what she says - i’m fine

what she means - in addition to being a season long microcontinuity about the directions tng might have gone but ultimately didnt, and that the franchise as a whole might have carried forward on voyager, but instead got sidelined to ds9 and then quietly forgotten, tng season two has a lot of really compelling dialogue that the writers never did anything with and tbh tried mostly to forget, like, when q shows up in q who he paints a wholly different picture of the borg than the one we delved deeper into with locutus and then the queen and seven of nine and so on, but also, he pops into ten forward and literally like hisses at guinan and she puts hands up like she’s gonna cast a fucking spell and go mcgonagall on his godlike ass, and q calls her an imp and tells picard she isn’t what she appears to be, and everyone chortles now that he means it metaphorically, but what if in 1989 he was being literal, what would that have been like that one of the incomprehensible cosmic energy entities, which kirk and spock ran into every other day, but in next gen’s more grounded scientific cosmology were condensed into q alone, was hiding out on the enterprise as a space bartender