In this episode, the Enterprise comes across an oddly shaped probe dating back thousands of years, with no habitable world for lightyears around it. Suddenly it 'shoots' something at Picard, and the Captain wakes up in a desert town, with people who have supposedly known him all his life, and a wife who listens as he tells of his "delusion" of being a Starship captain named Jean-Luc Picard, when their own race is just on the cusp of space technology.
For the next 45 minutes of air time, and 25 minutes of Picard's life, he lives out an entire 50 years or so in this life, not returning to the Enterprise, raising a family and working to solve the problem of a drought that is threatening the entire planet.
Picard's experiences on this planet gradually shape him, as he begins to reject his life as "Jean-Luc Picard" as a delusion, and spends the next several decades of his life living on this world, dealing with the typical issues of family life such as raising his children, trying to accept his son's decision to drop out of school to become a musician, and his life-long project of trying to save the planet from drying up and dying.
Then comes the very end, which took what could have been just an odd and arbitrary, yet still very good episode, and made it spectacular, mind-blowing, and heartbreaking.
For the next 45 minutes of air time, and 25 minutes of Picard's life, he lives out an entire 50 years or so in this life, not returning to the Enterprise, raising a family and working to solve the problem of a drought that is threatening the entire planet.
Picard's experiences on this planet gradually shape him, as he begins to reject his life as "Jean-Luc Picard" as a delusion, and spends the next several decades of his life living on this world, dealing with the typical issues of family life such as raising his children, trying to accept his son's decision to drop out of school to become a musician, and his life-long project of trying to save the planet from drying up and dying.
Then comes the very end, which took what could have been just an odd and arbitrary, yet still very good episode, and made it spectacular, mind-blowing, and heartbreaking.