Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The Enterprise A You Need To Know
6. The Only Toilet In The Fleet
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is the Enterprise-A's first big screen adventure following her brief introduction at the conclusion of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. While the film is mostly remembered for its chintzy effects and half-baked third act, the hijacking storyline did allow for several parts of the new Enterprise to be explored and included one major missing piece of tech.
During the scene set in the Enterprise-A's brig (with bars that are clearly just fluorescent light tubes), Captain Kirk is shocked to learn that Sybok is Spock's half brother and forced to sit down. It's a blink-and-you-miss-it detail but the seat Kirk chooses to take is, in fact, a toilet – the first and only to appear aboard a Federation starship in all of Star Trek.
We definitely knew toilets existed in Star Trek's future (the Enterprise-D's bridge had a door opposite the observation lounge labeled "head" and Rom mentioned having to go "waste extraction" in Deep Space Nine – whatever that means), but before Star Trek V, no episodes or films called for the appearance of a 23rd century or 24th century toilet.
But they had to put it somewhere.