10 Most Shocking Betrayals In Star Trek
9. Agnes Jurati - Stardust City Rag
Picard, like Discovery, follows one arc across its first season. What the audience sees is confined to a relatively small amount of time, which means that the characters and crew need to act with a little more speed and little less subtlety.
While likeable, few viewers would argue that Jurati was a subtle character. She initially seemed poised to become the stand-in for the audience, hanging a lampshade on the various silly events that take place during the show's run. She is part of the very on-the-nose scene where Picard exclaims that he never liked science fiction. She often asks the questions that force the crew to explain their plan for the hard of hearing. She, frankly, seems a bit lost.
Though the audience sees her approached by Commodore Oh, they don't see the actual conversation for several episodes. In the introduction to Stardust City Rag, the audience discovers that her relationship with Bruce Maddox was romantic as well as professional. Forty minutes later, she murders him.
The act itself is less shocking than the circumstances surrounding it. It was fairly evident that she was a spy, yet her motivations were unclear. Was she a sleeper agent? Was she replaced perhaps with an altered duplicate?
Neither is correct. She was, in fact, trying to do the right thing. Oh showed her a future where synthetic life would annihilate organic life in the Galaxy. The only answer was to cut off the source and that was Maddox. It was a sad event that was actually proved somewhat justified in the season's finale.