Absolute Candor

With Jonathan Frakes in the director's chair. The opening flashback scenes certainly had a feel of The Next Generation television series.

Before the events in Mars. Picard had saved some Romulans and took them to the planet Vashti. He was feted as a hero and he even acted as a father figure to a small Romulan boy called Elnor.

Now he returns to the planet 14 years later with failure in his eyes. Picard needs the help of the order of nuns who are feted as fighters. They give him the adult Elnor but they all look on him as a man with empty promises who lets them all down.

Patrick Stewart had no desire to reprise Picard for more The Next Generation adventures. The slow burn storytelling is plain to see here. However it is to the detriment in pace. So many times it feels stilted.

The Borg scenes is evident of this. It just repeats events from previous episodes. Narek has a weird relationship with his sister. He is working on Soji to trust him despite his sister telling him to hurry up.

Is anything ever going to happen in this series?

Did they think to have a self contained story in every episode? Or are they planning on having some grand story that we don't find out about until episode 10...or ever.

Yawn. I almost fell asleep.

Good directing on this episode, but the music competing with the actors has to stop. If the writers can't come up with a good enough story, don't try to hide it behind grandiose music...like we're experiencing something great. If they played lullabies it would be more appropriate.

Snore.

Seriously, 900 million? For the home planet of Romulan Star Empire? At least DS9 had a sensible order of population for Cardassia: 800 million died in the final battle alone, infer total population however you like.

"There are over three billion stars in our galaxy alone." Again, my god, is off by a factor of 100. There are 100 - 400 billion stars in our galaxy. Did the Q civil war cause 99% of the stars to go supernova? At least try Googling it if you want to put easily verifiable facts into your script!

Let alone the Romulan Star Empire rivals the Federation on her own! Why couldn't they themselves conduct the evacuation? There are so much logical inconsistencies with the production that would drive a Vulcan into a Romulan!

Just so you know, "Science Fiction" has the word "Science" in it. I missed the good old days where the technobabbles are actual engineering/physics terminologies that motive young viewers to learn about the science behind, instead of "we can teleport anywhere in the universe using mushrooms because reasons" nowadays. #PicardFacepalm

This finally feels like Star Trek. After the terribly written technobabble of episode 2, and the definitely better episode 3, this could be hitting it's stride? Picard with some intense dialog. Consequences for his precious actions! Strange alien customs followed to consistent logical extremes. Space ships! Not cancelling CBS yet.

The existential pain of living with the consciousness that new Trek is not what you hoped it would be.

Four episodes in and the characters seem to be beaming in from other franchises. Possibly trying to create a dysfunctional Star Trek Firefly crossover feel...?

Do we really need to have a Romulan Jar Jar Binks sliding across the floor in his socks? Or an attack of the drunk hologram clones, with subtitles in the middle of the battle sequence?

Forced "clever" dialogue, not even technobabble, to explain obscure story elements, or provide psuedo character development. There's no warmth.

JL, really? not buying it. the "F" word, for no reason? moody emo teenager-esq captain? too many hollow-grams? even the ship design is lacking character. boldly going in random directions...

At least we have Patrick Stewart.