Out of these, Data is able to edit out three significant moments that re-construct the narrative of the Enterprise's destruction. To escape the loop, they attempt to send a message to Data from this loop into the next, a message that is likely to be interpreted by Data as perhaps little more than a subconscious irritation. In that next loop, after we witness yet another destruction of the Enterprise, everything seems to change. In fact, the number three continues to pop up throughout this loop until Data manages to save the Enterprise in the final scene when he realizes that the number 3 points to the proper course of action to escape destruction. Throughout these loops, the class went to work interpreting the narrative.
Narrative is one of our primary tools for making sense of traumatic events.
They do not present life as it actually happens in the real world, for life in the real world is often chaotic and meaningless, something like the slice of the real that Dr. Crusher hears in her room and that Data manages to record. Life works by chance, hence the reason for starting the show with a card game, as Craig Stalbaum pointed out. The Enterprise, faced with a traumatic, meaningless destruction could be said to enact Freud's repetition compulsion , repeating the same events until enough meaning is imposed, represented by all the 3s that, as it turns out, Data has unconsciously made to appear throughout the ship in the final loop. Narrative selects that which is significant in a diegetic world and presents these events to us in an ordered way. Narrative does not, however, present us with events in a simple, chronological way, which is the narratological definition of story .