Star Trek: Picard - Season One

18

Aw, Buttigieg, you're okay. Loved seeing him as a kid wearing a Trek costume. Ha!


Okay, I watched Episode 8: "Broken Pieces"

I have been thinking about this for a couple days and I'm not sure what to say. I think on a fundamental level I just don't like this story. "AI goes wild and destroys things, government tries to stop it" etc. Focusing on the dangers of AI just seems such a boring story idea for Star Trek. This is overdone in SF in general, and Trek has had androids in it for 50 years! Androids were played as a joke in TOS. This franchise spent 7 years in TNG exploring Data's quest to be human. Even the appearances of Lore weren't really about "oooh, AI is so scary!". We saw Data create a daughter. We met a much more lifelike android Soong had created as Data's "mother".

This was followed up in VOY with a computer system-generated hologram that was sentient and increasingly interested in gaining equal rights.

To spend so many episodes in this series focusing on people who believe AI will bring about the apocalypse feels so retrograde for Star Trek. There are so many more interesting topics a progressive pro-tech franchise like Trek could be focusing on. Trek is a pro-tech SF franchise. Have the creators forgotten that? This is especially boring considering ST: DSC season 2 ended up being about the dangers of an AI system. Kurtzman, do you have any other ideas?

Okay, so as for this episode... let's go from stuff I didn't like to stuff I did like.

This was such a disappointing use of the Borg. Again, when I saw the Borg cube in the trailer I groaned. They were the last thing I wanted to see. However, the presentation in PIC was so interesting. But this episode squandered any potential of that setting and that story.

I am mystified over what this show is doing with Seven of Nine. I am confused that they set up such an interesting idea with her, only to completely whiff on it. "Ooh, Seven has to take control of the Cube! Is she going to be the Queen? Will she have to be reassimilated? What will happen if she hooks herself back into the Cube?" Nah, this show doesn't care. Apparently she just unhooks herself after a couple minutes and it's all fine. Okay, cool.

The show spent several minutes in an early episode hinting at what would happen if the Cube reactivates. They build up in this episode to the Cube being reactivated, and then the Romulans just go "Meh, open the doors and blow them into space". And that's it. Sigh.

I don't understand the point of Elnor.

The opening scene with the Romulans and the secret planet and the panic of what synthetic life can do.... I'm torn. I think this would have been a great scene to have much earlier in the series, as it (remarkably) helps to make Narissa almost seem like a real person. Almost. But I am still left pondering why a generic Hollywood action reel of planet destruction is enough to drive people to suicide. How is this different than any number of other scary stuff we've seen in Trek? And crucially, I don't understand why these people see what happened 200,000 years ago and believe this is inevitable now. Where are the skeptics? Why isn't anyone asking questions about this? (More on this later.) Again, this scene may have played better much earlier in the series, because by now the show has set this up as this giant mystery, when the answers are simply not compelling enough to justify the buildup.


The stuff on La Sirena is mostly okay, but not great.

Kinda hated the scene between Picard and the Admiral. I'm not a prude and I don't mind swearing in media. However, there was no fucking need for this Admiral to tell Picard to "shut the fuck up". Actually saying "SHUT UP!" would have been more powerful. This was so arbitrary. Jurati also has a completely arbitrary swear word used in this episode.

It is lame writing that Jurati can't tell Picard what she saw because of a "psychic block". Ugh. Allison Pill is doing a great job, but her character is a mess. Why was what she saw powerful enough to get her to murder her lover, but she gets a look at Soji and suddenly is not scared anymore?

Amazing that the EMH can now pop up and explain to them all how Jurati killed Maddox. Amazing that there doesn't seem to be a requirement to report this stuff to Rios.

Rios in this episode is...Again I'm torn here. Because I do like the show actually finally telling us about Rios's backstory, and explaining some of why he is depressed and bitter. And I really liked Santiago Cabrera in these scenes. I really liked the scene of Rafi interrogating ALL the holograms at once. But, it felt redundant earlier when she tried talking to a couple of them individually.

I loved the scene of Rafi and Rios talking about what had happened to Rios. Thought both of the actors were great in that. However, it seems silly to me that Rios's tragic backstory is related to the exact AI story that Picard is involved in. That is way too convenient. I'm willing to just go with this, but it is disappointing.

The two scenes I enjoyed the most involved Picard. One is the scene with Picard and Soji alone where Picard talks to her about her experiences and memories. Picard is able to be much more empathetic here than we've lately seen. I like that the show can use Patrick Stewart's performance and the music to hint at Picard's experience in "The Inner Light" to explain how Picard can empathize with Soji, without having him make an explicit mention of it. And I enjoyed them talking about Data, and especially that Picard had trouble articulating the nature of his relationship with Data.

Finally, the only scene in a long time that has made complete coherent sense to me was the conversation between Picard and Rios near the end. I liked that Rios seemed generally on the "synthetics aren't bad" side, but did express a worry that this Romulan faction might be right. And thank God, Picard finally expressed some skepticism toward this idea and gave a wonderful speech about "that was then, this is now, we don't know what will happen in the future", etc. I don't understand why no one else but Picard is making this argument, but I am exceedingly glad to hear someone say it.

So, this was something of a mixed bag episode for me. I did enjoy most of the character work in it, but I'm increasingly uninterested in the story.

Oh, and Jurati indicated that it might not even be the androids themselves that cause the problem, but when the AI passes a certain threshold that it triggers something else that causes the destruction. I don't know, this all just seems hard to care about on a series where we've seen the Q, the Metrons, the Organians, and several other species with immense power. I sincerely hope S2 has a better story idea.

PS. I did also like the scene where Picard tried to sit in the captain's chair and take command, but then couldn't work the fancy controls. LOL

I have seen episode 9, I promise. I am just struggling to figure out what to say. Even moreso than last week. So, here's some random thoughts in no particular order.

Why is the plot of this series simply Mass Effect?

Why do these modern Trek writers introduce conflicts into their story and then dispense of them right away? This happens in Discovery all the time. I don't mean stuff they introduce in one episode and then forget about in a later episode, which also happens all the time. I mean individual scenes in a single episode that are then contradicted later in that same episode. We saw this in the Casino Planet episode of ST: PIC wherein we learned all about the scary henchman who could smell lies. An entire scene was built around this, but hey, no worries. We'll just give Rios a drug. Problem solved. Or, in episode 8, "ooh, Seven's going to hook herself up to the Borg Cube and the Borg are going to reactive and retake control!" Next scene: Nah, Narissa blows them all into space and Seven simply unhooks herself. (Why were the real Borg blown into space but Seven/Ellnor and apparently quite a few EB's were not? Also, what happened to all the non-Romulan researchers and scientists who were there?)

Here we see it in, "Oh, Ellnor and Hugh couldn't have survived. That Borg Cube is massive. Something that big falling that fast would be totally destroyed when it hit the ground.". Next scene: Borg Cube is fine, tons of Ex-Borg walking around, they even have the replicators and scanners working! I do not understand what the writers think they are doing with this.

Why does this show think they can build intense character relationships in, like, 4 episodes? The scene of Raffi and Picard saying "I love you" was completely ludicrous. And I'm completely baffled by the way the scene between Rios and Jurati was portrayed. They just met about 10 days ago. They had pity sex once. She killed a dude! Why was this played as some tender, romantic scene? I never thought I'd miss 26 episode seasons, but at least those allowed the writers to develop the characters and their relationships.

I'm not entirely sure the plot of this series makes sense. Aside from the general Mass Effect-esque nature of it, I guess. Critically, I'm not sure how the revelations of Episode 9 are supposed to make the Romulans and Zhat Vash *wrong*. The evil android sneers that the Romulans didn't understand the visions.... but it kinda seems they did? They knew that once androids achieved a certain level of.... something (sentience?), that they could call upon *something* more advanced that would help them destroy all life. This is the message that Jurati tells Picard was in the vision.

It feels like the show has created a "chicken or the egg" problem. AKA, it's a circular problem. What is causing what?

This also seems such a disappointing problem for Trek to be dealing with, considering both TNG and DS9 featured the Federation/Starfleet pondering whether it would be worth committing genocide to stop a dangerous threat (Borg/Dominion).

And.... really? There is some unknown, powerful group of synthetic beings who are watching the galaxy and will respond if called for by other synthetic beings? Really???

Is this the story any of the fans wanted when we heard that Trek would finally have a series set post-DS9/VOY/Nemesis? Is "evil AI" really the story Trek thinks speaks to our time? There's a lost story here about Romulan refugees, retreating empires, racism, and the struggles to maintain utopia under extreme stress from outside your borders.

 My problems are more that we’ve never heard about this before? How are these super synths hiding? And also, speaking of these godlike beings, would Q allow organic life to be wiped out? 

More though, it is your second point that bothers me. This is what I was getting at when I said that I don’t understand how this makes the Romulans/Zhat Vash wrong. These super synths left a message saying that as soon as synthetic life achieved a certain level that they would show up and help destroy organic life. 

So, like, why would organic life forms then be wrong to try to prevent that level of advancement in synthetic lifeforms? Really finding it tough to say that Narek was on the wrong side, here. 

But this brings me back to one of my earlier points, if this is the message, why did only this tiny secret Romulan society know about this? Why didn’t they take the message to the governments of every galactic power? “Ooh, we found this horrifying threat to wipe out life! Better keep this secret!”  What?

When I said that this created a “chicken or the egg” problem, that’s what I meant. The synths want to destroy organic life b/c the organic life wants to destroy them. But the organic life wants to destroy them because synths left a message saying they were going to destroy organic life. 

It isn’t really circular, though. None of this would be happening if the synths hadn’t left that message. They provoked this reaction. Which is why I can’t feel like the Romulans are entirely wrong. 

And that leaves us with “evil AI threatens to destroy life” as a story, which feels so dated and un-Trek. 

There were no androids on that planet who could logic their way to “Hang on, maybe the only reason they've been trying to destroy us is because they saw this message that said we would wipe them out? 

Episode Nine / Ten - "Et In Arcadia Ego" Pts 1 And 2


When the poster is better than the show...


So Picard is a Cylon. Huh. 

When, at the end of episode eight, I pleaded for the series to fix its basic ability to tell a story I didn't actually expect that to happen. And lo and behold it didn't. Episode Nine - which consists of the same old go-not-very-far-slowly that has become Picard's storytelling modus operandi - goes through the usual stop-start motions of delivering exposition a lot, followed by small bits of forward plot momentum, followed by more exposition. The small bits of forward plot momentum are often huge bits of forward plot momentum but rarely feel so, even when - to take a far-from-arbitrary example - a Borg cube crash-lands on a planet, our heroes do the same thing, and a vast Romulan fleet zips into orbit. There's absolutely no emotional or storytelling change of pace between those scenes and people sitting around a campfire exchanging bits of expository dialogue, most of which is delivered with all the passion and sustained enthusiasm of a bored civil servant on a Friday afternoon. There's very little sense that any of this matters to anyone, and when we're discussing a potential genocide that's a serious problem. Episode Ten starts off the same way again then valiantly, and completely unsuccessfully, veers off into a TNG style of storytelling. The TNG style is instantly more affecting and interesting but it's too little too late.

And there's a good reason for that. This show has done an appalling job of making us care about Picard as a character, and that's been it's Achilles Heel. Talk about this not being the same Picard we encountered in TNG is fine - the character should have moved on from those days. But the show depends 100% on our familiarity and good-will towards the old version of the character and does absolutely none of the legwork to make us care about this version of the character. It wants to rely on the goodwill towards a version of the character than isn't in this show and that's where the struggle to make any of the emotional investment we're supposed to have falls. And it's why the sudden veering into a TNG style of storytelling - replete with musings on mortality, the place of prejudice within an individual, hope over fear etc - doesn't work. In isolation it's fine - occasionally even great. And it's not that's it's unwelcome, it's that after nine and a quarter episodes of the lead character being largely side-lined in favour of a supporting cast that never became compelling it simply feels tacked on, a way of trying to wring some kind of emotional cadence out of a situation that hasn't earned it. Stewart's great at Shakespeare so they give him one of the best-known Shakespeare speeches of all. Fine. He can deliver on that, of course he can. But there's a lingering sense of "...and?" that the show nor the character ever manage to break free of.

That's especially true when it comes to Picard being downloaded into the golem, a shameless reset-button that even Voyager might looks askance at. Because "...and?" is the biggest question of all to come out of that plot "twist". We're reassuringly told that Picard's new body doesn't come with any "superpowers", will age just like his real body, and he'll die just as he would have had he not had whatever the brain tumour thing was (I guess not Irumodic Syndrome after all  meaning Picard had not one but two brain diseases, which is bad luck in anyone's book). So... what's the point? What storytelling options is that opening up? What character development will that give us? The show goes out of its way to re-enforce just how little its own revelations matter, so why are we supposed to care? So Stewart can have a nice scene where all his rather bland new friends can gather round him looking a bit sad while the real friend who was on screen fifteen second earlier to save the day warps away in ignorance? Imagine what a death scene between Stewart and Frakes would look like! Arrgh! This is all just so pointless, and that it's preceded by Picard "killing" Data and the usual platitudes about mortality giving meaning to life just makes it worse. Any show which goes out of its way to so undermine its own finale has absolutely and completely not fixed its problems. The TNG mode of storytelling at the end might give some hope for Season Two but the end of Season One doesn't give us any reason to even understand why these people are all leaving on the same ship together. Hey look, Seven's joined the crew! Great! Hopefully she'll be a regular in the next season because she - and Jeri Ryan - is way more interesting than anyone else on this crew, but she's just there in the final couple of shots (fingers interlocked with Raffi, who's back in friendly-mom mode if you were spinning the What's Raffi's Emotional State This Episode wheel). I haven't even mentioned yet how wasted Seven is - she kills Narissa, which is great and inevitable but does nothing else other than hanging around for a bit so she can be in the final ensemble shot. So yeah. Not great.

And what's most annoying about all this is that the few moments of real quality that do peek out show you how good all of this could have been. Or if you're feeling generous, might be in the future. The scenes in the simulation between Data and Picard are contrived in terms of Data still being alive (B4, it turns out, wasn't completely useless though you really have to be paying attention to pick that up) but the actual resonance between the two characters lands and feels true. Spiner does surprisingly well in his dual role as Alton Soong - playing "other" versions of Data or the Soong family hasn't exactly been his strong point in the past but he delivers well here so all credit where its due. His death is affecting here in exactly the way it wasn't in Nemesis and though it's a long way round for a short cut the sight of him ageing on the sofa while, in shadow, Picard in his TNG-era uniform holds vigil over him is genuinely moving. Picard's death scene contributes nothing to the character but of course Stewart sells the hell out of it, and again manages to find depths that's not really there on the page. The couple of scenes with Riker on the bridge of his ship are great, Riker back with that shit-eating grin we love so much as he faces down the enemy. I'm not going to claim that the show we should have is one with the old characters - actually I think the opposite is true and relegating the TNG crew to an occasional cameo is the correct approach. But what having those characters around does do is allow us to see how this show ought to function, with real emotional connections between characters. In "Encounter At Farpoint", Picard opens up to Riker that he's terrible with kids. He practically yells it, in fact. And he orders Riker to re-attach the saucer section manually. There's an immediate emotional connection between those two characters from the word go, even if that connection is Riker looking frankly terrified of his imposing new captain. Raffi hasn't managed that ten episodes in, no matter how often she calls Picard J-L. The biggest problem, ultimately, isn't that the new characters aren't the old characters, the problem is that the new characters aren't (yet) good enough to take their place.

And that it for Season One. It would be a lie to say it's been anything other than a bit disappointing. There's been some moments where the show has shined but too few of them to make it easy to invest in. Picard himself has remained too side-lined in a show that's named after him and the basics of storytelling seem to have strangely eluded the show from the word go. It's not been a complete disaster, and it's still more watchable than Discovery, but even while the last half hour or so gives hope for the future it can't manage to erase the disappointments of the past. This show had so much good will going in and it's repeatedly taken that good will and just pissed it up against a wall. I hope Season Two will be better. Our crew fly off into the sunset, having prevented an ill-defined disaster that seemed way too easy to solve, so they can jet off to newer and more exciting things. Maybe the next season will have an over-arching plot like this one. Maybe it'll be Murder, She Wrote In Space (I'm fine with that as option). Or maybe The Rockford Files, But With Picard And A Spaceship Instead Of A Trailer In The Desert. I'm fine with that too. I just don't want to see more of the same, I want the show to - at the very least - learn from its mistakes this time out. I'm doubtful I'll do an episode-by-episode write up of it - unless you all shamelessly bully me into doing it - because I don't think the show has done enough to justify that kind of investment. And, really, that's the saddest thing of all.

Any Other Business:

• And that's it for Season One of Picard! I hope you've enjoyed reading along and commenting.

• I don't really like that snap-into-place-coming-out-of-warp effect. It's the same one Battlestar Galactica used and I feel that Star Trek's slow-down-coming-out was more distinctive. I get the need to make it look like things have moved on - the speedy transporters do that quite well - but that effect just isn't working for me.

• The orchids that languorously drift up from the planet to envelop starships are fantastic and worthy of considerable praise. There's a weirder, stranger and altogether more fascinating show - the same one with space Vegas and ooouttttrageous French accents - where space flowers stop gunships and I'd love to see it. Oh wait, it's called Farscape. But still - Picard desperately needed more of that kind of distinctive weirdness to mark it out. It's another example of these two episodes getting one thing right and therefore making everything else suffer by comparison.

• I thought a Borg cube crashing on the surface of a planet would be a bit more... I dunno. Spectacular? Guess not.

• Seven is in Episode Nine for about three minutes and with absolutely nothing of relevance to do.

• She's in Episode Ten too, which hints at the idea that she might actually be suicidal, or at the very least have no interest in whether she lives or dies, and glosses over this in the most facile way imaginable. Yes, just like her creating a Collective a few episodes ago!

• Rios was in these episodes

• Didn't like the clumsy "Picard manoeuvre" reference. I guess some will, but it felt too on-the-nose.

• Christ this crew are crap sometimes. They come up with a plan to blow up the transmitter, actually smuggle explosives in to the camp and then... throw them directly at Soji who just catches them and throws the bomb away before it goes boom. For. Fuck's. Sake.

• There's no weight to the idea of the artificial lives coming to wipe out the organics. It's only ever described in purely abstract terms, and when we do get to the point where they may actually invade our space they're just a random series of slightly snake-like thing in a hole that could come from any computer game (here's one from 1987, for fuck's sake) or indeed the end of the first Avengers film.

• Seven killing Narissa with the "that's for Hugh" line should have been way more impactful. It's a poorly directed fight scene and it doesn't feel satisfying when Narissa gets her comeuppance, there's just relief that she's not on the damned show any more.

• You know, for a secret organization that have spent millennia on their mission they sure do give up easily when Soji is persuaded that one time. Hope she never changes her mind!

• Hey remember when Jurati (I keep using her last name because Agnes sounds weirdly prosaic for a show like Picard) was meant to be handed over to Starfleet for the murder of Maddox? Coz the show sure doesn't, not even when two hundred ships turn up...

• It's lovely to see Riker again. Of course it fucking is. I actually do like the fact that Picard keeps quiet about his condition and allows Riker to warp off, but I still lament not getting a death scene between those two characters.

• Picard keeps using "Blue Skies" as it's go-to emotive bit of music. It kind of works here.

• Well, better than the butterfly motif, which is winsome and twee in a way Star Trek almost never is.

• One of the running themes throughout all ten episodes of the show has been the ban on synths, how it's not fair and has been made out of fear and prejudice, one of Picard's through-lines. Here the ban is overturned in a single line, without any further explanation or justification, not even a "well, Starfleet's discussed the situation and..." fig-leaf. It's that sort of attention to detail that's really marked this show out. 

• And off to Season Two we go....

Some thoughts:

- It is weird that these episodes amounted to what would actually be a 2-parter on one of the older Trek shows. The only difference is that we've been shown more of the steps that older shows would cut out. I mean, how many episodes with somebody running from somebody else? How many episodes came down to a character deciding to activate some device? How many episodes ended with the Federation showing up and things going back to normal?  By that standards, its not bad. But by the standards the show set out to establish, it's not great. 

- Agnes not going to jail really bothered me. I don't care that she had a change of heart of did the right thing, this is a universe very much about law and order. Remember when Bashir's parents got sent to jail? It didn't matter what they did in the interim. The show was clear that they needed to pay for their crime (and Federation prison didn't feel like it was a terrible place to go).  Shit, Picard never let up on Ensign Ro for her past screwups and she was a way better character.

- The whole story with the Borg and Elf-guy (whose name I still can't be bothered to look up since he was so unimportant!) was a giant red herring that went nowhere and amounted to nothing. We didn't even find out what happened with the other XBs.

- Commodore Oh is fucking terrible at her job. When Riker shows up, she doesn't even try to hide her involvement and have someone else answer the hail. This is worse than when Narissa blew her cover to Elf-guy for literally no reason. I mean, all Picard and Rafi have are some conjectures. Nothing has for sure been proven yet. Oh doesn't even know if they have figured anything out yet. She's just there to kill the synths. And we didn't see or hear Picard tell anything to Starfleet. Not even a throwaway line about sending all of the non-evidence that they have.  Riker isn't even surprised to see Oh.  Its all so shoddily done!

- So the Tal Shiar just do not give a single shit about the Romulan people and continuing/protecting Romulan civilization? We've established that, right? They could be rebuilding their Empire, but they have their own holy war they are concerned with instead. Ok then.  

- Was it ever established that the Vulcans came from somewhere else? Narek is like, "this is from before our ancestors arrived on Vulcan" Did he mean to say "Romulus?" Because I feel like the Vulcans having a totally different homeworld is new information. Their history is super garbled though so whatever.

- Then Starfleet shows up with a ton of ships. I am almost willing to allow this since the franchise has shown the ability to materialize fleets out of thin air before, but its weird when this show made a point of saying how Starfleet is weakened to the point there is this giant lawless area and they have no way to help or anything to the point that you have vigilantes like Seven running around.  And it was a lot of ships. Like more ships than we saw during the attack on Cardassia. Didn't the admiral say an episode or so back that she had like 6 ships waiting for him at a Starbase? A lot more than 6 came to their rescue. 

- The super synths reminded me of Avengers mashed up with the Urdru Jahad from the first Hellboy movie. We never even found out if they were really evil. They might have shown up and simply helped the synths ascend to their plane, which seems more in keeping with Star Trek than. "Nope, they were actually evil. Everyone on both sides interpreted their message correctly, even though everyone who actually saw the message was crazy."

Just finished it last night! I am very clearly far less critical than a lot of you here, and that's okay.

I really think most of these serialized shows benefit from binge watching. Some of the "this is taking too long, they're spinning their wheels" is remedied, for me, by "Oh well, on to the next episode!" (But yes, overall there was a lot of wasted time.)

I am definitely one of those people who loved all of the callbacks to TNG. It was my second-favorite Trek show, after DS9. (Well, seasons 1-6 of DS9.) I am impressed that they focused on the friendship between Picard and Data to the point where they redeemed part of Nemesis for me.

Yes, there were a lot of scenes and plot points that went nowhere. Most obviously, Elnor's entire storyline and Seven's reactivation of the Cube. I was legitimately EXCITED - and SCARED - to have the Borg Cube reactivated and not be sure what was going to happen...but nope, it just acted as a distraction for ten seconds before crashing, and gave Narissa a way to survive somehow to meet with Narek and then get killed by Seven. (So...she got mobbed by Borg earlier, and appeared to have transported away - I assumed that would be "onto one of the 218 Romulan ships leaving the area", but no, she just hides on the Cube again? WTF?

On the subject of Agnes - I believe it's important to note that Trek has, at least IIRC, treated unwanted Vulcan mind-melds as a pretty serious psychological crime, so for that to have happened to her, once she explained it to Picard, I think that at least partially excused her actions, at least in the context of the show. PARTIALLY though. Not completely.

The thing I liked about the entire finale (other than the two giant fleets showing up, which was a bit too cheesy), was that all THREE SIDES were shown to have flaws in their actions. The Federation fucked up by banning synthetic life, the Romulans fucked up by trying to kill it all, and the Synths fucked up by trying to kill everyone else in revenge. Picard managed (not perfectly, of course) to mediate between all three of them to resolve the situation.

Yes, the Zhat Vash was TOO evil, and letting Commodore Oh off the hook after infiltrating Starfleet for like 20 years was absurd. But in the end the Romulans' plan WAS technically understandable. And for it to have come out of a misunderstanding from a warning created FOR the synths was kind of cool, in my opinion.

I loved the entire Riker and Troi episode. Everything about it. Sirtis made me care about a son we never even saw, and cry that he was lost. Kestra did a great job helping Soji re-find her humanity. And Riker was, as always, great.

I have more thoughts, but this is a start.

soooo...worth checking out or ultimately a disappointment?

That's where I remember her from! It was starting to drive me nuts but since I couldn't recall anything I figured I had to have been remembering some small part somewhere or something less recent. I almost went to IMDB but figured it wasn't worth the time to find out she was in some random episode of some procedural  show that I watched 5 years ago.