Picard, or how can they possibly start a long-arc without a plot?

Picard. They got Patrick Stewart back for this one.

God Damnit, I wanted to like this one.

It had a high production value and even half-way through I had high hopes. I didn't understand the hate. A lot of mystery and drama buildup.  But after the finale... yeah. I get it.

ok. overall plot.    [Spoiler Alert!]

Some intergalactic robo-group set up a planet with a message to any synths: You're gonna out-evolve bionics and they'll hate you. Call us to join up and we'll kill everyone for you.  It also just happens to induce religious-fervor-levels of hate against synths, and not unjustly because hitting the call button WILL kill everyone.  BUT HEY! easy recruitment strategy. Sure to get the synths to sign up.   Maybe they're afraid of competing synth-guilds. As far as big-bads go, that's not half-bad.  

Anyway, that forms the anti-synth romulan club, who stage a terrorist action against Mars (and dooming most of their own populous as... cover?) by subverting the synth population to nuke the planet.    ....Which all by itself sounds like a good argument that synths are a liability. They never really dig into that though and the ability to hack synths is never mentioned again.  This is stupid.

Anyway, some synths aficionados (ugh, and Data's meat brother) escape to their own planet to make a few more synths. One small village, really. The romulan anti-robot club goes to a lot of trouble to find them. Including planting a mole in starfleet's high security position. BTW, Starfleet found this planet and sent ambassadors, and almost had first-contact... but then got "black orders" to kill everyone and commit suicide and erase it all.   ....Because knowing about a small village of synths is... bad?  Starfleet doesn't have access to anti-synth religious-fervor-inducing pool though so they don't really have any reason for that. If they are so bad because they nuked mars, sure, you can (fail to) kill them all, but why erase the attempt? They have so many plot holes around this step.

Anyway, this high officer in starfleet hunts these people and tracks down two synth sleeper agents, but in doing so imparts knowledge into their own sleeper agent who is on board to help the syth sleeper agent who is now awake. Imparting that knowledge moves the character into a willing participant, but also that knowledge is the one thing that could doom them all.

Anyway, despite seeing that their ambassadors are brutally murdered "in the only ship they had on the planet", the synth group sends out agents to infiltrate synth research.  We are never told what their mission is. Only that it's successful, that they have false-memories implanted, that the agents are likely quite young/quick-grown, have nightly calls to "mom" who is likely a subconscious command structure, are tasked with "finding Picard" if things go badly. Oh, and they have self-destructive KILL ORDERS with super-human strength and speed as the perfect sleeper agents.   The super-human capabilities, mind-control, quick-grown aspects are never mentioned again.

Anyway, that high officer in starfleet (which knew about the synth planet), hunts for the synth planet through these two synth-sleeper-agents. One activates and kills the ROMULAN HIT SQUAD SENT TO EARTH!!?!?    Holy fuck is there no security on EARTH!? Is this not an act of WAR?  Also there's a "non-admissible" means of finding out what happened... but no authority figures care to use it. Even in parallel. Because they're so up-right and law abiding but still a fan of "black order" coverups...

Anyway, the other one gets seduced and, midway in dream sequence gets conned into revealing a description of the planet. (which sadly enough, we don't see when the show finally visits said planet).   

Then a borg cube is involved almost entirely for a 7of9 cameo. (And an absolutely AWESOME Hugh cameo) With a romulan ninja, which Picard goes out of his way to acquire, then immediately ditches, and repeatedly tosses away any chance he gets. The cube zaps them to a warm-fuzzy feel-good cameo with Riker and Troi.

Anyway, they leave and go at super-warp to get to the synth planet before the romulans finally get off their ass and go to the place they found 2-3 episodes ago and have been hunting for years and doomed their own empire to find.

The synths have anti-technolgy planetary defenses. Huh. Really thought they were going somewhere with that. Like maybe the planet is full of anti-syths since they have anti-synth space-weapons. But no, it's just something the synths have, despite not having actual space-ships. Completely ignoring that they somehow got sleeper agents off-world.

Now, the main character is a synth with an Evil twin sleeper agent that instantly murder-suicided when she was activated. The process for making these synths makes two. So we find out she also has a third Eviler Twin. She's from an older batch though. Her pair, the evilest twin, is never mentioned. Also, they can just crank out mirror copies of any synth, but apparently have never done this again.  So the eviler one apparently sucked out the knowledge of the one thing that will doom us all, conspired to stage a terrorist act to force her community of hippies to take action against all life. We also kinda have to assume that this "2nd batch" of the evil twin super-sleeper-agents with programmed memories was sent to.... go bring back the knowledge of the one things that will doom us all. Not that there was any means for them to know that existed.  Wasn't that convenient that the forces hunting them would send the one thing needed to doom us all? Bit of a gambit really.

Anyway, eviler Twin hits the call button on "free us and kill everyone" to the super-synths. And now that the super-synths know where they are the galaxy is doomed to an invasion of super-borg, regardless of if one fucking portal is closed because obviously the super-civilization of synths who encoded the knowledge of how to build super-portals millennia ago would themselves have the ability to open super-portals anywhere they wanted.

Anyway, they got the hyper-space email and know some potential recruits are in town. They comin'. But not right now, because.... one synth sleeper-agent decided to close a door and delete the email and ignore it ever happened. Because starfleet came through on the side of good, inexplicably, and immediately fly away having done nothing. (They didn't even bother modeling more than one ship design). Because the romulan agent implanted into starfleet high command (who just offhandedly revealed herself for no damn reason instead of being in command of that fleet) decided to re-target disruptions about 3 times instead of a quick bombardment of the one thing that could doom us all and the culmination of her religious fervor, the purpose of her secret order, her personal life-long purpose, and what so many have died for.

Anyway, door closed, Romulans leave, star-fleet leaves, all issues pertaining to a borg-cube full of rebellious ex-B's on a planet of min-programming synths is ignored.

The eviler twin was either off-handedly killed by her maker with one hell of an off-stick, or... gets woken up after her plans are foiled and ignored.

And oh btw, syths are legal now. Roll credits.