I recently rewatched the premier of Picard season 2 and was puzzled by one thing that doesn’t seem to fit, even on rewatch – why does the Jurati-Queen act so aggressively and fail so dramatically to communicate clearly? It makes sense if she were representing the regular Borg, but she’s supposed to be the “nice” Borg! What gives?
I think we can solve this puzzle if we realize that Picard season 2 is structured like TAS “Yesteryear” – a theory that I planned to write out here, without realizing that I already wrote the exact post years ago! Long story short, TAS “Yesteryear” is a unique situation in Star Trek time travel where the “wrong” result has to occur to motivate the “right” action – basically, Spock has to fail to go back in time to rescue himself, in order to be alerted to the fact that he needs to do it in the first place.
Similarly, when the Jurati-Borg sees her former self on the bridge of the Stargazer, she realizes that she needs to scare Picard into self-destructing the ship – so that Q will send them back and lead to her own creation. The “wrong” timeline is integral to the process of getting us to the “right” timeline. If she had acted more reasonably, she never would have existed in the first place!
What do you think?
There’s definitely a bit of a bootstrap paradox in play - Jurati behaves the way she does because that’s the way it happened the first time she experienced it.
I think it’s also implied that, like the Confederation Queen following their time jump to 2024, Jurati was sufficiently weakened from creating the giant portal that her only priority in the moment was to plug into the Stargazer to recharge - once she’d done that, she was better able to communicate, and possibly even to think straight.
That’s a great observation – I may have caught it if I’d had the endurance to continue my rewatch.
