How old is the Starship Enterprise? In our universe, in the year 2024, the answer is roughly 60, especially if we start counting on December 12, 1964, the day “The Cage” — the first pilot episode of Star Trek — began filming. But throughout the era of The Original Series, the age, and various eras of the classic NCC-1701 Enterprise were constantly being revised.
But on October 12, 1974, one massive retcon reestablished the backstory of the Enterprise forever (even if it wasn’t made into real canon until 2022). By the time The Original Series begins, in the year 2265, Kirk’s Enterprise is already 20 years old, having originally launched in 2245. But when did this retcon happen?
Here’s how the finale of Star Trek: The Animated Series — “The Counter-Clock Incident” — gave the most famous fictional starship a new history and a retroactive founding captain.
The “first” Captain of the Enterprise
Star Trek’s 1964 pilot episode, “The Cage,” featured a crew and captain who would not go on to become the regular crew of The Original Series. Most prominently, and for various reasons, by 1965, Jeffrey Hunter’s Captain Christopher Pike in “The Cage” was replaced by William Shatner’s Captain James T. Kirk in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” In doing so, Star Trek created its first-ever retcon. Creator Gene Roddenberry decided to keep “The Cage” footage but now thought of it as the backstory for the Enterprise, making Pike the captain who predated Kirk.
In 1966, the two-part episode “The Menagerie” permanently established Pike as Kirk’s predecessor in the 2250s, a detail that stuck and allowed Bruce Greenwood to play an alternate Captain Pike in the 2009 Star Trek reboot film (and more recently, for Anson Mount to play Pike from a pre-TOS era in both Discovery Season 2 and most prominently the ongoing series Strange New Worlds, which by its Season 2 finale, was set in the year 2259). However, Pike also had a predecessor as the captain of the Enterprise: Captain Robert April, who wasn’t introduced into onscreen canon until 1974 in The Animated Series.
Star Trek’s non-canon Captain April(s)
The final episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, “The Counter-Clock Incident,” begins with the Enterprise being toured by its first captain, Robert April, and his wife, Sarah, who we learn served as the first medical officer on the Enterprise. A lot of what happens in this episode doesn’t follow canon. Sarah says she was the first medical officer on a starship, which doesn’t track with TOS pre-history at the time — did the Horizon or other lost ships from the 2100s or early 2200s not have doctors? — and it certainly doesn’t work with the canon that came later. Sarah also mentions that the classic Enterprise was the first ship equipped with warp drive, which doesn’t make sense either. (Older ships in the TOS backstory wouldn’t have been able to get around in reasonable amounts of time without the technology.)
The premise of “The Counter-Clock Incident” finds the Enterprise getting sucked into a negative universe where stars are black and people begin their lives in old age and pass away in infancy. By the end of the episode, the crew de-ages into babies, making the elderly Robert and Sarah the only people capable of taking control of the ship. We’re told Robert is 75 years old at this point (in the in-universe year 2270), and that’s the mandatory retirement age in Starfleet. However, after this episode, Starfleet reverses this policy, because clearly, older people are useful, too. (Of note, James Doohan, famous for playing Scotty, provided the voice of Robert in this episode!)
For a very long time, nearly all of The Animated Series was considered semi-canonical, but the detail about Robert April pre-dating both Pike and Kirk remained a fixed idea in the minds of official Star Trek historians and hardcore fans. In 1994, for the first Star Trek Encyclopedia long-time Trek designer Michael Okuda photoshopped a picture of Gene Roddenberry into a retro Starfleet uniform and declared that was Robert April. In many of Roddenberry’s earliest notes for Star Trek (and as documented in the 1967 book The Making of Star Trek), the character who eventually became Kirk was originally named “April.”
And so, even though the details of The Animated Series became a place for future Trek writers to cherry-pick ideas, April remained a fixed point in the pre-TOS timeline, albeit a murky one. In 2017, during Discovery’s first season, his name was featured prominently on a screen when Saru was researching famous Starfleet captains. But it wasn’t until recently that he became flesh and blood. And that required yet another retcon.
The real Captain April
In 2022, with the debut of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the character of Captain Robert April was played by Adrian Holmes, marking the first time April was depicted in live-action. Though a few short-sighted bigots complained that the new April was Black, Star Trek experts including Michael Okuda and Fred Bronson (the writer of “The Counter-Clock Incident”) defended the casting decision.
Bronson (who used the pen name “John Culver” to write “The Counter-Clock Incident”) thanked Adrian Holmes on Twitter in 2022, writing that, as the person who “created the character of Robert April, he’d been “waiting ever since for someone to bring him to life.”
Essentially, April’s race has never been firmly established in canon because “The Counter-Clock Incident” had loosey-goosey canon problems to begin with. As Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers told Inverse in 2022, “There wasn't anything crazy about trying to cast him. In the 1960s, they were extremely progressive when they made Star Trek. That was an extremely diverse crew for the time. But I think is not particularly diverse for 2022. We really liked Adrian. I thought he was a really good actor, and we thought he had the gravitas to be that [mentor] guy for Pike.”
And there you have it. For Captain April, the road from a vague idea in the backstory of Star Trek, to becoming a full-blown canon character took nearly five decades. Today, “The Counter-Clock Incident” remains a charming and bizarre entry in the overall Star Trek mythos. But like so many things with Star Trek, its importance is bigger than the story the episode tells. By boldly introducing a new character, this Trek episode quietly, and unknowingly changed the future.
Star Trek: The Animated Series and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds both stream on Paramount+.
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