Federation Council Chambers

Are the Federation Council Chambers where the Council scenes in the 24th century are set supposed to be the same room we saw in The Voyage Home?
I've thought that room seemed awfully small for to fit the Councilors from every planet, so I had been picturing something bigger, more along the lines of the room where the UN General Assembly meets, but reading the ending of Peaceable Kingdoms it does sound like it's describing the room from TVH. Has it gotten bigger since TVH or am I just underestimating the size of the Chambers?

 

IIRC, it is the room from TVH, but it's been expanded in the year since so it has two to four times as many seats. Can't remember how I know that, though.

 

Maybe what we were seeing was the UFP equivalent of the UN Security Council and not the full Assembly/Council.

 

That would make sense. PK did say five rows of seats, but I couldn't tell from the pictures on Memory Alpha and Trek Core how many rows of seats they had there. I also wasn't sure if supposed to five rows in the boxes from TVH or five boxes with seats in them.

 

I was always puzzled by the claim in the books that the TVH council chamber was in the Palais de la Concorde in Paris, since the establishing shots in TVH implied it was in San Francisco. But then, maybe there are two meeting chambers of matching design?

 

Keith's annotations for Articles of the Federation say, "The council chambers were first seen in Star Trek IV. The movie implied that the chambers were in San Francisco, but there's nothing in the movie that contradicts the notion that they're in Paris, especially in a universe with transporter technology." That doesn't explain why he made the swap, though.

 

Yeah, it would have been interesting if they'd put the UFP governement headquarters and stuff in a more unusual place. I've wished for a while that we could have gotten to see more of 24th century Earth.

 

I've always assumed those two cities were used due to their historical significance.

 

That could well have been one of several venues, it being a trial that only certain member worlds could or would have sat in on. Since the Klingons could have veto'ed the presence of other Ambassadors that they thought would have created an unnecessary bias.

Also a more closed chamber for a more sensitive hearing/sentencing considering the Klingons would have viewed the situation as needing as few people as possible brought in on the events.

After all, a Starfleet captain did go rogue, murder several Klingon citizens and commit the theft of a fairly new vessel. For which I never did understand them not demanding it's return. That was a major plotpoint that was overlooked.

The Vulcans would have handed it back to prevent war, not renovated it for criminals.

 

^Have any stories ever addressed what became of the Bounty after TVH? Did they just leave to rust? Is it still sitting there by the TNG era?

 

Early drafts of The Undiscovered Country screenplay (which had the film taking place much closer to TVH/TFF than the movie ended up being) had the crew observing the Bounty getting dismantled up in Earth Spacedock by a Starfleet Engineering team while en route to the Enterprise-A, at the outset of the Gorkon mission.

Whether it was later returned or not, it's very unlikely that an intelligence-motherlode like a fully-functional B'Rel-class vessel would be left on the bottom of San Francisco Bay to rust. Starfleet undoubtedly ran a complete systems-analysis either way, similar to how the Chinese completely dismantle one of our planes that they capture on occasion before shipping it back home.

 

True, but this was also the draft where Kronos One turned out to be a much more sophisticated unique ship that made dismantling her sort of pointless.

There are photos of the K1 model on the board somewhere, which looks like a much older Negh'Var.

 

This has always seemed like an odd change to me, too--even if it's possible to explain it away as KRAD does, his choice goes quite against the strong implication of the film itself, where both scenes that occur at the Council are preceded by establishing shots of San Francisco. (The DC Comics stories with scenes set there also accepted this implication, FWIW.)

The first of those scenes, in particular, seems pretty clear in its cinematic language: a scene away from Earth, establishing shot of San Francisco featuring building with UFP logo, Federation Council scene, another scene away from Earth. Why else have that shot there but to...you know, establish where on Earth the scene is taking place?

 

Which is probably exactly why KRAD reinterpreted that scene as in Paris instead of San Francisco, honestly.

 

I'm fine with the Federation Council Chambers being in the Palais de la Concorde in Paris. Minor discontinuity I just don't give a damn about.

I do tend to agree that Star Trek is too American/Euro-centric. I like to imagine that even if the capital city of the Federation is Paris, the capital city of United Earth is in a non-Western country. I like to imagine it's Mogadishu, actually -- I like the idea that a city emblematic of what we today consider a failed state could by the 22nd Century be considered the capital city of the entire planet.