Rob: Hello and welcome back to Subspace Radio.
It is time to discuss the latest in Star Trek, and what other
topics lead from that discussion.
We have the final episode of Picard season three to talk about.
With me, as always every week, is Kevin Yank.
How are you?
Kevin: Pleasure to be with you, Rob.
Rob: It is an absolute pleasure to finally get down to the nuts and
bolts of The Last Generation and hear your thoughts, and share mine with
you, and see where we come to in the middle ground, in the neutral zone.
Kevin: one last time around the poker
Rob: Exactly, and a shot that just lingers.
It doesn't want to go.
A shot that doesn't wanna leave.
And just like most of the fans did not want the show to end.
Incredible.
Kevin: Yeah.
Rob: So what were your first impressions with the the concluding episode?
The second part of our two part finale, and the last episode of all these
regular characters together in the one place again for the, for the foreseeable
future, which is pretty much it.
What were your thoughts?
Kevin: This was real good.
They, they stuck the landing.
There were things that raised my eyebrows and kind of went, was that really
necessary or, that was a bit much.
And I have to say, having watched it a second time, with the surprise
gone, the overarching impression is just how confident and purposeful
and clear a story they told here.
They got all of the, What do you mean, they've injected Borg
programming into everyone's DNA?
They got all of that weirdness out of the way last week, so that this week
could be a relatively, in my view, straightforward that didn't confuse
anyone, didn't lose any fans along the way, and rather just indulged in a big
spectacle in which every character we cared about had an important part to play,
and on every front they just nailed it.
Rob: There's been a lot of talk online about finances and about how much
money has been put into this show, and joking about the return to that
bar and how often it's been used.
But it really was a clear indication of clever writing, a showrunner
who knows what the fans want, and also what a good story needs, but
also how to use that money wisely.
So to, be economical when you need to be for, closeups and set shots
and CGI shots, but also saving money for some incredible shots of, the
Enterprise D coming down within the Borg ship circling around to pick
Kevin: swoops in over their
Rob: in the lights and the smoke and the and the foam and the,
and the wind and everything.
Just
Kevin: And the the Borg Queen going, Come on!
Rob: Yes, it was very much, it was incredibly satisfying end and just, Even
though I'm not as huge a Next Gen fan, I have an infection for that crew and to be
drawn into it so that I felt like yourself and many others who have lived that seven
season story, those four movies and has been a part of your life for decades,
and I've been on that outside periphery.
But I felt very much welcomed in to, to to enjoy them for one last time and feel
a part of that collective experience.
Kevin: So this being the biggest of big finishes, I think we, we decided this
week what we're gonna be reflecting on in the rest of the Star Trek canon is
big finishes, final episodes, endings, and whether they were successful or not.
Perhaps how they compared to this week's money infused extravaganza.
Having watched this and then gone back and watched some other endings in Star
Trek, just how much money there is here.
This looked more expensive than most of the Star Trek films to me.
And some of the endings of Star Trek series that were like, just barely able to
make it to the finish line of their last season, were real cash strapped affairs.
And you could tell compared to this, where if no expense was spared,
it felt like, at least in this
Rob: Yes.
Some going out with a whimper, not a bang.
But yes, it would be great to explore which ones work, which one didn't work.
Kevin: Yeah that, that was definitely on my mind here of just how much of
these Changelings and secret sons are we actually going to care about.
When this, when all is said and done, it's probably gonna hinge on whether this
story got us somewhere that mattered.
And I feel like to this week, it
Rob: Yeah, definitely.
Like you said, it was really focused in.
Everything has been set up to this point, and so we could focus on what was
important, stripping it back to Picard and his relationship with all the people
around him and the connections with that.
Him as a father, him as captain, him as an admiral, and the people around
him and how they associate with it.
Kevin: I said that this was a simple story here by the end, and yeah, in broad
strokes, if we were to summarize this, it was the Enterprise D goes to find a
Borg cube at Jupiter, flies through it, blows up the thing and rescues Jack.
Meanwhile around Earth, Seven and Raffi fight back the assimilated crew
of the Titan and do some swooping runs on the fleet that are attacking
Spacedock, slowing them down just enough to prevent the destruction
of all of the cities on Earth.
And that's it.
The end.
Rob: And it really is a case of the Earth is being at its most threatened that it
has been, and it's all on one person.
So if you just disconnect that one person, Jack, everything's fine.
So it really is this case of
Kevin: They needed to unjack Jack, as it were.
Rob: Exactly.
Kevin: What else stood out
Rob: Well it, it started off with a homage to mah whale movie.
Not only did we have Walter Koenig back as as the descendant of Pavel Chekov,
he said the famous line from Star Trek that all presidents need to say.
Do not approach Earth.
Kevin: Star Trek IV reference!
Yeah, absolutely.
If you like stories where ships are told not to approach
Earth, go watch Star Trek IV.
Rob: And how are you with doing impersonations of your relatives?
Cause
Kevin: Well, we know in Star Trek that relatives are identical
twins of their forebears.
So, I think he, Walter Koenig had an easy assignment here.
The moment his, his voice appeared, I went, I know who that is.
And then he announced himself as Anton Chekov.
And I was like, oh, wow.
Every fan did the same mental math and it went Chekov, not Pavel Chekov,
Anton Chekov, Anton Yelchin, who played Pavel Chekov in the JJ movies.
Beautiful stuff.
Where it lost me is when he did the accent, As my father would've
said, Hope ees nyeever lost.
I just went, oh no, you took it too far.
I was rolling my eyes in the first 30 seconds, so it
was touch and go there for a
Rob: Yeah.
I could see.
I'm they're going, why didn't they have a video of him?
And then they're going, all right.
Okay.
They're gonna indulge a little bit here, and when I say a little, a hell of a lot.
Kevin: Some beautiful Enterprise D flybys and the exact same angles
that we saw every week, again and again, ad nauseum during the TV
series, but this time upscale to 4k.
With all of that incredible lighting and model detail, that ship has
never looked better, and they showed it to us at classic angles.
Certainly, at least until it started doing the bombing run through the Borg cube
where we saw it from every possible angle.
But they definitely took the time to reverently revisit the way we are
used to seeing this ship at great
Rob: There were those moments.
I mean, it
Kevin: They were playing all the hits.
They had Riker's foot on the
Rob: they did, he didn't do it.
He didn't do it on Data's side, he did it on Geordi's though.
Kevin: As soon as I saw that Borg cube sticking out of the clouds of
Jupiter's Great Red Spot with its pointy antennas, and then the shot in
profile of the arc of the planet the cube shrouded in the, those red clouds
and the tiny Enterprise floating in front of it with the sun lens flaring
all over the place in the background.
I just went, okay, this is special, now.
This is, this feels like more than just playing the hits, they are now creating
something beautiful and new here.
That that's, that's when it hooked me.
And it went to the opening credits at that point.
I went great.
I'm on
Rob: And there was definitely that balance of, a finale told in two stories.
So the old generation and the new generation.
So we see the struggle to keep the Titan disconnected in some way.
So those surviving old curmudgeons, Seven of Nine oh, send her out to pasture, not.
I'm being sarcastic.
And techno babble of going, all right, we've created this
teleportation portable device thingy.
Let's see.
I'm there going, oh, that's a good amount of techno-babble in the short amount
of techno in a short amount of time.
Kevin: I do not envy the writing challenge nor the acting challenge for all the
people involved in those B plot scenes of, you are going to be up against the
tear jerking nostalgia fest of the bridge crew of the Enterprise D going on their
suicide mission into the Borg cube.
You know that every one of your scenes will be cutting away
from that to, I'm just a chef.
I, I only took one week of pilot school.
You've got this son.
That was hard stuff to— I think it would've been hard to instill that with
the same amount of gravitas and importance as what was going on around Jupiter.
And I think they mostly succeeded.
Rob: is the one, one of the few signs where I am grateful for season one and
two of Picard, not for how they were ultimately presented, but what that
has done for Seven of Nine's character and what we've seen of Seven of Nine
evolve from season one to now, to get to the point where she can with the
gun swinging over her shoulder, look at this guy and just say, you got this.
And it's just like I'm there going, this is not just three years of Picard.
This is decades out of the show.
This is, everything that Jeri Ryan has been through to stand there and
take this and deliver that line.
And you go, that has been a journey in itself, off screen and on screen
Yeah,
Kevin: Without skipping to the end, I will say that, really Jeri Ryan carried
the B plot of this finale episode.
Raffi was there, other people were there, but really, it was the Jeri Ryan and
showing us her in command with no one to fall back on, no one to question her
what she can get done under pressure and in leadership of a crew, a small
one, but a crew that not only sells the potential for the Star Trek Legacy
series that the fans are now clamoring for, but it sells for me that Jeri
Ryan can lead that show persuasively.
Yeah, Having watched this, I, the only thing I want to be in a Star
Trek Legacy show is Jeri Ryan.
The rest can come along, but I can take or leave them.
Jeri Ryan is the reason I will be tuning in to
Rob: Yes.
Yeah, very much so.
I mean, I've discussed over the last couple of weeks my issues with Raffi
as a character and Raffi with her relationship with Seven of Nine.
And there's been a lot of talk about how amazing it is that for this
moment there is, you know, someone LGBTIQ+ represented in a captain's
role and a female and, all this type of stuff and which is incredible.
But yeah, it is that thing of Seven of Nine standing alone and proud
as themselves, not being tied to anyone, cuz Seven of Nine in many
ways was defined by finding her identity through her relationships
with the doctor, with Janeway, with Tuvok, all that type of stuff.
And to hamstrung her to a relationship that was thrown together with a handshake
in the last shots of a season, I've talked about it many times before.
I'm all up for that representation, but for her as a character.
It's her standing proud is, on her own two feet, is incredible.
And the stuff with Raffi, with like her connecting with her family again and being
able to, with jumping to the end with Worf there going, be with your family.
Connect with your family.
You are no longer, you can no longer be a spy cuz everyone knows who you are now.
So yeah, it was a big challenge.
But, Jeri Ryan continues to show, week in, week out, whenever they bring her back.
She's just, she's ready for it.
Like you said, she had to do all the heavy lifting going up against all of
the original Next Gen cast and never there was a moment where you were
going, come on, cut back to them.
Kevin: Yeah.
Credit to them for not, getting Seven and Raffi back together, or at least not
explicitly getting them back together.
That is the last thing we care about in this episode.
They can explore if the captain and the first officer are together
or not in that eventual series.
That dynamic was done on The Orville where the captain and the first officer
are a separated couple and every once in a while there's a bit of will they,
won't they do they miss each other?
Oh, this is nice.
Remember how it used to be?
And then professionalism prevails, or they remember why they're not together.
And I think that dynamic can work very nicely.
So I would look forward to that from Raffi and Seven more than I would look forward
to the the couple running the Starship.
Rob: Yeah.
Kevin: I'm gonna call it now, I think Raffi and Seven,
never getting back together.
I think that's done and dusted and like so many other things about
season two that was as efficiently and effectively canceled as possible
Rob: Yes, very much.
And don't make Jack a counselor.
That's the worst decision ever.
You wanted the shot of the three of them at the, on the chairs together?
Put him at a desk, put him at one of the operating stations.
Kevin: I wrote, give the guy a real job.
Special counselor to the captain isn't even a role.
That's not counselor, that's like special advisor, like, we'll bring you along
because you're Admiral Picard's son much as they, he said, it's nepotism.
And they said no, you earned this yourself.
You know what would've shown us that he earned this himself, is him taking
a proper station and doing a real
Rob: Yeah.
Yeah.
He's the captain's parrot on a pirate ship.
He's literally there.
He's he's Iago from Aladdin, going Whaark!
Crackers.
Kevin: Yeah.
That was my least favorite thing, this whole episode, that after
Jack did such beautiful scenes in the Borg cube with his father.
Oh.
Such good acting.
I was like, Jack, you're making me cry.
I didn't, of all the people who I thought would make me cry this episode,
I did not expect it would be heartbreak on Jack Crusher's face, but it was.
And then they threw it all away here at the end by giving
him a fake job on the ship.
Just so they could have that gag of, they gave the ship to a
pirate, a thief, and a con artist.
And I'm like, ah, come on.
That was, it was not a big enough payoff to, to rob Jack of a real job.
I expect if this series actually goes forward, that is one thing
they will slightly course correct.
And, he's at ops or he's at the comms station
Rob: You need to have something specific.
It is the case of, oh, it's a little gag at the end of a of multiple
endings, like a Return of the King.
But once you get down to the nuts and bolts, you go, alright, okay,
now seriously, what are you doing?
Kevin: Take after his mother, like he ran a medical rescue ship
with his mom for all those years.
Why wasn't he the Bones on that bridge, standing behind the first officer
and the captain making remarks, um, that would've been a great thing.
And then he goes down to sick bay and that's his job on that ship.
That would've been awesome.
While we're talking about that B plot, I'll just say I love the fact that
Stardock has quietly been upgraded to be the sum total of Earth's planetary
Rob: like all of it.
Kevin: Like, I don't think that has ever been true before.
In my impressions when we've seen Stardock before in the films and
since, is it has really been, like the name says it's the dock, it's
the parking garage for starships.
But in this, it is if something wants to attack Earth, it has to go through
Spacedock, and all of those phaser beams converging on that thing for
minutes on end with the fireworks of the impacts just hitting its
shields for minutes upon minutes.
I thumbs up that upgrade just because I am such a fan of that model, that
Rob: But it's a, it's a new, it's a newer model.
It's got extra.
Kevin: the extra, it's got the extra widgets
Rob: Yes.
Yeah.
Is that the technical term for it?
Kevin: Yeah.
That's the technical term.
And they rebuilt it in a year also, like at the end of this, it takes
the last hit, tilts backwards, and then someone says, Spacedock is down.
And a year later,
Rob: it's fine.
It's fine.
Yeah.
And there was that just that chilling sense of when the possessed young
starfleet members were on the crew and just how they're just talking in
this drone and there's just silence and they're just going unauthorized
movement or unsanctioned movement, and they're just fire, unsanctioned
movement, and they're just this chilling sense of that's what's ahead.
And we haven't seen the Borg in that way before.
That sense of there've been just these, the, these lifeless
shiftless, spirits walking through.
Kevin: It's hard to find a new stage of creepiness for the Borg that
makes us fear them again, and they did at least approach that here.
If not, get
Rob: Exactly.
Just that, yeah.
Just that sense of this, this eerie, abandoned mansion type feel that
you get in the old school horror sense of just these voices just
talking with no emotion and they're just repeating it like a program.
That was a tasty little bite of this potential evolution.
Kevin: Geordi's daughters, Sidney and Alandra really sold that for me.
If it had not been for those two characters and especially
Sidney, whose character we had gotten to know as a person.
Going back to our previous episode about the hostage situation on the
bridge and the fact that we didn't even know any of the people who were under
threat, here the fact that the Borg right at the front of the pack each
time were Geordi La Forge's daughters, and that we had seen them as people.
We knew what they cared about.
We knew their relationship with their father.
That seeing the real people converted to drones and threatening the
people, the very people they love.
That's what sold it for me.
If it had been just the rest of the nameless bridge crew marching around
the corridors, it wouldn't have
Rob: Yeah.
Bajoran guy slightly not as bald as the one who was killed off person.
Green Lady.
Yeah.
It's really interesting cuz they took, made a moment of capturing the old with
the new, so you had that shot of Raffi, the two La Forge kids and Seven of Nine.
So the four images there shown, so Geordi could look at his
daughters and go, there they are.
But it gave this impression of this is the future.
But then when you cut to the Titan turned into the Enterprise G, Sidney's
there, but we're down one La Forge, maybe they're down in engineering, maybe
they're down into the, with the warp core.
Kevin: Maybe so, yeah.
The only other thing about the events in Earth orbit was something that
I noticed last week, but I didn't mention when we talked, was the
formation of the fleet formation.
They're like circles or dots in the middle or little like, uh, yeah.
I, the first time that happened at the end of episode eight,
I was like, what is that?
I, I'm, I'm, I guess they'll tell us next week.
And then those formations were more and more prominent last episode
and they still didn't explain them.
I'm like, surely they'll tell us this week, and they never did.
Um, there has, there's been threads online with people going,
does anyone know what that is?
Nobody knows that that is.
Apparently the showrunner was pinned down in some interview
and he said, it's Borg script.
It's meant to look like Borg writing, but why would the Borg, you know, arrange
their fleet in the shape of their writing?
That, that doesn't really make sense either.
What it smacks to me of is that the script didn't say what formation they
were in, and when they just put them in a random formation, like just a random
cloud of starships, they kind of went that looks boring and underwhelming.
Let's do something more visually interesting.
What could it be?
And the CG artist did five versions and they went this one's based on Borg
script and Terry Matalas pointed at the picture and went, that one looks the best.
And that's how it ended up that way.
As far as I can tell, there's no story justification or function
for that, that formation.
And I find that a little
Rob: like what we talked about last week of like when the Starfleet
younger crew become Borganized.
I think that's a word I just came up with, either they become a Borg
or they become Ernest Borgnine.
Either way.
They had to visually show it in a way of going, they were once
themselves and now they are Borg.
This was a case of this was before when they were Starfleet.
Now they're Borg.
It was a case of we need to visually show this in some
Kevin: Yeah.
How can a fleet of ships look
Rob: Yes
Kevin: and that's the best they could do.
Rob: Exactly.
We spent our time on the B plot.
Let's go back to the meat and potatoes, what we're all there for.
We've already talked about Riker putting his foot up, which we all love.
Kevin: I noticed that this is yet another Defanged Borg cube.
It brought me back to the Borg cube that they visited in Prodigy in the
episode Let Sleeping Borg Lie, where it was like, oh, no, it's a Borg cube.
It's okay, they're all asleep.
It was the least scary Borg cube.
And in some sense, like this one was both the most scary Borg cube we've
ever visited, because it wasn't Borg, it was like zombie Borg on board, and
it was a real freak show over there.
But on the other hand, it was also like they went, look, we know that
the Enterprise D all by itself is outmatched by even a normal Borg cube,
let alone a giant one that they're gonna be able to fly inside of in a minute.
So they needed to like turn down the level of difficulty here
and I'm okay with it in the end.
I think the spectacle that it gave us justified the slight back flip
they did there of it's a really scary Borg cube, but it's not too scary.
But yeah, in the moment I was kind of like, Hmm, 36% operational, you say.
That's pretty convenient.
They did nod to that, once the Borg Queen started to make her speeches of
exposition, and she described the fact that Janeway's neurolytic pathogen that
paralyzed them and the destruction of the Transwarp Network when Voyager made its
way home at the end of that series, left them, the Borg shattered and left her
as the Borg Queen, isolated and alone, and all she could do was like feed on
what was left to her, which was that
Rob: And that's what she says, like she's starving and was really
quite powerful description of it.
Kevin: Yeah, it was well justified, but it was mighty convenient that
was a not too scary Borg cube.
Rob: Now it's been said it was the voice of Alice Krige, so I
believe it was just like it was a different actor in the Borg Queen.
Kevin: That's right.
There's a credited body double who, who is like in all of the
latex and the fake ribcage hanging
Rob: Yes.
Do the acting.
And Alice just came in and did her voiceover and they
synced it up beautifully.
So it was good to, we got a sense of the old school bridge
and the old school crew there.
But now with the new element of Data being part human in synthetic form, so
not just obligingly doing what they're told and reacting and wanting to, bite
back a bit with the captain going, no, I should come with you, and not wanting
to stay behind and coming up with their gut leading them to do what to do.
And a great moment with Geordi going Data, I said no.
I'm going, ooh.
Okay.
That's a little bit of a imbalance of uh, status there, Geordi.
Kevin: Yeah, yeah.
When Data finally took control of the Enterprise and flew that impossible
flight, it struck me that um, just how many bridge crew are actually needed
because, Data was still sitting at Ops and he was driving the ship, which
you do from the Conn at that point.
So Data really is superhuman here to the point where I wonder is
anyone else here even needed?
I did appreciate like the decision for Data to stay behind on the ship and Troi
like, calling that out and saying, look if this is gonna be successful, we need
to maximize our chances, and that means Data, you, our superhuman crew member
should be here on the ship where you have the most resources at your disposal.
So yeah, I like that.
I think what we saw there is why we cannot have a further adventures of
Data in because he barely needs a crew
Rob: Yeah, he just couldn't operate a ship on his own.
And that's where you have to suspend the reality of sci-fi,
of going what you love about it.
It's a massive ship that can only work with people in all these sections.
You need to cut to Geordi in engineering and trying to figure that out there.
And the doctor's in medicine.
You can't just do it all from one spot.
Kevin: It was lucky that Geordi was needed in the command chair because
otherwise it would've been really awkward that Geordi was still sitting there
in the driver's seat doing nothing.
I would've actually liked Data to like jump across to the other seat
when he needed to fly the ship.
That would've been a nice a nice little turn
Rob: Yeah, they did definitely keep him there cuz they're
going, that's Data's seat.
He's gotta stay there.
Kevin: Yeah.
We're used to seeing him from that side.
that's his good side.
Rob: Of course if Data does carry on with his adventures, he will need only
one crew member on the ship with him.
And that's Beverly Crusher to operate all the guns.
Kevin: I know!
As I was saying before, that they gave everyone something to do here, it was
like, okay, what is the doctor's job going to be on this suicide mission?
It's been 20 years.
She's, she's run her own ship,
Rob: And she's been on the front line.
She's been out there in the Neutral Zone.
She is not the same person she was.
She's got a lot of
Kevin: These people are not limited by their previous
roles and yeah, I loved that.
Leaving the Enterprise D and going on that away mission, Riker, Worf and
Picard going after Jack, they spent a good amount of time there making us feel
that these people might not come back.
That at least they believed they were potentially making
the ultimate sacrifice here.
Seeing Troi wordlessly farewell her husband and then shut her eyes tightly
to stop from crying, seeing Beverly let Picard go because she wants her son back,
but realizing she may be sacrificing two men in the hope of getting one back.
And all of that was delicious.
And the more they did it, the more I went, okay, none of these people are dying,
because that would be too obvious now.
But still it was, the emotion was real.
I didn't need to be fooled into thinking these people were going to die in order to
invest in the emotions of those moments.
And so that was like the, all these years of all these characters paying
off in letting them have those moments with each other, largely without
dialogue and, done through the acting.
Rob: And it, it did give you that sense of, this isn't just routine,
another mission that they're doing.
This is a case of, no, this is all of them at the twilight, that they're not as fast
and as on the ball as they used to be.
Apart from Worf who's taken stab wounds and phaser fire, and he's,
and then he deserves a good nap.
He deserves a good nap at
Swords are fun.
I like how they, just, that reality of how heavy the Bat'leth is, as well.
That's type of reality stuff, that detail is really cool.
I like bringing that stuff in.
Kinda like in the first Xmen movie when they reveal every time wolverine's
claws come out, it hurts every time.
Those type of things are like, the weight of it in, that
type of stuff I really liked.
And his final lines to Picard were amazing, beautiful stuff,
two words we don't like to admit that we know defeat and farewell.
That was, he's good, Michael Dorn, gee.
Kevin: We had another face-off in a CG void.
That was two in one season.
Rob: And it's just so easy for Picard to go straight back into Borg,
just gets a cord it into his neck.
Kevin: Against the queen's wishes!
She's going, nooo.
And he is like, you can't stop me if I stick this thing in my neck, I'm connected
and I am face to face with my son.
That was like, okay, we'll go along with this.
Rob: We need to get inside that face-to-face confrontation.
This has been accumulation of nine episodes beforehand, of Jack feeling alone
and left out and not having real, any place to go and finally finding his home.
Kevin: Yeah, a lovely, subtle twist of you think that's because you had Borgness
implanted in your genome, but no, that's because you are a son of Jean-Luc Picard,
a famously socially awkward individual, who never quite fit in anywhere except
on the bridge of his own starship.
That is such character driven storytelling there that what ultimately
put these characters in the situations they found themselves was not Borg
transporter code plot McGuffin stuff.
It was the true characters of these characters.
Rob: And a beautiful moment of Picard accepting that, he will stay with his
son rather than leave him, which we could see a mile away, but it was good.
And Patrick Stewart did incredibly well with those scenes just
in front of a green screen.
Kevin: I've never wanted a hug from Jean-Luc Picard more.
Rob: Yeah.
I think we should all get in line for that.
So, yeah, that led into the Troi saving the day, finally reconnecting
with her husband and being able to find exactly where they are.
Kevin: The first of many bookends in the way this episode played out is Riker
saying, I love you, Imzadi on that Borg ship, lighting up that between them.
It was a callback directly to the first time they both appeared on screen together
on the bridge, in Encounter at Farpoint.
Troi walks onto the bridge and says, Do you remember what I taught you, Imzadi?
Can you still hear my thoughts?
And that word that they made fun of just a few episodes ago, that word connects
them in a way that saves the day.
Here saves four characters lives.
Troi famously often did not have a lot to do, and I, I'd say in an
episode where everyone had something to do, Troi's something to do, felt
maybe a little crammed in there.
But the fact that once again, it was a character payoff sold it.
Rob: Yeah.
And beautiful, obvious line, but I did love it.
I'll wait for you with our boy.
You go, oh my gosh, are you kidding me?
Frakes bringing the, bringing the A game every
Kevin: Yeah.
No, no you look after our daughter, I'll wait for you with
my boy, like the daughter again,
Rob: completely left out.
What the hell, man?
And they've gone away on a holiday apparently at the end.
What about the daughter?
Kevin: It's gonna be home
Rob: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Hopefully she deals with her daddy issues better than Tom
Paris did, that's for sure.
So yes.
Kevin: Yeah, the endings here start with a log entry by Riker who
says, Stardate, shall we say one?
And I said, no, Riker we shall not.
I d I don't care how big of a grand finale you think you have here, you don't get
to reset the calendar in a log entry.
Rob: It.
Look it's a good finale, but it's not resetting
Kevin: Mm,
No.
It is not uh, in a, in in an episode that validated all of
history to go, okay, now we're like, we're in the New Testament, now.
I don't know about that.
I certainly don't think Riker has a big enough ego to think that his adventure is
worth declaring it a new calendrical era.
Rob: I dunno how you feel it is with how appropriate it is in a connection to Riker
as a character, but he's very cheeky after an overextended session for synth Data,
who's going through an emotional crisis just when he sees a crewman with a cat.
And Riker comes in and goes, still batsshit, huh?
Kevin: I'm a little uncomfortable with how much Riker A, is becoming sweary and
B, is using batshit as his catchphrase.
That's not the first time that Riker has uttered that term in this season.
And yeah, it's I'm not sure I'm there for that.
Rob: And
Kevin: It was worth it to see Troi say, Stop it.
Rob: Yes.
And to see her subtle acting again of rolling her eyes going, come on.
I want, I wanna be anywhere but here.
Kevin: Shopping for uh, holiday on her PADD while he is talking.
So good.
We got Tuvok
Rob: We did get Tuvok back.
The real Tuvok, and again, this is a thing, another wave of the hand thing.
We've had, eight episodes of the Changelings being this massive threat.
And then with, you know, a wave of the hand with a description going, not only
can we identify all the Changelings now thanks to Beverly Crusher, amazing,
good work, admiral, but all those ones that we thought had been killed.
Oh no, they were very valuable.
So we all got them
Kevin: Yeah, they were being kept for information.
I am told the original script even had Ro Laren survive that somehow somehow they
had beamed her off her ship and she was in the same gulag that Tuvok was found in.
But that all happened off screen here, and it was quickly waved away
in Riker's log entry, but Tuvok and Seven sitting across the table from
one another and Tuvok making Seven cry.
Oh my
Rob: It wasn't until I saw that scene that, because I'd always remembered
the scenes that Seven had with The Doctor that their relationship was
quite strong and her scenes with Janeway of course, were very good.
But I'd forgotten that Seven of Nine and Tuvok had built up a quite a mentoring
type relationship as well, so that was quite powerful to have that whole scene
acted out and have Shaw come back with one last tear jerking hit in the stomach.
Kevin: Yeah, I don't know about that, uh, log entry from Shaw.
That guy, I still don't understand that guy.
The fact that before any of this happened, he was willing to admit in a,
in his personal log that he should more accurately call her Seven of Nine, and
then he spent the entire mission refusing to call her that even when she told him
to, even when she had earned his respect and told him to, he still wouldn't do it.
I don't wanna speak ill of the dead, but in some ways that guy was a schmuck.
Rob: An asshole from Brooklyn is is too kind a description for Shaw.
Lot of levels to him.
You always hurt the one you care about the most, I dunno.
But yes.
Great to have Tim Russ back as actual Tuvok and him working beautifully.
Jeri Ryan, can we just give her a show?
Come on guys.
Come
Kevin: Yeah.
Yeah.
You mentioned briefly Crusher being promoted to Admiral of Starfleet Medical.
In my heart, Beverly Crusher has been Admiral of Starfleet Medical ever since
she left The Next Generation in the middle of its run, and Pulaski came on board.
Like the the story there is she had gone to Starfleet Medical, and in
my mind, she was running the place.
So the fact that she is now running the place is just like reestablishing
what I already felt to be true.
Rob: Vindicated.
Kevin: We get the trip into Spacedock to see the Enterprise
Rob: and we see the Crushers and Picard together in this familial type setup.
And there's
Kevin: Yeah.
No Laris.
No Laris, I might add.
Rob: Justice for Laris is a hashtag going around, but Laris was great.
Laris just said, look, I'm, she was leaving the vineyard.
She was going back to one of the moons of
Kevin: Yeah.
Yeah.
Who even remembers?
She's sitting at that bar table, still waiting for Picard to
Rob: You know what, I don't, I think she's off doing a thing.
She's, Picard's in them, her mind, but she's moving forward.
Kevin: That is clearly left ambiguous for us to make up our own mind.
My version of it is that Picard did go home to Laris.
He did make that date.
It just happened off screen, like so many other things here.
And that he also, he has Beverly and his son in his life and when there is
a family moment for the three of them to do together, they get together.
But they weren't holding hands, they weren't snuggling.
It for me, they are their friendly
Rob: Look, it is, yeah, it is that case of Laris was amazing.
She's confident herself, no jealousy at all, and understands where
this positioning is and goes yep.
This is where I'll be to wait for you.
And this, Beverly and Picard have realized we tried 5, 6, 7 times.
It's never
Kevin: Yeah, if she was the one who'd got away and they had never
made a go of it, then great.
I would be on board with the romantic notion that reunited the dam burst and
they finally fell into each other's arms.
But that is not this relationship.
The counter argument is Picard says several times that the discovery of being
a father and having a son changed him.
And maybe it changed him into a man that could settle down with Beverly
Crusher, but that to me is less interesting than Crusher and Picard being
co-parents, people who love each other but are not in love with each other.
And Laris gets the admiral she deserves.
Everybody's happy.
Is all I want
Rob: Oh, look and look, and a part of me is they're going, look,
Beverly doesn't wanna settle down.
She's finally back in a position of admiralty that she's
deserved, clearly, for decades.
So she's not gonna be settling down.
She's got shit to do.
She's got, transporter programs that are magic wand solutions to not only
the Borg infection, but also can now identify Changelings, which they said
clearly they couldn't do a couple of, cuz it was so impossibly hard.
And no talk of a virus, so I'm very happy of that.
Kevin: So it's the Enterprise G, it's no longer the
Rob: Yes.
Kevin: What did you think of
Rob: Yeah, I was a bit confused with it all.
I didn't pick it up until the second time.
And again, I think that was more of a, a, saving their money
to have the exact same set.
Kevin: But it's such a Star Trek IV moment of coming into Spacedock and going, oh,
we're gonna get the Excelsior, and you fly over top and no, it's the Enterprise
Rob: Well it's, that's the thing.
It's the titan.
It's not the Titan.
That was a beautiful moment.
Names don't mean anything at all.
And Jack goes, names mean everything.
Kevin: Seven of Nine, what do you think her go to warp phrase will be?
Rob: Uh, woohoo.
Kevin: Woohoo?
I really want it to be, Let's go.
I think her saying, let's go would be awesome.
Rob: Has she said that as a
Kevin: No, she's never said, let's go.
But she's also never been a Starship fan.
She's never been known to make models in her quarters.
So I think there's room for anything here.
And I just imagine Jeri Ryan saying, let's go.
And it feels both playful and powerful.
Rob: So Pike's is punch it or hit it?
Kevin: Yeah, that's right.
Rob: Kirk doesn't really have one does he?
Kevin: No, he didn't really have one back then.
I think that in this there was um, take her out.
He has said take her out once or twice in the films because
they were leaving Spacedock.
And in the scene here they say, will it be take her out, engage, make it so, so there
was like a playing there fast and loose, I think with the idea that Kirk's would be
Rob: Yeah.
Yeah.
Like he had at the end of Star Trek IV, Let's see what she's got.
And they made a joke to that in Star Trek V.
And then in Star Trek VI, he did the beautiful second star to the
right and straight on till morning.
Kevin: Honestly it's gotten too cute for me.
I wish they would not like have the characters be self-aware.
I would if it is much more satisfying when they say it with a straight
face than when they say it winking.
And I don't know if you saw it in the trailer for season two of
Strange New Worlds, we're gonna get Spock's one and it is ridiculous.
Rob: That was a
Kevin: He had better be drunk.
He, that is the only other time I have seen Spock be that ridiculous, was
drunk Spock in The Animated Series.
He had better be in under the influence of something to be saying,
I want to make the ship go now.
Rob: Yeah.
I get it.
Cuz Engage was never a catchphrase.
It was just an order, an instruction.
Kevin: Catchphrases are made by characters saying things that feel natural to them.
When a character pre meditates their catchphrase, you
Rob: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah.
It is.
They're putting a bit too much pepper on it in the new shows.
So yeah.
So woohoo?
Kevin: So to 10 Forward at last.
Oh, sorry.
One more thing.
In all of these closing scenes before we go to 10 Forward, something I noticed a
lovely detail is their badges turned gold.
When we jumped ahead a year, the badges changed from black backings
to gold backings, and we have seen those gold badges once before.
We saw them in the future shown in Star Trek Voyager's finale Endgame.
Admiral Janeway comes back from a future in which they are
wearing those exact gold badges.
And it was so satisfying when they said one year later and suddenly
everyone was wearing those gold badges.
It was like, we made it, everyone, we made it to the better
future that Janeway created for
Rob: We go.
And so it's all and tied in.
But yes, we finally get back to the bar.
We have a reference to Guinan who's just off stage.
Kevin: She's hanging out with Ro Laren.
Rob: She is.
She and Janeway as well.
That's where Janeway has been this
Kevin: Yep.
They have a talk show in, in the 25th century.
It's called The View from 10 Forward.
Rob: It writes itself.
And it wouldn't be a Star Trek show without a a Shakespearean reference.
I know the movies very much with Nicholas Meyer.
Kevin: an off color limerick.
Rob: What's that?
One day he'll get that, he'll get that limerick out.
Kevin: The original went there once was a woman from Venus whose
body was shaped like a, and then he gets interrupted in the original
Rob: of course.
Didn't even get that far.
They knew too much.
So yes, Shakespearean Royal Shakespeare Company Patrick Stewart does deliver a
beautiful monologue from Julius Caesar.
Kevin: I wanna believe, and I would be shocked if it were not true
that they just said to Patrick Stewart, page in the script.
Say something Shakespearean.
Patrick Stewart has been on his Instagram through the lockdowns of the
pandemic, he was reading Shakespeare.
Yeah, he was reading sonnets and so I think they trusted Patrick Stewart
with this one and said, Hey, bring us something appropriate to the
moment that hasn't been overdone.
And he said, I know exactly the one.
Rob: We haven't done Julius Caesar.
We've done Hamlet, Angels and ministers of Grace defend us.
And yeah, oh, of course, Cry havoc.
Let slip the dogs of war.
The chimes of midnight.
All those type of, beautiful ones.
Julius Caesar not the most obscure, but in the pathon of mainstream
Shakespeare, not a deep cut, but definitely a manageable cut in the
way of Shakespearean references.
Kevin: You probably know your Shakespeare a little better than I do,
although I do enjoy some Shakespeare.
I don't think I've ever seen Julius Caesar, at least in full.
I think I've seen parts of the film.
But what is your read on the appropriateness of this speech
to this moment, cuz for me, as someone who doesn't know the play,
it felt extremely appropriate.
This idea that fate comes for you as a tide.
And if you don't let yourself be swept away with it,
you'll miss out on your life.
And that they have all been traveling together on this swollen
tide of fortune that has taken them where they needed to be together.
And it felt so appropriate, almost impossibly so, that I almost, I
almost worry that that speech meant something completely different
Rob: No.
Within Julius Caesar, it's very much about how you make your own
fortune and your own destiny.
And whether you as always in historical stories like that, you trying to defy
destiny or the will of the gods and the hubris that you have, and especially
with, you know, it's uh, Brutus take, really, about the lengths he's willing
to go to gain the power that he needs.
And so it's very much a play in two halves where you have this
first section of political intrigue and conspiracy and ambition.
And then the second half is just warfare because of what's being created by the
death, the murder, the assassination of this highly regarded ruler.
So it is very much a pondering of men, particularly, and their ambition and
their fate and their desire to make their own fortune or what they're
willing to sacrifice to get further ahead with what they believe they
deserve or what they are entitled to.
It's yeah, there's a bittersweetness to that particular soliloquy that
Picard delivers, which makes it even better, is that it's not
soppily sweet or purely poetic.
There's a, there's an edge to it, which I really like.
Kevin: And he whips out the ace of spades.
Rob: Now, is that a particular, is that how they always started
off a card game or is that
Kevin: No.
No.
In fact, it took me a moment when he did it.
I was like, what?
I don't get it.
And then they said, yes, let's play.
And I was like, oh, of course.
It's the poker game.
It's the poker game that it had to end with.
The poker game itself obviously has great significance.
That is the parting shot of All Good Things, the series finale of
Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The crew has always played poker without Picard, and for the first time he
awkwardly steps into the room and says, I wondered if you'd mind if I joined you.
And they said, you were always welcome.
And Picard says, I should have done this a long time ago.
And then he deals out the hand and then we get the spiraling shot above the table
as it pulls up out through the ceiling.
To the Enterprise flying off into the distance.
And that's how Star Trek: The Next Generation ends.
So how appropriate to put them around that table, once again, spiraling above
the table, but this time refusing to leave them and spiraling back down.
Rob: The rumors going around that they shot, that they just let the cameras
roll and just let these friends who, as they to say they, they keep in touch
and see each other regularly, just spend that time and pick up all of this stuff.
The laughs, the giggles, the interactions that you just get
this sense of uh, that camaraderie.
Kevin: Yeah, it worked and it didn't.
Like, it so worked because it was such a reflection of that powerful
ending from the series and revisiting that all these years later, and it
feeling that much more nostalgic.
It worked because these actors actually like each other and seeing
them hang out and laugh together is genuine and you feel the love.
It didn't work because you could tell they were improvising and I
think you could tell why during the series, they were told never, ever to
improvise that they were under strict instructions to stick to the script.
Because the language of Star Trek and of those characters is so specific
when you get these actors, when you let them, and you don't tell them
what words to say, they slip into their own modern day turns of phrase.
I am positive, for example, that Riker would never say oy-yoy-yoy
when looking at his cards.
That was not Riker, that was Frakes.
And there was a bunch of that stuff going on, like when Geordi calls the game
and Troi goes, Whatever that is, that was Marina Sirtis straight up and down.
That was not
Rob: At Least Michael Dorn was still in character.
Michael Dorn was very aggressive in character.
So, he gets the MVP yet
Kevin: But he doesn't know how to play poker, I noticed.
The other thing is, if you pay attention to the cards flying around the table in
that long lingering shot, some of the, some of them know how to play poker and
they have one card down, and each new card that was dealt to them is face up.
Other ones were not so sure.
They had all their cards down.
They had all their cards up.
It was very inconsistent.
And the dealing was not great either.
Sometimes those cards were like getting stuck under chips and bouncing into
the wrong person's hand and like all of that, you can pick nits in it till
the cows come home, but the point was that this was an ending that the actors
had earned as much as the characters, and I think we were happy just to be
with them playing, in whatever form.
Rob: Exactly.
That was a case of that suspension, of disbelief of there going,
this is what we wanted to see.
And this is, we're willing to forgive certain blurred
lines to, to get that shot.
Kevin: And they should have stopped there.
That is my opinion about the Q cameo at the end here is I was like,
oh, you were, it was so perfect.
Why did you have to go and
Rob: Yep.
They wanna set up.
They did so well with setting up Strange New Worlds, and
they got that series approved.
So they want to go,
Kevin: If there was any doubt that they had zero respect for anything that was
done in season two, it was like this was the final nail in that coffin.
It was like, is there anything else that we can undo from
season two to pretend it didn't
Rob: I have been saying this all season.
I've been going, they have been throwing so much shade at season one and two and
thrown all of it, everything they have strongly developed of two seasons, Matalas
has just gone everything you've done for the first two seasons was all discarded.
Kevin: Yeah.
Much as I cringed, Q was really great in that scene.
That is the thing is, I wish the scene didn't exist, but also it's so
Rob: It's John de Lancie man.
Just get John de Lancie in front of a camera.
He can read the phone book and it's amazing.
Kevin: No.
Season two prove that is not true.
There is some, there was some weak Q stuff
Rob: Yeah.
I've already forgotten it.
Terry Matalas made me want to forget.
Yeah.
Showed that we could ignore it and I was following his lead.
Kevin: All right, we have talked for over an hour about this episode.
We have well and truly broken our format where we promised each
other we would not do a recap show, but this was a special event.
Let's get back to not beat by beating these episodes in future, but it
was worth it this time around.
Let's talk about big finishes.
I've brought a couple that I wanna reflect on and um, I wonder if we'll
match up cuz there aren't that many
Rob: that many.
When it comes to TV show endings, I think that's what we're
gonna be mostly focusing on.
Yeah.
Kevin: And I already mentioned All Good Things….
I think that one, unless you picked it, Rob, I'm gonna say certainly if you've
not seen the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and you're
sitting here listening uh, to us talk for an hour about The Last Generation,
what are you doing with your life?
Go back and watch that thing.
It is a masterpiece.
I will call it now, it is even better than what we got this week,
even under the budget constraints of early nineties TV sci-fi.
It is an even better story than what we got this week.
Rob: I admit I have seen it.
I haven't, I've only seen All Good Things… once and it was
like over, oh god, 20 years ago.
And I had not earned the right to watch it.
I had not, I'd been in and out of Next Gen and so I watched it.
So I was lost.
I was completely lost.
And I finished watching it and going, I haven't earned this yet.
I need to have watched everything else.
So when I get to that that, that finale.
I understand it.
And especially since Deep Space Nine and Voyager, which I've
watched the finals of that I was there for the whole seven years.
Kevin: It does somewhat reward a like close viewers of the full seven seasons.
But I'd say the only required viewing is the series Premiere,
Encounter at Farpoint, which sadly is a bit of a slog for two hours.
And it's a shame you have to watch that sloggy two hours where the characters
weren't sure what they were yet.
It was all very stretched out because it started as a one hour story and
then they tacked the whole Q thing onto it to pad it out to two hours.
So, Yeah I don't love it.
And the fact that a third or more of All Good Things takes place in that episode,
they return to Encounter at Farpoint and revisit some of the scenes, Picard
knowing that he is revisiting them, knowing what's going to happen and playing
at the events differently on purpose.
It is, if you have sat through Encounter at Farpoint, All Good
Things… is twice as good to watch.
I don't think you need to necessarily know the details of anything else
that happens in those seven years.
Basically Q takes Picard, splits him in three and says you are now
Picard in Encounter at Farpoint.
You are also Picard here and now seven years in.
And you are Picard in the future, divorced from Beverly Crusher with Data as a
Starfleet professor with a streak of gray through his hair, and like all of
these let's jump ahead and see what the future of these characters might hold.
Very satisfying, as is often the case in these finales, a glimpse into a
possible future so that we don't have to worry about what might become of
these characters when we leave them.
So yeah, definitely go watch that.
And the, the fact that q is there at the beginning there at the end,
and here at the ending of the end is very bookendy and poetic in a way.
But it's almost unfair.
To me that is the best series finale of all time, All Good Things….
Rob: Oh, wow.
Wow, big call.
So well, yes I went with of course I had to go with What You Leave Behind,
the finale of Deep Space Nine, which has the big task of tying up the
Dominion War tying up the invasion of Cardassia, tying up the plague,
which is ravaging the Founders, and solve things with a Sisko and his
connection to the beings in the wormhole.
Kevin: This, like this week's episode, is very much an ending to the ongoing story.
It isn't a coda, it isn't a standalone thing, it is the climax
of the story that they have been telling for several years by this
Rob: Definitely.
And yeah, it carries directly on from the previous week's episode.
So you've got Gul Dukat has gone full Bajoran and is having
an affair with with Kai Winn.
You've got Cardassia being invaded, but then the Cardassians shifting
to allegiance with the Federation.
You've got the virus, which has now got a cure, thanks to the episode just
before, and Odo connecting that way.
And Sisko's ongoing journey that has been seven years all comes to a head.
And unlike you were saying about with All Good Things, setting you off going,
this is a possible future, sending things on with a safe, secure place in
your heart, it's What You Leave Behind.
The title says it.
There's this bittersweet sadness to it.
The final shot is a son looking out into the emptiness of
space, missing his father.
Kevin: They're not afraid to let it hurt I will say many nice things about our finale
of Picard here, but one thing it was not, is courageous about making us hurt.
Like everyone got a happy ending, everyone survived.
There was no like sting of poison in the mix.
It was truly all good news.
Rob: Yes, and very much that's why I got so emotional when we got to Lower
Decks and they finally returned to Deep Space Nine, and how excited I got
that Kira's doing fine because, her and Odo's relationship over seven years was
such a crucial part for me of the show.
And for them to find each other so near the end of the show, and then
having this heartbreaking, but not tragic, a heartbreaking goodbye where
Odo's responsibility as a member of his species outweighs everything else.
And especially now with so much time passed and with the passing of the
beautiful René Auberjonois, Odo and Kira will never have that connection.
Kevin: Yeah definitely a minor chord, this finale, like the entire
goal seemed to be bittersweet, not happy ending, bittersweet.
Every good thing came at a
Rob: Exactly, and we got war has ended.
And, but the ripple effect of that is felt.
And so it's the end of an era, and letting that sink in and going, not
looking back and celebrating going, this is what happens with change.
And so, you know, O'Brien leaving, people moving on to other roles
and leaving behind this home that we have been in for seven years.
Kevin: Yep.
Yep.
I'm gonna take us to Voyager's finale
Rob: mine as well.
Kevin: Endgame.
Great, we get to talk about it together.
So yes, it is halfway the culmination of the story we've been having
all of this time, but not as well.
In a sense, I feel like Voyager had wrapped up all of its unfinished business
before the start of this episode.
The only dangling thread, the only question left to be answered
was would they make it home?
And that is the entire purpose of this episode is answering that question
in an interesting enough, complex enough, maybe convoluted enough way
to make something that felt worthy of the seven years that came before.
And in that sense, it falls a little short to me, especially on repeat
viewing, but I can still remember the first time I watched this
episode and how abruptly it ends.
It has none of those multiple endings, those, where do they end ups?
Those, it's all gonna be okays.
It's got none of the hugs, none of the thank yous, none of the
drinks at the bar, none of that.
They literally emerge from a transwarp conduit hidden inside
a Borg that then bursts apart.
The ship comes out and they say to the assembled fleet,
oh, sorry it took us so long.
Let's go back to Earth.
Credits.
Like it is so
Rob: It is too abrupt.
It came across as far too rushed, and it was just a case of let's just get
the hell outta here, as opposed to, even with What You Leave Behind, even
though it's bittersweet, they take their time to go, let's sit in this sadness
of moving forward and what we have created, whereas this entire episode
just feels like racing to the end.
There's abrupt stuff brought in.
Like we've talked about it before, like there's a scene with
Chakotay and Seven of Nine kind of flirting and you're going that
Kevin: are so many scenes with seven of nine in Chakotay.
That romance, which was just barely hinted at in the episodes leading
up to it, and infamously even by the actors now they say we, we had
no idea what they were doing there.
There was no chemistry.
And watching it yesterday, I'm like, those actors, Jeri Ryan and Robert
Beltran are acting their butts off to convince us that are in love.
But you can tell there is nothing.
They're like brother and sister, in every scene they are in.
They smile at each other lovingly, and I believe the emotion until
it cuts to the other person, I go, what why about that person?
It makes no sense.
It is so weird and it comes outta nowhere almost in this finale, in order to justify
in part the decision that Janeway makes.
I feel like this somewhat suffers from the convoluted plot that they devised
for themselves, that Voyager would make it home, but at such a great cost
that given the opportunity, Admiral Janeway would come back and try to
change destiny so they make it home even sooner, which is flying in the face of
a lot of things that, you know, Star Trek fans hold dear, that you don't mess
with the timeline and that, if people have lived out happy lives, you should
not mess with that because the future you could create could be nightmarish.
But all of that is swept aside in the face of two things.
One, Seven of Nine dies before they make home.
And two, Chakotay is so heartbroken by that fact that he dies an
unhappy man many years later.
And that's, oh, and Tuvok goes insane.
Tuvok loses his mind.
His brain stops working properly.
It would've all been fixed by a mind meld if they made it home sooner, but
they didn't, so tragically he's left a scribbling invalid in a hospital.
And that those three facts are enough for Janeway to decide to break all the
rules, to go back in time, change the past, and then Janeway as we know her,
refuses to go along with the plan and says, no, I know you gave up everything
and risked everything to come back here and change it, but I know better.
We're gonna do that and destroy the Borg while we're at it.
And it's just, I think there is so much set up for that dilemma, that
there's no time left to reflect on what has happened after it's
Rob: Yeah.
And having that abrupt cutoff, we ha we know nothing we know nothing about,
we have little hints of it earlier on about what's going on with the holograms
in that time and, but it's just so many characters that we've been with for
seven years, where you're just left there going, they just, they did not let
the door hit their ass on the way out.
They just wanted to get out of that show.
Kevin: The thing that they try to do, they try to have their cake and eat
it too, is they set up this future that is not perfect, but it's good.
The Doctor is married, Harry Kim is a captain, Tom Paris is bald, and has
a cool daughter who's running secret missions for Admiral Janeway, like
all of that, and B'Elanna Torres is a proud mother who misses her daughter.
Like all of that is, is cool.
And we get to spend actually quite a lot of time like at a dinner party where
they get to see each other and reminisce.
The attempt to give us the fuzzy happy ending is kind of there,
but then the story requires that Janeway change history.
And we never get to see, do those characters get their happy
endings, or is it different?
We never do until we get to see the gold badges in Star Trek: Picard this week,
and I'm like, yeah, it still happened.
The good stuff
Rob: badges are there.
We didn't get, we didn't get a real understanding or clarity or closure
with, the crew when they get home.
But we got the badges.
Kevin: The big showdown of Endgame is really a one-on-one between
future Janeway and the Borg Queen, and it makes the entire crew of
Voyager who should be the heroes in their own finale, feel sidelined.
There's this shot where future Janeway has poisoned the Borg Queen, and there's
a moment where like the Borg Queen goes, you haven't destroyed us yet.
And they look at the view screen and the USS Voyager flies past into the
transwarp conduit, which explodes, and that is basically the thing that the
entire crew of the Voyager contributes to this episode, is on a view screen,
they fly and blow something up and then cut to, they make it home.
It's quite sad.
And uh, if you're ready for the segue, it reminds me also of the series finale
of Star Trek: Enterprise, These Are the Voyages…, in which, once again, the
stars of the show are relegated to being guest stars in their own series finale.
Rob: of course Frakes and Sirtis coming back.
Kevin: That's right.
These Are the Voyages… is very much, the most charitable take
is that this was deliberately not the series finale of Enterprise.
That it was an attempt to say goodbye to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager.
Right here, as they knew for the first time, Star Trek was going off
the air and there wasn't a new series coming to replace it, they wanted,
as they put it at the time, to write a love letter to the fans who had
been with them through all of that.
And you can see that in the way that this is structured is that there is a time
jump between the preceding episode of Enterprise, which you might say is the
true series finale of Enterprise, although it is, it resolves all the plot threads,
but it doesn't feel like a culmination because that's not how it was devised.
Enterprise wanted to have three more seasons on TV, but they got
canceled after their fourth season.
So what they did here, in These Are the Voyages…, is they jumped
ahead in time, from when we last saw all these characters.
And Enterprise is heading back to Earth to be decommissioned.
Everyone's in slightly fancier uniforms, different hairdos, they're acting a little
more mature, a little more comfortable with each other, a little more familiar.
Especially T'Pol has loosened up.
T'Pol and Trip are no longer together.
They have been broken up for quite some time, and then Riker
is on the bridge outta nowhere.
And this is all revealed to be a holodeck simulation of the final mission of
the Enterprise NX-01, which Riker is watching in order to figure out whether
to disobey orders or not, in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called
The Pegasus season seven, episode 12.
Yeah, the uncharitable take is the indignity that the cast of this show were
sidelined to be holodeck simulations of themselves being toyed with by Riker.
There's an especially cringey moment where Riker, having gotten an insightful
nugget from T'Pol in the galley, freezes the simulation and says to frozen
T'Pol, thank you, and kisses her on the cheek before exiting the holodeck.
And that moment of this person you don't know personally, this is a historical
figure, she just happens to be a pretty lady, so I'm gonna freeze her and kiss her
on the cheek to thank her for her help.
It's, ew.
I think it maybe barely worked at the time, but with each passing year, that age
Rob: It.
Yeah.
it's like a very, it's like one of uh, Picard's wines from Chateau Picard.
Kevin: I happened to show this episode to a friend of mine who
had seen none of Enterprise.
To your point of you, you need to have seen a lot of Next Generation to fully
appreciate All Good Things, my friend who had seen none of Enterprise, just
asked me offhand, like, how did that end?
Like where did it leave Star Trek, at the end of that run?
I was like, let's watch it.
You, you probably don't need to have seen anything.
That's the criticism that this episode gets.
And we watched that standalone and at the end of it, he said, that was great.
That felt like a fitting tribute to the Star Trek I know, Next Generation and
Deep Space Nine, and I don't know why anyone has any complaints about that.
Rob: Yeah, I have not seen it, to be honest.
I've read about it and I know all about it and the furore that it creates.
And it's never a good thing when you can come in and just watch the
ending and go, that goes well for the shows that I watched, but I
haven't watched any of this at all.
Kevin: It really is more of an episode of Next Generation than Enterprise.
You imagine, you get canceled, but you get told, you get to finish the
season and write yourself a finale that will be a love letter to the fans.
You get given a budget for that, surely.
And the budget on this was entirely spent on the Next Generation stuff.
Here in Picard, they created the bridge set.
And it was a it was a masterpiece and everyone is loving it.
Here in the Enterprise series finale, they created everything except the bridge.
We got the holodeck, we got Ten Forward, fully recreated.
We got a corridor of the Enterprise, tracking shot to a interior of a turbo
lift, which I'll admit was very carpety.
They did the walls in carpet instead of metal.
So it stands out a bit, certainly in, in high def.
We got Troi's quarters and we got the Observation Lounge with the big
conference table fully recreated.
They recreated all of those sets just to have Troi and Riker sit in them
and have conversations about whether Riker's latest visit to the Holodeck
had brought him closer to deciding whether to disobey orders or not.
Rob: My gosh.
Kevin: There's even a cameo on the comm, of Commander Data.
Data calls Troi to check in, and she says, can I give you a rain check, Data?
And he goes you can check me for rain if you wish, counselor, but
I think you'll find that I have no water in my, and she cuts him off and
it is beautiful, Uh, just a little voice cameo from Brent Spiner there.
So lots of stuff for the TNG fans, but the story for the Enterprise crew
is surprisingly thin and half formed.
They go to rescue Shran, jeffrey Combs's Andorian character,
they go to rescue his daughter.
Shran last seen as an, as a recurring character in the series is revealed, six
years later, to have to have died, but it turns out to have faked his own death.
And these bad dudes have kidnapped his daughter to bring him out of hiding.
And they want a gem and he's gonna give them a fake gem to get his daughter back.
They fake them out.
They get back on board the Enterprise and then the bad dudes,
their ship is surprisingly fast.
They catch up to the Enterprise, kill Tucker who sacrifices
himself for the rest of the ship.
The end.
They fly home, they mourn Tucker, they fly home and they attend
the founding of the Federation.
It really does not hold together.
It's half one thing, half another.
It's this weird caper with Shran that they never quite explain what
the stakes were, why the bad dudes caught up with them, or what they
even wanted with Shran to begin with.
And the founding of the Federation stuff feels it feels like they're going through
the motions and the focus is really on Riker and Troi standing on the balcony
going, isn't it cool that we are getting to watch the founding of the Federation?
Rob: So there we go.
We've gone through the highs and the lows of
Kevin: The highs and the lows.
I think what we've learned here is that Star Trek was overdue for a series finale
that really stuck the landing, and felt like it left us on a satisfying note.
So I'm so glad Picard got us and showed us what that can feel like
Rob: And especially because we didn't talk about the movies, but there
was such a bitter taste left with Nemesis that tried to do in some
ways what Deep Space Nine did with their finale, but didn't really work.
So to have this one, which so many fans have said, this is
the ending that we all wanted.
Kevin: The problem with nemesis A the actual story itself, not
that great, but the bittersweet ending also felt non-committal.
The thing Deep Space Nine did is those costs felt irreversible, whereas even as
B4 sat in Picard's ready room starting to sing Blue Skies, you felt even
before they had finished the movie, that they were already starting to
reverse the cost that had been paid.
And that's the sour taste that leaves in my
Rob: But yes, we definitely got something that we could relish,
enjoy, and really celebrate with the end of Picard season three.
Kevin: Yes.
It's a, it's an ending for a little while now, we don't have we don't
have any more Star Trek to watch
Rob: We're not up until Strange New Worlds season two starts.
Kevin: You've got some Discovery homework to do that you might want to get a
start on.
I'm just saying.
Rob: Yeah, I'll watch season four.
Kevin: at any point you feel like a debrief, I'll be
Rob: Oh look, I.
We will, we will definitely need to debrief back on the Subspace Radio
transmissions about our thoughts
Kevin: Yeah.
Rob: Discovery.
Kevin: But otherwise, I'll see you in about six, six weeks in mid-June for the
premiere of Strange New Worlds season two which, which is looking wacky.
I'm a little worried by how wacky it looks.
Rob: for its own good?
Kevin: Yeah.
If there's other star Trek around that's grounded, like Picard was, great.
But when we've got Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds carrying the torch
Rob: doing a crossover.
Kevin: Discovery's going off the air, it's a little bit too wacky.
Star Trek needs the grounded stories in order for the comedy to seem special.
When it's all comedy it starts to lose the plot a bit.
So I hope we'll find some dramatic Star Trek in the mix in Strange
Rob: Yeah.
Season one got that balance quite well with what I remember.
So maybe they're just pushing the wackiness to draw people in.
But
Kevin: Yeah.
Rob: and hopeful.
Kevin: Until then, I'll see you around the galaxy, Rob.
Rob: you around.