Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Season 7 opens with Picard, Troi, and La Forge captured as Lore directs Data and a group of liberated Borg. Crusher commands the Enterprise with a skeleton crew while Riker and Worf search the planet and join Hugh’s resistance. Crusher uses a stellar eruption to destroy the attacking Borg ship; Picard uses a modified transceiver to restore Data’s ethical subroutines. Hugh stops Lore from killing Data, and Data disables and deactivates his brother. He returns to the Enterprise with the emotion chip, which La Forge persuades him to keep.
Midseason, Picard must relocate Dorvan V’s Puebloan settlers for Cardassian control, but they refuse. Wesley, home from the Academy, sides with them after a vision quest and quits Starfleet. Lakanta reveals himself as the Traveler and offers to mentor Wesley, who leaves with him. Picard secures the colony’s right to remain under Cardassian jurisdiction. Later, Ro infiltrates the Maquis for Starfleet; after Macias is killed, she exposes Picard’s planned ambush and defects to the resistance.
In the finale, Q sends Picard between the Enterprise’s first mission, the present, and a possible future more than twenty years away. At each point he confronts a spatial anomaly whose effects grow larger the further back he travels; in the distant past it threatens the beginnings of life on Earth. Data identifies it as an anti-time rift, and Picard realizes scan orders from all three eras created the problem. He gets each Enterprise to the anomaly to form a static warp shell, collapsing the rift. Q returns Picard to the present, says humanity’s trial continues, and Picard joins the senior crew’s poker game for the first time.