I posted this today because there is a new collector ship model out for the Enterprise-B that was used in the opening sequence of Star Trek: Generations. Ah, Generations. The best 30 minute Star Trek movie out there. It’s so sad that Captain Kirk dies after being sucked out of the Enterprise-B. That’s the way the movie ends for me.
What happens after that with the Next Generation (TNG) crew is a completely different movie. Sometimes I go on and watch that other movie, I just skip the part where Kirk has another death at the end of that movie. I’d rather forget that one was ever filmed. His sacrifice on the Enterprise-B was in character, the heroic Kirk saving his crew one last time. The bridge fiasco at the end of the TNG version of Generations is simply not Kirk. Not the Kirk that was on the original series.
I watch up to the point where the saucer section for the Enterprise-D does its spectacular crash landing on the planet’s surface, a marvel of photographic special effects, and then I turn it off or walk out of the room. I don’t care. The entire time-traveling quantum filament thingy is just a McGuffin, a way to bridge the distance between classic Trek and TNG and put the two captains on screen together, visually passing the torch from one to the other. It didn’t work at the time, and it definitely doesn’t work now, twenty years later.
I say new, but the commemoration Enterprise-B model isn’t new. It is the exact same collector’s model as the one in the featured image, repainted. Here’s a demo of it:
It’s repainted, with new electronics, additional lights and a new voice chip with Shatner’s voice on it, but it is the exact same injection mold as the original Excelsior that I’ve had sitting in my library for 10 20 years. I see no reason to buy a rebranded newer, shinier version of the same model, just as I’ve also decided that I don’t need a new, shinier Enterprise or crew or even just new stories told in the Star Trek universe.
