My apologies that this one's going up late, even by my standards. Between work, social obligations, and my internet going out during the time I normally have to write these, I wasn't able to get it up when I'd like. Still, it is (barely) before the next episode drops, so there's that.
He didn't imagine it. He just took the ball and ran with it.
I think the shot we see of it against the Enterprise E in "First Contact" doesn't help with the perception of the scale of the ship.
"Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" - release date: 26 November 1986
"Encounter at Farpoint" - original air date: 28 September 1987
"The Bonding" - the first episode of TNG Ronald D. Moore wrote, and sold as a spec script before getting hired as part of the writing staff, original air date: 23 October 1989
There is plenty of references to money in TOS, and not merely as a figure of speech.
Roddenberry didn’t imagine a moneyless future; that was an invention of “The Voyage Home”, which Roddenberry had no involvement with.
This is fucking gross. We're all having a good time here, but let's not try to play sexual assault off as a joke.
MRW the ship is overrun by tiny monsters demanding “treats” and threatening us with “tricks, but the captain won’t let me detonate the warp core!
I have a different theory.
Scotty knew this training shakedown was going to be easy times, so he got into the bottle of green stuff he keeps stashed in the intermix chamber.
Yeah, it's completely nonsensical without the context of the episode.
But they made Badgey blue and had him go off to create his own universe. For me, they might as well have given Mariner a Rorschach mask.
Tell that to the Baku.