Was it ever explored in Treklit what being caught in the temporal causality loop was like from the perspective of the U.S.S. Bozeman?
Unfortunately, doesn't the episode more or less explain that it'd be the same day being repeated over and over again? I imagine, in the U.S.S Bozeman's case, everyone had gone past from Deja Vu to "this is the most tedious day EVER."
Ship of the Line by Diane Carey features the event from the Bozeman's point-of-view, but it seems they were unaware of the loop. They just jump to the future and narrowly avoid the Enterprise-D.
The experience on the Enterprise seemed to get out of hand pretty quickly (17 days) whereas on the Bozeman (lost 80 yrs earlier) they didn't seem bothered at all. I wonder if they did experienced anything at all, and if they did, what the writers came up with. Also, I wonder if they on the Bozeman only began to experience something like the Enterprise did once the Enterprise entered the expanse and the two ships began colliding with each other. Maybe if they hadn't, if it were just the Enterprise lost in the expanse, IT wouldn't have felt anything at all for years on end either until some other ship caused ITS temporal loop to be interrupted. Though, I'd prefer something more "out there" to have been the case for the Bozeman. Spoiler: Warning for the writers here! I've come up with story ideas below! The Enterprise experienced deja vu on its end; maybe the Bozeman experienced some sort of entropy effect...where like in "Remember Me", every time through the loop they began losing crew members or equipment or something. ...Just to switch it up a little. Another century, and there'd be nothing left to copy through to the beginning of the loop. Also, what if there are other ships lost in the (as Geordi dsaid) very large expanse. Maybe it's like a Bermuda Triangle of alien ships, and the only reason these two ships got out of it is because of their collision with each other.
In Watching The Clock, one of the Bozeman's crewmembers explained that some people had the notion every now and then something felt 'off' or something like that, but other then that, they never noticed anything.
^No, I went into more depth about it than that. Spoiler: WtC -- Bozeman Essentially they had the same gradual "awakening" of awareness that the E-D crew had, but with no means to resolve the crisis (i.e. no Data, and less advanced tech otherwise), they couldn't do anything with that awareness, so eventually their efforts to deal with it just gave way to resignation and despair, and they stopped trying to act on their feelings that something was wrong. Quite the existential nightmare, really.
See, that's what so nice about this forum, the writers are actually available to jump in and correct us when we misquote their novels.
As I recall, Ship of the Line ignores the fact that Bateman and his two female bridge officers don't look particularly shook up, presenting instead a frantic and frazzled all male bridge crew who were just fighting Klingons.
Among other continuity glitches like portraying the Typhon Expanse as a Federation border region with a starbase and several colonies, despite Picard's log entry in the episode stating clearly (four or five times) that the Expanse was still unexplored in the 24th century.
Captain Bateson's first-officer had an exceptionally difficult time with the transition as depicted in Ship of the Line. There are several scenes of dialogue between Picard and Troi regarding the emotional state of the Bozeman crew after the cessation of the temporal loop. --Sran
^Whereas in the Watching the Clock version, several Bozeman crewmembers -- including, IIRC, my version of the first officer based on the actual female XO we saw in the episode -- have a rather more, shall we say, aggressive reaction to their inability to accept being in the future.
I've not yet had the privilege of reading Watching the Clock beyond peaking at excerpts via Google Books. It's on my list of books to read. By the way, are you involved in the upcoming series of novels that follow the events of the Typhon Pact series? --Sran
Awesome! That series sounds promising, as there's so much ground to cover. I enjoy reading your work, so I'll definitely be checking those books out, too. --Sran
It is an amazing book. I rate both the DTI books among the best modern Trek books (Heck, they rate highly for me among any Trek books).
I enjoy stories depicting time travel. I love the theory underlying the science of temporal mechanics, so I'm sure I'll enjoy the novels once I have a chance to look at them more closely. None of the libraries in my area have Watching the Clock, but Forgotten History is available at a few branches. Maybe I should try to have Watching the Clock ordered. --Sran
It'll be interesting to see how the universe split is handled, as we know that both the Roddenberry Unverse and the Abrams universe consider the events of Archer an crew in "Enterprise" to occur in both universes.
I've always kind of assumed from the episode that there were two distinct temporal effects going on here. The first one is your standard (for Trek anyway) "Yesterday's Enterprise"-style temporal anomaly. This is what brought the Bozeman forward from 2278. According to chakoteya.net, the Enterprise crew constantly referred to it as a "highly localized distortion of the space-time continuum". Bozeman flew into the distortion in 2278 and emerged in 2368 almost instantaneously, much like Enterprise-C came forward from 2344 to 2366. The temporal loop effect was specific to the Enterprise. The characters speculated in the episode itself that the loop was caused by their ship exploding so close to the temporal anomaly. So from the Bozeman's POV, they wouldn't experience a loop, or deja vu, or anything like that. If anything, they'd maybe relive the amount of time over from the time they emerged from the anomaly to the time the Enterprise exploded, but that's only a minute or two at most. And they should have only experienced this for the same amount of time the Enterprise crew did--17 days. Anyway, that's my personal take on it, from back when I first saw the episode. I'm not sure it agrees with any of the novels' interpretations, but based on what someone wrote above, I guess it'd be closer to Ship of the Line, but it's been so long since I read that that I don't remember the details. I was actually quite surprised when I read online that people thought that Bozeman had been in a temporal loop for 80 years. The loop itself was a weird phenomenon. The Enterprise didn't seem to actually go back in time, because at the end of the episode, they found out how long they'd been in the loop by synchronizing their clocks to a "Federation time beacon". If they were really resetting back to where they were at the start of the loop, their clocks should have still matched once they broke it. I guess maybe the space-time continuum itself was fractured, and the local area of space reset while the rest of the universe carried on?
IMO, forget Ship Of The Line. Like Christopher stated, it was clearly seen in the episode itself there was a woman in the bridge-crew, something Diane Carey completely ignored while she went for an all male crew. That, together with bad writing, silly plot and Picard doing nothing but worshipping Kirk, make this a rather silly novel.