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| Picard reunites with an old friend (Ito Aghayere). |
Original Air Date: Mar. 24, 2022. Teleplay by: Juliana James, Jane Maggs. Story by: Travis Fickett, Juliana James. Directed by: Lea Thompson.
THE PLOT:
Dr. Jurati's connection with the Borg Queen was a success. She got coordinates to help Picard find the mysterious "Watcher," and she even has a date: the 15th, a mere three days from now.
With no way to contact the others, Picard beams directly to those coordinates. To his joy, this leads him directly to Guinan's bar! But the young Guinan (Ito Aghayere) is packing her things, having given up on humanity. She doesn't know who Picard is (for some reason), and he has to convince her that he can be trusted while at the same time trying to persuade her not to turn her back on Earth.
Meanwhile, Rios has been confined by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is set to be deported. This leaves Seven and Raffi racing to rescue him - which somehow leads to them stealing a police car!
CHARACTERS:
Picard: "I know you're done with listening, but you are not done with humanity. Change always comes later than we think it should." Picard's idealism shines through in his interactions with the embittered young Guinan. He doesn't deny the legitimacy of her disappointment in humanity, but he pushes her to realize what she already knows: Better is possible, and it will eventually come. Patrick Stewart is particularly good here, helping these scenes to work better than much of the surrounding material.
Dr. Jurati: More than the rest of the crew, she recognizes that Picard - "the great man" - is just human, despite his synthetic body. At the dilapidated Chateau Picard, she recognizes that he's distracted and prods him back to the present. Despite (in part because of) her intelligence, she remains vulnerable. She tries to avoid engaging with the Borg Queen, but every complication brings her back - and her willingness to engage in verbal sparring seems all too likely to lead her into serious trouble.
Raffi/Seven: When Raffi is being overly hostile and aggressive to a desk officer at the police station, Seven pulls her back and smooths things out as best she can. Seven continues trying to be the Voice of Reason, right to the point at which they find themselves stealing a police car - at which point she starts driving with the care and precision of a teenager playing Grand Theft Auto. Wouldn't it have fit the two characters' emotional states better had Raffi been the driver, with Seven begging for her to slow down?
Capt. Rios: Santiago Cabrera, usually one of the cast standouts, gets lumbered with the weakest thread of a pretty weak episode. Rios ends up confined in the cleanest, least crowded immigration detention facility in history. When questioned by an ICE officer, he decides to tell the man the full truth, knowing that there's no chance that he'll be believed. He is outraged that Teresa Ramirez (Sol Rodriguez) was detained, proclaiming that where he came from, she would be considered a hero.
Guinan: I'm torn with regards to Ito Aghayere's Guinan. In terms of baseline acting of the role as written, she is quite good, infusing her lines with emotion and presence. If this was a new character, I would be singing her praises without hesitation. There's only one problem: There isn't a single second in which I believe that I'm watching Guinan. She's simply too brittle and human. I'm assuming that she'll appear again. I hope that when she does, she's able to capture a bit of the otherworldly quality that Whoopi Goldberg pulled off so well.
Borg Queen: She talks about her brief connection with Jurati as if discussing a one-night stand. When Picard leaves Jurati to hold the ship, it's an important task that only she can do; but the Queen wields this task as a weapon, sneering that Jurati has been left behind again. Then she tries to position herself as an admirer, telling her how impressed she is not only with her mind but with her ability to be "more cruel than (she) could have predicted." The Queen remains in a position of weakness, but she exploits every chance to gain even a little power. Annie Wersching makes the most of every line and glance, and her scenes are easily the best of the episode.
THOUGHTS:
This was the entertainment equivalent of whiplash, as Picard jerked from my favorite episode of this season to my least favorite of the series thus far.
As an episode, Watcher seems to exist purely to get the characters into position to do something in the next installment. Cutting between four different character strands, which in this episode only directly connect a couple of times, it also ends up being as choppy as it is transitional.
There really isn't much unifying these threads. A better script, tasked with the transitional issue, might have tried for some thematic focus. Take either Picard's urgings to Guinan that change is possible, or the longing for connection that keeps drawing Jurati back to the Borg Queen, and infuse the other threads with that. If there had been the sense of a single theme that ran through all the character interactions, then it might have worked.
But that doesn't happen. Instead, we just get a collection of scenes. The Picard scenes are good. The Jurati scenes are clever and suspenseful. The Seven scenes feel like they were pulled out of a bad '90s action/comedy. Worst are the Rios scenes, which attempt political commentary on the topic of immigration enforcement.
For the record, I have no issue with Star Trek tackling divisive issues head-on. TOS did so with racial unrest; DS9 did so with homelessness; and I found both episodes to be effective. I do take issue, however, with the reduction of the complex and messy into the simplistic and sanitized. There seems to be only one other detainee in the entire center with Rios. There's also only one guard, who is portrayed as a sadist - but whose abuse never threatens to be anything to actually disturb home viewers. And no, nothing here is as bad as TNG's clunkiest efforts (I refer you to The Outcast or Force of Nature)... but I'd hope for the writers to aim a little higher than that.
OVERALL:
Despite some strong scenes featuring Picard and Jurati, Watcher ends up being my least favorite episode so far. Not just of the season, but of the series. Threads cut in and out of each other abruptly, creating a sense of choppiness, and there is no sense of connection. It doesn't help that two of the four threads are pretty bad to start with.
It does end with a pair of interesting reveals, though, which at least leaves me with hope that the next episode will go back to engaging me.
Overall Rating: 3/10. And only that high because of the Picard/Guinan and Jurati/Borg Queen scenes. Take those away, and I'm not sure the rest would even merit a "2."
Previous Episode: Assimilation
Next Episode: Fly Me to the Moon
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