I think, despite kinda liking it in the beginning...I have soured on this ep and as a result Picard as a whole thing.
Ultimately, it’s a ten hour pilot. A lot of emotional scenes felt unearned, and odd choices were made. There’s the constant ‘Data’s coming back’ tease, which goes unresolved, Dahj and Soji are resolved off camera as far as their ‘mystery’ is concerned...and I think that’s true of so many things.
It dips it’s toes in nostalgia subtly (kestra recalling Rene in Family with her introduction) and not so subtly (the TNG theme swell becoming very much recurring to tell us when Picard is being Picardlike.) but tries desperately to avoid getting its feet wet (no TNG crew present for the deaths of Picard or Data? When the Data one is planned, he owes at least Troi and Riker some information.) or shock (death of the Borg dudes).
Ultimately, the story isn’t really about Picard...perhaps that isn’t entirely fair, given how much it tries to be. It’s about Data...but doesn’t really go there either. No status quo is changed, and everything not about Data plays as a sequel to stuff we haven’t seen. I am not sure why Seven is really there, she’s a dislocated character and it shows, and you could make very minor tweaks to have *any* of the TNG crew take Picard’s role in events without too much change, or even Doctor Bashir.
Ultimately it feels too much of an attempt at rehashing stuff from the novels, except where it deliberately goes against them to avoid it becoming too obvious (a problem Star Wars also recently suffered)
But ultimately, ten hours to restore a status quo it first had to tell us was gone (the federation as utopia) ten hours to talk about one it kept static (data is dead) over and over and ultimately ten hours to get the cast all standing on a bridge well enough and bonded enough to go and have adventures. It made some weird choices on the way, and had nice individual moments, but I don’t ultimately think it brought anything new to the table.
It felt like an odd fanfic ultimately, where all the author inserts have crowded out the regular cast. There’s even the stirrings of all the seven slash fic in there.
I don’t know... it’s difficult not to let nostalgia and a need for something better than Nemesis as a coda to make me want to like this. But I think we just spent ten hours retreading Nemesis with some extra weirdness.
