10 Best Final Lines In Star Trek Episodes
9. "Sounds To Me Like We’ve Only Postponed The Invasion Until What, The 24th Century?"
With a note of dramatic irony, this last line of the Star Trek: Enterprise episode Regeneration wraps up the events of First Contact and anticipates the arrival of the Borg in The Next Generation.
In the episode, a team of scientists find the wreckage of a ship that crashed in the arctic a hundred years prior. With it, they also discover certain…cybernetic creatures all too familiar to the audience, but unknown to the unwitting researchers. The moment they bring the alien corpses back to the lab is enough to have any fan screaming at the television – nooooo, get out of there! – in anticipation of the move the Borg are going to pull.
Further observations from the scientists, such as “I think this ship was a perfect sphere,” only add to the dramatic tension that results from the viewer being in the position of familiarity. It is, ultimately, this disconnect of information that is key to the success of the episode, and what makes its final line so effective. It re-establishes the Borg in a position of dominance and real threat. The viewer is then allowed to be afraid again on behalf of the less well-informed characters.
Wibbly wobbly, Borg-y, worg-y, you may cry. The episode has certainly attracted a fair amount of ire for supposedly mucking around with continuity. The last line is, however, an attempt to explain what the Borg were doing on our side of the Galaxy when they are first mentioned in the TNG episode The Neutral Zone. Parsimony not paradox.
The Enterprise-E really should have done a better clean-up job!