“The Impossible Box” is the sixth episode of the TV show “Star Trek: Picard” and follows “Stardust City Rag“. It’s available in the USA on the CBS All Access streaming platform and in many other countries on Amazon Prime Video.

Note. This article contains some spoilers about “The Impossible Box”.

Soji (Isa Briones) is having strange dreams and Narek (Harry Treadaway) is pursuing his strategy to enter her mind by showing her his willingness to help her understand their meaning. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) reaches the Borg cube to find Soji and faces old terrors helped by Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco).

More than ever, the narrative threads of this show are intertwined in an episode that is about 10 minutes longer than the previous ones. This length is useful to get into the protagonists’ minds more than ever in what is perhaps the most introspective episode. The dim light of the Borg cube’s corridors is perfect for Soji and Jean-Luc Picard’s nightmares. They have to face very different terrors but in both cases linked to their identity.

Narek’s strategy is illustrated by a Romulan mechanical puzzle that is appropriately cube-shaped, the title’s impossible box. The fake lieutenant Rizzo (Peyton List) thinks he has feelings for Soji but apparently that doesn’t stop him. Narek helps Soji to explore her dream, which echoes Data’s dreams in various ways with the addition of some parts concerning her origins.

For Jean-Luc Picard, returning to a Borg cube brings to his mind the horror of the assimilation even decades later. It’s significant that on La Sirena’s holodeck, during his search for information, his face is superimposed on Locutus’s and he has the feeling of still having Borg implants. It’s a feeling present as a sort of background during his visit and is alleviated in part only by Hugh’s friendly presence and by the discovery of the operations he’s running.

The main problem of the show so far was the use of clichés for character developments that were very compressed, in “The Impossible Box” finally there’s something more nuanced in Soji and Jean-Luc Picard’s inner journey. The revelations pave the way for future developments and there’s still much to discover about the agenda of Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) and what awaits Elnor (Evan Evagora).

“The Impossible Box” is perhaps the most intense episode of the show. With the two great subplots of the season that at this point got unified, we can expect the plot to start offering solutions to the various mysteries introduced in the initial part.

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