Apparently the Borg can run...

So, apparently, members of the Borg collective can run. Really fast, actually. So fast that an experienced Star Fleet Officer standing about 40 feet away does not have time to draw her weapon before the Borg covers the distance and sets upon her.

Huh... who'd have thought it? Every Borg I have ever seen moves with a menacing slowness.  In fact, in Star Trek: First Contact, that menacing slowness is used to excellent dramatic effect. I can't claim to having seen every episode or movie in which members of the collective have appeared so perhaps I've missed some really fast Borg sprinting. Correct me in the comments.

But, frig, is Borgati fast. And agile. She makes that crazy sprint in a floor-length dress, wearing some kind of footwear that I can't make out, leaping from trunk to trunk of battered old cars in the blink of an eye. Leap leap leap leap attack. Woweee.

Too bad Raffi is so caught up in her own personal stuff to recognize that, as soon as you spot your target, your exceptionally dangerous, growing stronger every second target, you draw your weapon and get ready to fire.

And too bad that Borgati, just now ingesting the metal products she needs for full Borgification, has already enhanced her musculature and skeletal structure to handle the beating that little body lays on both Raffi and Seven.

If you're getting the impression that Episode 8 of Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard (STP) did not tickle my fancy, you're right. In fact, I'm not sure it deserves the title "Episode" at all.

I really feel like the STP creative team has suddenly realized they had three more episodes to go in Season 2 and only enough story for one, at most two of those episodes.

So they give us this hour-long space filler in which nothing of consequence happens.

"Mercy" includes three significant flashbacks, none of which is germane to the plot. Two of them focus on an earlier incident in the life of a minor character (the FBI agent) and the third, which is also the longest, seems intended only to give a little more screen time to a dead character and, what, give us proof of something about Raffi that we already know?

Is it possible that they had that scene lying around on the editing room floor, saw this episode will be much too short, and decided to drop the unused footage in?

The "episode" follows four distinct plot lines: Picard and Guinan get caught by a disturbed FBI agent; Raffi and Seven experience relationship issues while they are supposed to be tracking down the most significant danger to mankind ever imagined; Kore discovers the truth about her origins and figures out daddy doesn't really love her; and Rios gets huggy-kissy with the 21st century physician and her son.

If there is a development of any consequence at all, it is in the Kore/Soong story line and that's a minor subplot at best.

If this episode never happened, well... nothing would change for STP.

Some additional points, before we go:

Please, creative team, find some way to redeem Seven and Raffi. These are strong, effective characters that you have reduced to an annoying couple who let their personal stuff interfere with their ability to do anything right. It's embarrassing.

And what's with this FBI-dude's flashback to his childhood encounter with Vulcans? Did we not establish in the aforementioned First Contact that first contact between Terrans and Vulcans occurred when Zefram Cochrane made humankind's first warp flight? That it was only the warp signature of Cochrane's ship that attracted the attention of a passing Vulcan ship, making the Vulcan government aware of the presence of a new warp society and convincing the Vulcans that first contact was necessary?

And didn't we establish in Enterprise that transporter technology was not invented until Captain Archer's time? We never see Vulcans use it in the early episodes of Enterprise and the humans don't trust it. And, in First Contact, the Vulcans arrive on Earth in a landing ship, suggesting that transporter tech is not a part of their world. How does this 21st Century Vulcan ship suddenly possess this tech?

And didn't we establish, in TOS, that the Vulcans see the mind meld as a difficult psychological experience that they avoid at all costs, especially if it involves more emotional races, like humans? So why would this particular Vulcan decide to pursue this little human and perform the mind meld, rather than simply letting the kid escape to deal with his own weird memory of the encounter?

And where did Guinan get this power to cast her... whatever into another room?

And are we supposed to believe that Guinan is honestly willing to spend four centuries of her life (with the brief vacation onboard Enterprise D) tending a bar in the squalor of Los Angeles? She's there in the 21st Century, she's there in the 25th Century. It's the same bar. What the hell?

Okay. I'm done. This was an awful episode. Filler. Uninteresting, unnecessary filler.