Television

Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Stardust City Rag’Before we get to this week’s ”Star Trek: Picard,” I must address last week’s recap. I have received your emails! And your tweets! And the private messages. One person even sauntered over to my Instagram to tell me I got something wrong in last week’s post.Trek fans: I love you for this dedication. And I’m here to ask forgiveness. First, I wrote that Rios had difficulty outmaneuvering a Klingon Bird of Prey. It was a Romulan one. I’m sorry — or as Klingons would say: “jIQoS!”Second, I wondered how Rizzo could choke her brother in person as a hologram. (This is not a sentence often published in The Times.) Eagle-eyed viewers reminded me that Rizzo got there physically. Once again, jIQos! Thank you for keeping me accountable.On to this week, where the story takes a giant step forward, while also a hard left turn.We find out what Seven of Nine has been up to all this time. She’s a member of the Fenris Rangers, a vigilante group that operates in and around what used to be the Neutral Zone. She’s angry and cynical, and she now has the human capacity to express those emotions, unlike during her time on Voyager.This episode, by design, was the first one of the season in which Picard was not the sole focus. The chapter was about Seven — and the actress Jeri Ryan’s new way of bringing her back to life.I understand there may be some — ahem — resistance to Seven’s story, but I thought it was a resourceful way to imagine her path. Seven has always been an outsider with a strict sense of principles. To see her become a vengeful rebel (who drinks!) after so much time being a docile Borg drone made an odd sort of sense to me, especially given how much she had clashed with Janeway.What bothered me was not hearing more from her about what became of the former Voyager crew. (We do know Captain Janeway became an admiral, according to “Star Trek: Nemesis.”) I am curious about the plight of Chakotay, her former lover, and to learn more specifics about how she ended up here. Ryan did a nice job in playing Seven again. And although it was a grim reintroduction, it was also excellent fan service to open the episode with Icheb (Casey King). He was an underrated part of “Star Trek: Voyager,” and given that the Borg story line continues in “Picard,” it was relevant to see what became of him.The actual high jinks on Freecloud lost me a bit — although, did we all catch the reference to Quark after Rios beamed down dressed as if he was ready to bring back disco? Delightful. Picard And His Merry Band try to dupe a criminal mastermind — Bjayzl (Necar Zadegan), who harvests Borg parts — into trading Bruce Maddox (John Ales) for Seven. And they do so wearing ridiculous costumes at a bar on a planet that appears to be Las Vegas. (It’s Freecloud, but whatever.)Picard is one of the most famous people in the galaxy, and yet his disguise isn’t easily seen through. And Rios uses his real name, so I was a bit confused as to why they went to all these lengths to disguise their true intentions by becoming “facers.” There is also a revelation that Seven and Bjayzl have a history — possibly a romantic one, although this isn’t 100 percent clear.I liked watching Patrick Stewart get to goof around a bit, and so far, this episode was the one most like any “Next Generation” episode in its brush with the weird. Bjayzl’s letting herself get so easily fooled and outmaneuvered was a bit off for me, but the performances at Freecloud kept me entertained nonetheless. And seeing Seven give into her thirst for vengeance in killing Bjayzl — a change from the idealistic morality “Star Trek” has historically aimed for — was a welcome evolution for the franchise. (I have to imagine we’ll see Seven again. A one-episode arc doesn’t do her story justice. Please. Resistance is futile!)The big twist in the episode: Picard goes all this way to find Maddox. In sick bay, Maddox tells Picard that he thinks there’s a giant conspiracy afoot involving the Romulans and even the Federation. (We know more than Picard does at the moment, and we know there is at least some evidence of this, given Commodore Oh’s role.) But: Dr. Jurati murders Maddox, who is revealed to be her former lover, at the end of the episode!The nervous, high-strung Jurati doesn’t seem to want to do it — but she reveals as Maddox is dying that she knows things Maddox doesn’t, making his death a necessity. So who, exactly, is Jurati here? A double agent? Did Commodore Oh send her to find Picard? Is she a Romulan spy? At one point, she says, “I wish they hadn’t show me.” Who is “they”? (I’m glad Jurati is given something interesting because, frankly, I was wondering what she was planning on contributing to the team.)Side Notes:I don’t have much to say yet about Raffi’s finding her son on Freecloud, other than to note her interesting theory about what really happened on Mars. Raffi, like Picard and many other Trek characters, seems to have spent her life intensely focused on her work at the expense of family. But Michelle Hurd’s portrayal of someone who has additionally dealt with substance abuse is quite gripping. That’s relatively unexplored territory for the Trek franchise.Elnor is clearly playing the “fish out of water” character that Trek shows typically have. (Previously, Data, Spock, Odo and even Seven have played this role.) I’m not quite sure whether it’s working yet because we see only flashes of Elnor not quite understanding what is going on around him. And we don’t know enough about Elnor himself.No Borg cube this time, so no update on the romance between Narek and Soji or Narek and Rizzo. More

At the Oscars earlier this month, the two-time winner Mahershala Ali (“Moonlight,” “Green Book”) presented the best supporting actress statue in front of his Hollywood peers and millions of people watching live on television.But the next morning, he was more interested in discussing a humbler but no less momentous occasion: the first time he had ever spoken before an audience. He was 9, at bible camp, and he had written a poem.“I ended up performing it in front of the whole church,” he recalled during a phone interview earlier this month. “The courage that it took to go up there and share it, and see how people were impacted by it, was really empowering.”Ali sees a bit of himself in the young orators captured in the documentary “We Are the Dream: The Kids of the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest,” which premiered this week on HBO. Directed by the Emmy-winning filmmaker Amy Schatz (“Song of Parkland,” “In the Shadow of the Towers”), the film follows several Oakland students during the lead up to last year’s installment of the annual festival, its 40th, which was founded as a platform for students to shine and connect with Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and words.With its focus on young orators as they refine their speeches with their coaches, teachers and families, the film is a hopeful counterpoint to the spate of murder and true-crime docs on cable and streaming TV, shining a light on “this little outlet and platform of self esteem,” Ali said. In addition to appearing on HBO’s usual linear and on-demand platforms, the film was made available to nonsubscribers for a month on the network’s website.Ali, who was born in Oakland and grew up nearby, joined the film after it had been shot — he was asked to executive produce through his Know Wonder production company, which has a partnership with HBO.“I think they felt like it was a nice fit,” said Ali, who was happy to use his connections and Bay Area roots to “raise awareness about the children, teachers, their families.” The other executive producers include the actor’s wife, Amatus Sami-Karim, as well as Mimi Valdés (“Hidden Figures”) and Julie Anderson (“God Is the Bigger Elvis”).It was Anderson who first conceived “We Are the Dream”; the idea came to her from reading “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.” (edited by Clayborne Carson) while producing the 2018 documentary “Rise Up: The Movement that Changed America,” directed by Stanley Nelson to mark the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination.The book included a story about King, as a high school student, entering (and winning) a student oratory competition about 90 miles outside Atlanta in 1944. On their bus ride home afterward, King and his teacher were ordered to give up their seats to white passengers — the young King wanted to resist, but his teacher convinced him not to escalate the situation. So they stood in the aisle all the way back to Atlanta. (When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger 11 years later in Montgomery, Ala., it sparked the boycott that brought King to the forefront of the Civil Rights movement.)“I just thought about the contrast of what that would look like,” Anderson said. “This young kid who made an oratory competition. He talks about Lincoln; he talks about equality; he talks about justice; and then he gets on a bus and faces the height of injustice.”Anderson said she spent time on YouTube watching speech videos from other King-themed student oratory contests in states like Texas, Ohio and Virginia. She selected the Oakland Unified School District because of the diversity of the student body and contest’s longstanding importance in the community.In the Oakland event, competing students can perform their own original poems, monologues and scenes in addition to well-known speeches by King and others. The festival is less about competition than about encouraging the students to “bridge the past and the present as we are thinking about their futures,” said Awele Makeba, an educator and professional storyteller who produces the contest and appears in “We Are the Dream.”It’s about “the possibility of who they want to become,” Makeba added, “and the world they want to create.”Schatz, known for her documentaries and series about children confronting what she called “life’s big subjects,” like climate change and gun violence, originally thought “We Are the Dream” would be about the contest itself and largely consist of profiles of the winners.But after spending time with the student orators, she decided the story should be more about “these issues that the kids were grappling with and the subjects that they cover, like race, social justice, gentrification, immigration,” she said. “And then also ideas about kindness or what it means to do the right thing.”For example, Karunyan Kamalraj, a 9-year-old boy from Sri Lanka, had never heard of King before getting involved in the contest. But as viewers see in the film, Kamalraj learns to draws connections between King’s nonviolent movement and his own family’s past struggles as part of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka.“I realized through this boy Karunyan that it was about what Martin Luther King contributed to the world,” Schatz said.These moments of development and discovery give “We Are the Dream” its most poignant scenes. A poem by Lamiya Mohammed, 12, written to be performed as a duet with her 6-year-old sister, Abrar, was inspired by an incident in which a random passer-by called their mother a terrorist. In the poem, Mohammed imagines an America where Muslim children and their families are welcomed and can wear their “scarves” (hijabs) freely without rebuke.As Gregory Payton, the 9-year-old grandson of a Baptist minister, practices an address interweaving King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech with the 23rd Psalm, viewers see him starting to master the crescendos and flourishes of the African-American rhetorical traditions of his grandfather and King. “Give it that Gregory Payton power,” says Zerita Sharp, his coach.Payton reminds Ali a little of another 9-year-old orator from once upon a time, he said. But more important, the boy’s performance embodies the festival’s synthesis of legacy and optimism that “We Are the Dream” aimed to capture.“Seeing Gregory sort of metabolize pieces of Dr. King’s message and just take ownership of it makes me, as an adult, feel like we are the hope,” Ali said. “We have the responsibility to continue to strive for a world that is fair and inclusive and free.” More

What’s StreamingJOJO RABBIT (2019) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. “Remember that joke Kate Winslet has in ‘Extras,’ where she says you’d better make a Holocaust film if you want an Oscar?” Taika Waititi asked in an interview with The New York Times last year. “People might think that’s kind of true, but there was never in my mind any reality where this film was going to be part of that conversation.” He was talking about “Jojo Rabbit,” the satire he wrote and directed, which had become an unlikely awards-season contender and would win him an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. The movie, based a novel by Christine Leunens, follows Johannes (Roman Griffin Davis), a 10-year-old in Nazi Germany whose imaginary best friend is Adolf Hitler (Waititi) and whose mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), is hiding a Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) in their house. The film “risks going wrong in a dozen different ways,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, “and manages to avoid at least half of them.”THE CALL OF THE WILD (1972) Stream on Amazon and Tubi. Harrison Ford returns to theaters this weekend in a new adaptation of “The Call of the Wild,” Jack London’s 1903 novel about an outdoorsman and a dog. This earlier adaptation casts Charlton Heston in the lead role (the human one). Those curious to compare Heston’s and Ford’s takes might revisit it, but beware: Heston once called this film “the worst movie I ever made.”ON POINT Stream on Crackle. Guest appearances by the N.B.A. players Steph Curry, Kevin Durant and Zion Williamson add a bit of celebrity might to this amateur basketball documentary series — but if the young players in the show have their dreams fulfilled, they’ll become stars, too. “On Point” follows high schoolers playing A.A.U. basketball. Reminiscent of shows like “Last Chance U,” it follows them on the court and off.PLAYING FOR KEEPS Stream on Sundance Now. Those who prefer their sports with a side of murder-mystery can turn to this Australian series, which centers on the wives and girlfriends of a group of fictional Australian soccer players. Their flashy lives might be enviable to some — but the death of a player brings unsettling mystery and media scrutiny.What’s on TVTHE UPSIDE (2019) 6 p.m. on Showtime 2. The 2012 French dramedy “The Intouchables,” about an unlikely friendship between an uptight aristocrat with paraplegia and an employee, was a box-office sensation overseas. This Hollywood remake stars Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart. It keeps the main relationship the same (Cranston plays the rich man) but moves the action to New York. “Some squinting will be required to block out the race and class stereotyping, as well as the puddles of sentiment scattered throughout the highly predictable plot,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. “Yet Jon Hartmere’s script has genuinely funny moments and is blessedly short on crassness: even a scene involving catheters and colon hygiene is less cringey than you might expect.” More