Star Trek Did the Time Loop Again
Déjà vu ... in space!
Star Trek: The Next Generation did Groundhog Day one year before Groundhog Day came out. Because that’s how temporal paradoxes roll.
The fifth-season episode “Cause and Effect” traps the Enterprise crew in that perennial sci-fi staple known as the time loop. Written by Brannon Braga and directed by Commander Riker himself, Jonathan Frakes, it’s a memorable episode—and not just because of the repetition.
The teaser drops us right into the middle of the action. A crisis escalates. Things go wrong. The Enterprise explodes. The end. Cue the opening credits!
A calmer, more conventional opening follows. Picard records a routine captain’s log, and Data deals a poker game with Riker, Worf, and Crusher. The scene takes its time unfolding—hardly anything out of the ordinary, but the details are just distinctive enough that we’ll recognize them the next time. “Sometimes I wonder if he’s stacking the deck,” Riker says in each loop, and we know we’re back to square one.
The episode involves the whole ensemble, but Dr. Crusher serves as our viewpoint character initially. She experiences a strange sensation of déjà vu, which intensifies with each successive loop. The crew eventually realizes there’s a problem, then attempts to solve the problem before they forget the problem—again.
And the Enterprise keeps blowing up.
They keep ending up at the same destination and keep making the same decisions, always leading to their destruction. Their only hope of escape is to do something different. But since they’re trapped in the loop, they lack the perspective to determine what would be different.
A time-loop episode is such a great trope because it’s such a great metaphor. It combines the Sisyphus myth with hope. Maybe we can break the cycle and not have to push that boulder for eternity.
It can also be a fun puzzle to solve, and problem-solving suits Star Trek. But beneath the science, technobabble, and Starfleet professionalism lies a very human situation: Bad decisions are getting them stuck in a rut. They need to change course or suffer a living death.
Our own ruts and bad habits might not lead to the Enterprise blowing up, but they can blow up our own personal Enterprises. We all possess the ability to trap ourselves in a time loop at any point, and just like in most time-loop episodes, it may take us a while before we even realize there’s a problem to solve.
Data, naturally, devises the solution that allows the crew to break free. Interestingly, though, the solution entails admitting he was wrong. In each loop, as the other starship hurtles toward the Enterprise, Riker suggests a course of action, but then Data proposes an alternative, which Picard accepts.
But one time, Data manages to send a message to himself in the next loop. It’s a single number, three, which initially makes no sense without context—until Data sees the three pips on Riker’s neck denoting his rank.
Basically, Data’s error trapped everyone in the time loop. So, only Data can free them—he needs to correct his bad decision so life can continue on. Riker was right all along. He was smarter than the android! (That must be why Frakes wanted to direct this one.)
The Enterprise crew lost only seventeen days in the loop. The other starship, captained by special guest star Kelsey Grammer, was trapped in the loop for decades. Apparently, that crew kept making the same mistakes over and over, causing them to miss much of their lives. (If only they had a psychiatrist on board, someone who could dispense some advice, someone who was listening …)
“Cause and Effect” sets up a fun puzzle. But it ends up being a great episode because the puzzle represents so much more than technobabble.
I was originally planning on skipping this week to stick with my new three-Fridays-per-month schedule, but I couldn’t resist a good time loop right before Groundhog Day. (Maybe that means I’m stuck in my own loop?) So, I’ll skip next Friday instead, and I’ll leave you with last year’s Groundhog Day post:
Data stacked the deck by sending a message in the future to himself.
But all of this would have been moot if they’d just listened to Worf and reversed course. But no...!