What Happened To Star Trek’s Enterprise-E? Ship’s Official Final Records Revealed
A new official Star Trek image provides a cryptic clue about the fate of the Enterprise-E.
In the promotional lead-up to the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard, the franchise releases canonical records of almost all of the ships in the narrative named Enterprise — from Captain Archer‘s NX-01 to the Enterprise-F — with brief summaries of their histories. This includes the Enterprise-E which was last seen in 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. Unfortunately, the records list the ship’s final mission as “CLASSIFIED,” but regardless it reveals a lot more than is immediately obvious.
If nothing else, the records above reveal that Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) was the only person to ever serve as Captain of the Enterprise-E. In all cases in which more than one person canonically served as Captain of an Enterprise for a significant amount of time, it’s noted in the records, but no one but Picard is listed as commanding the E. Which suggests that whenever the Enterprise-E made its final mission, it was before Picard’s ascendance to Starfleet’s Admiralty.
More importantly, it suggests that the Enterprise-E’s final mission is related to the larger story of Star Trek: Picard‘s final season. We know that the main antagonist Vadic (Amanda Plummer) wants vengeance on both Picard and the Federation, and perhaps whatever happened on the E’s final mission is the reason for her rage.
Thanks to Star Trek: Lower Decks, according to Memory Alpha, we can narrow down the year of the Enterprise-E’s final mission to having occurred between 2379 and 2381. The former year sees the events of Nemesis play out, and the Season 3 Lower Decks episode “The Stars at Night” — in which Picard is referred to as an Admiral — takes place in 2381. Assuming Picard was the E’s one and only Captain, its last hurrah must be in that window.
The records also show that the Enterprise-F began flying in 2386, the year before the Romulan Supernova that helped bring Star Trek’s Kelvinverse into being. Interestingly, it does not name any of that ship’s captains, saying only it has been commanded by “several” of them. The fact that the producers are choosing to keep those names quiet suggests that at least one already established Trek hero — possibly a Star Trek: The Next Generation alum — took over the Captain’s chair.
The questions of what happened to the Enterprise-E and the source of Vadic’s motives are only the beginning of the questions piling about Picard‘s final season. Among other mysteries, there’s the character revealed in the final trailer for Picard, played by Ed Speleer, who many are theorizing could be either Picard’s son or perhaps his presumed-dead nephew René (who was said to have died in a fire in Star Trek: Generations).
Hopefully at least some of these mysteries will be solved very soon. The first episode of Star Trek: Picard‘s third and final season streams on Paramount+ this Thursday.
