It’s one of the saddest moments in all of Star Trek.
Outnumbered by Klingons, his son murdered only moments ago, determined to save his friends,
including the recently resurrected Spock, James T. Kirk does the unthinkable: he lures
his enemies onto his ship, the legendary U.S.S.
Enterprise, beams himself and his crew to relative safety on the planet below, and watches
as the auto-destruct system destroys the Enterprise.
As the remnants of the ship burn up in the planet’s atmosphere, Kirk looks as though
he could cry.
I’m sure many people watching this scene in movie theaters back in 1984 felt the same
way.
And who can blame them?
This was the Enterprise!
The ship that had carried Kirk and his crew on adventures across the galaxy for almost
twenty years!
Or maybe for only a few years.
Because from a certain point of view, the Enterprise destroyed in Star Trek III was
not the same ship as the Enterprise Kirk commanded during Star Trek: The Original Series.
It all depends on how you look at it.
And look at it we shall in this video, which I’m calling
Is the Post-TOS Enterprise Actually a Different Ship?
On one level this is the nerdiest of nerd questions.
But on another level, the question leads us to grapple with one of the oldest and most
difficult problems in philosophy: the nature of identity.
What makes a thing the thing that it is?
How much can a thing change while still remaining the same thing?
Like I said, it’s some deep shit.
Let’s get into it, shall we?
The most well known example of this type of problem is the ship of Theseus.
It was described almost two-thousand years ago by the Greek writer Plutarch.
According legend, the great hero Theseus had sailed from his home city of Athens to the
island of Crete to rescue a group of young Athenian captives and kill the Minotaur who
lived at the center of the Labyrinth.
After his triumphant return, the grateful Athenians preserved the ship of Theseus as
a tribute to the god Apollo.
The Athenians were able to keep the ship seaworthy for centuries by swapping out old, rotten
wooden planks with new ones as necessary.
Eventually, every original plank was replaced.
Plutarch writes that the philosophers of Athens began to argue with each other about the ship
of Theseus.
Some said that it was still the same vessel that had carried the great hero to Crete and
back.
Others insisted that because none of the original planks remained, the ship now moored in the
harbor was a different ship altogether.
When Star Trek: The Motion Picture premiered in movie theaters in December 1979, Star Trek
fans got their own version of the ship of Theseus problem to argue about.
Call it the “Ship of Kirk” problem!
Wait, I got a better one!
“The Ship of Tiberius!”
[Monitor graphic: Roman Emperor Tiberius] No!
The Enterprise on the big screen looked . . . different than it had looked on TV.
The general design was still the same – big flat saucer section, cylindrical engineering
section underneath, long, narrow warp engines jutting out on either side.
But the changes – to the ship’s interior as well as its exterior – were impossible
to miss.
These changes could easily have been treated as a retcon.
In other words, the ship doesn’t look different for any in-story reason, it looks different
because the producers had more money and wanted to redesign everything so it would look better,
and the characters don’t notice the difference – to them, it’s always looked this way.
That’s exactly what the producers and designers of Star Trek: Discovery decided to do when
they created the look of their show.
Many longtime Trek fans were (and still are) upset by the fact that the technology, the
uniforms, the appearance of the Klingons, and the overall aesthetic of Discovery is
virtually impossible to reconcile with previous Star Trek shows set during roughly the same
time period.
But those elements aren’t meant to be reconciled with previous Star Trek shows.
That’s what makes them a retcon.
There is no explanation offered in the story for why everything looks different – it’s
just different.
Which, to be fair to the fans who are put off by it, is unusual for Star Trek.
Discovery features the most extensive unexplained cosmetic alterations to the franchise to date.
There have been significant changes in the past, but – like the differences between
the looks of The Original Series and The Motion Picture – there’s always been a reason
why things look different written into the story.
But in the case of the changes to the Enterprise from The Original Series to The Motion Picture,
the presence of that in-story explanation – the fact that it’s not a retcon – is
actually what creates the Ship of Theseus problem.
The Enterprise looks different when it shows up at the end of Discovery’s first season,
as well, but that’s a retcon.
It looks different to us, but to the characters in the story it looks exactly how it’s supposed
to look.
The Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture looks different, but the characters are aware
that it didn’t always look like this, and there is a reason why it looks different now
included in the story.
And yet we’re also told, and the characters in the film seem to accept, that the Enterprise
of The Motion Picture and the Enterprise of The Original Series are the same ship.
But are they?
. . . Or, is it?
However you say that?
When we overlay images of the Enterprise before and after the Motion Picture refit, we can
see how extensive the alterations were.
As you can see, these are supposed to be of the Enterprise-A, but the Enterprise-A and
the original Enterprise post-refit were identical, on the outside at least, so I’m going with
it.
By the way, I got these images from the website Ex Astris Scientia, which is the sort of place
a Star Trek nerd can fall into and never want to climb out of, highly recommended if you
haven’t checked it out.
And these images in particular were created by Igor Marić – Igor Marić the bobsledder
from Croatia?
I have no idea.
Maybe!
Here’s a top view and a side view of the Enterprise from The Original Series.
I’ll replace each component of this ship with its equivalent from the refitted Enterprise
from The Motion Picture one at a time, so we can see how much of the original ship is
left when we’re done.
First, obviously, the warp nacelles.
Those are totally new in the movie – the originals are tubular, in the movie their
flat and rectangular.
The struts that connect them to the body of the ship are also new, shaped and angled differently.
Next, the engineering section has either been replaced or at the very least significantly
redesigned and augmented, plus the original deflector dish, which looked like a big radio
antenna, has been replaced by a glowing version that sits within the hull of the ship rather
than sticking out.
The neck linking the engineering and drive sections has also either been replaced with
a completely new component or altered quite a bit.
Ditto for the saucer section.
And when we move to the interior of the ship, we see a whole new bridge, a whole new main
engineering facility, a new transporter room, a new sickbay, and new corridors.
And we’re talking about more than cosmetic alterations here, too.
At one point Kirk gets lost and has to ask a crew member for directions.
And she’s like, “The turbolift is that way, Admiral Dipshit.”
And then he runs into Decker looking all smug, and Kirk’s like “Oh, bite me, Proto-Riker.
How many godlike beings have you faced?
None?
How many evil supercomputers have you tricked into destroying themselves?
Is that number zero?
Thought so.”
I’m paraphrasing a bit.
The point is, it seems as though the interior of the ship has been gutted and redesigned
and rebuilt.
So if the exterior has been completely redone, and the interior has been completely redone,
what’s left?
The frame?
If we assume the engineering and saucer sections weren’t replaced entirely but rather extensively
remodeled, then I guess we can assume the original skeleton of the ship is still intact
for the most part.
But is that enough to consider the Enterprise we see in The Motion Picture to be the same
ship we saw in The Original Series?
Philosophers arguing about the ship of Theseus problem have been asking themselves a similar
question for thousands of years.
Some would argue that the ship retains its original identity because its original components
were replaced gradually, meaning the history of the ship doesn’t begin with placing of
the last new plank, but can be traced back to the ship as it was before the first plank
was replaced.
Others would argue that as the original planks were removed and replaced, the ship gradually
lost its original identity and must now be regarded as a different ship.
One of the most interesting ways to approach this problem is to examine it in terms of
what Aristotle called the Four Causes.
Aristotle proposed that before we can claim to have knowledge of a thing, we must understand
why it is the way it is.
To provide a general framework for seeking that understanding, he offered the Four Causes:
The Material Cause: What is the thing made of?
The Formal Cause: What is the shape, the arrangement, the appearance of the thing?
The Efficient Cause: How was the thing made?
By whom or by what was it made?
The Final Cause: What is the purpose of the thing?
What does it do?
What was it made for?
An Aristotelian solution to the Ship of Theseus problem might be to say that it is the same
ship even after its last original plank has been replaced, because even though it is no
longer made of the same specific material as it once was, it is still made of the same
kind of material – wood, in this case – and though the new planks may not have been placed
by the same people who built the ship the first time, they were placed in the same way.
And the ship retains its original shape, and exists for the same purpose it always has.
So, same ship!
We can apply this same solution to the Enterprise problem.
Presumably, the ship after the refit is made of the same kind of materials as it was before
the refit.
It’s in the same general shape, though as noted already it does look a little different.
It was made by the same people – generally speaking – not necessarily the exact same
individuals who built the ship originally, but the same organization, Starfleet.
And it was made for the same purpose.
That last bit might be the most important point in deciding whether or not the refitted
Enterprise is still the same ship.
Because when we consider the purpose of a thing, we’re talking about more than its
intended practical function.
The refitted Enterprise wasn’t intended to be just any starship – it’s purpose
was to be the Enterprise.
Not a new Enterprise – we got plenty of those later on in the franchise – the same
Enterprise.
By having it undergo a refit, albeit an extensive one, instead of building a whole new ship,
Starfleet was able to maintain a tenuous but unbroken thread of continuity from here [TOS
Enterprise] to here [TMP Enterprise].
The identity of an object is determined by more than the planks of which it is made.
Identity is a complex and malleable thing, and it’s dependent on more factors than
we generally acknowledge.
Think about our identities as individuals.
I might like to think that my identity is rooted in something solid and immutable, but
the truth is it’s the sum total of my body, my experiences, my memories and interpretations
of those experiences, my inner sense of who I am, how I’m perceived and treated by others,
and lots of other things that I have little or no awareness of or control over.
And the same is true for you.
Isn’t philosophy fun?!
The same thing is true of the Enterprise.
There isn’t one essential thing that makes the Enterprise the Enterprise.
Its identity is made up of many ingredients, including the specific materials it’s made
of, but many other things, as well – its form, its history, its purpose.
Now, maybe even after all this you still look at this ship [monitor graphic: TMP Enterprise]
and think, “I don’t care if they did replace everything one piece at a time to maintain
continuity, and I don’t give a damn what Aristotle thought – it’s too new, there’s
too little of the original ship left, that’s not the same ship, and everybody – characters
and audience – is just pretending it’s the same because it makes them feel better.”
Cynical bastard, aren’t ya?
But from where I sit, that’s an equally valid answer to the problem.
If there was a single obvious solution that everyone could agree on, it wouldn’t be
a philosophical question.
And it wouldn’t be as much fun to talk about.
I don’t really care if the Enterprise from The Motion Picture is “actually” the same
ship from The Original Series, because there actually is no ship!
The Enterprise we all know and love was made not by engineers and shipwrights, but by writers,
directors, production designers, concept artists, set designers, special effects artists.
It exists not in the 23rd century, but on the screen, on the page, and in our collective
imagination.
We ask ourselves questions like “Is the ship in Star Trek: The Motion Picture really
the original Enterprise?” or “Does the transporter kill you?” or “How many times
does the Next Generation crew have to save the galaxy before some of these people get
promoted, for God’s sake?”
We point out contradictions and inconsistencies and invent explanations for them.
We ponder the unseen ramifications of the actions of our heroes.
We do all of this, hopefully, because it’s enjoyable, because it reminds us of the ways
in which Star Trek is silly and preposterous, but also of the reasons why we love it.
And it’s not just Star Trek.
Is the Flash faster than Superman?
Could a lightsaber slice through Captain America’s shield?
Why didn’t Thanos use the power of the infinity gauntlet to increase resources instead of
killing half the population?
Do the answers to these questions even matter as long as we’re having a good time arguing
about them?
Is it really Kirk’s original Enterprise if it’s changed so much that Kirk can’t
even find the elevator anymore?
Maybe not.
But what about this:
Is that the face of someone who just blew up a ship he’s only been on a few times?
Or the face of someone bidding farewell to an old friend?
I leave that judgment to you, you mawkish nerds!
This concludes my presentation.