“Cause and Effect” (5×18)
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This episode starts with a literal bang. Ensign Ro plays a very minor role, only appearing in one scene—albeit a scene that repeats many, many times.
Time loops were still a novel and unfamiliar idea to most viewers when this first aired, nearly a year before Groundhog Day hit theaters. It’s a Brannon Braga teleplay, and we all know how Braga loves time travel stories. But this one is different than his usual shtick.
Jonathan Frakes, slipping into the director’s chair, shot this story in a very unusual fashion for TNG, largely avoiding the normal flat full lighting and standard camera angles to keep the repetitive beats fresh.
The poker games were a device that the writers liked the use to pad out episodes than came in short, and one I tend to like because it allows for the kind of character beats that the normally plot-focused TNG episodic format doesn’t make much time for. But here, the poker game serves as a crucial framing device. It provides a concrete numerical source of repetition that makes the characters confront their sense of déjà vu in a conspicuous and easily validated way.
My one issue with the episode is Picard’s determination to maintain course even after he’s been presented with incontrovertible evidence of the time loop. It seems like the obvious decision in that situation would have been to order an immediate full stop and see if it gave them more time to work the problem.
Impacts on Star Trek Continuity:
Having just watched “Ensign Ro“, I was amused to see two stories back to back with folk remedies from Picard’s Aunt Adele.
The USS Bozeman was named after Brannon Braga’s hometown of Bozeman, Montana. But the events of Star Trek: First Contact provide a compelling in-universe reason to name a starship after such a remote an sparsely populated city: It was the city where Vulcans made first contact with humanity after Zefram Cochrane’s maiden warp flight aboard the Phoenix.
Captain Bateson (played by Kelsey Grammar, a huge star at the time from “Cheers”) reports the year as 2278, which places the episode between Star Trek: The Motion Picture (roughly 2273) and Star Trek: Wrath of Khan (2285). That implies that the TMP leisure suit-style uniforms didn’t last very long, and nor should they have: They were hideous.
I always thought it would have made a good film or miniseries following Bateson and the crew of the Bozeman as they adapt to life in the 24th century. The only time we see the character again is a brief non-speaking role in the “Lower Decks” episode “Grounded”, as the leader of a covert investigations team that included Tuvok. But we know from one of the screens in Star Trek: Generations that he was still the commanding officer of the Bozeman in 2371, and the Bozeman is also mentioned as being at the Battle of Sector 001 in First Contact, either an upgraded refit of this ship or a new ship with the same name (NCC-1941-A?). If we see the fleet museum on this season of “Star Trek: Picard”, it would be fun see the Bozeman as one of the mothballed ships in the collection.
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