The operations of Gaia, ESA's two billion star astrometric satellite mission, are now shortly before entering its final phase. Therefore it is a good time for a review by the local Gaia group, both looking back to many exciting and sometimes demanding years, and forward to the promises, the obtained Gaia data holds for the future. Over the last eleven years, one of the groups pivotal to ensure a consistant data quality, has been the Gaia First Look (FL), based at ARI. The FL is the first part of the Gaia consortium (DPAC) which gets to look into the newest data obtained by the satellite, albeit in the form of diagnostic data. Its duty is to access this data both in the short term, i.e. to identify problems, as also longer term, to identify trends, which might need to be addressed at some point. I will give a brief overall synopsis of how the FL works, then showing some examples of the issues which the FL-team has had to deal with. During the spring of this year, Gaia was first hit by a micro meteoroid impact, which caused a significant amount of periodic stray-light infall, followed by an electronic malfunction, which resulted in an important detector being permanently inoperable. This double blow and how the resulting issues have been addressed by several groups within DPAC, including the FL-team, will be a focal point of this presentation. This is a dramatic story, with the attempts to first analyse and understand the impact of these events, then to mitigate the really damaging effects, quite a few failures, and ultimatively, success. I will also point to the upcoming EoL phase, which will sound the knell only for the satellite itself, but by far not for the mission as such. Finally, I will also look ahead, at the two future releases, i.e. the best part of the Gaia dataset, which is yet to come.