The Vadic backstory is pretty good and answers a lot. Indeed, given her "Hi!" and various bits of goofy dialogue that Amanda Plummer acts out might explain her, shall we say, "handy pal" - the floaty devil head thing may be a psychotic manifestation, the way she thinks she sees it? Along with her other scars, could she be self-mutilating and not just part of the reaction to the experiments she was subjected to?
There can never ever be a bad Geordi/Data scene and this episode still holds true to the rule.
Okay, I've heard reused sound effects before, partly because they're probably easter eggy callback thingies, but sometimes because the audial tones just fit the scene. But Vadic's arm sensor doing the TWOK noise is a little too recognizable. Even the TOS sickbay sounds don't detract.
Back to a plus, since episode 1, the Titan and "Neo-Constitution class" or whatever to justify the retro design didn't bother me at all. Maybe I'd adjusted since when I first saw it. It's grown on me tremendously.
However, the big diaperload took me by surprise for one scene: Aren't they
raising the forcefields in the corridors? Replacing "raise" with "drop" just makes those forcefield scenes sound stupid. Of course, once the forcefields aren't needed, then they can be dropped. "AI" is one thing, "tech" is another, but now the episode feels like it's not even trying. Also, I miss the old HTML standard where blinking text was possible, since the emphasis accorded the blinky effect might be fun for "raising". There's another reason to miss the 1990s right there... and three points alone, because this one should have been too easy.
On the flip side, the detail accorded the ship playing dead is, I believe, the first time Trek went into detail as to how to hide somewhere so they can't be picked up by ships. There's a TNG episode where they go play dead and I couldn't buy into that for an attosecond either when they had full lighting and life support going on.
As always, great music.
So did I misinterpret, or was Data/Lore/Lal plugged into the ship deliberately? This one's another nappysack, full of used plotting tropes. That said, the unstable amalgam did lead to some great tension-driven moments so it's not all bad. And, if housing a historical program or operating system, like how many of us 90s nerds had set up hard drive partitions for multi-OS configurations with menued bootloader to select our desired operating system in question (and they all have sleep modes that instantly revive to where one left off, on top of bank switching and other ye olde concepts, I've no problems with the one shell housing multiple "personality" operating system interfaces. That's kinda cool...
And, yup, if not before, the revenge-themed trope is trotted out again, but it is done
well. The episode ends up being more than the sum of its parts, that's for sure.
And who can't like not-Tuvok?
Another great cliffhanger too.
7.5/10 but rounding up. Maybe 8.25, the more I think about it...
(Well among a host of other idiotic things like the those garbage TNG movies that killed off all TNG until Picard.) Of all the ideas they could go with, they choose THIS cringe-fest? Really?
