Update: The events of the Star Trek: Picard finale has required a slight reordering of our list. Accordingly, the list contains some major spoilers for Star Trek: Picard. We have left most of the original text as it is.
Original story: It’s the day Star Trek: Picard fans have been waiting all season: this week it’s finally here: Frontier Day! A fleet-wide celebration of the Federation and Starfleet, where everything goes according to plan and nothing surprising happens!
As part of the festivities, the episode gives us a good look USS Enterprise-Fa ship that has been around for more than ten years Star Trek online but only makes its first canonical appearance in Picard. It is, depending on how you count, the latest and most advanced version of the Company we’ve seen it all in action march movie or TV show (yes, we’re talking about the Enterprise-J later on).
A new Company means another chance to re-evaluate the many canonical ones Enterprises that have existed in the past half century; to this end, we have compiled a fully scientific and objectively correct ranked list of each starship Companyfrom the original 1960s show to Picard. For the record, we’ve also ranked several versions of several Enterprises of reboots, updates and alternate timelines, plus a few Enterprises that didn’t log much screen time, but it deserved a quick mention.
#12: Alternate Future Anti-Time Enterprise-D
A distant future Enterprise-D caused by an “anti-time disturbance”. God, I love Star Trek.
The next generation has a near-perfect finale episode, one that wraps up the crew’s week-to-week television adventures nicely, while leaving the door open to what seemed like (and on rare occasions actually was) a promising movie franchise.
It also gave us a glimpse into an “anti-time” far-future version of the Enterprise-D, where it was still in service after extensive refits instead of crashing into a planet’s surface. And there’s just a bunch of extra stuff attached to it? Including a third weird center-mounted gondola? It certainly makes it easy to tell the difference between the regular ones Company and the future Company when they’re both in the same shot, but it’s just way too busy and looks beat up.
Fun fact: The events of Star Trek: Picard take place even later than the events of this anti-time future. If anyone sees a Galaxy-class ship with three gondolas flying around, let me know.
#11: Kelvin Timeline Company
It’s just not for me, that’s all.
The first of a few different riffs on the original Company which will appear on this list, the JJ Abrams “Kelvin-timeline” version of the Company leave me cold. I think it’s mainly the gigantic, spherical nacelles, each of which is almost the same size as the secondary hull (the part under the saucer with the round deflector dish at the front, for people who don’t spend a lot of time studying Memory Alpha starship designs ). They make the whole ship look top-heavy and insect-eyed.
Every light on the ship is also a glowing whitish-blue, giving it a monochromatic look that just isn’t much fun to look at. It’s a slick, sterile Apple Store Company. I don’t hate it, but I can’t defend it either.
#10: NX-01 Company
It’s been a long road.
The reclusive “first starship Enterprise” is a flat little thing. It looks like an old, plain forerunner to the starships that would come later, and the red tips on the nacelles do a little spidery thing that calls forward to the nacelles on the 1960s Enterprise model.
I understand they couldn’t make this precursor to Kirk’s Company looking fancier and more advanced than the ship it replaced, but understanding Why the NX-class Enterprise just the way it looks isn’t enough to make me fall in love with it.
