United Federation of Planets, Starfleet, Constitution-class heavy cruiser refit, launched in 2273. This is the first starship I truly loved. This is my
Enterprise.*
I was born four years after
TOS went off the air (personal trivia: though I fastidiously searched out reruns, I didn't actually see "The Trouble with Tribbles" until years after I'd seen every other episode of the original seventy-nine). I'm sure I saw
TMP when it opened, but the one that stuck with me was
Wrath of Khan. Those red uniforms, the James Horner score, all the visual effects (especially the nebula sequence), and the production design (especially the starships)--that was my
Trek.
There was more to come, but it would only succeed, not replace. I loved
TNG; it was the first
Trek I actually watched on television as it aired (I also missed
TAS, for obvious reasons), starting in my first year of high school and ending in my junior year of college--but not really, because there was still
DSN and then
VOY, providing a solid fourteen years of continuity. (We're not going to talk about
ENT. Just...
no. But wow, apparently I was a really cranky blogger back in the early 2000s.)
I grew up with TNG, and
Trek grew alongside me. I loved the expanded universe we got to see through those interconnected series, but it was a different aesthetic than the previous adventures, which had been all about one ship and one crew. I'll never forget seeing
Khan when I was nine years old, being totally freaked out by the
Ceti eels, not really understanding that Spock was
dead (and allowing my father to convince me, on the way home from the movie, that my favorite character was "just unconscious"), and regardless of everything, wanting to live in that world, on that starship.
Different things about later
Treks would captivate me--the insane detail of the
TNG writers' tech manual (a photocopied version of which I found for sale at a convention), Picard's gravitas, Data's fine-tuned humor, DSN's sprawling politics, the
EMH's sarcastic wit--but nothing caught my eye quite like the look of that TOS-movie-era
Enterprise. And it still makes me nostalgic for that time, when I was also deep into comics and enthralled by
the brazen narrative of the 1980s DC Trek books, which danced around canon and told unforgettable stories (go find a copy of
The Mirror Universe Saga and tell me I'm wrong).
Even now, when someone utters the word "starship," or when I'm doodling in my notebook, the first image that comes to mind is from
Star Trek. But it's not
the classic TOS model, or
the revolutionary Enterprise-D** (and certainly not
the Abramsverse oddity). It's the NCC-1701-A refit, and it always will be.
This is my
Enterprise.
a recent sketch
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