Epis­ode Num­ber: 5×05

Writ­ten by: Jeff Wheaton

Dir­ec­ted by: Jon Crew

Trans­mis­sion: 11^th Janu­ary 2025

Guest Stars:

• Lieu­ten­ant Larc glash Nossaag: Archae­olo­gic­al remote sens­ing expert.
• Lieu­ten­ant Com­mand­er A’Mathi: Chief Engin­eer on the U.S.S. Lex­ing­ton NCC-1709.
• Lieu­ten­ant Com­mand­er Gomez: A’Math­i’s pre­de­cessor as Chief Engin­eer on the U.S.S. Lex­ing­ton NCC-1709.
• Cap­tain Rebekah Kon­in: Com­mand­ing officer of the U.S.S. Hyper­ion, and Atani Kon­in’s wife.

Lex­ing­ton has just fin­ished her pre­lim­in­ary scans of the fourth plan­et in the Tam­mer­on sys­tem using an exper­i­ment­al pro­to­type sensor based on chroniton particle reac­tions. If all goes to plan, this new sensor should be able to achieve a low-detail scan of the his­tory of any plan­et­ary body, and could lead to major advance­ments in Star­fleet’s archae­olo­gic­al stud­ies. The sys­tem was designed as part of Pro­ject Dia­mond Hedge, but even though the pro­ject is sus­pen­ded fol­low­ing the dis­cov­ery of Ash’tamali­a’s true motiv­a­tions, the Tilikaal ruins remain of suf­fi­cient interest to make these tests worthwhile.

Cap­tain’s Log: Stard­ate, 51135.7

Plot: Trapped in a repeat­ing loop of time, the crew battle to free them­selves, while con­tinu­ing to encounter strange phant­asms from the past.

The ‘A’ Plot: As Azon­an takes in the frac­tured scene before him, the dis­turb­ance in the warp core increases, trig­ger­ing a breach and restart­ing the loop again.

Raynor is at the tac­tic­al sta­tion on the bridge, car­ry­ing out routine threat scans of the sur­round­ing sys­tem. The sensors pick up an anom­aly at the edge of the sys­tem, which reappears as the sensors sweep the area again. This seems very famil­i­ar, so he con­tacts Zepht in astro­met­rics, who responds instantly. Raynor asks him to check the coordin­ates, but Zepht inad­vert­ently inputs the wrong ones and observes an explod­ing fire­ball over the plan­et. He retries and real­ises they mark the ori­gin of the meter­oid. Exper­i­en­cing the same sense that this has happened before, he dis­cusses this with Raynor, as anoth­er met­eor explodes on the screen.

In the ready room, Kon­in is going over daily reports, try­ing to sup­press his wor­ries about his wife, who is deployed on the front line of the Domin­ion War. Reach­ing over for anoth­er PADD, he knocks his cof­fee mug off the table. Curs­ing, he calls for ser­vices to come and clean it up, then grabs a cloth to mop up the worst of the mess. It is then that he hears a voice in his head telling him that he’s too dis­trac­ted and dis­or­gan­ised. He looks up to see his wife sit­ting on the oth­er side of his desk. They con­verse tele­path­ic­ally, and while she is unable to explain why she is here, rather than on her own ship a hun­dred light years away, she emphas­ises that he is allow­ing his wor­ries to erode his abil­ity to con­cen­trate. Tidy­ing up the mess on his desk will help him centre him­self. Sens­ing she is not really there, he looks around the room, and she is gone when he looks back. He begins tidy­ing anyway.

In the mess hall, Quinn is get­ting lunch before begin­ning the after­noon shift. He picks up a tray of food from the rep­lic­at­or and goes to join some col­leagues in the conn depart­ment. An anim­ated debate ensues, but he quickly real­ises it feels too famil­i­ar. Sus­pect­ing what he’ll see, he looks down at his tray – it is empty.

In main engin­eer­ing, Azon­an is closely mon­it­or­ing the activ­it­ies of Nossaag and his team, not quite trust­ing their tech­no­logy. A crew­man approaches with the engin­eer­ing duty roster, and he waves him off: “not now!” As he watches, he sees mem­bers of his team behav­ing oddly. Some are mov­ing in slow motion, oth­ers at high speed, while oth­ers appear frozen in time. Two engin­eers are repeat­ing their actions in loops of dif­fer­ent lengths, while Ensign Elser is star­ing at his withered hand, scream­ing silently.

Next to the warp con­trol, he spots a Human in an old-fash­ioned red shirt work­ing at the main con­trols. He looks famil­i­ar, but then Azon­an sees the warp core start to over­load. He imme­di­ately orders an evac­u­ation, but is hor­ri­fied by the effects as the engin­eers move through the time zones, suf­fer­ing bizarre tem­por­al shear effects.

Then the ship explodes.

The loop restarts once again, but this time fre­quent déjà vu exper­i­ences rap­idly enable the crew to begin fig­ur­ing out what’s going on. Raynor and Zepht com­pare their exper­i­ences, pre­dict­ing events, and are quickly joined by Kon­in. Quinn begins ask­ing oth­er crew mem­bers in the mess if they’re see­ing any­thing unusu­al, while Azon­an soon real­ises that some­thing odd is hap­pen­ing with time on the ship, and sus­pects the exper­i­ment­al sensors. Although there is no sign yet, he also sus­pects that they are destabil­ising the warp core, so he pre-empt­ively warns the bridge to pre­pare for emer­gency sau­cer sep­ar­a­tion. Time appears to be passing more rap­idly for him, and Raynor is forced to replay the mes­sage at a lower speed before they can be sure what he said.

Azon­an tries to work out the best way to shut down the sensors. Unfor­tu­nately, the tem­por­al shear planes across the cham­ber are mak­ing dir­ect com­mu­nic­a­tion impossible, and pre­vent­ing him from simply cut­ting power from the main con­sole. Between the archae­olo­gists and the main con­sole are sev­er­al dis­tinct zones, each with a dif­fer­ent flow of time, and some of them look very dan­ger­ous. He calls to the bridge, ask­ing for a site-to-site trans­port, but Raynor replies that the intern­al sensors don’t seem to be able to resolve the tem­por­al dif­fer­ences in suf­fi­cient detail.

Zepth and Raynor are, how­ever, able to pick out a rel­at­ively safe route through the tem­por­al zones, so they relay that to Azon­an. They also send a rep­lic­at­or pat­tern for a tem­por­al sta­bil­iser, hast­ily mod­i­fied from a trans­port pat­tern enhan­cer, say­ing that it should ward off the more extreme effects of trans­ition­ing through the tem­por­al shear planes. With this gad­get strapped to his arm, Azon­an heads towards the warp core, passing Elser, who is again star­ing at his withered hand. It is now clear that Elser­’s hand was on the oth­er side of one of the shear planes, and has aged rap­idly com­pared to the rest of him. Azon­an is forced to ignore this as he presses on towards the core.

Then, as he steps up to the core, he encoun­ters a stranger, a Caitian in 2260’s engin­eer­ing uni­form. When chal­lenged, the new­comer intro­duces him­self as Lt Cdr A’Mathi, and demands to know what Azon­an is doing on his engin­eer­ing deck. Azon­an imme­di­ately won­ders if Ensign A’Mathi is play­ing a prank, but the young engin­eer is still stand­ing in the door­way ward­ing off oth­er crew mem­bers as he had pre­vi­ously been instruc­ted. The two officers shake hands, and the Caitian remarks that this is obvi­ously not his main engin­eer­ing, so time travel must be involved. Azon­an quickly brings him up to speed and the two agree to work together.

They real­ise that the Andori­an is going to have to move quickly through the next sec­tion. This is exhib­it­ing a 5 second repeat­ing loop, dur­ing which one officer moves across the most dir­ect path through, lim­it­ing the safe peri­od to move. A’Mathi volun­teers to give Azon­an an extra push to move faster, and they begin tim­ing their operation.

Unfor­tu­nately, as Azon­an begins to move, A’Math­i’s keen ears detect a change in the warp core hum, indic­at­ing that the mat­ter­/anti-mat­ter mix is drift­ing out of bal­ance. Instinct­ively, he moves to fix the prob­lem by phys­ic­ally pulling out the dilith­i­um crys­tals (which will hor­rify Azon­an later when he finds out). Des­pite the lack of assist­ance, Azon­an is still able to make it across the inter­ven­ing space in time, yank­ing out the sensor sys­tem power con­duit, to the sur­prise of the archaelo­gic­al team, and the whole tem­por­al anom­aly collapses.

He turns to thank the vis­it­or, but he is gone.

Des­pite the tem­por­al resets, there has been some dam­age and a num­ber of injur­ies, not least to Ensign Elser, whose hand remains crippled. Even the archae­olo­gic­al team agrees with the cap­tain’s decision to ter­min­ate the sensor exper­i­ment, and return to Nar­en­dra Sta­tion. While the pro­ject will not be dis­con­tin­ued, it evid­ently needs sig­ni­fic­ant review and redesign.

The ‘B’ Plot: Fol­low­ing the end of the loop, reports con­tin­ue to come in regard­ing sight­ings of indi­vidu­als from the past. Quinn, in par­tic­u­lar, is involved in gath­er­ing up reports and passing them back to the bridge. Raynor ana­lyses the reports, track­ing the pro­gres­sion of the sight­ings from the mis­sion pod pylon to the bow.

Sus­pect­ing some kind of sen­tient psion­ic influ­ence, Zepht car­ries out an interi­or scan for unknown life-forms. He soon picks up some­thing odd near the bar area at the front of deck 9. Kon­in gath­ers up Zepht, Raynor and a secur­ity team and heads down in person.

He enters the bar, and sees his wife at a table, boun­cing a baby on her knee. She looks up as he approaches and says simply “I’m tired, take me home”. As she con­tin­ues to insist on going home, he tells her that she can­not be his wife, as she lives for explor­ing the stars. He con­tin­ues to demand that she show her true form, and she vanishes.

Tri­cord­er read­ings pin­point a non-humanoid life­form in the gal­ley to one side, so Raynor cov­ers Zepht as he approaches the door. With­in, Zepht sees his own moth­er, who also demands to be taken home. He real­ises she can­not be real, and tries to get the real source to show itself. Raynor, mean­while, catches sight of some­thing ser­pent­ine and pink below the counter. It’s a simple mat­ter to catch it, and they take it to the zoology lab for study.

It tran­spires that their stowaway is a hyp­noid, a psion­ic­ally-cap­able creature from the Rigel sys­tem. While not very intel­li­gent, it is very tim­id and cap­able of using men­tal pro­jec­tions to dis­tract pred­at­ors. This one appears to be lost and lonely, pro­ject­ing images it thinks its tar­gets asso­ci­ate with home, appar­ently as a kind of dis­tress call. It’s unclear how it got here, but it is a mem­ber of a pro­tec­ted spe­cies, and will need to be returned to its home­world or a suit­able facil­ity. With the hyp­noid in cap­tiv­ity, the ghosts cease to appear.

Obser­va­tions: It seems Ensign A’Mathi is the great-grand­neph­ew of the ori­gin­al Lex­ing­ton’s last engin­eer. From his cos­tume, he was play­ing a pir­ate holonov­el before the emergency.

Dia­logue: Quinn, upon the res­ol­u­tion of the time loop: “Oh good! I can finally eat…”

Ref­er­ences: A Rigel­lian hyp­noid was pre­vi­ously seen in the anim­ated Star Trek epis­ode “Mud­d’s Pas­sion”, when the notori­ous con­man made use of its tele­path­ic illu­sion gen­er­at­ing tal­ents in one of his scams.

Lieu­ten­ant Com­mand­er A’Mathi was the chief engin­eer aboard the Con­sti­tu­tion-class U.S.S. Lex­ing­ton NCC-1709. He was repor­ted lost with the rest of the crew when that ship dis­ap­peared in 2269.

The oth­er indi­vidu­al in 2260s uni­form spot­ted by Azon­an seems to have been Lieu­ten­ant Com­mand­er Gomez, A’Math­i’s pre­de­cessor. The Caitian encountered the tem­por­al ghost of Gomez on stard­ate 5722.

Ques­tions: How did the hyp­noid get on to the ship?