T&K Go Loopty Loo: Star Trek: The Next Generation

[Toast and Kent love time loop stories.  With this "Loopty Loo" series, T&K explore just what's happening in a film or TV show loop, and maybe over time, they will deconstruct what it is that makes for a good time loop]

(because they talked about this show in The Mindy Project...)
Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 5, Episode 18 - "Cause and Effect" 

How did the Loop Begin?
[Kent] Apologies for starting this post with a bit of opining instead of just the details, but I found this episode tedious and exhausting, even while being somewhat engaged by the episode.  I really don't want to have to rehash it..but here I go...

The Enterprise encounter a temporal distortion that knocked out their engines, thrusters, and shields, when out from the distortion pops an 90-year old Federation ship, the Boseman (named in honor of Chadwick Boseman, I've retroactively decreed....whoops, nope it's "the Bozeman", to which I have no pop culture figure or item to attribute it to).  The Bozeman collides with (to quote a wiki) "the Enterprise's starboard nacelle and its pylons exploded" destroying the ship...but in the process catching them in a "temporal causality loop".

Science!

[Toast] Hah! I felt the same way. Oh man, another loop? Data, just figger the fucking thing out already so we can find out who is on that obviously really OLD ship.

Hah! I felt the same way. That ship is definitely named after Chadwick, as they were running out of impactful, historical important names and a guy who was reaaaally fond of Boseman just blurted out the name. Everyone assumed he was talking about the place in Montana and went with it. Little did they know.

Hah! I felt the same way. OK, this is getting as tired as the episode. Yes, they come across a temporal anomaly, and the USS Bozeman emerges, grazes the nacelle and BOOM goes the Enterprise. My thought is that their proximity to the already existing temporal anomaly combined with a warp core explosion is what creates the time loop. Meanwhile, the Bozeman just happened to wander through a breach in the space-time continuum into the current nG day. Their experience had nothing to do with a time loop, but DID add an additional 17 days to their jump into the future.

[Kent] Reading a wiki or two, yeah, they basically say the Bozeman time traveled through the anomaly rather than being stuck in a time loop for 90 years, but I like the latter idea better.

What was the main character's first reaction to the Loop?
[Kent] In this case, it's not the main character, as ST:tNG is an ensemble show.  But Dr. Beverly Crusher is the first one to discover that something is up.  She keeps having a repeating sense of deja vu.  As the loops keep happening more and more of the cast start to experience the deja vu too. 

[Toast] Why Crusher? What about her gave her insight into the loop before everyone else? Is it because she is the mother of Wesley? And as we know, Wesley ends up becoming some ultra-powerful being with awareness of all space and time. So, he's having a drink with friends, after Riker's wedding, and, "Hey, can you hold me beer? My mom is caught in a time loop a few years ago and I have to assist her getting out..."

[Kent] Hah! I felt the sam... *cough*. I mean your retained knowledge of Star Trek lore is much deeper than mine, but I like this explanation.

WHY did the main character get put into the Loop? Can someone else be brought into the Loop?
[Kent] It was accidental, obviously. But also...science!

Everyone on board the Enterprise (and I guess, the Bozeman as well, though we never see events from their POV) is brought in the loop, and I'm assuming at some point the whole crew is aware that something's up.

[Toast] I can see why there is an organization in the Federation's future that is tasked with policing the space-time continuum. These anomalies are just littering the universe, causing enough havoc without people purposely messing around with them.

Yeah, as I said above, I think the Bozeman was just dragged into this loop after their emergence from the past. Now they are in the show's current date. That must be a bitch. Like the Fringe team emerging from the amber 20 odd years later, everything they knew is gone, people are aged, the Federation has had about a dozen uniform updates and its a whole new normal to deal with.

[Kent] Man, they could have done Season 3 of Discovery so long ago with a Fraser-captained starship.

How long is this time Loop? What resets it? Can you force the reset?
[Kent] Hard to say.  I'm never quite certain how time passes in a Star Trak. It's definitely not a 24 hour loop.  It always starts with Crusher, Riker, Worf and Data playing poker (which the show opens following their game in excruciating detail) and ends with the Enterprise exploding.  In between, Crusher is getting ready for bed, sometimes having drinks with Picard and wearing a weird ribbon in her hair that seems to do nothing to keep it under control. 

I do like that the show's cold open (the sequence before the opening credits) finds the Enterprise in distress, and then exploding... very bold open...too bad the poker game just murders that tension and momentum.

The crew is more trying to discern how to get out of the Loop, or prevent it rather than exploring what resets it.  I like that at one point they're basically resigned to the fact that they're going to blow up, but plan to send a message to themselves in the next iteration.

Science!

[Toast] Given that they are in Space, where day and night don't mean much, and the chronometer must have to arbitrarily choose a point in the 24 hr clock, as the Federation standard, it is hard to tell a day from another day. 

This episode dispenses with many of the tropes of the time loop, but for one -- the waking up suddenly to become aware that something is not quite right. Well, Beverly never really gets to sleep. Nor is she awoken by a Sony & Cher song, but she does keep on knocking that glass of something off the table. Does that correlate to Mindy and her phone falling into the big gulp?

[Kent] *snicker*

How long does the main character stay in the Loop? Does it have any affect on them, their personality, their outlook?
[Kent] The Enterprise's chronometer is off by 17.4 days, which implies they were in the Loop for that long.

[Toast] Not all that much time to be frank. Oh this Enterprise crew being so on the ball, that they catch the time loop so early on. Of course, they have Data around to make sense of the thousands of voices from previous loops so he can key on the points of "Abandon Ship!!"

To the crew, this is just another day, another space time anomaly that almost got them. So, no personality changes, no great revelations about how Picard and Beverly should just quit beating around the bush, waking each other late at "night" to do things other than boink.

[Kent] TOS was a very horny show.  TNG is so largely chaste and sterile.

What about the other people in the Loop? Are they aware? Can they become aware?  Does anything happen if they become aware?
[Kent] Everyone is aware in this Loop, since they're all in it together.  I'm not sure why it's Crusher that picks up on it first (other than Toasty's perfectly reasonable explanation above), but they're all students of science so it makes sense that they all would think somewhat scientifically about the shared experience of deja vu.  I kind of wish it was only Crusher though that was retaining memories, and that we had the more conventional trope of trying to convince others that the Loop is happening.  Dr. Crusher is kind of our focal figure, but when it comes time to work on the resolution she's cast aside for LaForge, Data and Riker to work it out...  I know she's *just* a doctor, but I wish they had given her the full spotlight in being instrumental in figuring this out.  

[Toast] Well, she is key in them even starting down that path. She could have just ignored the voices she heard, assuming she had a bit too much of whatever was in that little glass she's nipping at, but she actually looks into things and finds the reports of others having the same experience. Also, once she's a few loops in, she connects it to LaForge's visor. By now she knows, its always the visor. But, of course, once she has them all convinced, even before the shared card counting experience, she has the most appropriate minds (LaForge and Data) working on it. What a good crew working together!

What does the main character think about the other people in the Loop? Are they real? Do they matter?
[Kent] Not really relevant in this Loop, methinks.  In a Star Trak everyone works on the same problem as a team, so there's no sense of prioritizing the individual over the others (except in how the scripts are written).

[Toast] Yup. Just another time anomaly challenge for the log books, and the eventual talk at the annual Space Time Anomaly conference circuit that Beverly gets into after she retires from Star Fleet.

Most memorable event in a Loop? Most surprising event during a Loop?
[Kent] The way Picard is sitting reading his book in his very salmon-coloured room.  We stan a comfy Patrick Stewart in repose.

Maybe not most memorable, but most confusing...why did Crusher keep moving her long-stemmed cordial glass around her room?  What was she trying to get at with that?  By not keeping her as the focal character of this episode, some of her actions are puzzling. Although, I do like the refined, erudite drinking habits in this show.

[Toast] My memorable moments hinged on the fact that they turned over one of the technical tropes of this subgenre, wherein they re-use the same shot over and over, but tweak it at the end. I loved how they kept on shooting from new angles, new perspectives as they went through each loop. It was because of these that I was able to notice those giant granite... arm rests (??) ... on the conference table in the Ready Room. WTF Star Fleet designers? Those big, stony protuberances are just asking crew members to bark their elbows on them.

(Edit: After Googling a bit, those fucking things are its LEGS ?!?!?)

How does this stack up in the subgenre?
[Kent] I would say, hands down, the most boring time loop story I've seen.  It predates Groundhog Day so the subgenre was still pretty nascent with only a few examples preceding it (12:01 PM, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time).  I'm a casual fan of Star Trek, but I forget how tedious TNG can be sometimes, and this is so mercurial in its pacing.   I'm sure when I was a younger lad watching this show the first time through, week-to-week, this was a mind-blowing episode in how it breaks from any sense of TNG format.  However watching it solely in the context of watching Time Loop stories it's just so staid in how it wants to play with the concept of a Loop.  It's so full of mumbo jumbo Star Trakky dialogue that I couldn't help but laugh.  This was Frakes' fourth directorial effort, and, you know, he's still learning.  It's pretty perfunctory. My wife commented on how funny it was that the show hinged completely on Riker's solution being the right one to get them out of the loop.

[Toast] Yeah, being so early in this subgenre, the tropes didn't really exist fully so they didn't have them around, to have fun with them. Like 12:01 this is more like a Twilight Zone what-if-this-happened exploration. But it is prime tNG in that its about the crew coming together to figger something weird out, and finding a novel, invent new things, way out of the predicament.

I like to think of Riker's solution as a prime example of KISS, keeping it the simplest it needed to be. In the end it wins out.

P.S. I experienced a micro-version of our own time loop, in that, as I was making my final edits on the last post, the Mindy one, the text kept on reverting, or changing. I must have published and re-edited three times, only to find old text back in there. I realized the other day that you must have been editing at the same time I was, and we must have been reverting each other's particular edits.