TNG Flashback: Time Squared

I'm now more than halfway through re-watching the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. You may have noticed that many of the second season episodes seem to have a behind the scenes story about the script. Today, I bring you another such episode, "Time Squared."

The Enterprise comes upon an unpowered Federation shuttle in deep space and brings it aboard. They discover it's from the Enterprise, and its only passenger is a duplicate of Captain Picard! While the doppelganger is strangely incoherent, the crew is able to download the shuttle's log and learn it comes from six hours in the future -- a future in which Picard was the lone survivor of the destruction of the Enterprise. When the ship suddenly becomes snared in an energy vortex, the crew must figure out how to avoid the decisions that doomed their alternate future selves.

If this story seems a bit lacking in sense, it's because head writer Maurice Hurley planned it as a setup for the return of Q a few episodes down the road. The episode that became "Q Who" would have begun with Picard magically appearing aboard a shuttlecraft (that element stayed in the final version), watching the Enterprise be destroyed in the vortex before him just before Q appeared to reveal that he'd been behind this and other mysterious problems that had recently plagued the ship. Gene Roddenberry nixed this idea, and I believe he was right to have done so. It just makes no sense to me to air an episode with a nonsensical ending that the audience wouldn't even know was unresolved until a few weeks later.

That said, they didn't exactly rewrite this episode, and so what we're left with is scarcely better. Without the Q hook, all we were left with was just that nonsensical ending -- and the nonsensical story leading up to it. With Q pulling the strings, one can understand why this strange space phenomenon seems to exhibit primitive intelligence, and why it targets Picard specifically. But Maurice Hurley was insistent in interviews that Q's involvement would also explain the solution to the puzzle: that they had to turn the ship around and drive into the vortex to escape it. Of that, I remain skeptical.

I think Hurley was so focused on his Q tease (and the admittedly neat idea of a time jump of just a few hours rather than the sci-fi typical years or centuries) that he missed the truly compelling story opportunity here: Picard vs. Picard. The "future Picard" of this episode spends most of the episode comatose or incoherent. When he finally does start walking and talking in the final act, he doesn't actually seem anything like Captain Picard. He's driven to escape the ship, but doesn't really seem to know why. He somehow thinks he understands the motivations of the space vortex, but doesn't remember the effects his decisions had the first time he made them. He's a hollow reflection of an actual character. And it doesn't even make sense that he is; if traveling just six hours outside your normal time renders you an incoherent imbecile, why have we not seen even more deleterious effects in the far greater time jumps that Star Trek characters have made on numerous occasions before this?

The better story here, in my opinion, would have been to have the "future Picard" be as real as "present Picard." The captain is used to giving orders and having everyone else follow them. A second Picard would upset that norm. And if future Picard had been able to actually explain everything that went wrong, there could have been interesting dynamics in a debate between the two: "that can't be right" vs. "I'm telling you what I lived through!" (Instead, the only debate we get all episode is between Pulaski and Troi, when the former voices the empty threat that she may have to relieve Picard of duty.)

Despite all these deficiencies in the writing, however, there are also a few strong points. We get some nice details of Riker's past in a casual opening scene where he cooks for fellow crewmembers. The scene strongly implies the strained relationship with his father that we'd see firsthand in the very next episode. It also includes some great physical comedy from Michael Dorn as he bares his teeth menacingly at the food before wolfing it down and pronouncing it "delicious."

There are a few very clever lines of dialogue, particularly Picard's resolution not to "make the same mistake once." There are also continuity references to past Star Trek episodes, both Next Generation (mentions of Paul Manheim and of the Traveler) and classic (mentioning the high-warp slingshot effect used to achieve time travel in multiple episodes, and in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home).

Other observations:

• Dennis McCarthy delivers another one of his rare musical scores that I actually like (and again, it hasn't been represented on a soundtrack album release, that I know of). Particularly effective are the slow and sinister undertones for the review of the future shuttle's "flight recorder," and a more urgent restatement of that same leitmotif during the final act.

• The energy vortex looks fantastic in the Blu-ray remaster.

• Pay close attention, and a moment at the end of the penultimate act will make you wonder exactly how turbolifts work. Picard gets into one to leave the bridge right before the commercial break, and Troi somehow follows just seconds later... but not in the same lift as Picard. Weirder still, the next act after the commercial break starts in Sickbay, with Troi already there as Captain Picard arrives!

• The series has delivered many visual effects that still hold up 25 years later, but there's something a bit off about the splitscreen Picards in the finale here. Patrick Stewart is never quite looking in the right place to be facing "himself."

• Does "present Picard" really have to kill "future Picard" with his phaser at the end of the episode? Sure, FP can't be allowed to leave the ship, but a stun would have seen to that. And we can't have two Picards at the end of the episode either -- but the doppelganger vanishes when the Enterprise escapes the vortex anyway. So as it stands, Picard basically commits murder for no reason. (Or is it suicide?)

• Possibly stranger still is Pulaski's reaction to finding the dead Picard clone. She checks his vitals, wordlessly pronounces him dead, and then just turns and exits the shuttlebay, leaving O'Brien to... what? Dispose of the body himself? Summon the Enterprise coroner? (Does the ship have one?) Apparently, the instant you stop being Pulaski's patient, she wants nothing to do with you.

"Time Squared" isn't exactly a bad episode, but you can really sense that something's missing -- not just Maurice Hurley's intended explanation of it all, but the more promising story that could have been told with this clever setup. I give it a C+.