Not to ruin the mood, but I think the idea was that it was this scary procedure only used in extreme emergencies.
For example, when the episode was running short by about 5 minutes...
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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I swear I remember they cut directly to Obrien and Data with incredulous "did he just say saucer sep" looks on their faces.
They actually only did a saucer separation three times during the entire TNG run. The pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint", the cliff-hanger douple-part episode at the end of Season 3 with the Borg, and that one random episode back in the first season. If you count the "Generations" movie, that's a fourth and final time.
Yeah I read somewhere they found it just slowed down the episode too much, so it wasn't used much after the first season.
Correctly used in the movie though.
Its use is limited in actual scenarios, but it does make for a good test.
Test?
The trial never ended, Captain.
I felt like they did it one more time, but I guess they only ever discussed doing it and never actually did. Given that it was a series opening event and how well it was used in The Best Of Both Worlds im surprised it wasn't used again until Generations.
I just remembered the discussion without separation was in Disaster, when Troi was the senior officer on the bridge and a warp core breach was developing. Ro wanted her to separate the ship to save as many people as possible, but Troi wanted to wait in the hopes someone would get to engineering and fix the problem.
They did it three times in TNG. Once during Farpoint, once during The Arsenal of Freedom, and once during The Best of Both Worlds.
Riker's first time in a Galaxy class? Let's have him (order O'Brian and Data to) dock the saucer manually.
Yeah what was the point of that test?! "Oooh he give orders good."
Break out the joystick like in Insurrection and let's fucking dock this thing MANUALLY.
Saucy and Saucier separation.
Some people consider Tuvix to also be saucy and saucier separation, but it’s much too difficult determining which moniker did not belong to Tuvok
You can’t separate the Sauciest, Tuvix.
Out of universe, they wanted to show the crazy stuff the ship was capable of...until they started running low on budget
Maintaining two bridge sets = budget buster.
What, did they have to rent set space or something? I would've figured the major cost would be in the construction, so it would be a sunk cost once they used it the first time.
If I remember right the battle bridge was a re-dressed bridge set from the TOS run of films, so it was doing double-duty, and needed to be re-dressed each time.
TBF it triple-dutied as other ship bridges also, the old Stargaze iirc, the Brittain with the old dead people on it...
Believe it or not,
Straight to saucer separation.
We have the best Borg-free quadrant in the galaxy, bc of saucer separation!
maybe a man just wants to captain two ships, pretend he's a commodore for a little bit. let picards have fun
The helmsman just hates all the math he has to do to get them back together after separating.
Season 1 Geordi? That's all he can do distract himself from creepin'. /s
fuck you Geordi stop forcing me to readjust my eyes every time
"Give me a saucer sep rep!"
"Ohhhh. Shit!"