Why did it seem like the crew of the Bozeman never figured out they were stuck in a time loop?
- Thread starter Nenya
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The 2270s starship was in the 24th century for all of fifty seconds per each loop. Picard's team experienced loops that took at least the better part of a day. Not fair insisting that the 23rd century folks should catch on (at least) a hundred times faster than Picard's heroes!
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
Good point. I honestly didn't think of that.
The episode has many eyebrow-raising issues that may surprise on the second or third viewing, or leave one puzzled forever. It's either great scifi, or at least damn good fun in providing this challenge of rationalizing the stuff away!
Say, if one realizes one is caught in a time loop, is it better to keep on sailing straight or to make an unpredictable turn? In this episode, sailing straight really makes more sense: the heroes are already charting an unknown region of space and thus making unpredictable turns, so second-guessing themselves isn't going to help. It would be different if they were on a course from A to B, in which case they could rest assured that the loop-inducing adventure lies on that path and that taking any other path would decrease the odds of getting stuck...
Timo Saloniemi
Say, if one realizes one is caught in a time loop, is it better to keep on sailing straight or to make an unpredictable turn? In this episode, sailing straight really makes more sense: the heroes are already charting an unknown region of space and thus making unpredictable turns, so second-guessing themselves isn't going to help. It would be different if they were on a course from A to B, in which case they could rest assured that the loop-inducing adventure lies on that path and that taking any other path would decrease the odds of getting stuck...
Timo Saloniemi
1st, the Bozeman likely wasn't in the anomaly any longer than the Enterprise was... 17 days or so for both. (Maybe less for them as @Timo said) It's a temporal anomaly that exists in both the Bozeman's time as well as the 1701-D's, capturing both, so that they now exist in the same space/time together, that creates the looping event. (When it ended they unfortunately got thrust in to the 24th century)
2nd, who's to say they too weren't also figuring it out? They maybe were reliving the same half day or so, that we see the 1701-D's crew reliving, & encountering the same phenomena, like Deja-Vu, & past voice echo reverberation, but they wouldn't have Geordi's VISOR feedback to study, & they wouldn't have Data's hearing to as quickly & easily sort through the recorded echoes & determine that they were their own voices repeating.
So they didn't have as much clues/data to work with, and as a result were slower to figuring out that the phenomena they were experiencing were relived time loops. They might possibly have never even known anything was happening at all, except creepy Deja-Vu. Once again, having more advanced tech onboard (Namely Data & a VISOR) gave the Enterprise an edge.
2nd, who's to say they too weren't also figuring it out? They maybe were reliving the same half day or so, that we see the 1701-D's crew reliving, & encountering the same phenomena, like Deja-Vu, & past voice echo reverberation, but they wouldn't have Geordi's VISOR feedback to study, & they wouldn't have Data's hearing to as quickly & easily sort through the recorded echoes & determine that they were their own voices repeating.
So they didn't have as much clues/data to work with, and as a result were slower to figuring out that the phenomena they were experiencing were relived time loops. They might possibly have never even known anything was happening at all, except creepy Deja-Vu. Once again, having more advanced tech onboard (Namely Data & a VISOR) gave the Enterprise an edge.
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Because there were no main characters on board.
I doubt there's any temporal loop anomaly in the 23rd century. There's just this one portal into which the Bozeman gets sucked, once. She just happens to emerge into a time loop that repeats the brief emergence dozens of times.
But there's probably a deeper connection there, too, facilitating the astronomically unlikely event of two Federation starships colliding. What connects the dots/ships is not obvious, but I guess we're best of assuming "nothing much". I doubt the two ends of the time portal that brought Kelsey Grammer to the 24th century were even at the same spatial location in both eras...
Timo Saloniemi
But there's probably a deeper connection there, too, facilitating the astronomically unlikely event of two Federation starships colliding. What connects the dots/ships is not obvious, but I guess we're best of assuming "nothing much". I doubt the two ends of the time portal that brought Kelsey Grammer to the 24th century were even at the same spatial location in both eras...
Timo Saloniemi
Agreed^. I certainly don't think the Bozeman has been looping for 80 years or so. Probably only as many times as it's crashed into the D.
I think it might even be the fact that this anomaly has both ships in it, that is why it's a loop at all. Their crash is certainly the reset, & its avoidance is the way out. So it might be the entirety of the reason for the loop.
It's plausible to think it's otherwise just a potential wormhole through time instead of space, or maybe even nothing at all, except the result of 2 federation ships encountering the right conditions in their respective space/time to have created some rift, not all that dissimilar to the multiple D's in All Good Things... making that event
That it happens to be 2 Starfleet vessels kind of even hints that it might be something about them specifically, that could be part of the equation creating this event
I think it might even be the fact that this anomaly has both ships in it, that is why it's a loop at all. Their crash is certainly the reset, & its avoidance is the way out. So it might be the entirety of the reason for the loop.
It's plausible to think it's otherwise just a potential wormhole through time instead of space, or maybe even nothing at all, except the result of 2 federation ships encountering the right conditions in their respective space/time to have created some rift, not all that dissimilar to the multiple D's in All Good Things... making that event
That it happens to be 2 Starfleet vessels kind of even hints that it might be something about them specifically, that could be part of the equation creating this event
Me neither. If that had been the case, her crew would have all gone space crazy.
The way I look at it is, the Bozeman was thrown back to its own time whenever it hit the Enterprise. It would then re-enter the anomaly, unaware of what was about to happen.
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Or then not: the number of the loops is the common thing, but their duration need not be, and the most satisfactory model would have the Bozeman part of the loop take just those fifty seconds or so, there being no 23rd century component to it. Hence no chance to learn anything from the loops.
I gather the E-D always stumbles onto something that opens the 24th century end of the portal and lets the Bozeman through - thus guaranteeing a collision. It's a robust thing, then: if the E-D takes a slightly different course or arrives a tad sooner or later (say, fifty years sooner or later!), the collision will take place anyway. If the E-D does not arrive at all, then there is no emergence of the Bozeman. But it need not be specific to the E-D or anything: any ship entering the Typhon anomaly might do the triggering, and it just so happens that only the Federation is interested in the region during the century that involves the two starships at the two ends of the mystery.
Timo Saloniemi
I gather the E-D always stumbles onto something that opens the 24th century end of the portal and lets the Bozeman through - thus guaranteeing a collision. It's a robust thing, then: if the E-D takes a slightly different course or arrives a tad sooner or later (say, fifty years sooner or later!), the collision will take place anyway. If the E-D does not arrive at all, then there is no emergence of the Bozeman. But it need not be specific to the E-D or anything: any ship entering the Typhon anomaly might do the triggering, and it just so happens that only the Federation is interested in the region during the century that involves the two starships at the two ends of the mystery.
Timo Saloniemi
That's an interesting way to see it. So in that sense, The Enterprise is being sent out of the anomaly when they crash too? or were never actually in a temporal anomaly at all, but their loop event is happening because of the crash itself? Thinking that way, kind of means there might be a way to avoid encountering it altogether, like changing course, the way Worf suggests
It kind of holds with the theory in the episode. Geordi postulates that their proximity to the "Highly localized distortion in the space-time continuum" in concert with the collision might've ruptured the space-time continuum, & threw them into a loop back in time, but when he theorized that, he didn't know about the other ship.
The Bozeman however definitely traveled through a temporal anomaly before the crash, because they are actually emerging from it. So there's already some kind of temporal phenomenon going on before the crash, not because of it
I've always theorized that the Enterprise too had already been IN the anomaly prior to the crash, and there was actually no way to avoid encountering the Bozeman, & the 12 hours or so they get tossed back was maybe the range of the actual event in space travel for them.
So the Bozeman entered the anomaly, in the 23rd century, & because it's a temporal anomaly, existing across time, the Enterprise exists in there simultaneously, about a half day's travel away from some central distortion they were both aimed at. (At least half a day for the D. Maybe somewhat more or less for the Bozeman)
In a strange way, I've always wanted this phenomenon to be the Moebius theory that Worf tells about in Time Squared. This occurrence fits that description way more than the occurrence in that episode, & it's kind of a neat call back.
Worf said:
I lean toward the time wormhole and its immediate vicinity being the full extent of the distortion, rather than it being the central point of a distortion so big it took them hours to traverse the radius. Geordi calls it, as you say, highly localized. Sensors were shown to be able to detect this kind of temporal phenomenon, while they picked up nothing unusual in all the time leading up to encountering it. In which case, Worf's suggestion to reverse course would indeed have worked. Still, continuing without second-guessing themselves was a reasonable course of action.
This also implies that the Bozeman was experiencing loops of the same duration as the Enterprise in the 23rd century. I don't hold not putting the puzzle together against them, in light of the aforementioned points concerning their lack of VISORs, androids, or main characters. Though their captain looks like he just might be cut out for a main character role...
This also implies that the Bozeman was experiencing loops of the same duration as the Enterprise in the 23rd century. I don't hold not putting the puzzle together against them, in light of the aforementioned points concerning their lack of VISORs, androids, or main characters. Though their captain looks like he just might be cut out for a main character role...
But we can't actually be sure of that. All we know is what happened once the Enterprise-D entered the picture. For all we know, the Bozeman was stuck in a time loop for 80 years that continually reset itself at a certain point so that the crew had no idea what was happening. And finally once the Enterprise came along, it added a variable to the mix that allowed the time loop to end, but with the destruction of the other ship as a result. And since the Enterprise was in that area of space, the time loop started affecting them as well until they figured out how to get out of it, the side-effect being that the Bozeman got out of it too. The Enterprise just had the benefit of being reset an entire day rather than a few seconds.
And if we go by that logic, then the crew of the Bozeman would have had no time at all to react to their circumstances before the reset button went into effect. Especially if, until the Enterprise got there, there was nothing happening that would have made them think that anything was wrong.
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There's no loop without the crash (otherwise the loop would still reset when the crash is averted). The way I see it, the Boseman passes through a "standard" temporal anomaly. The energy released in the explosion causes the ships to be "rewound" about 12 hours or so. This is where it gets interesting. The Enterprise D retraces its course as we see, not realizing the rest of the Galaxy is X days ahead. But the Boseman was in temporal transport 12 hours previously (and the previous 90 years as well) so they only experience the last 50 seconds on a loop 17 times, instead of 12 hours in the past.
To bad no one sent the D any subspace messages during these days, or they would have figured out the clock discrepancy that way.
I understand what you're saying, but we still don't know if the situation was how you describe, or if the appearance of another ship was actually a variable that caused a way out of the loop under the right circumstances.
We might take the lack of any previous debris at the points of collision as evidence for one theory or another...
Time moves on for the universe while the two ships are looping. If the first collision happened on Monday, the next is on Wednesday and so forth. If the older ship just emerges from a timehole on Monday, she should be dust on Wednesday, incapable of colliding again, while the hero ship should run into that dust. But is it Wednesday on the spot of collision? Or is it always Monday there?
The model where the Bozeman only emerges on cue sweeps all the problems under the carpet: her every emergence is her first one, and always has the perfect alignment and timing for collision with the triggering ship. And it always results in a debris field, but since the heroes follow a random path in the Typhon Expanse, every emergence actually takes place in different coordinates and thus the older debris fields, while extant, are nowhere to be seen.
If the Bozeman simply emerges on her own, at a specific spatiotemporal spot, then the E-D always ending up there is a miracle. Since it's a loop, it need not absolutely be a series of miracles, which would be even less plausible - but even the one repeating encounter already beggars belief. It's not even as if the E-D specifically homes in on the emergence point when observing something fancy going on: she's always already right there to begin with, not a single meter or second off her mark.
Add that to the "kaboom resets the clock" model and you got a working loop. The mechanism for the loop needs to be incredibly robust so that it works so many times in a row; if the kaboom is the mechanism, then it's pretty robust since it's no doubt overkill to start with. So our worry is about making the kaboom robustly happen, which is where the "E-D invites Bozeman into the 24th century by her very entering a particular timey-wimey part of Typhon" model helps, in always ensuring the collision. And as a side effect, this explains why the previous debris fields aren't there, since it's a different "there" every time.
As for the E-D being out of touch with "true time", I gather the Typhon Expanse cuts them off somehow. I mean, the thicker the soup, the more plausible it is for Starfleet to lose ships in there, and for few players to ever bother entering the soup in the first place.
(Is it only in Typhon where one can hear the echo of a previous loop? If reliving a moment always gives you the echo (and this episode is the first to feature it because it's the first with so many iterations to a loop), then the Bozeman can't really have lived through multi-day loops, no matter how harmless, since they would be drowning in the echoes just like our heroes. But if being inside Typhon is a key factor, then perhaps the Bozeman did do a multi-day loop every time in the 23rd century, only she dashed into Typhon only at the last moment, and spent most of her loop time in a region of space where the echoes went unheard? Not that I'd see advantages to any model featuring days-long looping in the 23rd century.)
Timo Saloniemi
Time moves on for the universe while the two ships are looping. If the first collision happened on Monday, the next is on Wednesday and so forth. If the older ship just emerges from a timehole on Monday, she should be dust on Wednesday, incapable of colliding again, while the hero ship should run into that dust. But is it Wednesday on the spot of collision? Or is it always Monday there?
The model where the Bozeman only emerges on cue sweeps all the problems under the carpet: her every emergence is her first one, and always has the perfect alignment and timing for collision with the triggering ship. And it always results in a debris field, but since the heroes follow a random path in the Typhon Expanse, every emergence actually takes place in different coordinates and thus the older debris fields, while extant, are nowhere to be seen.
If the Bozeman simply emerges on her own, at a specific spatiotemporal spot, then the E-D always ending up there is a miracle. Since it's a loop, it need not absolutely be a series of miracles, which would be even less plausible - but even the one repeating encounter already beggars belief. It's not even as if the E-D specifically homes in on the emergence point when observing something fancy going on: she's always already right there to begin with, not a single meter or second off her mark.
Add that to the "kaboom resets the clock" model and you got a working loop. The mechanism for the loop needs to be incredibly robust so that it works so many times in a row; if the kaboom is the mechanism, then it's pretty robust since it's no doubt overkill to start with. So our worry is about making the kaboom robustly happen, which is where the "E-D invites Bozeman into the 24th century by her very entering a particular timey-wimey part of Typhon" model helps, in always ensuring the collision. And as a side effect, this explains why the previous debris fields aren't there, since it's a different "there" every time.
As for the E-D being out of touch with "true time", I gather the Typhon Expanse cuts them off somehow. I mean, the thicker the soup, the more plausible it is for Starfleet to lose ships in there, and for few players to ever bother entering the soup in the first place.
(Is it only in Typhon where one can hear the echo of a previous loop? If reliving a moment always gives you the echo (and this episode is the first to feature it because it's the first with so many iterations to a loop), then the Bozeman can't really have lived through multi-day loops, no matter how harmless, since they would be drowning in the echoes just like our heroes. But if being inside Typhon is a key factor, then perhaps the Bozeman did do a multi-day loop every time in the 23rd century, only she dashed into Typhon only at the last moment, and spent most of her loop time in a region of space where the echoes went unheard? Not that I'd see advantages to any model featuring days-long looping in the 23rd century.)
Timo Saloniemi
Namely, The Picard.
The Bozeman may very well have been on a survey mission very near the Typhon Expanse. Probably a secret mission.
They could easily have not been in contact with any Starfleet ship for decades, especially since the Enterprise is the first to go chart that region.
They could easily have not been in contact with any Starfleet ship for decades, especially since the Enterprise is the first to go chart that region.
Lilith wasn't there to brainstorm with Frasier.
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