is there truly anything worse than a story which seems to end exactly where it started? perhaps I'm being harsh, really. Echoes was published in January 1998. year of hell, a two-part story line which also sees everything reverting to the way it was at the beginning, more or less, first aired in November the year before. deadlock, an episode of the series often mentioned in Echoes aired in march of 1996, so you'd have thought there was plenty of time,as it were, for events to propagate before a television episode muscled in.

Still, this sort of story allows for mass destructionn and all sorts of things, because as with "it's all a dream", everyone's fine at the end. not that any of the authors seem to be in for that ssort of thing; to be truthful I expected better of Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch as they are quite prominent.

Still, the concept is familiar. As with the TV episodes mentioned above, things can just go full circle and no harm done. Add Voyager's Endgame, TNG's Cause and Effect and yesterday's Enterprise and probably a TOS episode or two (I haven't watched many) and you're probably well on your way to imagining how droll this sort of thing can get.