It's weird, I don't really have any optimism for it but I'm enjoying it and I'm going to keep watching. There are enough small things I like, whether it's Patton Oswalt Cat or the fleet shot or Seven being badass, that I feel like I'm probably going to enjoy the experience even though I fully expect the overall story to be a letdown.
But they DRM’d the body to be just as janky as his old human one.
They even spent time *explicitly* exposition dumping that.
The one thing they technically didn't do this time was explicitly say that those limitations extend to the synthetic body Picard now has in the alternate timeline. Logically it shouldn't, because the circumstances Q exposits for how Picard got that body in this timeline were different. I feel like we know that it nevertheless
does apply, because the show is just
not going to throw CGI Picard having a Yoda fight at us and none of this alternate timeline stuff is going to matter after the next episode, but that one link hasn't technically been established explicitly.
But it's splitting hairs - I think 47 is assuming that Stewart's age and his body's age DRM are a package deal, and that it would have made sense to turn a character into a synth for action scene reasons but only if that character was then going to go on and do action scenes.
I'm still at a loss to explain what the first season intended to accomplish by making Picard a synth myself. I think the one thing the writers intended that worked for me on some level was the idea that Picard was part of Data's family and Soji's minority group now. Season 1 is full of minority groups Picard represents at a distance, because he's not treated as an XB because they got him out quick enough to remove the implants, he's obviously not a Romulan, and until the end, he's not a synth. (Synths aren't banned in the Federation anymore, but surely there's still some fear and discrimination we'll see when they get back to the Federation in the second season, right? Right? Oh, never mind.)
But bringing him back as a synth was also just a naked plot mechanic for a death fakeout, which I just despise, and I think there was potential for emotional payoff there in relation to Soji and in relation to his brain condition, but I also think that whatever the writers intended to accomplish with those aspects got utterly scrambled in the final result to the point that the original intentions are indecipherable.
For right now it really seems like something the writers are keeping in their back pocket for a future situation in which someone will be inclined to react, positively or negatively, to Picard on the basis that he is technically a synth.