One More Thing to Atone For
As I mentioned at the start of Part One of this essay in defence of Agnes P Jurati, MD, PhD, this whole exercise began it’s life as a refutation of criticism I’ve commonly seen lobbed at her character and motivations. Now, even having laid out my interpretation of Jurati’s character at length, I assume, based on what I’ve seen around fandom spaces, that there might be some objections to my arguments. I want to address a few of the ones I anticipate in more detail here.
[Once again, Content Warning for Psychological Trauma, Manipulation, Discussions of Murder, and Suicidal Ideation]
Two quick caveats before I start.
First, I’m not telling you you have to like Jurati as a character. I’m perfectly fine with you disliking her, that is your absolute right. I will, however, ask that you dislike her for things she has actually done and for her actual motivations, as we see them on screen, in their full context.
Second: I’m not talking about the books here. I have thoughts about Jurati and Maddox in The Last Best Hope. (Boy, do I have thoughts.) But this is about Agnes in canon, and in Star Trek, canon means the shows and movies. So that’s why I’m going to ignore any background info we get from the books (even though, in my opinion, the book does line up with my reading of Agnes).
Now without further ado:
Objection 1: Jurati knew she was working for the Romulans.
I cannot 100% disprove this, but I think it is extremely unlikely, mainly because Commodore Oh had no reason to take that risk. If she told Agnes that Starfleet Security was cooperating with the Romulans, and then Agnes got caught at any point during her mission, Oh’s position would be in serious jeopardy. Sure, it’s unlikely anyone would outright believe the accusation, it’s just too absurd, but even the spectre of suspicion could do serious harm to Oh’s mission. More so than a poor, deranged scientist blaming her academic misfortune and the murder of an ex-lover on a conversation she had with Oh, and is horrendously misquoting to save herself.
The only possible indication that Jurati could have known about Oh’s involvement with the Zhat Vash is that there are glimpses of the initiation ceremony spliced in with the vision of the Admonition during the mind-meld. If Jurati did in fact see these moments (and they’re not just an artefact of editing), they could, perhaps, raise questions about why it was a group of Romulans discovering this historical record. However, this circumstance could be easily explained. Commodore Oh is with Starfleet Security. If Jurati had the presence of mind to question how Oh got this information (a big “if”, given she had just had a mind-meld conveying an apocalyptic vision forced on her), Oh could simply say it was part of an undercover operation or any of a myriad other explanations.
Strengthening my argument that Oh was very selective in which information she passed along is the fact that Jurati clearly doesn’t know the Zhat Vash caused the destruction of Mars until Raffi lays out the pieces of this puzzle for everyone. You can see Jurati putting it together during that conversation, she clearly didn’t know before. This means that Oh had control about how much information she wanted to share with Jurati, and she didn’t give her the full picture. And I’m fairly sure part of the information she left out is that she was actually a secret half-Romulan leading a super-secret sect of the Tal Shiar.
Objection 2: Jurati should never have trusted Oh, who was clearly up to no good.
Here, we run into one of my pet peeves with season 1: the disconnect between viewer knowledge and character knowledge and how that occasionally led to characters making decisions that don’t seem supported by the facts, even though they are.
I’m not going into it all in detail here, it basically deserves an essay of its own. But for this particular instance: we, the viewers, know from the very start that Commodore Oh is up to know good. We don’t know the absolute depths of her betrayal, we don’t know for sure that she orchestrated the Attack on Mars or that she’s half-Romulan until episode 8 (“Broken Pieces”). But we know she is at least working with the Tal Shiar, she was the one who ordered the hit on Dahj, and she is running Narissa, an undercover operative in Starfleet.
When Commodore Oh shows up in Okinawa, wearing her Evil Sunglasses of Evil, we suspect right away she might be recruiting Jurati to be a mole for the Romulans. And Jurati’s motivation is kept purposefully vague until the beginning of episode 7, when we see more of the conversation between the two women and can conclude that Jurati most likely never knew she was helping the Romulans. Up until then, we are left to think that Jurati could very well be willingly working for the Romulans, since Oh is so clearly up to no good.
But think about it from Jurati’s point of view. Oh is the Head of Starfleet Security. As a civilian, as someone who admired Starfleet enough to go through a few years of the Academy, no less, Jurati has no reason to distrust Starfleet. A lot of the shadier things we know about the institution (Section 31, various Black Flag directives, corruption, infiltration, etc.) we saw from the perspective of Starfleet captains and other officers. The wider Federation public will never have known about the vast majority of these issues. The failure of the Romulan Rescue Mission would have appeared like a political decision, brought about at the level of the UFP government. From the outside, it could have looked like Starfleet just bowed to the political climate. A failing, perhaps, depending on your views on the Rescue Mission, but not enough to destroy their reputation as the most stalwart, trusty guardian and absolute beacon of all that is best about the Federation.
And the head of Starfleet Security is coming to Jurati to give her a secret mission. Even after Jurati destroys the tracker and tells Picard about the Admonition, he still doesn’t believe what she says about Commodore Oh, it’s that absurd to him.
So, Jurati has absolutely no reason not to trust Oh when she comes and gives her a secret mission.
But because apart from a very brief sentence by Raffi, nobody ever actually acknowledges that Jurati was deeply betrayed, brainwashed, and manipulated, a lot of viewers were apparently left feeling like Oh’s intentions should have been transparent, so Jurati should have known better than to trust her. But they really, really weren’t.
Objection 3: Jurati should have refused Commodore Oh’s request/order, because Killing Is Wrong
The argument here is usually that when Oh told Jurati to go and kill Maddox and Soji, Jurati should have taken a step back and gone: “Hold on, is the only way to prevent the über-synths from coming in and ending all organic sentient life in the galaxy really to kill Bruce Maddox and the synth he created? There has to be another way.”
And honestly? Yeah, maybe. Agnes isn’t perfect. That’s kind of the point. All the characters in Picard are flawed, and their flaws actually negatively impact the story. But, in my opinion, that’s not a problem, that’s realistic.
When Commodore Oh comes to her, Jurati probably already feels some guilt, responsibility, or remorse about the part she played in the creation of the A500 synths who went on to cause the deaths of 92,143 people on Mars and countless more on Romulus. Then she finds out that her work, and the work she helped Bruce to continue without her, are threatening to cause devastation on an absolutely unimaginable scale. And she isn’t just told about this devastation, she is shown visceral evidence that it has happened before. A vision so terrible, Jurati describes it as “hell”, a concept she never believed in before, and she comforts herself by thinking about suicide, just to escape the images. And it’s her fault, and she is the only one who can stop it.
I think it would take an exceptionally strong character to go through that kind of experience and still have the resilience to question anything that was asked of them to prevent that sort of history from repeating itself.
Are there people who could have? People who could go through a violation on this scale and be told by a figure of intense, trusted authority that they are the only ones who can prevent it from coming true, but then step back and say “hold on, I want to make sure I have considered every single alternative”? Yes. I’m sure there are.
I also know for damn sure I wouldn’t be one of them. And most of you wouldn’t, either. And neither is Agnes. And that’s not bad or inconsistent writing.
On a similar note:
Objection 4: Jurati should have tried to convince Maddox to stop making synths rather than killing him.
Yeah, maybe. But she knew his hubris and drive. He gave up everything and defied interstellar laws and treaties to keep fulfilling his dream. I’m not surprised Oh manages to convince her that killing him is the only way to truly prevent the knowledge from spreading. Especially when Jurati’s mind is already reeling from the neurological and psychological trauma the involuntary mind-meld and second-hand Admonition have caused her,
And finally (and yes, I have actually seen this objection in the wild more than once):
Objection 5: I prefer imagining Jurati was a Romulan double agent, knowing full well what she was doing, sleeping with Rios as a ploy to gain his trust, pretending to willingly surrender herself to the authorities but always with a secret escape plan up her sleeve. If she was manipulated by Oh into doing something she regrets almost as soon as she’s done it, I think that would make her a boring/weak/bad character.
Well, you can imagine that Jurati is secretly a Gorn who has undergone genetic modification to infiltrate the Federation if you want to, or if you think that would make her a more interesting character. I’m certainly not going to stop you
Doesn’t mean that reading is actually supported by the text, though.
And that, I think, is all I’m going to say on this topic for now.
I apologize for the mountainous levels of salt in this part of my essay, but Agnes as a character really means a lot to me, and I’m tired of people hating her for reasons other characters have never been criticized for even once. You don’t have to think she’s a good character. You don’t have to like her. But I’d really like to see fewer takes talking about how uniquely depraved, evil, duplicitous, weak, or terrible she is, when that is simply not supported by the text.
There are legitimate shortcomings in framing, pacing, and storytelling in season 1 that can make it a little difficult to fully appreciate Agnes’s motivations. And I’ll happily accept that mine isn’t the only valid interpretation of her actions. But hopefully, this screed will help some people who have been on the fence find a new way to look at one of the most misunderstood characters of Star Trek: Picard.
