Is it the same Titan?
I’m kind of fascinated by Big Franchise storytelling? That is, the completely unique set of constraints and opportunities you get when you’re trying to tell a story as part of a continuity thats been going for nearly 60 years. The third season of Picard has a fantastic example of building on top of what came before while using it to make your story better, despite some sharp edges.
Picard 3 is effectively a new show—and unlike the previous seasons is much more Star Fleet–focused. (And is acting like it might be a backdoor pilot for a follow-up.) Most of the action takes place out in space on a star ship. Given all that, it realy needs its own signature Hero ship.
What ship do you use? For starters, it can’t really be the Enterprise, partly because that’ll swamp the storytelling, partly because the story works better if the ship isn’t from the Star Fleet major leagues, but mostly because I’m convinced they’re saving the Enterprise for the grand finale. (As I write this, there are still two episodes to go, so we’ll find out if I’m correctly interpreting the guns they hung over the mantlepiece.)
But, even thought it can’t be the Enterprise specifically, it should be something “like” the Enterprise. That is, the classic Star Trek look: round saucer, secondary hull, glowing dish on the front, warp drives up above. Like SNW before, this season has a real back-to-the-classics approach, and the ship design should reflect that.
But emotionally, the ship should reinforce the state we find the TNG characters in at the start of the show: retired, out to pasture, star fleet has moved on. Picard and Riker are both well past the point where they have a ship or can get one easily. The ship should reinforce their sense of displacement at the start of the story.
If it can’t be the Big E, is there something else lying around in the toybox we can use? Fortunately, there is! The USS Titan.
For those of you just joining us, Riker was promoted to command of the Titan in 2002’s aggressively mediocre Star Trek Nemesis. In keeping with that movie’s lack of basic competence, Riker finally gets a ship of his own, and the audience never gets to see it, the movie keeping it off screen the entire time.
The ship did get a design later, however, with a design sourced from a a fan contest. The winning design was a Reliant-style “light cruiser” reconfiguration of the Enterprise-E’s parts, same saucer, engines below, rollbar with torpedos above. (As an aside, I always thought the design was fine, but thought it was slightly insulting that Riker didn’t deserve a “real” Enterprise-style “heavy cruiser”.)
This design got used in various spin-off material for 2 decades—novel covers, calendars, and so on—until it made the jump to the screen at the end of the first season of Lower Decks.
Emotionally, an upgraded Tian is perfect. Riker has just enough pull as the former captain with this one specific ship to get on board, and let him and Picard try to pull off a heist through sheer charisma. But! The new captain, Riker’s replacement, doesn’t like them, and the ship is remodeled and different. It’s barely the ship Riker knew, and a thing that he thought was his one connection back to the old days ends up highlighting his disassociation even further. It’s Kirk unable to find the turbolift in TMP, but better written.
And from the dialog in the show it’s clearly supposed to be the same ship. Riker’s music was still in the library, and Shaw, the new captain, knows how to pull off some tricks with the 20-year old warp engines.
The problem, however, is that the new Titan and the old one look absolutely nothing alike, and there’s no sane theory that could explain how the one could be rebuilt into the other and have anything orignal left.
So: creatively and emotionally, it’s the right thing to do, but derailed by a 2 decade old design that was never in live action. So, what can you do? Well…
Decide to stay consistant with the old look and launch your new show with a ship that won a contest for paperback covers. Clearly not going to happen. Regardless of the pros or cons of the design, this is a new show and calls for a new ship.
Hope no one notices, and retcon the old design and pretend the Titan always looked like this. That’s just rude.
Sigh deeply and use a different ship. Sure, but… What? Make a up a new one? There’s suddenly a lot of time you have to spend rebuilding the emotional beats to a ship no one in the audience has ever heard of. Worf’s old Bird of Prey from DS9? Even worse. The Defiant? Talk about extra baggage we don’t want to spend time on!
Invoke the Mystery Science Theature mantra of “It’s just a show, you should really just relax,” and then split the difference between being a refit and new build by calling it a refit in dialog and then slapping a -A on the registry number, and hand-waving past the details.
Given the options, number Four is clearly the right choice, here.
Personally, I think it’s a pretty elegant way to use the existing material to deepen the new stuff without letting it drag the new show down. I mean, it’s pretty silly to imagine what it would take to rebuild the old shape into the new one and have it be worth the effort, but where else can you juice an emotional beat by dropping a reference to a movie from 20 years ago, which was itself a follow-up to a show that went off the air nearly a decade before that?
Not everything should be a sprawling multi-decade multi-format multi-media franchise, but I’m enjoying the way people are finding new ways to tell stories using them.
(And, as a final note here, I’ll add that Picard 3 also has what I think is the single best use of “hey, you know we have footage of these same people playing these same characters from 36 years ago, can we use that somehow?”)