1:[3,#b],4:[2,#i]@1“All Good Things…”@2Next Generation episode #177
Production No.: 277
Aired: Week of May 23, 1994
Stardate: 47988
Directed by Winrich Kolbe
Written by Brannon Braga & Ronald D. Moore
GUEST CAST
Q: John de Lancie
Commander Tomalak: Andreas Katsulas
Admiral Nakamura: Clyde Kusatsu
Lieutenant (j.g.) Alyssa Ogawa: Patti Yasutake
Lieutenant Tasha Yar: Denise Crosby
Chief Miles O’Brien: Colm Meaney
Jessel: Pamela Kosh
Lieutenant Gaines: Tim Kelleher
Ensign Nell Chilton: Alison Brooks
Ensign: Stephen Matthew Garvey
Computer Voice: Majel Barrett
Picard is disturbed to realize, after several dizzying episodes, that he is slipping back and forth among three distinct time periods: the present; seven years in the past, when he first took command of the Enterprise; and twenty-five years into the future, when his crew has scattered or resigned from Starfleet.
The captain opts to keep his past crew in the dark, leading them to question their new leader’s sanity, while those in the future think he’s crazy due to Irumodic syndrome, a rare mental degradation of aging. Picard, amidst more unpredictable time travels, realizes that the link with his maddening situation is an odd anomaly in the Neutral Zone ­ and as Q makes a sudden reappearance. The superbeing admits to being the cause of Picard’s time-shifting but insists that the captain, not he, is responsible for the impending doom of humanity. He even shows Picard how the first amino acids of life never connected under an anomaly-filled sky on primordial Earth.
The anomaly is the key, but the captain and his various crews can’t figure out why it is larger in the past than in the present ­ or why it’s absent in the future. Scanning with a tachyon pulse leads nowhere until Picard realizes the rift is a fracture of time and “anti-time” that enlarges into the past, by scanning the same point in 3 eras. The rift is healed after the apparent destruction of all three Enterprises, but Q restores the present time by quietly telling Picard that his insight into the problem-solving was a mere glimpse of what humanity is truly capable of beyond mere space and science exploration.
With “reality” restored, Picard tells his officers of the future he glimpsed ­ Riker and Worf estranged when neither married Troi and Dr. Crusher a captain and his ex-wife. In the end he joins in the others’ weekly poker game ­ to their surprise and delight.
This highest-rated and most complex TNG effort ever had anything but a smooth ride, as one might expect from its scope, humor, mystery, and surprises ­ with writers Ron Moore and Brannon Braga still dealing with their year-old Generations screenplay, a crew already exhausted by the long, ambitious season, a blaze of national media scrutiny, and a cast mindful of both the onrushing movie and their pending unemployment for the first time in seven years.
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The studio had asked for a two-hour series-ender by December. When thoughts began turning to a plot, Michael Piller pulled elements from a “time-slipping” story by Braga (with Worf and Alexander) and followed Moore’s suggestion to “bookend” the series by revisiting the “Encounter at Farpoint” courtroom with Q, while suggesting the three-era crew format with Picard as the conduit ­ an intentional homage to Slaughterhouse Five, an early personal influence. Jeri Taylor decided the movie duo would get enough of a break to do the finale’s writing chores.
In a February 7 memo to the co-writers, Piller hit on two themes for the finale: the idea of “family” in each time period ­ as symbol of “the cast, the crew, the fans, the writing staff . . . all the families of Star Trek: The Next Generation” ­ and the realization that every moment is precious, affecting all those before or after (a theme he also explored in the DS9 pilot “Emissary”). “You can revisit it, you can remember it, laugh about it, hold reunions, go to conventions, show reruns forever, but you can never live that moment again,” he wrote, leading to Picard’s self-learned Q lesson that “if man is to evolve to the next level he must learn to explore the moment.”
But Moore and Braga couldn’t start until “Genesis” and “Journey’s End” were put to bed. So, thanks to the due date being moved up a slot ahead of “Preemptive Strike” because of the finale’s scope and complexity, the writers found themselves with only six days to finish a draft. “A two-hour show ­ they should have had a month to write it!” moaned Taylor. Originally, a fourth timeline was part of the mix: a revisit of “The Best of Both Worlds”.
Still, the finished product had a long way to go and became perhaps the mother of all TNG under-the-gun writing jobs. Director Rick Kolbe, here working his sixteenth and final TNG outing, recalled that “I don’t think we ever had a production meeting with a full script. It always was ‘Well we have Part I and an outline for Part II, we have Part II and an outline for Part I, we have everything but Act 10’ . . . it was difficult.”
“Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” Braga said of the writing process. “We were running out of time; we couldn’t get the story approved ­ and this was to be expected, since there was a great deal of scrutiny on everyone’s part and rightfully so. But things were heating up with the movie, we had to rebreak the finale three times, we had to rewrite the whole script twice; Ron’s dog got sick; we had a computer failure and lost an act. . . . There was a two-week period there where we wrote like three hundred pages! By the time it was over, I got some sort of carpal-tunnel syndrome between my thumb and wrist from hitting the space bar.”
Cast and crew alike fell in love with that first draft, a “valentine to the characters” as Braga put it, but Piller caused a ruckus with a major restructuring of Part II that tightened up the story while losing several character moments ­ including Picard’s future crew “stealing” the mothballed Enterprise from a museum! The late rewrite led to unhappy actors and a weekend meeting requested by Patrick Stewart, when many of the character moments were restored amid the new framework.
“I knew there were problems, structural problems in Part II,” Kolbe said. “But I think we might have gone a little too far in solving those . . . and it lost the charm and the freshness of the original.” For his part, Piller agreed that the rewrite brought more “technobabble” to Part II and that the restored scenes helped “warm it up a little,” but said his initial concerns about the weak, slow-developing second half still stand. “I won’t argue at all with the fact that we lost some cute things, but it wasn’t good storytelling,” he said, noting especially the ship-stealing sequence. “The problem was, the future Picard needed a ship, and he got one by going to Beverly. . . . And just because the writers wanted to go and hijack the Enterprise because it would be neat ­ ‘OK, you’ve got the ship, now go get another one, too’ ­ didn’t make it good storytelling.”
But getting a shootable script was just the beginning, recalled Kolbe ­ who had hoped for more than five days to prep his long-sought Q show. Aiming to make this finale TNG’s best-ever segment, he came to feel the project was taking a backseat to various unrelated distractions: the actors’ ongoing contract negotiations for the movie, their anxiety about job hunting, and a revision to the already complex production schedule so Gates McFadden could leave long enough to shoot a new series pilot in Oregon ­ a change that led to an extra seventeenth shooting day only at Kolbe’s insistence. “For a time I felt like I was the only guy doing anything, and it came to blows about halfway through ­ we had a big argument,” Kolbe said. “And I said, You gotta focus on this show! . . . and then everybody ­ producers, cast, crew ­ just came together; it was amazing!” Adding to the frenzy was a virtual media circus tromping by the set daily to record the series’ final days ­ promoted by the studio with the curious theme “Journey’s End,” a confusing overlap of titles ­ and led to a couple of run-ins with camera crews by an exhausted Stewart, who never liked to be filmed while rehearsing anyway.
“I was at times anxious as to whether I would get through that last period of work, and I’m not being melodramatic,” he said, noting his Christmas break spent onstage in London and his directing the previous episode. “This was followed then immediately by the final two hours, and I was in every single scene of the show. . . . Towards the end I just got so tired. . . . I was just trying to do the best job I could. And at the same time there were a lot of people with other needs and demands and I found it all just a bit distracting.”
Fatigue was a concern for everyone, Kolbe added: “I was about as dead as you can be, which is not something I like to do, especially on a two-hour show. . . . It was the end of the season, everybody was basically tired and worn out, and tempers were short.” But he gave credit to the stage crew, who not only supported his beyond-the-norm camera shots but gave a lift during the most hectic times ­ such as the last day of all, when eleven takes were needed to film Q’s entrance on the floating camera crane while a second crane helped film it. Shooting’s end for the whole cast together in their final scene ­ the poker game ­ was an emotional affair shot the Thursday before, which Kolbe recalled was slowed down by another brand of visitors ­ the Paramount brass. “I had the feeling that Sumner Redstone himself was in there,” joked the director, referring to the chief of Viacom who had recently bought out Paramount. Ironically, with the Stage 16 courtroom not yet struck, the last first-unit shooting on April 5, 1994 ­ the primordial Earth sequence ­ took place on DS9’s Stage 18 cave set in the same soundstage where another famous Paramount swan song was filmed: Gloria Swanson’s Nora Desmond uttering “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille” from Sunset Boulevard.
The script that finally made it to film featured one big break from past Treks: a “future” that could be revealed on the pretense that no one wanted it to happen. “Since the feature’s not anything like this, we had to get out of that by the end of the show,” Moore noted. “Rick [Berman] felt very strongly about that ­ we have to keep our options open.” But by doing so the door was open for all kinds of fun tweaking the known characters and background in two alternate timelines ­ ”It was all about just playing with the audience’s expectations,” Moore said ­ and there was much throwaway that only a true fan could love: the Klingons’ vengeful defeat of the Romulans (“Redemption”), with the subsequent end to the UFP’s cloaking ban (“The Pegasus”); and the addition of a third nacelle to the future Enterprise, heretofore a design taboo, and its ability to go warp thirteen.
The characters themselves were affected even more, although some setup scenes were among those cut. One at least referred to in the aired version ­ Worf asking Riker’s permission to date Deanna ­ was a straight rehash of the Klingon’s earlier bungled try (“Eye of the Beholder”); in it Riker gives his consent, then thinks a moment before surprising both Worf and himself by withdrawing it. Another omitted scene saw Alexander tell his father he knew he’d just been with Troi because “you’re always in a good mood after you see her” and in effect give his permission for them to go on; the future Worf was initially a Council member on the Home World. Still another scene, dropped even before the break session as “too contrived,” Moore said, would have had Lwaxana Troi in the future bring the news via “long-range transporter” (“Bloodlines”) of Deanna’s recent death ­ providing a shock to her old friends and a first step in the Worf-Riker thaw. Oddly enough, though the season-long Worf-Troi plot finally veers into “reality” here with their holodeck date, the subject is not dealt with at all in the upcoming Generations.
Another lost first-draft scene, setting up Geordi’s surprise career as a novelist, saw him in the present confiding that he’d probably always be in Starfleet and disagreeing with Data over great literature, preferring holodeck versions to the original prose ­ a sly poke at today’s nonliterate videophiles. For Geordi, the eternally disappointed dater, his passing reference to his wife “Leah” is a subtle sign that he and Leah Brahms somehow did get together (“Booby Trap”, “Galaxy’s Child”) ­ though Moore revealed that the first thought was to have him wed Aquiel (“Aquiel”). “And everybody said, ‘You really want to summon those bad vibes, the way that show turned out?’ “ he recalled. “And we said, ‘Maaaaybe not!’ “
Crusher’s captaincy was another fulfillment of a season-long drive (“Descent, Part II”, “Thine Own Self”), while Moore noted that the writers were finally able to answer fan demands to really get her and Picard together (“Attached”) ­ only to turn that on its ear as well with their eventual divorce. Among the logical turns of Data’s life were his easy use of contractions and his position as the Lucasian chair of physics at Cambridge ­ an homage to not only Isaac Newton but current holder Stephen Hawking, two of his famous holodeck buddies (“Descent”). For the record, Critters of the Cinema had ten of its cats on-set as successors to Monster and Brandy’s “Spot” (“Descent, Part 2”, et al.): Bacall, Uma, Zeke, Bandit, Wendy, Shelley, and doubles Crystal, Sinbad, Sascha, and Justin filling in for Aspen, Caesar, Buffy, and Fido!
Though covering known territory, the “past” timeline provided almost as much originality. The only scene lost here, squeezed out in the later rewrite, would have had a conn officer named “Sutcliffe” upset at the perverseness of that era’s Picard and finally request a transfer ­ an homage, suggested by Piller, to the original “fifth” Beatle who likewise left his group on the eve of its greatness. Actor Christian Slater, a big Trek fan who’d cameoed in Star Trek VI, was up to play the part until it was penciled out; later tries at getting him in as the Romulan commander or other walk-ons didn’t pan out.
Many of the “past” choices were dictated by visual needs, Moore said “Tasha was something that would tie us into the past, and so’s O’Brien,” said Moore, “and Troi’s hair and go-go boots, and the ships on the wall in the obs lounge.” Of course, here O’Brien ­ with Colm Meaney stealing a break from DS9 filming ­ is given a name and backstory with the Rutledge (“The Wounded”) and model-ship-building (“Booby Trap”) long before they were ever heard on the series; though his uniform is the command-division cranberry he first wore in “Farpoint,” his pips show the revisionist rank of “chief” (“Realm of Fear”) and not ensign as they did then.
The past also recalls the early “babbling” Data ­ a fun re-creation for the writers as well as Spiner ­ and the first season’s confusing lack of a chief engineer. A clip of “babyfaced” Riker from Season 1 (“The Arsenal of Freedom”) was inserted to provide a link to the period; a succeeding viewscreen moment between Picard and an uncomfortable Beverly was trimmed for time. There’s also the bit that Picard’s trademark “Tea ­ Earl Grey ­ hot” is not yet programmed, while the “future” includes the obvious smart comeback to the command by Professor Data’s housekeeper Jessel ­ whose name is a repeat Turn of the Screw homage by Braga (“Sub Rosa”). Also, the “past” Troi recounts that she and Riker cooled off “years ago,” although established dates (“Second Chances”) would make it only two years before this point.
Even Q’s demeanor changed throughout the rewrites, with Berman pushing to pull back the sight gags so the tension would not be undercut by the alien’s various guises as a croupier, the Grim Reaper with a scythe, and a game-show host flipping question numbers a la What’s My Line? Still, de Lancie makes the most of all his chemistry with Stewart in his eighth and final TNG outing. “I did not want to make it a ‘Q test,’ “ Piller said, wishing instead to echo the omnipotent being’s observance of humans solving a problem as in the pilot. But Q’s influence had to be injected when Stewart, as shooting commenced on the stage, pointed out the logic problem that the anomaly would not have occurred had Q not sent Picard in the time motion in the first place.
Visually, the production staff did all it could within reason to re-create the past Enterprise-D as well as postulate its future, such as returning the laid-back conn and ops chairs to the bridge; several details, such as set and carpet color, main viewscreen details, Q’s courtroom chair, and so on, were not altered ­ although the “future” viewer used details from past “alternate” looks (“Parallels”, for one). The observation-lounge ships are the originals, safely stored ever since production designer Richard James opted not to return them when the set was rebuilt. Still, with a pricetag of about $281,000 for thirty-one sets to ready or revamp for the time-switches ­ including four all-new sets ­ construction chief Al Smutko recalled that his crews worked their fourth weekend in a row after a busy season windup to get the show ready. Makeup wizard Michael Westmore regretted not being able to experiment more with aging and youthening the regular cast, but kept “the little things” of the cast’s prior makeup jobs while opting not to shave Denise Crosby’s hair as Yar.
A shuttle “07” named Galileo is the art department’s parting homage to the original series craft, built for the namesake 1966 episode ­ though of course the Type 6 shuttle used here was not around at the time of the TNG pilot. The bridge plaque seen hung in the “past” is another Mike Okuda touch, replacing the original’s production staff “admirals” with a design including only “authentic” Starfleet personnel mentioned in the series ­ including the Utopia Planetia technicians seen only weeks before (“Eye of the Beholder”).
The show was also a family affair for the visual effects team, with everyone divvying up the chores to have a hand in the last hurrah. With Phil Barberio handling some minatures and compositing, even Ron B. Moore took a moment from his ST: Generations duties to handle the transporters: “I can’t possibly work on the series seven years and not be involved with the last one.” Dan Curry created the “very radiant” anomaly and the primordial Earth, matting in backlit lava and rocks against actual ocean footage enhanced with “Boraxo spray.” Artist Eric Chaubin, an Emmy winner for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and supplier of the Dyson Sphere interior (“Relics”), provided Data’s futuristic Cambridge environs, one of this season’s few matte paintings. Matte touch-ups also enhanced the “Picard” vineyards, shot this time near Temecula because the Lancaster area used previously (“Family”) was drably out of season.
The climax of the opticals featured Rick Sternbach’s future Klingon ship, built by Greg Jein after a less inexpensive redress of the attack cruiser (“Reunion”, et. al.) almost had to make do, in a two-plane battle sequence intended as a Hans Solo-like homage by Moore and storyboarded by Joe Bauer. Beverly’s medical vessel, the NCC-58928 Pasteur, was christened the Hope class after the World War II hospital ship, a suggestion of Don Beck with the series’ previews-producing Beck-Ola. Bill George of ILM had already built the miniature in his spare time to TNG shooting specs for possible use, dubbing it Olympic class and basing it on an early original Enterprise concept by Roddenberry and Matt Jefferies, but the series’ policy forbid accepting unsolicited models ­ that is, until Peter Lauritson won approval when a ship was needed in a pinch!
Among other scattered trivia, the first draft originally featured Admiral Blackwell and the Romulan Sirol (“The Pegasus”) until final casting of familiar faces Kusatsu (“The Measure of a Man”, “Phantasms”) and Katsulas, the latter making his first showing as Tomalak since Season 4 (“Future Imperfect”) and bringing some of the bravado of his Babylon 5 ambassador to the part; he’d also appeared as the one-armed man in 1993’s film remake of The Fugitive. A scene cut for time featured actress Martha Hacket as Androna, who would have been the first-ever depicted Terellian despite her having only two arms (see notes, “Liaisons”); as it was, Braga still inserted mention of the Terellian Death Syndrome, perhaps the same as the Terellian Plague (“Genesis”). Ensign Chilton was played by Alison Brooks, his girlfriend.
Also, Ogawa’s baby dies an unborn hero (“Genesis”), with extra B. DeMonbreun finally seen as her elusive husband Andrew Powell (“Lower Decks”); Braga’s USS Bozeman is back (“Cause and Effect”, ST: Generations), as is a mention of Dr. Selar (“The Schizoid Man”, “Remember Me”, “Tapestry”, “Genesis”, “Sub Rosa”), Admiral Satie (“The Drumhead”), the USS Yorktown (1968’s “Obsession”), acetychloline (from 1967’s “Immunity Syndrome”), a “fleetwide yellow alert” (“The Defector”), and Starbase 247 as Shanti’s home (“Redemption”). Rigel III, Geordi’s “future” home, is one of the few planets of that system not already mentioned as harboring a population.
“It’s not like it’s a perfect episode ­ it was done in quite a hurry ­ but I’m quite proud of it,” Piller said, “and proud that we’ve done something very much Star Trek, very much that deal with this strange universe, the universe of ideas.” “It’s the kind of show that only be done now, and by people who know it forward and backwards ­ and have done it for a long time,” Moore said. “It was a tall order but I think we pulled it off by the skin of our teeth,” Braga agreed. “And I got to blow up three Enterprises in this one!”
