“ALL HANDS, ABANDON SHIP! REPEAT! ALL HANDS, ABAN—“
Here’s the episode of Star Trek that taught a generation about a key trope in time travel fiction: the recursive time loop. (Remember, this was a year before Groundhog Day.) For some reason, this seems like the episode of Next Gen that pretty much everyone, everywhere, has seen. I don’t know why. But if I ask the noobiest Star Trek noob who ever noobed about Star Trek: The Next Generation, he’ll probably pull out the one where the Enterprise blows up four times – possibly, in fact, because the Enterprise blows up four times. Once, even, before the credits!
Sneakily, “Cause and Effect” is a Beverly episode, and we follow the good doctor through the various iterations (except for the last one, which we spend with Data) as she begins to sleuth out the reason that a single night on the Enterprise has been happening over and over again. “C&E” must have been a monstrously difficult episode to perform and film, playing certain sequences three or even four times, with marginally different lines and blocking each time. Director Jonathan Frakes opts to shoot each scene, and each temporal iteration, completely differently, instead of relying on any common footage between the loops. (Except, of course, for Captain Picard’s final line before the explosion – which many of us will likely hear in our dreams until the day we die.)
Frakes’ choice is the right creative move, of course, due to the episode’s adjustment to the rules of time travel sci-fi. In “Cause and Effect,” the characters carry residual memory from one iteration of the time loop to the next, which works its way out of their heads as increasingly pronounced déjà vu. It’s a bloody odd idea, but I have to admit I like it; the notion that the minds aboard the Enterprise have basically been pacing back and forth on the same stretch of carpet for three weeks. Even if they’re not consciously aware of it, their subconsciouses are picking up on the repetition, and understandably freaking out.
The episode was written by Brannon Braga, who contributed a lot of temporal paradoxes to the series over its final few seasons. Back in the 1990s I remember a large and very vocal part of the Next Gen fan base who flat out hated Braga, and I never understood why at the time; I quite liked the sorts of stories he was telling. Now I get it. Watching “Cause and Effect” again, it’s pretty hard to avoid the degree to which it is a full-on assault on reason. Even if you allow for the déjà vu phenomenon described above (which, of course, makes no scientific sense whatsoever – a time loop is a time loop), the remainder of the episode relies relentlessly on convenience, contrivance, and illogic to bail the crew out of their jam. (I mean: Riker’s rank insignia? In a million years of trying, how could Data possibly have made that connection?) It’s one of those things that happens a lot in writing: you come up with a great premise, but then have no reasonable idea how to resolve it. I’ve got a whole folder full of the first acts of various scripts on my computer – literally hundreds of them – which I abandoned for this very reason.
One more for the logic police: the Enterprise finds out they were stuck in the loop for 17 days, which suggests that they were stuck in a localized loop of time, while time everywhere else was continuing to tick. In other words, they weren’t actually traveling through time; their brains just thought they were, and the Enterprise was mystically reassembling itself after every explosion. That’s nutty. Even more nutty, though, is the fact that the USS Bozeman – Frasier Crane’s ship – was stuck in the same loop for ninety years. If the déjà vu phenomenon exists, wouldn’t the crew of the Bozeman have figured out how to solve the problem about, oh, 90 years (minus 3 weeks) ago? I allow for the fact that the Enterprise is full of whiz kids, but come on.
Ok, one more: Hilariously, Guinan doesn’t show up this time to tell the crew what’s going on, as she has done in any number of time travel-related instances before. Maybe she’s on shore leave. Or just down in her quarters with a splitting headache.
“Cause and Effect” is still a hell of a lot of fun to watch, so I’m giving it four Enterprises out of five, one for each time the ship blew up.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Five is in stores now.