The Enterprise Was Just Destroyed By Star Trek Again
The Enterprise was blown up this weekend. Instead of it being a dramatic moment, the iconic ship exploded as the punchline in a joke.
It happens in the first episode of Star Trek’s new comedic series Very Short Treks. The title is a reference to the previous Short Treks series, which ended its run a couple of years ago.
It’s also an extremely accurate title. These Treks are indeed very short. The first episode, titled “Skin A Cat”, clocks in at only three minutes and forty-eight seconds.
The Enterprise gets destroyed at the end when Captain, well, I’m not sure who the Captain of the Enterprise is here. The man wearing command gold and sitting in the chair looks and acts nothing like Captain Kirk.
This inept Captain is voiced by comedian Pete Holmes. I guess somehow it’s Captain Pete Holmes? Was he before or after Robert April?
The Enterprise gets blown up when Captain Pete Holmes gets too busy using a people-get-offended anomaly to create the perfect woman and forgets to do something about a group of attacking Klingons. Nothing that’s going on here makes much sense. It feels like something that should have been an SNL digital short, not something actually produced by Paramount for Star Trek.
The short, as all the Very Short Treks will, uses the animation style of the 70s Star Trek: The Animated Series. Spock is voiced by Strange New Worlds star Ethan Peck, and the rest of the crew are assorted characters previously seen only on The Animated Series (M’Ress and Arex) or concocted for the sake of this very short joke clip.
The first time the Enterprise was destroyed in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, it was a gut-wrenching moment on par with the death of Spock himself. In the context of that plot, the Enterprise died to give Spock back his life.
The next time an Enterprise was destroyed, it was in the Next Gen episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, when the Enterprise C went back in time to sacrifice itself and its crew to save the future of the Federation.
Since that sacrifice, Enterprise destructions have become increasingly less meaningful. The Enterprise D was destroyed in Star Trek: Generations as part of a battle it seemed like it should have easily won and that never needed to happen, but did, thanks to bad writing.
And they shredded the Enterprise again in the alternate universe Kelvin movies. At least that was a better-written sequence.
Now destroying the Enterprise has devolved to the point that it’s the punchline of a joke. I guess that’s where Star Trek is at in the 21st Century. I think we’ve officially blown up the Enterprise enough.
Here’s the full Very Short Treks episode, if you want to join me in being confused about why this exists at all…
At least the Enterprise looked good before they blew her up. The animation team has done a much better job than the Short’s writing team, faithfully recreating the look of the Animated Series and, in some ways, even upgrading it.
Here’s a closer look at how they’ve rendered the Enterprise in the two-image gallery below. Click on either image to enlarge…
