‘Star Trek: Picard’ S2E4 (“Watcher”) Recap

With the placing, stakes, and important gamers already launched, this week’s Star Trek: Picard is tasked with keeping momentum and including some new wrinkles to the season’s ongoing thriller. Whilst certainly a “middle chapter,” “Watcher” is even so a sturdy episode that presents each member of the ensemble anything entertaining to do and highlights a single significantly thrilling visitor star. At the similar time, my personal viewing working experience was hindered for the dorkiest explanation — inconsistent continuity with a Next Era episode from 30 a long time back.

In final week’s episode, Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Tablet) plugged her head into the ailing Borg Queen and extracted two urgent pieces of facts. Now, the workforce understands that they have only three days to avoid a catastrophic improve to their timeline, and they have the coordinates to a person known as a “watcher” who can help them on their quest. The coordinates direct Picard to a bar in Los Angeles that has been owned and operated by his buddy Guinan for generations. There, he finds a younger Guinan (now portrayed by Ito Aghayere) packing her things and closing up shop. Fed up with our planet’s mounting social injustice, Guinan designs to depart humanity behind for superior. Picard assumes that Guinan is the “watcher” he’s been wanting for, and tries to persuade her to remain and support conserve humanity’s future. But, from Guinan’s viewpoint, Picard is a stranger, a strange previous guy who claims to be from the upcoming but refuses to even give his name.

Here’s the issue: no make any difference how you seem at the timeline, Guinan and Picard have now achieved. One particular hundred and 30 many years before, in the Future Era two-parter “Time’s Arrow,” a 24th century Picard and a 19th century Guinan do the job together to avoid malevolent aliens from wiping out humanity. This commences a paradox that sales opportunities to their deep bond, which they each describe as “beyond friendship.” It’s a significant instant in their connection, and offered that Star Trek: Picard typically revels in callbacks to Trek’s past, this uncharacteristic shrug to continuity built this subplot a little bit disheartening to look at. “Time’s Arrow” may not have created the identical cultural stamp as the oft-referenced “The Ideal of Both of those Worlds,” but it continue to counts, and it’s correct there on the Paramount+ application for curious viewers to check out out. It is also the tale that establishes that Guinan utilized to reside on Earth posing as a human, something that is recognized as given in “Watcher.” So are we supposed to bear in mind “Time’s Arrow” or aren’t we?

Compounding the dilemma this episode’s various winks to other older episodes and movies. The punk on the bus is the same dude from The Voyage Home. Guinan donates her belongings to the 21st Road Mission, which shares a title with Edith Keeler’s shelter in “The Metropolis on the Edge of Forever.” There are various references to Picard’s favourite pulp detective Dixon Hill, a newspaper headline that namechecks the tech mogul from “Past Tense,” and a pavilion named for the inventor of Nomad from “The Changeling.” The storytellers put in all of these mnemonic cues to remind us of other episodes, but disregard the one particular that is related to the tale we’re at present viewing. Even immediately after Picard at last reveals his title to Guinan, she appears to figure out it not from personalized experience, but in relationship to the thriller of the Watcher — there is no sign that Guinan recollects that he’s the person who saved her existence in the 19th century and whose friendship she’ll find out in the upcoming.

If you are unaware of this continuity snafu, nonetheless, Picard and Guinan’s scenes with each other are rather helpful. Ito Aghayere brings a different power to Guinan, an exhaustion with existence in a crumbling modern society exactly where she suffers unjust hardship due to the fact of her pores and skin color. Guinan succinctly outlines our planet’s overarching ills in language that we’ve all heard right before, but with the supplemental annoyance of a staying who is familiar with far better than any person born on this earth that it does not have to be like this. She provides a monologue on humanity’s self-destruction as preachy as any Star Trek speech, but with these enthusiasm and sincerity that it functions. (It’s also as succinct a summary of our modern day troubles as you’ll obtain anywhere.) As Guinan, Aghayere doesn’t confine herself to executing a Whoopi Goldberg impact, but there are times (like when she’s sitting down in her truck with Picard) when her overall body language and cadence are stunningly familiar.

Across town, Raffi and 7 learn that Rios has been arrested by ICE and is remaining held pending deportation. Concerned that Rios may well soon vanish into some remote detention facility, they steal a cop car or truck and set off to rescue him, all the although pursued by the LAPD. Michelle Hurd and Jeri Ryan have settled into a buddy cop rhythm, with Raffi forged as the reckless hothead and 7 her by-the-ebook foil. Increase in their unresolved romantic friction, and you get a textbook but entertaining dynamic. The car chase by itself is firmly “good adequate for Television set,” a novelty considering that you not often see a automobile chase on Star Trek. It doesn’t present any serious jeopardy, but it does give Raffi and 7 an justification to bicker like a married pair in a sitcom. By the conclude of the episode, they’ve escaped pursuit and are getting ready to spring Rios from ICE custody.

“Watcher” outlines the broad strokes of what would make ICE so terrifying — that the people today they arrest can fall proper off the map —  but there’s no hint at any of the further, a lot more monstrous abuses that the company is alleged to have enabled or participated in. Rios’ limited time in custody doesn’t commence to converse the scale or scope of the evil that is been performed in the title of “protecting our borders,” though this might be a story convenience to shield our people from an not possible selection. Rios’ shipmates continuously remind just about every other to shield the timeline and “watch out for butterflies.” Springing a busload of detainees (which seems to be Raffi’s rescue prepare) could possibly be some thing they can get away with, but an overall detention center could possibly generate too significantly of a ripple in place-time, and no person would like to see their Television heroes switch their backs on individuals in need to have. 

Throughout the world in France, Dr. Agnes Jurati has stayed powering to repair La Sirena, which implies she’s by yourself in the organization of our villain-in-a-box, the Borg Queen. The Queen continues toying with Jurati, making an attempt to exploit her insecurities and influence her to grant her more entry to the ship’s programs. Jurati turns the tables, the moment again tricking the Queen into assisting the mission though giving her very little in return. While I lamented past 7 days that the Borg Queen is basically a really verbose punching bag, I’m discovering her ongoing battle of wills with Jurati to be a person of the season’s much more exciting threads. Back again on Voyager, Janeway or Seven of 9 would ideal the Queen and that would be the finish of the tale. In this serialized context, her defeats feel like they’re constructing to a thing. This conflict is also serving to us to get to know Jurati better, and understand together with the Queen that she’s not to be trifled with. 

The episode closes with a pair of game-shifting reveals. To start with, Guinan prospects Picard to satisfy the true watcher, a remaining remaining on Earth in buy to safeguard the destiny of a selected person. Following communicating with her as a result of a selection of telepathically-borrowed bodies, we see that the watcher’s legitimate sort is that of Laris (Orla Brady), sporting rounded human ears and a extremely poor perspective. We’re remaining to surprise what this revelation implies for the Laris we know. Is she the exact same being, dwelling undercover as a previous Romulan spy? Is Picard about to commence yet another vital connection out of sequence with linear time? Second, we test in with Q as he attempts to use his powers to induce concern in an unsuspecting human, and she chuckles to herself as an alternative. This is even more evidence that Q is suffering from some sort of ailment that is influencing his powers as very well as his disposition. Q’s experiment also occurs to take location near the workplaces of the Europa Mission, with Q donning the project’s insignia on his coat. Is he just taking part in gown-up, as common, or has he taken on a new identification and develop into actively concerned in the mission? With six episodes remaining, there is however a bit of runway for including new queries just before we start off getting some answers.