Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Picard Season 2, Episode 3 - "Assimilation"
Captain Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) is injured in a rare transporter mistake in Star Trek: Picard season 2, episode 3. After time traveling to 2024 in a bid to find "the Watcher" and the divergence in time caused by Q (John de Lancie) that changed the Star Trek timeline into the dark, Confederation reality, Rios joined the Away Team consisting of Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) and Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd). Picard's motley crew beamed to Los Angeles to search for the Watcher but they were sent to different areas while Rios ended up getting seriously hurt by his arrival.
Transporter accidents are nothing new in Star Trek and malfunctions of the miraculous devices have spawned plenty of memorable episodes. An evil duplicate of Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), for example, was created by a transporter accident in the classic Star Trek: The Original Series episode, "The Enemy Within." Another transporter error sent Kirk to the Mirror Universe in "Mirror Mirror." The transporters' pattern buffers have also saved Starfleet's lives. Both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Discovery showed how the pattern buffer could be used to keep Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) and the entire crew of the USS Discovery safe during a calamity. On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's popular "Our Man Bashir" episode, the transporters kept Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) and his crew alive long enough for them to be inserted in Dr. Julian Bashir's (Alexander Siddig) 1960s secret agent holodeck program, which ultimately saved their lives.
In Star Trek: Picard season 2, episode 3, "Assimilation," Rios was actually beamed near the roof of a building instead of arriving safely as Seven and Raffi did. Chris immediately succumbed to gravity and he wasn't able to grab onto a nearby fire escape to break his fall. Instead, Captain Rios hit the concrete ground hard with a sickening thud, bleeding out onto the sidewalk as he lost consciousness. It was a shocking and unexpected Star Trek transporter accident that doesn't normally happen. Even if someone is beamed into a hostile environment, Star Trek has usually followed the trope that someone transported arrives on the ground safely, and vice versa back onto a starship's transporter pad.
Rios beamed into mid-air and falling was perhaps the most unexpected event in Star Trek: Picard season 2, episode 3, including Elnor (Evan Evagora) dying from the phaser wound he suffered from the Magistrate (Jon Jon Briones) and Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) tricking the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching) after the cyberneticist allowed herself to be temporarily assimilated. Meanwhile, the Borg Queen is largely to blame for Rios' transporter accident. After she directed La Sirena's successful time travel to 2024, the Borg Queen began draining the starship's power to sustain herself. La Sirena's crash and the Borg Queen assimilating the ship made most systems inoperable so the transporters ended up not being reliable, and Captain Rios suffered a terrible accident as a result.
Things got even direr for Rios after he was found and brought to a nearby clinic because ICE raided the building and detained him for being illegal. Chris, Seven, and Raffi were warned not to attract attention because, as 25th-century citizens of the Confederation, they have identification implants and vaccination chips that 21st-century scanners can detect. Since Rios carries no ID, he was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Worse, neither Raffi, Seven of Nine, nor Picard has any idea what became of Chris and what danger he's now in. Star Trek: Picard's unexpected transporter accident spun off an interesting new story that places Captain Rios in relevant jeopardy in 2024 and it will be fascinating to see how Picard's motley crew saves Chris so they can continue their mission to fix the broken timeline.
Star Trek: Picard Season 2 streams Thursdays on Paramount+.