The Classic Star Trek Episode That Inspired Avengers: Endgame

The final episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" aired on May 23, 1994 to the wistful smiles of Trekkies everywhere. The adventures of The U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D would continue, and the characters would live on, but we, the audience, simply wouldn't be permitted to see them. At least not until the "Next Generation" feature films. 

"All Good Things..." was not only a fond farewell to Picard (Patrick Stewart) and company, but a clever time-bending plot that spanned three different time frames. In the episode, Picard awoke to find that he, much like the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel "Slaughterhouse-Five," had become unstuck in time, and found himself randomly inhabiting the body of his past self — about seven years prior, right before the events of the show's pilot episode — and his future self — old, bearded, retired, and suffering from a rare brain condition that might be affecting his cognition. 

His mental time jumps could also be the work of resident "Star Trek" trickster Q (John de Lancie), a recurring Trek character hellbent on mischief and keen to test Capt. Picard's ability to grow up and grasp newer, bigger ideas. Over the course of "All Good Things...," Q appears to be encouraging Picard to trek out to a very particular spot in deep space where a strange spatial phenomenon has formed. In the seven-years-ago time frame, the phenomenon is larger. In the future, it is gone. In true Trek fashion, a mystery must be solved. Only this time, it must be solved in several time frames simultaneously. 

All in all, it's a pretty darn good episode of "Star Trek." 

Of course, one of the central conceits of "Avengers: Endgame's" time travel shenanigans is that we are meant to ignore causality altogether. Indeed, The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) even has dialogue addressing the audience more than the characters that causality is not a factor in traveling into the past this time, and that this is definitely not like "Back to the Future." If the Avengers do something in the past, it won't effect the future because they came from a future that already happened; they're essentially going back to their start point when they return back from the past. 

This drives Trekkies nuts, as Trekkies — and I, boldly and confidently, elect to speak for all Trekkies as a group — tend to be attracted to scientific specifics and complex technicalities. Trekkies were, after all, one of the original inventors of inter-TV-series continuity back in the 1960s and 1970s, so being sticklers for detail is Trekkies' bread and butter.

There is a moment in "All Good Things..." wherein Picard gathers his senior staff and asks him if they remember some of his actions from the past, actions that differ from the past he knew. The senior staff says no, and Picard states that his actions in the past aren't altering the present. However, this is used as evidence that Q must be creating the events of the past, or that they are hallucinations of some kind. As such, "All Good Things...," even though it's a time travel plot, immediately becomes a story of Picard's brain, the challenged of solving a mystery, the general arc of one's life, and grappling with a paradox. 

"Endgame" — coincidentally also the title of the final episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" — wants a direct hit of nostalgia more than it wants to grapple with the complexities of time travel, so it pretty much just throws the most Star Trek part of time travel out the window. Feige may have been influenced by the story of "All Good Things...," but he opted for adventure and superhero fights over sci-fi tech thinking. 

Which is fine, I think, in a world with wizards, Infinity Stones, and actual Norse gods.