With this episode, after three seasons, the success or failure of Star Trek: TNG came
down to just three words.
This is a review of the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation two-parter “The Best
of Both Worlds” If you have not seen this episode, and you don’t want to know what
happens in it, be warned: spoilers beyond this point!
As I’m sure most of you know already, this is not just any old episode of Star Trek we’re
talking about here.
This is the most important episode TNG ever produced — arguably the most important episode
of any Star Trek series ever produced — but before I get into that, just for funsies,
lemme tell you what happens in the episode.
Briefly:
The crew of the Enterprise arrives at a planet where there should be a colony, but instead
of a colony there’s just a big hole in the ground.
This doesn’t look good, so they rendezvous with Admiral Hansen and young hotshot Lieutenant
Commander Shelby.
Shelby has been in charge of getting Starfleet ready to face the Borg — they’ve expected
the Borg to be coming since the events of “Q Who?”
the previous season, but if the Borg are responsible for scooping up this colony — and all signs
point to yes on that — it must mean their ships are even faster and their resources
even more formidable than previously thought.
While the crew of the Enterprise works to get ready for a confrontation with the Borg,
we also get some character conflict — Riker has been offered the captaincy of the U.S.S.
Melbourne, but he’s reluctant to accept because he doesn’t want to leave the Enterprise.
Meanwhile, Commander Shelby is practically pushing Riker out of the airlock so she can
take his place as Captain Picard’s first officer.
This leads to some friction between Riker and Shelby.
When the Borg finally show up, they have an unexpected request: they want Captain Picard.
It seems they’ve been doing some thinking since they first encountered humanity last
year, and they’ve decided that the best way to take over the primitive, authority-driven
culture of the Federation is to have a human voice speaking for the collective.
And as the captain of the strongest Federation ship and the lead protagonist of the series,
guess what, Jean-Luc — it’s your lucky day!
The Enterprise manages to hide from the Borg cube inside of a nebula for a while, but eventually
they have to make a run for it, and the Borg chase them down, beam aboard, and abduct Captain
Picard.
The Borg cube jumps to warp on a direct course for Earth.
Riker sends Shelby, Data, Worf and Dr. Crusher over to the cube to rescue Picard, but by
the time they find him he’s already gone Borg.
Before beaming back to the Enterprise, the away team does manage to blow up enough stuff
to force the Borg cube to drop out of warp.
Geordi and Wesley have modified the Enterprise’s deflector dish to emit a blast that they think
might be able to destroy the Borg ship, but it won’t work if the cube is at warp, and
since they have no idea how long they have before the cube repairs itself and starts
moving again, it’s now or never.
Captain Picard, now calling himself Locutus and speaking for the Borg, hails the Enterprise
and says, “So, here’s the deal: your life is over, your ass belongs to the Borg.”
And that’s when we hear those three words I mentioned at the beginning, the three words
that decided the fate of the Star Trek franchise for the next thirty years.
Riker stares back at Locutus, sets his jaw, and says “Mr. Worf . . . fire.”
End of part one, time for part two — how was your summer?
Mine was good.
We went to D.C.
The National Zoo is pretty cool.
My favorite was the Air and Space Museum, though — I’d live there if I could — I’m
serious, if I thought I could get away with it, I’d Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler the fuck
outta that place.
. . . Oh, yeah, Star Trek!
Worf fires the secret weapon and it does nothing, no effect on the Borg cube at all.
Locutus is still on the viewscreen and he’s like, “Picard knew about the secret weapon,
genius.
That means we know about it, too, and were able to prepare.
Ha ha, you suck.”
The Borg cube takes off again for Earth, while the Enterprise is stuck making repairs.
Admiral Hansen calls to promote Riker to Captain of the Enterprise, and to announce that he’s
gathering a fleet of forty starships at Wolf 359 to stand against the Borg.
While they work on repairs, Riker appoints Commander Shelby to be his first officer.
He also has a heart-to-heart with Guinan, who drops by the ready room to tell him to
get his shit together, let go of Picard, and accept that he is the captain now, or they’re
all gonna die.
Riker’s like “Good point, okay” and sits down behind the desk in the ready room
like a normal person instead of throwing his leg over the back, and you can just tell he
hates it.
The Enterprise arrives at Wolf 359 and finds that the entire fleet assembled to confront
the Borg cube has been destroyed — all forty ships, floating in pieces.
Not encouraging.
They continue their pursuit of the Borg ship and by the time they catch up to it in Earth’s
solar system, Captain Riker has a plan.
He separates the saucer section, has Shelby take command of that part of the ship and
start shooting antimatter at the Borg cube.
With the Borg distracted, Data and Worf fly in close aboard a shuttlecraft, beam aboard
the cube, grab Locutus, and take him back to the Enterprise.
The Borg are like, “Oh, to hell with this,” and the cube resumes its flight to Earth.
Data detects the subspace signals that are being sent back and forth between the Borg
cube and Locutus, and figures they might be able to do something with that, so he takes
Locutus to a science lab, strips him about three-quarters naked, and plugs his brain
into Locutus’s brain using some aquarium air tubing.
The Borg cube reaches Earth, the Enterprise catches up to it again and puts up the best
fight it can, but it doesn’t look good.
All seems lost when suddenly, Locutus reaches out — with his un-Borgified hand — grabs
Data, and speaks once again with Captain Picard’s voice.
“Sleep,” he says.
Data guesses that Picard is trying to tell him to access the Borg’s regeneration cycle.
So, Data uses his connection to Locutus to hack into the Borg collective, access the
regeneration cycle, which is a low-security system, and put the entire cube down for a
nap.
It works!
It works even better than Data would have hoped, in fact — after they go to sleep,
the Borg activate a self-destruct mechanism and the cube blows up!
I guess they were embarrassed that they let Data hack them or something?
Ooh!
Would you call that . . . a Data breach?
Don’t boo me!
Anyway, the Borg have been defeated, Picard is back to his old self, Shelby is off to
lead the effort to rebuild the fleet, and Riker has decided to step back to being a
commander and remain as Picard’s first officer.
Everything is fine — except Picard still seems a little bothered by the whole experience.
Oh my god, it’s been like a whole day, man, get over it.
“The Best of Both Worlds” is the most important TNG episode, and maybe the most
important episode of any Star Trek series, because it’s the show that solidified TNG
as a hit and convinced the studio that Star Trek was a bankable TV franchise.
By the end of season three, TNG had found its footing creatively and had mostly evolved
into the show we all know and love today, but it was not yet the institution that it
would become.
The cliffhanger at the end of season three is what finally hooked the audience for good
and guaranteed that TNG, and Star Trek in general, was here to stay.
Remember, this was the early 1990s, the golden age of the shocking season-ending cliffhanger.
It was ten years since Dallas had the whole country asking “Who Shot JR?” but primetime
shows were still chasing their own version of that.
And Star Trek finally got its very own “Who Shot JR?” moment with “The Best of Both
Worlds.”
Only this wasn’t a mystery — we knew what happened to Captain Picard.
The question we were all asking that summer was “What’s going to happen next?”
Watching the episode again this morning, it’s easy to see why it hooked so many of us back
then.
Part one is a great episode in its own right, and lays the foundation for a compelling cliffhanger
in several ways, some of which are diabolically subtle.
First and foremost, it reminds us of how formidable the Borg are as a threat — they can scoop
entire colonies off the surfaces of planets, they can take the best shot the Enterprise
has got and come away with hardly a scratch.
They are faster, they are stronger, they are relentless, they aren’t interested in talking,
and they’re practically unbeatable.
And this time, there’s a twist: they want Captain Picard.
Placing Picard in jeopardy and making that the emotional core of the story serves to
bring home to us how much we like Picard.
Remember, this is only season three — a lot of us hadn’t fully embraced him as a
replacement for Captain Kirk yet.
But once the Borg had him, and it looked like he might be going away, we were like “Oh
no, Captain Picard!”
The episode doesn’t just increase our attachment to Picard — it shows us how attached the
other characters are to him, as well.
That’s important — I’ve often said that the best thing a story can do to really get
me invested is convince me that the characters actually care about each other.
When you see how the crew of the Enterprise reacts to the loss of Captain Picard, and
what they are willing to do in order to get him back, you believe it.
Or I do, anyway.
And while all of that is happening, the episode is also building up Riker as a lead protagonist.
The most important event of the episode is the abduction of Picard, but the story is
just as much about Riker as anyone else — his conflict with Shelby, his reluctance to take
the next step in his career, his worries and self doubt.
In a conversation with Deanna he says, perhaps only half joking, “Maybe I’m just afraid
of the big chair.”
Then, when he finally gets his shot at the big chair, it’s under the worst possible
conditions, after his mentor and friend has been lost.
That stuff is not only good drama, and good character development for Riker — it helps
to sell the cliffhanger, especially in part two.
Because here’s the thing — if you’re just a viewer in 1990, and you see Captain
Picard get taken by the enemy and the episode ends with Riker giving the order to fire,
you probably think, “Oh, damn, this thing is wide open!”
You have no idea what’s going to happen!
Is Patrick Stewart leaving the show?
Is this how they kill off Picard?
When the show comes back for part two and you see that Patrick Stewart is still there,
the general outcome feels a lot more certain — oh, okay, he’s still on the show, however
this gets resolved, Picard is gonna be captain again by the end.
But, you can’t be 100% certain.
Maybe Patrick Stewart only came back for one more episode — maybe Picard is still being
written out somehow.
Because while this drama is unfolding, we’re watching an episode of TNG with Will Riker
as captain of the Enterprise, and the thing is, it works.
This feels plausible as a direction the series could go.
Yeah, Picard is probably here to stay, but maybe he’s not . . . the episode commits
to Captain Riker fully enough to make you wonder, even though you know intellectually
that they’re probably not going that way.
Part one of “Best of Both Worlds” usually gets most of the praise — which is only
fair, it’s got the setup, it raises the compelling questions, it’s got that showstopping
cliffhanger at the end.
And I agree, of the two parts, part one is superior.
But that’s usually the case with two-parters, especially ones with cliffhangers in the middle.
Part one is where the creators show up loaded for bear.
Part one is the hook.
Part one is where the characters are pushed into the unsolvable dilemma, the inescapable
trap, so we can be left to wonder how they’re possibly gonna be able to get out of this
one.
Part two, by comparison, is usually a more straightforward exercise, as the writers try
to write themselves out of the corner they intentionally wrote themselves into.
Even with that encumbrance, part two of “Best of Both Worlds” is still pretty good in
its own right.
The destruction of the fleet at Wolf 359 — which, blessedly, happens entirely off-screen so
it can be a stunning reveal when the Enterprise gets there — is another sobering reminder
of how dangerous the Borg are; Riker’s plan to rescue Picard feels inventive and daring;
and the resolution not only manages to have our heroes defeat the Borg without weakening
the Borg too much, it also finds a way to bring Picard back into it as an active participant
rather than someone just standing there waiting for his friends to bail him out.
Throughout both halves, it’s obvious that “The Best of Both Worlds” represents everyone
bringing their A game.
Every facet of the production is top notch — the acting, the special effects, even
the score by Ron Jones, with its stabbing strings and threatening ghostly voices, is
perhaps the finest score ever composed for an episode of Star Trek.
Both parts are packed with meaningful details, like how Picard has to tap the aggressively
take-charge Shelby on the shoulder to get her to stand aside during the first engagement
with the Borg, or how Guinan walks into the ready room during her scene with Riker and
sits right down in Picard’s old chair to show him it’s not that big of a deal, or
how Locutus is shown shedding a single tear during his assimilation, and is almost nude
while in Data’s lab, to remind us that he’s still Jean-Luc Picard, a human being.
It’s Star Trek’s first cliffhanger, still arguably Star Trek’s best cliffhanger, and
surely Star Trek’s most consequential cliffhanger, commercially and creatively.
It showed TNG living up to its potential as a successor to the original Star Trek, it
presented the Borg fulfilling their promise as all-time classic villains, and it set the
entire franchise on course for a journey that, aside from a few interruptions here and there,
continues to this very day.
I’d call that a pretty great episode.
Those are my thoughts on “The Best of Both Worlds.”
What do you think of this episode?
Please share your thoughts with me in the comments.
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Please join me next week for another retro review.
Next time, we continue our series of reviews of Borg episodes with yet another classic
show from Star Trek: The Next Generation: “I, Borg.”
I’ll see you next week for that.
Thanks for watching and take care, everybody!