My notes from 306. Apologies for stuff already covered:
[Aside: WOW!!!]
- The episode opens showing that the Echelon, Excelsior II, and Duderstadt classes are all around the same size and habitable volume (and by extension, so are the Sagan and Connie III). While each one doubtless has certain features that establish it as unique (the Duderstadt has an aft-facing sensor, the number of nacelles on the Sagan, the whole <waves hands at the Connie III saucer> THAT...), it nonetheless seems to suggest that in this era Starfleet likes its ships to have around the same sort of general displacement metric.
- The Echelons seem to be established as a "mid model" starship design, with known features. Are we saying they're a workhorse class of the fleet, the equivalent of the Mirandas and Excelsiors of their day?
- And I'm (very) slowly coming round to the notion that the Excelsior IIs we've seen could be literal refits of the original Excelsior hulls if Starfleet can do the same sort of thing from the Connie I to II or whatever fandom settles on with the SNW Enterprise. The two Excelsior IIs have numbers in the 42000 range which match (most) of the newer Excelsior hulls we run into in the TNG era. My headcanon goes that they're post Utopia Planitia upgrades that are the equivalent of SLEP upgrades in today's US warships, which have been known to result in significant external changes (though not to the visual degree we see here). QED.
- The "decoy transponder" is of a new design - it mostly echoes the
multispatial probe used on Voyager, which suggests the latter is not a ground-up design but an adaptation of an existing one (or at least its design theory). There are also hints of the Class 1 and 2 probes from the TNG-TM.
- So how are we positioning the new uniform variants with the vertical pips? Geordi's seems to be a new flag officer's variant (we saw Admirals in 201 wearing the standard uniform but with Admiral's bars, and another Admiral's variant with a similar pattern).
- And these new leather field jackets are starting to filter in, with Riker, Jack and Raffi sporting them for no real reason (especially Jack - whom I'm guessing is still hiding in plain sight per Seven's directive, but in STYLE!). Promo pictures suggest Worf and Geordi will soon trade up as well. Worf also removes his baldric at the end of this episode.
[It was a joke amongst the writers for "Generations" that the cast filtered into their new uniforms as they took showers between scenes - and what that meant for Crusher, Troi and Worf.]
- Worf is still using his dolphin phaser despite access to the Titan's more modern selection.
- Back in "All Good Things" Crusher could not definitively diagnose Irumodic Syndrome in Picard, circa 2370. Here it's not a problem identifying it - props to the advancement of medical science, or Crusher just knowing what to look for these days.
- The Ten Forward program seems to be running perpetually now, the equivalent of Voyager's extended use of certain settings like the resort, Sandrine's, etc. They also have access to a bartender who is not Guinan. Also, it's daytime now. Last year, Picard visited the "real" bar when it was daytime, but no daylight was visible through the windows.
- Echelon class phaser fire - it's like a phaser bolt, not a constant beam, but it still gets emitted from different places along the strip and with none of the traditional phaser strip firing sequence. Maybe this is the trackable weapons fire Sidney was talking about?
- A "Genesis II Device" - not Genesis Device II? Are we implying that it's not the second Genesis DEVICE, but that the device is for a Genesis II effect..?
- We are finally gifted a real look at Tribble physiology, assuming it's a standard Tribble. Basically it's like starfish with teeth, claws and possibly extra insectoid legs, and everything that's used for locomotion is basically mouth-related. This goes all the way back to TOS when the props people basically figured that Tribbles basically pulled themselves along the ground with their mouths. Anyway, we know from a Short trek that a Tribble is mostly one muscle, like a scallop, so all the stuff we see under the hood here seems to be all that ISN'T muscle or fur.
- So this just might be THE old spacedock, making it some 120 years between its first chronological sighting and now (if not more). How does one move something this big - or this old? Do we break it up into pieces and move them? Was the spacedock capable of interstellar travel in the first place?
- And does this support the notion that at some point Starfleet replaced the old mushrooms with scaled-up versions that can support ships the saucer width of the Galaxy class and her peers?
- Despite Geordi talking about it, no one else visits the museum while they're there. Did the Titan happen to pop by when they were closed to the public? Or did several runabouts full of snotty kids come by off screen between scenes?
- So are the various museum ships equipped with dummy lights or spinny things to make it LOOK like they're functional ships? In general, today's museum pieces are little more than the shells of the originals: the engines are removed (on planes anyway) and sometimes they place plugs or mockups of stuff like engines, cockpits, etc. to give the illusion of a functional craft. As it stands, someone fixed all the damage the Enterprise-A took at Khitomer in the past 110 years, but IMO it's probably just skin deep, and no one replaced the dining room and other internal spaces that were lost.
- I'm guessing they can in fact board the ships, as both Riker and Troi recall visiting the NX-01 in the museum and touring that Enterprise's bridge; and Picard muses about a Connie there as well ("Relics"). Still, there's probably ample room in the rest of the museum for full-sized mockups of ALL those ships' bridges for kids to crawl over and break, or for people to take holo-selfies or whatever.
- Still, those rings around the museum ships seem to be kinda pointless. I'm a runner, and I've literally run around the three accessible sides of the the much smaller USS Midway museum in San Diego - it's not a short stroll. Are there really fast moving walkways on those rings? Would people be able to beam from one point to the next?
- The Titan drops their cloak to beam the away team back, but this was not a problem with the HMS Bounty in Star Trek IV. I'm guessing that this was a compromise they had to make to get the cloak to work in the first place on a ship it wasn't designed for, and to make it work so that the Cole and Sternbach couldn't find her with sensors more than a century more advanced.
- While we don't know the weight, the Bounty's cloak is smaller than the one stolen from the Rotarran on DS9. It's also visible in the first place.
- Riker is inhibited with a Transport inhibitor dart! And possibly a tranquilizer of some kind? He doubles over in more pain than he does when getting worked over by some big muscly Changelings later on. Are we implying that Changelings are wimps?
- While it's hardly a new thing, they are working on the new Data in Sickbay, not Engineering. They more often used Engineering in the past, notably giving Data a whole closet to himself in "Insurrection". Of course it's probably because they don't have an Engineering set for the Titan - or because this golem body has some biological components to it?
Mark
