TNG Rewatch: Series Finale - "All Good Things..."

Link to my, lengthy, recap.

Summation:

There's not much that can be said about this episode that hasn't been said countless times over the last 23 years. this episode is pretty much a perfect, warm, lovely ending to this series which is, almost inarguably, the best of the "modern Trek" series.

Say what you will about DS9 and it's darker, more serious, elements but this series for me has always had the most heart, most Trek-feel (it didn't need a war to attract people to watch it) and just some great stuff with the characters. I never got as much of the "family" feel from any of the other casts. This final episode is pretty much flawless. Yeah, push me and I'll point some out. I tip-toed around some in this recap, but in the end it's hard to not watch this episode and not feel very, very emotional even though I've watched it so many times in my life.

It's a shame the movies weren't quite able to capture this series right and really do more with it, but that's all in the management problems at Paramount and the creative minds than anything else, Trek as a whole lost its way by the time TNG ended.

For me TNG will always be "my" series and the one I always think of fondly. I have my likes and dislikes for the other series, but for TNG it's pretty much the center of it all and the reason why I am Trek fan.

Nothing will ever be like this again.

 

My two concerns-
1) It's more Picard-centric than I would have preferred. Probably a bit necessary given the premise, but the movies would become Picard-centric to what I believe is generally considered to be a fault. I wouldn't have minded the ensemble getting more to do overall.

2) It's a bit of a reset button episode for everyone who isn't Picard, another item for which later installments would be more heavily criticized.

Make no mistake, I like the episode...a lot...but I don't think it's perfect, and it troubles me that this marks the beginning (continuation) of TNG focusing on Picard to the detriment of the others.

 

Truth

The faults of the movies aside, I don't mind the finale being Picard centric so much. The whole Q dynamic became more Picard centric over the years. 3 of the last 4 episodes were all about messing with Picard, & Q-Who leans that way a bit too. True Q & Deja Q are both about Q themselves or himself. So basically, only the 1st two outings with him were of a more all encompassing nature. They deliberately got away from that. So it makes sense in the context of the relationship, that his last stunt would focus on Picard. That's not the same thing as what they did in the movies, imho

 

I love the TNG finale and it's always hard to decide if I prefer it more to the DS9 finale. I would probably give "All Good Things" the edge, simply because despite having a big fleet battle in "What You Leave Behind" feckin, reused stock footage pisses me off. I would also agree that the TNG finale has more heart to it and IMO feels the most Trek like finale to the most Trek like show in the franchise (I know, how can TNG be more Trek like than the original but ).

Q and Picard were always great together and it wraps up the story started in the pilot

 

Has it really been 23 years? I feel so old now haha!

I've always loved this series and felt it was the best. The finale was perfect IMO.

@Trekker4747 , thanks for taking the time to do all of these reviews. I've enjoyed reading them!

 

"All Good Things ..." is curiously sentimental, considering that those making the show knew TNG would be transitioning to movies. The series was a success, maybe that's why, and those working on it loved it, for that reason. There's nothing like being on a winning team ...

 

I still think they knew that the hominess of their dynamic wouldn't quite carry over. The intimacy of being able to have a scene where Data just plays with his cat, or Riker sits in on a jazz session, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, Dixon Hill, that kind of relationship was bidding farewell

They had to know that every story thereafter would have to be some epic tale of heroism & villainy. That poker game? That was gone forever, & that's where the family lives

 

I could have lived without another time-travel episode, but Brannon Braga was involved, so we had to have one. Still, of all the various-quality time travel eps in all the series, this was one of the better, least annoying ones.

 

I agree, no matter what the knew the movies just weren't going to have time or chance to really show the depths of these characters again or show the "down time" as that's the nature of movies, higher stakes and 2 hours to tell an entire story. So the sentimentality in the episode works very, very, nicely even if we knew we'd see the characters again in the movies it wouldn't be the same.

 

I think it's better than just a time travel episode though. It touches on the higher evolution of the species, Q-like higher consciousness, living outside the realm of time & dimension

 

I have to admit I always felt like that part of the situation was a bit overblown.

It's an anomaly that "travels" backward (but apparently also a bit(?) forward) in time. I don't have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around that as a concept.

 

Yeah... I do agree. If it hadn't been for the fact that one of the periods had a Picard that got treated like a doddering old twit, that Q was deliberately screwing with, it wouldn't have been much harder of an anomaly to figure out than in Timescape, Time Squared or Cause & Effect

But I still think the claim stands, because with this situation comes the lesson that the kind of power a Q possesses has a much broader scope of possible consequences than a Human might consider.

The idea was that Picard caused the anomaly, with the cross-dimensional convergence of the inverse tachyon beams, that his witless handling of this one minor aspect of being a cross-dimensional being was enough to cause a catastrophic effect, that wiped out humanity in it's primordial infancy. It was Q 101

Edit: I do kind of think that test is somewhat unfair though, because it was unannounced. It's kind of hard to blame Picard for a miscalculation when he got dumped into it without knowing the basis for this circumstance. Had Q even just told him "I'm going to move you around through time. Try not to f### anything up" I imagine Picard might've been on his A game a bit better.

 

I didn't really get this episode and I was a little disappointed that the series ended with Q fing with Picard once again. I like Q and all but I was a little let down. What was the point? Q must've been aware of Picard's actions throughout the series and he (it?) should've known what kind of person Picard was. I also thought the Q episode before that was kind of pointless too.

 

Well if you watched Voyager than you would know better than to try to understand a time paradox. Janeway will remind you of that fact on numerous occasions.

 

'All Good Things...' = awesome finish to awesome series.

 

I watched Voyager. "Relativity" in particular brought up some interesting temporal shenanigans.

 

But wasn't that a huge mistake in that episode? They went there, where the anomaly was supposed to be, but it wasn't there. Then they left (that old fool!), but they went back and there it was. But if the anomaly is growing as it goes back in time, it should have been there then, not later, in the future by a few hours or whatever. It has been 23 years, after all. There was no accounting for it, apart from a mistake they made in the story, IIRC.

Apart from that, I liked the episode and thought it was a good ending to the series.

 

There's a couple ways to look at it, I suppose. One being that maybe it does travel into the future a "bit" before the "Anti-Time" is built up enough to revert its growth into the past. It may also expand into the future as well as the past. But there's no explanation for it in the episode. It's "possible" it's something Q manipulated in order for his tinkering with Picard to work.

 

Well, if Q is manipulating it beyond the explained effect of anti-time, then anything is possible. The way it stands, though, it just seems more like a mistake, as sometimes happens in some convoluted time travel stories. I've never really gone looking for a behind the scenes explanation though. Maybe there is one.

 

Wouldn't say perfect, but gets very close. (The Pasteur sends out the tachyon beam, never the future-Enterprise, and the other paradoxical chestnut there of not seeing the anomaly - the "it takes time to form" sounds nice until you realize that's irrelevant when the anomaly travels backwards in time so it should still have been there. Even Red Dwarf did a better job with "Stasis Leak" in acknowledging the reality of temporal paradoxes.

But that's the only real dig and not many points are cut as a result. So much more works so much better I can't really take away any points.

Without TNG there would have been no DS9. That's the truth. But DS9 exists to show how the utopia TNG suggested was maintained. And did a darn good job at it too. And, honestly, the D had some armament to it. Even the premiere talks about it. A proper war arc would have been a lot better than most of seasons 5-7 combined. In hindsight, TNG seasons 5-7 have the feel of how the writers were focusing more on DS9's development as DS9 starts out remarkably strong. The strongest, in fact, of any spinoff.

I used to feel that way, but on my DS9 rewatch, especially by season 3, the "family" feel is definitely showing and it's a lot more lively as an extended family due to the wide array of characters.

See first paragraph above, LOL

So much of it is nailed down perfectly, it was a terrific finale. Bookends with Q. Picard being the cause of humanity's annihilation/nonexistence. Q being shown conclusively as not being the of a 24th century troll but someone trying to teach the humans to improve. He otherwise wouldn't have clued in Picard on anything.

The movies... "Generations" felt like a TV episode on the big screen and yet feels most TNG-like of the four. The others try to be big action epics, retconning themselves along the way and making Patrick Stewart try to out-act Bruce Willis, with the rest of the crew sidelined and reduced to one-liners. The TNG movies needed new people, the way Nicholas Meyer took over for TOS.

During original airing, I didn't become a fan until season 5, ironically. Seasons 1 through 4 had some very hit or miss episodes and I always poked fun at it. TOS was the "only" Trek for me, back then. I was in awe of some episodes' content and the effects, but it wasn't *spectacular*. I kept watching because of the great episodes that popped up from time to time. When the show started to have reruns of the older seasons, that's when I really got into it - at the same time I noticed season 5's style and feel having changed compared to previous seasons and it only went downhill from there, though season 7 felt like a step upward - when I found out there was not to be a season 8 after all, I was crushed... But second chances often mean more than the first. The first 4 years of TNG were the best, had the most content, more action-oriented... DS9 started out with a nice mix of action and intellectualism, which only improved with each passing year, only in season 7 did it feel like the show was winding down and out of ideas, ready for closing the wormhole for the last time...

But, yeah, TNG's first four years - warts and all - are beloved to me nowadays. Season 1 is very hit or miss but there's still a freshness in most episodes, even if it's tacked with 80s tripe... at least "Angel One" is made easier with all that eye candy, and mullets. Some people can actually get away with mullets. People of either gender...