Deal us in. Three decades ago, one sci-fi series rose above the rest to approach the impossible label of perfection. When aired its triumphant finale on May 23, 1994, it was almost an entirely different series than when it began in 1987.
Back then, was an awkward remake of . When ended, it Star Trek, transforming a 1960s curio into a format destined to survive and evolve for another quarter century. To say there is no modern Star Trek without is obvious, but what gets missed in countless is that most adoration for can be qualified non-linearly.
Just as Captain Picard discovers that a time paradox is the key to saving the galaxy, the success of the finale “All Good Things...
” didn’t just come from the fact that it ended a hit show on a high note; instead, it revised history to make the beginning of the show feel as good as the ending. “All Good Things..
.” was presented as a two-hour finale, just like pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint.” Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) finds himself jumping between the present, a past before when we meet him in “Farpoint,” and a future where he’s a doddering old man with memory problems.
Borrowing from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel , Picard is unstuck in time. It’s soon revealed that the meddling space god Q ( ), intent on teaching Picard a lesson before it's too late, is behind these time shifts. The entire history of everything is on the line as Q reveals a spatial anomaly centered around Picard that threatens to wipe out .