By Chris Snellgrove | Published
LEGO has made a galaxy of profits creating sets based on the Star Wars universe; Now, the brickmakers have decided to “go boldly at it” by creating sets based on Star Trek. Their first launch is a replica of the Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generationand fans are incredibly excited about the prospect of bringing this famous Galaxy-class ship to life.
Unfortunately, this LEGO set may be the the ugliest thing I’ve seen since Business final.
Boldly no
The Enterprise-D set comes with a few minifigs of the TNG bridge crew, and to LEGO’s credit, these guys look absolutely adorable. It would be great if we could purchase a set containing just these characters. I’ll even get into future sets with alternate versions of everyone (Thomas Riker, anyone?). The main thing you’re paying for here is the ship itself, which is far uglier than anything LEGO has ever created for Star Wars.
What’s wrong with the Enterprise-D, you ask? The obvious problem is form.
Like Captain Kirk’s Enterprise before it, Picard’s ship has an oval saucer section, which is its most striking feature. LEGO’s attempt to replicate this oval seems distracting (like, bad Minecraft blocky creation), and it’s hard not to compare the jagged edges of this Enterprise main hull to the smoother oval of LEGO’s multiple Death Star sets.
Star Wars Beats Star Trek (One Brick at a Time)
Although the Death Star sets weren’t perfect, the larger ones had one very redeeming feature: they opened up to show a number of familiar Star Wars locations and scenes. The Enterprise-D doesn’t have a cool interior, which is a shame because it would be really cool to see, say, a LEGO recreation of Star Trek: The Next Generation settings like engineering, bridge or transport room. Here, the main feature of this expensive set (more on that soon) is the ship itself, and the design is so bad it would have caused Geordi La Forge to short out his VISOR with tears.
Besides the saucer section, this ship has many other ugly features, including a deflector that looks (much like the saucer before it) much more of an ugly square than a delicate oval. All of this combines with an awkward-looking secondary hull, ensuring that the Galaxy-class ship looks more like the Ambassador-class Enterprise-C than it should. For what they expect fans to pay, is it really too much to make this ship actually look like the one it’s modeled after?
The line should be drawn here
The final insult is that this set costs a whopping $400. Of course, inflation and tariffs are possible factors, but that’s only $100 less than what Star Wars fans paid for 75159 Death Star, which contained more than 400 additional pieces, nearly three times as many minifigs, and opened to reveal several iconic scenes from the franchise. You get so much less bang for your buck with this first Star Trek set that it feels less like an official LEGO release and more like one of Quark’s wacky projects.
Dear Star Trek fans, I implore you to see past the comforting fog of nostalgia and see this set for what it is: a lazy $400 monstrosity that looks like it should be on sale for $50 in Ross’s discount section.
It has all the aesthetics of a knockoff LEGO set, but with the price tag of an overpriced official version. Fans should avoid buying this crap and send Paramount a message about releasing shoddy official merchandise, the kind of message Captain Picard would approve of.
