You know its saddening when the next button disappears from an episode of a show.
[9.2/10] Expand your mind. Broaden your horizons. Open yourself up to the infinite possibilities of this dangerous but miraculous universe. Imagine the world and its intricacies beyond your limited view of them. Challenge yourself to consider causes and effects beyond what you know and understand. Accept the strange and unknown. And do it all with the knowledge and support of those whom you’ve come to depend on.
Regardless of its strengths as a story and its status as a capstone to a superlative series, “All Good Things...” soars in how it is a vindication of the franchise’s essential ethos. To face an unfathomable problem, embrace lateral thinking, prove humanity worthy of continued indulgence, and rely on a team you trust and believe in to accomplish it all, is the lodestone of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Nothing else would be the right choice to take them home.
It’s worth acknowledging the impressive needle writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga (and presumably the rest of the creative team) thread here. “All Good Things...” is a series finale, but not The End:tm:. A leap to the big screen lay around the corner, and two other Star Trek shows would play in this corner of the sandbox. So there’s natural limits to how much can be irrevocably changed and what type of punctuation mark can be placed at the end of these televised adventures.
In the shadow of those challenges, the “anti-time” anomaly accomplishes so much without upsetting the broader narrative apple cart. When Captain Picard seems to be jumping to different time periods, he must unravel the mystery of spatial anomaly in the Neutral Zone, to satisfy none other than Q and perhaps even save humanity.
I love finales where shows “die as they lived,” and “All Good Things...” fits that to a tee. The premise here enocmpasses so many tropes the series would return to time and again. A weird spatial anomaly off the port bow. A tense standoff with the Romulans. A character who can’t decide whether the weird sci-fi phenomenon is really happening or if it’s the product of illness or delusion. Time travel. Alternate dimensions. A god-like being judging humanity. Stakes to threaten the whole galaxy and the personal still taking center stage amid such peril.
This finale does everything in its power to be the ur-episode of *The Next Generation, not just closing out the series on a high note, but embodying the types of elements and stories that allowed it to thrive for seven seasons.
Picard’s time skips also allow TNG to honor the series’s past, present, and future in a way only a genre show can. “All Good Things...” is still anchored in the contemporary period of Trek. We still witness Picard and company operating at the top of their game after many years together. Whether they’re analyzing the strange phenomenon in the Devron system or determining whether Picard has become unstuck in time or just suffering the beginnings of irumodic syndrome, the crew of the Enterprise is a well-oiled machine. The senior officers are practically cozy at this point, and it remains a thrill to watch them in action.
But the episode also brings their personal relationships to the fore. I’ll admit, my one major beef with the finale is the choice to fall back on a rote love triangle between Deanna, Will, and Worf. The Troi/Worf relationship never really clicked, despite it making some sense on paper. More than that, though, one of the wholesome things about TNG is how mature a relationship Riker and Troi had with one another despite being exes with a difficult break-up. Shedding that for a cheap “I saw her first!” sort of tension is unbecoming and out of step.
And yet, as an inveterate Jean-Luc/Beverly shipper, it’s hard not to love the show finally pulling the trigger on their affections, albeit in a fingers-crossed sort of way. There’s logic in how the prospect of Captain Picard developing a degenerative illness would help put the pair’s feelings about one another into relief. As Riker himself articulates, you always think you have more time to get things right. Learning that you don’t would change things, and seeing Beverly and Jean-Luc share a kiss as they acknowledge that is a cheer-worthy moment.
At the same time (no pun intended), there’s something heartening in the way “All Good Things...” does something so many season finales do -- pays tribute to where the show started. When Picard jumps back to the past, we get a small prequel of sorts to “Encounter at Farpoint Station”. The opportunity to revisit the pilot allows the show to give us Picard first arriving at the Enterprise a la Kirk, and to witness his formal acceptance of command and welcome to the crew. Seeing Jean-Luc in the old uniform, looking upon his ship for the first time, gives the show a sense of having come full circle.
It also let’s us spend time with some characters we haven’t seen aboard the Enterprise in some time. Tasha’s return is lovely, with the character showing the same mettle she did before she departed the show. Alongside her is Chief O’Brien who, sure enough, was on the Battle Bridge with the Captain in that first outing. The casting here is smart, because it allows the episode to further differentiate the three time periods. With Riker, Dr. Crusher, and Geordi down at Farpoint Station during this time period, there’s a good excuse to give Patrick Stewart some different scene partners in the different eras.
Plus hey, I’ll cop to being a sucker for the various callbacks and easter eggs here. Seeing Troi and Worf in their gawky, early outfits and hairstyles has an almost nostalgic quality to it. We get brief but pleasing returns from the likes of Admiral Nakamura and Tamalak. Q’s salutation that he’ll see Picard “out there” plays like a stirring echo of the captain’s closing lines from the series premiere: “Let’s see what’s out there.” Hell, I’m half convinced that the lingering shot of Jean-Luc and Beverly holding hands in the ready room is a minor tribute to the pair of space jellyfish doing the same in the show’s first episode.
What I like, though, is that this return to the past isn’t just a nostalgia-fest. There’s a unique angle, in that Picard knows the future but shrinks from mentioning any of what he knows for fear of, as Geordi puts it, “polluting the timeline.” The choice unwittingly turns him into a Jellico, making unilateral, risky decisions without explaining himself or hearing out his crew’s concerns. There’s an inherent tension in the way he barks confounding orders and barges into the Neutral Zone while the officers respect the chain of command but wonder why their leader is making such puzzling and perilous moves.
It’s the obverse of the dynamic Picard finds in the future. While on the way to Farpoint Station, the crew follows his orders despite reservations because of their new captain’s reputation, in the distant future, a flummoxed Picard has to convince the folks who used to follow him that he’s not a senile old man chasing ghosts.
The juxtaposition is striking. The old age make-up is, alternatively fine (Picard), impressive (Dr. Crusher), and awful (Riker). What sells the difference in time period, though, isn’t just the extra gray or the cool new ship designs we see. It’s Patrick Stewart’s performance, buoyed by some superb writing. As Ambassador Picard, he is more cantankerous, more warm and casual, more powerless and vulnerable than we’ve ever seen him outside of a Cardassian torture chamber. Stewart adopts a slightly different voice, more accented and growly, but also a more pleading and insistent tone, that befits someone who used to have authority and respect and who now can only rely on past affections to overcome the doubts about him and his condition.
Those glimpses at our heroes’ future are simultaneously joyous and sad. Picard is an ambassador who has time to tend to his vineyards. Lovelorn Geordi is a family man who writes novels. (Though the implication is that he’s married to Leah Brahms, which remains kind of gross.) Inquisitive Data is a professor following in the footsteps of Isaac Newton, with a more emotive bent and a house full of cats. Ambitious Riker is an admiral who got to select the Enterprise as his flagship! The capable Dr. Crusher is the captain of a neat-looking medical vessel! And Worf, who always struggled with his place as a Klingon, was on the High Council and is now the governor of his own Klingon colony.
Everyone’s succeeded. Everyone’s achieved some measure of their dreams. These destinations are a pleasant sop to the fans who’ve come to know and love these characters over seven years’ worth of adventures.
Almost everyone that is. Troi is dead in some unspecified incident. And for all the success the main characters have had in this vision of the future, they’ve drifted apart. Worf and Riker had a falling out over Deanna. Jean-Luc and Beverly married and then divorced, with glimpses of how Picard’s demeanor and Dr. Crusher’s aspirations could have made being together difficult for both of them. Some members of the crew have gone almost a decade without seeing one another. As rousing as it is to see Jean-Luc’s colleagues having risen to such places of pride, it comes with the concomitant melancholy of the ways in which they’ve become estranged over the years.
In the wake of those old bonds become frayed, Picard has to leverage his past friendships to try to solve this existential problem. There’s a dramatic irony to the setup, because the audience knows (or at least has good reason to suspect) that what Jean-Luc’s saying is right; he really is tripping through time and encountering some unique phenomenon. But Geordi, Data, and Beverly are mainly humoring a sick old man whom they love, as a way of honoring the person he used to be. Their kind but skeptical treatment of him explores the pains of aging in a realistic way, while presenting pragmatic challenges for Picard to be able to solve the crisis of the week.
Thankfully, he has a helping hand. The Next Generation finale wouldn’t feel right without Q. Not only was he there from the beginning, one of Gene Roddenberry’s trademark god-like aliens there to judge humanity. But he was one of the series’s earliest successes, someone whose trouble-making, species-doubting ethos caused no end of headaches for the good captain, but which also brought out the best in him.
Q, and with him John de Lancie, is in rare form here. The trickster god offers some brilliant taunts, knowing lines, and a delightfully arch game of ten (née twenty) questions. His declaration that “the trial never ended” helps put the series into a broader context. It brings the central question the series started with -- whether humanity is worthy to explore the galaxy and discover what’s out there -- back to the fore.
The test is two-fold. One part is simple -- stop the big flashy thing in space that’s threatening to destroy humanity. For all of the nested storytelling in “All Good Things...”, I love the fact that the episode comes back to that same familiar chestnut, only in triplicate. It’s fitting, somehow, that for all the time-hopping urgency of this story, it ultimately boils down to “There’s some weird thing happening in space and we need to figure out why!”, an approach that’s been fodder for Star Trek stories since 1966.
And yet, it also requires an impressive degree of lateral thinking. The cinch for Q’s riddle is not just to recognize the recursive source of the anomaly -- that Picard’s own attempts to investigate and scan this “collision of time and anti-time” that caused it; it’s Jean-Luc coordinating his efforts back and forth across eras to figure out and ultimately solve the problem.
Thanks to Q’s lobbing Jean-Luc into this nonlinear temporal flow, Picard can use what he learns in one period to help in another. A theoretical piece of technology Data mentions during the Enterprise’s first mission is on board and ready to use seven years later. A theory the crew pieces together in the far future can be shared with the crews in the past to help analyze the problem. Picard himself is the link, passing along information and insights from one era to another, and it’s his ability to think not only in one direction, but to expand his thinking to weave thought and action in three periods simultaneously that demonstrates his, and humanity’s, unbridled potential to do more and be more.
The problem and solution are genuinely clever, worthy of the final challenge our heroes would face in the series. Simple details like noting that different choices made in the past don’t seem to affect events in the future works for hints and epiphanies. The anti-time anomaly itself is complicated enough to seem difficult for even trained scientists to grasp, intuitive enough for us laymen at home to understand, and unique enough to feel like something a skeptical god would throw our way to test mankind’s limits. All of these cosmic puzzles walk a fine line between being too simple and too convoluted. Moore, Braga, and their team find the perfect sweet spot.
Regardless, the most important thing that Picard passes back and forth across the eras is his friendship and trust. As much as “All Good Things...” puts the ability to think outside the box on a pedestal, the thing that makes all that creative thought actionable is the bonds Jean-Luc has formed with his colleagues past and present.
In the present, the captain has garnered the sort of implicit trust and buy-in from his team that even when the experiences Picard’s describing sound insane, his senior staff is willing to countenance the possibility and investigate with rigor and care. In a strange way, it brings “All Good Things...” in line with “Turnabout Intruder”, the Original Series finale, which similarly boiled down to recognizing that after all the peculiar experiences the crew has had, they couldn’t right off an extraordinary explanation for their captain’s behavior as a possibility.
In the future, it’s only Picard’s longstanding friendships with these people that spur them to indulge these theories that may just as easily be the agitated ravings of someone suffering from dementia. It takes leveraging the personal to make the scientific and existential possible. Finding a ship, gaining passage into the Neutral Zone, earning a rousing defense from a tricked out futuristic Enterprise doesn’t happen without the individual connections and camaraderie that prompts these comrades to get the band back together.
But oddly enough, that camaraderie and mutual faith has the greatest resonance in the past. The crew on that first mission doesn’t know Picard. They have no reason to trust him yet. But he knows them. He understands what they’re capable of, how much he’ll come to depend on them. When he asks them to risk their lives and their ship with minimal explanation, he does so on the backs of one of those great Picard speeches. The thrust of it is this -- “I have faith in you.” Jean-Luc has every reason to import the great trust he’s developed in his crew after years in the cosmos into the one he barely knew at the time, and with such stirring words and abundant belief in their potential, his trust is returned.
Hell, it even takes his barb-spitting friendship with Q to save the day. None of this lateral thinking, none of this harnessing trust from one point in the timeline for another, would have been possible without our planetary Puck choosing to help “mon capitaine” by giving him this multi-temporal experience. Jean-Luc thanks his occasional tormentor, recognizing that for however much the Q Continuum doubts humanity’s prowess and potential, however much Q himself insults our “dangerous, savage child race,” this a being who believes in us, in his own peculiar way.
Q is uncharacteristically warm in his congratulations and farewell, half-teasing the cast’s future in film (which couldn’t live up to the billing), but half-vindicating Picard, and by extension, humanity, for showing a glimmer of the ability to live up to his impossible standards. The success is born on the backs of an unlikely friendship between a humble yet noble man, and a demeaning but invested god, who believed we could be more.
That is what I took from Star Trek: The Next Generation -- as a child when I saw the show originally, and now as an adult where I see it on a deeper and richer level -- a vision for the best of what humanity could be. I see the values that burrowed deep within my young mind: of tolerance; of curiosity; of openness; of thoughtfulness; of respect for living things; of acknowledging the complexities of diplomacy and politics; of creative thinking and problem solving; of hope for a brighter and more equal future; of debate over edicts; of understanding over violence; of principle over hierarchy; and of opening one’s mind to the wonders of art, history, and philosophy so that all of this may mean something.
These are the values Jean-Luc Picard, and The Next Generation embodied across the run of the series. They are the foundational building blocks of Star Trek that sustained the shows that came before and the ones that followed. They shaped me, guided me, helped form my own moral compass and approach to the world, through the work of mortal men and women with the courage to imagine the challenges of sustaining a better world and aspiring to be worthy of it.
Less explicitly, and yet somehow more overwhelmingly, they also taught me the values of personal trust in those comrades and friends and loved ones without whom none of this highfalutin aspiration is possible. The looming tragedy at the heart of “All Good Things...” is not that humanity will perish, but that the men and women who’ve served together will drift inexorably apart. It is the attendant warmth of Jean-Luc inspiring his crew to come together in the past, prompting his friends to reunite and forgive one another in the future, and sitting down with them in friendship in the present to warn off that grim possibility, that lingers as the abiding thought and feeling of TNG’s swan song.
Star Trek, in all its many forms, has inspired scientists, astronauts, doctors, philosophers, and explorers. The Next Generation in particular enshrined high-minded ideals of dignity, community, and the ability to countenance new thoughts and experiences in all those who watched it. But it also encouraged us to open ourselves up to something else -- the enervating acknowledgement that these ideals as best accomplished with the help and company of those we love and trust. That too requires openness, requires vulnerability, and its devotion to that belief lifted the hearts and minds of young men like me, who watched the show and aspired to be half as good, half as worthy, as such achievement and love.
Shout by FinFanBlockedParent2020-03-09T21:36:58Z
So, here I am again, at the end of the series. I don't know how many times I've seen the complete show. I do know I haven't seen any other show, including all of Star Trek, as often. And although I have made some critical and negative comments, I love the show as much as ever. Maybe even a bit more if I see what's on TV today. And everytime I watch it I learn something new and I like things I didn't like the last time. That is something I can't say about any other show.
And I feel already a bit sad to leave the crew of the Enterprise behind. Until, in a couple of years from now, I probably feel the need to re-visit them again.