The Enetrprise D's Record of Battles

[Tomalak]

We don't see our heroes "not doing anything" about the shield thing. We don't see our heroes, period. For all we know, LaForge could have been working his fingers to bleeding stubs trying to punch in new shield commands, all of them voided by the VISOR tap. The camera just didn't go there.

[...]

As for scanning for Soran's VISOR tap, why should our heroes have been successful? Soran concealed the device. We could give him credit for doing it right - it took Data several days to figure out how Tal'Shiar did a similar thing in "Mind's Eye"!

Timo Saloniemi

Geordi comes back from captivity, and as soon as he's returned to engineering, the Klingons start blasting holes in the ship. No one saw the connection? He should have thought, "Hang on a minute, something's not right here", put a bag over his head and made Farrell remodulate the shields.

Maybe that incident was the last staw. After years of being blinded or used by bad guys, he was finally convinced to ditch the VISOR and go for the Terminator eyes.

 

[Timo]

Geordi comes back from captivity, and as soon as he's returned to engineering, the Klingons start blasting holes in the ship. No one saw the connection? He should have thought, "Hang on a minute, something's not right here", put a bag over his head and made Farrell remodulate the shields.

Only the audience could jump to such a conclusion, not the heroes... There was no known history of spies at Engineering sabotaging the ship, so that wouldn't have been anybody's first guess. There was some history of LaForge being possessed to do the enemy's bidding, but that was a very different situation, and LaForge himself would obviously vouch that he was not being mind-controlled in ST:GEN. The VISOR had never before betrayed LaForge in this manner.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[EmperorTiberius]

We don't see our heroes "not doing anything" about the shield thing. We don't see our heroes, period. For all we know, LaForge could have been working his fingers to bleeding stubs trying to punch in new shield commands, all of them voided by the VISOR tap. The camera just didn't go there.

[...]

As for scanning for Soran's VISOR tap, why should our heroes have been successful? Soran concealed the device. We could give him credit for doing it right - it took Data several days to figure out how Tal'Shiar did a similar thing in "Mind's Eye"!

Timo Saloniemi

Geordi comes back from captivity, and as soon as he's returned to engineering, the Klingons start blasting holes in the ship. No one saw the connection? He should have thought, "Hang on a minute, something's not right here", put a bag over his head and made Farrell remodulate the shields.

Maybe that incident was the last staw. After years of being blinded or used by bad guys, he was finally convinced to ditch the VISOR and go for the Terminator eyes.

I don't know if they could think like that in the heat of battle with the pressure, fear, lack of time, and confusion playing their part in the scene.

 

[Strider]

Yeah but come on, look at the beating the unshielded Odyssey took against three Jem'Hadar fighters. The E-D was supposed to have some pretty good guns, so shields or no shields just keep firing torpedoes until the BOP is scrap. It even looks weird on screen, like Riker is majorly pulling his punches.

 

[Timo]

But the Twisted Sisters make a big thing out of the fact that their shields are holding. Clearly, their original pessimism on that issue is being contradicted. Perhaps Soran helped them along in more ways than one? It's not uncommon in Star Trek for an advanced ship, no matter how small, to withstand heavy fire from the hero ship - and Soran could have turned the old BoP into something quite alien and advanced with his super-duper knowledge.

All this is compatible with how the battle was portrayed. None of it is particularly enjoyable to watch - the battle should have been filmed with more of the external visuals (showing it to be epic), and perhaps also with at least one iteration of the implied "Geordi readjusts shields, the Duras sisters watch and adjust their weapons, Geordi scratches his head and readjusts again" scene...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

One line of dialogue could've fixed everything.

"Their first torpedo knocked out our shield generators!"

QED. I prefer to imagine it that way, with the subsequent attacks taking out their phasers and redundancies for both, with the forward torpedo launchers to follow. The Sisters probably weren't dumb enough to just fire randomly from the outset; one of them had the freaking targeting periscope thing, after all. I like to think that at least at the beginning, they were surgically removing the Enterprise's ability to defend herself, and once that was done they started to get cocky while trying to maximize their enjoyment of slaughtering a thousand people. Cocky enough anyway to get directly in the way of the single, dramatically slow-moving torpedo that did them in.

Mark

 

[Praetor]

One line of dialogue could've fixed everything.

"Their first torpedo knocked out our shield generators!"

QED. I prefer to imagine it that way, with the subsequent attacks taking out their phasers and redundancies for both, with the forward torpedo launchers to follow. The Sisters probably weren't dumb enough to just fire randomly from the outset; one of them had the freaking targeting periscope thing, after all. I like to think that at least at the beginning, they were surgically removing the Enterprise's ability to defend herself, and once that was done they started to get cocky while trying to maximize their enjoyment of slaughtering a thousand people. Cocky enough anyway to get directly in the way of the single, dramatically slow-moving torpedo that did them in.

Mark

I shall subscribe to that particular interpretation, line presence notwithstanding.

The Duras Sisters did seem to be taking warrior's delight in pummeling the D...

 

[ancient]

Well, every shot in the movie showed the Enterprise getting whipped and doing nothing. Except running like a bitch. I'll chalk it up to bad screenwriting and/or budget problems, but that doesn't make it less annoying.

 

[Dayton3]

In essence, I suppose that there's nothing that could have really been shown to make the forced destruction of the D less annoying than it was.

As originally written, the Enterprise-D was supposed to show up at the station/array where Soran was found, DURING the attack by the Romulans.

They were supposed to have a scene with the Enterprise streaking in firing and engaging the Romulan Warbird while Worf (still dressed in his wet clothes from the Holodeck) and a group of Security Guards took on the Romulans.

I always assumed that the writers figured the Enterprise could've taken damage during that battle with the Warbird that cost them later against the Duras sisters BOP.

Reportedly though, Jeri Taylor read the script and advised against having a starship combat sequence at that point in the movie, and with budget constraints they decided to pull it.

 

[Praetor]

In essence, I suppose that there's nothing that could have really been shown to make the forced destruction of the D less annoying than it was.

As originally written, the Enterprise-D was supposed to show up at the station/array where Soran was found, DURING the attack by the Romulans.

They were supposed to have a scene with the Enterprise streaking in firing and engaging the Romulan Warbird while Worf (still dressed in his wet clothes from the Holodeck) and a group of Security Guards took on the Romulans.

I always assumed that the writers figured the Enterprise could've taken damage during that battle with the Warbird that cost them later against the Duras sisters BOP.

Reportedly though, Jeri Taylor read the script and advised against having a starship combat sequence at that point in the movie, and with budget constraints they decided to pull it.

I'm starting to dislike Jeri Taylor.

 

[JNG]

A D'deridex Warbird on the big screen would have improved the movie for me by approximately one and a half stars.

I own the Hallmark ornament of that ship, for God's sake.

 

[Praetor]

A D'deridex Warbird on the big screen would have improved the movie for me by approximately one and a half stars.

I own the Hallmark ornament of that ship, for God's sake.

Agreed. You can imagine how I feel about that.

Also taking some damage earlier in the movie would have made the plot-forced D destruction much more plausible. Still annoying, but more plausible.

Is it just me or does anyone feel like they might not have had as many 'budget concerns' if they weren't rebuilding everything for the next movie and redressing the standing sets for VGR? It would have been easy enough to explain away why the corridors of the D looked different.

 

[Tomalak]

I'm just excited by the image of Worf kicking ass, dressed as a nineteenth-century sailor.

In my mind, he's slicing Romulans for fun with his sword, stops a phaser blast with his hat, and makes anything still alive walk the plank for real.

Worf never had enough badass moments on TNG. He was a Klingon for christ's sake!

 

[JNG]

stops a phaser blast with his hat

I loled

But would have settled for an exquisite, if not Guinan-level, display of marksmanship from him...seeing as his is oft-criticized.

 

[ancient]

Yeah, I've listened to the GEN commentary, which is very good. Some commentaries are a joke, but they really openly admit every bad plotting choice they made and explained what they were thinking at the time.

It included such things as using the sailing ship sequence to open the TNG era rather than the Rommie attack. Yeah, we got a holodeck sailing ship as an alternative to Rommies. They thought the space attack would be too 'predicatable' or old hat and wanted to do something unique. It's the same reason kirk died on a bridge (originally shot in the back). They were trying to do something different.

And they know a lot of it fell flat on its back.

 

[Praetor]

At least they knew afterward.

 

[Tomalak]

Yeah, I listened to that recently too. It's interesting that Moore and Braga admit that most of the bits that don't work came out of a desire to do something more "off-beat", and not do what was expected. So Kirk doesn't die on the bridge of the Enterprise, saving the universe, the TNG crew are introduced in a slightly silly holodeck sequence, the Enterprise-D is destroyed by what should be a minor threat, and the Duras sisters are in the movie.

With First Contact, they just went and wrote a good movie with all that you would expect from a TNG Borg story. Generations probably shows that it was their first movie, and they were naive in the way they went about it. It's probably the best commentary on the Trek DVDs actually, and First Contact's isn't too bad either, even though it's a bit too back-slapping at times.

There's a new commentary on the Star Trek III blu-ray with Ron Moore, which should hopefully be interesting. It would be nice if he could record some for his TNG and DS9 episodes too, as he strikes me as someone who has a lot of good stuff to say. Ira Behr's done one for the new Undiscovered Country release, which will be worth a look.

 

[Vanyel]

You know there might be some circumstantial evidence that explains why the Duras sisters attack worked.

They did have an eye in the 1701D's Engineering section via LaForge's VISOR, so they could very well have been changing their their weapons to match the 1701D's shields and protecting themselves in the process every time the 1701D changed its shield frequency.

When they matched the shield frequency of the 1701D, the BoP shields also had to be at that frequency to allow their weapons to pass through. LaForge or Worf could have been rotating their shield frequency which would also change their weapons frequency. The BoP's shields, being at a different frequency would then be able to block the incoming fire. Once LaForge glanced at any station displaying the new shield frequency the Duras sisters could match them again and fire. The 1701D would change her frequency and the pattern would repeat.

Make sense?

 

[Praetor]

^It does, and frankly it defies plausibility to assume that anything other than that is what happened. A single line from Worf to say 'I have been rotating shield frequencies, to no effect' would have honestly helped me wrap my head around it a little more.

 

[ancient]

That sort of relies on Geordi staring over at the shield frequency indicator the entire time.

Anyway, another time the ENT-D fell short to me was in Yesterday's Enterprise. That was the battleship Enterprise-D and it still shot only one burst of torpedoes the entire fight and something like 4 phaser shots before going under.

And since they were trying to defend the ENT-C from multiple attackers, that would've been an ideal situation to do a saucer sep.

That version of the ship also suffered from a severe case of exploding consol.