Star Trek-RM: The Enterprise Incident… Grading/Discussion
- Thread starter AstroSmurf
- Start date
Count me in as one of the dummies. I found the addition of the traditional Romulan ship to be a nice surprise.
This is a good episode. Shatner's acting style really comes in handy when he needs to play a "madman" ("The Enemy Within", "Whom Gods Destroy"). Spock manages to get jiggy with the Romulan commander without losing his composure. BTW, does anyone else think they "did it"? There's a couple of lines at the end where they discuss what they "exchanged".
MeanJoePhaser
Admiral
Changes in the timestream. Or a wizard did it.
I always chalk it up to the Season 3 writers forgetting elements of "Balance of Terror." Bad continuity.
^ Or it might be just a simple television show with a writer who forgot about the minutia of an earlier episode.
I have always loved this episode. I don't know why really. It could be the insane plan hatched to procure the cloaking device or the neat action packed story or the nifty character moments. Is Kirk dead? Will the ship survive? Will Spock succumb to the Romulan Commander? Will Scotty say something else hilarious? What ever the case I love this one. I give it an A.
As for the remastering... I gave it an excellent. I really loved most of the shots. I also really liked how they mixed up the ships too. I do agree that the showing the nacelles in the reverse angle is a bit "over the top" at times but the supposed distances between ships is something Trek has never tried to get right. It has always been more about what looks dramatic and interesting rather than scientifically accurate. If we are going to get snippy about it than we might as well pile all five series and the movies up and burn them in effigy to bad science.
I have always loved this episode. I don't know why really. It could be the insane plan hatched to procure the cloaking device or the neat action packed story or the nifty character moments. Is Kirk dead? Will the ship survive? Will Spock succumb to the Romulan Commander? Will Scotty say something else hilarious? What ever the case I love this one. I give it an A.
As for the remastering... I gave it an excellent. I really loved most of the shots. I also really liked how they mixed up the ships too. I do agree that the showing the nacelles in the reverse angle is a bit "over the top" at times but the supposed distances between ships is something Trek has never tried to get right. It has always been more about what looks dramatic and interesting rather than scientifically accurate. If we are going to get snippy about it than we might as well pile all five series and the movies up and burn them in effigy to bad science.
I suppose we can always say that the device seen in "BoT" wasn't called a cloaking device by the Enterprise personnel...remember it was called a "practical invisibility screen" by Spock in the briefing room in that earlier episode and nobody else said "cloaking device." Maybe by 2268 the crew thought that since it was an entirely different type and class of ship involved that it might be different technology and called it different.
Also, the ships in BoT were still detectable by motion sensors while those in TEI apparently were not.
Actually, no, they got it right. In "Balance of Terror", Spock says "A blip on the sensor. Could be the intruder" and " Blip has changed its heading. And in a leisurely maneuver." So the Enterprise could detect the Bird of Prey - just not that easily.
Then, in "The Enterprise Incident", Kirk asks "Mr. Spock, you said you had a theory on why your sensors didn't pick up the new ships", to which Spock replies "I believe the Romulans have developed a cloaking device which renders our tracking sensors useless." So these two episodes don't contradict each other; rather, the second one builds on the first.
All valid points, especially from the perspective of overly anal Trekkies 40 years later. I think the real reason is much simplier.
That's not to say this hasn't always bugged me, too.
Exactly. This is episodic television at its most traditional. If the opening credits didn't say "5 year mission", there would be no continuity.
That's not to say this hasn't always bugged me, too.
Also, different writers penned the two episodes almost two whole years apart. That never helps.
Calling it something else (invisibility screen vs cloaking device) is the workaround ENT writers were planning to use to have a pre-TOS cloaking device. In their case they were supposed to be using the word "stealth" instead of "cloak", but later on they forgot about it and used cloak. But using different names doesn't really work. The casual viewers don't care, and hardcore fans don't really buy it (unless they badly want to). But having this cloaking contradiction in TOS makes it a little (and only a little) easier to tolerate ENT's transgression in this regard.
fyi here the cloaking device question I asked ENT's esteemed writer/producer Mike Sussman (who is a damn good writer) and his reply in a TrekToday chat:
http://www.treknation.com/interviews/mike_sussman_qanda.shtml
fyi here the cloaking device question I asked ENT's esteemed writer/producer Mike Sussman (who is a damn good writer) and his reply in a TrekToday chat:
http://www.treknation.com/interviews/mike_sussman_qanda.shtml
Cyrus: In an interview with Star Trek Communicator magazine you admitted that all this cloaking technology we see in Enterprise (specially from the Romulans) is contradictory with TOS. Is there any plans to address this somehow in the show?
Mike Sussman: Well... I don't know if I used the word "contradictory".At the time of that article, we had yet to see any Romulans on Enterprise. To my knowledge, there are no plans to address the cloaking issue on the show.
In the first season, we encountered a few invisible "stealth vessels", which was a bit of a cheat, but one that I thought worked brilliantly since it allowed us to run into invisible enemies without getting into whether they were "really" cloaked, or just transparent to sensors. Then at the end of the season, the crew suddenly started talking about cloaking devices, a term we'd never heard before, and it's been "cloaking this" and "cloaking that" ever since. *sigh* It was the end of the first season and everyone was exhausted... that's the only excuse I can offer!
Last edited:
We can always chalk up the NCC-1701 computers having no record of cloak and invisibility screens to Starfleet classifying earlier systems and devices, especially in light of the Earth-Romulan War and other negative encounters with hostile races that may or may not have been experimenting with cloak technology.
OK, back to the FXs: was anyone else bothered by the two banking turns the Enterprise makes, one in the intro segment, the other towards the end when it hauls ass away from the Romulan ships? In both cases the Enterprise slowly banks away from the camera, but the camera is "locked" at a constant distance from the ship, so the ship is changing it's direction relative to the camera, & therefore, the stars should be seen changing their direction of movement as well, staying PARALLEL to the direction the ship is pointing as it turns. But in both cases, the stars don't shift their direction relative to the camera, so it looks like the Enterprise is eventually traveling SIDEWAYS!!!! Come on, CBS guys, this is basic CGI 101!!! You blew 2 good ideas with sloppy execution! I'm bummed.
I'm not sure why we're having these various theories about writers forgetting what another writer wrote two years earlier when, as I pointed out in my first post in this thread soon after it began, there was a line in Fontana's first draft which acknowledged that it was an improved cloaking device. So, to put an end to the needless speculation, here is the exact line from Fontana's June 7, 1968 draft:
SPOCK: I believe the Romulans have devised an improved cloaking system which renders our tracking sensors useless until the cloaking shield is deliberately dropped.
So, we can certainly wonder why the line was slightly changed, but it was there to begin with. Fontana at least knew her show history, and wasn't blowing off or forgetting Paul Schneider.
Sir Rhosis
SPOCK: I believe the Romulans have devised an improved cloaking system which renders our tracking sensors useless until the cloaking shield is deliberately dropped.
So, we can certainly wonder why the line was slightly changed, but it was there to begin with. Fontana at least knew her show history, and wasn't blowing off or forgetting Paul Schneider.
Sir Rhosis
...And as Racer_X said, the dialogue doesn't even really need the word "improved", because it is already implied in the content of the phrase.
That is, Spock isn't saying "The Romulans have developed a Cloaking Device (that is, a device that is capable of fooling our tracking systems)". He is saying "The Romulans have developed a cloaking device that, unlike other cloaking devices, is capable of fooling our tracking systems". The latter phrase would be the correct answer to the question posed by Kirk, at least as much as the former.
I'm not convinced that the writer who trimmed Fontana's version was deliberately aiming for a Clever Continuity Effect That Still Doesn't Confuse Random Audience. That, however, is the end result.
Timo Saloniemi
That is, Spock isn't saying "The Romulans have developed a Cloaking Device (that is, a device that is capable of fooling our tracking systems)". He is saying "The Romulans have developed a cloaking device that, unlike other cloaking devices, is capable of fooling our tracking systems". The latter phrase would be the correct answer to the question posed by Kirk, at least as much as the former.
I'm not convinced that the writer who trimmed Fontana's version was deliberately aiming for a Clever Continuity Effect That Still Doesn't Confuse Random Audience. That, however, is the end result.
Timo Saloniemi
Yeah, I doubt it was an intentional effort to confuse viewers. But the way dialogue is edited and filmed it just ended up that way. Had one or two more short sentences been there none of us would be debating this.
Perhaps, but I'd rather we had an explanation which made the slightest bit of sense instead.
``Man, there's like a half-dozen powers in the galaxy with the ability to make their ships invisible, and it made for all sorts of frustration in our recent war with the Romulans. We better never talk about this ever again ever!''
``Agreed!''
Hell, Starfleet even classified most of the details about the Delphic Expanse and the Xindi Crisis. And the Expanse was a region of space 2,000 light years across that countless species lived inside of or at least knew about! If Starfleet brass can classify the details of an entire region of outer space then simple cloak technology most people never even saw would be a piece of cake.
Similar threads
- Sticky
- Poll
