WHY WE LIKE IT: Baltar!
WHY WE DON'T: A number of groaners.
REVIEW: The meat of this episode takes place inside Picard's mind, where he confronts that childhood trauma that's been haunting him since episode 1 (which must be chalked up to coincidence). How does getting hit by a car induce this self-imposed coma/experience when all instruments say he's fine? It's not clear. I might suggest it's because his positronic brain works differently from his old one, but that's never mentioned. They wonder later if Q didn't provoke it since it leans on the lesson he wants to teach Picard, but the one instance of him not being able to use his powers was about screwing with someone's mind so... How can it be him, except by the Season's law of "things work only when the script needs them to"?
Picard's mind trip isn't without interest even if I'm not a fan of this subplot. James Callis (Baltar!) appears as, well at first, Picard's snippy therapist, who is alter revealed to be his father. It's possible Picard's mind is conflating different events, and that such a therapy session did occur at some point, but it's not clear. Not much is, honestly. Tallinn is in there helping Young Picard brave the monsters in his head, but we don't know that she really does anything to help the situation. Teresa, in the real world, is handed a 25th-Century neural thingie and someone knows how to use it (point and click, sure, but how does know it's working?) and waving that wand around more or less coincides with Tallinn breaking the boy's manacles, but who's doing what? Older Picard is meanwhile just fine (if irritated with his psych eval), and eventually pulls himself out of the coma NOT because he has faced his fear, but because he doesn't want to face the horror behind a certain door (it's not hard to guess what that might be). So he might have been fine even without his friends interfering. In other words, what was the point of all that? One thing I do like is that the lack (or denial) of an ending in this vision mirrors the story he tells his therapist - sometimes stories just end. Picard comes out of it realizing he never really knew his father, remembering him as the brute responsible for his mother's hardships, but of course, she had mental issues that were not his fault. A child makes his choices, but might never have a complete picture. It's good, but Picard shouldn't be coming to this so late in life. Know thyself? He should know himself quite well at his age and has always been portrayed as introspective and self-possessed. Nor does the whole thing about him being afraid of enclosed spaces make a lot of sense. Yes, the cosmos is big, but you're gonna go out there in a tin can? Running from something sure. What they say here doesn't really match his personality.
Meanwhile, Rios gets closer to Teresa. I rate them as a couple, especially how she turns her fear and mistrust into humor. He opens up, telling her that he sees Picard as a father figure (so it's everyone then?), and rather foolishly brings her and her son aboard La Sirena (yeah, nothing bad could possibly happen, hope someone cleaned all the Borg and cop blood). The eye-rolling nostalgia moment of the week: When she asks if he's from space, he says he only WORKS in space. And with that Star Trek IV has been cannibalized to the bone. Raffi and Seven are on Jurati's trail, having discovered that the Queen is in the driver's seat, keeping that strand alive. They also imagine a life growing old together, but they are so undemonstrative that I completely missed the subtext the first time around. They could just as well be talking about a non-romantic friendship, it's weird. At one point they say they need Picard, but there's no indication as to why. Second time in as many episodes. As for Soong, Kire and Renée, they've disappeared from the narrative for now.
Back to Picard... Tallinn confesses she's a Romulan after all, so it seems the strong DNA isn't just for the Soong family. The point of hiding it (so to speak) is to give her some kind of disguise device with an unlikely limitation (it can't be REactivated for 8 hours after being deactivated, like why not?), a device that again would have been very useful during the gala complication. Picard now believes if he can understand why Q is doing all this, he can go on the offensive, and goes back to Guinan so she can use her El-Aurian powers to summon him. We learn more here about El-Aurian culture, worldview and abilities than in all prior appearances combined, and it's couched in a certain mysticism. However you want to interpret it, Guinan accesses a "moment" representing a truce between her people and the Continuum that creates a localized poltergeist event and is supposed to make Q appear. He doesn't, probably because his powers are disrupted. Instead, and this is probably a bigger eye-roll moment, an FBI agent walks in and "captures" the two "aliens". I physically groaned at this hackneyed complication. After all, we JUST had such a thing with Rios and ICE. Now it's Picard and the X-Files.
LESSON: We'll never really know who our parents were.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-Low: A quality guest star enlivens the subplot (here, plot) of Picard's childhood trauma, but there are entirely too many irritations swirling around the episode.
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