6.25 — “Timescape”
Plot: Picard, Troi, Data, and La Forge are returning to the Enterprise on a Runabout from a conference when they encounter time anomalies. When they locate the Enterprise, they find it time-frozen in apparent combat with a Romulan Warbird, seconds away from both its destruction by warp core breach and the death of Beverly Crusher by phaser blast (which seems redundant, tbh).
Thoughts: I like this episode, but it summons a strong feeling of déjà vu. The script by Brannon Braga is essentially a cross between “The Next Phase” (TNG 5.24) (Geordi and Ro Laren are out of phase with the rest of the ship and pursued by phase-shifted secret Romulans) and Braga’s own “Cause and Effect” (TNG 5.18) (in which the Enterprise is stuck in a time loop, ending in its destruction).
If you’re going to rip off previous episodes, you may as well choose two of the best.
Did you think you couldn’t dislike Riker any more? Well, he hates cats. (I actually do not dislike Riker much anymore, although her remains a big goof.)
We learn that sexual harassment has not died out at technical conferences in the 24th century. Nor has the social convention requiring everyone to brush it off as a laugh.
The technobabble in this episode is extreme. Picard suffers from temporal narcosis? It’s like the bends, just… temporal. And the situation is extravagantly contrived. Can you imagine the precision needed to stop time mid-phaser blast for Crusher and, simultaneously, mid warp-core explosion?
But it’s the details that make this episode fun. Picard’s long fingernails, in a scene that strictly observes the show-don’t-tell principle. The conversations aboard the Runabout and Enterprise. The editing around the time distortions. The expanded Runabout set! The Romulan ship interiors. The special effects. The ticking clocks. The callbacks to previous episodes. Yes, I had fun.
It’s not as if technobabble didn’t exist in the Original Series, but I feel like it served a different function, rarely doing heavy lifting on the plots. Both TNG and DS9 are developing bad cases of “any magical thing can happen, and we’ll just explain it away with gibberish.” Look how fast we can do it!
4 out of 5 blemishes caused by vicious cat scratches.
Leave a Reply