Guess we’ll find out who watches the watcher. Spoilers.
Slightly less compelling episode for me. Still moving the plot along, but there wasn’t anything that incredible in the different scenes. The only story that seemed to be told from start to finish this episode was the 21st century Guinan sequence, which was a bit more fan service than really moving the plot forward. It felt like there was some kind of inciting incident that was missing – what was it that had made her choose to pack up and leave at that exact time?
The rest is mainly moving things forward, without anything really special. The Queen and Jurati fence a little more. Rios sees how horrible immigration detention is and gets moved forward. Picard meets the Watcher at long last (which at least is nice and creepy). And Q turns up briefly with some kind of click impotence.
The main thing losing marks for this episode is Seven and Raffi. Yeah, Raffi has been through some stuff. But they are both behaving in a ‘bull in a china shop’ way that is a little out of character. Only a little, to be honest, but it would be nice to see a bit more subtlety and intelligence going on, rather than getting into what was presumably a very expensive car chase.
Quick hits:
= Yep, they’re parked at Chateau Picard. That makes no sense at all – France is 9,000km from LA, if they were going that fast they would not have crashed like that.
– The Picard as a child stuff continues to not fill me with hope. I am not a fan of long buried traumas for someone who we have seen in so many stories (around 200) before now.
– Ah, there’s the ticking clock. Was wondering when it would turn up.
– Ah, nice Star Trek IV reference with the punk music. Played by Kirk Thatcher again.
– Maybe let’s not leave the person the Borg Queen is playing mind games with alone with the Borg Queen?
– Oh what a total surprise, it’s Guinan. Shocked, shocked I say.
– It’s pretty worrying when the terrible future dystopia can be achieved with a more or less documentary approach in terms of US immigration enforcement.
– Why is Picard not mentioning San Francisco to Guinan?
– It’s pretty good casting with the young Guinan.
– I’m guessing that a lot of people are frothing at the mouth about the politics of this season. I mean, they’re the same as always. They’re just being applied to the real world conditions now.
– Rios enjoyed the old ‘tell them the truth’ trick.
– Ooh, sanctuary districts, link in to DS9’s trip to the past. September 2024 for that one, I think.
– That’ll be an interesting police report with the disappearing subjects.
– Sounds like a Marvel crossover with the watchers.
– Yay, Chris Brynner reference. More DS9 callbacks.
847 down.