It's one thing for me to suspend my disbelief when it comes to the many questions about details of a story as opaque as this, such as how Captain Picard travels back in time, what the vortex is, why it wants to capture the Enterprise and how the Enterprise escapes it in the end, but for me to suspend my disbelief on the irrational actions of the characters on top of that is just asking too much. The notion that the ship is caught in an inescapable time loop turns out to be (mostly) correct but is pulled completely out of thin air by the crew, as is Picard's idea that changing any detail of the events previously unfolded will lead to escape; even then that doesn't explain why he thinks letting alt-Picard leave would doom the ship, and EVEN THEN, killing his double in cold blood is not only needlessly drastic but also just cruel and plain un-Picard-like. The concept of trying to escape from a time loop was later revisited with way better execution in the season 5 episode Cause And Effect, so this episode might as well be obsolete as far as I'm concerned.
Review of Time Squared
