WHY WE LIKE IT: The Borg solution.
WHY WE DON'T: Continuity nonsense and magic tech.
REVIEW: La Sirena is under attack by the Queen (still in Agnes' body, but reclaiming her costume), her pseudo-drones (with their giveaway sight beams), and Soong, fighting for a future of which he is the founder. Our heroes split up to take care of these various moving parts with variable results. Picard's story continues and finishes the repressed memory subplot, which fuels his idea to go hide in the maze under the house. He and Tallinn (who has supplied the crew with Romulan-looking disruptor weapons - one wonders why a single agent had this entire arsenal and whether Gary Seven was similarly armed) take a lot of breaks from trying to reach the ship before it's too late via the chateau's tunnels, to indulge in therapy sessions, it seems. I still contend that this could all have been resolved within a single episode without it changing the plot. It's not like Yvette's suicide is a big surprised based on what we already know, and the only real revelation is that while she was locked away by Picard's father for her own (and the boy's) protection, Jean-Luc ill-advisedly freed her so she could self harm. The immense guilt sent him running from the vineyard and to the cosmos, and if his father was an unsympathetic figure in his life, it might stem from his resentment that the boy had something to do with her death. Placed in the penultimate episode, the story really only serves to kill its momentum, and in-story, allows Soong to catch up to them in the solarium. It also provides the episode's eye-rolling moment, with Picard explaining that he used to imagine his mother as an old woman, a way to cover her appearance in a hallucination back in Where No One Has Gone Before. More square pegs being rammed into round holes, I see.
They are only saved by Rios, in fact, who had been wounded early on, and who Picard had sent away with Teresa and her son, permanently, he thought. The wound didn't seem that severe and indeed, was easily healed with Tallinn's equipment, so Picard choosing to "save" a Starfleet Captain in exchange for one less pair of hands to fight the FREAKIN' BORG QUEEN is one of the season's dumbest decisions. Keep Rios around and you can still have him crash through the window at the last minute, you just wouldn't have Teresa's appeal for him to stay in our century. Oh boy.
Seven and Raffi are the only ones who get aboard the ship, but they have unexpected help from Agnes herself. Lurking in the Queen's head means she's really lurking in the makeshift Collective, so she can lock the ship out and activate an Elnor hologram based on the kid's short, short time aboard the Confederation version of the vessel. It's cool to see him in action with a sword in his hand, but I have to quibble with the mobile emitter he's wearing. La Sirena, at least in our universe, is enabled with holographic projectors all over. The mobile emitter, we have to remember, was from a future where Starfleet is managing time travel, and even if our La Sirena could have one replicated from the Doctor's after Voyager's return, is it reasonable that the fascist history has all those stories intact? It's also pretty incredible that Elnor, who was never a member of this ship's crew can be resurrected in such detail from what little time he was aboard. The suggestion is that the ship is telepathic and records people's minds as a matter of course. Perhaps throw us a line of dialog about genius Jurati programming him from inside the network instead. Raffi nevertheless uses him to expiate her guilt, and it's also interesting to hear that Seven was rejected by Starfleet and that Janeway threatened to resign over it (but didn't, classic Janeway). The heroes get rid of the drones, brutally materializing them inside a wall, but the Queen is tougher. And the object of the season's first climax (Soong and Q remain in the wind).
Earlier, we'd had Raffi and Seven thinking they wouldn't survive this mission. It's a fake-out, but you start to believe it when the Queen mortally stabs Seven with her tentacles. This allows Jurati to take back some control - her preferred hormone is sadness - and give a blazingly good speech about what the Borg COULD be under their combined control. The Queen slowly comes around to Agnes' idea that instead of forcibly assimilating people, they only do so with those who give their consent to join the Collective - the lonely, the desperate, the dying - people who then have a stake in the community. She references Seven as the first of a "Universe of Sevens" - saving Seven's life at the cost of giving her her implants back (not much of a sacrifice as we expect everyone to be redirected to their original bodies at season's end), but Jurati is herself the first, the lonely soul who accepts to remain joined to the Queen and be the first building block of a new Collective. Taking La Sirena in exchange, the suggestion is that they will not join the 21st-Century Collective in the Delta Quadrant, but stay out of history's way and forge their own way (more on this next episode).
I'm less enamored by her parting message, which is more of her "prophetic" hogwash. The idea that to resolve the situation, one Renée must live and another must die could have been a Schrodinger's timeline that would allow both histories to survive (ensuring her existence), but nah, it's gonna definitely be a "I can see the future but can only talk about it cryptically" thing. Similarly, Picard then saying he refuses to "accept an outcome that has not yet occurred" is nonsense, as those are two opposite outcomes she's proposing. The season's scripts are intent on making me frown.
LESSON: There's a difference between fighting for your future, and fighting for THE future.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: There's a lot of nonsense on show, unfortunately, but making friends with one's greatest enemy is prime Star Trek.
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