See Enterprise-D Model From The Best Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode Get The Love It Deserves
While they are mostly known for their keen film criticism, two of the core trio of RedLetterMedia hosts (Mike Stoklassa and Rich Evans) are some of the biggest Star Trek fans around. They particularly love Star Trek: The Next Generation (hey, who doesn’t?), and they recently decided to buy an exploded Enterprise D prop from the episode “Cause and Effect.” Figuring out how to effectively pose an exploded prop was a major challenge for these veteran YouTubers, and you can see exactly how they did it in the video below.
If you haven’t watched every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, you might be wondering why the show ever required an exploded Enterprise D prop, especially because this ship was fully intact at the beginning of the post-series film Star Trek: Generations. In the episode “Cause and Effect,” the show delivers a bonkers plot in which the ship is caught in a temporal causality loop.
Effectively, the crew keeps repeating the same day over and over, and this culminates with the Enterprise D colliding with another ship that suddenly appears (that ship was captained by Frasier’s Kelsey Grammar, and that’s not even the weirdest thing about that episode).
The RedLetterMedia prop is quite literally of the exploded Enterprise D, which meant that the group couldn’t put it on display as easily as their other props, including some vintage Gremlins. However, this prop does have one crucial thing in common with their Gremlins props: it already has a bit of wear and tear. That’s unsurprising in and of itself: “Cause and Effect” first aired in 1992, so it’s reasonable to expect a prop over three decades old to be showing its age.
That wear and tear added an extra level of difficulty to RedLetterMedia’s task of displaying the exploded Enterprise D. Not only did they want to pose the model in a way that looked cool, but they wanted to make sure the process didn’t cause any additional damage to this one-of-a-kind prop. Fortunately for that group and Star Trek fans everywhere, the YouTubers managed to come up with a clever solution.
The solution they went with was using silicone calk to mount different pieces (the remnant of the saucer, the remnant of the main hull, and the two sets of split-apart nacelles) onto a giant piece of wood. The mounting looks simpler than it really was: as cohost Rich Evans explained, they had to use a wooden peg to mount the underside of the hull that couldn’t be pressed flat onto the piece of wood.
The project may not be fully over, though, as RedLetterMedia has been brainstorming different ideas to keep the wooden piece everything is attached to from falling forward and damaging the Enterprise D prop.
While this isn’t the normal type of content RedLetterMedia produces, we were happy to watch their humorous struggles with the prop, and we’re even happier that they’re doing their part to preserve the cultural legacy of Paramount’s Star Trek franchise. We’re looking forward to future videos, especially ones that let our favorite film critics geek out over Star Trek. Speaking of which, we just have one question for these YouTubers: when are we finally going to get that Mike Stoklassa/Rich Evans Star Trek trivia showdown you recently teased us with?
