The Enterprise's starboard nacelle glows and flashes red as drive plasma vents from it. The bridge rocks violently as the crew reports varying failing systems including the antimatter containment, core-ejection systems and casualty reports start flooding into the bridge.
The damaged nacelle flashes, spinning the ship around.
As the ship continues to violently shake, Picard orders all hands to abandon ship, but the order comes too late. The Enterprise explodes in space.
The Enterprise is entering an unexplored area of space known as the Typhon Expanse.
Riker, Crusher, Worf and Data are all gathered for the weekly poker game and are settling in for a new hand. As Data deals out the cards Crusher seems distracted but eventually wins the hand, not falling for Riker's bluff. Crusher is soon called to sickbay to care for Geordi.
Geordi suffered a bout of vertigo while working in engineering and has come to have himself checked out, Crusher can find nothing wrong and simply suggests that Geordi may be working himself too hard. That night as Crusher prepares for bed she, again, seems oddly distracted and as she settles in she is startled awake my a series of strange voices in her quarters. She alerts engineering but nothing odd was picked up on sensors.
The following morning the Enterprise is closing in on an odd formation in space, an apparent distortion in the space-time continuum. As the ship nears the formation the ship begins experiencing power loss and system failures just as another ship emerges from the formation. The ship (a Soyuz-class Federation starship) is responding to hails and is on a collision course with the Enterprise. As navigation systems are down Picard asks for suggestions on what action to take.
Riker recommends decompressing the main shuttlebay, hoping the explosive force of evacuating air will push the Enterprise out of the way. Data recommends using the tractor-beam to push the closing ship out of the way. Picard agrees.
The tractor-beam ends up not being enough and the other ship impacts the Enterprise's starboard nacelle.
The Enterprise's starboard nacelle glows and flashes red as drive plasma vents from it. The bridge rocks violently as the crew reports varying failing systems including the antimatter containment, core-ejection systems and casualty reports start flooding into the bridge.
The damaged nacelle flashes, spinning the ship around.
As the ship continues to violently shake, Picard orders all hands to abandon ship, but the order comes too late. The Enterprise explodes in space.
The crew is stuck in a fractured area of space-time and as a result appear to be stuck in a time-loop. They are repeating the same period of time over and over again, mostly unaware of what is happening. But it seems each iteration of the loop causes everyone to become more and more aware of what is going on but nothing much beyond a general feeling of deja vu.
Playing on these feelings Crusher manages to record the "voices" she hears in her room during one of the instances of the loop and as they're analyzed Data and Geordi are able to isolate key phrases in it -as the voices are "echos" of the crew in the previous version of the loop- and discover at some point the ship will collide with something and explode.
Everyone is unsure of what action to take to avoid the coming collision but decide they shouldn't second-guess themselves but they do come up with a way they might be able to send a message through to the next loop. Data is rigged with a device allowing him to send relevant data into the next loop just before the ship explodes.
In the final take of the loop certain aspects of the day don't come out right (the hands dealt in the poker game aren't the same as what everyone predicted they would be. Instead everyone is dealt a "3" and then a three-of-a-kind." Doing a test later on turns up all "3"s on a display console. No one is unsure of what this means but Data notes the crew has encountered and unusual instance of three over the last few hours.
The ship encounters the time distortion again and just as Data is ready to use the tractor beam to push the ship out of the way he decides to go with Riker's suggestion and decompress the shuttle-bay in order to push the ship out of the way. The plan is successful and after a moment power is restored to normal on the ship.
Data reveals that at the last moment he realized that "3" must have represented the number of collar-pips on Riker's uniform and that his suggestion was the one to go with to avoid the collision.
The Enterprise is now able to communicate with the other ship, the Bozeman a ship of a design abandoned nearly 80 years prior. The captain of Bozeman is confused at first by the appearance of the Enterprise's design and says he'd just left spacedock a few weeks earlier. Picard asks if the other captain knows what year it is, the captain answers it's 2278. Some 90 years piror to the present, Picard recommends the captain beam-aboard the Enterprise to discuss his current situation.
There isn't much I can really say about this episode that probably hasn't been said countless times over the last 20+ years. It's just a fun, fantastic, episode.
It certainly has some problems but I never found the repeating series of events to be too tedious. I find that kind of thing fascinating (along the lines of "Groundhog Day" and this past summer's "Edge of Tomorrow" er.... "Live. Die. Repeat.")
The only thing I find tough to buy is that there's enough air at standard pressure inside the shuttlebay to push the bulk of the Enterprise out of the way. Sure, nothing has weight in space but there's still mass and force and I'm just not sure there's enough of either to push the ship in any meaningful way to avoid the collision.
It also seems Wesley's season-1 "repulsor beam" idea stuck and it was what used here to try and push the Bozeman out of the way. While it could certainly be argued that in standard use the Enterprise "anchors" itself in place when using the repulsor beam (so it only pushed the target and not itself as well) why couldn't that feature be turned off? That way when the repulsor beam pushes the Bozeman away it also pushed the Enterprise away? I'd think that'd have done a lot more than opening the shuttlebay.
In the effects department the crew went out of their way with this one. Usually when a ship explodes the video of an explosion simply consumes/replaces the video of the model. (So as to not destroy a model for an explosion.) Here they went the extra step and actually built a crude model of the Enterprise and blew it up.
A good, enjoyable, episode that through all of it's faults and problems and even repetition I just can't help but enjoy over and over again.
Last edited by a moderator:
)
