Didja Notice?

 

The Enterprise central computer claims to have achieved sentience with the addition of the data uploaded into the ship's computer gathered on the sentient planet. It loses this sentience at the end of the story.

 

On page 6, Dr. McCoy refers to the new avatar (0718) as "Mr. Enterprise".

 

On page 7, someone who appears to be Dr. Carol Marcus is present in the briefing room as the Enterprise avatar explains itself and the history of the sentient planet they've discovered. But this story takes place before Carol joined the crew in Into Darkness!

 

The sentient planet attempts to eliminate the contaminants aboard the Enterprise...the crewmembers! This is similar to V'Ger's desire to eliminate the carbon-based units infesting Enterprise in the original timeline in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The Enterprise avatar explains that the planet was once similar to Earth, populated by humanoids who eventually uploaded the minds of all their civilization's citizens into a master computer so they might live forever. One might be tempted to ask if the sentient planet seen here could be the machine planet that reprogrammed Earth's Voyager 6 probe into V'Ger in the aforementioned movie. But the data in that film suggested that Voyager 6 had fallen into a black hole after leaving Earth's solar system and was believed to have exited through a wormhole on the far side of the galaxy, which is not reachable with current Starfleet warp drive ships. (Note: V'Ger appeared in the new timeline in "Voyagers".)

 

When the Enterprise avatar decides that the only potential method of stopping the sentient planet's takeover of the ship's systems is to wipe out his own memory, Kirk compares the process to what they did when Captain Robert April hijacked the ship's controls. This occurred in "Countdown to Darkness" Part 4. But this wedges yet another adventure in between "Countdown to Darkness" Part 4, at the end of which the Enterprise is ordered to Nibiru, and "Gorn, But Not Forgotten", at the end of which the Enterprise is also ordered to Nibiru (for the beginning of Into Darkness). At this point, I think we just have to pretend, for the sake of continuity, that the Enterprise was not ordered to Nibiru at the end of "Countdown to Darkness" Part 4. Instead, the ship continued onto its next mission, the events of "I, Enterprise", followed by "Gorn, But Not Forgotten", then Into Darkness.

 

The Enterprise avatar loses its sentience in defeating the planet's takeover of the ship, but Spock is able to partially restore the avatar's functioning with a prototype artificial intelligence program he's been writing and experimenting with in his off-duty hours. This is the version of the avatar seen in Into Darkness, now known as 0718. The explanation of the name is that it is his numerical designation as the newest member of the ship's crew, implying that the Enterprise currently has 718 crewmembers aboard.

 

Back to Star Trek Episode Studies