Cause and Effect
What a cop out! It's just the same story playing out five times in a row. Well yes, but it's also the greatest of the Trek time loop stories
When the Enterprise is blown up in the teaser, it looks like a short episode - but wait! Don’t turn off the TV yet as we’re going to watch this happen again four more times. Yes, it’s a time loop episode! And this one is even more fun than all the others in TNG.
Words
The Ship-in-Jeopardy season meets the annual Time Loop story with spectacular results thanks to Brannon Braga’s charming screenplay. Braga was keen to avoid the usual clichés:
I love time travel stories and I don’t know who doesn’t. We wanted to do a time travel story that had never been done before. Being trapped in a time loop is one I’ve never seen before... I came up with the poker game while I was eating pancakes and pouring syrup. I had no idea how it happened – because it was before the sugar rush. I knew then that the poker game would somehow be utilized for once, and lay it in so the viewer thinks it’s just a poker game and it turns out to be the key to saving their entire existence.
Braga’s frequent partner in the writing room, Ronald D. Moore, noted that the poker game had become “the cliché padding” the writers threw in when an episode came up short on run time. He especially enjoyed Braga’s twist of using what was a throwaway recurrent sequence as the lynchpin of the plot resolution.
While I’m not an enormous fan of the way the poker game provides the means of escape (which feels a little forced), I enjoy the fairly minimal use of technobabble in this screenplay. ‘Typhon Expanse’ is used to simply imply the capacity for something freaky, named on screen as a ‘temporal causality loop’. Amusingly, the pronunciation guide explains this should be said as ‘kaw-ZAL-i-tee’, I suspect to avoid confusion with the similar looking ‘casualty’.
The only other invented term is ‘dekyon field’, which is the plot device used to get them out of this mess. There was always going to have to be something! What’s a ‘dekyon’…? I suppose we should avoid asking awkward questions about ludicrous subatomic particles, but it seems to me that this was an effort to avoid the rather overused hypothetical particle ‘tachyon’, which sees a lot of service in Trek and other sci-fi shows.
It’s also worth mentioning (as Braga never stopped pointing out) that this episode aired in March 1992 while Groundhog Day opened at the cinema in February of the following year. Despite the inevitable comparison, Braga got there first. He especially enjoyed making tiny changes to the events in each iteration of the loop - the glass breaking over the intercom in the final loop was the last thing he added to the story.
But what really stands out here is the brilliance of the opening sequence, which is truly jaw-dropping. Boom!
Sure, we know they’re going to undo it (or else it wasn’t actually real) but it still gave the show what Braga himself called “the ultimate teaser”. I have to agree!
More than that, the entire script is so unusual it actually short circuited director Jonathan Frakes when he read it:
I thought it was joke from Brannon Braga. I read Act One. I read Act Two. I read Act Three. I read Act Four. I read Act Five. And I said, “You guys are screwing with me! C'mon!”
Frakes wasn’t the only one punked by this episode! A large number of local affiliate TV stations in the US were inundated with phone calls from viewers who thought the broadcast had gone wrong somehow, having not spotted all the subtle differences in writing and scene composition that Braga and Frakes had built in. Braga later suggested that TV viewers in the early nineties were not used to unusual episode structures - although by the end of that decade, it was starting to become more common. Once again, TNG was ahead of the television curve.
Acting Roles
The core cast are wonderful throughout this episode. I love everyone’s acting here, with Gates McFadden giving an especially great performance as Dr Crusher that beautifully expresses the sense of being on edge. It’s effectively McFadden’s episode, as she’s used as the focal character throughout, and she delivers it well.
Say hello to Michelle Forbes new hair! She literally has nothing to do in this episode but show it off.
And special guest star of the week is of course Kelsey Grammer as Captain Bateson of the USS Bozeman.
Grammer, of course, was Frasier Crane on Cheers (which was still airing at this point), and the production staff really wanted to get Kirstie Alley, who was playing Rebecca Howe on Cheers in the later seasons, to reprise her movie role as Saavik on the bridge of the Bozeman. That would have been her to the right of Grammer in the shot above instead of… well, actually we don’t know who that is (it’s someone called either Ericson, Michaels, or Reed - that’s all that survives of the names of the Bozeman crew cast members!).
As is so often the case, scheduling conflicts made Kirstie Alley’s guest appearance impossible, but it would have been marvellous if they could have pulled that off! It also would have left the original Saavik in the TNG timeline - and you just know DS9 and Voyager would have made use of that!
Models, Make-up, and Mattes
Astonishingly, this is the only time we ever see the Enterprise’s main shuttlebay.
Ed Miarecki at Science Fiction Modelmaking Associates was asked to build the maquette for the bay:
This set miniature, built in five days, featured a hangar door, which worked like a roll-top desk, and was powered by a cordless electric drill. The two Shuttlecraft in the scene were named for the shows producers, ‘Berman’ and ‘Pillar’.
Okay, they spelled Michael Piller’s name wrong, but still, it’s pretty cool!
And we get a whole new ship! Once again, the production team were hoping to use a classic Trek Constitution-class starship, like the original Enterprise. The official story is that this was closed down because of the cost of creating the model - but this makes no sense, as there was already a great model available from the movies. So this must mean the movie production team wouldn’t let them borrow their model! Meanies. That said, they did let them use the uniforms from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, so maybe I’m wrong about this.
Anyway, instead we get the Soyuz-class (named on screen as such) which is a slightly modified version of the USS Reliant studio miniature, designed by Mike Okuda and model-maker extraordinaire Greg Jein. Here’s Okuda’s original schematics!
Finally, enjoy this sizzle real of the Enterprise blowing up!
Each one was custom-made, using four different break-away models loaded up with pyrotechnics and then shot from multiple angles while they kaboomed. This is TNG - and arguably Trek’s - greatest time loop story, and it certainly goes off with a bang!
Well here we are again, another one of my favourites. This sort of episode is perfect for me for all the reasons you mention: ship in peril, time loop: all we need is some portals and a time traveler and it’d be perfect. It’s also Dr Crusher heavy (as you say) which provides strong “Remember Me” vibes.
I don’t love the way that Data figures it out and communicates with himself: I was never really convinced by that. On the other hand, I haven’t been able to come up with anything better he could have sent round the loops: however, I’m not a Trek writer.
I also wish that they had been stuck in the loop for a lot longer: 17.4 days isn’t long enough, it almost makes it seem too easy. “Groundhog Day” (the film) didn’t answer the “how long?” question”, but it made it clear it was a long time, and “Groundhog Day” (the regrettably short-lived musical) really leant hard into the “Phil’s been going around this loop for a really long time” aspect whilst also never answering the fundamental “how long?”.. It’s not really reasonable to expect Trek to not immediately know “how long”, so I just wanted it to be longer.
In a more modern version of this, they would have been stuck in there for years and then there would be some background repercussions from that in the subsequent episodes. But this was a different time.
— inw