‘Star Trek: Picard’: Michelle Hurd on What’s Driving Raffi After [Spoiler]’s Death

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season 2, Episode 3 “Assimilation.”]

Star Trek: Picard goes back to 2024 Los Angeles in the latest episode, but not everyone makes it there alive.

With their covers posing as their alternate reality selves blown, Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill), Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd), Elnor (Evan Evagora), and Cristóbal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) come under fire by the First Magistrate (Jon Jon Briones). Elnor is shot, and after jumping them to 2024, the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching) drains the power from the ship to save her life — power that Raffi needs for the bio-bed in sick bay to try to keep Elnor alive. Elnor dies, and Raffi is (understandably) upset about the circumstances. Will fixing time bring him back, she asks. That’s unknown, but she latches onto the possibility.

So what’s driving her more, the loss of Elnor or the fact that the power wasn’t used to save him? “In this moment, it’s the loss,” Hurd tells TV Insider. “If you think about what we learned from Raffi in Season 1, for 14 years, she felt the guilt of causing the death of a millions of Romulans. That she wore as it was her fault. So in this moment, he was shot right in front of her. She couldn’t do anything. And then there was all this chaos happening. She couldn’t help him.”

She continues, “So right now she gets that one possible suggestion that maybe changing time could bring him back and that’s it, that’s all she needs. She doesn’t need to hear anybody else’s conversation. She’s not interested in debating it. She’s going for that. And there’s moments in there that she starts to realize how irrational she is, but she’s not going to dive into that because that means that Elnor is dead and she doesn’t want to accept that. So in the moments that we’ve witnessed so far she’s absolutely driven with the passion and the desire to change time so she can bring back Elnor. That’s it.”

Trae Patton/Paramount+

Executive producer Akiva Goldsman sees it as a “combination. Part of what we’re going through for her, with her is a discovery of where her motivations come from.”

When Seven tries to talk to Raffi, she gets the brush-off. “What I want is to try to figure out how to fix the timeline and not talk about how it felt to watch him die,” Raffi says. Ryan refuses to say if we’ll see Seven get her to open up and lean on her.

While they and Rios head down to LA, Picard and Agnes stay on the ship to try to fix the Borg Queen. He’s very reluctant to go along with Agnes’ suggestion, that she risk assimilation to do so, but she not only succeeds but also steals the coordinates to find the Watcher, who can help identify when time diverged. What she did was dangerous, the Queen notes after, and she impressed her. Uh-oh. All Goldsman would say about that is “one way to look at Season 2 is in pairs, and one interesting pair might be Agnes and the Borg Queen.”

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As for Soji (Isa Briones), who was not with the others on board the Stargazer or has seemingly made the jump to the new reality, we’ll have to wait to see what’s going on with her, too. “You will discover it,” the EP promises.

Star Trek: Picard, Thursdays, Paramount+