Star Trek loves itself a nebula. It loves itself a starship that will get caught inside a nebula. When that nebula is definitely a residing being? It’s downright giddy. This week’s Star Trek: Picard not solely did all three, it used that traditional premise to offer all its characters a selection: come collectively or crack below the stress.

“No Win Situation,” the fourth episode of Star Trek: Picard season 3, constructs on final week’s barnstormer of an episode the place Picard, Riker, and everybody else aboard the Titan had been having absolutely the worst time of their lives. Seems, there’s at all times a method to make issues worse! With the Titan all however scuttled by Picard’s failed, hail-mary assault on the Shrike, the ship’s dwindling energy reserves go away it in a tailspin down deep into the gravity nicely on the coronary heart of the nebula. If that wasn’t sufficient, their energy reserves are so low the Titan’s life help techniques are very near shutting down, so the crew is both going to freeze, asphyxiate, and/or be crushed by the gravitic forces throughout the nebula. And if that wasn’t sufficient, there’s additionally a changeling saboteur working aboard the ship, and nobody actually is aware of the place one in every of Star Trek’s most sinister foes is lurking, or who they’re.

Suffice it to say, if “No Win Situation” was about getting out of all these particular person no-win situations and nothing else, it’d be a reasonably tense, thrilling episode of Star Trek. However Picard continues its robust streak this season by not likely specializing in the hows and whys and technobabbles of those plot threads, however their immense impression on the characters—the stress of a number of deadly situations compressing them into the most effective variations of themselves, primarily by way of loads of damage.

Riker, contemporary off of his very public dust-up with Jean-Luc, spends any time he’s not making an attempt to maintain what’s left of the Titan collectively lengthy sufficient to determine a method out whereas reflecting on how the lack of his and Deanna’s son Thad—which he used to reassure Picard about getting nearer to his newfound son final week—has left him emotionally distant, damaging their relationship alongside the way in which. Doing so lets him mirror lengthy sufficient that if this is the top, he can’t go away Picard on the phrases he did final week, resulting in an emotional calming of the waters between them.

Picard, in the meantime, tries to spend what could possibly be his final hours with Jack, retreating to the holodeck’s recreation of Ten Ahead (the Picard bar, not the TNG one, alas) alongside a number of different distressed members of the Titan crew to attempt to calm his son within the face of virtually sure demise. It’s a robust sequence of scenes, as Patrick Stewart displays a rawness not often seen in his portrayal of Picard—human, humorous, melancholic, a little bit expletive—and the bittersweet nature of all of it is contrasted with a sequence of flashbacks to the precise Ten Ahead again on earth, as Jack, unbeknownst to his father, surreptitiously overhears him regale a crowd of Starfleet Academy college students about his historical past. There, Picard concludes when a pupil asks him if he ever supposed to begin a household, that Starfleet was his household, breaking the guts of his unseen son. However within the current, simply as Jack and Jean-Luc are on the cusp of discovering some connection collectively, the second is thrown into emotional chaos as a substitute… as a recovering Captain Shaw enters the bar.

It seems a part of Shaw’s animosity to Picard isn’t simply the way in which the Admiral bludgeoned his path aboard his ship together with his personal legacy. Shaw was stationed aboard a ship that took half within the notorious Battle of Wolf 359, the place Picard, as Locutus, led the Borg in a devastating assault on Starfleet. There have been no heroic survival tales of willpower like those Picard tells, Shaw bitterly rails on the Admiral, assuming that is the one probability he’ll ever get. He survived his ship’s destruction by being randomly chosen to flee on the remaining life pods, then watching his mates die in his place. For a season already bringing as a lot Deep Area 9 nostalgia to the fore as it’s TNG by making Changelings the massive risk of the present, there’s a fascinating parallel between Shaw’s relationship with Picard and Benjamin Sisko’s relationship with Picard as seen in DS9‘s premiere, “Emissary,” 30 years in the past in that the bitter recriminations of survivors of Locutus’ assault undo the person utterly. Before Jack can come to his protection, Picard glumly accepts each Shaw’s hatred and that his second together with his son has handed, retreating from the bar and into himself whereas the Titan faces its doom.

Talking of Shaw, the opposite rocky relationship we get this week comes within the type of his questionable bond with Seven of 9, who continues to be technically awaiting court docket martial whilst she runs in regards to the Titan making an attempt to do her job. Tasked by Riker with discovering the Changeling saboteur as quietly as she will be able to, Seven finds herself having to go to Shaw for assist, who solely begrudgingly agrees to supply info when Seven likewise begrudgingly admits she wants his familiarity with the Titan to seek out the saboteur. Seven and Shaw work collectively to trick the Changeling after destroying its regenerative bucket (which, apparently, tells us all Changelings copied Odo’s bucket design, which is oddly candy) whereas Shaw tries to hotwire the Titan’s engines after Riker and the bridge crew give you a madcap plan to get out of the residing nebula. In a second of catharsis, all the things comes collectively, and it’s the essential connections everybody has made within the stress of this episode—Shaw and Seven, Picard and Riker, Picard and Jack—that win the day. When Ensign LaForge exhibits as much as assist Seven and Shaw, the previous performs on her friendship with the younger officer… goading her into revealing she’s the Changeling in disguise, referring to Seven as “Commander Hansen” as a substitute of “Commander Seven,” as the true LaForge does.

And so, in spite of everything this pressure and intrapersonal drama, Star Trek: Picard permits itself a second of catharsis—the Changeling agent is useless, the Titan escapes the nebula (timing its velocity with the discharge of a wave of new child nebula-jellyfish), and Riker even will get to return the proverbial favor and use its tractor beam to lob an asteroid on the Shrike on the way in which out. Everybody’s pleased, everybody’s alive, and for the primary time in a number of episodes, virtually all of Picard’s characters can catch their breath.

It’s an incredible climax to this opening chapter of Picard’s ultimate season, even because it’s very clear issues aren’t over. The query of simply why these Dominion renegades need Jack Crusher nonetheless plagues Picard, and Jack himself continues to be likewise tormented by his unusual visions. And, in fact, albeit a bit battered, Vadic continues to be on the market and keen to assert her bounty. But when “No Win Situation” proved something, it’s that even when issues are sure to worsen once more from this second of respite, the crew aboard the Titan, despite their variations, are greater than able to face the stress.

Need extra io9 information? Try when to count on the newest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s subsequent for the DC Universe on movie and TV, and all the things you must learn about the way forward for Physician Who.