r/startrek: The Next Generation
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Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is one of my favorite Trek films. It’s a great finale for the original crew and it’s both well done and also not at the same time (I could do a whole thread on the numerous continuity errors within the film, but I digress). One thing I’ve always wondered is why the galley in the Enterprise is so beat up in the scene where the senior crew debates the use of a phaser as part of the crime against the Klingon Chancellor.
So…. Why is the galley so beat up?
One of the plot points in "Undiscovered Country" is that the crew were coasting out the last three months until their retirement, when the Klingon crisis happens.
So it makes sense to me that the set team tried to make the ship look worn in and ready for some time off.
You and others have suggested similar theories. Other commenters mention tight production budgets or reusing set pieces.
I don’t get it though. The worn out effect is so over-dramatic and visibly noticeable on this one set/scene but not on any of the others. It’s like they played into making the galley look like a complete wreck but didn’t for the other Enterprise sets. Also the worn effect is not just one part of the galley - it’s the entire thing.
Edit: also they refit the Enterprise in The Final Frontier. How does the galley get that wrecked so quickly but everything else is tip top?
The galley is the only place that sees every crew member every day probably twice a day, it gets worn out much faster.
It's probably one of those things unnoticeable in real life but stand out on screen.
(from wikipedia)
Director Nicholas Meyer wanted the Enterprise to feel grittier and more realistic for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), but realizing that vision was limited by the need to use existing sets. Cinematographer Hiro Narita changed the clean, bright look of the bridge from The Final Frontier by lighting it differently in The Undiscovered Country.
My interpretation has always been that the enterprise is getting pretty run down by that point and the wear is starting to show - we see this wear happen to plenty of other Federation stations (DS9, Starbase 80, etc.) so it makes sense that in the lore such a venerable ship would be starting to show it's age.
TIL the Enterprise A only served 7 years. But yeah, that's plenty of time for cosmetic wear to build up in a well-used galley
Edit: The Enterprise A was commissioned in Voyage Home. According to Memory Alpha Undiscovered Country takes place 7 years later.
There has always been an incongruence around the A where the original point, when it was revealed at the end of four, seems to have been that it was a recommissioned and renamed constitution class that had been recently refitted like the Enterprise was in TMP. But then Shatner came in with five and insisted that it was a brand new ship for some dumbass reason that most people seem to have retconned from the cannon.
Because its the finale for the original crew. It's meant to look older.
My in-universe explanation is that the Ent-A was originally the Yorktown and is, thus, more worn down than a relatively newly built ship would have been in that amount of time.
I like that version of the lore but I added my own. Enterprise A is actually the Yorktown… but why was the Yorktown available you may ask? I mean it would have had a captain and crew right?
Well it was one of the ships that attempted to intercept the whale probe during Star Trek III The Journey Home and had its systems soo badly scrambled that it lost all power and was running life support on batteries. (Which happened in the movie and was a transmission received by Earth, it is even mentioned that they were trying to assemble solar sails to attempt to make it to a habitable planet.)
Well the fearless crew of the Yorktown didn’t make it and the entire crew suffocated or froze in the cold blackness of space…
Starfleet isn’t so big that it can waste a starship even if it’s full of frozen dead people. So they spaced the bodies, cleaned it up and stuck Kirk with a malfunctioning potentially haunted ship as a kind of punishment.
This explains why nothing worked on the Enterprise A in Star Trek IV as its systems were still pretty scrambled from the Whale probe and was haunted by the long dead crew of the Yorktown…
This theory makes too much sense, I love it. One question though why specifically the Yorktown? How do we know it was that specific ship and not any other damaged federation ship?
The Yorktown is specifically mentioned in the movie and the ill fated captain of the Yorktown reports it to the admiral in this scene:
Also Star Fleet Admirals being the canonically evil dicks that they are would totally stick Kirk with a messed up haunted ship.
Edit The scene in question starts at 2:30 for reference.
If you were to follow the Yorktown’s name’s history, the original USS Yorktown was damaged, then repaired within 3 days at Hawaii, but then sailed out hard only to be sunk in its next battle.
That's a good question. I found this on Memory Alpha:
A desperate scramble among the creative staff ensued to trim as much as possible of the budget as possible; the entire prologue was (albeit painfully) scrapped, scenes were trimmed, all planned set construction for new starship interiors was abandoned (though a new Kronos One corridor set did get build ultimately), the planned live-action shoots in Alaska for the Rura Penthe scenes were scrapped as were plans for new studio models and other visual effects elements. Starship sets were to be entirely recycled from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was concurrently in production, but was slated for its summer hiatus, when filming of The Undiscovered Country was planned to start, and only existing studio models were to be used.
I'm guessing this set was simply not built to hold up under feature film-level resolution.
Edit: elsewhere on the page, it says the galley was a redress of Troi's office.
Wow I never knew about all the bts drama of this film! Also found this illuminating:
Frank Mancuso, Sr. – who had been intimately involved with Star Trek ever since Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – , did not really want to end the Original Crew run on The Final Frontier low note, especially with the 25th anniversary of the Star Trek franchise coming up, and wanted one more film, but found himself seriously hampered by the strictest of budget limitation: under NOconceivable circumstance was a potential new film to exceed the budget of The Final Frontier, not even by one dollar.