Has Enterprise ever messed up the continuity?

[Start Wreck]

I loved the look of ENT, the beautiful detail and realism of it. I love the touches like the cooling fans on the bridge consoles and the handholds all over the rooms and corridors, a subtle reminder that the gravity plating isn't entirely reliable. It feels like a believable extrapolation into the future. And I think the technology of TOS, if you overlook the '60s-vintage bulbs and switches, actually looks more advanced in some ways, because it doesn't have those realistic details like cooling fans and thus implies a technological level farther removed from our understanding.

Agreed.

That said, they could have dialled back Enterprise a little more, even just to differentiate it from the other shows.
Eg:
- No particle weapons at all. Invisible 'pulse' type weapons for the crew and stick with those primitive torpedoes for the ship. I liked those.
- No transporters. Just completely forget about them. Maybe have an episode where some advanced race of aliens is developing transporter tech, but it's really crude and requires a receiver pad and takes twenty minutes to put you back together again. "Come back in a hundred years."
- Lose the ship's turbolifts. I wanna see ladders leading up to the bridge! Ladders, man!
- Get rid of the giant viewscreen on the bridge and make it a window instead. Replace with smaller personal screens or scanners or periscopes or something a bit more retro.
- More instances of gravity failing on the ship.
- More spacewalk stuff. Manual labour on the exterior, etc.
- More primitive UT. Fewer English-speaking aliens.

Just some ideas. Too late now, but that would have been better, from a stylistic perspective. Not strictly a continuity problem, just for a better 'feel'.

 

[Christopher]

That said, they could have dialled back Enterprise a little more, even just to differentiate it from the other shows.
Eg:
- No particle weapons at all. Invisible 'pulse' type weapons for the crew and stick with those primitive torpedoes for the ship. I liked those.
- No transporters. Just completely forget about them. Maybe have an episode where some advanced race of aliens is developing transporter tech, but it's really crude and requires a receiver pad and takes twenty minutes to put you back together again. "Come back in a hundred years."

The producers wanted to leave out transporters, but the network insisted on the inclusion of more familiar Trek elements. And you can tell that in the first couple of seasons, they tried to avoid using the transporter more than they had to, often not even bothering to concoct excuses for not using it. In my Rise of the Federation novels following the ENT cast after the Romulan War, I've had the Federation discover a danger to transporter technology and ban it for non-emergency use, in hopes of getting closer to the original intent.

- Lose the ship's turbolifts. I wanna see ladders leading up to the bridge! Ladders, man!

The thing is, turbolifts are a good place to have conversations, so from a dramatic standpoint it's good to keep them around. (Although the introduction of ready rooms kind of reduced the necessity for turbolift scenes.)

- Get rid of the giant viewscreen on the bridge and make it a window instead. Replace with smaller personal screens or scanners or periscopes or something a bit more retro.

A big window on a spaceship is actually a pretty bad idea, what with all the radiation in space and the blinding brightness of a nearby star. And we have giant wall screens today, so it's a little disingenuous to claim that technology is too futuristic for the 22nd century.

- More instances of gravity failing on the ship.
- More spacewalk stuff. Manual labour on the exterior, etc.

Both of these would be expensive to show. There'd have to be a story reason.

Anyway, Matt Jefferies's design philosophy on TOS was to avoid the need for spacewalks to maintain ship components, to put everything serviceable on the inside and keep the outside as smooth and clean as possible.

- More primitive UT. Fewer English-speaking aliens.

I agree in principle, but in practice it would've gotten in the way of the drama if half of every episode had to be Hoshi feeling her way to a translation of an alien language. It made sense to focus on it a few times in the first season to establish the idea and then streamline the process later on.

 

[jespah]

....

- More primitive UT. Fewer English-speaking aliens.

I agree in principle, but in practice it would've gotten in the way of the drama if half of every episode had to be Hoshi feeling her way to a translation of an alien language. It made sense to focus on it a few times in the first season to establish the idea and then streamline the process later on.

Definitely agree with this. There's just so many times and ways we can watch Hoshi figure it out on the fly. Even though her look into alien databases is something relatable (people do this sort of thing now, in order to understand data that comes into their companies from outside), it's also not too terribly dramatic.

 

[Start Wreck]

I've no doubt all of those things would be harder to do, but that's one of the reasons they should have done them. Shake things up a bit, rather than relying on old "safe" ideas.
Some of my favourite moments on Enterprise were when they did something different or original.

A big window on a spaceship is actually a pretty bad idea, what with all the radiation in space and the blinding brightness of a nearby star. And we have giant wall screens today, so it's a little disingenuous to claim that technology is too futuristic for the 22nd century.

Ah, I'm not claiming it's too futuristic, just too familiar. I liked what they did in the JJ Abrams movies with the mixture of window/viewscreen all-in-one. It's just something a bit different.

You can always filter harmful rays, and it sort of makes sense to have a big window to look out of in case your external cameras malfunction!

 

[Nerys Myk]

I've no doubt all of those things would be harder to do, but that's one of the reasons they should have done them. Shake things up a bit, rather than relying on old "safe" ideas.
Some of my favourite moments on Enterprise were when they did something different or original.

A big window on a spaceship is actually a pretty bad idea, what with all the radiation in space and the blinding brightness of a nearby star. And we have giant wall screens today, so it's a little disingenuous to claim that technology is too futuristic for the 22nd century.

Ah, I'm not claiming it's too futuristic, just too familiar. I liked what they did in the JJ Abrams movies with the mixture of window/viewscreen all-in-one. It's just something a bit different.

You can always filter harmful rays, and it sort of makes sense to have a big window to look out of in case your external cameras malfunction!

Not sure that "too familiar" is a good reason to change something.

 

[Start Wreck]

Not sure that "too familiar" is a good reason to change something.

It's often the best reason to change something.

 

[Christopher]

I've no doubt all of those things would be harder to do, but that's one of the reasons they should have done them. Shake things up a bit, rather than relying on old "safe" ideas.

In theory, sure. But in practice, a lot of the things you're suggesting would simply be too expensive to do on a more frequent basis. It's not just a matter of how hard something is to do or whether you have the courage to do it, it's a matter of whether you can find the money for it in your budget, whether you have the time for it on a tight shooting schedule. The producers may want to do these things, but if they go over budget or over schedule too often, then the show won't make a profit or meet its airdates, and that will get it cancelled. So compromises have to be made, and producers have to choose their battles.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Not sure that "too familiar" is a good reason to change something.

It's often the best reason to change something.

Sounds like change for the sake of change. I'd rather they change something because it makes sense. Getting rid of the main viewscreen to be different doesn't make sense.

 

[tomswift2002]

One of the biggest continuity errors I found was the introduction of both the Ferengi and the Borg. The ship had camera's mounted all over and I'm pretty sure that there would've been a photo and/or video of a Ferengi and Borg captured for future generations to view (not to mention but with the Borg there would've been records and descriptions of the type of software they uploaded to the ship, and the technology that Trip would've ripped out---not to mention Dr. Phlox's resistance to the Borg nanites). And Zi never bought the part with the Borg intro before the channel was open---that would be like calling someone on the phone and introducing yourself while you still had the dial tone ringing. And we had never seen the Borg do that before.

 

[Christopher]

If there had been video records taken of the Ferengi, it wouldn't have changed anything, because Starfleet in Archer's era knew their appearance but not their species' name, and Starfleet in Picard's era knew their name but not their appearance. So they had no way of putting the two together until "The Last Outpost." How could they have possibly guessed that the unseen race called Ferengi happened to be that particular unnamed race from a long-ago encounter?

With the Borg, again, I don't see how having images on file of an unidentified race would be incompatible with later events. As far as "Q Who" being the first time anyone had heard of the Borg, that ship sailed with VGR's "The Raven" and "Dark Frontier," which established that the Hansens were aware of the Borg as a space legend years before "Q Who" happened. Not to mention that "Q Who" itself is contradictory on that point, since Guinan knew about the Borg all along; surely at least some of the El-Aurian refugees from Generations would've told about the Borg (although the survivors were probably mostly people who hadn't encountered them directly and could only describe them secondhand). People like the Hansens may have come to suspect that the entities recorded during the events of "Regeneration" might be connected to the Borg creatures that the El-Aurians told about, but there would've been no way to prove it until they were directly encountered.

So yeah, they both stretch continuity a bit, but no worse than plenty of earlier episodes and movies have done. It's certainly no harder than retconning Chekov into the events of "Space Seed," say.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Yep, a thousand pictures is not going to give you their name.

 

[tomswift2002]

With the Borg the Enterprise-D and other Starfleet ships would've had a record of the NX-01's encounter of their technology, even though they did not have a name. So when the D first encountered the Borg in "Q Who" or the Hansen's were investigating the Borg (or even one of the El-Aurian refugees if they were part of Starfleet in either a military or civilian capacity and came across the record, they probably would've recognized it: Guinan managed to recognize a Borg a cube even though by her own words she was nowhere near her planet when the Borg wiped out the planet, so she had never seen a Borg or one of their ships). Data even performs a library search to see if anything matches in Federation databases in "Q Who" when the Borg cube first approaches. On other occasions Data would let Picard know if an unknown ship had elements that matched up with even a little bit of technology from a known race, plus in "Q Who" Data also references how the destruction on the planet was done by the same people responsible for the destruction of the Federation and Romulan outposts in "The Neutral Zone". And I'm sure that, if not Data, then someone at Starfleet Headquarters, once the reports got passed along, would've double checked to see if there was anything else that the readings at the destroyed outposts matched from debris to energy signatures used. Considering that the Borg modified the Earth ship to where Trip couldn't even guess at what the modifications were for, and the NX-01 got some very detailed scans of the ship at different points in it's modifications (not to mention that Starfleet would've had the original specs on record) even without a name the first scan of Borg technology should've raised red flags all over the place, and considering that the Hansen's apparently fell into a position where they were laughed at by Starfleet, the NX-01's contact in the 2150's doesn't fit and is a major continuity screw-up.

And the Ferengi, really if Riker was able to recall something as ridiculous as someone showering in their clothes from the NCC-1701's mission to Psi 2000, surely in the 200 years between the NX-01 and the NCC-1701-D someone else probably read the report (and I'm sure an instructor at the Academy probably would've used the incident as a class assignment to come up with alternative ways that Archer could've handled the situation), and put 2 and 2 together if they heard an alien representative talk about the Ferengi, and if they were able to, even pull up one of the historical pictures.

 

[Nerys Myk]

And the Ferengi, really if Riker was able to recall something as ridiculous as someone showering in their clothes from the NCC-1701's mission to Psi 2000, surely in the 200 years between the NX-01 and the NCC-1701-D someone else probably read the report (and I'm sure an instructor at the Academy probably would've used the incident as a class assignment to come up with alternative ways that Archer could've handled the situation), and put 2 and 2 together if they heard an alien representative talk about the Ferengi, and if they were able to, even pull up one of the historical pictures.

If they don't have a picture of the Ferengi that is labeled "Ferengi" its pretty useless for ID purposes. Riker can recall an incident that Archer had with a group of bald, snaggle toothed, big eared aliens, but why would he think the Ferengi are those aliens? As far as he and the rest of the UFP know, no one has seen a Ferengi. It's only when the Ferengi first appears on screen in the Last Outpost that any one in the UFP or Starfleet can say "Hey, they look like those nameless aliens from the 22nd Century!". And someone else can say "Hey, they also look like those aliens from the 20th Century!" Though most of the crew is a bit busy at that point. So it's a note to explore at a later time.

In the Last Outpost, the Battle and Acquisition it is established that the Ferengi go to great lengths to hide their identity and ignore calls to identify them selves.

As for the Borg. You've mentioned the Hansens went out looking for them. That was a decade before the Enterprise-D ever encountered the Borg. It's easy to conclude that the NX-01 logs and the El Aurian reports are part of what set the Hansens on the Borg's trail.

 

[Christopher]

^Okay, you just made me realize, the continuity problem isn't with "Acquisition," where the Ferengi never identified themselves by name, but with "Little Green Men," where they did. So the name "Ferengi" would be in historical records, not from Archer's encounter, but from the Roswell incident.

Well, unless those files were lost before they could be declassified. Or destroyed by someone like Gary Seven or some temporal agency.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Or perhaps Odo himself. I don't know if he's particularly skilled with computers, but it is possible that he took it upon himself to remove all evidence of their 'trip' from the records of the time.

 

[Nerys Myk]

^Okay, you just made me realize, the continuity problem isn't with "Acquisition," where the Ferengi never identified themselves by name, but with "Little Green Men," where they did. So the name "Ferengi" would be in historical records, not from Archer's encounter, but from the Roswell incident.

Well, unless those files were lost before they could be declassified. Or destroyed by someone like Gary Seven or some temporal agency.

Wainright's response was "Whatever", so I don't think he wrote it down.

 

[Melakon]

Yeah, as far as the military was concerned, they were Martians. Then the ship disappears, the Martians disappear, so there's no evidence except for some photos.

 

[F. King Daniel]

How about the D7/K'tinga class battlecruiser in "Unexpected"? Most fans like to pretend it never happened, since another model was built for the scene but rejected by the producers. But I was over the moon to see the original (and IMO best) Klingon ship in Trek again. Since Klingon ships are so rusted and worn out, I can believe they're hundreds of years old.

 

[Avro Arrow]

^ I like to pretend it never happened.

I still wish they had put the unused D4 in for the Season 1 Blu-Ray release...

 

[Nebusj]

Yep, a thousand pictures is not going to give you their name.

And there'd be no way to get the name and their appearance linked up, unless someone asked a Valakian, or any of the other species that lay between Ferignar and Valakia that Ferengi had been visiting in the two centuries between Enterprise and Next Generation.