I do love Robert Wilde’s time-consuming work, taking a scene from Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country (the final film with the original series crew), and reworking it and the soundtrack, with painstakingly crafted and rendered animations. The result takes the original scene of the Enterprise leaving the gigantic, Spacedock orbiting above the Earth, and makes it a far more memorable scene.

Lovely little touches like the thrusters to gently move the ship in port, just like the Shuttle or a satellite today would do, tiny little touches on the thrusters for fine moves, then the powerful impulse engines glowing into life, ready to propel this huge ship out into her natural habitat – deep space. And that final scene as she surges out, eager to be out there again, where she belongs…

I’ve always considered the Big E herself to be an actual character in Star Trek – she is as important as the human actors. And the Enterprise is also a symbol of what humans could become – this huge, immensely powerful vessel, capable of traversing enormous distances, of directing frighteningly powerful weapons…

And yet, she is no warship, she is designed primarily for research and exploration. Not conquest or battles, to explore, to seek out new civiisations and make contact with them, to expand the knowledge of the universe. The idea in Trek that humans by the 23rd century would be capable of creating such astonishing craft, and using them for peaceful exploration, is a part of the optimism in Trek, that humanity can be better than it is now. The ship herself is a symbol of optimism and hope, something we all desperately need.