"Engage!" Neat new "old" uniforms. "The End is the Beginning"

Episode 3 marks the end of the First Act for the season. Or put another way, the series is finally gonna get get going... next week! These first three episodes truly constitute the full Pilot, the opening setup and all the introductions. If it were early Nineties TNG, this would've all been done in the first ten minutes of a single episode. Nowadays, it's not prestige television if it isn't stretched out and character moments are all we have yet to fill the void. 

​Picard puts his team together. We've got Raffi, the begrudging old pal he shouldn't have waited fourteen years until he had favor to reconnect with. She's bitter since hitting bottom vaping orchids and she's definitely not joining the team, until she does. There's Agnes, the world's foremost robot-nerd who' can't pass an opportunity to hunt down more robots. And now there's Captain Rios, who seems depressed and self-destructive after the loss of his last Captain, and spends all day with differently accented holograms of himself. Together, they're off to have an adventure!

Meanwhile, there's Data-daughter Soji. Yes, I'm using her name, finally, since she's finally starting to do... something. Remember she's the synth-twin that's still alive, but she continues to have a completely incomprehensible subplot with the Borg. It seemed cool and mysterious last episode. This time it's just vague. Her Romulan spy boyfriend is in love with her. Sure. She talks mythological nonsense to a mentally-ill former-Borg fortune teller. Okay. And her new mentor-figure is Hugh, a holdover from The Next Generation. Alright. He's the original ex-Borg, you obviously recall. He was the first one to break from the collective and reclaim his identity and then immediately get confused about it (welcome to the party). Here, he doesn't do a whole lot. His arrival is a little underwhelming when it should've been more dramatic. It's so vanilla, in fact, I'm giving up on all my fan theories of any clever plot twists about Soji being his daughter instead of Data's. This show clearly isn't playing at that level. Still, it's nice to see the tie-in. Conclusion: Another slow episode of setup. Beautiful touches evoke memories of TNG, like the teleporter effect when Picard finally boards a space ship or the classic theme music sneaking in at the final moments. "Engage!" he says. Remember how he used to say that? And he points in the direction he wants them to go and they go there? Yeah, good times. But the show suffers from saga-storytelling syndrome: It's just dinking around, meandering its way along the plot, instead of moving in big bold strides. It's decompressed, and it's all well and good in a Coen Brothers film, but I wouldn't mind they have fewer scenes talking about the story and about the characters and more scenes where they actually do stuff. I thought maybe the industry learned something from the Netflix Marvel decompression disaster, but nope. This week, they get together, they get on a ship and they go. That's it. Next week, maybe they'll arrive. Until then, at least the theme song is growing on me.  Last Episode
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