My brain skipped over the Constitution part and went to the Galaxy Class saucer phasers.
Star Trek The General Star Trek Thread - From TOS to Corporate Schenanigans
- Thread starter bullethead
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Of course besides the minor inconvenience of depressurization to a hard vacuum, there's also the aspect of where she just has to be the bestest best person at everything, and anyone else remember when they made a big deal out of how the captain's place during a crisis should be on the bridge?
I'd watch it, but I don't like the show.
Poor Ensign Kim, he'll never be as cool as his actor.
What's the sitch?
Well-known member
I never got why he was an ensign the entire time. Is there some sort of "head count" quota of ensigns that need to exist or something? He was one of the main characters of Voyager, and at least as competent as many captains/commanders and such. Just didn't want as much "title" bloat perhaps? Ensign is shorter and rolls off the tongue I guess.
I mean, honestly! I thought Star Trek was more Woke than this! He should have been able to choose his own pronouns afterall!
He was cast as a naive young ensign fresh out of the academy in the pilot, and like eveyone in the cast who wasn't Seven or the Doctor, his character never developed from there.
I suppose in universe, the logic would be that the ship's staffing and chain of command are going to be lagely fixed because of the situation, you're not going to be promoting people around and reshuffling things because they're going to be stuck in the same role regardless.....but that doesn't work, because other people do get promoted, and enough people die that thier should be some openings and space to move up. I guess that time he broke regs by sleeping with a space alien really screwed him when it was time for promotions.
This is the real answer right here. He was "the ensign," so that was the slot he was stuck in. Essentially a very slight modification of the Wesley Crusher character, because VOY was basically just a lazy reinterpretation of TNG made by people who wanted to recapture the popularity TNG had during its height, but lacked the understanding of what made TNG work and were too lazy to try to figure it out. They did again on ENT, which was basically a lazy rehash of VOY, and in many ways felt just like it, especially early on. There you had Mayweather, who filled exactly the same role, had the same lack of development, and was also perpetually stuck in his rank and position, ending up with the exact same rank and position 10 years after the pilot was supposed to have taken place.
That last part is just part of the stupidity of VOY in action. Of course, as a whole it's pretty obvious that the writers had no idea about this kind of stuff, and leaned really hard on the tired old excuse of "it's not a military" to avoid admitting to their ignorance and laziness. In reality, rank and position would go hand in hand, which is why you had stuff like field promotions taking place during wars and the like, simply out of attrition because people got killed in battle and you ended up going with whoever you hoped would be able to do that job because the showed some competence. So really Kim should have been promoted to an appropriate rank to actually be a department head (which was basically how the show treated him), and they even could have done some stuff with that as far as drama, but apparently liked the idea of him being the squeaky clean ensign fresh out of the academy for the entire run of the show.
That is why I hate Janeway. She promotes every other person including one person who was in Jail. Tom Paris and one person who technically was a Terrorist. Torres. And yet the try not to get into trouble Harry Kim. She snubs. Had this been the old days of the US Navy they would have booted her ass out for undue favoritism.
bintananth
behind a desk
TOS and DS9 got promotions right.
TOS: Spock goes from LCDR to CDR at some point during the original run if you look at the sleeves of the costume and every regular character is a Commander or Captain by the time Generations rolls around.
DS9: O'Brien's a Chief Petty Officer (really should be Chief Warrant Officer instead), Bashir screwed up enough that he wasn't getting promoted past LT, and the others aren't military. Sisko, Kira, Jadzia, and Nog all got promotions which made sense.*
TNG: Promoted as the plot demands. Riker really should have been told "either accept a ship or resign from Starfleet" with Data taking over as XO. Wesley should never have been allowed anywhere near critical systems or the bridge before he got into Starfleet Academy.
ENT and VOY have already been addressed.
* There's that whole Valiant episode, which I like to pretend is a non-canon omake. Here's what should have happened: Nog - the only commissioned officer on a ship full of cadets - takes command and gets them out of there ASAP.
TOS: Spock goes from LCDR to CDR at some point during the original run if you look at the sleeves of the costume and every regular character is a Commander or Captain by the time Generations rolls around.
DS9: O'Brien's a Chief Petty Officer (really should be Chief Warrant Officer instead), Bashir screwed up enough that he wasn't getting promoted past LT, and the others aren't military. Sisko, Kira, Jadzia, and Nog all got promotions which made sense.*
TNG: Promoted as the plot demands. Riker really should have been told "either accept a ship or resign from Starfleet" with Data taking over as XO. Wesley should never have been allowed anywhere near critical systems or the bridge before he got into Starfleet Academy.
ENT and VOY have already been addressed.
* There's that whole Valiant episode, which I like to pretend is a non-canon omake. Here's what should have happened: Nog - the only commissioned officer on a ship full of cadets - takes command and gets them out of there ASAP.
I think the issue with making Kim a department head would have been, or at least could have been justified as, there being no room to make him one, and no one to take his place at ops. Looking at the crew causalities (I love that that site exists), while goldshirts do bit it more often than other colors, the actual casualties are mostly shuttle pilots and engineers, and they're most at below Kim's own rank.
You can't make Kim a department head, because there's already a guy above him doing that, and that guy just refuse to fix anything or fly a shuttle and therefore survived the entire trip.
Also, TNG promoted Trio to Lt Commander.
bintananth
behind a desk
She started the series as a Lieutenant Commander.
Troi went from Lieutenant Commander to Commander in a very dumb season 7 episode which said that she had to pass a "Commander's Exam" to get promoted even though she's not a line officer and was never trained or expected to be a watch officer. I think it's also mentioned in that episode or a different TNG episode (possibly the one where Dr. Crusher is left in charge of the Enterprise-D) that Crusher is full Commander because she passed the same exam.
Okay, so who was in charge of the ship's operations department?
I don't think it was ever stated. The only head ops I know of is O'Brien, who was chief of operations despite not even being an officer. Data, as the second officer on the Enterprise, was presumable the chief of operations given there was no one but Riker and Picard ahead of him, but that's just a guess.
Val the Moofia Boss
Well-known member
To be fair, Tom was apparently one of the bestest pilots ever in the history of Starfleet, and he invented the Delta Flyer. That's talent you do not want to waste.
Every Trek character (besides maybe the TOS cast) has screwed up a lot. As for Bashir specifically, his character was wonky. Originally he wanted to be out on the frontier because he wanted a challenge. Later on he had a backstory retconned in about how he was actually genetically engineered (which is taboo) so he actually ran off to DS9 hoping to be able to use his talents without scrutinizing eyes cast over him.
Also, if you believe that there is actually a Section 31 and Sloan isn't just some lone crazy man with delusions of grandeur, then Julian was invited to join one of the Federation's most elite organizations.
When Best of Both Worlds was in production, Patrick Stewart's contract had expired and he wasn't sure if he was going to renew, hence the episode left the door open for Riker to succeed Picard as captain of the Enterprise. Stewart decided to stick with the show, hence why Riker remained the second in command.
I actually like that episode. It shows that the "chain of command" and "orders" only exist so long as the people decide it exists. Nog might outrank the people on the ship, and officially they should go back home, but that counts for nothing if the people actually running that ship collectively refuse to recgonize him and invent their own objectives.
Voyager not picking up additional crewmembers to fill in spots along the way really was a missed opportunity. They didn't need to be main character; they could've been guests who appeared in a few episodes. There would be many aliens who would have wanted off their world or go exploring, or would have travelled a distance along the route Voyager was travelling and would have worked as crew. Could have also had a plot about Voyager being so short handed that they resort to press ganging or trying to find ways to pay people to staff their ship.
They actually did pick additional crew, enough that they returned to federation space with more people onboard than they had when they left. They got a bunch of Maquis, Nelix, Kes, Seven, and a couple guys from the Equinox.
The show treated Kim like he was the head of operations. O'Brien was treated like he was the chief engineer and actually had officers working for him. While the writing on DS9 was by far better than VOY, this is another example of the writers not really understanding the military structure they were trying to emulate.
With Kim, yes. With O'Brien, I think they were going for him being a command master chief petty officer/Chief of the boat sort of role, and just slightly botched it.
bintananth
behind a desk
The vibe for DS9 I got back when it was airing: his position outranks yours even though you outrank him on paper.
Sorta like how LCDR Scott - on paper - should have been in the center seat whenever Kirk and Spock were both on an away team but - as far as I can figure - LT Sulu was the 2nd Officer during TOS.
EDIT: Scotty was both a line officer and an engineering officer. Sulu was a line officer, a navigator, and a weapons officer. Scotty deferring to Sulu makes sense when they're the two most senior present. Sulu deferring to Scotty does not.
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bintananth
behind a desk
If I'm remembering the episode right it ends with Nog in an infirmary saying to a fellow survivor who thought highly of her cadet captain: "He may have been a hero. He may even have been a great man. But in the end, he was a bad captain."
From a Ferengi perspective Nog comes from a horrible background. His grandmother wears clothes* and his dad is such a complete failure at business that his mom left them and his dad is his uncle's mistreated handyman for a bar on a Federation outpost orbiting Bajor which was built by Cardassia.
* A Ferengi female wearing clothes is just about as taboo as a man asking for a towel after losing their swimming trunks while swimming because the mens locker rooms and showers usually do not have privacy partitions.