I was expecting the person taking over the bridge to be a possessed/controlled Seven since the opening scene didn’t show their identity but they were clearly Borg.

I hope the stuff with the Borg at the start actually matter to the plot of the show and aren't just the studio waving shiny starships at us to appease the nerds.

I was ready for this to be Q showing Picard some alternate universe or timeline, or the mirror universe or whatever they're doing, but after that intro... I'm going to be spending the rest of the season waiting for them to go to the proverbial fireworks factory.

They took care to have someone point out that the Queen was only shooting to stun - I have a feeling there are other details going on in that sequence and a hope that the whole point of this little adventure is to help nudge Picard away from self-destructing the Stargazer and, dare I hope, forming a lasting, rehabilitating alliance with the Borg.

I for one appreciated how they dealt with immortal/long lived characters ageing as us weedy ‘oomies do.

Sure it’s hokey for Guinan (we age slower unless we don’t want to). But at least they covered it.

Picard has a female love interest
There's more Starfleet
Starfleet are using visually different ships

The scenes of Picard being about his business seem somewhat disjointed.

It could be ropey editing. But, I do wonder if we’re perhaps seeing different possibilities, to be revealed later?

I think some of Picard's business at the start isn't possible futures, but rather just moving the story forward so that they could end the first Episode with more having happened. One weakness of the first series was that it took a good few episodes to actually get going. So this new season does feel a little "fast" in the editing. Esp since a lot of the core characters from the first season have traded places and moved around a fair bit from where we last saw them. But as I see it we don't need a long introduction to them and most of the role changes are them settling back into roles they had before the first season (eg being a captain again, being an admiral again etc...).


The Queen is very interesting, she's certainly much more cybernetic and seems to much better befit the epitome of a race aiming to become machines than earlier displays of her where she was at least upper body organic on the outside.

They've certainly setup the whole beginning with a LOT of questions.


I think so far the only strange part is that no one recognised the Borg signature of the temporal rift; and the somewhat "Oh suddenly there's a fleet" kind of angle. Suggesting that the Borg Ship just sat there doing nothing whilst a fleet had time to warp in - which takes time; although considering that it was only 48 hours and Picard travelled the distance in days it seems like they are very near the core worlds so chances are it wouldn't take "too" long for the Federation to at least get some ships in range.



Otherwise very enjoyable; leaving us with a fast setup but a lot of characters set and ready to go and a lot of questions unanswered which is just what you want from the opening play. Q appearing was very well handled considering its a scene they had to cover in a few lines before the end of the episode.




Also I think people who didn't like season 1 as much might like this a bit more. Picard is back in Starfleet, this isn't the story on the outside looking in. Of course he's hardly in it before he's seemingly out of it and now in a different time-line. However, as I've said before, the joy of a Q based storyline with time travel and alternate timelines is that its often (or at least historically) less of a "everything changes and stays changed" and more of a puzzle of "try to get home".

Also on the subject of the Borg seeking peace lets consider that with the events of First Contact and the end of Voyager the Borg have been hit with several massive blows from the Federation. Granted the Voyager one was a bit of a long stretch, but all in all we are seeing perhaps that the Borg have been losing for some time. Heck after Voyager's adventures it might be that even a short term heavy impact to the Borg left them vulnerable and other powers in the Delta Quadrant rose up and suddenly the Borg went from dominant to more fringe.

At the same time for a race that seeks to become machine they've been surprisingly poor at achieving it in its most pure form. Meanwhile the Federation hasn't just done it, they've made machines who are alive, not just organics becoming machine but actual pure machine life. And now those machines are making more machines - in theory the Federation might be one of their enemies, but they have also achieved that which the Borg, at its very core, was created to achieve. Peace might well be the Borg's way of trying to gain that from the Federation.



That or the Queens bid for "power" is because there's something worse behind that mega-ship. That its not an invasion ship but an escape ship. We've seen races like Species 8472 rise up against the Borg and threaten them. Perhaps they found a way back to this universe.

The Borg have always worshipped the machine*, they are like the Ad Mech of the Startrek Universe. However when the Queen had Data she knew that she couldn't just "hack" him or corrupt/infest him to her cause. So she gave him what he wanted, flesh. Preying on his emotion chip (which she reactivated) and feelings to try and convince Data to join her and abandon Starfleet. Considering that Data wasn't just a wealth of knowledge on the perfect machine body, but also able to take control over the Enterprise as he knew most of the security codes and such. If she got him she got the ship, if she got the ship she won the war against humanity in the past.

As for adaptation the Borg typically assimilate other things into their own. Indeed as the queen proved within her first few moments of appearing, she was already securing those ships for her own use. It's their first line of thought - to infest others not be infested. What's strange is that they'd request Picard to appear and their whole approach is very non-typical for the Borg. They also rarely show concern for preserving other life; other life is either hostile and to be destroyed or non-hostile and to be infested.


Your idea that the queen is a mask is a good one. Time Travel/reality hopping is something we know will happen and the Queen was very well hidden. It could be she's a character from the future come to the past; or one from an alternate reality again fleeing an enemy. Alternate reality presents an interesting situation as she could be the alter-ego of an existing character.



*That said I've often wondered if the Borg are "broken" in some fundamental way as they are rarely shown as having very advanced bodies. Heck their early ones were very slow and the cybernetics very primitive compared to, say, Data and other mechs they encounter. Plus adapting others into their whole isn't "necessary" for them to gain new technology all the time and such. So I've often wondered if they've this lofty goal to become the perfect machine, but somewhere along the line something got correupted/confused within the collective and they end up like an ant-hive. Even though they've a "Queen" they've no way to move out of what they are locked into. A fixed way of flawed design and thinking.

No one else has mentioned it, so just to make sure, you caught the queen quoted a line from Picard’s mother to him, right?

Very true. That does reinforce the idea that who the queen is could potentially be someone close to him. Then again, in theory, the Borg should know everything about Picard as well as what strings to pull on him. He was once part of the collective.

Actually that whole line of thinking brings about the very start where "something" happens in his home that sets him apart from people and makes him isolate himself and, if not reject, at least not openly commit to relationships. So there's that whole arc waiting for development.