In this week’s episode, “Watcher,” Picard meets an old friend, Seven and Raffi ride the bus, Rios rides a different bus, and Jurati and the Borg Queen continue to bond. Written by Juliana James & Jane Maggs, directed by Lea Thompson.
Mark Turetsky: Will! Here we are, another week in the crazy far future world of 2024!
Will Nevin: Where are the jetpacks? The aliens? The depressing slide toward authoritarianism? At least we have two of the three this week.
Mark: Jetpacks aren’t in the budget. What do you want? Rocket boots? Sounds silly.
Will: If rocket boots are good enough for Spock, they’re good enough for us, goddamnit.
Old Friends, Out of Time
Mark: One big shift in this episode is that we spotlight Picard much more than we did last week. There, he was a supporting character to Jurati’s story. Here, after a brief scene at an abandoned Château Picard where we learn why he speaks with an English accent, he strikes out on his own to find the eponymous Watcher, whom he hopes can help them fix the timeline.
First off, his English accent needs no explanation: as pointed out by Trek scholar Manu Saadia in a now-deleted Twitter thread, well-to-do folks in France learn English from, well, English people, and their target accent is a sophisticated English one. So in this way, Captain Picard is the perfect Frenchman. When he speaks English, he is utterly indistinguishable from a native English speaker. Any thoughts on the Château sequence? The flashback to kid Picard and his mom?
Will: See, I liked the explanation for his accent — it tied nicely into a believable history, explained why the Château was abandoned (although when was it resettled?) and answered what was at least a surface-level question dating back to Patrick Stewart’s casting. The bit I didn’t like was the line in which Picard said the family estate had been abandoned for “generations” — far too close to a nod to Star Trek: Generations, the film in which Picard learns his brother and nephew were killed in a fire at the Château. Maybe that was unintentional and my ear is just on hyper alert after the garbage meta references to episode titles, but I doubt it.
So the big, central problem with this episode comes in the Picard and Guinan relationship. First, though, let me give the production credit for not trying to make Whoopi Goldberg work here. Thanks for sparing us the uncanny valley CGI or the painful in-world explanation. Again, good job there.
However, that’s where the kudos stop. Mark, how in the heck does this episode square with “Time’s Arrow,” the TNG two-parter in which Picard and Guinan meet in 1893? The only way I can make it work is that *this* is their first meeting and Guinan time travels back to the 19th century *after* this encounter. Otherwise, Picard should have said, “Hey, we met a long time ago. You know, with Mark Twain?”
Mark: Ah, but this Guinan is now existing in the Confederation timeline. General Picard never traveled back to San Francisco in this timeline, so he never met Guinan. Picard and the gang traveled back from that future, so they’re witnessing that past. There’s a ripple effect, even if their meeting in San Francisco predates the divergence by more than a hundred years. How could they travel back to a past that couldn’t have happened?
Will: You’re about to drop the Professor Hulk speech from “Endgame,” aren’t you? See, I don’t think your explanation works because they’ve gone to a time *before* the divergence into the Confederation timeline. I mean, I’ll take your explanation over mine and their lack of one at least.
Mark: Let’s do a thought experiment. Say General Picard, the evil man from the Confederation timeline, travels to 1893 San Francisco. Would he find Data’s head there? Would he meet Picard from the Federation timeline? Probably not. So why should we expect to see the effects of that future that didn’t happen?
Will: Mark, my head hurts. I need to lie down. Can we at least agree that Ito Aghayere did a fantastic job as a young Guinan?
Mark: Oh yes, on that I definitely agree. And she is not the serene Guinan that we know from TNG. Why should she be? She’s a powerful alien, living as an African American woman in the early 21st Century. She can see fascism coming back into vogue; she sees humanity destroying the Earth through climate change. Why shouldn’t she want to jump onto the next spaceship out of here?
Will: If there’s a more depressing time to live in than the world of 2022, it has to be the world of 2024, and, again, I’ll give this series due for going right after the environmental and political issues currently fucking this country (and the world). But, on the other hand, Guinan’s also seen the squalor and de jure racism of the late 19th century so *shruggie*.
Mark: The big reveal in this episode is when Picard meets The Watcher. It’s funny, I noticed Orla Brady was back in the opening credits, but I had completely forgotten about that by the time we got to her onscreen reveal as The Watcher.
Will: What’s your take here: Has Picard’s housekeeper been The Watcher all along, or is this one of those “I thought I’d take a pleasing shape for you” sort of deals?
Mark: If she did, why is she a human? In order to fit in on Earth? And since we’ve heard that she’s there to preserve the timeline by looking after a few key people, who is it in service of? Is it, perhaps, The Guardian of Forever?!! (last seen in season 3 of Discovery, centuries after Picard).
Will: That’d be a nice thing to tie it all together, wouldn’t it? It would be fun to see unifying elements between Discovery, Picard and Strange New Worlds.
Episode IV: The Search For Chris
Mark: Seven and Raffi spend the episode trying to find Rios. Rios spends the episode in ICE custody and not getting very far. We start with a scene on a municipal bus with a familiar face. Will, I have a headcanon about the Star Trek IV punk’s return.
Will: GO ON.
Mark: Just imagine his life from his perspective for a second. You’re in your 20s; you’re a bit of an asshole, but who isn’t at that age? You’re riding the bus one day, playing your music and some guy tells you to turn it off. You respond by turning it up, because you’re an asshole, sure, but then his friend, a guy in a bathrobe, reaches out, touches your neck, and you lose the next few hours of your life. You wake up with no idea what happened. Maybe all your money’s been taken; your boom box is probably gone. Maybe you find out that after this strange man assaulted you, everyone on the bus literally applauded. How can you face riding on the bus ever again? So, cut to more than 30 years later. You’ve put your life back together. You’ve cleaned up. Maybe your therapist has finally convinced you that it’s okay to ride the bus again. You find a vintage cassette boombox on eBay, get on the bus, and say to yourself, “Today, I’m finally going to take that ride.” Just imagine what must be going through this guy’s mind when the same scene starts repeating itself.
Will: Mark, you’ve taken something that made me roll my eyes and turned it into a deep look at the fragile state of one man’s existence. I’m in awe.
But in seriousness, I distinguish between references to canon (good!) and references to the mere existence of other Trek works (bad and dumb!). Mr. Bus Punk was…somewhere between the two?
The show has seen a marked increase in its budget and production values, but I thought the car chase (the second in the Trek franchise?) showed off how cheap this and, to be fair, a lot of other television is in comparison to film. Think about all of the tight shots of Seven and Raffi and how little context we saw in terms of the chaos that would naturally surround a car chase. If I had to guess, 80, 90 percent of this was shot on the backlot. Which is fine! But also, if you know you don’t have the budget or the time to pull off a big fancy car chase, either cut it down in the script or cut it out.
Mark: A part of me really wanted to see police cruisers piling up à la Blues Brothers, but it wasn’t meant to be, alas.
Will: Seven driving through a mall? Hell yeah. Although I guess in 2024, it’d be through one of those outdoor shopping places. Gross.
Mark: I hear so many good things about The Grove from literally every podcast.
Agnes Jurati’s Lonely Hearts Collective Band
Mark: The third throughline to this episode is Jurati and her uneasy alliance with The Borg Queen. Clearly, The Queen is manipulating her. Clearly, Jurati knows it and thinks she can win in a battle of wills.
Will: Maybe Jurati is going to come out on top? If not, it’s a real bad rerun from last season.
Mark: She’s going to be crucial to bringing the Borg into the Federation at the end of the season, mark my words. She’ll teach the queen about cooperation and companionship instead of assimilation.
Will: The mysterious future queen. Oh shit, what if that’s Jurati?
Mark: Fuck, he did just tell her about the Édith Piaf music, didn’t he?
Will: We stumbled into #content.
Mark: And I’ll point out, just because I pay attention to such things, Annie Wersching, who plays the Borg Queen, is not listed in the opening credits, even as a special guest star. Credits like this usually come down to contract negotiations, but with the amount of screen time she’s gotten in the last three episodes, I’m surprised that she’s not part of the main cast. That is, of course, unless her character isn’t long for this world.
Will: Let’s game this out. We know the Borg exist — albeit in the Delta Quadrant — at the time of First Contact, which is set in 2063. Is there anything that establishes them in 2024? What if this is an ouroboros, and Jurati basically creates the Borg?
Mark: In First Contact, merely alerting The Borg to Earth’s existence in 2063 is an existential threat that Worf had to put on a space suit for and say, “Assimilate this!” So, if Agnes joins the Borg in the D-Quad in 2024, it’s game over for humanity, because they will know everything she knows, including the location of Earth. But maybe the Green Space Thingy from “The Star Gazer” is a conduit between two timelines? Who knows?
Will: I’m convinced that the Future Queen is not the Crucified Queen — and I like Jurati as a better answer than my first guess (which was Picard’s mom and something that I feel really dumb for now.) I’m just gonna try to calm down and watch as this particular thing unfolds — it’s got more juice than a lot of other things going on presently.
Ex-Q’s Me?
Mark: The episode ends with a coda desperately in want of context. We see a young woman emerge from Jackson Roykirk Plaza, reading a Dixon Hill novel, while Q sits nearby and issues commands to her. He snaps his fingers, but nothing happens. His powers are still wonky. Will, you remember Jackson Roykirk, don’t you? The scientist who created the artificially intelligent NOMAD probe back in 2002 and sent it off into deep space in search of alien life?
Will: Ahhh, yes, scientist Jackson Roykirk from the “The Changeling;” what a wonderful episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. (P.S. Thanks for the assist, Google.) You mention the weird screen time/credits stuff, but what about John de Lancie? He’s had, what, maybe five minutes of screen time over four episodes?
Mark: The answer is that John de Lancie has a good agent and status as a beloved recurring
Will: Also — and maybe this is a spoiler, but sorry, I accidentally clicked on it — according to the subtitles in the episode (or at least what Memory Alpha says the subtitles say), the young woman is Renee Picard, so whatever that last scene is, it’s setting us up for some important stuff.
Mark: I’m guessing she’s the one The Watcher is keeping an eye on in this time period.
Will: That makes a shitton of sense given that Guinan didn’t care until Picard broke down and gave her his name…which was a moment that didn’t seem to fit right unless there’s the possibility of another important Picard at this time and place.
Mark: Which demands the question: Did the Watcher manage to disable Q’s powers? He’s certainly someone who’s there to mess with the timeline of some key people.
Will: The Watcher is in some way affiliated with the El-Aurians — or at least the Watcher is affiliated with Guinan. If the Watcher is somehow…a boss El-Aurian?…that would explain the contempt Guinan and Q seem to have for each other in “Q Who” because Q would only fear/hate someone more powerful than himself. Also, is Picard going to explain why the Borg destroyed the El-Aurian homeworld?
Mark: That would be some galaxy brain reach for this show.
Make It So On and So Forth
- With Lea Thompson directing, Jurati’s line, “Milk. Chocolate. Hot.” is almost certainly a reference to this classic moment from Back To The Future George McFly – Get Me a Milk, Chocolate.
- Rios being unclear about the whole Picard-being-an-android-now-thing is such a mood.
- Another callback to DS9’s “Past Tense:” Chris Brynner, the tech mogul who rescues Dax is mentioned in the newspaper headline “Brynner Fights Unionization.” So he’s Jeff Bezos. Or Elon Musk. Or any number of people, take your pick.
- Did we figure out what happened to Rios’ combadge?
Mark Turetsky
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
