| The Next Generation | |
| 118 | |
| Cause And Effect | |
| 45652.1 | |
The Enterprise is damaged! Actually "damaged" might be understating it. Riker orders everyone to the escape pods and Picard's order to abandon ship doesn't happen in time - the Enterprise explodes! Is it really the end for the Caped Crusaders?
"They're back!" we all gleefully cry as we see the Enterprise again. They are the first Federation vessel to charter an area known as the Typhon Expanse. Unfortunately if this is a flash-back, they are going to have a rough time of it. There are a few odd occurrences, but nothing that suggests the imminent destruction of the NCC-1701-D. Bev outbluffs Riker at Poker and then goes to treat Geordi for a case of head spins. She has a feeling of déjà vu, but thinks nothing of it. To prove that weird things come in threes, she also hears voices in her room late at night, but the sensors showed nothing.
Bev raises her concerns at the staff meeting the next day, and Picard politely implies that she's losing it. She counters with the fact that ten others also experienced the same thing, and before it can degenerate into name calling, Worf signals from the bridge. They are getting unusual readings, and there is a localised space-time continuum distortion just off the starboard bow. It looks like it wants to reach out and touch somebody, as it knocks out the ship's thrusters. To make matters worse, a ship emerges from the cloud onto a collision course. Impact in 36 seconds. Boom!
We've been here before. The Enterprise is entering the Typhon Expanse again. It's Groundhog Day! Both Bev and Riker get strange feelings of déjà vu at the poker game, but the day continues in much the same way as before. This time Bev goes to see Picard personally about the voices she heard, but nothing comes of it. They get the unusual readings from the cloud and the ship smacks into them again. Boom again.
We are now entering the Twilight Zone, or if you prefer, the Typhon Expanse for the third time. This time the poker game is fully remembered, which seems to surprise Data. Bev diagnoses Geordi's head spins as not being alcohol related as she previously thought, but visor related. She starts to freak-out badly and manages to record the voices. Data's analysis shows them to be the overlayed voices of the Enterprise crew!
Geordi posits that they might be in a temporal loop, but they have no way of testing the hypothesis. Couldn't Guinan, who can "see beyond linear time" have told them what was going on? Nah, that would have made it too easy!
The voices could be an echo from a previous loop, so maybe they could send a message into the next one. Data will be the receiving bunny. The problem is they can only send something subconscious, so it could take a number of tries. The distortion appears again, and just before they are destroyed, Data sends the message.
Typhon Expanse, take 4. The poker game is completely different - despite them all "remembering" what the hands should have been, they all get a 3, then a 3 of a kind. Weird. Everything else seems to be continuing as before, but the Warp diagnostics all show as 3s as well. Curiouser and curiouser. At the staff meeting, Data reports 2085 unusual occurrences of the number 3. It sounds like a plot hatched from Sesame Street!
The distortion appears on time. Data again suggests that they try to deflect the incoming ship with the tractor-beam, but at the last moment realises that it won't work, and uses Riker's suggestion of decompressing the main cargo bay. Success! He said that he got the idea because Riker had 3 pips on his collar. How cunning!
A quick check of a nearby StarBase clock shows that they lost 17 days in the loop. It could have been much worse. The ship that they nearly hit is piloted by none other than Captain Frasier Crane! He claims that sitting in a Boston bar all the time was wrecking his career, so he thought he'd join Starfleet. Unfortunately he thinks that the year is 2278, so he's lost about 91 years. "Bummer" thinks Picard, and says to Frasier "There's something we need to discuss...".
