"Jim, the Enterprise is 20 years old, we feel her day is done." My thoughts when seeing that scene.

[Damian]

Certainly it would have been preferable if someone could have caught these discrepancies; I can agree with that. I just don't know how realistic it is that that's always going to happen. Even the Berman era spinoffs had numerous discrepancies, and those shows were so slavishly faithful to each other that they eventually became recycled and boring.

Meyer's DVD commentary (the solo one) is a very interesting listen, in fact one of the best movie commentaries I've ever heard even just from a DVD commentary (forget about ST) perspective. And he does address the issue with Chekov, citing an instance in which Sir Conan Doyle similarly apologized for similar discrepancies between his Sherlock Holmes stories.

Back to ST, I find that every incarnation of it disagrees with every other on some level. The podcasters over at Trekmovie.com describe it as having to put on a different pair of glasses for every ST, and I have to say I've always agreed with that (though I couldn't have verbalized it as well as they did). I think it's the right attitude. Because what works in the Bermanverse, for example, doesn't necessarily agree with (to count them all off) what worked in the NBCverse, the Bennett-Meyerverse, the (god forbid) Shatnerverse, the Abramsverse or now the CBSverse... each with its own re-interpretation of what details were important to canon moving forward.


I would say it's more understandable than "lazy". Bennett and Nimoy probably both thought they remembered it as 20 years (as did perhaps many fans at the time, even ones who on any other day of the week might recall having seen 'The Menagerie').

It's infuriating to me just how quick a lot of fans are to use terms such as "lazy" when describing the creative efforts of people who write for, produce or direct their beloved franchises. It's already established that Bennett watched all 79 eps before producing The Wrath of Khan; he could even have stopped at 30 and that would be more than most producers taking on his job would have done. He actually did his research, and he still missed this one two years later. It happened. I would have missed it too most likely, even with most of 'The Menagerie's saved inside my head.

Yeah, some of it is minor, like the 20 year old reference. Chekov, I never got to hung up about that one because it's easy to imagine him being on the Enterprise before being assigned to the bridge, and some of the novels have even gone with that including Bennett's Ex Machina and Cox's 3rd Khan book. Cox even found a way to explain how they basically lost a planet (I have to admit that did bother me a bit in TWOK---I mean, how can you lose an entire planet, esp. one close enough to see it explode as Khan did--but his explanation did make some sense.

I'd probably hesitate to use the word lazy though, I mean unless it's something blatantly obvious. I'm usually pretty reasonable about minor errors. I sometimes get hung up with consistencies in production design, like the redesigned Klingons in the Abramsverse and Discovery, or the engine rooms in the Abramsverse movies that look more like they should be bottling water then powering a warp capable ship (though it was better in STID). But storywise, as long as things are reasonably consistent I don't sweat the small stuff too much.

 

[USS Triumphant]

People misspeak. Maybe he was thinking of 3 five year missions (April, Pike, Kirk) and the years since Kirk's five year mission ended.

 

[Lt. Tyler]

On the contrary, Admiral Morrow was not mistaken he was correct. He also totally discounts April and Pike as if they never commanded the Enterprise. 15 years ago from the time of The Wrath of Khan and The Search For Spock, Kirk was in the middle of the 5 year mission. Therefore, on that timeline as TWOK is a total reboot of the franchise, Kirk had commanded the Enterprise from the start in 2265 until Captain Spock took command when it was turned into a training vessel. So that brings us to 2285. Admiral Morrow was right.

 

[Bad Robot]

On the contrary, Admiral Morrow was not mistaken he was correct. He also totally discounts April and Pike as if they never commanded the Enterprise. 15 years ago from the time of The Wrath of Khan and The Search For Spock, Kirk was in the middle of the 5 year mission. Therefore, on that timeline as TWOK is a total reboot of the franchise, Kirk had commanded the Enterprise from the start in 2265 until Captain Spock took command when it was turned into a training vessel. So that brings us to 2285. Admiral Morrow was right.

I partly agree with that. I've always considered TNG (and later the spinoffs) to be one parallel universe removed from TOS. So essentially a reboot.

I don't consider TWOK to be more than a "partial" reboot though, of either TMP or TOS. However TMP is similarly a partial reboot of TOS.

Or perhaps TMP is the real reboot, and TWOK and TNG are both only soft reboots of TMP. That probably makes more sense. The movies are kind of flexible in their reboot status anyway, just because they don't afford for the kind of world-building of a full TV series.

 

[Phoenix219]

That was my theory for a long time, too. THE Enterprise as a museum ship would make sense.

As for Yorktown being renamed Enterprise A? That ship was in bad shape, maybe the engineer couldn't get the solar sail working and life support did fail. There's an empty ship that had to have a completely new energizer and control system replacement and no surviving crew. Giving that to Kirk isn't that great of a reward, no matter what they renamed it.

I really liked the idea of the Enterprise - M (TOS Connie class) being a Museum ship in the Gods and Men fan film.

On the contrary, Admiral Morrow was not mistaken he was correct. He also totally discounts April and Pike as if they never commanded the Enterprise. 15 years ago from the time of The Wrath of Khan and The Search For Spock, Kirk was in the middle of the 5 year mission. Therefore, on that timeline as TWOK is a total reboot of the franchise, Kirk had commanded the Enterprise from the start in 2265 until Captain Spock took command when it was turned into a training vessel. So that brings us to 2285. Admiral Morrow was right.

In that line of thinking, I don't know what is more fascinating to me - the idea of seeing (fanfilms) of TOS episodes redone on a TWOK set (for instance, Space Seed) with the ship never going through a refit, and aging out; or seeing TWOK and TSFS refilmed with a more TOS style aesthetic, on a ship identical to TOS, with maybe the engine only refit happening somehwere along the way.

 

[Phoenix219]

This is basically what I thought was happening: the Enterprise was fairly old, and the Excelsior was designed to do the exact same job but better. Then the Enterprise got seriously messed up in combat and was goong to need expensive repairs.
And somebody pointed out that they could save the cost of those repairs and make her a museum piece.
I believe FASA suggested that by Wrath of Khan the Enterprise was the only pre-refit Constitution Class ship left. (That is: all other Constitution Class ships had been built since TMP and were built to the refit design.)
The Enterprise had reached a point where its historical value outweighed its operational value.


If Starfleet could build new ships "as fast as airplanes", why did the Enterprise undergo a refit that took more than a year?
On-screen evidence is that building ships takes months and maybe years, and therefore implies that if the Enterprise-A was newly built, construction on it began significantly before Kirk's trial.

Getting the first one perfected, working out bugs and things that you don't know about until they are a problem, etc.... would all take time to figure out and develop. Once the design is perfected, they should be able to churn them out much much faster then the first Kirk-refit version.

 

[Timo]

The underlying problem of course being, they never do.

If Starfleet could build starships easily (and never mind quickly), it would have those. It never has, though - most of the time, Kirk is the only one responding, in the nick of time, and without the option of backup, or then Kirk is the backup and it's indicated there's no third option lining up if our hero fails.

The writers don't exactly help us out on understanding why Starfleet doesn't have enough ships to perform its duties. I mean, there's the real-world precedent of nobody ever having enough of anything - but why does that apply to the futuristic Starfleet so absolutely? Here on Earth, military budgets may be bloated to temporarily create situations where the army indeed is strong enough (despite its inevitable protestations); why is this never the case in Trek? Or, alternately, why are we always catching Starfleet when it's short on ships or staff, or where it's short on ships or staff, regardless of whether this is peacetime or wartime, the far frontier or the vicinity of Earth?

But it's for the best that they don't touch upon the issue much. We need to believe in the shortage of ships, for most of the Trek plots to work. An explanation might fail us; lack thereof allows us to believe the perfect explanation might exist, somewhere, somehow.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[XCV330]

The underlying problem of course being, they never do.

If Starfleet could build starships easily (and never mind quickly), it would have those. It never has, though - most of the time, Kirk is the only one responding, in the nick of time, and without the option of backup, or then Kirk is the backup and it's indicated there's no third option lining up if our hero fails.

The writers don't exactly help us out on understanding why Starfleet doesn't have enough ships to perform its duties. I mean, there's the real-world precedent of nobody ever having enough of anything - but why does that apply to the futuristic Starfleet so absolutely? Here on Earth, military budgets may be bloated to temporarily create situations where the army indeed is strong enough (despite its inevitable protestations); why is this never the case in Trek? Or, alternately, why are we always catching Starfleet when it's short on ships or staff, or where it's short on ships or staff, regardless of whether this is peacetime or wartime, the far frontier or the vicinity of Earth?

But it's for the best that they don't touch upon the issue much. We need to believe in the shortage of ships, for most of the Trek plots to work. An explanation might fail us; lack thereof allows us to believe the perfect explanation might exist, somewhere, somehow.

Timo Saloniemi

Starfleet brought in a hastily assembled task force at the BoBS with very little notice. Maybe by TOS they don't have as many ships as they simply lost too many well trained crew and ships, and the decision was made to slowly rebuild.

During the Napoleonic wars, France lost a good deal of their expertise early on, and earlier during the revolutionary period and the Terror. Bonaparte's attempt around this problem was simply to out-built Britain in the number of ships it could put to sea, but it did so without experienced crew and the results was costly mistake in terms of life and resources. There may be political reasons why Starfleet started to keep its numbers more closely in check as well. The member states may simply have been uncomfortable with that many mostly human "this is not a warship" ships sitting around with nothing to do.

 

[mos6507]

It's infuriating to me just how quick a lot of fans are to use terms such as "lazy" when describing the creative efforts of people who write for, produce or direct their beloved franchises.

Writers tend to focus on story, character, theme, style. It's fans who value continuity so highly.

 

[SpyOne]

But it's for the best that they don't touch upon the issue much. We need to believe in the shortage of ships, for most of the Trek plots to work. An explanation might fail us; lack thereof allows us to believe the perfect explanation might exist, somewhere, somehow.

Timo Saloniemi

Indeed.
For example, I am reasonably certain that I could find an explanation that I would find satisfactory for why a Federation of post-scarcity worlds might still find Starships to be rare and precious.
I am far less certain that my explanation would satisfy you or anyone else in particular.
But we can all take comfort in the idea that there is an answer we'd find sufficient.