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WARNING: The following post contains critical spoiler information for this
week's TNG episode, "Cause and Effect". Those not wishing to know the
details in advance are advised to remain clear.
Good evening. Tonight on "It's the Mind", we examine the phenomenon of deja
vu; that strange feeling we sometimes get that we've lived through something
before; that what has just happened has already happened sometime before,
tonight, on "It's the Mind"...
Good evening. Tonight on "It's the Mind", we...
Wait. Hold it. Did that.
Ohhhh boy. This is gonna be an intriguing one to summarize, I must say.
Damned good show, too. So, let's get underway...
Disaster has struck. Casualties are mounting. The starboard nacelle has
taken a direct impact and is leaking drive plasma. Geordi attempts to shut
down the warp core as Riker orders the crew to the escape pods. The shutdown
is unsuccessful, and the ejection mechanism for the core is not off-line.
Picard gives his final orders. "All hands abandon ship! Repeat, ALL HANDS
ABAN--" And the Enterprise goes up in a fiery explosion.
Stardate 45652.1. The Enterprise is entering and beginning to chart the
unexplored Typhon expanse. At a poker game that evening, Bev manages to call
Riker's bluff and win handily. When asked how she knew, she says it was just
a feeling. She's then called to sickbay to assist Geordi, who's been feeling
dizzy and disoriented. The symptoms are those of an ear infection, but
there's no apparent physical cause. She suggests it's overwork and
prescribes him something for the dizziness--and then suddenly has the feeling
that they've had that conversation before, despite Geordi's insistence that
he's never had those symptoms before. Later, when Bev goes to bed, she hears
incomprehensible voices just after turning off the light. She turns the
light on (breaking a glass on her nightstand in the process)--and then hears
nothing.
The following morning, as strategies for charting the Expanse are discussed,
Bev reports the previous night's voices. Nothing anomalous appeared on the
sensors then, however, and Troi sensed nothing odd--but ten other people
reported the same voices. Picard makes a note to have the sensor logs checked
later--but then Worf calls, with news of something very close off the
starboard bow. It's a very localized distortion of the space/time continuum.
Picard orders Ro (at the helm) to slowly back off--but then thrusters suddenly
don't respond. The distortion fluctuates--and the Enterprise systems go down.
The distortion field builds up power--and another ship suddenly comes
barrelling through the rift, heading right for them. Thrusters don't respond,
shields are down, and hailing them brings no response. Riker suggests
depressurizing the main shuttle bay to move them out of the way, and Data
suggests using the tractor beam to push the other ship out of the way.
Picard orders the latter--and while the ship avoids a head-on collision, it
scrapes the Enterprise's starboard nacelle.
Disaster has struck. Casualties are mounting. The starboard nacelle has
taken a direct impact and is leaking drive plasma. Geordi attempts to shut
down the warp core as Riker orders the crew to the escape pods. The shutdown
is unsuccessful, and the ejection mechanism for the core is not off-line.
Picard gives his final orders. "All hands abandon ship! Repeat, ALL HANDS
ABAN--" And the Enterprise goes up in a fiery explosion.
Stardate 45652.1. The Enterprise is entering and beginning to chart the
unexplored Typhon expanse. At a poker game that evening, Riker begins to run
a bluff--but then realizes Bev will call it and quits while he's ahead. When
asked how he knew she would call, he says that he just had a feeling; and Bev
says she had the same feeling. She's called to sickbay to help Geordi, and
this time *both* of them have a sense of deja vu about their conversation.
A check of the medical logs, however, shows no sign of Geordi ever having had
these symptoms. "Must be deja vu." "Both of us? About the same thing?"
Disturbed, Beverly goes to bed--and again hears voices. She turns on the
light, breaking the glass in the process--and the voices are gone. She goes
to talk to Picard in his ready room. He suggests that it's probably just
insomnia, but says he'll have Geordi and Data run a diagnostic to make sure
everything's all right.
The next morning, Geordi and Data report they've come up empty--but again,
ten other people reported the same voices. Suddenly, Worf calls with news of
the space/time distortion. Picard orders Ro (at the helm) to slowly back
off--but then thrusters suddenly don't respond. The distortion fluctuates--
and the Enterprise systems go down. The distortion field builds up power--
and another ship suddenly comes barrelling through the rift, heading right for
them. Thrusters don't respond, shields are down, and hailing them brings no
response. Riker suggests depressurizing the main shuttle bay to move them
out of the way, and Data suggests using the tractor beam to push the other
ship out of the way. Picard orders the latter--and while the ship avoids a
head-on collision, it scrapes the Enterprise's starboard nacelle.
Disaster has struck. Casualties are mounting. The starboard nacelle has
taken a direct impact and is leaking drive plasma. Geordi attempts to shut
down the warp core as Riker orders the crew to the escape pods. The shutdown
is unsuccessful, and the ejection mechanism for the core is not off-line.
Picard gives his final orders. "All hands abandon ship! Repeat, ALL HANDS
ABAN--" And the Enterprise goes up in a fiery explosion.
Stardate 45652.1. The Enterprise is entering and beginning to chart the
unexplored Typhon expanse. At the poker game, Worf is the first to announce
a sense of deja vu, but everyone aside from Data feels it. First Beverly,
then Worf, and then Riker in turn announce the cards Data is about to deal.
Bev calls sickbay to ask about Geordi about five seconds before he comes in.
Later, Picard enters sickbay to hear her report. This time, Bev's feeling
that a regular analysis wouldn't work was so strong that she tried an optical
diagnostic, and she discovered a phase shift in the response of Geordi's
VISOR, in effect giving little afterimages of nonexistent things. She
checked further and found evidence of tiny distortions in the surrounding
decyon field. Geordi goes to check the warp-field coils and to do a
localized subspace scan.
That night, Beverly moves her glass far from her nighttable before going to
bed. When she hears the voices, she records as much as possible with her
tricorder, then turns on the light and calls Geordi. Upon hearing that he
and Data just picked up something on their scan, she runs down to join
them--and knocks the glass over with her lab coat en route. Geordi and Data
hear the recording, and confirm that it's both real and voice output. Data
tries to differentiate the voices himself, and discovers that it's
approximately a thousand voices, belonging to the Enterprise crew--them.
At a conference very early the next morning (it simply couldn't wait until
0700, the time of the conference on previous iterations), Geordi presents his
hypothesis. He believes they've somehow been caught in a temporal feedback
loop, where they're repeating their actions and events over and over. They
could have been in it for hours, days, or years. Data plays the three
significant voice recordings he gathered from Bev's tape (which appear to be
from previous loops): in turn, they are "...a highly localized distortion of
the space-time continuum...", "...collision course, impact in 36 seconds...",
and "All hands abandon ship! Repeat, ALL HANDS ABAN--" Geordi theorizes
that the explosion of a starship so close to a distortion such as this might
have caused the loop in the first place--and thus, by avoiding the collision
might avoid the loop. While reversing course is ruled out as an option, all
precautions are ordered. Geordi then points out that they may not figure out
where they went wrong until it's too late, and that the crucial thing is to
make sure the next loop doesn't start back at square one. The best way to do
this appears to be to make a deliberate decyon emission which will be
received by Data's brain, "subconsciously". But it'll have to be short--no
more than a word, probably; and there's also no way to gauge exactly how Data
will perceive it.
Regardless, the emitter and receiver are set up--and Bev and Geordi note they
feel no sense of deja vu in this case, which might be a good sign. Then,
they're called to the bridge by Worf; the distortion has just been found, and
Riker wonders aloud how they might have handled it the last time. Picard
orders Ro (at the helm) to slowly back off--but then thrusters suddenly don't
respond. The distortion fluctuates--and the Enterprise systems go down. The
distortion field builds up power--and another ship suddenly comes barrelling
through the rift, heading right for them. Thrusters don't respond, shields
are down, and hailing them brings no response. Riker suggests depressurizing
the main shuttle bay to move them out of the way, and Data suggests using the
tractor beam to push the other ship out of the way. Picard orders the
latter--and while the ship avoids a head-on collision, it scrapes the
Enterprise's starboard nacelle.
Disaster has struck. Casualties are mounting. The starboard nacelle has
taken a direct impact and is leaking drive plasma. Geordi attempts to shut
down the warp core as Riker orders the crew to the escape pods. The shutdown
is unsuccessful, and the ejection mechanism for the core is not off-line.
Picard gives his final orders. "All hands abandon ship! Repeat, ALL HANDS
ABAN--" And the Enterprise goes up in a fiery explosion--but not before Data
hurriedly makes a decyon transmission...
Stardate 45652.1. The Enterprise is entering and beginning to chart the
unexplored Typhon expanse. At the poker game, all but Data feel a sense of
deja vu; and Beverly again reads off the cards she believes Data will deal.
As Data deals, however, the hand is *different*. All four hands get a 3, and
then all get three of a kind. All are at a loss to know what it means, and
Beverly goes off to answer the call from sickbay. She helps Geordi, and
again decides to try an optical diagnostic, discovering the phase shift
(discovered last time around to be afterimages in time). Again, Picard is
informed, and Geordi goes to check the coils and subspace scans.
This time, however, as Geordi and Data run the diagnostic, the monitors are
filled with the number 3. They are puzzled, but then pick up the decyon
fluctuation just as Beverly calls from her quarters. She comes down to see
how they're doing; and they hear a glass breaking from her quarters...
At the conference later that morning, the same conclusions are reached as in
the last loop, but the number 3 is met with puzzlement. Geordi and Troi
believe it may well be a message from the previous loop, but neither can
figure out what it might mean. They decide to run a level-3 diagnostic on
all systems--but then Ro calls about the distortion and all head to the
bridge. While wondering what they did the last time around, Picard orders Ro
(at the helm) to slowly back off--but then thrusters suddenly don't respond.
The distortion fluctuates--and the Enterprise systems go down. The distortion
field builds up power--and another ship suddenly comes barrelling through the
rift, heading right for them. Thrusters don't respond, shields are down, and
hailing them brings no response. Riker suggests depressurizing the main
shuttle bay to move them out of the way, and Data suggests using the tractor
beam to push the other ship out of the way. Picard orders the latter--but as
Worf implements it, Data finds himself facing Riker's rank insignia--with
THREE pips. He immediately concludes that the tractor beam will not work and
also depressurizes the bay. The impact pushes them back slightly; and the
two ships miss each other entirely.
As power comes back up and Data explains his reasoning (apparently he
subconsciously arranged the deck in the poker game to come up all threes,
along with all the occurrences on the monitors), Worf checks a timebase
beacon and finds they've been trapped in the loop for 17.4 days. The other
ship hails, and is identified as the USS Bozeman, a Federation ship--but of a
class not used in over 80 years. Picard talks to Captain Bateson and
suggests that they too were caught in a temporal loop. Bateson dismisses the
idea as absurd, but when asked the year, responds immediately that it's 2278.
"Perhaps you should beam aboard our ship," suggests Picard. "There's
something we need to discuss..."
Wheeeew. That was not easy (although it let me have fun with cutting and
pasting on this editor :-) ). Now, onwards to commentary.
Good evening. Tonight, on "It's the Mind", we...[STOP THAT!]
Those familiar with the seeming pattern of "when Tim writes a synop that
long, he must have liked the show a lot" will find no counterexamples here.
Loved it to pieces. Let's see what I can say that's more concrete, though.
This has got to be a hellish kind of episode for both the actors involved and
the director. It's obnoxious enough having to do N takes for the same scene;
when many of the scenes THEMSELVES repeat, it's that much worse. It takes a
lot of work to make the scenes different enough that the audience is still
involved, and not simply saying "oh, hell, it's this scene again." And
amazingly enough, it worked this time. Most of the parallels were played up
in a suitably creepy fashion that we were stifling chills rather than yawns;
and that's always nice. :-)
I think the above is mostly a function of the director and actors playing the
scenes, but there is a certain element of writing involved in setting up the
parallels as well; you have to make sure you don't repeat those things which
are stable enough to be boring. (One example that they could have done would
have involved Bev's going to bed; while the latter half of the scene is
absolutely necessary, if they'd shown another 60-second clip of her humming
while clipping flowers, I doubt it would've worked very well.) Again, those
choices were made quite well. (I'm not entirely surprised at this; the
writing/directing team of Brannon Braga and Jonathan Frakes has produced one
other show in tandem, namely "Reunion"--and "Reunion"'s one of my favorites.
So I did go in with a bit of a bias. Even so, Frakes is now 4/4 on directing
stints, IMHO, and Braga is certainly over .500.)
Some things in particular that seemed to work really well were the following:
--Bev's glass breaking every night. Even when she moves the glass, she
somehow ends up breaking it later. I don't know exactly what did it, but
something about the next-to-last time it broke (the first one where she moved
it) really sent chills up my spine. Brr. Talk about fate...
--The continuing poker game. First of all, the banter was generally very
well put together; between "It's the way your left eyebrow raises when you're
bluffing, Commander--oh, just kidding" and "Yeah, [Worf remembers this as
having happened before], of course, last Tuesday night", the friendships
flowed that much more smoothly and subtly. Secondly, I got a real sense of
unreality from the first time they all managed to recite the cards coming up.
Beverly was sure of herself, yet wondering what the hell was happening;
Worf's voice came almost literally out of the dark [while his eyes are
usually shadowed to some extent, this time they were in pitch black shadow
and invisible], and Riker sounded not quite himself. Very eerie.
--The teaser. Probably the shortest teaser on record (a scant 46 seconds),
there was nothing superfluous about this baby. It got your attention and it
kept it there; you can bet very few people saw that teaser and then said "oh,
how dull". (They probably said "what the hell is going on? It's only the
BEGINNING of the show and the ship blew up? I'm confuuuuuuused!" We did.
:-) )
The only slightly weak point, really, was in the ending. It was still a bit
too rushed for my blood. While I realize that the discussion between the two
ships was not the point of the story (any more than the actual negotiations
with the Legaran were in "Sarek"), I do feel a little cheated at not having
seen a little bit more of the Bozeman. (And given the time period the ship
came from, I would expect just a wee bit of surprise at Picard claiming his
ship is the *Enterprise*, mmm?) It's a minor point; the object of the show
was having the crew figure out the loop and manage to break it, and in that
they did a beautiful job. But another minute might have been nice.
I'm not really sure what else I can say. The show's difficult to summarize,
and must've been difficult to assemble in a workable way, but my feelings on
it are pretty simple. It's the return of TNG's "Twilight Zone"-esque style
of shows, a la "Remember Me", "Night Terrors", and "Identity Crisis"--and
given both Bev's prominence and the nature of the problem, the first of the
three seems the closest analogue. I loved RM, and this is no different.
A few short takes, I guess:
--As long as I was on the topic of sincere friendships earlier, I should also
mention the Picard/Bev conversation in his ready room. While Riker and
Troi's friendly conversations will occasionally veer into seeming very forced
(the one about Soren in "The Outcast" comes to mind as a very recent
example), the friendship between these two characters seems to flow very
naturally. Nowhere was it said here that these two are good friends, and
harbor a few interests beyond friendship; and nowhere did it need to be. The
scripting was suitably subtle, and both Stewart and McFadden can handle it.
Let's see more of this!
--During the last break, we were all trying to figure out what Data was going
to send to the next loop. The best thing we could come up with was probably
"bay". I still think it might have been a little clearer that way, but Data
was presumably looking for something as easy as possible to put in his
subconscious. "Three" is a nice general word in that regard, and led to some
nice eerie scenes, but I'm not quite sure I'd have used it even so. I'm not
sure.
--Despite the repetition of events, the effects budget here can't have been
cheap; none of the explosion shots were the same. Oy, what a costly show...
--The music was fairly typical: unmemorable, but also unintrusive. I'll
take it.
--2278? If TNG really started "78 years after" ST4 as suggested in its early
press reports, then the Bozeman comes from about eight years prior to said
film, and thus between the first and second film. Interesting; I wonder if
there was any particular reason to choose that year.
That ought to about do it. Good, good piece of work; after three shows
ranging from reasonable-but-no-big-deal ("Power Play") to depressingly
unsatisfying ("The Outcast"), it's good to get back to high-quality stuff.
Nice work.
So, the numbers:
Good evening. Tonight, on "It's the Mind", we--[would someone PLEASE stop
him?]
Plot: 9. I don't quite think "3" was a perfect choice of things to bring
back, and the ending was a wee bit rushed, but I can't complain much,
really.
Plot Handling: 10. Nicely, nicely done--incredibly eerie.
Characterization: 10. I couldn't find a thing to complain about at all, and
lots of things to like.
TOTAL: 10. Very nice; let's see more like this!
NEXT WEEK: (another delayed review, but besides that...)
Wes is on trial for an Academy mishap, and seems determined to take the fall.
Why is he hiding the truth?
Tim Lynch (Cornell's first Astronomy B.A.; one of many Caltech grad students)
BITNET: tlynch@citjuliet
INTERNET: tlynch@juliet.caltech.edu
UUCP: ...!ucbvax!tlynch%juliet.caltech.edu@hamlet.caltech.edu
"I have this terrible feeling of deja vu."
--Monty Python's Flying Circus
--
Copyright 1992, Timothy W. Lynch. All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...