And now, the conclusion.
I’m still processing my feelings here. I think this finale needed more time to breathe. They managed to still have ten minutes for winding things down, but there’s so many prongs to the story that it gets cluttered. You can see why last season, they finished up with the Borg in episode 9.
I mean look, we go with all this going on:
- The Titan has to defend Earth from the fleet
- The assimilated Titan crew is trying to retake the ship
- Picard’s trying to save Jack
- Someone’s got to defeat the Borg queen
- The Enterprise has to destroy the transmitter
- Worf and Riker have to fight the Borg
- Also it would be nice if everyone got out alive
One negative consequence of this is that when we get to the climax, it feels like the plot keeps blocking on a mutex. The Enterprise makes it to the beacon and then has to wait while Picard tries to reach out to Jack. The Enterprise destroys the beacon and the destruction of the Borg cube has to wait while Riker and Worf go back for Picard and Troi locates them. Spacedock is destroyed, and the fleet targets every city on Earth… Then instead of attacking, waits for several minutes because the cast is busy elsewhere. Most egregiously, when the Enterprise destroys the beacon, the Titan crew keep carrying out their Borg orders (You hear a line which I think is meant to indicate that they’re defaulting to carrying out their last order when the signal is lost?) retaking the bridge, pointing their phasers at Seven and the gang… And then they just wait for like 30 seconds while we cut back to Jupiter to see the destruction of the Borg cube, and it’s only then, when the cube explodes, that the young’uns of the Titan de-Borgify and stand down. I have talked before about how different media have different modes of expression. This story structure really suffers from being a bad match with how the medium of Television expresses simultaneity. You really want a feeling of immediacy in a lot of these scenes, the sense that the fleet targeting Earth, the Titan crew breaching the bridge, the destruction of the beacon and the subsequent explosion of the cube all happen at effectively the same time, but of course they don’t. And it’s not just “Those two scenes took place at the same time but had to be shown serially.” There are logical interlocks in the plot. There’s no clear reason for the causal relationship between the destruction of the cube and the crew coming back to themselves when the loss of Jack’s signal clearly didn’t have that effect.
The whole structure of the episode is kind of dicey, in fact. Down to the whole ‘ONE YEAR LATER’ ending which feels a little confused about how much time has passed. There’s a conflict – similar to the one we saw at the other end of the season – between the fact that the epilogue is a direct continuation of the preceding. scene and also the acknowledgement that we logically need some time to get to where the story is going to leave off. You can’t just cut to the next day and have Stardock rebuilt and Jack an officer. At the same time, a year actually seems awfully quick for either of those things to have happened – they even comment on how quickly Jack made it through officer training (Similarly, Season 2 may not have even been a whole year before the beginning of this season yet Seven not only became an officer, but worked her way up to Commander and was recommended for promotion?). Yet in other ways it doesn’t seem like any time has passed. It does not help that everyone is wearing the same clothes. But also, “One Year Later” starts with Geordi parking the Enterprise at the museum and powering it down (Which is weird; if it’s part of the museum, wouldn’t they want the lights on and the consoles lit up? I suppose it’s just that “Power down” is pithier than “Computer, reboot in demo mode”). It took a whole year to put the Enterprise back in the museum? Are we to understand that the Enterprise-D was pressed back into service for a full year while the fleet recovered? Troi is still planning that vacation “One year later” that she was planning instead of doing her damn job during Data’s therapy session (Where the hell does this scene take place? Are they on a starship? Are they all active duty again?) . Yes, Data is boring his therapist. Ha ha, very funny. The dude just came back from the dead, ate his brother, became mortal, had his psychology radically changed at a fundamental level, and narrowly escaped dying again. Yes of course he is going to need therapy and a lot of it is going to be repetitious. If Troi can’t handle that for a good friend, I question how well she’s going to do with the fact that literally everyone in Starfleet probably has serious PTSD, and every single one of them over 24 has the exact same story of narrowly surviving being murdered by their kids, while every single one of them under 24 has the exact same story of having their minds and free will stripped away and being forced to murder their colleagues.
But I’m meandering. This episode is so full of loving nods to the past it doesn’t really have time to let anything just grow. We open up with a message from the Federation President warning folks away from Earth, and there’s so much going on right out of the gate. Much of the text of the message is taken directly from the president’s warning in Star Trek IV – even to the point of emphasizing the signal that’s controlling people in a way that kind of buries the lede of “Everyone under 24 has turned into Borg”.
On top of all the nods to The One With The Whales, then, we’ve got who the president is: Anton Chekhov. And the fact that the president of the Federation has the same name as one of the greatest writers in Russian history. The fact that he is named for the guy whose name is an eponym for the law of conservation of drama that requires the gun from act 1 to be fired in act 3, and in a season whose whole modus operandi is to bring back a flurry of nods to things from the past thirty years. The fact that the character is voiced by Walter Koenig, playing his own son, is possibly the funniest thing in Star Trek since “He was an idiot.” Possibly longer. It’s so funny that I completely overlooked the fact that they didn’t actually name him after the Russian Playwright; they named him after the actor who played Chekhov in the JJ Abrams films. But that’s also very amusing.
Another thing about “There’s just so damn much going on that nothing has room to breathe” is that last week we ended with Picard in his iconic position in the center seat of the Enterprise-D… But that isn’t much of this episode. Picard almost immediately relinquishes command. It is necessary and right thematically to do the climax with Picard and Jack – that is how this story needs to go – but at the same time, you worked so hard to get these characters here for this thing, and you immediately send three of the four characters whose most traditional and iconic places are on the bridge off on an away mission. We go into the climax, into the Big Exciting Death Star Trench Run Sequence (I know it is more like the Death Star II sequence, but I prefer the name of the first one) with Geordi in command – a thing which I believe happens only one time in TNG (“The Arsenal of Freedom”, which is also the second of the what, three times they do the saucer separation sequence? Weird little thing; the saucer separation sequence was billed as the Big Cool Thing the ship could do, TNG’s version of Turbo Boost or Morphin’ Time, but it was expensive and required the other set of filming models and so they only used it for the absolute most dire of emergencies… And also “The Arsenal of Freedom” for no really clear reason) – and Beverly shooting the guns, and, at the key moment, Deanna flying the ship. I’m not saying I don’t like it – I do, point of fact, like getting some redemption after decades of jokes about her flying the ship when it crashed. But you went to all this trouble to give us the Iconic One True Enterprise Gang Team Up, only to immediately shuffle everyone around into new positions that, with the exception of Data, we haven’t really seen them take during the series (And even Data doing the flying during the Death Star Trench Run isn’t quite his normal role; he traditionally did the non-driving parts of “Just run the whole rest of the ship.”).
It’s all very nice, even so, just that this was a lot of effort for the payoff. They all roll in in classic formation and instantly Picard announces that he’s fucking off to give his son a Talking To (Man, a Big Damn Picard speech from your dad?), and so of course it makes sense that Riker, who is himself also a Starship Captain, would take over, while Picard beamed over with the medical doctor who might be able to help Jack overcome his condition, and is also his mom and is also probably redundant in her professional capacity because death is likely to come so swiftly there will be no call for medical treatment, and maybe the could take Geordi for his engineering skill, or Troi for her telepathic powers to sense and contact Jack.
Oh. No. Riker’s going with Picard, and Worf is making it a threesome (“Do you even listen to yourself?” Not a bad joke. Still wish they’d leant in on Riker being a swinger instead of a prude, though). Okay, Worf makes sense to take along. Would also make sense to leave behind to defend the Enterprise, but it works at least. Riker… There is no argument for Riker being there. Letting Riker command the ship makes so much more sense. Of course, we need him to go for the resolution, but it’s such a weirdly small element of it. Frankly, it would’ve made more sense to send Troi in the hopes she could reach Jack telepathically.
But okay, it works on a different level. Geordi and Data were always the “soft boys” of TNG; Riker, Picard, and Worf were the “hard boys”. I mean, it’s TNG, so Jean-Luc is the gentle service top and everyone else is a total bottom, but there’s definitely that second tier there. The “soft” gang stays on the ship, the “hard” gang has fun storming the castle, okay, team work makes the dream –
Wow. Almost instantly, Picard declares that he’s got to go off and do this alone while the others find the (rolls D20) transmitter beacon that is allowing Jack’s powers to connect with everyone back at Earth. Kinda looks like the singularity core from Event Horizon, doesn’t it? Or one of those dimensional cuisinart thingies from Cube 2. They get to have an Old Man Fight scene that isn’t all that interesting and do some poking at a computer. Eh. It’s fine. It’s actually pretty solidly TNG-era Star Trek, so that’s good.
By the way, let’s take a second here to reflect that Shaw was basically wrong: The OG Borg weren’t still out there. If we take the queen at the surface, this is it for the Borg. Their last stand. She’s cannibalizing the drones themselves from this last cube to keep herself alive after Admiral Janeway poisoned her decades ago. If the changelings hadn’t teamed up with her, the Borg would have been well and truly extinct within a decade.
Changelings, right. They sort that, I guess. Two lines of dialogue in the montage at the end: Crusher, having returned to Starfleet as an admiral, pays off that one line from a few weeks ago about one of the chemicals involved in Vadic’s mutation by installing a de-Borger-and-Changeling-Detector in the transporters. Makes it easy! And I don’t really object that much, since we’re kind of out of time. But just the sheer amount of stuff this season has picked up and discarded. The changelings were the “big bad” for the first eight episodes, and then Vadic gets blown out the front of the Titan, and that’s that. Catching the rest of the conspirators is basically an afterthought. The portal weapon was a misdirect. The recruiting center attack was a misdirect. Vadic was a misdirect. That’s clever in its way, but it means 80% of the series as a whole was a misdirect. That is too much misdirect. That is too much of the running time burned on irrelevancy. Nothing Worf and Raffi do before episode 8 really matters all that much. For all their work, for Raffi’s sacrifice, all they learn is what the Titan gang works out at exactly the same time. None of it matters, it’s just there to set up some character moments. So little of what happens actually matters. Vadic ditches the portal gun to go chase the Titan into the nebula and that’s the end of it, because it was only ever meant to be a distraction from the theft of Picard’s corpse. But also the attack on the recruitment center was a distraction… Only it doesn’t actually distract anyone because it gets immediately pinned on a random patsy. What was any of this actually for? You can basically skip the entire season up to the last 5 minutes of episode 8 and the show makes no less sense, really.
This, of course, does not even come close to the level of missed opportunity in the wholesale discarding of the past two seasons. Look, if you don’t want to bring Allison Pill back, that’s fine, but at least a brief, “Can we contact our Borg allies?” “No because of the reason.” exchange? And why isn’t anyone else coming to help? Where are the Klingons? The Romulans? The Vulcan Science Fleet? Again, you can say, “They are all busy soiling themselves that the Borg are back and have effortlessly absorbed all of Starfleet,” but you should actually say that. Say, “The Klingons are setting up a defensive line at their border,” say, “The Vulcans are preparing for refugees.” Say, “The Romulans are sending thoughts and prayers.” (Not directly related, but I’ll step ahead to the end and complain that during the final goodbyes at Ten Forward, Data should really be talking about going to Coppelius to meet that entire race that he’s technically the father of.)
Now I shall stop being upset by that and gush for a while, because the Death Star Trench Run was, indeed, very cool. And the Titan’s strafing runs against all of Starfleet… Well, conceptually cool at least; in practice, you don’t really get a good look at much, and they don’t get as much screen-time as you’d like, but they wisely decide to keep the camera on the Titan itself and let us get a good look at her bobbing and weaving. Both it and the D look far more elegant as they do their big action sequences than the Enterprise did in its several Exciting Space Action sequences in Strange New Worlds. The D, of course, is flatter and longer than the original Enterprise, so it is easier to work with in these dogfight scenes, but the Titan’s proportions are close to the Constitution Class it’s a revival of, so I guess they just had a long think about how to film it.
And the bit there where the Enterprise has to outrun the fireball? But they can’t get a lock on the away team? Riker upsets me greatly by telling his wife and child to get stuffed so he could go die with Jean-Luc, but I forgive that for the cool thing where his bond with Troi is strong enough that she can use her telepathy to find them, at which point she takes the wheel and flies the ship right up over the Borg Queen’s room. That is pretty cool. Riker does not mention Kestra when he’s saying his little “Eliza, my love, take your time; I’ll see you on the other side,” bit.
Missed opportunity to have Worf inappropriately say, “I too often think of your wife when I am facing death.” Just to lighten the mood.
But, of course, there’s the big climax. And there is a ton going on here. I’ve said before: The Borg are not TNG’s enemy. They fall into that role because TNG failed to provide a properly iconic enemy for itself. Q, of course, but he very quickly evolves into “Picard’s Wacky Godlike Uncle”. The Ferengi were a major stumble, clearly meant to be the “New Klingons”, but utterly unsuited to that role. The Cardassians get thrown in late in the series, but mostly to set them up for Deep Space Nine (And the retcon of a Cardassian war a few years before TNG, I think, is not healthy for the mythos, which benefitted greatly from the sense of TNG starting out during a long period of peace that had prompted Starfleet to become more bureaucratic, less militaristic, but also encouraged them to pursue projects like the Galaxy Class – cities that could in principle fly off into deepest space for decades). Rather, the Borg are Voyager‘s iconic enemy. The point of them in TNG is like a kind of sneak preview. The thing Enterprise did over and over but not well: “What would happen if the iconic enemy from generation 3 shows up in generation 2?” TNG does this sublimely with the Borg, largely because they used the Borg sparingly.
I bring this up because the finale of Picard does something interesting with the Borg: it presents them as still being Voyager’s enemy. It’s strange that they chose this very TNG-centric show in its most TNG-focused incarnation for this, but even without bringing back the casts of Deep Space Nine and Voyager (Seven and Tuvok’s cameo excepted, of course), the plot arc of the season is a direct follow-up not really to anything specific from TNG (The Borg Queen, as a concept, remember, is introduced only in First Contact, thus well into the Post-TNG phase of the era). The Changelings are seeking revenge for the crimes committed against them by Starfleet during the war; The Borg Queen too is seeking revenge for Admiral Janeway’s attack on the collective. Both attacks, interestingly, consisted of biological warfare. The Queen wants revenge. And more than that, in possibly the only point of continuity from season 2, she’s addicted to the presence of the hive and is going insane from the silence. And just as the Changelings have evolved in the face of the biological attack by Section 31, the Borg too are evolving in response; you get the impression that she doesn’t intend to go back to bolting on laser eyes and tubes and wires and cube ships; from now on, it’s biological assimilation, piracy, and lots and lots of killing. Even if she did get Jack a high end Locutus cosplay suit.
Which brings us to the obligatory “Ross cries at the end of a Star Trek season and probably needs to talk about this with his therapist.” Because after failing to snap Jack out of it, and having learned that Jack can only survive disconnection if he does it willingly, Jean-Luc goes and stabs himself with a Borg wire and what do you know, this does indeed plug him back into the collective (Oh, duh, this makes sense; he’s a synth, and they showed us just a couple of weeks ago that synths can plug wires into the backs of their heads to access gentle blue glowing conversation voids).
How does he save Jack? Did you guess “A big speech”? Smart money, but no, not this time. This time, it’s something else. For whatever reason, the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking about the 1998 Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come. I won’t trouble you with the details of the movie, but the ending is largely the same as happens here. Jack is trapped not in hell, but in the false connection and companionship of the collective, but Picard’s answer is the same as Chris’s. Not to argue, or try to persuade, or show the evil of the collective, or speechify about the indomitably of the human spirit. But rather, to just… Sit with him. If you won’t leave hell with me, then I will stay here with you. Real connection to compete with the Borg’s false connection. God, this is such a hard thing. Star Trek gave a generation of geeky people a skewed understanding of empathy, what with the episode titled “The Empath” about a magic space lady who can absorb the pain of others and take it away from them. That’s not this. It’s not “I will take this pain so you don’t have to.” It’s not even “I can’t carry it. But I can carry you.” It’s, “I will walk back into hell and sit down next to you there so you don’t have to do it alone.” They finally got it. Mmm.
And, of course, it works, and they even let Jack get the spotlight here. Rather than Picard, it’s Jack who gets to tell the queen off, because even without the collective, he will never be alone. Connection. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
So yeah, cube explodes, everyone gets better, happily the Changelings hardly murdered anyone (“But few of any sort, and none of name,” – Much Ado About Nothing, Act I, Scene 1) other than the one transporter operator and the thousands of people in Spacedock and anyone over 25 in the fleet and the entire crew of the Excelsior, so good times all around. We’re just left with a fun scene of friends hanging out, which is how it should be. I mean, it’d be nice if everyone had changed their clothes over the course of the year, but still. Guinan waves from off-camera. Data starts to recite the “Lady from Venus” limerick from “The Naked Now”. All fine stuff.
Oh, right. I glazed over the “Everyone goes to Starfleet” part of the ending. Jack enters Starfleet and completes officer training in a year, almost as fast as Seven went from ranger to first officer (I think we all have to accept that they intended this season to be 10 years after season 2. Beverly even says “The Borg haven’t been seen in ten years”. Also Ed Speleers being 24 is a STRETCH. Also, somehow Shaw was captain of the Titan for five years despite the ship only being a year old. You’re not going to convince me that the 2401 date wasn’t a retcon halfway through production). Beverly also goes back to Starfleet because fuck the Mariposas. And are we to assume Troi un-retired because she’s working as a councilor on a starship? Was Picard captaining the Enterprise that whole year? And Raffi’s back in normal starfleet having given up being a spy since Worf blew her cover so that her son would talk to her again (A small and kind gesture).
Which brings us to the Big Fun Sequel-Baiting reveal at the end, with the Titan rechristened as the Enterprise-G. If you only watched the show and did not read the supplemental materials, you might be wondering what happened to the Enterprise-F, but apparently it was scheduled for decommission right after Frontier Day, on account of some irreparable damage a bit before. Just as well, the bridge of the Enterprise-F appears to just be a conference room with one chair in it and nothing else. Like the Boss Fight room at Starfleet Headquarters from “Conspiracy”.
Some people are not happy with the rechristening. I get it. I do feel like it’s a little weird that the Titan’s “reward” for singlehandedly delaying the fleet long enough to save Earth is to essentially have its own legacy erased. I’m not as bothered by the fact that the Constitution III class isn’t as big and prestigious as the whale of a ship that just got decommissioned. The Titan is a workhorse. Not the biggest, coolest ship in the fleet, but the ship that does good, solid work. I am not crazy about the look of the Titan, but it’s a good ship, and the adventures of Captain Seven, Commander Musiker and Ensign Crusher aboard the Enterprise-G are something I’d probably watch. Probably should remove the staircase from the bridge though. Someone’s going to break an ankle.
The last note I’ll make is that a lot of folks were also disappointed that Kate Mulgrew didn’t get a cameo as Janeway granting Seven the captaincy. But the thing is, aside from the fact that calling Kate in for a cameo would be a waste, the scene just wouldn’t work. The love between those two would have to be the emotional center of the scene. With Tuvok, we get his stoic response to maintain the plausibility of the illusion that Seven isn’t about to be massively rewarded for her act of piracy (Characterizing Enterprise-G’s command staff as “A pirate, a spy and a thief” is great), and the emotional core of the scene gets to sit on Shaw, posthumously delivering Seven’s performance appraisal, seemingly drunk, to show that despite his own issues, his own struggle with Seven’s clashing style and what it means for his own place in the world, he recognizes her as the future of Starfleet. Emergency Holographic Dipshit for when they go to series, please (We never met Titan’s chief engineer; a holographic recreation of Shaw is plausible here). The only way you could wedge Janeway in there would be to do the scene as filmed up until after Shaw’s recording. Then have Janeway walk in and say “Resignation not accepted, Captain Seven.” But even that is not as good as just holding her back for some future project.
And so we are left with a new crew and a new Enterprise, and a path forward to the future. And the old crew fades into the sunset, still there if we need them, sure, but at a thematic level, sort of done. Complete. Where they needed to be. The TNG era is over. Time for something new.
Oh then Q shows up because mother fucker. Soft reboot. Yeah, yeah. Q still died at the end of season 2, but he’s a non-temporal being so it’s technically okay. Fuck you.
The post-credits scene I wanted was Jean-Luc waking up, hung over, slumped over the poker table and shouting, “Merde! I was supposed to call Laris a whole fucking year ago!”
Sheer. Fucking. Hubris.
See you in June.