Star Trek Picard: Ranking All 10 Episodes From Season 1

"Broken Pieces" is less a complete episode than it is cleanup duty for the preceding eight episodes.

To its credit, "Broken Pieces" sits the characters down at a table and lays everything out for the audience to understand. Raffi, Rios, Agnes, even Soji spill their guts to each other and to Picard and the grand mystery of the synth ban, the Zhat Vash, and the Admonition more or less falls into place. There's still a major twist to come in "Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 1", but "Broken Pieces" at least makes a concerted effort to dispense with the mystery plot and move those broken pieces into alignment before the endgame.

The problem with "Broken Pieces" is that all the major revelations are either things characters have already been saying for weeks, or they're things the audience was already able to deduce. It's frustrating that Picard takes a whopping eight episodes to come around to believing Raffi's Mars attack conspiracy theory when he was asking everyone around him to believe his equally absurd story about Soji and her relationship with Data. It's also frustrating that Rios' occasionally teased demons turn out to be less about Rios himself than about linking him to the overarching plot line. Did every single character aboard the La Sirena have to be personally involved in the synth conspiracy?

This is in service of personalizing the story to give the characters stakes in massive galactic affairs, but making Rios, Raffi, and Agnes all coincidentally linked to the synth story is a stretch and robs them of being real people rather than just plot points.

"Broken Pieces" also suffers from following on the heels of two extremely strong episodes, "The Impossible Box" and "Nepenthe" – the latter episode taking the exact opposite approach and telling a deeply personal story that has stakes because it is so personal.