It's weird to think that any one of the movies could have been the last one, yet most of them are decent potential final outings. Except for one of my favorites, TSFS. Can you imagine that movie as their last major adventure? Spock is alive, but everything has been left up in the air. There's a straightforward, familiar status quo at the end of TVH, that it doesn't seem like a novel or comic story would need to make major decisions about the next narrative step.
The ongoing comic series made a bold step of speculating on how the crew navigate their way back to a set-up that is somewhat recognizable, putting them on as the command crew of the Excelsior. Their tenure running the Excelsior through a shakedown cruise is a great window into what it might have looked like if the movies carried forward towards this, their originally intended trajectory. This has been very exciting to read through, yet I realized that the changes weren't that drastic; the adventures could easily have been transposed to one or the other of Kirk's Enterprises without much change.
But would a follow-up spin-off show which picks up from TSFS rather than TVH have been a good way to go? That would seem to be a little unsettling that the resolution to where Kirk's command crew are at the end of TSFS would manifest in a different medium.
It seems like it would be a lot more work to pick up the pieces for a new show. The ongoing comic series show them going through quite an extensive (7 to 8 part issue) storyline before we see a new status quo emerge.
It might have been interesting to see what the occasional novel tried to do with an undefined post-TSFS time period, if there was no TVH to "put things right" as it were.
The ongoing comic series made a bold step of speculating on how the crew navigate their way back to a set-up that is somewhat recognizable, putting them on as the command crew of the Excelsior. Their tenure running the Excelsior through a shakedown cruise is a great window into what it might have looked like if the movies carried forward towards this, their originally intended trajectory. This has been very exciting to read through, yet I realized that the changes weren't that drastic; the adventures could easily have been transposed to one or the other of Kirk's Enterprises without much change.
But would a follow-up spin-off show which picks up from TSFS rather than TVH have been a good way to go? That would seem to be a little unsettling that the resolution to where Kirk's command crew are at the end of TSFS would manifest in a different medium.
It seems like it would be a lot more work to pick up the pieces for a new show. The ongoing comic series show them going through quite an extensive (7 to 8 part issue) storyline before we see a new status quo emerge.
It might have been interesting to see what the occasional novel tried to do with an undefined post-TSFS time period, if there was no TVH to "put things right" as it were.
The character arcs within all three time zones are linked. Troi confessing to Picard in the past zone about her relationship to Riker reflects directly on the Troi/Worf/Riker triangle in the present, and Riker is still bitter in the future about her death and their not having reconciled. Another key scene, off the top of my head: Data in the past can't understand analogies ("burn the midnight oil" confuses him), but only a few scenes later, present Data then makes an offhand comment about how Q's relationship with Picard is like someone and their pet. He makes an analogy, and shows to us how far Data has come in seven years. As a piece of TV, as a piece of Star Trek, and as a TV finale, "All Good Things..." is simply perfectly crafted. 
