Time Squared

It's the season two time loop episode, although it's a little short on loops

Riker's making an omelette and has invited his pals over for breakfast. We get a little exposition about his father, who by total coincidence is going to pop in for a visit in the very next episode. Anyway, it seems the eggs have gone off, but Worf gobbles them up with relish anyway. Klingons, eh? Then before the credits roll we learn there's an automated distress signal from a Federation shuttlecraft. It's clearly supposed to be a big mystery - I mean, the credits roll and everything. Maybe they should have waited a scene or two, because when they pull the shuttlecraft on board Picard is inside! Now that would have been a good teaser.

Troi confirms that Picard-2 is a genuine Picard in his original packaging, and the crew poke around for clues on the El-Baz AKA Shuttle Number 5. We learn that Picard-2 has come from six hours into the future... Everybody mopes around, especially Picard, until someone pulls the plug out of the universe and the Enterprise threatens to go down the plughole. It seems there's another of those vaguely defined energy forms out there, and this one wants Picard. I can't say I blame it, but its putting the Enterprise in grave danger, so Picard plans to leave the ship... but wait, was that what Picard-2 did?! Picard decides the only thing he can do is kill himself, which seems harsh because it might have been handy to keep a spare Picard around.

Anyway, O'Brien turns up to look disturbed about dead Picard-2, and the Enterprise goes straight down the plughole, allowing O'Brien to report that the shuttle and corpse have vanished. Picard looks smug and goes off to stare out of the back window and pontificate on why the Enterprise is so prone to encountering weird phenomena.

Words

"There is the theory of the moebius, a twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop from which there is no escape."

This line by Worf is a classic, and all the more so because it was sampled by British electronic duo Orbital for the opening track, "Moebius", on their eponymous 1991 debut album. It also features LaForge's line: "When we reach that point, whatever happens will happen again." Orbital revisited the sample in "Time Becomes", which opens their 1993 follow up album Orbital 2. That second piece uses a musical technique called phasing, created by the avant-garde composer Steve Reich, in which two identical samples are played at slightly different speeds. I love Orbital, and if you have any stomach for electronic music you should go right away and listen to "Moebius" right now - it's a brilliant slice of nineties music.

Maurice Hurley, who wrote this screenplay, was head writer at the time, and he delivers some of the more memorable stories in the second season. I rate this one even though later time loop episodes take this framework to much more interesting places. Also, this story suffers from an excess of hand-wringing. As future TNG writer Ronald D. Moore complained: "so ponderous. They agonize about what to do the whole show. All right, already!" Moore actually visited the set of the show for the first time during the filming of this episode, and handed over the screenplay that would get him hired... but we'll get to that in due course.

Acting Roles

It's been a long time since the production team trusted the core cast to hold an episode together on their own, but they really ought to because they are absolutely up for it as this episode shows. Of course, technically there's a guest star (Colm Meaney) and a Special Appearance (Diana Muldaur), but really this is a family affair - they even have breakfast together in the teaser!

Patrick Stewart is right at the heart of it all, and delivers an understated performance bristling with a quiet intensity that somehow makes everything work. But he's supported by the rest of the cast, who provide a context of reaction that adds to the eerie quality of what we're watching. Marina Sirtis gives us her first genuinely promising performance here, and it helps that the script provides something useful for her empathic powers to do.

It's a solid ensemble cast story, but while everyone is given something to do I’m afraid Colm Meaney's job is basically to react to seeing Picard dead.

Still, he nails it!

Models, Make-up, and Mattes

Say hello to an entirely new shuttlecraft!

Supra-fanonically, this is a Type 15 Shuttlepod, but as far as the screenplay and the episode itself are concerned this is just 'a shuttlecraft'. What's more, why do we have a whole new studio miniature when there's a perfectly good shuttle model that we only got twenty episodes ago. What's the story here...?

Well, it turns out that the rather lovely shuttlecraft model that we gained in "Coming of Age" had one problem: it was almost impossible to produce a life-size model for use on set with the acting staff. The lines were just too complex to duplicate on a reasonable budget. Enter this new design with conspicuously angular lines - much easier for the production crew to produce a life-size version to match. Since this screenplay requires the discovery of Picard aboard a shuttle, something had to be done, and adding a new studio miniature was the easiest solution. In the shot below, you can see the life-size version in the foreground and the studio miniature in the background. It’s a wonderfully composited image that conceals the utterly different scales of the two objects.

And why is it called El-Baz? It's after the NASA geologist Farouk El-Baz, who advised the Apollo lunar missions.

Props to the make-up team who manage to make time-displaced Picard seem really haggard. He looks like he's spent all night drinking Romulan Ale and brawling with surly Nausicaans.

But the special effects star of the week is the energy vortex, which looks great against the 2-foot long Enterprise-D studio miniature.

The smaller model was created back at the beginning of the show’s run, since the original 6-foot model was so difficult to work with. It's a striking moment when it appears, and it gifts this episode with some truly memorable imagery.

If the story is somewhat lacking in interesting events, at least the backend of the episode has some cool SFX to look at!