10 Best Time-Loop Sci-Fi TV Episodes
Time loop episodes can be fun! Time loop episodes can be fun! Time loop episodes can be fun!
Time travel often brings about talk of paradoxes such that it doesn’t often make for the best television… except for Doctor Who, of course. For most sci-fi shows, they stay away, but that doesn’t mean it’s never tapped into every once in a while. Some series have managed to handle time travel rather well, while others… not so much.
One of the hardest timey wimey things to get just right isn’t time travel; it’s a time loop. Watching the same events over and over again rarely works well outside of a Bill Murray movie, but there have been some standout occasions where science fiction television shows have mastered the time loop episode.
There are tons of examples of this sort of thing all across science fiction, which begs the question, which episode is the best of them all? Time loops have popped up in all sorts of shows, including Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Arrow, Stargate SG-1, Star Trek, and much more, but not every episode is the best.
This list highlights the very best time loop episodes ever brought to television. To make the list, an episode has to show repetition without boring the audience, it has to show how the characters got into the loop, and how they got out.
10. Star Trek: The Next Generation - “Cause And Effect”
"Cause and Effect" opens with a poker game, followed by the discovery of a spatial anomaly. When the vessel studies the anomaly, a ship emerges on a collision course with the Enterprise. Data suggests using a tractor beam while Riker says they should decompress the shuttle bay.
Captain Picard uses a tractor beam to try and push the ship out of the way. It almost works, but it hits one of the warp nacelles, resulting in a catastrophic failure and the Enterprise's destruction. The next scene begins with the officers playing poker, and nobody realizes they are caught in a temporal causality loop.
Eventually, Dr. Crusher begins to hear voices and experiences déjà vu, which ultimately uncovers that they were stuck in a loop. Data manages to send himself a message in the subsequent loop, and he begins seeing the number "3" all over the ship.
He realizes that the threes are referencing Commander Riker's pips, revealing his plan as the one to save the ship. The anomaly disappears, and the time loop comes to an end after 17 days. The vessel they nearly hit turned out to be the USS Bozeman, which had been missing for over 90 years.