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Alternate Finales

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It's probably not controversial to suggest that "Turnabout Intruder" is an abominable send-off for TOS. Similarly, "These Are The Voyages" is... not great, exactly.

If you don't like the finale - or entire final season(s) - of a Star Trek series, what episodes do you think would make good makeshift finales instead?

For TOS, "The Tholian Web" works well - that way, the series ends with Spock and McCoy working together and Kirk coming back to rib them both over it. "The Savage Curtain" works fairly well too; the series ends with Kirk expressing his belief in a better future and his desire to continue the good work of past humanists.

For TNG, "All Good Things" is fine but oddly I always find "Emergence" makes for a fairly sweet finale - the Enterprise-D gives birth to a new lifeform based on the crew's fantasies, and from that it learns compassion and heroism and carries those values forward. Granted, the episode is boring as shit, but thematically it's a good conclusion to the show.

With DS9 you're obviously locked in to the end if you go into the war arc seasons, but if you want to rewatch just the first few seasons, "Explorers" is a fantastic sendoff - Jake and Sisko embracing as the Cardassian government begrudgingly acknowledge the successes of Bajoran culture, which is a situation that will no longer be thematically or logically possible in what the show turns into afterward.

Any others? I suppose Voyager's stuck with "Endgame" (which is fine for what it is), unless you want to awkwardly end with them still trapped in the Delta Quadrant.
 
VOY should have ended with "Year of Hell", leaving everyone's fates unknown. :devil:
I still say the last couple scenes of Endgame should have been Voyager approaching Earth...and then being sucked into a freak wormhole and emerging in the Delta Quadrant at exact the same position where they started in Episode 1.
....and the Adventure continues! :devil:


As to actual episodes that could have been an alternate end point for the various shows.
I kinda think that DS9 should have ended the war arc with about 5 episodes to spare and the show should have ended with Bajor joining the Federation or at least re-starting their negotiations. So I agree that an episode like Explorers would have been a nice series finale.
I just think what we got was way too abrupt and the series could have needed several episodes to wind down and have a sort of coda.

For TOS I think either the Enterprise Incident, or, as cheesy as it is, Day of the Dove could have worked very well as series finales. Both bring back recurring adversaries and are enjoyable episodes.
 
I still say the last couple scenes of Endgame should have been Voyager approaching Earth...and then being sucked into a freak wormhole and emerging in the Delta Quadrant at exact the same position where they started in Episode 1.
....and the Adventure continues! :devil:
I tend to respond similarly to people who suggest that Voyager would have been better off making for the Bajoran wormhole, given the number of times we see it collapse in just seven years. :p
 
Any others? I suppose Voyager's stuck with "Endgame" (which is fine for what it is), unless you want to awkwardly end with them still trapped in the Delta Quadrant.

I actually prefer “Renaissance Man” as a finale because it gives everyone in the cast (pace Philips) something to do, and honestly given the sort of show Voyager evolved into an old-fashioned “regular” last-but-not-final episode seems right. They’re at home in the Delta Quadrant, they’re fine and having adventures, going home really didn’t seem to matter.
 
I suppose Voyager's stuck with "Endgame" (which is fine for what it is), unless you want to awkwardly end with them still trapped in the Delta Quadrant.

I don't have a problem with Endgame, although I wish they had a little more of their return to Earth.

I also think Shattered could have been a good ending as well.
 
With Endgame still the finale, I guess Living Witness could have served as a sort of epilogue to Voyager. Similar to how some people consider Demons/Terra Prime Enterprise's true finale and TATV is an epilogue.
 
Imagine if the framing story for "Living Witness" had involved a species with some extratemporal awareness (similar to the El-Aurians) who were adversely impacted by Voyager arriving home prematurely...
 
All they had to do was swap “Shades of Gray” with “Q Who” and TNG’s second season would have gone out with a bang. What a silly way to close out the season, even if clip shows were common back then.
 
TOS/TAS did not get an episode that was in any way attempting to be a series finale. It is just another episode.

ENT is, by far, the worst finale with TATV. But you do not have to look far for a good alternative, just end it after Demons>Terra Prime.

To a lesser extent, do the same with TOS and take "All Our Yeaterdays," which is a perfectly good episode.

As was the TAS "finale" of "The Counter-Clock Incident."

If I had to rank the last episodes:

1. TNG: All Good Things (2 part)
-----------------
2. LD: The New Next Generation
3. PIC: The Last Generation (Vox>)
4. PRO: Ouroboros (2 part)
5. DS9: What You Leave Behind (2 pt)
----------------
6. VOY: Endgame (2 part)
7. DISCO: Life, Itself
8. TAS: The Counter-Clock Incident
--------------
9. TOS: Turnabout: Intruder
10. ENT: These Are The Voyages

YMMV, of course.
 
"Terra Prime"

Yeah, it's perfect not just in quality but message - that Earth is now ready to lead what would become The Federation. We see the racism being figuratively purged.

I know Berman and Braga said that "is" the finale and These Are The Voyages is a finale to all of Trek since 1987 but that doesn't come across on screen.

And killing Trip was bad drama for the sake of it.
 
I would have liked one addendum scouring-the-shire if you will, kind of episode for DS9 that maybe shows some final issues resolved on Bajor and a return in some manner to reunite the Sisko with his family.
 
I know it’s a common view that “Terra Prime” should have been the ENT finale, but I wouldn’t want to close the series on Trip & T’Pol weeping over their daughter. (This is not a defense of TATV!)
 
The local station where I first saw TNG rand "All Good Things" then "Gambit" them "Thine Own Self," then started over. It made a lot of sense that way, actually. "All Good Things" shows that the crew has become a family, but in the next episode, in their minds, they suddenly lose Picard and the story brings Vulcans to the forefront of the story the most TNG ever does. Then, in "Thine Own Self," Picard is back, but, aired in this order, the episode ends leaving the question if Data remembers what all has happenned to him or if he will have to start over. This sets up the movies quite well.

With "Thine Own Self" being a regular length episode, it could be included, or not, but having "Gambit" after "All Good Things" works well and I sometimes view the series in that way. In is a good way to start in watching the TNG movies.
 
I know it’s a common view that “Terra Prime” should have been the ENT finale, but I wouldn’t want to close the series on Trip & T’Pol weeping over their daughter. (This is not a defense of TATV!)

Instead we get T'Pol losing her baby and love in back to back episodes...
 
With Endgame still the finale, I guess Living Witness could have served as a sort of epilogue to Voyager.
That would give fans a view of what happens next, but it also leaves open the question of what happenned to the Doctor.
To a lesser extent, do the same with TOS and take "All Our Yeaterdays," which is a perfectly good episode.
For some reason my choice to watch TOS, and sometimes even TAS, in stardate order gets controversial around this site, but "All Our Yesterdays" is the last episode in stardate Order. That also puts "B.E.M." as the last TOS episode, which actually does sort of work as a way to show that that 5-year mission is over wrapping up. The stardate of "B.E.M" might be better regarded as an error, since it seems to be using a fan stardate system and refer to 1974 and the third month rather than a real stardate, and may be a bit too close to TMP.

In fact there are only 4 TAS episodes with a stardate higher than "All Our Yesterdays."
 
I would have liked one addendum scouring-the-shire if you will, kind of episode for DS9 that maybe shows some final issues resolved on Bajor and a return in some manner to reunite the Sisko with his family.

In retrospect Sisko’s “penance” should have probably been in the 6th season cliffhanger/7th season opening arc, I think, which would have left a bit more space in the finale (though I also think the mythic character arc for Sisko over the 7th season was a mistake). For audience expectations and depth-of-story reasons I think the Dominion War was so big they couldn’t really finish it up in anything other than DS9’s finale, but I like the idea of having more of an epilogue.
 
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