The Franchise Is Cheapening The Name 'Enterprise'
The name -- once synonymous with Star Trek -- is being endlessly recycled into irrelevance
The name “Enterprise” used to really mean something.
Hell, at one point, you could have said that — in Star Trek — it meant everything.
The starship Enterprise was once instantly iconic.
Not only was it a living, breathing character all its own in the series itself, but it became such a part of the American zeitgeist that this fictional spaceship not only became a display fixture in the Smithsonian Museum but it lent its name to one of nation's very real spacecraft.
However, over the decades, the name has increasingly applied to a parade of successive starships with seemingly little thought or care to the pedigree or legacy that that storied name is supposed to represent.
The latest example of this is coming in the impending third season of Star Trek: Picard when we're introduced — for the first time — to the seventh ship to bear the name, the Enterprise-F. And by the time we meet her, she's already on the way to being decommissioned.
The power of the Enterprise was once such that its strength as a character — its centrality to the Star Trek universe itself — justified such lines as:
Let's make sure that history never forgets the name ... Enterprise.
— Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, “Yesterday's Enterprise”
Lines like these, which otherwise would come off as melodramatic, set the stakes perfectly when it came to our favorite starship.
And when Jim Kirk orders the destruction of the Enterprise in The Search for Spock, it's very much a death unto itself.
If Kirk is to bring back his best friend, he would have to sacrifice not only his son, David, but the ship which has been his love and his home for so many years.
I very much remember the release of Star Trek III in 1984. I remember the self-destruction of the Enterprise was the focal point of the film's trailer.
I remember, as a young 12-year-old in love with all things Trek, watching that and thinking how brutal — how final — it seemed. I wondered how, without the Enterprise, Star Trek could possibly have been expected to carry on.
And I remember shortly thereafter, when my grandmother took me to see the movie in the theater, sitting there with tears rolling down my cheeks. I mourned the death of the Enterprise just as surely — just as grievously — as I had that of Spock in the previous movie.
Even Kirk seemed to know just what he had done when he remarked to Dr McCoy, “My God Bones, what have I done?”
The devaluation of the starship Enterprise would begin at the end of the next film, The Voyage Home, with the introduction of the Enterprise-A, the “replacement” for the original starship and the first of the ships which would seemingly recycle the name “Enterprise,” endlessly.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier devalues the new Enterprise almost immediately by turning it into a poor copy of its gallant predecessor, as Scotty says, “I think this new ship was put together by monkeys. Oh, she's got a fine engine, but half the doors won't open, and guess whose job it is to make it right.”
To be sure, advancing through iterations of the Enterprise is an easy — and immediate — way for producers and writers to communicate the passage of time.
And the introduction of a new Enterprise, the Enterprise-D, in Star Trek: The Next Generation was a smart and successful way to connect the new series to the original, while the spin-off took place nearly a century after its predecessor.
At least in the case of the Enterprise-D, we spent seven years getting to know her as part of the essential lifeblood of the franchise. The “D” would become as beloved in her own right, as the original NCC-1701 once was.
But it would fall to Scotty — who, after all, once started a bar fight with some Klingons defending the honor of the original Enterprise — to most profoundly call out what had seemingly become a revolving door of ships named Enterprise when in the TNG episode “Relics,” he goes to the holodeck and asks to see his Enterprise: “No bloody A, B, C or D!”
The Enterprise-D, of course, would be lost in the first Next Gen movie, Generations, only to be replaced by the Enterprise-E in the very next film.
And now, with the premiere of Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard, we have to absorb that not only is the “E” gone but time's also up for the “F” — which we haven't barely had time to meet.
How are we fans expected to continue to hold the name “Enterprise” close to our hearts when each time we meet a ship so named, it's with the refrain, “Barely had time to know ye?”
MOMENT FOR TREK
Star Trek: The Evolution of The USS Enterprise
COUNTDOWN TO PICARD …
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This is being overdramatic. It makes no sense that every ship of the line bearing the same name would be legendary. The NX-01, TOS Enterprise, and Enterprise-D are important ships, while the B, C, E, and F are not. This is far more realistic than there being something magical about the name.