands it clearly.
While this telepathic message and recording has been driving a secret cult of Romulan Women insane for generations, its relatively clear to an artificial life form.
it's a message from the AI aside of the ancient AI war. The ancient AIs say that organic, mortal beings always wind up seeing synthetic people as threatening. So Meatbags always try to genocide synthetic people.
basically the same mind set I made up for the T'Kon Killbots in the BHR semi-plot I made up.
meanwhile Seven and Elmir get the Borg Cubes sensors working and there are 219 Romulan warbirds heading their way. The Romulans are not messing around. They mean to scout the planet clean of everything.
Soji and Arcana discus it. Soji is deeply conflicted and unsure but Aracana is very certain. Arcana feels that the Android-topia has zero defenses against the Romulan Armada (They have 15 Orchids left, and the Armada will get there in 2 days)
So Arcana and Soong Jr make the decision to call the T'Kon AIs. The message says that they have stepped outside of reality to await the call from other AIs.
Everyone is pretty sure that sending the call and summoning the other dimensional AIs will start some flavor of Ragnaraok.
Picard gives a moving speech about not starting up with that, but trying a different solution that involved running away. Arcana and Soong Junior point out that the Federation banning Synths pretty much proves the Admonitions point.
As the episode ends, Arcana, for reasons not clear to me lets Romulan fuck boi spy loose and we see him beating feet for the downed Borg cube.
It seems that Arcana and Soong have decided to call the ancient AIs and start Ragnarok, killing all meatbags, but ensuring the survival of Android-kind.
At the last minute, Soji seems to side with the Android-topians and advises that Picard the rest of the mostly crew be put into house arrest until the call is sent. But I think she has an ulterior motive.
At every turn, and underlying themes of this story has been "fear of the other" and Picard seems to be fighting a losing battle to call to people's better natures.
We'll see where the climax of the story takes us.
This post took me over two hours to write. I just cannot put my attention anywhere and hold it right now. External things keep interrupting me. Grrr.