I just ignore it in my head canon.
USS Enterprise (eventually) on Discovery?
- Thread starter EJD1984
- Start date
I just ignore it in my head canon.
"Q&A" featuring Ensign Spock and Number One is set during the former's first day on the Enterprise circa 2252.
oh i forgot about that one lol
I'm up to episode 13 in my S2 rewatch, and when the torpedo hits the conference room they say it's deck 5. On the classic version of the ship it'd be deck 6 but the Discoprise bridge is part of the "teardrop" rather than being a level above so every deck inside is one-up from what it "should" be. It shows they put thought into what deck was hit at least.
Pretty sure they're all pre-"Cage"
"The Trouble With Edward" is Pike's science officer leaving to captain another ship. "Q&A" is him getting Spock as replacement. I guess the one about the cadet could go wherever, though.
It's all a bit anachronist/achronological anyway: in "The Cage" the rank of #1 was said to be Lieutenant, with the sleeve braid to match, yet she welcomes Spock aboard as a (Lieutenant) Commander, with that much more braid to her uniform, too. Why was she demoted for "The Cage"?
Of course, if they did show her as Lieutenant when receiving Spock, then it would be odd for Spock to be the replacement of an officer who leaves the ship at Captain rank. Presumably Captain Lucero would have served under Pike at the Commander and Lieutenant Commander ranks previously, making it awkward for the Lieutenant to be her boss.
Timo Saloniemi
Of course, if they did show her as Lieutenant when receiving Spock, then it would be odd for Spock to be the replacement of an officer who leaves the ship at Captain rank. Presumably Captain Lucero would have served under Pike at the Commander and Lieutenant Commander ranks previously, making it awkward for the Lieutenant to be her boss.
Timo Saloniemi
I know you don't like the idea, but I think we have to ignore the rank stripes in The Cage, or accept the usual interpretation that they denote something other than rank (probably a commissioned officer or bridge qualified or something). There are too many contradictory points now, thanks to Discovery and Short Treks. Maybe Pike was going through an egalitarian phase, and insisted that all officers (including himself) wear one stripe while on duty.
This, of course, doesn't explain why he referred to Una as "Lieutenant" in The Cage. But then again, there's no explanation for why Troi was referred to as "Lieutenant" in Encounter at Farpoint by Riker of all people. Except for the obvious, Troi and Una served with Riker and Pike as Lieutenants for a time, and their respective superior officer made an uncorrected mistake when he forgot about her likely recent promotion.
Q&A doesn't have a specified setting. MA assumes 2254 for some reason, but most assume 2252 or 2253, based on old Chronology assumptions of Spock's hire date. He's explicitly an Ensign (no mistake there) in the short, but perhaps will receive a two-step promotion with his acceptance of a senior officer position. Lucero probably was a Lt. Cdr, vastly overqualified for her position on a 200+ person ship, who may have served from Lieutenancy or earlier and had pushed for two-step promotion to command a science vessel (and she probably received a two-step demotion since).
Lucero's eventual Cabot crew was of the all-Lieutenant-braid type, too. Were they all Lieutenants, perhaps? Apparently at least "Sarah" was. But it's possible that the ship was among those where rank was not indicated by braid, if we want to believe in such things.
Lucero being "overqualified" is probably better read as her being "as qualified as meets the eye": she gets the rank that corresponds to her skills. And Pike's ship just had a more skilled CSO than some other ships of that size, or Pike's own ship at some other time. We never learn of a specific rank that would go with a specific starship duty, other than full Captain being overwhelmingly common for the CO. And there's no good precedent for one rank being better than another for the XO position, either - all we have to go by is the perceived logic of the XO needing to outrank most other officers for formal reasons.
Number One's promotion from Lieutenant rank is unlikely to be "recent" in any scenario dealing with "The Cage", so that doesn't excuse Pike's "error". (Troi of course would have been absent from Riker's life for years, never demonstrating her new rank to him.)
As for a "200+ person ship", as far as we know this is the biggest Starfleet has to offer - or at least we never hear of a ship with a bigger crew in that era. But it may also be among the smallest, eyeballing the external size. It loses out to the DSC hero ship in said external size, but still wins out on crew size by some seventy people! That is, if the snapshots into crew size we get from isolated episodes are in any way indicative of the average complement.
Timo Saloniemi
Lucero being "overqualified" is probably better read as her being "as qualified as meets the eye": she gets the rank that corresponds to her skills. And Pike's ship just had a more skilled CSO than some other ships of that size, or Pike's own ship at some other time. We never learn of a specific rank that would go with a specific starship duty, other than full Captain being overwhelmingly common for the CO. And there's no good precedent for one rank being better than another for the XO position, either - all we have to go by is the perceived logic of the XO needing to outrank most other officers for formal reasons.
Number One's promotion from Lieutenant rank is unlikely to be "recent" in any scenario dealing with "The Cage", so that doesn't excuse Pike's "error". (Troi of course would have been absent from Riker's life for years, never demonstrating her new rank to him.)
As for a "200+ person ship", as far as we know this is the biggest Starfleet has to offer - or at least we never hear of a ship with a bigger crew in that era. But it may also be among the smallest, eyeballing the external size. It loses out to the DSC hero ship in said external size, but still wins out on crew size by some seventy people! That is, if the snapshots into crew size we get from isolated episodes are in any way indicative of the average complement.
Timo Saloniemi
Although, the main saucer deck ranged depending on the cross-section: 4 (Jefferies TOS), 5 (Jeffries P2/Probert TMP) or 6 (FJ TOS/Drexler ENT-TOS). Deck 5 probably still works for the Discoprise because the saucer seems flatter even though the ship is a bit larger.
Are you talking about how they insinuate that the Discoprise was a refit between the Cage/TOS Enterprise and the TMP Enterprise? Yes, indeed, that doesn’t fit, but that thinking has since changed. Now CBS considers the Discoprise to have always looked like that, and the Cage/TOS design has been retconned out of existence.
I think the relevant question is, what has been permanently swapped for something new?
We got new/redone Enterprises at a great number of junctions before. Apart from a bit of minor back-and-forth in TOS, due to the use of stock footage from the pilots, Trek never went back on anything before.
But here we are discussing the very "apart" case, and in a prequel context that no other ship change previously had to cope with. So, will this one play out differently?
It already has, as we got the cartoon'ish portrayal of the "The Cage" ship in a show that also gives us the other portrayal; other shows that featured shots of a "preceding look" of hardware never tried to play clever tricks with that, but simply told the audience that things looked different earlier on.
OTOH, DSC is the first show ever that felt the need to alter the TOS looks. Other shows simply went with the 1960s haute couture as is, even if their own production design was utterly different - or then bent over backwards thrice to establish an "alternate universe" to create a chance to do something different. Does this mean DSC is gonna be "unrepenting"?
OTTH, apparently DSC is dead, as regards the 2250s. So the shows that would deal with the changed looks of Pike's old ship are the ones that currently engage in unabashed canon-worshipping rituals and employ writers and designers who were told to frantically backpedal in DSC. So us spotting the altered ship in PIC need not mean much more than us spotting a particular design of the ship on Picard's Conference Lounge wall: it doesn't answer the "permanently swapped" question for us, unfortunately or fortunately.
Timo Saloniemi
We got new/redone Enterprises at a great number of junctions before. Apart from a bit of minor back-and-forth in TOS, due to the use of stock footage from the pilots, Trek never went back on anything before.
But here we are discussing the very "apart" case, and in a prequel context that no other ship change previously had to cope with. So, will this one play out differently?
It already has, as we got the cartoon'ish portrayal of the "The Cage" ship in a show that also gives us the other portrayal; other shows that featured shots of a "preceding look" of hardware never tried to play clever tricks with that, but simply told the audience that things looked different earlier on.
OTOH, DSC is the first show ever that felt the need to alter the TOS looks. Other shows simply went with the 1960s haute couture as is, even if their own production design was utterly different - or then bent over backwards thrice to establish an "alternate universe" to create a chance to do something different. Does this mean DSC is gonna be "unrepenting"?
OTTH, apparently DSC is dead, as regards the 2250s. So the shows that would deal with the changed looks of Pike's old ship are the ones that currently engage in unabashed canon-worshipping rituals and employ writers and designers who were told to frantically backpedal in DSC. So us spotting the altered ship in PIC need not mean much more than us spotting a particular design of the ship on Picard's Conference Lounge wall: it doesn't answer the "permanently swapped" question for us, unfortunately or fortunately.
Timo Saloniemi
Then how come the Discoprise looks the same during the TOS scenes in Ephraim & Dot instead of what it looked like in TOS?
I'd take a lot of what we see in "Ephraim & Dot" with a grain of salt. They didn't even get the registry number right on the TOS Movie Enterprise destroyed at the Genesis Planet and the interiors of the TOS Era ship were an odd mix of original TOS designs(the Sickbay and even the visible warp core components behind the mesh grating in Engineering) and the DSC-style corridors.
Let's face it. The "canon" appearance of the Enterprise was a major inconsistency since 1966. Each and every episode mixes takes from the different versions of the model for The Cage/Where No Man/regular series, used as stock shots. This was somewhat solved by having the new remastered CGI effects (did they 'decanonize' the old ones, I wonder?). But still we see sets and costumes changed from "Charlie X" (episode 2) to "Where No Man" (pilot and episode 3). The solution here was to assume the production order was the chronological one, and some kind of refit happened between Where No Man and the regular episodes. But this is all for "fixing" purposes. Things were messed from the start.
Having said that, what the Discoprise does is to put another confusing data point in this. Now we have one additional Enterprise to reconcile with, mixed with several others that appeared regularly in each episode of TOS. Considering all, I'd be happy to think the Discoprise was the April and Pike ship, that got a refit before it was passed along for Kirk, getting the appearance of the regular episodes of TOS. That would make The Cage and Where No Man the outliers, in a otherwise "fixed" continuity. And that would be an acceptable way to show the 60s sets and models, by the way -- maybe a couple of shots in the last episode of the Pike series, when he passes the ship on to Kirk. But no previous series has adopted the 60s view in a regular basis. Not even STTMP, which was really, really close to it (both in real-world and in fictional-world terms).
Having said that, what the Discoprise does is to put another confusing data point in this. Now we have one additional Enterprise to reconcile with, mixed with several others that appeared regularly in each episode of TOS. Considering all, I'd be happy to think the Discoprise was the April and Pike ship, that got a refit before it was passed along for Kirk, getting the appearance of the regular episodes of TOS. That would make The Cage and Where No Man the outliers, in a otherwise "fixed" continuity. And that would be an acceptable way to show the 60s sets and models, by the way -- maybe a couple of shots in the last episode of the Pike series, when he passes the ship on to Kirk. But no previous series has adopted the 60s view in a regular basis. Not even STTMP, which was really, really close to it (both in real-world and in fictional-world terms).
The registry snafu was a legitimate mistake. The use of the Discoprise during periods of TOS episodes, and its mixing of TOS interiors with DSC interiors, was deliberate. There’s a difference.
IMO,Ephraim cannot easily differentiate one universe from another. Discoprise exteriors and TOS interiors are indicative of this.
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