Is It Really A Star Trek Series If Someone Isn't Stealing The Enterprise?
This post contains spoilers for the "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 2 premiere.
Ten minutes into "Strange New Worlds" season 2, before the show's title has even come up or the opening credits have rolled, Ethan Peck's Spock decides to violate what newcomer and willing accomplice Pelia (Carol Kane) estimates to be "about 17 Starfleet regulations." He's not one to resist the call to adventure, nor is "Strange New Worlds" one to waste time recycling the oldest plan in the Spock-related playbook.
"What plan?" asks Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush). The storytelling plan to implement a love triangle? (Or perhaps a love quadrangle, judging by the sudden intimacy radiating off Chapel and Babs Olusanmokun's Dr. M'Benga, as they hold onto each other for dear life and prepare to jump into space later this episode?)
No, silly, not that plan, because, as Peck observed last summer, the romance part for Spock "feels like breaking new ground." The plan we're talking about is the one Spock introduces when he says, "I would've thought it obvious. We must steal the Enterprise."
Spock spends less than a minute of screen time formulating this plan, maybe because it's informed by the memory of his past Vulcan life, back when he was played by Leonard Nimoy in "Star Trek: The Original Series" and later films. The "Strange New Worlds" season 2 premiere is entitled, "The Broken Circle," and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we shall endeavor here to show that you don't have to search very far in the annals of "Trek" history for instances of Enterprise crew members stealing the Enterprise.
It's not as punchy as, "Engage," or, "Hit it," but now might be a good time to cue Spock's awkward new catchphrase: "I would like the ship to go. Now."
Spock steals the Enterprise in 'The Menagerie'
Captain Kirk (William Shatner) doesn't pay attention to "Trek" Twitter, or wherever the "subspace chatter" about his predecessor, Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter), has been happening. In the Hugo Award-winning "The Menagerie," the first two-parter in "Star Trek" history (and only one in "The Original Series"), Kirk is out of the loop about Pike along with Spock's entire plan to steal the Enterprise.
Spock served with Pike for precisely 11 years, 4 months, 5 days, and he'll do whatever it takes to restore his happiness, even if it means acting in a seemingly illogical, un-Vulcan-like manner. In "Strange New Worlds," Anson Mount's Pike has been haunted by visions of his future, and in "The Menagerie," we see firsthand how rescuing cadets from a radiation leak has left Hunter's Pike horribly disfigured, unable to move or speak in his futuristic wheelchair except through flashing yes-or-no lights.
Though he knows it's "treachery, and it's mutiny," Spock kidnaps Pike and commandeers the Enterprise in "The Menagerie." Setting a course for Talos IV, he lets the computer run the ship, and it takes us back to the original unaired "Star Trek" pilot, "The Cage." The characters then do what "Star Trek" writers and online culture vultures have been doing ever since: namely, watch old "Trek," strip it for chop-shop parts, and frame new stories around those parts.
As we'll soon see, Spock's emotionless "Next Generation" counterpart, Data, would get in on the fun, too, doing an impression of his captain to give orders, the way Spock uses recordings of Kirk's voice. To his credit, after lying, disobeying orders, and doing the Vulcan nerve pinch on anyone who gets in his way (all for a good cause, Pike's Talosian happily ever after), Spock hands himself over to be court-martialed.
Kirk's crew steals the Enterprise in The Search for Spock
Some say odd-numbered "Star Trek" movies are bad and even-numbered ones are good. Regardless of one's personal politics, it's funny to think that even U.S. President Ronald Reagan (a former actor) logged his thoughts on the matter like a confused Starfleet captain. In a White House diary entry dated June 23, 1984, Reagan called the third "Star Trek" movie "II" and wrote, "It wasn't too good."
Since it's a direct continuation of "The Wrath of Khan," "The Search for Spock" tries to refresh the audience's memory with repeated lines and scenes, literally rewinding them onscreen. Once again, we see characters, Klingons now, gathered around a monitor, watching previous "Trek" footage. It's the Genesis terraforming sequence from "The Wrath of Khan," which, as ILM notes, was "the first all-CG sequence in a feature film."
While the Klingons, led by Christopher Lloyd (the year before "Back to the Future"), were watching that, screenwriter Harve Bennett might have been mentally replaying "The Menagerie." When Starfleet decides to decommission the Enterprise and stonewalls Captain Kirk's request to return to Genesis for Spock, Kirk zones out as the camera slowly zooms in on his face. Then, he laughs, as if he's had a "Eureka!" moment.
Comic book thought bubble: I must steal the Enterprise.
And so he does, first breaking Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) out of the cell where his own attempts to charter a ship have landed him. (Even the Yoda-like, backward-talking alien knows, "Genesis, allowed is not!")
Together with a plainclothes skeleton crew, they evade the USS Excelsior and fly the Enterprise out on automated systems. The truth is, "The Search for Spock" would've ended a lot sooner if Kirk had just looked behind the camera since Leonard Nimoy directed this film.
Data steals the Enterprise in 'Brothers'
When it comes to hijacking the Enterprise, the "Next Generation" season 4 episode, "Brothers," sure doesn't miss a beat. On the Enterprise-D, Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner) is riding a turbolift with a kid Riker just scolded for being a bad brother. Suddenly, Data starts wigging out, suspiciously affecting a nervous tic (or robo-tic). His chin dances like a bobblehead as he takes to his console on the bridge and immediately puts the pedal to the proverbial metal, pushing the Enterprise to warp 9.3.
Echoing the wishes of Trekkies everywhere during certain franchise lows, Worf (Michael Dorn) asks, "Captain, did you request a course correction?" Before anyone can figure out what the heck is going on, Data has forced an evacuation of the bridge. He cuts off life support in places and herds the Enterprise crew where he wants them with a "cascade force field sequence."
As an android, Data can perfectly mimic the voice of Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), so he's one step ahead of the captain's plan to separate the Enterprise's saucer section and thereby take back the ship. Paramount and other studios (not to mention, mercenary media companies), take note: this is what happens when you enable AI writing. It will endanger space children's lives.
There's a chilling moment where Data rattles off a security code that seems as infinite as the number pi. He seizes control of the Enterprise the way his creator, Dr. Noonien Soong (not to be confused with Khan or La'an Noonien-Singh) has seized control of him, through his programming. This is the episode where Data meets his Michelangelo-esque maker (Spiner, in old-age makeup). "Why are humans so fascinated by old things?" Soong asks. That's a good question, as it relates to old "Star Trek" plotlines.
'The Last Generation' steals the Enterprise in 'Vox'
The ashes of late April's "Picard" series finale are barely cold, but two months is a lifetime in the streaming cycle, and it doesn't hurt to review facts when you're accusing Starfleet officers of theft. Technically, in the show's penultimate episode, "Vox," Picard and the USS Titan crew are fugitives when Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) reveals that he's rebuilt the Enterprise-D at the Starfleet Museum. Geordi says he combined the ship's surviving saucer with salvaged parts from another Starfleet vessel. That suggests this thing is museum/Starfleet property.
Granted, Picard and "The Last Generation," as the finale calls the "Next Generation" veterans, have a good reason for sorta-kinda stealing the restored Enterprise-D. They're trying to save the Federation from the Borg and Starfleet's assimilated youth. Anyone under 25 is evil, at least when you're an aging legacy character. Let's be honest, too: putting these folks back in the same stations on their old ship ("She's exactly as she was") is really just an excuse for showrunner Terry Matales "to place the action figure set neatly and safely back on the shelf," as he told Variety.
"We've been here before," Picard admits. Matales milks the nostalgia porn to death in "Picard" season 3, borrowing from "The Wrath of Khan" and "The Next Generation," just like Spock "borrows" the original Enterprise this week in "Strange New Worlds." Cross-reference the "Next Generation" series finale, where the last shot is a match cut from the God's-eye view of a poker table, to the Enterprise's exterior saucer, flying through space. In "Picard," the camera just keeps spinning and spinning over another poker table, going nowhere as the closing credits roll for almost two minutes straight. The visual metaphor of a show spinning its franchise wheels is obvious.
'I would've thought it obvious. We must steal...'
To be fair, with or without stealing the Enterprise as a recurring plot device, "Star Trek" was already cannibalizing itself and swiping from external sources long before Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) and his Marvel-esque mid-credits scene in the "Picard" finale were a twinkle in anyone's eye.
When the "Original Series" cast flew their final voyage together in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," they fought a Klingon villain who employed false-flag tactics (like in "The Broken Circle") and spent his whole dying battle quoting liberally from Shakespeare. Every line out of Christopher Plummer's mouth as the pirate-eyed Chang sounds like a Shakespeare mad-lib or some ChatGPT-generated plagiarism of the Bard. (In actuality, Nicholas Meyer penned the otherwise swell script and directed the two best "Star Trek" movies with the original cast: this, and "The Wrath of Khan.")
Spock has a line in "The Undiscovered Country" where he attributes a Sherlock Holmes quote to an ancestor of his. His generation looked to literary sources, whereas "Trek" under Alex Kurtzman prefers pulling from the early 1980s Lucasfilm handbook. You can see it when La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) out-drinks a Klingon and bluffs past another one with an "antimatter detonation switch" in "The Broken Circle." La'an, in those moments, is the clear pop cultural descendent of both Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), disguised as the bounty hunter Boushh, in "Return of the Jedi."
You know the line: "He's holding a thermal detonator!" C-3PO says it to Jabba the Hutt in "Jedi." Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) asks La'an in "Strange New Worlds," "What's an antimatter detonation switch? It's not a thing, is it?" The unspoken answer: Nope, it's just a thermal detonator by another name.
The unbroken circle: A poetic license to steal
None of this is meant to suggest that ship thievery or artistic thievery should land anyone in jail for crimes of unoriginality. If it's true, as the old rock song says, that "every poet is a thief," then "Strange New Worlds" is surely the kleptomaniac poet-warrior of "Star Trek" in the 21st century. By its very nature, the show is boldly going where "Trek" has gone before by having Ethan Peck, for instance, follow in Zachary Quinto and Leonard Nimoy's footsteps as Spock.
At least Spock's a good enough sport to recognize aloud the obviousness of his stealing-the-Enterprise ploy in "The Broken Circle." "Star Trek" has circled back on itself before, and it will do so again. To play a whack-a-mole game of spot-that-reference with its many influences is to ultimately fight a losing battle.
We've discussed how "Strange New Worlds" season 1 mended frustrations over "The Original Series" while cribbing from the "Alien" films and Ursula K. Le Guin's short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." Its back half was hit-or-miss, episode-wise, but the season overall was the best "Star Trek" has been in years. Besides, when you really get down to it, how different are the floating mountains on that dilithium mining planet in "The Broken Circle" from the ones on Pandora in James Cameron's "Avatar"? That movie took flak for copying "Dances with Wolves," and it's still the lesser sci-fi film of 2009 compared to that year's "Star Trek" reboot.
If you'd like to conclude this discussion, perhaps we can do so over a barrel of blood wine. Until then, may your blood always scream as stolen ships fly through the "Star Trek" universe.
The season 2 premiere of "Strange New Worlds" is now streaming on Paramount+.