Clockwork Moon: Impossible Impact
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Captain Picard logs the Enterprise's mission to save Bre'el Four from its descending moon, establishing the existential stakes.
Data confirms the moon's fatal trajectory will bring it within 500 km of the planet, triggering immediate danger.
Bre'el's scientists reveal the moon's ferrous structure makes disintegration impossible, escalating the crisis.
Data shatters Riker's fragmentation solution—impact debris would amplify destruction across continents.
Garin paints apocalyptic consequences—tsunamis, earthquakes, and a planetary ice age—if the moon impacts.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Anxious, desperate — carrying the burden of his people's imminent extinction and pleading for intervention.
Doctor Garin appears on the main viewer, visibly distraught, detailing atmospheric drag predictions and the cascading catastrophic effects — his testimony personalizes Bre'el's vulnerability and presses the crew to act.
- • Convey the dire empirical consequences to the Enterprise command
- • Secure assistance or solutions to prevent annihilation of the impacted region
- • Scientific evidence must compel action to save lives
- • External aid (the Enterprise) is the best hope for mitigating disaster
Grave, controlled — outwardly composed but internally pressured by the scale of the moral and tactical choices at hand.
Captain Picard presides over the briefing, frames the situation with a log entry, asks the crucial question about disintegration, and keys his insignia to call on La Forge — moving the scene from diagnosis to command action.
- • Clarify the technical facts and timeline of the threat for decision making
- • Authorize and direct a practical engineering response to avert planetary catastrophe
- • Lives of millions trump personal sentiment and require decisive, pragmatic action
- • Accurate scientific information is necessary to choose an ethical and effective response
Clinically neutral yet purposeful — Data's tone imposes the emotional weight of the facts on the crew despite his lack of affect.
Data presents the orbital diagnostics and mass calculations with clinical precision, supplies the twenty‑nine hour projection and explains why fragmenting the moon merely redistributes harm, anchoring the scene in incontrovertible facts.
- • Convey accurate orbital and mass data to inform command decisions
- • Prevent ill‑considered tactical options that would increase overall destruction
- • Quantitative analysis must drive tactical decisions in physical crises
- • Misunderstanding mass/energy consequences leads to worse outcomes
Stern, focused — prioritizes readiness and enforcement of command decisions over dialogue.
Worf mans tactical/security, maintaining a guarded posture and situational vigilance, ensuring bridge order as the briefing escalates and the crew confronts the moral crisis described on the main viewer.
- • Maintain ship security and readiness during crisis deliberations
- • Be prepared to execute orders that protect the ship and permit any required operations
- • Order and discipline are essential under catastrophic threat
- • Security must not be compromised by emotional reactions
Frustrated by limited options but determined to find an actionable path to reduce casualties.
Commander Riker offers tactical intuition (suggesting fragmentation), challenges assumptions with practical bluntness, and presses the technical limits implied by Data's numbers — reactive and solution‑oriented but frustrated by constraints.
- • Explore all tactical options that could mitigate impact
- • Prompt immediate engineering response and avoid paralysis by analysis
- • Action, even risky, can be preferable to inaction when lives are at stake
- • Technical constraints can be pushed if command commits resources
Concerned and empathetic — she translates panic into sober emotional data for command without panicking herself.
Counselor Troi sits in a command chair as emotional ballast, monitoring crew affect and giving Picard a quiet human presence during the grim briefing; she registers Garin's distress and the crew's rising tension.
- • Stabilize crew morale and provide Picard emotional counsel
- • Ensure the human cost of choices remains present in tactical deliberations
- • Emotional states influence operational effectiveness and must be managed
- • Crew cohesion will be tested by imminent catastrophe and leadership must maintain it
Objects Involved
Significant items in this scene
The ferrous crystalline satellite is the scene's central antagonist: sensors track its deteriorating orbit, experts explain its tidal resilience, and its projected impact defines the moral and tactical urgency that forces command to consider impossible engineering options.
Main bridge sensor monitors display trajectory plots, orbital projections, and countdown metrics; they visualize Data's analysis and the scientists' findings, converting arcane calculations into legible evidence that shapes command decisions and raises emotional stakes.
Picard keys his Starfleet insignia to authorize an urgent channel to La Forge — the badge functions as the procedural instrument that converts command resolve into directed engineering action and signals the pivot from assessment to operational mobilization.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
The main bridge functions as the nerve center where empirical data, ethical weight, and command authority collide: senior officers sit in the command chairs, experts are displayed on the viewer, and the decision to pivot from analysis to action is taken here.
The Conn helm anchors the operational aspect of the scene: the supernumerary at Conn represents the ship's immediate ability to maneuver while command considers engineering fixes that might alter trajectory.
The Enterprise's orbital position provides the vantage and jurisdiction to assess and attempt intervention; orbiting above Bre'el makes the ship the immediate responder and frames the crisis as a problem the crew can conceivably address.
The western continent on Bre'el Four is identified as the projected impact zone — it provides the human scale for catastrophe and is invoked repeatedly to quantify destruction, casualties, and long‑term climatic effects.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
No narrative connections mapped yet
This event is currently isolated in the narrative graph
Part of Larger Arcs
Key Dialogue
"DATA: The satellite's trajectory continues to deteriorate, Captain... This orbit will bring it to within five hundred kilometers of the planet's surface."
"SCIENTIST: No, it has a ferrous crystaline structure and will be able to withstand tidal forces, Captain..."
"DATA: Twenty-nine hours... projected somewhere on the western continent. It would destroy an area eight hundred kilometers in radius."