The third and final season of Star Trek: The Original Series (September 1968 to June 1969) doesn’t often get much love from Star Trek fans. Yes, it serves up some half-baked dishes, from “Spock’s Brain” at the start to “Turnabout Intruder” at the end. But like the first two seasons, it also introduces some of the coolest Star Trek ships the franchise has seen.
Here’s three great spacecraft we’d never had known had not all those devoted, letter-writing Star Trek fans persuaded NBC to give the series one more shot.
Klingon Battle Cruiser (“The Enterprise Incident,” first aired September 27, 1968)
Viewers saw Klingons in Star Trek’s first two seasons but never clearly saw Klingons’ spaceships (a situation the TOS remastering team remedied).
Ironically, the first Klingon ships clearly seen in the series are crewed by Romulans. As Spock announces, “Intelligence reports Romulans now using Klingon design.”
D.C. Fontana made that line of dialogue do a lot of heavy lifting!
Fans speculated about the extent of Klingon-Romulan cooperation (the episode never explicitly mentions a treaty), but the real reason Klingon ships appeared in the episode is they were models the production crew had on hand.
Wah Chang’s magnificent Romulan Bird of Prey model no longer existed, but a model of the Klingon craft did. Matt Jefferies had designed it for “Elaan of Troyius,” which preceded “The Enterprise Incident” in production order but aired later (December 20, 1968).
The Klingon ship—never called a D-7 onscreen until the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Trials and Tribble-ations”—boasts a stark, sinister design. The bulging command section with prominent torpedo chute is poised at the end of a long “neck” connecting it to the angular engineering section.
Jefferies modeled the craft on a manta ray, according to The Star Trek Sketchbook as quoted by Nick Ottens on his “Forgotten Trek” blog. Jefferies achieved his aim of a vessel “instantly recognizable as an enemy ship.”
Incidentally, the TOS remastering team replaced one of the Klingon ships in “The Enterprise Incident” with a Romulan Bird of Prey, giving us the best of both worlds.
Tholian ship (“The Tholian Web,” first aired November 15, 1968)
The ships piloted by the famously punctual Tholians aren’t much to look at as they originally appeared.
The Memory Alpha wiki reports the script called for “a tetrahedron shaped ship… crystaline in appearance and of blue green coloration,” pulsating with an internal “soft light.” But budget restrictions meant Matt Jefferies could only design a much plainer craft.
It has an odd shape—like some sort of futuristic fruit juicer, perhaps. But it also has a golden sheen the TOS remastering team saw fit, for whatever reason, to remove. One wonders why they didn’t attempt to realize the script’s original concept instead.
But what makes the Tholian vessel one of the coolest Star Trek ships isn’t its form but its function. When two of these unprepossessing ships buddy up, they can weave an immobilizing energy “web” around their enemies. A time-consuming tactic, sure, but for a while it’s effective enough against the Enterprise!
Yonada (“For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” first aired November 8, 1968)
The vessel ferrying generations of unsuspecting Fabrini to a new homeworld is arguably the highest concept Star Trek ship in the original series.
Yonada is a hollow asteroid some 200 miles (nearly 322 kilometers) in diameter, with an independent inner core and an atomic engine that’s propelled it for more than ten thousand years.
Plus, Yonada shoots missiles!
Like the Fesarius in season one, Yonada is really big. And just as I liked the original effect shots of the Fesarius better than the remastered ones, I prefer the original look of Yonada.
I don’t deny the remastering team did a beautiful job rendering a realistic, crater-pitted asteroid. But the admittedly inexplicable colors on Yonada’s surface in the 1968 footage—the reds, blues, and greens blanketing its contours—give it a pleasing “alien” look that help cement it, in my mind, as one of the coolest Star Trek ships in the entire series.
What are your nominations for the coolest Star Trek ships in the original series? Sound off on Twitter, on Facebook, or in the comments!