Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Wolf 359
9. Who Shot J.L.
"You have ruined our summer," shouted a fan to Patrick Stewart at a set of traffic lights on the Pacific Coast Highway in 1990, as the actor recounted in Resistance is Futile: Assimilating Star Trek: The Next Generation, Part 3: The Collective. Unlike Dallas a decade earlier, at least viewers didn't have to wait months to find out Who Done It in The Best of Both Worlds, Part II. 'Who shot Jean-Luc' was never the question, to which the answer was always writer and executive producer Michael Piller. The story of the two-parter, the story of Wolf 359, was most personally his.
"When we finished the first half, we had no idea what the second half would be," noted Rick Berman in Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages. At the same time, Piller wasn't sure he was going to return for season four. "I found myself in the position of Riker, who was trying to decide whether he was going to leave the ship or not," Piller added in Captains' Logs.
Piller did eventually re-sign on the dotted line, but found he'd written himself into a corner with his own cliffhanger. Getting Locutus, and indeed everyone else, out of the Borg imbroglio proved difficult. "I had created an unsolvable problem," Piller insisted on the DVD extra Mission Overview Year Four. Only by 'listening to the characters' did he come up with the idea to use the Borg's interdependency against them, to 'put them to sleep'.
As the rest of the world wondered if Patrick Stewart was making a quick exit, Piller completed the final draft script of The Best of Both Worlds, Part II on 2 July 1990. Budget and time aside, the aftermath of Wolf 359 might also have been an afterthought. "Battles [are] the stuff I don't like writing," as Piller admitted in Captains' Logs.