Thr best ending for TNG was ALL GOOD THINGS.
Beverly meets Laris. Picard turns to the camera with a cheeky smile stretched across his face.
Fade to black.
The more time goes by and the more I watch it I realise what an absolute masterpiece it it.
When it came out my very young self was disappointed that it didn't have enough explosions and felt the finale should have been more like what First Contact gave us. Now I can see both are brilliant.
I wish AGT hadn't been quite so Picard-focused at the expense of the secondary characters, and that the writers had thought through the (fairly creative!) puzzle they created a bit more carefully when it came to the execution of it in the episode, but otherwise, it's pretty great. I'm not sure there's a better finale other than possibly WYLB (though that has its own set of issues).
As the theme song from "Three's Company" begins playing.
The TNG crew had three endings and none of them really top All Good Things but Picard S3 was definitely a better ending for the crew than Nemesis.
I keep going back and forth if the Enterprise-E should have been in Picard, if it had been the one getting retired. On the one hand I think it would have been cool to see both ships from the TNG-era celebrated, but on the other would the E's appearance have made the D's appearance less impactful?
The season was built around nostalgia, so the D was always going to beat the E. If anything, the F should have been the E. It would make more sense for Starfleet to give the E one last hurrah in the big fleet gathering before decommissioning it due to critical damage sustained in the mission prior to the gathering. Which would then better algin with the STO timeline for when the F originally launched. The only issue with this is that the Titan would need to be named something else, if you even bother to rename it at all.
Seeing them work together would have been more interesting.
I like "All Good Things..." slightly less as the years go by, but I recognize that's hardly a commonplace opinion. It's a very good episode of television. It's a reasonably strong note to go out on. But it's not even my third-favorite Star Trek series finale.
Back when PIC S3 aired, I refrained from saying this out of concerns over personal recency bias. But I'm now certain. I genuinely prefer "The Last Generation" as a TNG finale. Three years later, and I'm still ride-or-die on PIC S3 on the whole, too. Nostalgia-drenched salad that it is, it's still absolutely delicious to me.
Back when PIC S3 aired, I refrained from saying this out of concerns over personal recency bias. But I'm now certain. I genuinely prefer "The Last Generation" as a TNG finale. Three years later, and I'm still ride-or-die on PIC S3 on the whole, too. Nostalgia-drenched salad that it is, it's still absolutely delicious to me.
If the E filled the F's role of being the ship that was retired and then lost, it would things more poetic, as you could have had the D be the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes to avenge its fallen successor. And when you get down to it, the E was still a part of TNG, it deserved to be present for TNG's last ride.
Which is why I have always found it odd that they started the show as a new thing and then back tracked to a nostalgia salad, rather than the more logical - reunion nostalgia salad, with a spin off focusing on a reinvigorated Picard.
Because fan feedback that was the loudest was clamoring for the familiar.
You might be right.Cynical Me will cite this as one more reason not to listen to the fans.
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