“Fly Me to the Moon” is the fifth episode of the second season of the TV show “Star Trek: Picard” and follows “Watcher“. It’s available in the USA on the Paramount+ streaming platform and in many other countries on Amazon Prime Video.
Note. This article contains some spoilers about “Fly Me to the Moon”.
Tallinn (Orla Brady) explains to Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) that her mission is to protect his ancestor Renée Picard (Penelope Mitchell) and thanks to him she discovers the interference by Q (John de Lancie). The risk appears to lie with NASA’s Europa mission but at the same time Q contacts geneticist Adam Soong (Brent Spiner), who is desperately seeking a cure for the genetic disease of his daughter Kore (Isa Briones).
In the first episode of this season directed by Jonathan Frakes, we start getting some answers about the alteration of the timeline but at the same time, the plot leads to new questions. Jean-Luc Picard seems to have studied James Kirk’s missions because he knows about his time travel and his confusion mainly concerns what Tallinn looks like. There’s a confirmation of the inclusion of plot elements from old episodes while pure fanservice is increasingly limited.
The interest of the time travelers focuses on Renée Picard and Q’s interference but in “Fly Me to the Moon” there’s much more because Q hasn’t only gotten into the Picard family’s history but also the Soong family’s history. This new subplot not only brings a couple of familiar faces back to the show but also offers various aspects of a complex theme.
Q shows a personal interest in Dr. Adam Soong’s work. At the same time, that work offers some food for thought partly related to the Star Trek saga and partly related to developments in genetic engineering techniques. The saga includes a taboo toward eugenics that follows the Eugenics Wars but in this episode, we see another side of the problem. Kore Soong suffers from an incurable genetic disease that leaves gene therapy as the only hope.
The ethical issues concerning biotechnology are complex but today we know of thousands of genetic diseases, which are often highly disabling and can leave low life expectancies. In Star Trek, aside from the Khan-centric stories, only a few possible consequences of illegal genetic interventions were shown that were connected to Julian Bashir’s personal story. I don’t expect real insights in “Star Trek: Picard” but the applications in this field are becoming important, so it’s about time such a complex topic gets addressed in a way that goes beyond the very limited ones seen in the previous shows.
Apart from the introduction of the subplot linked to the Soong family and the end of the misadventure of Chris Rios (Santiago Cabrera), “Fly Me to the Moon” shows some new pieces of the great puzzle that is this season’s plot. There are various twists whose developments will only be shown in the next few episodes. In short, they were intriguing but more than ever we need to see the plot’s continuation to judge it.
