Picard: Watcher

The newest episode of Star Trek: Picard was released today, but here I will "catch up" by talking about last week's installment, "Watcher."

Picard follows a strong lead on the location of the mysterious Watcher. Rios lands in an ICE holding center, and Seven and Raffi try to rescue him before he's transferred to a Sanctuary District. And Jurati trades verbal jabs with the Borg Queen in the aftermath of their link.

This was the second episode in a row directed by Lea Thompson, and she was just as strong here as she was the week before. The material, though, was just a touch weaker. Just a touch.

The Picard storyline of the episode was perhaps the weakest element to me this week, but only in that it took a lot of time and a lot of dialogue to get to where it was going. We were served multiple scenes of Picard trying to convince Guinan to trust him, which stalled completely until Picard finally dropped his name (which apparently he should have done in the first place). I also stumbled a bit at first on reconciling the continuity of it all; why didn't Guinan remember the events of "Time's Arrow?" (Ah! Because the correct future from which Picard traveled back in time doesn't exist right now.)

But setting aside the slow burn of that subplot, there was a lot of interesting material in those conversations. Casting a new Guinan was absolutely the right move, even if the show had had the budget for extensive (and not entirely convincing) de-aging visual effects on Whoopi Goldberg. Ito Aghayere did a remarkable job of capturing some indescribable essence of Guinan, and her very presence in the role made the point of all the dialogue hit harder: here's an old white man telling a young black woman to just hang on a bit longer and keep waiting for the change that is going to come, I promise. Very effective Star Trek social commentary. No, not subtle, but still well integrated into the episode.

More of the same came in the Rios subplot. There weren't any soapbox speeches asking how "primitive humans could allow such a thing to happen?" Still, pointed lines of dialogue like "they make you swear allegiance?" could not help but get the message across. The way that real world ICE was blended with the Trek back story of the Sanctuary Districts worked all too well. (A linguistic inversion of the term "sanctuary cities" feels absolutely plausible, doesn't it?)

Seven and Raffi were the release valve on all the serious talk about morality, and served that role well. I'm very much enjoying their dynamic, especially the fact that Raffi's impulse control is even worse than Seven's, and that Seven therefore has to be the level head in the pairing. (Four years of Voyager taught us well that this doesn't come naturally.) Was the car chase a bit silly, a bit manufactured just to inject some action into a talk-heavy episode? You bet. But how often do you get to have a car chase in Star Trek? You gotta just let them have this moment.

The handful of exchanges between Jurati and the Borg Queen were once again a highlight of an episode. Annie Wersching really does seem to be the perfect performer for this different way of writing the Queen. We've had flirtatious (Alice Krige's original) and menacing (Susanna Thompson's version on Voyager), but this queen is oddly sarcastic and quippy. If you'd described it to me, I wouldn't have believed it would work, but Annie Wersching really sells it, and the dynamic between her and Alison Pill has quickly become one of the best elements of the season. And you know it's still going somewhere.

Q continues to be a spice used very sparingly, and that continues to serve the season well. He appears here in a brief final scene (that would have been mid-credits, were this a Marvel movie), after showing up for literally only seconds the week before. It seems as though "just what is up with Q?" is a concern that will rise higher on the list very soon. For now, his scene was fun for more shoutouts to Star Trek continuity (that this season has shoveled on for the fans) -- we got a newspaper referencing Chris Brynner and a Dixon Hill novel written by Tracy Torme (who wrote the first Next Gen episode to feature Hill).

Of course, the big fan shoutout was the return appearance of "the punk on the bus" from Star Trek IV, who had an updated new song ("I Still Hate You") and a healthy fear of what happened the last time someone asked him to turn down his music. Meanwhile, the fan "deep cut" was the revelation that the Watcher was also called a Supervisor, which makes them a possible "co-worker" of Gary Seven from the classic episode "Assignment: Earth." Though of course, the bigger revelation there was that the Watcher somehow looks like Laris. (I knew it couldn't be Guinan; she's famously a Listener, not a Watcher. Nonetheless, I didn't see this twist coming.)

Like I said, this was perhaps a small step down from the week before, but there was still plenty of exciting stuff to keep me very high on this season so far. I give "Watcher" a B+.