YMMV / Star Trek: The Next Generation S3E26 S4E1 "The Best of Both Worlds"

• Angst? What Angst?: During this two-part episode, Picard was abducted, physically turned into a Borg without anesthetic, mind-raped and forced to divulge his most intimate thoughts, used as a puppet to threaten Starfleet and the Federation, forced to watch as the Borg used him to wipe out 40+ Starfleet ships and tens of thousands of people, and forced to threaten, damage, and injure (and nearly kill) his own ship and crew... But in the scene immediately after the Cube explodes, Picard is seen sitting in his Ready Room in his uniform, sipping tea and discussing repairs with Riker. Several small bandages indicate that he just underwent surgery, so no more than a few days have passed, and he acts as if he was kidnapped for only an hour or two by a few insolent rebels (though he does get up and look out the window pensively, clearly troubled to some degree).
  • The next episode, "Family", does acknowledge Picard's lasting mental trauma, but only for the duration of the episode. There are no long-term stays at a psychiatric clinic, no monitoring of Picard's mental well-being, no moments of mental or emotional breakdown from Picard after "Family". For the rest of the TNG series, Picard seems to recover completely, as if it were all just another day in the service of Starfleet.
  • Future episodes and films, especially Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Picard, do deal more thoroughly with Picard's abduction and ordeal, and they show that no, he did not recover completely, at all. The "Best of Both Worlds" incident did indeed permanently fuck him up (though it is certainly in Picard's character to refuse to open up and show such "weakness" to others).
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Retroactive instance with Guinan after the events of Season 5's "Time's Arrow". Thanks to the revelations of that two-parter — that Guinan and Picard are part of a Stable Time Loop spanning 500 years — her speech to Riker takes on an alternate interpretation: that she's actually reassuring him that Picard will survive, since Guinan knows Picard will meet her in the past from a later point in time.
• Awesome Music: This episode's score is basically Ron Jones' tour de force on this show. It even has its own CD release.
• First Installment Wins: The first season-finale cliffhanger in Star Trek history, and by far the best-known.
• Franchise Original Sin: The Cliffhanger ending was written with no idea of how anything would be resolved (mainly because it was unknown until after filming whether Patrick Stewart's contract would be renewed for the next season, so they gave themselves the option to kill him off). It worked out amazingly well, but it unfortunately encouraged the crew to keep doing this across the whole franchise, with increasingly diminishing returns.
• Genius Bonus: "Locutus" means "he who has spoken" in Latin.
• Growing the Beard: With this two-parter episode, arguments over the Next Generation series being inferior to the Original Series faded.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Picard's and Hanson's warnings that Riker is risking his career by repeatedly turning down commands end up ringing unfortunately true when you consider that after this episode, it would be twelve years before Riker was offered another command.
  • Even though this two-parter ends with Picard being de-borgified, he can still hear the voice of the Collective in Star Trek: First Contact. Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard then reveals why, and it's horrifying.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In Part II, Beverly briefly proposes making nanites as a weapon, the problem being it would take two or three weeks to produce them, with Troi remarking "In two or three weeks, nanites may be all that's left of the Federation." Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Voyager would show that the Borg use their own version of nanites, nanoprobes, to assimilate species, which makes it unlikely that Beverly's nanites would have worked as a weapon after all.
• It Was His Sled: Picard is transformed into Locutus of Borg. A major shocker when it first aired in the summer of 1990, but it's common information to even most non-Trekkies nowadays, especially since one of the films is centered around the fallout of it, and it later becomes key to his own series too. Home releases of the episode don't even try to hide the twist ending of Part 1 anymore.
• Narm: When the Enterprise's engineering section is under attack, Geordi epically rolls under the door sealing off engineering... which was still high enough for Geordi to simply crouch under. This scene has been memetically mutated on YTMND as the "Epic Geordi Maneuver".
• Signature Scene: The last scene of Part 1, when Picard introduces himself as Locutus, and Riker says, "Mr. Worf, fire", is not only the signature scene of the episode, but arguably the entirety of The Next Generation.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: While fans were happy to see Picard still around (and the following episode really helped to seal Sir Patrick Stewart as one of the truly great Trek actors), especially as time went on a lot of fans and viewers were sad that Shelby went away so quickly after this pair of episodes - Elizabeth Dennehy delivered a really good performance of the firebrand Commander and her chemistry with Riker and a few of the others was obvious. Not only does part 2 in particular deliver a tantalizing taste of What Could Have Been if Stewart had decided to move on, but many do wish that the writers and staff had found time to give Shelby a more recurring role. Not surprisingly Shelby does become a major character in the Expanded Universe novels and would later make a return appearance in the final season of Picard at the helm of the Enterprise-F no less.
• Tough Act to Follow: None of the Star Trek season cliffhangers since this one have been nearly as well-received.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Trek matte painting shots in earlier episodes and shows sometime get panned for being obvious and off-putting, but the overall effect here used to show the destructive scooping-up of New Providence is blisteringly effective, and holds up extremely well even in the HD version and well into 21st-century viewing. It helps that the framing of the shot is absolutely perfect (it's bracketed by some real model-work in the foreground to create the illusion of the camera panning to be over the near rim of the crater), and that the sound stage for the actors in the previous shot was carefully crafted to match the painting tone-for-tone, all the way down to the inferred lighting. Not the easiest thing in 1990, either, with minimal-at-best computer post-processing assistance and a television budget.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: A subtext that makes the Borg effective villains (particularly for when TNG originally aired at the tail-end/immediate aftermath of the Cold War) is that they are simultaneously the excesses of Communism and Capitalism taken to their extremes. Borg society dispells any notion of individuality, to the point that all Borg are mere cogs in the greater machine totally lacking in any free-will, while the Collective also sees anything and anyone as a mere resource to be consumed, no matter the consequences.

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