Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season 5 Episode 18 – Cause & Effect
Star Trek TNG was incredibly strong through its 4th and 5th seasons, with too many memorable episodes to mention. The visual effects were really hitting their stride and the characters were well and truly established. Of course time travel has found its way into pretty much every version of Star Trek on small and big screens, but here was a fascinating and engaging episode that essentially channeled Groundhog Day to dramatic and ultimately faintly comic effect.
The episode begins with the Enterprise in a literal tail-spin, Captain Jean-Luc Picard issuing the order to abandon ship and an almost immediate explosion doing it for NCC-1701D. After the brief interlude of the title music, we see the Enterprise, freshly intact, traveling through space, headed somewhere nondescript, with life as normal proceeding and we wonder quite what is going on. They then approach a “spacial anomaly” (not going to win any Emmys with that, but there is comfort to be had in the warm bosom of the familiar) out of which another ship appears, colliding with the Enterprise (probably its port naycell or something) and leading to the tailspin, order to abandon ship and then explosion. Again. Then back to travelling through space towards a nondescript mission. Rinse, repeat.
What differentiates this from Groundhog Day (and indeed the obviously more sci-fi inflected Source Code) is that no-one knows they are in a loop. The first few times through, it all proceeds as before. What then happens is that various crew members start to experience something approaching deja vu and eventually work out how to escape the loop, without knowing for how long they had been in it. Indeed, the ship they keep colliding with turns out to have been “looping” for considerably longer, sporting as they are uniforms more akin to 1980’s Star Trek movie outfits. There is a little bit of “Enterprise crew are smarter than everyone else” about that, but it’s good fun nonetheless.
By keeping the episode within a contained loop, we manage to avoid having to deal with any wider interference with timelines, paradoxes and butterfly effects. There is also a really great handling of the subtle differences each time the loop is traversed, while still maintaining continuity of character and performance. As with the underrated Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day, it is surprisingly difficult to maintain a consistent performance when “re-doing” the same sequences over and over. Each principal character gets a decent beat, the crew work together to resolve a thorny issue and the whole episode moves along pretty charmingly.
As a footnote, I explained this episode to my 10 year old, who immediately said, “if the other ship has been in the loop for so much longer, what were they colliding with to send them back through the loop before the Enterprise came along?” Answers on a postcard to the usual address please.
