Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Wolf 359
1. The Battles That Follow
Wolf 359 was a singular event, lasting a matter of minutes. Its ramifications would echo through the decades. In the immediate aftermath, the Enterprise-D returned home to Earth, and Captain Picard went back to France, not to fight Borg, but his brother in the mud — a foray into serialised post-trauma.
Now widely lauded, Family was "controversial even among the writing staff" at the time, according to The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion. After all, this was the only episode of The Next Generation NOT to feature the bridge. Rick Berman initially wanted a "science subplot" to complete the episode. Weeks of trying later, that idea was abandoned, and Family was allowed to be all about family.
The trauma of Picard's assimilation wasn't re-addressed so openly until Star Trek: First Contact. As detailed in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, writers had considered returning to Locutus in All Good Things…, — a storyline which would have also (somehow) included Hugh. Evidently, that was dropped in favour of just three time periods.
One might argue that all of Star Trek: Picard was the resultant of Wolf 359. The now retired admiral, grown older, was still processing his assimilation and the devastation wrought, able to share with a handful of only those who could truly empathise, including those who still recognised him as Locutus. What was believed to be Irumodic Syndrome was, in fact, the biological vestige of his time with the Collective, a physical manifestation of his trauma that killed his body whilst others rushed to spare his mind.
Star Trek: Picard also gave voice to another survivor of Wolf 359 — Captain Liam Shaw, an ensign at the time of the battle, a 'grease monkey' aboard the USS Constance. Like Sisko before him, Shaw was forced to confront the man who was Locutus, the Borg who'd "[set] the world on fire". ENSIGN Shaw also appears, briefly but to chilling effect, in JTVFX's Wolf 359: The Massacre (Part I).
On the Star Trek: Picard season three Blu-ray bonus feature Making of The Last Generation, actor Todd Stashwick called the holodeck confrontation scene his "favourite". "They wrote me poetry," he went on to add, before concluding that,
As the Star Trek fan who, as a young man, watched those episodes, to know now that the character that I'm playing is somewhere in that star field was a little mind-blowing.
24th September 2025 is thirty-five years to the day since The Best of Both Worlds, Part II first aired. That star field is still a grave site. The battles rage on.