I guess the Locutus thing isn't impossible. If Jack's deal with Sidney wasn't super-networking, it's hard to say what it was! But Vadic had that one line to Crusher that "he wasn't for you either." That says to me that there was a reason Jack was important even before Picard's human body was killed, and that whether it was involved with this changeling business or not, there was some kind of secret keikaku involved all the way back at Jack's conception. She could have meant something else, but that was the implication I took.
There have been enough Borg references now that I should be convinced this is definitely a Borg thing and the person Vadic is under the heel of is the Borg Queen. The "real Borg", as Shaw put it. Certainly it seems unlikely that this person who talks to her through her hand and can remotely torture her Unicron-to-Galvatron style are themselves just a normal Founder. Even though I can easily imagine the Founders deciding that Vadic's "kind" is not as "special or complex" as she thinks, and talking about humans as "beholden to a singular flesh" works equally well for the Founders as it does for the Borg. (Or Lore for that matter, but his current situation means that he can't be in control of much of anything, and really just wants control of the brain he's cohabitating.) It sure doesn't work for many other possibilities. But the reference to "your own resistance" being "meaningless" sure does tip the scales away from Founders and toward the Borg.
I thought that "Tick-tock goes the ancient clock" and "shorter lifespans" were related somehow, that perhaps what Vadic's hand puppet was offering was a cure, but Vadic may have only meant the time running down until the the big Frontier Day fleet show and the deadline for the plan involving Jack.
God, Jack keeps coming so close to telling Picard, Sidney, or Crusher what's actually going on in his head. It could be frustrating but the way he avoids it in the ready room chat with Picard, taking a step into it but then shying away from admitting it and instead rationalizing why they should just give him up instead, feels so natural and relatable.
Gotta be said, the reveal that nasty parts of Starfleet were doing these awful things to captive changelings, possibly even after the war ended, is making Vadic's point of view not very unsympathetic. It's possible that Vadic's people infiltrated Daystrom first and so have been making a habit of getting all the juiciest stuff sent there, explaining things like the portal gun, so maybe it wasn't quite the little shop of horrors it is in the present until after that point, but there's a certain amount of proportionate response justified here. It wouldn't be sad to see Daystrom deorbited at this point, possibly in relation to solar orbit and preferably while containing anyone who ever had oversight there. Apart from that, Vadic is really moving up the list of best Star Trek villains for me.
Nice to see that these changelings with Vadic's new technique still have the ability to become inanimate objects, even if we only get to see it in the form of the T-1000 floor trick with the turbolift (and even if it was paced a little weird and made Seven look unusually incautious for getting jumped like that.)
The Founders did not get the cure by a Changeling stealing it. Julian Bashir stole it and he gave it to Odo and Odo gave it to Mom and the Great Link. I wonder if Vadic has ever been back tot he Great Link since the Dominion War. Her own group may have operated independently that whole time and had to separately steal the cure to cure themselves.
Yeah, I guess propaganda and deliberately uncharitable interpretation only goes so far when you can experience the memory for yourself. It sounds like it's almost what she said but not close enough for someone who could effectively see it firsthand. One possibility is that while Vadic stressed that only changelings who wanted to take on her new distinctiveness and its side effects willingly did so, it was still considered too dangerous to allow her back into the Great Link, so she's experiencing isolation from her own people on top of the rest as well. Certainly she has the means to get back if she had wanted to instead of spending that time infiltrating Starfleet.