Who watches the Watcher?

Watcher brings us the second part of Star Trek Picard Season 2’s two-part homage to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (both episodes directed, appropriately enough, by Back To The Future star Lea Thompson), a homage so on-point we even get Kirk Thatcher’s punk making a cameo. Elsewhere, though, we’re slowing down a little for a lot of exposition. All hands brace for impact; Season 2 is finally getting to the point. Sort of.

With Rios in ICE custody and lost in the indifferent bureaucracy, Seven and Raffi have their hands full trying to track him down, so it’s left to Picard himself to beam into Los Angeles and head for nearest dive bar where he encounters a familiar face, except the face isn’t that familiar. In searching for a Watcher, Picard has instead found a listener: Guinan (Ito Aghayere). There’s no in-universe explanation of why Guinan looks different here, although her not knowing Picard is less of a stretch: no Starfleet, no Time’s Arrow. Anyway, it turns out Guinan has had enough of Earth and is packing up to leave and Picard has to not only convince her of his bona fides (she does sense something’s going awry with time) but also to help him track down the Watcher.

We know El-Aurians are long-lived and we know what Guinan looked like back in 1893, so unless Q’s changes somehow rippled back in time – or Guinan herself is time-hopping and this is earlier in her personal timeline than 1893 – the change of actress doesn’t make much sense continuity-wise. I guess it was too expensive to de-age Whoopi Goldberg for every scene and while it’s not a deal-breaker, it’s just annoying sloppiness on behalf of the showrunners (whose after-the-event rationalisation of alternate realities doesn’t stack up, again thanks to Time’s Arrow).

Thankfully Jurati manages to trick the Borg Queen into fixing the transporter so when Picard is transported there’s no repeat of Rios’ crash landing. Nobody wants a broken hip subplot for Picard, although it is notable that the series writes its way around its elderly star by giving the lion’s share of the action to Raffi and Seven while Picard picks up the expository exploration.

Speaking of Rafi and Seven, their ill-matched buddy comedy schtick may be fun, but it also underlines just how little romantic chemistry the characters have. It doesn’t help that their dialogue is peppered with Kurtzman-era Trek’s particular brand of moralising. Eschewing the symbolic approach of its forebears, Picard prefers obviousness over allegory but here it’s particularly crass, ticking off the various socio-economic talking points of America – and western society’s – ongoing and accelerating decline. After an action-packed (and transporter-assisted) jailbreak, Picard is led by Guinan to an encounter with a mysterious “Supervisor” – the Watcher they’ve been seeking and lo and behold its…not Llaris, as Picard’s ongoing need to find things for its pre-contracted actors to do in a series that still feels like it’s making it up as it goes along. Want more evidence they’re chucking things at the screen to see what sticks? How about a café-based Q’s unresponsive snap that far from changing reality, fails to even attract a waitress. I’m sure that’ll be hugely significant in the episodes to come. Right?