7:24 Preemptive Strike – Ensign Ro gets a wrap-up episode! (And a promotion to Lieutenant!) No, she hasn’t just been invisible in the background (Ro don’t DO “invisible”); she’s been away at Advanced Tactical Training. And now, because of the increasing activities of the Maquis — the guerrilla group of former Federation citizens now in the Cardassian demilitarized zone or in actual Cardassian space — she’s been tapped for an undercover mission to suss out the Maquis before their actions lead to further open hostilities with the Cardassians.
Problem being, Ro is conflicted, having grown up in a Bajoran refugee camp thanks to the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. Picard has always had great faith in her, despite her troubled history in Starfleet and her instinctive distrust of authority, and his exercise of faith has usually borne out, but this time…
Especially skillful here, when Ro talks about her father who was tortured to death in front of her, is the father-figure subtext: Picard has filled that role for her. But the leader of the Maquis cell she infiltrates is an avuncular older human who appreciates her Bajoran culture (especially cooking). So when he gets killed in a Cardassian attack, Ro really has no choice but to transfer her father-loyalty from Picard to the Maquis.
As with many of the best storylines in DS9 (with which this story shares the political landscape), there’s a realpolitik feel to the at-odds motivations of the main characters, and no easy answers.
7:25 All Good Things… – “You just don’t get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends.”
Masterful. Tying back to the initial encounter with Q at “Encounter at Farpoint” allows there to be a sense of closure and resolution to the seven-year run without actually ending the Enterprise‘s mission or materially changing the ongoing premise (thus leaving it open for movies, extrapolatory novels, etc.).
The main idea of the backwards-growing time rupture refuses to make sense, of course (Cue Chief O’Brien: “I hate temporal mechanics!”), but this time around I did manage to work out at least one subsidiary premise and find a logical workaround. To wit:
The anomaly, growing larger toward the past, is begun by three starships (or rather, the Enterprise twice plus the Pasteur) aiming anti-tachyons at a single point of space, causing a rupture of anti-time into our time continuum, growing larger toward the past (because anti):
My prior contention was that, when the future Enterprise (after rescuing everyone from the Pasteur) goes back to that point in space, they should not see what they see, i.e., the anomaly, because it should be expanding the other way in time (i.e., backwards).
However, with further consideration this time around, I postulate that, as the anomaly is the annihilation of time and anti-time beginning from a fixed point in box space and time, it should logically expand both backward and forward in time from that single point:
I’m glad to have resolved that to my satisfaction, and I hereby award myself a No-Prize.
Thank you for joining us for this binge watch. While all of this was a leadup then to the TNG movies, at which point my family will FINALLY be versed enough in continuity to tackle Picard, we’ll be taking a little break. Which will also give me a chance to recap some of the other movies I’ve seen.
The preemptive strike episode sounds excellent, whereas most of the episodes this season sounded like they ranged from bad to bland. I don’t remember watching it, though it’s been a long while since I watched TNG regularly. I plan to go through the entire series just as soon as I get this graduate school nonsense sorted out (i.e., finally graduate).
I haven’t watched Picard myself, but based on the reviews I’ve watched (Red Letter Media, Critical Drinker), I’m going to be very interested to hear your and your family’s opinion of it.
Most of the episodes this season sounded like they ranged from bad to bland.
This is why I think it was a good thing that they decided to quit after seven seasons. There were some good episodes, but I thought it was pretty obvious that the well was running dry. By the end, I thought that if I saw one more episode about a never-before-mentioned family member, I was going to throw the remote through the TV.
If anything, DS9’s final season was worse — just one stalling, filler episode after another, and then the finale was a real letdown.
(And hey, if we really want to talk about jumping the shark, HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES’ final season…)
I loved Picards facial expression at the end of the Preemptive Strike episode, its really the old really memorable episode out of the last season for me.
I second that.
“All Good Things” was brilliant, and the tie to “Encounter at Farpoint” really redeemed the latter episode, I think. I came to the series late, so when I finally saw “Encounter” in reruns, I liked it a lot more than it probably deserved, because I was seeing it as the first half of “All Good Things.” It wasn’t until I saw the SFDebris review of “Encounter” that I realized, “Yeah, it’s just another space douche like the original Enterprise met dozens of times, and by itself, it’s really not that good.”
I like your explanation of the temporal mechanics.
You did, however, miss my favorite line: “That is the challenge that awaits you, Jean-Luc. Not mapping star systems but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.” I was hoping that the movies would follow up on that idea, and I guess maybe they tried (possibly that bit in Insurrection about stopping time to make each moment last?), but it never really came through.