Hopefully the quality of episode won’t be strained. Spoilers.
Overall this episode really felt like filler. There’s very little overall advancement in the season plot – really the only thing with consequences that happens is the Queen/Jurati links up with Adam Soong, and starts to assimilate mercenaries. The rest is different levels of inessential.
The FBI stuff doesn’t go anywhere very interesting. We could have had a bit of fun with Picard trying to justify different bits of his ‘trail’, but there isn’t very much done with it. Maybe if there’d been more bread crumbs towards this over the season it’d be more interesting. Nice to link in to the First Contact back story of Vulcan surveillance. Nothing is terrible, it just feels like a distraction and delay.
Raffi/Seven continue to be great to watch. Really good example of how to combine character development, emotion and plot advancement. But still, relative to the amount of screen time there isn’t much going on. And the Rios scenes do even less, other than a slight advancement in the relationship. Ultimately we have a few bits of justification – for instance, how they know about Soong and the Queen.
I’m glad the Adam Soong stuff is paying off at last, it’d felt quite separate for the most part over the season. The last part of the episode is really ramping up the pace and tension of the season.
Quick hits:
– Wish they could have got David Duchovny for the FBI agent.
– Microsoft Tablet and HoloLens. Don’t get a lot of product placement in Trek.
– That really is a spectacular dress Jurati has on.
– Not quite sure why the Queen is harvesting car batteries. They’re a lead-acid construction, no metal except lead. Just because it’s a battery doesn’t mean it has lithium in it – that’s a totally different chemistry.
– Love that the Rios joke comes back to pay off as a plot point.
– Rios is going to need some temporal interference remedial training.
– Q’s monologue is a good example of how to do ‘award show clip’ writing that the previous episode couldn’t hit.
– Seeing Elenor in flashback made me miss him. I hope he gets to come back to life.
– Really poor OpSec from the Vulcans there. No perimeter, no use of sensors, just snuck up on by a child. Not sure how they kept secret until First Contact.
– Alison Pill’s performance this season is really off the charts. Her Borg Queen is very impressive.
850 down.