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| The Enterprise is destroyed. Again. |
THE PLOT
The Enterprise is badly damaged, one of its engine nacelles torn. On the bridge, emergency lights flicker as Riker barks out orders for the crew to get to escape pods. The warp core is breaching. Containment has failed, ejection systems are off-line. Picard calls out: "All hands, abandon ship! All hands, abandon ship!"
But it is too late. The ship explodes and is gone forever.
The ship has entered the Typhon Expanse, an uncharted region of space. The crew goes about its routine duties, preparing for a simple charting mission. But Dr. Crusher experiences a sense of deja vu. She treats Geordi for dizziness, a symptom he's never complained of before - but she is sure that she's already had this conversation with him. Later, when trying to sleep, she hears an indistinct murmur of voices. She dismisses this as imagination - until she learns that ten other crew members heard the voices at the same moment.
That's when the ship encounters a rift in time and space, from which another ship emerges. With only seconds to react, a wrong choice is made. A collision occurs, and the Enterprise is destroyed. Again. Leading back to its entrance into the expanse. Again and again, until the crew becomes ever more aware of being trapped in a time loop - one from which there may be no escape!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Picard: Even once he recognizes that the crew is trapped in a loop that will end in the ship's destruction, he insists on continuing as normal. He refuses to get caught in the trap of second-guessing himself, perhaps remembering the last time that happened. He shows his most human side to Dr. Crusher, sharing a warm milk/eggnog with her to ease her sleepless night in the second loop we see.
Dr. Crusher: The first to realize that something isn't right. On the first pass of the events that we witness, she is already experiencing deja vu, well before anyone else senses a thing. Arguably, this should have been Troi's role. But Troi's had more time in the spotlight than usual in recent episodes, so I'm just as glad to see Dr. Crusher get a turn. Gates McFadden does well, her sincerity anchoring the episode without getting in the way of the plot.
Data/Geordi: Data's positronic brain and Geordi's visor are, effectively, the magic wands of the episode. It just so happens that Geordi's visor can pick up after-images of previous loops, and it just so happens that Data's positronic brain can be programmed to push information forward to the next loop. Keeping this from seeming too convenient is that it all pretty well ties in with the way Geordi's visor has already been shown to work. Meanwhile, Data can only send a fairly obscure single-character message forward, leaving that as a mystery for the next loop. Oh, and points to the script for having Data give a suggestion that turns out to be dead wrong.
THOUGHTS
"It's Groundhog Day!"
Cause and Effect is TNG's "time loop" episode, running the characters through the same events multiple times until they can find a way out of the loop. Which makes it a great episode for saving on the budget, as only one non-recurring guest star (Kelsey Grammar, glimpsed for a single scene) is present and only standing sets are used.
It's also one of the season's best episodes.
Long before he became the butt of Trek fandom's ire, Brannon Braga was actually a fan favorite writer. Episodes like this are the reason why. Cause and Effect has a very good, very clever script. One of Braga's canniest moves is to keep the characters ignorant of the loop they are in. They perceive it only as deja vu - ghosts of previous loops, that become gradually more defined the more times they move through the same actions. This gives the characters three obstacles to overcome in any given loop: First, realizing that they are repeating the same actions; Second, discovering that the ship is heading toward its destruction; Third, finding a way to avoid that fate.
Another clever aspect of the structure is that the script avoids showing us any "first" version of these events. We never see the original set of events, save for perhaps the Enterprise's first destruction. Our first trip through the loop, the one that establishes the core events, is not the character's original trip, but rather the one in which Dr. Crusher becomes aware that something isn't right. From the ending, we can gather that there were many loops we didn't see; I'd suspect it would take several times through before people would begin really noticing the after-images.
Also keeping things interesting is the direction. This was Jonathan Frakes' fourth episode as director, following the superlative Reunion and The Drumhead in Season Four. It's his most visual episode to date. He varies camera angles and distance between camera and subject in each pass, altering the tone of scenes that would otherwise be near-identical. We see the destruction of the Enterprise four times, each time from a different angle. Dr. Crusher treats Geordi multiple times - the last time, at an eye-catching low angle. The differing camera setups create a feeling of unreality, lending an added layer of atmosphere to an already good script.
The combination of writing and directing puts Cause and Effect among my favorite TNG episodes. It's a gimmick episode, sure, driven more by cleverness than heart. But it's a good gimmick episode - and there is nothing at all wrong with that.
Overall Rating: 9/10.
Previous Episode: The Outcast
Next Episode: The First Duty
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