Why didn't Data just do both options the first time? I mean, how would it hurt anything?
Apparently it would.
Releasing the air moves the hero ship forward. Applying the tractor pushes the other ship back and to the side. The collision is avoided in the end by the hero ship dodging forward; if she were locked to her opponent with the tractor beam, there apparently would be no dodging. So a pretty good call from the VFX folks.
You’re assuming they are in the loop.
Yup. They experience at least two versions of it: the one where they collide, and the one where they don't. There's no logical reason to assume this would be limited to two when we can see it's not limited to one or zero.
Why would their loop only start when they cross through it? There’s nothing to back that up.
Well, there is, and you said it best:
Real time is going forward outside the bubble.
And the other side of the weird passage from the 2270s to the 2360s
would probably qualify as "outside". I mean, it's supposedly the big kaboom, combined with the local conditions, that flings the heroes backward. I could see it reaching a fellow starship a few hundred meters away; it's more difficult to see it reaching a fellow starship ninety years away.
The Bozeman isn’t destroyed by the hit, so are there a bunch of Bozemans floating around?
Why wouldn't she be? Both ships get hit in the nacelle, as they conveniently have nacelles positioned at exactly the right places. It takes a few seconds for the E-D to blow up after the collision; the same might well apply to the
Bozeman. So, even if she is blown up - are there lots of debris fields floating around?
And there very well might be. After all, the two ships are unlikely to meet at the location of a time tunnel. This would be an astronomical coincidence, as the collision calls for
extreme precision in positioning, while the heroes never do any steering or homing or positioning of any sort.
More probably, the very presence of the E-D within the zone of magic opens a portal from which the
Bozeman plops out. And the heroes enter the magic cloud at different positions every time, so they miss their own floating corpses, and those of Bateson's crew, from the previous loops.
Does the Bozeman get rebooted and disappear just because the Enterprise explodes?
Probably. After all, she's just a lump of matter at a distance from the kaboom, exactly like the E-D. It's just a matter of the distance being right, and it may well be.
Why would an explosion trigger anything like what we’re seeing?
Why not? It's not a particularly unusual Trek event. They are in a magic cloud where explosions send stuff back in time. Hardly a case of lazy writing or anything.
And they get all their systems back after they solve the puzzle? Why?
The systems supposedly went down because this portal-from-the-past thing was happening. It's not happening any longer. Why should the heroes not get their ride back shipshape just like they always do after battles and other hiccups? Simply being inside the Typhon Expanse doesn't hurt the ship, or any ship. Only the act of triggering the timerift does, or at least that's the only time within each loop when things do go haywire.
And, seriously, why does the engine getting nicked turn off all safety measures on a galaxy class ship and make it explode?
Why seriously? Why
should the ship be able to survive a collision? We have no reason to think this would be in the design specs. Starships are supposed to be vulnerable to dangers, so that we can have adventures. And a collision is a nice built-in seam in plot armor, not affecting those other plots where the ship is hit by death rays or grabbing beams or subspace tsunamis or the like.
Timo Saloniemi