Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 2x04 - "Watcher"

It’s literally a red shirt with a zipper…

 

Maybe they can't do it until after they hit puberty.

Well, ENT S4 "Kishara" canonizes the fact that Vulcans and Romulans are the same species 1700 years before the 21st century, (and both are related to the Mintakans), and we see that Loris (a Romulan) is a Supervisor Agent for a race watching Earthlings...

 

I reckon you are over thinking it. I don't think it needed an explanation and it's just one of those funny things like the French Highlander and his Scottish Egyptian friend.

But honestly having lived in England and Ireland my whole life I have never met a non native English speaker who sounds like Picard. Most and especially the French speak English with their own accent or a mishmash. The only exceptions I met are young Scandinavians who seem to speak with an American accent (I assume cause it's a cool trend there)

 

Don't make the mistake the Encyclopedia made, "a century ago" does not mean "exactly 100 years ago". Anywhere from 90 to 110 years would fit that description.

 

I’m enjoying this season, yet at the same time I’m a little perplexed by it. It’ll be hard to truly judge until we’ve seen all ten episodes, but at the moment I’m not quite sure why the writers are telling this story. Although enjoyable in itself, just about everything feels derivative. So much so it’s almost felt like a Trek greatest hits, combining various storylines and themes we’ve seen many times before, and feeling like a mashup of First Contact, the Mirror Universe, Yesterday’s Enterprise, All Good Things, Past Tense and all the franchise’s Earth time travel episodes. It’s like everything has been thrown in a blender. At the moment I’m struggling to think of a single element that feels even halfway original and new.

This episode is hard to rate as it felt like a transition piece. Much of it worked fine, although some elements felt like filler—not least the Seven/Raffi chase scene…that wasn’t even a chase, just Seven driving recklessly for no real at all other than “it looks cool”. I’m not even sure what the purpose of that was and it wasn’t that well executed. The directing wasn’t much to write home about. The Rios stuff didn’t quite work for me this week and the message seemed to be a disappointingly one-dimensional “police are racist”. I know Trek is capable of much better, more nuanced and insightful sociopolitical commentary (thinking of Past Tense).

The Guinan stuff was intriguing although ultimately left me a little cold. I can understand the recast, as it would have cost a bomb to de-age Whoopi for multiple scenes. But the portrayal felt very off and this rarely felt like Guinan (mind you, even Whoopi’s performance in episode one didn’t really feel like Guinan). I’m not entirely sure why she seems so broken by life here. Chronologically, we last saw her in the 19th century where social injustices and discrimination were surely far worse. For all we have a long way to go, enormous social strides have been made the past hundred years. Guinan’s cynicism here just didn’t ring true for me. In some ways it almost felt like a character assassination, although I’m reserving judgement until I see where they go with this.

That’s about it, really. The more I think about it the more my impressions feel mixed. The Jurati and Borg Queen scenes didn’t really go anywhere and I’d prefer a less is more approach with the Borg Queen, as I wouldn’t want her to descend into the pantomime villain campery of Voyager. The Laris reveal didn’t do very much for me, but we’ll see where it goes. The closing scene with Q was a bit of a head scratcher—who was he talking to, and why did the woman with the Tracy Torme book feature so prominently? John de Lancie has barely been featured thus far but he has been phenomenal in every single scene, exuding a tremendous sense of menace and screen presence.

P.S. Regarding Guinan not recognising Picard. On the one hand, I get it. However, unless I’m mistaken, the event that triggered the timeline change hasnt happened quite yet in the 2024 timeline, so I would have thought that until it did, Guinan would recognise Picard…until the triggering event, then she wouldn’t recognise him. “I hate temporal mechanics.”

 

Two thoughts...not sure if they were addressed earlier in this massive thread.

Seven probably learned to drive from Tom Paris, who had a thing for antique cars.

The Queen is on a ship with a massive hologrid that she could potentially use to her benefit.

 

Is it possible that Picard is of Jewish ancestory? Could this have been the reason that the Picard family fled Nazi occupation? I know that a lot of other French citizens carried on with their lives relatively normally under Nazi occupation, though there was of course the underground French resistance.

 

Sometimes there is no nuance. Sometimes theres just racist cops

 

I think the idea is, she had been seeing things improve steadily from the 19th century, then in the last 50 years or so, things have stalled out. I don't know if that's actually true, but it's what we are supposed to think in the context of the show.

 

When they claim the character is French and very proud of his French heritage; and has a fully French name and surname...yes.

 

ICE is a Federal Department.

You need a college Degree and to pass a psyche test to sign up.

 

Were all them boys with the tiki torches not college boys. Racists can pass psyche tests too.

 

Sure, and I think that is a sensible interpretation. I was mainly commenting the people being glad that 'and explanation' for the accent was provided.

 

What that has to do with being to able to learn to pronounce English?

 

Why does that not make them racist? I think if you sign up for a job where you're hunting down immigrants to kick them out, you're a fucking psycho.

 

And here we go again

 

If any of those boys were still in college, they would have been expelled days later.

 

I was comparing a federal office to a local sheriffs department.

One has a series of tests to weed out the worst psychos, and the other is bunch of cousin fuckers hiring cousins to fuck.

 

I like the mods here too much to go back into this again.

 

I may disagree with you on stuff, but we can agree on that.