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The Least Disliked Episode 2025 - TNG Season 7

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"All Good Things" gets the chop.


And now you have all stopped shouting, let me explain. I liked the "Farpoint" parts of the very first episode but disliked the Q and court scenes. I don't like Q any better here, and I still don't like the court scenes. The linkage to the first episode is clever but that's not enough.

There are good things about the episode, not least the poker game and the open ending that allows Our Heroes to be out there somewhere having adventures still.


Gambit (II)
Phantasms
The Pegasus
 
"Gambit, Part II" I like it, I have no real complaints, and I love any story that gets a bunch of different aliens together. But "Phantasms" has such iconic imagery, and "The Pegasus" has Jonathan Frakes shirtless. :bolian:
So I can't ax either one of those!

Phantasms
The Pegasus
 
A high-concept surreal psychological thriller of sorts,

Phantasms

even has good music. But when it comes to robust TNG, other elements prevail. Since ATG isn't in this list, the only other qualifier is the story that could qualify for hitting all the right marks and with a minimal amount of nitpicks is:

WINNER:
The Pegasus
 
I'd come up with a really good reason to remove The Pegasus in case it made it to the end and I was the one who made the last choice (it's got another evil admiral), but honestly it's a worthy winner.
 
"All Good Things" gets the chop.


And now you have all stopped shouting,

LOL!

let me explain. I liked the "Farpoint" parts of the very first episode but disliked the Q and court scenes. I don't like Q any better here, and I still don't like the court scenes. The linkage to the first episode is clever but that's not enough.

There are good things about the episode, not least the poker game and the open ending that allows Our Heroes to be out there somewhere having adventures still.

A good explanation, certainly.

I loved how it was Picard who had set up the anomaly that nearly destroyed the Federation, all life on Earth, the secret ingredient to Janeway's coffee, etc. The court stuff was iffy*, but the Continuum leaders having decided humans hadn't improved (those last three years were really the impetus, I'd swear! :guffaw:) would decide their annihilation, but our Q decided to prod Jean Luc just enough and made a promise of what his future would really be like. A shame that none of the movies came close to that claim, though relatively speaking "Generations" was the closest to trying to come close to it.

* Farpoint did it better, IMHO. Sci-fi trying to decide how future-Earth might be, right down to clothing style, is generally really basic: "It's well past nuke war 3 and if we're not eating each other or only one person is left or we're all simians now, we're still human but we all dress in revealing Earth tones and conquered cooties and everything!", but "Farpoint" threw in some nuance that was new - two time periods in fact where a new future was created but another changed it around (2036 and 2079 respectively, at least per the pencil of 1987 - really creative stuff to play into multiple ideas as much as they had. This is the same Star Trek that said Khan would rule in the 1990s as well and there's no need to retroactively change or even address it: TOS and TNG are their own universe, which ultimately isn't ours any more than the Smurfs' isn't. Yikes, most people seeing a bunch of small moving things the the size and height of three apples would probably get all spazzy and run around. Fiction generally means it's not real or going to be, but I just looked on social media and people thought that October 21 2015 (BTTF) and August 30 2024 (DS9) as if they were actually real. So far, no DeLorean had stopped by, and if it did it'd have James Bond smoking a ciggie in it.)


On edit: Changed movie name to "Generations" and made one nominal clarification in an early sentence regarding the Continuum's decision to wipe out humanity.
 
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I question whether Picard “nearly destroyed the Federation” in AGT.

He goes to the past, makes changes, and returns to a present in which those changes have not occurred. This suggests he’s moving back and forth not only through time, but through parallel timelines.

There’s a timeline where life on Earth never emerges, but the prime timeline is unaffected. Whether the other timelines are “still out there” after the episode isn’t clear. Also, are there just the four or five timelines we see, or infinitely many?
 
I question whether Picard “nearly destroyed the Federation” in AGT.

He goes to the past, makes changes, and returns to a present in which those changes have not occurred. This suggests he’s moving back and forth not only through time, but through parallel timelines.

There’s a timeline where life on Earth never emerges, but the prime timeline is unaffected. Whether the other timelines are “still out there” after the episode isn’t clear. Also, are there just the four or five timelines we see, or infinitely many?
Well at the end of it none of it ever happened but we can also assume Q shenanigans kept everything tethered together to teach Picard a lesson.
 
I question whether Picard “nearly destroyed the Federation” in AGT.

He goes to the past, makes changes, and returns to a present in which those changes have not occurred. This suggests he’s moving back and forth not only through time, but through parallel timelines.

There’s a timeline where life on Earth never emerges, but the prime timeline is unaffected. Whether the other timelines are “still out there” after the episode isn’t clear. Also, are there just the four or five timelines we see, or infinitely many?

Great point. Of course, in 1994, people really weren't thinking of parallel universes anywhere near as often as they are today as all the franchises are doing it and the next obvious one will probably be Doctor Who, unless they delayed production to do filming to tinker with script rewrites. Even "parallels" was a passing one-off fancy.

But, yeah, in another continuum, humanity may have existed, or not, or the Federation existed - just without the humans. As far as viewers watching in 1994 were considering, none of that mattered. It was the TNG timeline as they saw it unfold and flower over nigh on a decade. Applying today's fads retroactively just doesn't fit. Especially as we grew to love just the one Picard, the one Beverly, the one Data, the one Broccoli, etc. If everything is played out everywhere everywhen, then does any of it matter? Why or why not? That said, instead of the silly reset button Treknobabble, the ending of "Parallels" could have had fun and bring over another universe's (name your character) and see if they were to play with the trope better than and one-up the Riker transporter malfunction doppelganger episode.
 
Probably my second-to-last favorite season of TNG, there are not a lot of surprises in how this went in terms of everyone's votes...but a few for sure. Here's how I bucket them:

Least Favorive/Skippable
Descent (II)
Interface
Dark Page
Force of Nature
Inheritance
Homeward
Sub Rosa
Masks
Eye of the Beholder
Bloodlines
Genesis

Good but not Great/Relatively Entertaining
Liaisons
Phantasms
Attached
Thine Own Self
Journey's End
Firstborn
Emergence

Favorites: Frequent Rewatch
Gambit (I)
Gambit (II) And honestly, the Gambit storyline could have easily gone into the "good" category
Parallels
The Pegasus
Lower Decks
Preemptive Strike
All Good Things...
 
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