Cthulhudrew

My take was that Vadic was trying to terrorize the crew and Picard's people, and a Vulcan was the least likely to be susceptible to emotional blackmail so made sense as the first victim. It seems logical to me. 😄

There was a lot of gobbledygook in this, so I may not be right, but the gist that I took away is that Jack is the "transmitter" through which the Borg Queen can exercise control of the "infected". So as long as he's plugged into her Borg Cube, she retains control of the NextGen-Z crowd. Unplug him (or "plug" him with a phaser) and everyone's free to be you and me. As for what they needed Picard's original body for? Dunno. Unless they just wanted it to hide evidence of their nefarious plan. It's funny; in seven seasons and four movies of the ST:TNG cast, there were really only a handful of episodes that dealt with Picard and the Borg. A handful in nearly 200 outings. Yet Every.Single.Frickin'.Season of Picard has revolved in some fashion around Picard and his Borg past. It's funny and kind of sad.

Am I mistaken or didn't Jonathan and Jordan share a bedroom the past two seasons? But now they're in separate rooms conveniently enough for Candice to take one for herself?

Agreed. The pacing this season (and especially this episode) has been atrocious, not to mention much of the dialogue. The amount of actual story they've given us could have been put into half as many tightly written episodes. The rest of it has been endlessly drawn-out melodrama, circuitous babble and teasing out what will likely be a less than satisfying "mystery" about Jack Crusher. It's never a good sign when your own dialogue has one of your characters pointing out that another main character is talking in needless riddles. I hadn't realized until this episode just how much this season was also relying on dramatic musical cues to try to generate emotional gravitas that the writing was failing to convey. I found myself wishing for the days of ST:TNG where they didn't have to resort to such handicaps. On another note, I don't get why Seven staying behind with Jack was supposed to be such a dramatic moment, as it went nowhere (in spite of Vadic intimating how "ironic" it was that she decided to stay behind, thus supporting- to me at least- the notion that Jack's specialness is somehow Borg-related). And why in the name of heck would they have an emergency evacuation door on the bridge? Dumb.

I'll give them points for the Snake Plissken reference. What's especially silly about this is that the changelings can obviously mimic inanimate clothing and accessories, so there really isn't any reason they shouldn't also be able to imitate chairs, boxes, statuary, and the like. Todd Stashwick is to Terry Matalas what Bruce Campbell is to Sam Raimi. Not your imagination. I thought it was pretty clear that Jack "changeling hiveminded" her. She was duplicating his movements as he performed them after he mindlnked to her. That explains a lot. Geordi said that Lore's purpose was to cause Chaos. Data was clearly hacked, and not by Lore, but by this guy:

Ha! You could be right! "Who still needs their SAG card? Joe? You've been with us three seasons - you get a line! Judy - you get a line! Taft-Hartleys for everyone!!!"

You could be right I suppose, in which case I can certainly see why it would be such a low priority for the New Republic to bother with. After all, who really cares about an utterly insignificant little blue green planet with apparently about two dozen people in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of some remote galaxy? Might as well just drive a hyperspace bypass through it and be done with the whole thing.

I know I need to just embrace the suspension of disbelief, but I just find it so hard. "Attention Rebels! One city on this planet is under attack by pirates, and if you don't help us, we won't be able to stop them and the entire planet will fall!!!!" 🙄 Really cool to see live-action Zeb, though. The reveal of Moff Gideon's escape and the possible Mandalorian connection reminds me of a scene from the old GI Joe comics when Fred VII killed Cobra Commander. As he was contemplating replacing him, he noted "The great thing about this armor is that it could be anyone inside." Could we get a last minute reveal that one of our Mando ensemble is actually Gideon in disguise?

It took 10 episodes, but I finally see why someone decided to sign up for the underwritten and otherwise invisible role of Warren. Sebastian Chacon had the best moment in this show when he utterly burst Eddie's pity party.

Maybe Shatner's going to show up by the end and really kick the memberberries into nostalgia heaven. Also, I don't know what they intend with Picard's corpse my guess is something like what was hinted at above, a Borg connection. Maybe they want Picard's corpse and whatever Borg-tech got passed along to his son to use to create a weaponized "hive mind" that will connect everyone in the cosmos to the Dominion hivemind forever? Or create a new one to replace the Odo contaminated one? (I really don't remember exactly how the Dominion War ended). I can't help but think they'd have been better off stealing the Genesis device and just blowing up Starfleet planets with it, though.

Someone decided to saddle Riker with all the bad dialogue and one-liners this episode.

I was puzzled by the Mandos using live flamethrowers against each other as training. How exactly does that work? "Don't worry, those are just practice third degree burns." How about adult sized helmets with yoda ears sticking out from the sides?

Why does Coruscant even bother to have flying traffic "lanes" when it seems like every time we visit there (regardless of SW show), our main characters completely ignore them?

The show has improved since the first three, but I think it needed a few more episodes early on to really give the characters time to live and breathe so that I cared about them more. Or at least they needed tighter writing in those first three.

If we see Amanda Schull and Emily Hampshire show up, I will be convinced this is a 12 Monkeys crossover season. I'm not sure I understand the logic that there can be no Utopia without crime, but I'll give them points for at least having the character believe his criminality was a logical vocation. Agree on you with this point. Their interaction was so brief and curt that I was beginning to think I'd imagined they'd been intimate partners in ST:TNG. That was a little bit of a low blow. That's almost a rite of passage for a Starfleet captain.

Not to mention those smoke bomb tele-spheres that Nash appears to have left them an unlimited quantity of. I got flashbacks to the last couple of seasons of Arrow where there were so many episodes centered around the mostly unwatchable New Team Arrow characters.

I felt like they wanted to capture some of the worldbuilding, intrigue, and (as you note) 70s sci-fi feel of Andor but they couldn't quite pull it off. It seemed somewhat hollow and superficial to me, especially the dialogue and acting by the Nobles after Pershing's speech. Points for trying, but it came up short for me. Two sidenotes: 1) Does anyone know if any of those nobles also appeared on Coruscant in Andor? One or two looked familiar, but I haven't looked to see. 2) I think you can make a drinking game of "every time someone flies over water, they will drag one wing through it for no good reason". It seems to be a trope in just about every tv show or movie I've seen come out of Marvel recently. "Unless I can have freshly cloned replacement eyes, I shall keep these antiquated eyepieces." - attributed to Dr. Pershing (though he doesn't remember saying it.)

Ah, the miracles of the television legal system. If this had been the real world, Ben would have been stuck in that leap for months (if not years) instead of just a couple days.

I enjoyed this episode for the most part, but it committed one of the biggest cardinal sins of some sci-fi writers: failing to account for the scale of space travel. Unless he managed his own escape, Mando should have been long dead by the time Bo Katan showed up to save him. Baby Grogu flying millions of miles to retrieve Bo Katan and fly back to Mandalore isn't like running a block or two to fetch your big sister to stop the neighborhood bully from beating up your friend. I also have a hard time believing the Empire was able to so completely ravage Mandalore that all its people fled and it was left entirely uninhabitable (even if that turns out to only be true in the eyes of the Mandalorians). Its of a kind with these "uni-culture" planets that sci-fi writers use as shorthand ("It's a forest world! It's a water world! It's a desert world! And there is only ever one place anyone goes to every time, and you miraculously can run into everyone you know in the galaxy if you stay there long enough!"). Just my sci-fi pet peeves, but when I see this sort of thing in an otherwise good episode it bugs me. Especially when you can look within the same Disney/Star Wars production family at a show like Andor which handled it all so much more believably and with more nuance and know that it is possible with the right writers and production team at the helm.

He dove at both of the crawl-unders; I remember seeing him do that at the first one and thinking "that's a great way to get a concussion." Then, lo and behold, he goes and proves the point. Really dumb move. On another note, I wonder if anyone thought to take the second obstacle on their back. After someone (Carolyn?) came out the other end saying she couldn't see due to the mud in her eyes, I can't help but think it would have been a more efficient tactic.

I assume they meant they can't mimic an artificial lifeform's inorganic parts (ie, positronic brain, etc.), so they could be detected via bio-scans and other things that distinguish organic and inorganic life.

Did Jack Crusher just visit 12 Monkeys' Red Forest? I feel like they could have condensed the story we've gotten in three episodes into two (at least eps 1 and 2 could have easily been a single episode). A lot of forced melodrama. I miss Rios, even if they didn't give him much to do last season. Since Raffi seems to be using La Sirena, it would have been nice to see Santiago Cabrera reprise one or more of the ship's holograms.

Telling the guy who's pining for his dead girlfriend (and has sworn he'll get even with you for not helping bring her back) that you're going after a time machine. Yeah, couldn't foresee that going wrong at all. 🙄 I miss Captain Cold and Heatwave. Instead we get Chillblaine and Jocko. What's the term that is the opposite of "leveling up"?

Not implied. In the original, Sam was actually physically switching places with people. He just looked like them to others because he took on their "aura" or something. They appeared in the White Room (as someone else mentioned). We see Al interact with a few of them directly, including his younger self (played by How Do You Talk To An Angel singer Jamie Walters.] In the new QL, Ben seems to be somehow merging with their bodies or just taking over their brains (I'm not sure if we know whether his real body is still in present-day Project QL or he's a disembodied consciousness).

Didn't on one occasion Al bring someone else with him as a hologram, but that person couldn't speak to Sam because he didn't have the neurolink? Am I just imaginging that happened? Also, to me the first page of illustrations was clearly Ian, but the last one looked more like a combination of Ian and Janice's faces. EDIT: Just doublechecked. I was half right; Al was replaced as hologram by Gooshie from the original project QL on a few occasions, but Gooshie was able to speak/interact with Sam without any problems.