A collection of short stories involving the crew and their relationships with family members. Worf's human parents visit the Enterprise. Picard visits his brother on the family vineyard in France. Crusher gets a chest of keepsakes from her deceased husband, with a recording to pass on to Wesley.
There's a lot of humor to the episode, but it balances out with some fairly emotional bits. The Worf storyline is mostly played for laughs. It does have a nice scene where Worf realizes that human parents support their children through adversity.
Wesley's story is the weakest. I've never cared much about his father's death, since the issue is never explored too fully. Plus, it's hard to care much about what happens with Wesley.
Picard's story is the A-plot here. Picard's brother, Robert, is a firmly conservative anti-technology stalwart. He blames technology for replacing too many things, and harming the value in hard work. While synthetic wine is available, he feels it doesn't compare to wine he works to make. He dislikes replicators.
It's clear that Picard has a balanced view of these things, especially since Robert is written in such a two-dimensional way. But Robert's antagonism of Picard is useful. When they eventually start fighting, that gives away to laughing, then to Picard confronting his fears about his experience with the Borg. It turns out that Picard feels personally responsible for the information the Borg were able to gather from his brain, and how many lives that cost. We rarely see Picard allowing himself to feel bad about his decisions, since he typically takes the path that preserves life. Here, the loss of life was too large, and he feels like he could have made a better decision, or he could have been stronger.
It's a great episode, although Wesley's story is kind of weak, and Worf could have used some tweaking. But for an episode that was written by Ronald D. Moore, it's up to his usual levels of quality.
