The “Locker Room” on La Sirena
Spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Episode 3 under the cut ;)
I’ve seen a number of people wonder about the “locker room” we saw on board La Sirena in the latest ep of Picard (S2E3: “Assimilation”). I still have a bunch of open questions myself, but the longer I stare at that scene the clearer things seem to get. So, I thought I’d share some of my initial insights.
To start with, this is the plan of Sirena’s upper deck as we see it in the prime timeline (specifically at the beginning of season1):
(Note: There’s some set vs. in-universe size discrepancy. I’ll address that in a second.)
It looks like in the totalitarian timeline, the ship regularly has a whole group of people on board. When Raffi, Seven, and Cris go to look for clothes to blend in in 2024, they search the cupboards in what at first glance might be a locker room.
First, a general observation: the room they are in is located in the space that used to be Raffi’s and Rios’s quarters. Looking out the door of the room, you can see across the upper deck to the holodeck on the other side.
Also, the sloped walls, the lamps, the floors, everything matches the former quarters.
So we know the general location of this room. As for its size: that’s where the aforementioned discrepancy comes in.
As I’ve pointed out before, the sets of Raffi’s and Rios’s quarters from season 1 overlap a bit. They share a door (the aft door. The forward door is actually blind) and some of their floor space, because the dividing wall between their quarters got moved when filming on the different sets.
In effect, when filming in Rios’s Quarters, the set looked like this:
When filming in Raffi’s (and Jurati’s) Quarters, the set looked like this:
Which is why there is this discrepancy between the configuration of the rooms in-universe (on the left) and on set (on the right).
The question, then, is where the dividing wall is in this new room on the CSS La Sirena. Is it one of the configurations we saw in season 1? Or something new entirely?
Let’s go through this step by step.
We can estimate where in the room the closet is standing, because when Rios walks out behind it, we see it in relation to the door...
... and when Seven is standing in front of it, you can see the possibly-a-bathroom protrusion in the portside wall behind her.
So, the closet/locker is roughly located here:
(Look, I know it seems like there is way too much space on either side of it, but trust me, these rooms are actually pretty big to accommodate all the film crew and cameras.They're just shot in a way that makes them appear much more cramped.)
So, now that we know where the closet is located, we can look at the next clue. We get a shot out of this closet over Raffi’s shoulder here:
Look at the ceiling lights.
There’s a row of light strips (1), then a beam across the ceiling (2), then another light strip (3) (the rest of the row of lights is hidden by the furniture behind Raffi), and finally another beam (4).
Beam 4 is at the top of the wall, in a similar configuration as we see in Rios’s quarters in season 1:
But the question is whether this wall is the same wall as the one in the season 1 shot (behind Rios’s bed, red numbers in the image below), or whether it’s a temporary wall built into the frame created by the support beam right behind Rios’s desk (green numbers).
On the floor plan, the two different possibilities would look like this:
At this point, I have been going back and forth on this question for literal hours and I just cannot make up my mind. Given the camera angle, I am tempted to say the red version (i.e. the full room) makes more sense, but I could also be entirely wrong.
If you have an opinion on this, any input is highly appreciated 😅
The question of what, exactly, is going on in the front half of the room is probably just as nebulous as the room’s size, since we only catch some very brief glimpses of it. However, here I do actually have a theory.
Here are some of the details of the pieces of furniture that can be seen in the front part of the room.
Rios picks up his new shirt from one of them:
In the shot out of the closet we looked at above, one of the bits of furniture is mostly hidden behind Rafffi. However, you can just make out what looks like rails along both sides of the top of the piece of furniture:
There is also another one of these pieces further to port. You can catch a glimpse of its top corner here:
Here you can see stuff lying on one of these, at a height that’s maybe a couple of feet off the floor.
So, looking at all of this evidence, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say these pieces of furniture are: bunk beds!
Rios picks his shirt off the rung of a ladder to the upper bunk. The rails are along each side of the upper mattress to prevent people from falling out... This isn’t just a locker room, it’s the communal bunks of whatever squad of soldiers/officers/renegades/whatever evil!Rios was hanging out with.
(Who apparently specialize in Borg Slaying? Or at least one of them did?
I really would have loved seeing them on screen, but alas... 🙈)
As for how many pieces of furniture there are in total in the front half of the room, and where exactly they’re positioned, that’s not at all clear to me. As of S2E3, this is my best guess at what we’ve seen of the room so far:
Of course, that leaves a ton of empty space which will probably have some interesting furniture and clothes and assorted personal belongings in it.
While writing this up, I’ve already noticed a bunch of other points of interest, from lights to furniture details to infuriatingly inconsistent bits of wall. But since I’ve been working on this for most of a day already, I’m going to postpone any further observations until a later time.
I’m very curious to see if we’ll get a better look at this particular room. I’d really love to get a good shot of those bunk beds(?) and whatever else might be hiding in its depths.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see.