The subtitles read USS Thorn. I liked that peek at what was probably a Starfleet tug, but which could also be this "Division 12" ship. Like the USS Kelcie Mae, it's neat that we have both "traditional" Starfleet designs while sprinkling in some outside-the-box designs, versus some other eras of the franchise where anything goes.
More notes from 4x02:
- Division 12 was also mentioned last season as the guys that look into weird space stuff like the one Ortegas got sucked into. The only other Starfleet division we know about (not Section) is Division 14, who go around collecting Starfleeters who were victims of weird space stuff (ref: Lower Decks).
- See? Shuttle transporters! Why no one thinks of using them whenever "transporters are down"?!
- Quickly mentioned is "the MLK", which I presume means the USS Martin Luther King that La'an may have served aboard, and how she had a transporter accident involving people being shunted to, and then not being retrievable from the transporter buffer.
- They even make sound effects like the transporters from "The Cage". I know this shimmering SFX is heard elsewhere in this show, but they really crank it up for its use here.
- The whole negative ions = ghosts thing
is an actual thing. Spock stops short of whipping up a proton pack though, whose genesis in "Ghostbusters" was meant as a logical reason of using positively-charged particles to contain a ghost.
- The Engineering set finally returns as the engine room of the USS Griffin. The shuttlebay (also a virtual set) may be new though, I don't think we've seen the clamshell doors from the inside before on this show.
- I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that all the "Discovery" props and such have been sold off, but this would've been a great time to see the older uniforms in use again. I'd suggest that they were in the current uniforms as a hallucination, but La'an does see her Griffin counterpart in the current uniform in the logs.
- The USS Griffin's class is not firmly established. There is a fuzzy graphic at the top of the episode that lists assorted specs and her last mission, but it's too blurred to make out. Crew of ~300, we don't really know what the Enterprise's crew count is following her most recent refit at the beginning of the show but in DSC it was firmly established as its "Cage" level in 2259. That doesn't MEAN the Griffin isn't a Connie, as the Enterprise bounced to 430 in TOS possibly 500 in TMP, and back to 300 by TUC. There's ample space for all these people regardless.
- While an hallucination, La'an seems to believe a transporter can be set to beam a subject "into" itself, effectively killing them. She also believes Uhura can solve this by resetting the transport-in-progress and containing the subject in the buffer.
- While an hallucination, Kirk seems to believe that random rocks can easily smash a hole in the front viewscreen of a Constitution-class starship. He also thinks that a brother being hurled into a decompressing hole will result in
a gruesome disembowelment very reminiscent of a 1998 sc-fi movie.
- Nurse Chapel gets a new uniform variant, and it doesn't seem to fit well. But skirts are returning...
As an aside, I'm not pleased that there wasn't a sci-fi explanation for the Griffin being all "Event Horizon" (they even played into the "you belong to the ship" theme from that movie). I understand that not everything HAS to be explained by subspace fissures or time travelling aliens or whatever, but here the only conclusion for this situation is "oh, the ship's haunted", followed by a shrugging of shoulders and moving on. At least the Event Horizon was all because she attempted wormhole-based FTL travel and ended up transiting into a dimension of
evil.
Mark
yeah, I guess the logical gyrations could be worked to fit that concept. Never thought of it like that, but yes, it could be interpreted that way.
