“I thought Brannon was fucking with me.”
It’s easy to see why Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Jonathan Frakes had that reaction when he first read writer Brannon Braga’s script for “Cause and Effect” 30 years ago. Neither the series nor television in general had ever attempted something like it before.
Frakes had the challenging task of both acting in and directing the deceptively simple season five episode, which finds Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the crew of the Enterprise-D stuck in a time loop. The loop results in the crew dying over and over again as their ship explodes upon contact with another starship, the very old U.S.S. Bozeman. With each time loop, Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden) gets to play detective as she leads the crew’s efforts to escape the loop.
Related Stories
The result is a riveting, tension-filled hour of Star Trek unlike any before or, really, since. “Cause and Effect” not only made TV history when it aired on March 23, 1992, it also quickly found its way near the top of many fans’ lists of favorite Star Trek episodes.
According to Frakes and Braga, that was not something the production anticipated. Braga’s script was seen as a gamble, as it challenged the tried-and-true episodic formula that has fueled the franchise since the 1960s original series.
In honor of “Cause and Effect” celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, The Hollywood Reporter revisited the episode with Braga and Frakes for a deep dive into the making of a sci-fi classic.
“Originally, I was staff writer at the time, and I was pitching to [the late TNG showrunner and executive producer] Michael Piller a Rashomon-style idea I wanted to do,” Braga tells THR about how he came upon what would become “Cause and Effect.”
Braga had always wanted to tell the same story from several points of view, one that would unfold several times. But he couldn’t quite figure out how to expand that kernel into a full hour of TV, until it dawned on him: “Why not just tell the same story over and over? That seemed like something I haven’t seen before.”
Initially, there was some doubt that anyone would ever see it.
“We weren’t really committed to doing time travel at the time,” Braga recalls. “[Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry, who was still alive, wasn’t a big fan of time travel, because I think he felt it was a bit of a science fiction cliché. And he’d done it with [the classic Original Series episode] ‘City on the Edge of Forever.'”
Braga got around that strict mandate by arguing that time travel doesn’t have to be just traveling back in time to the past. One could be forced to repeat it, by getting caught up in a time loop. That realization got the episode closer to a green light. And it didn’t hurt that Braga and Ron Moore, the pair that later would co-write the TNG series finale, “All Good Things …”, had somewhat favorable status on staff that allowed for the outside-the-box idea to squeeze past the very specific parameters that Piller and executive producer Rick Berman had about what could pass for a Next Gen episode.
Despite Braga’s cachet as one of the show’s strongest writers, the initial script for “Cause and Effect” was met with some trepidation.
“The early reactions to the script were similar to the reactions that the audience had when watching the episode, which was confusion,” Braga remembers. “Because you’re reading that script and you’re like, ‘Wait a second. There’s got to be a mistake here. The acts just keep repeating. Is this a joke?’”
In fact, following the explosive teaser that sees the Enterprise blow up, Braga opens each subsequent act of the script by repeating the exact same (or similar) dialogue from other acts. (Contrary to popular belief, the episode wasn’t just an easy, “cut and paste” affair for the writer, which is quickly evident if you read his script.)
The time loop format confused audiences to the point where, infamously, viewers called in complaints to their local affiliates that ran the syndicated episode, thinking the repeating acts were a glitch.
How that design would unfold visually fell to Frakes, who lucked out with this episode following three previous directorial efforts on TNG, which include such memorable hours as “The Offspring,” “Reunion” and “The Drumhead.”
“At first, I didn’t really get that what Brannon was trying to do was a different kind of Rashomon story,” Frakes says. “It was an evolution almost of the way [the characters] understand what was going on.” From there, Frakes said it was like an “advanced director’s test” on how to shoot the same scenes in different enough ways that the audience didn’t lose out on the new information that every loop provides.
“There are only so many shots you can do,” Frakes explains. “So, stylistically, we tried different things for different scenes — and J.P. Farrell, who cut the episode, deserves a lot of the credit for making those sequences work. We had a plan that we needed to shoot each scene more than one way … we would shoot the master from either side of the room. But I really enjoyed the challenge. Once I realized that [Brannon] wasn’t fucking with me, it was fun.”
Frakes even discovered a shot that TNG had never done before.
“I think during prep, I was with Doug Dean, he was my first [A.D.], and we’re shooting one of the many scenes in the conference room, the observation lounge set,” recalls Frakes. “And we got an overhead shot of the conference room that we hadn’t used before. I said: ‘What if we go all the way up there?’ And [Doug] said: ‘Well, nobody’s gone there.’ To which I was like: ‘Oh, all the better!’”
Frakes and his crew also found ways to shoot the familiar set from new positions, such as filming a master from Riker’s side of the bridge, or starting from the station manned by Ensign Ro (Michelle Forbes). In one important loop, Frakes even borrowed from the most famous movie director ever.
“We did a lot of those Spielberg-style push-ins and close-ups. We started with Crusher figuring it out first, then [Michael] Dorn (Worf) as he figures it out during a poker game. And then Picard, later in a scene, we push in on him reading a book as he realizes he’s read that section before,” says Frakes. “So there were enough kind of signature, visual metaphors for [the characters] figuring it out and agreeing on what was going on.”
One of the hardest things for Braga was cracking just how the characters figured out their exit strategy from the loop.
“The two most challenging things about the script,” Braga recalls, “was how to get them physically out of the time loop. That was the main hurdle. And the second thing was the crew explaining to themselves, and therefore the audience, just what the hell is going on here.”
For the former, Braga turned to his best resource: His fellow writers in the room.
“It was Michael Piller, Ron Moore, Joe Menoski and Jeri Taylor. I remember being in the room, and I needed help. ‘How the hell does this resolve itself?’” Braga can’t recall if it was him or one of his colleagues that came up with Data (Brent Spiner) seeing the three rank pips on Riker’s collar and using that to send a message to a future loop. But he does remember that “we had an amazing staff of writers, and we helped each other.”
Unfortunately, Braga was largely on his own when it came to the second most difficult thing about writing the episode: The briefing room scene. Here, Geordi (LeVar Burton) explains to his shipmates that they are caught in a very Trek-ian “temporal causality loop.” Ironically, Braga found himself in a time loop of his own, rewriting the scene over and over again.
“It was my first big ‘technobabble’ scene, so it couldn’t just sound cool. It had to sound plausible. It had to resolve all the clues that had been accumulating,” says Braga. “In addition to all the explaining, you have to bring your own voice to it, too. You try to pepper in some cool or shocking moments, like when Picard asks how long we have been in the loop and Geordi responds with something like, ‘It could be years.’ But Piller had me rewrite that scene so many times. I remember over Christmas break of that year, I was working on that scene.”
The episode culminates with Picard faced with the same two choices to get out of this mess that got him into it: In order to avoid collision with the starship Bozeman, he can follow Data’s suggestion of using a tractor beam to push the Enterprise out of the way, or go with Riker’s advice and decompress the main shuttle bay, allowing the explosive reaction to kick them out of the way. Thanks to Data’s message of “three” throughout the ship, the android knows it is his option that dooms the ship, so he goes with Riker’s shuttle bay plan and saves the crew. Originally, this climactic sequence concluded with a visual gag: Glimpses, like after-images, of all the previous times the Enterprise and the Bozeman crashed.
“That was cut for budget,” Braga says. As was the initial concept for the Bozeman to be depicted as a ship from Kirk’s era of The Original Series, with her crew wearing classic series uniforms. Instead, the production “kit-bashed” the Reliant starship model from Wrath of Khan to create the Bozeman. They also redressed the Enterprise-D’s battle bridge set to resemble something closer to the Khan era of the 1980s, and put the crewmembers of the Bozeman in Wrath of Khan-style uniforms.
The episode’s final scene hinges on a surprise cameo from a future TV sitcom legend: Cheers’ Kelsey Grammer as the Bozeman’s captain, Bateson. Grammer’s casting as a captain who has seemingly been stuck in this loop for at least 90 years is one of Frakes’ favorite stories from the production.
“This was pre-Frasier,” Frakes says. “Before he had his spinoff, he was just a member of the [Cheers] ensemble. And they shot that show right around the corner from us, because we were on the same lot. And Kelsey, he was a Trekker. A huge Star Trek fan. And he asked to be on the show, like a number of actors that were fans, like Whoopi Goldberg, did. That’s how I understood it. It was just one day of shooting and I had no idea. But it was fun to shoot.”
“Fun” is a word both fans of “Cause and Effect” and its creators throw around often when discussing this landmark episode of the series, which, after three decades, still remains an outstanding and popular installment of the franchise, which currently clocks in at over 800 episodes.
“When you’re writing it, you have no idea it’s going to turn out to be what it is today,” Braga explains. “I mean, Frakes did a great, great job directing it, but I could never have predicted that we’d be talking about this 30 years later. You just don’t know. You’re not sure if it’s working, which is maybe a good sign when you’re doing something new. But it was unclear to anybody whether or not the audience was going to accept it.”
