Star Trek "The Royale" and "Time Squared"

"The Royale" and "Time Squared"

GROUP: Members

POSTS: 299

Report this Mar. 10 2011, 7:46 pm

My wife and I are rewatching our favorite TNG episodes, and we're up to these two.

I noticed a similarity I'd never noticed before. Both episodes end with Riker and Picard alone, and their conversation basically goes like this:

Riker: WTF happened?

Picard: *shrug*

Both scenes are really good, but this is what they boil down to. The writers didn't feel the need to logically account for the key issues, i.e. why the aliens in "The Royale" were smart enough to design the illusion for the astronaut, but not smart enough to know it wasn't the astronaut's preference, and why the future Picard from "Time Squared" got sent back in time. So instead of throwing in some technobabble to justify the preceding events, they wrote open-ended scenes of acknowledged confusion between Picard and Riker.

I think it's really an effective writing strategy, and it lends these episodes an appealing mystique. Yet I can't think of many other examples of this kind of ending from TNG or other ST series.

"We must strive to be more than we are, Lal. It does not matter that we will never reach our ultimate goal. The effort yields its own rewards." - Data, "The Offspring"