6x25 Timescape

[5.2/10] I don’t know how you make such a cool concept so damn boring. Time dilation is almost always a winner. Having the characters navigate a minefield of different temporal distortions, unravel a frozen mystery, and try to undo two ships’ worth of destruction witnessed again and again is a worthy premise. It’s one of those unique, sci-fi stories only a show like The Next Generation could do.

But the execution feels dry and mechanical. There’s never any emotional investment here. Picard looks upon the Enterprise exploding with a flat expression. There’s minimal reaction to Geordi being near-death after an encounter with another time-dilated individual. Even Troi’s response to everyone around her freezing seems strangely reserved. “Timescape” barely offers any tension or excitement, despite the unique concept at its core and the unusual hurdles our heroes must leap over in order to save the day.

Part of that may be that there’s no particular rules established for how a litany of temporal distortion bubbles works. We get that there’s “temporal necrosis” from being in a personal subspace shield for too long, and that interacting with time moving at a different pace can be painful. But otherwise, “Timescape” never really establishes what the boundaries are, so the threats are amorphous and the solutions seem too easy and random.

Now that could work if you’re doing a horrorshow or a thriller. The characters wandering around, frightened or at least unnerved by whatever could be happening next, unsure what surprises might be in store, is a mode that often works for Star Trek. Here, though, Picard and company are all in reserved, professional scientist mode. They never seem especially concerned or upended by what’s happening, just proceeding like it’s business as usual.

It might help spice things up if the mystery were better though. The setup here is that our heroes wander into what looks like a scene of Romulan invasion aboard the Enterprise, only to realize that it’s actually the work of two time-displaced aliens who’ve merely possessed Romulans. Sure? Okay? Why not!

I’m not complaining about the plausibility of it. Again, at base, I like the idea that this whole thing was an interdimensional misunderstanding. The aliens from another temporal continuum thought the Romulan singularity-based warp drive would be a good place to incubate their young, thereby causing all these distortions and, when the Romulan ship tried to stop it, threatening the alien babies. It’s a little weird, but I like when The Next Generation gets wild and wooly with its sci-fi concepts, and this one’s a doozy.

There’s just zero urgency or even intelligibility to the mystery. It reads more like there was random chaos aboard the Enterprise than a real struggle. The reveals feel cheap. The Romulan on the bridge who seemed to be accosting Riker was, in fact, helping him up. Okay, fine. A little convenient, but it passes the smell test. But the other big one is a Romulan seeming to have deliberately shot Beverly with a disruptor, when it turns out that he was actually trying to kill one of the aliens and Dr. Crusher “got in the way.” Come on now. That’s not playing fair, and even if you want to handwave it as the Romulan being reckless, lacks the zing of a good twist.

There’s also not much of a sense of urgency or a ticking clock to this problem. Obviously, Picard, Data, Troi, and Geordi want to get out of their temporal anomaly and save their friends. But there’s no clear avenue by which they can accomplish this goal, or even work toward it. And given the very idea that everyone’s moving at a different speed, including fast forwarding and rewinding, there’s very little sense that anything has to happen right now. Sure, apparently in ten hours the Enterprise will explode from a reactor breach, but we never really come close to that being an issue.

“Timescape” doesn’t even make much of its gimmick in terms of the visuals, which theoretically ought to be the coolest part of the proceedings. There is something eerie about watching Data wander around Engineering with everyone frozen in place. Kudos are owed to both the actors and the effects team for making that work. But it’s one move, and it loses its impact after they use it for a whole episode.

What’s more, it’s pretty much the only arrow “Timescape” has in the quiver. It’s other attempts to convey the passage of time, or the effects of these little temporal eddies, are tepid at best. Jean-Luc’s...fingernails grow too fast off screen? Some fruit turns into shriveled pellets? They play the audio and video backwards? There’s so much you can do with the idea of isolated pockets of time changing the “playback” speed so to speak, but there’s very little creativity on display with how this episode approaches it.

I realize that as you get to the end of a season of television, budgetary issues may be even more of an issue than usual (even with a bottle episode like this one. But for an episode where the delivery of the story is so boring and flat, “Timescape” could really have used more visual panache to help dress this otherwise doldrum-filled hour up.

All that’s left is a heap of technobabble, a bunch of miraculous solutions to a totally unknown problem, and a terribly literal joke about Data trying to determine if a watched pot will boil. There’s not much that’s actively bad about it. At worst, it’s an unengaging but watchable hour of television. It just feels like a massive missed opportunity given the novelty of the idea at the center of it.

It’s a testament to how much of what made Star Trek: The Next Generation special wasn’t just the imaginative sci-fi setups the writers’ room would come up with. It was the characters who explored those strange intergalactic phenomena, the stories that made us care about what strange thing might occur next, and the directors and craftspeople who took those far out ideas and made them visually interesting. “Timescape” keeps the unique premise that could be the foundation of a great episode, but forgets all the other important stuff that makes a good TNG outing work.