I was mildly pleased with the solution for this episode. I'm glad that the show went out with a "Star Fleet Good" note and everyone can get along without shooting at each other. It's frankly the least they could do after all they've put us through. It's funny that the show, with all its ham fisted fan placation, would surprise and delight me by giving us the most mundane and predictable of Star Trek endings that I could have never predicted because of their general incompetence.
It's a shame everything else was just tragically bad:
• 200 Starfleet ships on 200 Romulan ships? Come on. They could have had enough tension with 3 or 4 each. Plus, where TF did they get all these ships? We've got Romulans on earth having it so bad they're manual laborers. But they also have a state of the art fleet?
• The whole psych out plan with the soccer ball was lame. Why would a drone fly past Soji before heading up to the antenna? So she can catch it, of course.
• Riker being the head of the fleet is stupid only due to the writer's own corner painting. Why put him in retirement on some backwater planet to begin with? Why not have a still in service Riker the whole time, possible even at odds with Picard as he was in AGT?
• Elf-Boy and Soong-Son turned out to be completely pointless characters. Neither added a thing to the plot that someone else couldn't. They had no personality or desires.
• Picard couldn't just die at 93 years old of natural causes? That's supposed to be a tragedy? And put him in a robot body that's as old and feeble and will die any minute? It's a terrible, stupid waste of resources.
But worst of all is that the writers thought we needed to see Data die again. He already died heroically on his own terms. Besides having another chance at a tear jerker, what was the point? He didn't even have a place in the whole series. He was in the first episode and then he was in the last. He had zero effect in between. This wasn't his story at all, especially since none of the synths are his actual built-by-his-hands kids as we were originally told, and yet he capped off the whole show with the only permanent repercussions. In the end, I really don't get what the writers wanted from this show. Nothing in the narrative flows neatly into the finale. Picard is treated like an asshole the whole time, but in the end he's right just being his usual self. Star Fleet and the federation are incompetent monsters the whole time, but in the end they just magically do the right thing. Rios is just a guy with some connection to the whole robot plot. Raffi's alcoholism is just there. She gets to have a last fun drink like it's nothing in the end shot. Anges is just a lovable murderer who never even had a change of heart. She was just brain washed and had the sense to never want to kill humanity.
Seeing her have multiple heads was funny though. I loled.
