Cause and Effect

The Enterprise explodes. Then it explodes again. And again. And again. Eventually, it does not explode. This week we follow Cause and Effect into the Mission Log. What an amazing episode.! I remember my mind being blown. I cant think of anything at the time like it. I recommend the Netflix movie “ARQ” for a fun romp. “Time Squared” hinted at something like this but “Cause and Effect” really delivered!!! Just the creepiness of hearing the voices and finding out who they were. Data’s delivering the message to himself?!?! Clever! Man, where would they be w/o him? Lol. I remember that too; I never get tired of this episode either (I know others find it tedious; I never have.) I always appreciate the directorial changes in each replaying of the events and I’ve never spent too much time getting bogged down in the ‘but HOW…..’s And that last scene – my reaction then, and still, always ‘oh WOW!’ I’d always wished Captain Bateson would have made a return appearance. Ah well. A few pre listen thoughts: 1- Decompressing the Shuttle Bay sure has a lot of power. 2- Way to ignore your 1st officer Picard. 3- The easy way to go would have been to have Troi have visions. I’m glad they made Dr. Crusher the focus. 3- Love seeing Kelsey Grammer’s cameo. Into obscurity here: In the (not good) 2002 remake of The Time Machine, the hero tries to save his fiancée’s life… and fails… over and over. Each save leads to a new form of death. By the third time, the audience was laughing at her unavoidable death! Point: So, Starfleet has invented time n weather subspace markers (sponsored by Eaglemoss, I believe) since the events of ‘Clues.’ Kudos to Frakes for keeping this ep from getting REALLY dull. How does time/space work? Voices squeak through? Data can send a radio message, but only a small one? Finally, if you gotta repeat a day, I want a day like the one the voices “of an intimate nature” are having. Thanks again for a fun podcast! Apparently voices carry from the titanium-plated hull of a Constitution class ship while on silent running hiding from a Romulan Bird of Prey, so voices carrying through time? Noooooo problem. 😉 Ya, the episode could have been really dull if they had just repeated the same scenes. Fun book on the fate of the Bozeman (and a special guest from Relics!!), if anyone’s book hunting. He’s a cool guy — Captain Bateson, Klingon Fighter. This book came out a few years before ‘Enterprise.’ I totally geeked on the concept of a starship using a grappling line, especially as a weapon! Oh, and there’s that other displaced TOS era guy who shows up. Fun read. The throwback to those uniforms really had a PUNCH!!!! I recall “Family” showed hologram Jack Crusher, but to see the USS Bozeman. Bateson who was at least a peer of James Kirk by organizational association… How cool!!! I always wished for a minor crossover like that. Some TOS phenomenon or missing ship explained w a TNG episode!!!! Thanks for continuing to post these, Earl. Great additional documentation for TNG! Fun fact: listen closely to the background music. Starting in the third or fourth act, when things begin getting weird, it drones out a slow, steady “one-two-three” rhythm. So basically, even Dennis McCarthy is telling Data what message to send. Slow golf clap for the criminally under-appreciated Mr. McCarthy there. If I could nominate anyone for a future Supplemental, by the way, it’d be McCarthy, or maybe the TNG composers as a group. They get crapped on for not having produced anything as iconic as the Amok Time or Doomsday Machine fight music, but they were operating under a whole different set of strictures imposed by a set of producers and sound editors who had very different feelings about music than Gene and Bob Justman did in the ’60s. This made it incredibly difficult to make distinctive music, i.e. knowing that a certain octave range would effectively be claimed by the Enterprise’s background “air conditioning”, so they had to avoid that range altoget