Love. Love is the most enigmatic of all emotions. There’s endless gradations of love. There’s endless manifestations of love. There’s endless rationalizations of love.

Every writer in the history of mankind has scribbled about love, every singer in the history of music has crooned about love, every teenager in the history of puberty has felt the discovery of love.

Of all human emotions, love is the most universal and the least understood. I’ve been in love. I’m currently in love. Do I understand it? I didn’t then, I don’t now, and I probably never will. But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? If you could wake up tomorrow knowing precisely what love is and have it distilled into a formula that you could quantify, would you? Or would that destroy the beauty of it all? The mystery of love is the appeal. The unknowable nature of love is what makes it love. Listen to me, I sound like a stoned teenager…

Animals, to their credit, have a pretty good grapple on the topic: Love is a means to an end. Are cats just manipulating us to get food? Of course. Are dogs manipulating us to go on a walk? You betcha. But that doesn’t make their love any less sincere. They sincerely want to make you feel things. They sincerely want you to engage with them. They sincerely want to make you happy.

Animals know you’re simple and will react the way they want. Does that make this an artificial relationship? Does that make this a predatory relationship? Does that make this… an abusive relationship? Or are we content knowing that their actions are cynically utilitarian and transactional, so long as that transaction results in our happiness?

The Good

• Old Man La Forge fell into the same conservative rut as Old Man Riker. This is good. Sometimes heroes don’t age well. (cf Luke Skywalker)
• The symbolism of Geordi’s daughters splitting his career path is fun. Because remember — although seemingly no one in the show actually remembers this — Geordi was a pilot the first part of his career. Titan’s Turn!
• The TOS Constitution is back! We can now sleep soundly knowing the oversized and ugly nuConstitution proves STD and SNW are an alt-timeline.

The Bad

• Everyone called the whole “these are Changelings who didn’t get the cure during the Dominion War” thing. Also apparently all of them are Changelings, which is dumb.
• The whole fleet is networked? I mean, is nuTrek straight-up plagiarizing from nuBSG now? Poetic, I suppose.
• They still have no sense of how time works. Nope, there’s no way Picard will be back in an hour, sorry Will. Get into that cell.

The Ugly

• Everything related to Data and synths. Stop it, Star Trek. That’s a bad Star Trek.
• Kirk and Picard’s bodies. Stop it, Star Trek. That’s a bad Star Trek.
• By far the most ugly part of the episode, however, has been the fan reactions on social media. Too many people are embarrassing themselves, plunging to their knees to bow and worship at the altar of a mediocre TNG fanfic written and produced by assholes. Oh, Terry Matalas is from New Jersey? You’d think then he’d have a thicker skin, considering he’s spent months picking fights with normal people on twitter. But, here we are. The cat wanted food.

NCC-1975 is a Constellation Class registry number, moron.