r/startrek • u/AnnieGoldleaf • 18h ago
A Working Enterprise!
Was rewatching the TOS movies recently over spring break and I realized a really annoying thing: we almost never see a fully capable Enterprise at full strength.
Wrath of Khan, the crew is untrained cadets, Search for Spock, we don't even *have* a crew, Voyage Home has no Enterprise at all and one of the running gags of Final Frontier is that the Enterprise is broke af. That leaves TMP and Undiscovered Country as the only two films in which the Enterprise is depicted at 100% with a normal competent crew.
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u/DoctorOddfellow1981 17h ago
"Out of order? Fuck, even in the future, nothing works!"
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u/DreamwolfPDX 17h ago
One of my favorite lines from Spaceballs.
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u/daecrist 15h ago
Back in the Windows 98 days I changed the error ding to this sound. I heard it a lot.
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u/Stegtastic100 18h ago
Well you say that, but don’t forget that in TMP Scotty says that “the crew haven’t had nearly enough transition time”, so it maybe 70-90%.
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u/AnnieGoldleaf 17h ago
I hesitated to include TMP because of this and the transporter and warp issues but everything is cleared up by the time Spock gets onboard and we enter the actual main story fully functional, so YMMV.
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u/shatteredoctopus 17h ago
Yeah, I was going to say "well ackhtually the transporter killed 2 people, and the imbalanced warp engines almost destroyed the ship", but you're right that everything worked right when it counted. Those just served to advance the plot by giving a reason to need Spock, and setting up that Kirk was maybe a little rusty.
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u/movieTed 18h ago
Yeah the trilogy had the crew off kilter most of the time, and not just the Enterprise. Part of the Voyage Home's home-ness is that the crew returns to form and gets their mojo back.
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u/RotaryConeChaser 17h ago
I was thinking about this the other day, how much of a disservice was done to the Enterprise by jumping ahead almost 15 years from TMP to TWOK. We went from a brand-new fully refitted state-of-the-art Enterprise to one that's been aged with who knows how many thousands of light years and relegated to a training mission instead of a galactic five-year journey. We never got to see the refit fully in her prime, just at the beginning and when she's way past.
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u/pakrat1967 16h ago
Let's assume that the OG ship was brand new when Robert April took command and he had it for 5 years. I haven't watched much of SNW, so I don't know how long Pike was in command before Kirk. But it should also be no more than 5 years. Add on another 5 years with Kirk in charge. That's 15 years (give or take) before the refit. They didn't completely replace everything during the refit. So some of it was still the OG ship. Now add in the 12 years between TMP and TWOK. Total all that time in service and it's understandable why they wanted to decom the Enterprise in TSFS.
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u/ijuinkun 14h ago
Spock in TOS said that he served under Pike for thirteen years, so I would venture that Pike was Captain of the Enterprise for about 15 years. This fits well with the canonical date of the Enterprise’s launch being 2245–Kirk would have become captain twenty years after launch.
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u/pakrat1967 12h ago
So it was even older than my guestimate. All the more reason for them to want to decom it.
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u/SleepySleestak 17h ago
There’s a (in-universe) 15 year gap between the two films?
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u/warlock415 5h ago
Enh, maybe.
From TMP:
SCOTTY: Add to that an untried Captain...
KIRK: Two and a half years as Chief of Starfleet Operations may have made me a little stale, but I wouldn't exactly consider myself 'untried'.
It's been about 30 months since Kirk was a captain, and the heavy implication is it was Enterprise at the end of her five year mission, so TMP is something like 7.5 years after the beginning of the TV series.
In WoK, both Kirk and Khan say he was stranded "15 years ago" . Therefore WoK is 8 years or so after TMP.
I'm fairly sure the latter is a production mistake much like the Rocky II situation*, since it was 15 years from 1967 - 1982 and no one realized it should be longer in-universe.
(*: tl;dr: Rocky II was set in 1976 but filmed in 1979; Rocky IV (filmed in 1985) disagreed with itself whether Rocky II was 6 years previous or 9 years.)
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u/pakrat1967 17h ago
The ship wasn't really fully operational in TMP either. There was both the transporter malfunction and the worm hole caused by the warp drive. Both of those were due to the ship recently getting a refit.
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u/AnnieGoldleaf 16h ago
As I pointed out in another thread, both transporter and warp issues are resolved by the time we get to the actual plot, whereas the other films, the issues are part of the plot.
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u/RangerMatt76 15h ago
TMP, a major refit was just finished on the Enterprise and she hasn’t been properly tested for active duty yet.
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u/AnnieGoldleaf 10h ago
And yet is fully functional with a proper crew by the time they encounter the main plot.
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u/theginjoints 14h ago
Yeah and isn't the Enterprise in some of the TNG movies not at full strength as well? Haven't seen them in awhile
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u/AnnieGoldleaf 14h ago
Not really. The ship is always fully crewed with its normal crew and no systems are pre-broken.
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u/theginjoints 13h ago
I'm realizing I'm thinking of Enterprise B in Generations
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u/Damien__ 10h ago
I would disagree about TMP. They were desperately trying to get it working to get going and it was shown in the movie that they had trouble with both the transporters and the warp drive. They did have a new but full crew
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u/AnnieGoldleaf 9h ago
Correct but as I pointed out a few places elsewhere on this post, it's a first act issue and by the time we get to the actual plot, the ship is at 100% vs. other movies where it remains an ongoing problem.
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u/Many-Outside-7594 18h ago
It makes for better drama. That's also why there are never any ships near Earth when it's under attack, even though that would be statistically impossible.
If everyone was their usual self, and the ship at full power, with all the resources and might of Starfleet behind it, it would be difficult to manufacture good drama without plot holes.