First things first, the show is still good. That is, of course, the most important notion to remember. Because by this point in Picard Seasons 1 and 2, these podcasters had checked out for the most part.
Yes, you might remember that we’d never given up hope that the show might turn itself around, but we knew if the depths of our hearts and stomachs it was a failure. So far, this is not the case for Strange New Worlds. It’s blowing our expectations out of the water!
Though, there are a few weird anomalies in this episode centred around Una, the Number One.
There is a moment early in the episode where Una seems to be infected by the mysterious sickness. She glows for a moment, but she doesn’t report or even acknowledge her condition to herself or anyone. It’s less a mystery of what’s happening in the plot and more plain confusing. It’s almost as if the audience is missing information. It would have been fine either way if she was intentionally keeping her infection a secret, or was somehow an amnesiac of those events. Neither was clear.
Of course, we later discover she’s an Illyrian in a big, revelatory way which only compounds our confusion. Then she heroically rescues the chief engineer of Enterprise (whose name these podcasters can never remember) in proper Avengers fashion, complete with slow-motion strutting down a hallway.
Once again, there’s this feeling the audience is missing information to completely explain why this has been crafted as such a big moment. We can only suspect that this episode was meant to air much later in the season and its release was accelerated for an unknown reason. It’s likely these questions and concerns will bubble to the surface as more episodes air.
We’re hoping vehemently this isn’t the consequence of poor writing or network bureaucracy, that it was an imperfect solution to an unavoidable post-production problem. All shows have them.
