Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is one of my favorite Trek films. It’s a great finale for the original crew and it’s both well done and also not at the same time (I could do a whole thread on the numerous continuity errors within the film, but I digress). One thing I’ve always wondered is why the galley in the Enterprise is so beat up in the scene where the senior crew debates the use of a phaser as part of the crime against the Klingon Chancellor.
So…. Why is the galley so beat up?
My in-universe explanation is that the Ent-A was originally the Yorktown and is, thus, more worn down than a relatively newly built ship would have been in that amount of time.
I like that version of the lore but I added my own. Enterprise A is actually the Yorktown… but why was the Yorktown available you may ask? I mean it would have had a captain and crew right?
Well it was one of the ships that attempted to intercept the whale probe during Star Trek III The Journey Home and had its systems soo badly scrambled that it lost all power and was running life support on batteries. (Which happened in the movie and was a transmission received by Earth, it is even mentioned that they were trying to assemble solar sails to attempt to make it to a habitable planet.)
Well the fearless crew of the Yorktown didn’t make it and the entire crew suffocated or froze in the cold blackness of space…
Starfleet isn’t so big that it can waste a starship even if it’s full of frozen dead people. So they spaced the bodies, cleaned it up and stuck Kirk with a malfunctioning potentially haunted ship as a kind of punishment.
This explains why nothing worked on the Enterprise A in Star Trek IV as its systems were still pretty scrambled from the Whale probe and was haunted by the long dead crew of the Yorktown…
This theory makes too much sense, I love it. One question though why specifically the Yorktown? How do we know it was that specific ship and not any other damaged federation ship?
The Yorktown is specifically mentioned in the movie and the ill fated captain of the Yorktown reports it to the admiral in this scene:
https://youtu.be/rvdR0UuNsFY
Also Star Fleet Admirals being the canonically evil dicks that they are would totally stick Kirk with a messed up haunted ship.
Edit The scene in question starts at 2:30 for reference.
If you were to follow the Yorktown’s name’s history, the original USS Yorktown was damaged, then repaired within 3 days at Hawaii, but then sailed out hard only to be sunk in its next battle.