The best Star Trek TNG episode has a huge plot hole

Speaking of fate, the plot of this episode implicitly asks us to believe that our characters’ actions were already predetermined. The Company-C was always meant to travel to the future and then be sent back to the past. For the audience thinking about it, this robs the episode’s climax of its drama, as we see Picard go through the motions of something we already knew would work.

The only other possibility is that we’re dealing with even more timelines than we thought: for example, there could be a timeline in which the Romulans never accidentally opened the temporal rift in the first place, or perhaps a reality in which the Company-C came into the future and never returned to the past. That would actually make the ending of the episode much darker: instead of changing their own reality for the better, Picard and his team may have sacrificed their lives to simply create a different reality.