It’s the beginning of the end for The Next Generation.
Endings are hard. Just ask the the writers of *Lost* or *Mass Effect 3*. So there’s a lot of pressure coming in to this episode.
There’s a lot happening in this first part. Too much really. Picard is jumping through time. Worf and Troi are getting serious. Picard and Crusher are finally making a move. And then there’s Romulans in the neutral zone.
And then there’s Q. Surprisingly enough, harking back to what worked really badly back in *Encounter at Farpoint* is very effective. Q has been very hit or miss (cough *Qpid* cough), but it works here. In fact they come perilously close to breaking the fourth wall (‘we’ve watched you these past seven years’, ‘your trek through the stars’), but avoid falling flat on their face.
329 down, 408 to go.