“Timescape” is a pretty solid three-star offering about which I have a few minor quibbles but no major complaints, apart from some very general here’s-why-I-don’t-enjoy-it-more type observations. For the most part, it’s just good old fashioned fun-with-time-weirdness and a pretty engaging and well-constructed mystery. There’s really no depth or thematic content, but a sufficiently fun and well-crafted story of this sort (“high-concept sci-fi,” in my story types categorization scheme—or, alternatively, “Brannon-Braga-style Trek”) doesn’t absolutely require that kind of depth to be thoroughly enjoyable or feel like a “classic.” This particular story isn’t quite in that category, for me (hence three stars instead of four), and I’ll get to the why of that in due course…but it’s still a pretty good one.
I mean, time anomalies are almost always fun—but encountering the Enterprise frozen in time, seemingly in mid-battle with a Romulan warbird? That was a pretty cool (and classically Braga) reveal. Plus, the episode provides just the right amount of information up front to keep the audience engaged and guessing. We know slightly more than Picard and company do, thanks to the opening scenes in which Worf picks up a Romulan distress call and Riker decides to go check it out. But then we shift to the point of view of the four characters returning to the ship via runabout, and follow a trail of time anomalies along with them that lead back to the ship, and then watch as they piece together what must have happened. It’s pretty cool. Then, too, I like the fact that (contra “The Next Phase”) the Romulans in need of aid actually aren’t treacherous this time, despite all appearances to the contrary. (In particular, the reveal that the Romulan who has apparently shot Dr. Crusher with his disrupter was actually aiming for an intruder is cool.) The sequence with time suddenly resuming for a few seconds, then abruptly “rewinding” back to its previous frozen point, is also super-fun, both just for the general high-concept wackiness of getting to see it and for the brief glimpse that it provides us of a bunch of Romulans trying to react to a developing crisis (and actually working to prevent harm to the Enterprise).
Okay, so, minor quibbles: First, while I appreciate the writers making an effort to make Troi seem more competent and useful, I have a hard time with the idea that her time about a Romulan warbird in “Face of the Enemy” has made her a font of useful information about Romulan engine design—and, conversely, I also feel like if the Romulans indeed use a unique technology like an artificial singularity to power their ships, this fact would already be generally known to Starfleet. Second…what exactly happens at the end of the episode? It’s easy to miss, but there’s a line establishing that the warbird vanishes, and Data concludes that it has gone back to its own time continuum. So…the Romulan ship was from an alternate dimension, or something!? That’s weird—and if true, what’s even weirder is that the evacuated Romulans aboard the Enterprise apparently get left behind in “our” time continuum (something about them is also briefly mentioned at the end), but the episode barely acknowledges this. Why write it this way? Why not have the ship be a normal Romulan ship, from our normal universe, and have it still be there at the end? This bit just seems really bizarre and pointless. Third, it’s a little unclear what the apparently not-time-frozen aliens aboard both ships are up to for most of the time that our characters spend investigating and whatnot (or before they even show up, for that matter). And finally, a conceptual nitpick: When Data says that the Enterprise is not actually “frozen,” but instead experiencing the passage of time “at an infinitesimal rate”…isn’t he getting it backwards? For everyone on the ship, the events of the episode—including all the stuff that we watch Picard and company spend hours and minutes doing—only last something like a second. Doesn’t this mean that time is passing faster, not slower, for them, as compared to for Picard and company?
When I first started thinking about what I was going to say in this review, I knew that I was going to have good things to say about it as a fun, high-concept installment, but I also wanted to express a sense that there is, on the other hand, something about it that feels just a little too…routine? I couldn’t quite put my finger on what this was at first, though I had a few notions: Is it that the characters don’t really seem to react much, emotionally, to the weirdess (and the potential horror) of what’s going on? Or maybe it’s that the answer to what’s actually going on (aliens from another dimension incubating their young in the Romulan ship’s singularity, etc.) feels a bit too random/convoluted/arbitary (i.e. the plot is a little too far up its own ass)? Or that, in the end, extricating the ship from its predicament and restoring the space-time continuum kind of proves too easy, in a way that feels anticlimactic? (Sure, there’s a slight complication that prevents the plan from going off without a hitch, and Picard has to improvise in the moment…but there are no hard decisions, and nothing particularly surprising or cool happens. Ho-hum.) All three of these proto-assessments of mine still mostly ring true for me (and the first two also are in line with my overall take on Braga’s weaknesses as a writer), but I don’t know that they quite get at what I was feeling. Since jotting them down, though, I have perused others’ commentary on the episode, and as usual, my favorite commenter on Jammer’s site (William B; see the 19th and 20th comments under the review) hit the nail on the head for me. I highly recommend reading his comments for yourself, but to summarize: Brannon Braga has what William B describes as “a penchant . . . for stories that lose all sight of character or meaning,” and “live or die” on plot cleverness. Some of these episodes are “clever enough to stay afloat,” while others (mostly still to come) absolutely aren’t…and this one is kind of in the middle. Also, this Braga tendency is more tempered in some of his episodes than in others; “Cause and Effect” and “Frame of Mind,” for instance, both manage to stay tethered to the actual experiences of their characters enough for me, as a viewer, to connect with them emotionally; “Timescape,” by contrast, strikes both William B and me as “clever but in a way that leaves me cold,” even though it is still enjoyable. It comes down, I think, partly to tone, but also to intent (what it is that Braga is trying to accomplish with his storytelling). (Delightfully, William B introduces his thoughts by quoting Geordi’s critique of Data’s poetry from a previous Braga-penned episode, just as I myself suggested in my review of that previous episode that Braga ought to listen to the advice that he put in Geordi’s mouth!)
Finally, I should comment on a few of the lighter character moments in “Timescape.” The one that gets mentioned the most is Picard drawing a smiley face in the warp-core-breach cloud and laughing like a maniac; a lot of people seem really taken with this bit, but for me, it doesn’t quite work. I know it’s supposed to show that the time distortions are messing with the captain psychologically, so it technically doesn’t matter that the behavior seems wildly out of character, but…I dunno. I guess it’s just a bit too silly, and connects back to what I was saying above about not quite being able to connect emotionally to the episode. (I recognize that this is very much a YMMV kind of thing; some people, after all, despise Worf’s “I am not a merry man!” declaration in “Qpid,” but I can’t help but to enjoy it.) (Oh, and also: Time distortion or no, shouldn’t the gas cloud fry Picard’s finger when he touches it?) On the other hand, the captain’s somewhat uncharacteristically goofy/informal demeanor in the runabout at the beginning of the episode (mimicking the hypnotic monotone of the conference speaker, etc.) does work for me; he’s relaxing and being personal with his colleagues in an off-duty, away-from-the-ship setting in a way that I totally buy, and that showcases his growth as a character over the course of six seasons. (Data, though, strikes me as a bit more socially oblivious in these early runabout scenes than is usual for him by this point in the series, as if some of his growth over time has kind of been forgotten.) Riker’s struggles with Spot are good for a bit of a laugh but feel totally disconnected from the rest of the episode. And as for the final scene, with Data contemplating humans’ perceptions of time and testing the aphorism about a “watched pot”? Okay…sure. It’s a bit silly, and I would probably prefer for the dialog to make it a bit clearer that he’s really studying himself, not human perceptions (and certainly not the nature of time itself), but the idea of his turning off his internal chronometer in order to test whether or not he can, in some sense, have a subjective and inexact experience of time, is sort of intriguing, and has some merit.