And there's Seven getting re-Seven'd, yep. Fits her seasonal arc of self-acceptance like a glove. Good stuff. Guess I'll do predictions one last time, then. Been on a roll overall. Lots of questions peppered into this, though.
Picard will cite personal insights he's found this season in his fateful conversation with Q. They'll both learn something from Q's last trial, something poignant that Patrick Stewart will make sound meaningful no matter what it takes.
Will Q be capable of tapping into the final reserves of his withering godlike powers to bring them home? Right back to the Stargazer, as it were? Will the Stargazer sequence be fundamentally altered by Jurati not being present? Or will the "one Renee must live, one must die" a kind of timeline splinter that allows for the previous iteration and altered iteration to somehow occur simultaneously, before snapping back together in that major moment when the Borg Queen Jurati transports herself aboard? (She, herself, is the culmination of all this - one half from the Federation timeline; the other half from the Confederation timeline.)
Since Soong's still an issue, I suspect Kore will reappear before the end. What will become of her? If the writers opt to devote much more time to her, perhaps she'll leave for the future with Picard and the others. Certainly, now more than ever, I think this will happen with Theresa and her son. They lampshaded it this week by pointing out how hard it is for her to encounter this wonderful technology and have to watch it leave, just like she'd be watching Rios leave. They want the audience not to dwell, to just root for it to go the whole nine yards now.
La Sirena will be the very heart of that wild-looking Borg vessel the Borg Queen Jurati uses. Star Trek's seldom been as nuanced as folks pretend, and the modern writers are typically that much thicker about things.
Tallinn gets to factor into the timeline split somehow, yeah? Renee doesn't necessarily have to die on one side of the equation if she can instead be whisked away by her secret near-lifelong guardian.
But back to Q. That scene, the inevitable one between de Lancie and Stewart, it needs to work on a similar level to Stewart and Spiner inside Data's mind during last season's finale. They'll go big on this, I think. If there is a point in the episode in which the scenario stops juggling between several settings and simply breathes, it will be these two men discussing the finite matters of past, present, future, and farewell.
A throwaway line may exist, blink-and-miss, where Seven says something along the lines of "now that the Federation is involved with this new breed of Borg, Starfleet is more interested in having someone with firsthand experience on the inside." Setting Seven, as an official member of Starfleet, aboard the same ship as Raffi and Elnor would be a fine sendoff (with stuff for them all to do next season as well, of course).
Anyway, that's my guesses. Always fun to type them all out. Before I head to bed, I'm gonna go ahead and guess that there will be a huge internet shitstorm over Seven saying Starfleet wouldn't accept her when we know that Icheb made it in. Gonna chalk this one to the writers not being clear enough that there's a difference between Icheb's few years as a drone and Seven having spent decades as one and being viewed with favoritism by the Borg Queen herself. It won't stop Angry Joe or Miffed Irene or whoever from reminding us that the show is dreadful.
