I totally didn’t notice until it was pointed out to me, but on Friday’s Battlestar Galactica, four characters meet clandestinely in “weapons locker 1701D.”
ZOMG!
What? You don’t get it? Ah. I forget, sometimes, that not all the Accumulated Heathen are orthodox geeks. Naming the locker thusly was a deliberate shout-out to that oldest of geek tribes, the Trekkies. Every iteration (well, except one) of the Star Trek “Enterprise” has been numbered some variant of “NCC-1701.” Wikipedia helps us with the lore (no, not the Lore):
- NCC-1701, from the original series and, in a refitted version, the first three films;
- NCC-1701-A, from the fourth, fifth, and sixth films;
- NCC-1701-B, from Star Trek: Generations;
- NCC-1701-C, which appeared only in a single episode of The Next Generation;
- NCC-1701-D, the ship crewed by Picard, et. al.; and
- NCC-1701-E, from the First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis films.
Missing from this list is the version captained by the dude from Quantum Leap in the wholly forgettable and blessedly short-lived Enterprise series; since there are no letters before “A,” even in the Star Trek universe, that ship was the Enterprise NX-01.