Trek-a-Week #25: All Good Things

Ben:

I’d forgotten how much this final episode of TNG involved time-travel. Katherine will surely grouse about it — and I’ve actually come to realize in the course of considering episodes for this project that I usually find it problematic as well — but the time-travel in All Good Things is a MacGuffin. Like the Maltese Falcon, the meaning of “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane, or the contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, the time-travel plot problem in All Good Things doesn’t really matter that much; it’s just a narrative device to get the TNG crew together years into the future for one last adventure — one last adventure that’s one of the best final episodes of a long-running series around.

This episode is (obviously) wrapping up a lot of things and is also throwing out a lot of cathartic character/narrative info at the same time, rather than as is often the case in usual Trek, wrestling with philosophical or moral considerations. (Or really even presenting us with a classic SF plot for that matter.) As such, I’m going to here — as I have once before during TOS — just have this post be a list of off-the-cuff thoughts about this episode.

Here we go:

• Geordi’s wife is mentioned in the episode and she’s identified as “Leah.” This is clearly an Easter egg for fans who’ve followed Geordi’s terrible, terrible dating history throughout the show. Now he’s apparently happily married to the (previously-married) woman he “cyber-stalked” then got infatuated with after creating an exact replica of (again, married) her on the holodeck without her permission. So that’s kinda odd.
• It is, though, great to see Future Geordi with no VISOR!
• Time-travel stories have been a staple of Trek since the beginning, but they’ve all been of the sort we see here: a situation where actions taken while travelling into the past can change the events of the present one just came from. It’s curious that no Trek narrative has so far utilized “closed loop” time-travel causality a la Bran/Hodor. This episode seems like one where things could have been structured so the Enterprise could have caused the beginnings of humanity in such a closed loop — and such a story would have avoided some of the usual time-travel paradoxes (admittedly, swapping them all for one big one), which are precisely the things that make time-travel stories so hard to buy. “The future as something which is not written in stone” (from this episode) is a lot more problematic narratively than “the past is already written. The ink is dry.” (GOT)
• Listen: Jean Luc Picard has become unstuck in time. One of the best things in this episode is that Picard’s traveling through time is thrown in near-constant doubt throughout this episode because of his brain condition , which could be causing him to hallucinate/imagine all this time jumping. This is great classic Trek material — how can you tell delusion from reality, religious epiphany from psychological break? As per Crusher: “…I also want you to allow for the possibility that none of what you’re (experiencing) is real.”
• Picard trying to convince people that his experiences are real, not delusions, directly recalls The Inner Light.
• Unlike The Inner Light, though. Picard’s friends/crew are in this story. I love the scene where Geordi’s clearly doubting Picard’s veracity but then giving his captain the benefit of the doubt, asks him what his plan is, launching the classic “assemble the team” part of the story:

PICARD: Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. It’s the Irumodic Syndrome. He’s beginning to lose his mind, the old man. Well, it’s not that. And I’m not daydreaming either.
LAFORGE: Well, all right. All right. So, what do you want do about it?

• It’s great that Future Data has become a Crazy Cat Lady.
• Jessel, Data’s housekeeper, is fantastic character. “ If you’re really his friend, you’ll get him to take that grey out of his hair. Looks like a bloody skunk.”
• I haven’t seen the very first TNG episode Encounter at Farpoint in ages but they did a great job duplicating the look of that era in this episode. Troi’s miniskirt uniform was spot-on. Did I spot a skant? No, just wishful thinking…
• The “ignite the midnight petroleum” bit was completely cringe-inducing, but a great call-back to the Data of earlier TNG seasons whose “humorous” banter was often similarly terrible. (Although, the bit with Data’s “master and his beloved pet” analogy for Q/Picard was legitimately funny.)
• The Riker/Worf feud seems somehow wholly in-character, with Worf delivering some great zingers: (to Riker) “Unlike you, I still have a sense of honor and loyalty.” I’m so glad Troi’s fate and the specifics about it are left to speculation. Not every single thing in a story needs to be explained.
• One tiny complaint I’d make about this episode is the excessive techno-babble going on at the climax of the story — the whole bit with the “static warp shell,” etc. In a more standard TNG episode this would be par for the course, but the issue in All Good Things is that this really isn’t the climax of the story. The true climax is the “vindication” of Picard — convincing his crew in all three timelines that he’s not crazy, that something is amiss, and that by following his orders they can solve it.
• And this is All Good Things’s real strength: it’s a final tour-de-force for the character of Jean Luc Picard as a leader (and Patrick Stewart as an actor, for that matter). In all three timelines Picard — by sheer force of strength of character — convinces his crews that the very existence of humanity hangs in the balance and that the only way to prevent the worst is to take an insane leap of faith. In the present timeline, Picard’s just been diagnosed with a brain disorder; in the future timeline he’s still got a brain disorder, and potentially dementia as well; in the Farpoint timeline, he’s a total unknown quantity — and yet in all three his crew are willing to take that leap of faith. In other hands Picard’s final scene, at long last joining the officers’ poker game, might have come off as trite or corny. Here, though, it’s a fitting end to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Katherine:

We are ending our batch of TNG episodes with the actual final episode of the series, All Good Things…, an extra-long one. I can say I have learned a lot about what kinds of stories Ben likes in his selection of episodes. I knew already that he enjoys Philip K. Dick style stories in which the nature of reality is in question and, via Wikipedia, “the main characters slowly discover that their everyday world is actually an illusion assembled by powerful external entities.” This is exactly what happens in All Good Things… where the nearly omnipotent Q sets a challenge for Picard that has him doubting his sanity.

The captain is made to experience multiple time periods: 1) current time, 2) a prior time, in which Picard has just joined the Enterprise, and 3) a future time in which Picard is retired, working in a vineyard and has what we can assume is some type of degenerative brain disease. The episode starts in the current timeline where Worf and Troi are chatting — about how they’re now dating?! — and Picard appears in his bathrobe in an agitated state asking what the date is. He tells them he is “moving back and forth through time.”

He tries to explain the experience to Troi who suggests it may have been a dream but he is certain it was not. The scene then skips to Picard in future time who is visited in the vineyard by an equally aged Geordi. They chat and refer to time together on the Enterprise being 25 years in the past. Even in this timeline, which Picard is experiencing as real time, he begins to have hallucinations of people dressed like peasants jeering at him.

We skip then to past time and Picard is being introduced to the crew by Tasha on his first day. In this timeline, however, he immediately has a sense that he has experienced it before. Skip back to current time where Picard is examined by Crusher who finds no evidence of psychological problems or that he’s been anywhere except on the ship. A call from an admiral comes in saying that several Romulan warbirds are heading for a specific system in the neutral zone and he asks Picard to go and investigate.

The rest of this long episode does what TNG seems to do best, or at least what most of Ben’s selection of TNG episodes do, which is to switch from scene to scene, intensifying the confusion and urgency as the characters race to try to figure out a solution to the puzzle before time runs out. In each time, Picard, with the help of his crew, natch, learns or intuits a little bit more of what is happening, which is that a “temporal disturbance” — lord, here we go again — appears and the tachyon pulse that the ship emits to scan for the anomaly in each of the three timelines, somehow alters the primordial soup on earth such that human beings will not come to exist.

The situation is all a bit fuzzy and is explained to Picard when Q appears as a “judge”, with the jeering peasants as jury, to put the captain, nay humanity, on trial for “being inferior” with the consequence of our actual existence being denied if Picard cannot realize that he needs to stop the tachyon beam, initiate a static warp shell around the ship and enter the temporal shift. As they close in on solving the problem in all timelines, scenes are shortened so that the action is flipping between them all and, ultimately, all three Enterprises fly in and explode!

Of course, this works to collapse the spatial anomaly, preventing the whole time issue and we return to current day where Picard relives his scene with Worf and Troi and all is well, like Dorothy returning from the Land of Oz, with on one else having knowledge of what transpired. The details of the personal lives of the crew members as we see them in past and future are honestly not worth going into. This episode was fun to watch but I really only found the dialogue between Q and Picard to be interesting.

I have not seen the initial TNG episode which, as I understand, has a similar courtroom scene with Q testing Picard. Q makes reference to the organization to which he belongs, as he says that the test he imposed on Picard was “a directive from the Continuum.” I mean, what the heck, in the past seven years the crew has “journeyed to countless new worlds, contacted new species, expanded [their] understanding of the universe” as Picard points out. But it all comes down to this? Some existential god-like being toying with humanity like a [particularly snarky] cat plays with a mouse?

I do like how Q challenges conceptions about the passing of time, “must you be so linear?” and how he implies that there is some wholeness to a person that transcends time, “You’re not alone, you know. What you were and what you are to become will always be with you.” The word continuum itself implies a continuous set or whole, some sort of connectedness that links everything together. This is all dangerously close to religion, or at least a belief in something greater than humankind. It seems that, as gutsy as it was for TOS to delve into scientific talk, TNG treads into talking about the meaning of life. Q hints at this alternate perspective, the willingness to go beyond what science alone offers us, “For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence.”

I really love this series and all its characters. I’ve enjoyed TNG as much as TOS even though they are so different. There are similarities in the mission of the Enterprise, the respect for life — same and other — and the ingenuity of the crew in solving problems. But the new elements, the inclusion of psychological science, the acknowledgement of doubt, and “to boldly go where no one has gone before” make Next Generation exactly that, an innovative vision that builds on the timeless ideals established by the original.

Next week: Captive Pursuit