This all adds some much-needed texture to the Evil with a capital "E" Narissa, however, who we now see was deeply affected by that experience and at least has reason to be doing what she's doing. She, and Oh, really do believe that androids will lead to the end of everything -- "hell," as Agnes describes it.
Meanwhile, Seven of Nine returns to save Elnor on the Artifact, who got in a bit over his head. It's a great moment when she arrives and he jumps up to hug her. He's still in many ways that little kid who Picard used to read The Three Musketeers to.
It's also interesting, and gratifying, that Seven's first question to Elnor is, "Where's Hugh?" But unfortunately, we get no follow-up on that. So Seven knew Hugh? Were they close? Did they used to work together? After Hugh was killed last week, it would've been particularly nice to hear that he had a connection of some kind to Seven, or to see her mourn him.But Seven is busy anyway, trying to take over the cube by jacking into the queenscell -- the Borg Queen's tubes even come down from the ceiling to connect to her, and she gets all "We are Borg" about it! But this is a last-ditch maneuver as Seven knows that creating a mini-Collective this way, which will be controlled by her, is dangerous and possibly something neither she nor the Borg can come back from. What if she doesn't want to disconnect after they beat Narissa and the Romulans?
Well, as it turns out, that's apparently a non-issue, because she disconnects just fine. Yes, this is because Narissa is successful in jettisoning most of the poor Borg (poor Borg? Yep, I said it) into space, leaving Seven with nobody to share a Collective with. But dramatically it becomes a whole bunch of nothing. Why set up this potential inner struggle for Seven only to completely deflate it?
Over on La Sirena, the Picard Squad are reunited -- aside from Elnor -- and Rios is freaked out because Soji looks just like someone from his troubled past. In what surely is a galactic-sized coincidence, it turns out that while on the USS ibn Majid, he and his captain had encountered... wait for it... a pair of androids! And one was another Soji/Dahj model (so they're not just twins?). Ordered by Starfleet (and more specifically, Commodore Oh) to kill the androids, Rios' captain couldn't handle the guilt of what he'd done and he committed suicide.
It's an interesting backstory but also feels a tad farfetched. Would a Starfleet captain really kill in cold blood like that? And again, what a coincidence that all these years later Rios was hired to track down another copy of that same android model. (Santiago Cabrera plays the lingering anguish of the incident well though.)In order to get this information, Raffi (who seems totally fine not drinking now, somehow) gets to interrogating the various Emergency Holograms onboard. This is all fun stuff, but it also seems a bit out of place, like it's taking up precious time that we could be spending with Seven and Elnor, or maybe even with Jean-Luc, who has very little to do in this episode, really.
As for Agnes, we now know that, yes, she was trying to get rid of the tracker insider her when she gave herself that shot last week, though whether it worked or not is unclear by episode's end. Alison Pill is pretty great here, torn between her guilt over killing Maddox, her knowledge of what is to come if the androids inherit the Earth (figure of speech, even in space), and her fascination with Soji. Oh yeah, Soji -- she finally takes charge of her own destiny in this episode. As Picard says, "Let's try doing it her way." I think I like her better like this.
Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:tt
"Broken Pieces" is appropriately titled, as it feels like a lot of dangling bits and pieces of this season were thrown together here in an attempt to streamline things as we head into the final two episodes of the year. And oddly, amid it all, Patrick Stewart doesn't actually seem to be all that important to the proceedings. There's still plenty of interest here, but Picard's being sidelined, combined with Seven's story this week petering out, makes for a bit of an off-week for Picard.
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