- Picard, Riker and crew must confront the sins of their past as the Titan drifts helplessly in a mysterious space anomaly.
- The Titan is in a hopeless situation. The engines are down, and the ship is sinking towards the gravity well. The power is dropping with every passing minute and soon the ship will lose life support systems as well. If Riker diverts all available power from the engines, they will go into meltdown and cannot be revived. Diverting all power will buy them a few hours at best. Riker orders his crew to divert as much power as possible to life support. The Titan is being hit periodically by bio-electrical energy waves.
Seven continues to track the Changeling on board the Titan. She tells Riker that the Changeling could looks like anyone by now. She finds the dead transport officer, whom the Changeling was impersonating earlier. The officer had been dead for several days. Seven reports her findings to Shaw. Shaw and Seven devise a strategy to capture the Changeling. Shaw tells Seven that Changelings cannot maintain their no liquid form for long and return to their vase to recharge. Shaw asks Seven to steal the vase. The vase would have a residue of the Changeling that would help the ship's computer to identify it. Seven finds the vase in the transport officer's cabin.
Vadic, who is a Changeling, contacts her superior and is ordered to pursue the Titan at all costs; doing so in the nebula requires disengagement of the portal technology. Vadic argued that pursuing the Titan in the gravity well is a suicide mission, but she is told that she is expendable and is ordered to capture and deliver the "asset".
As Seven takes the vase for analysis, she is attacked by the Changeling, and Seven is able to shoot it down easily. Still, the Changeling manages to escape. The vase is destroyed.
With only 4 hours of power remaining on the Titan, Riker admits Picard was right and suggests he spend his last moments bonding with Jack. Picard tells Jack about Jack Crusher, Beverly's first husband. Picard and Jack Sr were Academy graduates serving on board the Star Gazer. They were on holiday at Argelius IV and received an invitation from 2 women, when they were recalled to the ship. Picard stole a shuttle to return to the planet to meet the women. On the way back, the shuttle was hit by a micro-meteor shower and was blinded. They had disabled the communications before they left to be untraceable, and hence could not contact the ship. Jack Sr and Picard improvised a system to inch their way back tot ship in 10 grueling hours.
In the Holodeck, Picard and Jack tell each other some of their adventures. They are joined by Shaw who bitterly recounts his experience as a Starfleet engineer during the Battle of Wolf 359, when Picard had been assimilated by the Borg and was attacking the Federation. Shaw lost many friends on his ship that day. 11,000 people died at Wolf 359 due to Picard.
Beverly reckons that the gravity well is a womb of the organism, which is the nebula. At the center of the gravity well, the womb reconstitutes matter into energy and expels it as a wave. Riker, Beverly, and Picard form a risky plan to use an energy pulse from the nebula to recharge the ship's systems and hightail out of the nebula. Riker opens the port nacelles to guide the energy pulse right down to the warp core. Shaw and Seven help them succeed as they work together in Engineering to uncover the port nacelles. Seven identifies and kills the Changeling impostor who appears in Engineering disguised as Sidney.
The plan works as the Titan catches the energy wave and charges its warp engines. The Titan damages the Shrike on their way out of the nebula. The Shrike was dead ahead and Riker lassos an asteroid with his tractor beam and hurls it at the Shrike.
The Titan exits the nebula with many jellyfish-like space creatures. As they warp away, Picard realizes that he briefly met Jack five years earlier and inadvertently dismissed his attempt at connection.
Alone, Jack has vivid hallucinations of a destroyed world and a voice saying "find me".
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