#but the choreography of the cali ships moving around each other makes me lose it

[thesearchforbluejello]

I am once again asking.meme why The Stars at Night is one of the singularly greatest episodes of all Trek???????

I am such a sucker for big space battles and the current Trek era has delivered on that a few times, but this one might be my very favorite one. Like the moment when all the ships drop out of warp makes me absolutely lose it. I can count on one hand the number of TV shows that have made me cry, but this episode makes me cry every time specifically at that point????

The moment where one of the yellow Cali class ships physically blocks Cerritos from the Aledo??? And where Mariner uses Petra's little ship to block and destroy that last shot??? The choreography of the whole battle scene both at Douglas Station and then after the Cali class ships show up is just so, so good.

AnD tHe CaLi cLasS cHaNT?!?!?!?!

The meta implications of how fast the Cali class arrives is wild-- it's said a few times that Cali class ships are kind of junky and old, and when Freeman asks for maximum warp, Boimler says he's engaged warp 8... the Cerritos maxing out at warp 8 before severe damage to the struts and core (as Billups says and as visually shown) makes it significantly slower than the Intrepid class, because Voyager maxed out at warp 9.975 unless you want to be a salamander, and Voyager was about ten years out of date from Federation tech by LD s1. Voyager got Borgified, of course, but it's specifically said at least in the 5x23 Voy ep Relativity in one of the 2371 scenes that that's its specs before launch and thus before Borgification, though 2x15 Threshold establishes it can't travel over 9.95 for more than a short period of time. We don't actually know when the Cali class or the Cerritos itself was launched, but they're canonically aging noticeably by the early 2380s.

TL;DR If the Cerritos pushes past warp 8 and sustains considerable damage doing it, it's presumably very dangerous to do that yet the Cali class arrives extremely quickly to their defense, despite not all being close by. It's For the Narrative™ of course, but still. It's arguable that all of those crews took a significant risk to save the Cerritos, and that just makes me need to scream into the void for a hot minute.