Another good episode for me, if a little less good than episode 6. I am really enjoying this season. The characters are good and we are getting good storylines. Still not the biggest fan of serialization for Trek, but PIC s3 is doing it better than anyone else has (except probably Prodigy).
My "biggest" issue are just little things. I guess you could call them nitpicks, but to me they are just story/character/Star Trek stuff that are just errors. With all the turnover in this show (in terms of showrunners and writers), this feels basically like a season 1 of Picard. And if these creatives could continue onward, by season 3 they would probably have these things all worked out.
Issues:
My "biggest" issue are just little things. I guess you could call them nitpicks, but to me they are just story/character/Star Trek stuff that are just errors. With all the turnover in this show (in terms of showrunners and writers), this feels basically like a season 1 of Picard. And if these creatives could continue onward, by season 3 they would probably have these things all worked out.
Issues:
- No way a 120+ year old cloak lasts for more than 5 seconds under 25th century Federation sensors. To fix it, they just needed to add a wallpaper explanation that Geordi and Shaw would "upgrade" it with some modern tech.
- And why did the Titan warp back to Daystrom station and only then cloak? Subspace sensors work at a distance, they can still see you coming!
- Three federation Starships warp to within 200 meters of the beacon pretending to be the Titan. If that had been the real Titan (as they expected) they would have crashed into the ship and they all would have exploded. [Maybe just a CGI error?]
- The Titan is hiding behind the little moon near the Daystrom station, but as soon as the patrolling ships see it, suddenly the Titan is out in the open only a short distance from the station. Another CGI error? [SNW also had these kind of discontinuity issues where spoken dialog doesn't match the exterior visuals.]
- When Vadic kills the two "Starfleet officers" with her when she is torturing Riker, I see three possible explanations: 1) they are actually Starfleet officers who she kills (which makes some sense if she is going to kidnap Riker but for some reasons couldn't do that under the guise of her assumed Starfleet officer identity) but who are just ok with torturing a fellow officer (which makes no sense), 2) Vadic just felt like killing two fellow changelings for no reason, 3) they are changelings of a different faction or Vadic is just going a little bit rogue from "the Face's" plans and she needs to get rid of them (which also doesn't make sense as she just takes Riker back to her ship anyway and continues about her business). 3 is the most reasonable answer, but so far there is no evidence for it. 1 seems to be the real situation and the showrunners/writers didn't care about regular Starfleet officers being ok with torture.
- The whole "have a superior AI like Moriarty guard the station" is a cool idea, but just poorly executed. The staging was awkward (he was chasing them, then just stands there? why did he chase them? he is a hologram and can just appear anywhere he wants. But if he is just supposed to be a lock on the door or a guard on that door, why did he chase them at all?). If it was meant to be exciting or dangerous, it just didn't feel that way. And the whole way Moriarty was integrated into the station didn't make sense (maybe I need a rewatch?): Moriarty was in the station, but somehow so was Data? Was the M510 android somehow connected too? Or were they saying that the original Ent-D computer incorporated Data's experiences (hence the raven and the song?) into the Moriarty program in order to create a villain that could defeat Data, but that those Data programming elements somehow unlocked/defeated Moriarty when Riker completed the tune? Could the Ent-D computer infiltrate Data's positronic brain to get all that stuff? And even if it did, Data hadn't had the raven dreams yet when Moriarty was created. Did the Ent-D extrapolate that Data might eventually have raven dream imagery based on the hidden dream program Soong buried somewhere in Data's brain? Ugh.
- The conference table scene, while nice, was not the highest quality. People didn't seem to be reporting on the data or expertise that only they would have to contribute to a discussion and actually determine a course of action. They almost all seemed to already be aware of all the information and practically already agreed on the course of action. And Shaw being the captain didn't even really speak or act as captain. The scene was just not staged well.
