I don't quite know what to think of the writing in this. Older Trek shows had good episodes and bad episodes, Picard has good scenes/moments and bad scenes/moments. Sometimes as terrible and clichéd as DSC.
The villains (Narissa, Narek, Oh, Sutra) were particularly poorly written, reminiscent of 90s sitcom villains. MacGyver villains. I wouldn't be surprised if femme fatale Narissa showed up again after that fall, to complete the MacGyverness of it.
Sutra... you knew immediatly that she'd turn out to be a villain, from the first 5 seconds on screen. On one hand, credit to the actress for conveying that with a couple of head tilts alone, but on the other hand, there's a reason it worked: it's a cliché.
The plot begins to unravel towards the end, particularly how quickly the androids went from "peaceful commune" to "let's slaughter the organics!"
They tried to give motivations to the androids, you have to credit that. They're not just gratuitously jumping to genocide, but it's still extremely thin.
"The measure of a man" would not be a legendary episode if Data instantly tried to kill Maddox upon learning his plan, especially not if he did so whilst uttering a classic villainous line ("I'm so sorry to hear you say that" or something of the sort), which is what these villains do.
I've been using the word "villains" above, and that wasn't even a choice. It's just the word that came to me. If they were better written, I'd have used "antagonists", instead, but these characters fit a simplistic manichean model better.
More nitpicky points about the ending: aspects of it are quite predictable (Picard's ultimate fate), though that's not necessarily a bad thing, if well foreshadowed, and there are Dei Ex Machinae (the repair tool, the fleet arriving in the nick of time, ...).
So, that's the bad. On the good side, I liked Picard's journey of self-rediscovery, I liked Soji's learning (aside from the aforementionned instantly embracing genocide for a while) and the parallels between them, I loved that Picard gives morality lessons to someone who just saved his life! That was such a great moment, him chiding Ellnor just after they beamed from the NunPlanet. There were a few more of those.
I loved the Riker/Troi scenes. I loved the first scene of ep1, too. You could predict Picard's lines, but they were delivered so well that it didn't matter.
And overall, the resolution was pretty good. The ending arc was poorly set up, but resolved quite well, I think.
So, I don't know what to think. I just hope Narissa doesn't come back, not so much because I disliked the character (though I did), but because it'd be a sign that they're going full MacGyver.
It's a lot better than DSC, though, that's for sure. In the good moments, it's hard to believe both are Kurtzman projects.
