mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

It's been a busy week and I got behind on this, so let's catch up before tomorrow.

The Impossible Box:

I think this was one of the best episodes so far. It was very well-structured and suspenseful, and it advanced both the immediate plot of this series and Jean-Luc's larger character arc. The episode put Hugh to very good use, giving his story some closure as well as bringing resolution to the story of Jean-Luc's assimilation. (Of course, if anyone in the Star Trek universe ever got proper trauma therapy, this would have happened deacedes ago, but hey, we got there eventually.) I also loved that Hugh totally knew Narek was on the Artifact the whole time -- like he was going to miss a sexy Romulan spy lurking around for weeks? :D

Soji finally gets something to do other than sex it up with Narek! I had been underwhelmed by Isa Briones' acting up until this episode; I wasn't sure if she had purposefully been playing it a little flat to suggest that her characters are androids, or what. I liked her work better here. I always appreciate it when characters react to something that would make a normal person freak the fuck out by actually freaking the fuck out. I think there is a tendency in fiction for characters to significantly underreact to things like finding out there are aliens, or magic is real, or you're a three-year-old android. I love it when it's not so easy to accept. So this episode really hit that narrative kink for me and I thought it was handled well.

I also was totally into the Romulan therapy scene -- Narek having to walk the tightrope of getting to the truth without activating her and probably getting himself killed, while also knowing success meant killing her himself. I thought the complexity and tension of that was conveyed extremely well. sdk and I had talked about how it would be kind of predictable if Narek couldn't bring himself to kill Soji because he was in love with her, so I was glad to see they took it in a slightly different direction -- he does have feelings for her, but in his worldview he feels like he's just fooling himself. When he says she was never real, he's not being cruel to her, he's expressing bitterness at what he sees as his own stupidity in falling for a machine.

The only thing I didn't get about this episode... Rios/Jurati? Why? In light of the next episode, maybe this was supposed to suggest that she's continuing to break down emotionally and hardly even knows what she's doing anymore, but it seemed totally out of left field to me.


Nepenthe:

We've now split the party into three groups that have completely different things going on and different emotional tones, and it began to feel structurally disjointed, bouncing from FAMILY LOVE to FIGHT SCENES to MENTAL BREAKDOWNS and around and around. So this episode didn't gel as well as the last one, to me. Also, was it just me or was this one longer than the others?

FAMILY LOVE - Omg. If this is fan service, then serve me up. If Picard's poly triad with the Romulan housekeepers doesn't work out, he's got this one to fall back on! I love that they were able to convey that Deanna sensed Jean-Luc is dying without anyone saying the words, and how she defended Soji and immediately had her number even though she couldn't sense her emotions. This is how you use this character!! We can only wish she'd been put to such good use on TNG. The relationship between Riker and Jean-Luc was sooooo good, a perfectly natural continuation of what went before. Of course their dynamic has shifted since there's no longer a power imbalance between them, and that felt very authentic and satisfying. (Do I want to see them cuddling on a porch swing? YES I DO.) I also think it makes sense to have this interlude at this point in the series, where Jean-Luc has made some progress but has now been knocked down again and needs to gather himself and return to people he can draw strength from.

I liked Kestra (aw, she's named after Deanna's sister T_T) but I'm not sure about the choice for them to have lost an older child, at least the way it was framed here. I don't know if it's a good idea to do something really awful to longstanding beloved characters who the audience is enormously invested in, just to make a newer character feel better about herself for being an android. It seemed like they were reaching, and Soji's character could have been developed in a better way. Because the bigger issue, really, is that finding out androids can be useful doesn't address Soji's actual problem. What does it matter if she's useful to humans? She's not afraid of being useless, she's afraid of not being REAL. Her struggle is existential, and what Deanna told her didn't truly address that.

If I'd been the writer, I probably would have instead tried to tie it into the kids' constructed world, and how just because things are created by people doesn't mean they are fake. Their constructed language is a real language -- you can use it to communicate. Only its origin is artificial. So that's the direction I would have gone.

FIGHT SCENES - Hugh with Elnor, this could be interesting... aaaaand he's gone. I can't say I was surprised they killed off Hugh since they don't seem to mind killing people on this show, but it is kind of rough for him to die seemingly for the sole purpose of getting Seven back in and making her the one person who can save the day. (I'm already preparing my Hugh Lives!AU.) I questioned why Narissa would be concerned about fighting Elnor honorably instead of just shooting him; walgesang suggested that since he seems to be able to dodge disruptor fire (Neo, is that you?) maybe Narissa thought her chances were better in hand-to-hand combat.

MENTAL BREAKDOWNS - Wait... Oh is actually a Vulcan, and not a Romulan in disguise?! That's kind of huge. We thought she was a Romulan sleeper agent who'd been infiltrating Starfleet for decades, but if she's a Vulcan maybe she started working with the Romulans much more recently, convinced that their cause was logical because of the stuff she showed Jurati. Which I guess we still don't know exactly what it is, except that it's Very Bad. And nauseating.

So the tracker Oh gave Jurati is how Narek is tailing them. She feels guilty and doesn't want anyone else to die (besides Soji). walgesang thought it was weird that Rios suspected Raffi since they're such good friends, but I thought he was just saying that to Jurati to gauge her reaction and find out if she knew something. I also wondered if Jurati was trying to kill herself at the end, but walgesang thought the chemical she synthesized might deactivate the tracker.



Okay, I think I've typed enough for now! I guess soon we'll find out what exactly the Romulans are so afraid of.