Timescape

DVD, TNG S6 (Timescape)

Just like 'The Inner Light' in the same slot last season this bucks the trend of the second to last episode of a season being a bit weak. This is in fact one of the strongest stories of the season showcasing increasingly inventive effects and a clever time-based story without the usual time travel conventions. It doesn't quite hold up when you think about creating a personal bubble of time around characters (or wristband devices they even have a little drawer for - "Geordi, did you remember to pack those time bubble wristbands, just in case?" "No sir, I was going to leave them this time, thanks for reminding me"), or little details throughout, but if you go along with it and don't think too hard it does make an entertaining tale. It's like a cross between 'Wink of An Eye' from 'TOS' and 'The Next Phase' from last season, with the people moving incredibly slowly so they seem to be stopped still, from the former, and Romulans sneaking around in another phase or timeframe than everyone else, as in the latter.

This time it isn't the Romulans who are the villains, and actually there aren't any villains at all, just concerned parents of little baby beings trapped in the gravity well of the Romulan power source, the quantum singularity, which also caused time-based trouble in 'Visionary' on 'DS9' - the female member of the species does come across as a villain since she tries to prevent Data from stopping the power transfer beam to the Romulan ship, and I assume the male of the species made the ship fire at the Enterprise, but I'm not altogether clear on that point. Does this mean that the various-sized time bubbles in space were created by the Romulan ship and all went back to normal when time was reset or did those bubbles continue to float off and cause havoc?

I think Picard must have been more affected by the bubbles at the start than we realised, as he tells them to pilot the Runabout to meet the Enterprise and to send a message to the ship telling them to meet at the rendezvous point as quickly as possible. Surely the meeting point couldn't have been reached any quicker by them so he should have asked the Enterprise to meet the Runabout sooner, not at the rendezvous point. A bit later Geordi says there's no sign of the Enterprise, not even on long-range scanners, then they navigate round a few bubbles and seconds later there is the ship! I know he mentioned something metallic on sensors, but surely that was on long-range and they shouldn't just bump into the Enterprise right away, should they?

Forgetting about the problems there is so much to enjoy here: for a start we get a Runabout in 'TNG' and unbelievably they show more of the Runabout than the series fro which it was created, 'DS9.' How great it is to be able to see the back room and I can't believe they never bothered to have scenes like that in 'DS9' Runabouts. I'd have loved to know what the name of the ship was, though. It's a really nice family moment with Picard, Geordi, Data and Troi sitting round a dining table talking about the conference they'd been to, although Troi's impression of a Ktarian she met was so weird, like a cross between an Irish accent and a Liverpudlian one, and you can tell she's drawing on the regional accents she'd know about, coming from England. Because the scene is so homely it makes that much more impact when something eerie happens and Geordi and the others freeze as he's in mid-sentence, then carry on as normal a few seconds later. Then when they ask Troi if anything's wrong she says "I'm not sure." Now either she didn't want to sound like an idiot (which is unlikely since outlandish things happen all the time in space), or she really doubted what she'd seen, but I'd have thought her answer would immediately be in the affirmative without any room for doubt!

The unsettling effect is used even better when the freeze happens to Troi - I bet she was relieved that she'd proved she wasn't mad. It works because it's like it happens to us, the audience: Picard's speaking then cuts out in mid-sentence, and like Troi we're bewildered when we see a hand pop up in front of her face. The bowl of fruit's disintegration worked really well, although Picard's hand just made me wonder how he cut those long nails off in such a short time… I bet Data's pinpoint accuracy with a phaser would have been called into use. The creativity doesn't end on the Runabout as we soon get to go the route of 'Wink of An Eye' and walk round corridors of people stood stock still.

When they first beam to the bridge you can tell that some of the shots are locked off and Troi, Picard and Data are inserted in, because of the absolute frozen poise of the other characters. It may not have been ideal to start with the best shots and then have much more of a mix with people trying to hold still. It gives more dynamic three-dimensional shots with the unfrozen characters moving around the set, but the trade-off is that some of the background cast weren't very good at keeping still. The worst one is the woman in the transporter room looking up at the Romulans on the pad - she does a massive wobble, unless that was some kind of time distortion visual flux. Yeah, that was it… Other people were excellent at holding position: Worf, for one, looks like a statue, and the woman in the corridor that Troi nearly bumps into was great until they zoomed the camera right into her face.

I wonder if in the Blu-Ray Remastered version they'll make it so the people really don't move as that would be a major improvement. There is a kind of charm to people desperately trying to stay rigidly still, so I hope these old versions of episodes don't get lost or superseded by newer ones. The idea of having to get around people because they mustn't be moved was a good one, best illustrated when they use the Jefferies tubes to try and travel the ship, but find a group of people blocking their way. But the best effects were saved for last as time goes forward and backward and it can be difficult to work out which people are actually a visual effect and which are really walking backwards, which is saying something.

The reveal that it was nothing to do with a Romulan plot or Romulan experiments leaves the aliens from outside our space-time seeming like a weak, last-minute addition to explain the problem away. They could really have done with fleshing out the race, but as a story the visuals kept us from thinking too much about the problems and good direction from Adam Nimoy, son of Leonard, made this special. The end music reminded me of 'Star Trek: Generations,' but I may have already been thinking along that route since we see the Enterprise explode. And no matter how hard I looked I could not see a beam coming from the deflector array. Maybe it was all due to temporal psychosis?

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