Star Trek: Everything We NOW Know About The Q Continuum

And now, I die. So came the 'final' act of John de Lancie's familiar Q in Star Trek: Picard's second season finale Farewell. With a click of his fingers, he returned JL, Rafi, and Seven to the right time and place, while also resurrecting Elnor - and seemingly killing himself in the process.

Farewell was written after the publication of The Eternal Tide, by Christopher Monfette and Akiva Goldsman. In this episode, Q states that, as he is about to die, he is about to experience something new. This, reminiscent of Quinn from Death Wish, may be another state of being entirely - something already experienced by Worf, Wesley, and Elnor - or different again, thanks to their different physiologies.

Thanks to this uncertainty, the Q Continuum get to have their cake and eat it. They are both unable to know what it beyond death, while still having the power to recall people from it - even if it breaks their own rules. The episode also suggests that de Lancie's Q is definitely dying, though what is time to a time traveller? 

The post-credits scene in The Last Generation shows Q admonishing Jack Crusher for thinking in three dimensional terms, so for as much as we know about the Continuum, do we really know anything at all? 

One thing is for sure, if William Campbell, Rhys Darby, and John de Lancie have proven anything - it's that whatever they do, they do it in style.