I really liked it. In my view, sci-fi as a genre inherited a film/literature project that came more from westerns (like, cowboy shit - not "the west" as a cultural phenomenon) than from hardboiled/noir. The latter has an anthropology that fits more closely with my own in the sense that it has a Catholic view of the perfectibility of the human person rather than a Calvinist one - but that observation isn't a necessity. Nobody has to do it that way, and I've really enjoyed some of the exceptions, like Blade Runner.

This one is starting off structurally like noir. It's got a central mystery that really feels like it's going to pull the noir feint of not ending up as the actual mystery. And we've got a tired and (sorta) reluctant "detective" in Picard. That makes me really happy.

I have one dumb TNG question that I'm just going to ask here because I was embarrassed to ask my wife: was Data canonically different from all other synthetic beings in the series as well? or is that new information?