How the hell am I two weeks late for this? I have no excuse. This was glorious. Chef's kiss, and so on.
If there's one thing I could mourn about it, it would be Seven's inexcusable, horrible, awful, no-good decision to merge all of the Rios holograms into
Inigo Montoya Emmett. Someone should tell the Doctor so that he could yell at her about how he thought she was better than that.
Oh wait, two things. Cause I don't like the new theme song. It starts interesting, but falls apart for me in the second half.
Drunk Jurati is a mood, I took an instant liking to her last year and she didn't disappoint, even if she's Tilly-esque to the point where it triggers my longing for my absent favorite on that other show. Even beneath the fact that she's still obviously not over being mind-raped into murdering Maddox, she manages to come off as a grown-up Tilly who just learned to embrace her awkwardness and sometimes even weaponize it to get under people's skin.
Picard's indecision regarding the Borg Queen attacking was quite interesting. I'm not sure if it was warranted caution because of how different the Borg were acting or it was actually stupid... as I was watching, I felt like Seven was the only sane person on board trying to point out the obvious to deaf ears. I was so consumed by wondering about this that I didn't even stop to consider what should be a major clue, namely that they were referring to Picard by name instead of Locutus. They might be the Borg from the alternative universe, trying to pull the Federation fleet over there to fight the evil Federation. Or maybe it's something we'll only get the context of in the season finale, and it's actually Soji or Seven herself under the mask, recently returned from the past, and trying to purge something from the fleet's systems that only they know is there (*cough*
Control*cough I jest of course. But we need the once-a-season unreasonable fear that our friendly omnicidal AI will be involved somehow and I wanted to keep up the tradition).
I'm also glad that the "didn't LA sink into the ocean" debate has already ended by the time I got here. I'm getting tired by some people and Memory Alpha taking every single spoken line in the franchise at face value and treat it as factual and 100% correct. If Picard says something happened "fifty years ago" in 2368, you bet you'll find hundreds of comments and articles on the internet treating 2318 as the canon date.
Family from TNG, is nothing but characters talking, the vast majority of which is set on a vineyard. It's one of my top ten episodes of the show.
I can't help but love how meta that episode is to how certain fans seem to treat each and every single "non-sci-fi" or character moment in this franchise... Michael Piller had to beg Berman and Roddenberry to allow it to be produced because they would've just had everything back to normal the very next episode after BoBW, and even after he managed to convince them, Berman still insisted on a sci-fi B-plot that was only scrapped because they couldn't fit it into the script. Roddenberry, for his part, kept complaining about how boring it was, there wasn't any action and jeopardy, and it also didn't fit his vision because families were all completely harmonic and loving to each other in the 24th century and adults resenting their parents or siblings was completely unthinkable.
Curious. What determines significance?
Something something plot something. I guess it comes from that Berman-era concept I've been seeing from quite a few people all over the internet that the most important part of the episode is the sci-fi concept driving the plot, with the characters being mere facilitators of it, where backstory is only given if it's relevant to the episode's dilemma/conflict/villain or if it's a few minutes of unrelated Piller filler in the teaser to lighten the mood before the actual plot starts.
Anyway it wasn't that it was 15 min. or in a vinyard, etc., it's that it was all 4 at once (boring setting, stupid dialog, non-significant, etc.) Remove one or two of those and you'd have something watchable. All I remember is looking at the time, seeing 15 minutes and thinking "what the HELL is this - nothing at all of significance is happening".
