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 U.S.S. 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..."

Highlight Listing:

"Cause And Effect" - The Enterprise is trapped in a time warp that forces the crew to endlessly repeat the same experiences.

Advertising Headline:

TRAPPED IN TIME! Can the crew find an escape from a deadly moment in time?

TV log listing:

Crew trapped in endless time loop on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION

Operation SNAFU

The first time we see Picard in the Sickbay talking to Geordi and Dr. Crusher, he is wearing his standard uniform, and states he had a feeling of deja vu when he was reading. However, in the next loop, he is shown wearing his grey uniform while reading in his ready room, and when he's in Sickbay, he's also wearing his maroon jacket. (Also recall that in the first loop, when he is talking to Beverly, he is wearing the grey uniform. Thus, the sequence goes: grey -> standard -> grey). Presumably, both instances of this scene happen at the same "time", and since Picard's behaviour was not affected until Dr. Crusher contacted him, why is he wearing the standard uniform in one loop, and the grey uniform in the next loop? (V)

Technical design, graphic design, interactive features, HTML & CGI programming by Andrew Tong. || All materials Copyright © 1987-1995 by their respective authors. || Document created: January 28, 1995 || Last Modified: July 12, 1999