Picard: Watcher (Paramount Plus)

 I feared a CGI Guinan would appear eerily in this episode, but there is a young actress instead.  She's young and angry and has a very disillusioned view of 21st century humanity.

 She doesn't know Picard, doesn't trust him, and is closing up shop before the big time anomaly event can occur.

Seven and Rafi try to track down Rios who has been arrested by ICE and is on a bus to...somewhere.

Their sequence is all about cops and robbers, and since they've stolen a police car, they're both.

Poor Agnes remains on the La Sirena with the dangling Borg Queen.  The Queen finds Agnes fascinating and keeps picking at her.  Burati has such a baby face, but we know she's capable of cold blooded murder, so I'm not worried about her.

The episodes continue to combine thoughtful science fiction with roaring action sequences, and excellent personal moments.

The Tomorrow War (Amazon Prime)

 

I'm a huge fan of science fiction/action/adventure movies.  The Tomorrow War has Chris Pratt's Dan Forester joining a large group of untrained draftees in a time jump to the future.

In 30 years, earth is overcome by White Spikes, screeching, tentacled, loping devourers.  A group of soldiers comes back from the future and says they need help fighting these creatures or humanity will disappear.  All nations agree to a draft, and thousands are sent from all over the world each week.  Few return.

Dan Forester's group doesn't stand a chance as some glitch has them mostly falling from tall building height to the ground. The lucky few land in a rooftop swimming pool.  Pratt takes charge as he answers a com message. 

His daughter, grown up, is in charge of the operation. He follows her orders to try to retrieve lab personnel and their work.  Succeeding only in getting the lab test tubes and hard drives, the staff is dead--Forester works with his daughter to try to find a toxin that will kill the creatures before they wipe out humanity.

I thought the film was action packed.  I liked Forester's relationship with his daughter as a child and adult as a backbone of the story.   

All those ordinary people just tossed into the conflict with no training, yikes.  And Forester, a veteran, took as good care of them as he was able.

Good stuff.

Picard Season 2 Ep 1 Stargazer (Paramount Plus)

 

While I loved season one of Picard, this first episode seemed a bit meandering.  On the plus side, all of the great characters new and old from season one are here.

On the negative side, Q.  I knew he was in the season, but have never liked the character.  According to the previews, he feels Picard owes some sort of penance.   At least he came in at the very end of the episode.

I love the Borg, though, so seeing their newly designed ship was pretty cool.  Awesome armor for the Queen as well. At some point she and Seven of Nine will no doubt go Circuit to Circuit, with Seven triumphing (I hope).

More air time for Guinan would be great too.

The Stargazer was a particularly beautiful ship.