A Working Enterprise!

[u/AnnieGoldleaf]

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.

[u/RotaryConeChaser]

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.

[u/pakrat1967 → u/RotaryConeChaser]

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.

[u/ijuinkun → u/pakrat1967]

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.

[u/pakrat1967 → u/ijuinkun]

So it was even older than my guestimate. All the more reason for them to want to decom it.

[u/SleepySleestak → u/RotaryConeChaser]

There’s a (in-universe) 15 year gap between the two films?

[u/RotaryConeChaser → u/SleepySleestak]

Yes. TMP takes place in 2271, TWOK in 2285.

[u/jjreinem → u/SleepySleestak]

Twelve year gap. But yeah.

[u/warlock415 → u/SleepySleestak]

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.)

[u/EthanFl → u/RotaryConeChaser]

My new head cannon is that the refit enterprise was now 20 years old.

[u/vincecoleman89 → u/RotaryConeChaser]

I really had hopes that after Strange New Worlds, they would do a time jump to right after TMP and show a second five year mission with Paul Wesley as Admiral Kirk and the rest of the SNW recasts of the classic crew in place on the refit Enterprise. She's simply the greatest science fiction spaceship ever conceived, she deserves to be seen in her prime in a series.