After last week’s more middling performance in terms of “What are they on about? What is he on about? What are you all on about?” (Read like Bandit’s father from Bluey) everyone is going into this week hoping for some answers. “Well you’re DREAMIN’ mate!” While this week does contain some edge-on-your-seat-of-forever suspense leading into some amazing action, we’re still no closer to solving the core mystery of this entire series, and that is one Jack Crusher. However, if you were here for the TNG cast reunion, this episode will certainly tick off all of your boxes and then some.

Vadic has control of the ship, and will execute a bridge officer every ten minutes unless Jack comes up to the bridge. No one can access any of the ship systems as they’re locked out, with which we learn was a command code Riker gave Vadic, hoping Picard would employ a classic reverse gambit. Very trusting indeed. A few review outlets and Trek spots I frequent were lamenting over the sameness of Vadic’s character in this show, the whole slighted by the Federation or someone in their orbit, revenge, and so on. Seeing that play out in Vadic’s opening bit this week does iterate some of that sameness to previous villains, but I would wager that Amanda Plummer’s performance is a lot more nuanced, and a bit more frightening from a truly horroresque experience. Watching her just sort of shuffle, dance, and move her hands like a conductor to people’s screams and weapons fire, she truly has earned her place among Trek’s more psychotic villains, completely devoid of any kind of empathy or honor in her repertoire. For as somewhat awful as Star Trek Insurrection was executed, F. Murray Abraham’s Ru’aflo comes to mind as a villain who all but cast aside any kind of compass to achieve his goal. However the So’na ultimately wound up having a core empathy to them, a line they would not cross that separated the group from the star villain. Vadic has demonstrated she does not give a shit about her kind anymore than she does the Federation or solids in general. She accepted a self-destruction path from the start, and reveals in whatever or whomever gets swept up in it along the way.

Meanwhile Picard, Beverly, Jack, and Sidney are trying to regain control of the ship in one room, and Geordi and Alanna with Datalore are trying in another. Neither find success, and come to the conclusion that the only way to regain control would be to do it with the speed of a supercomputer. Namely Datalore. Only they are still fighting internally over control of the body they’ve been given. Brent Spiner has been dazzling us with his performances of Data and the Soongs for thirty years, and it’s a performance everyone says is one of his best. I listened to the season opener to Star Trek: The Pod Directive earlier this week with Jonathan Frakes, and he frequently talks about how goofy and amazing Brent is. He really has put a lot of effort into making the Soongverse work across multiple Trek series and movies. Check the spoilers before for more, but suffice to say he easily does his best work as the halves of Data and Lore compared to his various Soong fellows, which never really connected with me the same way the OG, Noonian Soong, did on TNG. The classic clash between Data and Lore was always a treat on TNG, and seeing that continue in this episode the way it does was great.

We have not seen much of Marina Sirtis’ Deanna Troi this season until Riker was captured and taken aboard the Shrike. One thing she mentions that might concern those who watched the first season of Picard, was that it seems Riker was replaced by a changeling when we first saw them all meet on the planet they lived in. “Good in bed, bad at making pizza!” I am not sure why she wouldn’t have picked up on that sooner given Betazoids cannot read changelings, as mentioned in DS9 with Troi’s mother and Odo. They did not dwell on that line for long though, and by now it’s a bit of a moot point. I kinda thought it was a writers’ room cheeky retcon of his bad pizza though. But now that Troi is back in the picture, it seems her role will be required in the next episode to unravel our big mystery. It feels real late to be doing this, in the penultimate episode, but I guess now is as good as time as any.

So in the first half of this episode, we’re dragged through a classic execute a hostage every ten minutes scenario to draw Jack up to the bridge. While I don’t really fault the writers for leaning on that sort of cliche villain moment, especially given how wonderful Amanda Plummer plays grand grandmother bird lady cheerfully executing the task, the way with which they are dangling this whole Jack’s abilities and powers thing is really, really trite. He’s fucking Bran from Game of Thrones. Vadic knows this. She knew the moment he possessed the bridge officer to input the cancel codes. So why not just spill the beans? Why not tell us what makes this guy special and how he got it? Was it from Picard’s body? Has Picard and others of his family been like this all along, but Jack was the first one to actually use it? Even when Jack shows up on the bridge and confronts her, she still does not indulge us. I like a good slow-burn story, and I like meaningful twists and reveals. This isn’t one of them, and it isn’t one of them because it doesn’t feel like it is going to make any sense or pay off in any meaningful way. Comparisons to the Red Angel from Discovery are apt, because throughout Disco S2 we’re told these wonderous stories about this winged thing executing all of these miraculous and often beneficial things in the galaxy, only for it to be fucking Burnham’s mother, somehow alive, somehow from the future or something, and that leads to the convoluted CONTROL plot and thrust into the future. I don’t need that here with Jack. I don’t need them to set up some big grandiose thing for him or the rest of the cast closing out this show. It seems like a neat power to be able to control another person, but then they should have figured it out mid-season, and used it to shadow Vadic on her ship or something sneaky, maybe obtain a list of all high-ranking Federation officers the changelings replaced. Or better yet, not do any of that shit, and just let Trek be Trek without some deus ex machina bullshit.

Once Picard and Co. link up with Geordi and Alanna, they reluctantly decide to remove the partition separating Data and Lore, so that the two personalities can have their fight. This was by far one of the best short sequences of the series, something I wish were applied to other subplots and scenarios. Data is seen pulling various memorabilia from his mind, things like Sherlock Holmes apparel, a deck of cards, and his cat Spot. At first Lore mocks him for even bothering with such things, as he only envisions power. But then Data seemingly hands them to him, insisting that he have the things he never got being offline or otherwise disassembled over the years while Data was not. Everything leads into this scene where you think Lore was successful at taking over Data, only for Data to flip the board around and actually win. But the way he wins isn’t by removing Lore, but absorbing his personality and experiences into his own, the way Altan had intended. In doing so, he regains control of the ship, and forcibly removes Vadic out the front of the bridge into space. The dialogue was amazing, and easily the highlight of all of this. Later he joins the rest of the Enterprise-D crew, a much more human Data than we’ve ever seen. They kind of acknowledged his “death” in the first season of Picard as being a different copy of him. The whole Soong android continuity can be disconcerting at times, but I am kind of just going with the casual hand-wave the writers here make of that and embracing the true return of Data since Nemesis. I’m with Geordi, it’s great to have our friend back.

So what now of our monolouging protoplasm? She was blown out into space, frozen, and shattered into pieces along the Shrike’s hull before the ship was blown up. We know from Odo that changelings can survive in space, typically in their original state. Considering how these changelings evolved to take on actual human organs and parts, I’d be curious if this means they are susceptible to space, or if she didn’t have the chance to morph back before space killed her. I’m also considering the fact that she could be T-1000’ing this and all of her pieces come back together in space, waiting for the next ship to pick her up. With two episodes left though, I am hoping the writers are not going to invoke some kind of Marvel-esque resurrection here, she’s dead-dead, and now we’re facing either the big-bad on her hand presumably somewhere else, or within Jack, or maybe they will do the 1000 Janeways ending like Into the Spiderverse. By now, Beverly should have really had some kind of detection and neutralization method cooked up for dealing with these new changelings, but she has been putt-putting around sickbay seemingly this whole series not really doing much. Perhaps that will be this second-to-last episode, alongside Deanna’s examination of Jack’s “red door”. Raffi and Worf’s rescue and retaking of the Titan was great, though we only got a couple scenes with each. I would have liked to see Worf take on Vadic’s big right-hand henchman there, that might’ve been good fun. Wonder if that ends up being deleted scenes?

Random Observations and Easter Eggs:

• Shaw is still holding on to calling Seven, Hansen, which she finally swiftly rebukes this episode. Poor Shaw is finally realizing how tough it has been for him to deal with this situation as his commanding officer did during Wolf 359. Sometimes it really do be a lottery, and that it’s okay to have that survivor’s guilt and process it.
• Worf upon meeting Troi again starts to go into this sort of gushing moment with her that invokes many of the former relationship angles they have during The Next Generation. He always had a little bit of a crush on her that became a rivalry at times with Riker. Of course, he moved on to Jadzia Dax on Deep Space Nine before presumably turning to more peaceful intentions after her death.
• Among Data’s memories are lines from TNG episodes where he played Sherlock Holmes on the holodeck, and items from that point, such as the hat and pipe. Lore on the other hand refers to how he was shut down and replaced by Data when Noonian Soong declared Lore “a failure” and removed all sense of emotion or treachery from Data’s programming.
• Picard’s original body is seen on the Shrike, but there is no mention of them taking it with them when they left. Did they take it with them, or is it a Viking funeral?
• “Hey Data, you used a contraction!” A realest of Trek nerds recall that during TNG, Data spoke in a way where he was not able to use contractions. So when he said “We’re good here.” it would normally be “We are good here.” A changeling would have a difficult time copying him for sure.