disintegration

Something I think about a lot:

In Star Trek (2009) Spock Prime, who has accidentally traveled back in time 130 years into a parallel reality, hiding out in an ice cavern, accidentally runs into Jim Kirk and his first thought is, “How did you find me?”

Mind you, Spock hasn’t seen Jim in a hundred years.

In Spock’s reality, Jim died a hundred years ago during the christening of the Enterprise-B, and then again several decades later in events his acquaintance Jean-Luc Picard certainly told him about.

So in Spock’s life, Kirk is double-dead. And he knows he’s in a parallel universe, so reality isn’t progressing the way it did in his memories. The galaxy is branching out, becoming ever-more-different than the one he knew.

Spock is a man who values logic above all else, a man of science and intellect, and all of that combined and his first thought is still, in essence:

“I’m in my darkest hour, so of course Jim Kirk is here to save me. Or at least, to be with me:’

No entertaining “coincidence.”

The really interesting thing is, we have a second data point on this.

In “Relics,” the episode of TNG where they find Scotty trapped in a transporter buffer, Riker mentions he’s from the Enterprise.

Scotty responds, “I bet Jim Kirk got the ol’ girl out of mothballs to find me”

Scotty stood on the edge of a massive hole where the Enterprise-B’s hull used to be, staring into the void that claimed Jim Kirk. He was there the day he died. He knows that the Enterprise-A is a museum piece, that there have been other ships since then.

Now, in reality its because “Relics” aired long before “Star Trek: Generations,” and the writers didn’t yet know the fate of James T Kirk, or that Scotty would be there (most of his lines were originally intended for Spock, Chekov’s lines for McCoy).

But I like to think that, deep down, every crew member of the original Enterprise believed this, deep down. No matter where they went, what dangers they faced, how long they lived, in their darkest moments, they believed, “I bet Captain Kirk is going to show up to save me.”

Imagine how they held on, how they pushed themselves to be better, smarter, braver, because they believed that all they had to do to see another day was to hold out long enough for James T Kirk to find them.

That if they just kept moving, the Enterprise would warp in.

I don’t think this is unique to the original crew, either.

Worf once said to O'Brien that when he was aboard the Enterprise, he felt like they were the heroes of the old stories he learned as a boy, that there was no trial they could not face together.

A couple of years later, Worf is captaining the Defiant, getting ready to ram the thing into a Borg cube, when his helmsman says “Another ship is warping in… it’s the Enterprise!”

And the look on Worf’s face says it all: “Of course it is.”

To serve on the Enterprise - any Enterprise - is to believe in the Enterprise. To believe in the Captain. To believe in your friends.