So, watching SG1's Window of Opportunity, which also brings to mind TNG's Cause and Effect, I'm wondering ... even if the people caught in time loops do not feel the passage of time, wouldn't they still age normally? They may be thinking only 6 hours have passed, but as Carter points out, thousands of days (at least 3 years) could have passed. No hair/nail growth, no aging. I know it's just a plot device, but I really hate time loop stories - humorous as they are, they don't make sense. What are some of the mental gymnastics have you guys come up with to explain these inconsistencies?
The weird thing for me in Cause & Effect is that the Enterprise crew knew something was weird almost immediately and figured it out after a handful of loops (even if we assume there were some unseen loops, they didn't skip a meaningful amount of time), but Frasier's crew on the Bozeman didn't. (Although maybe from their perspective, they just had one really weird day where people heard shit, but without Data it wasn't possible for them to learn anything?)
Right? If the TNG crew knew something was up, why was Frazier completely ignorant of anything unusual?
For the Enterprise they were caught in the time loop for X cycles. For the Bozeman they entered the anomaly, then popped out to find the Enterprise. See, it's really all a big ball of wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey . . . stuff.
If there really were such a thing as a time loop--like in TNG's "Cause and Effect," where the ship is repeatedly returned to some earlier point in its voyage following its destruction--there's no reason ANY information would survive the process. No one would be getting deja vu, Data wouldn't realize the significance of the number three. Hell, there's no reason the ship should be reconstituted and intact after the reset; at most, its fragments should be teleported. But such limitations would make for an unsatisfying tale for the audience.
I assume it rewound back together like Dr. Strange's apple. As for information getting through, frinky-frat particles.
It is exactly the same: a scenario that can occur only in a reality created by a screenwriter. Ah, I neglected the chronometric interaction of the frinky-frat particles. Ready the inverse tachyon beam, Mr. Crusher!
It's a good episode, but the whole time loop makes no fuckin' sense unless you assume Q set it up. (That was originally supposed to be the explanation for the anomaly in Time Squared, but the scene got cut.)
That explains the TNG episode. Has anyone seen Stargate? Specifically, the Window of Opportunity episode?
If I remember correctly, O'Neill and Teal'c are fully aware of the repetition, but everyone else is not? Is that right? At any rate, it's no wonder SG-1 could figure it out while the Bozeman couldn't. They had the better Frasier.
Yes, Teal’c and O’Neill knew about the time and Janet figured it out by looking in their eyes with a small flashlight.
I was quite young when cause and effect first came out, and even I knew it was a creative way for the writers to slack off and write a quarter of an episode.
The time loop in SG-1 was due to a piece of Ancient machinery, so knowing their tendencies it was probably actually something like the entire previous universe was getting destroyed at the end of the each loop with Jack and Teal'c thrown into a parallel universe running a few hours behind ours, with a few extra supernova thrown in for good measure.
I think that the idea was that like magnetic tape, where you can get what's known as "bleed-through," as things kept cycling through in the loop, little bits, and pieces, of what had happened before were able to seep through, with Data being able to pick up on them since he was more "sensitive" than the others. (A computer is more likely to be fucked up by having a stray cosmic ray particle going through its CPU than a human is when hit by one.) In theory, Fraiser's ship would have eventually figured out something was up and have taken steps to prevent getting caught in the loop back in their time, but because the Enterprise showed up and whacked into them, it prevented that from happening. I do have to wonder about Picard's logic when he figured out that Data might be onto something and say, "Well, we'll still keep doing what we're doing, since we don't know what it was that caused us to get caught in the time loop, to begin with." Seems to me that the logical answer would be to have the ship immediately make a random course change, using the ship's computer to do so. That's almost certainly not something that a ship's captain would ever order, and would thus be the most likely thing to break them out of the loop.
