Star Trek: Picard season two, episode four, “Watcher,” is a balancing act between the A plot and the B plot, and I felt like they focused a little too much on the B plot. It was to the detriment of the episode, and it makes this my least favorite episode so far.
The setup: with time running out to save the future, Picard takes matters into his own hands and seeks out an old friend for help. Meanwhile Rios ends up on the wrong side of the law, and Jurati makes a deal with the devil. All right, devil might be the wrong way to put it, but I don’t know what else to call the Borg Queen.
I do like where we eventually go. So I’m still with it, I’m still here, I’m on board. Trust me.
Back at Chateau Picard, Before It’s Chateau Picard
We start out back at Chateau Picard before it becomes Chateau Picard, when it’s just a run-down place they crashed the ship into. Shout out to Michelle, by the way, because she’s the one who reminded me in the comments section that it was Chateau Picard. Thank you, Michelle, for subscribing on all of the socials and joining the Know-It-All Nation.
Picard and Jurati are doing their best to communicate with whoever they can find. And come to find out, the Confederation starships have cloaking devices, probably from when Picard was handling Martok. So, the Klingons.
They kick open the door, the place is very run down, and Picard starts seeing the future. I’m being poetic. He starts seeing visions of his past, which is their future. You see a young Picard running around looking for his mother, and even Jurati’s asking him where he’s at, and he tells her he’s seeing events that haven’t happened yet. Eventually you get the scene with Picard’s mother in the atrium. She hugs him, she has the computer play a song, and you see that stained glass rose window intact, not broken or destroyed. I believe all of this is going to come together. They’re really taking their time connecting these dots.
Then Picard’s making a fire in the fireplace while Jurati goes looking around, and she finds a book and a bottle of wine. Picard points out that this is the 15th book in the series, this is a 1915 bottle of wine, and he goes through the math. They’ve got three days left. They landed on the 12th of the month and they have until the 15th. At least that’s the conjecture, and it turns out the conjecture is correct.
That’s another problem I had. This entire series of A to B to C that Picard does feels really contrived. I’m a writer myself. I’ve written two pilots and four features, and one of my feature scripts was on the desk of the president of Warner Brothers. At the end of the day I know a little bit about writing, and this was a very neat bow to get Picard to these conclusions.
The Punk on the Bus
Raffi and Seven track Rios’s combadge to the clinic, and one of the doctors there lets them know what happened. Rios and the other doctor have been taken by ICE, which is immigration.
This is a uniquely California problem, however you want to interpret it. I’m not here to make political statements, and I’m not one of those people who’ll sit here and say Star Trek never does. Star Trek has often made commentary on things. My issue at the moment is that the commentary feels very one-sided. I covered that last episode, so I’m not going to get into it too much.
So Raffi and Seven are on a bus, and we hear a familiar song and see a familiar face. It’s the punk rock guy, listening to a very specific song. It’s a callback to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. At one point Seven asks him to turn it down, and rather than bowing up, dude touches his neck and his shoulder, having a memory, if you will, of when Spock neck pinched him. He says sorry, sorry, I really like that song, and he turns off the radio.
It’s a neat little Easter egg. I was like, right on, dude. Good for you for being brave enough to do this thing again. It’s a little bit of fan service and it felt a little ham-fisted. I’m still here for it, though, because I’m a total shill for that kind of thing.
You also get Seven really being endearing here. Raffi’s stressing out, Seven holds her hand, and it’s really nice. It’s sweet.
The Guinan Who Isn’t Whoopi Goldberg
Back on the ship, the Borg Queen is watching Picard and Jurati, and she sees what’s going on. They have the coordinates, so Picard transports away, leaving Jurati with the Borg Queen, who’s more or less telling her, you’re going to need me.
Picard beams into a very familiar alleyway. He looks up and it’s Forward Avenue. Specifically, 10 Forward. He walks in, he sees a box with the Saurian brandy bottle in it, and I was very much ready to see a de-aged Whoopi Goldberg.
We don’t get de-aged Whoopi Goldberg, and I’m okay with that. What we do get is a different actress who walks in doing an amazing Whoopi Goldberg impression. The inflection, the voice, sounding very much like the Whoopi Goldberg of the past.
So here’s my explanation. I’m a big believer that you don’t say something in a script or in your story without paying it off later. The last time we saw Guinan, she mentions to Picard that her people can change how fast they age. I believe she has de-aged herself in this particular era.
For those of you playing at home, we know for a fact from the Next Generation episode “Time’s Arrow,” which was the season five and six cliffhanger, episode 26 of season five into episode one of season six, because they used to do cliffhangers like that all the time, that Guinan meets the Enterprise crew back in 19th century San Francisco. And when Picard gets back to his own point in time, she remembers that exchange.
They may still address that. So I’m not ready to tout this as a plot hole. When you call back Star Trek IV and you call back some other things, I have a tendency to feel like they’re going to pay this off. My read is she’s de-aged herself younger than what she was before, which is why she doesn’t look like Whoopi Goldberg anymore. She looks like a younger version.
And she’s not happy at all. She doesn’t want to talk to him, she’s very pushbacky, and Picard finds himself having to really work to get her to have a conversation. Then she pulls a shotgun on him, and his look of shock is amazing. Patrick Stewart, again, always bringing 110 percent.
When she finally does start listening, it’s because he calls her an El-Aurian, and she’s shocked. She tells him he’d better explain himself.
Then we get a really cool cameo. Brian Quinn from Impractical Jokers plays a guy, and it’s funny, he literally just looks like himself from the show, which I think is brilliant. Apparently he’s the guy Guinan’s giving her dog to, and her dog is a really great judge of character. It cements the fact that she’s leaving. She’s trying to get out of here.
Picard keeps trying to entreat her, and she’s talking about humanity, and she’s not happy. She’s a very angry Black woman, and I feel it. I get it. Picard’s trying to explain to her that he’s from the future. She’s loading everything into her SUV, she’s about to go, and he says, “My name is Jean-Luc Picard.” That’s what gets her to tell him who he needs to see.
The Police Station, the Lockup, and a Car Chase Nobody Needed
Meanwhile Raffi and Seven have gone to the police. The officer at the desk is doing her best to not get upset and angry, and eventually Seven comes to the rescue and pulls Raffi aside to have a seat. There’s a guy watching the whole exchange, and I have a feeling he’s supposed to be an Easter egg, something from back before. He tells them the police aren’t going to have the information on the guy they’re looking for, because he was taken by immigration, not the police. It’s all part of this through line they have going.
Then we cut to the mug shots of the doctor and Rios, and a fenced-in area I assume is some sort of lockup. It looks like a parking lot where they set up a fence. The ICE officer comes in and they make an example of a guy, and he’s very racist about it. Rios tries to help, only to get tased. A little later the doctor sits down with him and they have a little exchange.
Coming out of the police station, Raffi wants to break into a police car and use the computer to track Rios down. So she uses a phaser, which they’re not supposed to have with them, and vaporizes the window. Seven notices some police officers coming out, runs around the other side and gets in the car. They talk to Agnes, Agnes can’t get the transporter working, and they take off in the police car.
This whole thing felt like, well, the story’s getting a little boring, so we’ve got to throw something in there. And they just threw in a car chase that was utterly and totally unnecessary.
Seven, who apparently is going to start driving, floors it, and she’s going, and it’s fast. I have a problem with how quickly they jumped into it. Now, you can always say she’s trying to figure out how the car works, and I’m okay with that, except she seems to be handling herself quite well for someone who’s trying to figure out how the car works. Within seconds it’s all vehicles be on the lookout, stolen police car. The B plot really took over the story, fast. It felt like the formula went, yep, time for a car chase.
And by the way, all of a sudden Seven is a completely different character. She goes from being the understanding, mild-mannered, calm-spoken person she was in the police department to Seven in rare form, gung-ho and angry. She’s angry suddenly, for some reason, and I don’t know why.
Two Episodes Fighting Each Other
This entire episode is so weird tonally. You have this deep story we’re supposed to be understanding. It’s poor people in L.A. It’s Guinan disillusioned with humanity, and that seems to be the era we’re living in. And then you keep jumping back to this high-speed car chase, which is a very different energy and a very different pace.
The pacing seemed really off, especially because this episode is directed by Lea Thompson from Back to the Future, who played Marty McFly’s mom. Wonderful director. Last episode was chef’s kiss, a work of art in terms of everything that was happening and how smoothly they ran through it. This episode just felt super clunky.
There’s an exchange between Jurati and the Borg Queen that I find really interesting. They start to come to an understanding, and they’re almost in a weird relationship. Jurati makes a deal with the Borg Queen, the Borg Queen fixes the transporter, and they transport Seven and Raffi out of the middle of a police car, with the police all stunned at an empty car.
The Watcher, and Q’s Snap
Guinan does take Picard to where she believes he’ll find the Watcher, and he tells her, please don’t leave Earth. He goes off with a little girl who has white eyes. The little girl just leads him to the Watcher, and they pass several people with the same thing going on with the eyes.
It turns out the Watcher is Orla Brady, who plays Laris. All of a sudden she gets super close to him, and a weird kind of box transporter effect with clouds happens.
Then we see the end coda of the episode, which is Q. He sees a young lady who’s walking and reading a book, and as he’s narrating something in his head, he goes to snap his fingers and nothing happens. So now they stick their toe into whatever’s supposed to be a C plot, slash the carryover cliffhanger plot.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Picard season two, episode four, “Watcher,” is my least favorite episode of the season so far.
Everyone seems like they’ve been waiting to hear me do a negative review, and this is probably going to be it. I was not impressed with this episode. This episode was a mess. It was all over the road.
I’m sort of heartbroken by that, because I’ve loved everything the series has been doing up until now. Last episode they knew what the beats were and they understood where they had to go with the story. They know the ultimate destination, and here they’ve chopped everything up. I feel like this episode was simply a bridge. It was a bridge from A to C, B was just getting there, and it was all over the road.
I think the show is going to do better next episode. I really do, because this feels like a bridge episode. So I’m looking forward to next week, and I’m so excited for where we’re going.
I’d love to hear your take on this one, so let me know exactly what you think. Be like Michelle. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
