What happened to the Jenolan crew?

[t_smitts]

I was looking at, and enjoying, my Jenolan model from Eaglemoss, when something occurred to me.

Yes, the episode explicitly states that only Scotty and Matt Franklin survived the ship impacting the Dyson Sphere, but what I mean is, what happened to their remains? There's no mention of the Enterprise crew recovering any bodies. Were there any bodies to recover? Even after decaying for 75 years in an oxygen rich environment, there'd still be some skeletal remains. Did Scotty and Franklin consign them to the deep via the transporter, as we saw done in "The Schizoid Man"? Did part of the ship decompress (as was the case in the novel), which could've blown them out into space? The bodies shouldn't be hard to locate, since the sphere's gravity wouldn't have let them travel far. Moreover, what happened to the bodies of the bridge crew, since that section clearly remained intact?

 

[Tenacity]

Scotty and/or Franklin could have phasered the corpses.

 

[Timo]

Supposedly, keeping bodies in that Trek thing they call stasis takes power, and our TNG heroes detected little to none (and whatever they saw was supposedly associated with the transporter).

But keeping the bodies preserved aboard the ship would be trivial: just put them in vacuum, of which there's plenty around.

I didn't get the impression that Scotty and Franklin would have jumped into the transporter seconds before they'd have died of treatening thing X. Rather, they probably spent weeks pondering their Crusoe predicatment, aboard a ship that could have kept them alive for centuries if not for the frailness of their bodies, before deciding on a course of action. They could have arranged for suitable rites aboard if that was their way, and declared Cargo Hold 47 henceforth a cemetery. Or Decks 2 through 17, for that matter: there'd be little point in relocating the corpses. And no good reason to vaporize them with a phaser or a cremation chamber (indeed, that we never hear of such chambers probably already tells volumes).

However, as far as we can tell, returning the bodies of those fallen in space is simply not customary in any of the Trek eras after ENT (indeed, Wes getting his dad back is a major anomaly). So Scotty wouldn't shed a word let alone a tear when realizing the cemetery was going to go down in flames: the appropriate burial had already been conducted to conclusion.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

I figured Scott and Franklin removed all the bodies. They were there for awhile before thinking of the transporter solution.

 

[Timo]

..."Transporter solution" would also make it simple and non-icky to get rid of the bodies.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mojochi]

Yeah. I just assumed that after the crash they used the transporter to relocate or dispense with the remains, either to a location on board or off board, & whichever it was, whatever is left of them is either eradicated or consigned to space, once the Jenolan is gone

Besides, it's kind of fun to envision the survival story of Scotty & Franklin, with Scotty having his beat up arm, & them having to Apollo 13 their power & resources etc...

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

The novelization (remember when Pocket did novelizations of certain TNG-DS9-VOY episodes? Oh, the days before on-demand streaming!) suggested that there was a passenger compartment which held the passengers and some of the crew when the ship went down; it was opened to space in the crash and everyone inside went out that way. Scotty and Franklin were on the bridge (possibly with a couple others), and were the only survivors. IIRC they didn't have much time between the crash and entering the transporters in the novel, barely enough time to really get to know each other.

Edit - Per Memory Beta:

http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/USS_Jenolen

Mark

 

[Timo]

Whether what we see is even the bridge, or just a transporter room into which Scotty and Franklin dragged a random chair and viewscreen, is debatable.

Would the ship have passengers? She's apparently a Starfleet transport, unless the commercial user was too stingy to have the pennants painted over. Perhaps she only hauled cargo, plus a retiree who could pull the right strings. The remarkable thing is that she seemed to be flying along a route never taken by any other vessel, which would be very odd for a liner, or for any ship with passengers who want to know in advance where and when they are going.

A Starfleet colonial supply ship without paying civilians aboard might get diverted to an emergency mission to replenish the napkin supply of Beta Distantis, though, after which the shortest route to Norkan would go through uncharted space... Pretty much the same rationale that would make Kirk the first to fly past the Murasaki mini-quasar and risk never being allowed to do that again.

Timo Saloniemi