258. TimescapeFORMULA: The Next Phase + We'll Always Have Paris + Starship Mine
WHY WE LIKE IT: Cool temporal anomaly.
WHY WE DON'T: Stealing shots from DS9? For shame!
REVIEW: By this point, even a technobabble premise can be saved by the characters. We know them well, and they're allowed to act as a family and grow. Picard and Troi doing impressions, her use of plexing when she gets unnerved (never noticed it before now!), Data watching a pot boil, Riker dreading Spot's feeding time - they're all fun moments that make us like what is essentially a high concept episode. Not that that concept is bad, mind you. The temporal bubbles are actually pretty fun, and it's to the episode's credit that while the solution requires some [TECH] tools, it is noetheless predicated on puzzle-solving and actions that you or I could have thought of.
Our characters walking around frozen crew members is at once eerie and cool, and the dilemmas set up are tension builders - Beverly being shot by a Romulan, Romulans on the bridge, a warp core breach in progress. How did this all happen and how do we stop it? It's a timeline puzzle like that of some film favorites like Memento, 11:14 or 12 Monkeys. The plot goes a little gonzo with the quantum singularity parasites nesting in the Romulans' engine and their parents taking Romulan form, but you buy it.
In the final analysis, what's enjoyable is that the characters are smartly written. Troi pulls the plug on Geordi to save his life, Picard throws the runabout into the beam, etc. And there are some really fun, surreal moments like Picard getting the "time bends" and tracing a smiley face into the warp core breach, or his hand aging at 50 times the normal rate in the rotten fruit bowl.
There are flaws, such as pulling the runabout shots straight from DS9 (I'd recognize the Denorios Belt anywhere!), apparently in exchange for building the aft section (ok then), and Romulans armed with disruptors in sickbay (when Riker went through the trouble of planting a phaser there in the opening scene). I'm sure the concept can be nitpicked to death like The Next Phase, but like the Next Phase, the character moments and fun action save it from its logical failings.
LESSON: Picard has an affinity for Lee Press On Nails.
REWATCHABILITY - High: Loads of fun, with nicely written characters moments as well as effective tension.
Comments
What is "plexing.?"
BTW I read your blog every day. Fun, succinct, and well thought-out. I'm sad more folks don't comment.
Thanks for the kind words. If you want more traffic, tell people about it :). I'm fine and encouraged by the number of comments myself.
One thing that always bugged me... part of the reason for the runabout appearing on TNG was so that they could use the parent's shows budget to build the aft section, right? So how come we never, ever saw it again?