Theme Month: "Annoying Colonists"

This was ALMOST the official design of the Miranda Class USS Reliant in The Wrath of Khan.

Do I have space karma for this forum?

pics via @starfleetdesign

Seven of Nine had many different looks & styles over her 4 years on Voyager.
From Borg drone to Borg babe, which was your FAVORITE one?

Via @portalrealm

For any Bobiverse fans in the area (or willing to travel), I'll be moderating a Bobiverse panel at Philcon (check out www.Philcon.org for full details) on Nov 21. I've got 10 pages of DETAILED notes for this one, but don't worry, our 50-minute audience-participation panel will NOT be going through that line by line, LOL! It's our 90th Anniversary Convention! Come for the Science Fiction and Science, and stay at the hotel for the room parties at night! Our universe doesn't have its own signature drinks (YET!), so I'll be bringing a couple liters of my infamous Romulan Ale in celebration of Star Trek's 60th Anniversary too! Speaking of which, there's also going to be an awesome "1966 Time Capsule: What Made Star Trek So Far Ahead of its Time?" panel on Saturday too! Jolan Tru!

pics via @portalrealm

Rewatching the TOS movies for the umpteenth time, I realized a contradiction I had somehow overlooked before.

It has been pretty much established since the second film, at least offscreen, that Sulu was slanted to command the Excelsior. This was present in the novelization of the Wrath of Khan and was supposed to appear in a scene cut from the original script. This can be seen as the crew is approaching the Enterprise in the travel pod Sulu says "Any chance to go aboard the Enterprise" and then there is an abrupt transition to the stock image of the pod approaching the ship and by Sulu's mouth still moving it's apparent there was some dialogue taken out in between. Supposedly this was Sulu and Kirk discussing Sulu's recent assignment to command USS Excelsior and he only agreed to delay that to help out the training cruise.

Flash forward to the next movie when the Enterprise is returning to Earth and the first appearance of the USS Excelsior in Spacedock. As most of the crew is marveling at this brand-new ship, more advanced than the Enterprise (except Scotty of course), Sulu says the line, "I hear she's supposed to have Transwarp drive." which if we are to assume he was going to be the captain of Excelsior as far back as before the last film, how would he not know this definitely already?

I had always assumed Captain Styles was only given command temporarily or for Excelsior's shakedown trials and Sulu would take over once the Enterprise's training cruise was over and only Excelsior's Transwarp failure that maybe caused it to maybe be overhauled as well as the events of the next several films caused Sulu's promotion to be further delayed until ST VI. Yet, if this was the case, Sulu's line in ST III still made no sense as he would have been familiar enough with the design of the Excelsior before ST III that he was 100% aware of the existence of her Transwarp engines rather than speculating based upon second-hand rumor if it wasn't yet general knowledge. Someone in line to be captain of a vessel would or should have already had a fair degree of familiarity of its technology and components before even taking over the center seat.

My only conclusion is that since we never saw onscreen until ST VI any ties between Sulu and the Excelsior, that his assignment to command it as far back as ST II was never meant to be canon and Starfleet only made a decision to assign him as captain three years before the beginning of ST VI. Yet, since the idea has been so ingrained in beta-canon since ST II and it just seems a coincidence that the writers of ST VI decided to make him captain of the same ship most of fandom already assumed he was always going to get since the second movie, I can't accept this explanation and it would have been a lot simpler to have given his line to one of the other crew upon arriving at Spacedock as their being unfamiliar with a new ship design still in the testing phase would have made more sense.

So, has anyone else every noticed this discrepancy and how do you square it?

Michael Forrest, Apollo in a legendary Star Trek episode has died at 97.

https://deadline.com/2026/10/michael-forest-dead-1237166329/

Were you a flip top or tapper fan?
From prequel Enterprise era to Voyager Endgame era, which of these Starfleet designs was your favorite TV series communicator?

RIP Apollo