In honor of Star Trek’s forty-fifth anniversary, the magazine did a series of articles looking back across all the series and movies by numbering them all from one to whatever and then reviewing every forty-fifth show. I was lucky enough to get “Cause and Effect,” a fan favorite featuring Kelsey Grammer as Captain Morgan Bateson of the time-displaced USS Bozeman. The excerpt below is the opening of the article.
Cause and Effect
It is perhaps the greatest teaser ever, starting in the middle of a catastrophe as the Enterprise-D tumbles out of control, venting plasma, unable to eject the warp core . . . then is ripped apart by multiple explosions with all hands lost. Viewers knew things would somehow be set right by the end of “Cause and Effect,” but it’s a scene that helped make this episode a fan favorite.
Following the credits, the ship is intact. Dr. Crusher, called away from the weekly poker game, dismisses the déjà vu she has while examining La Forge, but the Enterprise is soon destroyed again, trapped in a temporal causality loop. The poker game, the sickbay visit, a briefing about the Typhon Expanse, distortions in the space-time continuum, and the USS Bozeman suddenly appearing and colliding with the Enterprise—the same events rebooting and replaying. The veteran staff rose to the challenge of keeping these scenes engaging. . . .
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