I loved this episode!! This is one of the best episodes in the series in my opinion. It's one of the most accurate portrayals of time travel and kind of a Doctor Crusher episode too!
The opening is exciting enough! It starts with the Enterprise having suffered heavy damage. They need to eject the warp core but there's really no time. Picard orders all hands to abandon ship. Too late though... the Enterprise is destroyed in the first scene before the opening credits.
But then we realized that the episode started at the "end" so to speak as the activity leading up to the fatal accident is recounted. The senior officer poker game is going on like normal. Crusher is called away to tend to Geordi who is experiencing dizziness. She feels a moment of déjà vu when she gives him a hypospray, but thinks nothing of it. Later that night she's tending a plant and having a night cap before she goes to bed. While in bed she hears the whispers of many voices and as she sits up to put on the light, she knocks her drink over. The next day in the briefing room, the staff is gathered together to discuss a plan for charting the system they're in. She reports the voices and everyone is interested but they're interrupted by Worf who is on the bridge and has discovered what appears to be a disturbance in the space-time continuum.
Picard begins with the command to back away slowly but the thrusters aren't responding. Then a ship appears from the void on a collision course. Riker suggests decompressing the main shuttle bay to push it off course while Data recommends the tractor beam to alter its course. Picard goes with Data's suggestion, but it doesn't work. The ships collide and the events of the opening scene begin to repeat ending in the destruction of the Enterprise again.
The day repeats again, beginning with the poker game. With most of the same dialogue regarding the friendly teasing the officers engage in while playing...playful accusations of stacking the deck and such. Frakes directed this episode and for each repeat of the events he filmed it at different angles to try and keep in fresh and interesting. And I can see how this would be difficult episode to tackle because of the repetitive nature of the story. But this is why it's such a good "time anomaly" episode. Right up there with Yesterday's Enterprise. If people were traveling through time, they wouldn't be aware of it. But, of course the crew of the Enterprise are more intelligent and curious than others would be. They become disturbed by the déjà vu they are experiencing. Riker uncomfortably realizes that he knew Beverly was bluffing and folds. It's enough to make them wonder if there's any truth to their playful cheating innuendo, but they trust each other too much to believe that. Geordi's inner ear infection plays out again with Beverly wondering if she'd treated him before and that night when she hears the voices, she goes to Picard's quarters to talk about it. He feels like he's read passages out of his book before, but overall they just talk themselves back down into feeling comfortable, as though they've overreacted. The next day Beverly not only reports the voices but discovers that ten other people on board have heard the voices too. Before anything can be done though, they're contacted from the bridge by Worf announcing the space-time disturbance and all is lost once again.
The day starts over at the poker game with Beverly calling the cards as Data deals them to the astonishment of Worf and Riker. She then calls sickbay to see if Geordi is there. He isn't, but they contact her again shortly to tell her he's there. She calls for Picard and puts Geordi's VISOR on a scanning device while asking Picard if he's been experiencing the déjà vu. He says that he has and that many others have as well. She examines the VISOR instead of hunting for inner ear infections and finds out that his dizziness is being caused by phase shifts in the visual receptors, seeing things that didn't exist like the voices that Beverly was hearing that weren't really there. The distortions were found in the surrounding dekyon field. Beverly knows she's onto something and stands in her room waiting for the voices this time. She records them and takes them to Geordi and Data and they confirm that they are thousands of voices coming from everyone on the ship. Beverly calls the staff meeting early the next day so that everyone is there. Geordi has been able to isolate some of the voices off the recording including the order to abandon ship. He postulates the theory that the destruction of the Enterprise has caused them to rupture space-time resulting in a temporal causality loop, which explains the déjà vu, the dekyon disturbance, and the thousands of overlapped voices. They realize that changing their course now may not solve anything, so they continue. But they also realize that they won't remember all of this if it should happen again.
So they suggest modifying a dekyon emission that could leave an echo in Data's brain with a message of some kind. The events play out again towards their destruction, but this time on the brink of the explosion Data is seen typing the message into the dekyon emitter on his arm. When the day begins to play out again, along with the déjà vu, they are now deluged with the number 3. Three and it's multiples turn up in Data's deal of the cards, surprising Beverly who was thinking she could predict what was coming. The number 3 overwhelms a console where Geordi is preforming a diagnostic. The events continue with Beverly reporting voices but now there are also reports of the strange repetition of the number three.
They are called to the bridge to once more go through the distortion and consequential danger. When the ship emerges, Riker and Data repeat their suggestions again, but as Data is getting ready to activate the tractor beam he glances at the three pips on Riker's collar and deduces that the message means that Riker's suggestion is the correct one. He decompresses the shuttle bay, the ships don't collide, and they have a chance to breath finally. After accessing a time beacon, they realize that they've been in the loop for 17 days. The ship they've encountered is a Starfleet vessel that hasn't been in commission for over 80 years. They hail them and they each offer assistance to each other. Captain Batesman's story is similar... they encountered a time distortion in the expanse and then the Enterprise suddenly appeared on a collision course. Picard explains that it was a causality loop and that they've been caught in it as well. Although Batesman doesn't recognize the Enterprise's design, he thinks that he must be mistaken since they'd left their starbase only weeks ago. Picard then asks him what the year is and we discover the year he believes it to be is somewhere between the first and second TOS movies which explains their uniforms. It ends with Picard inviting the captain aboard for a long talk.
The brilliance of this episode is its simplicity. The actual disaster "friendly fire." Two ships were too close to each other without knowing it and collided. And even though we here the same "captain's log" repeated over and over as well as much of the rest of the dialogue it's no less intense from one "day" to the next since we can see that they're always on the verge of solving the problem. It's just a lot of fun to watch. There's no deep meaning or message. It fixes the problems with the episode Time Squared, which had a similar theme. And the way it was written and directed make it worthy of five stars even though it's only a one-off episode.
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