Stardate 45652.1: The Enterprise is destroyed in a huge
explosion - but only a moment later the senior officers are playing their
regular a game as if nothing was wrong. Dr. Crusher feels like she already
knows the present situation and what will happen next. When suddenly another
starship appears from an anomaly and is about to collide with the Enterprise,
Picard follows Data's advice to alter the other ship's trajectory with the
tractor beam, rather than decompressing the main shuttlebay as Riker suggested,
but this doesn't suffice. The Enterprise is destroyed in a huge explosion - but
only a moment later... The ship is caught in a time loop, and the crew -except
for Data- notice this by déja vu experiences that grow the stronger the more
often they run through the time loop. Being aware that something terrible will happen
and there may be little time to avoid it, Geordi provides Data with a dekyon
emitter, giving him the possibility to
remember a specific small piece of information in the following loop. Just
before the ship explodes yet again, Data programs the number "3", which to everyone's surprise frequently
appears during this loop. The "3" refers to the number of Riker's rank
pips, and when the collision is about to occur again, Data follows Riker's
suggestion and opens the main shuttlebay too, which eventually breaks the time
loop. The Enterprise was caught in the loop for seventeen days while the other
ship, the USS Bozeman, has traveled 90 years to the future, only to get stuck
in the time loop too.

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