10 Best Final Lines In Star Trek Episodes

These are the decisive final words of what is one of the greatest episodes of Star Trek, The Best of Both Worlds Part I. The line itself may be rather laconic, but it certainly does the job. It is made memorable, of course, by what comes immediately before it: "I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life, as it has been, is over." Picard has been assimilated, and Riker gives the order to fire the deflector weapon.

Nowadays, the next episode will play as automatically as a Borg resonance signal, but at the time you would have had to wait a whole summer to find out the conclusion to Riker’s fateful words. Shockingly, in retrospect, Patrick Stewart was in contract negotiations at the time of the episode’s production, and so there was real doubt as to whether he was to return. The ambiguity of that final line was ever more deliberate, therefore, as the writers held on to the possibility of killing off Picard, and this fact alone created considerable buzz amongst fans at the time.

Furthermore, this was only the second two-part episode in Star Trek history, the first having been The Menagerie I & II. It was also the first end-of-season cliff-hanger for the franchise, and, in this, The Next Generation really began to thrive on its own merits. Backed by some other particularly strong episodes in season three (Yesterday’s Enterprise, as near perfect example), those final three words cited above solidified TNG’s place in the Star Trek canon – it was now firmly carrying the torch.