We at The Measure of an Episode podcast are thrilled to announce that this episode of Picard is the first-ever Star Trek-Back to the Future crossover episode in history. Time travel? ✅ Science fiction? ✅ Lea Thompson? ✅ Delorian? ✅ (We’re positive we saw one somewhere during the episode.) Unbeknownst to these podcasters, Lea Thompson is a director and did a pretty darn good job on this one. The script, on the other hand…
Synopsis of Picard “Watcher”
With time running out to save the future, Picard takes matters into his own hands and seeks out an old friend for help. Meanwhile, Rios ends up on the wrong side of the law and Jurati makes a deal with the Borg Queen.
What jumped out as interesting and Star Trekian about this episode was the discovery of Agnes subconsciously selecting objects containing the number 15. This concept was reminiscent of Data, in the TNG episode “Cause and Effect”, encountering the number 2 a conspicuous amount of times.
The conceit of that entire sequence felt familiar enough without being fan service. But to throw a little shade, Picard’s realization that Agnes was doing this was played too heavily. The music swells unnecessarily and the acting swells more unnecessarily. It didn’t have to be this big moment, just an acknowledgement.
One of the more disappointing aspects of season 2 so far is the cartoonish, politically charged portrayal of the ICE officers. There was zero dimension to the scenario. They were more Skeletor’s minions than plausible government officers, down to the antagonist, the racist ICE officer that beats up Rios on the bus.
A new Guinan is introduced and is separated from the TNG lineage because of the alternate Q timeline. She laments to Picard how jaded she’s become from humans’ apathetic, yet willing destruction of their planet. This plays nicely with this episode’s theme of lecturing the audience about climate change. It’s hard to digest this perspective since, in spite of how crappy we might think our modern world is, pick any other period in history and it was indubitably worse.
Guinan was likely around in the 1800s as she was in the prime timeline, so she would have seen how much worse humans had it then. That being said, these podcasters are still excited about her playing a bigger role later in the season.
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Picard airs on Paramount+ in the United States, and on CTV Sci-Fi Channel and Crave in Canada. Outside of North America, the series is available on Amazon Prime Video.
