How James Doakes Internet Memes Are Converting New Dexter Fans

Nearly 20 years after the first Dexter show’s debut in 2006, the franchise has regained unexpected relevancy. Startup line such as the prologue, Dexter: Original Sin, and the ongoing movie, Dexter: Ascension, have placed the company in the pop social crosshairs once again. However, just as The Walking Dead has discovered that a myriad of […]…

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Episode 6 of Star Trek: Strange New World winter 3 is spoiler-free in this article.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds year 3 show 6″ The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the excellent traditional science fiction curls. The feared and almost mythical hunter ship that the Business encounters, the one that had been destroying planets and spacecraft with impunity, was in truth a long-lost space mission that was actually launched from Earth.

It&#8217, s not exactly a new twist ( even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond ), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. You might have been wondering if Kirk would have been so unhappy about those 7, 000 deaths if the room hat had opened to reveal a brand-new slippery forehead.

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But it also gave us a picture into a exciting time in Star Trek‘s potential story. The Star Trek universe’s 21st century is riddled with abandoned and destined place operations. In Kirk’s very first trip on display,” Where No Man Has Gone Before”, he encountered the journey record of the SS Valiant, and later the area sensor Wanderer. The team of Next Generation discovered the body of the stricken NASA spacecraft Charybdis, as well as the body of its sole remaining crewmember, who had been buried in a restoration of an ancient pulp novel. Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV ( presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon ), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

Yet among these galaxy-spanning journeys, this hunter ship stands out thanks to what we can see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating functions.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the” Starfleet Delta” ( there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that ) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100”. That ship receives a heritage that is unique to the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself thanks to those numbers.

” All these ships were called Business”

In Star Trek: The Motion Image, those numbers initially appear together on camera ( though they are too small for you to really examine ). An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew ( later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe ). The Enterprise is given a tour of the Enterprise in search of peace and understanding, including the ship’s recreation room ( not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also known as the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the most recent” A Space Adventure Hour” ). Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle ( which in real life was named after the fictional starship ), and the Enterprise we know and love. One more, never-seen-before spacecraft, some of which had never been seen before, was located in the ships that were in between those spaceships.

A small, circular spacecraft on the end of a long pole, surrounded by a pair of large circle shapes. The title Enterprise XCV 330 may have appeared if viewers had been able to look carefully enough. It was a small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aspect, but obviously Trekkies have been obsessing over it for years.

Place a Ring on It

That image has its origins straight at the very beginning of Star Trek‘s history, when Matt Jefferies ( the man who the popular” Jefferies Tubes” are named after ) was sketching out possible details for what would later become the Enterprise. A ship with a large set of rings at the back, sometimes with a saucer at the front, and occasionally with other shapes, was a concept that kept recurring, even after you looked through those sketches and discovered some cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch” 22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker, a digital artist, has contributed to a wide range of Star Trek projects, including some that were entirely based on that sketch.

” About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called’ Starship’”, Rademaker tells us. That series was never realized. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the’ 22L ‘ version”.

Even if the interior of this new show turned out to be more cosmetic, because it wasn’t going to be Star Trek, it would still have some significant differences.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s early set designs.

People “would not travel to a planet,” Rademaker says,” but rather they would enter the “metafier” ( the dome on the right side of the command module ) and “project themselves” onto a planet.” ” I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter”.

When Starship failed, a second attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II was turned into a movie production, and that concept eventually made its way into the Star Trek canon.

” When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene]Roddenberry ] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies ‘ painting, to add onto this wall”, says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. The Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology served as the only additional information fans would have on the ship for decades. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

The ring-ship Enterprise was referred to as” Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things, according to this chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

Up until 2001, when a new show showcasing the adventures of the Enterprise that were previously untold in the Original Series, the ship remained in canon there for decades.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably” Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Return to the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. Vulcan starships would play a significant role in the show for the first time, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies ‘ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler later stated,” My main goal was to create a signature ship for another classic Matthew Jeffries concept from Star Trek.” So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship“!

With the episode” First Flight,” Enterprise would go a step further in establishing the ring ship’s place in the canon. This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We are introduced to Club 602, a San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out, after we saw Jonathan Archer’s young competitor competing for the title of first to command an actual starship. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

This again raises the question of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek‘s chronology.

” My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed”, suggests Rademaker. I’m assuming the XCV-330 was a human design that was based on some sub-light XCV platform but that was engineered to work with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical design with a thin internal design, and a long neck, keeping the crew far from the danger areas.

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to consider this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s” Ships of the Line” calendar.

Rademaker recalls that Andrew and I emailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot of details, with Andrew drawing over my renders to show us the best course of action. ” This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it”.

The work received a lot of attention, including that from the modeling firm QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an” Artisan model”.

” Later, when I sat in the theater, I discovered that QMx used the model to make a prop for Into Darkness“! Rademaker says.

Between Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship” The Phoenix” and the real-life Ares V rocket, the miniature appears on Admiral Marcus ‘ desk. This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. This Enterprise was” Earth&#8217, s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle,” according to the QMx website ( which is unfortunately no longer online ).

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. According to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was hired to work on the ring ship once more in 2023, 100 years prior to the launch of this Enterprise.

” I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great performance Rademaker says.

At the Rodenberry Archive, you can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, both inside and out, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room based on Jefferies ‘ blueprints from the canceled Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film” Memory Wall”. Ragemaker has also kept working on the shape of the ring ship for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek‘s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His” Alcubierre drive” is thought to be driven by an engine that is most likely, you might say, ring-shaped.

” In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘ Sonny’ White ( Then working at NASA ) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach”, Rademaker shares. We ultimately made the decision to create a completely different ringship that would be more in line with his theory. ( The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise. ) The media later came up with the idea to portray that ship as an actual new NASA Starship rather than a useful motivator for STEM/STEAM students, but the idea was never to do so. It was good fun”.

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. With what is now a Hugo award-winning finale, Star Trek: Lower Decks came to a close last year. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design, which included some extra solar panels, added details, and a clever new landing mechanism, was undoubtedly an evolution of the Enterprise XCV-330.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It provides a lot of details about how the Enterprise ring ship fits into Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

The XCV-100’s mission required a larger ship because it was not a warp ship. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason”, Rademaker hypothesizes. Or perhaps they simply created this shape in a few sizes. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics”.

The ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta are visible in the ship’s brief glimpse, which is significant considering that Starfleet was a long time in the making.

” The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Therefore, it still appears alongside an UESPA logo, which we also see on the Friendship One probe launched in 2067, according to Rademaker. ” However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me think that 2067 will mark the beginning of UESPA’s successful integration in terms of space-related issues.

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s” Z2″ spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 serves as a missing link, a direct link between Pike’s spacecraft Enterprise and NASA’s ( however long that may go ) future.

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. We are informed of the legends and rumors surrounding this scavenger ship through” The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail.” Even the Gorn call it a monster.

Its needs are bottomless, as Scott puts it. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The more it demands, the bigger it becomes. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop. &#8221,

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys, and assimilates everything it encounters, such as the Borg or the Doomsday Machine from TOS.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek‘s perfect future.

It’s a long journey to get from here to there, to quote another old Enterprise.

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.

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