Headscratchers / Star Trek: The Next Generation S6E23 "Timescape"

• When Picard, Troi, and Data visit Main Engineering, they see that the Enterprise's warp core has started to explode. But when time resumes, the Romulans run around and converse as if the Enterprise is about to explode. It then takes a whole 33 seconds between the point when time starts to flow normally, and the Enterprise explosion.
  • So if the warp core explosion was "already in progress", even if it were only nanoseconds into the blast, shouldn't the Enterprise have exploded immediately, and not 33 seconds later?
  • If the Enterprise exploded immediately, then the Romulan Warbird would've experienced the shockwave, and the crew would've been distracted from the crisis for a moment, and seen Data, Troi, and La Forge (who weren't there seconds earlier). This would've necessatated a completely different (and convoluted) story track at that point; one which would have Picard's team trying to both convice the Romulans of the time pockets, and hunt down the desperate aliens. Keeping the Romulans distracted with the emergency allowed Picard's team to go unnoticed as time reset itself.
• How did the Enterprise evacuate the entire crew of the D'Deridex-class Romulan Warbird, between the time that the power transfer beam's feedback loop started, and the moment the Warbird disappeared, after the beam was disrupted? The Warbird (1.3km long) is over twice the size of the Enterprise (642m in length), and should have at least the same number of people (~1000 personnel). Were they at the very end of the evacuation when the power transfer beam was cut? What about the Romulans in the D'Deridex engineering area? How was there time to evacuate them, too? Also, only a few Romulans had been beamed over when time stopped on both ships. When did they have another 20 minutes needed to properly evacuate the rest of the Romulans?
  • Specifically, evacuating 1000 people with 20 transporters (10 total on each ship), each with 6 pads (120 pads total), requires 8 or 9 transporter cycles. Let's also assume that they beam into the Enterprise's transporter rooms from anywhere on the Warbird, and beam onto the Enterprise (not the transporter room) with the Romulan transporters. At around 30 seconds per transport cycle, a full evacuation should take 250 seconds, or just over 4 minutes. And that is only if every Romulan were ready to transport, if half of them were queued up outside the Romulan transporter rooms, and nobody was running about gathering items or performing other evacuation tasks.
  • Also, why did the Enterprise continue to evacuate the Romulans after the power transfer beam was disrupted? The crisis was over (or so they thought), so there was no longer a need to evacuate the Warbird. Everyone on board the Romulan ship should've stayed on board when the ship returned to its own timeline or time period.
• When the Enterprise exploded (even just for a moment), why didn't the explosion destroy the runabout and Romulan Warbird, too? The Yamato warp core breach in Contagion was so powerful that the Enterprise violently shook when hit with the Yamato's debris, even with their shields up. However, in this situation, nobody had their shields up (the Romulans were transporting over to the Enterprise), and everyone was within "I see you waving in the window" distance from each other. The Warbird and runabout should've been toast.
  • And then the episode would've ended, as would the show.
  • Except that the moment the signal-emitting tricorder was destroyed, the signals it sent out would've ceased, and time would have reversed back to where it stopped, just as it did in the episode.