Risa

That could have been an incredible story, if the whole story was about that. But it felt like an afterthought, like they needed to create some motivation for the character that the Nexus could exploit. Apparently it was Patrick Stewart himself who suggested that plot point. On top of that you have Kirk and his horse, which seemingly has nothing to do thematically with Picard's troubles.

The Nexus concept is good, but they didn't push hard enough on it. Here's this psycho-temporal rift in space that functions like a literal heaven. It's basically the manifestation of everything the Traveler talked about: thought transcending time and space. So Picard wants to cosplay a Victorian family Christmas, and Kirk wants to be alone on a ranch? Like, what? Maybe if Kirk was there with Carol and the son he barely got a chance to know, it might have created a parallelism that Picard could relate to. There's just way too much going on, and it doesn't cohere very well.