10 Most Messed Up Deaths In Star Trek: The Next Generation
9. Death To The Dekyon Field — Crew Of The Enterprise-D…
… Crew of the Enterprise-D, crew of the Enterprise-D, crew of the Enterprise-D… and won't somebody PLEASE think of the children! Round and round they go, where the temporal causality loop stops, nobody knows… until Data figures out why three is the magic number.
A glitch in time saves no one. The cold-opener to Cause And Effect is one of the most dramatic put to screen. What a way to announce a reboot with a whole new cast! Of course not! This was just one of those weirdly beautiful Star Trek technicalities in the Typhon Expanse. They were all back to playing poker soon enough. A Riker in time saves everyone. Decompress the shuttlebay already!
Death, deal, repeat; death, deal, repeat. If having your molecules ripped apart by a warp core breach several times over weren't bad enough, the most messed-up thing was that, even though each loop was a reset, the crew became more and more aware that they'd done it all before. This wasn't déjà vu (nIb'poH in the Klingon), this was 'déjà vécu' — quite literally 'already lived'… and lived and lived.
More than that, when Doctor Crusher realised she was not just hearing voices, but actually hearing voices, Geordi and Data figured out that they were, in fact, listening to themselves — the crew on a path to disaster, echoes of the dekyon field. Now they had the .mp3 of their own doom! All that's not to mention the social death for the crew of the Bozeman of being 90 years behind the times.