The Best of Both Worlds Part II

Captain Riker tries to kill his old boss, but when that doesn't work he's forced to rescue him

The big plan to blow up the Borg cube doesn't work and Riker has to get his worst scowl out of the big box of facial expressions. Off go the Borg to take over the Federation using Top Tips stolen from Captain Picard, while Riker and Shelby bond over their opportune promotions. After the Borg pop forty Federation starships like they were balloons, Captain Riker uses the entire cast to effect a rescue - during which Worf gets to defeat Locutus in hand-to-hand combat - admittedly with an assist from Data (Worf 7, Aliens 9). So it’s a battle to control Picard’s cyber-soul and thus blow up the Borg cube before it breezes into Earth and assimilating all those wimpy Federation citizens. Better luck next time, Borg!

Words

“And now the conclusion.”

On the whole, I think the second episode of any two-parter will tend to be the worst. That’s because the first part sets up the big gosh-wow crisis, and the second part often just has to disappointingly take it all apart. There are exceptions that play the other way (there’s a doozy in a later Trek season), but in general screenwriters love to go ‘all in’ setting situations up, while unpicking the knot on the other side is more of a pain. Indeed, since Michael Piller didn’t know for certain he was coming back to the show after part one, he hadn’t spent any time at all thinking about how to get out of the nightmare he had created! He remarked later:

I had created an unsolvable problem. And to be honest with you, as I started writing the second part of the cliffhanger – that was supposed to resolve the story – I just didn’t know what it was going to be, that was ultimately going to beat them.

How did he solve the problem? He let the characters work it through.

I didn’t discover it until the characters did... I try to believe in Zen writing. I actually like to stand back as a writer and let the characters speak and listen to them and I’ll sort of like take notes, while they’re talking. Well, that’s what happened in “Best of Both Worlds Part II”. We got to the scene where they had to solve the problem. Time was running out, there was only ten minutes left in the show. And, um, finally, they came up with the answer that the Borg’s strength was also their weakness, that their interdependence was their strength, and interdependence could lead to their defeat. I can remember the smile on my face when I heard that. I said, ‘Oh, that is cool!’ And that’s how we ended it.

Interesting to hear ‘nanites’ brought up again while the bridge crew is brainstorming… Roddenberry’s resistance to reusing material from the back catalogue is long gone by this point, and this season really leans into using the TNG’s own mythos as source materials. There’s also some wonderful technobabble in the later Acts, I particularly like O’Brien’s “your submicron matrix activity is increasing exponentially” - I mean, we’ve all been there after a heavy night of drinking, right?

Acting Roles

As with the first episode, Jonathan Frakes’ Riker remains the focal character, although now he actually gets to be Captain. This is underlined by having Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan come and lecture Riker in the Captain’s Ready Room like she would the big guy.

Despite Riker being at the centre of it all, there’s a great ensemble cast vibe going in this episode, and even Marina Sirtis’ Troi has something useful to do (although I wish she, rather than Data, had been allowed to interpret Picard’s “sleep” comment at the relevant moment).

If Patrick Stewart’s Picard is away on his own for most of the episode, we still have guest star Elizabeth Dennehy’s Shelby to fill a seat and give Riker someone to work with for the bulk of the story. She perfectly delivers the names of the ships destroyed at Wolf 359, letting “the Melbourne” (which would have been Riker’s command, had he accepted it) hang gloomily at the conclusion to the second Act.

George Murdock’s Admiral Hanson is also back, and delivers a great scene in the conference room before rushing off to get killed at Wolf 359. He is the only member of the cast to get to say “Wolf 359” except for Data, and he affords a gravitas to the name too.

“Cheerio folks, I’m off to die.”

As for Colm Meaney's Miles O’Brien, he not only gets to deliver exposition and run the transporter in a couple of exciting moments, but he also gets to help Data deprogram Locutus - which might be the single most useful thing that they’ve let him do so far.

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

First of all, can I express my love of the scene when the Borg turn Picard grey...?

Extreme Make-over - Borg edition!

It’s simple, and if the tear in the eye is a rather overused imagery, it still works so brilliantly that I can’t complain too greatly. It not only says that Picard is being assimilated, but it also sends the key message he’s still in there. This is essential for that untying of the Borg knot.

Also, the spinning cube viewscreen is a wonderfully silly way to reuse the Syd Dutton matte painting.

Honourable mention for that great shot of a swiftly doomed skirmish at Saturn - head over to the “Top Forty TNG Models 26-30” to see this one again if you like. I’ll wait.

But let’s be honest, the big moment in an episode full of big SFX moments is the point the Enterprise arrives at Wolf 359 to find all forty Federation starships reduced to wreckage.

What a mix of studio miniatures in here! There are some intact pre-production models, including a study model of the Excelsior, and also some custom-built starships that were built and destroyed by Greg Jein, not to mention some smaller ships constructed by Ed Mirarecki. I also learned from the incomparable Jörg Hillebrand and Bernd Schneider that there is a model in this scene that was intended for the unproduced Trek film Planet of the Titans - a striking reminder that no matter how big a Trek nerd you might be, there are always yet more trivia to be discovered!