Trivia / Star Trek S3 E2 "The Enterprise Incident"

• Actor-Inspired Element: The original script had Spock and the Romulan commander kissing, which at Nimoy's suggestion was changed to the hand caresses.
• Corpsing: Kirk breathes awful deeply for a dead man. Then again, he's not yet dead....
• Creator Backlash: Writer D. C. Fontana hated (as did fans) how rewrites handled the relationship between Spock and the Romulan commander, making it clear to Leonard Nimoy that she hadn't written that scene.
  Overall it was not a bad episode, but I did have a lot of complaints about it and things that weren't approached or handled right… Let's face it, the romantic scene between the Romulan commander and Spock was totally out of context. Any Romulan worth her salt would have instantly suspected Spock because they are related races. That was wrong. Kirk's attitudes were wrong. A simple thing – the cloaking device was supposed to be a very small thing, about the size of a watch, for instance, and it could be easily hidden. Here's Kirk running around with this thing that looks like a lamp. You know, highly visible. This is stupidity as well as illogical thinking. Visually it was stupid, conceptually it was very bad. There were a lot of things, little things, that were changed, but my biggest objection is the scene between Spock and the woman, because I really did not believe it. And I did not believe that the Romulan did not suspect Spock of something underhanded. She does know enough about Vulcan and Vulcans to know that something's afoot.
• Prop Recycling:
  • The Romulan cloaking device prop consists of part of Nomad's head and a globe from "Return to Tomorrow". The Romulan console that holds the cloaking device had been used before in "I, Mudd" and "The Return of the Archons" and was used again in "Whom Gods Destroy".
  • Also the D-7 cruiser, which is handwaved as the Romulans having acquired them from the Klingons. According to some sources, one reason is that the lovely Bird of Prey model seen in "Balance of Terror" had been constructed by an outside shop and was unavailable for this episode. The "remastered" episodes add one back in place of one of the D-7s.
    • Star Trek: The Motion Picture introduced a tweaked redesign called the K'Tinga, which would be a featured Klingon warship through The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Besides some additional detailing for theatrical viewing, the main difference is a few re-arranged components.
• Recycled Set: The Klingon bridge set is reused from "Elaan of Troyius". Romulans refer to their bridge as "Control Central".
• Shrug of God: TNG research consultant, Richard Arnold said in a 1991 interview Tim Lynch that he couldn't explain why the Enterprise encountered Romulan cloaking devices in "Balance Of Terror" but the crew have never heard of it here.
• What Could Have Been:
  • D. C. Fontana had intended the episode to be a Ripped from the Headlines story about the USS Pueblo affair in 1968 (see That Other Wiki for details). Unsurprisingly, NBC quickly put a stop to that. ITV Playhouse did do a dramatisation in the UK in 1970, and American TV tackled the story in a 1973 TV movie (For ABC).
  • In Fontana's first draft, it is explicitly stated that the Romulans have an "improved" undetectable version of the cloaking device, which was a prismatic type of mechanism. It was stored in a laboratory waiting to be installed on the Romulan ship, rather than an already operational mechanism. Also, both Kirk and McCoy are disguised as Romulans and steal the cloaking device.
• Word of Saint Paul: The Klingon ships were never referred to onscreen as being of the D7 class. But this terminology comes from a behind the scenes in joke between William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy who decided to play a practical joke on Gene Roddenberry by having a mock argument about whether the Klingon ships were D6 or D7. Both terms would be used in Expanded Universe for the class of Klingon vessel seen in the original series with D7 being used more often and D6 presumably an earlier model (as mentioned in the Star Fleet Battles gaming universe). Despite being ubiqutious, the term D7 was not heard onscreen until 32 years later in the Star Trek: Voyager episode Prophecy

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