Okay, it wasn't quite the three years "Star Wars" fans had to endure waiting for closure on that "I am your father" revelation. Even so, the summer of 1990 can't have been easy for "Star Trek" fans who'd just watched "The Best of Both Worlds", "The Next Generation"'s season 3 finale. The classic episode debuted 35 years ago this week, and remains the franchise's greatest ever cliffhanger.
The Borg's arrival in the Alpha Quadrant came as little surprise, of course. The assimilation-happy cyborgs had been (vaguely) teased as far back as the season 1 closer "The Neutral Zone". Then Captain Picard and co had their first close encounter with one of those distinctive Cube spaceships in season 2's "Q Who", after cosmic prankster Q zapped the Enterprise 7,000 light years across the galaxy, essentially to prove a point — namely that, despite Picard's ready-for-anything hubris, some very bad things were waiting for them on the final frontier.
