Picard heads into the field (literally) to meet his brother, Robert, who gives him as warm a welcome as you could expect from someone you’ve been purposefully avoiding for 20 years. Sorry, Jean-Luc, I’m with your brother on this one.

Back on the ship, Worf’s parents (Sergey and Helena) have come to visit and are generally making a nuisance of themselves, demanding a full tour, badgering La Forge and perhaps worst of all, treating O’Brien like an actual person.

Elsewhere, Crusher retrieves a box of her late husband’s stuff from storage, only to find that it has a holo-message in for Wesley. She gives the message to Wesley. He watches it. We ostensibly experience the appropriate emotional response. It’s not really a story so much as an attempt to prove that even Star Trek can make you cry, and not just in the way you cry when you realise you’ve tuned into one of those Troi Falls in Love episodes. Personally I don’t think it works.

Back at the Picard Ranch, the Picards are having dinner. Robert keeps making snide comments about replicators and synthehol, to Jean Luc’s obvious annoyance. Replicators are, of course, the means by which he gets his precious Tea, Earl Grey, Hot, so you can see why he’d be so upset. To try to defuse the tension, Marie reveals that the mayor of the village wants to hold a parade for Picard, but he strongly declines. Rene tells him he’s written a report on starships, and when Picard encourages his interest Robert becomes angry. What, Robert, you don’t want your son joining a pseudo-military organisation and getting potentially replaced by an alien clone, or sent into a parallel universe, or (more probably) electrocuted at his desk? How close-minded.

The next day Jean-Luc talks to his friend Louis, who works at the Atlantis Project, which is trying to raise a new continent on Earth and damn the environmental catastrophe that would cause. When Picard shows interest, Louis points outs that it needs a new project leader. Picard is reluctant but agrees to look at the job listing anyway.