That’s All, Folks: Star Trek: The Next Generation Sent Its Crew Off with a Final Look Back
TV Features Star Trek
Most scripted television shows end in cancellation, so there’s something special about the ones that get the chance to go out on their own terms. This year, Ken Lowe is revisiting some of the most influential TV shows that made it to an officially planned final episode. That’s All, Folks is a look back at television’s most unforgettable series finales.
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all events in between.
He says.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Star Trek: The Next Generation is Trek’s apotheosis. (That it happens to also be the franchise’s best show—my DMs are closed—is related to this, but not the reason why it is.)
Star Trek has become one of American pop culture’s deathless franchises, but before that it was a peculiar, nerdy little obsession for a lot of people that eventually started racking up big theatrical releases. Gene Roddenberry, by all accounts a pretty well-liked guy who spent his life arguing for peace and inclusion, eventually sold some executives on the idea of kicking off a new series. And fortunately for everyone, that series was TNG, which I also dare to call one of the best television shows in the history of the entire medium.
The Show
Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard leads one of the best ensembles in TV history: Michael Dorn’s Worf, Gates McFadden’s Dr. Crusher, LeVar Burton’s Geordi LaForge, Brent Spiner’s android Data, Marina Sirtis’ Counselor Troi, and Jonathan Frakes’ Riker, the second-in-command who would lay down his life on the off-chance it might get a fellow crew member laid. Yes, even Wil Wheaton’s Wesley deserves a mention, and especially worthy of a mention is Denise Crosby’s Tasha Yar, who got done absolutely dirty by pissy producers who killed her off early in the show. (The writers and fellow cast members clearly hated this, and engineered scripts to allow for Crosby’s return multiple times for the sole purpose of being the baddest bitch in the quadrant.)
It doesn’t hurt that the crew of the Enterprise-D are just fun to hang out with. Over the course of seven seasons, we watch as they develop interesting little dynamics to play off of one another, such that you can almost imagine how they would react in other scenarios. Data’s matter-of-fact friendships with Worf and Geordi, Worf’s deadpan badassery, Riker so clearly rooting for everybody, are framed almost like gags, except the goal isn’t to get you to laugh at a joke but to smile at a pleasant little moment. Stewart’s Picard tries to maintain a professional distance, is flustered by intimacy, but even he is a big ol’ softie underneath.
The episodic structure of Star Trek: The Next Generation checks the boxes of the original show: Strange new worlds! New life! New civilizations! Lots of boldly going where no one has gone before! But it also moved forward in ways that make the show even truer to the spirit of Roddenberry’s shining post-scarcity future than the original, too. Data creates a daughter and decides that it’s only logical to give this new form of life the opportunity to assign their own gender. Picard dispenses managerial advice that might come from the mouth of any of your most fondly remembered supervisors. In an early episode that is typical of all the cool shit he so often got to do, Burton’s Geordi finds himself in command during a crisis and gets to SEPARATE THE SAUCER SECTION before outwitting a cloaked enemy vessel and zapping the motherfucker.
More than any of that, though, the show worked to make the inclusiveness and utopianism of the original series seem more universal in principle. Episodes like “The Measure of a Man,” in which Data must argue in court that he is sentient rather than just Starfleet property, “The Outcast,” in which Riker falls in love with an alien from a planet that is vicious about repressing gender identity, or the aforementioned “The Offspring,” the episode in which Data explicitly lets his child choose her gender and sex, read like they almost might have been written last week. There is philosophy behind the decisions Picard and his crew make in these stories, thoughts so deep that they make the shallow and exasperating bigotry of our current moment seem even smaller, if that could be possible.
Yet for as high-minded and ethical as the show was, it also had some banging action beats, chief among them the two-part cliffhanger and season premiere “The Best of Both Worlds,” in which Picard is assimilated into the Borg’s hive mind and his crew have to fight like to hell to free him before he destroys the entire Federation.
It’s hard not to get effusive when talking about this one. It made Patrick Stewart a household name, gave Jonathan Frakes the directing chops he’s used to make more than one really good sci-fi movie, and turned longtime series writer Ronald D. Moore into the guy who would one day lead the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica. It introduced the Borg to the Trek universe—a villain so compelling that they carried one of the franchise’s best films, and that Star Trek: Picard Kept. Bringing. Back.
In one way or another, as I’ve written in the past, this show is the one the franchise keeps answering in one way or another. But what Star Trek: Picard would seemingly prefer you don’t think too hard about is that any desire to bring these characters back bumps into a problem: They already got a great sendoff.
The Finale: “All Good Things…”
In the series finale, Worf and Troi are getting back from their holodeck date (Yes, this was before she married Riker for good) when Picard comes running down the corridor of the Enterprise in the same extremely provocative night robe he’s been wearing for the past seven seasons. Jean-Luc has come unstuck in time, he says: Periodically he finds his consciousness jumping between different versions of himself on the first day he came aboard the Enterprise, on this day he’s speaking to them, and long years into the future when he’s become an old man with a degenerative cognitive disease. Gradually, he comes to the realization that there’s an anomaly in space-time at the same exact point in all three timelines. It’s getting bigger… but in reverse, as in its point of origin is further ahead in time and it is growing backward through time. He discovers his old nemesis, the interdimensional trickster god Q (John de Lancie), has something to do with his predicament, but for once Q isn’t the cause of it: Picard is, and he doesn’t know how or why. He only knows that if he doesn’t figure out what the anomaly is and stop it, all of humanity could be destroyed.
The challenges here are manifold: On his first day as captain, none of his crew know or trust him, and several of them aren’t even aboard ship yet. (Crosby returns, naturally.) In his autumn years, beset upon by mental decline, Picard’s trusted colleagues no longer entirely believe in his sanity. And in the “present” of the episode, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
It’s a kind of commentary on the entire history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in a way. In presenting the awkward first days of Picard’s command (nobody is going to claim the show’s first two seasons were its best), the issue isn’t ability but trust: At one point Tasha Yar completely reasonably tells Picard that his panicky and bizarre orders might go down better if he would explain himself. Picard, knowing he can’t divulge his foreknowledge to some of the most beloved people in his life in good conscience, merely says that they have to trust him because he trusts in their abilities. In the far future, when everybody thinks he’s old and slipping, he has to somehow convince his aged and crabby former crew members to recapture some of the old magic—not by simply following his orders, but by recalling the lessons about themselves that they learned under his command.
“You stuck with us during the rocky parts and you should in this last hour” is what the show seems to be saying. And in the end, Picard manages to carry the day in all three timelines through self-sacrifice and the common thread that runs through the whole of Star Trek: The Next Generation: An unshakable faith in his crew and his ship.
Star Trek: Picard cribbed a lot of ideas from this glimpse into the future, but the one it should’ve left alone was the very final scene of the show. The senior staff of the Enterprise often gather for a few friendly hands of poker, and in the last scene, Picard joins them for the first time.
“I should’ve done this a long time ago,” he says wistfully, and then deals: Five card stud, nothing wild, and the sky’s the limit.
The story of the Enterprise D’s crew continues after this through several feature films, as guest stars and even regular cast members on other shows, and now in the Picard series, which got them all back on the bridge again, for good or ill. As with so much in our IP-driven present, I cherish some parts of that more than others. For me, whatever may happen chronologically after “All Good Things…” doesn’t change the fact that this cozy little scene is the true ending for this cast on this ship.
Q’s right: When it comes to time, we don’t have to think so linear.
Tune in next time, when That’s All, Folks! finally gets to the finale Ken can’t avoid, no matter how hard he’d like to: Seinfeld.
Kenneth Lowe will be watching, and if you’re very lucky, he’ll drop by to say hello from time to time. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses and read more at his blog.
For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.