1x08 Veritas
Granted, the accuracy of the majority of this episode is questionable, as it's being told in the form of flashbacks through the eyes of our heroes (notably Tendi and T'Ana, IMO). Still, there's a lot we can speculate on given what REALLY happened, namely with this off-book rescue mission the Cerritos somehow got itself detailed to do...
- The repair bay's ceiling is angled, suggesting that wherever it is, it's against the top of the saucer somewhere.
- The gang is actually working on the shuttle that's been there since the first episode. I'm guessing it's a personal or even make-work project of some kind, as there seems to be no rush on getting this done, AND Tendi is working on it for some reason. It doesn't seem to be a vintage ship or anything a Tom Paris would sink his teeth into.
- This is the first episode in which we see a California-class starship fire weapons, in this case the saucer's large ventral phaser strip. Gotta admit, I miss the whole light-travelling-along-the-strip thing.
- The two Vulcan dudes that Shaxs and Billups (and Rutherford?) knock out are using hand phasers most usually associated with the Ferengi, but which have been seen in Vulcan hands too.
- This is the first time we've seen the inside of the Vulcan Warpshuttle, a design that was first-and-only really seen in TMP. It's actually pretty accurate to the model from what I can see, although the side door Rutherford gets tossed through features a single horizonal window instead of the original's two vertical windows. Still, this can be a much later model of the design, as the forward console feature Vulcan LCARS touch controls.
- OTOH, the shuttle was originally designed as a standard Starfleet shuttle, complete with the docking ring used in TMP/TWOK. Several were seen in the Enterprise shuttlebay in the original TMP release, though they were replaced with empty CGI bays in later releases. One wonders if this is still a common design, given the number of Miranda class ships and their cohorts still ambling around with said docking rings.
- The outside of the museum has several ships on display outside and atop the building. None of them seem to be classic Vulcan design, but are not any known Trek design. Three of them seem to be the same Starfleet-ish saucer design, exhibited (or maybe parked!) on pads around the facility.
- Okay, my list of what's visible in the museum:
Ferengi shuttle
Tholian webspinner (TOS)
Starfleet Type-6 Shuttle
Workbee (DS9)
Jem-Haddar attack ship
Klingon ship (PROBABLY a D7)
Romlan BoP (TOS)
Vulcan Lander (First Contact or that Discovery cameo)
Starfleet shuttle (TOS)
There's also a conspicuous bottom of another ship, barely visible in the shot where Shaxs starts clambering up the struts holding the BoP in place. It looks like the bottom of an eight-sided dice but I can't identify it. In that same area is a generic display of some sort that seems to have a starship silhouette on it - or it could just be a map of the museum.
- Lots of these ships must be scale models. The size of the building isn't really precluding full-size exhibits from fitting, but going by the scale of the people standing next to some of them, there's no way they can ALL be full size IMO.
- The Vulcan guard Rutherford has to distract is wearing armor that is inspired by, but not QUITE like the armor that shows up in assorted TOS movies. He's carrying a modern phaser rifle that is seen elsewhere in the show (overkill for a museum security guy, no?). What's the deal here - are we looking at non-Starfleet museum security, a Vulcan museum docent getting a little trigger happy with his weapons collection, or 2380 Starfleet security complete with contemporary weapons? We see in "Picard" that Starfleet security has graduated back to full armor by the attack on Mars in 2385, perhaps this is a version of that?
- And this is the first time we've seen someone steal a museum exhibit in Trek. This has been done in other sci-fi (Battlestar Galactica comes to mind) and in Trek literature (Scotty steals the USS Yorktown out of the museum in the TNG novel "Crossover"), but not as part of an episode's plot. Still, it disregards how we understand museum exhibits are usually seen - there is a LOT of work done to the ships and planes we see in museums today to make them display-ready, notably removing the engines, avionics, weapons and so on. I've been on the USS Midway and Intrepid museums, and they're both permanently mounted (in the water) and everything that makes them move has been disconnected and largely removed. It's not like some sneaky teens could stay after closing time and float the thing away.
- As such, I'm wondering about the logistics of getting an antique moving again in the Trek universe. Assuming the ship was stored flight-worthy in the first place, I can't imagine they'd just leave it fueled up and ready to go. Perhaps the ship, once stolen, was sent somewhere it could be outfitted with a warp drive, antimatter / singularity, and a cloaking device that wouldn't instantly be seen through as it's a century old?
- Or maybe it wasn't even a Romulan ship! For all we know it was a Federation ship designed and built for infiltration in some period, and once it wasn't useful anymore, put out to a museum.
- Or that's what they WANTED you to think...
- The Rutherford segment doesn't necessarily end on Gorn or a Gorn planet. It's got the Vasquez rocks in the background, but rock formations exactly like that have been seen on many planets around the Galaxy. For all we know, this Gorn wedding could have been on Earth!
- The commandos on Ramsay's team need not be Starfleet, need they? They're obviously not meant to be part of the Cerritos' regular crew, but they may not even be Starfleet at all.
- The USS Alhambra bridge has the exact same bridge paint scheme as the Cerritos, which bucks the trend for the other ships seen in this series, even for a one-note joke...
- Where exactly on the ship does Freeman praise / dress down the LDs? It's a big empty space with a bench in it. It's not the shuttlebay.
Mark
