I have a soft spot for this episode. I've seen this particular episode more than any other. The writing is clever, and I love how the repeated time segment is slightly different each time. Interestingly, it was directed by Jonathan Frakes. Which TNG gem can you watch again and again?
I actually liked the camera work a lot on that episode. All the unusual angles and views gave a nice perspective to the episode. The plot was silly and was capped off by it all being Frazier's fault, but it works.
I remember liking this one when I first saw it but I have to be honest that the rewatchability of this episode is pretty poor for me. Watching the same scene over and over again gets tedius when you already know the endgame.
I still get entertainment from rewatching this one. Most of the entertainment is in watching the nuance of all the actors' slight variations on the scene I'd say my guilty pleasure episodes that I can rewatch indefinitely are Disaster & Timescape
Captain Frasier: "How many years were we caught in that loop?" Picard: "About ninety years." Frasier: "So virtually everyone I've known and loved is gone..." Picard: "I'm afraid so, captain." Frasier: "Is my wife Lilith still alive?" Picard: Yes." Frasier: "BACK INTO THE LOOP, EVERYBODY!" Display Text: Executive Producers Peter Casey David Lee Cue theme song about tossed salad and scrambled eggs
That'd make sense if it was the same sequence of events over and over again. But it's not considering things change through each iteration of the loop and towards the later loops even more so as the crew work to a solution.
The joy of the episode is how each time is is a tiny bit different, and you can see how those tiny bits gradually come together to give them what they need to get out. And at first the changes are tiny, but as they get closer and closer to the solution they start taking much larger steps.
Yeah, I get it, like I said I enjoyed piecing it together when watching it for the first time. The premise and story aren't lost on me, it just becomes less interesting as it comes up on my queue these days.
No kidding... *ship blows up* "Space...the final frontier...These are the voyages of the starship enterprise..."
This joke made me think of something, the Enterprise Dee ended up out of sync with time by 17.3 days, and the crew started figuring thing out a few loops before and devised a way out. The USS Boseman was in the loops for 90 fukking years, what kind of clown show did Captain Bateson have aboard his ship anyway? I mean, I understand that the Enterprise Dee is the flagship, and best of the best, yap yap yap. But the Boseman is a Starfleet vessel, they couldn't do anything in 90 years?
I always assumed that the Enterprise was the one in the loop, not the Bozeman. They were just displaced to a certain point in time in the future that happened to fall into that loop.
That's how I took it, the Bozeman was simply shifted forward into time through some phenomenon. (Oddly, a phenomenon they didn't seem aware of or tried to avoid.) While the Enterprise was stuck in the localized temporal loop.
Picard: "The Enterprise has been caught in temporal causality loop, and I suspect that something similar may have happened to you."
Clearly, he suspected wrong. But even if the Bozeman had been in a time loop, she would naturally have been there only for the same number of repeats as the E-D. Which might amount to the same number of days - but more logically to just the same number of repeats times the number of seconds the ship existed in the 24th century, which gives a total of a couple of minutes at most. Timo Saloniemi