The New Ship In Star Trek: Lower Decks Is A Touching Tribute To A Departed Friend Of The Show
Fabio Passaro, who passed away in October of 2022, was a beloved mainstay behind the scenes of "Star Trek." He was a famously self-taught and extremely skilled computer modeler who contributed 3D models of the many "Star Trek" ships, often to be used on authorized "Star Trek" magazine covers. Specifically, Passaro's model of the U.S.S. Reliant, the ship that Khan stole in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," was featured on the cover of the March 2002 issue of Star Trek: The Magazine. Passaro once said that it took him 60 hours of work to make the Reliant look as photorealistic as possible.
From then on, Passaro became an invaluable contributor to ancillary "Star Trek" projects and makers of collectibles. Passaro helped design the interiors of the Borg ship for "Borg Invasion 4D," the theme-park-ready short film that was included in Star Trek: The Experience (1998 – 2008) at the Las Vegas Hilton.
Thereafter, Passaro would be hired to be the official CGI designer of the Eaglemoss Collection, a recently defunct model-making service that recreated literally hundreds of "Star Trek" ship models. Most of the starships offered by Eaglemoss hadn't ever been rendered in CGI, and Passaro modeled many of them, allowing some ships to be built in actual reality for the first time. Eaglemoss is no more, but a company called Master Replicas took over a lot of what Eaglemoss had been doing.
As of the latest episode of "Star Trek: Lower Decks," Passaro, widely beloved by the technical advisors on "Star Trek," has two in-universe ships named after him. The U.S.S. Passaro is among the Federation ships recruited by Nick Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill) in the episode "Old Friends, New Planets." "Lower Decks" producer Brad Winters paid Passaro homage in a recent series of Tweets.
The U.S.S. Passaro
In "Old Friends, New Planets," Locarno was seen recruiting a vast multicultural network of malcontent aliens to serve in a new "no Gods, no masters"-style demi-Federation, and there were many alien species and ships seen within Locarno's enclosed deep space facility. One of those ships was the U.S.S. Passaro, call number NCC-52670. As an additional tribute, Winters pointed out that the call number was Passaro's birthday: May 26, 1970. The Passaro was a new type of starship class called the Sabrerunner-class. These sorts of details are filed meticulously away in the brains of Trekkies.
Winters also pointed out that Passaro was kind and generous, and helped Winters include a "vertical" Romulan ship in the show (that is, the ship is twice as tall as it is wide, an aberration in "Star Trek"). It seems that Passaro didn't merely render the designs of others, but inspired them to include wilder, more interesting designs. Passaro was in the unique position of studying the entire franchise's shipyards, looking closely at many ships designed by many people, allowing him to get a broader sense of a "master aesthetic" of spacecraft. He would know exactly what Trek had and hadn't done.
Passaro worked on "Lower Decks," and was recommended to the position by Ben Robinson, the onetime head of Eaglemoss.
Passaro was also given a briefer tribute in the final episode of "Star Trek: Picard," called "The Last Generation." In one of the episode's final scenes, the Titan-A, rechristened the Enterprise-G, heads out into space on an exploratory mission. A Gagarin-class ship called the Passaro can be seen, itty bitty, in the background.
"Lower Decks" puts Passaro's name right up front. R.I.P., good sir.