Towards the end of “Stardust City Rag,” Seven of Nine asks to borrow a couple phasers. She then picks out a pair of phaser rifles that look comically large when you hold them one-handed, which she then proceeds to do as she blasts her way through that scene they put in the trailers.
There are several problems with this. Picard neither owns nor commands the ship they’re on, and doesn’t have any business giving away its phasers. Seven’s plan is to use the phasers to go murder somebody, so she’s making Picard complicit in her plan while actively deceiving him about it. And Picard seems completely oblivious to this, despite it being blindingly obvious.
But the silliest problem is that Seven definitely doesn’t need two phasers. Not only that, but each phaser she takes is about the size of her arm, when Star Trek has repeatedly shown—including in this episode—that weapons a fraction of that size already have more firepower than she would need. But in a sense, this fits perfectly—because if “Stardust City Rag” has any defining characteristic, “too much” probably sums it up.
There’s a theory of dramatization that if you don’t really have anything to say, say it louder, and this episode speaks very loudly. It begins with a scene that borders on torture porn even given the work Discovery has done to normalize graphic violence in Star Trek. The planet Freecloud is presented as a den of excess where visitors are immediately assaulted by holographic popup ads. To blend in, the characters need to dress up like the 1990s caricature of a pimp, while Picard takes on an over-the-top French accent.
Likewise, the characters’ relationships feel like they’ve been dialed up for maximum angst. We learn that Raffi’s son is so badly estranged from her that he can’t talk to her for more than two minutes without berating her with such vehemence that it makes him look like the unstable one. Drs. Maddox and Jurati were apparently romantically involved, a development that doesn’t particularly make sense in the context of their characters or the story, but does serve to make it more impactful when she betrays and murders him.
The episode’s entire construction feels similarly forced. The entire plot relies on a massive series of coincidences. Seven had no idea that Picard was going to Freecloud, nor that he was trying to find Maddox, nor that the evil body-harvester who had brutalized Icheb was there, nor that she had just captured Maddox. While we’re at it, we can assume that Raffi knew her son was on Freecloud all along, but since he seems to have no connection to Maddox, that seems to be a total coincidence as well.
The purpose of all these stories seems to be to tell a story about the death of idealism. Raffi’s efforts to save the Romulans, and subsequent suspicion that the attacks on Mars weren’t what they seemed, ended up estranging her from her son. Icheb’s commitment to help stabilize the region after the Federation left ended with him as the victim of the body-harvesters.
And the common element of all this is Picard’s failure, both to see the rescue mission through and then to take any part in the aftermath. So it’s odd that the other characters almost uniformly go out of their way to insulate him from that reality. Raffi doesn’t mention her son once, but worse is how Seven repeatedly tries to disguise her quest for revenge, even saying at the end that she wants to protect Picard’s idealism by keeping him in ignorance. It’s a truly baffling choice that diminishes both of their characters and the story they’re in.
There was another version of this idea that would have fit Seven’s character better and made more thematic sense. The Borg epitomize ruthless efficiency and put absolutely no value in individual life. As a member of the Fenris Rangers, a vigilante band who act as a kind of law unto themselves, Seven could easily use that logic to assassinate someone whose kidnapping and murder schemes are helping to destabilize an entire region of space.
Instead, the show makes clear that she’s motivated by personal guilt and revenge. This makes her attitude less Borg and more human, but it also defeats the purpose of use Seven of Nine in this role to begin with.
Toward the beginning of the episode, Raffi notes that both Seven and Picard are former Borg. That throws Rios for a loop, because he’d forgotten that Picard had been assimilated once, too. And that really is an idea with a lot of potential—Picard and Seven really do have a unique perspective on what it’s like to occupy a space between human and machine, and there was plenty of potential for a better-focused story to explore that.
But this is what they came up with instead.
“Stardust City Rag” doesn’t really hold together either totally or thematically. Its only uniting feature is excess. So it’s kind of fitting that the episode also doesn’t really advance the overall plot: It doesn’t spend any time with Sohji on the Artifact, and if Raffi had originally used her hacker skills to find Sohji instead of Maddox, the entire thing would have been unnecessary. So it’s all the more troubling that the show’s creators felt a need to include it anyway.
Other times when Star Trek handled these ideas better:
“Prey.” Star Trek: Voyager, Season 4. A member of Species 8472 hides on Voyager while some Hirogens are hunting it for sport; Seven wants to sacrifice it for the good of the ship, which puts her at odds with Janeway’s sense of Starfleet morality. It touches on the kind of cold, amoral calculus that animates the Borg, but which humans often resort to when convinced they don’t have a choice.
“Silicon Avatar.” Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 5. The Enterprise is tracking down the Crystalline Entity, which has wiped out several Federation colonies including the one where Data was created. Assisting them is a scientist whose son was killed in the attack, and the episode offers a much deeper and more nuanced exploration of the costs of revenge.