Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 2×04: Watcher

Well, I guess I should’ve saved my comments about ICE being a bunch of fascists for this week, because man, without giving the assholes too much screen-time, they manage to very clearly convey La Migra as a bunch of white supremacist assholes who get off on violence to brown people (The agent who calls Rios “Juan” is a nice touch) and disappearing them to “sanctuary zones”, pronounced to rhyme with “death camps”. “Sanctuary zones” are a reference to a Deep Space Nine episode, where a temporally-displaced Sisko has to take the place of a twenty-first century civil rights icon, but that episode, being made in the ’90s, was far more coy, trying to give the idea of polite society trying to warehouse the poor safely out of sight. In very few words, Picard makes it much more clear that what we’re talking about here are death camps, where the designated okay-to-brutalize classes are sent to “disappear”. Hopefully through neglect, but I won’t be surprised if a later episode shows techbros paying off the ICE agents for a chance to get their Most Dangerous Game on.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on here. If Discovery‘s latest season is about grief, I think Picard‘s might be about anxiety. Are the Star Trek producers talking directly to my therapist now?

So, the rest of our plot. Like the last few episodes of Discovery, we’ve got a fuckton of stuff going on, but the plot doesn’t feel crowded. Leah and I watched the first part of Doctor Who: Flux this week, and man, what a contrast. Flux is crowded with plot, packed tight with just an absolute ton of shit happening and nothing having room to breathe and transitions that leave you unsure whether anything connects. Picard, on the other hand, squeezes in just as many plot threads, but keeps them all coherent. We get an alternative origin story for Picard’s accent, with Jean-Luc and Agnes retreating to the now-abandoned chateau (Did they actually explain until now that Picard had guided the crash to be at his vineyard? It felt right that this is what happened; I remember him giving Rios coordinates to aim for while they were crashing; but I don’t recall them ever actually saying that was what they were doing) and getting a little backstory about how the Picard family had fled to England during the war, only returning to the estate generations later. And a flashback of Little Boy Picard being comforted by his mother after some kind of unspecified anxiety attack. The ultimate reveal of whatever it is that Picard has been scared of since childhood is going to be disappointing, isn’t it?

(Also, I guess it makes sense that the chateau of 2024 looks like a run-down version of the chateau of 2400, but the chateau of 2367 looked very different. When the Picard family returned there in the 22nd century, they’d probably restore the place based on their budget and 22nd century aesthetics, but after the fire, Jean-Luc might have chosen to restore the original design rather than live in the place as it had been when Rene and Robert lived there. Except that it also looks the same in the flashbacks to Jean-Luc’s youth. Eh. Whatever.)

Jurati once again manipulates the Borg Queen, offering her companionship in return for fixing the transporter, only to renege afterward, though one feels very strongly that she is coming due for a comeuppance here. And, y’know, she plugged the Borg Queen into La Sirena’s systems for a bit so that’s probably bad. But the queen plays on Agnes’s anxiety, her loneliness and her inability to form secure attachments, and it’s clearly working, and at least this didn’t make me cry. I feel crying will come at some point with the way this is going.

Young Guinan is an interesting character. We’ve never seen a bitter, disillusioned Guinan before. I assume many people are angry that the Guinan of 1893 was played by the Whoopi Goldberg of 1992, but the Guinan of 2024 was not played by the Whoopi Goldberg of 2022. It’s fine, folks. I disagree that the actress they cast looks unambiguously younger than ’90s Whoopi. She does look younger-ish, but it’s not so patent that you can’t attribute it to clean living and cosmetics. Besides, they took all the trouble of having Guinan establish in dialogue that she could control her aging process. The Guinan of 1893 was less responsible and more of a gadfly; it’s interesting to see her here in a period of transition, when she’s living through the suffering that will make her future self what she is. And good on her for calling out how much easier it is to be patient for humanity to change when you’re an old white man than a young black woman. Also good on her for telling off the billionaires who could fix the world if it weren’t for the fact that it would exhaust their resources to the point that they would still have more money than you or I would make in a dozen lifetimes.

Picard does not mention what is going to happen to her homeworld and her people. Dick.

Also, I notice that this Guinan does not know Picard at all, despite them having met in 1893. This makes perfect sense, as the Picard of 2369 was now the genocidal captain of the CSS World Razer, so the events of “Time’s Arrow” never took place, but it’s interesting that Picard himself does not comment on this. He’s been pretty savvy about changes to the timeline so far, so it’s not really a logical problem that he just accepts and rolls with it, but it feels like a misstep for the character to not at least betray a little pain at the realization that Q’s meddling has changed this too. This is at least partially confirmed by the fact that Picard induces time-sickness in Guinan by repeating her future-words to her, something which he says happens when the timeline is altered.

Now, if you’re about to tell me that “Time travel doesn’t work that way!”, I should remind you first that we absolutely do not have any comparable situations: the only cases I can remember where someone traveled back from an alternative-present to before the point of divergence in order to set things right are “The City on the Edge of Forever” (TOS), “Past Tense” (DS9), and “Shockwave” (ENT), only the last of which includes evidence of something done by a time traveler from a now-defunct timeline, and it’s specifically time war technology.

And I should remind you second to not make me tap the sign again.

I do find myself wondering why the Borg Queen’s directions led him not to “The Watcher”, but to Guinan, given that she’s not the watcher herself, but just someone who knows how to find them. But never mind that; inexplicably, the watcher looks exactly like Picard’s housekeeper, only human. It wouldn’t make sense for her to actually be Laris; Romulans live longer than humans, but not as long as Vulcans, and 200 is elderly for a Vulcan. A temporally-displaced Laris during her previous career as a spy is possible, I guess, though I’m not aware of the Romulans having time travel of their own, particularly if the Confederation didn’t manage to snag it while conquering them.

And I don’t think that’s likely anyway, because Guinan describes the watcher as a “Supervisor”. Did not see that coming. If you asked me to rank Star Trek continuity references that they might incorporate into the new series, a Supervisor isn’t even on the list. Because holy shit, are they really referencing Gary Seven? Yeah, a one-off character from a failed backdoor pilot that ran in an episode of TOS. The premise aligns, the name aligns. The teleportation portal falls within the range of a modern-Trek-era-visual-retool. The body possession doesn’t align, but whatever. Yeah, the premise of Assignment: Earth was that a powerful and mysterious alien race abducted prehistoric humans, trained their descendants in the use of advanced technology, and returned them to Earth at various points in history to protect certain key events. The Supervisors themselves didn’t seem to have access to time travel, but Gary Seven did have knowledge of the future, at least enough to identify where the culture that Kirk and company came from. Who are they? Why are they? What’s their deal? Will we find out? Why does the Supervisor look like Picard’s housekeeper? Is it just because Orla Bradley is a darn fine actress and we are lucky to get more of her? Also, fun fact, “Orla” is my cat’s name. Complete coincidence; we didn’t name her. Will she tell Picard to go fuck himself?

But speaking of “Time Travel Does Not Work Like That,” we possibly see Q working his machinations by trying to induce anxiety in a random woman who seems to be associated with a space project. The details will come soon, I assume, but once again we have themes of anxiety. And the surprise reveal that Q can’t simply snap her into a panic attack. We’ve already hinted that something is going seriously wrong with Q, so is he losing his powers? Or, now that we know that the Supervisors are involved, perhaps she is somehow Protected. That would give us a piece of information about the scale on which the Supervisors’ mysterious benefactors operate. Perhaps this is down to some conflict between them and the Q? But the oddity: if this is indeed supposed to be Q altering the timeline, and he appears as his older self, that would indicate that from Q’s perspective, this is taking place after he meets with Picard in 2400. This is certainly odd; somehow he shifts Picard and company into an altered timeline, but does so before making the change to the timeline? I mean, he’s literally omnipotent, so okay, but how does this even work? It would make sense if Q’s interactions with Picard take place out-of-order: we see him here trying to alter the timeline, things start to go badly for him, and he skips forward to be angry at Picard about his powers going wrong. But then why alter his appearance? And, of course, Q doesn’t need to go back in time personally and intervene in a specific way to change the timeline; he can just declare a new timeline by fiat. I think. Not actually sure what the limits of his reality-altering powers are. So it seems that Q preserves Picard and company from the year 2400, then magically alters the timeline, then ages himself up, then goes back in time to give Renee (Yeah, that’s her name, per the credits) a panic attack, but that doesn’t work, so his plan has already failed, except that I assume he has a backup. Maybe I’ve got this the wrong way ’round. Maybe he did change the timeline by fiat, but that somehow weakened him, and now he’s got to go back and make the necessary supporting change to the past “by hand” in order to make it “stick”? There’s something similar in a Doctor Who novel where a race of aliens generate power by “borrowing” against future events, but have to pay that power back if the future events don’t play out the way they predicted (Their goal is to make the universe entirely predictable, and thus oppose the Doctor, who, as an agent of chaos, sows too much unpredictability until they can’t pay their power debt). Perhaps Q “borrowed” too much power to alter the timeline and won’t get it back unless he can make the Confederation timeline occur “naturally”. As support for this, consider that the other times we’ve seen alternate timelines result from Q’s interventions, he didn’t just snap Picard into another timeline: he sent Picard back in time and and manipulated him into doing the thing which altered history.

I hate temporal mechanics.

This leaves us with the thing which I think takes up the biggest part of the episode. I’m not actually sure it gets the most screen-time, and it’s not necessarily the most important to the plot, but it feels the biggest, and that’s Raffi and Seven pursuing Rios. And it is wonderful. It is just so full of wonderful moments. Like, the very least of these is the encounter with a much older Kirk Thatcher (A man whose name even sounds like some kind of really clever 1980s-Star-Trek joke), playing the punk from Star Trek IV, and listening to a sequel to the ’80s punk classic “I Hate You” too loud on the bus. And Seven tells him to turn it down, and with age and grace…. He does, thoroughly chastened. “I just really like the song is all,” he says.

Last season, I felt the relationship between Seven and Raffi came out of nowhere. They’ve really sold it, though. There’s some tension, sure; Raffi wants more commitment than Seven is ready for. But this is such a functional relationship, compared to the tumult we usually get. There’s one exchange on the bus where Raffi is dysregulating, because she’s messed up over Elnor and anxious over Rios and worrying about the responsibility of fixing the timeline, and Seven just quietly holds her hand. Seven isn’t great at relationships; her emotional development was stunted by the Borg; she struggled for years to integrate herself with a human crew, and faced tremendous bigotry when she entered Alpha Quadrant civilization. And you would expect that she’s the one fucking up the relationship by her unwillingness to commit and settle down and open up. You’d expect Seven to be avoidant, scared of intimacy. But she has this amazingly secure bond with Raffi. She coregulates. Raffi’s the one having a hard time here; Seven stays calm, diffuses tension, comforts her partner. And Raffi lets herself be comforted. Seven is this badass space-ninja, yet it’s Raffi who keeps getting worked up and wants to start fights. Raffi rubs against the traditional image of the cool, collected Starfleet captain. And that’s in keeping with what we saw of her last season, that she’s not well-regulated, that she’s prone to paranoia, and might have some emotional issues that she is working on. She is in this regard everything Janeway was not allowed to be: Raffi can be vulnerable because the showmakers have faith that the audience will still accept her even if she’s fallible, a courtesy never granted in the ’90s. And every time Jeri Ryan is called on to do Acting, I get a little angrier at Berman-Era trek for treating her like eye candy rather than fully appreciating her acting chops.

Spoiler: in the preview for episode 6, which dropped while I was writing this, Raffi basically brags that her and Seven are the OTP for this show and no one finds the Jurati-Rios thing especially interesting. And she’s right. I’m so fucking sick of genre fiction’s obsession with dysfunction. I get enough dysfunction and anxiety and avoidance and codependence and conflict in my home life. Give me secure attachment and loving families and healthy coregulation and kishōtenketsu.

(Also, I like Rios and all, but he’s an entirely reactive character. I don’t once think we’ve seen him present an agenda or goal of his own. Seven wants to protect the former Neutral Zone with the Fenris rangers. Raffi wanted to find her kid and prove the conspiracy. Jurati wanted to kill Maddox and salve her massive insecurities. Picard wanted to save Soji, then restore the timeline. Rios? Rios does what he’s told or responds to what’s happening to him. Even as captain of the Stargazer, he lets Picard set the agenda, and the only orders he ever gives are about how to respond to things. Even the best things he does are purely reactive, like going back to the clinic to help the doctor.)

I love these two. I want the Raffi and Seven Buddy Space Cop series. Do not kill either of them off, Picard.

Four weeks and Picard remains un-told-to-fuck-himself. Come on, people.