177 – All Good Things …

Grade: A-

Summary

Captain Picard seems to be shifting through time. He finds the same spatial anomaly in three different time periods – the present, 25 years into the future, and 7 years in the past. But he also finds that he’s still going to have to deal with Q again.

Commentary

Finally a great episode – it’s been way too long in this season. This is one of the best episodes of the seventh season, and a very good way to end the series. The acting and characterizations are excellent – and much better than we’ve been used to seeing for a very long time.

The storyline is pretty exciting, and doesn’t seem too padded, despite being a double episode (90 minutes in length). Some parts were a bit annoying – like the Captain on Trial stuff that we’ve seen a hundred times before in this franchise. And I was also annoyed by the references to the series premiere episode, Encounter at Farpoint. Honestly, that’s one of the most forgettable episodes of any show that I’ve ever seen. I don’t want to remember that at all. So it was annoying that it was brought up here again.

Other than that, I thought some parts of the story were a bit simplistic, and certainly much more predictable than the writers would like to have seen. But it’s very enjoyable, and I don’t know of any Star Trek fans who didn’t like seeing what might happen to the Enterprise and its crew in 25 years. The relationship between Troi and Worf was a bit strange, but not a total surprise. We’ve seen hints of it in the past year or so.

The ending scene in this is just absolutely fantastic. It brings a tear to my eye every time I see it.

Finally, one last point. It’s really too bad that not all the seventh season episodes couldn’t have been this good.

Of Note

This episode probably has the greatest ending of the entire series. Picard finally joins the rest of the senior officers in a game of Poker. It’s not the fact that he’s there at all that’s the issue. It’s that his experience in this episode really helped show him how important it is to never take these friendships for granted. And just how he looks around at all the officers and says “I should have done this a long time ago” is just classic Picard. It’s great stuff. You have to see it to believe it.