Being “stuck in the past” is both a literal and figurative theme in this season of Star Trek: Picard, and we see that narrative coming into focus in a myriad of different ways in “Mercy.”

The phrase “stuck in the past” could also easily be interpreted in a meta way as this unprecedented season of Trek begins to wind down. With just two episodes left, there seems to be two distinct takes on how the season is going. In one corner, you have fans who have generally bought in on the season long story arc being framed in the same light as Trek classics like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek: Voyager’s “Future’s End.” It’s a spunky, earthbound show, with our fish-out-of-water heroes battling modern day influences to save the day.

On the other end of the spectrum, it’s pretty clear there is not going to be a lot of spaceship bound adventures in this season of Picard — although that is definitely coming in Season 3! That has surely been a disappointment to some fans who could fairly critique the season as a series of adventures being stretched out across six or seven episodes that are maybe starting to feel a little repetitive.

Having said that, this reviewer is fully in the former camp that this season of Trek has been a unique thrill ride, unlike anything the franchise has ever done before – but at the same time, it is not an unfair criticism for those wanting to not only “look up” at the stars, but also to see their Star Trek out in them.

With “Mercy,” the viewpoint that some content this season is being stretched out is on display amid four story threads that push us closer to the finish line. At the core of the episode is an off-the-books interrogation of Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Guinan (Ito Aghayere) by the FBI detective who picked them up at the conclusion of “Monsters.”

It doesn’t take long for Guinan, the listener, to realize that this quest for information from Agent Wells (Jay Karnes) is not coming from a position of authority or power but is instead personal. In a fun connection with Star Trek: Enterprise — the show where Picard showrunner Terry Matalas was weaned as a professional science fiction storyteller — we see the investigator as a young boy who stumbles upon a pair of Vulcans surveying Earth in the second half of the 20th century.

The encounter with the Vulcans — a fun homage to “Carbon Creek” — ensures the detective would not “walk the Earth like other people,” as he ends up on a lifelong search for his own personal “monster in the dark.”

As the interrogation proceeds and gets closer and closer to that personal reveal, Wells becomes increasingly sympathetic, and it is Guinan who helps guide Picard to reveal the truth to him. In a separate room, Guinan has come face-to-face with Q (John de Lancie),  who has finally shown up (on foot) after being summoned by the El-Aurian last week.

Their confrontation is a revealing one, with Q taking a moment before realizing who has summoned him and then — sounding like his old self — calling Guinan the “sanctimonious, droning shrew” that he will come to know again in the 24th century. The recognition goes both ways, though, as Guinan quickly notices the emptiness and fear in Q and calls him out for not being quite as immortal as everyone originally thought.

Q acknowledges that the prospect of “knowing the unknowable” (his optimistic spin on death) was enticing for a moment, but his hopes of gaining something new and wondrous have instead turned into him “disappearing into nothing.” It’s a sad, stark reveal for the popularly irrepressible Q, who wonders that since he now has a “lifetime,” could a single act redeem it? That line is a teary moment for those paying close attention.

With Guinan continuing to push him, Q screams that “the trap is immaterial. It’s the escape that counts!” — a blueprint for this entire season of Picard being revealed in this clash of old adversaries. Guinan immediately conjures up some more time-fracturing El-Aurian shenanigans to signal to Picard something she knows will help him, both personally and in his current situation: the fact that all humans are trapped in the past.

The signal comes through loud and clear to Picard, as he opens up to Agent Wells with a little mini-Picard speech that highlights “the pieces of emotional shrapnel” that drive all of us. “What is it for you? What is your moment? What am I to you?”

These seemingly small moments are being crystalized as a microcosm of the season, something Guinan describes in humans as an “inability to escape the past,” which she means as a positive not a negative, saying, “When something inside you is broken, it stays with you, you stay in the past until you can reconcile it. You do the work because you want to evolve. I almost forgot how unique that was in the galaxy.” Wow.

We already know Picard has a little more work to do in that regard based on what we saw in “Monsters,” but the detective has now worked through his shrapnel from the past – he’s been fired and decides to let Picard and Guinan go, content to have the answers to his childhood trauma that have been driving his adult life. And content to know he is a small part of the “ebb and flow of time” that led him to this specific moment – with an alien and a time traveler.

With that, Picard and Guinan bid adieu as the wily El-Aurian says, “I almost can’t wait to meet you.” The narrative this writer’s room has framed through this season of Star Trek to bring us moments like that – to connect us with the scenes and feelings we have lived with for 30 years – has been nothing short of spectacular.

In the end, all of these interrogation scenes are incredibly fulfilling, and help frame the themes of the season in a new light, but two things can be true at once — they also make you feel so penned in, you will be champing at the bit to amp up the action as everything comes to a head with ‘Queen Agnes’ in the final two episodes.

And speaking of the emerging Borg Queen in the form of Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) she is being tracked by Seven (Jeri Ryan) and Raffi (Michelle Hurd) throughout the episode as she works on accelerating her own assimilation. With that endgame in mind, she meets up with the reprehensible Adam Soong (Brent Spiner) to form a partnership that will allow her to get a 400-year jump start on assimilating the galaxy — and will allow Soong to etch his legacy into the future dark timeline we’ve been living in all season long.

Seven and Raffi also get some personal focus as they track Jurati, as the former Borg calls Raffi “manipulative” in a confrontation that reveals the Starfleet officer’s secret pain: that she guilted Elnor (Evan Evagora) into going to Starfleet Academy instead of returning to the Qowat Milat, a tactic which ultimately lead to the young Romulan’s death.

Soong, meanwhile, has been confronted by his genetically created daughter-slash-project, Kore (Isa Briones), who has received a potion from Q labeled “freedom.” As Alice before her received a potion labeled “Drink Me” to escape into her beautiful garden Wonderland, Kore takes the cure from Q to leave Soong behind, telling him, “Maybe it’s you that doesn’t exist without me.”

In Soong, Spiner has sunk his teeth into an uncomfortably smarmy Star Trek villain. One that is quite content to saddle up with Agnes once he learns that he is either going to die alone or be labeled the “father of the future” pending the outcome of the imminent Europa mission.

In exchange for the raw ingredients she needs to ramp up her transformation into the Queen, Jurati has offered her services to Soong to help stop Picard. With Agnes now “assimilation ready,” she helps to create an army of drones from the Project Spearhead special forces operatives that Soong had previously experimented on to earn his reputation as a mad scientist.

It’s all coming together for Soong, who has now gone full Lore with his all black, turtleneck attire, as Jurati announces, “Who’s in the mood to add a little bit of their biological and technological distinctiveness to our own?”

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• In between the two main storylines this week, Rios (Santiago Cabrera) spends time with Dr. Teresa Ramirez (Sol Rodriguez) and her son as he works to repair La Sirena, introducing them to his world of the future (including the mess hall’s replicator).
   
  Teresa in turn works to build a deeper connection with the vagabond captain, unspooling a long set-up for a question about learning someone’s deepest fundamental truth… by asking him to pretend they’re married! Halfway through the question, Rios interrupts her to say, “Is this you being romantic?”
   
  We know that answer, but sadly we don’t get a fundamental deep truth from Rios as he gets cut off before he can share.

• Q’s proclamation that it’s Picard’s “escape that counts” echoes “All Good Things,” where he revealed that the key moment during that trial occurred when Picard realized he was living inside a temporal paradox.
   
• Guinan reveals that El-Aurians have another trick up their alien sleeves; apparently the long-lived listener race can astral project.
   
• Deep Space Nine’s “Past Tense” established that Robert Chen was serving as governor of California in 2024; when Raffi and Seven track Jurati, graffiti reading RECALL CHEN can be seen in multiple spots during their back-alley search.

• Jay Karnes, who portrays FBI Agent Wells, first appeared in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Relativity” — where he portrayed Lieutenant Ducane, first officer of the Wells-class Federation timeship Relativity. While there’s no indication that this character is that futuristic temporal guardian, it’s a fun connection for this season’s time-tripping theme.
   
• Young Wells’ missing dog is named “Maggie,” sharing a name with Ann Cusack’s character in “Carbon Creek” who served as Mestral’s primary human connection in that episode.
   
• The secret direct-to-camera message Q left on Kore’s virtual reality headset — in reality, a Microsoft HoloLens device — had strong Star Trek: Borg vibes.