Cause and Effect - the Bozeman

[Mytran]

@STR is more or less correct - it wasn't just a "random battle", it was an explosion which occurred at the exact point of an unstable area of space/time. I'll let Data explain:

PICARD: Has (the Enterprise-C) travelled through time?
DATA: It is a possibility, Captain. If that hypothesis is correct, the phenomenon we just encountered would be a temporal rift in space...Possibly the formation of a Kerr loop from superstring material. It would require high-energy interactions occurring in the vicinity for such a structure to be formed.

Yesterday's Enterprise has more than it's share of problems associated with it's use of time travel, but this isn't one of them.

 

[STR]

Glad to know my memory is still sharp. However, to emphasize my point: what about the possibility that Data was completely wrong? No Kerr Loop. No high energy interactions. He made an offhand guess and it wasn't what happened, but nobody investigated it further because it wasn't relevant to the mission.

 

[Mytran]

Glad to know my memory is still sharp. However, to emphasize my point: what about the possibility that Data was completely wrong? No Kerr Loop. No high energy interactions. He made an offhand guess and it wasn't what happened, but nobody investigated it further because it wasn't relevant to the mission.

In fact there are a great many assumptions made in Yesterday's Enterprise by the crew, not all of which stand up to scrutiny (or even common sense).
Picard risks the existence of the Federation and sacrifices the lives of his crew based on the vague feeling of a bartender, for goodness sake!

However, the following events are not in dispute (I hope):

• Regular Ent-D finds a weird spacial rift. They almost detect a ship on the other side of it.
• The audience's perspective changes to a "Federation At War" Enterprise-D.
• The Ent-C enters through the rift, a ship last seen 22 years ago and presumed destroyed
• Alt-Data speculates that the Ent-C has travelled forward through time due to various local conditions in space/time. Picard accepts the assumption.
• Alt-Picard spends a couple of days fixing up the Ent-C
• Alt-Guinan persuades Picard to send the Ent-C back through the rift which he does, hoping that it will change established historical events (another assumption).
• The audience's perspective changes back to regular Ent-D where we left it, 2 days ago. Geordi chats to Guinan.

 

[Forbin]

Cause and Effect was one of those times I think the effects folks forgot about the size differences between ships. The D was huuuuuge, and the Boseman was only Reliant-sized. Here's the moment of impact in the episode:
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/season-5/5x18/cause-and-effect-hd-125.jpg
The Bozeman's engines look about the same size at the D's.
Now here's the Ertl 1/1400 scale Enterprise-D model, next to a Starcraft's 1/1400 scale Relant model:

So the entire Bozeman shouldn't even be as long as one of the D's nacelles.

 

[STR]

@Mytran That all seems fine to me. They're all major plot points, and not just throwaway dialog meant to give a fantastical story (even by SciFi standards) a sheen of plausibility.

 

[Mytran]

@Forbin that is an excellent picture and makes the point very nicely! Based on the episode, I suppose we have to believe in scaled up versions of the Reliant style ship, much like the Klingon BOPs.
Of course, if the Bozeman was really that big it couldn't have collided with the nacelle in the first place, as the E-D saucer would have got in the way!

@STR thanks for the response about the plot points. I deliberately worded them that way because I although I don't have a problem with Data's theory in general, I honestly believe that the crew are in error when they think that the E-C travelling through the rift has altered history and sending the vessel back through will "restore" the original version.

• The Kerr loop is a extant part of history (from the E-D perspective)
• The photon torpedo explosion is a normal event of history
• All the movements of the E-C around the 2344 end of the rift are an established part of history
• There is no external influence at play here (like Daniels yanking Archer to the 31st century, for example)

Consequently, there can't be any change to the timeline, because it is all a part of the natural flow of events. What we are witnessing instead is (I think) a parallel universe, loosely connected to our own through the space/time rift. This also gets around the apparent paradox of Lt Yar arriving back in 2344 from a future that has no business existing in the first place(!)

YMMV

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Cause and Effect is a good episode but one of those episodes you shouldn't think too hard about because nothing that happened in the episode made any sense.

Like "Maybe turning back is what causes the accident!" ...No, then it wouldn't have happened the first time. And if that's your concern, why not randomize your decision based on cosmic background noise or the spin direction of an arbitrary neutrino or something else that would be different each loop? Then within a couple loops you'll probably get out.

 

[Mytran]

Maybe some of the crew's decisions were questionable (such as the "let's not turn back" idea you mentioned) but I think it's an exaggeration to say that nothing in the episode made any sense.

For instance, the loop itself - caused by an exploding warp core in a region of space with certain properties, leading to a rest of time within a very local area of space/time. The fact that it occurred in the vicinity of a temporal rift to 2278 may or may not be related, but nothing in the episode really contradicts the basic premise.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

The mechanics of the loop were well within normal Trek parameters but the echoes or retained memories are hard to justify. Or at least to explain it you need to invoke the 'thought is connected with space time' stuff from Haven and Traveler eps.

 

[Mytran]

Actually, I think that the crew running into their own memories is a symptom of the special conditions near the typhon expanse breaking down, to the point where the time looping will no longer be possible!

We don't know for sure how many times the local temporal landscape was reset by the explosion, but Data says at the end of the episode that their chronometres are off by 17.4 days so we at least know how long they were stuck. Interestingly, 17.4166666 days are exactly 418 hours, which divides up into 22 loops of 19 hours or 38 loops of 11 hours (or any number in between of not-exact hourly figures).

Either way, I think around 30-40 loops of approximately 12 hour cycles is in the ball park. That is a lot of overwriting for a particular section of space/time to endure repeatedly (and I don't think we've seen time looping elsewhere for comparison). This could be the reason for the deja-vu; instead of the local area being reset entirely each time, they are literally passing through earlier iterations of themselves as space/time energy in the neighbourhood gets drained with each loop. This is not a good sign - the next collision with the Bozeman could be their last!!!

 

[Paul Weaver]

The Bozeman crew did seem clueless. And I love Picard's "do you know what year this is?" bit ... like, "oh, you tree-dwelling, 23rd century primitives!"

The problem was it was an unknown crew -- Bateson's normal crew were off on voyager at the time (

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[Gary7]

I think there were too many plausibility holes in this episode. For instance, the introduction of the "3"... which meant Data would've had to subconsciously "stack the deck" so that it would unfold that way, plus set who knows how many consoles...
LAFORGE: Captain. We've been seeing the number three all over the ship. On consoles, in a poker game.
DATA: To date we have encountered two thousand eighty five conspicuous examples of the number three.
LAFORGE: All of these threes can't be coming up by accident.
CRUSHER: Maybe somebody's trying to tell us something.

So Data would do all of that "subconsciously" and not have any record of it? I don't buy it.

LAFORGE: Data, you must have picked up a message we sent from the last loop, and stacked the deck in the poker game without realising it.
DATA: That is possible. I may also have been inadvertently responsible for the unexplained appearances of the number three.

Also... just go back to Captain Picard. Imagine you're on the bridge as the USS Bozeman emerges. You don't have thrusters. Your shields are down. Picard gets "nothing" and then asks for suggestions. Given all that training and experience... first thing that would come to my head would be "tractor beam." And it would've worked, because you've got at least 20 seconds of wasted time as there's conversation and thoughts about what to do with various crew members. And from the way the scene unfolds badly for the Enterprise, it looks like engaging the tractor beam 10 seconds sooner would have done the job.
Also, Data's doubt about the decompression of the shuttle bay is flawed... because clearly it ends up working even after the delay of engaging the tractor beam. So using it right upon Riker's suggestion would've given even greater padding of time to the effectiveness.

How I would have done the episode is like this:

• Picard suggests the tractor beam right away, but somehow it fails to engage. THEN he tries to entertain suggestions. And as Riker comes up with the shuttle bay decompression, Worf discovers that the tractor beam device is back on line and tries to use it... too late.
• Forget the forced introduction of "3" into the card game. Let it be another loop of deja-vu. But Data finds himself noticing a peculiar occurrence of "3" that had happened before -- they could have had it where Riker gets dealt three 3's, and Data feels like it has some significance (because that "time loop" programming trick introduces a kind of "nudge" for Data to pay attention to it). Then when on the bridge in the midst of the doomed collision with the Bozeman, it "clicks" for Data that the noticing of "3" has to do with Riker's insignia and that his decision is the one to choose.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I never subscribed to the notion that the Bozeman was stuck in a timeloop for 80 years - logically it couldn't have done, since the events that prompted the temporal reset didn't even take place for 79.99 years!

It's surprising how often the opposite interpretation takes place, however.

And besides, if the Bozeman's crew had been stuck in the loop for that long, they would all have gone completely space-crazy from deja vu. On the Enterprise they were only stuck for a few days. Keep multiplying that over a space of 8 decades, and the Bozeman's crew would have suffered a far worse fate than the Ent-D's did.

 

[Tenacity]

When the loop reset, did the Boseman return to the moment they emerged into the 24th century (less than two minutes before the reset), or like the Enterprise did they go back a few days which for them would be back in the 23rd century?

 

[Mytran]

Days? It doesn't look like much more than 12 hours for each of the E-D's loops to cycle through.
But then again, 12 hours (or even several days) earlier would still find the Bozeman in transit between the 23rd and 24th centuries, wouldn't it? From an outside perspective, I mean

 

[Timo]

Indeed, we should be counting the number of loops and multiplying that with the duration of a single loop if we want to know how long the Bozeman spent in weird deja vu limbo. And while the first variable is probably around "a dozen" (17.4 days have elapsed, and it's indeed just about half a day of action per each E-D loop), the second may be "four seconds" for all we know, from the Bozeman POV.

As for the old chestnut of "Why not turn in a random direction?", we should remember that turning in a random direction is what a starship surveying the Typhon Expanse would probably be doing. Turning around makes sense in "Time Squared" where the ship was in scheduled transit from A to B and that got her into trouble; turning about might be an event to be avoided in "Cause and Effect" just because it's what would have happened in the normal case.

OTOH, our heroes know they are in a repeating loop, not merely facing a one-off event. There must be an "attractor" to what they are doing, and not just a single unlikely choice they end up making again and again and again because the latter would be, well, unlikely. They wouldn't be stuck in a loop if turning in a random direction were the way out of it - they'd merely be facing a one-off repeating of events, without those multiple layers of overlapping voices.

If Riker spelled that out, he'd be making a good argument. If he spelled out nothing, we could assume he was thinking on the above lines and all the heroes realized this as well. It's just an unfortunate wording of his concerns, is all.

Loving Gary7's reworking of the conclusion to the ep!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Voth commando1]

The temporal anomaly in YE didn't seem caused by the battle to me, it just seemed like any other naturally occurring anomaly in the Trekverse.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I thought the anomaly in "Yesterday's Enterprise" was indeed caused by the battle, but the one in "Cause and Effect" was naturally occurring.

 

[Prax]

Was the Bozeman actually stuck in a loop? That was the impression I had, but now that I think about it, they may have only been in the loop for 17 days, like the Enterprise. If they were stuck in a loop for 80 years, what was their loop like?

 

[Gary7]

Bozeman wasn't caught for 80 years. Tthe anomaly was a temporal distortion that caused them to travel forward 80 years. And they also must have looped the same number of times (17 days, almost 3 weeks). It's also possible they experienced it differently and may not have even had deja-vu.

BATESON [on viewscreen]: Our sensors detected a temporal distortion. Then your ship appeared. We nearly hit you.
PICARD: The Enterprise has been caught in temporal causality loop, and I suspect that something similar may have happened to you.
BATESON [on viewscreen]: You must be mistaken. We left starbase only three weeks ago.

It would've been nice for there to have been some cause identified that triggered the temporal distortion. But interesting how Bateson mentioned "your ship appeared", rather than taking note that they "suddenly came upon your ship"... because they're the ones who time traveled through the rift, not the Enterprise.