I thought this was a big step up after a shaky (and sometimes bad) episode last week. There were a lot of subplots - a lot of balls being kept in the air - but most of them worked well, and a few of them actually offered some compelling character drama. Most importantly, after an episode of wheel spinning, there's actual forward movement in the plot, which is finally beginning to take shape (though I expect twists to come).
Picard's stuff with Not Laris (Tallinn) was...okay. She honestly doesn't feel like a real character yet so much as a plot device, and she had to give the clunkiest exposition of the episode. However, the scenes involving Renee Picard was great, giving us an emotional connection to her struggles in a short period of time. I was also amused that right when I was wondering why the psychologist had such an awful fake European accent we pan back (so to speak) and find out it was Q. Well played.
The buddy cop crap with Seven and Raffi is still hokey/interminably dull, but they get the rescue of Rios finished in less than 3 minutes, so I can't complain. And some of that run time is spent with Rios, whose scenes are better in every possible way. Good riddance to a clunky plot line.
The stuff with Adam Soong, Q, and his daughter (Kore) is just wonderful. It's a very manipulative and cliche scenario - the father with a child with a terminal disease willing to do anything - but Spiner has the chops to pull it off and has amazing chemistry with DeLancie - something we never got to see on TNG because Data was such a dry character.
Unlike a lot of viewers, I've not been feeling the Jurati/Borg Queen stuff this season. But I think the scenes in this episode are very effective, and there's finally some clear forward movement here, with Jurati having a coherent character arc which will unfold over the remainder of the season.
And of course we end with everyone still alive in the La Sirena crew (plus Tallinn) getting together and planning the "heist" so to speak. Not sure where things are going yet, but I'm sure it's not as simple as it seems. I think the Renee Picard stuff may be a red herring to some degree, since we know it's Adam Soong who gets remembered by the Confederation. I'm wondering if it's actually something related to Jurati's assimilation (and whatever the 2024 reaction to the crisis is) that spurs humanity to become isolationist and xenophobic.
There are some interesting implications of the worldbuilding of this episode as well. After playing footsie with the idea in the last two episodes this may be "our" 2024, this episode seems to put to bed the idea that Trek takes place in anything other than an alternate timeline, what with a manned mission to Europa and that drone force field the Soongs had. It also seems to retcon at least a bit of old Trek continuity, because there's no way Adam Soong could be doing the work he was if the Eugenics Wars took place during the 1990s. Trek has tried to have it both ways when it comes to the Eugenics Wars - DS9 tried to be fuzzy regarding the dates, VOY ignored them, and Enterprise embraced the original idea under Manny Coto, so it will be interesting to see what is done here.
Picard's stuff with Not Laris (Tallinn) was...okay. She honestly doesn't feel like a real character yet so much as a plot device, and she had to give the clunkiest exposition of the episode. However, the scenes involving Renee Picard was great, giving us an emotional connection to her struggles in a short period of time. I was also amused that right when I was wondering why the psychologist had such an awful fake European accent we pan back (so to speak) and find out it was Q. Well played.
The buddy cop crap with Seven and Raffi is still hokey/interminably dull, but they get the rescue of Rios finished in less than 3 minutes, so I can't complain. And some of that run time is spent with Rios, whose scenes are better in every possible way. Good riddance to a clunky plot line.
The stuff with Adam Soong, Q, and his daughter (Kore) is just wonderful. It's a very manipulative and cliche scenario - the father with a child with a terminal disease willing to do anything - but Spiner has the chops to pull it off and has amazing chemistry with DeLancie - something we never got to see on TNG because Data was such a dry character.
Unlike a lot of viewers, I've not been feeling the Jurati/Borg Queen stuff this season. But I think the scenes in this episode are very effective, and there's finally some clear forward movement here, with Jurati having a coherent character arc which will unfold over the remainder of the season.
And of course we end with everyone still alive in the La Sirena crew (plus Tallinn) getting together and planning the "heist" so to speak. Not sure where things are going yet, but I'm sure it's not as simple as it seems. I think the Renee Picard stuff may be a red herring to some degree, since we know it's Adam Soong who gets remembered by the Confederation. I'm wondering if it's actually something related to Jurati's assimilation (and whatever the 2024 reaction to the crisis is) that spurs humanity to become isolationist and xenophobic.
There are some interesting implications of the worldbuilding of this episode as well. After playing footsie with the idea in the last two episodes this may be "our" 2024, this episode seems to put to bed the idea that Trek takes place in anything other than an alternate timeline, what with a manned mission to Europa and that drone force field the Soongs had. It also seems to retcon at least a bit of old Trek continuity, because there's no way Adam Soong could be doing the work he was if the Eugenics Wars took place during the 1990s. Trek has tried to have it both ways when it comes to the Eugenics Wars - DS9 tried to be fuzzy regarding the dates, VOY ignored them, and Enterprise embraced the original idea under Manny Coto, so it will be interesting to see what is done here.
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