Having watched it once, I liked it more than I was expecting to. That's not an especially high bar to clear, as I didn't have much hope of it even improving on Nemesis, but I appreciate that it was slower paced, more sensibly directed and edited, and didn't have the over-the-top visual 'sheen' of Discovery. It has the cadence of Star Trek, which is more than has been present since Beyond (which I didn't like as much as many fans, but it at least felt as though it respected what Trek was). Stewart gives a strong performance as an older, more wounded Picard who still has his ethics but lost his faith in his ability to make them count for anything, and the interview scene was a solid restatement of the nature of the character, even if very writerly and the staging clichéd (the interviewer lied and is unnecessarily confrontational!). My hope for the rest of the season remains extremely mixed because the plot is the weakest part by far. The 'protect a special girl' schtick is creaking and the backstory is strangely overwrought and lacking the connective tissue needed to hold the base narrative together.
(FULL SPOILERS FROM HERE) So Picard led the rescue mission to save refugees from Romulus. At the same time, a group of androids* used the opportunity, presumably of Federation resources being diverted, to blow up shipyard installations on Mars. This leads to the Romulan rescue effort being abandoned and all androids being declared illegal. None of those three developments follow particularly smoothly, or even logically, and while it's a bit more coherent than the gigantic black holes sucking up Discovery's storytelling, it's clunky and overburdened. Some would argue that we don't yet know the full story after just one episode - almost certainly true for the android attack on Mars - but right now, it's distracting and piecemeal. Couldn't the android rebellion have occurred as part of the rescue effort, for instance? The callbacks feel similarly untidy: so Dahj is not Data's daughter, but a new type of android by Maddox inspired by Data painting a woman and calling the work 'daughter', even though the woman didn't exist, let alone have any relationship to him (wouldn't he have painted Lal)? And Maddox created the Dahj androids in pairs because... Data made two paintings? And since she was created by Maddox, why would she apparently have secret programming to seek out Picard in a time of need? Again, maybe this will all be explained and the details filled in - also why Lore hasn't been acknowledged, even though his existence should completely derail one of the central plot points, that the Federation were unable to replicate Data's complexity because the closest surviving model they had was B4 (amusingly discarded). Maybe I'm misremembering the end of Descent, but I thought Lore was deactivated but not destroyed, and the whereabouts of his remains unstated but presumably in Federation hands.(SPOILERS END)
Anyway, I appreciate the slower tone, the hint of ethical consideration and Patrick Stewart's performance in this episode, but the clichéd and overstuffed plot make me question whether it's all going to rapidly go downhill once it starts having to get into the weeds and up the stakes of the story it wants to tell. This episode is better than I was expecting but without necessarily being all that reassuring.
*I'm not going to call the androids 'synths' or 'synthetics'. That kind of nicknaming belongs in far stupider series than Trek should be.
luckily we have the Orville...
