Star Trek: Picard opted not to bring the U.S.S. Enterprise-E back to television but that doesn’t mean Star Trek: Prodigy didn’t step up.
Star Trek: Picard has really ruffled some feathers by not treating its reunion season of the Next Generation cast with the reverence the third season has been perceived to lack. Among some of the missteps, we know about include pitting the former bridge crew of the Enterprise-D and E against one another, as well as not bringing back the Enterprise-E.
Fans are a bit peeved about that, and it’s fair. Shows in Star Trek are as defined by their space fairing vessel as they are about their commanding officer. If you have a bad one of either, it just won’t matter how good the writing is around them, or how good the special effects are.
It’ll have a hard time finding its audience. So to ignore the relevance of the Enterprise-E, while doing a show that is supposedly about the ship’s crew, is borderline blasphemy. How can you celebrate the crew without celebrating the ship?
It’s rightfully gotten fans mad. But Prodigy is here to help soothe the issues, as the ship does in fact appear in the animated Star Trek adventure.
Star Trek: Prodigy brought the U.S.S. Enterprise-E to Nu Trek
According to TrekMovie.com, the producers of Star Trek: Prodigy brought the ship to screens in several small cameos during the final battle in Prodigy’s “Supernova, Part 1”.
You can see parts of the iconic NCC-1701-E registry in several quick shots of the Protostar moving in and out of the firing range of various Federation ships.
Terry Matalas, the Picard season three producer, claims he kept the Enterprise-E out of Picard due to the milage of the ship, implying that it’s “taken a beating”. Though he could’ve found a way to use it, had he wanted to, so that’s just a cop-out.
That said, Picard is further in the timeline than Prodigy, so it makes sense that the Enterprise-E would be operational in Prodigy, which is set only a few years after Voyager ended.