TNG Rewatch: 5x18 - "Cause and Effect."

[Trekker4747]

Narratively I think the episode is awesome. I'm willing to accept the cargo bay thing, but what I find harder to accept is the decision process. "For all we know, turning back is what caused the accident!" That makes no sense, why would they have turned back the first time? And why couldn't they just find some way based on something that would be different every time like position of the stars to randomize their course in come way?

Right. Turning back only becomes an option once they know they're going to face impending death. That means that in the first iteration, they never had reason to turn back, and died. Therefore, turn back, idiots!

Yeah, that bugs me too. Turning back is obviously the correct course of action. Maybe the "3" implanted in Data's "subconscious" was really meant to say, "Don't listen to Riker!" Hell, maybe Data should have implanted in his own subconscious a "U-Turn" symbol.

But, yeah, turning back is obviously the correct course of action sense the first time through the loop they'd have no reason to turn around so proceeding forward is obviously what gets them into trouble.

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

The Next Generation always did this. Whenever faced with a glimpse of their immediate future (such as in Time Squared), they'd always go on about "Maybe changing course causes the catastrophe". I don't understand it, either. It's pretty much the equivalent of saying 'let's do nothing, let the trouble come to us, and hope for the best'. Pretty screwy reasoning, really. Yet it happens repeatedly!

 

[MikeS]

Of course, the real-life reason they never turn around is simply because it would mean a lack of drama, and end the episode about fifteen minutes early. And we'd not get to see Kelsey Grammar.

 

[Marsden]

It could be a predestination paradox, maybe.


And if you turn around every time there's trouble, you won't get very far.


But, it must be the Plot, otherwise we'd have episodes of Picard sitting in his room reading a book for 48 minutes and then end credits.

 

[Green Shirt]

I sure hope no one was stationed in the main shuttlebay at the time.

Acceptable tactical losses, that's how the Zakdorn would have seen it.

 

[Marsden]

I sure hope no one was stationed in the main shuttlebay at the time.

Acceptable tactical losses, that's how the Zakdorn would have seen it.

The needs of the many....

out weigh the needs of the few or the one to keep breathing.

 

[tomalak301]

Love this episode, but I kind of wish as an extended for the blu ray, we could see the loop from Bateson's point of view. Of course that would have meant bringing back Grammer for a little more, but it would have been interesting.

 

[jimbotron]

The Enterprise crew were feeling the effects of the repeated loops, but not the Bozeman crew? I take it from Bateman's matter-of-fact response that they weren't experiencing the loop over and over. I wonder if it was even enough to destroy the Bozeman ... probably not?

And what was the Bozeman doing before the Enterprise came along? Did it get forwarded into time to meet the Enterprise or was it stuck in the loop continuously for 100-ish years? That doesn't make sense since it didn't have anything to run into until recently.

 

[trekshark]

I kind of think the Bozeman entered some kind of time portal, like the Enterprise C, and when it popped out it somehow caused a loop on the exit end of of it
So for them it only happened once. Part of why I think that is that if they had been looping for 100 years they should have been really on edge from the deja vu considering the E-D's crew had become suspicious after a few days of looping

 

[Trekker4747]

It's hard to really know what happened with the Bozeman they couldn't have also been in the time-loop because Picard says in his log that they're the first ship to enter this area of space. (Though, I guess the Bozeman could have been the first but no one knew it because it was lost,) but it's tough to know what exactly caused the ship to end up in the 24c.

It's hard to imagine the Bozeman entering some mysterious, unknown, space portal. (Propelling them through time and possibly space.) But they must have considering we see them coming out of the rift.

But if they were stuck in a time-loop as well they would've been stuck in one for 90 years or so which one would think means they would have caught on what was going on much sooner.

I kind-of wonder if the "cloud" wasn't something of a mistake in the way the area of space was depicted but put there to just give the audience more of a visual-clue of something moving from one place to another.

I think it makes more sense that that area of space was just completely out of time and it's own little "pocket" of time and the rest of the universe was moving along fine outside of it. The Bozeman entered it and was sent into this "null" time, the Enterprise also entered it 90 years later. There's a collision in this "pocket" that is out of time and just, somehow, from the Enterprise's perspective several days had passed in a loop and from the Bozeman's maybe for them only a few days had passed as well but for whatever reason they didn't catch on to the loop as well as the Enterprise crew did. Or they were but just didn't have the technology to really latch onto it or weren't getting the "echos" (like the voices, or the images of past loops Geordi was apparently getting with his VISOR.) Maybe the "field" the Enterprise was able to monitor was something out of reach to the Bozeman?

I dunno, it's all very, very odd and doesn't make much sense. Which, honestly, is more-or-less consistent with Braga's writing. He comes up with a good idea but it'll fall apart under scrutiny. By and large this wasn't too big of a deal on TNG since he worked under stronger writers, stronger writers who helped make this episode something good.

But when he got to be more on his owns these little problems compounded and became big ones. (See: Threshold.)

 

[Marsden]

I kind of think the Bozeman entered some kind of time portal, like the Enterprise C, and when it popped out it somehow caused a loop on the exit end of of it
So for them it only happened once. Part of why I think that is that if they had been looping for 100 years they should have been really on edge from the deja vu considering the E-D's crew had become suspicious after a few days of looping

I always assumed the collision caused the rift, but it happens after the Bozeman is thrown forward, but because of the explosion, the Bozeman is pulled forward. A predestination paradox, how could something that happens afterward cause it to go back into the past, but it seems to be what is happening.

 

[Trekker4747]

I kind of think the Bozeman entered some kind of time portal, like the Enterprise C, and when it popped out it somehow caused a loop on the exit end of of it
So for them it only happened once. Part of why I think that is that if they had been looping for 100 years they should have been really on edge from the deja vu considering the E-D's crew had become suspicious after a few days of looping

I always assumed the collision caused the rift, but it happens after the Bozeman is thrown forward, but because of the explosion, the Bozeman is pulled forward. A predestination paradox, how could something that happens afterward cause it to go back into the past, but it seems to be what is happening.

Predestination Paradox in an area of null-time existing inside a universe with moving time. Both ships enter at different times, meet at the same time and collide causing the time loop.

When everything is over it's still the 24c outside the area of null time.

 

[Marsden]

I kind of think the Bozeman entered some kind of time portal, like the Enterprise C, and when it popped out it somehow caused a loop on the exit end of of it
So for them it only happened once. Part of why I think that is that if they had been looping for 100 years they should have been really on edge from the deja vu considering the E-D's crew had become suspicious after a few days of looping

I always assumed the collision caused the rift, but it happens after the Bozeman is thrown forward, but because of the explosion, the Bozeman is pulled forward. A predestination paradox, how could something that happens afterward cause it to go back into the past, but it seems to be what is happening.

Predestination Paradox in an area of null-time existing inside a universe with moving time. Both ships enter at different times, meet at the same time and collide causing the time loop.

When everything is over it's still the 24c outside the area of null time.

Well said!

 

[Ghrakh]

Not that I actually care, but at the end when Worf ID'd the ship by checking the starfleet database...wouldn't the ship and crew have been listed as missing, or was this a timeline change?

edit: from "Relics" the ship is ID'd thusly:

"I have identified the signal, Captain. It is from the U.S.S. Jenolan, a Federation transport ship reported missing in this sector seventy-five years ago."

 

[Timo]

Good question! I don't see how it could be a timeline change, so Worf's omission is curious.

A few personal interpretations:

The time loop is in the 24th century, within a limited area of space. The Bozeman only enters the 24th century (and for all we know this area of space) via the portal for less than a minute. That doesn't amount to "ninety years of looping", but X times 40 seconds, X being the number of times the E-D was in the loop. The number, not the time.

The Typhon Expanse may well be pretty expansive: the Bozeman was only three weeks out of port when disappearing, but the part of the Expanse where we meet our TNG heroes is still unexplored a century later. It might make sense to assume the Bozeman was caught in an anomaly on the near-Earth edge of Typhon, and propelled not just a century forward in time, but also across the Expanse to its distant end which still remains unexplored as of the 2360s.

As for the "altering nothing is a silly strategy" thing, that strategy does have its upsides. The objection assumes that there originally was no reason to turn anywhere - but if the ship is in a time loop, this is probably due to an anomaly of some sort, and starships explore anomalies for a living. Quite possibly, then, the ship originally turned to examine the anomaly and was caught, in which case the correct strategy is to proceed until the anomaly is observed, and then not approach or enter it.

Out heroes would then be betting against the anomaly being undetectable from a distance, which may actually be a fairly good bet. They already know it's difficult to realize that one is in a time loop, so they would have a good reason to assume that their predecessors would have approached the anomaly unawares, several times. They also have a reason to think the time loop isn't particularly harmful to them: they all just get killed and then reborn. The risks of betting that way are low, then.

It's way different in "Time Squared", where the heroes have every reason to think their fate is gruesome and only one of them will barely survive the event to reboot the loop. There's no assurance of resurrection, that is, no mounting evidence of multiple resurrections - quite the contrary, there's some evidence of resurrection actually being a low-odds event. Even in that episode, our heroes have the duty to assess the risks this anomaly presents to shipping, but they probably also have the right of self-preservation.

Also, in "Time Squared", the heroes are proceeding to a destination, not exploring; odds are high that their late predecessors followed a straight-ahead course. Yeah, there's talk there, too, about the E-D being the only Starfleet asset out there at the time, but there's no mention of her being the first and thus probably exploring the region.

(However, nobody in "Time Squared" suggests just stubbornly staying on course. Rather, everybody knows that there will be forewarning: Picard will decide it is a good idea to take a shuttlecraft on a solo flight, then hopefully remember that this got them all doomed in the first place, and choose a completely opposite action. The heroes remain true to this line of thinking when, at the conclusion of the episode, they do the completely unexpected, dive into the maelstrom, and survive.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Old Mixer]

It's hard to imagine the Bozeman entering some mysterious, unknown, space portal.

Yeah, that sort of thing never happens on Star Trek.

 

[Trekker4747]

It's hard to imagine the Bozeman entering some mysterious, unknown, space portal.

Yeah, that sort of thing never happens on Star Trek.

Touché

 

[Mojochi]

I'll say this. Say what you will about the plot points, but it's pretty rare in those days for a show to mess with the audience's heads in such a specifically relevant to TV serials way.

By the time they are headlong into act 1 with the lull of the poker game and Geordi's sickbay visit, the audience has long forgotten the events shown in the teaser, which took place maybe 10 minutes earlier, before the credits & the commercial break.

Even if some people had recollected the teaser throughout, it's likely they dismissed it as a flash forward to the episode's climax. So it's surprising when the explosion recurs at the end of act one

Now, during its 1st airing, the really savvy viewers might have caught on at the beginning of act 2, but more likely than not, when the poker game started playing again, the viewers would jump to the conclusion that there'd been a broadcasting glitch, where we're duped into thinking the affiliate had accidentally replayed act 1. At that time, such errors had been known to happen. It's only after the events in the card game begin to differ, does everyone realize what's happening.

Throughout the episode, Frakes' directorial choices of camera placement slowly become more bold and obvious, (and wonderful actually) but early on, they are purposefully more subtle, for exactly that reason. The viewer is not supposed to notice the different time loops right away. They want the viewer to think they are replaying act 1. That's part of the magic of the episode, using the formatting of the show, (which is often times an encumbrance) as an advantage in misleading us.

For no other reason, I can call this episode brilliant. I was a teen at the time it aired, and got totally duped. I actually had the phone book out and was ready to call the local affiliate to complain that they'd botched their playback. I call that the " War of The World's Effect", named for Orsen Welles' radio broadcast that inadvertently mislead the public into thinking the show was a live news broadcast. "Cause And Effect" is the only time in my life when that's happened to me

Talk about water cooler talk the next day. I wasn't the only one they fooled. TNG did that.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

And what was the Bozeman doing before the Enterprise came along? Did it get forwarded into time to meet the Enterprise

That's what I always assumed, yes.

If only a few days of repeating the same events led the Enterprise crew to experience such crippling deja vu, imagine what 90 or so years of it would have done to the Bozeman. They'd all have been insane with rage by that time.

The simplest explanation is that the Bozeman was just pushed forward in time by the anomaly, and it experienced no more repeated loops than the Enterprise did.

 

[Trekker4747]

FWIW: Due to the holiday the new recap/rewatch this past week was delayed. I'll have it up tomorrow.