WHY WE LIKE IT: Ro Laren returns and it's her!
WHY WE DON'T: Well, there goes all the Ro extracanon.
REVIEW: It's Conspiracy or Homefront writ large. The changelings have infiltrated Starfleet at the highest levels, the changelings have evolved to pass a blood test and retain their shape even after death, and no one can trust anyone. We particularly don't know if we can trust Ro Laren, who hasn't been seen in-canon since she turned Maquis at the end of TNG, but now remarkably sports commander pips and is part of Starfleet Intelligence. A Ro Laren who doesn't wear her earring, who uses a shuttle rather than a transporter (is this how changelings are getting aboard ships without being detected?) and who offers a blood test seconds after we see Beverly prove it's pointless. It really is her, too secret an operative for Riker and Picard to know her story, and because she doesn't know if she can trust THEM, is acting all suspicious-like. Her refusing to use the transporter because of unreported "issues" is a clue that will be clarified later. It's all a rather well-engineered red herring to make US paranoid as much as the characters.
How they prove their identities to one another lies in how long Picard can hold a grudge - sheesh! - but the scene on remonstrations and eventual understanding between them - in the holographic bar, cuz that thing just won't go away - is played like an estranged father and daughter hashing things out. This is perfectly in line with the themes exposed by Jack. She is a surrogate daughter he fostered and mentored, and who he never forgave the sin of thinking unlike her father. Duty vs morality, as she describes it, is a conflict that's more believable than whatever they drummed up between Picard and Riker a couple episodes earlier, and though letting it fester like that doesn't make Picard look good, it feels true to life. This is a taste of what it might have been like between him and Jack had he known him, and indeed, it's not unlike his own relationship to his father, though he seems blind to it. The turning point is a strong one: She asks him to trust his betrayer, and seeing the situation is bigger than either of them, he does. She leaves him with a way to connect the dots, and more importantly, connect to the Worf-Raffi story (she was Worf's handler all along), but is rumbled by the changelings aboard the Intrepid. Her sacrifice to buy the fugitive Titan some time was pretty touching, and so one of my favorite TNG characters leaves us to be with the Prophets.
Meanwhile, Jack's hallucinations intensify, and they're interesting in the context of what we know will happen in the last episodes of the season. Where the vines appear, on whom, whose voice he hears (his mother's)... He also showcases some of his incredible fighting prowess, like a man possessed, not just in his dreams, but in real life. But if we were led to think he was a changeling plant, why is he killing changelings? There was more to this mystery, a lot more. Speaking of which, the "detectives" Worf and Raffi, are once again a highlight. They rumble an associate of Sneed's, a Vulcan gangster (interesting) who forces them to fight one another at gunpoint. Worf should win this easily given his almost zen fighting earlier in the episode, but she wins and we may have thought this very operatic death was real. Ro AND Worf?! A bit of a let down in his case given the stakes of the fight (just another piece of information), so we punch the air when Worf returns from the dead and slays all the bad guys. These two are super cool together.
LESSON: The natural evolution of pride is downfall. (Is it me or does he essentially paraphrase Ving Rhames' speech in Pulp Fiction?)
REWATCHABILITY - High: A great guest star brings everything into focus.
Comments
This evolution is much more drastic and useful to them. But I'll have more to say about it in the next review.