Or are they cylons?
Its happened before it will happen again.
Maybe Star Trek is the sequel to Battlestar Galactica.
Or Mass Effect, one of the two.
Comments below, and I put them in spoilers because to be honest after a few episodes of being pretty happy with the show, I'm pretty critical of this episode, so if you want to read it read it, its up to you.
Spoiler!
To be honest, after enjoying the last few episodes, I thought the writing on this and the overall plot development here was awful.
From the whole it was a couple of woman that are running everything and suddenly they fell into the Star Wars trap that everything just has to be connected right down to the Rio's and his Captain story where he's connected to the synthetics let alone these synthetics.
The whole Agnes' psychic wall just coming down, and then her apologizing for her murder and everything else and suddenly its all ok.
The 7 of 9 thing where she spends time telling Elron or Elnor about being in the collective is the worst nightmare ever and reactivating the collective is a bad idea, and then doing it, having the whole Elnor saying are you going to assimilate me, followed by a nah and then no ill effects on 7 of 9.
Oh and the Aunt, it was a mistake for the Borg to assimilate her which includes suppressing her personality, but her memories of the Synth destruction was somehow way too intense for the Borg so the Assimilation failed.
I mean from an acting standpoint, great, Even the scene where Picard was having his heart to heart was Stewart at his Picard best. The effects and filmography brilliant, loved it.
But this episode smacked of writers panic where they clumsily tried to link everything together to get some aha moments and instead created a implausable story line that felt like a mix of the above science fiction franchises with a sprinkle of "Yeah, that's unlikely" and "Oh come on man"
I also cringed at the Picard Admiral scene with the obvious "Shut the F up moment" I could almost hear the writers giggling in my head at dropping an F bomb. I get it, we got it once, we didn't need it again.
There was just a stunning lack of context to go along with all of these reveals. The other thing is it almost feels like we're just supposed to accept this crew as a family because in the past crews have been a family, but I'm not feeling that establishment in this episode.
My biggest concern is that it feels like Picard is fading into a secondary role in this show. He feels like he's there to move conversations along, and have the occasional look he's old moment, but honestly he's almost becoming the least relevant and connected person in the show, and that's after a nice performance last week. But in terms of the main plot and the main storylines, he's literally background, or the NPC in a video game that sends people on a quest.
Sorry guys, I think it was a weird episode, where they were overly ambitious and made a house out of mismatched counterfeit lego's instead of real lego's.