I'm doing reviewing Picard in pairs of episodes partly to manage the jumping about. Having said that, these two episodes represent the show settling down to a more stable premise than the first two. In short, Picard and chums escape the fascist Confederation and with the help of the Borg Queen, they time travel to 2024 to fix the timeline. The rest of episode 3 and all of episode 4 settle on this as the central premise of the plot (for the time being). Sadly, in the process, everybody's favourite Romulan-space-elf Elnor dies. However, if the rag-tag crew can fix the timeline...maybe, maybe Elnor will be alive. I won't recap the plots in detail. Cora has two lengthy reviews that cover all the relevant plot details here and here.

2024 is a more interesting dystopian portrait than the Confederation. It annoyed me that the Confederation was just a more dour version of the Mirror universe. It was just too obviously bad in a "are we the baddies?" way. The next two episodes make that choice a bit clearer. 2024 is where the show presents the more subtle form of fascism that a liberal society might easily slide into. The almost-now date is intentional, echoic not just the immediacy but Star Trek lore. The incipient fascism is just straightforwardly ICE brutally rounding up people suspected of being illegal immigrants, while the cities are impacted by climate change, wildfires and homelessness. It's not a subtle vision of the future mainly because it's barely the future. The only obvious missing element is a pandemic.

Plot-wise, the story is mainly spinning its wheels (literally at times) with characters wandering about and not achieving much. Picard meets a younger Guinan (played by Ito Aghayere) who doesn't recognise him because the time stream is now like Excel trying to cope with a circular reference [Picard met Guinan in the 19th century in TNG, but that meeting didn't happen because the Federation won't come to exist and hence Picard won't travel back to meet Guinan that first time]...if that makes you feel a bit queasy then that's also how Guinan feels when the time-stream shenanigans catch up with her.

It's another plot delay though. Guinan isn't who Picard needs to meet but she does set him up to meet the mysterious Watcher. Meanwhile, Raffi and Seven are busy trying to free Rios from ICE and Agnes is having a battle of wits and wills with the Borg Queen. Stuff happens but really the episodes are about establishing stakes and setting. The events that keep the characters moving primarily create narrative space for establishing the dystopian vibe and cramming in Trek easter eggs.

Where the show is strongest is in simply asserting that things currently are bad and will remain bad. The timing makes the point stronger: this is post-Trump America but the dystopic element that looks Trumpian has not gone away (as indeed it hasn't). Of course, we still don't know what has gone wrong with the timeline and it is notable that the precipitating event has yet to happen.

We will hopefully find out where things have gone wrong next week...