10 Crazy Ideas For Seasons 4 & 5 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
8. Destroy The Enterprise?!
Put down those pitchforks, we're going somewhere with this one.
James T. Kirk needs to sit in that captain's chair by the finale of season five. Spock, Uhura, Chapel, Scotty, McCoy and Sulu are all set to join him, with M'Benga popping in for the occasional medical cameo. However, there exists now an opportunity to rectify two continuity issues with one warp core breach: destroy the ship that we've followed since Brother.
In Discovery and Strange New Worlds, the Constitution-class USS Enterprise is highly similar to the ship introduced in "The Cage." Footage from that episode was incorporated into If Memory Serves, so let's allow, for a moment, that the original configuration of the ship, or of the class of ship, exists in that same timeline.
The Motion Picture canonically refit and upgraded the Connie, so it wouldn't even be the first time that the class got a makeover. Destroying the Enterprise, while Pike is still in command, might seem a tad dramatic, but could also easily serve as a thematic ending for this streaming era of Star Trek. Provided, of course, we are not left with only debris floating through space.
The second continuity issue has existed for forty years now. Admiral Morrow claims in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock that the Enterprise is 'twenty years old'. In universe, that would put its launch date around 2265 - pretty close to the beginning of Kirk's five-year mission.
Perhaps - he's right. We now know that ships do not always follow the numbering and lettering convention (e.g., USS Defiant 1764 vs USS Defiant NX-74205, USS Excelsior NX/NCC-2000 vs USS Excelsior 42037). While this may make a few heads spin, having a new Constitution-class USS Enterprise NCC-1701 departing Earth under Kirk, in the original configuration seen in The Original Series, may just bring several eras and headaches to a satisfying conclusion.