'Star Trek: Picard' Episode 2: What we learned from the 2385 attack on Mars by its synthetic workers
Spoiler alert for Episode 2 of 'Star Trek: Picard'
There are two events that redefined the post-Enterprise life of Admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and they both happened on the same day. One is the Romulan disaster, his decisions during which led him to part with Starfleet. The disaster-relief endeavors there were, however, compounded by the second event - the attack on Mars at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards.
The attack was first featured on the 'Short Trek' episodes released by CBS. We were shown very little of it - only that workers on Mars had been brutally attacked on the celebration of First Contact Day. The first episode of 'Star Trek: Picard' reveals more details: The attack was carried out by rogue synthetic beings, ones not unlike Commander Data (Brent Spiner). The sudden, devastating attack on Starfleet ships led to an extreme distrust of synthetic beings - to the extent that they've been banned by the Federation, throughout the known galaxy. While there are still AIs, they are restricted to digital interfaces and soft-light holograms - none of them are given physical form and the creation of one is illegal.
In Episode 2 - 'Maps and Legends' - we are given a ground-level view of the attack itself. What's interesting is that the attack happened on First Contact Day - a day when most of the Shipyard's employees were given the day off, with only a skeleton crew to supervise the work of the synthetic beings. This seems to suggest that the plan was to minimize the cost to human life.
Another thing we see is that there was no specific trigger for the androids to attack - at least, not one that came for them. The android we see - designated F8 (Michael Dorn) - was acting as normally as he could despite obviously being a much less advanced android than Data - when something suddenly changes inside him. It's implied that F8 was hacked - meaning that the androids might not be to blame for the Mars attack. That does not make them any less dangerous, however - once hacked, F8 was able to take out the human crew members with horrifying efficiency, before taking himself out, meaning that even if androids aren't inherently malicious, they're still very, very dangerous.
It's a mystery that the show appears to slowly be teasing out through its season and the question of why Mars was attacked is one of the series' biggest mysteries, for now.
The next episode of 'Star Trek: Picard' airs February 6, on CBS All-Access