It's irritates me when people say the Enterprise D was taken out buy a 70 yr old Bird Of Prey

Agreed. For me TNG ended with “All Good Things...” as well. I haven’t watched any of the TNG films in years.

 

Oh, I thought the destruction of the Odyssey was handled pretty darn well, and I would have loved to see that done with the resources of a feature film instead of an episode of TV. I think I said recently in a different thread that I could see "The Jem'hadar" being expanded into a two-parter.

 

^ Well it was the first episode of the three parter, but yeah a two hour episode would’ve really helped build up the Odyssey more so that the crews loss would’ve carried more impact, as well as play more with Eris (is she friend or foe?) and had more time for the Siskos (as well as Quark and Nog).

 

Something that always bothered me...

I get how you could match the frequency of an energy beam (phaser or distruptor) to that of an energy field (the shields)...

...but physical objects don’t have “frequencies”, how could they adapt torpedoes to pass the shields?!

 

Honestly I don't think much thought was given to the entire sequence of events. I can't say how poorly-written in terms of logistics it may have been from the get-go, but it was certainly complicated by budget restrictions.

The easiest option would be putting the Duras sisters in a better ship, but failing that, if they'd made a clear point of attacking the E-D's critical systems first (which is to say, show them taking out the E-D's torpedo launcher and such, or deliberately attacking the Engineering section (hell, a hit to the deflector dish or nacelles would have been a sight to see)), that would have addressed most of my dissatisfaction.

Instead, what I walk away with is a sense that the sisters are toying with the E-D (ripping off Chang in TUC?) while the E-D in turn is fighting perhaps the most ineffectively we've ever seen in seven seasons. When Our Heroes do destroy the BoP it's a horribly tacky reuse of footage from the prior film, followed by "Oops, we took one hit too many!"

IIRC the novelization has the BoP about to target the E-D's bridge when Our Heroes force them to cloak, which at least increases the sense of urgency, though I still feel that without any other explicit explanations for the E-D's poor performance that combat should have been over and done in two minutes. Hell, why didn't the BoP target the bridge with their first shot?

 

Honestly the battle in the previous movie was totally on another level.

All in all one has to wonder where the budget went, given that most of the sets and the models were repurposed from the previous movies and TNG.

 

The "battle" from TUC is really easy logistically. You've got an invisible enemy attacking Our Heroes and constantly moving so that Our Heroes can't hit it. Chang takes his time because he's a jerk and has no reason to think he's in any danger (classic Bad Guy move).

I wouldn't have minded if Kirk had at least fired weapons a bit more with some hope of randomly hitting the BoP, but it works well enough without that.

I like that the existence of the sensor equipment is even foreshadowed early in the film, though it's a bit of a goof that it's mentioned with regards to Excelsior, not Enterprise.

 

It was groundbreaking effects-wise, though, with the enterprise getting that kind of battle damage and so on

 

Nice, I'm not the only one. For me TNG ends with 'All Good Things...' too.
Picard: "So, five-card stud, nothing wild.... and the sky's the limit." Enterprise flies towards a beautiful nebula (or something like that).
The movies? Not interested in any of them.

 

Exactly. In my mind the Enterprise D is still out there somewhere, with Picard and company continuing to seek out new life and new civilizations...

 

I dunno, INS did give us the dubious privilege of including so many plot oddities that we've been talking about them for years now...

 

Or then he's desperately trying to hide the fact that his ship is an assassin's Derringer and no match for Kirk's assault rifle of a starship, by pretending to fire wounding shots out of sheer sadism.

Chang's weapons were supposed to convince everybody that they came from a Starfleet ship. They probably were provided by Cartwright, then. But they were only ever meant to wound: if they accidentally blew up Qo'noS One, there could be no footage of "Starfleet assassins" gunning down the Chancellor. So it might well be Cartwright only ever gave Chang wounding torpedoes, not lethal ones...

Sprouting Shakespearean insults at Kirk would be a shrewd tactical move, distracting our heroes from the fact that Chang's ship was actually a pushover and that any maneuver other than trying to fight her would be tactically superior. If Kirk realized Chang's worst could only ever tickle the Enterprise, he'd simply fly right next to the planet, drop shields and beam down. But if the thought Chang could kill and was holding back solely because he was batshit crazy...

It's also pretty realistic to assume he would have hit nothing - the odds would be immensely against that. But there are obvious dirty tricks that he could have tried, wholly in the Trek context: blowing techno-smoke and seeing if the BoP left a hole in that, laying mines to limit Chang's maneuvering options, attempting exotic types of scanning rays. Were this the 24th century, he would have tried those. And it's a good thing we can interpret his inactivity as a sign of times, of his ship and crew being incapable of whipping out an Inverted Decathron Ray or a Isostatic Space Powder in a matter of minutes.

But it's also a Meyerism, a reference to the International Year of Geophysics where superpower navies carried "scientific" equipment to all parts of the globe in order to better spy on each other. Every ship would supposedly have the spying gear, even if only the Excelsior dared bring hers to the very doorstep of the Empire.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Were TOS films less because there were new ships in them (and the refit of the original Enterprise pretty much seemed like a new ship, even though it technically was not new)? I'm not really a huge TOS fan, but I'm not sure if it made a huge difference either way.

As I understand it, when filming Generations, corners had to be cut to make the bridge (and probably other sets) look acceptable on film. That's why the bridge is darker than on TV. That's one of the reasons I think for getting a new ship that they could better use on film. And yes, I suppose some of the ship could be refit as well, but it's still going to seem like a new ship.

 

I'm sorry, but why would satifying the writers be even a small concern? They're not the customer.

 

Yeah, it was painfully obviously that the writers of "Generations" just cribbed the same "oh no! crisis!" dialogue from Yesterday's Enterprise, as if there's only one way a ship can start blowing up.

 

The bird of prey was clearly outmatched by the Enterprise without the cloaking device, but the torpedoes seem to work just fine. Keep in mind they take on the enterprise and the excelsior with both ships coming into battle in perfect conditions and full shields and manage to cause quite some damage.

Well, didn’t they indeed employ a
“Dirty trick” by setting up a homing torpedo to seek for the BoP’s impulse engine emissions?

Agreed that firing blindly wouldn’t have accomplished much. This is the tactic we see in Nemesis and even there, with much better targeting computers, I’ve always found it unlikely to work realistically.

A lot of people here seem to be under the assumption that the writers were “looking ahead”, thinking already about a new, sleeker enterprise for movie 8. This is definitely not the case: besides the fact that this is simply not how Hollywood usually works, multiple interviews show that they started the movie with only two ideas: kill Kirk and crash the enterprise.

Landing the enterprise’s saucer was a concept that had been depicted in concept art since the 80s (and, in a less definite form, the 60s!) and that a TV budget would never have permitted, it made sense to do it in a major production.

The Sovereign class wasn’t even a concept until after Generations, in fact the last thing that was done before retiring the huge six-foot D model was to paint NCC-1701-E on it, assuming the next enterprise would be a Galaxy class one.

 

I wasn't suggesting that the writers had an exact idea in mind of what ship they wanted to have after Generations. They knew that the E-D sets weren't going to be viable to use long-term in films. Perhaps the writers weren't thinking specifically about this, but I'm sure the production people who would also be working on the future films would have wanted to have a set designed for the big screen. Even if it was another Galaxy class, it still would have allowed for a different set.

 

It's been a while since I've seen any of the Star Trek films, but the Enterprise in the TOS movies didn't re-use any of the sets formt he TV show, so imho they could have simply given the Enterprise D a refit along those lines.
They had a good excuse as to why Starfleet would be doing that; to make the ship more effective against the Borg menace the Federation was dealing with.

 

Was Riker a bit dumb for not firing everything they got on the Bird-of-Prey? Early on before the Duras sisters got more than few shots in through the shields and Enterprise was still in pretty good condition, "fire all weapons continuously". Galaxy class ship firing everything it has on an old BoP, that's not even a contest, right?

Except in 'Rascals' when the plot needed that....

 

How would you have felt, had that actually been "our" Enterprise-D, rather than it going down the way it did in Generations? (Of course, we'll have to assume it happened slightly later, short after the conclusion of TNG in that case). Perhaps with a line that explained that fortunately, most of the crew got into the escape pods and through the wormhole in time, or some such thing, to explain how they could reappear in the next movie?

I don't know how these things work exactly in the writer's guild, but in my line of work there's this small thing called "job satisfaction". (And to me, one of the key ingredients in sufficient job satisfaction is that within a clearly established goal, my employer gives me enough freedom to do what I think is best , and then use that freedom in order to create the best possible product for my employer within the time and resources allotted, one which I am convinced is high quality myself).

Low job satisfaction usually results in a high employer turnover rate, which isn't good for the company, especially not if it concerns positions that aren't that easy to fill (which I would assume would be true for experienced writers for TV shows).

And even if you find decent substitutions, they'd probably still have different ideas of where to take the show next, not quite meshing with how the show originally was set up, which in turn probably isn't good for the continuity of the show, even if the refreshment itself was needed, etc.

 

For me seeing a TNG-DS9 crossover where the enterprise is destroyed would have worked great.

But for the many TNG viewers (or ever people who only watched it occasionally) who don’t watch DS9 would have been really confusing seeing the first TNG movie didn’t have the D.

 

Also worth noting: I saw Generations with my parents before seeing anything of TNG and they had seen it in a theater a few years before, they remember only a few things from the movie, that is Kirk dying, the crash scene and Data being an Android while the android-looking guy was actually a blind man.