All that time on Nepenthe and not once did anyone say "quaff."
Well, this episode certainly had its ups and downs. How wonderful it was to see Picard reunited with Riker and Toi, but this business of killing off a character just to impress the teenagers in the audience has got to be the most moronic trope of all time.
The circumstances of Will and Deanna's life twenty years later are not what I expected, and I'm still kind of mulling it all over. I wonder how the writers came to write them into this scenario. It's an unusual situation for this type of show, but certainly a situation that a lot of people experience, so it makes me wonder if it's a fictionalized version of somebody connected to the show. But it was sad and sweet and felt like more than a few real-life reunions that I've had. Kestra was certainly a likeable kid. The thing with the languages seemed a little too specific to be random, as did the references to Captain Crandall. It seems likely that both will be important later. Even moreso is the detail that their son died because there were no positronic matrices available after the AI ban-- this makes the Federation seem even more callous if they even outlawed medical applications.
The Riker homestead also left me with a few questions. Such as, if this planet has medicinal properties, why aren't there more people there? And if access is limited, why are the Rikers still allowed to live there after their son died, rather than make room for somebody else with a sick kid? Maybe they just got suckered by a persuasive real estate agent and there's nothing special about the planet at all.
Meanwhile, back on the cube, Hugh the XB, one of the most promising characters on the show was killed, just to convince us that anybody can die at any time. Because that's one of the hallmarks of a great story. And wasn't it lucky that Elfwich just happened to find a Fenris medic alert tag while hiding in a random corner of the Borg cube. Where did that come from?
And then, somewhere out in the final frontier, Agnes has realized that the smarmy Romulan is able to track their ship because of a Chocks chewable tracking device given to her by Commodore Oh back on Earth-- right after the Commodore took off her Ray-Bans long enough to implant apocalyptic images of a synth uprising into her brain. Where did those images come from? They didn't seem like anything that actually happened in real life, so I'm thinking Oh just kind of implanted her own psychotic paranoia into the woman. But, after coming to the realization that she was putting her comrades in danger, Agnes did what any rational person would do and attempted suicide. Because killing yourself disables the trackers in your body. Of course, this was after we got to watch her puke all over the floor a couple of times. It cracks me up that this show will use the word "fuck" freely, share graphic images of eyeballs being torn out in a gory mess, and give us all the vomit that can fit in an actor's mouth-- but then cop out on the nude scene back at the Riker Ranch. It also amused me to see Raffi almost lose her lunch while calling on the Emergency Hospitality Hologram.
In sum, we finally got the big reunion that we were waiting for, but it was slightly mitigated by a pointless death of a promising character. We got some backstory filled in for Agnes, which didn't really add up. We got some foreshadowing of further involvement by the Riker family and their friend Captain Crandall. Also a couple of nice moments from the crew of La Sirena as they try gamely to stack up (loved Rios' mad dash for the comatose Agnes and Raffi's comment about being the wreckage of a good person). And there it stands for now.
