“Time Squared” (2×13)
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This is one I sort of half remembered from repeats in the early nineties. There have been plenty of time travel stories in Trek, and even plenty of time loop stories. But this episode, coming out four years before Groundhog Day fixed the rules of time loops in the public imagination, is something stranger. It’s not really a time loop story, because events don’t repeat even a second time. And they don’t really learn anything from the previous iteration, because both shuttle and passenger are too out of sorts to be useful.
It’s also a story that is completely at odds with the rules of episodic storytelling, which demands that the characters take action and drive the plot forward. In this episode, they know that they’re going to face their doom in six hours, and the only thing they can do is sit around and wait. Even the resolution is passive; Picard succeeds by preventing future Picard from taking action. And then his alternative is to steer into the skid, essentially.
At the end of the episode, they don’t know what sent the other Picard back in time. They don’t know what intelligence was within the vortex, and they don’t know why heading right for the heart of the vortex saved them.
It’s not an especially great episode, but it is a slightly unnerving one. It’s always nice to be reminded that space is vast and full of the unknown.
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