Star Trek TNG — Cause and Effect (1992)

Screening Room TV
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Season 5, episode 18 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, first broadcast March 23, 1992.
Medium Tv
Year 1992
Creator Brannon Braga (writer) · Jonathan Frakes (director)
Runtime 45 min
Mode Fiction
IMDb tt0708445
Reviewed 2026-07-26

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The Enterprise is destroyed in the cold open, then again, as the crew works out that they are inside a repeating causality loop. Kelsey Grammer appears as Captain Morgan Bateson of the USS Bozeman. Some viewers phoned their stations to report a broadcast fault.

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The Enterprise repeats the same days until echoes of previous iterations leak through as déjà vu. The loop is the plot, not a twist.

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The crew perceive the repetition before they can explain it — the episode is about the felt sense of recurrence, and viewers phoned in to report a broadcast fault.

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