@andrewbloom There must have been some kind of mental connection between us as we kind of wrote the same at about the same time.
@finfan Perhaps we were cloned from the same positronic neuron! :-)
@andrewbloom "Everything in this finale is just so rushed and glancing and ultimately unsatisfying. There's some good ideas here, but they're all shortchanged for a meditation on death that feels out of step with the show's ideas to this point, and a bunch of easy plot fixes and character relationships that haven't actually been developed."
This.
I've enjoyed most of this first season but this was by far the weakest episode. The plot felt paper thin and rushed. While I agree Riker's arrival was a cool moment, the actual staging of that "battle" was terrible and the orchids defending the planet was really difficult to visually decipher.
I hope season 2 goes more conventional with its stories - or at the very least gets some better writers.
@2ls1t Yeah, despite a much higher budget than during the TNG days, the space battle here wasn't any more visually interesting than the ones from the early nineties, which says something about the series's visual acumen. It's a shame.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-03-26T17:04:36Z— updated 2020-03-27T20:53:21Z
[6.0/10] Oh man, what a crock this is. It is so full of cheats and shortcuts and self contradictions that it's hard to take any of it seriously. Suddenly, we've pivoted to the prospect of mortality and self-sacrifice as the most important theme of the season, despite the fact that those have been, at best, tangential to the ideas the show was exploring up until...last week.
And it's totally contradicted by what the episode actually does! Picard trying to "give his life" to prove to Soji that organics is good would have more weight if we hadn't seen him jump into death-defying situations throughout the season. What makes this one any different? And when he "dies", it's not because the Romulans blast him or really anything to do with his grand stand. His brain abnormality just acts up when it's dramatically convenient, with no apparent connection to his attempt at self sacrifice.
Then the episode just wipes away that sacrifice anyway! I can't tell you what a cheat it feels like to have Picard die, learn a very important lesson about the beauty of life coming from the fact that it's finite, only for him to then immediately cheat death! Then the whole bending over backwards to try to explain that even though he has an android body now, he'll age normally feels contrived and bullshit as hell. It's a dumb plot choice that immediately contradicts the episodes laudable themes about accepting mortality as something inherently human.
It's not all bad. As deus ex machina as Riker's arrival, it's still a cool moment. As weird as Data looks in the "quantum simulation" (oh brother), his death and appreciation for Picard's love is moving. And even if Jurati feels like she's from a different show, her quips and jibes got a chuckle out of me.
Everything in this finale is just so rushed and glancing and ultimately unsatisfying. There's some good ideas here, but they're all shortchanged for a meditation on death that feels out of step with the show's ideas to this point, and a bunch of easy plot fixes and character relationships that haven't actually been developed.
On the whole, this season was a real missed opportunity. Assembling this kind of talent and deploying it only for this wobbly mess of a season is a big shame. I'm a sucker, so I'll be back for season 2, and I hope they'll work out the kinks But after this, I'm not terribly optimistic.