Star Trek: 10 Most Mind-Bending Spatial Anomalies
5. A Highly Localised Distortion Of The Space-Time Continuum
Or the 'Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs' Anomaly
It's one of the most mind-blowingly-est, starship-explodingly-est cold opens in Star Trek history, and it's all thanks to a spatial, and especially temporal, anomaly. If your brain isn't already bent out of all proportion at seeing the Enterprise-D summarily reduced to rubble before the credits roll, you should hang on a little tighter to the back of that chair at ops. It only gets stranger and more explosive from there!
The Enterprise-D is charting the Typhon Expanse, and the crew experience déjà vu all over again… and again… and again… and again… (nIb'poH or "The time is identical" in Klingon.) Dr Crusher's hearing voices and smashing glasses in her quarters, La Forge is feeling familiarly queasy, and ship's poker becomes particularly repetitive. It's Groundhog Day avant la lettre, as Brannon Braga was keen to point out.
At the end and the beginning of each temporal causality loop is Bateson on the Bozeman, emerging from the anomaly to collide with the Enterprise until Data finally realises that three really is a magic number! The Enterprise-D's chronometers are off by 17.4 days, but for a pre-Frasier Kelsey Grammer aboard the Soyuz-class, it's been 90 years!
"There's something we need to discuss," offers Picard. You're damn right there is! Captain Bateson is still in active service in 2381, but the adjustment to the 24th century must have been one hell of a mind-f**k for him and his crew!