Going, Going, Gone...
| Star Traks: Boldly Gone | |
| Episode name | |
|---|---|
| Season | 10 |
| Episode number | 6 |
| Writer(s) | Alan Decker, Anthony Butler |
| Year | 2503 |
| Stardate | Unknown |
| Chronology | |
| Previous in series | Born to Rom [BG] |
| Next in series | |
| Previous in timeline | Born to Rom [BG] |
| Next in timeline | |
And now we bring you the final tale of Star Traks: Boldly Gone…. in which everything from the last 10 series culminates in an extended meditation on the very nature of human existence. Or maybe there’s just a bunch of bad jokes and explosions. Our money is on the latter.
Summary
Featuring
- Captain Reginald Bain
- Commander Prosak
- Commander Vioxx
- Lieutenant Commander Tovar
- Lieutenant Shelly Marsden
- Sub-Commander Remax
- Dr. Natalia Kasyov
- Centurion Nortal
- Sub-Lieutenant Zantak
- Cabral
- Rosalyn Bain
Author's Comments
We’re finally here. I have to admit that for a while there I really thought that we were just going to leave things with Series Nine. True, it wasn’t much in the way of an overall wrap up for Boldly Gone, but it was an ending of a sort and didn’t leave things on a cliffhanger.
We weren’t happy with that idea, though. It may have taken us 13 years to get to an actual ending, but we did it. Between the two of us, Anthony and I have written several different endings for our Star Traks series. Some of them didn’t stick. I’ve ended the original series 4 times, and Anthony is still going with his latest incarnation of The Vexed Generation. The big question in my mind for Boldly was how to leave it. Would we go open ended, like “All Good Things…” in TNG, where the crew just continues on to the next mission? Or go with something more final, like “What You Leave Behind” in DS9, where characters move on and things have changed?
Obviously we went with the latter. I may be overstating this, but I chalk some of that up to us being older and understanding more that things don’t last forever. Friendships drift apart, coworkers move on, jobs change, and life can send you in directions that you aren’t expecting. Boldly Gone is about the period of time that these characters spent as a crew on board the USS Anomaly, so for the end of the series, it made sense to show how that time ended.
Some parts of this final story have been in our heads for years and years. The final scene with Tovar and Marsden’s kid coming aboard to serve under Bain has been planned since long before Series Nine even. We just didn’t know the particulars leading up to it. Originally, we were just going to time jump to it at the end, but as we were actually writing the final story, going with the future time (Well, the future of the future of Star Traks’ future) as a framing story presented itself and worked well for what we were trying to do.
And the basic idea that the finale would involve the Anomaly taking on another ship with an anti-singularity drive has been in place since the end of Series Nine. The circumstances kept shifting, though. When we thought all of Series Ten, the Dillon Consortium was involved, and the fight with the empty suit also happened in this last story. I won’t go into all of the reasons that we changed our minds, since I’ve discussed it previously, but more specific to this story, it felt right to include Thot Phul, since he’s been in the series from the beginning, and Selex, since that storyline was never really resolved and it helped push Prosak to where she needed to be.
Because of that, while the story picks up on characters and events from earlier in Series Ten and across Boldly Gone overall, it’s standalone in some ways. I wanted it to be more like “All Good Things…” (And Voyager’s “Endgame” really). You can jump into that episode with a general knowledge of TNG and the characters and have no trouble understanding what’s happening, unlike “What You Leave Behind,” which is the culmination of a massive arc.
Another thing we wanted to make sure happened in the finale was to give Reginald Bain a chance be Bain. Here he is, in command of a starship but facing steep odds. Bain is in many ways the most capable Star Traks captain that Anthony and I have written across our various series. He’s a bit eccentric in some ways and oblivious in others, but in a situation like this final story, he is absolutely in his element.
Anthony and I have different strengths, and one thing he is MUCH better at than me is titles. I was originally thinking to call it “The Bold and the Deceitful.” It was supposed to be a play on the long-running soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” (Which Jimmy Doohan actually appeared on in the 90s), but it never felt right. “Deceitful” and “Beautiful” just don’t sound enough alike for the title to land. Anthony instantly came up with “Going, Going, Gone…” which is, as I said earlier, MUCH better. Anthony’s ideas also led to the name of the Romulan ship, which in turn led to what’s possible one of the stupidest gags we’ve ever done. I love it so much.
As for the actual ending, the goal was to give enough of a sense of where the characters went after their time on the Anomaly to be satisfying without getting too bogged down in the details. I thought of it a bit like the flash-forward sequences in the final episode of “Parks & Recreation” (Sorry if that’s a spoiler for a show that ended eight years ago). We don’t have any plans to follow up at the moment, but if at some point in the future someone did have an idea for a Prosak story or something else, things are wide open for whatever we (or they, if it’s not one of us) might want to do.