See Star Trek’s Enterprise D Saucer Being Recovered After Crash, In A New Scene
A fan-made video portrays Starfleet's recovery of the Enterprise-D and Spock visiting his fallen comrade James Kirk.
There’s nothing like beautiful fan-made Star Trek content to make the world even richer. As we learned in the third season of Picard, the Enterprise-D was partially rebuilt using the original saucer that was recovered from Veridian III. While this fact was only mentioned in passing, we didn’t get to see what recovering and restoring the ship might have looked like — until now, in a fan-made video.
This fan-made scene does everything right, first by showing the Enterprise-D being re-constructed and second by showing Spock making a visit to Veridian III to visit the grave of Kirk. Fans will remember Kirk died on the planet in 1994’s Star Trek: Generations. It’s a beautifully rendered and poignant scene that could have fit easily into the third season of Picard.
While we only got to witness it for a couple of episodes, Picard showrunner Terry Matalas brought back the Enterprise-D in all of its carpeted glory before closing the book on the series for good. Just past the mid-point of the season, Mica Burton’s Alandra La Forge reveals her father Geordi had something squirreled away in the Fleet Museum. The reveal that it was a faithfully-restored Enterprise-D in episode nine was a beautiful way to bring the ship back into the fold.
Of course, the biggest question was how the Enterprise-D was brought back from the grave. Geordi then revealed that the Prime Directive actually helped out in that respect, since Veridian III was an uninhabited planet and Starfleet has to avoid influencing cultures that have yet to discover interstellar travel. Still, you’d think that Starfleet might not go through the trouble to recover it off an uninhabited planet.
That is until you remember that in Star Trek: Generations Veridian IV, a nearby planet, had a pre-warp society living on it. If they happened to develop interplanetary spaceflight, they might happen upon the Enterprise-D saucer in the future. This would violate the Prime Directive, so Starfleet went and retrieved the ship parts.
Obviously, the third season of Picard probably didn’t have the time, or maybe even the budget, to give us a detailed visual breakdown of all these events. It’s a lot easier to just explain how Enterprise-D was rebuilt using a few lines of dialogue. Still, it’s cool that fan-made content can be so evocative and add visual context to what is obviously a very important moment in Star Trek.
If you haven’t seen the last couple of episodes of Picard, now is the time to do it and see the restored Enterprise-D in all its glory. The third season of the show has been getting nothing but glowing reviews, including from us, and it’s well worth diving in to see the end of Patrick Stewart’s tenure as the beloved character. Every episode of the series, including the series finale, is now available to stream on Paramount+.
While it was good seeing the Enterpise-D again, we won’t be getting another season of Picard. However, there is plenty more Trek content on the way. Strange New Worlds will be back on June 15, and you’ll be able to check out the final season of Discovery in 2024.
