“And the sky’s the limit.”
There’s that shot at the end of “All Good Things…,” the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Captain Picard starts dealing a poker hand to his crew – he’s never, in seven years, sat at that table, though he was always welcome – and as the cards start moving around the table, the camera booms straight up from the seven characters sitting in a circle, up and out the window as the U.S.S. Enterprise sails away into an Easter egg-coloured nebula, into memory, into myth; and every time that shot unfolds in front of me I remember my friend Amelia gripping my arm beside me and the commensurate lurch in my stomach, as we both realized at the same time: this is it.
Star Trek: The Next Generation meant the world to us. Amelia was my Next Gen buddy. Most of my other friends begrudgingly or not-so-begrudgingly got pulled into the cult over the course of our years in high school, but she and I – born on the same day in 1976, my “twin sister” – were the devout. There is something about that particular show coming along at that particular time in one’s life – not childhood (that belonged to Star Wars), but the portion just afterwards; and not “space adventure!” (that, too, was Star Wars), but something slightly richer. Star Trek is a lot of things, all of which have been discussed endlessly, but hidden among them is a complicated idea: Star Trek is a framework. Star Trek teaches you how to think about the world, and your purpose in it, and how all our lives relate to one another.
This show built me. It went with me on the journey – overshare alert! – dropping into my life in the actual week when I first got pubic hair, and sailing off into the sunset at the end of my last full year of high school. There has been no equivalent, any other time in my life, to the kind of generative energy at play in those six years when I happened to be watching Next Gen each week. While Captain Picard and his friends were up there dealing with Manheim effects and inverse tachyon pulses, I was going through the two or three scariest things that ever happened in my life; having a couple of the best nights ever; making every movie that ever meant anything to me – and I came out the other side with at least a notional concept of who I actually was. “All Good Things…” wasn’t the end of childhood, but it coincided with the end of something they’d never told me was even a thing: it was the end of the in-between.
We were at the SkyDome that night, May 25 1994, with 40,000 or so like-minded individuals, watching “All Good Things…” on the Jumbotron – which is not, I suppose, the best of all possible viewing experiences for a TV episode, but will remain forever etched in my mind as the ultimate expression of “holy shit, we got here?!” When Next Gen kicked off in 1987, it was an unwanted stepchild on two fronts: fans of Star Trek didn’t want it; and mainstreamers didn’t want it either. Seven years later, it was the most successful series in syndication of all time, but far more importantly, it had opened up the Star Trek pipeline so widely that the franchise would remain healthy for another fifteen years.
The 25th anniversary of the original series had come and gone; Star Trek VI had closed off the adventures of the original crew (and seeded continuity backwards and forwards between the two eras of the story); Deep Space Nine was running in parallel with Next Gen; Voyager was waiting in the wings; and Star Trek: Generations was about to go into production. Accidentally, but no less deftly, Paramount and Rick Berman had foreseen the future of mainstream entertainment. We’ll always say Marvel did the “Cinematic Universe” approach to franchising first, with multiple streams playing out on multiple, interwoven platforms; but that honour belongs to Star Trek – and, explicitly, to
“And the sky’s the limit.”
There’s that shot at the end of “All Good Things…,” the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Captain Picard starts dealing a poker hand to his crew – he’s never, in seven years, sat at that table, though he was always welcome – and as the cards start moving around the table, the camera booms straight up from the seven characters sitting in a circle, up and out the window as the U.S.S. Enterprise sails away into an Easter egg-coloured nebula, into memory, into myth; and every time that shot unfolds in front of me I remember my friend Amelia gripping my arm beside me and the commensurate lurch in my stomach, as we both realized at the same time: this is it.
Star Trek: The Next Generation meant the world to us. Amelia was my Next Gen buddy. Most of my other friends begrudgingly or not-so-begrudgingly got pulled into the cult over the course of our years in high school, but she and I – born on the same day in 1976, my “twin sister” – were the devout. There is something about that particular show coming along at that particular time in one’s life – not childhood (that belonged to Star Wars), but the portion just afterwards; and not “space adventure!” (that, too, was Star Wars), but something slightly richer. Star Trek is a lot of things, all of which have been discussed endlessly, but hidden among them is a complicated idea: Star Trek is a framework. Star Trek teaches you how to think about the world, and your purpose in it, and how all our lives relate to one another.
This show built me. It went with me on the journey – overshare alert! – dropping into my life in the actual week when I first got pubic hair, and sailing off into the sunset at the end of my last full year of high school. There has been no equivalent, any other time in my life, to the kind of generative energy at play in those six years when I happened to be watching Next Gen each week. While Captain Picard and his friends were up there dealing with Manheim effects and inverse tachyon pulses, I was going through the two or three scariest things that ever happened in my life; having a couple of the best nights ever; making every movie that ever meant anything to me – and I came out the other side with at least a notional concept of who I actually was. “All Good Things…” wasn’t the end of childhood, but it coincided with the end of something they’d never told me was even a thing: it was the end of the in-between.
We were at the SkyDome that night, May 25 1994, with 40,000 or so like-minded individuals, watching “All Good Things…” on the Jumbotron – which is not, I suppose, the best of all possible viewing experiences for a TV episode, but will remain forever etched in my mind as the ultimate expression of “holy shit, we got here?!” When Next Gen kicked off in 1987, it was an unwanted stepchild on two fronts: fans of Star Trek didn’t want it; and mainstreamers didn’t want it either. Seven years later, it was the most successful series in syndication of all time, but far more importantly, it had opened up the Star Trek pipeline so widely that the franchise would remain healthy for another fifteen years.
The 25th anniversary of the original series had come and gone; Star Trek VI had closed off the adventures of the original crew (and seeded continuity backwards and forwards between the two eras of the story); Deep Space Nine was running in parallel with Next Gen; Voyagerwas waiting in the wings; and Star Trek: Generations was about to go into production. Accidentally, but no less deftly, Paramount and Rick Berman had foreseen the future of mainstream entertainment. We’ll always say Marvel did the “Cinematic Universe” approach to franchising first, with multiple streams playing out on multiple, interwoven platforms; but that honour belongs to Star Trek – and, explicitly, to Star Trek: The Next Generation.
And “All Good Things…” is my very favourite one.
Oh, I know, it isn’t everyone’s. But whether you’re a “Yesterday’s Enterprise” person or “Best of Both Worlds,” I think you have to admit that “All Good Things…” is at least a part of the conversation for the best episode they ever did on Star Trek: The Next Generation. This, alone, was a surprise and a delight to me; the final season of Next Gen, even at the time, was a poor victory lap for a series that had been so much better before. That the show’s final episode – written, or so it is said, by Ron Moore and Brannon Braga in an exhausted 2-week sprint following the screenwriting of Star Trek: Generations – is even passable is a genuine relief. That it is as good as it is feels to me like Star Trek’s last miracle.
Great final episodes for TV series, in addition to their burden of simply being good episodes in and of themselves, are foremost called upon to do two other things: to look back at the series we are leaving; and to look forward at the lives of the characters we are leaving behind. “All Good Things…”, of course, does both simultaneously, and the only word to describe the result is “virtuosic.” Where other series might have incorporated flashbacks (or worse, clip reels) and flash-forwards (or worse, flash-sideways) to accomplish the same means, Next Gen gets to literally have its cake and eat it too by creating the same effect within the diegesis – because this is Star Trek, and such things are therefore possible. Captain Picard gets unstuck in time, Slaughterhouse-Five style, and travels to three parallel planes of time, slipping hither and yon between each. To extend the obvious Star Trek analogy, “All Good Things…” is a game of three-dimensional chess – with the past, the present, and the future as the game boards.
And so, in the midst of Worf and Troi’s appropriately bloodless first kiss, Picard finds himself commanding the seventh year of the ongoing mission of the Enterprise, while simultaneously re-experiencing the handful of days immediately prior to “Encounter at Farpoint,” and occasionally darting to the distant future, where he is a retired Federation ambassador with a failing memory and an ex-wife / former chief medical officer who is out hopping galaxies in his place. It’s an astonishing piece of science fiction writing, and hasn’t even arrived at the MacGuffin yet.
That MacGuffin – that the temporal anomaly that unifies all three timelines is to time what antimatter is to matter, and is travelling backwards through time with an aim to wipe out the first moments of life on primordial Earth – is itself such a beautiful leap of thematic and conceptual logic that it gets a satisfied yelp of pleasure out of me every time. And as one last cherry on top, because this is “All Good Things…” and everything must, by definition, be perfect, the whole story is driven by Q – who has returned to the Enterprise to conclude the trial of humanity he began in “Encounter At Farpoint,” but whose experiences with Picard in the intervening seven years might finally have given him a reason to help humanity out. A little.
Gods, I love it. I love every single moment of it, from prologue to poker game. It’s a beautiful idea for a story, and yet its success as this show’s series finale rests entirely with how much care it shows its characters. My guys! Picard and Data and Geordi and Crusher and Troi and Riker and Worf! And since we’re rounding the bases one last time, let’s throw in Q and Tasha and O’Brien, and even Commander Tomalak!
All of which is to say that the futureworld scenarios are the usual amount of “what if…?” fun (Picard and Beverly: Married! And divorced!), and the “Encounter at Farpoint” prequel is beautifully bittersweet in all the ways it needs to be, particularly in everything involving Tasha (and, appropriately, a very young and naïve Data).
But none of it would really matter if the present-day, real-world adventure didn’t ring like a bell too, in all the small, perfect ways that the series has coalesced around its characters and turned them into a family.
These are the scenes and moments that keep us rooted in the series that we’ve enjoyed for all of these seven years, reminding us that we are still here: that this is just another adventure-of-the-week, and that these now-iconic heroes, writ larger than life, are just having another day at the office. It is so goddamned reassuring as a result. “You’ve saved humanity… once again,” Q jokes, but it’s the cleanest interpretation of everything that’s gone before. Somewhere in the middle of this weird and marvelous show, Picard’s gang joined Kirk’s team in the pantheon – a group of superheroes who never seem to notice or care that they’re superheroes. They just do the work. There’s huge, resonant meaning in that: the work, and the work of working together.
“For that one second, you were open to possibilities you’d never imagined,” Q says in his final scene with Picard at the end of the episode, talking about Picard’s sudden, perspective-shifting understanding of the anti-time eruption and how it was operating beyond everyone’s assumptions to bedevil humankind. That simple idea – the fourth-dimensional thinking that Picard momentarily exhibits – is actually one last, absorbing challenge from the minds behind Star Trek: The Next Generation to the people watching it. It’s the series’ grace note; this show’s answer to The Sopranos’ final shot or Six Feet Under’s closing montage. Q’s riddle is Gene Roddenberry’s future utopia given new vision and meaning, past social issues and science fiction, and directly into the challenge of the human mind: think bigger. Think wider. Think beyond. Make leaps and go boldly – where no one has gone before.