I feel kinda cheated from that fake out with Picard his death. I don't know why the writers tried to put several high emotional stakes into 1 episode, with several of them feeling unneeded, while neglecting many loose threads.
Overall, this show is very good, but after this episode I have a feeling some of the writers have difficulty with creating overall story structure. With (high budget) series being more and more like movies these days (and this series definitely having the allure of one) I also expect more from the writers to treat the stories and characters with more consistency, and not cram too many different stories to follow or (fake) drama into a show. They chose for a season overarching story instead of an episodic one, so a disappointment at the end like this affects the whole show, not just a single episode (although the cracks started to show in the last episode already.)
It is not just Picard's death fake out. Rios and Agnes matching was dumb (but at least it was a hinted at, although without clear explanation) and made no sense for either of the characters. Seven of Nine and Raffi (which tbh was my least favourite character to begin with) romantic involvement tease at the end felt like I was watching The CW network, and made completely 0 sense. Starfleet (Riker) flying in last minute also looked like a result of the writers getting stuck. Soji her motivation for her choices were remarkably underdeveloped. Why did the Borg cube weapons have to be activated, when it is not used at all, except to get abused by the villain. Why do all the synths just agree with whatever Soj/Sutra/Saga say or want. What are the flowers? So many questions are left unanswered, so why did they introduce all those things so close to the end of the season?
I hoped the evil synth overlords would enter the stage, and turn out to be very different than anyone would have expected. I think that would have been far more interesting, match better with Star Trek themes (curiosity and exploration)
I feel disappointed after having a pretty good run this season, that they ended it like this.
